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).