Today we’d like to introduce you to Matthew Muñoz.
Matthew, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
After I moved to San Diego, I discovered formal poetry through the California-based “weird” poets of the 20th century (George Sterling, Clark Ashton Smith, Donald Sidney-Fryer), who used strict meter, archaic rhymes and overwrought diction to evoke genre-based themes (horror, fantasy) in a “literary” style. From there, it’s been a lot of experimentation with poetic formalism: extreme metrical restrictions, visual poetry, and “vernacular” forms like limericks.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Poetry doesn’t exist as a career: most journals and book publishers survive on submission fees (because they don’t sell many copies—because nobody reads poetry). Poems only get written to the extent that someone’s willing to dedicate effort apart from working full-time. The writing needs to be both something worth spending time on each day and possible to spend time on each day, which severely narrows what’s possible.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Many people assume that formal poetry is stuffy and intimidating, but I think the opposite is true: metrical rhymes are so readily understandable and productive that you can’t stop children from inventing them. I try to go further into formalism in order to demonstrate interesting or disturbing things about language, but in a way that can be picked apart and reconfigured by a careful reader. I like the meaning of the poem to be aesthetically obscure but logically straightforward if you pay close, literal attention.
Recently I’ve been involved with communities on Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky creating poetry from “bot” programs based on simple generative rules. In contrast to text created using large-language-model AIs, simple formal algorithms can demonstrate aspects of language that are typically unregarded in a transparent way (a way the reader can understand from first principles and emulate).
To give an example: if you restrict a poem to five-syllable English words chosen in a simple way (even at random), it will have a sense of bureaucratic evil, because that’s the primary reason long English words exist. Asking an AI to produce a similar poem will result in an obsequious statistical hedge, masking the unpleasant aspects of English as it actually exists.
Finally, I’ve been experimenting with making visual art according to simple rules analogous to generative poems (“visual poetry”).
Alright, so to wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to share with us?
Id like to encourage readers to write something themselves every once in a while, even if it’s a dirty limerick here and there. Keep it alive.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://knucklebones.rip/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pseudepigram/
- Other: https://m.knucklebones.rip/@pseudepigram
