Nature

Crone by Clare L. Martin

/ Clare L. Martin
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Available on Amazon and through Nixes Mate Books.
“Clare Martin’s Crone is a feast for eyes and ears, seductive in its use of both imagery and sound. Celebrating the sometimes terrifying, sometimes life-giving teachings of the wise woman,  Crone evokes a woman’s coming-to-power, an epic “cronesong” of spells and potions in the form of poetry.”
–Sheryl St.Germain, author of The Small Door of Your Death.
 
Clare Martin’s Crone glows equal parts magic, music, and muscle. Her lines are laced with ambergris and jasmine, ghosts and wolfbreath. I would call Martin’s art a gorgeous dream, but that would ignore the blood, bone, and heart that drive this book at its core. Crone is the creation of a poet at the height of her powers, in full voice, and mesmerizing. Immerse yourselves in these lines, friends. You’ll rise from their waters cleansed and awed.  —Jack B. Bedell, author of No Brother, This Storm, Poet Laureate, State of Louisiana, 2017-2019
 
“Clare L. Martin is a mysterious spellcaster. CRONE is a lush and dizzying monster of a poem. Coming through it made me see the world anew.”
Luis Alberto Urrea, author of House of Broken Angels

Enchantment of the Crone

/ Clare L. Martin / 1 Comment
2018-02-11 18.31.51
In December of 2017, I went on a women’s retreat organized by The Penchant Group, a creative collective founded by Bessie Senette. On the retreat, each woman was free to choose their focus, whether on writing or another art form. In a lovely cabin in the woods of Chicot State Park, we spent time alone with our work. We communed when we ate meals or after meals as we sat by a roaring fire. I had been experiencing a nearly four-year-long depression, triggered by my mother’s death, with some high points that worked to pull me through. This nutritive gathering was a balm to my heart and soul.
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It actually had snowed in Louisiana that weekend. On one of the full days there, a poem burst through me as I looked out the floor-to-ceiling windows onto the snowy scene outdoors. I read the poem to the group. They appreciated it and said it was strong. Later, when I returned home, I revised it several times. I absolutely hated the revisions and went back to the first draft. That poem became the first poem written for Crone.
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When I was hospitalized in March 2018 for suicidal depression, someone in the hospital, when they learned that I was a writer with two published books, asked me if I was going to keep writing. I was on the mend as a new dosage of antidepressant took root. I answered, “Yes, of course.” I had started a creative project. It was a nebulous vision but something was ahead of me.
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Shortly after I got out of the hospital, I received an email from Annie Pluto, asking if I had a manuscript of 40 to 50 pages. I was wowed to be asked but I did not have a manuscript of that length or one that was ready. I had a loose group of sketched-out poems that I was working and reworking without a clear vision of what it would be. The working title was Crone. I might have had 15 to 20 poems that needed a lot of attention. I asked Annie if I could be given some time to work. She said to take four months.
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I was driven. I was mad with poetry. I finished the manuscript in two weeks!
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I have to give credit to my therapist, J.S., who I started seeing after my release from the hospital. Weekly sessions and full disclosure to her pulled me together. Also, my nurse practitioner, who I’ve seen for a decade, worked fiercely to see me well. The intense talk therapy helped. I really scored with J.S. She’s professional, compassionate, intuitive, and agrees with me politically if that matters. (I think it does!) I’ve spent 30 years trying and failing at talk therapy with less than competent therapists and my hopes had dwindled that anyone could help me in that way, but I was wrong. I still see J.S. biweekly and I don’t foresee stopping. She’s really proud of me and owns my first two books. She has an affinity for poetry, as well. That helps. She understands creatives like me.
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Nixes Mate Books only solicits manuscripts. They are not open to unsolicited manuscripts. I finalized Crone, burnishing it to wholeness. When I sent it to Annie, she read it carefully, spent time with it, and let it resonate. She said yes to it. This achievement was a victory of life over death for me. The same year I was hospitalized for what I believed and wanted to be the end of my life, I was able to pull out a book from my psyche that I am so proud of and in love with.
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From the first poem written in December to the last edits prior to going into book design, it might have been four months. Then a few weeks after the acceptance, the contract was signed and the work shifted to book design by Michael McInnis. Michael has been wonderful to work with and his design work is impeccable. I haven’t spent time working with Philip Borenstein, but I’m indebted to him as well as a publisher of Nixes Mate Books.
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Crone is like no other work I have created. It came out in a fury. It came out after a suicidal depression. It was my hands, neck, shoulders, back, butt and thighs putting in the work at a desk. Hours and days and weeks of intuiting the narrative, intuiting the magic and myth, intuiting voices of the Crone and the Maiden.
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We have something very special in store for you. The work isn’t confessional. It’s myth and magic. It’s a poet seeing outward and into the ether. It’s a long poem, meant to be read as narrative but experimental in form and subject. It’s an exploration of mystical womanhood, and the natural and supernatural worlds.
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I hope you will read Crone. It’s available now via Amazon and soon directly through Nixes Mate Books and me. It’s not a book for the faint of heart. It saved my life. I pray it will keep in you for the ages.
`Clare L. Martin

“Marsh Song I”

/ Clare L. Martin / 2 Comments

marsh-song-1“Marsh Song I*” Mixed media, Clare L. Martin ©2016
Inspiration—

We drive westward along the Louisiana coast on a crumbling highway with my parents. The sky purples with becoming light. Our bellies are full of boudin and cracklins. Hot coffee is handed carefully from the front seat to my husband and I seated in the back.

