hat:
 

BE THERE THEN 

Passion & Post-Psychedelic Poetry by Clive Matson & Friends

 

Join Clive Matson, his gang of poets and their many friends for an afternoon of music, art, humor and passion. Clive and his friends read from poetry that chronicles the searing passion they felt then and the spark that feeds their poetry now.

 

Venue: Art House Gallery & Cultural Center

Contact: Harold Adler 510.472.3170

 

Where: 2905 Shattuck Avenue , Berkeley

                        between Ashby Avenue and Russell Street

nearest BART station Ashby

 

When: Sunday October 18, 2009

4:30 Music & Refreshments

5:00 Literary Reading

 

Cost: $5-10 donation

 



Who:

 

Clive Matson received his MFA from Columbia . His first book, Mainline to the Heart (1966) is being re-issued in 2009. Members of the Beat Generation were his teachers. His text, Let the Crazy Child Write! (1998), honors the creative unconscious. Chalcedony's First Ten Songs (2007) is his current enthusiasm, a passionate, erotic and spiritual voice evolved from the Mainline poems.

D.r. Goodman is a martial arts instructor in Oakland . She always meant to be a poet, but got distracted and went for twenty years without writing. She came to and started writing again after hearing Kay Ryan on her car radio. Since then, her poems have appeared in such journals as Apalachee Review, Calyx, Crazyhorse, Seattle Review and many others, and in the 2005 anthology Sonnets: 150 Contemporary Sonnets, edited by William Baer.

Jeanne Lupton hosts Frank Bette Center for the Arts Second Saturdays Poetry and Prose Reading Series.  She leads writing groups at Lakeview Library in Oakland and in her home.  Her tanka collection "but then you danced" appeared in 2007.  She is currently exploring solo performance.  www.jeannelupton.com

 

D. Jayne McPherson once led the Russian River Writers Guild in its last years pop-out a commemorative anthology.  After a long haitus, she has returned to the writing life via Clive Matson's tutelage. She is one of his wayward and lost seeking refuge in the recesses of their hidden soul or Crazy Child whichever comes out of hiding first.  Her Raindrop kitten licks her feet at will, sleeps on her desk as she writes. (415) 456-4355 

 

Adele Mendelson is a poet and fiction writer who has published two volumes of poetry and is currently writing experimental and flash fiction.  Adele has read and featured at many venues around the Bay Area .  She conducts a monthly writers’ salon and is now organizing a short story discussion group.  She plays a leading role in many activities of the literary community.

 

Laura Riggs is an architect as well as an emerging writer. Her writing has appeared, or will soon, in journals and zines ranging from the erudite to the scandalous including the Exquisite Corpse, AlterNet, Alimentum, the SoMa Literary Review, CleanSheets, Rivets and The East Bay Express. She produces literary readings and publishes broadsheet cards through Speckled Egg Studios. She is currently at work on her first novel, Some Trips Make a Circle.

 

Gael Alcock, on cello, has accompanied poets Adam David Miller, Jane Hirshfield, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Eliza Shefler in Bay Area poetry festivals, and at KPFA Crafts Fairs.  She has performed her compositions for solo cello and for cello choir widely, and has produced collaborative events such as "In Celebration of Water", "Words, not Wars", "Star Spangled Summer" and "Minor Excursions" to raise funds for public pools, teen academic enrichment, and peace projects. She teaches music in the schools, and privately to individuals and groups including the famous Cello Zymbidium.

 

More About Clive Matson
Clive Matson arrived on the Lower East Side of New York City in 1960, a fresh-faced adolescent with a blank notebook under his arm. He quickly fell in with the Beat Generation – his first event was a reading at the Tenth Street Coffeehouse, where he met Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Diane di Prima.

“The atmosphere was stunning. People were aware that new ground was opening every day, and most of the Beat luminaries were in that one small café.” Matson had already traveled a long way from the avocado ranch in Southern California where he grew up. He had dropped out of the University of Chicago and hitch-hiked around Europe ; his education in life was accelerating.  

