Movie Trailer Is Here! See Me in Documentary The State of Poem
Screen Grab from The State of Poem
Hey Everyone!
Grab your popcorn and favorite movie candy; we're getting closer to the grand premiere of The State of Poem.
As you may know, I am in a feature-length film documentary on contemporary American poets called The State of Poem. Los Angeles filmmaker Alveraz Ricardez and his crew traveled across the country filming influential poets of today. It was a delightful experience being interviewed and reading my poetry while being filmed on location in my own living room.
The State of Poem is an outstanding work of art that will change what you think about poetry. Because of its popularity and beautiful cinematography, this soon-to-be-released feature film has big recognition to come.
I am honored to present to you the movie trailer for The State of Poem, an Alveraz Ricardez film. Take an extraordinary journey through the landscape of contemporary American poetry.
My Interview in Film Documentary on American Poets
Hey everyone:
I have some exciting news! I am in a feature-length film documentary on contemporary American poets called The State of Poem. Los Angeles filmmaker Alveraz Ricardez and his crew traveled across the country filming interviews and poetry readings from influential poets of today. It was a delightful experience being filmed on location in my own living room.
Kill Poet in association with Lucent Films will release The State of Poem in late 2007.
Look for it in theatres and on DVD.
Wishing you well.
Matthew Nolan
Alveraz Ricardez is a filmmaker, writer, and publisher/editor of Kill Poet. Take a look at some of his outstanding work. Here is a trailer from one of his soon-to-be-released movies.
To read book reviews and excerpts from my first book Crumpled Paper Dolls: A New Orleans Poet, a collection of poetry, prose, and journals
Her warm blood filled body has robbed me of testosterone, chilled sperm on ice, her microscope scientific and indifferent. Her lab is littered with other vials of boys. The refrigerator door opens and a fog of cold air blows into her white lab coat, or was it that sexy piece of lingerie we promised to make babies in?
Her experiment is our love, a cadaver, cold and unknown, a senseless and random death once the breeding ground for life, now is her love a void sucking in warmth, a covetous whore of life, a witness to the holocaust, a German scientist, a rank for herself
Her choice. Her choosing to sit isolated in her laboratory, cultivating her anger, nurturing it, watching it grow she becomes a passive scientist, an impartial observer to her dying madness which is no longer mad or less or more
It is her cold chamber, her choice, her dying space, her living space vacuumed away into her sanctuary void of warmth
A void which was a lush ecosystem of organisms, orgasms, tropical bright colors in perfect symmetry, and my warm body too! Before she hoarded the heat— robbed it of me and all my sperm to fill and warm her until I was cold on a metal table in her lab, unnoticeable to her and dead to me. Can't she see my face?
Unstick your myopic eye from the microscope and see my lifeless body! This lifeless body you took on to be one with yours
Listen while you plot against us in your cold chamber, hear the laughter of our future children playing warm and full of heat, once immature sperm, just like your love for me, never growing into strength as you hunch down in your microscope, myopically and continuously viewing your angry slide, while love is scented around you, the cadaver of us lies before you unnoticed on the metal table getting colder, colder while you get warmer, a warm blood filled body, a thief of my love a mortician to your life
Excerpts From My Book Crumpled Paper Dolls: A New Orleans Poet
Excerpts from Crumpled Paper Dolls: A New Orleans Poet,
a collection of poetry, prose, and journals
Excerpt from Prose titled "Stick Man, Sick Man" pages 154-155
My insides agree with her and contemplates a plan. A razor across the wrist in the bathroom sink would look best and give me more time to bleed and hate myself in the mirror. Hanging from my neck creates a picture that would finally make them all stop and look; just like Jesus on a cross makes people stop and look. My stick man begs for just one person to leave their world to save mine. Loved ones want comfort, food, and pleasure, not the burden of my dying soul. The ones closest to me won't even pick up a book to understand my madness. They toss out solitude like candy throwers. The dependence on God must be due to the lack of one man to put his pain aside and step in the pile of another man's torture and sticks. So I will make peace with this torture. He and I will make a home together.
