Spring Is Close - Come Celebrate with Poetry This Evening

The air will be clear and bright this evening, according to the forecast. Are you feeling cabin fever? Then plan on being at the Downtown Writer's Center this evening. Our guests are the DWC's own Nate Pritts and his good friend and educator, Matt Hart, who is traveling in from Ohio to share his work with our community.

Nate Pritts is the author of The Wonderfull Yeare (Cooper Dillon, 2010), Sensational Spectacular (BlazeVOX, 2007) and Honorary Astronaut (Ghost Road Press, 2008).  The founder & primary editor of H_NGM_N, on on-line journal of contemporary poetry, Nate currently teaches at the DWC. Now we get a chance to feature Nate not as educator but for the poetry he creates.

Matt Hart is the author of two full length books of poetry, Who’s Who Vivid (Slope Editions, 2006) and You Are Mist (Moor Books, forthcoming), as well as numerous chapbooks. A co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, & Light Industrial Safety, Matt teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.

The Spring calendar of readings will be released soon but you can get a jumpstart on the season with this last of the Winter line-up. The reading starts at 7:00 p.m. and, as always is free. We encourage you to bring a friend as well to share the evening. The Downtown Writer's Center is located off the main lobby of the Downtown YMCA, 340 Montgomery Street, near Syracuse's Columbus Circle. We hope to see you!

The Imaginarium of Matt Hart

by Georgia Popoff

Reading Matt Hart’s poetry, I find myself negotiating undercurrents of a “normal life:” the job, the baby, the wife, the dog who definitely wants to move faster than her human, the confusion of a morning started too early; all of the elements of a life reaching middle stages, all its trappings but no ordinary observations wending into typical narrative form here.

Matt Hart agrees to let us witness the Venn Diagram of his inner thoughts, where his love of language meets his rock-n-roll heart. Coffee and the paper are not enough. I am reminded that there is a period of rock-n-roll I missed. Matt has archived that era for himself, and the blare of punk seeps through as he wanders an interior landscape, where the topography is constructed of fanciful images and the orchestration of the poet’s daily query to establish place, create meaning, dispel wonder. He is also bold enough to resurrect the poetic “O” and get away with it.

He risks our meddling. His reader has a spyglass of Matt’s specifications to witness the confusion a man feels when suddenly he looks around at his own trappings to see a world he created and, at the same time, stumbled into without realizing. Take, for instance, these lines:

Tonight the sun is shining, and I am joyful,
but why? The world is weird wired
and white as hydrangeas. I am joyful
in my blue plaid mind, even as I think
terrible thoughts against my wife,
my daughter, the leaders of my country.
There is no end to my terrible joy.
I am like a wolf with an egg in its mouth,
the yolk running over its mad lip curling.

The poet is not about to stray from his family’s routine but still there is a dark foreboding. He is at ease in his station as professor yet I hear a challenge in his poems, a slow rumbling of “Why are you listening to ME?” In the midst of this ongoing questioning of the universe, the magic realism never ceases to amaze Matt.

His is a world influenced by the masters who have gone before him, not just the sparse Zen of Philip Whelan or the angst of Johnny Rotten, but the singsong of Dr. Seuss, the acid touch of Lewis Carroll. There is the craft of the finest and the storm of a summer night. The Bootsy bassline and the order of a Wordsworth garden. Every poem gives me reason to stop, read it phrase by phrase, question the song of wind chime in late winter, challenge my own poetry to a duel of fascination.

As I sit in a seeming silence, the timer for the living room light to fool the potential interlopers ticking a frantic pulse, the late winter breeze outside creating a random etude, my coffee growing cold too quickly in my cup, I think maybe, just perhaps, I get it. Matt will let me know on Friday, as he breathes these words into air.

Don't miss Matt Hart and Nate Pritts at the DWC Friday night, 7 pm.

Georgia Popoff is a well-traveled teaching artist, community poet and currently serves as interim managing editor for Comstock Review. She is definitely someone you should know.

Calm Poem

by visiting author, Matt Hart, who can also be found here.

1.

Several years ago I was in a poetry workshop with Tony Hoagland. During a one-on-one meeting about my work, he noted all the noise and disruption in my poems—all the feedback and chaos—and said “Here’s what I want you to do: write a calm poem and call it “Calm Poem.” Make every line a line of clarity and tranquility.” He said that, or something like it... Anyway, his point was that I was garbling what I wanted/needed to say, clouding the issues in a lot of unnecessary roughness—sabotaging myself with fireworks—which are maybe thrilling for a few minutes, but don’t last very long. Somehow I needed to find a way to keep the lights on in my work, even if what it illuminated was completely weird and chaotic.

Here’s the poem I wrote:

Calm Poem

Of all the calm poems I've written

This calm poem

is definitely my favorite.

It came at the end of a calamitous day—

I couldn’t remember what to say

during a lecture.

I cried while reading

a philosophical preface.

