Matthew Hittinger's Blog, page 8

“your body tours my body rhyme” – The Erotic Postulate now available for pre-order

My second full-length collection of poetry, The Erotic Postulate, is now available for pre-order. This is also my second title with the fabulous Sibling Rivalry Press, who brought you Skin Shift two years ago.

There are three variant covers from which you can choose (or collect all three!), featuring paintings by the talented Provincetown-based artist Christopher Sousa, who worked on a series of paintings in part inspired by the poems. You can check out more of his work here.

You can also purchase the book as part of SRP’s fall subscription where you will get the three fall titles for $30 in a bundle: my collection along with Stephen Mills’ A History of the Unmarried and Brent Calderwood’s The God of Longing. Free shipping in the US. Cheaper than Amazon. Will introduce you to some new voices.

Here are the variant covers and links to pre-order each, as well as the bundle link:

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Link to order Cover 1
Link to order Cover 2
Link to order Cover 3
Link to order Fall 2014 Bundle​

Praise for The Erotic Postulate:

“Matthew Hittinger’s The Erotic Postulate is a sophisticated examination of math’s most basic equation: 1 + 1 = 2, which he reconfigures as ‘your body yours,// my body mine, one next to one as two.’ Suddenly, the politics of desire–physical attraction, emotional distance, surrender, struggle, rejection–trouble the intimacy of any unit (a pair, a couple, a marriage) located on any plane (a wrestling mat, a dance floor, a bed). But in Hittinger’s vision, the intersection of separate entities isn’t limited to one body’s connection to another, it also charts human relationship to landscape, culture, and imagination. Curious and observant, The Erotic Postulate sparkles with wonder.”

- Rigoberto González

“The Erotic Postulate is arresting and subtle in its exploration of the complexities, histories, and realities of gay sexuality, aesthetics, and identity. Many of these poems reveal — and revel in — the erotics of sight and the written word. It is both a cerebral and visceral pleasure to read a poet who brings so much to the page. Anyone who cares about the present — and future — of poetry should read this brilliant, groundbreaking book.”

- Alice Fulton

A Minor Dilemma at The Good Men Project

As we were preparing the galleys for The Erotic Postulate this past spring, I was revisiting poems I had written more than 10 years ago. Most of them still held up–a different style from how I’m writing these days, but I’m excited to have them soon out in the world to expand the conversation I’m having and the evolution of my craft. Aside from a few word choice edits in a handful of poems, there wasn’t much work to be done, save for one poem that just didn’t feel right.

The poem was called “Minor” and it was my attempt at a “found” poem. Looking back, it was the best I could do at the time based on the control I had of my craft back then. But from today’s vantage point I knew I could and had to do better. A big part of my unease was how little of the language was “mine” which might sound like an odd concern for a “found” poem.

But a concern nonetheless. The poem is a dramatic monologue in the voice of the 20th century photographer Minor White. I was obsessed with his work 10+ years ago, and while reading his journal entries and letters stumbled upon a narrative. The texts that spoke to me were divided by 17 years: a letter to Isabel Kane from July-August 1943, and a moment in one of his “Memorable Fancies” journal entries from March 10, 1960. Both spoke about his time on the Pacific during WWII and his conflicted feelings of desire for comradeship and love with his fellow soldiers. The 1960 text clearly (well, clearly to me) spoke back to the story he retold to Isabel in 1943 of encountering a soldier on deck one moonlit evening. So I wove the two together to form a cohesive monologue.

The only problem: my first attempt was predominantly his language and very little of my own. Which just felt…wrong. I didn’t feel present aside from shaping and selecting what of his text to use with an occasional parenthetical to indicate where my voice intruded as his inner voice. So I rewrote it. And what you’ll read at The Good Men Project is very much a new poem–with a new title, “A Minor Dilemma”–from what I wrote all those years ago.

“A Minor Dilemma” has the same premise and narrative at its core, but a new syllabic and stanzaic structure, and the balance of my language to Minor’s has definitely tipped. The soldier he quotes I decided to leave alone for the most part–a quote is a quote–though that “heave heave heaving” is my rhythmic choice. And I had to leave the final lines as Minor wrote them–my line breaks, his language–but you’ll see why when you read The Erotic Postulate. That dog baying at the moon was a flash of lightning when I encountered it as it spoke to another poem I wrote where that dog and moon appear.

So that’s the process story behind this poem. I don’t usually write “found” poems, though many of my poems often engage quotes from other sources–poems, articles, interviews, overheard language. That’s often how my poems start–as conversations with others, with other language out there zipping around us.

You can read “A Minor Dilemma” over at The Good Men Project, here.

“Cross Bucket Candle Knife” at The Offending Adam, MoMA Musings

A new poem, “Cross Bucket Candle Knife,” is up at The Offending Adam. It’s an ekphrastic response to Max Ernst’s Trois Poemes Visibles from his Una Semaine de Bonté: A Surrealist Novel in Collage (1933) and the poem sections align with his collage sections.

It’s part of a triptych of poems. “Caliper Owl Thistle Fork” appeared in Crazyhorse late last year and is in response to Jess’s Ō-blēk, No. 10 (1991). “Color Keyboard Eye Hammer” has yet to find a home, but was the first of these I wrote, a crazy sestina in response to Kandinsky’s Panel for Edwin R. Campbell No. 1 (1914), one of my favorite paintings at MoMA.

Speaking of MoMA, I started a class there last night (it’s been a few years since my last course there) called “The Modern Studio: Rauschenberg, Johns, Cage” taught by Corey D’Augustine who I could listen to for hours in that way the best art history teachers I’ve had in my life captivate me–that ability to weave stories and facts together while examining a movement or period. The class is unique in that it’s part art history, part studio so we’ll be creating work, too–I stretched my first canvas last night! And I was reminded what a treat it is to be back in the galleries after all the visitors have left for the day. I’m a huge fan of Johns, so am excited to examine more of his work.

