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Show Marriott to present program as part of English poetry series Hi - ',y..,- 1 Hoi ' 1 SOi'r rfftV- H 'iit. v , V 1 I h 1 e ,f , , Pertif. . . ' j'V' f J A') The 1971-72 Poetry Series of the Department of English will present William Matthews, reading from his work at the Marriott Library Auditorium. The program will be Wednesday at 8 p.m. There is no admission charge. Mr. Matthews has a B.A. from Yale University and a M.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is currently a member of the English Department Depart-ment faculty at Cornell University. Mr. Matthews' latest book of poems, Sleek for the Long Flight will be published later this year. An excerpt from Mr. Matthews' poem "The Waste Carpet" follows: It is like being in a Catholic Church the night before Easter. The statues stir under the heavy purple drapes. The stiff gods we have made so lovingly stir their stony muscles. They can breathe the new air, we can't. The slime crests toward the Mississippi. Cairo, Natchez, New Orleans, the litany of the new flood. It will be like fording a string, an isthmus of water. :hnolc- ini lliam Matthews, contemporary poet, will read from his work in a Hf gram presented at the Marriott Library Wednesday. I he sea has re-arrived in the grassy interior. What we imagined was the fire-storm. Or, failing that, the glacier. Or we hoped we'd get off easy, losing only California. With the seismologists & mystics we saw the last California ridge crumble into the ocean like new Camembert. We would learn to love Nevada and develop a taste for salt J in our water, as though our thirst were a wound. We were ready with elegies: O California, sportswear & defense contracts, gases that induce deference, high school girls with their own cars, we wanted to love you without pain. O California when you were moored to us like a splinter of melon bobbing among tankers we knew the European tongue was cobblestone. l( But now you are lost at sea, , your cargo of mudslides & mystics I lost, the prints of the old movies lost, the thick unlighted candles ( of the redwoods J snuffed in advance. On the ocean V floor (l they lie like hands of a broken clock. California, truly you are the living end. We're all coming west inexorably, bringing our ruinous self-knowledge. quoting Ecclesiastes. We'll be there Friday, early, your time. |