Matthew Ramsay

Keeping it Real.
Words have weight and shapes,
I like to mold them into narratives.

I am a poet and a playwright. There’s poetry spoken in my plays and stories heard in the poems. During a long career in performance from producer, actor, to stagehand, I observed all types and the somewhat absurd circumstances that would bring us together. I have always written plays, short stories, and poems about these experiences.

I am inspired by the superficial hype of our ordinary life on a landscape of foreboding institutions, cold corporations, and tribal traditions. I am inspired by the faded debris in the street and the friendly parrots on the wires. I try to notice the unnoticeable, feel the weight of our vernacular, see through the BS and share it with an audience.

My plays are more comedic than didactic. They can be both serious and absurd. I want anyone and everybody to enjoy the experience from the time they arrive at the box-office all the way through the incidental music they may have heard on their way out. I’d prefer to lampoon the ordinary than preach something complex. My poems explore themes of economic disenfranchisement, angst, charlatans and influencers, infrastructure erosion, political strife, and general sensory overload. Life as it is observed and lived.

Publications include a trilogy of poetry books; You Deleted Everything You Saved, West Elbow and The Parrots Must’ve Flown Down South (due 2024). They include color plates of my detailed illustrations. Recent live performances include my original rock opera Cheap Cheese.

Whether with ink on paper, or promoting a free form jazz concert in a local church, I possess a passion for what I do.