Clive Matson (born March 13, 1941) is an American direct expression lyric poet[clarification needed] and creative writing teacher.

His father, Randolph Matson, an electrical engineer with the aircraft industry, moved his family in 1948 to an avocado orchard in San Diego County.

As a child Matson was interested in rocks, studied James Dwight Dana's System of Mineralogy, and found crystals in the hills beyond the farm.

After briefly attending the University of California at Riverside, Matson hitchhiked around the country and then toured Europe on foot, before settling in New York City in 1962.

He received broad guidance from Diane di Prima and Ginsberg, and Irving Rosenthal introduced him to the poetry of John Wieners and Michael McClure.

They discussed writing, ethics, drugs, jazz, Beat figures, and walked the streets of Manhattan, talking with a range of humanity from bums and thieves to workers, artists and members of high society.

In the company of Erin Black and friends, Matson used marijuana, hard drugs, and psychedelics and sought inspiration in literature, in indigenous cultures, in Eastern religion, in music, and in their own creative impulses.

In 1968 he traveled to England (a trip planned with Huncke, who withdrew at the last minute) and read poems at University Art Festivals throughout the United Kingdom.

"[2] Matson held to and developed his youthful instincts, and this effort was supported by several Beat paradigms: One, that a poem is shaped by the poet's breath, a perception extended by Charles Olson as "projective verse.

The childhood study of minerals informed Matson's sensibilities, since Dana's early science stipulated that visible qualities of crystals revealed their essence.

Relationships with Martha Muhs and Maggie Clougherty, and the general atmosphere of the 1970s engendered the sense that whatever strategies worked for Matson needed to include women.

Besides business cards, broadsides and issue number four of the Berkeley Poets' Cooperative,[9] he printed and bound his own book Heroin and John Ceely's The Country is Not Frightening as publisher Neon Sun.

He produced fine business cards, broadsides, announcements, and a number of chapbooks for Paul Mariah of ManRoot Press in the 1980s and early 1990s[11] In 1978, while Matson was giving readings in the Northwest, he was invited by Jack Estes to teach a workshop at Peninsula State College in Port Angeles, Washington.

When Matson stepped into the classroom, every comment fit those voices: analytical – from the Editor; understanding of the process – from the Writer; and impulsive or emotional – from the Child.

He began the reading series "Poetry Unbound" in 2013 with Richard Loranger and Harold Adler at Art House Gallery and Cultural Center in Berkeley, which continues today.

Following the tragic attacks of 9/11, Matson wrote Towers Down, published as a chapbook along with Diane Di Prima's Notes Toward a Poem of Revolution (Eidolon Editions, San Francisco, 2002).

Mainline to the Heart expressed Matson's concerns in hipster phrases and in the cool vernacular of the time, influenced by Van Buskirk and John Wieners.

Space Age (Croton Press, NY: 1969) added free-flowing, satiric portraits, inspired in part by the lyrics of Bob Dylan and apocalyptic visions of Van Buskirk.

Matson's political awareness found some larger expression, largely as criticism or riffs on the culture, in that volume and also in shorter poems written through the 1970s.

Equal in Desire (ManRoot, San Francisco, 1982 and 1983) also expanded the direct expression style into love poems, at the same time including awareness of gender and pro-feminist concerns.

[26] Hourglass (Seagull Press, Oakland, CA: 1987) is a series of eight-syllable line sonnets with rhyme and half-rhyme schemes, each with a creative process travelogue in prose.

After he began Crazy Child workshops, Matson discovered he was one of many who, on cracking open the door to the creative unconscious, was overwhelmed by floods of images.

Chaotic first drafts were eventually shaped into Squish Boots (Broken Shadow Publications, Oakland, CA: 2002), concerned with childhood and core family issues.

In the background resonates his learning from Ancient Greek Classics, William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Ranier Maria Rilke, Pablo Neruda and Rumi, as well as contemporary poets.

The voice aided in making a flexible structure for a series of poems, War Allies, inspired by difficult political times toward the end of the 20th Century, by 9/11, and by the encroachment of marketing into our private lives.

His poems evolve in a roughly straight line from Beat lyrics to direct expression to a deeper level of language, involving the primitive heart and limbic system.

The short essay Being Present: Paleo Poetry came about with help from Marie Martin, painter and childhood friend, and from John Paige (formerly Ceely) who has remained an insightful advisor since 1964.