Camille Martin, R

Light is not
inevitable. Overshot it
or not yet there.
Nothing, for that
matter. In any case,
not arrived. Anything
could have been
otherwise.

The latest from Toronto poet and collagist Camille Martin is the poetry title, R (Toronto ON: Rogue Embroyo Press, 2023), following a list of books and chapbooks over the years, including Plastic Heaven (New Orleans: single-author issue of Fell Swoop, 1996), Magnus Loop (Tucson, Arizona: Chax Press, 1999), Rogue Embryo (New Orleans: Lavender Ink, 1999), Sesame Kiosk (Elmwood CT: Potes and Poets, 2001), Codes of Public Sleep (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2007), Sonnets (Shearsman Books, 2010), If Leaf, Then Arpeggio (above/ground press, 2011), Looms (Shearsman Books, 2012), Sugar Beach (above/ground press, 2013) and Blueshift Road (Rogue Embryo Press, 2021) [see my review of such here]. It is interesting that, after a period of relative silence, she has quietly reemerged through self-publication, offering a first (Blueshift Road) and now this second full-length collection (R), since the onset of Covid-19 lockdowns. Still, with pieces that originally appeared in a handful of journals and anthologies, as well as in the chapbooks Magnus Loop and Sugar Beach, it suggests that this particular manuscript has been gestating for some time. The one hundred and fifty pages of this collection are predominantly articulated as a sequence of short, untitled, haiku-like bursts, each carved into the centre of the page. It is almost as though these meditative bursts are attempts to achieve and articulate balance, seeking a grounding effect through this sequence of carved sketchworks. Each poem is thoughtful, observational; settling into short-form thought and speech via playful scraps. “plastic raspberries linked with safety pins,” she writes, mid-way through the collection, “dull flavour of stewed rubies // stoplight blinking in a junkyard [.]” Each poem offers sketch and pause through an effect of collage, suggesting a construction similar to the images presented on the front and back cover: a suggestion of simultaneous image and idea, carved, clipped, collected and formed into poem-shapes that retain their collage-simultaneity through each tightly-packed singular effect. There is an enormous amount going on in these poems, clearly.

shadow concealing
colour, colour
shedding cells

Camille Martin, Blueshift Road

 
 

Identity as Norwegian Pagoda

It never was the right time to travel to Rome
to find yourself. Autumn fog and rainy wind
are symbols of crushed hopes—miasma
birthing counterfeiters who clutter the globe
with shields of Sistine junk. Praise the miasma.
Who wants to be gulled by the hand
that pulls back the curtain? Better to re-invent
metacarpals for houseflies, to hullabaloo
down the pike tearing blank after blank to bits.
Rome’s an imposter. Mimicry ripples
from the dying words of the last spelunker on earth.
Surf’s roar summons beached puddles ad infinitum.
Bred in chiaroscuro, savvy pilgrims fashion
caves of ice adorned with sequined plums
and settle in for a long night.

It has been a while since we’ve heard from Toronto poet Camille Martin (and some of us have missed her, truly), the author of the trade collections Sesame Kiosk (Elmwood CT: Potes and Poets, 2001), Codes of Public Sleep (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2007), Sonnets (Shearsman Books, 2010) and Looms (Shearsman Books, 2012), as well as a variety of chapbooks, including Plastic Heaven (New Orleans: single-author issue of Fell Swoop, 1996), Magnus Loop (Tucson, Arizona: Chax Press, 1999), Rogue Embryo (New Orleans: Lavender Ink, 1999), If Leaf, Then Arpeggio (above/ground press, 2011) and Sugar Beach (above/ground press, 2013). Her fifth full-length collection, and first in nearly a decade, is Blueshift Road (Toronto ON: Rogue Embryo Press, 2021), an assemblage of poems working a variety of forms, continuing numerous structural threads that have existed throughout her work [see the text of my 2011 Influency talk in her Sonnets here], from the sonnet to the short sequence to the prose poem to the open lyric. As she discusses one of the poems that made its way into the eventual collection back in 2014, over at Touch the Donkey:

Each of my books seems to find its own centripetal pull. Sometimes it’s formal, as in Sonnets (a book of variations on the form), or as in R Is the Artichoke of Rose (a collection of short-short poems). And sometimes it’s thematic—even if loosely so—as in Codes of Public Sleep, in its way a tale of two very different cities (New Orleans and Toronto).

“Page Dust for Will” will probably be woven into a manuscript with the working title Blueshift Road, some of whose poems find their inspiration in the sciences, especially astronomy.

