Matthew Hittinger's Blog, page 12

Ornament Stories: Day 2

A cardinal on a pinecone nest. Another craft. Once a month the women’s craft guild would meet in the social hall at Rosemont, my father’s church for 18 years. The room smelled of hot glue guns, silk flowers and Spanish moss, and when I was done with my homework I would help my mother construct this month’s object, always warned away from the glue gun’s heat. Hot cardinal, Christmas bird, the festive red in the bleached winter light. A sprig of holly, shed blood next to evergreen, colors that tingle with Sun God birth and Goddess renewal, the Oak King’s triumph over the Holly King, Lord of Light locked with Lord of Dark. Yuletide symbols the Christians so easily hooked onto so that all our seasons are palimpsest. A cardinal is just a cardinal, new world bird of the Americas, named by colonists who saw the male’s crest and thought of a Catholic bishop’s headdress. But to see that streak of red when the Earth has turned from the sun, when all of nature seems to slumber—the bird still brings wonder.

Ornament Stories: Day 1

For the month of December, I’ll be posting little stories about the ornaments on my Xmas tree. You can take the boy out of Christmas City, USA…

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My little sister’s birthday is today, December 1st (Happy Birthday, Jess!). We are four and half years apart, so one’s full birthday is the other’s half. My early summer, end-of-school year birthday parties were usually the Showbiz Pizza kind, or video game fueled sleepovers with cake and newly unwrapped He-Man figures battling on the back porch. For my sister, a string of celebrations around the dining room table where she and her girlfriends would make crafts as part of the entertainment. I loved crafts, anything arts or arts adjacent that let me use my hands to make beautiful objects. So this older brother often joined in. One year we made cut-out cookie ornaments. I have two on my tree to this day: a star covered in gold glitter and a miniature stylized fir decorated with puffy paint. And they still smell of cinnamon and ginger, applesauce and glue.

Skin Shift: The Stats

I meant to publish this post sometime after Skin Shift was released back in 2012 and it just never happened, probably because I borrowed info from it for various interviews last year and for the Poets & Writers profile they did on me. But still–since I did one previously for my chapbooks, let me pause and take a moment to look at the history and stats for this book project.

The first incarnation of Skin Shift was as a chapbook, which I started sending out in 2005. It consisted primarily of the poems in the “Mutatis Mutandis” section under the title Questions of Metamorphosis with a few from the “Protean Ambitions” section.  In early 2007 I sent out the first full-length version of the manuscript, which included Narcissus Resists and Platos de Sal as sections.  In fact, both sequences were written in tandem with the stand-alone poems to flesh out that early chapbook into a full-length manuscript, and I later popped them out as their own chapbooks when I realized they could stand on their own.  My ideal reader situation was that people who were familiar with “Narcissus” and “Platos” in their chapbook incarnations would gain a new layer of context for them within the wider scope of the full-length version.

That early version of the manuscript placed as a top five finalist for the New Issues Poetry Prize, which was judged by Carl Phillips.  That was prize enough, to know that Carl Phillips had read my work.  The manuscript was later a finalist for the 2009 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize; not a bad track record with the whole contest system.

Other ways it changed: “The Metamorphosis Treatise”–the meditation on Kafka’s Metamorphosis in the middle of the collection–was the final section added. This project is heavily influenced by Anne Carson, among others (Alice Fulton’s Sensual Math, James Merrill’s Changing Light at Sandover), and in my efforts to recast myths of transformation and tackle the whole question of metamorphosis in as many ways possible, I found a poetic essay on a text I could not ignore would add one more facet to the idea I was turning and examining.

Now some data: according to my records, I sent out this manuscript (including its chapbook incarnation) 42 times from 2005 until 2010, solely to contests. The amount of money invested (or to try to spin it in a more positive light, the amount of money I used to support presses and other books of poetry): $982.  Silly, I know.  Those $20-$25 entry fees really add up!  But averaging that out over six years, and I know this flattens out the stats a bit, but that’s about $165-$175 a year.  Thank goodness I have a day job.  And to think: it was finally picked up on the 43rd try–the only time I sent it out in 2011–when I decided to send it for the first time to an open submission period with no fee. Thank you, Sibling Rivalry Press.

