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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: Invisible Hands

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I'm Helena de Groot. Today, “Invisible Hands.” You know the image of the invisible hand coined by Adam Smith, aka, the Father of Capitalism. But have you ever come across the full quote? Let me just read it to you. “The rich consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, they divide with the poor, the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life which would have been made had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants.” It's so great; it couldn't be further from the truth. But it sure sounds nice, the rich sharing with the poor, everyone getting what they need. The poet Airea D. Matthews first learned about this invisible hand theory while she was getting her BA in economics, and it was hard for her to take the theory seriously. The only invisible hands she knew were those of people like her mother, who worked three jobs to keep her children housed and fed. For her new collection, Bread and Circus, Airea D Matthews wanted to know more about the myth of the invisible hand, so she decided to go back to the beginning, to Adam and Eve, to Adam Smith, and to her own beginnings. Here is Airea.

Airea D. Matthews: I'm fascinated by beginnings. You know, I kind of think in terms of, if I think about a geometry, so a lot of my thinking is spiraled and there's always something there at the beginning, something that sparks, something that makes you interested, or at least that leaves a thread that weaves into each of your ears. Like, what is that one thing? And I think one of the things that I've picked out from Adam Smith is the idea of alienation. Adam Smith introduced the concept of the division of labor, saying that you have a whole factory that's making the same thing. Maybe there should be one person who specializes in one part of the widget and another person who specializes in another part of the widget and so on and so forth. But how that's concretized over time, it feels for me very deeply that it leads to alienation. And, so, I think about Adam and Eve being alienated from the garden, the myth there. And I think about the early alienation that I had. So, I think alienation is probably the chiefest concern that drove the writing or was the thread between all three of those things.

Helena de Groot: Well, before, you know, I want to get to the other origin stories, but let's start with your own. Where did you grow up and what kind of kid were you?

Airea D. Matthews: I grew up in Trenton, New Jersey, born in 1972. And Trenton factors into the book quite a bit, too, just because of the landscape of Trenton. Trenton was a city that was built on industry, but all of those industries have gone away. So, it's an East Coast Rust Belt City, is the best way that I can say. It feels very much like if it was in the Rust Belt was fitting perfectly, but it's on the East Coast, so it's a little bit of an anomaly. But there's some sense of abandonment. But what I saw was a lot of working-class folks from every color, race, ethnicity living near each other. So, we lived in a two-family home. My grandparents lived downstairs, my paternal grandparents lived downstairs. My mother and my father and my sister and I lived upstairs, and our neighbors were a working-class white family. The girl's name was Marianne, I believe. We used to play together. And then there was another girl on the other side. I think they were from the islands. And, so, there was this sense of working-class grit. And the neighborhood that I grew up in, there were kids of every background, and we just kind of all had the same situation. We were from working-class families and we'd go play with our Barbies on the sidewalk, and that was a good memory.

Helena de Groot: And since everyone was working-class, you know, I imagine the parents were all, you know, working, you know, long hours, probably. Did you have a sense of freedom, of independence? Like, were you, you know, on your own a lot? What did that look like?

Airea D. Matthews: I want to think that I was free and independent, but I wasn't actually. My mother at that point, when I was very young, was still trying to get her undergraduate degree. She'd had a gap in her college education because she'd gotten pregnant. And shortly after I was born, she went back to go get her undergrad, which she earned in ’74, I believe. And then my father had these weird bouts of joblessness. So, I'd be around my father and my grandfather a lot. So, as I said, his parents lived downstairs. They were incredibly religious. So, whereas I should have had freedom, right? It was the ’70s, like kids were, they would sneak, go away, come back when the light comes on, you know. Right. I didn't actually, because I had these hyper-religious grandparents that lived downstairs. And then my father was home sometimes and my sister was in school. She was three years older than me. So, at the point that I'm really remembering, my sister was already in school. And so much of my freedom came through my imagination. It didn't really come through being able to walk anywhere I wanted to go or being able to do anything I wanted to do. I mean, yeah, we could walk to the corner store, we could do things like that. But my grandmother was very religious and very judgmental, and so she had a tight rein until her death. I think she died in ’77.

Helena de Groot: And how did that show up? Like, what were some of the things that she didn't want you to do?

