To catch up…

I have come to realize since I have started posting more regularly to Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/blainecmartin) that I haven’t really posted here much.  And that includes the biggest piece of news currently available in my life as a writer.  If you read this blog, there is a good chance you know me in real life and follow me on Facebook, so you probably already know, but this is for anyone that may randomly happen upon this blog and enjoys my poetry:

My chapbook, A Whole Armada of Loss, is available through Plan B Press.  I am really proud of the collection.  There is a lot of blood and sweat that went into the poems and Plan B is a great home for it.  They have published a lot of wonderful poets and done a lot to support up and coming writers, so I’m thrilled to have joined the family.  If you’d like to buy a copy, you can find it here:

http://www.planbpress.com/bookstore?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage_books.tpl&product_id=76&category_id=6

In the near future, I’m going to try to actually create a website and tie this blog into it.  Things will get moving after my life calms slightly.

 

 

 

 

As Promised, a Writing Exercise…

So yesterday, I put out a challenge.  To listen to a play list of songs that attempt to tell a story and to latch onto something in those songs and write.  I have a rough draft of a poem that I worked on today while listening to the playlist.  It is rough and title-less, but it is important, when working on a writing exercise like this one, not to focus on perfection.  The important thing is to write.  To focus in on something and let the words come out.  Chances are, you won’t use the complete bit of writing, but in the future lines and phrases may prove useful in your other writing.  Here is my scrap of poem.

As the train plunges below ground near
43rd and it’s darkness all around,
I can’t help but think of all those
oceanographers talking

about the black of the ocean deep below
the surface, how strange it is something
so clear could be so hard to breach,
like memory,

so viscous the synapses fail to fire.
How you are present at your birth,
but that is fog, life starts at four
or five, with shreds of moments

from before, like drunken nights,
like the time I fell, scraped my knee
on the patio by the pool, running
like I was told not to,

the time I cut a corner out back by the fence,
cut my arm open on a pricker bush,
blood so red it cuts through time, the scars
just fading fading from flesh a few years ago.

I don’t remember the before or after,
but the seconds are clear,

like that time I kissed a girl I never met,
her lips tasting of cigarettes and bourbon
as we groped at each other through
the murkiness of memory and whiskey.

All these scraps floating in the darkness
of brain matter, flooding back in those seconds
between 43rd and 40th, the voice on the El train
“Doors are Opening”

and I’m back in the halogen light.

If you tried this out, I’d love to see what you got.  Post it as a comment to this post and hopefully we can get some people discussing their writing.

For my writer friends, a writing experiment…

I had hit a bit of a snag with writers block and have recently taken to using writing exercises and experiments to try to get the synapses firing again.  At roughly the same time, I received an email that someone recently liked a digital mix tape I made on a site where you make digital mix tapes.  It was one of those things I did years ago, that I had nearly forgotten about until I received this email.  I have to say, it is a pretty damn good mix tape, in a weird sort of way.  In the “I decided to write a story using a mix tape” sort of way.  That inspired me to try something.  That something isn’t ready to be shared, but I figured this might be a good opportunity to get interactive up in this blog.

So here is the deal, if you are a writer and feel like trying an experiment that I’m trying and then sharing your experiment with the world, then listen up.

Check out this mix tape I made a few years ago, entitled “upon sailing the sea, a Crash occurs and a journey begins,”

http://8tracks.com/julyjuly1825/upon-sailing-the-sea-a-crash-occurs-and-a-journey-begins

then write a short piece of flash fiction, a poem, a snippet of memory, a song, or anything else you may feel so inspired to, based on the ideas contained within.  It is a play list about traveling, about the ocean, about love, about danger, about crashes, about fear, about struggle.  There is a lot in there, so anchor onto something and start writing.  If you feel comfortable sharing your piece, post it as a comment and we can all discuss.  I’ll be posting mine sometime this weekend.

