Search Party Read online

  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

  Twins

  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