As part of that interview, Martin offers that the manuscript, then very much still in-progress as a singular unit (poems out of the chapbooks Magnus Loop and Sugar Beach are included in the collection), was working inspiration from “the sciences, especially astronomy,” although there seems just as much conversation around distance, and a search for both meaning and identity. She writes of not only shifts of air, weather and of attention, but of uncertainties around them. As her title poem opens: “Recalling a slight breeze of little consequence / on an unremarkable cloudless morning, // except for wearing blue plaid, / picking blackberries along an ancient // riverbank. And the breeze, of course.”

There is a thickness to her lyric, one that provides both precision and clarity across an abstract sheen. “You can still get lost.” she writes, to close the poem “Dawn Contracting, Inc.” “Direction’s musculature pretends to know due north / but hibernates in a Dead Letter Office. / In fickle weather, a promise nonetheless overflows, / drenching the petals of a larkspur.” Martin rourtinely references shifts in physical space, including shifts in landscapes and seasons, particularly autumn. “Untranslatable,” she offers, to close the opening poem, “Prelude,” “trading yellow crayons for leaves. / Undeterred, every leaf shades us.” Or, the “Autumn fog and rainy wind / are symbols of crushed hopes” she offers, in the poem quoted above. Further on, to open the poem “Shared Lattice,” she writes: “Fall flicks / off yellow / leaves one by / one [.]” In the same poem, a bit further, writing “page / after page of / variations [.]” There is something in the way Martin utilizes the sciences-as-subject, also, almost as a way to articulate both distance and connection, and a particular kind of uncertainty and anxiety, albeit one composed with a clear, steady line. Or the end of the poem “Druthers,” that offers:

Unplugged, I can still taste paradise
without feeling I’ve settled for self-evidence:

peel closing in around fruit; home and not-home
eroding in equal parts.

 

new poetry book + book launch/reading,

My new poetry collection, If suppose we are a fragment (BuschekBooks, 2014) launches this month at the RailRoad Reading Series at Pressed Cafe, 750 Gladstone Avenue: 7:30pm, Thursday, September 25, 2014. I'll be reading alongside Ricardo Sternberg, and will have copies of the new poetry collection, as well as my brand-new collection of essays, Notes and Dispatches: Essays (Insomniac Press, 2014) and The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014). This is my second title with BuschekBooks, after A (short) history of l. (2011); enormous thanks to John Buschek for the ongoing support! Also: much thanks to Camille Martin and Cole Swensen for the generous back cover blurbs, and to Felix Berube for the use of his artwork on the cover. The cover artwork graces Stephen Brockwell's living room, where the bulk of the book was composed during the first few weeks of January 2011, as Christine and I did a house-sit or two over at his place [see the report I wrote on such at the time].

Touch the Donkey supplement: new interviews with McElroy, Martin, McCarthy + Baus

Anticipating next week's release of the second issue of Touch the Donkey (a small poetry journal), why not check out the interviews that have appeared over the past few weeks with first issue contributors Gil McElroy, Camille Martin, Pattie McCarthy and Eric Baus?

Also: there's a new self-profile, "On starting a new poetry journal," newly posted over at Open Book: Ontario.

The second issue features new writing by Julie Carr, Catherine Wagner, Susanne Dyckman, Pearl Pirie, David Peter Clark, Susan Holbrook, Phil Hall and Robert Swereda. And, once the new issue appears, watch the blog over the subsequent weeks for interviews with a variety of the issue's contributors!

And of course, copies of the first issue are still available, with new writing by Camille Martin, Eric Baus, Hailey Higdon, rob mclennan, Norma Cole, Elizabeth Robinson, Rachel Moritz, Gil McElroy and Pattie McCarthy.

Really, why not subscribe?

The journal now even has its own Facebook group. How is it possible to resist?

Acceptance Speech: [poem]

I have two new poems in the first issue of Touch the Donkey, alongside work by Gil McElroy, Eric Baus, Hailey Higdon, Rachel Moritz, Elizabeth Robinson, Norma Cole, Pattie McCarthy and Camille Martin. Here is one of my two:

Acceptance Speech:


    I love the ology of clouds
        Mary Ruefle, Trances of the Blast


Disorient, a shape. Cohere. What matters would be, antibodies. Truth. I want this, ambivalence. Branches: allusions wrestle, wing. Says one: forbid, thoroughly. What would have been excluded. Coiled, hammer, anvil. Reluctant patterns, boundary. Says one: we dismantle, endlessly thorough. Biopsy: linguistic. I am not ambition: all my roads repeat, interior, repeat. Winning. Snow-branch weight a study, low to ground. This brutal, excessive heat.

