Clive Matson

Clive Matson arrived in NYC in 1960. He quickly fell in with the Beat Generation – his first event was a reading where he met Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Diane di Prima. Herbert Huncke became his second father. Diane di Prima published Matson’s first poems.

He returned to school and earned his MFA in poetry at Columbia. He has taught more than 3,000 workshops nationwide, and his how-to text Let the Crazy Child Write! (New World Library, 1998), honoring the creative unconscious, is being used by a number of groups around the world.

Matson co-edited, with the late Allen Cohen, the anthology An Eye for an Eye Makes the Whole World Blind - Poets on 9/11 (Regent Press, 2002), which won the 2003 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles National Literary Award. His seventh book, Squish Boots (2002), was placed, amazingly, in John Wieners’ coffin.

Chalcedony’s Second Ten Songs (2009) is his current enthusiasm, a passionate, erotic and spiritual voice evolved from the Mainline poems. Mostly Matson writes from the itch in his body.