Trevor Joyce: Let them eat fire

The Fishers Fished

dark within darkness
let them approach
that dry estuary
whose waterless wave
brings down
the gravel of worlds
to a bed of sand
because the diamond
is feeble and restless

leave them be guided
to the motionless storm
by the evidence of trees
and mineral structures tumbling
slowly through the hushed light
so they may see
this still disturbance
reach deep within the wrenched metals
making them whole

have them discover
flame without fire
where it adjusts itself
brooding on wood and stone
that they may bind
apes and lower vertebrates
and lay them under its blue claws
and later gather them again
unharmed and whimpering

they may set
nets below
the fish leaps
nets above
the fowl flies by
fires within
the flame scorns
withdrawing
through stone
or settling
in the open sky

then they are snared by water
wind devastates their dreams
and fire nests savagely
above the derelict jaw

Trevor Joyce, from With the First Dream of Fire They Hunt the Cold, 157-58
 
 
        Trevor Joyce’s parable of the exploitation of nature reads like a ritualistic curse, such as those found in Psalms. Compare, for example, its imperative formulations (“let them approach . . . leave them be guided . . . have them discover”) with the petitions against enemies found in Psalms (“let them be put to shame,” “let them be turned back”). In Joyce’s poem, the speaker first petitions an unnamed power to let humans see the beneficent forces of nature. The second part of the poem is where the curse packs its punch: if humans continue to abuse nature, they will taste its destructive forces.
        The poem’s paradoxical images of nature (“waterless wave,” “motionless storm,” “flame without fire”) are not ordinary phenomena but rather nature’s destructive powers transformed into agents of healing. First, the “waterless wave” lays gravel onto a bed of sand (as opposed to breaking down the gravel into sand) because the diamond, a symbol of wealth, has grown “feeble and restless.” (Of the three images, that one is the most elusive, and I’m not convinced that mine is the best reading.) Next, the “motionless storm” permeates the metals that have been “wrenched” from the earth by greedy humans and makes those metals “whole” again. And lastly, the “flame without fire” binds all life forms from apes to lower vertebrates (humans, the true destructive agent in the poem, being significantly absent) and casts a spell on them with the “blue claws” of its healing flame, later “gather[ing] them again / unharmed and whimpering.”
        Thus in the first part, the speaker asks that the fishers bear witness to each of the three acts of healing. In the second part, he places a spell or curse on the fishers, who try in vain to net fish and fowl, which easily evade the nets. Now it is the fishers who are acted upon by the forces of nature, but this time the water, wind, and fire are not so benevolent. Instead, water “snares” the fishers (who were just thwarted from snaring fish and fowl), wind destroys their ambitions, and fire “savagely” makes its nest (an echo of the birds unsuccessfully caught) in the mouth of the fisher (bringing to mind the hook in a fish’s mouth).
        Thus if the fishers continue their exploitative ways, their fate will be similar to that of the fishes and birds they have caught: in the end, they themselves will be snared and hooked. The title’s double meaning is apparent: “the fishers fished” can be both a sentence in the active voice, in which the fisher does the fishing, or a phrase in which “fished” modifies “fisher.” In a twist of poetic justice, the fisher fishes, and is in turn fished.
 
 
Camille Martin
http://www.camillemartin.ca

Barbara Guest: “BLEAT”

I just ordered Barbara Guest’s Collected Poems (Wesleyan, 2008) edited by daughter Hadley Hayden Guest and prefaced by Peter Gizzi. I’m only familiar with Fair Realism, so I’m looking forward to experiencing the trajectory of her work, the changes that it underwent during her life. I love the musicality of some of the work in Fair Realism. “Fugue” is sometimes used to describe such poetry. It’s not an exact parallel, but it does capture the idea of intertwining motifs and echoes—sonic, semantic, and metanymic—as well as the idea of the poem being a language and a thing unto itself, opaque yet also, strangely, lucid. Guest’s music isn’t so decentered as to be dodecaphonic. Instead, hers is a music on the brink of atonality yet still somehow still exerting a centripetal force through its hints of tonality and its recurring motifs—akin, perhaps, to Messiaen, Bartok, and Stravinsky. Janacek also comes to mind.

Below is “BLEAT,” a short poem from Fair Realism.


Barbara Guest, Fair Realism (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995)
 
 
BLEAT
 
drawn on the burden of light
the pottery throw
in bleat turning
 
ballast makes fingers twitch
shutters close
“going to pour”
 
wet to root and pavement
tent sagging like an oyster
 
“the city has another soul”
 
gnat passes someone swallows
“another soul”
 
figurines
 
“the city also”
stole the bench and echoes
 
blight and shuttered bleat
soul chews a wilted corner
 
 
Camille Martin
http://www.camillemartin.ca

Sonnets is now available! Read its first review . . .

