Matthew Olzmann's "Letter Written While Waiting in Line at Comic Con"

Thoughts on language and love.

Letter Written While Waiting in Line at Comic Con

Klingon, Parseltongue, Na’vi.
People invent imaginary languages so imaginary
citizens of imaginary worlds can speak
to one another. Elvish, Ewokese,
Dothraki. You can learn these languages,
come to a convention with your face painted blue
or a leather scabbard bolted to your back,
and talk to people who will understand you.
I understand what language feels like
when you’re not understood. More than once,
I thought some other planet might be my home.
Last week, in an alley, I saw a man punch another man
until neither looked like a person.
There are hundreds of reasons like this
to long to be from some other galaxy,
century, or dimension. Reasons
to put on a space suit or wizard’s cloak
and hope no one will recognize you. But it’s not
these costumes that amaze me; it’s always been
the languages. The way they reach
for something that can’t be said
in our tongue. In the only language I know,
there are not enough words for parabola
or isotope. Too few phrases to say I’m
sorry or I’m glad that I found you.

Though we’ve been married for years,
I wish we met when we were children.
If we had known each other in the year
you spent alone on Earth without one friend,
we could’ve been aliens together.
I’d have those green, four-fingered hands.
You, with your glow-in-the-dark antennae.
Words in the form of strange whirling noises.
Low chirping machine music.
Wisps of static, lamentations of rain.
Only you and I would know what these sounds meant.



from Constellation Route (Alice James Book, 2022)

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A week ago, I found myself sitting by a fire on a farm in Georgia, a farm I have visited five times in my life, each time to run a race that consists of completing however many nearly-two-mile loops (sometimes almost exactly two, this year more like one and two-thirds, as the loop varies in obscure and always interesting ways nearly every year) that one can in the allotted time limit that one signs up for (six hours, twelve hours, twenty-four hours).

Some people are out there all day. Some people are out there for an hour or two before turning in to sit by the fire and sing karaoke and eat roast pork. Some people do a little bit of everything: the running and the singing, the sleeping and the waking. For my friends and me, the race has become an annual sort of pilgrimage, a place where we have learned a lot about each other and whole lot about ourselves, a place where I ran my first hundred miles (and, in a lonely and enriching and illuminating sort of way, my second), and a place, especially, where we have come to share and laugh and wonder aloud with the friends we have made there, on that farm in Georgia, friends who have walked laps with me at three in the morning when I wasn’t sure if I could go on, friends who have massaged my calves and fed me melons with their fingers, friends who smell like sweat and woodsmoke and dirt, who smile while they throw pizza boxes into a fire that burns all night.

Prior to this year, I hadn’t been to the farm in a couple years due to some other, deeply important things (like getting married), and this year marked the first year I had run an ultramarathon — which had been, for so long, such an integral part of my life — since a cartilage transplant in 2021, a surgery that blessed me, briefly, with a cane, a surgery that rendered me unable to run for over half a year.

And so, a week ago, I found myself happily dazed — sitting by this fire, eating my tenth handful of potato chips, and nursing a mid-afternoon beer, when my friend Andrew, who is one of the race’s co-directors, sat down near me. Or maybe stood. Maybe I was standing, too. We were near the fire. And I hugged him and said how grateful I was to be there, and how lucky we were to be friends, despite the fact that we essentially see each other just once a year. And we talked about friendship and community, about the seemingly-little-but-actually-quite-big ways that love can bloom out of the ordinariness of these places we return to, these small or large rituals we do together, these ceremonies of togetherness that I think we all undertake, whether at a farm in Georgia or on a daily walk through the neighborhood or during that one dinner you have with that one friend, every month or so, where it’s all catching up and conversation.

A few hours later, the fire still burning, Andrew sort of half-yelled at me from across the flames. “There’s got to be a German word for that,” he said, “for these friendships that occur the way ours has.”

