Matthias Goeritz is represented in the archive by three poems from the thirty-fifth installment, presented in German with English translations by Susan Bernofsky, Christian Lux, and Kevin Prufer. The group includes Aus einem alten Anzug / From an Old Suit, Wir und die Jahreszeiten auf Nantucket / We and the Seasons on Nantucket, and Briefe an Alice / Letters to Alice. Together they move through family memory, island weather, birds, whaling history, graves, time, and literary allusion.
From an Old Suit
The first poem centers on a father remembered through pockets, chocolate, coins, sleep, loneliness, photographs, graves, and a suit. Clothing becomes a vessel for memory. Pockets hold small objects, while the suit itself becomes an imagined surface that decay will eventually transform.
This attention to objects places Goeritz naturally within poetry where family memory is carried through material things. A photograph album, clothing, coins, and dry socks gain emotional weight because they remain close to the body and to daily habit.
Graves and rooms
The poem gives graves architectural presence by describing them as rooms. Death becomes spatial, and the father’s suit extends that spatial imagination toward the body itself. Readers exploring modern poetry can follow how Goeritz turns ordinary objects into structures for thinking about mortality.
The image of worms reading a suit with their tongues gives decay a strange form of interpretation. Matter becomes legible through touch, consumption, and time.
Nantucket seasons
The second poem widens the scale dramatically. Spring frost, sparrows, goldfinches, hawks, gulls, berries, hurricanes, swans, turtles, snakes, field mice, whales, ships, petroleum, waves, shells, and sand form a long seasonal field around Nantucket.
The repeated “we” binds human presence to birds, weather, shore, and island history. Readers interested in poetic forms can approach the poem as a seasonal sequence whose structure develops through recurrence and accumulation.
Whaling and time
The poem remembers the departure of the last great whaling ship and the economic changes that followed new forms of illumination. Industrial history enters the lyric through whale oil, petroleum, stearin, and vanished fortunes.
That historical passage gives the island more than scenic presence. Nantucket becomes a site where ecology, labor, technology, and memory intersect. Time acts on both culture and coastline.
Waves and sand
Near the end, green water pounds the beach while the sea polishes shells and time grinds bodies toward glittering grains. The image links geological erosion with mortality.
This elemental scale gives Goeritz’s work affinities with experimental poetry that allows historical fact, natural observation, and philosophical meditation to occupy the same long sequence.
Letters to Alice
The third poem begins with the idea of running through texts as though they contained instructions for a better life. From there it moves through snapshots, present time, chances, tasks, rabbit burrows, watches, and the repeated declaration of being late.
The Alice reference brings the poem into conversation with a literary world of clocks, rabbits, altered scale, and unstable passage. Reading itself becomes part of the subject: texts promise guidance, while time continues to move.
Translation
The archive preserves all three poems bilingually, making translation part of the reading experience. Susan Bernofsky translates the first two works, while Christian Lux and Kevin Prufer translate Letters to Alice.
Translation gives sound, syntax, image, and cultural reference a second life in another language. Within contemporary poetry, Goeritz’s archived contribution offers a rich example of poems traveling through language while preserving their central fields of memory, place, mortality, and time.