I kill myself again for the hundredth time in my head, but not yet for real. Still sick, I gather up my sticks and leave the hospital. People in the streets are yelling words at my clothes, hair, dead eyes, and sticks trailing from the back of my head. I can't keep the sticks still and from rolling around in my body or head or wherever they be. Poking at a sick man who is trying to pull his sticks together is wrong. The spaces between the buildings look deep gray. It is more than cloudy but less than a thunderstorm and coats my eyes with a film. I think I am in the city. Maybe this is a street--somewhere. Everything around me is a large painting being pressed in my face.
I only eat when reminded by harsh smells or clocks. The peanut stand chokes my acute senses and I cough like coughs between vomiting. My mind doesn't distinguish from night or day but is full of scary colors on the horizon. My soul can't purge itself of the black mud and yellow light that soaks it. I am rotting. My breath tastes like a hospital or fruitcake again. I feel dizzy. I was set on fire yesterday but now I am dripping wet to the bone. The heaviness drops me quick like good gravity and cracks my sticks. I net my head with fingers like spider legs and work my body into a pretzel and sigh.
Poetry Excerpt from pages 68-69
Caterpillar Girls
Should have known! Should have known! Between a phony butterfly and a never evolving caterpillar—
Her pleasant sincerity is a funny hat that droops over her face, a blind dunce, a cartoon caterpillar; a squirming, eyeless caterpillar, on its back in loose dirt, like Marilyn Monroe posing on satin sheets saying, "Me! Me! Pick Me! Love Me!"
If only she could see her dirty white lies, countless as her dirty green caterpillar legs spread as wide as a caterpillar can, collecting tree sap between them, pasting her tiny opening shut
With her wide, munchy caterpillar mouth she says, "Sorry I am a liar! So sorry! Pick me! Pick me!"
She can't cocoon. She can't become pretty things like the phony butterfly skipping in the air, dodging under a thorn bush to organize a glassy, green, symphony of caterpillars to inch towards me, to befriend me, inching inside my belly button, to love me, then inching back out with my shredded heart lining, bloody red tears of skin like a menstrual cycle hanging from mushy caterpillar lips, bright red Kool-Aid lips; Gory green caterpillar girls that never evolve and say, "Me! Pick Me! I am sorry I lied! Pick me!"
Journal Excerpts
From pages 173-174 October 2002
The months are flying by. Historically, mad men have been exalted for their creative genius. Tyrants, inventors, and artists alike have broke and reshaped the world. Not today. Today I have to take medicine in order to harness, bridle, suppress and restrain the irritability and agitation which makes me sharp, clear, creative and in the balance of indispensable intelligence and insanity. My mind is restless and on fire. To be inside of it would overwhelm you with nausea, vomit, or faintness. It is not bad. It is good. To castrate brilliant minds just because they are difficult, opinionated, and hurt feelings, is to murder the soul. The great and tortured men of the past never had to tiptoe around the feelings of females and political correctness. They could be unbridled, unrestrained, free thinking men who devoured countries, established governments, drove the Renaissance, wrote the greatest novels, painted the famous pictures. Not anymore. Now we are a genderless, mind numbing, soulless, and diluted society of people who chemically restrain our passions because the love between man and woman cannot exist without a power struggle, because strife is high, because you can't tell a joke, because you can't raise your voice, because you are the protector of her pathetic and helpless little feelings. I am still off my medicine. But if I am ever to have a relationship in this century, I will have to drug myself up to get along with her and throw away all the gifts God gave me to change the world. Things didn't use to be this way.
From pages 207-208 June 2003
I feel like a crunchy spoiled corn dog on a stick this morning. New Orleans is fantastic. However, I am slowly deteriorating from the social depletion of family and friends. If I am to make it here I need to do something different. Maybe I will put my "house projects" and unpacking aside today and visit the art museum. I feel isolated and homesick. Friends are hard to come by. Mom is getting daily shots for her low white blood count. It doesn't feel right for her to be there and me to be here while she is sick. Father isn't in much better shape. I am saddened by all of it. We are all drowning two arm lengths away from each other in this unkept family swimming pool. Whatever happened to my siblings, aunts, uncles; grandmas playing the starring role at family reunions? What is going to come of my continued struggle in New Orleans?