I laughed. There had to be, I said. And, thinking about it now, I know there must be, in the way that language and feeling work together to form some thing we call expression, this sense of coming to know and define and redefine who we are. And so, yes, I am thinking of today’s poem because I am thinking of language. I am thinking of these lines of Olzmann’s:

But it’s not
these costumes that amaze me; it’s always been
the languages. The way they reach
for something that can’t be said
in our tongue. In the only language I know,
there are not enough words for parabola
or isotope. Too few phrases to say I’m
sorry or I’m glad that I found you.

I love Matthew Olzmann’s work for its earnest desire to see in this world all sorts of wild and possible beauty. There is amusement in this poem today, and love, and wonder. And there is, in these lines above, a reminder of the way a poet can turn our gaze back toward a kind of mattering, like how Olzmann says, in his own way, that our language has more room for certainty than it does for mystery, that these words — parabola, isotope — expand the more we look at them, and leave us longing for a kind of expression that gives voice to the impossibly infinite depth of — what is it? — wonder, awe, strangeness, absurdity, or maybe even innocence that we feel in the face of all we learn about this world, if we remain open to learning about this world.

It’s not the first time Olzmann has written about otherworldliness. In one of my favorite poems of his, “Astronomers Locate a New Planet,” he juxtaposes these lines below with lines that detail the discovery of a new planet where, according to a Reuters article, “the carbon must be crystalline, so a large part of this strange world would effectively be diamond”:

On Earth, when my wife is sleeping,

I like to look out at the sky.

I like to watch TV shows about supernovas,

and contemplate things that are endless

like the heavens and, maybe, love.

I can drink coffee and eat apples whenever I want.

Things grow everywhere, and so much is possible,

but on the news tonight: a debate about who

can love each other forever and who cannot.

There was a time when it would’ve been illegal

for my wife to be my wife.

There is a turn that Olzmann does in these lines above, where he moves from his own forms of longing to these lines that read: “so much is possible, / but on the news tonight: a debate about who / can love each other forever and who cannot.”

He offers a similar turn in today’s poem when he writes: “I understand what language feels like / when you’re not understood.”

These moments illustrate what I love most about Olzmann’s work — how it moves in tangents, often beginning with such kind, generous noticing of these wildly ordinary and human things, before infusing such moments — through the act of relation — with a sense of depth that communicates just how important such moments, whether the eating of an apple or the painting of a costumed face, really are.

In other words, his poems will say something like: our forever-growing understanding of the objectively wonder-filled and awe-inspiring outer reaches of space, where there are planets made, quite literally, of diamonds, means so frustratingly little when here, in our own world, we are asked to debate and litigate the status of literal people’s personhood, the language they use to identify themselves, and the control they have over their own bodies.

Or, in other words, his poems will say something like: though you might think that the act of someone painting their face the same blue as an alien movie character is merely a form of fandom or entertainment, there might be, if you consider such a thing earnestly enough, more of a sense of belonging for that person while wearing such a costume than the belonging they might feel without wearing any costume in the world.

Loneliness, in other words, is real. It lives in the words we have and in all the words we don’t have. We often weaponize the former to make people long for the latter.

Poetry, I think sometimes, is a kind of antidote to loneliness, which is — more and more, I think — one of the great ailments of our time. By that I mean: our loneliness, and our inability or unwillingness to see it in ourselves and others, to admit, with vulnerability and courage, how scared we are, and how scared we notice others to be. In a poem, you can practice the kind of noticing — of self and of others — that is liberating because of how deeply it tries to see, and how widely it tries to connect. When you encounter a word or an image or an idea that gives voice to a feeling you experience that seems, in your head, to be shared by no one else but you, it is almost like encountering the love of another — something that could save you, I think, if you accept it. Or learn to accept it. The way you learn a word. The way you learn a language.

In a postscript to one of his poems, which is tangential and discursive, Olzmann writes, as a kind of justification for such discursiveness:

I suppose, in some manner, it all belongs together.

I love that sentence as a kind of anti-prescriptive writing tenet that focuses more on allowance than self-censorship. But I love it, especially, as a statement for how we might come to consider this world and all that is contained in this world.

