#ted mathys

[bibliomancyoracle]

Nobody’s yet explained that this is a competition. Someone must lose. 

*

from “The Score” by Ted Mathys

[jempai]

the distance between              my affections and ability to touch their sinuosity              is itself a felt silence called sun. Sun rises              without provocation over a frozen stream that frustrates              reflection, but will by the time a pulse is palpable,              have thawed and grown clear again, permitting me to see              a tree surface, distort, flow.

Ted Mathys, “Let Muddy Water Sit and It Grows Clear”

[allyourprettywords]

“Key to the Kingdom,” Ted Mathys

July 2016

This is the key to the kingdom, rustproof nickel silver, cut in the hardware aisle by a man in uniform on a rotating steel carbide blade, a vice securing the blank, the key’s rounded bow a medallion of sun with a hole punched through to hang on its galactic ring. Weightless in the palm, the shoulder is sharp to mark the exact depth of engagement. A jagged range of peaks garnish the shaft, align with wards in the pin tumbler keyway and unlock the door, swung open to reveal

the kingdom. Of rain, of infancy, kingdom of clapboard, concealed carry, of the night shift at Frito-Lay, nuclear gerontology at Los Alamos, L-shaped couches, tributaries of heroin up the Mississippi basin, of prison writing workshops, kingdom of arugula, of a slaughtered pee wee team invoking the mercy rule, peaches and asters, of helicopter cinematography, a girl blowing bubbles over the river, of a poet unable to sustain the Blakean conviction that all subjectivities, predator and prey, are holy, that police are, a coyote stalking the pinnacles, bald eagle at the zoo.

In that kingdom there is a state, “the state with the prettiest name,” land of flowers on the conquistador’s tongue, the state of brackish water, coastline and glade, made habitable by sugar and central air, porn mecca with oranges, flakka zombie flail, grandchildren lollygagging in manatee exhibits, space exploration over a red tide choking the cape east of the polis   where a dance club pulses until a man enucleates its love. If blinded by hatred of those unlike himself, or by hatred of himself, the stem that anchors the thorn is the same. In that state there is a city, initiating its morning thaw, flag over the courthouse at half mast, a hollow sidewalk yawning to accept boxes of granola, olives, wheels of manchego slid down into the deli’s larder, newspapers slung at stoops from the window of a crawling minivan, women in yoga pants clutching Lululemon mats like scrolls, diesel exhaust, certified nurses in scrubs streaming into the hospital where a man bleeds from a hole in his still uncertain future and a woman veers into labor, the ovaries in the fetus in her womb already freighted with all the egg cells her child will possess.

Over that city there is a forecast, severe weather, a storm that hangs like a decaying gourd from twine in the kingdom’s portico, gourd of a variety present in the New World before Columbus, the exact moment of its breaking impossible to predict but certain to arrive when its curved neck can no longer sustain the weight of its own rot and snaps, drops, blows open nutty white flesh on steps below, gale force and hail wrung out of the jet stream’s trough and bulge contact zones, over grasslands then south to the city where white men confuse any threat to their absolute power as a form of persecution.

In that storm there is a house, its roofline lashed by rain that courses down asphalt shingles to decorative gables, slides over dormers, pools in gutters then runs down downspouts onto the saturated lawn, water wrapping the house like a body in muslin. A house in old Colonial style but thrown off by additions in the back, interior walls subtracted for flow, a decade-by-decade replacement of hardwood floors, fixtures, the chimney sealed up, molting over generations each original element like the ship of Theseus, this poem of slow violence with bodies that change in a form that remains.

And now that she is at rest, poor woman, now that the sky’s ritual errancies have tried to sack her house and failed, and fled, Justine is alone again. A black kerchief tied across her eyes, she measures in darkness ground coffee beans strong as rocket fuel on a digital scale, pours steaming water in circles to bloom the beans. When the brew is rich and viscous, she glides to her typewriter and writes “In that house there is only this room.” She removes her sword from the wall and cuts the blindfold from her eyes.

