Life & Wisdom Quote by Harry Mathews

"Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest"

Harry Mathews, Author

About this Quote

Mathews is naming the magic trick good poems pull in plain sight: they say one thing and mean another, and the best ones widen that gap until it becomes the point. “Dislocation of words” isn’t just metaphor; it’s a compositional ethic. Move language off its usual tracks and you expose how much “sense” depends on habit, not truth. The phrase “what they say they’re saying” has a sly, self-canceling humor: poems don’t just speak, they stage the performance of speaking. Mathews is drawn to that theatrical double register, where the poem’s surface is a decoy and the real signal lives in undertow, rhythm, omission, misdirection.

The subtext is an argument against the utilitarian demand that language be a transparent pipeline for meaning. In Mathews’s world, clarity can be a kind of lie - a pretense that words behave. The “distance” he praises is where contradiction, irony, and unconscious material leak in. It’s also where a reader becomes necessary. If the poem’s “actual” saying isn’t identical to its declared saying, interpretation isn’t decoration; it’s the completion of the work.

Context matters: Mathews is tied to Oulipo and other constraint-driven experiments that treat writing as a system you can hack. Dislocation is both aesthetic and procedural - a deliberate engineering of mismatch that produces surprise, comedy, and unease. He’s not romanticizing ineffability; he’s admiring precision of a different kind: the exact placement of ambiguity so the poem can tell on itself.

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Topic	Poetry
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About the Author

Harry Mathews (born February 14, 1930) is a Author from USA.

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