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Photo byLisaHull
The late David Matias's clarity and consciousness come through in 'Fifth Season.' |
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A poet for all seasons
Matias honored with posthumous publication of collected works
JoeBurns
BANNER STAFF
It's a rare writer who can excite both a poet laureate and a proletariat, but David Matias was one. A poet of uncommon clarity and perception, Matias who died, at age 35, on Dec. 13, 1996, will be remembered Saturday with the publication of his poetry collection 'Fifth Season' by the Provincetown Arts Press. A publication celebration will take place that evening at 8 p.m. in the Stanley Kunitz Common Room of the Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., with readings of Matias' work by poets Frank Bidart, Cleopatra Mathis and Greg Miller.
The son of a Baptist minister, Matias was raised in Kerrville, Texas. He arrived in Provincetown in 1988, bringing with him the seeds of creativity and the virus that would spur him on and ultimately take his life.
'When I first met him in 1988, he was totally secretive about being HIV-positive,' says his partner Dr. Leonard Alberts. 'The only person that knew was one of his sisters and one of his friends in Texas. The rest of his family didn't know and he was sort of, in all honesty, in denial about it .'
As Matias's relationship with Alberts and Provincetown grew, he became more comfortable with revealing his illness. By 1991 he no longer had a choice. Matias, an actor as well as poet, was in the middle of a Provincetown Theater Company production when he took sick for the first time.
'He was very much a show-must-go-on type of actor. For the first few nights, he was just getting sicker and sicker and sicker and loading up on aspirin and Motrin and having these horrible headaches and just marshaling the strength to go and do an hour and a half of theater and then come home and feel terrible,' Alberts says:
'The news isn't good my boy friend whispers Meningitis. We're checking you into the hospital for treatment. I nod angry at disruption's victory.'
'First Hospitalization July 1991'
'When he came back from the hospital, he was weak. It took him time to get his strength back, but also that was sort of the beginning of facing the epidemic. That was sort of a turning point in which he became more public about his illness. He started writing poetry that was much more topical,' Alberts says. 'Coming to terms with his illness, feeling that he had something to say, the story of the struggle that he went through coming to terms with his illness, he thought would have value to someone trying to come to terms with something in their own life. That was why it became so important to him, and that was what spurred him on.'
Matias had applied for an FAWC Fellowship in the past, but it was this new material that impressed the selection committee.
'The work was so fresh and amazing that a lot of the people on the writing committee were just stunned by it,' says Gail Mazur, a member of the committee that granted Matias a 1994-'95 FAWC Fellowship. U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, was also a member of the selection committee, writing on the book's dust cover, describes his reaction to Matias's poems this way: 'I remember the thrill I felt to find some of them among the applications. ... Throwing away protocol, I read them aloud to friends, on the phone, excited to discover such an exciting new talent.'
As remarkable as those works were, Matias was already moving beyond them. 'I think his writing was growing a great deal,' says Cleopatra Mathis, who was Matias's instructor at a week-long writing workshop following his fellowship and also a member of the FAWC Writing Committee. 'I think he used the illness to give everything he could to the writing.'
'Eat, David, eat! Put down the pen. I tell myself over and over, but my hunger for words is greater.'
'Selfish'
'I think of that poem he wrote about not wanting to stop to eat lunch because he's writing,' Mathis continues. 'Words are what he needs, that's the sustenance he wants more than any other sustenance. He had very little time and he knew it. He carried the class. He was one of those people you love to have in class because he was so warm and interested in everybody else in the class, really supportive of everybody else's writing and able, always, to find a way to see beyond what the person was writing into what the person might have needed in order to go back and work on the poem more. He had a wonderful way of perceiving why and how poems were being written. Not many poets can step away from their own work long enough to see what other people around them might be feeling.'
Alberts says his partner's intuitive abilities extended well beyond the written word. 'He was amazingly prescient. His timing was always very good until the very end,' Alberts says. 'When you know you're dying, you tend to want to cut to the chase, and sometimes you take other people and shake them until they realize that that's what you're trying to do.'
The urgency of his creativity manifested itself in poems that are direct and accessible and imbued with lyrical beauty. Reading one is like tasting fresh fruit for the first time.
'It's so accessible,' Mazur says of Matias's writing. 'I really think that there are questions in the poems about character and how to be forgiving and how to be patient with other people and how to feel compassion.[Stanley] Kunitz once told me that he would tell his poetry students - first you make your character and then the character makes the work and when he said that I thought of these poems.'
Matias' ability to empathize with others moves his work from the parameters of AIDS or gay labels to universal themes.
'That's one of the interesting things about David's work,' says Greg Miller, a close friend of Matias. 'The book comes out of a gay sensibility, but he's always seeing connections with other people - people like him and people different than him - and that poem gives me a sense both of difference and similarity, I like that.'
Miller was a catalyst in the creation of 'Fifth Season,' working with Alberts and poet Frank Bidart in gathering material and putting them in an order. 'I was a Fellow with David at the Fine Arts Work Center and I knew how powerful his poems were,' Miller says.
Provincetown Arts Press publisher Chris Busa, who had previously published Matias's poem 'Eyes to the Sun' in Provincetown Arts magazine, recalls his first impressions of Matias.
'My first professional experience [with Matias] was when he came to visit me in my Brewster Street studio with a packet of poems and a neatly written letter,' Busa says, remembering 'his scrupulousness, his care for his work, his regard for it and yet his calm sense of not trying to impose it on you. He just was absolutely an exquisite person.'
Busa calls the latest addition to the Provincetown Arts Press catalog 'quite a document. It's a psychological achievement in some ways, to go through a decade of your life with the foreknowledge of your death and then to be able to demonstrate how you change through that period. You can feel the growth of the poet's soul being created through the book as he revisits some childhood scenes and later points with a different wisdom.'
Alberts says the collection is a fulfillment of a goal that Matias had held until the end. 'He always wanted it to come together in book form, and the last few months of his life, when he knew that time getting short, he spent a lot of time trying to organize things into a series of books,' he says.
A previous self-published book entitled 'Dancing With Family and Disease' was a start, 'but that was really only his work up to 1992,' Alberts adds. 'The majority of his really knock-you-down-and-grab-you stuff was written the last two or three years, the period of time when he got really sick, and some of the stuff was after the diagnosis with the brain tumor [in 1996].'
'... grief is a tangible love.
Death will make me genuine.
Death is holding my hand these days.'
'The Myths of My Life'
'The last poem breaks my heart every time I read it,' Alberts says.'. It's almost like he knew. The last few weeks before he died, he went around the house making labels on every thing so that klutzy Lenny would know that this was the mister for the bonsai, this is the litter pan for the cat box. It was partly that he was losing his short term memory and he was doing them for him, but it was also in a way that he knew that I was going to have a hard time carrying on after he died and he wanted to make things as easy as he could for me. A lot of people have said about him that the last year or so of his life that he had one foot on both sides of the Pearly Gates, that he was God's creation more than Earth's creation that last year or so.'
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Nov 19th, 1998