In July, Cleopatra Mathis, who retired from Dartmouth College this year after 34 years teaching the art of writing poetry in the English Department, moved into a new house in East Thetford with her two dogs Fen and Zeno, and a very old cat, Sylvie, which, contrary to people’s assumptions, is male.
Mathis, who has published seven collections of poetry and had poems appear in nearly every distinguished American literary magazine, including The New Yorker, Southern Review, Georgia Review, and Ploughshares, as well as in the anthology Best American Poetry 2009, was eager to set up her desk so she could get back, after days of packing and unpacking, to her writing.
She put her desk in the living room, where windows facing north and south let in ample light, and organized her papers.
Later in the month, a big storm blew in from the west, one of those late-day thunderstorms when the skies turn black, rain cuts to the skin and trees snap in half.
“This wind came — and I know about gale-force winds, being from Louisiana,” Mathis said.
She was about to make biscuits in the kitchen when the powerful wind came through, lifting a stick of butter out of a shallow bowl and hurling it against a wall. The same wind also scattered the papers on Mathis’ desk onto the floor, willy-nilly.
“It was a full day’s work completely ruined,” Mathis said. As she shakes her head, her long corkscrew curls move with her.
The storm was the kind of natural event that turns up in Mathis’ poems, where life and death happen, often, on the periphery of the human world, and creep into our sight lines when we’re not expecting them.
It’s nature’s aftermath, and the invisible in nature (at least, mostly invisible to us), with which Mathis seems preoccupied: What happened before she got there, what happened when she wasn’t looking, and what happens when we’re too late — too late to save a place, a person, an animal, a marriage.
In spare, deceptively unadorned language, Mathis investigates our interiors by looking at the exteriors, the infinitesimal, myriad details that reveal so much about life, if we pay them close attention.
An old heron stands vigil by water’s edge, “some blind clockwork keeps her going.” Crows gather around a decomposing deer, “hunched over the skull.” A dead fox sprawls stiffly on the lip of a sand dune, its presence marring a pristine view of the Atlantic; it’s possible to ignore it, maybe, by staring only at the water but then “the currents of an odor wafted in and out, until the sweep of smell grew wider, wilder.”
Mathis’s work “uses nature as a way to unlock human relations,” said Vievee Francis, a poet who first met Mathis when they were both teaching at The Frost Place in Franconia, N.H., in 2010.
Francis will join the English Department at Dartmouth as an associate professor this September, where she will succeed Mathis in teaching the arts of reading and writing poetry.
Of Mathis’ poetry Francis said, “it’s work that has a lot at stake. What does it mean to only have nature to turn to? How much of the human belongs to nature?”
Mathis’ poems also meet one of her own criteria for what makes an effective and memorable poem, a lesson that she imparted to her Dartmouth students.
“Don’t tell me what you know; tell me what you don’t know,” Mathis said.
Mathis was born in Ruston, La., in 1947, the first child and oldest daughter of Messine Theodosiou Walton. She has a sister, Maria, and a half-brother, Tab Long, but her younger brother, Jimmy, died in 1979.
Her father, James Christopher Walton, abandoned the family early on. It had been an impulsive first marriage for Messine, and one frowned upon by Mathis’ maternal grandparents, Eleftherios and Cleopatra Theodosiou, for whom Mathis is named. Mathis saw her father very little after he left, and he died nearly 30 years ago.
The Theodosious had emigrated from the Greek island of Lesbos to the U.S. in 1922, although Eleftherios and his brother Stavros had been back and forth to the U.S. a few times prior. They’d returned to their hometown, Mitilini, the capital of Lesbos, to find brides, and having secured them, went back to the U.S, bringing their wives with them to make new lives.
The families had already lived through the cataclysms of the early 20th century: first, the slaughter of the Armenian Genocide in 1915, in which ethnic Greeks living in Turkey were also killed, including members of Cleopatra Theodosiou’s family; then World War I; and after that the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic.
Mathis’ grandparents, and great-uncle and -aunt, ended up in Birmingham, Ala., then home to a sizable and thriving Greek population.
When the Great Depression hit, many of the Greeks who’d come to Birmingham saw their businesses fail and dispersed throughout the South. The Theodosiou brothers and their wives also left. By 1934, after some fits and starts, the clan settled for good in Ruston, in northeastern Louisiana.
Ruston is bottomland, a place of swamps, bayous, lakes and pines, far removed in every way from the mountains and hill towns of Lesbos — the same island that, in the past three years, has been the first stop for thousands of refugees fleeing conflict in the Middle East and Africa, often dying in the attempt as they cross the Aegean from Turkey.
