PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Perhaps nothing is more rewarding to a mother than to have her son follow in her footsteps. Poet Airea Matthews was proud when her son began writing poetry in high school at Science Leadership Academy.
Now Matthews is following in his footsteps.
Her son, Wes, was Philadelphia’s student poet laureate in 2018. Airea Matthews has just been named the city’s Poet Laureate for 2022-23.
“I don’t think there’s been a situation where there’s been a parent that follows a child as poet laureate of a city so Philadelphia is the first in many respects,” Matthews said with a laugh, in an interview this week.
Matthews is the author of Simulacra, a collection of her poems, which won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 2016. She also won a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award that year, along with the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. In 2020, Matthews received a Pew Fellowship.
“Airea’s work is complex and challenging in all the best ways that I love to see poetry move us,” Yolanda Wisher, a former poet laureate and co-chair of the Poet Laureate Governing Committee, told KYW newsradio.
“Matthews is virtuosic, frantic, and darkly, very darkly, funny,” wrote Dan Chiasson in the New Yorker, reviewing Simulacra, which he praised for its ingenuity and variety of forms.
Matthews will admit to focusing on “things that happen that aren’t great,” but one of her favorite of her poems is "Black Ecstatic Ode," in which, she said, she turns her attention to moments of joy.
“Praise to the father holding his sleeping daughter on the 52nd Street trolley,” it begins, “To the daughter sleeping through the pothole thrum.”
You can hear Matthews read the entire poem below.
Matthews grew up in Trenton and Bucks County and attended Penn before moving to Detroit. She moved back East, to Philadelphia, about five years ago and directs the poetry program at Bryn Mawr College.
She said she was elated when she learned she’d been chosen as poet laureate, as was her son, now an anthropology major at Penn.
“It’s a very exciting time,” she said. “You know that you work very hard at your craft and you know that you care about your environment, the landscape that you inhabit, and to the degree you can mix both of those things—your art and your place—it feels very empowering.”
Philadelphia’s poet laureates are asked to pursue a major project to engage the City and its residents with poetry and Matthews hopes hers will make poetry more accessible to everyone in the city by mounting text-based public art installations in various locations, featuring excerpts from poems.
“A lot of times, folks are not going to open a book,” she said. “We’re busy and we’re not going to open a book but there’s something about words and there’s something about language that strikes an emotional cord or the root of whatever it is that someone is going through at any particular time, and I call those serendipitous engagements so at the point where you need that good word, it appears. I’m thinking about ways to make language appear for folks in every quadrant of the city."
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