You can find ordering information for Sonnets here.

I was pleased to read an enthusiastic review of Sonnets recently in Stride Magazine. Here’s an excerpt:
 
        “Sonnets is a delightful body of work. Even though we wander
        into the oblique there is never alienation because the words
        are too beautiful …. Incredible poetic craft.”
             —James Mc Laughlin, Stride Magazine

Read the review here.
 

Cheers!
 
 
Camille Martin
http://www.camillemartin.ca

Fat Tuesday, Krewe of St. Anne: A Photo Essay

                                All photos on this page copyright Camille Martin.

 
                          MORE PHOTOS BELOW
 
 
        Although Fat Tuesday isn’t until February 16, New Orleans is already well into the Mardi Gras season, which began on January 6. It’s what I miss the most about living in New Orleans. As for as I’m concerned, the place to be on Fat Tuesday is the French Quarter. Because of the narrow streets, tractor-drawn floats are impossible. So the parades hoof it: The Krewe of Kosmic Debris and the Krewe of St. Anne are the two to see. In these krewes, there isn’t really a central command deciding on a theme to unify the parade. And no top-down decisions means a fantastic array of individuals and small groups strutting their alter-ego costumes, snaking their way through the old city. Waves of colour flow through the streets, and just when you think sadly that the parade has ended, another motley wave arrives.
        For several years, I went to the French Quarter on Fat Tuesday as Frog Lady along with other members of the True Church of the Great Green Frog. We celebrated Frog Mass in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral by eating frog pastries for communion and singing froggy hymns (“Amazing Frog,” among others), and generally spreading the word that “Frog croaked for your sins.”
        I had come up with the idea to construct a two-person frog litter on which a giant stuffed frog sat on a satin cushion, surrounded by incense and decked with Mardi Gras bead necklaces. Carrying the amphibious deity around on a litter was fun, but it meant that my hands weren’t free to take photos. So in 1999 I decided to walk around the Quarter just taking pictures. I was in photographer’s heaven.
        The following gallery is the first of three installments of these photographs. I hope that you enjoy viewing them as much as I enjoyed taking them. Frog is Love!

PS: Following this gallery is a an excerpt from “Fat Tuesday’s Heterotopic Splash,” a piece that I wrote for Streetnotes: Cross-Cultural Poetics and revised for this post.
 
 

 
 

 
 

 
 

 
 

 
 

 
 

 
 

 
 

 
 

 
                                Fat Tuesday’s Heterotopic Splash
 
        Mardi Gras in New Orleans contains multitudes, and one of the best places to appreciate its polymorphic revelries is the French Quarter on Fat Tuesday. You only need to avoid most parts of Bourbon Street and the sophomoric guys on balconies coaxing young women on the street below to bare their breasts for the price of a few dangled beads of glittering plastic. A few steps away, a heterotopic paradise opens up: two walking parades (the Society of St. Anne and the Krewe of Kosmic Debris) and the Bourbon Street Awards, a mostly gay costume contest, fill the streets of the Vieux Carré with explosions of color and fantasy.
        Here, desires are loosed in a spectrum of attitudes ranging from sublime to ridiculous, mundane to bizarre, deadpan to satirical, erotic to bo-peepish—and everything in between. Some costumes mimic or satirize the familiar pop idol, while others celebrate unrecognizable life forms. The parades feature no overriding theme, but instead invite individuals and groups to explore uncharted and prismatic identities through masking. Categorical sexual identities are drained and then re-envisioned, suggesting a plethora of newly-invented gender cocktails.
        In the great street theater of Mardi Gras, privacy is banished, and the public space reigns. Yet normal conventions of public encounters, such as averting one’s gaze from the approaching stranger (at a distance of eight to ten feet, according to a study in Manhattan) or avoiding unnecessary verbal exchanges, are tossed out. One calls out to the other (“Hey, Pink Showgirl!” “Over here, Mirror Man!”) and the other obliges with a smile and a wave, or poses with dignified or exuberant theatrics.
        Exhibitionism and voyeurism are the symbiotic soul of this communal promenade, where it might be considered impolite not to stare at the phantasmagory of characters passing by or to show off your own alterity that you might normally keep carefully veiled. The revellers perform their freakishness to satisfy narcissistic urges and to give delight to the gazer; gazers stare for their own pleasure and for the gratification of the performer. Thus a spirit of cooperation flourishes in the theatrical dialogue as chance conjunctions of identities suggest odd or outright bizarre narratives. Carnival in the French Quarter revels in incompatible sites: it is the epitome of the celebratory heterotopia.
        After the well-practised street cleaners and dump trucks roll into action to clear the roads of debris at the stroke of midnight, only questions remain. Are the identities unleashed through this carnivalesque mining of the psyche more true to the self than the groggy, hungover shadow that awakens on Ash Wednesday to a sadly diminished and color-drained universe? Where did the fantastical self that flourished yesterday scurry off to? And when will it re-emerge?
 
