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| Poet William Matchett |
Interview
and article By Peter Menkin
Quakers do not
have a set of beliefs they adopt when they become Quakers. We have four
testimonies we try to live out: Community, simplicity, equality, and peace. In
poems you would find a number of things referring to (the testimony). We try to
live for it. We believe in continuing revelation. Which means we feel there are
new truths emerging in the Universe all the time and we need to use discernment
and the help of each other to find these truths. To find if they are truly
true.
--Judy
Brown, Quaker
She
introduced me to Poet Matchett and is an editor of poetry (Friends Journal)
An interview with poet William H. Matchett, Quaker,
done by phone, but mostly answers typed on his typewriter from the 90 year
old’s home in the remote area of Seabeck, Washington in the United States’
great Northwest where he lives with his wife in the Summer (this done 2013 from
September 12, 2013 through the end of October, 2013). Correspondence by U.S.
Mail was our method of sending manuscripts. This took a few days as poet Matchett
has neither computer nor internet for one. He retired as a teacher from The
University of Washington in 1982 (Shakespeare).
In this interview we focus somewhat on his new book described
by W.S. Merwin as poems gathered over a lifetime and published by Antrim House
in Simsbury, Connecticut, “Airplants: Selected Poems.” There is a short
interview by Antrim House publisher Robert Rennie McQuilkin following the
interview with poet William H. Matchett.
An older statement by The University of Washington
on the internet says of him, in part:
William Matchett, professor emeritus of English and former longtime
editor of the journal Modern Language Quarterly…Matchett retired from the UW in
1982 but continued teaching and writing after that. He is the author of two other
books of poetry, Water Ouzel and Fireweed as well as the work
Shakespeare and Forgiveness. He also has written stories, articles and
other criticism, and his work has appeared in dozens of magazines, include The
New Yorker, Saturday Review of Literature, Harper’s and The
New Republic.
Antrim House says this of the poet: “William Matchett was born in Chicago and educated in its public schools until his final two years of high school at Westtown, a Quaker boarding school, where his commencement essay was a long poem. During World War II he was assigned, as a conscientious objector, first to a Civilian Public Service camp and then, as a guinea pig, to the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory in Cambridge, Mass. After graduating from Swarthmore with highest honors in 1949, he married and returned to Cambridge to pursue a PhD at Harvard. While there, he had a teaching assistantship in Archibald MacLeish’s popular poetry course, and was one of the founders of the Poets’ Theatre, remaining active with it until 1954. Matchett’s entire teaching career since then has been at the University of Washington, where he is now an Emeritus Professor.”
INTERVIEW WITH POET WILLIAM MATCHETT
WITH RELIGION WRITER PETER MENKIN
1.
Of
your poems, many give a taste of being close to the land. Which of those speak
to you of God, if you will, and give an example of one that is special to
you--if only a few lines. Has your Quaker faith influenced you in your
appreciation of the land and its environment?
I think it is true that the only time the word ‘God’
appears in these poems is in the third section of the Accademia poem where it
clearly refers to the Old Testament God of the Adam and Eve story in Genesis as
he appears in those glorious tapestries. I don’t use the word otherwise since
it means so many different things to different people and would get in the way
of the experiences I am trying to create. I don’t think of poems as sermons but
as creating experiences for others to consider.
After I completed “Water Ouzel,” I recognized that
it was one-sided, only part of the story. The poem ends most dangerously with
the word “sweet”—dangerous because, as Shakespeare makes clear in a scene in Troilus
and Cressida, it easily cloys. I didn’t know Troilus and Cressida that
well when I wrote it. I did realize that it was a poem expressing a very
optimistic view of the world, and I knew there was another side to the picture.
So I wrote “The Petrel” to indicate a darker side of the balance. Still, I let
“Water Oruzel” have the last word in that volume.
Many Quakers differ in the language they use to
express their deepest convictions. But we are tolerant of each other and try to
hear what the others are saying even though their words may not be ones we
would use.
I don’t think of myself as a “Quaker Poet.” Though I
am a Quaker who writes poetry, I don’t speak for Quakers. Many of my earliest
poems were about birds. I then consciously ruled them out as a subject, not
wanting to be thought of as a Bird Poet, wanting to avoid such cataloguing.
Only two poems in this collection are Quaker in subject matter, “Quaker
Funeral” and “Jordans Meeting.” However,
a friend did once say she thought of Antinightmare” as a quintessential Quaker
poem since (mistakenly as it turned out) I gave George W. Bush the benefit of
the doubt, seeing that of God in him.
