Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Ruining the New Road (1970)
The Search Party
Psychoanalysis
Blues for John Coltrane, Dead at 41
Coleman Hawkins (d. 1969), RIP
Jealousy
Moving
Lust
Faith of Our Fathers
Why We Are Truly a Nation
On Cape Cod a Child Is Stolen
Driving All Night
Oh Yes
Old Girlfriends
What You Need
Wehlener Sonnenuhr Auslese 1959
Yes!
Sleek for the Long Flight (1972)
Directions
Sleeping Alone
Driving Alongside the Housatonic River Alone on a Rainy April Night
Another Beer
Night Driving
The Needle's Eye, the Lens
An Egg in the Corner of One Eye
The Cat
Talk
La Tâche 1962
Snow
Sleep
Letter to Russell Banks
Sticks & Stones (1975)
The Portrait
Mud Chokes No Eels
Beer after Tennis, 22 August 1972
Bring the War Home
The Waste Carpet
Sticks & Stones
Rising and Falling (1979)
Spring Snow
Moving Again
Snow Leopards at the Denver Zoo
The News
Strange Knees
Living Among the Dead
Left Hand Canyon
In Memory of the Utah Stars
Bud Powell, Paris, 1959
Listening to Lester Young
The Icehouse, Pointe au Baril, Ontario
The Mail
Taking the Train Home
Waking at Dusk from a Nap
In Memory of W. H. Auden
Nurse Sharks
Long
Flood (1982)
New
Cows Grazing at Sunrise
Housework
Bystanders
Our Strange and Lovable Weather
Descriptive Passages
Good Company
School Figures
Pissing off the Back of the Boat into the Nivernais Canal
The Penalty for Bigamy Is Two Wives
Bmp Bmp
Nabokov's Death
On the Porch at the Frost Place, Franconia, NH
Uncollected Poems (1967–1981)
The Cloud
Eternally Undismayed Are the Poolshooters
The Drunken Baker
Leaving the Cleveland Airport
Dancing to Reggae Music
Gossip
Iowa City to Boulder
Lions in the Cincinnati Zoo
A Walk with John Logan, 1973
Clearwater Beach, Florida, 1950
Jilted
A Happy Childhood (1984)
Good
Sympathetic
Whiplash
Bad
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
Loyal
A Happy Childhood
Civilization and Its Discontents
Familial
Right
The Theme of the Three Caskets
Masterful
An Elegy for Bob Marley
Wrong
Foreseeable Futures (1987)
Fellow Oddballs
April in the Berkshires
Photo of the Author with a Favorite Pig
The Accompanist
Herd of Buffalo Crossing the Missouri on Ice
Caddies' Day, the Country Club, a Small Town in Ohio
Dog Life
Recovery Room
Black Box
Vasectomy
Blues If You Want (1989)
Nabokov's Blues
39,000 Feet
Mood Indigo
Housecooling
Homer's Seeing-Eye Dog
The Blues
Moonlight in Vermont
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
School Days
Little Blue Nude
Onions
Straight Life
Time & Money (1995)
Grief
The Wolf of Gubbio
Mingus at The Showplace
The Bear at the Dump
My Father's Body
Time
President Reagan's Visit to New York, October 1984
Mingus at The Half Note
Men at My Father's Funeral
The Rookery at Hawthornden
Note Left for Gerald Stern in an Office I Borrowed, and He Would Next, at a Summer Writers' Conference
Cheap Seats, the Cincinnati Gardens, Professional Basketball, 1959
The Rented House in Maine
Mingus in Diaspora
Tomorrow
Money
The Generations
Cancer Talk
A Night at the Opera
Uncollected Poems (1982–1997)
Another Real Estate Deal on Oahu
Slow Work
E lucevan le stelle
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Clarinetist
Debt
Condoms Then
Condoms Now
Phone Log
Driving Through the Poconos, Route 80, 1:30 A.M., Snow
The Buddy Bolden Cylinder
The Memo
Grandmother Talking
Grandmother, Dead at 99 Years and 10 Months
Names
I Let a Song Go out of My Heart
After All (1998)
Mingus in Shadow
Rescue
Truffle Pigs
Manners
Promiscuous
Sooey Generous
Oxymorons
Dire Cure
Umbrian Nightfall
The Cloister
A Poetry Reading at West Point
People Like Us
Frazzle
The Bar at the Andover Inn
Big Tongue
Bucket's Got a Hole in It
Misgivings
Care
Index of Titles
Copyright © 2004 by Sebastian Matthews and Stanley Plumly
Introduction copyright © 2004 by Stanley Plumly
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
Visit our Web site: www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Matthews, William, 1942–1997
Search party : collected poems of William Matthews /
edited by Sebastian Matthews and Stanley Plumly.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-618-35007-1
