Clive Matson (born March 13, 1941) is an American direct expression lyric poet and creative writing teacher.
Biography
Early life Clive Matson was born in Los Angeles, California in 1941, the middle child of five. His father, Randolph Matson, an electrical engineer with the aircraft industry, moved his family in 1948 to an avocado orchard in San Diego County. His mother, Evelyn Vincent Matson, was an educated woman, daughter of Clement Vincent, linotypist and print shop owner in Los Angeles. Vincent published a Spanish-language newspaper, believing the future of California belonged to its Latino population. As a child Matson was interested in rocks, studied James Dwight Dana's System of Mineralogy, and found crystals in the hills beyond the farm. His interest in science changed at the age of fourteen, when he wrote a poem for an English class. He was captivated. Matson received a full scholarship to the University of Chicago in 1958 but dropped out after attending one year, in order to pursue poetry. The seminal event came when Matson offered that John Milton wrote Paradise Lost "Because life has conflicts like that," instead of giving the literary answer, that Milton was revisiting his issues with the King of England. After briefly attending the University of California at Riverside, Matson hitchhiked around the country and then toured Europe on foot, before settling in New York City in 1962.
Involvement with the Beats Matson was drawn to the East Village, after hearing Allen Ginsberg read Howl at the University of Chicago during the 1959 suppression controversy over the publication of Beat authors in The Chicago Review, and was welcomed into the Beat Generation. He received broad guidance from Diane di Prima and Ginsberg, and Irving Rosenthal introduced him to the poetry of John Wieners and Michael McClure. Friendships with John Ceely, Martha Muhs, and David Grey Rattray brought Alden Van Buskirk to his attention, and Matson helped in the preparation of Van Buskirk's LAMI. Throughout the mid-1960s Matson's most significant influence, in writing and in life, was Herbert Huncke. They discussed writing, ethics, drugs, jazz, Beat figures, and walked the streets of Manhattan, talking with a range of humanity from bums and thieves to workers, artists and members of high society. The environment was ideal for far-ranging explorations of self and the world. In the company of Erin Black and friends, Matson used marijuana, hard drugs, and psychedelics and sought inspiration in literature, in indigenous cultures, in Eastern religion, in music, and in their own creative impulses. Writing was Matson's instrument for articulating insights. The friends strove to separate from the dominant culture and to develop their more native, authentic traits. With the publication of Mainline to the Heart, Matson was coming into his own. In 1968 he traveled to England (a trip planned with Huncke, who withdrew at the last minute) and read poems at University Art Festivals throughout the United Kingdom. Mainline was confiscated by British authorities and later released as "borderline pornographic."Sunday Times, 12/03/1968, p. 5
Matson held to and developed his youthful instincts, and this effort was supported by several Beat paradigms: One, that a poem is shaped by the poet's breath, a perception extended by Charles Olson as "projective verse." Ginsberg disseminated a similar idea from William Carlos Williams, who advised him in the 1940s to "Listen to the rhythm of your own voice. Proceed intuitively by ear."Kramer, Jane, Allen Ginsberg In America, Random House, New York, 1969, page 111. A second paradigm suggests that the source of poetry is life itself. Life as lived on streets, in jobs, in relationships, in meditation groups, on farms and in mountains, not something found through scholarship or abstraction. "No ideas but in things," Paterson, New Directions, New York, 1946 also passed on from Williams, and Robert Creeley's "Form is never more than an extension of content" Interview with Leonard Schwartz, http://jacket2.org/commentary/robert-creeley-conversation-leonard-schwartz were significant ideas in the conversation. Street wisdom, too, informed Beat sensibility, that a homeless drunk was more likely to see God than a professor. A third, and largely unacknowledged, dictum of the Beats is that writing is to communicate. Many times Huncke asked, "What do you mean by that?" The question was legitimate, though undercurrents among intellectuals at the time were palpable, to reframe poetry as an arcane art and make it ripe for the academies to hijack. Matson's original impulse to communicate to others, educated or not, endured for him as a common-sense virtue. A fourth feature of Beat sensibility, the longing to expand consciousness, drove much of Matson's experimentation. That desire was ubiquitous among young artists and found clear articulation in Timothy Leary's Turn on, tune in, drop out. This code expressed widespread dissatisfaction with mainstream culture and gave license to rebellion. Leary's formulation, plus the emerging hippie ethic, kept the political concerns of Matson's forebears in the foreground. Behind these paradigms, for some, lay the intuition that the feeling in the body is paramount, along with what one observes with one's own eyes. The childhood study of minerals informed Matson's sensibilities, since Dana's early science stipulated that visible qualities of crystals revealed their essence. Seeing and describing with clarity mapped fluidly into his writing. The weakness of cultural imperatives kept the field open, fertile, and largely undescribed.