The proto-Beat Herbert Huncke became his second father, and Matson was captivated by John Wieners’ poetry and subsequently by Alden Van Buskirk’s. Diane di Prima published Matson’s first poems, and in the introduction John Wieners wrote, “One wonders about the nature of love in these poems. Are they vicious, or not?”

Matson and his first wife Erin Black immersed themselves in sex, hard drugs, and psychedelics of 1960s Bohemian life. Eventually Matson became overwhelmed and returned to the West Coast. He worked for Taxi Unlimited, a producers’ cooperative in Berkeley ; briefly for the Free Clinic and for MOVE (men overcoming violence); and learned the craft of printing from Clifford Burke at Cranium Press. Psychotherapy, Vipassana meditation, and twelve-step programs became fixtures in his life.

Space Age (1969) displays his psychedelic years, Heroin (1972) outlines his struggle with addiction, On the Inside (1981) continues the political sight of his communist grandparents, and Equal in Desire (1982) shows feminism instructing his own sexuality. In 1978, he got involved in workshops and found he could make a living teaching creative writing. He returned to school in the 1980s and earned his MFA in poetry at Columbia University . He has taught more than 3,000 workshops nationwide, and his how-to text Let the Crazy Child Write! (New World Library, 1998), honoring the creative unconscious, is being used by a number of groups around the world.

Matson co-edited, with the late Allen Cohen, the anthology An Eye for an Eye Makes the Whole World Blind - Poets on 9/11 (Regent Press, Oakland, 2002), which won the 2003 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles National Literary Award. Earlier that year his seventh book, Squish Boots (2002), was placed, amazingly, in John Wieners’ coffin.

In 2004, a character in one of his unfinished stories began writing poems. His editor said, "Her stuff's junk," and Matson replied, "Get over it. They're not yours." Chalcedony's First Ten Songs (2008) obsess on sexual passion. The poems are an extension of Matson’s Beat training, as Chalcedony makes a vibrant call to body and spirit and earth through the sensory world.

That Matson ultimately emerged drug-free and healthy gave him full appreciation for 1960s passion and honesty. These qualities are crucially important, he thinks, for the current era. “Coming to terms with my youthful, energetic voice has been a challenge,” he admits. “It helps that I hear, in these poems, both an urgent need to connect and full cognizance of the difficulties.”

Mostly Matson writes from the itch in his body, and says he always has. He likes playing basketball, table tennis, and collecting minerals in the field. He lives in Oakland , California , where along with ex-wife, Gail Ford, he co-parents his early teen-age son, Ezra.

Let the Crazy Child Write! 1998. New World Library.

He leads his merry band of writers to a place of vibrant self-realization; his humor and enthusiasm are as infectious as his wisdom.

~ Joe Quirk, The Ultimate Rush

Matson encourages the discovery of what so impassions us to write in the first place ~ the intuitive, the raw, the bloody.

 ~ Laura Glen Louis

 

Mainline to the Heart and other poems, 2009. Regent Press

(originally published 1966). Poets Press.

Has the author sacrificed anything or everything to arrive at the toughness he celebrates? It seems he has. It in not angelhood any longer. It is not nature, springing up in the woods at twilight. It is heroin, and the blood he draws.

~ John Wieners, poet

 

Squish Boots, 2002. Broken Shadow Publications.

Delightful and penetrating at the same time, these poems are a revelation.

~ Susan Griffin, author and poet, Bending Home, Poems Selected and New

 

Hourglass, 1987. Seagull Press.

Read these poems out loud ~ especially the marvelous running and flying poems ~allow them to lift you into the open.

~ Dr. Shepherd Bliss, Professor of Psychology

 

Equal in Desire, 1983. ManRoot Press.

Matson's work is powerful and tender. He has a clarity which is deceptive: the seeming simplicity that comes from a thoughtful and complex technique. The poems speak direct to the heart.

~ Diane DiPrima, author and poet

Remarkable! How rare poems like these are. How important..open and delicate.

~ Robert Bly, author and poet