I have another post drafted on The Erotic Postulate‘s stats. I’ll post that in 2014 once the book is released.

Casting and Gathering

Back in the summer of 1999 I did a little independent study over in Ireland between my junior and senior year of college called “The Solitary Voice”. It was a class for actors and writers and I was the lone poet. We all had to memorize a text–the actors monologues from plays such as The Mai by Marina Carr and Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane. I chose a poem by Seamus Heaney, “Casting and Gathering” which he dedicated to Ted Hughes.

We did our final performances on the Aran Islands, on the summer solstice, and hearing the news of Heaney’s death today (at an age that is spitting distance from my own father), the rhythms of this poem have come rushing back.

Casting and Gathering

for Ted Hughes

Years and years ago, these sounds took sides:

On the left bank a green silk tapered cast

Went whispering through the air, saying hush

And lush, entirely free, no matter whether

It swished above the hayfield or the river.

On the right bank, like a speeded-up corncrake,

A sharp ratcheting kept on and on

Cutting across the stillness as another

Fisherman gathered line-lengths off his reel.

I am still standing there, awake and dreamy.

I have grown older and can see them both

Moving their arms and rods, working away,

Each one absorbed, proofed by the sounds he’s making.

One sound is saying, ‘You aren’t worth tuppence,

But neither is anybody. So watch Number One!’

The other says, ‘Go with it! Give and swerve.

You are everything you feel beside the river.’

I love hushed air. I trust contrariness.

Years and years go past and I cannot move

For I see that when one man casts, the other gathers

And then vice versa, without changing sides.

Birthday 35

A birthday post to round-up the latest news and happenings:

The big news is that I’ve signed the contract for my second release from Sibling Rivalry Press, The Erotic Postulate. It will be out in September 2014 along with Stephen Mills’ second book, Brent Calderwood’s first book, and Douglas Ray’s anthology of queer Southern writing. It will be an epic week for poetry, and I look forward to the readings and events the four of us will cook up to promote the titles.

A bit about The Erotic Postulate: it’s technically my first book, the first poetry mss I ever completed. It grew out of my MFA thesis at Michigan and the core poems in the book were awarded the Hopwood at UM. The book’s been long in coming: it was a finalist for the National Poetry Series back in 2005 and then went on to be a bridesmaid in contest after contest. When it makes its debut next year, it will have been 10 years since I completed the project. I haven’t re-read the book in a while, and have resisted the urge to, so that when galley time comes I can really re-live those poems again and see how I relate to them at this point in my life. And I’m excited to work with Bryan at SRP again. Watching Skin Shift come into being as a book was a magical experience, and I already feel the tingles when we start to talk about the direction we want to go with TEP.

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There’s a new review of Skin Shift by Tory Adkisson over at The Rumpus.

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An upcoming reading: Tuesday, July 30th, Sibling Rivalry Press will be featured in the Word for Word reading series at Bryant Park. I’ll be reading with Bryan Borland, Seth Pennington, Stephen Mills, D Period Gilson, Joanna Hoffman, and Collin Kelley. Bryant Park is a few blocks from my office. I’ve seen so many readings there over my years living in NY, it’s exciting to finally be on the other side of the microphone. And it’s Bryan Borland’s birthday that day, so come celebrate!

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Dear Marilyn: happy birthday to us. xo

PoetsArtists Heroes & Villains Collaboration

A new Marilyn poem, “My Cinemascope Life (With Stereophonic Sound)” is in the recent “Heroes & Villains” issue of PoetsArtists magazine. It was a collaboration with painter Francien Krieg, a response to her painting of the elderly woman in the bathtub. Got me thinking: if Marilyn had lived to be 80, what would her thoughts be looking back at her life?

Here’s a little video of our page.