 
Camille Martin
http://www.camillemartin.ca

Ann Lauterbach’s Pilgrim of Desire

Ann Lauterbach, And for Example (New York: Penguin, 1994)

Rancor of the Empirical

A lavish pilgrim, her robes unbound,
checks into a nearby hotel.
Let us spread the wealth.
Let us speak in such a way
we are understood, as a shadow
is understood to assuage these prisms
and these mercurial clasps. She was told
yes and she was told no
which is how she became excessive, spilling
over the sequestered path, her wild garments
lacerating stones.
She took pills against rain.
She slept under tinfoil.
In that country, there were no heroes
to invent a way to fill the hours
with parables of longing, so her dreams
were blank. Sometimes she imagined
voices which led to her uneven gait
and to her partial song. Once she was seen
running. A child said he saw her fly
low over the back meadow and into the pines, her
feet raving in wind. The child
was punished for lying, made to eat ashes
in front of the congregation. The priest said,
You have made a petty story. Now enter duration.
 
 
        I love this poem by Ann Lauterbach, which speaks to the sad consequences of the repression of desire and the imagination, with echoes of Puritanism and the Platonic distrust of poetry. The allegorical “lavish pilgrim” enters a new country where no poets are born, or else if they are (like the visionary boy who is able to see the spirit of desire), they are punished by puritanical clergy, made to “eat ashes” (associated with death and penitence) and “enter duration,” presumably a monochromatic place of temporal stasis. There are no “heroes” of the imagination to compose “parables of longing” and unleash the latent desires of a populace.

dry leaf on velvet

Photo: Camille Martin

Camille Martin
http://www.camillemartin.ca

Stoning the Devil on my sonnets in moria magazine

Adam Fieled’s review and thoughtful analysis of some of my sonnets published in moria magazine:

“I was excited to find a group of wonderful sonnets from Camille Martin. What I at first dimly suspected has now been affirmed; there is as much vitality, craft, and genuine art being transmitted via the Web as there is being released via print journals. Martin’s sonnets deserve a closer look. I have chosen two of the six to look at . . .”
             —Adam Fieled, Stoning the Devil
 
Click here to read more.
 
Camille Martin
http://www.camillemartin.ca

“The night is tough”: Voices of hope from two Haitian poets

Although the following excerpts from two Kreyòl poems by Haitian writers refer to calamities other than the recent earthquake, they speak across decades of misery to the hope for a better life.

.

Pou fèt mwen m’ta renmen
Tou peyi-a
Kouvri ak rivyè k’rekonmanse chante
Pou tout wout dle ap rezonnen.

.

For my birthday I want

“something gets lost in the translation, and it’s not me, friend.” — more from “nomadic slant”

Recently published: three double sonnets from “nomadic slant,” a work in progress, in Reconfigurations: A Journal of Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture.
 
Camille Martin
http://www.camillemartin.ca

Connie Deanovich’s Essence of Saint

the poem, then a brief essay

Requirements for a Saint

think of a saint
and you think
of the incredibly dull clothing of a saint
 
perhaps extreme temperatures
or the difficult terrain they travel
(everything about a saint draws attention to itself)
 
think of a saint
and your thought is not
of a train thrusting through lightning
 
but of wind that smells of wood
or a wet disease
(saint world is the world of the empty hand)
 
breath is sometimes banged out of copper
and so is a saint
often with bell attachments
 
I’ll make you a saint
from an unblemished code book
that must be read
 
in a German restaurant
where beer is served in glasses
wrapped in brown leather
 
when the cuckoo strikes twelve
this will be the moment
of ascension
 
 
Connie Deanovich, from Watusi Titanic (New York: Timken, 1996)
 
