Samhi C.

Features Editor

skc5908@psu.edu

At 6 P.M. on Thursday, November 9, 2023, Matthew Roth visited our campus to perform a reading of his latest work as the third installment of the Smith Creative Writers Reading Series hosted by the Behrend Creative Writing Department. 

Roth, a poet, has had his work published in several literary magazines as well as had two books published: “Bird Silence” in 2009 by Woodley Press and “Rains Rain” in 2023 by FutureCycle Press. 

Unlike that of some writers, Roth’s work does not simply hope to fixate on one overarching theme or feeling. Instead, as Prof Tom Noyes stated in his introduction to the reading, Roth’s work is “tonally complex.” It plays with many themes, many emotions, and many aspects of human life.

In “Rains Rain,” there are poems such as “Debris” and “Fatherly Gesture” that directly display day-to-day parental mistakes. There are poems such as “Against Machines” that discuss how, without machines, humans would be more attentive and connect to nature, and my favorites, poems such as “Way and Wood” and “Why” that comment on the human condition but require a certain level of analysis and stepping past the words on the page.

I especially love “Way and Wood,” the first poem in the collection that describes how the speaker of the poem feels as though they “find [them]self | a noun without a verb” or alternatively “no substance, | a verb, unsponsored and unbound.” On one hand, it’s a metonymic moment in which the poem is commenting on language and how it functions. At the same time, I find that this poem describes how easy it is for us human beings to lose our own meaning and lose track of the meaning of our actions and how easy it is for us to feel weary of trying to live with purpose. Thank you, Existentialism. 

I also find that in a more optimistic light, the last poem in the collection, “Why,” in which every line starts with “Because,” gives us the reasons that this same speaker lives the way they do, a list of life’s purposes, that flow into the last line “Because love is the business of fire, of heat | and the light.” In essence, this poem is telling us that the highest purpose of life, at least for this individual, is love and the passion it brings.

I also find that Roth’s poems are varied in structure not all written in the same form. This, too, I admire. 

“As a human being,” Roth tells us, “I have lots of moods.” He admits that he might be more successful if he did stick to “one or two big ideas” as some writers do. But he says he can’t, choosing to be faithful to the holistic human experience instead. 

Whatever his own opinions towards his success might be, I believe he is more successful than the rinse-and-repeat writers and guarantee that I, for one, will be following in his footsteps. 

It feels good to know that there are some writers, at least, who do not just choose to regurgitate the same ideas twenty-thousand times, making audiences think, ‘We got it the first one-thousand-nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine times.’ Roth’s work is a breath of much-needed fresh air, a break from the rinse-and-repeat writings we are forced to learn in most classrooms and marketable contemporary authors are forced to spit out.

Roth, originally from Sandwich, New Hampshire, earned a B.A. in English at Houghton College, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Wichita State University, and a Ph.D. in Literature at the University of North Texas. He currently resides in Grantham, Pennsylvania, where he is an English professor at Messiah University.