Buffalo is a happening poetry mecca—here are some photos from my January 28 reading with Mark Goldatein, also featuring films by Carl Lee and gourmet eats by Geoffrey Gatza. As if that weren’t enough, we were also treated to a mock Republican poet debate by Michael Kelleher and Aaron Lowinger.

Alas, I didn’t get photos of half the people I would have liked to—I wanted to enjoy their company as well—but here are a few that I was able to snap at the event. Enjoy!

(Click on a photo to get the gallery view.)

---

Camille Martin

How did the sonnet get from Petrarch to Bervin?



How will you re-invent the sonnet?

Find out in my six-week workshop/class on the sonnet at the Toronto New School of Writing. I taught this course last year and was blown away by the class discussions and the poetry written by the participants.

Click here to view the course on the TNSoW website. Register early to reserve your place!

Duration: 21 February – 27 March 2012 (6 Tuesdays) 6-8 PM
Location: Of Swallows, 283 College Street, Upper Floor Seminar Room

“The sonnet . . . is not a form at all but a state of mind.” – William Carlos Williams

Throughout its 800-year history, the sonnet has seen periods of vogue and dormancy, but it just keeps bouncing back, and its contemporary allure to poets shows no signs of abating. Just why did the sonnet come into being, and what accounts for its remarkable longevity?

In this Sonnet Workshop, we’ll explore the enduring appeal of the sexy “little song.” Combining a historical overview of the sonnet with creative writing assignments, this course offers you the opportunity to experience the sonnet as a traditional and experimental network of possibilities.

Through a series of Reading/Writing sessions focused around various poetic models, we’ll deepen our appreciation of the sonnet’s evolution as well as generate our own sonnets, continuing the historical momentum of this ever-popular “state of mind.”

Instructor bio:
Camille Martin is the author of Sonnets (2010), Codes of Public Sleep (2007), and Sesame Kiosk (2001). Of Sonnets, Rae Armantrout observes that “in some ways, these poems are almost traditional,” yet “in these taut, fast-paced, self-aware poems, the lyric meets 21st-century paranoia and sparks fly.” Carol Dorf writes that Martin creates “a world where science and myth intersect,” a “world of a mind reflecting on itself, the natural and built environments, time, and language.” And Jordan Scott speaks of “the magnificence in these poems, a poetic magnetic, propelling you to turn the page.”

Martin has performed her work in over twenty-five cities in the United States, Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and France. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Louisiana State University and an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of New Orleans. She is a seasoned instructor of poetry and workshops in the community and at high schools and universities.

---

Camille Martin

Fellow Toronto poet Mark Goldstein and I are delighted to be kicking off Big Night Buffalo’s 2012 reading season at the beautiful Western New York Book Arts Center.

Done with the compass, done with the chart. Come!

---

Camille Martin

                                                                mono / stich

        The monostich could inspire a question for poetic Trivial Pursuit: What form (other than prose poetry and vispo) has no line breaks?
        The monostich has none because it consists of a single line. In the essay collection A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line, Kimiko Hahn explores this Lilliputian form, both in its literal manifestation—a poem written and intended as a monostich—and as a “found monostich,” the idea of reading a poem with an appreciation for an individual line as “a startling fragment that [has] its own integrity.”
        For the latter, Hahn gives examples of such lines to be savoured for their poetic cadence from Denise Levertov’s “A Common Ground”:

grown in grit or fine
[. . .]
new green, of coppery
[. . .]
crumpled wax paper, cartons
[. . .]
curved, green-centered, falling

A single line within Levertov’s poem becomes an imagined monostich, suspended in its own time and space.
        Hahn points out that whereas imagery appeals to the visual imagination, cadence involves the ear attuned to the pitch and rhythm of a group of words, and she recounts that in her evolution as a poet she gradually became aware of the qualities of poetic cadence while considering such found monostiches within longer poems.
        Barbara Guest comes to mind as another poet who often sculpts her lines with a stand-alone quality, such as the following from Quilts:

where footsteps tremble on quicksand squiggly
[. . .]
third time white like autumn squash
[. . .]
minnows on muslin