There’s one final turn that Olzmann makes in this poem today. And it’s right at the end, in that beautiful stanza separated from the longer opening stanza:

Though we’ve been married for years,
I wish we met when we were children.
If we had known each other in the year
you spent alone on Earth without one friend,
we could’ve been aliens together.
I’d have those green, four-fingered hands.
You, with your glow-in-the-dark antennae.
Words in the form of strange whirling noises.
Low chirping machine music.
Wisps of static, lamentations of rain.
Only you and I would know what these sounds meant.

This turn, where it seems as if Olzmann’s speaker is speaking directly to someone he loves, makes this poem transcendent. Think about it! How it expands at the same time as it reduces, how it longs to un-age, to go back to the earliest time in life, and how it uses such a time — of unspeakable loneliness and strangeness and love — to explore how we find connection in this world where sometimes we have no words to explain how we feel. There is such longing here. Innocent, wonderful, hand-reaching-out-for-another.

Think about it again. How it says: I wish we knew each other when we were at our loneliest and our most wordless; then, even then, I think we would have loved each other.

And then, think about that. Because I am sometimes lonely and wordless now. Because you, I imagine, sometimes are, too.

I am reminded, then, that love is always somehow possible.

As I did last week, before I close, I’d like to mention a little something. I am in the middle of teaching a virtual class for the Adirondack Center for Writers. It’s called You Do Not Have to Be Good, and it’s on reading and writing with generosity in mind, on moving away from a restrictive and prescriptive method of such things that can label things in ways that feel reductive rather than expansive.

I’ve asked my students to, in the week between classes, engage in reading and writing prompts that feel, at least to me, like some small way to try to read a poem and then look at the world and then try to approach any of it — however hard — with generosity. I’d like to offer the prompts here, each week, as well — in case you, reading this, are interested. I don’t want to gate-keep every aspect of that class. And I’d like to answer them myself. Here’s this week’s prompt:

Read, as a guide, Leon Stokesbury's "Unsent Message to My Brother in His Pain" and Matthew Nienow's "Letter of Recommendation," both of which, despite their different titles, serve as reminders of the possible in this world — reminders of what is beautiful, or surprising, or lovely, or strange, or just simply enough, enough to make you want to live and look another day.

Then, in a little mini essay or a poem or whatever you want, write your own reminder of the possible. Whether a poem or an essay, a list or a note, or even a letter addressed to someone, tell us what you'd recommend about this world, or what you find yourself reminding yourself about this world.

And here’s Stokesbury’s poem:

And here’s Nienow’s:

I am writing this on behalf of all I don’t have words for, for the way it feels to see someone for the first time in a long time and know, with absolute certainty, that they will open their arms to hold you, for the way the light looks at dawn, as if the night is pulling a pink gauze over the open wound that darkness sometimes feels like, for the way, sometimes, silence feels better than conversation, and for the way, sometimes, silence is conversation. I am writing this on behalf of all the ways a dog runs, whether with a loping gait or with only three legs or with a kind of forward-backward bounce or with that almost sideways kind of tilt even as they move forward or with their tongue hanging out of their mouth, for the way I cannot find a memory in my brain, the shelving system gone awry, and for the way the sadness in such moments seems so endlessly deep it feels like a sadness I have never felt before because it is related to a part of me I cannot find. I am writing this on behalf of the way I can be broken out of sadness so abruptly by laughter, and for the infinite kinds of laughter — the kinds that are doubled-over, or high-pitched, or freight-train-booming, or never-ending. I am writing this on behalf of the soundless motion of a mouth too happy to know its own frequency. I am writing this on behalf of all of this endlessness, or should I say boundlessness, of world and self, of self and other, of what I cannot describe and could never hope to, though I want to, and, as a result of this wanting to, keep living.

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Some notes:

1. Here is a website — put together by volunteers — that tracks the jobs lost and lives affected by the de-funding of USAID. It’s worth reading in order to fully understand the severity of what is happening, who it is affecting, and how to help.

2. You can find a list of the work that Writers Against the War on Gaza is doing to build solidarity among writers in support of Palestinian and against their consistent oppression here.

3. Workshops 4 Gaza is an organization of writers putting together donation-based writing workshops and readings in support of Palestine and in awareness of a more just, informed, thoughtful, considerate world. You can follow them here and get more information about them here.

4. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.