The poetry of John Martone: & some reflections on community

you can see
the broken stones

around this garden
from outer space (from braincase)

        

          you're just
          an or

ganelle

golgi
body

mito
chon
drion

mr
no name (from ksana)

I have lately spent much time in my blog on the minimalist & visual poetries of American poets, even though 'Word-Dreamer' was created to address primarily Canadian issues in contemporary poetry. Am I losing focus?  Have I lost the terminus ad quem? The literary scene at home does get my attention but (sigh) only sporadically, & only when I'm not distracted by what's appeared to me to be a much more vibrant, culturally significant American discussion. I've found most Canadian bloggers to be standoffish, territorial & generally unreceptive to tough discussion of their works and viewpoints: sometimes willing to exchange ideas on criticism, provincial disparities and arts funding but mostly interested (I find) in promoting a dominant Canadian status quo. And I've sometimes reflected here on the reasons why.

How different things are stateside! The American poets I've met espouse an openness to ideas and intellectual fair-mindedness, a generosity and unstinting commitment to literary work I find admirable. How do I know? To begin with, I sometimes get copies of inventive & imaginative work, always generously given, and with no other end in view than to share & create a literary community of poet-friends. Ed Baker and Geof Huth are two such contributors to this growing transborder friendship. And  now from poet John Martone comes a collection of haiku and minimalist poetry in the form of ksana (published in Jim Kacian's Red Moon Press in 2009) and other "small books and ephemera" which I will look at shortly.

To judge, and appreciate, the quality of work one must then belong to a community, or be prepared to espouse a version of one. And John Martone recently has done that. Poet, publisher and conceptual artist, he's given to a grateful reader interesting entryways into a world, a buddhistic cosmos actually and insightful intersections with Vedic cosmology, language & minimalist sensibility. Here are also artisanal productions (in the spirit of Cid Corman & Ed Baker) attuned to tradition and mindful of the conditions of creativity itself: never daring to conceptualize fake divides between language & poetry—the two always seen as working at cross purposes these days—and make a monstrosity of vital poetic matter. Here's also work that's respectful of real readers who are capable of building their own bridges to distant authors and styles.

 As I've said, I've recently received a gift of poetry from John Martone: one main recently published text ksana, with a collection of smaller works, variously named & designed. The title ksana, Sanskrit for extreme swiftness (as in the time it takes a "Chinese blade" to pass through a single silk thread), is a declaration of origins and poetic style. The grateful reader ponders on work that's felt to be, in one sense, as congenial as "pebble in palm" ( ksana 13) or, in another, as majestic as "cliff in hand" (14). It's remarkable that there's no more nor less in the pebble than in the cliff:  both are poetic objects given equally in a moment of  brilliant intuitiveness, energy-bearing and as highly charged as a charm or amulet. As Martone himself describes the poetic object, in an online article entitled "The NEOLITHIC (re)turn in poetry",

A Poem is first of all an amulet, an OBJECT bearing energy (c.f. the objectivist poem as object and Olson's poem as "at every point a high-energy discharge"). The poem is first of all a charm, relic, medicine, compass, key. See, too, the ORACLE BONES of Shang dynasty China, scapulamancy as practiced even today by arctic peoples, and Marija Gimbutas’ The Living Goddesses. We are not talking about the poem sitting on a page like a jewel in a ring but the two inseparable, Eshleman’s THE ONE ART given its place. In this context, to “reproduce” (i.e. publish) a poem widely is to pass on as little of it as the “reproduction” of a painting or sculpture. We would speak instead of instances of a poem – think of the poet as writing down the poem again and again.

To read  is to engage always in a playful shifting between 'abodes' (topoi) that don't ever clash: rather they complement each other, providing always for that quick clean cut to the poem's center. Yes, a poem's center and the closure of poetic space where things offer portals to shared insight. How marvelously the boy is indistinguishable from his gloves in the absence of illusory earthly dimensions (like real gloves), trees from an alphabet, room from diorama & lichens and stones from the house:

                           a boy
                           snow in
                           his gloves

                                                                   these fallen trees
                                                                   an alphabet


      his room yes
      shoebox
      diorama



                                                                   acorn caps
                                                                   lichen stems
                                                                   fossil stones—
                                                                   houseful soon
                                                                   then no wall

Far from not seeing the same things and writing wildly disparate visions, the reader senses that one mind's at work always, & that viewing is participatory and even joyful, and that the poet has consciously adapted skill to vision. One equal vision in which Martone, never the cavalier theorist of difference & diffidence, the namer of schools, lets language work co-materially with poetic objects & sometimes the form of expression itself. Whether it be a new moon, a slitted sheet folded into a tiny 2.5" by 3.5" six-page booklet or a book itself a bookmark, a book converted to booklet; or the equally small pocket-size texts bye now, geometry & [Crassula ovata], each bound with delicate handmade papier-mâché covers, artifacts to be held reverentially in the hands—whatever the materials or form of expression, it's poetry designed to bring readers together into community and tradition. Never exilic and dispersed as are the fragments of contemporary poetry, Martone's pieces offer shareable secrets (as poet says, "you're part of this secret", ksana 48) & instruct by direct showing:

keeping a jade plant
all winter
that's my secret ([Crassula ovata])

blue sky
the first
pet (bye now)

log—
hollow

long time
now

down
to this

empty
skin ( geometry)