In that room there is a bed, Justine’s bed, tucked with hospital corners, quilt spread tight as a drum skin and depicting a black cross side to side, toe to head, marking the kingdom’s epicenter in crosshairs beneath which she nightly slept. The bed is empty. Justine is gone. She drags her sword through thick woods, alive with new perceptual acuity, hacking at brambles, hoverflies mobbing her head as she reaches the brook, blade glinting with orange flecks of sunset as she writes the word “retribution” in the sky, leaving tracers in her vision like a sparkler on the Fourth of July.

On the bed Justine left behind, there is a book bound in leather, the one that wrote her into allegory long before statues in her honor were erected in civil squares, dog eared at the passage in which she is still an ideal, standing blind in train tracks with a falcon on her shoulder. Before she sees the locomotive, she hears the bell, bell, bell, feels the ties tremble, and then the engine’s pistons announcing the arrival of freight: an eight ton Bearcat armored personnel vehicle, assault rifles, Kevlar helmets, pilotless surveillance drone, hounds of hell, bomb-disarming robots and 400 sworn officers of the law.

In the final pages of that book there is a flowering plant, blue false indigo, native to America, growing wild at the border of the forest where Justine now stands, its roots described as woody, black, unkillable, branching underground in a rhizomatic hydra of power belonging to no one, to all, its genus derived from the Greek, bapto, as in dip, immerse, baptize, and make new from criminal soil. In writing, the plant is motionless, an image that flickers in the mind and recedes again into the grammar of its making, but in the wind that wraps Justine just now, the plant is stereoscopic, grey-green leaves waving, violet flowers in riot.

In that plant there is a sap that goes blue on contact with oxygen. It contains a toxin. Toxic blue dye comes alive as Justine slices into the hairless stem. Silken weapon, it beads then streams toward her heels, a blue the Greeks could not see, blue of the ribbon holding back Washington’s hair, blue robin egg hidden in the nest, blue of the officer’s uniform the moment before he raises his firearm, Neptune’s blue glow, blue of her birth certificate and a darker blue passport embossed with the kingdom’s gold eagle, one talon for the olive branch, one for the arrows.

In that blue there is a belief that the kingdom’s dome has been sealed from within, that the exceptions have devoured the rule, that the watchers need watched and the charges dismissed, that the presumption of safety has been put on permanent layaway for those not born into it, a presumption replaced with this color that cuts, as it has, as it must, both ways. Justine’s eyes ache. The sky is bright with exhortation. She fills each vial like an inkwell, clambers over monster ferns, and heads to the city to face the king.

Belief in the blue, in its cruel illusion of habeas corpus, of “You may have a body.” Blue in the sap, in its toxin of last resort. Sap in the plant, blue false indigo, its deep and communal roots. Plant in the book where Justine’s an ideal.

Book on the bed in the room she fled for the city, where if you stand, if you run, if you resist or comply, where if your pants are low or high, where to be visible is to hang in the balance. Bed in the room, room in the house where she cut the kerchief from her eyes.

House in a storm mistaking its temporary strength as permanent weather, storm in the city where Justine follows a river of others into the tear gas plume. City in the state with the prettiest name, state in the kingdom that forgot its key and kicked in the door.

[chpinthestacks]

In The Stacks with Ted Mathys: Sang Froid & The World’s Fair

Ted Mathys, author of Null Set (2015), The Spoils (2009) and Forge (2005), is currently a writer in residence in the Central Library in downtown St. Louis.

It’s hard, living in St. Louis, to not feel the historical pull of the year 1904. It marked our city’s coming out party. During that single summer, St. Louis played host to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, otherwise known as the World’s Fair, as well as the 1904 Olympics and the 1904 Democratic National Convention.

Today, the World’s Fair legacy is everywhere. Most palpably it is felt in Forest Park, the site of the Fair. Twice as large as Central Park in New York, and four times the size of Grant Park in Chicago, the park accommodated 20 million people at the Fair during 1904. The fountains and grounds where the Fair was held are now the site of the St. Louis Art Museum. In the park there’s also the Missouri History Museum, which has a permanent exhibit about the Fair, as well as the St. Louis Zoo, the St. Louis Science Center, the World’s Fair Pavilion, restaurants, an 18-hole golf course, tennis courts, ball fields, horse stables, an ice skating rink, and gobs of geese.

