Mathias Svalina – In the beginning there was nothing, but nothing smelled like bacon; human life begins at the moment of contraception

Mathias Svalina, Destruction Myth (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2010)

«Destruction Myth responds irreverently to the primal origins of poetry and folklore. It points out the inherent surrealism and silliness of origin stories, while also implicitly respecting this silliness. It displays an aesthetic directly traceable to the pre-modern fabulist origins of Kafka, Samuel Beckett’s absurdities, and James Tate’s forms of surrealism. Destruction Myth brings a postmodern sense of irony as not an attitude but a way of understanding the truth.»

«Expanding the palette of contremporary surrealism while harkening back to the stories and prayers at the origin of poetry, Destruction Myth is a series of abusrdists myths of creation and destruction that are at times both inventively silly and surprisingly emotionally direct. This book attemps the world again and again, only to find that even the most ridiculous of creations contains the seeds of its own destruction.»


“In the beginning, everyone looked like Larry Bird. In the beginning, there was a rotting pig corpse. Everyone wanted to fight to the death. There was a hole in the basement floor. And a bunny with a broken leg. There were ghosts. Evildoers. A gun. Bacon. Cologne. A pencil. In these inventive, often deeply unnerving poems, Mathias Svalina offers us a string of forty-four creation myths and one longer, unsettling destruction myth. The result is a sonically complex, breathtakingly witty book, a collection of poems that surprises first with its wildly orchestrated clamor of narratives then, on reflection, surprises all over again with its intelligence and insight into the many ways we tell stories, the many means by which we imagine ourselves participating in them. This is an ambitious, brilliant first book.” - Kevin Prufer

“If I feel physically as if the top of my head is taken off and replaced with a soft serve ice cream machine, I am pretty sure it is poetry. Svalina’s book does no less, and also so much more. Read but also believe this book of fantastic lies. It’s like how you see a cat sitting there and you think ‘that is just a cat’ and then you realize that cat is God. Mathias Svalina has reinvented Yahweh as an Animorph. When this book is taught in college classrooms, students will curl up on the air conditioning vents and ask for salt.” — Anne Boyer

“Inspired, concise, often macabre yet always joyful, these creation myths are filled with a thousand odd, jagged miracles. A truly exhilarating read. Bravo!” — Linh Dinh

“In the beginning, we were children and we had beautiful imaginations, but we had no home for them. Then up sprouted Mathias Svalina’s Destruction Myth and we did. It too was beautiful, bloody, silly, haunted. At first we thought it was godly, and then we discovered it was human. We feared it; we loved it; we slept with it under our pillows.” — Eleni Sikelianos


