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 New
Selected Poems gathers something old and new by John
Matthias
John Matthias opens and closes his latest book, New Selected Poems, with two poems set in the American Midwest, “Swimming at Midnight” and “Swell.” It’s a deliberate attempt, he says, to reclaim his identity as an American poet.
“There’s a passage in “Swell” about my travels where I say it’s taken me a lifetime to prefer it ‘here,’” Matthias says. “I think that as one grows older, one circles back in the direction of one's starting point.… At any rate, that’s my recent experience. I had thought the shape of my life was fairly permanent, that I would write in England and do my teaching in America. When I really returned to the U.S. to stay, Midwestern themes began to emerge again.”
Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1941, Matthias was part of the same Stanford University generation that included Robert Hass, John Peck, Robert Pinsky and James McMichael. In 1966 he moved to England, and a year later, Ernest Sandeen, the senior poet at the University of Notre Dame, hired him to teach poetry and literature there. During the ’70s and ’80s, Matthias and his family split their time between East Anglia in England, where his wife was born and raised, and South Bend, Indiana. For the most part, Matthias wrote while in England and taught while in South Bend.
“My career has perhaps been unusual for an American poet given that I’ve spent so much time writing in England and dealing with English and European subject matter and historical themes that may have sometimes seemed remote from American readers,” he says. “I have even been reviewed, to my dismay, as an English poet. But the body of work seems to me obviously by an American poet who has traveled a lot, though the subject matter is not always typical of an American poet. Still, it’s all by an American. I wanted to make that obvious by way of the structure of the book.”
A box set of poetry
New Selected Poems functions much like a box set by a musician: It’s not a complete collected works, but it does provide a comprehensive overview to a 40-year career distinguished by Matthias’ highly allusive but ultimately quite personal voice. Lyrical or experimental, original or a translation, playful or scholarly, Matthias’ poetry engages readers in a lively and exacting investigation of history, the arts and his own life.
For New Selected Poems, Matthias wanted to include both short and long poems, something he didn’t do the last time he selected poems for this type of book. Swimming at Midnight contained his short poems only, while Beltane at Aphelion contained long poems only. “It was a tactical error,” he says: “The former sold well, and the latter didn’t.”
“Clearly, the question of length is a factor when you sit down to read a poem,” he says. “If it’s a page long, you’re more likely to read it. Without a degree of dedication, you're not as likely to read a long poem. It requires a different level of engagement. If you put them all in one volume, the likelihood is greater that the reader will be tempted to give the long poems a try because of the short poems.”
Most of all, Matthias says, he wanted to include most of 1991’s A Gathering of Ways because it had never been published in England, and New Selected Poems would be published there as well as in the United States.
“I think it’s the most important of the long poems,” he says, aside from the two in Salt’s Working Progress, Working Title. “But then came the question of how to include it. It's over 100 pages long. Put it in the middle, or spread it around? I decided to spread it around.”
Aside from the inclusion of “Facts From an Apocryphal Midwest” from the 1980s in the first section, New Selected Poems follows a chronological and thematic structure. The last third of the book includes new poems that have never before been published in book form "scattered" among other recent work.
“The poems are not in the same order they were in the original books" Matthias says. “They were written at about the same time, but I've shuffled them around a little so that they begin to talk to each other in a new way.”
A grand collage
A writer, Matthias says, has the “ability in poetry to control and manipulate sound,” a prime motivation and pleasure for him as a poet.
“This can be done in prose as well, but not to the same extent, unless you happen to be a Joyce or a Beckett,” he says. “Poetry, before anything else, is sounds. A lot of nonsense has been written about ‘the music of poetry,’ but unless there is a music, a compelling rhythm of some kind, you really don't have a poem before you but something else. There are hundreds of different ways to make such rhythms, but the pleasure of making them sustains the mind and emotions with a strange kind of paradoxical joy even in the midst of engaging difficult and painful material.”
Many times, Matthias has been tagged by critics as a poet of place, a description that is in some ways inaccurate.
“You don't want (references to places) to sound like nostalgic laments for the old homestead,” he says. “And I hope none of mine has sounded that way.… If you look at the poems, they're not landscape poems. They're all history poems. I'm interested in what happened someplace, not in empty spaces.”