Bill Knott: 1940-2014

American poet Bill Knott has died. There is a lovely obituary for him by American poet Elisa Gabbert, posted here on Wednesday, and another, posted yesterday on Coldfront magazine, and a further at Open Letters Monthly. Many in Canada might know of Knott as a favourite of Canadian small press maven Stuart Ross, but he was quite well known as an American poet, as well as a lasting influence upon and mentor to younger writers south of the border. You can also check out a 2005 interview with him here, and another, here. Camille Martin wrote on his work here, as did Kirsten Kaschock.

new from above/ground press: N.W. Lea, Hugh Thomas + Camille Martin;

Present!
N.W. Lea
$3
See link here for more information

Albanian Suite
Hugh Thomas
$4
See link here for more information

Sugar Beach
Camille Martin
$4
See link here for more information

 
published in Ottawa by above/ground press
January 2014
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal (above). 

Review copies of any title (while supplies last) also available, upon request.

keep an eye on the above/ground press blog for author interviews, new writing, reviews, upcoming readings and tons of other material;

and don’t forget about the 2014 above/ground press subscriptions; still available! Forthcoming chapbooks by Kate Schapira, David Phillips, Eric Schmaltz, Pearl Pirie, Dennis Tourbin, Sarah Rosenthal and rob mclennan, and watch for new “poem” broadsheets by m erskine, Rachael Simpson and Elizabeth Robinson!

Ongoing notes: mid-January, 2014

In case you haven’t been paying attention, there is constant activity now over at the above/ground press blog, the Chaudiere Books blog and the ottawa poetry newsletter. Haven’t you seen? The new issue of ottawater is due to appear soon, and the next issue of seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics is most likely online in March (featuring new works by Amanda Earl, Brecken Hancock, Jessica Smith and David O’Meara, among others). Plenty of new above/ground press titles are in the works (you should totally subscribe!) by N.W. Lea, Hugh Thomas, m erskine, David Phillips and Camille Martin (with more to come!), and Chaudiere Books works up to an Indiegogo Campaign launch/announcement very soon, as well as an announcement for upcoming 2014 titles!

And Emperor Rose is nearly two months old; sleep has become some kind of fading, faded memory. What is this “sleep” you speak of, there?

Ottawa ON: Since baby keeps us from leaving the house, I only now received a copy of Three Poems (St. Andrew Books, 2013) by Cameron Anstee, which he self-produced in an edition of forty copies “for a reading in The Reading Series (In/Words) at the Clocktower Brew Pub (Ottawa ON) 30 October 2013.” The small publication is exactly what it sets out to be (reminiscent, slightly, of a similarly-built three poem item of John Newlove poems from the 1980s), a sly three-poem treat (or possibly, trick). Unlike his previous poems—long, meditative sequences that held trace echoes of the work of Monty Reid and others—these new works are smaller and far more compact, suggesting that the work he’s done over the past little while on the works of Paris, Ontario poet and publisher Nelson Ball have begun to seep in. While still holding on to the meditative moment, instead of stretching out the singular moment, these new poems of Anstee’s work to make those moments, while still allowing for breathing space between the lines, as compact as possible.

Daylight Savings

the widening

discrepancies

between the

numerous clocks

in our

home

a dissonant

stagger

I’m both optimistic and impatient about the fact that Anstee releases his work slowly, and in such small packages. I’m intrigued to see the sum of what he has accomplished up to this point, in a singular space. Whenever that might be.

Toronto ON/England: The blurb on the back cover of David Herd’s chapbook Outwith (BookThug, 2012), the first in their “New British Poets” series, writes:

NEW BRITISH POETS is a series of chapbooks edited by Stephen Collis and Amy De’Ath that brings work by younger British poets to North American readers. This is post-language poetry that betrays a transatlantic engagement with and response to contemporary North American poetry and poetics, while at the same time carving out strident new paths through current British literature. Don’t know what’s been happening in UK poetry since Prynne? This is the place to start.

I admire the ambition of this emerging series, and can only hope that BookThug continues to engage this way with contemporary British poetry via chapbooks. The first in the series, by Canterbury poet David Herd, presents an intriguing mix of language play and the straight line. I’m always intrigued by the experimental and/or avant-garde poetry of the UK, knowing full well it has an entirely different lineage than anything that has gone on in North America, even if some of the influences might overlap. There are some magnificent pieces in this collection, the first I’ve read by Herd, including the short sequence “3 notes towards a Love Song” that opens: “The world is feral today and still / There is much between us / This dumb old November weather / Consequential, nothing but itself.”

I –

Don’t know if there is a poem here.

With all the beautiful things you

We walk down by the river

In the cold through the Africa rooms of the British Museum

Tell a story of the half-brother who rose up –

I have never seen you angry

I have never seen you drunk.