I. Matthews, Sebastian, 1965– II. Plumly, Stanley. III. Title.
PS3563.A855A17 2004
811'.54—dc22 2003056795
Book design by Anne Chalmers
Typefaces: Venetian 301 (Bitstream), Centaur, Humanist
eISBN 978-0-547-34860-5
v2.1117
Some of these poems have not appeared before in book form. We would like to thank the editors of the journals in which they first appeared: Afterthought: Gossip. Amicus Journal: Names. Atlantic Monthly: E lucevan le stelle. Ironwood: Leaving the Cleveland Airport. New England Review: Jilted. Passages North: Grandmother Talking. Plainsong: Clearwater Beach, Florida, 1950. Poetry: The Buddy Bolden
Cylinder; Grandmother Dead at 99 Years and 10 Months; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Clarinetist. Quarterly West: Driving Through the Poconos, Route 80, 1:30 A.M., Snow. Sand Hills Press: A Walk with John Logan, 1973. Seattle Review: Dancing to Reggae Music. Solo: Condoms Then; The Memo. Tar River Review: Phone Log. TriQuarterly: Another Real Estate Deal on Oahu. Virginia Quarterly Review: Slow Work.
"Gossip" and "Leaving the Cleveland Airport" originally appeared in Provisions: The Lost Prose of William Matthews, a limited edition, hand-set book from Sutton Hoo Press.
for Peter Davison
Introduction
THE POEMS in this collection represent the best of William Matthews's ten original books of poetry, almost thirty years' worth, beginning in 1970 and including the posthumous After All, 1998. There are some hundred and sixty-five poems here, twenty-six of which are from work previously unpublished in a book. In the course of his remarkable career, Matthews placed in various magazines—from the ephemeral to The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker—more than eight hundred poems. He was prolific, but he was also selective. When it came time to assemble a new volume, he was severe. Either a poem played in concert with the concept of the whole manuscript or it didn't. Fewer than half the poems he wrote made it into books.
With the help of Michael Collier, Houghton Mifflin's poetry consultant, and Peter Davison, Matthews's longtime friend and editor, Sebastian Matthews and I have followed the author's model in producing a collection we feel he would be proud of, a selection he himself might have made. Matthews died on November 12, 1997, the day after his fifty-fifth birthday. He had, just days before, sent off the completed manuscript of After All, in accordance with a creative schedule that presented a new book of poetry every three years. Added to this calendar were any number of critical essays, commentaries, memoir pieces, reviews, and interviews, many of which have been gathered into Curiosities (1989) and The Poetry Blues (2001).
Matthews's marvelous letters make up yet another category. His correspondence with the world, through his masterly poems and graceful prose, was rich and varied; his correspondence with his friends and acquaintances was loving, engaging, and always on point. All of Matthews's writing, regardless of genre, reveals the man, both the persona he wished to disclose and the person he almost successfully kept to himself. His brilliance and volubility are inseparable from his reserve—the tension between them is the core dynamic of his kinetic mind and demanding language. His announced self and secret self parley not only the precision of his diction and imagination but the spoken music of his sentence. His poetry, like his prose, can seem impromptu, when in fact it is written in astute, rehearsed internal conversation within a form itself being addressed. Matthews's buoyant feel for analysis, his restless curiosity, his refreshing range of knowledge, his quirky, often sardonic take on memory, his insistence on the invisibility of his craft—these elements and more set him apart as a maker.
To paraphrase, however, is only to suggest Matthews's depth and resonance as a poet. The implicit chronology of this careful selection of his poems conjures a narrative of work that moves from the imagistic, aphoristic seventies to the more directly autobiographical eighties to the more meditative, introspective nineties. All the while the poems grow in size, texture, complexity, darkness, and acceptance of the given situation—or, at the least, a reluctant reconciliation. The full heart behind the poems becomes more and more available to the luminous mind making them. Too often honored for his wit alone, the Matthews throughout these pages is a poet of emotional resolve, enormous linguistic and poetic resources, and, most especially, a clarifying wisdom. Here he is reinforced as a writer of responsibility to form and tradition as well as irony and idiom, whether that heritage refers to literature, jazz, and epicurean delight or elegiac testimonies for those he has loved.
Reading Matthews you get the impression that his insights and images and the syntax created by his inevitable ear have traveled great distances to the page. They have. They arrive distilled from a metaphysics in which thought is not only feeling but a coherent language, a language that must be mastered before it can be made. "Snow Leopards at the Denver Zoo," from the seventies, is an early example.
