Your Name: Matthew Curtis Ernst
Your Nickname: Matt-Ernst (said as one word so I can be cool like those one-named poets); MC Ernie LB (the Love Battery); (also simply) Ernie; (or) Simple Ernie; Sweaty Matt, The Other White Matt, (and of course) Way To F#ck It Up For The Rest Of Us Matt.
Born (place and year): Lansing, MI; August 16, 1967. (NASA hadn’t even faked the moon landing yet.)
Day Job: Cook.
Formative Childhood Experience: My father teaching me how to swim; Hearing my first Jimi Hendrix record; Nixon resigning; Ricky Snellingburger accidentally tearing off his own scalp with a claw hammer (you had to be there).
Your Interests include: Baseball; Reading; Spelunking; Fantasizing about what it would be like to have a girlfriend and what I would do to her in a baseball uniform, on a book shelf, or in a cave (all these things at once and I could happily die); Pretending to be a poet by reading preposterously short fiction at poetry slams.
Last Book Read: As Above, So Below; A Novel of Peter Bruegel, by Rudy Rucker
Ambition: Yeah, uh, you see, that’s really my main problem, isn’t it — the lack of ambition? If I have to name one though, I’ll stick with becoming the first American First Gentleman.
Recent Accomplishment: I think this might be related to the previous topic…
Prized Possessions: I’m looking around, and, really, I’m not seeing anything. My Louisville Slugger? My questionable sanity? (Wow — let’s put those two things together and see what happens.)
When you started Slamming: I remember two guys with "wolf" in their names being there, but I was that guy in the corner who read an occasional poem and was often kindly asked to "wrap it up."
One-sentence description of your Slam/Writing style: I like to write an adequate and sufficiently strange three and half minute long piece of work and read it — hand in or out of pocket — as fast as I can.
Influences (poetic and otherwise): Being the youngest child in a family of prodigious readers with peculiar tastes; Donald Barthelme; Amiri Baraka; Allen (cringe) Ginsberg; Kurt Vonnegut; Jerzy Kosinski; Dashiel Hammett; the Raymonds, both Carver and Chandler, and a host of others up to and especially including Steve Marsh.
Favorite Slam Poet: Morris Stegosaurus? Matt Olzman? Do I really have to choose?
Favorite TV show: Currently, Six Feet Under. Previously, Homicide; Life on the Street. (Also Firefly, which was cancelled even more prematurely than Homicide)
Favorite book: Tough one. It’s probably one of these: Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, Straight Man by Richard Russo, Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow, or Frank Herbert’s entire Dune series (every last word of it, but not his son’s adequately written yet pale-in-comparison spin-off).
Website: yeah, right.