Two things struck me while we were in the galleries examining some biomorphic pieces, in particular an early piece by Rothko: one, you can see the earliest hint of what was to come with his color fields in a small section of the painting where the pigment is diluted and applied in a wash over other colored layers. It got me thinking how often this is true with writers and artists–that you find seeds and gestures in early work that later grow into the mature work. And two, how my lifelong interest in ekphrasis and pushing it to do new things has led me to the pleasure in cataloging what I think I see in biomorphic works, and what my eye gravitates to in collages, but paring down the language inspired by these works so that it’s driven by sonic play more than sense, if that makes sense.

More musing to come as the course continues this summer.

OCHO #32

Happy to announce that the new issue (#32) of the relaunched OCHO is now live. Didi Menendez, the publisher of MiPOesias, PoetsArtists, and iArtistas, contacted me back in February about relaunching OCHO as a journal focused on queer arts and literature. I thought it was a great idea, wrote a new mission statement and submission call for it, and agreed to guest edit the relaunch issue. #32 is the fruit of that labor, and I’m quite happy with how it turned out. It was my first time editing an issue, which is a great experience every writer should go through. Gives you a newfound appreciation for what goes on when you submit your work to a journal.

I’ve agreed to stay on as Managing Editor, but now pass the guest editor torch to Rae Gouirand for the fall issue. This will be our way forward, each guest editor passing the torch to a new editor as we go. I hope it allows for an interesting overlap and extension of the queer aesthetics conversation.

Drawn to Marvel

My copy of the new anthology Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books edited by Bryan D. Dietrich and Marta Ferguson and published by Minor Arcana Press arrived today. My homage to Wonder Woman, “Orange Colored Sky” is in there, sandwiched between a John Ashbery poem and a collaborative poem by Denise Duhamel & Maureen Seaton. Not bad company at all!

It’s a first of its kind gathering of poems devoted to that uniquely American literary form of the comic book. You can check out some of the 140 contributors here.

Spring Readings

I had a lovely time visiting both my alma maters this past month. In an odd alignment of the stars, they both contacted me within a 24 hour window back in February to return to their campuses as a “distinguished alum” – aw.

My first visit was to Muhlenberg where their new/reinstated chapter of Sigma Tau Delta (English major honor society) invited me back to be the inaugural alum guest speaker. I gave a multimedia reading, showing some of the visual art my ekphrastic poems engage, as well as the calligramme of Marilyn’s face, and led a workshop on Poetry & the Visual Arts, taking them through calligrammes to poem comics to an extended look at the ekphrastic mode. I had a great time visiting with my old professors who were like proud parents at my homecoming, and the new generation of students had me breathing a sigh of relief–engaged, smart, inquisitive.

After a quick reading at this year’s Rainbow Book Fair here in NYC, where I aired out some poems from my upcoming collection, The Erotic Postulate, I was off to Ann Arbor for their inaugural UpstART festival. I gave a TedX-style talk on collaboration in the arts, beginning with my own journey since leaving the MFA program and my appreciation for that web Virginia Woolf described in A Room of One’s Own, encouraging the students to think about what anchors they need in their life to secure and spin their creative webs. One of my anchors is collaborative experiences, and the talk turned to lessons learned from some of the collaborations I’ve been part of in recent years. Despite some technical glitches with my slides and videos, I think the talk went well. And I got to visit with some friends who are still in Ann Arbor. I hope to make it back this fall for a reading at Literati, the new bookstore filling the void of the departed Shaman Drum and Borders.

Four poems in Crazyhorse

I forgot to post here that I had four poems appear in Crazyhorse (Number 84/Fall 2013): “Frost Pear,” “Caliper Owl Thistle Fork,” “The Sphinx * The Asterisk,” and “Villa Lyric.” The first three are from my current Book of M project, and the last from Smite & Spoon.

Chip Livingston wrote an insightful review of the issue for NewPages, and singled out my poems for mention:

Matthew Hittinger, another poet of whom I was previously a fan, also surprised me with his poems—two of which, “Caliper Owl Thistle Fork” and “The Sphinx * The Asterisk,” challenged my conceptions of line breaks and phrasal breath, spacing, “asterism,” and taught me new things about poetry while, at the same time, entertaining me.

Three at Blue Fifth Review

I’ve had three poems appear recently at Blue Fifth Review:

“Rune Stories” appeared in their Winter Quarterly: City (February 2013/13.4)

“There Are Characters I Omit;” appeared in their Poetry Special (December 2013/13.23)

“The Library The Lion” appeared in their collaboration issue. The poem is in response to a drawing by Portrait of Dennis (In His Library) by Ira Joel Haber.

The first two are from my Impossible Gotham project, the latter a new one for Book of M.

Enjoy!

The Gay Rub

Over Christmas, when I was home visiting my parents in Bethlehem, PA, I trekked over to Nisky Hill and the Public Library to do rubbings of H.D.’s grave and historical marker. Finding a flat grave after a fresh snowfall is quite the challenge, but I’ve shown many a visitor those sites over the years and had memorized its location from where it aligned with a nearby tree. These rubbings were for Steven Reigns and his “The Gay Rub” project, which you can read more about here at Out Traveler and if you’re in L.A. can see during the month of February at ONE Archives Gallery & Museum in WeHo.

Here’s a shot of me at her grave (with my raw, red hand!):

New poem in Weave

I have a new poem from my Book of M project, “Script Sculpt,” in Issue 10 of Weave.