January 28, 7 p.m.


Matt Hart


at MOTR

MATT HART is the author of nine books of poems, including most recently Everything Breaking/for Good (YesYes Books, 2019) and The Obliterations (Pickpocket Books, 2019). Additionally, his 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, Columbia Poetry Review, Harvard Review,  jubilat, Kenyon Review online, Lungfull!, Mississippi Review, Ovenbird, POETRY, and Waxwing, 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 teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and plays in the band NEVERNEW.
 


                          

---

 JOHNNY CASH JOE STRUMMER
  
Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.
I have just stepped out of a limo.
You should thank me and believe me
because I have written
some really classic American songs.
I myself am a classic American. Sometimes
I ride my bike places and throw F-bombs around
where people can hear them. It’s a kind of terror
of the mouth. Mothers cover the ears of their children,
walk away quickly in the other direction.
I am also Joe Strummer. I am not
a classic American, but you can read
all about me and listen to my band The Clash.
I smoke a lot of weed. I drink a lot of Guinness.
I am a dead man, like Johnny Cash.
But I am alive like him as well
And also like him, I have written a lot
of classic songs. “Daddy was a bankrobber,”
I used to sing.  I have been planning this
reemergence for ages, but I have been here
all along. Yesterday I was standing
in my front yard with a garden hose
watering the petunias and lilacs
and all manner of geraniums, and people were
confused, wondering how I can be
Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer
and why I’m a dead-alive man
and all that. Well I’ll tell you.
First, I’m a fucking classic, like I said,
and classics never die. They’re always
alive even out beyond the bodies
strewn in the streets
of all our cities. I see so many bodies
on the streets of our cities, sleeping
in doorways, rolling around
in drainage ditches, pushing
stolen merchandise in stolen shopping carts.
Everywhere I look there’s a newspaper
president. Some of them ask me
for change, but I say change is inevitable
or I sing about “a ring of fire”
and everybody calms down and goes
about their business. Second
when I did that duet of Bob Marley’s
“Redemption Song,” I thought,
this sounds pretty good.
I should make us forever,
so that’s what I’ve done.
And when I talk to the cats
in the alleys or the chickens
in the darkness, they always ask me
to sign their fur and their feathers,
and of course I oblige. I sign them
“Best wishes always,
Johnny Cash Joe Strummer.”
And if I ever do disappear
you should really be worried,
because that’ll mean something’s gone
horribly awry. Something’s skipped out
of the deep groove of the planet
and you’d better probably check
the classified ads and the help wanted
posters and the wanted posters
because the Sun’s gone out
and Four Horsemen are stirring
the apocalypse.

 

Launched by poets Mark Flanigan and Jim Palmarini in 2014, Word of Mouth  was inspired by the late Cincinnati poet Aralee Strange. Poets of all stripes are welcome to show up, listen, and mouth off.

MOTR Pub, 1345 Main Street, Cincinnati