"The first forty-four of the poems in Mathias Svalina’s Destruction Myth are called “Creation Myth”—that’s all of them except the very last one, which happens to be the title poem. It would be easy enough, and also probably correct, to read deeply into the title, locate there the thematic and/or philosophical and/or theoretical matrix that centers and informs the work. One could go off on the whole thing about how all creation is in some sense a destructive act (even ex nihilo creation requires a rending of the nothingness that exists prior to thingness), or, better still, how even as creation is ongoing and ever-renewing, we can never escape the essential fact of destruction: the limitless variety of creation, for all its glory, can never not be overshadowed by the singular fact of destruction, the final and re-unifying change that awaits us all. But to be perfectly honest, I’d rather not get into it, because there are few things duller than diligent, well-intentioned exegesis, and a book as big-hearted and bonkers as this one deserves better.
“In the beginning everyone looked like Larry Bird
but everyone did not have the name Larry Bird
& this was very confusing. Everyone had a headache
& walked around with furrowed brows. Headaches
hadn’t been invented & when people described the pain
they said: An angry Larry Bird stands on my neck
& My head is Larry Bird after missing a layup.”
These are the opening lines of the first “Creation Myth” in Destruction Myth, i.e. the first poem in the book. Elsewhere, “In the beginning there was nothing. But the nothing smelled like bacon.” Elsewhere still, “In the beginning there were only borders, because no one had created the spaces within the borders. The borders all had fancy dance moves with names like The Snake’s Lower Intestine Is Not a Game, the Carpal Tunnel Twister, & True Love.”
The poems in Destruction Myth are as lucid as they are loopy, and though they run the range, content-wise, from the meditative to the downright goofy, the over-arching mood is one of infectious geniality. Svalina may be taking some formal and /or theoretical cues from Jack Spicer’s notions of dictation and the serial poem, but his attitude (though not his style) feels more in line with up-beat freewheelers like Frank O’Hara and Tony Towle. But don’t get the impression that the book is in flight from seriousness. Svalina is more than capable of gravity (cf. “In the beginning the only job was unwrapping the mummy”, and the title poem for just two of the finest examples), it’s rather solemnity which he rejects altogether—and why not? The palpable sense of this poet’s pleasure in his work is one of its most fundamental elements, and enlivens the entire experience. It is as if this book were an atmosphere with slightly more oxygen—and far less pollution—than the one we’re otherwise resigned to. Hey buddy, thanks for the fresh air!
Svalina’s poems delight in delighting their reader—with surreal images, sharp turns, sudden outbursts of affect that undermine our quickly-established expectation that if one joke is told, another must follow. Some of the best poems do their good works simply by offering up some ludicrous premise (“In the beginning there was a woman with a toolbox full of paperclips”) and then keeping a perfectly straight face while patiently working the notion through to its (il)logical end. Surprises abound, and thrills.
Because part of being a genial host is being a generous one, it’s hard to complain that there are forty-four “Creation Myths” where, say, thirty might well have sufficed. The main risk Svalina runs is that, having created all the conditions for propulsive readability (which is desirable) individual myths may blur together (which is not desirable) like so much scenery on a scenic drive. This concern in mind, I point you to my own two favorite creation myths, so you take care not to breeze past them: “In the beginning everything I said exploded” and “In the beginning I was a little thing in the center of a star” –also, “Destruction Myth” itself, though there’s approximately zilch chance of that one slipping past. In any case, it’s a sad day for poetry when stoking a reader’s eagerness to consume the work is counted as a mark against it, and the fact of the matter is that anything you miss on the first go-round will still be there when you come back and come back again, which I expect that most readers will. Unless the world ends, of course. Or unless—no less frightening and heartening a prospect—it is junked only to be remade from scratch, again and again and again." - Justin Taylor

"The burden of myth is plausibility. In the religious traditions that have sought to explain both our purpose for being and the way the world came about, the same questions must be answered, but each spun tale must, at its core, have a plausible shred—a common-sense starting point.
So it is with Mathias Svalina’s exceptional collection of poems Destruction Myth. Of the forty-five pieces that make up the book, forty-four carry the title “Creation Myth,” and forty-four of them set out to explain, in their own ways, using their own discrete logic, how the world came about and what meaning our origin brings to our lives.
While the poems often begin in absurdity, they locate their rational shreds fairly quickly. The first contends, “In the beginning everyone looked like Larry Bird,” then quickly rights itself by continuing, “but everyone did not have the name Larry Bird / & this was confusing.” Or, take this example, equally logical: “In the beginning there was nothing. But the nothing smelled like bacon. No one could figure out how nothing could: a) have a smell & b) smell like bacon.” The poem continues to describe how the occupants of the nothingness provided theories to explain the bacony smell of themselves. That they discover, in the end of the tale, that they are all made of bacon as they are made in God’s image is both a satirical reading of religious tradition and, at the same time, an oddly touching tribute to the power of faith.
Such contradictions—in narrative, in tone, in language—are the hallmarks of this exciting and talented poet. Svalina is the master of the poetic turn, inverting his pieces so that what was serious is mocked and what was humorous becomes sad. Take, for example, the piece that begins, “In the beginning there were only streets.” The streets, unwieldy, take over the world, become the world. Svalina builds and builds the absurdity of the piece with each line, taking it beyond the realm of the rational and into the preposterous. And then, the poem closes:
Your car does not love you. Your car knows
what it is to be a car & that cars belong
to the streets. Just as every bird
belongs to the bird feeder. Just as lead
belongs to the pencil. That’s how I felt
when I was eight years old
& my home broke apart.
The book goes on and on this way, creating and recreating the world with myth after myth, each one more interesting, more compelling, more curious than the last:
“In the beginning everyone wanted to fight to the death. This made shopping difficult & also lovemaking and almost everything else.”
“In the beginning everything I said exploded. I’d say I am holding a glass of ice water and the glass of ice water would explode.”
“God created the world over a span of four years.
He would get all excited about it & work really hard for a few days
& then he would watch some movies & get out of the mood”
“In the beginning there was a book
but every time a villager read the book
it meant something different to her
than it did to her friend or mother.”
“At the beginning of everything the suicide rate increased dramatically.”
Svalina employs a consistent use of irony in these pieces, perhaps as a way to demonstrate that the world’s inherent contradictions resist any formula that may describe it. If the myths are as cunning and impassioned as Wile E. Coyote, the world they try to encompass is the Roadrunner, who merely moves two inches to the left and manages to avoid every restriction that could contain it. Svalina masterfully uses the kind of ambient language that clogs our culture today—ad words, brand names, TV news sound bytes, scientific jargon, and other bits of ephemera that, while seemingly empty, bring credibility and a kind of real-world color to these myths. These are myths of our culture, reflective of our culture, that tell us as much about who we are today as about who we were.
The final piece in the book—the frenetic, schizophrenic poem that lends its title to the book—skillfully, and perhaps gleefully, deconstructs the contents of the creation myths that precede it. All of the memorable presences from the earlier works—Larry Bird, pig’s blood, a sledgehammer, a fight to the death—reappear and are destroyed or subtracted. After such hard work to create the book—and, ostensibly, the world—it’s interesting to note it takes Svalina only thirteen sections to work it backward to oblivion. While many of the creation myths rely on prose and prose conventions of narrative to weave their worlds, “Destruction Myth” is built from rapid-fire lines whose pace, comparatively speaking, feels like poetry on the autobahn, generating more speed from its own speed. Like a furnace devouring its own house, the poem consumes the book, the myths, until it notes, “Most people didn’t want it to end. / But then it was the end.”
What makes this book such a compelling read isn’t Svalina’s deft use of imagery or the pervading sense of play at work in these poems, although those are enjoyable elements. While Svalina treads in the absurd, he stays close to the central truth of our humanity, that we are, fundamentally, miraculous errors, blessed with being and cursed with the need to explain why." - Charles Jensen


