Matthew Hittinger's Blog, page 7

New poem “There Were Turtles” in Memorious 23

Most of my writing friends concur that years in which we publish books are slower years for publishing in journals and magazines. Much of it has to do with a redirecting of energy into the galley proofing, party planning and reading and interview promoting that comes along with a new book. So with the release of The Erotic Postulate, 2014’s been a slow year for work appearing in journals, but here is one final publication for the year, a poem from my unpublished collection Smite & Spoon called “There Were Turtles,” in the new issue 23 of Memorious.

Dreamsplaining at Queen Mob’s Teahouse

Reb Livingston tackles one of my recent dreams in her new feature at Queen Mob’s Teahouse. She’s an insightful dreamsplainer! Check it out. Here’s the premise for dreamsplaining in Reb’s own words:

Bored with traditional profile pieces & interviews? Me too! Here I will introduce writers and artists via their psyches by sharing one of their dreams and then explaining it. The unconscious doesn’t lie or bloviate, so we can bypass all the bullshit and get to know these misunderstood souls in-depth and truly understand them, better than they understand themselves, thanks to my top-notch dream analysis skills.

And be sure to pick up Reb’s new genre-defying novel Bombyonder!

The Queer South

The fall’s been so busy with book promotion and our reading tour that I forgot to plug a new anthology from SRP called The Queer South: LGBTQ Writers on the American South edited by my good friend Douglas Ray.

When Douglas first told me about the project back in 2013 when I was visiting his students at Indian Springs, he asked if I had anything he could consider. I didn’t think I did, and then recalled a poem I wrote in South Beach, Miami back in 2007, June 7, thirty years after Anita Bryant’s unfortunate but successful referendum to repeal Dade County Ordinance 77-4, the law that outlawed discrimination against gays and lesbians in employment, housing, and public services.

The poem’s called “The Light, the Idea of Light, Repeats Itself at South Beach” and while it’s not Key West, it’s full of nods to Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop, to Hart Crane’s Key West: An Island Sheaf and to Mark Doty’s “An Island Sheaf: Key West.”

If you’re in NYC on Saturday, December 6th, there will be a “Queer South” contributors’ reading at The Bureau (Room 210 at The Center, 13th St).

M Dreams: Lyric Dream Project at Fogged Clarity

For the month of October, Ben Evans at Fogged Clarity has been featuring a different lyric dream each day. For Day 26 he features my “M Dreams” sequence–a stitching together of the various Marilyn Monroe dreams I’ve had over the years, featuring cameos by other early June Geminis such as Allen Ginsberg and Josephine Baker. The sequence will eventually be part of my Book of M project.

Two Poems Reprinted in Assaracus #16

Assaracus #16 marks SRP publisher and Assaracus founder and editor Bryan Borland’s last issue as editor. He’s pulled together a stellar line-up of poets he’s published from over the years and reprints two poems from The Erotic Postulate: “Wrestlers Unfinished” and “Wrestlers Finished.” Check it out! Cover poem by Danez Smith:

Interview with Denise Duhamel in PoetsArtists #58

I had the pleasure of interviewing the famous and fabulous poet Denise Duhamel for Issue 58 of PoetsArtists. Our conversation ranged from the pleasures and pitfalls of collaboration and her upcoming book (collected, uncollected and new collaborations with Maureen Seaton) from Sibling Rivalry Press, to questions of form and “ultra-talk,” to our love of pop culture (Madonna!) and trading of Barbie links (The Most Popular Girls in School, Todd Haynes’ Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story). Check it out!

My partner, Michael, also has some color photos in this issue from his new Coney Island series which will be part of a new book coming out in March 2015 from Brooklyn Arts Press.

Happy Book Release Day!

Today is the official book release day for The Erotic Postulate, my second full-length collection of poetry, and my second book with the fabulous Sibling Rivalry Press. It is also book release day for my pressmates Stephen S. Mills and Brent Calderwood, so happy book release day to all of us!

Stephen and I will be celebrating together this coming Saturday, September 20th, 3pm at Suite Bar & Lounge in NYC. Brent will also be holding a book release party on Saturday in San Francisco, 6:30pm at Modern Times Bookstore Collective. We hope to see many of you at our respective events, and if you miss us, we’ll be doing a bunch of readings in NYC and Boston the last two weeks of October, and then LA and San Francisco at the end of January/early February.

The Erotic Postulate has been long in coming–the poems in it were written between 2000-2004 and the earliest version of it as a book was my MFA thesis at the U. of Michigan. It’s been a bridesmaid a number of times along the way with book awards, but I’m okay with the delay; it made it a stronger manuscript in the end by giving me more time to revise and tweak. Now I understand Virginia Woolf’s advice to not publish a thing before age 30–I probably would be mortified if it had come out in its earliest incarnation.

So happy entering the public world day, little book. I look forward to reading from you and falling in love with your poems all over again.

“I Am Not a Myth”

My villanelle, “I Am Not a Myth,” is today’s Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets!

 

Fall 2014 Readings & Events

Still working on some readings in Boston, Philly and D.C. in October, but in the meantime, here is a summary of places I’ll be reading this fall:

September

September 5th, 7pm. “Across Genres, All Genres: A Night of Queer Writing” with Melissa Febos, Joseph O. Legaspi, and Shelly Oria at the BGSQD (83A Hester St, NY, NY)
September 20th, 3pm. Joint Book Launch with Stephen Mills at Suite Bar & Lounge (992 Amsterdam Avenue, NY, NY)
September 27th, 7pm. “Three Astoria Poets: Guillermo Filice Castro, Matthew Hittinger, Ocean Vuong, hosted by Queens Poet Laureate Paolo Javier” at Astoria Book Shop (31-29 31st St, Astoria, NY)

October

October 17th, 6pm. Rabbit Ears: TV Poems Anthology book launch at Cornelia St. Cafe (29 Cornelia St, NY, NY)
October 18th, 7pm. Reading at BGSQD with Brent Calderwood and Stephen S. Mills (The LGBT Center, 208 W. 13th St, NY, NY)
October 19th, 5pm. Reading at Berl’s Poetry Shop with Brent Calderwood, Joanna Hoffman and Stephen S. Mills (126A Front St, Brooklyn, NY)
October 30th, 7pm. Reading at KGB Bar with Brent Calderwood and Stephen S. Mills (84 E 4th St, NY, NY)

 

Sonnet 126 Remix

I’m excited to be part of D. Gilson’s Out of Sequence: The Sonnets Remixed project, which is best described in his editorial words as “154 people responding to each of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in 39,854 words; 23 pictures; 2 songs; and a one act play.” You can read his full introduction to the project here.

I chose to respond to the infamous Sonnet 126, the sonnet that is “missing” its final couplet and is only 12 lines long instead of the requisite 14. There are many theories as to whether this was intentional. Some editions of Shakespeare’s sonnets have two bracketed lines indicating the empty space (a publisher’s decision). Some note that the sonnet in its truest form, a little song, didn’t have to be 14 lines. I like to imagine the beloved boy’s silent reply in those final two lines, and took that as a bit of a starting point for my remix effort, which you can read here.

Check out all the remixed sonnets in Upstart: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies. They will also be collected in a print anthology due out later this year.