SPECTRA returns to Rozz-Tox to celebrate five years of live poetry, literature & music.
This one-of-a-kind event will feature Matt Hart reading his entire book-length serial poem RADIANT ACTION (H_NGM_N Books).
Matt is one of the most dynamic poets in the country & this will be a one-time only event. Special limited edition broadside programs, designed by Christine Cooper and Skylar Alexander, will be available for purchase at the event.
Ryan Collins will start with an introduction just after 8pm, reading to follow immediately after. There will be brief intermissions between sections of the poem.
Free & open to the public. Donations gratefully accepted to support touring poets. Visit the Facebook event page for poems, videos, and more information.
Please note that this event will be recorded (audio and video) live.
For more information on RADIANT ACTION, visit the H_NGM_N Books website: http://www.h-ngm-n.com/
Praise for RADIANT ACTION:
‘Radiant Action’ is part reading list, part diary, part record review, part prayer. He throws it all in, rips it up, and starts again. He is not above flowers or the moon or love for his family. Imagine Kenneth Patchen fronting Black Flag: a voice brave with beauty vs. all of the guitars in the world vs. all of the fears of our fathers. [O]ne of the most me-shaking questions ‘Radiant Action’ makes me ask: how can anyone protect anyone from anything? Is there a magic word, a perfect phrase that might magically save us all from the slaughter? Matt Hart is the poet who taught me that, when in doubt, ask a question. Don’t trust answers. Answers are dead ends. A poem is all possibility, and Matt’s is a mouth that takes it all in. Matt has the guts to do whatever-the-what he wants.
—Ben Kopel, author of VICTORY!
In [Radiant Action’s] long, loping stanzas, we get Black Cats and TNT, pink polka dots, Dante’s Inferno, Slayer, cherries and asparagus. The inclusion of such a disparate range of material seems illustrative of an organizing idea: “Leave out nothing.” To be sure, these pieces give an effect of an unmediated experience of the world in its messiness and beauty and anger and delight and confusion. Matt Hart scans the landscape and takes everything in, organizing it into one massive soup. But through it all, patterns clearly emerge; everything orbits around the organizing voice, and it’s the voice that cuts through the mess, arranging the noise into “one giant cacophonous euphony / of unity.”
—Jennifer Moore, author of The Veronica Maneuver
Bio for Matt Hart:
Matt Hart is the author of six books of poems, including Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless (Typecast Publishing, 2012), Debacle Debacle (H_NGM_N Books, 2013), and Blue Jay Slayer, an art and poetry collaboration with artist Ken Henson (Aurore Press, 2016). Hart’s poems, reviews, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous print and online journals, including The Academy of American Poets online, Big Bell, Cincinnati Review, Coldfront, Columbia Poetry Review, H_NGM_N, Harvard Review, Jam Tarts Magazine, jubilat, Kenyon Review online, Lungfull!, and POETRY, among others. His awards include a Pushcart Prize, a 2013 individual artist grant from The Shifting Foundation, and fellowships from both the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. A co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety, he lives in Cincinnati where he is Associate Professor in Creative Writing and the Chair of Liberal Arts at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. He plays guitar and shouts in the bands TRAVEL and THE LOUDEST SOUNDER.
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This season of SPECTRA manifest thanks to the generous support of the Regional Development Authority, and the Illinois Arts Council Agency through federal funds provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.