Airea D. Matthews: Well, she had this perfume collections, funny story. She had a perfume collection. I loved the smell of it. And I would go into her bedroom and her perfumes were kind of arrayed on this mirrored tray that was on her dresser. So, one day I went down there and I tried on one of her perfumes and I happened to like the smell of it. And I went outside and there was a boy who was playing with my group of friends, and I told him he could smell my neck. And my grandmother caught me. I mean, what was there to catch? I was just telling him he could smell the perfume. And she told me to come in. And then she told me I was fast because I was letting this boy smell my neck. And after that, I think she was just really always watching from the window like a hawk. So, you really couldn't do anything, you know? You couldn't do anything that wasn't under her gaze. She saw you. She would... Her name was Fanny Holloway. She saw you. So, Fanny would see me. And I think one time, actually, I do remember listening to the radio, and there was a song by Peaches & Herb, which is a group from a husband and a wife, I believe from the ’70s. They were big into disco and they were singing “Shake Your Groove Thing.”

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Shake it, shake it, / Shake your groove thing / Shake your groove thing, yeah, yeah / Show ’em how we do it now / Shake your groove thing / Shake your groove thing, yeah, yeah

(MUSIC ENDS)

Airea D. Matthews: And I started shaking my groove thing. My grandmother immediately came outside and grabbed me. So, my…yeah, my freedoms were limited.

Helena de Groot: How old were you?

Airea D. Matthews: Let me say I was...I was, say, I was five. I was five when this happened, which was weird because, you know, they're also the grandparents of my... they're the parents of my father. And my father was a mess of a man. And, so, it's interesting to see how they were so strict with my sister and I, but they were so lenient with and fawning over my father. I mean, he was a man who was kicked out of the armed services. He was dishonorably discharged. He was a drug addict. He was a womanizer. He was a gambler. He was, he had every vice that you could possibly think of, but they just doted on him.

Helena de Groot: That must have been really confusing for you.

Airea D. Matthews: It was very confusing. And the only thing I could think of was that it had everything to do with gender.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, right.

Airea D. Matthews: In that he was their youngest son. He was my grandfather's only son and my grandmother's youngest son. The only thing I can think is that, you know, as the baby of the family, he was given quite a bit, including attention and leeway, which was not a fate of the women or the girls in the family. There was no leeway given.

Helena de Groot: And did you know that your dad struggled with addiction?

Airea D. Matthews: Yes.

Helena de Groot: Or like when did you know that, you know?

Airea D. Matthews: I knew it from a very early age. I can't remember when I first knew. I think it was before I was five. But this is just when I'm gathering and garnering memories. So, some of the memory that I have of him then could be muddied by the stories that I've had now. But I do remember he had a love affair with the bathroom. He would go in the bathroom and get lost in there for hours at a time. And then he'd go in one way. And if he came out—sometimes he came out, sometimes he nodded off—but when he came out, he was completely different. And, so, I think I started noticing that change. I was always hyper-observant as a kid, and I just noticed there was a staunch before and after with his personality, you know, just he could be really low one minute and then the next minute after, you know, he'd eaten his fowl, otherwise known as heroin, he'd be fine. And it was interesting because it's one of those things we know that it's bad for him, but it also calms him down. And so thus it calms you down, you know, like, your vagus nerve can kind of breathe a little bit because he's calm now. So it is a very interesting relationship with the drug.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Airea D. Matthews: But, yeah, I was probably like four or five when I really realized he was strung out.

Helena de Groot: That's so young.

Airea D. Matthews: You don't even realize it. You just recognize their moods change—and swiftly. And it's not like a mood change from getting good news. It's, you can feel that it's a chemical mood change. And there was also a smell that's associated with it that I cannot get out of my…I can still smell it. So, there's like, it's hard to describe it. It's like a, almost like a metallic smell. He had this, like, metallic smell in his skin. And, you know, we remember by smell. So, I can still smell it now, but that smell doesn't make me think, it doesn't leave a negative thought in my mind. It just means he's calm.

Helena de Groot: Oh, interesting.

Airea D. Matthews: And then dark liquors, they also have a very distinct smell for me. He loved dark liquor. I was thinking about that recently. I was like, wow, I said this to a friend. And I was like, you know what, I just really would like to know what he liked? I knew what he didn't like and I knew what he was addicted to, but I didn't know what he actually liked. Like, did he like to go swimming? Did he like riding bikes? Did he? I know he liked jokes. He's a funny man. But do you like going to shows? You know, those kinds of things that you realize? I was too late to find out now, but it would be interesting to know.

Helena de Groot: It's such a generous question. I really love that, that you're like that thing that he seemingly liked more than anything, I know that that was not really what he liked. That was a compulsion and that there must be something else that he liked that I never got to find out.

