David Matthews

                                                             

Magnapoets Feature Interview with David Matthews, a native of the South Carolina Midlands who now resides in Portland, Oregon. His poems have appeared in Abbey, Chattahoochee Review, Meander: The Journal, Ouroborus, Quill and Parchment, Red River Review, Tryst, and elsewhere. Matthews writes about literature, film, politics and current affairs, and other topics, including from time to time sports, on his blog Memo from the Fringes.

______________________________________________________________________________________

Magnapoets: What are your influences?

David Matthews: The usual litany goes something like this: the European tradition that ran from Baudelaire through Rimbaud, Verlaine, Apollinaire, and culminated in surrealism; the Beats, Gregory Corso in particular; Bob Dylan. These were my influences in the early years, and they remain important. More recently, over the past 15 years or so, I feel greater kinship with the English Romantics, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and the two great American poets Whitman and Dickinson. These are the ones who speak most to me.