We face that fjord and the Olympic Mountains beyond
it, as we have now for more than fifty years. But the fjord is dying. In winter
there used to be rafts of many kinds of ducks. Not now. There are no longer the
fish to support them. The ecological balance has gone awry. Even then I thought
of the seal as looking through and beyond us.
Numbers of poems in this book end with unresolved
observations, like “Clearing the View”:
2.
This
short interview by phone gives me the opportunity to ask you the retrospective
question: As you pause with us, tell us what time in your life as a poet was
most fulfilling in your work? And again, will you give us a snippet from a poem
from that era to illustrate a work. We’d love to hear from you, even if your
answer is not a final one and is only one answer of many possibilities and
realities.
Only once in my life was I able to give writing
poetry uninterrupted attention, day after day: that was in 1962-3 when, on my
first sabbatical, I was living in Florence with my family. My main project that
year was to finish writing a book entitled Poetry: From Statement to Meaning,
a textbook for college use, on which I started with a University of Washington
colleague, Jerome Beaty. He meanwhile had moved to Emory University, but we
both had sabbaticals that same year, he in London, I in Florence, and we got
together in both places and finished that project. This left me with time I
could devote to writing poetry, and it was an exciting year.
Among others, I wrote the Accademia poem then,
visiting the gallery time and again to look at Michelangelo’s David, his
so-called “Prisoners,” unfinished, lining the hall by which one approached the
David, and the amazing, tapestries hanging behind the Prisoners. It was a very
ambitious poem with an intricate rhyme scheme. I am always fascinated with
attempting to maintain intricate patterns without letting them sound
artificial, keeping the normal speech-patterns. If one is writing in
self-contained stanzas and discovers late in the poem that one needs to add
something earlier, it is always possible to insert another stanza. When the
stanzas interlock, one can’t just add another, but must take them apart like a
watch and try to put them back together.
I was first taken to Florence briefly by my parents,
as tourists, when I was 13. I came home with a photograph of the David, which
became the subject of a poem originally entitled “Packing a Photograph from
Florence.” This raised the obvious question, who was Florence? So I changed the
title to “Packing a Photograph from Firenze.” After we had lived there, the
Italian name seemed the appropriate one, though I admit I am not consistent. I
still say Paris, not Paree, Rome, not Roma. I stayed with Firenze in the two
other later poems that have it in their title. “Five Illuminations in Firenze”
is a kind of short story allowing me to write of the city I love. Readers
object there are only four, but I hope there is a fifth in the coming to
understanding of the speaker.
3.
Religion
Writer and Poet Matchett are now in Conversation. We begin a kind of memoire
and reminiscence of poetic work by the poet.
Rennie was most supportive, but he didn’t do the
actual selection. I knew I couldn’t include everything I’ve written, so I tried
to select those which seemed to me the more successful and to eliminate those
that were weaker. I also wanted to demonstrate a variety of approaches, not all
in the same voice. There are a couple I included because they had been well
received by readers I respected. “Old
Inn on the Eastern Shore” is one of those. I guess the poem stands up, but it
doesn’t really represent me now. Too much influence from T.S. Eliot. I had
written my senior thesis at Swarthmore on his Four Quartets, then newly
published, but I was writing that “Old Inn” poem as though I were Eliot and I
am not.
In contrast, the Hopkins influence in my early poem
“Osprey” doesn’t bother me at all because it is an influence of technique, not
of philosophy.
4
and 5.
The
Conversation between Religion Writer Menkin and Poet Matchett continues. Their
subject ranges from creation of experience by the poet through sense of place,
“love” and the fjord. Not in that order.
My interest as a poet is in trying to create
experiences, perhaps guiding the reader but leaving conclusions up to him or
her. An example of trying to force a response, a simple example, might be in
the first poem in the Fireweed section, “The Nature of the Beast.” When
the cat brings a mouse, we are in the realm of cliché—cat and mouse, of course,
so we hardly respond. When the list continues, however, I hope we find
ourselves beyond cliché, so that “clotted feathers” and “half a chipmunk” force
a response. Then the end of the poem turns from the cat to use it as a metaphor
for the speaker.
In the wedding poem “Go Team” I left out all the
punctuation to let the reader experience differing possibilities. Especially,
of course, at the end, where “nothing” can be either subject or object. Is it
that love holds nothing and changes? Or that love holds and nothing changes?