Airea D. Matthews: Yeah. And I kind of think that every addiction is running toward that thing. It's running toward that thing. It's a compulsion toward the thing that you actually really love. Whether it's love, is there something about being in love that you really like? Is there something about feeling calm that makes you feel good? Is there something about being numb that makes you feel good? I just think that there's kind of these unspoken loves that we don't think about, and we find some other ways to substitute them, which is the addict's plight. Right. You find other ways to substitute that feel good feeling when you can't get it or it's not within reach. How do you substitute it? Do use drugs or people or other substances, alcohol, TV, social media? And I do think that I have an addictive personality. I do think I got that from my father. So, one of the first things, one of the many reasons why I wanted to research him was because I wanted to understand or try to remember him because I wanted to understand myself. But I actually do believe that a part of my wanting to...with this book, I wanted to bury my father once and for all. But to bury him, I had to understand him. And to understand him, I had to write about him and past him. So, most will notice that the second half of the book really doesn't deal with my dad at all. Once he's in the ground, he's in the ground. And that's because I needed to write past him. So sometimes writing is a needful thing. It's a thing you absolutely have to do. Sometimes it's a willful act. It's the thing that you will yourself to do. And sometimes it's just this unconscious, intuitive act and you don't know why you're doing it, but you know you have to. I just felt like this was the need for work for me. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: I was wondering if you want to read that poem where you bury your father.

Airea D. Matthews. Yeah. “Elegy for the Moaner.”

Helena de Groot: On page 37.

Airea D. Matthews:

Elegy for the Moaner

After 22 years of gathering dust, it’s time

to remove the urn from the cabinet

& put him beneath proper ground.

There’s the small problem of not having

a pine box for the body made

smaller by not having his body at all.

Hell, I don’t have a choir to sing riffs

and not one pastor to eulogize.

  I abandoned hat feathers and black

             church theatrics to settle on myrrh

kindling and mindful mantras.

  Although I concede: burials should be

an occasion of final rites, pomp

and happenstance, if you will,

with at least one moaner who may or may

  not know the departed. And so

I gather alone

with a shovel in my backyard

and his needle in my forethought.

I offer what I have to give—these brick pavers,

his cheap urn, the memory of my sister’s

fist through our childhood home’s window

  and the gentle way he sobered to wrap

her paw in an old shirt. The Barbie lunchbox

  in which he, high, captured the rabid

                bat that bit me while I slept.

Except it wasn’t a bat at all but a wren.

Imagine a grown man chasing a bird

just to say he finally caught the

elusive. Nevertheless, that bat spell took.

The bird flew. We fled. I lived.

We all lived for a while at least

until we didn’t. I am now miles

from where he spoke his last words:

                    Even God left. I’m only . . .

I get it. If the reaper RSVPs,

men wait at the forked road

                    with fresh baked chaff

grown over many summers—

bounty cut lovely, dross shot up.

Fool hands won’t realize Lucifer

   manages the silo, his barters larcenous.

I once loathed the blind risks

  that made men harvest pulse and

bet full stalk. Laid odds against gains

             and harbored spite of ill gambles.

  But loss humbles, hindsight mellows,

since my double down with rage

             never once paid—

never one raised

                   my father from any grave.

Helena de Groot: How long ago did you write this poem?

Airea D. Matthews: I think it was 2016. Actually, it was when I did a burial ceremony in my backyard. And, well, my father died in 1996, and we were going to give him a proper burial, but he didn't include us on any of his papers, so we never had any right, any real right, to any of his stuff. So, we kind of abandoned that and decided to have him cremated. But nobody in his family came to get his urn. So, his urn was in the funeral home for years, literally years. His urn stayed in a funeral home in Trenton, New Jersey, for many years, until my mother decided to go pick up the urn. She picked up the urn. She put it in a curio cabinet next to a bunch of dog cremains. And, so, I thought, listen, this is probably, it's probably time to go ahead and bury the man. She said that's enough. And so I took some of his cremains and put him in my backyard. I know that that's probably not ecologically sound, but it was something that I needed to do for ritual to make sure that he moved on.

Helena de Groot: What has closing that chapter done for you? Like what has it made room for?

Airea D. Matthews: It's made space for forgiveness. And I think that forgiveness is not necessarily something that you give to someone else; it’s a gift you give to yourself. I had no room left to be mad. I had no room left to be enraged. So, I just let it go. I let him go. I have nothing to hold on to anymore and there's no man left there. He's gone. There's no ashes to speak of. It's just, let it go, you know?

