Reviews & Interviews

On “Whistle What Can’t Be Said”

Charlotte Matthews’ wonderful work concerns the ordinary strange, the ordinary dark, all of it surprising. Grief underpins this world with such unnerving offhand clarity that it’s both pleasure and pain to hear these poems. Because you do hear them—and see such small huge things by way of a voice and eye truly attentive to childhood, to pandas and birds, to the ravages of cancer, to death and birth, to circus trains stopped in the middle of nowhere, to kindness and clocks, to moments of news where everything suddenly shifts for the speaker of these poems and thus for the reader. A most radiant honest intelligence lives in this book.

—Marianne Boruch, author of Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing

With candor, craft and courage, Charlotte Matthews writes intimate poems that refuse to skate over the trials of childhood: she perseveres through absence, illness and loss, earning the rich and poignant claim ‘most of what / I care about is invisible.’ Having endured difficulty, in the last section of the book, as if taking Rodin’s advice to Rilke, she can say of Pandas at the zoo ‘I’m watching them, these black / and white bears luscious as anything I can name.’ Thanks to her hard work she—and we—can look out at the world with fierce and loving attention and take in our beautiful, difficult lives.

—Ira Sadoff, author of True Faith and Barter

“Within every tornado of consequence is a core of quiet. Charlotte Matthews crouches inside that core. Each line break is an act of disclosure, a tilt toward devastation or delight. Whistle What Can’t Be Said explores an experience with cancer, recognizing ‘What I want back are not my breasts / though they were the exact ones I would / have chosen.’ But Matthews offers much more than a recovery narrative. Spanning generations, each poem tugs at the senses with its careful phrasing; even dull linoleum comes alive with ‘exquisitely bright flecks / the yellow of Audubon’s Oriole.’ Vibrant, wise, this collection awakened my awareness to the world.”

—Sandra Beasley, author of Count the Waves and I Was the Jukebox

Southeast Review, "Q&A With Charlotte Hilary Matthews"

Q&A with Charlotte Hilary Matthews, Poet

Questions by April L. Freund

Q: Why do you write?

A: I write to housekeep, in a way, to make a sense of the riotous world, to make order of a world where there are socks that don’t match and wind that blows askance and people who murder. Here’s an example: last week I was helping out in the kindergarten classroom, helping the children trace their bodies. I was unable to see it for what it factually was: the simple act of tracing children’s bodies so they could decorate them. Instead, swarming at me were all the other implications of lying down and making permanent one’s shape. How eerie and wonderful—both at once. Out of the emotion I wrote a poem “Volunteering in the Kindergarten Classroom” That’s the blessing part, that the world, off-kilter as I often see it—has such fodder for poems. When I write about what strikes me as off-kilter there is a sort of order that makes living more possible, not unlike a home that has been swept, that has been kept up.

Volunteering in the Kindergarten Classroom

The teacher has spread huge pieces
of ivory paper on the linoleum
where the children lie down,
quiet as dusk, to have their bodies traced.

They are so still I want to show them
the blue heron who just this morning
hovered above the creek’s high water,
then set sail over the freshened fields.

They will see their breath in winter,
hear torrents of rain on the roof,
taste the ocean’s metal, smell
the gleaming fire in the burn pile.

Victoria turns her head
to tell William of all the places
in the world she has been.
It’s enough to make you love most anything.

Later she shows me her drawings.
That’s the sound of an owl.
That’s my fish in water.
That’s me, even when I’m not really here.

Q: Why do you teach writing?

A: I love to teach. I love the community it offers, the sense that everyone is there to stretch and grow. There can be boundless honesty in a classroom. If teacher and students create a set of standards and expectations for one another, a sort of charter, the classroom becomes an authentically cooperative place—so rare in our world.

Q: Which poets, writers and/or artists influence your own writing?

A: I love Keats—his cadence as well as his belief that the natural world is a presence. For this same reason I also love Wendell Berry. Lately I’ve been reading Akhmatova and learning from her about voice. I think that it is important to read everything one can about a poet—to delve into that life and truly study, almost as if it were a class.

Q: Still Enough to be Dreaming is your second full-length book of poetry upcoming in November 2007, followingGreen Stars in 2006. Did different writing processes inform each of these? If yes, how? And what do you feel made the difference?

A: Still Enough to Be Dreaming has, as its background music, what cannot be defined. The book’s five sections hinge upon field guides to what really cannot be field –guided (to make a verb out of a noun). For instance, the third section, Confinement, depends upon its first poem Field Guide to Confinement, as a sort of background music.

Q: The cover of your latest book of poems bears a beautiful black and white image of a little girl in a park, surrounded by pigeons, one in flight near her face, making the little girl appear still as a statue. How did you choose the cover image? What does it mean to you and what does it say about the poems?

A: The cover photograph is of one of my childhood friends with whom I am still close, Charlotte Gould. I’ve remembered the photograph for thirty years as it was her 9th grade yearbook photo (our school ended in the 9th grade and the graduates had a page all their own.) I think the picture stayed with me because it is both tender and eerie. It is taken in Farragut Square in Washington, D.C. where we grew up. I wanted it to be the cover because I hope it speaks to the central tone of the book.

Q: In both books of poetry you invoke familiar, everyday images to explore the chasms between life and death, darkness and light, managing deftly to marry such dichotomous concepts. How do you notice and interpret that everyday fodder when you sit down to write?

A: I think our lives frequently do require us to explore those chasms. It’s what Auden talks about so evocatively in Musee des Beaux Arts, how the boy is falling from the sky but the world still goes on, the expensive delicate ship sails calmly on. As Coleridge taught us, we write to reconcile the discord in our lives.

Q: There is a graceful silence about your poems underlined by striking personal revelations. Do you feel a poem that is silent in this way ultimately speaks louder to its audience?

A: Thank you. I’m a great fan of silence. It is space and freedom—it enables us to find answers. Alone, I spend most of my time in silence, listening to that inner voice, waiting for new truths.

Q: What advice can you give to aspiring writers?

A: Write every day. Set your kitchen timer for ten minutes and make those your writing times. Don’t get up, don’t answer the phone. Just write. Save what you write and go back to it later. Don’t try to edit while you write—that is for the next sitting. If you write for small parcels of time, you will grow more comfortable and one day that ten minutes will, fortuitously, turn into an hour, then two. One rainy Sunday you’ll look up from your writing desk and four hours will have passed without your knowing it.