Editor’s note: Lila Matsumoto’s new collection, Two Twin Pipes Sprout Water (a Winter 2021 Poetry Book Society Recommendation), is at once plainspoken and spellbinding – a sure antidote to the charged language of our times. We’re deeply grateful to Lila and her publisher for this short interview, which took place over email.
Theophilus Kwek (TK): Congratulations, Lila – I thoroughly
enjoyed reading Two Twin Pipes Sprout Water, and you must be
pleased about all the positive attention the book has received! I wonder if you
could start by telling us a bit about how this latest collection builds on your
earlier work (either your first book and pamphlets, or your wider practice as
an artist and musician)?
Lila Matsumoto (LM): Thank you, Theo. TTPSW collects
poems and poem sequences that were written over the last two years or so. Some
of the poems were originally written for particular contexts, such as for a
song for Food People (a band I play in) or as a live
performance with visual elements. It’s to the credit of my incredible publisher
Prototypefor helping me to produce a book that
‘houses’ these discrete pieces, and at the same time keeps the flavour of their
original context through elements such as typography and illustrations.
TK: Something that struck me from the very first section of
your collection was how your poems deal with being a writer. Not only with the
practice of writing, but the paraphernalia of the writing life –
attending book launches, literary conferences, and the like. How would you
describe your relationship with your own identity as a writer?
LM: I would probably describe it as ambivalent! I
have been thinking about the artifice of the ‘writer identity’, as well as the
artifice involved in writing: making things up, embellishing, presenting life
through uncanny lenses. When I was a student I worked for a few years at a book
festival. Although I appreciated the context of coming together to have
conversations around writing, I felt uneasy about the pageantry. Lauding
writers is fine, but many of the events centred on the authors rather than on
their writing. There also seemed to me an assumed alignment of the books’ texts
with the authors’ personal lives. Books such as Rachel Cusk’s Outline series,
Alice Thompson’s Burnt Island, and Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire
Fractal guilefully and hilariously unpack and brew more trouble
about the meeting points of writing and the writing life.
"[...]
I saw her art for what it really was: not a punctilious crafting of rare
materials, but a reckless haunting of obscure works, made flesh in modish
lingo. It
was a tricksy turn of pen, a vaporous bauble. But who am I to criticise –
I, too, have a searing desire for recognition, and have committed textual
crimes in the name of amour propre. I have plumbed my own life for
material, dressed up its feeble outlines, and have stuffed descriptions of
sensual delicacies in every chapter."
(from 'In Order to Make Words Pleasurable')
