Background
Matthias, John Edward was born on September 5, 1941 in Columbus, Ohio, United States. Son of John Marshall and Lois (Kirkpatrick) Matthias.
("Working Progress, Working Title" combines two of John Ma...)
"Working Progress, Working Title" combines two of John Matthias' most experimental poems. Critics have for some time written of Matthias as a poet of place, but what will be made of his "Automystifstical Plaice"? The poem in fact derives from the strange fact that film siren Hedy Lamarr and avant-garde composer George Antheil collaborated on a patent for a radio-directed torpedo in the early days of World War II when both had gone to Hollywood. But the piece is also about the Paris avant-garde, early experimental films like "Ballet mecanique" and "L'Inhumaine", Antheil's early scores, Hollywood in the 1940s, spread-spectrum technology, artificial intelligence, and many related matters. The narrator seems to be Claire Lescot, who steps out of "L'Inhumaine" and follows Antheil and Lamarr to Hollywood. The second and longer poem, "Pages: From a Book of Years", is a kind of manic attempt at remembering in the context of the poet's mother's loss of memory to Alzheimer's disease. The years happen to be 1959, 1941, 1953, 1961 and 1966, all years of great personal significance to the poet, but also years in which the public world intersected the private world in unusual ways. Matthias' father collected yearbooks on a wide variety of subjects. Materials from these yearbooks, along with the poet's high school yearbook which he hadn't seen for forty years, propel themselves into the world of these poems as the poet cleans out the family home and writes his pages, abruptly ending each one at the bottom of his computer screen.
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(Swimming at Midnight collects the short and middle-length...)
Swimming at Midnight collects the short and middle-length poems from John Matthias's earlier books together with twenty poems that have previously appeared only in magazines. It is published simultaneously with Beltane at Aphelion, which includes all of Matthias's longer poems. The two books together represent some thirty years of his work. The poems in Swimming at Midnight range from early lyrics written in American during the late 1960s to meditative poems dealing with historical, geographical and cultural themes deriving from Matthias's years in England in the seventies and eighties; they include the epistolary poems from Turns, "Poem for Cynouai" from Crossing, "A Wind in Roussillon" from Northern Summer, and the formal experiments engaging issues of poetics and metaphysics for which Matthias is well known. The book concludes with a section of new poems and translations dealing both with the public world of modern history and the private experience of life in the century's final decade. The last poem of all connects the work in Swimming at Midnight with the last of the long poems in Beltane at Aphelion. Critics have been warm in their praise of Matthias's work. Robert Duncan called his early poetry "the work of a Goliard-one of those wandering souls out of a Dark Age in our own time," and Guy Davenport has said that his recent work makes him "one of the leading poets in the USA." D. M. Thomas in the TLS admired the "virtuosity" of Turns and the way "life presses into the poems," while John Fuller in the same journal found the poems in Crossing "bursting with a masterful intelligence." In a long essay on Northern Summer, Jeremy Hooker wrote: "In his combination of lyrical and discursive voices, as in subject and concern, Matthias has an exciting range...He writes in some poems from a tension between a scribe's respect for the integrity of his materials and a magician's freedom to transform them, and in many poems he brings together the contrasting gifts and is fully present as himself, both scribe and magician."
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( Northern Summer is a representative selection from John...)
Northern Summer is a representative selection from John Matthias’s previous books, together with a group of poems written since 1980. Robert Duncan wrote of his first book, Bucyrus, that in part “Matthias is a Goliard – one of those wandering souls out of a dark age in our own time.” The present selection includes the three epistolary poems from Turns – hailed as “major art” by Arthur Oberg in Western Humanities Review – as well as the long “Poem for Cynouai” from Crossing, which extends and modifies their idiom. The book reprints entire “The Stepfan Batory Poems”, written on a Polish liner while Matthias traveled to America after a year in England during the last stages of the Watergate controversy, along with three sections of “The Mihail Lermontov Poems,” written two years later while returning on a Russian ship to England. The comic vision of these poems has been widely acknowledged since the publication of Crossing, a book the TLS found “bursting with masterful intelligence” and Thames Poetry called “packed with poetic thought, devilment, and complexities of spirit.” The new work in Northern Summer culminates in the title poem, a personal and historical meditation set in Scotland. In it a new landscape and history – that of Fife and “The Matter of Scotland” – join the East Anglian and Midwestern American concerns of his earlier work. It is a poem that bears out Neil Corcoran’s observation in PN Review that Matthias is a poet “whose exceptionally original work has something of David Jones’s magpie eclecticism and much of his sustaining interest in specific re-imagined historical occasions.”
