Street-level Urgency: In Conversation with Matt Proctor
from the vault ꒰ঌꨄ︎໒꒱ circa january 2023
The first thing you notice about Matt Proctor during one of his infamous YouTube livestreams is the way his hair sticks up only in the front like a kid who half-heartedly stuck his finger in an electric socket, pulling away before the static reaches the other side. The second is the exposed brick of his Chelsea apartment accompanied with all the sights and sounds of the neighborhood and its rich history—Eileen Myles’ Chelsea Girls on one of his book stacks or children on recess across the street. The thirty-nine-year-old poet can be found online and on both Brooklyn and Manhattan Public Access TV under his ongoing bildungsroman Scenes from a Life, documenting the poetics of the everyday, not unlike if the New York School poets had iPhone capabilities.
One of his recent videos “cuffing season” orally explicates the poem “11/11 palo alto dir. by gia coppola” off his latest open mic chapbook (yes, he hosts the Easy Paradise open mic every Monday night at the Kraine Gallery Bar Red Room ). “11/11” starts with “my poetry is for ivy / league 22 year / olds / my job is to avoid work” before diverging from “platonically sharing my futon / overnight w/ future poets / of female america” to a disruption of whales “fucking th glass” of an Indianapolis aquarium and their consequential drowning. Proctor solidifies the sweetness of the poem by comparing the situation to the relationship between Bob and Charlotte in Lost in Translation (2001): “platonic in a way; it’s sort of romantic. You’re not even fucking sure; even they don’t know. It’s also just this vibe you know, and they have fun, and i’s kind of innocent, right?”
I’ll be honest. I’m the “ivy league 22 year old” poet Proctor writes about. We were strangers once. After waking up on his futon—which is remarkably huge for a single person—I observed Proctor in his apartment, attempting to unpack what he could possibly do in between starting his day after four p.m. and occasionally filming Poetry Project readings at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery.
He started by lighting a joint in bed, leaning against the wall to stare at his shelves and shelves of books. Name any literary school, and he’ll be able to trace it. His apartment is a library with the benefits of having a walking encyclopedia at your disposal. His livestream viewers are devoted, even if they cannot catch up with every single two-hour drop. My Zoomer friends call him a “coked-out winter Paul Rudd.” His poems capture the minutiae of New York City, tracing culture through fragments, placing “andy warhol’s novel” and “yoko ono having dinner” in the same poem (“mouth beach” from bloomsday) as “ear buds in / orange neon liquor sign.”
Proctor divulges that one of the original lines he intended in “11/11” was “my timing cdn’t be / any more worse” rather than “precise.” Still, it was the incapability of reading his own handwriting that led him to this leap. Proctor isn’t a stickler for time, preferring loitering to having a set schedule, so it’s an honor to experience what he’s up to.
Proctor tells me his latest pursuits have been at West Village comedy clubs, but his performances, including those with his noise band System Lord, have always consisted of stand-up poetry.
Proctor enters El Quijote, the famous bar at the Chelsea Hotel, from the street even though we wait for him to come through the lobby. I am joined by our friends Ian and Noah and his presence is always a surprise. We get Taco Bell after.
When he pulls out his ID, I learn his legal name isn’t Matt—or Matthew—and that he hails from Columbus, Ohio. Upon arriving in New York City at twenty-four, Proctor hung out at the Pennsylvania Hotel, learning about Real Social Dynamics.
[This interview has been edited for clarity.]
Who are your biggest influences aside from the daily observations of the New York School?
Before I came to New York, I didn’t even know what that was. Most of my education was layers and layers and layers of other stuff. I came in 2010, but I tried to move here a few times before and just got horribly abused, chewed up, and spit out. The first night I ever got to New York, I smoked weed laced with PCP. I didn’t smoke weed until I was like 30 years old. I was in college at Ohio State for six years till I was 24. Other than New York school, definitely San Francisco, Black Mountain, and Paul Blackburn, big time. Joel Oppenheimer, but that’s sort of New York school. Jack Michelin is like a street poet. Vachel Lindsay has this book called Adventures while Preaching the Gospel of Beauty where he walks. He walked right through the state of Kansas and he had little books that he had made, and he could do 20 miles a day. Richard Linklater, Godard, John Giorno. Taylor Meade is my God. Pull My Daisy (1959), of course. Kerouac you know, he’s underappreciated.
You think Kerouac’s underappreciated?
Definitely, people hate him. He's like a clown figure or a slob, and he ended in disgrace. He’s like Elvis.
In your sex book, you make a lot of references to pick-up artistry—how has that influenced your poetry?
It influences the sense of poetry and language as a power. It teaches you to manifest your own ideas. It’s improvisational from person to person. The biggest influence was text messaging, because text messaging is a literary poetic form. It's short, you know. I had a BlackBerry until about 2017. Persuading people to be attracted to you, but honestly, it's more about being yourself.
How does it feel knowing that your audience members are essentially reading your diary, or do you prefer to not view it that way?
