Right on the heals of his debut publication Revelated published in the Hollyridge Press Chapbook Series, Matt Hart’s full length collection of poetry, Who’s Who Vivid, was published by Slope Editions, the funky, provocative, and sometimes punishing small press started by Ethan Paquin and Christopher Janke 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. Who’s Who Vivid is an electrifying collection that demands stripping away of subterfuge and posings. Hart is as real as a poet gets. Baudelaire famously said you have to always be drunk! on wine, poetry, or virtue as you wish, and Hart’s poems are drunk with life, with virtue, and with honesty, honestly rendered. He’s a bald-faced truth-teller, unafraid or at least willing to admit when he is. Who’s Who Vivid is full of verve and intelligence; it’s aware of the shoulders, both poetic and philosophic, it stands on. It ignites like a pyre and cleanses like a cool sorbet. Hart is hot and cold; you won’t be unaffected.

Laura McCullough: Tell us a little about your background and influences. Where did you study? Who do think your poetic ancestors are?

Matt Hart: I was born in 1969 and grew up in Southern Indiana—typical middle-class luck of the draw (dysfunction, privilege, malaise). During high school, I sang, played guitar and wrote songs for a bunch of punk rock bands, but of course it was the mid/late-1980s, so punk rock was sort of already finished. I attended college at Ball State University where I studied Philosophy. Before the age of twenty I’d maybe read a handful of poems, and I certainly didn’t write any before then. Poetry wasn’t even on my radar. I wanted to play guitar in Black Flag.

Things changed pretty quickly, however, when I went to a student reading where a guy stood up and read Etheridge Knight’s poem “Feeling Fucked Up.” Strangely, that one reading of that one poem—a litany of expletives, which turns out to be a crushingly plaintive love call—was my whole way into poetry. Sitting in the audience I remember thinking, “This is poetry?” From there the world fell apart and reassembled itself in words and mouths, and things haven’t been the same since. Nevertheless, there have been a few significant detours.

After college, I went to grad school at Ohio University (again for philosophy), where—much to the dismay of my philosophy professors—I kept reading and writing poems. But I also started studying the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein—also much to the dismay of my professors. As it turned out, however, Wittgenstein, and particularly his theory of “language-games,” had a huge influence on my poetry. Thankfully, it also gave me an out from philosophy, as Wittgenstein argues that philosophical problems arise from a sort of neurotic tendency to misunderstand and misuse language. In short, philosophers take ordinary words like “knowledge” or “art” and give them specialized meanings which have no basis in reality, thus short circuiting the arguments they’re being used to make. “Reasons end somewhere,” Wittgenstein famously wrote, and philosophy is simply a mild form of mental illness where the sufferer (the philosopher) can’t leave well-enough (ordinary language) alone. Thus, if you understand Wittgenstein, you quit doing philosophy. He actually thought of his work as a kind of therapy. In any case, I left the Philosophy program, then bummed around a few years playing in bands—put out records, went on tour, had a couple of videos on MTV—but all the while I was still writing poems.

Fast forward (finally!) to 1999, I somehow got into the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. There, I had excellent teachers like Dean Young and Heather McHugh. That’s when I really started reading deeply. That’s when I “got” discipline—made a boatload of work and wrote a critical thesis on the collage poetry of Tristan Tzara, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Ted Berrigan…

And somehow, after much adieu about nothing (it seems now looking back over this), here I am with poetry—a blockhead with a scorpion stinger and a heart where my nose should be…

LM: 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 in the poem, “Who’s Who Vivid in the Moonlight in Pain,” the book’s title poem, dare to speak of the difficulty of living and writing in our time:

…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.

Is there such a thing as The New Sincerity in Poetry, and can you talk a little about your sensibilities, your aesthetics?