Either can be true or false. It is, of course, quite unfair to the couple for
whom the poem was being written, and one wants to read it that love holds and
nothing changes, but I was carried away by what became possible as I wrote and
left it this way. Either statement may in fact be true—or false. It is up to
the reader.
I am perhaps overly interested in technique, having
too little to propound. I am as interested in how things are said as I am in
what is said. My wife says I read novels for style rather than for plot.
My two well-received books have long been out of
print. Several well-meaning friends asked why I didn’t republish them, but it
is not that easy. Fortunately Antrim house was interested in my putting
together a selected poems and it gave me the chance to make available again
works in which I retained some pride. It is the usual human desire to leave
something worthwhile. I suppose this book will also disappear in time, but I am
grateful that it exists for now. The first three sections are the best of what
was printed in the earlier volumes; the fourth collects poems which had been
only in various magazines. Rennie McQuilkin of Antrim House was designer and I
think he did a wonderful job in creating a handsome volume.
You asked how I would respond to the question “If I
write poetry, will I make money?” I say, No, you won’t. That is, perhaps
unfortunately, not the point. Any value a book of poetry—or a poem—has is in
what the reader finds in it. Perhaps modern developments are progress, but I
still much prefer books as books, the heft of them, the smell of them. I mark up
my own books and like to return to them and discover whether I have changed my
mind. I have an enormous library and when someone looks at it and asks the
inevitable question, “Have you read all these books?” I have learned to answer
“Many of them more than once.” At my present age, I enjoy rereading books I
remember liking earlier. Of course teaching kept me reading. Trollope is one of
my favorite authors. I’ve read all 47 of his novels—most more than once—and
prefer him to the other Victorian novelists. But I could list many other
“favorites.”
My present plans are just
to keep going. My wife and I are slowing down, having been together for 65
years. Daily living takes most of our time now—and doctor’s appointments. I
doubt that I will be writing much more poetry. We used to enjoy being snowed in
here in the winter, but can’t go on with that and have to retreat to Seattle
when snow threatens. We have lots of friends and family helping us out, but we
need to think of abandoning this remote spot in winter. I tried to capture what
this place means to me in a poem entitled “The Sense of Place:”
THE
SENSE OF PLACE
For
Judy
It
is beyond configuration.
The
horizon may not proclaim
the slow boil of the mountains,
but
there is no permanence—
a
shoulder is stripped,
a
road slashed,
the
snow line recedes or advances
and the light,
the
light never repeats.
The
foreground is merely less stable.
Saplings surge up;
a dead branch falls;
whole trees must bow to the view.
From
hour to hour what we love changes.
Nor
is it at any moment an absolute beauty.
Other vistas are more dramatic,
or
more domestic;
other gardens less of a hodgepodge;
there
must somewhere be a maple as magnificent.
We
have in fact been as happy elsewhere.
Why
is it then to this place and no other
that I return, asleep or awake, night after night?
Why
has this become home,
though
more recent,
less
formative,
and
not in the least ancestral?
Why
is it here that my body says I am here
without any tensing to withdraw?
That
it is so, but not why, I know,
constant as breathing
or rising into consciousness
like
thunder rumbling fragrantly
behind
the far ranges.
All
that holds good is a continuity of change.
For a moment, look, dew edges this strawberry leaf
and moss exerts its soft pressure
in
the cracked stone.
Our post office is
Seabeck, Washington. We are in the woods seven miles south of there with our
wonderful view of the fjord and the mountains. We bought this place in 1961 and
spent summers here until my retirement, when we came here full time. Now we
have to retreat again in the winter.
We are members of the
University Friends Meeting in Seattle and attend it regularly when we are there
and fairly frequently even from here, two hours away. This is the oldest of the
three Seattle Meetings (though there is an older church in the other branch of
Friends) and we have been members since we transferred here in 1954. Quakerism
itself gradually changes. We believe in continuing revelation, meaning that
there is still truth to the be revealed. Each Yearly Meeting has its own Faith
and Practice (the very names may differ) and is continually reconsidering
it. The most recent example, of course, is the acceptance of, indeed the
welcoming of, gay marriage by most Meetings. One might note that the earliest
Friends were beer-drinkers—or wine, if they could afford it—and this is again
true. There was however, an intervening period when most Quakers were
tee-totalers. Moderation is the present standard.
