This sophisticated poetry book consists of five sections,
four of which originally appeared as stand-alone chapbooks. Each uses specific
formal devices—from sonnets to free verse to meter—while Martin’s thematic
obsessions appear throughout—language, love, humor. Martin also makes liberal
use of collage and parataxis, which puts him squarely in the Pound-Williams
tradition, in spite of his occasional use of tradition.
In the first section, “Sideways,” Martin uses, for the most
part, vaguely iambic lines and punctuation as he flits and digitizes from one
thematic perch to another. And this linking of the organic—“perches”—with the
technological—“digital”—is apt since Martin makes our greatest technology,
language, into a langorous, comedic organism.
Language
moves to stillness.
We have the
details: old pond
In the
ancestor’s neighborhood.
Your fear
of barns and tall grass. (20)
These lines illustrate this section best. You can feel the
vague iambic rhythm. He uses a lot of end-stop. Language as an entity quickly
gives way to empirical particulars. Unlike high LANGUAGE poetry, where language
is opened to reveal its complicity in social structure, Martin places language
squarely in our thoughts, affections, and evolving desires.
In the second section, “Sound Nets,” Martin turns to 14-line
sonnets. In his hands, the traditional form becomes funny, talky, and lacks
punctuation:
Boat of
blond strangers has too many opinions
Time to
float Current of thought
less than
Nile but not my exotic mother (62)
The third line quoted above provides a typical example of
Martin’s humor. He yokes together disparateness in a manner that shocks,
amuses, and throws us into reflection. “Current” clearly relates to “Nile,” but
how does it relate to “thought”? How is such “current” related to the “mother,”
and why is she, apparently, more “exotic” than the Nile? These questions
provide the openings, the breathing, the possibilities of this poetry—not any
answers.
Thank goodness.
In the section “Under the Sky of No Complaint” Martin uses
few formal devices nor even hints at meter. But the title poem of the section,
in two-line stanzas, hilariously riffs on the tensions between our “cell phone”
world and Romanticism, the pull of the old and “The School of Advanced Poetics,” and the academicized AP writing
course. The poem seems frustrated with the boxes into which writing and
thinking is put, the fetishizing of the new, the needless denigration of what
might still be useful or fun from the past.
“Strip Meditation” consists of a series of numbered poems,
most in regular stanzas:
In time we
will
Overcome
everything
If we are
the immense universe
& not
some egomaniacal
Splinter of
light in the mind (119)
Martin is way too sophisticated to be uttering the cliché in
the first two lines. I did a double-take: until I hit the ironizing of the next
two lines. I laughed out loud. These switchbacks and double-takes are typical
of this book.
The final section, “Skylark,” ends with the title poem. And
it is magnificent. Divided into three numbered sections, it is further
digitized by leaping from each stanza to the next in terms of
image/thought/thematic nexus. We reflect not so much on the relationship of one
line to another, as we do in much of the rest of the book, but on the relation
of one stanza, as unit, to the next:
Under the
constellations of heaven
There are
plenty of options
Instead of
forests we could have
More
superhighways (for instance)
Witness the
cellar of oranges
Climb lemon
steps at the sun’s request
Squeeze the
light in you
Into shapes
of day (148)
The first stanza’s nexus—space, options, landscape—gives way
to a whole different one—surrealism, fruit, instructions in the form of verbs.
Here the openness, the breath, the possibility comes in the intertwinings and
the gaps between stanzas.
This is a big-hearted book by a complex and assured poet. I
have never before encountered someone who, while remaining committed to various
formal investigations, combines a reflection on the nature of poetry and
language to the use of digitized techniques to a variety of ends.
___________________________
Richard Martin is a
regular contributor to this blog.
For years, he ran The
Big Horror Reading Series in Binghamton, NY. He is the author of Dreams of Long Headresses: Poems from a
Thousand Hospitals, White Man Appears on Southern California Beach,
Modulations, and Marks.
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