Book-signing/Reading: Nate Pritts & Matt Hart, March 6

This was a small, informal gathering at the Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza as part of a tour of these poet-friend-collaborators that will take them up & down the East coast & out as far as Kalamazoo until the end of the month. I had met Nate Pritts just last month when Daniel Nester brought him to the Social Justice Center with his class from St. Rose, & when he attended the Karaoke+Poetry=Fun event at Valentine's. Matt Hart is a poet, teacher, editor from Cincinnati, Ohio.

The center-piece of their reading was a neat little tour chapbook, Feelings, Assoc., of poems that play off each other, perhaps collaboratively written, so much so that none of the 12 poems contain the individual author's names & a few share titles or title variations. In their remarks, they explicitly referenced Lyrical Ballads, but neither was sure who was playing Wordsworth, who Coleridge.

They also seemed to share an affinity for public speech of the pulpit -- Matt read an affecting piece combining his background in a punk-rock band with childhood memories of listening to preachers in church, while Nate's latest book The Wonderful Yeare (Cooper Dillon Books, 2009) opens with a section titled "Spring Psalter."

Catch them as they fly by, if you can.