William Matthews

Looking and Listening

If one were to compile all the reviews written about William Matthews’ work, it would be a compendium of contradictions. What I appreciate about his work is the range of interests and the courage to write about what he loves. Students are often told, “Write about what you know.” Knowing what we love does not always mean we understand it. So, we think about it, hold it up to the light, turn it this way and that. Look and ruminate. William Matthews does that in a way that engages me.

In Curiosities, Matthews uses an epigraph from Goethe, “Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting that looking.” I believe William Matthews spent his brief career (died at 55) looking, and perhaps even more importantly, listening intently. What he saw and what he heard are both interesting enough to bring me back to his work again and again.

What most endears Matthews to me is his love of jazz music. His is some of the writing about jazz that keeps my attention and pushes me toward thinking. I don’t care for the critics takes. I would rather listen without their judgments. Matthews is not a jazz critic; he is a jazz lover and his writing about it is sensual, passionate, playful and sexy. From the title of a jazz standard, he goes off on a written riff that makes one sit up and take notice.

He says of Lester Young, “He played with an unmatched tenderness, as if suffering and pleasure were impossible without each other…a master of mixed feelings…” If I had to come up with a way to speak about Matthews work, I might borrow his words about Lester Young. Perhaps his love of jazz from a young age (see Anita O’Day and I in Curiosities), and the musicians and vocalists who performed it, influenced his work, as a whole, more than any critic or devotee of his work has yet to acknowledge.

That brings us to Blues If You Want, his volume of poetry thematically dedicated to jazz. This is when I met William Matthews. I was an adult student at a state college in Southern New Jersey, fortunate to have Stephen Dunn as a teacher and mentor. Matthews and Dunn had not only poetry in common, they both loved basketball and were part of a contingency of jock poets. Stephen, of course, had attended Hofstra University on a basketball scholarship.

Matthews was not a chatty guy, as I recall. He was personable, looking almost embarrassed by his college campus notoriety. When he read the closing lines of the initial poem in Blues If You Want,

just as you’re having what you wanted most,

you want it more and more until that’s more

than you, or it, or both of you, can bear.

I was hooked and, bearable or not, I was lustfully greedy to hear more. Here are a few of the poems from that book.

Mood Indigo is a lyrical treatise on day-dreaming solitude gone unbalanced. Yet as with the tune itself, there is a mesmerizing quality and even as the protagonist at last is well pleased with her mood indigo so is the reader. No matter that someone must go and bring you in when you wander. A good improv solo is like that. That’s why live jazz is such a scintillating experience. It only sounds that way just once. If you are fortunate enough to be present, listening, it won’t leave you and that mood may issue into you as it does into the protagonist of Matthews’ poem.

It Don’t Mean A Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing certainly does its share of wandering from adolescent concupiscence, to Olympus, to the devil’s lair, to a mid-Western Drive-In Theater. In the midst of it all, we have the transfer of language from the gods to mortals:

Language was young and sad. She could

implore and charm, she could convince and scathe,

pick laughter’s lock,

she could almost glow with her own powers,

but she was the wind’s

like jazz before recordings. Deep into…

Matthews brings us to that place where we want so badly that we must have it—capture it, be able to have it at our bidding, own it; yet, even more obviously, be memorable in our own right as artists. And, we do flirt with it, lust after it, fumble at it, stamp our feet and demand it, become adept at it even as we violate it: the way convicts can tell you all about the law.

For me, this whole book would be worth reading just for Smoke Gets In Your Eyes. Matthews’ description of settling into listening mode at a jazz club is lush and languorous. It was the days before bars were smoke-free and the stuff of movie scenes:

I love the smoky libidinal murmur

of a jazz crowd, and the smoke coiling

and lithely uncoiling like a choir

of vaporous cats. I like to slouch back

with that I’ll-be-here-a-while tilt

and sip a little Scotch and listen,

keeping time and remembering the changes,

and now and then light up a cigarette.

Yet, the poem itself is about how we kill time only to have “changes” keep their unsteady pace in spite of us. Changes in the music, changes in the landscape, changes in what we encounter “in a mirror,” no matter the predictable image we project in whatever setting. Matthews surely is more interested in looking than knowing.

What A Little Moonlight Can Do is a scene well worth looking at. The juxtaposition between the adult take on what moonlight can do, as the tune’s lyrics suggest, is far removed from the perspective of the boy in the poem. He is smelling the summer effluvium of the adults below his third story perch and becoming a voyeur—all of his senses engaged by the natural and human worlds invading his sleep.

our sounds and fervent odors. We’d be aloft

if our bodies didn’t hold us down,

and everything that memory can get

its clumsy hands on. The boy watches a dog

skulk out of the rough and dark to lift

its moon-silvered leg – that’s not a dog,

it’s a fox! And its fur is not silver but gray –

and pee distractedly into a sand trap. And then

Well, of course, we look and then what we see is gone. What we hear is over.

What we read has been read. What we create is committed to time and memory. The final two lines of Straight Life, the poem that closes the book are:

Music’s only secret is silence. It’s time

to play, time to tell whatever you know.

It’s Blues If You Want and I do want and I’m willing to look and listen enough to know. It’s poetry and jazz that bookend my days and William Matthews work is part of what’s in between. I need both and, so far, can bear both no matter the wanting more.

Works Cited

Matthews, William. Curiosities. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989. Print