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Helena de Groot: You talked about research. You said that you wanted to research your father in order to understand yourself. And I was thinking about that when I read some of the earliest poems in your book that talk about moments that you did not witness, like your parents’ marriage or like your mother's pregnancy with you. And so I'm wondering, how did you do your research, you know? Or like if you talked to your mother, what were those conversations like?

Airea D. Matthews: Some of it is that I had to let imagination stand in proxy for real life facts. And some of it was asking my mother as much as she could remember. More recently, I've been getting in touch with my extended family, so I have a larger base of people to pull from. But a lot of it is sitting with my mom and asking her. Now, here's the thing about that. My mother has a block with her memory. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that she experienced trauma and she blocked a lot of stuff out. From the age of 13 on, she's had a pretty hard life. And so she had to block certain things out. And she'll be honest and tell me when she doesn't remember. But I can conjure up a scene in my mind's eye, you know, and I can make a poem remember when I can't. And that's just through the imagination, through the imaginative act of sitting with a thing or sitting with an idea and then transporting myself back to what I might have seen. I mean, I did not have to put two and two together to figure out that I was not a planned birth, and my mother probably did not want me.

Helena de Groot: But she didn't tell you that?

Airea D. Matthews: She would not say that. She wouldn't say it. But, you know, it's one of those things where it's like you're in a troubled relationship. You had not planned this child. It is not too far out of the realm possibility that you didn't want me to be here. And that's OK, you know, that's OK. That's just a real moment. I'm still here and I'm thankful. But it's a really, it's a very real moment, you know, of thinking of my mother as a person who has agency and free will and the ability to have a personal and private thought.

Helena de Groot: That is so interesting that you... I mean, seriously, the generosity of your questions or your imagining, you know, trying to imagine what is it that my dad would have liked? Did he like to swim? And that you're also, you know, towards your mother also, like she doesn't need to tell me. I just, she has the right to have that thought.

Airea D. Matthews: She has the right to have that thought, you know? And it's just like what happens when we see these people who are so pivotal in our upbringing and in our very existence and we think, oh, you know what? They're just human. They have the right to make mistakes. They have the right to be flawed beings. They have the right to make good decisions. They have the right to make bad ones. And to know that is not an indictment on us or the self or the child, it's just saying that they have these other lives and it's OK. And I hope at some point my children get to the point where they realize that I'm much more than just a mother to them. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: That’s like the start of the spiral, where you preceded their birth?

Airea D. Matthews: Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So, seeing it in those terms makes it... But does it make it tender or precious? It just makes it the truth, or a truth? A possibility?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Airea D. Matthews: Then I'm OK with. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: To go to a part of the spiral that precedes you. Do you want to read the wedding poem?

Airea D. Matthews: Sure.

Helena de Groot: It's titled “March 1969,” on page five.

Airea D. Matthews:

March 1969

Back at the church, the best man draped the groom's shoulders,

Passed a flask of hundred-proof.

A mother fondled her fake pearls, walked the aisles in search of a soloist

to replace the cousin who canceled an hour earlier. Will you sing His Eyes on the Sparrow or Amazing Grace? She asked each guest.

Across town on Hanover Street, a young woman in a taffeta

and lace gown huddled on the cold tile of a YWCA bathroom stall. She heard

the lobby phone ring incessantly. The receptionist trumpeted her name

over the intercom. She balled up wads of Angel

Soft and blotted the Revlon fleeing her lash. For the last

two hours, the cost of the dress, flowers, drinks, the Soloist,

the hall, and her mother's second mortgage to fund

the matrimonial circus, paraded across an embedded reel. Thoughts

of a fatherless baby pushed her to decision. That inevitable

bride called a yellow taxi to deliver her to fate. Outside,

a homeless prophet touched her shoulder while she waited, reassured:

It's better for the baby girl, Honey.

Three hours later, an understudy organist played the sorriest wedding

march. The bride tripped down the aisle, busted her knee wide

open, bled through her stockings and silk slip. Her groom,

many swigs in balanced by his best men, could barely

stand. Her mother ran to the altar to lift her daughter, her sole

investment. While an unholy congregation craned their necks

and swished their church fans, advertising a local funeral

home, to watch a lovely commodity reluctantly

agreed to her own barter.

