Laureates and Heretics: Six Careers in American Poetry

Chapter 5: John Matthias: Homing Poems

Chapter Five John Matthias Homing Poems Applause in South Bend It was fall in South Bend, Indiana, when Robert Pinsky appeared at the University of Notre Dame to read from The Figured Wheel and to discuss his new translation of Dante’s Inferno. The year 1997 had been a good one for Pinsky, who had taken to his role as U.S. Poet Laureate like a newly tenured professor takes to a sabbatical, and he walked on stage to applause considerably more heartfelt than the mere polite smattering given to most visiting poets. A good portion of the applause was, no doubt, offered up in deference to the title of laureate, and a few further decibels were probably wrung from the heavily Catholic crowd at Notre Dame due to a certain home-team feeling for the translator of Dante’s great Catholic epic. For a few members of the crowd, though (mostly graduate students in the English Department), the applause was as much in appreciation of the man who had introduced him as it was a welcome for the laureate himself. That man was John Matthias, Pinsky’s classmate at Stanford and the senior poet on the faculty at Notre Dame. After the reading, while Pinsky was being mobbed by an appreciative crowd, some of those graduate students clustered in a corner of the reception room and disparaged the famous man, comparing him unfavorably to their own relatively unsung 135 poet. (“Graduate students of many years standing,” the Canadian writer David Arnason once observed, “speak only in easy insult” [102].) None of the disparagers was among the authors of the articles soon to appear in Word Play Place, a collection of essays on the poetry of John Matthias, but their somewhat prickly defensiveness about Matthias was a sentiment not uncommon among the contributors to that volume, at least in private conversation. The scene in the theater after Pinsky’s reading can be seen as emblematic of the different kinds of recognition that Matthias and Pinsky receive. While Pinsky is valued by a fairly general readership by the standards of American poetry at the turn of the twenty-first century, Matthias’s reception is in some ways similar to that of Yvor Winters. Like Winters, Matthias has few readers; but like Winters’ readers, Matthias’s support him with an uncommon intensity. It is significant in this regard that despite Pinsky’s considerable renown and his triplecrown laureateship, there has yet to be a book dedicated to the study of his poetry. Viewers of, say, PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer may be familiar with Pinsky as a commentator and deliverer of ceremonial poems (as, for that matter, are viewers of The Simpsons, on which an animated Pinsky once gave a reading of “Impossible to Tell”). But this kind of recognition is as different in kind as it is in degree from the devotion to Matthias shown by the writers of the essays of Word Play Place, many of whom were once his students, just as Winters’ primary critics have been his former students. While Matthias would never want to offer anything as doctrinaire as the later Winters’ version of literary history and morality, there is a certain intensity about his readers: they do not enjoy his work so much as they believe in it. If Pinsky has a broad-church following, based on an appreciative but relatively casual engagement with his work by a great many readers, then Matthias has a small band of passionate heretics, few in number but producing a great deal of text and commentary per capita. Why is there such a difference in the degree and kind of esteem offered to Pinsky and Matthias? What differences in career, disposition , habitus, and poetics make for such different kinds of appreciation as well as such different trajectories through the American poetic field? To understand these differences, we should begin by looking at what Pinsky, Matthias, Hass, and the other Stanford poets of their genera136 | John Matthias tion have in common. Jeremy Hooker gets to the heart of the matter when he writes: It seems to me that John Matthias and the American poets (all students of Yvor Winters) with whom he is most frequently associated, Robert Hass, James McMichael, John Peck, and Robert Pinsky, all feel the need both to create a covenant between word and world...