Poetry

Poems are a way of identifying what’s happening, often in conversation with oneself, or with others. What do you hold dear, what needs to be said this moment? Our observations, for me, seemed the first accurate ones ever, as we shed the trance of World War II and the 1950s. Interesting to be young and growing, in consonance with the culture’s evolution, wherever that growth has taken us.

Writing poetry is a journey into form and into unknowable material. Guides are Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse" which taught us the line is a score of your personal breath and Robert Creeley’s “Form is never more than an extension of content,” plus the visual improvisations of John Wieners and Allen Ginsberg’s broad sprawl. Ginsberg's most profound precept to me was that poetry should "Make the private world public." 

Beginning a poem begins a new and ageless journey. If the journey is not pristine, we’re not tuned in. My background contains strong tugs toward Wieners’s exact statement of feeling and Alden Van Buskirk’s personal, apocalyptic vision.  Then include the social power of Bob Dylan, feminism, radical politics, meditation, sonnets, and spoken word, alongside study of T.S. Eliot, the Greeks, Shakespeare, the anthologies.

Chalcedony’s voice, a woman’s, came to me in the cycle of Chalcedony poems, somehow grounded me and inspired a rediscovery of passion. I started using the form of early poems and speaking in a more authentic voice, whether female or male. I have extended that process to my newest works, War Allies, Love Poems: Your Hands Say Breathless Rose and Hello, Paradise. Paradise, Goodbye.

The honesty, passion, and justice of the Beats, responsibility in answering a general need for authenticity, along with an unswerving focus on the topic and how to present it without distractions - these values seem undying to me. The image itself, the emotion itself, and the evolution embedded in them. How to follow it - through poetic expression and staying true, in these difficult times, to those principles I learned among the Beat Generation.

Clive Matson