MH: New Sincerity…uh…? I have no idea what the Old Sincerity was… What I’m interested in is writing poems that employ the experimental techniques, strategies, and styles of the avant-garde in conjunction with more traditional approaches—a poetics of inclusion rather than exclusion, not merely a long series of ones and zeroes in the form of ones and zeroes. The fact is I’m really bored by contemporary poems that are just playing with language for its own sake. The notion of a poem as merely an aesthetic object, to be dissected by a few robots in-the-know—robots who’ve read X,Y, and Zukofsky—seems not only played out, but irresponsible. Of course, I’m not suggesting that we compromise our aesthetic principles in the name of accessibility. First and foremost, we have to make interesting art, but beyond that (and in addition to it) we also have to say something human in our time—something which is not the poem. The art that matters (and has mattered) is always urgently embedded in its time. So it seems to me that we’re at crossroads in poetry where we can either keep spinning our Projective, Objective, Dadaist (name your poison) wheels, or we can use these things to amount to something more than the sum of our smarty-pants parts. If this makes me a Neo-Romantic or a Beat Sentimentalist or a New Sincerist (name your poison), then so be it.

To me, a poem is a gesture, a momentum—a conduit to people and poets alike—with aims both artistic and humanistic. In Gregory Corso's words, "I love poetry because it makes me love." Or to quote James Longenbach: “Poetry's greatest power is to instill in us a longing for something other than poetry.” Or put yet another way, I’m not interested in prescribing (or subscribing to) any particular style, mode, or technique, but rather in using any means necessary to make work which is both artful and moving. Machines made of words are great, but machines are no longer enough. Nowadays, I and a lot of other people are looking for (in addition to the cool new poem-gadgets) poetic voices propelled by human beings, making connections between poetry and the world that aren’t poetry.

LM: In the poem, “In the Gloaming,” you assert

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.

What is your mission, Matt?

MH: Well, in that poem my mission was to make a thing with real tentacles and a sharp beak out of a dictionary definition for “gloaming” and an ice cream sandwich in the pale moonlight, O. In retrospect, however, that whole book was about trying to talk to other people and the Vast by talking to myself. The only problem was that I had no idea what I wanted to say—that was a matter to be discovered in the course of the poems. And this was further complicated by the fact that “I” kept falling apart in my split pea soup, or while doing my laundry, or in the midst of picking through the guts of a giraffe, etc. forever, amen.

With that in mind, maybe my mission is to remain as confused as possible while somehow managing not to come off as confusing to other people. Or maybe it’s, as I have noted elsewhere, to believe in something in the face of nothing, even though the only thing I believe for sure is that there’s nothing to believe in. Probably, however, the truth is something more like: I never have any idea what I’m doing, so I just keep writing poems hoping to invent a new kind of anchovy, or a way to say SHAZAM! that feels authentic and transforms me into a five-star French chef. Somehow, I want to end up in a room talking with other people, and then I want to have a dance party.

Along these same lines, I guess I should note that there’s no speaker in my poems. It’s me; I’m talking—and not because I have something unique to say, but rather exactly because I don’t. Everybody has that creative urge in them—that mission to become. It’s just that I do it via poetry, while other people do it via carpentry or feminism or jumping rope. Thus, my mission is to reach out to them with the “what” that I’ve got, so that they’ll reach out to me with theirs.

LM: Your work is unabashed and brave. “In the Gloaming” the poet says: “Give me a sound I can make with one cricket…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.” What were the tides you experienced in compiling Who’s Who Vivid? And how has it been received?

MH: Well, to answer the second part of the question first—I think I try pretty hard not to think about how the book’s been received. I mean, obviously I do think about it—I read the reviews, I listen to what people say, I second-guess every move I’ve ever made. But I’m not sure I’m really in a position to comment on how people have actually received the book—which really is a reception of both me and not me. By my lights, I’m fortunate to have any readers at all—to have a book at all—to be received in any state other than dead.

As for the tides, I wrote the poems in WWV over about a five year period. At one point I thought I had two manuscripts. But as it turned out neither of them really worked very well on their own. So the book is actually a wiring together of those two separate sets of poems, along with some material that wasn’t part of either of them. All in all, I wrote about double the poems that actually appear in the book, and many of the ones that do appear developed over a long period of time—weeks, months, years.