I have seen you with the waitress

Listened as you ask after my family

Pictured you on the beach waiting for the agencies to show

As the boats come in oblivious to place

Each time asking a different question you saying,

‘Ceux qu’ils restent sont ils pas mes amis.’ (“The hearing”)

The second chapbook in this series is Petrarch (2013) by London poet Tim Atkins, a short collection of expansive poems composed as collage works, with clipped lines and staccato pauses. Presented out of numerical order, each poem is titled with a number, and the results are intriguing, opening with “191,” immediately followed by “325” and “164,” for example. The mix might be straightforward enough, attempting to mix up pieces that might be composed concurrently, so the connections become discordant, therefore highlighting connections and disconnections that might not otherwise have existed. Are the numbers important, irrelevant or entirely the point? Is this work, possibly, part of a much larger discordant work?

164

Oh! Here I am & what is this

Duvet & ketamine   lemons in the North & South Circular

    stars asleep in their beds & the paparazzi

Do not twinkle at the gates   or were they   Cheerios &

    cold milk

Producing a temporary high & then finally   the remorse of

    a lover   human or   other   he said

Feeling a little  light-headed over   multiple copies of

    Wallace

Spilling & losing weight from the fingertips               but

    I Do Not

I got IBS paying off the IRS      perhaps the

Ignis Ignis   on the branch   pecks my wood when life is good

    (perhaps)

I went to the library in order to learn things but   To Kill A

    Mockingbird   taught me

Nothing about how to kill mockingbirds

It is beautiful to look at   beautiful things   & say

Fuck to the revolution      because one has already done it

I got the tiny mumps   instead of   Concupiscent Cups

You never do get all your money back

Camille Martin, Looms

Right now is what dwindling feels like, despite

the mulberry outside my window steadfastly

anchoring its taproot. The new century counts planets

that might support rooted beings and ravenous predators.

But stardust piles up on lines connecting dots

in constellations, blurring them into nebulae. Shapeless

experience waffles between concrete and abstract, accounting

for the popularity of horoscopes, especially when Jupiter enters

Aries and we vacillate, like volcanoes heaving ash

before the pyroclastic flow, collapsing before tsunami, dwindling

until the next cycle. I abstractly shake dew from ripe mulberries.

Or I lie down, gazing at shivering green tracery non-existent

a couple of months ago and just as soon to vanish.

A more or less concrete cup of coffee balances on my belly,

wobbling to the diastolic and systolic rhythms of my heart.

In her fourth trade collection, Looms (2012), Toronto poet Camille Martin continues her book-length accumulation of poems-as-collage, twisting and turning seemingly unconnected ideas into a single, coherent thread. These are poems of exploration, not always conscious or concerned about where they might end, allowing for a fearlessness that permeates the entire work. In an interview posted November 17, 2011 on Open Book: Toronto, she talked about her then-forthcoming Looms as a collection structurally built as an extension of her previous, Sonnets (Shearsman Books, 2010):

It’s interesting that book projects can seem to take on a life of their own and evolve into what they “want” to be despite original intentions. Before I started the poems in Looms, I had just published 100 sonnets exploring various approaches to the ancient tradition of the 14-line meditations – in the case of Sonnets, meditations on the nature of self, memory and cognition.

Wanting to write longer poems but still under the spell of that book, I started writing double sonnets. But the poems soon broke out of that too-restrictive mould and began telling strange stories that are often dream-like in the sense of being multi-layered and making unexpected shifts. They are still concerned with questions about self and other and about the nature of human thought. However, in Looms I began delving into narrative in relation to the formation of identity from many different and constantly shifting stories.

The image of a loom represents, to my mind, the idea of the complex, interwoven narratives that form the evanescent fabrics of perception and memory.

Martin composes “loom” as a weaving, suggesting the motion of looping and swirling a myriad of threads that wrap through and into each other, and her poems do exactly that, written as a series of dream-like movements that continue to riff until each poem concludes. In sixty-two poems, she references windows, nursery rhymes, coffee, dreams, bird migratory patterns and mockingbirds, but the poems are less about the specifics than the movements themselves and the lyric accumulations. She writes of “the tempering passion of mercury,” about how “a tiny pronoun gestates under a full moon,” and of “ukulele seas where mist coalesces.” There is such an expansiveness to Martin’s Looms. The poems exist in that magical place where words, images and ideas collide, creating connections that previously had never been.

Gliding through arteries you arrive naked

and vulnerable at the brink of a cliff. An oracle

dares you to roam faraway lands to learn

whether ballooning junk status can foster social

cohesion or whether Oedipus really needed

to know. Indifference is a country where trees dream

of primitive cells parading to the common ancestor

from which flora that would later look good

on someone’s mantle branched off. Here, a twitch

is a cup waiting to spill. If your evolution begins

at the finish line (which it won’t,

but that’s not the point), jump from the cliff

down a hole to the other side of the earth

and start over again naked and vulnerable

at the brink of a cliff.

Related notes: my essay on Camille Martin’s Sonnets, written for Margaret Christakos’ Influency