Trigons

by John Matthias

Trigons derives its title from an obscure Roman ball game mentioned by Petronius in Satyricon. The word also has meanings in the fields of music, astrology, gemology, architecture, poetics, and comic book illustration, all relevant to this book that is sub-titled "Seven Poems in Two Sets and a Coda." Trigons shares something of the same spirit as Matthias's two most extravagantly inventive experimental sequences, Automystifstical Plaice and From a Book of Years. In an essay on Matthias's cycles and sequences from the 1970s through the present, Mark Scroggins has said that Trigons explores the poet's "usual historical and literary obsessions, this time revolving much around the Second World War" through a series of surprising juxtapositions like that between the Nazi Rudolph Hess and his contemporary the English pianist Myra Hess, or the discovery made during the book's composition of yet another John Matthias, this one a British composer and neurophysicist" who becomes a shadowing doppelganger in this book in which both music and neurology play a highly significant role.

112 pages, Paperback

First published May 14, 2010

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Trigons the book is based on trigons the game, described in Petronius, much like hotbox from baseball lore, but instead of a runner, the scorer counts the drops of the ball; trigons in Matthias' book is a form, seven parts to a poem, seven "drops" making, as it were, the game. The formal method within these rounds, however, is the Poundian ideogram. Matthias writes about the period of his first travels in Europe, and the book acts as a kind of memoir particularly concerned with his relationship to the Beats, to the novelist and critic Charles Newman, and to a historian mentor, Harvey Goldberg. This long poem also involves various aliases, alter egos, and whimsical asides; the "life" remembered here, while it is certainly Matthias', is difficult to parse for its inflections of the author's fantasy -- with Matthias, it is useful to recall that whatever interest there may be in passing down through the annals the history of the right people it will include both Berryman and Pound, the former of whom, at least, Matthias did meet (though that's not here). Some readers will be turned off by the the sheer abundance of the recondite and the name-checked. Conceptions of the poem belong to poets; they rely on conceptions of the poet. As the bardic conception shifted to administer to the hurt feeling in American vernacular music (I'm name-checking a historical period here: Post WWII) the priestly poet-craftsman who would be bard vitiated his character to know his role (voila: Berryman). Thus Pound's priest meets Berryman's alter egos in the person of JM, the set of forces surrounding priestly conceits of the poet in Trigons.