The same reading applies, Matthias says, to his many poems about musicians. “They're poems about people’s lives,” he says. “They’re histories. The biographical impulse is another factor that isn't too often remarked upon in my work. A lot of the poems are simply about interesting people who have done unusual things.
Matthias’ most recent poems use his family life as their starting point but, typically, incorporate external subjects and themes. “Letter to an Unborn Grandson,” the newest poem in New Selected Poems, borrows from William Carlos Williams and serves as “a kind of homage to him as an American poet.” “Swell” begins and ends in a fishing boat on Walloon Lake in Michigan, a place where Matthias and his family vacationed when he was a child and where he and his wife visited in 2000. The poem, however, is also about Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Goethe, and America in the 1950s and England in the 1960s, among other subjects.
“I’m not actually ‘against’ personal or family poems when I say there are too many being written; it's just that one should be aware that one's family photo album may not be terribly interesting to other people,” Matthias says. “It all depends on what you do with the material, how interesting you make it and whether or not the context gives it some resonance.”
In arranging the poems in New Selected Poems, Matthias says, he considered the placement and juxtaposition of poems so that his objective, historical poems would give his personal poems a context within his body of work.
“In putting together a ‘Selected Poems,’ one is making a kind of grand collage where poem talks to poem and a version of one's self at 20 talks to a version of one’s self at 60,” he says. “In some ways, the historical poems exist as a critique of the personal poems, and the other way around. And certainly the poet at 20 and the poet at 60 are very suspicious of each other.”
The rewards of teaching
Matthias will retire from teaching in May, 2005, and he has dedicated his New Selected Poems “to my students at the University of Notre Dame, 1967–2004.” It’s his students who come to mind first when he reflects on his experiences as a teacher.
“Initially, looking back at a career that’s nearly 40 years old, I think of the students I’m in closest touch with and whose careers I've followed and who have published books,” he says and lists new volumes by former students Joe Francis Doerr and Robert Archambeau (both Salt authors), along with Kevin Ducey, Jenny Boully and Beth Ann Fennelly, and Anthony Walton as examples.
“I’ve consistently had excellent students, and as one gets older, one's former students become one’s closest friends,” he says. “The dedication is to be taken seriously.”
Matthias is now at work on a new volume of poetry, more translations from the Swedish of Jesper Svenbro, and a group of essays. He continues to edit the distinguished international journal, Notre Dame Review. He lives beside the St. Joseph River where La Salle made part of the famous journey described in “Facts From an Apocryphal Midwest.”
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 New
Selected Poems
John Matthias’s New Selected Poems brings
together both short and longer poems from eight previous
books. It ranges from early lyrics written in America during
the 1960s to meditative and epistolary poems deriving from
his years spent in England during the 70s and 80s, formal
experiments engaging issues of poetics, and sequences like Northern
Summer, Facts from an Apocryphal Midwest, A
Compostela Diptych, and Cuttings. Robert
Duncan called his early poetry “the work of a Goliard—one
of those wandering souls out of a Dark Age in our own time,” and
Guy Davenport has said that his recent work makes him “one
of the leading poets in the USA.” The present volume,
together with Working Progress, Working Title,
published by Salt in 2002, makes almost all of his major
work available in Britain for the first time in many years.
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Working
Progress, Working Title
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.
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Beltane
at Aphelion
Friedrich Schlegel preferred travelogues, correspondence
and autobiographies to novels, “for one who reads
them in the romantic sense.” Matthias’s international
plain-style redacts these genres into, and out from, a
romance of modernism. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio, quit
graduate school in 1966, left the United States, and for
many years lived between Notre Dame and Suffolk, where
he absorbed the work of British poets upon whom he has
since commented acutely. It might be said of him, as he
has said of Geoffrey Hill, that the poet reads history “in
the hope (and the horror) of finding materials for poems,
materials to exploit;” but Matthias’s poetic,
local, and historical sensibilities are more catholic.
