Matthew Hittinger's Blog, page 6

Guest Post on jdbrecords, Philly Reading and Other May Bits

A long overdue post (something I started to write and meant to share back in September when The Erotic Postulate was released!) is up on jdbrecords. Much like this post from 2012 where I took my dear readers on a storyboard tour of Skin Shift (also on jdbrecords), this post walks you through four of the paintings behind four poems central to The Erotic Postulate.

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I’ll be reading in Philadelphia for the first time this coming Sunday, May 31st, 5pm at Giovanni’s Room (345 S 12th St) with Dean Kostos, Paul Lisicky, Kelly McQuain and Jim Provenzano. Here is the Facebook event page for details.

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Speaking of readings, I’ll be reading with other Sibling Rivalry Press authors at the NYC Poetry Festival on Governor’s Island on Saturday, July 25th, 3pm.

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And speaking of SRP, their entire body of printed work – every printed full-length collection of poetry, chapbook, novel, anthology, and every issue of every journal – has been acquired by the Library of Congress for housing in their Rare Book and Special Collections Division. From the curator: “Please do share the information with your authors, letting them know that their works will now reside among history’s greatest poets—in perpetuity—in the Rare Book and Special Collections vault, in the world’s biggest library.” Exciting!

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Stephen Mills is the next guest editor for OCHO: A Journal of Queer Arts. Send him your work! Guidelines here.

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I was traveling so much in April for National Poetry Month, that I forgot to share this fun link. A tumblr devoted to poets and their shoes, curated by the fabulous Aimee Nezhukumatathil. If you were ever curious about what we poets wear on our feet, now you have pages and pages of visuals to scroll through. Here is my entry.

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My villanelle “I Am Not a Myth” was performed at the National Poetry Month edition of Emotive Fruition by actor Lucas Hall.

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And I had a fun time in Chicago where I spent an event-filled weekend with one of my oldest friends in the world, Lori Felker. Big highlight was the opening of the “Immortality & Vulnerability” exhibit at Zhou B Art Center where I felt like a rock star posing for photos next to my portrait. A visitor even wanted to buy one of my poems right off the wall! Thanks again to Didi Menendez (who I finally got to meet in person!) for creating these opportunities for poets and artists, and to Nadine Robbins for the amazing portrait. Here are a few photos from the event:

Me signing one of my poems for a patron who wanted to buy it while editor and publisher Didi Menendez looks on.

The painter of my portrait, super talented Nadine Robbins.

Replacing my portrait with the real thing.

This, all night.

New poem in Mead & Other Bits

I have a new villanelle, “Beau Buck at Dusk” up in the new issue of Mead: The Magazine of Literature & Libations. Thanks to Paul Lisicky for selecting it and giving my psychic buck room to strut.

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I’m giving away three signed copies of The Erotic Postulate for National Poetry Month over at GoodReads. You can enter the giveaway here.

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Tomorrow I head out to Minneapolis for this year’s AWP conference. I’m not doing any readings or signings or anything (SRP’s not at the book fair this year–you can catch them at the Rainbow Book Fair in NYC next weekend), but I’ll have a few copies of my newest collection on me, so if you track me down and want one, do let me know. I skipped the conference last year when it was in Seattle (it’s good to take a break!), but I am now overdue for a reunion with some of my writer buddies. Cue the never-ending cocktail hour!

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Issue #34 of OCHO is now out. Guest edited by Wendy C. Ortiz, it includes work by: Charlie Bondhus, Nathan Wade Carter, D. Dragonetti, Myriam Gurba, Jane Eaton Hamilton, Megan Milks, John Pluecker, and Jai Arun Ravine. Cover art by Rick Sindt. Click on over here to see info about ordering physical copies or downloading the digital.

Two poems in (and on the Cover of!) PoetsArtists Magazine

I have two poems from my Book of M project–“Dear Art Dear M” and “I Prefer Gentlemen in Bed”–in the new PoetsArtists (PA#62), which accompanies the “Immortality and Vulnerability” exhibit going up at Zhou B Art Center in Chicago this April. I’m also on the cover in a portrait by the painter Nadine Robbins sporting my She-Ra crown.

