Improvisation Without Accompaniment

By Matt Morton and Patricia Smith

First printing: 2000 copies (trade paper).

Improvisation Without Accompaniment is Matt Morton’s debut poetry collection. He is the winner of the 2018 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, selected by Patricia Smith.

This title is part of BOA’s New Poets of America Series, which have seen strong sales in recent seasons. Previous Poulin winners in this series have seen outstanding attention from The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, The Rumpus, Forward Reviews, etc.

Matt Morton is the recipient of an NEA fellowship and is the associate editor for the poetry journal 32 Poems. Morton’s NEA grant received media coverage by KERA radio in Texas and the NEA’s arts.gov’s Writers’ Corner page.

Poet Patricia Smith will write a new foreword introducing the collection. Smith is a four-time winner of the National Poetry Slam, a National Book Award finalist, and winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.

Morton’s poems bring a fresh perspective to the universal themes of grief, self-identity, and the search for meaning and belonging.

Stuffed with lyric associations and robust images, Morton’s poems fit with a trend of young writers influenced by Dean Young and A.R. Ammons. These poems will appeal to fans of these authors.

Strong regional appeal in Dallas, TX, and Baltimore, MD. Both cities are referenced in the collection from the author’s time living and working there.

Strong regional appeal in rural bookstores in Texas, Oklahoma, the Great Plains states, the Rocky Mountains states, and the Southwest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
• Release date: Apr 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781942683964

Matt Morton

Matt Morton holds a BA from the University of Texas at Austin and an MFA from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. His poetry appears in AGNI, Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, Tin House Online, and elsewhere. His work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He serves as associate editor for 32 Poems and is a Robert B. Toulouse Doctoral Fellow in English at the University of North Texas. He lives in Dallas, TX.

Book preview

IMPROVISATION WITHOUT ACCOMPANIMENT

WINNER, 2018 A. POULIN, JR. POETRY PRIZE

SELECTED BY PATRICIA SMITH

IMPROVISATION WITHOUT ACCOMPANIMENT

POEMS BY

MATT MORTON

FOREWORD BY PATRICIA SMITH

A. POULIN, JR. NEW POETS OF AMERICA SERIES, NO. 44

BOA EDITIONS, LTD. ROCHESTER, NY 2020

Copyright © 2020 by Matt Morton

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition

For information about permission to reuse any material from this book, please contact The Permissions Company at www.permissionscompany.com or e-mail [e-mail].

Publications by BOA Editions, Ltd.—a not-for-profit corporation under section 501 (c) (3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code—are made possible with funds from a variety of sources, including public funds from the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; and the County of Monroe, NY. Private funding sources include the Max and Marian Farash Charitable Foundation; the Mary S. Mulligan Charitable Trust; the Rochester Area Community Foundation; the Ames-Amzalak Memorial Trust in memory of Henry Ames, Semon Amzalak, and Dan Amzalak; the LGBT Fund of Greater Rochester; and contributions from many individuals nationwide. See Colophon for special individual acknowledgments.

Cover Design: Sandy Knight

Interior Design and Composition: Richard Foerster

BOA Logo: Mirko

BOA Editions books are available electronically through BookShare, an online distributor offering Large-Print, Braille, Multimedia Audio Book, and Dyslexic formats, as well as through e-readers that feature text to speech capabilities.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Morton, Matt, 1987- author. | Smith, Patricia, 1955- writer of foreword.

Title: Improvisation without accompaniment / poems by Matt Morton ; foreword by Patricia Smith.

Description: First edition. | Rochester, NY : BOA Editions, LTD., 2020. | Series: A. Poulin, Jr. new poets of America series; no. 44 | Summary: Set in the backdrop of rural Texas, Matt Morton’s debut poetry collection reaches for existential meaning within life’s joys and griefs— Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019035667 (print) | LCCN 2019035668 (ebook) | ISBN 9781942683957 (paperback) | ISBN 9781942683964 (ebook)

Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.

Classification: LCC PS3613.O77867 I47 2020 (print) | LCC PS3613.O77867 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019035667

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019035668

BOA Editions, Ltd.

250 North Goodman Street, Suite 306

Rochester, NY 14607

www.boaeditions.org

A. Poulin, Jr., Founder (1938–1996)

for Michael Adams

Contents

Foreword

Republic

1

Improvisation Without Accompaniment

The Good Life

Windfall

Not the Wind, Not the View

Wavelength

Pinwheel Floating on Water

Improvisation Containing Trace Elements

And the Mountains Grew Sirens

Overture

Viewfinder

2

Self-Portrait as Oswald’s Ghost Addressing the Warren Commission

Fever Dream

Improvisation After Keats

All Honeycombed, the Ground

Quebec City

Pale Annual

Wintering

Telltale

Vardaman

Improvisation in an Alpine Field

3

Elegy for My Brother in the Wilderness

4

Spring Bulletin

The View from Here

Improvisation with Scenes from the Pageant

City at Night

Landscape

The Idea

Improvisation Ending in Jamais Vu

The Expedition

Improvisation on Federal Hill

Dialectic

Loomings No Longer

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Colophon

Foreword

Judging the Poulin (doesn’t the simple Poulin elegantly resound like Oscar, Emmy, or Tony?) is an onerous undertaking. Anyone who says that poetry is sucking in its final dramatic breath—again—should, at least once, be confronted by a teetering stack of printouts, each manuscript purporting

Reviews for Improvisation Without Accompaniment

[al9g · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

These lines, for me, offers insight into this collection: from "Not the Wind, Not the View", "Two thousand miles away from here, my father / is lying in a strange room, being tended to. ...Somewhere / in America my father is dying and I am / sitting here, listening to the radio," I tend to prefer the more traditional poets but have found a pleasant surprise in Morton's work. His poetry is an evocative and lyrical look at the poignancy of life in all its shades and subtleties. As I recommended his work to someone I told them that he explores life in all its complexity and is at the same time both significant and spiritual. A powerful book.