John Matthias - Böcker

Sound art has long been resistant to its own definition. Emerging from a liminal space between movements of thought and practice in the twentieth century, sound art has often been described in terms of the things that it is understood to have left behind: a space between music, fine art, and performance. The Oxford Handbook of Sound Art surveys the practices, politics, and emerging frameworks of thought that now define this previously amorphous area of study. Throughout the Handbook, artists and thinkers explore the uses of sound in contemporary arts practice. Imbued with global perspectives, chapters are organized in six overarching themes of Space, Time, Things, Fabric, Senses and Relationality. Each theme represents a key area of development in the visual arts and music during the second half of the twentieth century from which sound art emerged. By offering a set of thematic frameworks through which to understand these themes, this Handbook situates constellations of disparate thought and practice into recognized centers of activity.

Since its founding in 1995, Notre Dame Review has become one of America's leading literary magazines. Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, has written, "It really has become one of the most interesting journals in the country." This anthology consists of representative poetry and fiction from its first ten years of publication. Like the magazine itself, the collection includes work by well known authors—Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and Czeslaw Milosz among the poets; Marilyn Krysl, Arturo Vivante, Frances Sherwood, R. D. Skillings, and Richard Elman, among the fiction writers—while also making room for exciting work by new and emerging writers, some of whom are former Notre Dame MFA students. The anthology also includes poetry and prose by several winners of the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry and the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, works that have set standards of excellence for writers and readers around the country.Contributors to this anthology represent a wide range of styles and aesthetic orientations. The reader will find in this collection poems and stories that challenge, surprise, comfort, discomfort, and delight—each in its own unique way.Poetry and fiction from the Notre Dame Review have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize volumes, and Harper's Magazine, among many other publications.

Reading Old Friends includes essays, reviews, and poems on poetics. Matthias, who has spent much time in England, concentrates on British poetry ranging from late modernist figures such as David Jones and Hugh MacDiarmid to contemporaries such as Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, Michael Hamburger, and John Fuller. He also seeks to establish, or re-establish, meaningful trans-Atlantic connections between Wendell Berry and Jeremy Hooker, for example, or between Robert Duncan and David Jones. Other, more generally acknowledged figures, are also discussed, including Wordsworth, Pope, Crabbe, Constable, Turner, Britten, Tippet, Lowell, Auden, and Berryman. The book also contains three poems on poetics that engage many of the theoretical issues left implicit in most of the essays.

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.

A Gathering of Ways is John Matthias’ first collection of poems since the publication of his warmly received Northern Summer collection in 1985. The book consists of three long poems dealing with the geography, geology, prehistory, and history of two places closely identified with Matthias’ work, the East Anglian region of Britain and the American Midwest, and a third place that provides the book with a new and deeply resonant setting: those parts of southern France and northern Spain through which run the famous pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela.“An East Anglian Diptych” explores those parts of Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, and Norfolk linked by three rivers and by those ancient paths and tracks known as ley lines which connect locality and locality and time with time. “Facts From an Apocryphal Midwest” explores another group of trails that began as prehistoric paths down which copper from Lake Superior was carried from the early days of the mound-builders. Despite the historical backdrop of these poems, both bring the reader into the present in unexpected ways, preparing him or her for the strange and visionary “A Compostela Diptych,” winner of the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award.

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."

Trigons derives its title from an obscure Roman ball game mentioned by Petronius in Satyricon. The word also has meanings in the fields of music, astrology, gemology, architecture, poetics, and comic book illustration, all relevant to this book that is sub-titled 'Seven Poems in Two Sets and a Coda'.Trigons shares something of the same spirit as Matthias's two most extravagantly inventive experimental sequences, Automystifstical Plaice and Pages: From a Book of Years. In an essay on Matthias's cycles and sequences from the 1970s through the present, Mark Scroggins has said that Trigons explores the poet's usual historical and literary obsessions, this time revolving much around the Second World WarA" through a series of surprising juxtapositions like that between the Nazi Rudolph Hess and his contemporary the English pianist Myra Hess, or the discovery made during the book's composition of yet another John Matthias, this one a British composer and neurophysicistA" who becomes a shadowing doppelganger in this book in which both music and neurology play a highly significant role.

Who Was Cousin Alice? & Other Questions attempts to answer both the first question posed in the title about American poet John Matthias' early family memories, and then to raise and engage, in a series of memoirs and critical essays, a large number of "other questions." These range from an attempt to find some answers about his wife's British family in 'Kedging in Kedging in Time,' an essay-memoir first published as an afterword to his long poem, Kedging, about the Adams and Young families during and after World War I, to memoirs inquiring into "Poetry and Insomnia," "Poetry and Murder," and the literary imaginations of "Grand Old Dirty Old Men"-Yasunari Kawabata, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Octavio Paz, among others-an examination of erotic writing of the old and aging as a manifestation of "late style." Specifically literary essays include considerations of W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Roy Fisher, Paul Muldoon, John Berryman, Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, Michael Anania, and "British Poetry at Y2K."In this hybrid mix of genres-both very recent work and a selection of pieces culled from the last twenty-five years-Matthias has added a number of poems that enter into a dialogue with his essays and memoirs. Guy Davenport has said that Matthias' prose "is written in a congenial and civilized style," and that while he "writes for a general audience that reads," his work, taken together, constitutes "a critical tour de force." In 2010 Shearsman published Matthias's most recent book of poems, Trigons. As Cousin Alice appears, Salt is publishing a critical Companion to the Poetry of John Matthias edited by J.F. Doerr.

