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Meet Matty Bovard of Boulder, CO

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Matty Bovard.

Hi Matty, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I’m not sure I can do it briefly but here I go.

I grew up around art. Both of my parents are artists in their own right, though they also were very practical in how they went about making a living from it. My dad was a painter, who knew he was a good salesmen, so founded a stained glass window company because it was a solid niche, and he could still be creative. My mom was a very talented cook, seamstress and singer. She would make costumes for local theater productions and did a bit of design for stuffed animals. With this and my home town in south central Iowa being the epicenter for Transcendental Meditation in the U.S. laid the foundation for me as an artist.

It was in 11th grade that I made my first committed step to a life as an artist. I really loved sketch comedy especially SNL and thought that it was something I would like to do. My school had a speech team that had an improv troupe. I tried out and got in. I was the first football player to join speech team. That is also a frame of reference I’ve always felt, being a on the edge between worlds, fitting in while standing out. It was that same year that I discovered I was a good writer by trying to piss off my English teacher. He had a reputation for being a real hard a*s so I took it upon myself attempt to be a nuisance. For the assignments I would write absurdist essays expecting to get an F but I got B’s because they were so creative. I was never really disruptive to the class just acting out while still participating. It was in that class that I fell in love with writing in notebooks. We would start out the day writing in our notebooks with zero restrictions. I would let me my mind wander all over.

After high school I went to the University of Iowa where I studied Theater and English. It was in a general lit class my freshman year that I discovered I was a poet. There was a poetry section for the class and to start it the teacher handed out a packet of quotes by list of heavy hitters from the western cultural cannon. Freud’s was “All the dark places I’ve been a poet’s been before”. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s was about living life as if on fire. Other’s were about the need for a great audience to support great work. As I read through them it hit me like a thunderbolt that I had been writing poetry in my notebooks for the past few years. From that moment on I’ve known I was a poet. Shortly after I got myself a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Walt Whitman’s 1855 Edition of “Leaves of Grass” These cemented my love of poetry and radical outlier artists. Over the next 3 years of college I immersed myself in the Beat’s and psychedelic thought leaders Terrence McKenna and Timothy Leary.

I graduated in 2009 with a degree in theater and a minor in English. It was shortly after that I had the thought that best way to develop a viable career as a poet was to start organizing art community and plug myself into it. As a college graduation present my dad printed 2,000 copies of a magazine called Knew rEvolution. It was poetry, short stories and photography. Along with the magazine I started to produce open mics and events around psychedelics and regenerative culture. Late 2009 I had been preparing to move to LA to get involved in the creative community there but was arrested in Iowa City for possession of cannabis with intent to distribute. With that I stayed in Iowa City but also discovered that I could get press passes to festivals with Knew rEvolution. The summer I attended Sonic Bloom music festival in Colorado and really like the vibes of the community. It also felt very supportive. That August I was sentenced to 2 years probation with a deferred judgement. I played the game they wanted me too and was released from probation after 1 year and moved to Boulder the day I got off. Once in Boulder I started organizing events around psychedelics and regenerative culture with the Evolver Network, now the Bloom Network. Along with these events I would go to open mics and kept working music festivals.

After a few years in Boulder making connections me and a couple friends founded New Basics Wednesday, which became StarWater Wednesday, at 303 Vodka. It was weekly event that featured live interviews, open mic and featured music. The crew that produced it also produced the StarWater Cafe that set up at ARISE and Sonic Bloom music festivals. Along with working on the cafe crew I would organize poets to perform and perform myself. ARISE 2014 I brought 9 poets out including Anne Waldman who co-founded Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics with Allen Ginsberg. The Wednesday event ran every Wednesday for 7 years at multiple venues. The last few years were at Vision Quest Brewery. In October 2020 I did a 13 hour live stream poetry performance from there where I read all original work from my notebooks and typewritten pages. It’s available on my youtube channel.

