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Friday, March 10, 2006
Friday culture and a hottie
Ed: I can't get the cut to work today, and I really don't have the time to figure out what the fuck went wrong, so you're just going to have to suffer through the culture part. Or scroll past it.
William Matthews was an American poet from Ohio. Matthews' work is not terribly well-known, which is a shame, and may be due to his death at a fairly young age: Matthews died on November 12, 1997, the day after his fifty-fifth birthday. Here are two of his poems. Job Interview Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's wife He would have written sonnets all his life? DON JUAN, III, 63-4 "Where do you see yourself five years from now?" the eldest male member (or is "male member" a redundancy?) of the committee asked me. "Not here," I thought. A good thing I speak fluent Fog. I craved that job like some unappeasable, taunting woman. What did Byron's friend Hobhouse say after the wedding? "I felt as if I had buried a friend." Each day I had that job I felt the slack leash at my throat and thought what was its other trick. Better to scorn the job than ask what I had ever seen in it or think what pious muck I'd ladled over the committee. If they believed me, they deserved me. As luck would have it, the job lasted me almost but not quite five years. A Poetry Reading At West Point I read to the entire plebe class, in two batches. Twice the hall filled with bodies dressed alike, each toting a copy of my book. What would my shrink say, if I had one, about such a dream, if it were a dream? Question and answer time. "Sir," a cadet yelled from the balcony, and gave his name and rank, and then, closing his parentheses, yelled "Sir" again. "Why do your poems give me a headache when I try to understand them?" he asked. "Do you want that?" I have a gift for gentle jokes to defuse tension, but this was not the time to use it. "I try to write as well as I can what it feels like to be human," I started, picking my way care- fully, for he and I were, after all, pained by the same dumb longings. "I try to say what I don't know how to say, but of course I can't get much of it down at all." By now I was sweating bullets. "I don't want my poems to be hard, unless the truth is, if there is a truth." Silence hung in the hall like a heavy fabric. My own head ached. "Sir," he yelled. "Thank you. Sir." Todays hottie is Rick Yune.   
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