Ape and Coffee

I have lots of exciting news coming, as I’ve said.  Even more than I expected.  I can’t reveal most of it right this second, but it will be dolled out appropriately.  One thing I can say is that it is the beginning of Nanowrimo.  For those of you who don’t know, it is National Novel Writing Month.  The point is to finish a 50,000 word novel in one month.  Obviously there is not time to revise.  The point of the exercise is to finish the basic shell of a novel in one month.  Then, should it be something worth working with, go back and revise, revise, revise.  I had originally planned on trying to write a novel this month, but I have been in a poetry mode lately, and don’t want to break the streak. Instead I am going to try to complete an entirely new poetry collection in a single month.  This will be, in my opinion, as difficult, as it will require 3-4 pages of new poetry a day, to result in a collection that is 90-120 pages long.  As with Nanowrimo, it will be largely unedited, so I won’t really want to share all the new poems here, but I’ll share as many as I feel are fit for public viewing, without time to revise.  Bring on Napocowrimo!  With that said, I will not always have time for my Wednesday “blog” posts, which have been suffering because of work and storms and birthdays, but you’ll get a few this month, as well as oodles of new poems, plus the standard “Poem I Love” Fridays.

So, here is a great poem by Russell Edson, the master of surreal, but important, poetry.  My first experience with Edson was “The Tormented Mirror” a collection of incredibly strange prose poems.  What Edson did, for me, was allowed me to realize that sometimes poems can seem incredibly inaccessible and odd on your first go-around, but once you start to read the poems over and over and look at what is happening, what seemed completely inapproachable is, in actuality, fairly simple.  He let me know that sometimes those really weird images you have in your head can be the basis for poems.  I don’t tend to write really strange poems anymore, but I had a huge Edson phase that affected me pretty deeply, in the long run.  Ape and Coffee, at first, seems to be near gibberish, but it is a brilliant poem about approaching the things we do not understand, in the guise of an unusual conversation between a man and his monkey.
 Enjoy!
 
Ape And Coffee

Some coffee had gotten on a man’s ape. The man said,
animal did you get on my coffee?

No no, whistled the ape, the coffee got on me.

You’re sure you didn’t spill on my coffee? said the man.

Do I look like a liquid? peeped the ape.

Well you sure don’t look human, said the man.

But that doesn’t make me a fluid, twittered the ape.

Well I don’ know what the hell you are, so just stop it,
cried the man.

I was just sitting here reading the newspaper when you
splashed coffee all over me, piped the ape.

I don’t care if you are a liquid, you just better stop
splashing on things, cried the man.

Do I look fluid to you? Take a good look, hooted the ape.

If you don’t stop I’ll put you in a cup, screamed the man.

I’m not a fluid, screeched the ape.

Stop it, stop it, screamed the man, you are frightening me.

Russell Edson

Henry’s Understanding by John Berryman

“The devil and John Berryman took a walk together. They ended up on Washington talking to the river.”

– The Hold Steady

I apologize that I didn’t post on Wednesday, but between Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday I worked approximately five full work days.  To say I’m tired is to say the least.

To make up for it, I’m going to ramble a bit more about the poem I’m posting today.  It is one of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets.

Yesterday would have been John Berryman’s 98th birthday.  Even if he hadn’t committed suicide, I doubt he would have made it to 98, but in reality he only made it to 57.  I found out about Berryman during my junior year of undergrad, thanks to The Hold Steady, and spent a good part of my graduate studies obsessing over his poems.

One of the things I find most interesting about Berryman’s work, as a whole not this poem specifically, is his dedication to form, despite his desire to experiment and express the strangeness of the world.  Through most of his early life as a poet, he wrote a multitude of formal poems and in his “Dream Songs” they did not follow a specific traditional form all dream songs consisted of three six line stanzas.  He reveled in consistent form.  However, his language was strange, even now let alone fifty years ago, his images are surreal, and his grammar, while usually correct, is composed as disjointed and jarring.  Berryman’s poem’s show the importance of whimsy and escape in a rigid, formal world.

What I find really striking about “Henry’s Understanding” is a matter of hindsight.  It may not have seemed striking to Berryman when he wrote it, or anyone who read it as a stand alone piece prior to the publication of Delusions, Etc Berryman’s last collection.  However, it becomes a strikingly eerie poem once it was released in the last book Berryman finished before his suicide.  In the last stanza, Berryman talks of knowing that one night he will walk out into the water off the coast and walk below forever.

