Way Out in the Center: John Matthias

John Matthias, Beltane at Aphelion: Longer Poems (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1995);

John Matthias, Pages: New Poems & Cuttings (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2000);

John Matthias, Swimming at Midnight: Selected Shorter Poems (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1995);

Robert Archambeau, Word Play Place: Essays on the Poetry of John Matthias (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1998). These works are cited parenthetically.

Readers of poetry knowledgeable about small-press publishing will have noticed a recent flurry of books and journals collecting essays on poets who emerged in the 1970s.¹ Such collections signal that efforts to sort out the poetry published over the last few decades are intensifying despite the inability or unwillingness of university presses to support this kind of work. The essays on John Matthias gathered by Robert Archambeau are published by Swallow Press, once an independent imprint but now part of Ohio University Press, and thus constitute an exception to what seems lately the rule as poetry criticism, like poetry itself, flourishes beyond academic culture, or, in the case of poets and critics who have academic jobs and publishers but also publish in such collections, at the points of intersection between the margins of academe and a larger poetry culture.² Archambeau’s Word Play Place (1998) follows by a few years the publication of Matthias’s collected longer poems, Beltane at Aphelion (1995), and selected shorter poems, Swimming at Midnight (1995), and precedes by two years his new book Pages (2000). It thus seems an appropriate moment to offer a few remarks on poetry that I have been reading with considerable interest for fifteen years now. Archambeau opens his introduction by claiming that Matthias’s work is “difficult . . . to place on any of the conventional maps of the literary terrain” (1), and while I am not sure how many maps of the terrain in poetry there are these days and which among them are conventional, I want to argue that if we indeed did have such maps and they were at all useful, Matthias’s work would be recognized as part of a viable center in American poetry.

Several among the generally fine essays in Archambeau’s book take up the implicit challenge of his opening sentence by attempting to locate Matthias’s work within a larger field of recent poetic practice. John Peck contrasts Matthias’s work with what he calls “the recent Objectivist ascesis” or “a third Objectivism”—his terms for what is more commonly known as language poetry: “Aspects of voice had been elevated by Williams and Olson and O’Hara, but the recent Objectivist ascesis dovetails with the stifling of voice, orality, and other ego vagaries by the deconstructive turn to writing/text. Matthias’s particular value as a writer is his consistent scrupulosity about texts, about both acknowledging them and wittily reworking them, but along with that his steady exploration of a voice. No fence straddler, he simply makes the fence unnecessary” (222). For Romana Huk, Matthias’s poetry is similarly “between,” though not between the New American poets Peck names and the younger language poets, but between British and American experimentalisms. Poems that seem to some “neo-modernist,” she argues, might be better read as occupying a transatlantic space between a “first [post–World War II] generation” of British experimentalism (for example, Roy Fisher) and language poetry, “sharing concerns with both” but only to a point: “[the poetry’s] interest in competing historical discourses and its lack of interest in full syntactic disjuncture signal its relationship to British as opposed to American avant-garde writing. I want to argue . . . that by the early 1970s Matthias had already made this experimental project clear in his poems, and that in some ways the early work predates the avant-garde’s current preoccupations, on both sides of the ocean, with imagining a postmodern but ‘located’ rather than an ahistorical, ‘authorless’ art” (115–16). Here Huk&rsquo...