By Jeremy D. Wells
Carter County Times
It’s a rainy, muddy afternoon as I sit on the front porch with local author Matt Parsons and his guitarist friend Logan Cooper to discuss his new book and upcoming shows. Parsons, clad in a well-worn flannel shirt, sweatpants, and nearly knee high muck boots, has just finished checking on his pigs. His children play on the covered front porch while chickens scratch about the yard.
Trade the copious winter mud for the lush grass of spring, and his hilltop cabin home is about as idyllic a setting as one could ask for.
As he tells me about a recent meal he had where the realization hit him that nearly everything was grown or raised by himself and his family – even the flour for the bread came from wheat raised by his wife’s grandfather – Parsons seems a man content with his place in the world.
But contentment is a journey as much as a destination. In our modern society, where many of the traditional markers of growing up and achieving adulthood are now out of reach or otherwise shifting rapidly, understanding our place in the world can be difficult. How do you know when you’ve reached adulthood? What does it mean to be a woman, or a man? And why does it matter at all?
These are the themes that Parsons had bumping around in his head when he put together his newest book, and first full-length collection of poetry, Mountain Roosters.
“Earlier, just at the end of last year, I published a chap book, but this is my first full-length collection of poetry,” Parsons explained, “and the book is, it sort of started as my exploration of poetry and the poetic form, and it became a survey of men that I knew at the time that had an impact on me of some kind. It didn’t have to be a positive impact, or an inherently negative one. Just people who I thought, ‘These are the males around me.’ Then, in hindsight, as I was completing that collection, it became an exploration of, ‘Well, why did they get to pass the test? Why were they men in that sense?’ So, then it became an exploration of what it meant to be a man, and how we define that, which I think is of course really important right now, especially.”
It’s a concept he’s touched on before. In his Cowboy Suite – a curated collection of songs written by himself, his brother Billy, and his father Will, interspersed with poems and correspondences with his friend “Dale from Texas” – Parsons brushed up against the idea.
“The Cowboy Suite was really just an attempt by me to explore one individual person’s life. This guy, this ‘Dale from Texas’ had this rich tapestry in my mind of life, and I wanted to try to get that on paper; and there were so many songs that I’d already written, or that Billy had written, or dad had written, that fit so perfectly. It was like we were all developing this story together without even realizing.”
It definitely influenced his decisions on this book, and its promotion, he said.
“When I went to start putting songs together, thinking about promoting this poetry book, I started thinking, well, obviously there’s a lot of the songs that blend over into it. There’s songs about coming of age. There’s songs about growing very old, and what’s your identity when people have sort of moved on, when the whole of society has moved on? We were just talking earlier about people who have sort of an antiquated identity within their own culture. So, when everybody else has moved on and forgotten what a cowboy is, or doesn’t care about it anymore… what does the old guy whose only identity is as a rough old cowboy, what does he do? Where does he have left to go? People kind of even make fun of him for being so antiquated, but that’s a difficulty when you’ve built your entire life around one identity. So, that’s why, for me, with the poetry book the concept is so fun to talk about.”
The book hits on those various milestones, mostly from a male point of view since that’s Parson’s perspective. But, he said, the underlying concepts apply to anyone growing to adulthood regardless of gender.
“The book opens with a passage from Robert Blythe… (from) a book called ‘Iron John, a Book About Men.’ And it’s simply an exploration of one single masculine myth, thousands of years old, and it’s cropped up in a bunch of different cultures. He sort of pares it down to its simplest form and delivers it to you, and then explains to you what it’s about. Within the context of that, he’s talking about exactly what you just said, the sort of gap in our experience, our current culture’s experience, where there used to be all of these rituals where – it’s not just for boys and men, but for anyone of any identity to become fulfilled. (Without it) they didn’t become actualized. You went through some process to go from a boy to being a man. You went through some process to go from a girl to being a woman. Whatever you identify as, you were required in your profession, in your artistic pursuits, to have these processes, apprenticeship, and these steps that you go through. Rituals that certify when you’ve reached a place, and it’s something that tells your subconscious mind to quit being anxious. You’ve made it. You have become what you sought to be.”
Parsons examines that growth, from the uncertainty of youth to the confidence of age, throughout the book. He’ll perform selections from the book, along with original music, at CoffeeTree Books in Morehead, this Friday, February 23, at 5 p.m. with an introduction from one of his mentors, KY poet laureate Silas House.
“I doubt that there are better writing instructors in Kentucky than Silas House, just from a pedagogic perspective there. He’s one of the best. Maybe the best,” Parsons said. “He just is very clear. His craft is very precise. And so, I learned a lot from that, and he became a mentor of mine through that (time as his student at Berea College).”
Contact the writer at editor@cartercountytimes.com
