It was Matt Trease who turned my attention to an interview that Eileen Myles gave in 2015 in which she said:

There is still a lot of power built up around mainstream poetry. People are afraid to give America anything but comfort. It’s like an ad for guilt. Even poetry is supposed to support it. Last year I was a judge on the National Book Award’s poetry panel and I felt there was a weird regard for readability which struck me as a kind of a regard for normality, the regular stuff. And we’re living in extraordinary times so our literary culture needs to wake up. 

Contrast that with words from the anthology: America: A Prophecy in which George Quasha writes:

The prophetic sense is affirming the oldest function of poetry, which is to interrupt the habits of ordinary consciousness by means of more precise and highly charged uses of language and to provide new tools. 

Matt Trease is not after the normative in poetry. He gives us new tools for navigating the early Anthropocene. Reductive materialism has had its run and real culture is happening in the margins where Trease has existed for years, studying poetry, poetics, astrology, mythology, indigenous culture, place, paganism and other alternatives to the industry-generated culture in a:
creative feast of self
awareness

Published by Carbonation Press in April, it’s a rare occasion in this selfie-oriented culture for a poet to delay publication, but that’s what Matt Trease has done with his career and The Outside is an occasion. Matt’s our guest today to tell us why he waited, what inspired him to write the work in this book and what poetry means in a culture that appears to be either unraveling or nakedly displaying its materialist vacuousness. Matt, is a poet, artist, teacher and astrologer, serves on the board of the Cascadia Poetics Lab and lives on the land of the Duwamish people. We recorded our chat on May 10, 2025