Verses also appear to be models suitable for imitation,with  place names and circumstances serving as significant literary occasions. The haiku tradition is being reverenced and legitimized as a viable contemporary art form: as who couldn't see the student's homage to Basso in, "green tree-frog/in bathroom sink/my dream" (ksana 63). Poetry offered as a kind of  instruction to the uninitiated such as to "make  yr/bowl/of clay//& have no metal" (from ksana, 47), or sketch the buddha in "one/syca/more's//highest/limbs" (ksana 47)  And expecting to find Martone stick close to form wouldn't be an unreasonable expectation since the reader also notes the presence throughout of  kireji (the break in verse that leads to insight) and kigo (the presence of obligatory season, plant, & animal names), structural principles that in a master's hand result in sharp seasonal & landscape vignettes that can stun the attentive into pure mindfulness:

fall's turned
    wild mint spikes
        white (ksana 37)

this lichen's a snowflake (ksana 45)

winter firefly-
  chip of
    yellow glass (ksana 57)

white bead
youll be
june bug ( from a shambles)

my wool
watch cop

on an
empty

flower
pot
    spring! (from braincase)

just let year's first mosquito take me (ksana 72)

it's spring all muddy w you turtle (ksana 72)

But formal conditions, too firmly locked in classical genre, won't ever restrict the poet's view here : everywhere the rhythms seem to jump into motion like the "spring's first water strider's drifting" (ksana 72) & "pea-/tenril-/sense" (ksana 187), or suddenly halt along riversides at a makeshift camp ground as in "riverside/you could camp/there's a bedframe" (ksana 73) Or consider the somber end-stop of arrested movement in death: particularly the "roly/poly//[that]rolls from dead//turtle's head portal" (ksana 73) Words and objects don't drift apart nor do rhythms, offered up in sound & meter, fail to gauge the course (or cycles) of natural events: none of the studied detachment (as in post-avant poetries)  from real lives & histories. "try hearing gods in a roadside ditch" (ksana 198).

As a contemporary poet Martone also explores the textuality of the page. In ksana the poet uses space creatively, interweaving verticals & horizontals that point towards interesting thematic cross links, as well as hyphenated and abbreviated constructions, & even the odd Chinese character:

                                                                     brick wall
                                                                            out of the wind
                                        red-                                     weeping cherry

                                        buds

                                        make

                                        a                                    7 pair
                                                                              dutchman's
                                        pur                                 breeches

                                        ple                                 on
                                                                              their
                                        mist
                                                                              flag
                                                                              pole (ksana 81)

algae
  cd be
      bullfrong (ksana 82)

jack in his pulpit
    by #3
          stepping stone (ksana 83)

shell, attentive to the integrity of page space, displays a kind of principle of repetition in which 'peony' sometimes begins, sometimes ends a verse: the effect is that of a cascading waterfall with plant caught somewhere in its clear basin (See also ksana 129, 136, 158, 178 & 199):

peonies—
                 already
                             too late

peony
                a huge eye
                               opens

...

more ants
                than petals
                                  peony

a habilis
              cranium
                                 peony

braincase is another work that displays an interesting economy of space, empty pages randomly alternating with full, and a full page sometimes comprising of only a single line. As the largest of the works it's surprisingly also the sparsest in terms of a word-to-page ratio. So the traditionalist can also be experimentalist: the two never seem at loggerheads for the reader engaged in the "pleasures of the text".

The node section of ksana, for example, is a particularly artful adaptation of Vedic classicism to a  'node' concept that's used in Internet discourse to mean information seen as points of interconnection among computer networks: in other words, here Martone's meshed, to great effect, "nodes of indra's net" with a more contemporary feel for the discreteness or ambiguities, perhaps, of the human condition itself. A god of cosmology, of the elements and battle who also provides terms of reference for cosmic tensions and life processes in postmodern life:  "yes  youre/an/attic/room/astro/naut" (134), "10/fallen/trees//&/you/were first" (135) and "sparrows all of us in our winter padding" (137). A wonderful interchange of classical and contemporary sensibilities that never tries to pass itself off as just pure experimentalism.

 In general, Martone's is a poetry aesthetically pleasing to the eye and suited to the reading mind's own call for alternating lexical and syntactical patterns Even Sanskrit and English verses can be vertically aligned on the page (as in ksana 92) and remain (as all of his poetry is) focused on shared vision. "my garden buddha  hasnt moved all winter" (ksana 163) Since the poet's put the power of verse back into the  garden buddha", the reader recognizes all the elements of that central trope ("place"), such as the accompanying "spreading ashes" "gloves", and "arching back" (163-64), as poetic processes intimately gathered in a single haiku-like effect. I'd venture to say almost every piece in ksana is a reestablishment of the assimilation of life-processes to a unified dharmic insight: and Martone the poet a buddha-figure who writes always "under the name of an ordinary fool".

Turkey buzzards, jade plant, shells, moons, refracted light & perhaps even the "book itself" are not just titles & metaphors in the poetry of John Martone—they're things to engage the attentive mind. And what's moved Martone to extend to me (as Baker & Huth have done before) the gift of poetry is the same thing that's moved the poet himself to write: a sense of the importance of community & of language's necessity to free things from the illusoriness of limitations, artifactual & linguistic mainly. And for that I'm extremely grateful.