And for Marie
Not sure you’re here or where in solitary
Splendor. Truth, our life and letters not a wreck
Waiting to happen quite yet, your absence less raw
Than real -- dark, stormy, bright as the keys
Of your Florida piano, the constraint
Like your upright performing a wheel
In a wheel on a roll like Earth less than we’ll
Know who turning every which way recall some solitary
Hope you understood of ours where the constraint
Was to live all you can if today you’re a wreck
Tomorrow discovering what? -- the keys
In pocket where you left them, all the raw
Material – your double espresso thermos’d against a raw
Wind whipping home plate dust at Shea, or a wheel
Of Brie less needed in my then raw downtown space of chi’s
Aflow with life force than, of my solitary
Stove, it seemed, third-hand Magic Chef, or my wreck-
ing bar, clarified butter you asked for, arriving. Constraint
Making do with the years, what stranded constraint
Alive on an island we thought up, my job raw
Fish to spear, Bill Gass record-keeper, our very shipwreck
Driftwood for Harry to cook on, spar, mast, even wheel,
Survival mysterious -- no solitary,
Chenetier, our fourth, but his job? Keys
To the island? the salt? a future? a life? -- words keys
Only sometimes, say Paris, Tlooth, silence, constraint.
In Siena one night when Calvino lay gone, solitary
the hours till dawn of your wake for him raw-
boned American friend, life’s own fame of itself will
Spin into, then out of control this mute req
we embody, for you, Schubert, Perec,
say, brothering posthumous keys
To us many and one our wheel
spinning eye to e- absence constraint
to twin fullness by you. Writer at risk in the raw
You knew in us and you solitary
What? Raw rookie’s post-season constraint?
Keys left to our reckoning hopes?
The wheel to windward, solitary west by east.
Ed. note: Harry Mathews, 1930 --2017, died on this day three years ago. For David Lehman's obituary essay, which we published on February 4, 2017, click here. For Ed Park's lively and well-informed Bookforum piece on Mathews ("Antics Roadshow"; April / May 2018), click here.
"Histoire," the most prominently anthologized of Harry's poems, is in the form of a sestina.
What follows is Joseph McElroy's note on his own sestina, composed for delivery at a memorial for Harry Mathews. -- DL
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Intro: Familiar faces here. The many ways we knew Harry and he us. Always the mystery of many and one. A trek up and down several canyons in New Mexico in search of the shrine of the Stone Lions. A fierce squash match at Beekman Place. Readings we gave including one Harry asked me to join him in for his friend Georges Perec, whom he had brought into my life. Many copies of Harry’s books inscribed to me so encouraging as he constantly was. One in which he said I had taught him how to be a friend. An odd moment after a conversation between the two of us in front of a large audience in Brooklyn and I thought just maybe I might have rubbed him the wrong way introducing Oulipo with more emphasis than I myself give it in Harry’s writing and aesthetic. So much more to his work than that. Blake says, “In opposition is true friendship.” I think not of that so much as subtle differences, personal style, strength – Harry’s hilarious humor and elan and later on the courage of good manners when he was sometimes physically suffering. Wild, too, in his imaginings – an authority on sinking stadiums, an explosive all-over comic release if you recall his reference where the passenger-seat companion in a car careering onward pleads let me take the wheel and WC Fields hands it to him. And here tonight remembering not only when I was there but when I wasn’t – which can be experience too. Even like the limit, the constraint Harry often called it, that a fixed form may impose on you yet yield strange, encouraging surprises as you work within it and yourself. Harry and I embarked on a series of poems, each answering the previous one. A series only embarked on, if that. Sestinas. Did Harry say to me, “Joe, it’s impossible to write a bad sestina” ? Yes, he did say that. He sent me at least once the six words – for me to use, arbitrary, as he felt they should be. I thought to read you my own six first of all tonight. But let me not. You will hear them. Two are hardly arbitrary. One is in the title of his I believe final novel, The Solitary Twin, now posthumously to be published, poignant, I felt, disturbing, witty, secret, revealing. My title tonight, “Sestina for Harry”; the dedication at least as important, “And for Marie.” In my sestina the you is Harry but then it is us, and then at last Harry.
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