        One of my works-in-progress contains a section of short poems, “R is the Artichoke of Rose.” I skimmed through it looking for monostiches, certain that there’d be a handful, but was surprised to find only one. The majority are between two and six lines. I’d forgotten that most of the ultra-short poems that were originally written as one line have since been revised into lineated poems.
        Why have I avoided the monostich, even in the case of a “flash poem” consisting of two words? I think it is because my ear—and mind—have become attuned to the argument of the sonnet. Although many of the poems in my Sonnets are far from traditional, I can see that the idea of the argument or even simply the development of an idea attracted me to that ancient form. The “if” and “then” structure had its appeal, and if the argument of a sonnet turned out to be illogical or open-ended, then that could become part of the movement of thought, the disruption of the proposition-conclusion folded into the scheme, observing itself in the act of giving the mental slip.
        My lone monostich in “R is the Artichoke of Rose” is a parody of a famous line by Emily Dickinson:

I heard a Leafblower—when I died—

If the monostich has an argument, it’s necessarily more subtle, even if it’s on the scale of subject-predicate, clause-clause, or a pithy dialogue with a predecessor.
        Below are some more true monostiches, memorable not only because their brevity makes them so easy to remember. Here’s one from Craig Dworkin’s aptly-named Motes:

WILTED TULIPS

split little puppet pulpits tilted spilling dew

The delicate tongue-twister of staccato plosives creates a striking image developing the title: the poetic miniature satisfies both ear and eye.
        In John Ashbery’s “37 Haiku,” each unfurls on a single line, and again, these monostiches turn on striking images, as in these two:

Night occurs dimmer each time with the pieces
        of light smaller and squarer

A blue anchor grains of grit in a tall sky sewing

In the second monostich, the final word, “sewing,” subtly echoes Lautréamont’s famous description of beauty as “the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table.” That statement, which became a sort of anthem for surrealists, speaks of the mysterious charm that ensues from the dialogue among disparate images. Perhaps the chance encounter involves some stitching together of such images, and Ashbery’s allusion nicely suggests the marriage of anchor and sandy grit in the sky, which might be reflected in “tall” or oceanic water.
        Many of Ron Padgett’s monostiches in “To Francis Sauf Que” exemplify his signature humour. I almost bypassed the one below, but it grew on me. (I’m finding that the effectiveness of some of the more successful monostiches increases exponentially with the thoughts they generate.)

Now I love you again because of these roosters.

Padgett’s fragment appears to be lifted from a narrative; the absence of context gives the line a twist of absurdity. But it also seems to offer a goofy explanation for the mysterious force that compels one person to be attracted to another, in this case perhaps in an on-again-off-again relationship: I’m not sure exactly why I love you again (the speaker seems to say), but these roosters are as good a reason as any. The line has the qualities of both a dramatic assertion and an aphorism.
        I don’t think the poem would work as well as a couplet:

Now I love you again
because of these roosters.

The separation of the abstraction (love) from the image (roosters) drains the poem of its humour. It’s funny and poignant precisely because of its seamless, matter-of-fact, droll delivery. The line break is overkill.
        Almost none of the more impressive one-liners survives exclusively on abstraction. In the example by Padgett, “love” is paired with a vivid image, “roosters,” which also serves as a kind of punch line to the enigma of love.
        A few years ago, issues of Peter O’Toole: A Magazine of One-Line Poems began to surface in Toronto, published by Stuart Ross. It’s the only magazine I know of that specialized in the monostich. Here’s one by Clarice Eckford that nicely captures a particular type of tedium:

WAITING FOR THE BUS

knee-deep in cement

And Dani Couture’s ear- and eye-fest:

Freezer unfrozen, slabs relax in the november electric heat.

        And Stuart Ross’s deadpan deflation of vainglory, perhaps describing the imagined triumph of a poet arriving in town for a reading versus the mundane reality:

AND THEY SHALL GREET US WITH ROSES

The cheeseburger broke out of the plastic bag.

        Steve Venright’s contributions hinge on spoonerisms:

With his long reach he pulled out the wrong leech.

        And Joel Dailey offers a sardonic take on adjusting to the end times:

CELL PHONE BITCH SLAP

The end of the world may require some lifestyle changes

        Lastly, one of my own from the magazine:

dead saints dream of the enshrined relics of their flight

        At least some of the monostiches above that have titles could arguably be called distiches. But such an argument might be putting too fine a point on the matter. Why shouldn’t monostiches be entitled to titles?
        Anyway, it’s New Year’s Eve and I’m not in the mood to split hairs. So here’s a parting monostich for everyone who’s read to the end:

Happy New Year!