Upcoming Readings, a Poem, and a Review

A quick note about some upcoming readings:

Monday, April 8th: Indian Springs School, Birmingham, AL, 7pm. I’m part of the Indian Springs Visiting Writers Series which was highlighted recently in The Nation . Looking forward to seeing Douglas Ray and Jessica Smith, and discussing Skin Shift with their students! The public is welcome.
Monday, May 20th: KGB Bar, NY, NY, 7pm. Reading with fellow UM poetry alum Rae Gouirand. Her collection Open Winter is amazing and has won all sorts of prizes and you should go buy and read it right now.

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I have a new poem, “Ditch-Digger” in the latest issue of Raintown Review. It’s from a new project, Book of M, which includes the Marilyn poems of recent years, a series set at the Museum of the Moving Image, and lots of Montreal poems. I just finished the first draft of the manuscript and am happily entering revision land.

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And a link for a chewy review of Skin Shift over at Lambda Literary by the fabulous Jerome Murphy.

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Happy National Poetry Month!

The Next Big Thing Interview

I was tagged by my fabulous press-mate Wendy Chin-Tanner to partake in “The Next Big Thing” self-interview series. Wendy’s book Turn is forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press in March 2014.

I tweaked the questions a bit as they had a prose writer bent to them, and seemed aimed at an unpublished manuscript (and though I have plenty of those, I figured I’d focus on the book that is published).

What is the title of your book?

Skin Shift

Who is the publisher of your book?

I’m proud to say Skin Shift lives at Sibling Rivalry Press under the careful eye of Bryan Borland.

What genre does your book fall under?

Poetry with a dash of essay, pinch of drama, and side of short-story in verse.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

I think the book jacket copy says it best:

Skin Shift assembles a metamorphosis taxonomy in poems that spider spin, that nimbus twirl into Wonder Woman and leap with the Aboriginal kangaroo woman, that escape from a sub-trunk with Houdini and seduce like the Amazon’s pink river dolphin man. Traditional forms morph into experimental narratives, lyrics and dramatic monologues that present an invitation to slip inside the skins of others and to experience the mythologies that resonate in modern times.

Okay, that’s two sentences. Just ignore that little period pause in the middle.

What inspired you to write this book/where did the idea for the book come from?

It sprung from a deep love of mythology and a desire to track how certain myths still resonate in our times, and the pleasurable creative act of updating and recasting those myths in the modern world.  So the Narcissus story gets updated as a technology myth, Echo becomes a pop starlet of the Britney Spears variety, the construct of Uncle Remus taps into the trickster Anasi tradition to confront an ethnographer, the David and Jonathan and Ruth and Naomi love stories of the Bible are transported both culturally to a modern Hispanic immigrant family dynamic and located on a farm.  I’m a sucker for a good origin story.  Especially proto-queer origin stories, and part of the book’s aim is reclamation: queering myth out of a desire to make sure the long hidden or “exists only in subtext” histories of gays and lesbians are preserved and brought to light.  It’s by no means exhaustive, but I tried to have a good representation of stories from around the world, from the Bufeo Coloardo (pink river dolphins) of the Amazon to the Aboriginal how-the-kangaroo-came-to-be.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

It took about 13 years or so to finish the final draft and write all the book’s parts, but the first draft of it probably dates to 2006 or 07, which puts the number of years at 9 or 10 for the first draft.  The oldest poem in the book dates from 1997; it’s gone through some heavy revision, but many of its core lines remain intact. The last poem was written mid-2009.

What are your influences for this book / what other books would you compare this book to within your genre?

Skin Shift has many sources, but is particularly indebted to Alice Fulton’s fractal poetics and Anne Carson’s mashing of essay, poem, drama, lyric all in the same space.  Both of them engage with myth-recasting, too, Fulton in Sensual Math with her updating of the Apollo & Daphne myth, and Carson in Autobiography of Red (and I’m super-excited for Red Doc>, the sequel coming out this year).

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Good question. There are many dramatic monologues in the book and the response I often get from theatre people is “I have to perform poem X on stage!” I’ve even been chatting with my good friend Troy about possibly adapting it for the stage, which would be fun. But I think I’ll make this a reader participation question. Dear readers, who would you like to see perform the following voices from the book (a partial list)?