For Mathis’ grandparents, their history was one of loss, displacement and survival. They held fast to their customs, and language.
Eleftherios Theodosiou, who wrote poetry and liked to dance to Greek music, refused to learn English, mastering only the phrases “Hello, my friends,” “Come again” and “Thank you, thank you,” despite living in the U.S. for 50 years.
Her grandmother was the driving force in the family, Mathis said. She worked at a fever pitch, and demanded much of her three children, Messine, Jimmy and Michael. Still, said Mathis, she was “in mourning her entire life for what she’d lost.”
Mathis’ mother was educated in Birmingham at a school attached to a Greek Orthodox church, where she was taught in Greek, and later in an American elementary school. But her parents would not permit her to continue on to American high school, although her brothers were allowed to go. The daughter of the family was needed to work, and relations between Messine and her mother were always strained.
Higher education for women was frowned on, and Messine’s parents were intent on her making a good match to a Greek boy of their choosing.
But Messine rebelled, marrying James Walton at the age of 22. When he disappeared, leaving Messine with three young children: Cleopatra, Maria and then Jimmy, the Theodosious punished their, as they saw it, wayward daughter.
They brought her back into the fold, they let her work in the restaurant, and they paid her bills in full. But she wasn’t allowed to have a car and they made her work seven days a week, opening the cafe every morning at 4.
“She was not paid a red cent,” Mathis said. “Ask me why she was a bad mother: they owned her.”
When Mathis was 11 her mother married again, to another man who was abusive to her and her children, Mathis said.
Messine had dreamed of being a poet or writer but she was trapped in the “worst kind of life,” Mathis said. “She never had the kind of independence to be able to make independent decisions.”
Her mother’s tragedy was, Mathis said, that she was neither wholly Greek, nor wholly American, but caught in a shadow world where she invented a fabulous, dreamy life for herself to compensate for a harsh existence.
As a child, Mathis, in some ways, was living a life that in its constraints seemed more suited to Greece in the 1910s, although both her grandparents and uncles doted on her. Her grandmother tried to set up a possible marriage for her when Mathis was 16, which Mathis completely rejected.
On the other hand, she had the freedom of going out into the swamps and bayous, taking peanut butter sandwiches with her, climbing trees and exploring by building makeshift bridges across the bayous, which took her deeper into wilderness.
This early immersion in nature has found its way into her poetry time and again.
“I don’t think I decided to use nature; I think nature decided to use me,” Mathis said. “I don’t find it easy to write without using nature.”
Mathis also had an early appetite for reading and a deep curiosity. And she had Uncles Mike and Jimmy, her mother’s brothers, and their cousins, all of whom had grown up together in Birmingham, and then Ruston.
But it was Jimmy Theodosiou who was like a father to her, and who encouraged Mathis from an early age to further her education. Because Ruston then lacked both a public library and a school library, he enrolled her in two book clubs, one for classics, the second for history. He bought her a piano and paid for lessons.
“You can do anything you want. You’re smart, you can go to college,” he told her.
When Mathis enrolled in the local university, Louisiana Tech, in Ruston, Jimmy and his wife took in Mathis, who didn’t have the money to live in the dorms and was paying the tuition, then about $54 a term, by working at her grandparents’ restaurant. From there she could easily walk to the campus.
Mathis was already writing poetry, interested in writing fiction and plays, and she’d had the benefit of a dedicated high school English teacher who introduced her to many of the great poets, including the early 20th century moderns.
At Louisiana Tech, Mathis studied under another teacher who proved influential, Francis Gwaltney, a novelist. Gwaltney was Mathis’ adviser, and he urged her family to let her leave Ruston to study at Tulane University in New Orleans. (Although Tulane then had a women’s college, Sophie Newcomb, attached to it, Mathis was let into Tulane as a special student).
Here, Mathis flourished. Then, the old story: She met a boy and fell in love.
He was a senior at Tulane and they married. He was drafted, sent to officer training school and they moved to Randolph Air Force Base in Converse, Texas, outside San Antonio. While continuing her college education at Southwest Texas State University, in San Marcos, she was hired to teach English literature at a local high school.
Nurse, secretary or teacher was the usual paradigm then for women who wanted careers, and Mathis wanted a middle-class life, not difficult to understand given the uncertainties of life with her mother. “I was a pretty crummy hippie,” she said.
Mathis loved teaching, not least because, she said, “I was teaching myself to write poems by teaching poems.” But she was unhappy in the marriage, which ended after three years.