---

Camille Martin

Beyond the Bother of Sunlight
Sheila E. Murphy and Lewis LaCook
Buffalo: BlazeVOX, 2011
(cover art: Sheila E. Murphy)

         Sheila E. Murphy is not only one of the most prolific contemporary poets; she’s also one of the most generous collaborators with other poets. Sometimes, collaborating poets engage in a clearly-delineated dialogue and indicate who wrote what, as in Leslie Scalapino and Lyn Hejinian’s Sight. But Murphy’s collaborations with poets such as Douglas Barbour, Charles Alexander, mIEKAL aND, and Peter Ganick tend more or less seamlessly to synthesize their respective contributions so that the textual offspring, so to speak, blends genetic material from both.
         This is the case with Beyond the Bother of Sunlight, Murphy’s most recent collaborative effort, in which she pairs up with Lewis LaCook, who publishes much of his work on his blog, Xanax Pop. Beyond the Bother of Sunlight consists of fifty-two untitled poems, suggesting perhaps one poem for every week of a year, as well as a series exploring related themes. Though their collaborative process is not described, knowing LaCook’s proclivity for digital manipulation of text, it’s possible that this played a part in the compositional method. But whether or not this is the case, there is ample evidence of a very human, joyous, and intelligent shaping of the material. And the result is, to my mind, a smooth blending of their poetics and a serendipitous duet. To borrow their own words, the poetry creates “accidents of startled symmetry,” “birthing fluid children.”
         It’s not surprising that both Murphy and LaCook have musical backgrounds, because reading the poetry is like listening to music whose complexity becomes more apparent as the piece progresses: gradually the listener becomes aware of themes and motifs, and during the course of the composition part of the pleasure is in the recognition of patterns and the recontextualization and development of those melodic fragments.
         The word that comes to mind to describe this intensely musical poetry is relational: Murphy and LaCook bring words from particular realms of signification in relation to one another so that their meaning shifts as, for example, when a words from the semantic fields of spirituality and sexuality are juxtaposed. A bit later, a word with sexual connotations might be set next to a mathematical term. Thus words such as “wafer” and “bless,” “tryst” and “moan,” and “fraction” and “equation” surface in varying contexts throughout the book, suggesting a kind of musical grammar in which words recur within different syntactical and semantic frameworks. Very early into the poems I began to perceive and enjoy the deft interweaving of themes that give the poetry an inner coherence but that also allows it generous room to breathe semantically due to the contextual shifts.
         In the following four passages, taken from different sections of the book, note the recurrent themes of consciousness, sexuality, spirituality, mathematics, language, time, and light/colour:

1)
What if sleep were as translucent as desire?

Desire breaks out of its equation
As mathematics clarify, language amples

2)
The frozen integers lacking this much space
Become a world thus far undocumented

3)
The more I simmer, the more you pave
The more you reverence, the more I stave off
Glyphs tearing into torpor

4)
Only a certain paradise knows
How to pause a shape of color in your sleep

These and other themes are subtly intertwined throughout the book, giving the poetry (to use an analogy other than music) the texture of an intricate fabric woven with colourful threads that create recognizable but shifting patterns. There are sonic patterns, too, as in the assonance created by “lacing gaps” and, later in the same poem, its anagrammatic echo, “lapse of grace.”
         The semantic field of Beyond the Bother of Sunlight is constrained by the vocabulary derived from particular realms of experience and knowledge yet also expansive due to a kind of lexical synesthesia that blends terms from these realms and enriches their experience. The result is poetry in which “language amples” into “a world thus far undocumented.”
         This is a book to which I’ll return to savour its mysteries. To appreciate more fully the beauty of Murphy and LaCook’s collaboration, you should read more than just a couple of poems to experience the sympathetic vibrations of the motifs that surface throughout the book. Nonetheless I’d like to offer two in their entirety, which I hope will entice you to to read more:

4/

Pacing bequeaths to water
What water and the sky do best:
Replenish.
Smile extinguishes all traces of significance.
We motor our way home, inventing machines to carry or to carry us.

Punctuation creeps into our codes, lacing gaps
Into our bodies, bracing pauses
Through which topographies of lingo
Merge, filling the map

That way I’ve got everything flattened
And before me, ready to be folded
Along all the wrong spines,
Awaiting translation in the temporal plain.

