Guest writer Bill Matthews dies

Poet passes away days before meeting class

Poet William Matthews, 55, died following an apparent heart attack Nov. 12. His death occurred just five days before he was scheduled to appear as this semester's Guest Writer for a creative writing course.

Each year the "Guest Writer" class intensively studies the work of one writer, who visits the course at the end of the semester to read excerpts from his or her work and discuss his or her career with class members.

Last summer, Associate Professor of Creative Writing Pam Alexander asked Matthews to be this year's guest writer. Alexander had served with Matthews on several panels and committees.

"The man was just incredible funny. You liked him in five minutes," Alexander said. "When I called to ask him if he wanted this position, I hadn't seem him in awhile so I was a little worried-I really wanted him to do this. I launched into this little speech I prepared and in the background the whole time, I kept hearing this voice saying, 'yes, yes.' He'd decided to do it in a second."

Matthews was scheduled to read his poetry Monday and meet with the 47 "Guest Writer" course members in class Tuesday night for a discussion on his career. Instead, Creative Writing faculty members held a poetry-reading memorial for Matthews in King during the time he was supposed to read his work.

"It's the worst news for us, this community of writers and readers, especially the 47 students in the Guest Writer class...because we expected to meet a friend, or because we expected to meet a man whose work we've inhabited for three months," Alexander said at the crowded memorial.

The "Guest Writer" course, which meets once a week, was originally scheduled to continue through Nov. 25. Alexander cut the class a week short in honor of Matthews' death. At the memorial she encouraged students to bring their favorite poems to share at the final class.

"One thing I noticed was the difference in how much attention you pay to reading someone when you know they're about to actually be in your life," junior Nate Cavalieri, a student in the Guest Writer course, said. "You actually get to know this person in a way, and it's hard to see them all of a sudden turn into someone who can exist only through their work. I was so sad about it, but the course was definitely worth taking."

"It was a huge shock," junior Ellen Vinz said. "I can't help thinking it's the kind of thing Bill would have found hilarious if he were here. But it really is sad. I was looking forward to hearing him read his poems and hearing his interpretation of them."

Junior Rumaan Alam had planned to pick Matthews up from the airport Sunday, at Alexander's request, and have dinner with him afterwards.

"I went to Pam Alexander's office before I left for the airport, and there was a sign up saying that Bill Matthews had died," Alam said. "It's a terrible loss; the visit was an integral aspect to the course. It's a weird kind of irony. It was almost as though he'd been our professor-we didn't know him at all, but I felt like I did. In some strange way, it turned out to be even more of a learning experience. It's really sad."

Creative Writing Program Director Martha Collins also saw the irony of Matthews' death. "The Guest Writer class had been studying his work all semester. This was supposed to culminate in the real live person appearing, and instead of that, they got news of his death," she said.

Faculty members read their favorite Matthews poems at the memorial. Among the poems read by Collins was one entitled "Nabokov's Blues." Matthews wrote this piece in the late 1980's after he and Collins, who then taught at the University of Massachusetts, went to see a museum exhibit on author Vladimir Nabokov's butterfly collection. The poem was published in Matthews' 1989 collection, Blues If You Want.

"I didn't know Bill Matthews terribly well, and I didn't see him terribly often," Collins said before reading the poem. "But whenever I did see him, I felt that I had had not just an encounter, but a genuine experience...you were apt to come away from a conversation with something you didn't have before-not just something you'd heard, but something you'd experienced and been part of."

Another poem read by Collins, "We Shall All Be Born Again But We Shall Not All Be Saved," in which the first-person speaker narrates his own heart attack, struck Collins because it seemed to predict Matthews' death.

Collins found the poem's last line, "I plan to notice everything," especially significant. "This poem concludes with the best of what Bill's life and death, and most of all his poems, gave us," she said.

Associate Professor of Creative Writing Sylvia Watanabe also read several of Matthews' poems, as did Associate Librarian Jessica Grim and Professor of English David Young.

Grim began with a passage from an interview of Matthews in The Georgia Review, in which Matthews discussed the relationship he saw between poetry and his other love, jazz music.

"'It's a sense of procedure rather than subject matter that is the deep link between jazz and poetry...Jazz gave me permission to begin composing a poetic language based on the rhythms of the speaking voice,'" Matthews said in the interview.

Young read several epigrams from the Latin poet Martial which Matthews had translated.

"William Matthews was a very good translator and because of that, we have some things in English we wouldn't otherwise have," Young said.

The author of 13 books, Matthews is especially renowned for his 10 volumes of poetry, including A Happy Childhood and his most recent work, Time and Money. He was the recipient of the 1996 National Book Critics' Circle Award and the Modern Poetry Association's 1997 Ruth Lilly Award. He also received fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

Matthews was the former president of the Poetry Society of America as well as the former chairman of the literature panel of NEA. At the time of his death he was a professor of English at the City College of New York.

Alexander concluded the memorial by reading the title poem from A Happy Childhood. She reminded people that although Matthews is dead his fans have not seen the last of his work: he recently submitted a manuscript to the Houghton-Mifflin publishing company.