Snow Leopards at the Denver Zoo
There are only a hundred or so
snow leopards alive, and three
of them here. Hours I watch them jump
down and jump up, water being
poured. Though if you fill a glass
fast with water, it rings high to the top,
noise of a nail driven true. Snow
leopards land without sound,
as if they were already extinct.
If I could, I'd sift them
from hand to hand, like a fire,
like a debt I can count but can't pay.
I'm glad I can't. If I tried to
take loss for a wife, and I do,
and keep her all the days of my life,
I'd have nothing to leave my children.
I save them whatever I can keep
and I pour it from hand to hand.
The connections in this poem easily surpass discrete metaphor to become the total medium—submersion—through which they move: from the snow leopards to water to snow to fire to consuming debt to loss; from jumping to pouring to filling to counting to pouring ... the concentric circles derive from and return directly to their common center of gravity in a flow and speed almost preternatural. Then there is the touch of the "nail driven true," the exquisite understatement of the soundlessness of the leopards, landing "as if they were already extinct," and the reality of taking "loss for a wife." The fragility of the poem is also its subject, the balance of saving "whatever I can keep" against the perishability of losing it all. Behind the poem is the certain knowledge—which is a theme in Matthews's poetry—that it will all, always, slip through our hands. This genius for turning the most familiar materials into something extraordinary—both smart and moving at once—comes from his gift for making connections and exploiting them to the limit their language will bear.
For all the normal changes in his writing, as Matthews matured he never surrendered his talent for the fragile, mortal moment that quickens the feel of things. At times his tone may have sharpened—he loved Byron as much as he loved Martial—but he never gave in to the fragmentary, the broken, the piecemeal hard emotion. He was continually a writer of the controlled but complete embrace. I think the soul of his work is closer to the toughness and sweetness of Horace, to the passions of mind of Coleridge, and to the nocturnal blues melancholy of all those jazzmen he revered. He grew up in Ohio, within the margins of both country and small city, pastoral and postwar urban. His father worked for the Soil Conservation Service. He rode a bike, had a newspaper route (the Dayton Daily News), went to the county fair, played baseball and basketball, moved back to Cincinnati (his birthplace), then later to a larger, eastern, Ivy League world. A not uncommon midwestern American story. Yet he never lost his sense of humor about himself nor forgot where he came from. His complexity combined the Ohioan and the New Yorker, the boy and the man, beautifully in his poetry.
In the transitional sixties, when he was a graduate student in Chapel Hill, Matthews met Russell Banks, also in graduate school and also starting out as a writer. They soon collaborated on what became one of the exceptional small literary magazines of its era, Lillabulero. The collaboration would fade but the friendship would last a lifetime. Matthews's commitment to the small magazine would not fade. It says everything about him that a good portion of the poems in this collection first appeared in journals of often very short shelf lives. He became one of the premier poets of his generation, yet he remained faithful to the idea of where literature can find its first expression. His democratic instincts never failed him. Matthews was preeminently fair-minded, and this egalitarian spirit informed every part of his personality and permitted him to serve vital roles in American poetry culture at a vital time, from the Poetry Society of America to the Natio
nal Endowment for the Arts. And his tireless support of younger writers, it goes without saying, began with his superb teaching.
It is still difficult, for many of his friends and admirers, to believe that he is gone. The poems represented here are alive in ways and at depths that most poetry can at best aspire to. The intimacy is never too familiar, the conversation never too friendly, the imagination never too busy, the wit never too sterling. The fault lines of heartbreak are everywhere, yet they map an intact emotion. Every gesture, every turn, every reverse is guided and governed by a classicism that values moderation, generosity, and, at just the right moment, an utter truth. Timing, indeed, is essential to Matthews's internal music: he knows just when to smile, when to open the window, when to change the pace, and when the last line is the last line. And he knows he knows, without display. Reading this collection, front to back or intermittently at leisure, we love his mind, we celebrate the skill that lifts the quotidian to meaning. And we love, even more, the man whose life was so much at stake in the words.
STANLEY PLUMLY
Ruining the New Road (1970)
The Search Party
I wondered if the others felt
as heroic
and as safe: my unmangled family
slept while I slid uncertain feet ahead
behind my flashlight's beam.
Stones, thick roots as twisted as
a ruined body,
what did I fear?
I hoped my batteries
had eight more lives
than the lost child.
I feared I'd find something.
Reader, by now you must be sure
you know just where we are,
deep in symbolic woods.
Irony, self-accusation,
someone else's suffering.
The search is that of art.
You're wrong, though it's
an intelligent mistake.
There was a real lost child.
I don't want to swaddle it
in metaphor.
I'm just a journalist
who can't believe in objectivity.
I'm in these poems
because I'm in my life.
But I digress.
A man four volunteers
to the left of me
made the discovery.
We circled in like waves