The Neon Hollywood Cowboy: an interview with Matt Mitchell
Matt Mitchell’s first poetry collection, The Neon Hollywood Cowboy, was released a little over a year ago through Big Lucks books. It’s a magical collection—cinematic & alive. His poems describe the experience of being intersex, gender identity, friendship, & pop culture. The collection is colorful, it floats & moves. It details the life of the neon cowboy, someone who readers can easily imagine on a TV screen, starting with the first poem, “The Birth of the Neon Hollywood Cowboy,” which describes the effect of the collection well:
Intersex people
are the best cowboys.
Me: chromosome chain
of a rodeo sweetheart,
body of a rugged and
forgotten outlaw.
The poems are very human. Playful at times, vulnerable at others.
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Gabby DiDonato: Hello, Matt! What’s your favorite color?
MM: I have a few! But oxblood red, mustard yellow, and seafoam green are the first ones that come to mind.
GD: Whoa. Those are very groovy colors. I didn’t expect that answer, haha. Can you describe your writing process a bit? Do you have any rituals or is it something that you just sit down and do?
MM: I used to always write at night—but now that I’m a dog dad, I happily take whatever free time I can get to put down some words. I used to write in an empty bathtub, but these days I prefer laying down on my couch with some tunes playing.
GD: When reading The Neon Hollywood Cowboy, my brain was flooded with colors and images that I could feel & really see. I’m reminded especially of the poem “Ode to Mitski Tweeting ‘No Shade But I am so Tired of this God Damn Body’”
every viewmaster card of great plains turns neon
rhinestones just colorless chandelier skin,
tiny skylights around your neck.
I am brilliant as diamond but cheap as silver.
I am a deepened voice exploding in ohio heat.
a citrus of queer sky beating against straight summer.
a flicker of rubber city spilling over faces of unknown gender.
It reminds me that you are a visual artist too. Is there an intersection between your visual art and poetry? Does either inform the other?
MM: Absolutely! I’m mostly interested in how poetry can become cinematic, how certain language evokes certain imagery. I’m very obsessed with making my books read as much like a movie as possible. I’ve always been a sensory-based artist, because music and paintings and photographs awaken this indescribable resonance deep within me—so I’m trying my hardest to articulate that resonance, somehow.
GD: Do you have any projects you are working on now that you would be open to talking about?
MM: My next book, Vampire Burrito, is coming out from Grieveland in the fall, so I’m actively finishing that at the moment. Other than that, I’m just chugging along, interviewing bands and writing my dinky little poems for now!
GD: That is the best title for a book I have ever heard, and I’m really looking forward to it. Your love of sensory-based art does resonate very much, especially with the references to pop culture figures. I found, at times, there was a contrast between talking about famous figures or shows, alongside images of erasure and dysphoria that made each concept more potent in contrast. It made me think about how there is not really a lot of media that focuses on intersex people, even though I am sure there are a lot of intersex people who are famous figures & we just don’t know. Can you talk about the process of combining the experience of being intersex, pop culture, & Hollywood within the collection?
MM: I think, since I was a little kid, I’ve always gravitated towards film and soundtracks. It’s just a very important part of my footprint, and I realized a while ago that I don’t have much of anybody on-screen that goes through what I’ve gone through. It felt like there was, at least, one or two portrayals of every type of person under the sun, good or problematic, but I didn’t have anybody, except for the character of Amy from Freaks and Geeks. I don’t make movies, but I do write poetry. At the end of the day, those things aren’t all that different, and I wanted to see myself on the big screen. Maybe that book and the next book will get us closer to more intersex people standing in the limelight. If not, I’m okay with just telling my story for as long as I feel like I need to.
GD: The Neon Hollywood Cowboy carries us through the birth, life, death, and afterlife of the cowboy. Each Neon Hollywood Cowboy poem feels cinematic, and beautiful, and tragic. What was the process of creating the cowboy? Was he always going to die, or was that something that happened through the creation of the collection?
MM: I positioned this book in a similar format to Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, where he creates an autopsy report for the book and whatnot, and I really wanted to play with the idea of making every era of myself a different character. So the Neon Hollywood Cowboy is deceased, but Vampire Burrito is alive and so is his dad, Cosmic Cowboy. Whether or not they make it out of the next book remains to be seen. I kind of love how poets like Frank O’Hara name their subjects. I wanted to do that, but in a comic book sort of way, as if everyone I write about is a superhero.
I like being hyperbolic and exaggerating mundanity, so turning average nobodies, like myself and the people I love, into spectacular, dynamic players makes me sing.
GD: There are a lot of birds and flying in your poems, I noticed. I like birds, so I was pretty excited about it, especially now that it is spring & the birds are back. I am not sure what the question I want to ask is. Maybe, why birds and flight? Is there a significance to the concept, or a magnetism to flight or the animal?
MM: I was very much raised in a pro-bird household. My mom thinks every cardinal she sees is her dead mom. Outside of familial mythology, I love birds for their delicacy, which I’d like to think is a theme I’m always working from and trying to better understand, both in myself and others. And I think birds are always transforming, just like a person’s body. Sometimes birds get overwritten, and I’m surely not doing that truth any favors with how much I write about them, too, but they were around when there were dinosaurs and they travel in droves, which is fascinating and makes me feel so much less lonely.
GD: Thanks for talking with me! Woo woo!
MM: Thanks for talking to ME! <3