Interview with Matt Mason

Poet and speaker, Matt Mason, uses his passion for poetry as a platform to educate others on an art form that has been used as a form of storytelling for thousands of years.

For years, Mason has been teaching in one fashion or another. As the former Executive Director of the Nebraska Writers Collective, Mason was integral in the creation of various programs throughout the state of Nebraska with the intent of building and empowering community through creative writing and poetry performance.

His legacy includes the Louder Than A Bomb: Great Plains annual youth poetry festival and competition, now known as All Writes Reserved, and Writer’s Block, a program that offers writing and poetry as a form of expression and therapy for incarcerated people.

“It was just great to see that much of a focus on creative writing in the state,” said Mason. “And to have people see the value of these programs as the kind of thing that grows us as a community and grows us as a state.”

After twelve years, Mason left the Nebraska Writers Collective to pursue a career in writing and public speaking.

In 2019, Mason was nominated as the Nebraska State Poet, with his five-year term beginning in 2019. After a public nomination, a poet must interview, provide a reading, and participate in a panel question and answer session with the Nebraska Arts Council, Humanities Nebraska, and Nebraska Library Commissions. After the three art agencies make their final decision, the Governor of Nebraska signs off on the selected poet.

As the Nebraska State Poet, Mason serves as an advocate for poetry, literacy, and literature in Nebraska. For his platform, Mason took on the challenge of having at least one poetry event in every Nebraska county during his term. Out of the ninety-three counties in Nebraska, Mason has just eleven communities left to visit.

“I love having a position where I get to talk poetry and spread poetry and write poetry with others,” said Mason. “It’s been a lot of fun running writing workshops with anybody from second graders to senior citizens.”

These workshops take place at schools, libraries, museums, coffee shops, or anywhere that works for the county he’s visiting.

Perhaps part of Mason’s passion for sharing poetry comes from his own educational experience in high school where he didn’t connect to the poetry he read in the classroom.

“Poetry is sometimes taught in a way that if you don’t connect with the teacher’s favorite poet, then you don’t get poetry,” said Mason. “There are a bunch of different genres in poetry just like there are in music. You don’t turn on a radio in the car, hear some Mozart and think, ‘I don’t know what this is,’ and then decide you hate music and will never listen to it again.”

In his classrooms, Mason now focuses on teaching his passion for poetry rather than treating it as a formal subject. He shows his students poetry is nothing to be afraid of or uncertain about.

“You need to get across the energy of poetry to the students,” said Mason. “As a teacher of it, even if I don’t have a grasp on every kind of poetry, I’m going to bring in a couple of different poems I’m passionate about and let the students see that passion and that interest and hope it’s infectious.”

Mason has not only taught in his home state of Nebraska, but around the globe in the countries of Botswana, Romania, Nepal, and Belarus for the U.S. State Department. No matter the country, Mason found his students have had a similar experience with poetry.

“Every country was the same. In school, they read poems that were a few hundred years old, usually written by men, and they didn’t really connect with it very much,” said Mason. “And this was my experience too. I also had a hard time connecting with these older poems.”

Mason says to better engage his students he starts with more current poetry so the students can better relate to the language and message of the poems. Then they build up to the classics.

Another similarity was that across the globe, even if students didn’t enjoy what they were reading in their former classrooms, they did love to write poetry.

 “In every country, these students wrote with passion about current events, their lives, their experiences, their societies,” said Mason. “It’s a reminder that poetry is part of every culture on the planet.”

According to Mason, poetry is overlooked in a lot of respects in our current societies but has stood the test of time because it fits a need. It helps people better understand the world and each other.

“We look at poetry as this mystifying art right now when it is the most basic thing,” said Mason.

“It is in every culture and has been for thousands of years. The way we tell stories through poetry, the way we get our experiences across with poetry, is important.”

Mason advises students to challenge themselves to read and write outside of what they are naturally drawn to. He said he loves seeing poets he admires break free from form and branch off into more free verse. He also appreciates crossing the boundaries of form. According to Mason, poetry breaks the rules of writing to be more expressive.

 “It’s why we write things as poems as opposed to writing it as an essay,” said Mason. “It gives a more direct emotional translation.”

Mason often uses his poetry to reflect on the world around him and to better understand his own feelings or experiences. He also carries the tradition of storytelling through his poetry, hoping readers will pull an idea or story from his work without the need to ‘sit and meditate on it for days.’ Ultimately though, Mason wants to make his readers feel the emotion organically written into his poetry.

 “A good poem makes you feel something that someone is trying to express,” said Mason. “A really good poem puts you in someone else’s shoes and helps you understand their experience and their emotional reaction to it.”

As a Good Life Review Honeybee Judge, the elements of poetry important to Mason personally will also be considered as he reads through the many poetry entries. In addition to storytelling and making him feel something emotionally, he also enjoys being surprised by a poem no matter the style or approach to the artform.

Thank you, Matt, for your willingness to spend time with us on this interview! We are grateful for your passion to educate and share and for the effort you put into fostering a stronger community in Nebraska (and beyond!). We wish you well on your mission to bring poetry to every county in the state!!

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If you want an opportunity to have your poems read by Matt, details about the contest and a link to the submission platform are on our 2024 Honeybee Prize page.