What's My Line?

If You Go

Poet Nicholas Korn reads selections from The Wild Sonnets: Volume V (401-500)

Thursday, Jan.19, 4–4:30 p.m.
Pearlman Gallery, Art Academy of Cincinnati
212 Jackson St.
www.artacademy.edu

Copies of The Wild Sonnets: Volume V (401-500) will be available after the reading for sale and signing.

For more than 150 years, the Art Academy of Cincinnati (AAC) has cultivated a love of art and developed artists throughout the region. But that inspiration goes beyond students. The faculty and staff of the AAC make incredible contributions to the local cultural landscape, not just in the visual arts, but in literature and performance.

“One of the amazing things about being part of the community at the Art Academy is the level of support and approval you get for being an artist,” says Nicholas Korn, director of marketing and communications with AAC. “Since the primary focus of the AAC is the development of the creative individual, there is a great deal of significance placed on its faculty and staff being productive artists in their own right. It sets an example for the student body as to what it means to devote your life to your art, whatever discipline that may be. I have never before worked for an institution where this was the case, and I am honored and grateful to be part of it here.”

Korn recently released his fifth volume of Wild Sonnets, a series of poems he has been working on for more than a decade.

“I have been writing poems since high school, and was drawn to the sonnet form since encountering it in sophomore English class,” says Korn. “The compactness of its structure, and the way that the poet has to find a way in fourteen short lines to land his final thought – in the way that a gymnast lands a dismount – that just always kind of thrilled me.”

Korn is also a playwright. He is the founder of Stage First Cincinnati, which has produced 23 classical dramas and comedies at the Aronoff Center’s Fifth Third Bank Theater. His play, Delirium’s Daughters, was produced off-Broadway in 2015. An earlier play, The Antic in Romantic was a finalist for the 2006 Kaufman and Hart Prize for New American Comedy.

Korn’s reading at the AAC will feature a unique format, using a tarot-style presentation where the audience will select the poems to read. Then each Wild Sonnet will be shown on screen while being read.

“When I present a poem in print, I always feel that the reader would benefit from hearing the work as well, because I do infuse these poems with the music and richness of language,” he says. “When I share one these at a public reading, I get the sense that the listener would have a clearer appreciation if they could see how the lines move from one to the other, and how the word choices often play upon one another.

That sense of experimentation continues in the new book Familiar, by Matt Hart, head of creative writing at AAC. In the book, Hart has written an “obliteration” of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” via the Spanish version of the poem by the 20th Century anti-fascist poet and critic León Felipe, to make an entirely new poem.

“I’m a really process oriented writer,” says Hart. “I’ve always liked the idea of translation as a re-creation of something–a form of play where something of the original is always lost, but something else comes into being that echoes where it came from while also positing something new. Obliteration takes all of this one step further by trying to maintain the echo while getting as far away from the source material as possible.”

Available from Pick Pocket Books, an imprint of Ledge Mule Press.

Familiar is Hart’s ninth book of poetry. Along with teaching at the AAC, he was the co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, & Light Industrial Safety, and currently co-edits the journal Sôrdəd. Hart also plays in the local band, Nevernew.

“Poems, in contrast to song lyrics, are the words and the music in the very same breath,” says Hart. “In poetry, the value is in the words alone. I feel much more of an obligation in poetry to both deploy the language artfully AND also attempt to say, express, suggest, or demonstrate something meaningful with the words themselves.”

Hart will kick off the 2023 Word of Mouth series at MOTR, 1345 Main St. on Sunday, Feb. 5 at 6 p.m. This monthly literary event consists of both a featured reader and an open mic. Often Hart’s students participate in the opening reading.

“There’s a sense in which the AAC is a kind of laboratory of creativity where everyone is contributing to the imaginative possibilities of everyone else,” says Hart. “My students, my colleagues (both faculty and staff), and the administration and board of trustees all help to create an atmosphere where surprising, unpredictable, and marvelous things can happen. For me, it's always inspiring, challenging and thought-provoking. I get to teach things I love and be around incredibly interesting people.”

–Tricia Suit