I hope you can join us following Mr. Matthews'
reading in the terrace lounge for reception.
The terrace lounge is on the second floor
of the Student Union in the older section of the Union.
If you have not received a copy of the spring schedule,
I will have some at the reception.
Be happy to give them to you.
You may have noticed that the name of the Poetry Center
has changed to University of Arizona Poetry Center.
We're in the same place.
Our hours are the same.
And I hope you will find that we have a fine reading
schedule for the spring.
Including Mr. Matthews reading tonight,
we will have five visiting poets.
Next Wednesday night, in this auditorium,
we will have a faculty reading by Steven Orlen.
That's January 31st, 8:30 PM.
We have scheduled for the spring three student readings.
The first reading will be February 14th,
three weeks from tonight.
In the old days, when the Poetry Center was very small
and there were not poetry writing classes,
they used to have Friday afternoon hours when people
were invited to come and read.
And we decided that it would be nice to have another hour when
the reading was open to all and any interested students.
So on February 14th, the reading will be open.
We will not invite anyone to read.
We invite everyone to read.
If you'd like any more information about it,
I hope you'll call the Poetry Center to talk to us.
This evening, I'm happy to introduce you
to William Matthews, young poet who was born in Cincinnati,
educated at Yale and at Chapel Hill at the University of North
Carolina.
While a student at Chapel Hill, he
was one of the co-founders of the poetry magazine Little
Bolero and The Little Bolero Press.
He presently teaches at Cornell University.
Makes his home in Ithaca, New York.
He's published two books with Random House--
Ruining the New Road and Sleek for the Long Flight.
We welcome Mr. William Matthews.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
I'm going to begin by reading a prose poem because about half
of the pieces I'll read tonight will be short prose pieces.
Prose poems is really a name that's
given to them by default. It's like saying cold fire
or something.
There's something paradoxical and impossible
about the idea of a prose poem.
Whatever they are, I started writing them
because I became fascinated with a French poet,
a friend of mine.
And I have spent four years translating some prose poems
by French poet named Jean Follain.
And after about two years of working on these poems,
it occurred to me--
I get ideas slowly--
it occurred to me to write some of my own.
And I started writing prose poems.
I've become rather staunch about it as an activity
and staunch about prose poems as a form
because I found that when I talk to my fellow poets,
they greeted the news that I was working on prose poems
with a strange--
well, they would say, what are you doing these days.
And I said, well, I'm writing some prose poems.
And they would say, oh, as if, gee, I
hope it'll be all right soon or as if they received
the news that I'd been caught dancing to Everett Dirksen
records or something that was really going to damage
my general reputation in life.
So when I published my last book,
I put a lot of prose poems in.
And I didn't put them in a separate section.
And I didn't call them anything separate.
I just displayed them in among what some poets call
regular poems or real poems but which
I call, in order not to make that kind of distinction,
verse poems.
I was first moved to write them because of working
on the Follain poems.
But after writing a few awful imitations of Follain,
it occurred to me that there was a great deal
of short prose in American language
that we don't think of it as art, prose.
I'm a newspaper junkie.
Today, for example, on the flight out,
I read the Pittsburgh paper.
I read a Syracuse paper, a Pittsburgh paper,
and a Chicago paper.
I collapsed when I got here.
I haven't yet read an Arizona paper.
But I will.
I always love reading the papers wherever I go.
And so I read all this prose in the paper, short prose.
I read obituary columns, horoscopes, sports columns,
advice to the lovelorn, Heloise's household hints.
These are all forms of prose which are very formulaic.
The prose always works the same way.
It's as patterned and it clicks 1, 2, 3, beginning, middle,
and end, as neatly as fairy stories
starting once upon a time and so forth.
And so when I first started wanting
to write prose poems that didn't sound like Jean Follain,
but that sounded like something that I might run across
in American language, one of the early ones I wrote
was a horoscope entry.
I was feeling betrayed by astrology at that time
because it was about the point where astrology had really
reached the common marketplace so that you would get
a little tumbler with your sign on it
if you filled up with eight or more gallons
at the gas station.
And they always started out promisingly.
They addressed me directly and personally
and intimately, and I liked that.
They told me nice things about myself,
which was also pleasant.
And then they veered off into generalities,
doubtless under the pressure of having the entry necessarily
explained equally personally the lives of the 500
million other people with the same sign.
But I didn't like this.
I wanted it to go on.
I want it to be more personal.
I wanted it to be more intimate.
I wanted to talk to me directly.
I wanted all other Scorpios in the world to fall away
from this particular message.
I never found a horoscope column that did this.
And in fact, the entries in my home newspaper
are written by a man named Carol Richter.
And unlike a lot of advice of that kind which
centers on getting rich and having
an exciting but destructive sex life
and going on long journeys and things like that,
this guy tells you how to get along at the office
so that there'll be things like impressed that bigwig today
or spend evening with mate.
I like that one.
And my favorite is show that you are ethical.
Doesn't say, be ethical.
It just says, show that you're ethical.