Matt Rader
Biography
Matt Rader is the author of five collections of poetry, a work of creative nonfiction, and a book of stories. His writing has appeared in publications around the world including The Walrus, Best Canadian Poetry, The Journey Prize Anthology, The Malahat Review, 32 Poems, The Scores, The Wales Arts Review, Terrain.org, and many others. The recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, he teaches writing at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. He lives with his family on the unceded and traditional territory of the syilx / ʔuknáqin in present-day Kelowna, BC.
Poetics Statement
“The insight for me, in the years writing Ghosthawk, was that the inner field of my imagination, my mind, was continuous with the field of wildflowers and the star fields. It’s an old insight; it’s nothing special, but it had a profound impact on me nonetheless. All the world in a grain of sand stuff.
The appearance on the page is only one manifestation of the energy of a poem. Poems also exist as physical and mental speech. In these forms, poems occupy different but equally true physical presences (Where in your head, for example, do you hear the poems you remember?). Poems can also exist as a kind of touch under the right conditions. Or as three-dimensional printouts. Or trees and grasses. Anything, really.
The question for me as an artist isn’t how to expand non-visual access to poems, but rather how to expand my own aesthetic preferences, how to make art that imagines difference from the beginning. Rather than thinking about what non-visual folks don’t have access to and how I might deliver that access to them, I find it generative to think of how I might be in better relationship with my non-visual friends and families and how I might care for them.
Great poems are to be lived with. They are inexhaustible. They are ongoing invitations to becoming. This is why a Japanese maple is a poem, why a friendship is a poem, why birdsong is a poem.”
Sample of Poet's Work
The Great Leap Forward
From Living Things. Gibsons, BC: Nightwood Editions, 2008.
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and none and none and none and none and un-
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zip, a light before light, quickening, like children
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of early enzymes feasting, each of each, protean
seas gone glacier, gathering footprints, thread, skin
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for collection at the Exhibit of Humans, a mountain
casting a mould from a city of walls and curs, women
at wash with basins of ashen water and no reflection
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to recognize their own husbands in a crowded pavilion
of charlatans, quack doctors, snake-oil salesmen
shilling goat glands for impotence, a foolproof gin,
horse semen brandy, and on the buckboard, a Christian
with hurdy-gurdy accompaniment hawking salvation
*
in the antebellum lands, where black winds separate kin
from kin, and the people of the plains hear the coming din
of cattle crossing the continent forty days before it even
begins, and leaded tins of fruits and vegetables poison
Franklin and his men, leaving them delirious and rotten
in the head, composed of thoughts and faith in a northern
passage from ocean to ocean that consumes them like vermin
in the cutch of an owl, picked to pieces, or else frozen
*
in the mind like that line from Keats we failed to learn,
heard melodies are sweet, unheard sweeter, so play on
into the cool afternoon of touching under tables, linen
hung on the line, saxifrage, stonecrop, phlox and gentian,
common-touch-me-not, the meadow beyond our garden
gate opening into bittersweet, death camas, fool's onion,
and again farewell-to-spring arrives in the parched season
of brittle grass, titian leaves, auburn and tawny crimson
infecting the edge of things, as dusk draws from dawn
to envelope us in dark arms like hope or lust, wintergreen,
the flowering weeds we kneel in without naming one
or all or none, for that is a kind of love we call possession
and have abandoned, Dominus vobiscum, a woman, a man
My Life Aboard the Last Sailing Ship Carrying Cumberland Coal
From I Don't Want to Die Like Frank O'Hara. Windsor, ON: Baseline Press, 2014
You give your firstborn daughter
A central-Asian name
Meaning blue or water.
Years later two bluebirds alight on either arm
And an artist’s quick needlework
Stitches birds to skin
So even
In your obsequies your fetlocks
Wing away, appear then disappear. Of course
Now you are a horse
With pale blue withers on a high Afghan plain.
What does it mean to be
Such a thing? Behind you, the blue Pamir mountains.
Before you, antiquity.
You follow a trade in lapis lazuli
From Badakhshan to the court of Cleopatra.
You see morning’s blue aurora
Alight on the Nile delta and around the eyes
Of the pharaoh. Oh.
Oh,
Isis, God of sailors. Entering the Salish Sea
Pamir becalms in a thick mist
Off Cape Flattery.
The water beneath the ship is dark lapis.
You are on the yard of the crossjack working canvas.
Out of the blue
The blue
Wings of eros and agape alight in you. Deus ex caritas.
Your God is born.
Cape Horn.
Galapagos. Azores.
The hurricane with a woman’s name that sinks Pamir
Off the blue shores
Of the Portuguese vernacular.
It all comes together in the English word
Azure. The hue of your daughter’s eyes.
Cognate of lapis lazuli.
The bird
A sailor gets on his arm for sailing the globe in three thousand years.
The horse that gathers away, appears then disappears.