Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years From Now

Matthew Olzmann

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2017

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Literary Devices

Further Reading & Resources

Like “Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years from Now,” this poem is written as a letter and addresses issues of environmental degradation. This letter is written to a specific person, not the hypothetical “person living fifty years from now” but presumably a person who is still alive and who carved his initials into the oldest longleaf pine in North America. Both poems lament what humans are doing to the environment.

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“Letter to Matthew Olzmann Sent Telepathically by a Flock of Pigeons Surrounding Him on a Park Bench in Detroit” by Matthew Olzmann (2022)

This poem comes from Olzmann’s book Constellation Route and deals with issues of climate change, food insecurity, war, industrialization, and other social issues, all from the point of view of a flock of pigeons. Unlike “Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years from Now,” this poem is arguably much funnier, characterizing the pigeons as angry creatures harassing Olzmann because he is eating a BLT and won’t share it with them. This longer, funnier poem is more typical of Olzmann’s work, dealing with serious subjects in more irreverent ways.

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“Letter to Bruce Wayne” by Matthew Olzmann (2022)

This poem, which also appears in Olzmann’s third book, uses the same epistolary strategy as “Letter Written to a Person Living Fifty Years from Now.” It is a longer poem that deals with issues of masculinity, which may be both personal and political to the speaker. In the piece, the speaker finds many different men named Bruce Wayne (the alias of Batman) living in the United States doing different jobs. It combines references to pop culture with a poetic search for meaning and demonstrates the breadth of Olzmann’s personal and socially-conscious concerns.

“Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem” by Matthew Olzmann (2009)

This poem demonstrates Olzmann’s versatility. As with most of his work, it makes use of humor and includes imagery from the modern world; namely, Mountain Dew. Unlike “Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years from Now,” this poem deals with love and personal relationships rather than socially conscious issues of climate change. It also ends on an optimistic note.

Further Literary Resources

“Constellation Route by Matthew Olzmann, Reviewed by Robyn Earhart” by WaterStone Review (2022)

This review of Constellation Rout gives readers an overview of Olzmann’s other epistolary poems and why they are important socially and artistically. The reviewer points out that many of the poems in the collection are funny, even when addressing serious subjects. Pigeons address climate change in a strange and unexpected way. The reviewer writes of “Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years from Now” that it brings some of the humor to a halt and becomes more serious.”

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“Letter to a Poet, Matthew Olzmann on Writing Humor and Befriending Whales” by Annelies Zijderveld (2022)

In this interview with Annelies Zijderveld from The Rumpus, Olzmann discusses his use of the apostrophe in his third book of poems. He notes that the longer titles in the collection help give the reader context to understand the poem before it begins. His teacher, David James, commented on the book that “[a]ll poems are letters, especially yours.” Olzmann notes that all poems are attempts to communicate between people and that poems, like letters, are the thing between the person writing and the person being written to.

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“Where a Poem is Going” by Seema Reza (2022)

In this interview, Olzmann discusses his writing process regarding dreams, distractions, and the way humor factors into his writing. He gives the interviewer, Seema Reza, some background about his work history, his interest in basketball, and his own worth ethic. Specifically, the two discuss Constellation Route and how dream-logic operates in his poems.

Listen to Poem

Enviro Docs reads “Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years from Now”

This short YouTube video presents Olzmann’s poem alongside images of things it depicts. The video moves from showing a healthy environment to an unhealthy one while a narrator reads the poem. It ends with a call to appreciate the environment more and to care for the planet. The video appears on the channel Enviro Docs.