John Matthias

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Biographical note:  John Matthias was born in 1941 in Columbus, Ohio. He has been a Visiting Fellow in poetry at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and lived for much of the 70s and 80s in East Anglia. He teaches at the University of Notre Dame. Matthias's recent books include A Gathering of Ways (1991), Swimming at Midnight: Selected Shorter Poems (1995), Beltane at Aphelion: Longer Poems (1995), and Pages: New Poems and Cuttings (2000). In 1998 Robert Archambeau edited Word Play Place: Essays on the Poetry of John Matthias.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781876857417
ISBN-10:  1876857412
ISBN-13:  9781876857417
Author:  John Matthias
Title:  Working Progress, Working Title
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  04-Jul-02
Extent:  108pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  7 mm
Weight:  162 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 8.95
Price:  USD 12.95
Rights:  Rest of world
Not for sale:  US
Not for sale:  CA

Main description:  Working Progress, Working Title combines two of John Matthias’s most experimental poems. Critics have for some time written of Matthias as a poet of place, but what will be made of his “Automystifstical Plaice”? The poem in fact derives from the strange fact that film siren Hedy Lamarr and avant-garde composer George Antheil collaborated on a patent for a radio-directed torpedo in the early days of World War II when both had gone to Hollywood. But the piece is also about the Paris avant-garde, early experimental films like Ballet mecanique and L’Inhumaine, Antheil's early scores, Hollywood in the 1940s, spread-spectrum technology, artificial intelligence, and many related matters. The narrator seems to be Claire Lescot, who steps out of L’Inhumaine and follows Antheil and Lamarr to Hollywood. The second and longer poem, Pages: From a Book of Years, is a kind of manic attempt at remembering in the context of the poet’s mother’s loss of memory to Alzheimer’s disease. The years happen to be 1959, 1941, 1953, 1961 and 1966, all years of great personal significance to the poet, but also years in which the public world intersected the private world in unusual ways. Matthias’s father collected yearbooks on a wide variety of subjects. Materials from these yearbooks, along with the poet’s high school yearbook which he hadn’t seen for forty years, propel themselves into the world of these poems as the poet cleans out the family home and writes his pages, abruptly ending each one at the bottom of his computer screen.

Meet the author

Table of contents:
Automystifstical Plaice
Pages
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five

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Excerpt from book:  

from Automystifstical Plaice

In the beginning
without any mother the girl was born a machine.
In the year of erotic parades.
The Novia poured out the oil the gears were engaged
the études composed and the light bulb
was Amèricaine. Voilà Picabia sweetheart of first
occupation voilà ballet mécanique.
We’ll not eat our bread by the sweat of our brows
in the end: Je viens pour toujours
it is error and grief you’ll be known by
the strength of our steel
the number of rivets and not by the river
where fishermen cast or the last
of your towers to build on the strength of our dowry.
Antheil Olga Boski Hedy and Ez, she says:
Or probably better
Olga and Ez, Antheil and Boski [Hedy Keisler Mandl Lamarr.
That’s Mandl, Fritz, from Vienna, the armaments man,
the war profiteer. Hedy Keisler, the naked broad in the film.
It won’t be a dance, it won’t be ballet mécanique.
Ecstasy, rather, a run through the woods and a swim.
The actress saying: sex in this movie is real,
Mandl’s lieutenants will buy up & burn any print they can find
so Hedy and Fritz can entertain Hitler and Mus.
Aribert Mog is displaced; the telescope on the lens
enlarges another face
from about a decade before.]

Review quote:  Over thirty years [Matthias] has built up a splendidly wrought mosaic of western culture and history shot through with personal inquiry and discovery. It’s a fascinating, unfinished journey, a secular but passionate pilgrimage.

Stand Magazine

Review quote:  The pairing of [these] two long poems productively juxtaposes Matthias’s abiding preoccupation with the artist’s reception and understanding of historical data (in this casse, the recherché fact that Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil conceived the ideo of radio-directed torpedo in the early years of the twentieth century), and the less hermeneutic issue of the creative rendering of one’s immediate lived experience (his moth’s succumbing to Alzheime’s disease).

Alex Davis
PN Review