Matt Yeager Setlist: Conversation@Efroymson

This week former Butler University grad, NY poet, Matt Yeager visited campus and gave an outstanding, energetic, and enthralling reading. Honestly, lucky me to have class in Efroymson on Thursday nights, or I might have missed it.

Anyway, the following is a setlist of poems he read. He began with the best, a must-hear-out-loud poem full of repetition and energy. He then moved into a set of sonnets (he says he has written 120, and will stop when he reaches 154, to rival Shakespeare, but I bet he keeps going), and then a bit of prose poem mischief that had the audience in giggles, and then some "songs from the gut":

1. Sleep Mothers
2. Black Socks White Socks
3. Couples in Plays, Couples on Screen
4. The Balloon Shop
5. Chad Johnson
6. Lukewarm Coffee
7. Top Floor Apartment Sans Ceiling
8. Poems are Grown (honestly, I'm not sure this was the title--I might have written down a snippet of his conversation here...)
9. Ode to Naps
10. Ode on Bacon
11. Portrait of Chico (his gut)
12. Ode on Cartoon Dancing Skeleton
13. Personal Physiology


A couple of comments he made about writing:

"When you are trying to write too hard to 'please', go the other way and offend everyone."
Poems occur when "the soul is abducted by a distant sense."

Lorna Dee Cervantes Reading at Butler University

     Before Lorna Dee Cervantes began reading her first poem “First Thought”, she introduced it with a T.S. Eliot quote, “April is the cruelest month,” relaying that she wrote the whole book Sueno over the course of several years’ worth of National Poetry Month (April) daily writing prompts. 

    Personally, I have always found February to be the cruelest month—after weeks of cold and gray skies, my mind circles the past, ruminating on failed relationships, lost friendships, and unfulfilled goals, fears of failure. And writing is entirely clamped in brutal bitter battles of bitchiness. So, I have no idea what the hell Eliot was talking about—and I guess Cervantes just meant that the rigmarole of writing on a new prompt every single day for a month was cruel. But, she found life there, and a whole host of what she called “story poems.” She said that she has created multiple characters, and they all talk together….

     Between reading her poems, she discussed her writing processes, her obsessions (cars—though she has never driven), her social activism as an advocate of Chicano literature, and the idea of language, and personal symbols.

     She said poetry is the art of language, and what makes your language unique is that it is from your body—and imbued with all that makes up every part of you, speaks for every cell of you—but at the same time as it is personally yours, it is already social, because language belongs to the community, is owned by the community. She said, “You don’t own the words—they are shared, like air.” 

     Her philosophy of writing is that each of us processes all of life’s moments, changes, and epiphanies as a poem, and that of us has a personal symbol that holds all of our personal contradictions (hers is the freeway), and that the advantage of poetry is multiple beginnings and multiple endings—to write things over again and again.

     Some of the lines which stood out to me:

 

“licked the chrome when no one was watching”

 

“the shackles of mascara”

 

“I want to hear all the Bose of you, down to your bones”

 

When it came time to read from her book “Ciento” (which translates for her as, one hundred somethings) she involves the audience, encouraging them to shout out a number (1-100), but beware that the 100-word-poems are like a tarot reading. It was playful and engaging, and energizing for the crowd.

     She was very physical with her reading, often using grand hand gestures to emphasize actions and objects in the poems. In the question/answer portion of the evening, she mentioned that her first book of poems was autobiographical, and written to be performed for illiterate people in her community. She stills performs energetically as she reads.