Matthew Gwathmey, Tumbling for Amateurs

 

A DIVE

Look to Sparta
or Athens
or Rome
for examples
of how to
reduce risk.
Jump for height
and distance,
alighting on praxis.
Bend arms,
duck head,
and forward
body over.
Never strike
the middle
of your back first.
Gradually
increase the height
and distance
until you can
dive across
the whole court
without jolting
or bumping
yourself in the least.

The second full-length collection by Fredericton, New Brunswick poet Matthew Gwathmey, following the full-length debut, Our Latest in Folktales (London ON: Brick Books, 2019) [see my review of such here] and the chapbook looping climate (above/ground press, 2022), is Tumbling for Amateurs (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2023). “We have no other way to touch each other.” he writes, to open the poem “NO OTHER WAY.” “Really no other way to touch each other. / We seek this particular exercise because / we have no other way to touch each other.” Compiled as a collection of collaged and reassembled text and image, Tumbling for Amateurs is a book of lyric translation, response, poetic structure, play and verve, riffing off an athletic manual of the same name, described on this collection’s back cover as “a 1910 manual from the Spalding Athletic Company.” As Gwathmey writes as part of his “NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS” at the end of the collection:

Tumbling for Amateurs is a modern reimagining of an old sporting manual written by a distant relative. The original text literally fell into my lap, and I was immediately taken by the descriptions of various feats of tumbling as well as accompanying illustrations and associated metaphors. I tried to peel back these layers to find the possibility of a hidden subculture of desire, both homosocial and homoerotic. This collection aims to give voice to a suppressed existence of the early twentieth century. James Tayloe Gwathmey’s original text of the same name was published in 1910 as part of Spalding’s Athletic Library and was gifted to me by someone who recognized the last name and thought that it must be poetry. JTG really is my distant relative: my second cousin, four times removed. I wanted to write the book that my friend thought Tumbling for Amateurs was.

There’s a twirling and tumbling to his lines, many of which might need to be heard or spoken to be properly appreciated. “All in a queue & start & start & we start & we / start & we crotch front & we straddle over & / we crotch back & we straddle under & we / crotch front,” the poem “CROTCH & STRADDLE” begins. Sharp and studied, the poems that accumulate, and even collage, into this book-length collection display a myriad of forms, offering overt play and visual displays of language, sound and, dare I say it, gymnastic fervor. “Reclining at meat,” the poem “THE JOUSTING TOURNAMENT” begins, “three guys clench each other’s hopes / and roll into chivalrous accolades. / To aid and succour at the sound of a bugle or herald’s cry – / Arthur squats, / Bennie planting charity / on Arthur’s strength.” The images included by Gwathmey, acrobatically collaged from the source volume, illustrate the poems, but just as much interact, and even counterpoint, allowing a visual thread that intermingles with the poems in its own simultaneous direction through the collection. Leaning into male movement, attention and desire, the poems open from the perspective of a subject matter that, at least from the source material, both suggests and deflects, all of which is on full display in Matthew Gwathmey’s playful blend of translation and reimagining.