Month: January 2014

Word by Word

/ Clare L. Martin / 1 Comment

I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.  –Anne Morrow Lindberg

Writing saves my life every day. Word by word, I have clawed my way out of myriad hells. Tragedy after tragedy, writing has brought about resolution and clarity for me.  In more peaceful times writing has centered me, shaped my living, brought my self into greater focus and allowed me to express passion. I am writing it all out, at any cost. I do not believe it is sacrifice. It is necessary and vital for my survival. Without it I would become completely undone.

Writers investigate this life. We follow words wherever they lead: to the seaside houses painted blue, to the lioness teaching her cubs to hunt, to the paper cut, to the oceans of grief within us, to the dying star. The greatest gift a writer can give another human is truth. It is a mysterious thing to “get there” via language. I am not sure I can explain it. There is a path, though, and I can point you to it.

You need:

1) a comprehension of a language
2) certain instruments with which to write
3) the will to do the work
4) the curiosity to investigate what is below the surface
5) time

Believe you have something to say and go forth. Your skill will improve and you will perpetuate a habit. Your investigations will produce evidence of what I speak of, that elusive but very real thing: truth.

About process: I start with a blank page and put words on it. That is it. I don’t get bogged down. Sometimes I play creative games. Whatever works. I don’t believe in writer’s block. I don’t give it credence. Write. Do it.  Respect it and respect yourself for doing it.

Let me tell you a story

/ Clare L. Martin

Another for the project…

Clare L. Martin

A wolf went blind, died and was fed on by scavengers. The gristle that remained decayed and maggots swirled. On a cold morning, after days of rain, these wolf bones crack under the footfall of a man. The man carries a shotgun and a flask as he walks in the wood. He is thin and holds one fractured belief. I will not tell you what it is.  He has a sweet side, or so they say, but that is not a necessary detail in the story. This man woke this morning with an erection that his wife would not satisfy. The man is looking for something to kill and a cure for his erection. The day heats up. Crows caw his coming into the sky. The man takes a swig from the flask and rubs his wet nose with a camouflage glove. The animals smell him and stay hidden. The…

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Embellishments

/ Clare L. Martin

I’m glad I rediscovered this today. I perceive a new project in the works.

Clare L. Martin

I am cold in the cathedral. The cold reminds my bones of all the places they have been broken: the metatarsals, the clavicle and the scapulae. I sit on the worn wooden pew.  The saints glower. There is a fountain of colored light on the marble. Beneath the floor, near the gold-shimmer altar, dead bishops are buried.  A stone will keep a secret. A gray woman prays on her knees. Her head is a pendulum. She confesses daily, an hour each time, telling sins that she could not possibly commit. What was the name of the old priest who gave Last Rites? He took a pill bottle from the nightstand and slipped it with his rosary into a red felt bag.  He left embellishments of forgiveness on the thin skin of my father’s brow.  A priest has the power to forgive as God forgives, with his very own breath. The…

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DANCE

/ Clare L. Martin

The room is the brightest blue. She unzips her dress, slips it off her shoulders, steps out and carefully places it on the bed.  She positions the arms of the dress one up/one down. She imagines the empty dress spirited with life. (She imagines the room is not blue, but black with bare red bulbs in the ceiling fixture).  The room fills with music: woeful drumming and softly struck piano keys—only the sharp notes. She picks up the dress and sways with it. She puts her hands into the sleeves and wishes for a body to fill the velvet bodice and flowing skirt.  The light is dim but bright enough to see a thin layer of dust on the cluttered vanity, the scars in the sun-rotted curtains. Her miserable cat, Mr. Bellows, claws the bedpost. The telephone rings. She shakes off her dance and rushes to it. Hello?  It is not who she had hoped it would be. There is weeping on the other end then a resonant dial tone.

©2014 CLM

Productivity, Wordlab, and a work-in-progress

/ Clare L. Martin / 2 Comments

Before Acadiana Wordlab was founded in 2012, I was pretty productive but I was at a weird point on my writing path.  The book had just come out and I was a bit aimless. So much time was devoted to preparing the manuscript, seeing Eating the Heart First into publication and promoting it, I was off when it came to daily writing.  At first I thought I didn’t need or want to be in a “writing group” and was actually a bit scared to write raw in a group. I was wrong. Acadiana Wordlab has helped me to go places in my writing I never would have ventured, and I am a much “looser” writer when it comes to first getting words onto paper. Also, the multiple creative approaches afforded by the variety of artist-presenters have opened my mind. This has probably created new neural pathways/tapped into other areas of my brain which has only strengthened my writing skills.  People in attendance vary week to week but our core group has become pretty tight. It’s is a safe place to create.  We are writing new. I am writing new and that is the most valuable thing to me.