But there’s nothing so-so about you.
Only every once in a while in the crackling
That swept over my brain text like viral winds
Swallowing scorched information affords
Fabulous blossoms,
So beautiful, so suspiciously pure, you
Doubt your touch of it.

Purity eventually is traced
To touch. Suspicion twines around
Topographies that embrace
The merging of sweet spines.

A singular fulfillment rescinds the stencil
That reduces bliss to genuflection.
Are we there yet?

A physicality endears itself to lapse of grace
Whose map occurs to us. In time,
A blossom purrs with listening.
We hear in our flesh the tension of it,
The awful urging pulsing breaks.

5/

It was eventually found that the paint
Would pane around the letters in ghost
Plains, and this complicated into
A false sense of depth.

When walking on
The surface her feet sometimes
Slipped through
It was all she could do to keep herself
Balanced, his
Inattention was her fated goal.

It had been a long time since he looked you in the eye.

We’re a conquered people, servants
In our own land. Tranquillizers, accidents
It is forbidden for anyone to open that book
Until physicality becomes religious combustion

I see it as hopeless to try to reason with you
Just in case the flowers didn’t work
He burrowed into the fields of narrativity
Slipping through the confluence of probable branches
Until he walked on translucent panes, interlocking,
Layered. Tranquilizers conquer you. Lovely tranquilizers,
Accidents. It is forbidden for anyone to open that book.

Tranquil is a word. Speech.
Ventilation coughs up
Translucence and transmission.
Changes lock open
The book of wheels, the book of patter, the book
Of a religion
Killing beams no episode at all.
All out of kilter then, the plot’s made simple
And advisement borrows shrapnel of nativity.
Bloom time once crescent shaped is domed
Its wheatened blue comes close to venture
Spawn.

---

Camille Martin

Galaxies collide in an orange universe on the cover of my hot-off-the-press chapbook by Above/Ground Press: If Leaf, Then Arpeggio.

---

Camille Martin

On Writing, with Camille Martin
“Camille Martin talks to Open Book about her work as a visual artist, the development of her writing, her upcoming poetry collection, Looms, and more.”
Click here to go to the interview.

---

         My last tour-by-train this fall will be to Bridge Street Books in Washington, DC, and Segue Reading Series in New York.
         This is the longest tour (by far) as I’m choosing to travel by train. Getting to DC will take a total of sixteen hours (interrupted by a rest-layover in New York). Even given the slower pace (and in reality, partly because of it), I’m finding that I much prefer to travel by train rather than plane.
         For one thing, I’ll have uninterrupted time to work on a couple of writing projects—an interview as well as an essay on the literariness of train travel, which I began to explore in a previous post on Fernando Pessoa.
         I’ll also continue readings that I started during my earlier trips, one of which is Bayamus & Cardinal Polatuo, two novels by Polish-British writer Stephen Themerson (with an introduction by Keith Waldrop). Come to think of it, maybe I should bring along some Kurt Schwitters, too, as a companion to this book, since Themerson and his wife, Franciszka, published his work in London.
         Another is Blaise Cendras, especially “La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France.” I can’t seem to locate my translation by Ron Padgett, but I have an en face by Dos Passos that seems quite good.
         The journey begins tomorrow morning at the entrance to the VIA Rail Station in Toronto, which is guarded by a mobile scare-owl. The pigeons nesting there are too smart to be tricked by the paper raptor twisting in the wind.

---

Camille Martin

Here’s the information on my upcoming readings n DC and NY:

MEL NICHOLS, AMY WRIGHT,
AND CAMILLE MARTIN
7:30 PM Thursday, October 27
Bridge Street Books
(5 blocks from Foggy Bottom Metro, next to Four Seasons in Georgetown at the end of M Street)
Washington, DC
Hosted by Rod Smith

RAE ARMANTROUT AND CAMILLE MARTIN
4:00 – 6:00 PM, Saturday, Octoer 29
Segue Series at the Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery (just north of Houston)
NYC
$6 admission goes to support the readers
Hosted by Trisha Low and Kaegan Sparks

Rae Armantrout’s most recent poetry collections are Money Shot (Weslyan, 2011) and Versed (Wesleyan, 2009), which received the Pulitzer Prize. Armantrout is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of California, San Diego.