"Mathias Svalina: Creation Myth

In the beginning everyone looked like Larry Bird
but everyone did not have the name Larry Bird
& this was confusing. Everyone had a headache
& walked around with furrowed brows. Headaches
hadn’t been invented & when people described the pain
they said an angry Larry Bird stands on my neck
& my head is Larry Bird after missing a layup.
Even the babies were the size & shape of Larry Bird.
Since everyone looked like Larry Bird they avoided
extravagant events. All the clubs shut down, no one
could watch a Larry Bird dance without understanding
that they danced like this, pursed lips, flagellum legs,
arms like wild fire hoses. The real Larry Bird retired
to his basement. He wore magnifying goggles
& built watches of smaller & smaller dimension.
He built watches so small that he needed a microscope
to affix the springs & levers in the right places.
He built watches so small that he called them cells.
He built watches so small that he called them atoms.


Mathias Svalina: Creation Myth

My mother & father are both chemists. They light their ranch-style home with Bunsen burners & drink from glass beakers. They created the universe in 1968 when they dripped one foul-smelling chemical into a clear chemical that smelled like ice & formed my brother. The universe was a small apartment in South Side Chicago. My Aunt & Uncle lived downstairs inside a camera lens.

Each morning my mother & father would drip chemicals from an eyedropper into a frying pan & the chemicals became French toast. When I was five they created a city that they called New Orleans. They created fire ants & water moccasins. When I was ten they created a new kind of bone that breaks.

My mother & father, the chemists, stayed up late every night mixing chemicals into new creations, their goggles steaming up with concentration. They created tall neighbors with cigarettes & dry hands. They created aboveground pools with blue plastic sides. Toilets full of urine. Collies. New hats. Things I could never have imagined appeared every morning like tents.

When I clip my nails I watch the clippings dissolve immediately into chemicals. Likewise with cut hair. When I die I will prove my mother & father correct. The chemicals into which my body will wilt will be stored on a wooden shelf in brown bottles with rubber stoppers. I had a perfect moment of clarity in the back of Mike Bunn's car while Pittsburgh unfolded into a paper swan. Even this I know they created with chemicals.

There was a shining new bike. There was a dog that jumped into my bed. There was a red bottle. A set of nun-chucks. A yellow dress. Every new thing made me cry tears of bromine, which immediately evaporated. It was a laboratory. I was a child."