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“Poetry is for Rock Stars” with Nebraska State Poet Matt Mason & Jay Hanson
September 8, 2023 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm CDT
Join us online for a special Curiosity Connections with Nebraska State Poet Matt Mason in conversation with Nebraska rock musician Jay Hanson.
Register for a Zoom link at Eventbrite.
Poetry is often seen as a formal, intellectual thing when it’s actually rooted in daily life and experiences. There was nothing formal about Coleridge enlisting in the Light Dragoons under the name Silas Tomkyn Comberbache after he was rejected by a girl. Nothing formal about Byron being described as “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” Nothing formal in Shelley being expelled from Oxford for publishing The Necessity of Atheism. And don’t even get me started on Blake… Let’s talk about poetry. And Eighties rock.
Register for a Zoom link at Eventbrite.
Matt Mason is Nebraska State Poet. He holds an MA from the University of California, Davis, and is the author of four poetry collections and numerous other poems. The former executive director of the Nebraska Writers Collective, Mason has run workshops in Botswana, Romania, Nepal, and Belarus through the U.S. State Department. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and two Nebraska Book Awards. In 2022, Mason received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.
Jay Hanson has been creating professionally for over twenty years as a songwriter, performer, and producer. A Berklee College of Music graduate, he has worked in the recording studio with artists ranging from Snoop Dogg to Larry The Cable Guy; clients such as NPR, ESPN and ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy”, and shared performances with music notables such as Hootie & the Blowfish, Cake, Taylor Dayne, David Lee Roth, and The Jayhawks.
As a resident artist, he was a performer and musician with Rave On Productions for thirteen years, where he appeared in Yesterday & Today: the Interactive Beatles Experience and Rave On! The Buddy Holly Experience His recent acting credits include starring as “Willy Wonka” in Willy Wonka and as “Guy” in the Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova musical Once, for which he won the Mary Peckham Award for Best Actor in a Musical.