In Appreciation of William Matthews [by Peter Fortunato]

Bill Matthews was born on Armistice Day 1942 and died of a heart attack a day after his fifth-fiifth birthday on November 12, 1997.  We asked the poet and artist Peter Fortunato to pick a poem by Bill and talk a little about it and him. Peter picked “What You Need,” from Bill’s first book, whose the opening lines illustrate the logic of metaphor in Matthews’s poetry. The self one would like to cast off, as a snake discards his skin, becomes “that old ring in the tub.”  Here is the poem and Peter’s note. See, too, Edward Byrne‘s essay on Matthews’s Search Party. — DL

 

 

Suppose you want to leave your life,

that old ring in the tub,

behind?

 

It closes cozily

as a clerk’s hand,

a coin with fingers.

 

You hate it

the same way the drunken son

loves Mother.

 

You will need pain

heaving under you

like frost ruining the new road.

 

— William Mathews (from his first book, Ruining the New Road)

 

Remembering William Matthews

              A few years ago at the Provincetown Public Library I was surprised to find withdrawn from circulation Search Party: The Collected Poems of William Matthews.  I bought it, a hardbound copy, for two dollars.  On leafing through its crisp pages I discovered that the last time a reader had checked it out, according to the library receipt tucked a third of the way through, was back in 2004, shortly after the collection was published.

             Inevitably, I was given to musing on fame and the fickleness of fashion.Throughout his professional life Bill was a prominent figure on the American poetry scene, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1995 and the Ruth Lilly Award from the Modern Poetry Association in 1997.  As a teacher he made a huge impact on his students, as a friend he was beloved, and after his death, an anthology of poems in his honor appeared.  It glitters with reminiscences and tears. Yet I wonder: is he forgotten today? Bill’s poems, always leavened with wit, are often self-analytical and have little to do with the identity politics prevalent among today’s younger poets.

            As I read Search Party, savoring again poems I have known and taught, discovering others to admire, I started recollecting Bill’s role in my early career as a poet.  He was at Cornell as an assistant professor during my undergraduate time there, 1968 to 1972.  While I never took a course with him, I was among a circle of students including those in Cornell’s rather new M.F.A. program who gravitated to him.  He was the first poet whom I knew close-up, and when his first book was published in 1970— Ruining the New Road—I bought it and practically memorized it. 

            Although Bill didn’t get tenure at Cornell, his years there are among the most exciting I remember.  The visiting writers series he organized and hosted brought James Wright, Diane Wakowski, Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell, and John Logan to campus.  Some of them participated in a weekend long poetry festival that included wonderful conversations in the evenings at Bill’s farmhouse.  His longtime friend, the novelist Russell Banks, was also on the scene: as young men in Chapel Hill they’d begun the magazine Lillibulero, an example of the real lives and work of writers.

            While reading Search Party, which spans Bill’s too short, intense life, the man and my acquaintance with him came back vividly. I absorbed much from him about metaphor and the power of images to communicate paradox. Consider the final stanza of “What You Need,” which resonates enigmatically with the title and poem’s first humorous lines.

            The most important effect Bill had on me was through his poems, and it’s in his poetry that any reader can find him.

Peter Fortunato’s most recent book is the novel Carnevale. He is an editor at Cayuga Lake Books.