A Meeting is not only a
church but a meaningful community of individuals respecting each other even
when they differ. The support of our fellow members through Judy’s and my ill
health has been most gratifying and almost unbelievable.
END INTERVIEW WITH POET WILLIAM MATCHETT
BY PETER MENKIN
ADDENDUM I
In
this interview with Publisher of Antrim House Robert Rennie McQuilkin talks briefly in his
written answers about his small list of work with poets. He does this for us in
an effort to give readers a perspective on the recently released work of
William Matchett’s title, “Airplants,” found here: http://antrimhousebooks.com/matchett.html
.
Without much more, here we have the publisher and
editor Robert McQuilkin answering questions posed by Religion Writer Peter
Menkin. McQuilkin can be reached through email: www.antrmhousebooks.com
.
THE INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT MCQUILKIN
1. What
is your opinion of the state of poetry publishing today? Yes, this is a broad
question. But would you say it is alive and well?
 |
| Editor and Publisher McQuilkin |
2. At
Antrim House, is your place in this world of publishing poetry one that has a
distinct point of view? Tell us something about it. More specifically, in a few
words speak to us of the characteristics of the kind of book of poetry your
house likes to publish?
I am going to quote from our website: “Antrim House strives to publish the best work by writers from all parts of the country, with a special emphasis on emerging writers. We prefer work that does not cater to the academic establishment but is part of the continuum of work produced by writers the likes of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Richard Wilbur, Mary Oliver, Mark Doty, and Jane Kenyon. We also stress the importance of oral presentation, encouraging our authors to perform their work as widely as possible, in part to continue the ancient bardic tradition, making poetry a living, breathing art form; in part to promote an appreciation of poetry in a country where it is denigrated; and in part to inspire young poets. We hope to cultivate wider appreciation of a vibrant literary form that too often goes unnoticed in the midst of pop culture’s noise-making.
While we have no bias toward formal or informal, traditional or innovative work, we do insist that Antrim House writing be both comprehensible and resonant, rewarding multiple readings by revealing itself gradually but also avoiding the sort of inscrutability too much in vogue. When the poetry we publish has a political slant, we like it to abide by Emily Dickinson’s dictum: “Tell all the Truth but tell It slant.” That is, we favor the work of a writer like Martín Espada, whose political poetry is imagistic rather than abstract. We also believe that all good poetry is essentially political. If we publish poetry that might be termed “confessional,” we insist that it be universal and not purely personal. And we believe that high seriousness and high humor can cohabit. We side with Shakespeare against Racine. As noted before, we are also interested in publishing photography, especially when it is joined to the written word, and. memoirs that have universal appeal.
We believe that our emphasis on clarity combined with resonance has led to the promulgation of work that has wide appeal to a general audience. The Antrim House publisher/editor’s experience as the founder and director of the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, which continues to attract enthusiastic audiences numbering in the hundreds, confirmed his belief that "poetry, like bread, is for everyone." Both he and the Associate Editor know that that when poetry speaks simply and plainly while at the same time retaining artistic integrity, it can be as popular an art form in this country as it already is in others.
3. Is
your publishing house in Connecticut a one man venture? Where is it located?
Antrim House has been a one-man operation until recently, when an
Associate Editor joined the staff. We operate out of the family homestead, an
18th Century farmhouse in Simsbury, CT.
4. What
of your personal interest in poetry? What is your own taste, that is what have
you liked most, especially as a student or young person?
I came to the work/play of
publishing poetry as a poet and arts administrator, having directed the Sunken Garden
Poetry Festival for ten years. While with the Festival, I came to realize that
many relatively unknown poets, ones more interested in writing new work than in
promoting themselves, have been overlooked by the poetry establishment. As a
result, I contacted one of them (Norah Pollard) to suggest that she should
consider publishing her work in book form. The result was a book (Leaning In)
that other poets seemed to approve of. I began to receive requests for
publication and am currently rather besieged with submissions. I have always
been very selective in accepting work for publication, but I am receiving so
many interesting manuscripts that Antrim House is turning out about 15 books
per year.
My own work has been
published in journals/magazines such as The Atlantic, Poetry, The Yale
Review, The Southern Review, The Hudson Review, and The American
Scholar. I came to poetry early on because of the encouragement of grade
school teachers and under the influence of writers as disparate as John Keats
and Emily Dickinson. More recently I have especially enjoyed the work of Galway
Kinnell, Mary Oliver, Richard Wilbur, Robert Cording, and Eamon Grennan.
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