Helena de Groot: Thank you. I mean, so many things about this poem. Let's start with the language of money, you know, the language of, like, economic logic. You know, you have that real, that worry real, right, of the cost of the dress, flowers, drinks, you know, her mother's second mortgage to fund the matrimonial circus. Then there's, you know, her mother ran to the altar to lift her daughter, her sole investment. The congregation is swishing their church fans advertising a local funeral home, which I thought was very funny. I mean, it's not very funny, but it's very funny.

Airea D. Matthews: It's so ridiculous and so true. If you go into any Black church, look at the fans, they all are advertising the local funeral.

Helena de Groot: It's so jarring. I mean, it's like the truth (CROSSTALK)

Airea D. Matthews: From beginning to end.

Helena de Groot: Like that's going to happen. Yeah. (LAUGHING) And then, of course, you know, you have that devastating end, you know? So, the congregation is there to watch a lovely commodity reluctantly agreed to her own barter. I was wondering how sitting down to use the language of economics and thinking these terms, how that changed the way you see these moments.

Airea D. Matthews: Yeah, that's a great question. I think a lot of it was thinking about the economics of marriage, particularly if you are from an underclass or working-class background, and like what the purpose of marriage is. And a lot of times, you know, even when we were an agricultural society, a lot of times family was, had everything to do with you have enough bodies to man the farm. And it becomes like an economic premise at that point. And so I was very much thinking about what would make my mother want to marry a man that I, she admits that even then she knew that he wasn't the best one for her. But what would make her do that? And a lot of it is that it's the economic pressure of the sunk cost. All the things that I talked about there are sunken costs, the cost of the dress, the second mortgage, the flowers. Those are things you can't recover. So, I think about how prominent the thought of the sunk cost is when you are from an underclass or working-class background because you've already put money into it, you can't get it back. You have to see it through. And so I think that really is one of those things that made me equate marriage to kind of an economic agreement, even though I knew in the back of my mind that, yes, it's very much an economic consideration, but this kind of like this merger and how, if you have very little if two people get together who have very little, they have marginally more than they had before, or nominally more than they had before. And so I'm thinking about that. And the kind of decision-making that goes into it. I get it. You start thinking about all of the little details of what might happen if, you know, planning for catastrophe. And sometimes if you are planning for catastrophe, it's better to have a partner there with you. And so I think that's what my mom and my father were both going through. I don't think either one of them wanted to be married to one another. But here they are. They've had these people in their ear. They're pregnant. It was the ’60s. They were both from fairly conservative backgrounds. And so there was something about acceptable, there was something reasonable, there was something societally welcoming about being married. You don't have to become a statistic. You don't have to become a single parent. You don't have to have the child be stigmatized in some way. Those are all the considerations. I know for sure that my family was thinking about because I know how they think now. And so I'm sure that when they were in the midst of it in the ’60s, for sure, they were thinking about that and it just became an economic proposition. You've already got these calls sunken into the marriage. You've got to just see it through to the end. And recognizing your daughter at that point when you've taken out a second mortgage for a wedding, she's an investment. So, you have to take care of your investments to make sure that they grow. And a lot of times, and a lot of Black families, the investment plans are other people. Right. You invest in other people because we have not always had equal access to investment platforms. And so you invest in your son or you invest in your daughter or your siblings in some way so that in the end of your life you get that paid back. They take care of you. And so I was thinking about that, how we view people as investment. And a lot of the things that we dip our funds into are often costs that you can't reclaim.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Yeah. What I also thought was so striking and moving about this poem is the feeling of fatedness, which can be a good thing. You know, I mean, sometimes when people are in love and they, you know, they are like going on and on about the story of how they met and how it was fated. Right. And that feels like a good thing. But of course, fatedness can also be a terrible thing.

Airea D. Matthews: Correct.

Helena de Groot: Right. So, you have that inevitable bride, inevitable. She already can't do anything about it. That inevitable bride called a yellow taxi to deliver her to fate. And then all these other fated things happen, right? Like the soloists doesn't show up. You know, on understudy, organist plays the sorriest wedding march. You know, the bride trips on her way to the altar. All these bad omens, basically.

Airea D. Matthews: Right.

Helena de Groot: And then, of course, you have that prophet, right? The homeless prophet who touched her shoulder, reassuring her: It's better for the baby girl, Honey. And I was thinking about prophets and fate. And in that light, I was thinking about Adam Smith, you know, the prophet of capitalism, who saw certain things, but also made certain things happen. Right? Like his theory about, you know, the wisdom of the free market and of the invisible hand. So, can you just give me a little primer? Who was he and where were you first introduced to him?