I’ll be at the exhibit opening in April:

Friday, April 17th
7pm CDT
Zhou B Art Center
1029 W 35th St, Chicago, IL

You can purchase (and preview!) a copy of the magazine here.

 

Remembering Philip Levine

“The whole history of poetry is yours. Poets love when you pay them homage.”

– Philip Levine, master class workshop, October 11, 2002, University of Michigan

I’ve been trying to write this post ever since I heard about Philip Levine’s passing. He was one of the first “living” poets I met almost 20 years ago during my freshman year of college when this whole poetry thing became necessary. I remember him reading a draft of a new poem at that reading, “The Mercy” which would become the title poem of his next book. I vaguely even recall going to dinner with him and some other select students and faculty.

He came back to campus my senior year of college (Muhlenberg’s English dept was in love with him, particularly his book What Work Is), and I do remember two moments from that dinner–all over the Nobel Prize in Literature. Whether T. S. Eliot counts as the only American to have won for Poetry or not. And some choice words for certain writers who have “campaigned” for the prize (ahem, Walcott). I asked if he would read “The Mercy” again that night at the reading, and he closed with it. That poem in many ways bookended my college years–I even remember a classmate imitating it in our final poetry workshop. You can hear him read it over at Poets&Writers.

I’d have one more encounter with him, when I was working on my MFA at the University of Michigan. I remember my cohort-mate, the fabulous Canadian poet Suzanne Hancock getting into a fight with him at a Hopwood Tea over whether Anne Carson was a “real” poet or just a classicist (Suzanne won), and his insightful feedback (“get to the subtle, moving ending the most effective way possible”) on my poem “Restoration” (it’s in Skin Shift) during a master class workshop. Here are some other notes I took during that master class:

Don’t set up rhythmic expectations you can’t fulfill (metrical lines in free verse)
Range of diction is the range of the degree of reality taken on in the poem
Frost – his structures are 19th c., Emersonian attitude, yet models syntax after speech -> sense of spontaneity, and yes, that means sometimes you must end a line on a prepostion
The stubbornness of things.
Good line, good passage, good pacing makes you a poet. Learn pacing to make the good sections of a poem stand out.
The poet selects on the basis of what a thing reveals (motion toward symbolism).
Revise on the basis of what’s there. Be patient. First draft, get it all out on the page no matter what direction it takes. Read it out loud. Use the best parts to revise. The way to revise is to listen to what you’ve written. Tone.
The whole history of poetry is yours. Poets love it when you pay them homage.
Re-embroider antique ideas.
In the 20th c., “things” have become increasingly important in poems.
Implication – use of “we” – Auden did it best, 20th c. invention
Rilke – “spilled religion” – the vessels of our faith and emotion have over-flowed – they fall on people and things and ennoble them.
Don’t lie a lot. Inspiration will bypass you.

I haven’t read his work in years, since a brief obsession in the early 2000s when I bought all his books, but I look forward to catching up on the last book or two I missed, and rediscovering my faves: “On the Meeting of Garcia Lorca and Hart Crane,” “They Feed They Lion!,” and, of course, “The Mercy.” Here are its closing lines:

…mercy is something you can eat

again and again while the juice spills over

your chin, you can wipe it away with the back

of your hands and you can never get enough.

Bay Times

2015 Over the Rainbow List

Stephen, Brent and I woke to the news this morning that all three of our books from Sibling Rivalry Press made the 2015 Over the Rainbow List for Poetry, which is compiled by the American Library Association’s GLBT Round Table. Nice news to receive while you’re on a book tour promoting the work!

You can read the full list here. It’s fun to click on a book and see what libraries it lives in.

 

New Poem in iARTistas

A poem from my Impossible Gotham manuscript, “1 January 200X,” appears in the new iARTistas (Issue 13 – January 2015).

