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Mingus at the Showplace

By William Matthews 1942–1997 William Matthews

I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen,

and so I swung into action and wrote a poem,

and it was miserable, for that was how I thought

poetry worked: you digested experience and shat

literature. It was 1960 at The Showplace, long since

defunct, on West 4th St., and I sat at the bar,

casting beer money from a thin reel of ones,

the kid in the city, big ears like a puppy.

And I knew Mingus was a genius. I knew two

other things, but they were wrong, as it happened.

So I made him look at the poem.

“There’s a lot of that going around,” he said,

and Sweet Baby Jesus he was right. He laughed

amiably. He didn’t look as if he thought

bad poems were dangerous, the way some poets do.

If they were baseball executives they’d plot

to destroy sandlots everywhere so that the game

could be saved from children. Of course later

that night he fired his pianist in mid-number

and flurried him from the stand.

“We’ve suffered a diminuendo in personnel,”

he explained, and the band played on.

William Matthews, “Mingus at the Showplace” from Time and Money: New Poems. Copyright © 1995 by William Matthews. Reprinted with the permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Source: Poetry (October 1991).

Biography

William Matthews's poetry has earned him a reputation as a master of well-turned phrases, wise sayings, and rich metaphors. Much of Matthews's poetry explores the themes of life cycles, the passage of time, and the nature of human consciousness. In another type of poem, he focuses on his particular enthusiasms: jazz music, basketball, and his children. His early writing was free-form and epigrammatic. As his career has . . .

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