Airea D. Matthews: So, Adam Smith is the author of his magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations, which he published in 1776, I believe, which is interesting because Adam Smith was not really an economist. He was a moral philosopher. And at the writing of The Wealth of Nations, it's my understanding that he was living with his mom.

Helena de Groot: Oh my God, Thoreau all over again, doing his laundry, making him donuts. Oh, my God.

Airea D. Matthews: Exactly. So, you have these mothers who are taking care of him, but he enters in the book as a secondary character. But I was interested in Adam Smith because I started reading up on, I realized that when I was in econ, I studied econ in undergrad at University of Penn. And I realized when I was an econ student, I really couldn't get into folks’ theories without understanding the folks themselves. I recognize that as a part of who I am. I was like, I want to know a little bit more about this guy. And he kind of entered into the realm of economics through the back door. And I have conversations with people because, again, he was a moral philosopher. So I have conversations with people and they're like, well, you know, I think that a lot of what Smith was saying was—these are other people saying this to me—I think a lot of what Smith was saying was misunderstood. And that very well may be true, right? When you write a book, it's like it's very easy to become misunderstood. And it could be that he was just writing scribblings that he didn't think would become The Wealth of Nations.

But at some point he had to catch on that he was actually writing the constitution of capitalism, essentially. It is truly the way, the guiding principle behind capitalism. And so I think he was actually thinking these out as philosophers do, as sort of musings, like, what if? Not necessarily something that would be enacted, but something that is on his mind that he was thinking through almost like a thought problem. And so he was forwarding this idea of the invisible hand, which is simply a theory about self-interest, where self-interest kind of creates optimal economic outcomes. And I guess in modern day society, the best example of that would be like Uber, oh, I'm going this place. Oh, you like to go this place, I can pick you up and take you to this place, but you have to pay me. So this idea of self-interest is just that the folks who have will make opportunities for those who don't. And it'll be a grand, old utopian society. And we have seen for centuries now that that doesn't necessarily work.

This theorizing about self-interest actually is not the key toward optimal outcomes. It's not the key towards optimal economic outcomes, and it's certainly not the key towards optimal humanist outcomes. So, you know, I just kind of was sitting with ideas of self-interest for years and thinking about Smith's invisible hand theory and thinking about how that simply can't work because you're assuming that everyone has a certain generosity of spirit in their self-interest. Not that they want to hoard their resources, which is what we see now. Not that they want to continue to amass these incredible resources while other people go without, which is what we see now. And so, I really wanted to, when I started writing this book, I really wanted to think through the ideas of self-interest and how self-interest has failed me and continues to fail me. Well, one self-interest failed me because my father was self-interested and he was a drug addict. Two, self-interest failed me because, you know, self-interest leads to self-preservation.

And what do we see in society at large? Well, we see these grand divisions where people think other people are so different from them and that they have to protect themselves from them. That leads to a certain protectionism. So self-interest actually, if you roll it out all the way to the end of the program, it's not actually ideal. It just creates more and more divisions. And so that's kind of how I was thinking about self-interest and thinking about how to move away from this grand old idea that everyone is generous and that this would happen this way, self-interest happens this way. It simply doesn't. Once people start getting means, you start to try and protect and preserve those means, you do not start to try and find ways to help other people.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And I mean, as you are, I am very interested in who is the person behind the theory? You know, how do they come to that place where that seemed to make logical sense to them? And you know, reading Adam Smith, I would think, you know, you're so close to getting it, right? Like we are indeed deeply enmeshed, like we indeed need each other. Like indeed we need to exchange in order to get everything that we need, right? Like, yes, we eat bread only because others go to the trouble of growing the grain, baking the bread, you know, getting it to us. Right. But then instead of going like, you know, since we're all interconnected, let's care about other people. No. He goes, you know what, just care about yourself. And somehow that will work out.

Airea D. Matthews: Yeah, exactly.

Helena de Groot: So what did you find, like, in your research? Because you went to Scotland and looked through his papers, right?

Airea D. Matthews: I did.

Helena de Groot: Like, what did you find about him, about his life that made him reach that very funny conclusion?