In 1968 Matson began a decades-long separation from the Beats. The seeds were evident in a discussion with Ginsberg, when Matson asserted that "Every user is a pusher." Ginsberg countered, "That isn’t literally true," at least in the eyes of the judicial system.Holladay, Hilary, Herbert Huncke: The Times Square Hustler Who Inspired Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation, p. 117 Schaffner Press, Tucson, 2013, 2015 Matson's experience, especially with Huncke and Erin Black, led him to question the Beats’ elitism and their patriarchal, anti-feminist bias. Moving away from the bias that savage aspects are at the apex of our personalities, showed Matson the larger landscape. At Huncke's Memorial in 1996, Matson addressed Huncke's impulse that "the only thing you can do with the pain inside is medicate it. That's shitty, Herb." Gregory Corso complained Matson was criticizing Beat behavior, and Matson replied that other options were available.Herbert Huncke: Final Reading & Memorial, DVD Thin Air Video, 2006, New York, NY Matson had become by then an avid participant in 12-step programs. Matson's most influential teachers, besides poetry and Huncke, were women. "I am a person!" Erin Black proclaimed in 1964, with proto-feminist exactness. Eila Kokkinen, who was conversant with the Beats, provided a balanced perspective and included psychoanalytic insights. Relationships with Martha Muhs and Maggie Clougherty, and the general atmosphere of the 1970s engendered the sense that whatever strategies worked for Matson needed to include women. The strategies needed to work for women, also. Fundamental threads prevail throughout Matson's work: the urge to honesty and to give messages from the body first regard. The stage was set, through training with the Beat Generation, for the development of his writing and of his career. Matson's evolution points directly toward his recent conception of "Paleo Poetry" and the primitive heart.
Career Matson moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1968, settling in Oakland and keeping his main focus on writing poetry. He took odd jobs: as a warehouse clerk in San Leandro; as a taxi driver for Berkeley's Taxi Unlimited, a worker's cooperative; as a laborer for several furniture movers; and he trained as letterpress printer under Clifford Burke at Cranium Press in San Francisco. Matson acquired a hand-lever letterpress from Harold Adler, following in the footsteps of his grandfather, and then a foot-treadle 8x12 platen press from Irving Rosenthal's Free Press in San Francisco. Besides business cards, broadsides and issue number four of the Berkeley Poets' Cooperative, he printed and bound his own book Heroin and John Ceely's The Country is Not Frightening as publisher Neon Sun.Ceely, John, The Country is Not Frightening, Neon Sun, Berkeley CA, 1975 He found that the demands of small-press publishing undercut his energy to write, so he let that enterprise dissolve and kept job printing as a part-time endeavor. He produced fine business cards, broadsides, announcements, and a number of chapbooks for Paul Mariah of ManRoot Press in the 1980s and early 1990sEqual in Desire, The Complete Poems of Jean Genet, Cocteau, Appogiatures/Grace Notes
In 1978, while Matson was giving readings in the Northwest, he was invited by Jack Estes to teach a workshop at Peninsula State College in Port Angeles, Washington. Matson asked for guidance. "It's easy," Estes replied, "give the exercise David Wagoner gave last month. He divided the psyche into the same three parts as Transactional Analysis and renamed them Editor, Writer, and Child. Tell the Editor and Writer to take a walk and let the Child write whatever it likes." When Matson stepped into the classroom, every comment fit those voices: analytical – from the Editor; understanding of the process – from the Writer; and impulsive or emotional – from the Child. Matson felt he was the custodian for everyone's creativity.Let the Crazy Child Write!, New World Library, Novato, 1998, page ix He returned to the Bay Area, took over John Oliver Simon's Learning Annex writing workshop, and tried out different articulations of the "Child" voice, eventually settling on "Crazy Child." That designation stimulated the most vigorous and most original writing. In 1985 Matson started teaching at University of California Berkeley Extension, specializing in beginning courses "Developing Your Creative Writing Style" and "Exploring Your Creative Writing Potential." He took notes for his tutorial, Let the Crazy Child Write! (published by New World Library in 1998).Review of Let the Crazy Child Write http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1910955.Let_the_Crazy_Child_Write_ He taught at various other venues: Pacific Oaks College in Pasadena, California; John F. Kennedy University in Orinda; Oakland Summer Arts Camp in the Sierra; and led writing excursions in Scotland, Italy, Costa Rica, and the eastern Sierra.