Matthew Hittinger's Blog, page 4
September 4, 2017
New Interview at Rob McLennan’s Blog
I have a new interview “12 or 20 (second series) questions with Matthew Hittinger” up at Rob McLennan’s Blog. Enjoy!
August 26, 2017
A week of printmaking at the FAWC
It’s been 15 years since I was last in Provincetown and at the FAWC. Back then it was for writing workshop vacations, summer respites from my first job before I got my MFA. I’ve kept my eye on their summer offerings over the years, but I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with writing workshops which only got more pronounced once I finished an MFA and started teaching and publishing. But as I dig deeper into printmaking and my exploration of where the visual and written intersect, I was drawn to a printmaking class offered this year called “Word Play” taught by Daniel Heyman which was happening concurrently with Elizabeth Bradfield’s poetry workshop “Making Broadsides: Image & Text.” And it was exactly what I needed to play, experiment, learn some new tricks, and generate some new work and ideas.
Here are a few images from the week, the prints all inspired by images from a handful of my own poems:
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August 11, 2017
New Poem at The Good Men Project
Another poem, “Yars’ Revenge“, up at The Good Men Project. This one’s for all those all school gaymers out there. Also appears in my new book The Masque of Marilyn as part of the “At the Museum of the Moving Image” sequence. Enjoy!
July 12, 2017
Text/Form Reading at The Center for Book Arts
I’ll be reading Wednesday, July 19th at The Center for Book Arts at the Text/Form Reading. Organized by Barbara Henry, who taught the Letterpress Printing & Fine Press Publishing Seminar For Emerging Writers I took back in 2009, I’ll be reading from The Masque of Marilyn and some of the new poem-print insect poems. If you’re in New York, drop by!
June 14, 2017
New Poem and Print at The Good Men Project
I have a new poem, “Benelux Redux” and its accompanying lino print up at The Good Men Project.
June 8, 2017
New Poem and Print at Star 82 Review
I have a new poem, “AC 749 Fly” and its accompanying lino print up in Issue 5.2 of Star 82 Review. I think this marks the publishing debut of one of my lino prints. And there are more to come! Keep an eye out for more poem+print combos in the coming months at The Good Men Project and in Crazyhorse.
June 2, 2017
New Poem in The American Poetry Journal
I have a new poem, “Bomb,” from my Impossible Gotham project in Issue 14 of The American Poetry Journal.
June 1, 2017
The Masque of Marilyn
It’s my birthday…and I’ll surprise release a book on it if I want to. Especially if that book’s about Marilyn Monroe, whose birthday it also is today.
My Marilyn poems have been kicking around for years, but I’ve finally bundled them in one sheaf-sequence to go have a public life of their own. With the help of fellow Marilyn lover and my longtime editor and publisher Didi Menendez, we are bringing them to you from her GOSS183 publishing imprint. I even tapped into my burgeoning printmaking skills to do the cover.
You can purchase it on either Amazon or Barnes&Noble. And as an added bonus: the first 20 people to post a photo with and/or of the purchased book on Instagram or Facebook with the tag #themasqueofmarilyn will get a signed handmade lip kiss print (see below). Feel free to tag me too if you’d like (@mightthreatenwit on Instagram). Some of the prints will be red, some will be black…and one lucky person will get gold. It’ll be a mystery!
Enjoy!
April 1, 2017
Poem in Impossible Archetype
A poem from my Smite & Spoon project, “71 Irving Place” appears in the inaugural issue of Impossible Archetype, A Journal of LGBTQ+ Poetry edited by Mark Ward.
March 17, 2017
Remembering Derek Walcott
An unpublished poem from my archives on this sad day.
Upon Reading Tiepolo’s Hound
for Derek Walcott
A pen trembled above a tea-stained page.
A brush climbed couplets laid out in paint :
Tahiti, St. Thomas, St. Lucia, a lineage
hovered en plein air like ghosts or faint
cloud wisps above the turning, turning sea.
The wave crest’s margin winked, blinked out
sea foam and sea gulls, sea grape clarity,
formed a blotch? a face? under a silver spout :
morning reflected in the red sink basin.
A crisp contour, gaze-wavered and dazed
by the ritual : first prime with chastened
dew drops, let the razor dissolve the haze
between the canvas and the page, the line’s
trial tenuous, a pierced verse live with current
as it leaps pole to pole, scratches the horizon
sine to black-cross to sine. The sky warrants
a knowledge of impression, of color, of light :
dotted palm leaves, slashed dune grasses.
At dawn the sand shifts from gray to white.
The herons undulate, surge. Shadow passes.
A stained glass wild flower flares, dares
to leap at a proboscis coil, a point to stalk
the ocean’s palpable light, to counter-stare
the silent-inked iris, the great pupil rocks
the world’s edge, there, beyond the gully
where the dune breeze blankets and recites
the past : island pins prick a ship’s pulley,
an archipelago anchor this canvas rewrites.
Walcott was a solid year of my life back in 1999-2000 as I worked my way through his massive body of work to crystallize an honors thesis during my senior year at Muhlenberg College. As I honed in on the connection between painting and poetry in his work, he released Tiepolo’s Hound, another of his late career, book-length poems, though this one shifted the post-colonial conversation from writing back to the Empire center of London (literature) to Paris (art). This poem was a bit of an appendix to that project, a creative processing of all I was working through critically. I offer it here in memoriam.
