Pages: New Poems and Cuttings

Abstract

John Matthias. Pages: New Poems and Cuttings. Athens, OH: Swallow, 2000. John Matthias once told a newspaper reporter that is ultimately important to write about something more significant than the self.... [otherwise] we begin to get poems at the level of the television talk show. A look through almost any popular contemporary literary journal or anthology proves Matthias all-too-right in claiming that American poetry has mired itself in the narrow world of workshop confessionalism, a world not far removed from talk show exhibitionism. But how to avoid this problem? How to cure poetry of self-obsession? Language poetry has offered path out of the swamp of confessionalism, but John Matthias has, in the thirty years since his first collection Bucyrus, been following another. Finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of places were all you could say and have them mean anything. So wrote Ernest Hemingway, famously in A Farewell to Arms. His sentences point toward the path John Matthias (coincidentally also a midwestern Europhile) has been following. Matthias's new collection Pages: New Poems and Cuttings is his first since 1995, when Swallow Press published Swimming at Midnight and Beltane at Aphelion, his collected poems in volumes. In Pages, as in his earlier work, Matthias makes names, dates, and numbers the backbone of his poetics. In his hands, proper names, specific dates, and significant numbers become the means to write away from the self, to travel through history, geography, and intertextuality. The first of the book's three harts consists of a prouD of short poems. as well as translations from the Serbian, Swedish, and French (translation has always been of Matthias's means of escape from the self, a way of importing new voices and energies into his poetry). In these short poems Matthias invokes the powerful aura of names, places, dates, and numbers, and revisits some of his habitual concerns: music, elegy, violence, and history. The names of the poems alone show the power of Matthias's attraction to the kind of language Hemingway praised. Even a few suffice: Two in New York;Easter 1912 and Christmas 1929,Two in Harar,The Lyric Suite: Aldeburgh Festival, Snape. Doubles and diptychs abound in these poems, allowing Matthias to draw connections between apparently discrete characters and phenomena. Two in Harar,for example, uses geographic coincidence to contrast the explorer and orientalist Sir Richard Burton with Rimbaud. The appear as figures of the artist (or man of aesthetic play) and the man of violence and realpolitik-a fundamental contrast in the poetry of Matthias, who once imagined himself with Prospero over shoulder and Lenin over the other. The unexpected turn here is that it is Burton who emerges as the artist or player, and the later Rimbaud, fallen away from art, as the bloodyhanded realpolitiker. Matthias has never been a poet for obvious conclusions. Place is used, in a number of the short poems, as a means of drawing together different characters and histories. Six or So in Petersburg, for example, reads like a Who's Who of Russian politics and culture. And in Sadnesses: Black Seas, the coincidence of place allows Matthias to intertwine the lives of Ovid, Eisenstein, and Pushkin: the horses of old Helios stumble in their course the sea's aflame the plow of earth cleaves heaven: General Insov was a loyal friend but what to do with this new Governor Vorontsov good Qvidius except go fuck his wife: the field of honor is as boring as the gaming board... The technique here is essentially a modernist one, in which or more times (evoked through dates and proper names) are experienced as one. It is as though we could place different epistemes over the other, like transparencies on a overhead projector. Hugh Kenner, seeing this technique in Pound's early poems, said that in them two times have become as one and that now lay flat, transparent upon not-now. …