Airea D. Matthews: I found out that this man lived an incredibly isolated life, and I looked at what he stood for. He didn't make any strong claims against slavery, for instance. And that was very much a burgeoning kind of economy then. And that I don't… listen, I know they were different times. I recognize that. But there are still ills in the world that I think across time and space one would say, hey, that's not OK. And that was just kind of one of the big things that I saw. And I also saw that he was trying to do good in what he was saying, just in the same way that you were talking about. You said that he had an idea for how society could work. But it just never became grounded. And instead it just became this colossal idea of capitalism. So just kind of one of those interesting things where I just really enjoyed getting into his head and seeing what he was reading, seeing what he was looking at. It helped me to figuring out he lived with his mama. I mean, it just helped me to understand him a little bit better. You know, it's in his self-interest to live at home. Self-interest worked for him.

Helena de Groot: And so what? Since you, in your own life, have kind of gone the other way. Like, what... Are there moments that led you to that conclusion, self-interest is not the way?

Airea D. Matthews: I think, sitting in those lecture halls, listening to these econ lectures about the free market and how much it's driven by self-interest, was one of those, like, sudden epiphanies that I had. And I was like, that's ridiculous. And I would think that folks who have several degrees and go to all these highfalutin schools would have thought through this a little bit better. But here's the thing. It's working for them. Do you know what I mean? So, something's working for you. It works. And I think that we have such an individual lens in the US until, yeah, we can kind of get behind these ideals of... And even the country itself, it was founded upon these ideals that you can get behind these ideals of self-reliance and self-interest. And but if you're thinking about the collective, it becomes a little bit different.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's so interesting, right, when you look again at the founding of this country, it's as if it's all based on the premise of Adam Smith and Thoreau leaning on their mother to do the invisible work. Only the invisible work is done by....

Airea D. Matthews: Exactly.

Helena de Groot: They're enslaved.

Airea D. Matthews: Exactly. Exactly. Right. And there's always the invisible work, right? It's just a matter of who is doing the invisible work. But we've made them invisible. So now that they don't matter. And that's incredible. Thank you for that. That is absolutely right. There's always someone doing some degree of labor that we can't see, that's bolstering the people who are moving forward, but we don't see it. So, we don't recognize it. We don't value that work, you know.

Helena de Groot: You have a beautiful, beautiful poem in the book about someone whose labor is invisible. It's the poem on page 24. It's titled “Working-Class Bedtime Story.” Is there anything you want to say before we get into it?

Airea D. Matthews: Yeah. So, this poem is an amalgamation of my mom and my grandmother, actually, my maternal grandmother and my mom. My maternal grandmother worked in a factory and she worked a swing shift in the factory. And my grandmother had a fifth-grade education. My mother finished college, as I said, in ’74, but my mother was a teacher and she didn't really make very much even back then. I mean, it was like, I mean, we think about the cost of living. We factor that in and inflation and all that stuff. It was very hard for her to make a living as a single parent, so she ended up working three jobs. So we would see my mother for maybe two hours a day. My sister and I would see her for two hours a day for most of our childhood. And then there was my grandmother who worked a swing shift. And so I was kind of thinking about their labors and what their labors mean and how hard it is when your night is day and your day is night. So I wrote a “Working-Class Bedtime Story.”

In 1981, every morning, two hours after the gate closed on her night

shift, a gowned woman wiped oil from ladder rungs, sharpened

two hatchets with a dull whetstone and steadily climb

through troposphere to reach the far edge of her roof. Positioned

just so, legs in kenebowe, arms dual wielding. She'd cut the sun

from its cosmic string, watch it gyrate in mid-air, light don't down

nowhere easy. Taking swing after swing until the ax head flew

and sun dimmed and fell through that roof onto a parlor

floor, where that woman collapsed, sheerly done in. While

her curious young'un, with a feral stare, sat silent in the dark

corner chair picking flint flakes

of ash from her nappy-ass hair.

Helena de Groot: Thank you.

Airea D. Matthews: So, it really is thinking about those who work swing shifts and unseen labor, and then the children who are still home watching it, watching the spectacle of labor, how it affects the people that they love. How they often come home. It was the ’80s and we would come home and open the door with a key that we had tied around our neck all day. We don't have neighbors to come check in on us. It was just my sister and I. We kind of looked after each other. And how was our lives? It's like many of the kids in the ’80s, we were really, we were 50 when we were 13. You know, we were we were taking care of ourselves. We were cooking dinner. We were kind of policing our own activity, knowing we needed to go to bed, knowing we needed to go home, knowing we needed to wake up.

Helena de Groot: And have you ever had a period where you sort of rediscovered your inner child, you know, where you, like, gave her some space to breathe?

