Reference Notes for "On the Approach of My Seventieth Birthday"
Readers of On the Approach of My Seventieth Birthday may find these notes for the Little 5 Points section of the poem of interest. Dead...
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David Matthews
- Aug 14
- 3 min
On the Approach of My Seventieth Birthday
On the approach of my seventieth birthday tropes of twilight and day's melancholy fade pass into the lyricism of softening light at...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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