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Matt Rentschler
Matt is the managing editor of Journal of Integral Theory and Practice.
Matt Rentschler (or "Wrench," for short) is a leading scholar of Integral Art and has helped pioneer a post-disciplinary approach to the
philosophy of art and beauty, or an Integral Aesthetics. His two foundational essays in Integral Art are used as core texts within University of North Carolina at Asheville's Arts and Ideas program, one of the only undergraduate courses in the country that explicitly focuses on Integral Art. He has also given a number of teleconferences with students regarding
Integral Art and Aesthetics and is available for more such services. Matt participated in the historic gatherings of one of the first
Integral Art Salons and wrote perhaps the only first-person accounts of
each meeting.
Matt is the managing editor of Journal of Integral Theory and Practice, the world's first and foremost source for peer-reviewed AQAL scholarship. He was also sole copyeditor for Dr. Simon Senzon's book, The Secret History of Chiropractic, and did extensive editorial work for Sean Esbjorn-Hargens and Michael Zimmerman's forthcoming book Integral Ecology: Uniting Multiple Perspectives on the Natural World.
In addition to his scholarly and editorial work, Matt is a professional poet with nearly a decade of experience, well schooled in the forms of both eastern and western approaches. He has pioneered an Integral Poetics, or a more comprehensive approach to the theory and practice of poetry. His thought has been influenced by the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lewis Turco, T.S. Eliot, Harold Bloom, Sri Aurobindo, and Patrick Laude, among others. His own poetry is predominantly carried on in the lineage of what Bloom calls the "Kosmic poets" (Walt Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens), as well as the tradition of emancipatory writing (including Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley, and Marcel Proust). The great poets of Europe, from Homer to Dante to Shakespeare to Goethe to Yeats, have also deeply informed Matt's work, as has the contemplative poetry of Islamic Sufism (Rumi), Zen Buddhism (Dogen, Basho, Issa), the Vedas and Upanishads of Hinduism, and the countless spiritual songs of Tibet.
With a keen eye for diverse poetics, both cultural and historical, his is a poetry of perspectives.
Finally, Matt is also an avid traveler. Some of his main tourism interests involve exploring his homeland, the United States (inspiration here includes the tour diaries of avant-garde bassist Mike Watt), as well as focusing on Europe, particularly his maternal country of origin, Italy, and his parternal ancestral nation, Germany, which is appropriately dubbed "the land of poets and thinkers." Basho's The Road to the Interior is also an inspiration for Matt, and he plans to one day visit the islands of Japan.
Matt is the managing editor of Journal of Integral Theory and Practice, the world's first and foremost source for peer-reviewed AQAL scholarship. He was also sole copyeditor for Dr. Simon Senzon's book, The Secret History of Chiropractic, and did extensive editorial work for Sean Esbjorn-Hargens and Michael Zimmerman's forthcoming book Integral Ecology: Uniting Multiple Perspectives on the Natural World.
In addition to his scholarly and editorial work, Matt is a professional poet with nearly a decade of experience, well schooled in the forms of both eastern and western approaches. He has pioneered an Integral Poetics, or a more comprehensive approach to the theory and practice of poetry. His thought has been influenced by the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lewis Turco, T.S. Eliot, Harold Bloom, Sri Aurobindo, and Patrick Laude, among others. His own poetry is predominantly carried on in the lineage of what Bloom calls the "Kosmic poets" (Walt Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens), as well as the tradition of emancipatory writing (including Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley, and Marcel Proust). The great poets of Europe, from Homer to Dante to Shakespeare to Goethe to Yeats, have also deeply informed Matt's work, as has the contemplative poetry of Islamic Sufism (Rumi), Zen Buddhism (Dogen, Basho, Issa), the Vedas and Upanishads of Hinduism, and the countless spiritual songs of Tibet.
With a keen eye for diverse poetics, both cultural and historical, his is a poetry of perspectives.
Finally, Matt is also an avid traveler. Some of his main tourism interests involve exploring his homeland, the United States (inspiration here includes the tour diaries of avant-garde bassist Mike Watt), as well as focusing on Europe, particularly his maternal country of origin, Italy, and his parternal ancestral nation, Germany, which is appropriately dubbed "the land of poets and thinkers." Basho's The Road to the Interior is also an inspiration for Matt, and he plans to one day visit the islands of Japan.