But the legacy of the Fair also indexes aspects of St. Louis identity. Like, we here in St. Louis were once the center of the world, and now we’re not sure what we are, but damn, look at those amazing trees and serpentine gravel paths and fountains and architecture. If you look in the right direction, doesn’t it just feel like Paris? The Exposition was also largely a celebration of conquest and racial exceptionalism, issues that haunt the city today. The Fair came in the wake of the Spanish-American war in which the U.S. had acquired new territories in Puerto Rico, Guam, and elsewhere. People from these areas, as well as Native Americans and indigenous peoples from the Philippines where literally put on display at the Fair. Finally, the Fair lives on in kitsch. For example, there’s an amazing little hole-in-the-wall donut shop that I visit at the end of each semester to get donuts for my students to bribe them into thinking I’m a good teacher. It’s called World’s Fair Donuts. The address is, appropriately, 1904 Vandeventer Avenue. And yes, of course, there’s Judy Garland as Esther Smith in Meet Me in St. Louis, which takes place in the lead up to the World’s Fair, and has given us standards like the “Trolley Song.”

The Internet also tells me I can now buy an incredible Judy Garland doll donning her trolley dress.

But, as with Ted Drewes Frozen Custard and toasted ravioli and slimy provel cheese on St. Louis cracker crust pizza, I’m never sure if I’m supposed to be proud of the Fair. Turns out this is nothing new. It’s a question about St. Louis’ identity as a provincial city or a national city, an outpost or a center. And it’s further a question about citizen humility vs. citizen self-regard and ambition. This is what Reedy wrestled with in The Mirror during 1904.

In the New Years Eve issue in 1903, Reedy pontificates on the coming year. Writing about the Fair, he wonders about the city’s residents’ flatlining enthusiasm: “What shall we say of it that shall avoid the mere hyperbole of patriotic booming? It will be the greatest Exposition of all history: that is vague. There have been already expended upon it $30,000,000….[But] to us here in St. Louis, perhaps the Fair doesn’t wear its true proportions.” Reedy feels that despite its magnificence, the locals have been working for so long to land the Fair, raising money for the Fair, preparing for the Fair, and thinking about the Fair, that they’ve forgotten that St. Louis is about to do something of global significance. He mocks how St. Louisans think of the local leaders who helped secure and bankroll the events as just guys down the street: “Dave Francis is a big man? Pshaw! We see him every day. We even take a drink with him. We don’t see any halo around him. He’s much the same sort of man he was when we knew him only as a citizen. He a man of genius? Go on! He’s only a slob of a St. Louisan like the rest of us.”  For Reedy, this line of thinking is the problem. “That’s the essential slobbiness of sentiment that has kept the St. Louisan of worth always in the slob class – in his own town.” Reedy wants his city to act like a world city, to have some self-regard.

As the Fair approaches, Reedy ramps up his boosterism. “The Fair opening is only four months away,” he writes. “The old town isn’t in the least excited.” Having struck out in his attempts to whip up excitement, he then tries an about face, half satirically and half earnestly suggesting that St. Louisans aren’t excited precisely because they are not provincial bumpkins but mature cosmopolitans: “We are only acting as cosmopolitans. This is a big city and the World’s Fair isn’t anything more than an unusually large and pretty bazaar or picnic held in an outlying wood…We are not like Kansas City, that turns out en masse to a flower show or a horse show or a cattle show. St. Louis is Cosmopolis. It has all the sang froid of Cosmopolis. It has acquired an “imperturbable aplomb.’…As was written of India, so of us it shall be said: “She heard the legions thunder past, then turned to dream again.”

By February he’s grumpy.  He’s worried that construction on a new railway terminal to transport people to the Fair is behind schedule. He uses the fair to highlight corruption again, this time focusing on how “Lindell avenue, the main boulevard to the World’s Fair, is to be paved with bituminous macadam. Now bituminous macadam in St. Louis is a rank monopoly….But Lindell Avenue had to be paved for the Fair, and the Board of Public Improvement would have nothing but the Warren Brothers’ material, and “there you are.”” And he inveighs against local barbers who are preparing for the coming influx of visitors by jacking up prices: “Barbers about the St. Louis Union Station will make whiskers popular with World’s Fair visitors, if they keep up the present rates of $2 per have and $6.25 for a hair cut…The robbery of visitors to the Fair should be punished as severely as the laws permit.”