Camille Martin is the author of Sonnets (Shearsman, 2010) and Codes of Public Sleep (BookThug, 2007). Recent projects include “Looms,” a collection of layered narratives, and “The Evangeline Papers,” a poetic sequence based on her Acadian/Cajun heritage and archaeological digs at an 18th century village in Nova Scotia.

Mel Nichols is the author of Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon (National Poetry Series finalist, Edge 2009), Bicycle Day (Slack Buddha 2008), and Day Poems (Edge 2005). She teaches at George Mason University and curates the Ruthless Grip Poetry Series in Washington, DC.

Amy Wright is the Nonfiction Editor of Zone 3 Press and Zone 3 journal, as well as the author of two chapbooks, Farm (Finishing Line Press: 2010) and There Are No New Ways To Kill A Man (Apostrophe Books: 2009). Her prose and poetry appears in Western Humanities Review, Bellingham Review, American Letters & Commentary, Quarterly West, and The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume III: Southern Appalachia.

---

Camille Martin

         Ongoing fantasy: to book poetry readings with perfect timing for the peak ripening of fall colours. I hit the gold, orange, and red jackpot in Ottawa and Kingston during my recent readings for the AB Series (hosted by Max Middle) and the Thrive Series (hosted by Erin Foley). The views from the train were gorgeous, and the lush backdrop of colours made walking around town with friends before and after the reading that much more enjoyable.
         Photos from the readings in Ottawa and Kingston:
AB Series, showing my new Above/Ground chapbook, If Leaf, Then Arpeggio, with colliding galaxies on the cover

AB Series

Thrive Series reading from Sonnets (dig the moose-muse!)

---

Thanks to Max Middle and Erin Foley, intrepid and community-creating curators;

Zorras Multimedia Troupe for putting on a spectacular show in Ottawa;

Dean and Francoise Steadman, who graciously hosted me in Ottawa;

Charles and Amanda Earl, who gave me a terrific tour of Ottawa and made me want to pack up and move there immediately;

rob mclennan for bringing If Leaf, Then Arpeggio, my Above/Ground chapbook hot off the press, to the reading;

Christine McNair and rob mclennan, who invited me to have dinner with them in their fantastic new digs in an old Victorian house in Ottawa;

Bruce Kauffman for interviewing me on CFRC-FM in Kingston;

and to those wonderful souls who attended the readings, made me feel welcome, and even bought some books.

---

Camille Martin

Thanks to Dale Smith for organizing and hosting this reading for Susan Briante and me at Ryerson University. The event served as the launch for the new issue of White Wall Review. There was a wonderful turnout. Congratulations to the winners of the Chang School creative writing contests!

---

Camille Martin

I’m packing for the second leg of my six-city train tour. This Saturday, I’m reading for the AB Series in Ottawa, and Monday, for the Thrive Series in Kingston.

I’ll be there . . . you come, too!

8:00 pm, Saturday, October 15 (doors open 7:30)
AB Reading Series
Hosted by Max Middle
Also reading: Sandra Alland/Zorras
Gallery 101 / 301 1/2 Bank Street
Ottawa, Ontario

8:00 pm, Monday, October 17
Thrive Reading Series
Hosted by Erin Foley
The Grad Club (Queen’s University)
Kingston, Ontario

---

Camille Martin

          In good weather, Jiri and I love to take the ferry to the Toronto Islands, not only for the pleasure of bicycling along the wide, car-free trails, but for the ferry ride itself.
          On the ceiling of the lower deck stretch long rows of orange life jackets. Walking along the length of the boat, I filmed a long shot of them, which I later inverted and overlaid with water imagery.
          At first, the the thought of such a juxtaposition creating the illusion of underwater life jackets seemed obvious or literal, but as I began putting the images together, the resulting little film felt to me like a meditation on impermanence, a theme that I also explore in some of my poetry.
          The strange thing, though, is that such meditations on the deathless rhythms of change, far from being depressing, give me a kind of — at first, I wrote “pleasure,” but it’s more like an aura of peace. Thich Nhat Hanh expresses the feeling beautifully in this epigrammatic passage:

                    We should not complain about impermanence,
                    because without impermanence, nothing is possible.

---

          The soundtrack is from William Duckworth’s The Time Curve Preludes performed by Neely Bruce, piano.

---

Camille Martin