TESS GALLAGHER reads
with LARRY MATSUDA
from their collaborative book of poems
Boogie-Woogie Crisscross
presented by
Marc Vincenz, editor of MadHat Press and Plume Editions
with
the Hastings Room Reading Series
Monday April 18, 7:00–9:00 pm
The
Friends Meeting House
(opposite the Longfellow House)
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tess
Gallagher’s latest book is Midnight
Lantern: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf,
2011). She recently
companioned
the film BIRDMAN, which includes her late husband Raymond Carver’s story:
“What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” She lives and writes in Port
Angeles, Washington, her birthplace, as well as intervals spent in her cottage
in the west of Ireland, where all of the poems included here were written in
her
chair that overlooks a green field in County Sligo.
Lawrence
Matsuda
was born in the Minidoka, Idaho,
World War II Relocation Center, one of the concentration camps where
approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans were held without due process. Matsuda
has a Ph.D. in education and was a visiting professor at Seattle University.
In
2015 he completed two graphic novels with artist Matt Sasaki and interviews
with Japanese American
fighters
from the 442nd and
their relatives, An American Hero: Shiro Kashino, and Fighting for
America: Nisei Soldiers.
Boogie-Woogie Crisscross, an intercontinental
collaboration/exchange between two poets of international stature is rowdy,
rambunctious and heartfelt. With a combination of joyful shared experiences and
attention to human suffering, past and present, its authors bring a thoughtful and
poetic focus to bear upon global events and their own histories.
These
poems developed via e-mails exchanged between Tess Gallagher and Lawrence
Matsuda over a number of years. The resulting collaboration is a poetry jam
session where they trade and borrow images, and run riffs on each other’s poems
in a responsive, competitive, and lighthearted way. Early on, Tess
characterizes the style as being “kind of hip and comic book and jangly.” Like
any dance it’s also an invitation to lose time and as Larry says—to show your
“chops.” A kind of dueling banjos.
It
is impossible to read Tess Gallagher’s poems without being drawn into their
mesmerizing rhythms and convinced of the rightness of her intense yet unforced
images. —Joyce Carol Oates
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