Matthew Henriksen’s All the Fights We Never Had

In Memory of Matthew Henriksen
1977-2022

Poem written read and recorded by Matt Henriksen
Video directed by Jasmine Dreame Wagner
Director of Photography Jonathan Schwarz
Audio mastered by Kern Haug

Matthew Henriksen, poet, performer, publisher, teacher, community organizer, friend.

A few years ago, Matt was working on a new series of poems that he referred to as All The Fights We Never Had. These were poems he wrote in his head in the midst of the Standing Rock protest and upon returning home from the protest, and he continued to write them in bookshops and at taco joints and on front porches, and they were basement poems and lawn poems and justice poems, poems that struggled with smoke and animals and love and loss and how it is to be a body in the world feeling wonder and awe and grief and holding on to it all. Matt saw the cracks in the world and through poetry and teaching and organizing, he let light in through those cracks.

One evening, he sent me a cell phone recording of him reading one of those fight poems while sitting outside of his home in Fayetteville, Arkansas. His voice, his images, his performance (he was a great reader), his insistence on seeing and remembering and testifying to what might otherwise be neglected or left or pressed down and under, these things were part of his fighting spirit and were what made him a wise witness to the world’s beauty and to the darker aspects of humanity. This poem is a dark poem, but it’s also flecked with light, like Matt himself, like one of those stones you find at the bottom of the river, kept clean by the constant pressure of flowing water, and I’ve saved it all this time. No spoilers, but it ends with two people deciding how to handle loss as the loss waits to be handled, and the painful weight on both sides of that equation, and in the end, the decision must be arrived at collectively, through conversation, a negotiation made of language and language we don’t want words for, and conversation is what Matt was made of, his connection to others, his insistence on staying in touch against distance and time.

One of my favorite memories of Matt is a shared memory we each had of standing as children on an open field of grass, maybe a playground or a ball field or the lawn of a large and impersonal government building. We both felt a need to chase the cool pond of a cloud’s shadow as it passed over the ground, playing a private game with the shadow, chasing it, and by extension chasing the cloud. The game was always to stay standing on the shadow, even as the wind picked up and the shadow scattered away or rolled to an edge where the grass ran out at the curb. Somehow, we both had this memory. And even stranger, we managed to remember this memory, and talk about it, and then text about it, make it part of our adult experience which has little room for cloud chasing, which is exactly the kind of conversation you’d have with Matt if you had the gift of spending time with him, whether in person, or through an evolving, migrating text thread of poems, commentary, questions, facts, jokes, encouraging statements and congratulations, the constant stream of good will that he emitted, a stream which outlasted platforms and digital intermediaries and I’m sure will outlast many other things, as I’m a mystical leaning person, and I feel like a part of Matt is still talking to us. And of course, he is, because he left us his poems.

Matt often spoke lovingly of his family and his house in Arkansas overlooking a river, and he also spoke of his many poets, and how much he wanted to come back to Brooklyn to visit, to browse the books and haunt the readings and inhale the work of the poets he loved, to feel the spirit of the city, which he said was almost overwhelming, the energy you felt just standing on the sidewalk, and he also spoke about how much he loved living and writing and hosting readings and publishing books in Greenpoint and Williamsburg years ago, and how he was filled with energy and mystery just thinking about it. So I wanted to share Matt’s cell phone recording, and share it with footage of a walk that Matt loved, from the Bedford L past the park to Greenpoint, footage coincidentally taken many years ago by Jon Schwarz as we drove around the park, Jon hanging out of the moon roof of my car with his camera, looking at the lights, and at the people, which is what Matt did: he looked very closely at lights and at people.

Gofundme for Adele Henriksen’s educational fund: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-build-an-educational-fund-for-adele
Gofundme for Matt’s widow and young children: https://www.gofundme.com/f/young-family-needs-help-after-sudden-loss

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