Each week after a session of Acadiana Wordlab, I take the raw writing and work the words. I usually get at least one new poem or a somewhat cohesive draft out of the writing done in the literary drafting workshop. This past week, I led the workshop and the themes we explored were mortality and darkness. It shouldn’t have surprised me that I was terribly depressed Sunday. The darkness broke for me, thankfully. Today I worked on what I began in Saturday’s Wordlab. The following poem/draft is actually a compilation of the three distinct bits of writing. It is a work-in-progress. What is interesting to me is that I am pushing  through to stylistic breakthroughs.  I am going in new directions and that thrills.

The lessons I presented on Saturday can be seen at the link below. The item I chose from the small batch of “mementos” was a crucifix.

1-25-14 Acadiana Wordlab (click for the prompts/exercises)

The Hanging Woman

breathes desert into her throat
Golgotha-naked

rapacious sun
spear opens rib

the most egregious of transgressions
lust inside/out

lungs vigilant flag
serpentine intestine

nailed-out muscles
Heaven’s jaw shuts

borne upon the cross
we cannot willfully die

the women tear at their smocks
sun goes

to terminal moonrise
burnt to bone

new meanings of the body impaled;

all sensation thrust
from pleasured skin

blade to stone
stone to bone

bone to blood night
incarnated, excarnated.

©2014 CLM

Clare’s presentation at Acadiana Wordlab 1-25-14

/ Clare L. Martin / 2 Comments

Margaret Simon who blogs at Reflections on the Teche asked me for the prompts I gave at Acadiana Wordlab yesterday because she couldn’t attend. She is a dedicated and talented poet who always challenges herself, even when she can’t be with us for Wordlab.

Here you go, Margaret!

Memento Mori

A memento mori (Latin ‘remember that you will die’) is an artistic or symbolic reminder of the inevitability of death.

There are items before you: a key, a wedding band, a butterfly, a Thunderbird, a crucifix, an empty journal, a mask, and a broken watch. Choose one and write how this is a symbol of your mortality.

MEMENTO MORI

A man walks across water
on stones. Notices a crow
sinking in the blue sky.
He steps onto earth,
leaning momentarily
against a cedar sapling.
Pines etch and sway.
The creek laughs. The man thinks
of endings and beginnings—
his youngest daughter’s
daisy-eyes.
He slips his hand into his pocket,
fingering the dry skull
of a hummingbird. And it is cold
spring again: the iridescent
hummingbird is caught
in a spider’s web.
The spider silk enwrapping
the tiny bird holds bones together.
He picks at the feathers
sodden with rot.
He opens like a fan
the thin-as-paper wings.
Bones disarrayed, drift
to the ground in silence.

©CLM First published in Press 1.

Dark Hours

I LOVE THE DARK HOURS OF MY BEING
by Rainer Maria Rilke

I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.

Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another life that’s wide and timeless.

So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a gravesite
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots
embrace:

a dream once lost
among sorrows and songs.

Translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

  • What do you love about the dark hours of your being?
  • How does darkness impact and affect us?
  • Do you access a different knowledge within the dark hours of your being?

Darkness can be comforting or disturbing. Write something of darkness, whether it is a setting or a place within you, or the darker aspects of your being.

I had a third exercise which was simply about writing out emotions or events with emotional impact in metaphor to “disguise” the actual facts, but to get at truth.

If anyone decides to use these prompts, please credit me and let me know!  Thanks and be well!
Clare

Buy Eating the Heart First!

/ Clare L. Martin / 1 Comment

My debut collection of poetry, Eating the Heart First, published by Press 53 as a Tom Lombardo selection, is now available. Click on the image to purchase directly from Press 53′s web site. Available via Barnes & Noble andAmazon.

 

THANK YOU

Praise for Eating the Heart First

“Clare L. Martin is a fine young poet whose work is dark and lovely and full of a deep organic pulse. Like the landscape of her beloved Louisiana, her work is alive with mystery. You could swim in this hot water, but there are things down inside its darkness that might pull you away forever. It is an exquisite drowning.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea, author of Queen of America

***

An excerpt from a review by Stacia Fleegal for Blood Lotus: A Journal of Online Literature:

“Martin is a fearless poet who opens her collection with a poem called “Naked.” She tells us she “winc[es] at self-recognition”—but wincing isn’t running, isn’t hiding from the mirror. In “I Have Learned to Hold My Tongue” a few pages later, silence isn’t forever, but “Not yet, not yet.” Words must gestate, be nourished in wombs until viable.

