“James Joyce.
He was stupid.
He didn’t know as much as me.
I’d rather throw dead batteries at cows than read him.”
It’s difficult to explain why Matt Cook is brilliant.
He’s got a way of sidling up to the language and tricking it into being much more clever than it probably should be.
He’s the type of guy who seems to enjoying meeting ideas that are weird to begin with and then getting them into an even stranger mood before presenting them to other people in the form of poetry.
Cook used to perform on Milwaukee poetry open mics with some frequency.
If you’ve heard the guy speak it’s very, very difficult not to hear his voice when you’re reading his stuff on the page. There’s a casual aggression there in slow, deliberate delivery with these incredibly long vowels and exaggerated enunciation. It probably sounds annoying, but it really isn’t. And that’s precisely the type of reason why Matt Cook’s charm is so very, very difficult to express. Like so much that is inexplicable, it's best to simply have it pointed at you.
So here’s a low-res look at Cook on a PBS special from nearly two decades ago:
The Milwaukee native Matt Cook will be performing tonight for Poet’s Monday at Linneman’s Riverwest Inn on 1001 East Locust Street. Open mic for poetry starts at 7:30 pm. The show runs until around 10pm. The cover charge is $3 at the door.