Berryman’s suicide was a grisly thing.  He was on the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis and jumped off.  Perhaps, sadly, deciding that night it was his time to walk below the water forever.  What is most horrifying is the cause of death, when the facts are considered.  Berryman died of asphyxiation, as one might expect of a man jumping into the cold, harsh waters of the Mississippi, as whimsical and surreal as Berryman’s poems.  However, he never made it to the water, he hit the hard, structured ground of the bank.  The list of things he potentially could have asphyxiated on are varied, but regardless, the death was certainly not a quick one.

I find it endlessly fascinating and sad that Berryman had such a premonition prior to his suicide.  It brings the question of how long he had been contemplating it, how long he had imagined stripping naked and diving beneath the waves.  Regardless, it is a brilliant poem and worth consideration.  Happy belated birthday, Mr. Berryman.

Henry’s Understanding

He was reading late, at Richard’s, down in Maine,
aged 32? Richard & Helen long in bed,
my good wife long in bed.
All I had to do was strip & get into my bed,
putting the marker in the book, & sleep,
& wake to a hot breakfast.

Off the coast was an island, P’tit Manaan,
the bluff from Richard’s lawn was almost sheer.
A chill at four o’clock.
It only takes a few minutes to make a man.
A concentration upon now & here.
Suddenly, unlike Bach,

& horribly, unlike Bach, it occurred to me
that one night, instead of warm pajamas,
I’d take off all my clothes
& cross the damp cold lawn & down the bluff
into the terrible water & walk forever
under it out toward the island.

John Berryman

Poem to Line My Casket with, Ramona by Josh Bell

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of seeing Josh Bell read as part of the Carlow MFA Program.  He was amazing.  His poetry is unique and strange and surreal and beautiful.  His first collection No Planets Strike varies in tone and voice and subject matter as wildly as hurricane.  Just when you think you have him figured out and are safe from harm, he shifts drastically and floors you all over again.  I highly recommend digging further, but for today’s poem, I’m choosing my favorite from No Planets Strike, “Poem to Line My Casket with, Ramona” originally published in The Boston Review.

Poem to Line My Casket with, Ramona

Come practice your whorish gestures in the graveyard, Ramona.
Come sharpen your teeth on the tombstones.
Cough up the roots if you know what’s good for you.
When coyotes are teaching their young to howl,
ghoulies rehearse the Courtship of Wristbones.
When you hear clawing at the square of styrofoam
serving as a window in the caretaker’s shack,
then you must count each step going up to the mausoleum,
and my ghost will appear in the churchyard.
He’ll kiss the back of your knee in the moonlight.
These are not promises, but eerie enough, regardless.
You must count out loud, Ramona, the steps,
because this is the time to watch what eats you.
I used to love the way the wind whistled through your teeth
when you drove the back roads, above your legal limit.
I used to have these poses. They turned into habits.
I used to love the folks that loved me.
And they’ve been sad ones, my years since being dead.
And they’ve been coming, the folks who claim to love me.
And I hardly recognize myself. There aren’t mirrors, as such.
The drum section rattles it out, down by the high school.
I hear them, or is it the caretaker drunk in his wheelbarrow?
You used to play the wheelbarrow, I recall.
You used to wash your underwear in the sink.
Above ground, the wind whistles through the tombstones.
Below ground, the wind sleeps and has colors.
Below ground, colors are how I dream of making my comeback.
There’s a difference between a white dress and the white dress.
You used to strip off the white dress in a highly professional manner.
You used to dangle the remote, and I’d come get it.
You used to skip church. You used to skip dinner parties.
Now you’ve been seen hoisting condoms from the pharmacy.
There are twelve condoms to a pack. A pack of lovers mills outside your door.
A pack of the dead are heading toward the showers.
A pack of dead lovers is referred to as “a creep” of dead lovers.
More than one dead lover is weeping. But oh, how it was me who loved you then.
You with your cracked lips, with your love and your otherdefilements kept alive in a bucket.
When I first died, I stole a lock of your hair while you slept.
Now I dip it in ink when the mood strikes,
and the times you visit and kneel so pretty on the grass above me,
that’s not scratching you hear. It’s writing.