The Fresco Worker
Mateus, the animal scientist
Bufeo, the pink river dolphin turned man
Uncle Remus
Aunt Eloe
The Ornithologist
The Gypsy Woman
The Spelunker
The Alchemists
The Taxidermist
The Astronomer
Two-Spirit
Narcissus
Echo
Tiresias
Rut
David
Juan
and…the “I” closest to speaker-me?

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

It’s oversized (8×10, roughly the size of a graphic novel) and rocks awesome wrap-around cover art by the artist Michael DiMotta.

My tagged writers for next Wednesday (February 13th) are:

Douglas Ray, author of the poetry collection He Will Laugh (Lethe Press, 2012) and editor of The Queer South (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014)

RJ Gibson, author of the chapbooks Scavenge (Seven Kitchens Press, 2010) and You Could Learn A Lot (Seven Kitchens Press, 2013)

From Motion to Stillness / Movable Mound Music

I have a new poem “Movable Mound Music” and sound art piece in the “From Motion to Stillness” exhibit opening February 15th, 7pm at the Zhou B Art Center in Chicago, IL.  The poem was written in response to Mark Mastroianni’s “Natural Wisdom” exhibit at the Woodwary Gallery in NYC, in particular the painting Autumn Fence. The sound art piece of me reading “Movable Mound Music” was a collaboration with composer John Glover. John’s piece “Life Cycles” for flute, viola and electronics is also a response to Mastroianni’s paintings and was performed in the Woodward Gallery on October 26, 2012. The sound art piece contains samples of John’s piece “Life Cycles”. You can listen to the sound art piece at Sound Cloud.

The “From Motion to Stillness” exhibit is in collaboration with PoetsArtists Magazine which will publish an accompanying print and digital iPad issue. I’m on the cover of the iPad issue with a new photograph by the talented Maeghan Donohue:

Here’s a note about the exhibit:

From Motion to Stillness is an exhibition and a publication seeking to explore aspects of stillness, quietness, reflection, meditation, inner-peace, solitude, reflection and calmness as a human experience. Despite living in a fast-paced and rapidly changing world, From Motion to Stillness invites the viewer and the reader alike to pause for a moment and experience stillness as interpreted by some of today’s most exciting contemporary artists and poets.

From Motion to Stillness takes place in a gallery setting, print and digital formats. The exhibition is co-curated by Sergio Gomez of Chicago’s Zhou B Art Center (www.zbcenter.org) and Didi Menendez of PoetsArtists Magazine (www.poetsandartists.com).

The show runs from February 15 to March 10, 2013.

 

Favorite Reads of 2012

Well, this is embarrassing. I made this post and thought I scheduled it to go up at the end of December, but it never posted. It’s now April.

So here is my much-delayed list of favorite reads from 2012 (which I’m back-dating to January 1!). As always, I present these in alphabetical order, and must note this is just a sampling of my reading list from the previous year (a mish-mash of books recently published and books I’ve discovered years after they’ve been published):

The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard by Joe Brainard
American Terrorist by Tyler & Wendy Chin-Tanner
Slow Lightning by Eduardo C. Corral
Whirlwind by Sharon Dolin
Une Semaine De Bonté: A Surrealistic Novel in Collage by Max Ernst
Little Murders Everywhere by Rebecca Morgan Frank
Catch & Release by D. Gilson
Open Winter by Rae Gouirand
The Nanopedia Quick-Reference Pocket Lexicon of Contemporary American Culture by Charles Jensen
My Only Wife by Jac Jemc
Unbuilt Projects by Paul Lisicky
Special Powers & Abilities by Ray McDaniel
He Do the Gay Man in Different Voices by Stephen Mills
Western Practice by Stephen Motika
Miracle Fruit, At the Drive-In Volcano, and Lucky Fish by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
The Martyrology and bpNichol Comics by B. P. Nichol
Skin Job by Evan Peterson
He Will Laugh by Douglas Ray
Prop Rockery by Emily Rosko
Palestine by Joe Sacco
Just Kids by Patti Smith
The Wanted by Michael Tyrell
Sonics in Warholia by Megan Volpert
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few. And then there are the books I bought in 2012 that I still have not read for whatever reason. O never-dwindling stack of books by the bedside!