David Matthews Portable Bohemia

  • Home

  • Blog

  • Gallery

  • Events

  • About

  • Contact

  • Members

  • Archive

  • More

    Use tab to navigate through the menu items.
    • All Posts
    • Arts
    • Cinema
    • Literary/Intellectual
    • Miscellany
    • Politics and Current Affairs
    Search
    David Matthews
    • Apr 6
    • 3 min

    Notes from the journal Monday evening 11 pm

    Maybe it is time again to take up the pen in the night's dark hours as I once did, a young fellow home from the night shift at Tall Tales...
    15 views0 comments
    David Matthews
    • Mar 20
    • 16 min

    Forthright and Fearless: Mary McCarthy's Intellectual Memoirs

    I knew next to nothing about Mary McCarthy (1912–1989), the name only, as author of The Groves of Academe and The Group, novels I had not...
    6 views0 comments
    David Matthews
    • Oct 23, 2021
    • 6 min

    Dispatch from the Bunker

    The president and the congressional Democratic brain trust may yet pull from their nether regions something to pass in tandem with the...
    6 views0 comments
    David Matthews
    • Sep 22, 2021
    • 16 min

    Thinking about What Surrealism Holds for Me

    These days when I confront the wild blank page or the keyboard and the void of the white screen as I set off in search of the poem, I...
    30 views1 comment
    David Matthews
    • Jul 31, 2021
    • 24 min

    Revisiting On the Road: The Original Scroll Route

    I first read Jack Kerouac in 1970. I was eighteen. For the next ten years or so I was heavily into Kerouac and the Beats, reading and...
    17 views0 comments
    David Matthews
    • May 21, 2021
    • 19 min

    Literary Adventure with Larry McMurtry

    We were taught to make outlines in high school, maybe before that, as far back as fifth or sixth grade at Dutch Fork Elementary. Although...
    12 views0 comments
    David Matthews
    • Apr 9, 2021
    • 11 min

    The Writer at Work

    W.S. Merwin wrote in a poem that he once asked John Berryman how you can ever be sure that what you write is really any good, to which...
    23 views0 comments
    David Matthews
    • Dec 12, 2020
    • 9 min

    My encounter with Alexander Herzen: reflections on a life in a turbulent age (part I)

    It is just barely possible that we are not the first to live in a turbulent age. Alexander Herzen was born in Moscow a few months before...
    14 views0 comments
    David Matthews
    • Oct 18, 2020
    • 7 min

    Mary McCarthy and The Group

    I knew of Mary McCarthy and her novels The Group and The Groves of Academe but had not read her until I was intrigued by her depiction in...
    22 views1 comment
    David Matthews
    • Aug 14, 2020
    • 6 min

    The rewards of writing...what?! there are rewards?

    A friend from the poetry scene who is now a comic book writer asked what I find rewarding but different in various sorts of writing I...
    31 views0 comments
    The Pope project part II: on to Pope
    David Matthews
    • Jul 7, 2020
    • 15 min

    The Pope project part II: on to Pope

    The Pope project kicked off in earnest with Maynard Mack's formidable biography and a selection of poems that included An Essay on...
    7 views0 comments
    The Pope (Alexander the poet, not the pontiff) project part I: why bother?
    David Matthews
    • Jun 29, 2020
    • 8 min

    The Pope (Alexander the poet, not the pontiff) project part I: why bother?

    The work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists of ourselves. —Harold Bloom The English poetry tradition, what is now in...
    17 views0 comments
    David Matthews
    • Nov 13, 2019
    • 16 min

    Out on the left bank of the spirit (Part II)

    When the intellectuals became celebrities and women swooned. On October 29, 1945, Jean-Paul Sartre gave a lecture at Club Maintenant in...
    15 views0 comments
    David Matthews
    • Nov 12, 2019
    • 13 min

    Out on the left bank of the spirit (Part I)

    Paris in the 1940s. Occupation. Resistance. Liberation, existentialism, jazz. Cafés and hotel rooms were hotbeds of intellectual,...
    16 views0 comments
    David Matthews
    • Jul 8, 2019
    • 5 min

    The pains in the ass of Rocco Schiavone

    Aosta is a town of some 34,000 in the Italian Alps between France and Switzerland. It is here that deputy police chief Rocco Schiavone...
    123 views0 comments
    David Matthews
    • Jan 25, 2019
    • 10 min

    Of Poets and Critics and the Passing of Mary Oliver

    The outpouring of affection for poet Mary Oliver (1935–2019) in the days following her death has been remarkable. Some pretty big names...
    26 views0 comments
    David Matthews
    • Jan 12, 2019
    • 6 min

    Amusements and Diversions

    My old friend Chuck Oliveros called to chat. The conversation commenced with baseball, specifically the pursuit of free agents Bryce...
    22 views0 comments
    David Matthews
    • Dec 31, 2018
    • 4 min

    Taking Stock at Year's End 2018

    The first full calendar year of retirement is in the books. The real work goes on as I try to keep faith with the dream of being a poet I...
    17 views0 comments
    David Matthews
    • Nov 15, 2018
    • 3 min

    On Reading Poetry with Harold Bloom

    I strove with none, for none was worth my strife. Nature I loved and, next to Nature, Art: I warmed both hands before the fire of life;...
    6 views0 comments
    David Matthews
    • Sep 14, 2018
    • 4 min

    The Fall Term 2018

    Autumn is in the air, as they say. The week has seen daily showers and temperatures no higher than 70. The change of season stirs that...
    0 views0 comments
    1
    2

    David Matthews

    © 2016–2022 All Rights Reserved

    Proudly created with Wix.com