Philip Matthews

Writing table, Reedsburg, WI.

Readings

A poem you like to teach:

“Ars Poetica” from Wedding Day by Dana Levin (Copper Canyon Press, 2005)

Email to Dana Levin, April 5, 2019, subject line: “Cocoons.” I’d just taught “Ars Poetica” to a group of fifth-graders at Provincetown Public School:

“First impressions: whoa, gross, cool, creepy. We talked about what it means to embrace the monstrous / grotesque: to find meaning and possibly even beauty there. One student picked up on the “gold wings trembling,” the thing about to emerge, and we talked about the vulnerability of letting go or sharing what’s been held in the dark. Another picked up on “butterflies in the stomach,” which opened up space to show them how you move that dead metaphor up to the throat: Pound’s “Make it new”. 

One student said that he thought the poet was afraid of the butterflies crawling up to the brain, which felt like electricity in the room. Another about being afraid of things that are much smaller than us. Another about things we can't control. 

Conversation got really interesting when we talked about the specificity of the bathroom. Downstairs because it’s dark, private, the bathroom that might be forgotten about, not usually used. One student compared it to an office, where a poet writes. Another thought maybe the speaker was a child — lived in the “family home” because they’re not an adult / can’t live on their own yet. I found that fascinating knowing that the poem comes from a dream, so we talked about that a little — how our dream lives allow us to revisit other versions of ourselves. Another student said that she thought the family home was supposed to feel safe, and it kind of did and kind of didn’t.

We talked a lot about the “Don’t, don’t” at the end — whether it was better to continue being uncomfortable with the cocoons lodged in the throat, or to spit them out and face them, possibly even allow other people to see them. And also whether spitting them out would kill them: are they finished with their metamorphosis yet? 

Was such fun!”

A work of art:

Hands Holding the Void (Invisible Object), Alberto Giacometti (1934–35, cast c.1946–47)

I discovered Alberto Giacometti’s Hands Holding the Void (Invisible Object) at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis. I had taken a gig as a gallery assistant to learn more about visual art in close proximity to it. I eventually became the assistant curator of public projects there (a right place-time-people situation) but I still have a soft spot for that first gig. So many notes for poems were made during those hours in the Tadao Ando building, watching the light change, experiencing works of art installed with a minimal aesthetic, with so much gorgeous space around each piece, without wall labels. It really did feel as if you were in your own home. 

Giacometti’s sculpture was borrowed from the St. Louis Art Museum for the Pulitzer’s 2011 exhibition Dreamscapes. There was something astounding about rounding the Watercourt and encountering this figure standing in the middle of the sweeping Main Gallery. I’m still drawn to her expression: a mixture of awe and recognition, as if staring into the divine. 

Holding and communing with objects has become an important part of my practice. It started roaming the rise and fall of the dunes in Provincetown, MA, asking the Atlantic Ocean to borrow objects (a pinecone, a gull’s feather, a stone) to bring back to my studio to engage with. Finding ways to tap into each object’s knowledge, distinct from my own, and bring it to the stream of a poem. 

Listening for permission is a key part of this practice, because even the temporary removal and ultimate replacement of something small can change the course of the land’s flux. Thylias Moss here: “flux may flex, may be able to bend, warp, return to prior shape that is not identical for the return occurring at a different time, for a difference in energy output, acquisition, the big bang was also a big push, f-lux, function…”

A book of poetry by a friend and how knowing the poet affects your reading:

Acid Virga, Gabriel Kruis (Archway Editions, 2020)

Each time I read Acid Virga (Archway Editions, 2020) I think, who IS this person? even as my brain knows it’s Gabe (Gabriel Kruis), among the dearest people to me on earth. I think we’re meant to feel this sense of remove, like we’re encountering the poet’s reflection (projected, astral, film-like) as he traverses memory, drugged perception, forwarding verse, inducing waves of euphoria and despair in the heart and mind. The first wave of Acid Virga proceeds quickly, the “waterfall effect” that establishes the book carrying us rapidly poem through poem, accelerated and bolstered by the poet’s particular use of comma and enjambment. 

