FAMILIAR
FAMILIAR
FAMILIAR is a joyous obliteration of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (via the Spanish version of the poem by the 20th Century anti-fascist poet and critic León Felipe) to make an entirely new poem that revels in the dissonances we face and the responsibilities we have to one another. Part deliberate mistranslation, part phoenix from the flames, part mosh pit of angles and angels and sleep, the poem is personal, familial, familiar and strange—wooly with possibility and awe/full reoccurrence. It asks, how to live and what to do in the turbulence and summons of our time, and what it proposes as an answer is a creative process of ever more radical inclusion and open heartedness: “If you crash through the world of this life without Love, you’ll have zilch to contribute when you get to the Void.”
FAMILIAR contains both a “Beforehand” preface by the author and a “P.S.” postscript by the teacher, writer, and translator (in no particular order), Alejandro de Acosta.
Published by Pickpocket Books An imprint of Ledge Mule Press
Release date: Oct. 31, 2022 / Poetry / 5.5x7.5 / 172 pages / Paperback
ISBN #: 978-0-9993985-5-5
Matt Hart's FAMILIAR is a wrestling match that morphs into a bear hug, & I mean that. This book's a dapper flâneur-stroll across time & space & the twisty landscapes of punk rock. Come on. Let's listen to Matt Hart pronounce secret truths through the spinning wah wah blades of Whitman's epic pedestal fan. Is this translation? Is this the grass? Part scorch, part drone, part weeping riff, this wrenching poem alchemizes new music from syllables you thought you knew. Read this book & stay stay stay stay stay "steady / tender / connected." —Kiki Petrosino, author of Bright: A Memoir and White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia
Matt Hart’s Familiar turns the action of obliteration—in this case combining erasure, translation, mistranslation, third-eyeballing, binocularization, expansion, multi-balling, julienning, feed(ing)(it)(all)back, head(s) production—into a constructive plenty-act, encouraging all fifty-seven of my heads to wander with Whitman’s head via Felipe’s head via Hart’s head via all of the heads and non-heads of the Earth. This poem sings us a new song that is also the oldest song ever or the always-song or the never-song we must continue to chase through voiced and unvoiced language. Familiar is also a very specific Matt-Hart song about the middle life years, about witnessing an unfolding and constellating long, long love, familial love and love of friends and of food and sensorium, of art, of creatures. His language engages a variegated presence of being (O that bright tree!) ever materializing this old, old love, always in motion and changing and seeking. And as is the case with Hart’s poetry, Familiar enacts for the reader the joy of screaming, of being alive with so many mouths all over our bodies. As the speaker says, “Obliteration is also a method, one that I write to be written everywhere: / in the infinitesimal smallness of the gluon, and the enormous appetite of a massive black hole,/ among all people everywhere / every single one of you potentially my loves. / Will you recreate me / and teach me your lungs?” Please, please, please—teach me your lungs, Matt Hart. —Jay Ponteri, author of Someone Told Me