After the Beckett-like bad trip of ‘Bucyrus’ (1965),
his longer poems crystallize around hermeticism and obscure
court records, Scottish genealogy and history, and transatlantic
crossings on Polish and Russian vessels (cf. Auden's ‘Letter
to Lord Byron’). The final triptych, formerly A
Gathering of Ways (1991), juxtaposes lays of ley lines,
Parkman's vision of La Salle's Mississippi, and gnostic
heresy at Santiago de Compostela. Formal recurrences stake
out hermeneutic horizons: the poet inhabits “An inbetween
/ when I don't know precisely what I want to do in time
/ but only where I want to go / again.” The shorter
poems, occasional, elegiac or ventriloquistic, often recall
the cragginess of Matthias’s master, David Jones,
while continually proclaiming the height of the mark they
have set—of “what is wrought by labour”: “Who
breaks a spear is worth the prize,” in the modern
bard’s “world against all odds.” Some
of the best are new, and share a fascination with the poet's
relation to political power, invoking Hamsun, Mandelstam
and the Balkans. Matthias, perhaps more than any living
poet in English, makes us want to go again—but also
to consider, in hope and horror, that we can.
Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved.
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The
Battle of Kosovo
Presents a translation of a cycle of heroic ballads considered
the finest work of Serbian folk poetry. Commemorating the
Serbian Empire's defeat at the hands of the Turks in the
late 14th century, these poems and fragments have been
known for centuries in Eastern Europe.
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Word
Play Place
“Taken together, the twelve essays in Word
Play Place, prefaced by Archambeau’s excellent
and informative introduction, make an important statement
about Matthias’s place on the current poetry scene—and
indeed, on the scene itself as it is playing out in Anglo-America.
An extremely valuable book!” —Marjorie Perloff
The poetry of John Matthias has long been admired by other
poets for the way it refuses to be categorized. Lyrical
and experimental, cosmopolitan and rooted in place, it
challenges our received notions of what poetry can be at
the end of the twentieth century. This volume introduces
the work of this significant American poet to readers previously
unfamiliar with it and enriches the reading of those who
have long admired it. The essays collected here treat Matthias’s
career from its beginnings under the tutelage of John Berryman
and Yvor Winters through its engagement with modern and
postmodern poetics. With contributions from John Peck,
Michael Anania, Peter Michelson, and ten other critics, Word
Play Place is the first sustained treatment of the
poetry of this writer who stands outside the mainstream
of American poetry in our time, and is guided by an aesthetic
that has not been easy to define. This collection emphasizes
how readers ought to approach Matthias’s work in
all its ambition, its richness, and its strangeness.
Robert Archambeau is a poet and a critic. He teaches English
at Lake Forest College in Illinois.
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A
Gathering of Ways
A Gathering of Ways is John Matthias’ first collection of poems since the publication of his warmly received Northern Summer collection in 1985. The book consists of three long poems dealing with the geography, geology, prehistory, and history of two places closely identified with Matthias’ work, the East Anglian region of Britain and the American Midwest, and a third place which provides the book with a new and deeply resonant setting: those parts of southern France and northern Spain through which run the famous pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela.
"An East Anglian Diptych" explores those parts of Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, and Norfolk linked by three rivers and by those ancient paths and tracks known as ley lines which connect locality with locality and time with time. "Facts From an Apocryphal Midwest" explores another group of trails which began as prehistoric paths down which copper from Lake Superior was carried from the early days of the mound-builders. Despite the historical backdrop of these poems. both bring the reader into the present in unexpected ways, preparing him or her for the strange and visionary "A Compostela Diptych," winner of the Poetry Society of Americas George Bogin Memorial Award.
John Matthias has published five previous volumes of poetry and has co-translated The Battle of Kosovo and Contemporary Swedish Poetry (both Swallow). He was awarded an Ingram Merrill grant in 1990 for work on "A Compostela Diptych."
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Three-toed Gull: Selected Poems of Jesper Svenbro
Perhaps the most widely respected and read poet of his generation in Sweden, Jesper Svenbro makes his debut in the English-speaking world with this selection of poems drawn from his seven previous volumes and impeccably translated by John Matthias and Lars-Hakan Svensson. At times intellectual and erudite, at other times invoking intimacy and closely observed memories, Svenbro appears here at his most richly allusive, calling with consummate ease upon the myths of the Greeks, real and imaginary journeys in Lapland, the poetry of Sappho and T. S. Eliot, the plaints and joys of childhood, and the evocations of nature and of art. Whether in intricate formal innovations or flights of free verse, in the linguistic politics of "Stalin as Wolf" or the political linguistics of "A Critique of Pure Representation," Svenbro's work captures in its every nuance the transcendent possibilities of the poet's art.
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