“James Baker Hall told me years and years ago that when he became poet laureate that whenever he’d go overseas or whenever he’d talk to other writers in other parts of the country, people would always comment, ‘Oh man, I wish I lived in KY! You have such good writers there.’ And I think storytelling is ingrained in this state in a way that you can go about the business of being a writer any way you damn choose, right? But you still have a certain respect for the principle of being a good storyteller because it’s just something that’s ingrained here. And that’s the reason why there’s no pattern for a quote unquote ‘Kentucky Writer’. They’re very, very different. And, I mean, Stuart (for example) is substantially different from James Still. Don West even more so. Moving up generations, James Baker Hall, for example, is very different from Wendell Berry. And Elizabeth Madox Roberts, you know? Whoever the case may be, these writers are very unique. But yeah, I think it does stem from this idea that we’re all storytellers. And I think the nature here supports that.”

“[…] It’s not about poetry. It’s not about prose. I think, you know, it’s just about the ability to try and commune with what’s going on around us.”

If you missed the first part of our interview with Matthew Haughton, you might not know what a Kentucky-phile Haughton is. He grew up in the same town as Jesse Stuart, a place where a statue stands erect in dedication of a poet. He’s proud of his Eastern KY accent as much as he is the coal-miners and steel workers he’s grown up around.

Haughton published Bee-Coursing Box in 2011 with Accents and his newest book, Stand in the Stillness of Woods, comes from WordTech Editions. In the previous article, I discussed the specific inspirations for his two books. In this part, I go more into Matthew Haughton’s life and get a stronger sense of his personality.

“How do you feel narrative plays with poetry, in your work or in general?”

“It’s all about context. I mean, that’s the big thing that I work with when I (of course, I teach high school), but I guess that’s the thing I work with students on is context. The way I describe it to them—in terms I hope they understand—is that when you have a friend who goes on Facebook and just says some obligatory statement where they’re angry, and then [you’re] kind of taken aback by what they’re mad about, they’re not giving you a context. The platform they chose to communicate in is not that altogether different than walking down the street and seeing someone get out of their car and curse at nobody and then storm off. You know?

“But good writing, be it poetry, fiction, comic books, anything, it’s the writers… The writer needs to be able to give the reader some sense of context, you know? To understand, you know, ‘Why am I being approached in this way?’ I tend to rely upon narrative to do that because I think there is something reassuring about, um… uh, about speaking in a candid way when I write. About the only thing that turns me off, honestly, is when I get a piece of writing that could be brilliant but I have no […] understanding of why someone’s talking to [me] about what they’re talking about.”

In the previous article, Matthew mentioned his initial rebellion against the Appalachian way of life. I compared it to Gurney Norman’s Divine Right’s Trip and Ed McClanahan’s The Natural Man. “Do you think [this rebellion] is a common theme in Kentucky, or just in small-town American in general?”

“I think even in America in general. I mean, there are extremes. I think most writers have an ex-patriot kind of impulse. You know, my heroes early on were people like Henry Miller and James Baldwin, people who, you know… Henry left for his reasons. James left for very real reasons, and was very candid about why he left. But they did come back. And, uh… I don’t think I have a particularly romantic answer for you on that. I mean, the primary reason I came back… Let me say this: the primary reason I’ve stayed on as an adult is that, when I made the decision to be a teacher, I couldn’t see myself teaching anywhere else but the state of Kentucky because I feel like this is a place where literature still has a chance. And I’m not altogether sure that’s true in a lot of places.[…] I’m not here for romantic reasons; I’m here because I think, quite frankly, it’s practical.”

According to him, Matthew Haughton’s published about a hundred poems so far, including respected literary journals, including Kentucky Monthly, Still: The Journal, and New Southerner. On being published in New Southerner, Haughton comments on his favorite poem that he’s written.

“That was a poem called ‘the rabbit cage’. It was nominated for the James Baker Hall Award for Poetry, but lost to Marianne Worthington, who is a great friend of mine and just a wonderful tornado of a friend. And I was thrilled to lose to her, quite frankly. Her poem was fantastic.”

“Well, whenever I interview her, I’m using ‘Tornado of a friend’.”

“Tell her I said that!”

“Absolutely.”

“She has great cowboy boots.”

We moved on to acting, since Haughton teaches high school English and Drama. He acted a lot as a child and even earned a scholarship for theater, but, “lost my stomach for it around 21. […] I think when I was about 15 I started playing music. And then when I was 16 or 17, my friends and I started playing out at clubs and bars and anywhere we could sneak in when we were teenagers. And so I got much more interested in recording my songs and trying to do something with that. And theater just kind of left me altogether.”

