Matt Hart and Dean Young are exemplary Surrealist poets.
They incorporate automatic methods, chance operations,
appropriation, and other Surrealist means
in the making of poems.
And like many Surrealist visual artists,
their works often take pleasure in whimsy around the corner
into ache, a sadness, a sometimes
momentary, crystalline song.
Unlike their visual counterparts,
Dean and Matt use language, a tool meant for meaning,
to break us out of our usual patterns of understanding.
This is an onerous task for any poet,
but particularly those for whom meaning itself is suspect.
Some poets destroy the meaning-making components
of language in order to rid it of deception.
Our poets tonight have found another way,
to choke out deception through active reception,
that is, imagination.
"It is the art of thwarting the merely random,"
Matt writes in a 2001 essay on collage.
In a 2003 lecture on Surrealism, Dean Young
says, "We are so alienated from our imagination.
All we are aware of is--" and there's a break in the tape
there, a jump in the audio, and all
of a sudden all we are aware of is an unanswerable mystery,
a technical blip, information the gods never
intended us to have.
All I can say is that imagination
scrambles into am I atoning.
Our poets, no doubt, can do better than anagrams.
Tonight, we'll hear first from Matt Hart,
editor of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking,
and Light Industrial Safety.
Forklift, Ohio, the new issue is for sale
out in the lobby, as is Matt's just released chapbook,
Revelated, and a CD from his band, Travel, all of which
are for sale for $10.
And all of Dean Young's books are also available for sale,
courtesy of Barnes and Noble.
But back to Matt, he's also the author
of the forthcoming Who's Who Vivid from Slope Editions,
and as I mentioned, the just released Revelated.
After that, Dean Young, author of six well-loved collections
of poetry, most recently, Elegy on Toy Piano, he'll read.
He's also the author of Skid, Strike Anywhere,
and the recently re-released Beloved Infidel.
He teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Warren Wilson
Program for Writers.
Please welcome Matt Hart.