Free Author Interview: Matthew Abuelo

Author Name:  I'm Matthew Abuelo

Readers can find Last American Roar and Organic Hotels at lulu.com http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/lastwordsout

The hard copy of Organic Hotels is $7.60 while the Last American Roar is $2.39. The down load prices are a little different but still about the same.

Last American Roar was my first collection of poetry, featuring works from 1999 to about 2003. My of the works focus on everything from drug addiction, both my own those who I knew directly or by proxy, to lost love. I was in my twenties when I finished LAR and was really looking for my own voice as writer. I look back at the time I was writing it, I think I spent too much time trying to sound like my own literary heroes, Jim Carroll, Pattie Smith, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. I do have some very fond memories of several pieces in the book including, "I Moves" which is look at the concept of addiction in all it's forms and how it will usually leaves you dry.

It Moves

It moves
it moves like a Guatemalan death squad
(paid for by American currency).
It moves
it moves with the precision of a knife fighter
or the heel of a whore’s shoe that cuts thin lines in frozen concrete.
It moves
it moves like strands of light that choke us,
expanding in our lungs.
It moves
it moves with the determination of elf-faced outlaws looking for
new nations of hysteria.
It moves
it moves across the landscapes and through skyscrapers at the
speed of the chaotic mind of a czar.
It moves
it moves between the gyrating teeth of saints and through keyholes
that led to old German staircases.
It moves
it moves as smoothly as the hands of jesters that hunt for fresh flesh,
to get them through the night.
It moves
it moves through New York City pipelines and through the
dramatic faces of Cairo.
It moves
it moves faster then any emotion that a muse could provide,
or a locomotive that runs on the rage of a city.
2
When it finally slows down,
I open my ribcage to let it feed on this dying kingdom.
But,
it doesn’t stay long.
It hunts for the contrasts to perfection,
leaving no walls standing and all nights moving,
without guide.


Organic Hotels is a collection of poetry and mostly in my thirties and focuses on the personalities that are quickly disappearing from New York City. As a former SRO (Single Room Occupancy Tenant) I felt the need to tell the story of those artists and overall characters that made NYC the great city it once was but has since turned out to my Disney Land in drag. Organic Hotels is the story of the down and out guitarist, poets and writers who are still barely holding onto their piece of Manhattan. Unlike LAR the voice in this book is distinctly my own.

And the News Factory which is being published by Plainview press is in many ways a continuation of Organic Hotels. It is set for release in the fall or winter of this year.  See link below.
http://newradiopoetry.blogspot.com/2010/11/two-poems.html

I'm currently working on a play called "Exist To The Island" which focuses on the three elderly men who are hiding out on long Island after one of them them kills a drug dealer. They find themselves at the home of the men's ex-wife. They are being pursued a detective who is barely holding own to his job as well as his sanity as his clinical depression forces him into violent fits of rage and even murder. The point of the play so far seems to focus on the hysteria of the frantic mind and on how the most enlightened being is reduced to a dumb beast.

My journey as a writer is really inseparable from everything else in my life, its a struggle. As a poet I've really learned to be my own public advocate in pushing my work along with dealing reality that the subject matter which I've chosen has a very limited audience, i.e. the working class, the homeless, prostitutes, residents of St Luke's mental ward and so on. But it was a choice between writing what I know and writing some third rate crap about romance which while important to some degree has been really played out in my opinion.

My decision to self publish came out of a wish to control my own work in making all of the decisions in how it was going to used and not having to deal with a publishing house.

Any future projects which I will probably self publish will be experimental works, things that no publishing house would ever touch. My play is turning out to be one of those projects.

Finally my advice to younger writers, is take the time to develop your voice as a writer. Don't be afraid of writing garbage; just discard into your neighbors trash bin.

 

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