Matthew Rotando’s poetry connects surreal learning, Buddhist poetics, Sri Lanka, pilgrimage, illustrated poems, strange instruction, desire, landscape, and the restless life of language. His books are The Comeback’s Exoskeleton and Hail. He studied English at Duke University, completed an MFA in poetry at Brooklyn College, earned a PhD in English at the University of Arizona, and later became a professor of English literature and creative writing at Nassau Community College.
A Fulbright fellowship took Rotando to Sri Lanka, where he lived in relation to the University of Peradeniya, taught creative writing workshops, spent time in monasteries, and accompanied monks on walking pilgrimages. His scholarly work on Allen Ginsberg and Norman Fischer connects this lived experience with a sustained interest in Buddhist poetics, fracture, attention, and the relation between language and impermanence.
Story of Learning
The archive preserves the title Story of Learning, a poem that turns education into an absurd apprenticeship. Pond, Old Man Killer Whale, Wall of Dogs, and other strange teachers judge the speaker’s attempts to master a language whose rules continually shift.
Learning becomes a comic ordeal. Vocabulary, grammar, naming, ownership, desire, animals, household objects, and invented phrases mix inside a sequence of correction and renewed effort.
The archive’s guide to experimental poetry provides a broad context for surreal narrative, invented diction, semantic instability, comic instruction, and forms where language becomes the subject of its own failure and renewal.
Language as apprenticeship
Rotando’s poem treats language as something a person can study intensely and still misunderstand. Every apparent achievement opens another demand. The speaker learns, tests the knowledge, receives correction, and begins again.
This recursive structure makes education bodily and social. Teachers appear as animals, walls, landscapes, and impossible figures. Authority becomes strange enough for the act of learning itself to become visible.
Lesle Lewis offers a neighboring route through poetry where ordinary syntax, absurd turns, philosophical pressure, and associative movement continually renew familiar language.
The Comeback’s Exoskeleton
The Comeback’s Exoskeleton gives Rotando’s first book a title built from return and outer structure. A comeback suggests recovery, renewed appearance, performance, or reversal of fortune. An exoskeleton provides external support and protection.
The title therefore gives renewal a material architecture. Returning requires form. The body or poem survives through an outer structure capable of carrying pressure.
This image suits Rotando’s interest in strange creatures, metamorphosis, vulnerable bodies, and verbal systems that support experience while also constraining it.
Hail
Hail, published in 2020, moves through attraction, attention, spring streams, abandoned cities, ghosts, small creatures, storms, and the unstable relation between wonder and danger. The title can name weather, greeting, acclaim, or a sudden assault from the sky.
These meanings give the book several emotional temperatures at once. Hail can be beautiful and destructive. A greeting can become a cry. Weather can turn landscape into event.
The broader field of American poetry offers a useful context for Rotando’s combination of surreal image, landscape, vernacular speech, Buddhist influence, humor, and lyrical attention.
Attention and attraction
Rotando’s later work repeatedly treats attention as a force that pulls the mind toward objects, people, images, weather, and memory. Attraction becomes both emotional and perceptual.
A poem can follow what draws the eye or mind and allow that movement to determine form. This creates writing whose logic often feels associative while remaining grounded in sensory encounter.
Albert Flynn DeSilver offers another route through poetry where disciplined attention, perception, bodily awareness, contemplative practice, and literary form remain closely connected.
Buddhist poetics
Rotando’s doctoral research examined Buddhist poetics in the work of Allen Ginsberg and Norman Fischer. Concepts such as impermanence, attention, emptiness, fracture, breath, and present-moment awareness offer a philosophical frame for his own poetry.
Buddhist influence can change literary practice through relation to thought itself. A poem may observe mental movement, allow contradiction to remain active, or treat identity as process rather than fixed essence.
The site’s overview of modern poetry provides a broad frame for twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers who connect lyric practice with meditation, altered attention, spiritual inquiry, and experimental form.
