William Matthews, American poet, born 1942. Much of Matthews’s poetry explores the themes of life cycles, the passage of time, and the nature of human consciousness. His collection Time & Money (1996) won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Matthews’s other honors and awards included fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund. He was awarded the Ruth Lilly Prize in 1997.
MINGUS AT THE SHOWPLACE
William Matthews
I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen,
and so I swung into action and wrote a poem,
and it was miserable, for that was how I thought
poetry worked: you digested experience and shat
literature. It was 1960 at The Showplace, long since
defunct, on West 4th St., and I sat at the bar,
casting beer money from a thin reel of ones,
the kid in the city, big ears like a puppy.
And I knew Mingus was a genius. I knew two
other things, but they were wrong, as it happened.
So I made him look at the poem.
“There’s a lot of that going around,” he said,
and Sweet Baby Jesus he was right. He laughed
amiably. He didn’t look as if he thought
bad poems were dangerous, the way some poets do.
If they were baseball executives they’d plot
to destroy sandlots everywhere so that the game
could be saved from children. Of course later
that night he fired his pianist in mid-number
and flurried him from the stand.
“We’ve suffered a diminuendo in personnel,”
he explained, and the band played on.