It's weird because you know there definitely have been consequences for being totally transparent. It hasn't become such a nightmare or so invasive that it's like, oh wow, this is like everybody knows everything about me and how do I stop this or anything? I just like the feeling of real life and I like things that are as close to actual experience as possible. I would say it’s an underrated literary genre. I think a diary can be a literary opus in and of itself. My idea is you could theoretically go into all this stuff and watch all of the episodes and then read all of my diary pieces and it would be like a Proust, or like a Kerouac book where it’s the whole life.
Besides the candid nature of your live streams, your poetry recycles lines and images directly as they occur in front of you—do you think this prevents or limits moments of reflection?
Obviously, I'm high most of my life and I'm high when I write, and so there will be moments where you'll just have surface memories or you know you will go down, sort of like wormholes, things that you forgot, or something. The pandemic year felt like one long moment of reflection. I think the live streams are probably more of a place for that. During the pandemic, I’d talk about my life or things that happened to me when I was a kid. I just think New York is not a place for reflection. I don't know if it's possible. There’s just so much action, and so much around you that you don't have huge reservoirs of time to go deep into concentration, at least not for me. I'm still in the mode of I want to live my life. I need to be social, and I need to be out in the world. I always kept notebooks, but now I can use every idea I have because if I can turn it into like a little word art thing, it can go into my diary. There are moments of reflection but they are super blips. The live streams became a replacement for sitting down and writing deep, spelunking explorations. I would like to write a piece about my younger life, like maybe high school like Kerouac did go back and sort of write books about his earlier stuff. Proust’s whole thing is recollection.
Do you ever find yourself writing prose?
No, I don’t believe in constraints.
What about prose poetry?
I don't find it interesting because I love line breaks. In a certain way, a lot of my poetry is prose poetry, but inverted where it's like prose. It’s prose but it’s lineated. If you watch my long videos, that's prose poetry. It's long and overflowing like a flow chart and that Ashbery book. I like looseness and speed.
What draws you to building your own families as portrayed through the literary salons and open mic series?
My brother and I have different ways of dealing with family trauma. My parents got divorced when I was very young. My dad was physically abusive to my mom. He was an alcoholic, so there were unhappy memories in early childhood. Creating these families, there’s a sense you can be a good father. Working with a lot of people, being social, and seeing their talents—coming from a theater background, that's sort of what a director does. A film director gets a bunch of cool people together, and it's a lot more amateurish than they make it sound. You get a bunch of magical people together and you're able to see something in them and bring it out. There are a lot of disabling things in our society that prevent people from getting on stage or committing to their vision, so I want to help people get to that place and discover things that maybe they're good at. I create these little surrogate families, probably out of loneliness and trying to fill that void in New York. I'm not very good at small talk, but I can create artistic situations with a lot of artists and it's sort of like a family. I have a useful role, rather than just hanging out.
Your entourage consists of mainly the younger generation—do you think you’re inherently drawn to Gen Z rather than millennials?
I don't really vibe with millennials. I think they were overprotected and overparented. Gen Z is more urgent. I've been doing these readings at Elizabeth St. Garden and these two Gen Z kids from Vassar came up to me afterward. They told me they loved my book, and I was totally surprised by that. Video editing has had a lot of influence on what I'm doing, and I definitely try to write for the future, that's one of the reasons why I write fast. You're constantly checking your phone, you're in reality, you're listening to music. There are screens everywhere so your consciousness is split in a million different directions, and I want to reflect that with my cuts. Maybe they’re into how colloquial and casual my poetry is. “Predicting future mainstreams” is what Alice Notley says and so as an avant-garde artist, you're supposed to be forecasting, so I reflect the modern speed of consciousness and pop culture, imagery, things you see on the Internet, banality.
If you could redefine one word, what would it be and why?
Masculinity, let's say, masculinity. It's very hard to do. That's one of the things about poetry, right? It's about returning to the origin of the words which a lot of times is under these layers of redefinition. Simulation, that word has taken on kind of a new meaning in the last few years. I mean, are we living in a simulation? The Internet layers on this whole new sense of definition over anything. I wouldn’t necessarily change the definition of the word so much as maybe the definition of like what it is like in the popular conception, which I guess is a different thing. That’s what slang sort of does. Men are traditionally taught to cut themselves off from their feelings, so I’d reframe it as being able to cry and being able to communicate emotionally. Everybody has feelings, so it's really an awareness. Also changing the relationship to violence as a requirement of masculinity.
Why didn’t you finish watching Palo Alto (2013)?
I recommend this to anybody: you don't need to watch any movie in its entirety. I'll watch a movie until it stops holding my attention. Palo Alto (2013) was more of a template for drafting or tracing over your own situation. How often do you see a movie, and you're like “Oh my God, that's exactly like my life?” I read one of James Franco’s short stories in Vice. I'm not sure if it was actually in Palo Alto, but I get the James Franco vibe.
Find his musings at Scenes from a Life
P.S. he has since evolved into my muse & you can read our entanglement in his latest zine War Commercial (2024) & my forthcoming collection GLIB (2025) & check out our recent reading at the nyc poetry festival ༺☆༻
