David Matthews

                                                             

Magnapoets Feature Interview with David Matthews, a native of the South Carolina Midlands who now resides in Portland, Oregon. His poems have appeared in Abbey, Chattahoochee Review, Meander: The Journal, Ouroborus, Quill and Parchment, Red River Review, Tryst, and elsewhere. Matthews writes about literature, film, politics and current affairs, and other topics, including from time to time sports, on his blog Memo from the Fringes.

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Magnapoets: What are your influences?

David Matthews: The usual litany goes something like this: the European tradition that ran from Baudelaire through Rimbaud, Verlaine, Apollinaire, and culminated in surrealism; the Beats, Gregory Corso in particular; Bob Dylan. These were my influences in the early years, and they remain important. More recently, over the past 15 years or so, I feel greater kinship with the English Romantics, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and the two great American poets Whitman and Dickinson. These are the ones who speak most to me.

Magnapoets: Which poets do you read today?

David Matthews: Same ones: Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson. I have several anthologies that I pick up regularly to read a few poems by whatever poet might catch my eye at a particular moment — Harold Bloom's The Best Poems of the English Language; Poems for the Millenium, Vol. One, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, and Helen Vendler's Poems, Poets, Poetry. Recently I've read Georg Trakl, A.E. Housman, and John Berryman selections from these volumes.

I am fully aware in formulating a response to this and the previous question that it sounds as if I have read no one since the Beats. I would not want anyone to take this as a rejection of my contemporaries. Rather it is a reflection of the difficulty one has in finding time to read everything one wishes to read, a dilemma compounded by realization that those works that most reward our reading often merit, even demand, rereading. The task would prove impossible even if poetry were all one read instead of only a discrete portion. I have taken stabs at John Asbery, Anne Carson, Jorie Graham, by way of example. They do not speak to me as Corso once did, as Dickinson does, as Keats does, in a way that drew me in to read more of them. The failing may well be mine, not Ashbery's or Carson's or Graham's. I imagine there are fine poets out there I simply do not know.

Magnapoets: Take us through a typical day of yours.

David Matthews: I logged a typical Sunday in a recent journal entry. It went something like this: Up at six. Zazen. Coffee and a roll, buttered and toasted, while checking the daily Doonesbury cartoon, sports, and news on the internet. Road-tested myself with a very short, very slow jog, first run since some minor surgery four weeks before. Followed that with stretching and the post-run breakfast of whole wheat pancakes and half a grapefruit. Baked a loaf of whole wheat bread. Wrote and posted a review of the film Avenue Montaigne for my blog, Memo from the Fringes. Dug into the files to come up with a poem for Magnapoets. Watched Game 1 of the Suns-Lakers playoff series, won by Phoenix after LA played about as well as they can play for three quarters before coming apart in the fourth. During the game I made the weekend phone call to my brother in Tulsa to touch base, the conversation centering on sports and running. Trani filled me in on the 7-inning complete game my nephew pitched the day before for Carleton College, where he's a freshman. Dan took the loss, but he pitched well. Read a little bit of Walter Kaufman's From Shakespeare to Existentialism, the chapter on Hegel and theology. Hacked away at the latest revision of a purported novel, The Winter Within. By then it was about four p.m., and I adjourned to the BridgePort Ale House for a pint. The journal entry closed with the comment "Full day. Good day."

Magnapoets: How many poems do you write daily? How do you go about that task?

David Matthews: If this were an audio interview, you would at this moment hear laughter, perhaps bordering on the hysterical. How many poems do I write daily? Try monthly. Yearly. I suppose there was a time when I wrote poems daily, but that was long ago and far from here. I would certainly like to be writing poems more frequently. Daily would be great. However, the poems are not coming. It may not be exaggeration to say that the poetry is dead in me just now. I am not happy about this. There are all sorts of factors having to do with this state of affairs, some of which I won't go into at this time.

These days I do have other sorts of writing that occupy my time and attention. I try to write at least several essays each week to post on my blog. While the blog entries seldom are of the quality I would like, they are more than mere jottings or idle musings, and I hope they have some substance and heft to them, which takes time and effort. Pretty much daily I work on revision of The Winter Within, which I may try to market, something I've never attempted with the fiction. I am also in the early stages of a new novel, which I am calling Charlotte Reine, after the protagonist.

How do I go about the task of writing poems when I do write them? There is more to writing poetry than simply sitting down at the desk and cranking it out, however much that is part of it. For me poetry is an existential stance, a way of being in the world. Poet is who I am. I think of Corso's line: "poet is up there with king, emperor, pope." Well, seriously as I take poetry and poets, I see that as kind of silly if we take it literally. Taken figuratively, taken as poetry, however, it points to what a serious matter this claim to be a poet is. Not something to be entered into lightly.

As for the writing, there is no set way. Rarely does a poem come spewing out in anything like finished form. More often poems come in bits and pieces, a line here, an image there, come to me from my readings, thoughts, concerns, activities, movies I have seen, all the imaginings that make up the reality of a life. Often it is only after I am somewhat into a poem that I figure out what it is about. Whatever I am writing, poem, essay, story, I rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. When I am fortunate, it comes together somehow.

Magnapoets: Percy Bysshe Shelley said, “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” Do you agree with this?

David Matthews: I'll keep this one brief for a change. Yes. Poetry lifts the veil of everydayness and routine to reawaken our sense of the wonder and mystery of the world. Not just poetry. Art generally does this. Painting. Film. In conversation recently, I remarked that there is a sense in which film is for me what nature was for Wordsworth. I walk away from the theater renewed and restored. This is what art does for us, even when it unsettles and disturbs and leads us to the difficult work of thinking.

Comments

[Aurora]

David, I really enjoyed reading your answers. A friend of mine read your interview, and enjoyed it, particularly your description of a typical day in the life of David Matthews. Great job! :)

[Robert]

You give excellent insight into the life and mind of a modern day poet. Enjoyed the exchange.

[Matt]

Very interesting. Enjoyed.

[Janet]

Very enjoyable to read - thanks.

[David Herrle]

"If this were an audio interview, you would at this moment hear laughter, perhaps bordering on the hysterical. How many poems do I write daily? Try monthly. Yearly."

Bravo. Witty, worthy interview!

[Joseph Armstead]

Very thoughtful and insightful, and very personable... a wonderfully intriguing interview of an artist of worth!

[Bryan]

Really interesting, David. I enjoyed this.