Fletcher Student Ted Mathys Publishes Second Collection of Poetry
J
ust a few months ago, US President Barack Obama was seen in Chicago with a copy of Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott’s Collected Poems. On first blush, it may seem that poetry and politics inhabit vastly different worlds, and “never the twain shall meet.” Yet, from the highest levels of the United Nations (Secretary-General Hammarskjold was an amateur poet and literary enthusiast) to grassroots poet-activists engaged in resistance and the struggle for justice, the list of literary and intellectual figures with an abiding interest in both fields is long.
Ted Mathys, a first-year MALD student specializing in international environmental policy at The Fletcher School, continues this tradition of mixing international politics and poetry. He is the author The Spoils, his newly-published second book of poetry.
Mathys sees his parallel careers as complimentary and related. Both, he says, challenge him to think in interdisciplinary and creative ways as a means of engaging with the world. The result is a “productive tension,” which struggles with the desire to reform and work within institutions or poetic forms on the one hand, or to challenge official poetic and political structures on the other.
The influence of Mathys’s international relations interests, particularly his commitment to sustainable development is evident in much of his writing. Consider the following lines from one poem (“The National Interest”), where Mathys takes a maximalist approach to call on images of 21st century economy, environment, and everyday life:
Gas logs, the derivatives market, surround sound
and LL Bean catalogues were growing on me.
Though I had grown immobile and unable to see,
This was in my nature. I was an ecology.
The lines and the poem more generally are reflective of Mathys’s work. On the one hand, the surprising juxtapositions clearly locate this poem in the post-modern or contemporary context. Yet, familiar elements of rhyme and alliteration, repetition and list, make this and other poems in The Spoils approachable even for casual readers of verse.
A clear theme throughout the book is the tension between the human-made artificial world on the one hand, and the world of nature on the other. Linguistically, Mathys plays out this interplay by placing philosophical or political-conceptual language side by side with anachronisms and folksy turns of phrase. For example, in the narrative first section of The Spoils, “A Soccer Ball for Dr. Kissinger,” Mathys’ narrates “a meditation on power, violence, and dissent.” Like the larger work, the following lines from the poem grapple with the banal immediacy of ordinary things compared to the institutions of high politics and war:
so what could it possibly mean
for both of us to be swatting with resolve
at the same damn cabbage moth
white and erratic as popcorn on a string
as it bounces up the lawn? A leveling? An end
to the logic of ambition? No more
than the incongruous protocols of official
and natural?
Mathys hopes that his surprising linguistic turns lead not just to aesthetic appreciation, but to new ideas for thinking about the world apart from typical narrative discourses. That said, he also is reluctant to attribute a final purpose or meaning to his work: "When you write creatively,” he explains,” you're not writing instrumentally or for some purpose...The purpose is often the language itself."
Mathys already has a theme in mind for a new book. Inspired by travel in Mexico and Laos, he is again fusing his international and artistic interests towards a new stylistic direction. Meanwhile, Mathys is also keeping busy looking for summer internships in community-based forest preservation or conservation.
Even successful poets take day jobs. Mathys has done one better by combing his two callings into a unique career.
Kirby Reiling F09