“So are you in a band? Or do you have any solo projects as far as music?”

“No. I quit music in probably 2003. I realized I hadn’t picked up a guitar in a year. And the only thing that… You know as lame, cliched as this sounds, the only thing I’ve consistently done is writing. My mother was a painter and I did a lot of art. Actually, when I dropped the Theater major at UK, I picked up a study in Art Studio and I love printmaking and drawing and painting. I don’t do it enough, but I love it. But writing’s really the only thing that […] I’ve consistently done. I think acting and music certainly helped in my writing, but it was more of a byproduct of the desire to write.”

I asked what he didn’t like about the music and asked if it was the audience participation. “A little bit, a little bit,” he said. “Particularly as an actor, I absolutely hated curtain calls. I didn’t really understand why I needed to do that. It felt like, ‘Well, no: I’m the character. I’m, you know, going to leave now. They can go home. It’s done.’ But with music—”

“You have to stick around.”

“Yeah.[…] There was a lot of anxiety for me getting those gigs and making those tapes. I had a little TASCAM four-track and I’d record my songs. God, it was primitive. The microphones where, like, taped to something. It was fun; the actual making the music was fun, the actual camaraderie I had with people. But I guess what it comes down to is, I wasn’t sustained enough by it to know to what extent I was getting better or worse. And the joke I tell my kids is that, when I started… The nice thing is that when you’re a writer, losing your hair and getting older: that ain’t a big deal. But at some point with music, I just started to feel kind of weird about what my ambitions were for it.

“So writing, ultimately (not to be romantic again), but the thing I appreciate about writing is it’s a solitary thing. […] A lot of people do writing groups, and I was in one writing group years and years ago, but I’m not a big… I didn’t do an MFA. I’m not that into writing groups in general.”

“Is the writing group still around?”

“No. They… I was the youngest member, and uh…”

“That’ll do it.”

“And they have continuted to support me. I’m still friends with them all. But it just kind of naturally dissolved.

“I wasn’t a very repsonsible member. I came every third time. The thing that appealed to be (I guess this makes sense based on what I was just saying), but the thing about writing that’s really appealed to me is that it’s something I can do myself. Not in a selfish way, but I don’t have to rely upon the audience. I can go do it and then try it out, ’cause all art is about communication. But I don’t… Agh! I prefer… I need that time to kind of have it to myself for a while.

“[…] And even in a writing group… I just… You know what I tend to do… Sherry Chandler was in that writing group with me and I’d share with her a poem or portion of this book and she’d be very kind to critique it for me. David Cazden was in that writing group. And I’d do the same thing with him. But again, it really worked because those relationships that… that weren’t, like, you know, basically ‘This works, this doesn’t work.’ It was very hands off. I do much better in that environment.”

“And I think writing groups are great! It just doesn’t really work for me.[…] To me, when that writing group did work well, we’d sit down and we’d talk about work, talk about things we’d read that we’d really enjoyed, and then, you know, go shoot the shit, go off and do something else. ‘Cause I think at some point you have to be willing to let go. And you can’t be selfish with your time and with your audience. It’s tricky. It’s tricky to negotiate these kinds of things.”

Matthew Haughton had mentioned having a variety of jobs before teaching, such as working at a Fortune 100 company to financing to retail. “How did those jobs get into your poetry?”

“In interesting ways,” he said with a smile. “I like meeting interesting people. And ultimately, in financing, I was around some pretty stimulating people. But, uh, carving my time. I’d get up around 4 in the morning just so I could do stuff. And then surrender the rest of my day for whoever I was working for. Teaching’s nice ’cause it keeps me in a constant flux. This school I teach at has awarded me a lot of individuality to how I teach. So, you know, I wake up in the morning, I go to class and I decide we’re going to teach a short story. I’ll teach it. Maybe I’ll teach a different one to the next class. It allows me to continue the conversation of writing pretty much all day. And when when I go home, I just revise and write. So, it’s much healthier for what I do.”

I want to conclude this series with another addition tomorrow that concentrates more on Matthew’s community. Kentucky writers, Lexington, and Accents will be the focus in Part 3 of our interview with Matthew Haughton!

• For the first part of this interview, where we talk about Matthew’s books, click here.
• Bee-Coursing Box from Accents Publishing
• Stand in the Stillness of Woods from WordTech Editions
• Matthew’s submissions for Lexington Poetry Month 2013