Matthew Nolan is a New Orleans authorliving in the artistic surroundings of the Lower Garden District. He can be seen taking the St. Charles Streetcar to local poetry readings and bicycling through French Quarter haunts. Nolan holds degrees in behavioral science, theatre arts, general education, and has studied emergency medicine. He has been nationally awarded for his outstanding academic achievements and community leadership.
Nolan has performed in numerous Shakespeare productions and has appeared in major motion pictures. He is a nationally published writer in the Sigma Kappa Delta Hedera helix, Sigma Tau Delta Gyre, Muse, and Athenian.
To read book reviews and excerpts from Crumpled Paper Dolls: A New Orleans Poet, a collection of poetry, prose, and journals
While living in New Orleans bohemia, Matthew Nolan wrote his first book Crumpled Paper Dolls: A New Orleans Poet. Nolan achieved his dream of selling his book out of his bicycle basket on Jackson Square, a magnet for local street artists, vendors, and tourists. Soon thereafter, Matthew Nolan got an unexpected break from a major bookstore chain, and nothing has been the same since.
Now Crumpled Paper Dolls: A New Orleans Poet,a book of poetry, prose, and journals, is on bookstore shelves across America and is distributed to international markets. University students are studying this book, excerpts have been read to an audience of one million on BBC radio, and a copy sits in the Louisiana State Archives. Spreading throughout the literary world, this outstanding work will find you, draw you in and keep you.
While revealing his personal torment, Matthew Nolan gives us the haunt and majestic charm of New Orleans. He captures the spirit of the unique city of New Orleans, an ability given to only a select few. A quality and endearing interpretation of the Big Easy, this book embodies the essence of a local artist in the Lower Garden District.
Created by the unhampered New Orleans writer, struggling and chasing his dream, Crumpled Paper Dolls: A New Orleans Poet is free from the bureaucratic hands of the book industry. It is one man, one story.
To read book reviews and excerpts from Crumpled Paper Dolls: A New Orleans Poet, a collection of poetry, prose, and journals
rattling, the tire I changed in shoe polished arms, your little boys hanging out the car window spying down on me for beetles or a melted popsicle, cream and sugar, July in New Orleans, salty lips and sweaty moods making me feel poor again, reminding me of when my little bare eyes and feet stared
up from the backseat into the back of my Mother's head, July in Florida
The beach was desolate, the back of a cereal box, too many dead things in the sand, too many alive things bouncing down from the heavens through my soul while you play water games with your boys, the other half of them elsewhere, spying in a freezer for a frozen popsicle; it is so cold in their father's house as we become bananas in the sun with his sons
I cast my body in the water warm and gray as old milk and feel the mushy sand between my toes, soft and greasy like when we are making love; I know there are not enough thrusts in your spine or fingers on the hands of God to save my soul, yet we play spiritual tug-of-war, suctioning skin that wraps crude sand from decayed fish and crabs so stinky and heavy I just smile and wonder if you can see the fish tails and crab claws poking out from my mouth like a flower arrangement of seafood moving slowly, sad and dying
Once a garden grew inside me, it was bright yellow with breasts of tough green leaves and fountains of clear water growing rows of fluffy popcorn where a rabbit lived at the end of a rainbow, just outside my heart
Then something horrible happened and the fountain showered hard red and one by one the villagers in my brain gathered every kernel of fluffy popcorn and replaced them with stuffed piles of unfolded curtains, blacking everything out
Like that day on the mucky beach, the sky lowered, flattening out your candy smile, melting popsicles, squishing beetles, shutting out a horizontal sliver of light, coloring black outside the lines, waving a dead fish in my face I can only smell, it smells like me
