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On March 5, 1998, the PSA co-sponsored "A Tribute to William Matthews" with the Academy of American Poets and The New School at The New School in New York City. He died on November 12, 1997, the day after his fifty-fifth birthday. The following essay by Stanley Plumly is written for Matthews, a past President of the PSA.

We are all unique, but some of us are more unique than others. Bill Matthews was the most unique man many of us will ever know. For one thing, so many of us are the stuff of contradictions. Bill was a man of reconciliations: he brought together, in both his poems and his person, an Ohio common sense and a rare scholarship of intellectual and social sophistication. He also embodied the understanding that to think at the level of his marvelous mind was to be both skeptic and romantic, wit and village wise man. As a thinker and writer, he had an uncanny gift--indeed, a genius--for selection: the right moment, the right word, the perfect image. He was a maker of symmetries and correspondences, a reconciler of dissonance and differences. And such skills were as much at the service of his public work as they were at the center of his own work. He knew and loved jazz, but he loved and knew equally the opera--the cool riff reconciled with the heightened aria. For Bill, both of these arts, like his poems, celebrated the solo-one with economy, the other with exaltation, and both with longing. His knowledge of and love for the best in food and wine were legendary, but no less than his insight into the beauty of the jump shot and the subtlety of the lead pass. He was, perhaps too much, the apparent master of his own anxieties, yet he was certainly also the master of other people's worries. He seemed, therefore, the master of ceremony, whether in front of a class or an audience. His diplomatic abilities were at the heart of his personality. He brought people together.

As a friend he was rock and oak. That is why, now that he is reconciled with gods, his passing is so difficult, and why, now months after his death, I still get mail and phone calls from those who knew him and mourn him. He was a friend of fierce understatement, clarity, integrity, and, above all, democracy. He was lifelong, and he did not judge who you were, only what you were. That is why he touched so many lives across such a wide national spectrum of writers in the thirty or so years in which he himself wrote, talked about, and taught, with extraordinary success, the writing of poetry. He treated people with equanimity and honesty and with the quiet authority of someone who hated to waste words. At the same time, what people most remember and value about Bill's friendship--particularly those I've heard from--was his generosity of time and spirit.

I'm sure I'm not alone in those moments when it still seems impossible that he is gone. He had just hit his stride. His last book, Time and Money, was his best book. And his new book, After All, is his best book--even more demanding--sardonic, lyric, elegaic, embracing of tones and shadows, sharply and deeply felt, scrupulously thought, flawlessly written. The picture of the author, taken November 10th, the day before his fifty-fifth birthday and two days before he died, shows a face worn to the wood with a lifetime of experience and thoughtfulness and not a little sublimity and heartbreak. It is a wonderful face--especially the eyes and the expansive, blessed forehead. Yet he died decades too young. Finally, he could not reconcile his beautiful brain with his broken body--a body that had seemed, more than once, to be a miracle of survival.

--Stanley Plumly

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Matthews Ah Um Dear Bill, on the pavement to your service, in the gingko oak muddle of the night's storm, a tiny tulip shone, one piece of metal confetti, as if coming up in November through cement. And in a gutter, wound with dark leaves like hair, a pink toothbrush. Are you packed? Do you have your hanky, have you got your keys? A trio of people came toward me, laughing, taking up the whole sidewalk, I wanted for them to be removed rapidly so I could walk without swerving, but then I thought, as if you broke out in me in a riff, Joy takes precedence over sorrow, Kiddo, so I veered around them, in close to the Orthodox Church, her porch mossed with tiny, pink, paper hearts. Any of us who has failed in love might feel ashamed to be alive and well when Bright Star and you are parted, not that I'm offering to take your place, Not this pig-life-line we would toss between us, who were raised as if intended to give up to others, and did not want to and didn't. But then you learned the bright-star language, the earliest human tongue, pure love's licks, like and unlike a mother's cleaning of her own inner foods and debris from the newborn's mouth and eyes. By the curb, shards of gold reflector, standing in its crackelure two old couples and two young cops, and near the funeral home, a tall handsome man, making music with coins in a cup. From my pocket, a dollar of our sorry republic, his eyes a lot like yours and mine, Bill, afraid and proud and humorous. I think you would have liked the service, your gifts and virtues praised, your flaws praised as virtues, as if we have all drunk bright star and can sing for an hour. At the end, when the horn went up and cried out, we couldn't tell his wails from ours, in those phrases the brilliant brass, massed tears, fresh flowers, swam and murled. Until that moment, I had thought a person was his flesh-when Galway had said, They took the body to Bellevue, I had thought, No, they took Bill to Bellevue. But now I saw I had been wrong, the skin of your coffin silken, the grain musical, the hidden burl structural power. Dear Bill, up above the bole, as if from the tree you sing, now, in perpetuity. You came naked from your mother's womb shrieking and wincing, you leave the earth rich with song, gleaming with new love's knowing. -Sharon Olds