Launch of John Mateer's Elsewhere

By Tracy


Elsewhere, the latest book by poet John Mateer, was launched Wednesday night at Planet Books in Mount Lawley.

Below is the text of the launch speech made by John Kinsella at the event, which drew a good crowd.

John Mateer’s Elsewhere

By John Kinsella

The persona behind these poems is a wanderer, and is indeed ghostlike, making small witnessings as he goes – even in his home-place – which pass through him, leaving a residue of loss, even pain, though often too degrees of love. The poet’s persona is a thing of emptiness that craves to be filled but must always remain bereft. Even poems that celebrate friendship, and celebrate the strength of resistance against imprisonment, oppression, and a litany of human wrongdoing, still convey a sense of the loss this process of witnessing must bring.

Poems for Mateer are not cathartic but inevitable. Though his poems express themselves clearly and concisely, noting observations of human behaviour communally and socially, there are also the private individual moments glimpsed and refracted through the wanderer-poet-ghost. For example, a street-kid or a prostitute or a white uncle and aunt who inflect the trauma of white colonisation in South Africa, or the tourist held up in a toilet block without surveillance, bitten on the shoulder by someone in “this land of AIDS”.

The achievement of Mateer’s verse is that he has the art of the storyteller but also an intense lyrical interiority that brings us close to both the experience being witnessed and the persona doing the witnessing. That doesn’t mean we’re necessarily reading Mateer himself, of course, but it does give a sense of great humanity.
As the poet wanders the globe in search of the meaning of the poet’s role, and ultimately in search of redemption in humanity, he focuses an acutely local eye on what he sees. By this I mean he is not appropriative of local custom and identity, but rather attempts to become a conduit for witnessing and even experiencing the uniqueness of any given place. Having said this, he can also be bitingly satirical toward those who hold the cultural and political capital, and how these are used to deprive others of their own heritage and rights of place. In a remarkable sequence of poems on the culling of elephants, Mateer manages both an elegy for the loss of elephants themselves and their complex social interactions, and the creation of a non-diminishing analogy for the broader condition of the oppressor and the oppressed.

One of the vibrant and deeply intelligent characteristics of Mateer’s verse, even in bleaker moments, is the revitalising nature of words themselves. He comfortably switches between English and languages of location, but this shouldn’t necessarily be seen as a celebration of the power of language to redeem; in fact, quite often in the case of Afrikaans the language carries an ominous weight that is almost invasive – as does English itself. Rather, language can ironise its own terms of production and allow us to see the faults in those who use it, including the poet himself.

It should be said, though, that there are also moments of great linguistic beauty, where friendship, place, experience and words themselves light up and almost synaesthetically become one. Mateer has also made himself a master of the line – he paces the line perfectly. He judges exactly when to end a line, when to enjamb, and when to break the stanza. In many ways, he is a formalist using a whole variety of prosodic techniques, but his crossing between language and place inevitably invests the English he primarily uses with a new energy. This energy isn’t just for pleasure, but is political. It implores the reader to follow “him” into these witnessings.

Don’t for a moment think that these are travelogue-poems – they couldn’t be if they tried. The persona behind these poems feels too much of the pain, and even more than that, fears the possibility of ennui. He desires love, though is not always sure of its presence; he celebrates the body and its sexuality but is always hesitant in exploring these. This hesitancy is what brings a trust to the reader of the poems; they are never lascivious.

I should say that there is also a searching spirituality at work here. At times you feel as if some inner peace has been arrived at, but then the doubt overwhelms. In seeing a truth, we find, to quote one poem:

“The translated man I am is becoming numerical: zero, ok.”

It would be a mistake to read this persona across Elsewhere as consistent and the same traveller-ghost in every poem – he is not. He transforms and transmutes – even though in many ways the external observer, he always absorbs a bit of the place he is in, which alters him. Then there’s the haunting intelligence which leads to the inevitable ironising of his own condition. Irony becomes his survival technique, the only way he can get through the trauma of this witnessing.

In the final section of the book we are in the Americas. His harshest insights are there at the centre of empire; “after the eagle has sprung to the Astroturf”, we join the eagle as empire inevitably draws us all to its centre. From America to Mexico, the final poem of the book, which is in the voice of the drug-smuggler (as Holy Ghost), the final line is “Wherever there is commerce I AM THERE”; the harshest judgement is reserved for the poet-wanderer-ghost-witness himself. This is also part of his persona, as inevitably all witnessings involve vicarious participation. He does not depict himself as standing outside the problems. There is no sense of the holier-than-thou in this book, and this is what makes Mateer one of the most genuinely ethical, sincere and visionary of poets.

The title of the book is so telling. Whenever we are not “at home”, we are elsewhere. And yet home for Mateer is one place and many. The book has made me realise how often the concept of elsewhere in so much other writing is an evasion of the responsibilities of respecting each and every place we pass through. The word “elsewhere” as it is generally and generically used seems so dismissive, but in the context of Mateer’s poems is so strongly evocative of the diverse threads that make up all of us, and our responsibilities toward each other.