 
        When I think of Connie Deanovich’s “Requirements for a Saint,” I think of chairs—or rather, the chair, the mental image of the one that can reasonably represent the entire category of chairs. I see in my mind’s eye Van Gogh’s straw chair or my idea of a generic dining room chair. Actually, there’s no such thing as a completely generic chair (a visualization has to look like some kind of chair), but rather chairs of our quotidian experience. What I don’t automatically see is a lounge chair, an antique commode chair, or Lily Tomlin’s giant rocking chair.

a collage for the new year

 

Camille Martin
http://www.camillemartin.ca

ditch,

Six from my work-in-progress entitled “nomadic slant” are featured in the January 2010 issue of ditch,.

ditch, has also produced an online anthology of Canadian innovative poets, which includes my six double sonnets along with the work of thirty-two others:

“G” is for Genre: Maxine Chernoff’s Todorov

Cover image: Susan Bee

 
Todorov at Ellis Island
 
The secret of narrative
in the sight of the lovely
original fixtures,
the false accusations,
the “K” for insanity.
An indigent writer,
specifying the predicate,
fear of fire in ramshackle
buildings, the ghost
of the fantastic looking
across frozen water.
He felt swallowed up
by the 200 stairs,
by a procedure based on
external criteria,
plot and genre likely
to become a public charge.
While from the mountains
of Northern Italy, refused
admittance, a girl acting
mad, alluding to hermits
and saints. For to destroy
does not mean to ignore,
does not meant to build
the story-machine nor to feel
the grass under foot, but
to turn, as if spoken to,
into what we represent.

Maxine Chernoff, from World
 
      Maxine Chernoff’s “Todorov at Ellis Island” implicitly critiques Tzvetan Todorov’s structuralist theories of genre and narrative. In essence, Todorov posits a literary taxonomy according to a universal grammar of types: he is the Noam Chomsky of narratology and genre studies. The guiding principle in Todorov’s schemas is differentiation: defining boundaries and deciding what to include within those boundaries and what to exclude. And it is the idea of exclusion that Chernoff satirizes in her poem.
      Chernoff anachronistically situates Todorov on Ellis Island during its heyday as a screening station for new immigrants.

Paris Métro

Photo: Camille Martin

In anticipation of my trip to Paris in May, I dug up this photo from a stay during the summer of ‘98.
 
Cheers for the holidays!
 
Camille

Camille Martin
http://www.camillemartin.ca

scattering dust is good practice

Four of my double sonnets have just been published in Stride Magazine, edited by British poet Rupert Loydell. The link:

http://www.stridemagazine.co.uk/
 
 
Camille Martin
http://www.camillemartin.ca

baked penguin

 

(Photo: Camille Martin)

 

          Camille Martin
          http://www.camillemartin.ca

Sonnets redux

I just finished proofing my upcoming book, Sonnets, which will appear in mid-March from Shearsman Books. I feel very close to this book—there was much pleasure in its writing.

And I’m excited about my tour of the U.K. following the London launch in early May. I just added a reading in Bangor, Wales, thanks to Zoë Skoulding. Iechyd da!

Here are a couple of my recently-published sonnets:
 
 
*
twigs with tiny
variations bob
against the blue.
no gunshot, no
sprint. earth murmurs
on its axis, volume turned
off. no hearts beating
to drums. seeds hook
animal fur. no countdown,
but a desert blossoming
between one and zero.
droplets fed by tiny
catastrophes dangle
from twigs.
 

a matter of degree /of unfast night/

experience and language as reciprocal … recognizing
to a matter of degree /of unfast night/

experience awakened: invent and receive … performance /recovered/ that recognizes multiple matters of degrees, an inclusive inventing, embracing also its emptiness–a matter and a transparency, slowly roiling … not /only/ language in the service of experience, experience and discourse timidly asleep together–an alchemy of experience into language, act of descriptive translation … capturing the present concludes it into an idea of the past, a convention of history … language supplying imagination limits the invented experience of language–or rather experience awakened to language … it sweeps itself unawares into a discourse of the clearly immortal even if unfamiliar … rather an unfast, a slow detached feast

de Sade in Amarillo, Texas

Photo: Camille Martin

Ruth Lepson: slicing the calendar

Ruth Lepson’s two poems below appeared in Moria Poetry Journal in 2008.

as enough approaches
I add hyphens and dashes
alone we leave the effort
the day moves forward slowly
yet quickens the heart
then overturns the applecart
so slice the calendar while you can
 
 
 
 
folded into yourself
how hard you are working on sleeping

my fingers grew long
and tears left the tips of my fingers

the rug dissolved
no things no bodies no separation
 
 
 

Ruth Lepson

 
 
Camille Martin
http://www.camillemartin.ca