Matt Trease moved to Seattle, became a postcard poet, has long helped run the Margin Shift reading in Seattle, has been a board member of the Cascadia Poetics Lab for 8 years and is my good friend. All these reasons would be sufficient to interview him about The Outside, his new book published by Carbonation Press. The best reason is that he is writing some of the most innovative, place-based poetry currently being written. Please enjoy the video version of our May 10, 2025 interview and hear the audio on Spotify.

My introduction:

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 Out Side 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.

An excerpt:

A couple years back I steered a kayak over the stone remnants believed to be of that dammed weir and felt the tears of Southwind and his grandmother that broke the spell of ice and separation. In a moment I felt that wheel turning me, releasing the grief over my own people, still a mystery to me from centuries of migrations, of imperial assimilation, erased by the cold wind of empire and science and the myriad attempts to dam up the natural world with standardized time, supply chains, and rows and rows and rows of repeatable little boxes we stuff our brains and bodies into.