Observable Readings

Naturalist Poet/Modernist Poet: Merrill Gilfillan and John Matthias Visit Observable Readings On November 1

Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 08:56 PM

Merrill D. Gilfillan  is the author of more than 20 books, including poetry, fiction, and non-fiction.  Born in 1945 to Merrill C. Gilfillan, the naturalist who worked in the Ohio's Department of Natural Resources, and who was well known for his Outdoorsman Almanac and helped to develop the Buckeye Trail, that extends to the four corners of the state, the younger, Merrill D.Gilfillan went to University of Michigan and received a Hopwood Fellowship in creative writing. In the late Sixties, he studied at the Iowa Writers Workshop with Ted Berrigan, George Starbuck and Anselm Hollo.

 Three early poetry collections were selected from in Light Years: Selected Poems (1977), and followed by River Through Rivertown (1982) and Satin Street (1997); these latter two books were then collected with new selections from the first three books for a second Selected Poems (2000).  Two other volumes, The Seasons (2000), and Small Weathers (2004), have since appeared, and match the story collections, Sworn Before Cranes (1994) and Grasshopper Falls (2000) of the same period.  In the late Eighties, Gilfillan published his first natural history collection Magpie Rising: Sketches From the Great Plains (1988), recently republished by the University of Nebraska Press (2003).  There are three other natural history journals and birding-essay collections. In 2005 Gilfillan published Undanceable, a book of poems, with St. Louis' own Flood Editions; Flood has recently brought out The Warbler Road, as well as a new volume of poems, The Bark of the Dog.  

 This prodigious output has been described as "al fresco writing" - writing out of doors - and takes as its particular tradition the geography of the Plains, and the history of place as these can be read off the people and the animal husbandry of what William Gilpin, Colorado's first governor, called "Pastoral America."  A resident now of Boulder, Colorado, Gilfillan shows us how the period style of Seventies American surrealism adapted to the terrestrial histories of Merkian or Sauerian attention.

A Columbus, Ohio native - his grandfather served on the Ohio State Supreme Court, and his family goes back to the Colonial period and were Western  pioneers in the early Nineteenth Century Ohio - John Matthias was born into genteel circumstances in 1941.  His relatives were Roosevelts; his aunt Alice Hoffman was a property owner on Bogue Banks and her legal wranglings with the Salter Path squatter group ultimately led to the settlement of that island in 1979.  In 1959, the eighteen year old John Matthias travelled to Utah in a summer poetry program for high schoolers where he met John Berryman, whose brand of Poundian modernism would have a permanent effect on the younger man.  From Ohio State Matthias matriculated to Stanford, and Yvor Winters' teaching; from there Matthias moved to London University on a Fulbright, and Notre Dame, where he began teaching in 1970. 

Matthias published Bucyrus, a long poem on the history and ceremony in common circumstance, in 1970. The next year his anthology, 23 Modern British Poets, was published to much acclaim and usefulness, introducing as it did the experimentalist legatees of the British late Modernist generation (two of Matthias' poet-exemplars are David Jones and Basil Bunting).  In 1975 Matthias published Turns; and in 1979 Michael Schmidt published Five American Poets (all of the Wintersian/Stanford legacy), an anthology that cemented Matthias' growing reputation in England, where he was living on and off again throughout the Seventies and Eighties.           

The most recent of his thirteen collection of poetry are Trigons (2010), Kedging (2007), New Selected Poems (2004), and Working Progress, Working Title (2002).   In 1992,  a book of criticism, Reading Old Friends: Essays, Reviews, and Poems on Poetics 1975-1990 appeared;  in 1998, Robert Archambeau published Words Play Place: Essays on the Poetry of John Matthias.  Matthias continues to teach at Notre Dame and to edit the Notre Dame Review.