Originally published in the Summer 2000 issue of Boston Review

Ruminations on Voice

When I was a kid I collected keychains.  

At 8, you don’t have any keys, but whenever my family would visit a new city or go to some historic attraction or museum, I would always hope we would find some kitschy keychain I could add to the growing collection.  

I think I had a pair of keys to an old rusted out, broken down pick-up in the backyard of a building my father owned in Spinnerstown and a key to a keepsake box I found in our attic, but that was it.  I just liked the jingling sound they made when they were all attached to one ring.  

We are talking about a monstrous amalgam of keychains, probably 20 or so, all attached to two keys, kept in the aforementioned keepsake box.

This will come back later.  I may be working my way towards crazy, but I’m not there yet.

One of the keywords of an MFA program is voice.  To hear instructors speak of it, in hushed reverent tones, the voice is the holy grail of every writer.  The thing that we will spend our whole lives searching for and probably never find.  

Whenever an up-and-coming writer makes it, the reviews all say “It is amazing that <insert trend of the week> has found <his or her> voice this early.”

I hear from writer friends constantly “I have been searching for my voice for years and I don’t really think I’ve found it yet.”

I remember being immensely flattered when my first MFA mentor told me I really seemed to be finding my voice in this new batch of poems.

When I started working on my creative manuscript I had those poems, all the new poems I wrote since, and the poems I wrote during undergrad all stacked in front of me, figuring out which hundred or so poems would make the cut and I discovered something interesting.

The voice in my newest poems, the voice in that first packet of poems, and the voice in the poems I wrote when I was 19 were all roughly the same.  There were flairs in different eras of writing, accents that I focused on, but the main voice resonated through all of them.

As I’ve revised older poems, polishing them and getting them ready to go out and meet the world, it has become increasingly evident to me that my voice has been there from the beginning.

What has changed has been my understanding of the craft of poetry.  What works and what doesn’t.  What words are loaded with meaning and what words are loaded with cliché.  Following where the line wants to break versus where I think the line should break.  What is the right number of images and what makes a poem too laden with images.  All these things are what work to make a poem strong.

Our voices are part of us.  I’m, obviously, not talking about the voice we speak with in day-to-day conversation, but the voice we write with.  The voice that informs our poems and our stories.  The voice that tells the reader what you are talking about.  While we may begin to speak and write years or decades before we ever decide to become creative writers, our literary voices begin to develop even before we learn to speak.  Our literary voices are informed by how we see the world, how we perceive the things we are confronted with, and how we eventually decide to name them and relate to them.

Our voices change with each day that passes.  Our voices change when we find ourselves in the midst of an experience we’ve never had before.  Our voices change every time someone breaks our heart.  Our voices change every time we read a new writer that floors us.  We let all of these experiences and people and books attach themselves to us and obviously they begin change the way we see the world and the way we name things and the way we express ourselves.

I’ve noticed these fluctuations in my own writing.  When I first read Pablo Neruda, I started to write like Pablo Neruda.  When my first girlfriend broke up with me, I started to write about breakups.  When I first started drinking, I started to write about drinking.  These things happen.  These things dominate us for weeks or months or years.  What I have noticed is that we always seem to right ourselves eventually.  I don’t write like Pablo Neruda anymore.  I don’t write poems that are just breakup poems anymore.  I don’t write drinking poems anymore.  But Neruda and breakups and drinking still inform my poems.  You never lose those things, you just learn how to incorporate them into the larger whole of your writing life.

Our lives become like that monstrous keychain I had when I was a kid.  Every time I went somewhere new, I attached a new keychain.  Until I got a new one, it was all about the last place I visited.  But what happened as more and more of them attached themselves it became a whole as opposed to individual pieces.  Each one a synapse of memory that became an embodiment of my whole childhood mind.

Now this is not meant to be an attack on the idea of voice as a whole, just on the modern obsession with finding it.  If you have begun writing, you have a voice.  That voice will, undoubtedly, morph and change over the years, but don’t mistake that for losing your voice or not having yet found it.  It is there and it is coming through.  Focus on learning how to make your poems great and your voice will be there for you.  

New Beginnings and Excitement, Huzzah, et c!