The first volume to be released in an ongoing project collecting all the poems of John Mattthias. Two volumes of shorter poems and one of longer poems will form the complete package and, with this initial release in the year that the poet turns 70, these books will bring back into a print a major body of work that readers on both sides of the Atlantic need to know better.

The second volume in the Collected Poems of John Matthias, following Vol. 2 of the Shorter Poems in 2011, this volume covers all of the author's long poems from before 2010. That year's Trigons is excluded and remains available from Shearsman. Texts included in the book are: Facts from an Apocryphal Midwest (1986); Northern Summer (1980-1983); The Stefan Batory Poems (1973); The Mihail Lermontov Poems (1976); An East Anglian Diptych (1990); Cuttings (1995); Pages: From a Book of Years (1998); Automystifstical Plaice (2000); Laundry Lists and Manifestoes (2003) and Kedging in Time (2006).

Chronologically the first, Collected Shorter Poems, Vol. 1 is editorially the third of John Matthias's three-volume Shearsman Collected Poems. It includes the poems that first made Matthias's reputation-experimental work like 'Turns: Toward a Provisional Poetics and a Discipline'; politically activist poems from the 1960s and '70s such as his elegy for the Kent State University students killed by the Ohio National Guard; poems written from his fifteen years of living off and on in Suffolk; poems articulating an aesthetic of play-and-game like 'Clarifications for Robert Jacoby'; along with several epistolary poems, explorations of place, and family-oriented lyrics, such as the often translated and reprinted 'Poem for Cynouai.' This volume joins Collected Shorter Poems, Vol. 2 and Collected Longer Poems in bringing together all of the poetry, with the exception of Trigons (available separately from Shearsman), that Matthias wishes to preserve.

Different Kinds of Music follows Timothy "Westy" Westmont through six episodes from his childhood and youth, through his experiences as an archivist and a thief, to encounters with William Faulkner's bear in St. Louis, Hemingway's lingering ghost at Walloon Lake in Michigan, and Phillip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus in Columbus, Ohio itself. The narrative is sometimes funny, sometimes sad; and it progresses in an order more interesting than the merely chronological. Between the episodes appears a sequence of interchapters about music, the different kinds of which define Westmont's experience from the 1940s to the turn of the 21st century in an idiom different from that of the narrative parts of the book. Different, too, is the final long chapter, "Westmont as Talbot Eastmore," in which the author of the previous five episodes tells his own story in terms of a miniature bildungsroman which is also an elegy for an old friend.

At Large takes its title from John Matthias' "Editor at Large" column published during the last decade in Notre Dame Review. The book is in some ways a sequel to his previous volume of essays and memoirs, Who Was Cousin Alice? And Other Questions (Shearsman Books, 2011). Like that book, At Large contains a series of personal essays, many of which also involve literary commentary, along with literary essays that retain the flavor of memoir. Subjects include memories of an early poetic apprenticeship, family history, backgrounds for his novel Different Kinds of Music (Shearsman, 2014), as well as longer and more formal pieces about "poetry of place"; the work of Basil Bunting, Tomas Transtromer, David Jones, Robert Duncan, and Hugh MacDiarmid; the fiction of poets; poetry in film and opera; and the literary dangers of finding "religious feeling" in texts that are really dealing with secular emotions. At Large also functions as a kind of anthology, reprinting excerpts, with Matthias' introduction, of John Peck's book-length poem Cantilena (Shearsman, 2016) and James Walton's unpublished novel The Progress of Romance.The book contains two interviews, the author's with Larry Siems, former free-speech trouble-shooter for American PEN and a former student, and Joe Francis Doerr's three-part conversation with the author. It is a book full of variety and surprises, one of them an illustrated lecture on the collaboration between screen siren Hedy Lemarr and avant-garde composer George Antheil as they appear in Matthias' poem-play, Automystifstical Plaice: A Spread Spectrum Cabaret.

Complayntes for Dr. Neuro is John Matthias's first volume of poetry since Shearsman's publication of his three volumes of collected poems in 2011, 2012, and 2013. The present book, ending with the title sequence about being forced to confront some of the very neurological problems in fact which have in many earlier poems been something of a theoretical pre-occupation, also represents the more experimental side of his work that has tended to preoccupy the critics who have written on him over the past three decades, along with translation-based work (Virgil, the Chinese Shijing, Rimbaud), a run of austere shorter poems, many of an elegiac cast, and some graffiti-like riffs. Matthias has always written in several styles, and those are once again on display in this volume. The notes include an important gloss on the title poem, 'A Poetics of Parkinson's.'

Acoustic shadows - sound suppressed in such a way that even General Grant was deceived by one at the Battle of Iuka in the American Civil War - complicate the lives of many figures appearing in these poems, including that of the young John Matthias at his grandfather's house on Iuka Drive in Columbus, Ohio in the 1950s. This book, Matthias's first volume of entirely new poems since Complayntes for Doctor Neuro (Shearsman, 2016), includes a group of short lyrics followed by an essay called "Some Zones" (about places in which a kind of imaginative clarity becomes possible) and two longish sequences, "Prynne and a Petoskey Stone" and "First and Last Opinions," dealing with the American Midwest from the perspective of an English poet's Cambridge, and the Ohio Supreme Court opinions written by Matthias's father and grandfather. The title poem concludes the volume by bringing together memories and documents relating to the poet's great-grandfather, especially those pertaining to Civil War battles in which he fought alongside the famous and mysterious Ambrose Bierce, author of The Devil's Dictionary, who disappeared in Mexico in 1913.