Working Progress, Working Title: Automystifstical Plaice (Salt Modern Poets S.) [Paperback]

John Matthias (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1876857412 | ISBN-13: 978-1876857417 | Publication Date: July 4, 2002 | Edition: 1st ed

"Working Progress, Working Title" combines two of John Matthias' most experimental poems. Critics have for some time written of Matthias as a poet of place, but what will be made of his "Automystifstical Plaice"? The poem in fact derives from the strange fact that film siren Hedy Lamarr and avant-garde composer George Antheil collaborated on a patent for a radio-directed torpedo in the early days of World War II when both had gone to Hollywood. But the piece is also about the Paris avant-garde, early experimental films like "Ballet mecanique" and "L'Inhumaine", Antheil's early scores, Hollywood in the 1940s, spread-spectrum technology, artificial intelligence, and many related matters. The narrator seems to be Claire Lescot, who steps out of "L'Inhumaine" and follows Antheil and Lamarr to Hollywood. The second and longer poem, "Pages: From a Book of Years", is a kind of manic attempt at remembering in the context of the poet's mother's loss of memory to Alzheimer's disease. The years happen to be 1959, 1941, 1953, 1961 and 1966, all years of great personal significance to the poet, but also years in which the public world intersected the private world in unusual ways. Matthias' father collected yearbooks on a wide variety of subjects. Materials from these yearbooks, along with the poet's high school yearbook which he hadn't seen for forty years, propel themselves into the world of these poems as the poet cleans out the family home and writes his pages, abruptly ending each one at the bottom of his computer screen.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Over thirty years [Matthias] has built up a splendidly wrought mosaic of western culture and history shot through with personal inquiry and discovery. It's a fascinating, unfinished journey, a secular but passionate pilgrimage. Stand Magazine The pairing of [these] two long poems productively juxtaposes Matthias's abiding preoccupation with the artist's reception and understanding of historical data (in this casse, the "recherche" fact that Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil conceived the ideo of radio-directed torpedo in the early years of the twentieth century), and the less hermeneutic issue of the creative rendering of one's immediate lived experience (his moth's succumbing to Alzheime's disease). -- Alex Davis PN Review

About the Author

John Matthias was born in 1941 Columbus, Ohio. For many years he taught at the University of Notre Dame and continues to co-edit Notre Dame Review. He has been a Visiting Fellow in poetry at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and lived for much of the 70s and 80s in East Anglia. His books with Salt include Working Progress, Working Title (2002) and New Selected Poems (2004). He has published some twenty-five volumes of poetry, translation, criticism, and scholarship.

Product Details

• Paperback: 108 pages
• Publisher: Salt Publishing; 1st ed edition (July 4, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1876857412
• ISBN-13: 978-1876857417
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,638,133 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Some Clarifications, August 20, 2004

By 

Stephen A. Allen (Saint Joseph, MI United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Working Progress, Working Title: Automystifstical Plaice (Salt Modern Poets S.) (Paperback)

The categories listed in the "search for books by similar subject" section below make it seem as if this were a book about creative writing, or linguistics, or fiction. It is, in fact, a book of poetry. It contains two of John Matthias' long poems. First is "Automystifstical Place," which involves Heddy Lamarr, a radio-guided torpedo design, and the composer George Antheil. As far as I am aware, this poem is not available in any of the other collections of Matthias' works currently in print. The second part of the book is "Pages" which looks at memory and forgetting though the lens of the Alzheimers' suffered by the author's mother. This latter poem cycle also appears in Matthias' recent collection "Pages."

As for the work itself, I must admit a conflict of interest here because John Matthias was one of my poetry professors several years ago. I like his work, and I think this book is worth having. His poetry is not the easiest in the world to read or understand, but any effort put into it is rewarded.