Farid Matuk by Geoffrey O'Brien

INTRODUCTION TO THE WORK OF FARID MATUK 
GEOFFREY G. O'BRIEN

Farid Matuk's This Isa Nice Neighborhood takes its idiosyncratically compounded title from a never-executed public art commission in San Francisco; the project would have arched that phrase in neon at the former site of a Filipino community and glowed parts of it simultaneously in Spanish and Chinese towards the Mission District and Chinatown. It's a canny choice for a poetry that seeks to occupy every available subject-position in relation to an event. Early in the book we encounter two consecutive poems titled "Talk" (there are many repeated titles across the collection) that describe the same melancholy self-interested exchange in Sicily between a North African teenager and a group of Italians, the first poem beginning "I am Moroccan today" and the second "I am Sicilian today." Like the simultaneously glowing phrases projected at neighborhoods, Matuk's I and today wander through perceiving centers and their inflections by class, race, and country, and don't do so to isolate some corporate human essence, but to track the interactions of different persons and the tragic and gratifying outcomes of those encounters, the "History As a War of Poses" as another early poem has it. That wandering through minds multiply foreign to each other has its counterpart in Matuk's extraordinary comfort with moving from subject to unobviously related subject as he moves between lines and stanzas. It's a poetry that softens the difference between non sequitur and entailment:

He wanted to lift the particular edges of their wishes to that dusty light

and witness the glint together, and wonder
and be so joined as he felt himself to be

with the wife slightly standing
and the reporter barely there.

And yet, there is nothing of this by the sea

                                ("Maybe Go to the Sea")

This empathic imagination that, beside the rolling sameness and difference of the waves, conjures the execution of a thief and his mourning wife half a world away, is typical of Matuk. He will not sacrifice the glory of the incessant ocean, the mutation's of sunset's internal differences, nor any affectionate, jaunty declarations of love for his partner Susan and their dog, but he will not pretend those avowals and their objects don't happen in a world that has also permitted countless lynchings and fatal border-crossings and hate speech—all those waves too are part of an ongoing singable tally. The book ends with a series of "Tallying Song[s]," a phrase borrowed from Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom'd," and like Whitman, that earlier poet of ecstatic and solemn inventories of difference, Matuk seeks to "accommodate the earth" in all its social and phenomenal variety, opportunity, and damage. It's why a poem about Richard Pryor and race relations can end "Birds in song / spit gold ropes"—the poet's gaze can make "thin relation" of anything because "everything / happens beneath the cover /of something else, something prettier / now there are Arab African boys everywhere" and even the words "is" and "a" can unite to form a new neighborhood.