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Poetry from Daily Life: Poems don’t need to be hard, they can just tell a story

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Poetry from Daily Life: Poems don’t need to be hard, they can just tell a story

Matt Mason
 |  Special to the News-Leader

This week’s guest on “Poetry from Daily Life” is Matt Mason, who lives in Omaha, Nebraska. Matt, who was the Nebraska State Poet from 2019-2024, started writing in high school and not long after learned that through poetry he was better able to understand his own feelings. Today he says he loves many ways of looking at poetry but likes narrative poems best. He loved working on the recent book, “At the Corner of Fantasy and Main: Disneyland, Midlife and Churros,” “which started as a lark (poems about roller coasters and whatnot) but turned into a meaningful project.” ~ David L. Harrison

I’m a fan of narrative poems, poems that tell a story. As I see it, that’s how poetry started, with epic poems that had to be memorized to be passed down, as people didn’t have printing presses or maybe even written work yet. That’s why those poems have rhyme and/or have a steady rhythm, so that the author can pass it down in a way that’s easier to memorize word for word. Those poems are still with us today, with Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, the Ramayana and others.

It can seem sometimes now, though, that most poems need to be translated to us by a critic or a teacher. Picked apart and explained to us so that we can understand its deeper meaning. It’s led to poetry too often seeming like something difficult rather than a thing to be enjoyed.

Not that a difficult poem shouldn’t be written, I certainly write some, but I love that there are more poets out there in publishing, in poetry slams, in cowboy poetry gatherings, with poems that need no explanation — and then if you look more deeply into them you might find some surprises and marvels as writing an “easy” poem usually is far from easy.

Robert Frost was like that, you can read a Frost poem once and get something wonderful from it. And then if you read it a few more times you may see more and more things going on under the surface. But that first reading is one which opens the door rather than leaving readers mystified.

That all said, here’s a poem of mine from my book “At the Corner of Fantasy and Main: Disneyland, Midlife and Churros.” The book is about, yes, Disneyland, which was a fun subject to play with in these poems as I was, ultimately, telling a larger story about growing older and living life after my parents have passed away. This poem centers on describing one particular part of Disneyland park where two “lands” intersect:

At the Corner of New Orleans and Frontier

Under Old West guitar and Jazz band trumpet,

where the riverboat steam horn blares,

you order a corn dog.

∘

Beignets and étouffée

are down the way, cowboy,

you don’t have to put up with that.

∘

But the sun dips into everybody’s eyes,

strollers full of screams rock by

and you

∘

start searching, at the popcorn cart and in your life,

for something more

than everything

∘

you’ve been settling

for.

◆◆◆

Matt Mason’s poetry has appeared in The New York Times and Matt has received a Pushcart Prize as well as fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Nebraska Arts Council. His book “At the Corner of Fantasy and Main: Disneyland, Midlife and Churros” was released by The Old Mill Press in 2023. You can find the book anywhere books are sold, including https://theoldmillpress.com/product/at-the-corner-of-fantasy-and-main/ and find more about Matt at his website https://midverse.com/ as well as more on his events and how to support him in his work at https://www.patreon.com/MattMason.

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