Knowing when to let words out becomes knowing how hard to love, and the knowledge, anthropologists might conclude, comes from women. Perhaps it’s one woman who is many women: “The woman naked before the mirror,” “the woman you married,” “Bone Woman,” “Girl Running with Horses,” “Garbage Woman,” “wood-boned mother,” “the earth, your other mother”…there are more. Martin tells us what women know, and looks to women in dreams, in art, and in memory for answers. Many of her poems even read like spells—the knowledge is “conjured,” “illuminates” and “enlightens.” Love letters are burned and smoke is “sacrificial.” Ashes are offered “to the thunder and wind.” Ceremoniously, Martin honors lives—her father’s, her infant son’s—she couldn’t herself sustain anywhere else but in the altar-tombs of her poems.

“What are these words / but weapons of grief?” she asks rhetorically in “Abandoned.”

And such weapons as we find in her book are exquisitely rendered.

***

“Clare L. Martin pulls off an impressive balancing act in her debut book of poems Eating the Heart First. In this collection, divided into three sections, she manages trust of her intuitive powers while she tats her findings onto poems built with technical expertise. She is a believer of dreams, and the whole of the work can be read as an oneiric treatise guided by the powers she believes in: the power of memory, the power of water, the power of moons, the powers of longing, and the power of love. In one of the late poems a crow in a dream asks, ‘Let me be a whorl of darkness— / Let me be a fist in the sun.’ All of the poems in this collection have the impact of that crow’s call and of the trope it creates. Gradually the poems reveal richly textured revelations of a heart tied to human experience in that ‘dream we cannot know completely.’ And, while we may not ever know the dream completely, Ms. Martin hands us a guidebook to dreams and to the art that uses dream and dreaming as the scaffolding from which to make something beautiful, and useful, and mysterious all at the same time.”

— Darrell Bourque, former Poet Laureate of Louisiana and author of In Ordinary Light, New and Selected Poems

***

“In her first collection, Martin deals with many common themes – motherhood, death, nature – but does so with an unsettling grace. There is an honesty and an understated tone that give each piece the right mix of tension and release. Many of the poems are exceptionally well wrought, describing loss and hope, anger and want. The most powerful piece in the collection has to be “Bread Making.” The seething anger, mixed with a dash of christian mythos, combined with flour, and sweat, all bake together into the perfect loaf.

Although described as a Louisiana poet, Martin will appeal to readers way beyond the dankness of the bayou.”

—R L Raymond  rlraymond.blogspot.com
Blog about the writing and poetry of R L Raymond

Need

/ Clare L. Martin

I saw a photo. A man casually reclined at the prow of a small sailboat in a harbor on the Nile. The man’s easy-way was obvious. His contentment was too. His sins were not apparent. He looked uneven, as though one leg was longer than the other or that a shoulder was dislocated. But it was the slanting light of Egypt and he was in white; his shape almost blinding, like an apparition shimmering against the thin blue paint of the boat.

I saw in this photo the seventeen year old boy who took it all away from me.

After we smoked the joint, he begged to put it in. Just let me feel the softness, the wetness…
I pretended I was in another room, a room with no mirror to realize I was merely the highway he traveled. The half-forced insertion, the bit of blood—what was the spell he cast? It caused me to melt into him like softened wax.

I saw another photo. The man was with a woman. She was beautiful and the sunlight made her more so. They were at Stonehenge. The woman and the man wore colorful sweaters that seemed well-made and warm. They smiled brightly. I could only think: How thick are his memories and do they penetrate bone?

There was another photo from Istanbul, but I do not want to remember it.

I bore the death of a child. I bore the death of a child. How many years of have I lived in hope for the one day to execute my hate? But all the fires I set are doused and forgotten. My hate has worn to a pebble; I have thumbed it so much.

The light in this room is like tea or rust. The scent of patchouli and orange cloys. The man in the colorful sweater, smiling with all the energy of a sun, persists even with my eyes closed.

I step into the bath. Hot water reddens my skin. I mouth the word ‘release’ and cry without sound. I swallow the moon so it will never rise again.

CLM
1/23/14

Feed your head!

/ Clare L. Martin / 1 Comment

MadHat Annual, Issue 15 “Eye On the World” features relevant, lucid, and provocative poetry*, fiction, drama, multimedia, audio, and visual art by artists from all over the planet.

To the brilliant artists whose contributions have made “Eye on the World” such an incredible offering, THANK YOU.

Be sure to view/experience the special video collaboration, “Refuge,” by our late founder, Carol Novack, and artist Jean Detheux.

 

*I’m particularly proud of the Poetry section, which was curated by Executive Editor, Marc Vincenz, Outgoing Managing Editor, Susan Lewis, and me–newbie Poetry Editor. Over 50 phenomenal poets are featured! (And I have a few poems in there as well).

~Clare