Do you have any collections?
I don’t have a book yet, but I have recently published a series of long poems, which are narrative in style. “Talus” is one of my favourites. That’s another macaronic poem. It is a narrative, almost journalistic, impression of my experience of first climbing Mount Errigle back in 2009.
Another poem has recently been published online at Action, Spectacle, a wonderful online publication, “The Turkish Bath,” which is based on the painting by Ingres. The more I think about the painting the more I dislike it. But it has become a sort of catalyst by which to examine broader issues such as empire and colonization and the lasting effects of these in the ways in which we appreciate art.
I first went to Paris back in 2005, when I was 19 years old, and I wanted to see this painting because Don Ellis, the famous big band leader during the ‘60s, chose that painting for the cover of his album, “Electric Bath”. I listened to that album over and over again obsessively when I was younger. So we come back to the link between visual and aural elements in poetry and the ways in which they are intimately intertwined. In any event, I went to the Louvre to see the painting, but the Denon wing where the painting is hung was closed for renovation.
Bit by bit, I have encountered this painting in different contexts over the years and the poem takes its spiralling structure, moving back and forth, through real lived time as well as imaginative time, and memory, from trying to represent my many experiences of the painting. What I ended up with was a sort of interwoven crown of sonnets – or at least each section is 14 lines, leap-frogging back and forth through time, tracing Ingres’s story, the story of Dominique Vivant Denon, my own personal history, and the troubling ramifications of the painting itself.
I have a few other poems coming out here and there over the next little while.
Where to now?
Other than that, I am reading a fair bit, plugging away at my poetry, and I am teaching. I’m also playing a lot of music here in the Bay Area.
If you would like to see more of the work of Matthew Ryan Shelton – see link below
