Laura McCullough
Laura McCullough holds an MFA in Writing and Literature from Goddard
College. She has been a New Jersey State Arts Council Fellow, won a
Geraldine R. Dodge Scholarship to attend the Fine Arts Work Center in
Provincetown, and was the 2005 Prairie Schooner Merit Scholar in Poetry at
the Nebraska Summer Writers Workshop. She attended the 2005 Bread Loaf
writers conference as a contributor. She has published poems widely in
literary magazines and journals such as Nimrod, Potion, Hotel Amerika,
Gulf Coast, Nightsun, Iron Horse Quarterly, Boulevard, The God Particle,
Poetry East, Confluence, Exquisite Corpse, Word Riot, Tarpaulin Sky, and
others. Her first collection of poems, The Dancing Bear, was published in
February, 2006 by Open Book Press with jacket blurbs by Stephen Dunn,
Li-young Lee, and BJ Ward. She delivered a paper, In Defence of Shelley:
the New Science of Mirror Neurons and its Implications for a Theory of
Poetics at The Mid Americans 2005 Winter Wheat Writing Festival in
Bowling Green. She is a professor of writing at Brookdale Community
College in NJ where she chairs the Visiting Writers Series.
Matt Hart’s full length collection of poetry, Who’s Who Vivid, published on the heels of his debut publication Revelated (Hollyridge Press Chapbook Series) was published by Slope, the funky, provocative, and sometimes punishing small press started by Ethan Paquin following the success of the online journal of the same name. Hart fits right in with Slope’s eclectic, cutting edge stable of writers: whirlwinds of words and worldviews.
Hart studied philosophy before going through the Warren Wilson College MFA Program. Philosophy undergirds his poems, with an occasional philosopher cameo. Hart is a “hipster,” Gregory Corso as a kind of poetic hero, and plays in a punk band. He is a co-founder and editor for a funky and funny journal, Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, & Light Industrial Safety. The submission guidelines warn people not to send poetry or fiction, but to send in found art, recipes, and other oddities to amuse and delight the editors and, presumably, to display the sender’s sensibilities. It’s a great little journal put together with industrial bi-products: plastics, metals, etc.
Hart’s poetry holds little back. He is a poet of sharp angles and juxtapositions; be careful romping through his books or you might get cut. The poems don’t seek to harm, but to flay us layer by layer, to expose us to ourselves. The reader gets the sense that Hart knows his progenitors in this wicked and dangerous pursuit of poetry: Corso and the Beats are there, Frost is in the heartfelt details. Present, too, is Whitman. Instead of his Barbaric Yawp, Hart’s great Awk signifies the self squirming in the converging tides of media, technologies, and politics.
Who’s Who Vivid bridges the world of quirky disassociation, yet flings itself headlong into feeling. These poems reveal a speaker uncertain of the relation of the self to the world. These lines by Hart in the poem, “Who’s Who Vivid in the Moonlight in Pain,” the book’s title poem, speak of the difficulty of writing as well as living in a postmodern world:
…How
uncomfortable to be comfortable, to be churning
with poems, to be messed-up and messy
exuberant-green…Anymore what I mean
is like new, wet cement.
I speak and I’m stuck in it forever.
I find myself wondering about and musing at the mind behind the words. I don’t mean the private self of the poet, but the public entity who is engaged with other minds, with the zeitgeist of the day, and with itself.
Hart’s poem, “In the Gloaming,” explains:
My mission: To save the most the best-dressed for dessert,
to assert myself in the gloaming, while wondering about gloaming
and looking it up and feeling all the while tangential.
Hart recognizes the angst of the day, and the exquisite condition of the poet speaks to the paralysis we often feel. Don’t we all feel just a little superfluous? Isn’t the world filled with gratuity? And yet, the poet is unabashed: “Give me a sound I can make with one cricket,” the poet says. “I've come to fix the sink. I've been freaking over a flower./ I thought my head was half its age. / The tide washes in/ washes out.” Life goes on asserting itself regardless of our human thrashings. Life is still in the cricket, in the flower, in the tide.
In postmodern poetry, fragmentation was lauded for the new associations one can assemble. Other schools claimed that post-war art was dead - how can art survive in the face of genocide, for example? The Age of Irony was ushered in. After 911 hit, some claimed that irony was dead, too. Matt Hart’s poems lay claim to history, but they point forward. Hart doesn’t claim a new meta-narrative, but a way to live in the interstices of our own lives and find meaning within that sphere.
Hart’s long poem, “Letter to a Friend Who I'll Never See Again” reveals his lineage, his mind’s machinations, his begging need to find connections. We discover the existential truth that the self alone is responsible for establishing meaning in the world:
I keep scanning the sky for a glimpse of you spinning,
but after a few minutes when you don't appear
I go back to what Breton said about the magnificence
of waiting, and about the love of the irrational
and the irrational of love. From there, Wittgenstein's preface
in the Philosophical Investigations is a cake walk,
especially the part about going, "criss-cross in every direction
over a wide field of thought."…
The poem speaks directly and without shame to the “other.” It wants connection, honesty honestly arrived at. But it also has a sense of its own inadequacy, apparent in this self-indictment:
…Like everything else, this started out with fire, but now I'm losing
steam. I'm tired of making the world up out of nothing. You said,
"Tell me what you believe in," in response to one of my poems.
I believe in nothing, and at the same time I believe that it's crucial
to believe in something in the face of nothing, and to live
with the consequences of that belief. Still, it's hard.
Even understanding that sentence is hard. I believe
in making indefensible statements and defending them
anyway. I believe in walking the blood red carpet…
The poem continues raising theses and discounting them as insufficient unto themselves, just as he is insufficient alone: there is a recognition that self can not be fully understood as singular, but rather as part of a community. Who’s Who Vivid is populated with artists, philosophers and poets who say, “I believe” and then apologize for what they believe in. The poems flirt with rogue sentimentality, only to lament the parodoxical role of the lover at a time when it is more acceptable to know than to feel.
Who’s Who Vivid takes on the world of the poet both internally and externally, sideways and frontways, extending back in time and forward. It isn’t linear, but it recognizes linearity as one mode, while admitting a suspicion that time doesn’t follow any rules we yet know. Hart’s poems break rules, tease out worm holes in the poet’s mind and follow them wherever they lead. Like Hart’s band, the musicality in his poems is in the joints, the syncopations more than the cadences.
Think: garbage can lids and stomping boots. Think: a swoosh of hair tossed over a shoulder. If you realize you are alone and not alone at the same time, and that the world is wet and the smell of spring means something bad has passed you by…you just might be able to imagine the tone of Who’s Who Vivid. This is what it means to be alive inside the mind of Matt Hart.
___________________________________
