Matthew Hittinger's Blog, page 5

Review of Sharon Dolin’s Manual for Living at The Rumpus

Reviewing is one of those generosities that I always thinks good literary citizens should do more of, and then I shrink from the task when I have to put my thoughts to page. But when it’s a poet whose aesthetic you click with, and whose work you’ve been following for years, you might find a new book unlocks their body of work in a way you hadn’t thought about before. And so it was with great pleasure that I got to string these connections together in a review of Sharon’s Dolin’s latest collection Manual for Living (U. of Pittsburgh Press) over at The Rumpus. Click on over to The Rumpus here to check it out. And buy Sharon’s book! Support poets!

Etherian Nights

My love for She-Ra is well known to most of you. The new She-Ra action figure, designed by twins Garrett and Darren Sanders for Mattel, is fab. u. lous. She’s pictured above checking out the dramatic monologue I wrote for her, “For the Honor of Grayskull,” in the Divining Divas Anthology. And here we are adjusting our crowns:

Been thinking of working on a longer sequence of poems about her. There’s some precedence of the poetry meets comics collection: Ray McDaniel’s Special Powers and Abilities which plays with characters from The Legion of Super-Heroes, in particular Brainiac 5; Bryan Dietrich’s Superman-infused Krypton Nights; Gary Jackson’s Missing You, Metropolis. And then there’s the massive Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books Anthology which captures the individual poems where so many of us have incorporated and channeled these characters and stories and universes into our own emotional landscapes. Maybe I’ll even give a wink to Dietrich and call it Etherian Nights. Oh what secrets those Whispering Woods hold…to be told…

Two New Poems in Nimrod

I have two new poems–“Cafe Imagination” and “Proof of Intent to Marry”–in the “Mirrors & Prisms: Writers of Marginalized Orientations & Gender Identities” issue (Spring/Summer 2016. Vol. 59, No. 2) of Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry. You can see the full list of all the wonderful contributors over here.

 

 

New Poem in PoetsArtists: Freak Out!

My poem “Xanadu Xanadu” from my Impossible Gotham book project appears in PoetsArtists #73, published in conjunction with the exhibit “Freak Out!”, an homage to disco, at Zhou B Art Center.

If you’re in Chicago, you should swing by the opening April 15th, and if you can’t make that, the exhibit will be up until May 13, 2016.

Two New Poems at The Ekphrastic Review

I spent far too little time submitting work to journals in 2015, partly out of that weird post-book fatigue I seem to experience in the months after a collection comes out (other poets, do you experience this too?). But I’ve committed to reengaging in 2016 with journals, getting work back out in the world. What a perfect place to reintegrate than by going back to my ekphrastic roots. Thanks to the appearance of Sharon Dolin’s lovely poem “Blue Ladder” in The Ekphrastic Review: writing and art on art and writing, edited by Lorette C. Luzajic, I discovered a wonderful journal devoted not only to the interplay of poetry and the visual arts, but to deepening and expanding what we have come to know as “ekphrastic” writing. Perhaps that’s why I’m so excited they took two “out there” poems of mine that I never thought would find homes.

The first poem, “7 ÜBER 7” is my nod to Fluxus, inspired by Dan Graham’s Schema which I saw at MoMA a couple summers ago during one of the evening classes I sometimes take there. Schema actually inspired a major revision of this poem while I was editing the art-drenched collection in which it will appear, Impossible Gotham.

Here’s Schema:

Dan Graham, Schema, 1966

And here’s how it inspired me (text is intended to be flush right):

The second poem, “Color Keyboard Eye Hammer,” was also written during one of my MoMA classes, and is in direct response to Kandinsky’s Panel for Edwin R. Campbell No. 1. As I whittled down the language from my free-write into something with structure, the “who-what-when-where-why-how” prompts kept popping into my head, and attached themselves to the ends of the lines in sestina repetition. This poem’s part of a sequence called “Thought Frost Voodoo” that currently lives under the Book of M project umbrella. It now joins its siblings “Cross Bucket Candle Knife” (The Offending Adam) and “Caliper Owl Thistle Fork” (Crazyhorse) out there to breathe in the world.

