Joe Francis Doerr (Ed.)

Biographical note:  Joe Francis Doerr is a poet, musician, and essayist whose Order of the Ordinary was published by Salt in 2003. His poems, reviews, and criticism have appeared in numerous journals including Fifth Wednesday, Notre Dame Review, PN Review, and Stand. A new book, Tocayo, has garnered interest from a number of publishers. Doerr is also the singer and lyricist for the internationally acclaimed dystopic blues band Churchwood, and Visiting Assistant Professor of English Writing & Rhetoric at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas where he lives with his wife Mary.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844718979
ISBN:  9781844718979
Author:  Joe Francis Doerr
Title:  The Salt Companion to John Matthias
Series:  Salt Companions to Poetry
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DSBH
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Sep-11
Extent:  256pp
Height:  228 mm
Width:  152 mm
Thickness:  15 mm
Weight:  384 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 14.99
Price:  USD 21.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  1995-2010 were fertile years for John Matthias, long-time co-editor of the Notre Dame Review. Adding to an already impressive bibliography, Matthias, has confirmed his status as a major American poet. In this book, eighteen contemporary writers work in essay, interview, and poetic form to offer penetrating insight into Matthias’ work.

Main description:  The years 1995-2010 were particularly fertile for John Matthias. In that time, he published five critically acclaimed books of poetry, two pamphlets, two collaborations (a translation and an anthology); and some two dozen poems in various international print and online journals. With such additions to an already remarkable bibliography, Matthias, long-time co-editor of the Notre Dame Review, has confirmed his status as a major American poet — albeit one that many anthologists, critics, and readers tend to overlook. His poetic modes are wide-ranging: the anecdotal, the wryly subversive, and the experimental find purchase in the familial, the historical, and the lyrical. Working in a variety of styles unified by their sources in modernism, Matthias engages the arts, politics, and (primarily) Western culture while acknowledging a past that continues to unfold in the present. In this book, eighteen fine contemporary writers working in essay, interview, and poetic form offer penetrating insight into Matthias’ work — work that is sometimes allusive and difficult, sometimes transparent and clear. This volume begins where the previous selection of essays on Matthias’s work, Robert Archambeau’s Word Play Place, left off in 1998. It will be an invaluable companion to the poetry of an important American author.

Table of contents:
Joe Francis Doerr
Resistant Materials: Approaches to the Poetry of John Matthias
Gerald L. Bruns
The Rogue Poet’s Return: On John Matthias’ Poetic Anecdotes
Robert Archambeau
Power and the Poetics of Play
Linda A. Kinnahan
Midwestern Place and Documentary Processes in the Later Poetry of John Matthias
Peter Robinson
John Matthias: Speaking Personally
Heather Treseler
Of Kin and Kindred: Matthias’ Relational Poetics
Mark Scroggins
One “Briggflatts” After Another: John Matthias and the Pocket Epic
Keith Tuma
Some Recent Poems of Professor Matthias
John Peck
from Nova Cantica
James Walton
A Blackbird’s Flight
Michael Anania
Talking John Matthias
The Fair Maid of Ribblesdale
David Kellogg
The Pages of John Matthias and the Future of Critical Recognition
Jesper Svenbro
JEM:A Trigram for John E. Matthias
Joyelle McSweeney
Lustrous Frequencies
Heather Treseler
Playing Games with Petronius Arbiter: John Matthias’ Trigons
Jesper Svenbro
There’s a Horseshoe on Her Door: John Matthias’ Method of Creative Reading
Christopher Merrill
They Are Waiting in Lund: The Translations of John Matthias
Alex Davis
And This is “Kedging in Time”: Post/Modernism and the Genre of Elegy
Herbert Leibowitz
John Matthias’ Musical Offerings
John Wilkinson
Leering Through Zero: John Matthias and Memory
Joe Francis Doerr
Interview with John Matthias, Samizdat, Spring, 2002. Continued,Winter 2010.
John Matthias: A Bibliography, 1970-2011
List of Contributors

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Excerpt from book:  

from Resistant Materials: Approaches to the Poetry of John Matthias

Joe Francis Doerr

When I first met John Matthias during a weekend visit to the University of Notre Dame in the spring of 1996, I happened to be reading Wyndham Lewis’ François Villon. Aside from a few facile connections of the sort that any imaginative reader might make between an actual event and whatever he or she happens to be reading at the time it takes place, I found nothing particularly relatable to Matthias in Villon’s Le Grand Testament. And yet I clearly remember sitting in the Morris Inn and penciling in a small star next to the Old French words “Ma vielle ay mys soubz le banc.” Lewis’ gloss on the phrase reads “I’ve shoved my hurdygurdy [sic] under the seat [a minstrel’s locution signifying the end of an occupation].” For me, the words were significant. Only a couple of years before two important events — my first meeting with John Matthias and my first visit to Notre Dame — I had decided to end a decade-long career as a professional, traveling musician and return to academia. My spring 1996 visit to Notre Dame, where I was eventually to enroll and begin attending graduate classes the following fall, was itself my own personal locution signifying the end of one career and the beginning of another.

That fall of 1996, I returned to Lewis’ book after attending a class in which Matthias lectured on the necessity of poets to “learn their instruments,” “carve into resistant material,” and “produce works of enduring and intrinsic value.” I believe Matthias emphasized these rigors of the craft precisely because they are fre- quently overlooked in the now ubiquitous workshop. After all, Matthias is a poet who, though he taught for some forty years at Notre Dame, spent less than half of them teaching poetry workshops. And he did so with marked ambivalence. Hence, much of the lecture I took to be a caveat to any aspiring poet in attendance who was content to explore the more confessional, personal, and representational reaches of poetry. Matthias presented us with a question for which a paraphrase will have to suffice: How does one live in a place like South Bend and not end up writing exclusively about hamburgers and Harley-Davidsons? The challenge was levied.

Unpublished endorsement:  John Matthias is a master poet. He is one of the great originals.

John Kinsella

Unpublished endorsement:  These incisive essays on Matthias’s challenging poetry redraw the boundaries of the field.

Marjorie Perloff