By that time she had met the man who would become her second husband, Bill Mathis, who was a captain in the Air Force and was getting his doctorate at the University of Texas, Austin. They moved to Trenton, N.J., where Bill Mathis was deputy assistant commissioner of education.
Being a Southerner in the North in the early ’70s was not always a comfortable fit.
“I just felt completely foreign,” Mathis said. She worked hard to rid herself of a heavy Southern accent, although there are still soft twinges of it left.
She felt that she was a “Southerner out of place, and a Greek out of place, too,” coming from a place where they’d been the only Greek family to a region where there were large, well-established Greek communities that were hard to penetrate.
But she kept writing. Bill Mathis encouraged her to get a master’s degree in poetry, and he paid for her to attend an M.F.A. program in writing at Columbia University. She taught English in the Trenton schools and commuted to Columbia, graduating in 1978.
They had a daughter, Alexandra, who now lives in a converted barn on Mathis’ property in Thetford. (Mathis has three other children: two step-children and one son from her marriage with Bill Phillips, a filmmaker and screenwriter in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Dartmouth.)
Her first published poems were under the name Mathis, and she has kept it for that reason, as well as from a sense of gratitude to her ex-husband. “I became an adult with that name,” she said.
(Bill Mathis now lives in Vermont, and telecommutes to his job as managing director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has also served as a superintendent of schools in the Rutland Northeast Supervisory Union. He sits on the Vermont Board of Education and is a frequent national commentator on education.)
In her new work, Mathis said she is going back to her childhood in Louisiana, which was the grist for her first two volumes of poetry, Aerial View of Louisiana (1979) and The Bottom Land (1983). The Center for Cold Weather (1989) was her third collection, followed by Guardian (1995), What to Tip the Boatman (2001), White Sea (2005) and then Book of Dog, which won the Sheila Motten Book Prize, awarded by the New England Poetry Club.
Mathis had told herself earlier, “I’m through writing about Louisiana, and I realize now, that’s not right. I’ll be writing about Louisiana until I die. It’s interesting the way you go back to these crucial issues.”
Sydney Lea, a Newbury resident and the former Vermont poet laureate, who has known Mathis and admired her work for years, wrote in an email that “Cleopatra has been in Yankee territory for virtually all of her adult life, but there remains in her poetry and her conversation a great charge of the Southern raconteur’s art; there is always a palpable and credible landscape under her poems, and … the rich particularity of good story-telling is always right there under the surface of her deliberately restrained diction.
“She implies a world of almost infinite complexity and human feeling, and it is that restraint in doing so that makes her work so stirring.”
Mathis came to Dartmouth in 1982, hired to start a creative writing program. When she talks about why and how poetry moves people, she speaks with exacting precision.
“It’s a very personal art and a duplicitous one,” she said. “The demands of a poem are always two-fold: the outer structure and the interior mystery. … I think that’s why poems take so long to write. You find your subject very, very slowly. In that sense, it’s not like the novel, where the question is: what is the problem, the trouble that is causing this novel to be written? …
“Poems exist in mystery. They exist to be mysterious and what brings you back to them is the mystery. A poem is always trying to say something that can’t be said.”
In the past six years, Mathis has lived with a number of complex health issues that accelerated her retirement from Dartmouth. She will continue to teach workshops, she said, although she conceded that she is likely done teaching undergraduates, to her disappointment.
Undergraduates are fresh and eager, she said. But they also have to unlearn habits they’ve picked up in high school, where they are taught to analyze and look for meaning, while also believing that creative writing is mostly about catharsis, or evoking emotion.
“My job is to show them the difference between their feelings and what is art. I’m trying to train them away from thinking about art as merely a matter of self-expression,” Mathis said.
Having left the college, Mathis hopes that she will now have more time to write poetry, to travel back to Greece, and to go to Provincetown on Cape Cod, where she has held fellowships and where she most likes to work.
She recalled that as a child she didn’t see the ocean — in her case, the Gulf of Mexico — until she was 18. She’d seen photographs but, she said, no one had told her about the sound of it, the unending waves, the slap of water against rock, the wash of the tides.
In Provincetown, she rents a place on the ocean, and when she’s there, she can hear the lapping of water under the deck of the house, an unceasing reminder of how nature has animated her and sustained her poetry.
“It feels like a heartbeat,” she said.
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.
Correction
Cleopatra Mathis was 18 when she visited the Gulf of Mexico. In addition, she moved to New Jersey with her second husband, Bill Mathis, when he became the deputy assistant commissioner of education in that state. An earlier version of this story gave an incorrect age for when she first saw the ocean and incorrectly described what job Bill Mathis had.