Vasily Kandinsky. Panel for Edwin R. Campbell No. 1. 1914

Click on the poem title above to read the poem’s text at The Ekphrastic Review.

Favorite Reads of 2015

My annual list of books I enjoyed reading over the previous year; not a “best of” list at all, just works that stuck with me. As always, I present these in alphabetical order by author. They are a mix of genres and a mish-mash of books recently published and books I either finally got around to reading or have discovered years after they’ve been published:

The Ghost in Us Was Multiplying by Brent Armendinger
Chord by Rick Barot
The Book of Frank by CA Conrad
The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems by Olena Kalytiak Davis
When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz
Caprice: Collected, Uncollected, & New Collaborations by Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton
From the Standard Cyclopedia of Recipes by B. C. Edwards
Barely Composed: Poems by Alice Fulton
Scattered at Sea by Amy Gerstler
You Could Learn a Lot by RJ Gibson
Our Lady of the Crossword Puzzle by Rigoberto Gonzalez
How to be Drawn by Terrance Hayes
When I Was a Twin by Michael Klein
Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue by William Logan
Hiccups by Joe Pan
American Barricade by Danniel Schoonebeek
Fibonacci Batman: New & Selected Poems by Maureen Seaton
The New Black by Evie Schockley
[insert] boy by Danez Smith
life-list by Jessica Smith
As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 by Susan Sontag
Spectacle: Stories by Susan Steinberg

New poem in Animal & Other Bits

Thanks to Stephen S. Mills for featuring my poem “Monocacy” in Animal: A Beast of a Literary Magazine for December. The Monocacy Creek is in Bethlehem, where I grew up. It’s a native word for a twisty creek or river.

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The new Rabbit Ears: TV Poems anthology is now available. My poem “Wednesdays at the Laundromat” is included (in honor of the Jerry Springer Show). I’ll be reading at the Bowery Poetry Club on Monday, December 14th, 6:30pm for its launch. Much thanks to NYQ books for saving the project and Joel Allegretti for editing it.

 

Picasso Sculpture: Little Owl

I never knew the extent of Picasso’s sculpture output–the focus is typically on his paintings and periods (his changes in style usually tied to a change in mistress/muse). The sense of play, though, of figuring out spatial questions, of turning the creative hand to a different type of “making” to give the brain a break/engage a different side of the brain–all resonated with me as I wandered through the galleries at MoMA’s current Picasso Sculpture exhibit last night.

One piece captured my imagination, a little bronze owl (Little Owl, 1951-52) made from found objects: the iron blade of a hoe for its shield-like spread wings, three nails down its back/wings; a pair of pliers to form a beak; screws to make its spindly legs and claws. Picasso had a pet owl named Ubu, which made me think of Bubo, the mechanical owl from the classic Clash of the Titans film. And Archimedes, Merlin’s talking owl from The Sword in the Stone. The wise Tootsie Pop owl from the “how many licks does it take?” commercial. Hedwig from Harry Potter. I’m partial to owls since they were the hieroglyph for the Egyptian letter “M” which ties into my Book of M myth-making.

All these connections and focused attention to say: this is how a poem often starts in my brain. A line came to me while meditating, the music of which signaled it will probably be a villanelle.

On the Cover of Chronogram & Other Bits

Nadine Robbins’ portrait of me in my She-Ra crown graces the cover of the September issue of Chronogram, a magazine out of the Hudson Valley. You can read the whole issue here.

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I’ll be attending my 15-year college reunion and an alumni author’s reception on Saturday, September 19th. Muhlenberg College, Trexler Libary, 3-5pm.

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The Erotic Postulate turns a year old this month. Signed copies are always available directly from me via my webstore.

Summer Bits

The summer 2015 issue (#162) of RFD Magazine featured an interview with Brent Calderwood, Stephen S. Mills and me as inspired by our Fall and Winter book tours. Franklin Abbott asked us to answer Harry Hay’s famous “three questions” – Who are we? Where did we come from? Why are we here? You can read the whole issue here.

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I read at the NYC Poetry Festival on Governor’s Island on Saturday, July 25th, on the White Horse stage with fellow SRP poets Robert Siek, Stephen S. Mills and Jane Summer.

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The new issue of OCHO, guest edited by Stephen S. Mills, is now out.