Parenting & Family Quote by Harry Mathews

There is a deliberately disarming humility in Mathews admitting, late in a career, that he still has to "learn how to write poetry". Coming from an author associated with Oulipo and formal constraint, the line reads less like self-deprecation than a sly redefinition of mastery: real skill isn’t the accumulation of techniques, it’s the willingness to return to the most demanding form and feel like a beginner again.

"Get back to that" implies a lost center of gravity. For writers who move between genres, poetry often functions as the original pressure point: the place where language stops being a vehicle and becomes the subject. Mathews frames poetry not as a prestige category but as a practice he’s been circling. The casual "Actually" corrects the first sentence midstream, revealing the underlying desire beneath the project-management veneer. He starts with a plan, then admits it’s more existential than logistical.

"I'm not kidding" is the clincher. It anticipates the reader’s suspicion that this is an ironic posture, a famous writer playacting modesty. Mathews blocks that escape route. In doing so, he also hints at a broader literary context: postwar experimentalism often prizes cleverness, systems, and gamesmanship. Here he signals a different hunger - for the kind of concentration and vulnerability poetry demands, where constraints don’t just produce novelty, they expose what you can’t fake.

The intent feels practical, even workmanlike; the subtext is almost spiritual: to restart, to submit, to risk being bad in public after being good for decades.