what it feels like to cross the street

William Matthews: [My low boredom threshold]’s been a real advantage to me. Having a high boredom threshold would be a different advantage to a different kind of poet; you have to use what you’re given and make an asset of it. That’s what an artist is. You’re born with a limp and figure out a way to run fast with a limp. If you think, I don’t like the sound of my voice when I do this, that’s information … it’s exactly the information that you need. I mean, the thing that I feel more and more as a writer and as a teacher of writing is that you really have almost all the information that you need to solve your problems right in front of you. Within four feet of you. If you can teach yourself to look around and find it. Don’t let the clues go by. It’s really everything you need. 

Pearl London: For all the great splurging of language, there is distillation all the way through. We mustn’t typecast even William Matthews.

Matthews: That’s why I’ve never wanted to write a novel.

London: Why?

Matthews: The low boredom threshold. The distilling is the fun. To write a novel well—I have a couple friends who are good novelists and I love what they do and admire it enormously, it’s just very different from what I do. When their characters cross the street it’s a good street and they know what the stores are, they know what people wear on that street; and I don’t care. I want to write a description of what it feels like to cross the street and I don’t care about the stores and I don’t care what the people are wearing. I mean, in a sense, everything is distillation.

 

- William Matthews, in conversation with Pearl London in 1994, from Poetry in Person: Twenty-five Years of Conversations with America's Poets (ed. Alexander Neubauer, Knopf, 2011).  

I’m not particularly interested in ideas

Pearl London: Coming back to the body of the poetry, wouldn’t you say that right from the beginning, all of the poems—somewhere, somewhere—are living in a moral universe. 

William Matthews: I think of the issue of equilibrium, both as a sense of personal poise or balance and also the notion that you can’t deal fairly with the world if you don’t have the ability to make yourself equal to people. These are notions that have seemed to me important. And it seems to me that in writers like Stevens and Nabokov and Bishop the real love is for the ability to experience the physical world. And to make connections by means of elaborate linguistic patterns that imitate in some way the profusion and inventiveness of the creation. In one sense it’s about order, but in another sense it’s about the unbelievable diversity of the world that we can apprehend with our senses. If you imagine what an expiring Nabokov or an expiring Stevens is most annoyed at, at three minutes before death, it’s “I’ll never make another metaphor.” They’re not thinking, “Oh, my idea of order turned out to be really interesting.” I’m not particularly interested in ideas—which have wrecked lots of poets. I think they ruined Ezra Pound. His fascination with ideas turned a great lyric poet into a kind of raving village idiot.

 - William Matthews, in conversation with Pearl London in 1994, from Poetry in Person: Twenty-five Years of Conversations with America's Poets (ed. Alexander Neubauer, Knopf, 2011).  

the four subjects of poetry

1. I went out into the woods today, and it made me feel, you know, sort of religious.

2. We're not getting any younger.

3. It sure is cold and lonely (a) without you, honey, or (b) with you, honey.

4. Sadness seems but the other side of the coin of happiness, and vice versa, and in any case the coin is too soon spent, and on what we know not what.

- William Matthews.

Thanks to the Poetry off the Shelf podcast for pointing this out. You can listen to their whole podcast on William Matthews here.