The past 5 years have been spent refining and working on developing the structure to make this a viable working career. Throughout the whole journey I’ve been focused on building better models for creatives. I’ve had patreon am on all the social media platforms including some blockchain ones. Still all these platforms feel like I’m working for them and they don’t align with my values. That’s why over the past 15 years I’ve also been developing what will be an alternative to what’s available. It started out as Knew rEvolution and has gone through a few different variations. From 2022-2023 I was producing a 4 hr internet radio broadcast featuring local music and locally produced talk radio shows. July 2024 I met my co-founder Grig Bilham who is a musician and software developer. He had been working for over 20 years on these same problems and was capable of building the digital tools to provide solutions the systemic problems in the creative industries. We have founded a non-profit called Distributed Creatives whose mission is to build the digital infrastructure for a 21st century creative economy as a public good vs a commercial enterprise. We’re currently in the process of developing our initial products to launch our pilot program in Boulder, CO. I’m also continuing to work on developing my poetry brand Dank PHART The Pirate Poet

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Definitely not. Being an artist is rarely a smooth road as there are many hurdles to overcome. It takes a ton of time just to make a living doing a job not related to our art, sometimes there are jobs available that are complimentary, then the art has to be done. On top of the art being done we have to build a brand, post content, book shows, write e-mails, network and maintain our personal well being. It’s multiple full time jobs on top of having to have a job. I’ve also been supporting a family the whole time.

Even if you manage to build an online audience monetizing it is a whole different beast. We’re essentially working for the social media platforms for free on the hope that we can turn it into a living. We’re also vying for attention with every single every kind of content out there and it takes years to build. They just tell us we have to keep posting, which is true in some ways but also the systems are set up against us. They aren’t designed to maximize the support of creatives. They’re designed to maximize their profits by addictive platforms sucking our attention.

As a poet I’m working in an industry that is basically considered dead. The Boulder/Denver poetry scene is an incredible poetry community and the talent is mind blowing, yet there’s no one really making a living from it. Even top slam poets have difficulty turning it into a working career. It’s not a lack of talent it’s a lack of structural support. There are a few poets who have found success in this modern era and those were mostly done using social media. It’s possible but is the exception. My issue with that is there’s so much talent I know it’s not a talent issue that there aren’t more working artists supported by their work.

I’ve been working on a budget of blood, sweat, tears and laughter the whole time. Putting on events with your own money, when you don’t have much to begin with is extremely difficult and causes anxiety. Getting people to show up takes a ton of effort and you have to be on social media or putting up flyers all over the place. A lot of the time I barely broke even and many times lost money. If I weren’t so passionate I would have stopped but it’s an obsession. I believe with total conviction the importance of art and my poetry.

On top of all this my pen name Dank PHART The Pirate Poet has made it all the more difficult. It’s a given name. It was gifted to me on an LSD trip with some friends when one of them declared “Bovard, you smoke so much pot your farts smell like dank. I can smell them at my house all the way across town” It stuck from then on. I’ve had lots of producers tell me they won’t put my name of a flyer and been told my writing would be accepted in a magazine if I changed my name. For me though it’s a higher calling. It represents the wild and fearless creative work that is necessary to move society. I see Dank PHART as a psychedelic super hero. It also puts a line in the sand that’s so far out that it gives permission to be your most creative self. If I can find success as Dank PHART it gives a ton of space for you to find your creative voice.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I’m a poet, community organizer and entrepreneur. What I do is cultivate community around art to help create a supportive environment for creative empowerment. I work at festivals in various capacities from poetry coordinator to building to cafe staff to journalism. I’m also developing some workshops around creativity and poetry. I also take my typewriter to events and write poems from people on demand.

I’m known for bold performances that excite the audience and are provocative. My work uses strong language and is heavily influenced by Eastern philosophy and psychedelics. It’s got roots in the work of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg but is uniquely my own. Another favorite Beat Poet of mine whose work I think resonates with mine is Michael McClure.

Community is the foundation of all that I do. The majority of work I’ve produced has had a strong community element to it. What I’m most proud of is my uncompromising ethic of my work. I’ve been told countless times that I have to change my pen name. I feel it’s bigger then me and to let it go would be to not complete the mission I came here to do, which is help facilitate a creative revolution. What sets me a part from others is my pen name and my style. My voice was found through my own personal journey that had influences but was never trying to be like them. Over the past few years I’ve come across interviews with Paul McCartney, Rick Reuben and other extremely successful creatives and the processes they used to develop their craft are very aligned with how I work. I somehow just had a good understanding of the raw creative process from the beginning and over the years refined it through studying and practice.

Before we go, is there anything else you can share with us?
Creativity is the one of most important parts of the human experience. Without it everything would just be a dull mechanical drone. The lack of creativity is what’s at the root of our global crisis. It’s an inability to see that there’s a different possibility. If we don’t dare to envision something different we will never be able to get out of this mess. All great leaps in humanity were creatively fueled. They dared to see things from a different perspective and it changed the world. It also helps us connect to our essence of life that is curious and wants to play. The future belongs to the creatives. Everyone’s invited and if you think you aren’t creative you just haven’t worked those muscles.

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These were all just captured by friends or me.

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