When I looked in the mirror

I saw pieces of a bluejay

and the world turned

my stomach

in the gathering dust.

Forget it, said the poem.

Now you’re safe at home.

Many people love you.

No need to create a scene.

No need to punctuate

the roar of the page.

Go to sleep and dream

you’re a giant paper snowflake.

There is nothing to be afraid of.

2.

What’s interesting to me is that traveling around giving readings and teaching workshops, I often hear people expressing a desire to make their poems wilder, stranger, more surprising and dynamic. Almost never have I heard someone wishing to make their poems calm down and behave. And yet, aren’t there occasions when staying calm is the most surprising and weird thing of all? As a result of this exercise, I have come to believe, even though I’m not always capable of acting on it, that to say a thing plainly and deliberately with clarity—with calm—is among the most poetic (i.e. surprising, strange and depth-charged) ways of saying anything.

With this in mind, I’ve adapted Tony’s assignment to me as one I sometimes use with my own students, especially when they’re being weird for weird’s sake and seem to have more on their minds than mere weirdness. This is how I put it to them:

Write a Calm Poem. In fact, use Calm Poem as the title, so that when we gather round the table next week we can survey the varieties and vagaries of calmness. Is calm merely the opposite of calamity? Is it a warm bath? Is it listening to Coltrane (the early stuff) with the lights down low? Is it chicken soup and sickness and clouds overhead? For some of you it may be soccer, and for others, a Sunday Stroll. For still others, what’s calm is a hardcore band for breakfast. I don’t have any particular designs on calmness (I’m barely calm at all). I’m looking for the truth; I’m looking for a world to kick back in, some place to have myself a bottle of wine, some place with a view of the ocean. Remember, too, that what’s calm in a poem may have nothing to do with its content. Calmness may be the result of purely formal maneuvers—the lengths of your lines, the kinds of stanzas you use, the way you arrange the words (and the white spaces) on the page. Pacing may be everything. What does calmness mean to you and/or how does it go down in language? Be steady, breathe easy, take yourselves away. Nobody panic. Stay as steady and calm as you possibly can. There are a million emergencies to contend with, and someone has to feel at home in them.

TWO MORE CALM EXAMPLES

Here’s one by my friend Nate Pritts that’s incredible for its steadfast attentiveness to the moment and also for the way it manages chaos—that’s what calm is in a sense managing chaos in the moment:

Calm Poem

It’s November 15th, 2009, & I’ve never been

Nate Pritts today. I’m 35 with about two months

tacked on & I’m taking your advice. Early

morning & there’s a halo of helicopters

harrowing the blue, sending word through the

static about the crowded intersections—

all that crosstown traffic—& I stepped

right in front of the car. I knew the speed.

I don’t care if it’s calm. It’s okay if it’s calamity.

Early morning & the buzz is circling my head

like a certainty. Three or four times a day,

I feel like I’m about to get shot out of myself,

like there’s a vibration approaching catastrophe

& I need to run. I’m thinking of language

like it’s something delicate I can hold in my hand.

I’m worried this might break. Early morning

& I don’t care if it’s starless. It’s okay that it’s

endless but full of endings. It’s November 15th,

it’s 2009, it’s me taking your advice because I’m

left without my normal faith in talk, that I could

fill a room with voice & tip the scales.

So hard to get through to you isn’t something

I’m saying but something I feel & the you isn’t

you. I don’t care if it’s indeterminate. It’s okay

that it’s not referential. Early morning & sun

gathers slowly in the clouds. November 15th

& I’m Nate Pritts right now more than ever &

the trees are already empty. It’s not fall

in Syracuse. It’s not fall; it’s fell. It’s exquisitely

dark. It’s this terrible. It’s this fierce destructive.

It’s the end of my favorite season ever & the beginning

of my dark poetry & I don’t care if it’s dark

as long as there’s light. It’s okay that I’m on my knees

to restart the fire as the damp wind whips

tumultuous & elegant. My faith is that more & more

will outweigh the less & less, that an I & a you

accumulates. I’m trying to be calm with the bomb

in my hand because it seems right to pretend

I don’t hear it counting down to one from two.

And this one’s by a former student of mine, Scott Dennis, who of course found a way through the assignment to something marvelously SCOTT DENNIS:

Calm

These are the tricks that make us calm:

The last bits of light

burn images of peace

into my skin.

I dream of dream-catchers

and of things salvaged.

I dream of things primitive

and of communication.

Ritual stimulates

me to my grave,

where the shaman takes me

and helps me survey the wreckage,

where my hands will not reach

my weaponry and my

face melts off my skull.

The only thing you have to lose in an exercise like this is pretense and the chains of expectation, but what you have to gain is something clearly and radiantly yourself.

Matt Hart is the author of two full length books of poetry, Who’s Who Vivid (Slope Editions, 2006) and You Are Mist (Moor Books, forth coming), as well as numerous chapbooks. A co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, & Light Industrial Safety, Matt teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.