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( A unique voice among contemporary American poets, John ...)
A unique voice among contemporary American poets, John Matthias has compiled here a major new collection, his first volume of poetry since the publication in 1995 of his retrospective collections of shorter and longer poems. Divided into three sections, Pages begins with thirty short poems that range in subject from Ovid and Akhmatova to remembered friends and family. The second part is the experimental and expansive title section, engaging a sometimes humorous and sometimes horrifying sequence of contradictions and non sequiturs. The final section of the volume is a poetic pastiche of letters, journals, poems, and scientific literatures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries having to do with botany, botanical drawing, voyages of exploration, and related concerns. Propelled by an unyielding rhythmic energy and the juxtaposition of disparate elements, Matthias again demonstrates the force of his poetic impulse but with a greater formal variety and a wider range of subject than ever before.
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( The Battle of Kosovo cycle of heroic ballads is general...)
The Battle of Kosovo cycle of heroic ballads is generally considered the finest work of Serbian folk poetry. Commemorating the Serbian Empire’s defeat at the hands of the Turks in the late fourteenth century, these poems and fragments have been known for centuries in Eastern Europe. With the appearance of the collections of Serbian folk poems by Vuk Stefanovic Karasdzic, the brilliance of the poetry in the Kosovo and related cycles of ballads was affirmed by poets and critics as deeply influential as Goethe, Jacob Brimm, Adam Mickiewicz, and Alexander Pushkin. Although translations into English have been attempted before, few of them, as Charles Simic notes in his preface, have been persuasive until now. Simic compares the movement of the verse in these translations to the “variable foot” effect of William Carlos Williams’s later poetry, and argues that John Matthias “grasps the poetic strategies of the anonymous Serbian poet as well as Pound did those of Chinese poetry.” First published in 1987, the translation of the Battle of Kosovo is now reprinted both because of its intrinsic merits and because the recent crisis in Kosovo itself compels the entire world to understand the nature of the ancient conflicts and passions that fuel it. Although Matthias and Simic have elected to retain their original preface and introduction, Christopher Merrill, a scholar of the region and author of Only the Nails Remain, has contributed a brief afterword explaining the importance of this poetry in the context of NATO’s first military action ever against a sovereign nation.
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( Beltane at Aphelion collects all of John Matthias's lon...)
Beltane at Aphelion collects all of John Matthias's longer poems and is published simultaneously with Swimming at Midnight, which collects his shorter poems. The volume includes his exuberant experiments from the 1960s, Poem in Three Parts and Bucyrus, followed by The Stefan Bathory & Mihail Lermontov Poems, his comedic diptych from the 1970s set on a Polish and a Russian ocean liner, and by Northern Summer, his meditation on history and language set in Scotland. It concludes with the three long poems first published in A Gathering of Ways which explore ancient paths and river routes in the East Anglian region of Britain and the American Midwest, and, in the most ambitious poem he has yet written, the famous pilgrim trails to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. About the books in which these poems originally appeared, critics and poets have written with enthusiasm.
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Matthias, John Edward was born on September 5, 1941 in Columbus, Ohio, United States. Son of John Marshall and Lois (Kirkpatrick) Matthias.
Bachelor, Ohio State University, 1963. Master of Arts, Stanford University, 1966. Postgraduate, University London, 1967.
Assistant professor department English, U. Notre Dame, Indiana, 1966-1973; associate professor, U. Notre Dame, Indiana, 1973-1980; professor, U. Notre Dame, Indiana, since 1980. Visiting fellow Clare Hall, Cambridge U., 1966-1977, associate, since 1977. Vis.prof. department English, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, 1975, University of Chicago, 1980.
( A unique voice among contemporary American poets, John ...)
(Swimming at Midnight collects the short and middle-length...)
( Beltane at Aphelion collects all of John Matthias's lon...)
( Northern Summer is a representative selection from John...)
( The Battle of Kosovo cycle of heroic ballads is general...)
("Working Progress, Working Title" combines two of John Ma...)
(Swimming at Midnight: Selected Shorter Poems)
(Book by Matthias, John)
Member American Association of University Professors, Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association, Poets and Writers, Poetry Society American (George Bogin Memorial award 1990), London Poetry Secretariat.
Married Diana Clare Jocelyn, December 27, 1967. Children— Cynouai, Laura.