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Website about to undergo overhaul...

My site is about to go through a major re-design this week. Stay tuned for an announcement revealing the new www.matthewhittinger.com!

Joe Milford Interview Now Archived

I had a lovely time chatting with Joe Milford Saturday night about my work. He's a sensitive and careful close-reader and the 90 minutes flew by; I felt like we could have talked for another 90 minutes and still not covered all there is to cover.

If you missed the show, it is now archived HERE (and is the streaming show on his site's main page this week). My site will be undergoing an overhaul soon and we'll be adding a media page where the interview will also live along with some other audio (and soon video!) files.

Here was the set-list from the show:

Set 1 – selections from Pear Slip
Preface: Pear Poetics
How to Write, How Not to Write About Pears
This Is Not About Pears
Pared & Canned
Silkscreen: Pome in a Bowl
Frost Pear (Bonus pear poem not in PS)

Set 2 – selections from Narcissus Resists
Contaminant
Celluloid
Clubbing
Concussion
Crush
Celebrity Skin
Cybersex
Crepuscule

Set 3 – selections from Skin Shift
The Fresco Worker Appears Suddenly in the Picture
Bufeo Colorado
Local Lepidoptera Adopt Municipal Pool...
Uncle Remus Denies the Ethnographer
Substitutions
Restoration
Orange Colored Sky

I will definitely take Joe up on his invite to return and do the show again. Maybe next time we'll focus on work from The Erotic Postulate or Impossible Gotham. Check out The Joe Milford Poetry Show site for upcoming shows and browse his extensive and impressive archive of past shows.

Long Poem Sequence in Dusie #8

I have a long poem sequence, "Merry-Go-Tats: A Bestiary, A Fable" in the new Dusie, the mega Issue #8 (vol. 2 no. 4) (Click on "download ebook" to the right; the sequence begins on page 59).

UPDATE: You can read Dusie 8 on their site now. Click HERE.

The sequence is the middle section in my manuscript project Smite & Spoon (its latest title) and is my stab at writing a bestiary. The sequence is dedicated to Erna Brodber and her Blackspace in Woodside, Jamaica where the seed and first drafts of the poem began, with nods to Brodber's novel Myal, Derek Walcott's poem sequence “A Tropical Bestiary,” and “The Bremen Town Musicians” by the Brothers Grimm.

Coconut Park, the abandoned amusement park referenced, is in Hope Gardens, Kingston and you can see pictures of it in this post from my trip to Jamaica back in 2007.

As for the Bremen Town musicians, I used to listen to old records when I was little, and on a recent visit to my parents' house relived those afternoons lying on the living room floor with the player spinning when I found the album Meet Tammy & Her Friends which includes "The Musicians of Bremen," my first encounter with the tale. The album cover was a Barbie-like doll (Tammy) with her friends (Misty, Dodie and Pepper--I think one was her kid sister) dressed up in cheerleader outfits on fake grass. The story was track 12 and a chorus sang this before the story:

Tell me a story

tell me a story

tell me a story

then I'll go to bed.

You promised me you said you would

I've been waiting I've been good

tell me a story

then I'll go to bed.

A woman then narrated with an orchestral accompaniment and every time an animal joined the band on its travels or sang, the orchestra would make a flourish. It's always stuck with me and something about the animals I encountered in Jamaica flashed my memory back to that record and the story and I knew when I started writing my bestiary that it would be one of the sources.

But enough of my nostalgia. Go check out the new Dusie!

Reminder/Update: Joe Milford Poetry Show 8/1/2009

Just a reminder: I'll be on The Joe Milford Poetry Show this coming Saturday, August 1st. Please note the new time: 7:00-8:30 PM (EST). The show is broadcast on the web, so you can listen live from anywhere in the world, and if you miss it, you can find it in the archives.

Frost Pear Print

Here's a scan of the print I made at the Center for Book Arts letterpress class:

Enjoy!

Center for Book Arts Letterpress Seminar Day 4

Our last day! It was primarily about distribution, the act of putting your type back into the case. It's supposed to be this satisfying, closure-inducing task but I found it sad having spent two days putting something together and then having to destroy it. Here's a pic of what it looked like on its galley and all tied up in its string before I began taking it apart:

And here is the CA Job Case for my Optima font after all the pieces were put away:

Barbara brought in a book that had the history of every font in it, so I looked up some of my faves including the one I used, Optima, which was created by Hermann Zapf; it is characterized by a "thick-and-thin serifless face" and combines the best of roman and gothic forms.

Our primary task for the day besides distribution was doing the title page for the little anthologies we made of the work we printed. We decided to go with a Barnum font which got us on a circus theme. We found some star ornaments and an elephant and made up a circus-inspired broadside title page.

Here is Rena, Ella, me and Gabriel collaborating (more like some of us trying to convince others about the awesomeness of having lightning bolts coming out of the elephant's trunk!) on the title page (photo taken by Holly):

Here I am posing with two title card pages (photo courtesy of Rena). We scored and folded these to make covers and holders for our prints:

And here is our instructor, Barbara Henry, posing with a title card:

Barbara showed us some of her amazing work today, too, including an accordion style book of WCW's early poems with block art, three books of poems she made throughout the W. years by playing with found text from the NYTimes, and this amazing "graphic poem" collection (like a graphic novel but with a more impressionistic narrative) of linoleum block cuts that were also floor tiles.

Sad class is over already, but happy to have learned the basics of letterpress and to have met such great people. Here's a snapshot of (almost) all of us:

From left to right: me, Ella, Gabriel, Jean, Myronn and Rena. Holly's taking the pic and Tim wasn't in class our last day. I'll scan a copy of my print tomorrow and post it. You can see more of Rena's photos of our four days here.

The class has only fueled my fantasies about starting my own press. I wrote down the specs for a table top press next to one of the Vandercooks and think I may ask for one for Xmas this year and take a class at the press on using one. And I found my old linoleum block cutting kit too so I could do it all: cover and text. Just need to learn how to make paper and it could be a 100% handmade product. Start publishing limited edition chaps of my friends' work...

"Poets publish other poets..."