The early click from “Waterfall Effect” to “Auscultation,” is useful: “trying to understand this poem,” the poet revisits / revises an early poem that tracks the dynamics of his family which continue to play throughout the book, inclined especially to understand his pastor-father. We learn to reconcile this picture with the succeeding reality, bizarre, wonderful, of the father stewarding the poet and his sister M through the New Mexican desert, “leaned out / on Mucinex:” a reality that feels as removed & familiar as the poet’s hands “become out- / liers to me when I / sit down again / to write this / poem,” 

Throughout Acid Virga, I think of iterations on the tone row in atonal music composition, ideas repeated, manipulated, inverted, perceived backwards or upside down. Like I’m hearing Gabe’s demon (“we all have one, Mom / has one, Dad has one / I have one, You have one,”) speak through a series of voice changers, and I can’t stop listening. Past Bosky Farm, Rush Limbaugh, decapitated snakes, desert canyons, Easter services, paralleled graves, the Cloisters and “CEOs pissing / on pink urinal cakes,” “Tee Vee snow / stars twinkling / in the aspic,” we arrive slammed into the dam of “Regression,” the book’s last section.

We slow down—sit with the poet processing a grief no one is prepared to process: the violent death of a friend to whom the last poem (a sequence) is dedicated. Time spins backward, or tries to:

As the end advances,
will the seasons accelerate in their rhythms,

Spring,
and then spring again,

You can’t simply re-apply the emulsion
crumbling from the tapes,
then listen,

Listen again,

Writings

Open Season

What fur knows: opportunity, proportion, respect. 
How to bleed, shed history, offer a stiff structure, clung to 
even while sweeping, keeping to a few inches in front of me. 
Keeping close information of value. 
I listen. I witness. 
I startle, rustle, I clink. Wherever I turn, actions unfurl 
I am wed to. 
I clang, know affection, pain I have caused, 
sit with both like hurt friends. Spirit, bowing, 
hand at a headache, water, familiar position. 

*

Turn, ride east of Cassock. 
Stand still now. 
Lark, I laugh, ever wow, a most lustrous kill. I dew, mama luffa, snail, I rev, I rev, take the far arm of mortuary, knock off an effigy I. I am the hunter. How I’ve shot it, filled it.

After Apologizing

The generosity of him
brushing my head.
Could have been the end, 
a pleasing, familiar sensation, 
unlit until I speak

chosen things to my people—
“I was surprised at the given
generosity, hands working on me,
crowning me,
I disappeared.

I walk now
with the sound of forgiveness,
any lust where one’s
eyes should be, I crest,

I fall,
converse with myself
harshly in the extremity 
of my wrongness. If I have harmed you,
I am sorry, have harried

your patience, lonely
and obsessed
with the idea of you 
bound to me, 
wrapped around me, 

love devotional, 
secretive in daylight. 
If I am hurt,
you understand . . . where I am now,
with what I want and still

I wait for a thing to arrive. In a car. 
From a blue, dark coat pocket.
I am unwell 
when I meant to write happiest
like this. Relentless 

in my need for more blood.”

Philip Matthews is a poet from eastern North Carolina. He is the author of Witch (Alice James Books, 2020) and Wig Heavier Than A Boot (Kris Graves Projects, 2019), a collaboration with photographer David Johnson. Anchored by site-specific meditation and performance, his practice of the past decade has investigated spiritual queer power, questions of home and ecological shift. He is curious about what happens next.

Philip is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Peaked Hill Trust and Hemera Foundation. He has taught at Washington University in St. Louis and Kansas City Art Institute, and from 2013-16 he organized public programs at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, emphasizing artist-driven thinking, cross-disciplinary collaboration and community-directed action. 

In two, 6-month phases over the past three years, he returned to North Carolina to de-hoard his grandmother’s home and begin repairing the physical and energetic infrastructures of a shared family place. This collaborative work with his mother has laid ground for new writing to take root. 

He currently directs programs at Wormfarm Institute, a nonprofit in Sauk County, Wisconsin dedicated to integrating culture and agriculture across the rural-urban continuum. He holds an MFA Writing from Washington University in St. Louis and BA English from Tulane University.