Seven additional poems from my book Thresholds and Other Poems (Apprentice House 2018), including the title poem.

A selection of additional poems from my forthcoming book with Salmon Poetry (Ireland) in 2023.

After leaving my job as a teacher, I worked for a friend inspecting houses in various stages of foreclosure in rural parts of central Maryland. Using an app on my smart phone, my job was to photographically verify and document occupancy in houses for which the mortgages were in arrears for a mortgage service hired by banks. Most of the time, the houses were still occupied, and I conducted a “drive-by” inspection from the street. Some houses, however, were vacant, often for quite some time.

This is a selection of additional poems from Foreclosures, a manuscript I am currently working on, describing the conditions of some of those vacant houses and the absences of the people who once filled them, whose spirit and presence still lingered in the spaces and on the grounds where they once flourished. It also records my struggle as a poet-observer amidst the devastation not only to maintain my own humanity in such an inhumane task, but to preserve the dignity and humanity of the folks whose lives and families were uprooted by financial disaster.

For more videos of me reading my work, including recent additions during the COVID-19 pandemic, please visit my Youtube channels here and here.

Video 1: "Poem for the Dead at Tuam Beginning and Ending with a Line from U2's '11 O'Clock Tick-Tock,'" published in Bangor Literary Journal, Issue 14, 2021. Forthcoming in my next book with Salmon Poetry, 2023.

Video 2: "Bearing the Weight of Light," for the 2020 Trim Poetry Festival in Ireland, celebrated virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Video 3: "Chemo," selected by poet Billy Collins for Second Overall in the 2021 Fish Publishing Poetry Prize and published in the Fish Anthology. Forthcoming in my next book with Salmon Poetry, 2023.

Video 4: "Oysters," winner of the 2014 Maryland Writers' Association Literary Contest. From Thresholds and Other Poems (Apprentice House 2018). 

Video 5: "Cord," recorded live at the Mom Egg Review Vol. 16 publication reading, The Poets House, New York, NY, June 2, 2018. From Thresholds and Other Poems (Apprentice House 2018).

I recently enjoyed reading a few poems for the blogspot Eat the Storms, hosted by Damien Donnelly. (Listen for a special guest appearance by Cassanova Cicada, translating one of my poems into Cicadian.) Go to the 15 minute mark on the recording here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/36ZYifZq0tj87fu26STAIC

Another poem, "Mob Hit at the Ark Ramp," winner of the 2018 Sport Literate "Anything But Baseball" Poetry Contest, can be read and heard here: https://sportliterate.org/2018/11/mob-hit-at-the-ark-ramp/

My poem "How to Unpack a Bomb Vest," which appears earlier in my portfolio, can be experienced online in text and audio form here: http://www.rattle.com/how-to-unpack-a-bomb-vest-by-matt-hohner/.  It was featured on May 25, 2017 on the Rattle: Poets Respond website. It was written in response to the suicide bombing of a concert in Manchester, England, which was attended by mostly young girls and women.

The first poem recording uploaded here is "Kevin," about a former student in my tenth grade World Literature class at Towson High School. It was the featured poem for Monday, November 3, 2014 on The Five-Two, a blog of poems about crime, edited by Gerald So. (Recording credit: Jason DeFontes.) Here is the link to the The Five-Two (scroll down to find my poem and recording): http://poemsoncrime.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2014-12-15T00:01:00-...

The second  poem, "Cal Ripken," was included on a CD of local Baltimore and Maryland poets reading their work, produced by Blair Ewing and released in 2001, entitled Word Up, Baltimore! I wrote it during the height of the media frenzy over "The Streak" in a bit of a tongue-in-cheek tone after detecting during and interview of Ripken a bit of weariness on his part over the hype surrounding what would be his eventual breaking of Lou Gehrig's record for consecutive games played. 

After my poem "How to Unpack a Bomb Vest" was published online at Rattle: Poets Respond on May 25, 2017, Rattle editor Timothy Green put me in contact with Dutch composer Brechtje Vandijk (she goes simply by her first name, Brechtje). Brechtje had read my poem and wanted to create an original musical composition for it. In a series of e-mails, I worked with Brechtje to edit my poem down a bit in order to fit it better into a musical score, to be sung with accompaniment. 

These images are of my revised poem and a few sections of  the poem as lyrics with the musical score written by Brechtje. The work was performed in early March 2018 at several venues around the Netherlands; my wife and I flew to the Netherlands to see the live performance by the avant-garde band VONK (which means "spark" in Dutch) at the Crosslinx Music Festival held at the Muziekgebouw / Bimhuis venue in Amsterdam on March 3, 2018. You can watch the video of the performance below. VONK also later recorded "How to Unpack a Bomb Vest" for a CD. 

This ekphrastic project paired images by Maryland artists, mostly of places or scenes in Maryland, with poets from Maryland, who wrote pieces in response to the images. My poem "Rumbley, Maryland," written in response to Jonathan Nepini's painting "Hooper's Island," was chosen along with his painting to be included in the book.

Images in this project are of pages from the book Here / Not Here: Art and Poetry of Place, published by Salisbury University Art Galleries in 2020 to accompany an exhibit of the artwork in Salisbury, MD in October 2020. I have included a PDF of my poem as well, in case the image of my poem from the book doesn't translate well visually on some people's computer screens.

A collaboration with Baltimore artist "Spilly" for the Baltimore Ekphrasis Project, published online and on a giant LED billboard on Charles Street next to Penn Station in Baltimore.

My poem "Pulse" was written in response to Spilly's painting "Play." Spilly, in turn, painted "Of Light and Water" in response to my poem of the same title.

Here is a link to my poems alongside artwork by Spilly: https://thelightekphrastic.com/baltimore-hoop-love-hohner/

States is my chapbook published by Third Ear Books. This chapbook originally started as a series of micro cassette tapes spoken as a travel journal as I drove solo across the country to Naropa University (then called The Naropa Institute) in Boulder, Colorado to pursue my MFA in Writing at their Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. States was first transcribed verbatim from the tapes, then shaped, workshopped, and edited over the next two years. This is the final product of the creative portion of my master's thesis, which Editor Jerry Tumlinson at Third Ear Books was gracious enough to publish.