Sri Lanka and pilgrimage
Rotando’s Fulbright period in Sri Lanka expanded his literary practice through travel, teaching, monastic life, and walking pilgrimage. Pilgrimage gives movement a ritual structure: the body crosses distance while attention is shaped by repetition, fatigue, landscape, community, and spiritual purpose.
Walking also changes the scale of place. Distance is experienced through feet, weather, road, rest, food, terrain, and conversation.
David Prater offers another route through poetry where travel, multilingual environments, temporary dwelling, long movement, literary inheritance, and changing forms of home shape the work.
Monastery and silence
Monastic environments introduce ritual, repetition, silence, communal discipline, and a different organization of daily time. These conditions can sharpen a poet’s awareness of speech because silence changes the pressure surrounding every word.
Rotando’s experience around monasteries also places spiritual practice beside the comic and surreal energies already present in his writing. Serious contemplation and absurd language can coexist inside the same poetic field.
This tonal range keeps spiritual inquiry embodied and alive.
Illustrated poems
Rotando has published illustrated poems and described himself through the playful term “ink-noodler.” Drawing gives poetry another way to think through line, shape, figure, sequence, and visual rhythm.
An illustrated poem creates a field in which image and language influence one another. A drawing can extend, complicate, or destabilize what the words appear to say.
Didi Menendez offers another route through poetry and visual art, where image, publication design, portraiture, collaboration, and literary text continually reshape one another.
I Haven’t Been Comfortable Enough To Take Anyone For Granted In Years
The second surviving archive title brings intimacy, unease, family, television, clothing, work, farming, food, Canada, relationships, and comic verbal slippage into one restless prose field. The title itself makes comfort an emotional resource whose scarcity changes the possibility of taking another person for granted.
The poem’s syntax moves through names, fragments, questions, mishearings, and sudden observations. Social life appears through language that keeps slipping sideways.
The site’s broad guide to poetry offers a useful context for how prose form, rhythm, voice, disjunction, humor, and everyday speech can carry complex emotional states.
Surreal instruction
Instruction recurs in Rotando’s work as a comic and philosophical structure. Teachers, lessons, rules, rewards, correction, and knowledge can all become unstable.
Surrealism makes that instability visible by turning abstract systems into creatures, landscapes, and impossible statements. Education becomes a scene in which the learner discovers that mastery remains temporary.
John Colburn offers another route through contemporary poetry where surrealism, altered logic, folklore, humor, and visionary experience create an unstable world of instruction and transformation.
Literary mothers
Rotando has playfully named Emily Dickinson, Paul Klee, Henri Michaux, Russell Edson, and Federico García Lorca among his artistic “mothers.” The list crosses poetry and visual art while emphasizing imaginative lineage as chosen relation.
Dickinson offers compression and strange syntax; Michaux and Klee connect verbal and visual experiment; Edson brings prose-poem surrealism; Lorca contributes image, music, duende, and mythic intensity.
These influences help explain Rotando’s ease with hybrid imaginative worlds.
Teaching and creative writing
Rotando’s career as a professor of literature and creative writing gives teaching a long practical place in his literary life. Workshops turn poems into shared objects of attention, interpretation, revision, and discussion.
His Sri Lankan workshops and later college teaching also give literary education an international and institutional scale.
This teaching history creates an interesting return to Story of Learning: the poet who writes absurd apprenticeship also works inside real structures of learning and creative practice.
Reading Matthew Rotando
Rotando’s literary identity emerges through surreal learning, Buddhist poetics, Sri Lanka, pilgrimage, visual art, strange creatures, humor, desire, landscape, and the continual instability of language.
Within contemporary poetry, Rotando represents a cross-disciplinary American practice where spiritual attention and comic absurdity share the same imaginative space.
The strongest route into Rotando is to follow learning as a process. Notice who becomes a teacher, how strange language tests meaning, how pilgrimage changes attention, and how image turns philosophical inquiry into physical experience. His poetry makes knowledge feel provisional, embodied, and alive.