Closer
The lyric poem has long been understood as a site of a certain idealism. For Hegel, it was the most challenging of genres because, he wrote in Aesthetics, it required the poet to become “the centre which holds the whole lyric work of art together.” Such a transformation, if carried out, yielded “a self-bounded subjective entity,” a form of perfect expression that constitutes historical progress.
Farid Matuk’s “Closer” probes the implications of this aspiration. Bringing together abstract ideals and images of the outdoors, the poem initially seems to conform to lyric conventions, but a catalog of US war planes swiftly interrupts, summoning a different genre: the epic—which mediates the relationship between the self and the collective. As the poem shifts scales, refuting both the lyric’s idealized individuality and the epic’s narrative impulse, the reader is suspended in the disjuncture where ready-made settings fail, blurring the world like the lens of a camera before locking into a distance. Where, in the modern lyric, ignorance of an audience constitutes evidence of the truth of its expression, in “Closer” that solipsistic exceptionalism is rendered as a question, given as a charge to the reader, who, in each encounter, completes the poem’s meaning anew. The pretense of solitude in a world underwritten by imperial militarism is, after all, also a relational stance, a technology of destruction.
— Claire Schwartz
Listen to Farid Matuk read "Closer."
Closer
If it’s freedom or Sunday morning Through which the iterations— UH-60 Black Hawk A-10 Warthog C-130E Hercules MH-60S Knighthawk HC-130J Combat King II E-3 Sentry E-6B Mercury EC-130H Compass Call F-4 Phantom F-16 Fighting Falcon F-22 Raptor B-25 Mitchell —fly closer, a clear sky, A perfect day Can be a backdrop so calm, Admitting no wind So, who’ll take that feeling With me Into the critique of feeling?
“Closer” appeared in Moon Mirrored Indivisible by Farid Matuk, forthcoming from University of Chicago Press © 2025 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
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Farid Matuk’s work has been recognized by the 2023 Rabinowitz Prize from the Poetry Society of America, a Holloway Lectureship at UC Berkeley, and a 2024 USA Fellowship. His latest poetry collection, Moon Mirrored Indivisible, is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press.