But by early April he’s excited, as is everyone else, and his pride is palpable. His reflection on April 28th, right before the opening, reads in its entirety: “Even the mighty Mississippi rises thirty-five feet above its banks to do honor to the greatest World’s Fair in history.”

Reedy writes on the Fair throughout the rest of the year, though he seems more interested in and writes more frequently about the Democratic National Convention in St. Louis and the meatpacking strikes in Chicago that would be later immortalized in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. About the Fair, he’s consistently celebratory, working to convince the locals that what they’ve done is great. He pillories national and international newspapers that have attacked the Fair for early sluggish attendance and for the “recklessness with which the critics set about to knock the city.” By the time the Fair attendance turns the corner and the year winds down, Reedy seems sure that the Fair will go down in history, and he’s right. In the end his verdict is: “World’s Fair a Winner.”

Originally from Ohio, Ted Mathys holds an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he received the John C. Schupes Fellowship for Excellence in Poetry; and an MA in international environmental policy from Tufts University. He lives in St. Louis, where he is Creative Writer in Residence at Saint Louis University and co-curates the Fort Gondo Compound for the Arts Poetry Series. He is the author of three books of poetry, Null Set (2015), The Spoils (2009) and Forge (2005), all from Coffee House Press.

As part of his CHP In The Stacks residency, Ted will give a reading and presentation on Wednesday, April 20th at 7 pm, in the Carnegie Room of the St. Louis Central Library.

[bibliomancyoracle]

After the west there will be the east.

After the east there will be the south.

After the south there will be a dog

*

from “Storm Damage” by TED MATHYS

[chpinthestacks]

Coffee House Press In The Stacks presents Poet Ted Mathys

In celebration of National Poetry Month 2016, the St. Louis Public Library will play host to poet Ted Mathys, author of Null Set (2015), The Spoils (2009) and Forge (2005), as a writer in residence this spring.

Mathys plans to focus his time on the library’s archives of William Reedy, the so-called “literary boss of the Midwest” and the editor of Reedy’s Mirror, a prominent St. Louis-based literature, politics, and social gossip magazine. From 1891 to 1920, Reedy’s magazine had a larger national distribution than either Atlantic Monthly or The Nation. Raised in north St. Louis and a graduate of Saint Louis University, Reedy was a prominent critic, provocative social figure, and massive influence on the St. Louis literary scene, publishing writers such as Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, Sara Teasdale, Ezra Pound, Theodore Dreiser, and more.

Originally from Ohio, Mathys holds an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he received the John C. Schupes Fellowship for Excellence in Poetry; and an MA in international environmental policy from Tufts University. He is currently a Creative Writer in Residence at Saint Louis University and co-curator of the Fort Gondo Compound for the Arts Poetry Series.

On April 20th at 7:00 p.m., he will read original work based on the William Reedy archives and engage in conversation with Special Collections staff. Library staff will also provide background on Reedy’s archive and personal book collection. Stay tuned to chpinthestacks.tumblr.com for dispatches from Mathys’ residency. 

[thedollhousereads]

DH #44 is this Saturday! We are stoked about our four readers, one of which will be Ted Mathys. Ted is the author of three books of poems, including Null Set, out this spring from Coffee House Press. Originally from Ohio, he holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and now lives in St. Louis, where he teaches at St. Louis University and is co-curator of the Fort Gondo Compound for the Arts Poetry Series. RSVP and deets here.

[therumpus]

I want to slide it clean through “a hawk against unadulterated sky scanning for a kill” but it doesn’t fit. Perched there on the angled branch, a formal sound silent beyond glass, body bound by faces, volumes enclosed.

“Polyhedral” is an apt example of Mathys’s approach to the form. In this poem, we see a preschooler come to an understanding of the world through the ritual of shape-sorting. Anyone who has ever rooted for a child engaged in trying to fit a circle into a square—anyone who has revisited the intensity of this stage in the mind’s development—will feel the pull of this poem.

Ann van Buren reviews Null Set by Ted Mathys.