 

Winter 2015 Readings & Events

I’ll be coming to California at the end of January/early February to do some events in San Francisco and Los Angeles with my SRP-mates Brent Calderwood and Stephen S. Mills. Here’s our current tour schedule:

January 31st, 3-5pm PST. “Three Under 40: Calderwood, Hittinger, Mills at the San Francisco Public Library.” Hormel Room. (100 Larkin Street, San Francisco, CA)
February 1st, 6-8:30pm PST. “Three-Way Book Party: Calderwood, Hittinger, Mills at Magnet. (4122 18th St, San Francisco, CA)
February 4th, 7-9pm PST. The Ugly Mug with Calderwood, Hittinger, Mills. (261 N Glassell St, Orange, CA)
February 5th, 7-10pm PST. “The Poetry Lab with Calderwood, Hittinger, Mills.” (235 E Broadway, 8th Fl, Long Beach, CA)

I’m looking forward to not only promoting The Erotic Postulate, but reading from Skin Shift as well. Hope to see some familiar faces out in Cali! And meet some new ones!

 

The Erotic Postulate reviewed at Lambda Literary

The wonderful poet Tony Leuzzi (The Burning Door, Radiant Losses) has written an insightful review of The Erotic Postulate for Lambda Literary. Tony is clearly an ideal and well-read reader, picking up on the influences of people like Marianne Moore with the syllabic calculations, the reasons for the experimentation with punctuation, the philosophical bent to the inquiring voice of these poems. Here’s a couple excerpts:

Weighing in at over 100 pages of verse, The Erotic Postulate is a full and generous experience that deserves all of the demands it makes upon its readers. Sexy and smart, these poems pivot on surprising leaps and turns of language.

And:

Many poets exploring connections between math and poetry have restricted their attentions to issues of form. By contrast, Hittinger’s approach is more philosophically integrated. Reacting to various sources and telling moments of observation and memory, he ties conceptual frameworks with personal history. He sees that geometry is not the cold study of numbers and facts but a complex, abstract system of human thought inevitably tied to our values and feelings. It is from the perspective of a humanist that Hittinger deconstructs and extends math’s most basic (and deceptive) equation: 1+1=2.

Go check it out!

Favorite Reads of 2014

Not a “best books” list by far, just the annual list of books I enjoyed reading over the previous year. As always, I present these in alphabetical order by author. They are a mix of genres (poetry, prose, art, graphic novel), 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:

Disturbance by Ivy Alvarez
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
Telephone by Jen Besemer
Foxes on the Trampoline by Charlotte Boulay
Rise in the Fall by Ana Bozicevic
The God of Longing by Brent Calderwood
Antigonick; Nay, Rather; and The Albertine Workout by Anne Carson
Turn by Wendy Chin-Tanner
Trespass by Thomas Dooley
Boys Have Been… by Christopher Gaskins
Crush by D. Gilson and Will Stockton
Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa; Unpeopled Eden; and Autobiography of My Hungers by Rigoberto Gonzalez
Contemplative Man by Brock Guthrie
Revenance by Cynthia Hogue
Prime by Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Saeed Jones, Rickey Laurentiis, Phillip B. Williams, and L. Lamar Wilson
Missing You, Metropolis by Gary Jackson
Prelude to Bruise by Saeed Jones
Aviary, Bestiary by Joseph O. Legaspi
The Burning Door by Tony Leuzzi
Bombyonder by Reb Livingston
Sumptuary Laws by Nyla Matuk
The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion and Writing Down the Vision: Essays & Prophecies by Kei Miller
A History of the Unmarried by Stephen S. Mills
New York 1, Tel Aviv 0: Stories by Shelly Oria
Silverchest by Carl Phillips
Sylvia Plath: Drawings by Sylvia Plath
Citizen by Claudia Rankine
Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah by Patricia Smith
Girls I Know by Douglas Trevor
Reliquaria by R. A. Villanueva
Only Ride by Megan Volpert
Mysterious Acts By My People by Valerie Wetlaufer
Mirrors, Messages, Manifestations by Minor White