So, there is exciting news on the forefront. I can’t share all of it now, but I will be letting it out bit by bit as things become solidified, sorted, categorized and so on. But lately, I’ve been feeling very writerly, which is nice, because I had been in a bit of a slump there for awhile. That said, the first in the exciting news, or at least exciting for me, not really for you, is that I’m going to start forcing myself to really blog.

Expect slightly more regular blog posts about things I’ve been reading or thinking or talking about over drinks with other writerly folks.

That being said, I have a twitter account and a Facebook page set up for my writerly profile on the interweb and will start posting to those pretty regularly as means of miniature updates between the bigger ones. The normal: articles, quotes, pictures of what I’ve been eating. So, if you found your way here by some means other than knowing me in the real world, please check out those sites.

Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/blainecmartin)

Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/bcmartinpoet)

 

Transparency

I am going to use you.  All of you.  Or more specifically, the small handful of people who may come across this blog.  I am attempting to be more active in my writing life.  That is, not just writing a poem when the mood strikes, but actively trying to write.  And the internet will hopefully help me to reach this goal.  I am going to be more transparent in both my writing and my process.  I am going to start posting poems, hopefully a lot of them.  Multiple drafts of the same poem.  I am going to write more and share everything I write, the good with the bad.  This will hopefully force me into a more active life of writing.

So, a few small informational updates.

First, I am trying to start a writing group.  If any of my fair readers live somewhat close to Media and are interested, let me know.  We will get together on a regular basis (once a week, once a month, once every 17.5 days, whatever we decide) and discuss what we are working on, what we are reading, what we think about some topic in writing.  Just drink and eat and talk.  About writing.

Second, contest season is coming up.  I am going to try to create an entirely new chapbook to send out.  I recently started reading Jack Kerouac’s collected haikus.  To quote the book sleeve:

“Kerouac experimented with this centuries-old genre, taking it beyond strict syllable counts into what he believed was the form’s essence.”

Meaning that he doesn’t use the strict 5/7/5 syllable count of classic haikus.  Instead, he looks at the haiku as a poem with three short lines that capture a precise moment in time as completely as possible while adhering to the brevity of the form.  I was never one for writing haikus until I encountered this idea.  So, the chap book I am working on will be called something along the lines of “X Haikus for the Abyss” (where X is the total number of haikus in the book and the Abyss is the world).  The format will be a series of interconnected haikus with titles such as “Twelve Haikus for Jack” or “Seven Haikus for Allen” (the two I have been working on, which I will post below).  Some of them will be for people, some for things, some for ideas.

So, after a bit of rambling and a bit of information, here are rough drafts of the two new poems I have been working on.

Seven Haikus for Allen

If I could remove
my face in strips
I would wear yours

Not young, almost
handsome, but
old, strange, sincere.

And slowly my voice
would be yours
to sing sad songs with,

and my howl
of pain
would become yours,

my shattered heart
barely passing
blood, yours.

But I can’t,
so I write
this poem:

a small drop of rain
in this endless desert
of dishonesty.

Twelve Haikus for Jack

Mad Jack,
you are too sad
for words.

Your scrolls
all crumbled
to dust and flown,

your pens
all dried up
lakes of blood.

You look so
young in every
picture I have seen,

no older than me,
your eyes
are ancient trees.

You broke
more hearts
than you’ll ever know,

killed
more men
than any army,

but brought
just as many
back from the dead.

The birds sing
so sad tonight
over your grave,

the leaves all
catch in air
like ice and weep,

and you there
sitting in Heaven
petting Tyke.

Sad Jack,
you are too mad
for words.

What I’ve been doing since I graduated…

It is refreshing to know that I’m done with school (at least for now) and I’ve been taking advantage of that feeling.  Maybe a little bit too much.

I’ve started working on revising “A Letter to Charles Atlas” to submit to some contests in the coming months.  I’ve also submitted some individual poems here and there.  I’ll post as I hear more.

Anyway, my writing has been a bit slow, what with this new found freedom and all, but I’m working on it.

I’ve started a short story called “Where’s Calvin?” that I’m slowly finishing up.  Please don’t shoot me, fellow poets, I’ll never leave you entirely.

I have a ton of poems floating about, so I’m going to try to start updating here a bit more often.