Harry (Burchell) Mathews Biography

(2000) A constant that has inspired my writing through many years of varied efforts is my original passion for reading. From late childhood on, poetry and imaginary narrative seemed to me to give access to compelling realities that could be communicated in no other way; and of these two, poetry has always had a primordial supremacy. So I think I have tried to bring to my prose writing poetry's intensity and authority, which depend essentially on abstract as opposed to representational elements. This had led some readers to consider me a writer who plays games, an attitude apparently justified by my membership in the Oulipo. To the extent that this may be so, I would like to say that the games are played in dead earnest and that their only purpose is to lure onto the page my obsessive and otherwise indecipherable sense of what is true.

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