Author: Matt Morton

My poem “The Idea,” which originally appeared in Ninth Letter, is now featured on Verse Daily. Read it here.

 

 

 

 

The Collagist is currently featuring an interview I did with Darby Price about my poem “What’s That You Said?” and the functions of collage. Read it here.

I have been named a finalist for a 2015-2016 Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellowship. View this year’s fellowship recipients here.

Bob Hicok has selected my poem “Windfall” as the winner of the Sycamore Review 2014 Wabash Prize for Poetry.

From Sycamore Review:

Here’s what Bob Hicok has to say about Matt Morton’s winning poem, “Windfall.”

“I find myself wanting to live in this poem every time I read it. To be held by these places and entranced by the things that seem like a gift – a windfall – to this mind, this poet. I like the mix of missing and having, how full the poem is, even as it addresses absence. Little things thrill, like the slide from “cloud cover” into “not if I can help it” and another linebreak driven gear shift, “And if this/is happiness then what.” Most of all I love the ease of movement from thing to thing, moment to moment. Why roundabouts? I don’t know but trust that the ease of passage (usually) through them, their fluidity, is somehow relevant, both to the subject and the nature of this poem. The poem glides in the way it becomes unexpected and yet remains true to itself, its tone. I’m pleased too that the poem begins with a distance it immediately crosses, immediately closes — with memory, perhaps, though certainly through the reach of a warm imagination. It reads and becomes vast – “a whole country” – yet I always feel that I’ve wandered into a privacy that doesn’t know I’m there.”

Read “Windfall” here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Carolina Quarterly is currently featuring “Poetry as Psychology: An Interview with Matt Morton,” in which I talk about memory, Sylvia Plath, and buying groceries. There is also a link to my poem “Lullaby,” which appears in the new Summer 2014 issue.

Read the interview here.