Airea D. Matthews: Totally. It was with me having children. I mean, I look back at pictures of myself from high school, from middle school. I always look like I had an IRA and like 50 kids and maybe smoke 50 Marlboros a day. I just, from the age, from seventh grade on, I look like a grown woman. I never looked like a kid. And I think a lot of that was just because I was trying to protect myself so that I would always be seen as competent and I would know what to do and I know how to handle situation. So when I had kids, particularly when I had my daughter, who's now 13, I was able to get inside of that like magical place of childhood again that I missed out on. Because I didn't really have a childhood that was chocked full of play and innocence. I was kind of stripped of innocence at a very early age. And so how do you relive that? Because you have to have that part of you. That part of you wants to come out, right? That part of you wants to be, wants to frolic and be frivolous and have fun. And I learned how to do that with my kids.

So, I was well into my 30s by the time I learned how to actually have childhood fun, whether it was going to like these little trampoline places and jumping on the trampolines or playing outside with them, playing dolls with my daughter, who only liked dolls for a really finite period of time, like super, super slim, super narrow. But we had that window and it was good. And seeing through their example what childhood should and could be. And so I was dead set on preserving their childhood and their innocence for as long as I could. But I also knew that they had to be a part of something beyond our forward walls. They had to go outside and they had to recognize what it is to carry the bodies that they carry in space to be who they are. And that's when gradually, over time, a bit of their childhood kind of peeled away from them and eventually just became a husk. Because you see, particularly I have three boys and so you see how Black boys and men and also Black girls and women are treated in society. And you just know that I can't protect them from that. So that's a crippling reality, to know there's something that outside of what I've done for them that I can't protect them from and that they had to find that out at a very early age. Unfortunately, because I couldn't keep them inside the four walls all day. I had to let them go. And, you know, that hurts because you want to be able to preserve, I believe, in the importance of innocence. I think in innocence, early innocence is where imagination flourishes, because you don't have to think about all these other adult concerns and worries. You can kind of leave it at the door or never, ever have to hold it, just be a child. And I really wanted that for my kids since I did not have it. My sister did not have it and their dad also didn't have it. He grew up in crippling poverty. And so I wanted that for them. And unfortunately, we live in a place where that they have to go out. They have to see for themselves what is outside of the four walls. That's a devastating reality for any parent who wants to shield their kids from the miasmic funk, that is, a racialized society.

Helena de Groot: I'm interested in, like, innocence in poetry, you know, because I think in order to be a good poet, you have to have some of that. You know, you have to have a place where you can play in innocence, you know, whatever that means to you. Like it's the opposite of jaded.

Airea D. Matthews: Yeah, yeah.

Helena de Groot: And since you are operating in that harsh reality, how do you preserve or find or keep on nourishing those pockets of innocence where you can play, where you can write poems from?

Airea D. Matthews: I think that question is almost always about how do you preserve all in wonder, you know? And so for me, it's going to sounds like such a simple answer: the dark sky park. I go to dark sky parks. There's only a few in the country, but there's one in Pennsylvania. And I take the kids to Dark Sky Park. So my kids are now adults now, so most of them are adults. But there's something about being under a dark sky. And you, and we've lived in cities our whole lives. So my kids are from Detroit. They were raised mostly in Detroit. We moved to Philadelphia. So they don't have the opportunity to see the night sky in its glory and brilliance and have never seen it. And so I was like, let's go to the dark sky park so you guys can see what the sky looks like, actually looks like when there's no city lights. And it is the most humbling experience that I think I personally have ever seen. It's overwhelmingly gorgeous. Just to see what the sky looks like when you're not shrouded by buildings taller than your imagination.

To see what it looks like when the only light is from the sky itself. What does it look like to see a planet from the earth? You know, to think about, you know, what stars are, what's the material of a star? And so that's how I preserve innocence and all, is that I'm always aware of what I don't know. And I'm always aware that I can try and find answers to what I don't know. And I think that whatever that parcel of innocence is inside of me, wherever that parcel is, that's what preserves it. It's knowing there's certain things I can't know the answers to, I don't have the answers to, but I sure would like to find out.

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Helena de Groot: Airea D. Matthews is the author of Simulacra, for which she received the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. And her most recent collection is Bread and Circus. She's been the recipient of a Pew Fellowship, a Margaret Walker for My People Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, and a Louis Hunter Meyer Scholarship in poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. In 2022, she was named Philadelphia's poet laureate. She teaches at Bryn Mawr College. To find out more, check out the Poetry Foundation website. The music in this episode is by Todd Sickafoose and Erik van der Westen. I'm Helena de Groot, and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.