#William Matthews

[tournesoleil13]

I think he’s just a little shy 🤷‍♂️, he’s absolutely not gonna bash Francis after this

[until-i-set-him-free]

the kind of love that's most at home in the kitchen

911 s7e04 "Buck, Bothered and Bewildered"// "Cupboard love: my biggest romances always begin in the kitchen" by Ella Risbridger // 911 s7e10 "All Fall Down" // "Unlikely Lovers" from Falsettos // "Leftovers" by Trista Mateer // "A Matter of Taste" by Steve Walker // "Little Miss Why So" by The Amazing Devil // "Food" by Brenda Hillman // a waffle my best friend made for me // "Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want" by Ruby Tandoh // "The Horror and the Wild" by The Amazing Devil // "Onions" by William Matthews

[typewriter-worries]

How familiar it feels to feel strange,

Morningside Heights, July, William Matthews

[extollingtheeveryday]

William Matthews // "Morningside Heights, July"

[starsilversword]

2p Canada should just be normal hetalia Canada's name reversed.

William Matthews

[sashayed]

The Bear at the Dump

Amidst the too much that we buy and throw    away and the far too much we wrap it in,    the bear found a few items of special interest—a honeydew rind, a used tampon,    the bone from a leg of lamb. He’d rock back    lightly onto his rear paws and slash open a plastic bag, and then his nose— jammed almost with a surfeit of rank and likely information, for he would pause— and then his whole dowsing snout would    insinuate itself a little way inside. By now he’d have hunched his weight    forward slightly, and then he’d snatch it back,    trailed by some tidbit in his teeth. He’d look    around. What a good boy am he. The guardian of the dump was used to this and not amused. “He’ll drag that shit    every which damn way,” he grumbled who’d dozed and scraped a pit to keep that shit    where the town paid to contain it. The others of us looked and looked. “City    folks like you don’t get to see this often,”    one year-round resident accused me. Some winter I’ll bring him down to learn    to love a rat working a length of subway    track. “Nope,” I replied. Just then the bear    decamped for the woods with a marl of grease    and slather in his mouth and on his snout,    picking up speed, not cute (nor had he been    cute before, slavering with greed, his weight    all sunk to his seated rump and his nose stuck    up to sift the rich and fetid air, shaped    like a huge, furry pear), but richly fed on the slow-simmering dump, and gone    into the bug-thick woods and anecdote.

William Matthews from Time and Money, 1995

[breakingbobcat]

Make 'em feel something!

Watching an interview with Jake Gyllenhaal, and he talks about acting on stage. The difference between acting out all the emotions, rather than delivering the lines at a reasonable clip (pacing) is the audience's emotional, visceral reaction. I've noticed this in poetry too. He says that's why on stage, story is king.

The more you talk about your feelings, the less I feel them.

That's the genius behind minimalism in writing, as in Raymond Carver's short stories being like liquid dynamite! That's why people still love Ernest Hemingway, even though he was a sexist prick. The man knows how to tell a story that lives on past himself, past his own nose, past his own ignorance.

This is why the best poetry is solidly grounded in the real, and for the most part, simple diction, German vs. Latinate diction. I want to feel my feelings as I react to the picture or story you are telling.

SO TRUE.

Amateur poets are full of long, drawn out expositions of feelings. Expert poets understand that anyone reading a poem is probably a person who feels already, and probably feels deeply. If you really want to communicate anything of value to your readers, if you wish to penetrate the fog in which each person lives:

Cut the fat. And cut the melodramatics.

YES! YESSSS! I HAVE BEEN LOOKING FOR A WAY TO SAY THIS FOR YEARS.

If you want to change the world, you have to get past a person's so-called logic and make them FEEL. How do you make them feel? Step aside and show them what you mean. Show. Don't tell.

Both William Matthews and Mary Oliver do this. Some of Louise Gluck's best work abides by this principle. I so dig it. I'm all about this when I write poetry.

[lascitasdelashoras]

Poetas, citas

[tail-feathers]

William Matthews, b. 1949

Sagebrush Sea

Watercolor, 21 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches

[aemperatrix]

William Matthews

[misserinmarie]

I love William Matthews’s idea—he says that revision is not cleaning up after the party; revision is the party! That’s the fun of it, making it right, getting the best words in the best order.

Billy Collins, The Art of Poetry

[insilverrolled]

Mood Indigo

By William Matthews [x]

From the porch; from the hayrick where her prickled brothers hid and chortled and slurped into their young pink lungs the ash-blond dusty air that lay above the bales

like low clouds; and from the squeak and suck of the well-pump and from the glove of rust it implied on her hand; from the dress parade of clothes

in her mothproofed closet; from her tiny Philco with its cracked speaker and Sunday litany (Nick Carter, The Shadow, The Green Hornet, Sky King);

from the loosening bud of her body; from hunger, as they say, and from reading; from the finger she used to dial her own number; from the dark

loam of the harrowed fields and from the very sky; it came from everywhere. Which is to say it was always there, and that it came from nowhere.

It evaporated with the dew, and at dusk when dark spread in the sky like water in a blotter, it spread, too, but it came back and curdled with milk and stung

with nettles. It was in the bleat of the lamb, the way a clapper is in a bell, and in the raucous, scratchy gossip of the crows. It walked with her to school and lay

with her to sleep and at least she was well pleased. If she were to sew, she would prick her finger with it. If she were to bake, it would linger in the kitchen

like an odor snarled in the deepest folds of childhood. It became her dead pet, her lost love, the baby sister blue and dead at birth, the chill headwaters of the river

that purled and meandered and ran and ran until it issued into her, as into a sea, and then she was its and it was wholly hers. She kept to her room, as we

learned to say, but now and then she’d come down and pass through the kitchen, and the screen door would close behind her with no more sound than

an envelope being sealed, and she’d walk for hours In the fields like a lithe blue rain, and end up In the barn, and one of us would go and bring her in.

[notquiteaghost]

Poem Ending with a Line From Dante

E detto l’ho perché doler ti debbia — INFERNO, XXIV, 151

Snow coming in parallel to the street, a cab spinning its tires (a rising whine like a domestic argument, and then the words get said that never get forgot),

slush and backed-up runoff waters at each corner, clogged buses smelling of wet wool... acrid anger of the homeless swells like wet rice. This slop is where I live, bitch,

a sogged panhandler shrieks to whom it may concern. But none of us slows down for scorn; there’s someone’s misery in all we earn. But like a burr in a dog’s coat his rage

has borrowed legs. We bring it home. It lives like kin among the angers of the house, and leaves the same sharp zinc taste in the mouth: And I have told you this to make you grieve.

— William Matthews

[avolan-istair]

CHECK OUT MY DRAWING PLEAAASE :)

[theautisticjedi]

THIS IS THE FUNNIEST PHOTO HE LOOKS PISSED

[seasunandstar]

Vermin

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" What child cries out, ‘An exterminator!’? One diligent student in Mrs. Taylor’s class will get an ant farm for Christmas, but he’ll not see industry; he’ll see dither. "The ant sets an example for us all," wrote Max Beerbohm, a master of dawdle, "but it is not a good one." These children don’t hope to outlast the doldrums of school only to heft great weights and work in squads and die for their queen. Well, neither did we. And we knew what we didn’t want to be: the ones we looked down on, the lambs of God, blander than snow and slow to be cruel.

-- William Matthews, from The New Yorker