David Matlin, PhD

David Matlin is a novelist, poet, and essayist. His collections of poetry and prose include the books China Beach, Dressed In Protective Fashion, and Fontana's Mirror. His first novel, How the Night is Divided, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1993. His newest book, Vernooykill Creek: The Crisis of Prisons in America, published by San Diego State University Press, is based on a ten-year experience teaching in one of the oldest Prison Education Programs in the nation in New York State. This extended essay is a discussion of the crisis of prisons, the invention of surplus populations, and how, in making prison our largest growth industry, we are mining our own civil disintegrations at unprecedented levels. The author studied with Robert Creeley, John Clarke, Diane Christian, and wrote his PhD on William Blake at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His interests lie primarily with Black Mountain, the writers of the San Francisco Renaissance, with the visual arts, and the questions and concerns posed at the threshold of a new century, and especially as the great poets Robert Duncan and William Carlos Williams formulated the starkness of these issues: "Pound, Lawrence, Joyce, H.D., Eliot, have a black voice when speaking of the contemporary scene, an enduring memory of the first World War that has revealed the deep-going falsehood and evil of the modern state ... Their threshold remains ours. The time of war and exploitation, the infamy and lies of the new capitalist war-state, continue. And the answering intensity of the imagination to hold its own values must continue," Robert Duncan, and William Carlos Williams: "Poetry is a rival government always in opposition to its cruder replicas."