For me the process of writing is explorative—a means of figuring out what’s on my mind or in the air. I enjoy it immensely, but the hard work of revision (where the poems actually get made) is arduous, painful, and slow. And that, coupled with the fact that I’m a terrible judge of my own work, means that I need time to allow the work to settle into itself—to work on me and let me know what it wants to do. Unfortunately, I’m the most impatient person on Earth, so I often kill things by trying to rush them to a finish line, which doesn’t yet exist. Thus, I am primarily a builder of coffins and fragments, which leads us to…

LM: 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. How does your work move beyond, behind, outside of this?

MH: In some ways, I’ve addressed that in my earlier responses, but additionally, having grown up in the 1970s and 80s, I’m not only a product of postmodernism; I am postmodernism. With that in mind, it’s both a blessing and a curse of our time that anything can be a poem. Nothing is off limits in the making of art, and there is no such thing as non-poetic language. The flip side, of course, is that there’s no resistance either. Nothing’s shocking. Surprise is at a premium. We can’t imagine a crowd rioting over an avant-garde work of art—we can barely imagine a crowd near a work of art. Lots of people argue nowadays—notably David Lehman, but there are many others—that an avant-garde isn’t even any longer possible. In the here and now, questions of value in art aren’t about “how much,” but about “how possible” and “why.” I have no idea what the answer to this conundrum is (as a postmodernist I guess I’d probably look for lots of them), only that it seems to be one of the fundamental issues facing artists of every stripe. Do we retreat into the old worn out values—beauty, truth, significant form—or dive off the deep end in search of new ones? Or, alternately, do we forget value altogether and shoot for some other justification of what we do? Obviously, it seems safe to me to say, art will keep being made and poems will keep being written no matter what. The question is what sort will they be? Who will enjoy and/or be appalled by them? Who will benefit? Who will care? These are questions we’ve managed for the most part to ignore in the last 50-100 years, because we’ve only been writing for other poets, critics, and aesthetes. But how small and specialized do our audiences have to get—how small and specialized do “we” as our audience have to get—before we realize that what we’re doing doesn’t matter?

LM: How does your music background play into your writing?

MH: As I mentioned above, I’ve been playing in bands since I was a teenager, so music, and (in particular) singing, has always been really fundamental to me. Perhaps that’s why one of the things that drew me to poetry initially was hearing it read out loud. I was suddenly amazed by the sounds one could make with one’s own, lone voice—sounds which simultaneously are and are not what most people would consider singing. With poetry a whole new world of music opened up for me where I could play everything with my throat and teeth and tongue: melody, harmony, counterpoint, consonance, dissonance, even distortion. I love the way words bang and chime against each other, and also how sounds lead somewhere. Often in my writing, the sounds propel me (and thus, the poem) where I (and it) need to go. As a result, I don’t think I ever really get very far away from singing in my work.

I also definitely try and read my poems with a certain sense of musical urgency and/or joy, which some people really dig and some other people find off-putting, but I’d feel ridiculous standing up in front of people and monotonously reading black squiggles from a white page. Like it or not, a reading is, in some ways, always a test of the reader’s ability to be convincing. That said, I don’t think of reading my poems as an act. I’m not trying to be KISS or reality TV or an amusement park. It’s just that I think you can learn a lot about a poem by hearing it read by the author, and then after that even more by going home (or turning off the recording) and reading it as yourself—the author’s voice spinning merrily or insidiously in your head. The music of the human voice can be powerfully persuasive. Remember the Sirens? Anyway, I love it when I have someone else’s voice in my head—mainly because my own voices scare the shit out of me. Besides, it’s more fun to sing along with someone else’s poems than it is to sing along with your own. Ultimately, the point I’m trying to make is that a reading is an opportunity to win over readers/listeners, and one way to do that is to be conscious of the music (or lack thereof) in your work.

With that in mind, here are my picks for the ten albums that should be required listening for poets:

1. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars by David Bowie

2. Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot by Sparklehorse

3. Storm & Stress by Storm & Stress

4. Orange Rhyming Dictionary by Jets to Brazil

5. Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan

6. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel

7. Anything by Hank Williams

8. Out to Lunch by Eric Dolphy

9. Ballet Mecanique by George Antheil

10. Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet by Gavin Bryars

LM: Tell us about Forklift: a Journal of Cooking, Light and Industrial Safety, that you co-edit with Eric Appleby?

