Timothy Mathews

    Biography
    Publications
->    Creative nonfiction, and writing 
       that’s hard to categorise
->    Translating and writing
->    Critical writing, writing the critical
->    Collaborations
->    Editing
    Upcoming
    Archive
    Email






Reading Apollinaire. Theories of Poetic Language
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reading-Apollinaire-Theories-Poetic-Language/dp/0719022207



The extent to which any term or attitude fails to appropriate Apollinaire’s language is a representation of what he confronts in language himself. It is a gap that is unbreached, repeatedly vast, giving form to his suffering; within it, words are constantly given back to texts and to the world, back to what is there and new, alive in its otherness and transience.

Timothy Mathews, 
from the book



Guillaume Apollinaire was much loved, multi-talented individual and writer. Born  Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Aleksander Apolinary Kostrowicki, he was the illegitimate son of Angelika Kostrowicka, and his sense of statelessness was a source of the anxiety as well as the boundless creative energy that are characteristic of him. The combination makes for his unique voice, questioning, seeking, hearing engaging, alert, challenging, playful, deadly serious. Living and working at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century in Paris, his writing and his extraordinary energy make him at once a leader and cypher of the upheavals in the arts of the time, from Symbolism through to Cubism and Futurism. He introduced Pablo Picasso to Georges Braque in 1907, setting off the Cubist painting which signals a ground-breaking re-think of the scope of representation in art. On his return from the fighting in 1917, he introduced André Breton to Philippe Soupault to each other, and the that was the birth of Surrealism. He had already coined the word in his prefaces to his pays Parade and The Breasts of Tiresias. He wrote poetry, essays on art, stories and novels, and his exuberant personality as much as how work are a lightning rod for the turbulence of his times, from turbo-charged creative energy in the arts, to the rapid increases in the speed and of communication and life, and on to the catastrophe of the First World War. 

This book is about Apollinaire’s poetry and his essays on art. It was my first book, and from the outset, as well as being fascinated by Apollinaire’s voice in poetry and the development of painting, actually because of that, I was drawn to the creative potential of critical writing. Much later, when I’d become still more immersed in seeking the creative in the critical, also the creative in translation, and in respecting my own voice in whatever I was writing, I turned to Apollinaire’s Seated Woman, a short novel, actually a series of prose pictures. It has so much to say about the confusion that reigned after The First World War; so much to say about the conspiracy ghosts and the demagogues of our own times; and so much to say about vulnerability, and the determination to put voices back together.    
Reading Apollinaire is an excellent book […], and Timothy Mathews never loses sight of the materiality of language. The poems and essays of Guillaume Apollinaire are read with the powerful currents of thought which form the context of the debates of early twentieth-century modernism, assuring Apollinaire an effective and meaningful role in those exchanges. The book is also brilliantly successful in maintaining a subtle interplay between criticism and poetry, a mutual implication characteristic of Apollinaire’s texts, and which finds form in Mathews’ own writing.

Nathaniel Wing,
Paragraph

Reading this valiant book, one is regularly surprised by the ebb and flow of Timothy Mathews’  arguments, and this effect is compounded by his effort to create new terms, and a sophisticated language corresponding to the originality of his individual approach.

Peter Read,
Modern Language Review



Prev    Next