For me the name of the journal sort of says it all. When you really look at them, forklifts are really rather absurd looking machines: goofy yellow monsters with two metal teeth sticking straight out and parallel to the floor. But they’re also these amazing useful tools as well—the embodiment of studied precision and brute force. Forklift is also, incidentally, what we do when we eat, which ties in very neatly with the cooking portion of our program—from this we also get the idea of poetry as a sort of nourishment (and occasionally a hallucinogen or even carcinogen) for both the body and the mind. A recipe is poem. A poem is a recipe. Language instructs. Safety is relative. And Forklift, Ohio is, figuratively speaking, a place with city limits and an ever-shifting geography.

That said, the more practical specs go something like this: Forklift (as most people abbreviate the name) was founded in Cincinnati by myself and Eric Appleby in 1994, and the two of us still edit design, and publish the journal ourselves (along with our new assistant ed., Brett Price), out of our pockets and out of our heads (take that any way you want). Issue 16 will be out in February-ish. The journal is bound by hand, using found or easily acquired industrial strength materials. One issue had a sandpaper cover and was bolted through the center. Another issue came as a bag of chili with beans and spices, and the recipe for making the chili was a jigsaw puzzle printed on the backs of the poems. Another issue was a tiny clipboard wrapped in caution tape with an actual used time card as the front cover.

I think we’ve kept at it for so long, because 1. To us poetry and cooking are the only mad sciences worth doing, and 2. The journal ties us viscerally, vividly, financially, and artistically to the world of poets and poetry—not to mention to the possibilities of language in general. Also, we like to hang out and eat.

LM: What excites you about the poetry scene?

MH: What’s exciting to me, in spite of my general crankiness, is that there’s a ton of great work being made which is not only weaving together avant-garde techniques with more traditional, human aims, but which is also (at least some of the time) walking that fine line between sentiment and sentimentality—which in this day and age is where the risk really is. I’m thinking of poets of my own generation like Anse LM Berrigan, Matthew Zapruder, Sarah Manguso, Dobby Gibson, and Nate Pritts, among many others (but of course the qualities I like in their work aren’t unique to this particular generation of writers). In all of this work, one gets experimentalism bonded to emotional torque, which in my book = capital B-beauty—which is not anything inherent in the world, but rather a way of seeing it—a way of looking and reading and living in general.

LM: What can we expect next from the mind of Hart?

MH: I don’t know, actually. I have lots of things in the works, but nothing which is ready for the fire. I’ve been working on a new manuscript, which I hope to have finished in the next six months or so. Ethan Paquin and I have written a collaborative book of poems, called SONNET BOOM!, which uses the “idea” of the sonnet (rather than the form itself) as a starting point for the exploration of form-in-general—esp. its limits—its elasticity and shiftiness. Finally, my band Travel just recorded a new CD, our sixth, which should be out sometime in 2007.

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Matt Hart was born in Evansville, IN, in 1969. He studied philosophy at Ball State and Ohio universities before receiving his MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College. His first book was Who's Who Vivid, published by Slope Editions in 2006. He is also author of the chapbooks Sonnet (H_NGM_N Books, 2006) and Revelated (Hollyridge Press, 2005). His work has appeared in numerous journals, and he has been awarded fellowships from both the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference and Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. A 20-year veteran of the punk rock music scene, he is co-founder and editor of Forklift: Ohio and managing editor of Incliner, the student-run arts journal based at Art Academy of Cincinnati, where he teaches.

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 Scholar, and was the 2005 Prairie Schooner Merit Scholar in Poetry at the Nebraska Summer Writers Workshop. Her short story, “Little Wolf” is forthcoming in Slab and her stories “What a Good Dog Knows,” has appeared in Nasty and “Brick Façade,” appeared in Pierian Springs Review. Both of these are chapters in her recently completed novel, Finding Ong's Hat. She has published poems widely in literary magazines and journals such as Conte, The Dream People, Nimrod, Potion, Hotel Amerika, Gulf Coast, Nightsun, Spoken War, Iron Horse Quarterly, Boulevard, Amarillo Bay, Small Spiral Notebook, The God Particle, Poetry East, Confluence, Exquisite Corpse, The Potomac, Stirring, 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.