We sing “J’ai Passe Devant Ta Porte” or “Bon Vieux Mari,” called by my mother and responded to by my father. Always my father embellishes his responses. My mother rolls down her window and points to the Roseate Spoonbills lifting from their roosts. My father stops singing and praises God.

A prayer is said for loved ones, wherever they are. More of the morning sky erupts over the marsh. I think of painters, how I wish to be one, how I have tried with my words. This day we are traveling to see Sandhill Cranes that have been spotted in Creole, a few miles from here. We always take the scenic route and happily travel from dawn to dusk.

How many times have we come to this slipping away land and been blessed by our forgetfulness of the world’s problems and our own? Countless. How much do I miss these two people who gave and saved my life? My longing cannot be measured.

To treasure the dead is our inheritance.

*I dedicate this artwork and these words to my beloved family, especially to my deceased loved ones, wherever they are.

 

Clare L. Martin

A Gift

/ Clare L. Martin / 1 Comment

THE ROAD BEFORE US

Let us travel the road before us

and enter into the mystery of trees.

Let us find the sleeping doe

attentive and aware

of the ever-wolf.  I will go

and find kindling. I will set

the fire that will engage us

and carry our heaviest thoughts

upward.  Clouds dwindle.  

Smoke trails us like a wraith.

I am caught in it. I rise

to the web of bleak branches,

to the very tops of trees.

Tonight leafless trees

are smothered with blackbirds.  

This night-smoke

becomes the blackbird

rising to its highest—

Drifting embers smite the moon.

©2011 Clare L. Martin

Haiti

/ Clare L. Martin

My prayers and thoughts for healing the suffering of your people go out to you…I have and will continue to give what I can.

My prayers, too, are for all who are suffering in mind and body.

Text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10 on behalf of the American Red Cross. — Text YELE to 501501 to donate $5 on behalf of The Yele Haiti Foundation.

Nice to meet ya, again.

/ Clare L. Martin / 2 Comments

OFFICIAL BLOG RENEWAL POST001-1014

 

Each success, no matter how small, in practice of what I love is a lightning strike against the dark.  And I have been in dark, metaphorically dark and literally extinguished places. I’ve been around fires a blazin’ too and they can be happy places!

Ah ha, yes. Well.

I am a poet/mother/wife living with bipolar disease. I have been blessed with clarity and stability in my medical situation for a few years with the effort put in by my strong team of caregivers medically, in the healing arts, and through the support of loving family members who have stood by me. I had recurring traumas and “breakdowns” in my life which robbed me of many things.  I was unhappy and clinically sick for most of the 1990s.

I’m gaining back my life, which could have been lost, had I succumbed to the disease and died. (And yes Bipolar kills.  Look up the suicide rates of bipolar people, people!) I have been gaining back my sense of self and finding healing through writing.  There’s a link between mental illness and creativity. My interest would be: poets who have bipolar disorder.  This is a hot topic and I expect to weigh in on it from time to time.

I’ve always been a writer, writing up to this very sentence, poems, plots, plays and peddling pure phiction.  

I am a lifelong resident of Louisiana, and a graduate of the University of Southwestern Louisiana, now called University of Louisiana at Lafayette. I majored in English and minored in Philosophy—the perfect match of disciplines for a budding poet.  I published a few poems in college, got married, and only sporadically wrote for a few years. 

When I feel the aura of a poem coming on to me so clearly,  I am moved by words yet forming, as if words could ride air and pass through my skull, form the syllables in my mind and mouth, and I get up from whatever I was doing and write something.  Writers write.  Thinkers think. Thoughts fly away until you put the thought-words on a piece of paper or enter them into a computer—then you are a writer, for having written it. Congratulations!

Pre-Poems/Free-Writes— the mystique of this airwave/brainwave/of what was working in my subconscious/some feathery slip of a thing flits from its dark hiding place and dawns in the mind.

I was a lazy writer, in the sense that I did not demand it of my self. I wanted to learn how to do it my way.  Not in a conventional class room.  I wanted to be in my environs living and drawing my poems from the right here that I am living. The within: my domestic life, sex life, body life, mind’s life, and my natural life as a creature on this planet with other creatures, domesticated and not.

I am in the pursuit of the image. It is my starting point in all writing I do.  What is the image?  Observation is the key. I am also an amateur photographer, so for me it is usually a visual stimulus. A description must encompass, not describe too much but rather show in deft and artful language the essence, the charm of it.

Is it startling?  Is it sustainable? What I mean is does it having lasting qualities to live on in the poem if we construct an environment for it to thrive? Will its meaning inspire other meanings which may or may not conflict with the intended meaning.  Does this matter?  If it is what it is and you want that image/those words, then you choose. Poetry is making choices.  Words-connections-shaping-breaking-exploding and putting the poem back together, or not– are the choices of the artist.  Read poetry, get inspired, and learn to make choices.  Major choices are definitive; some choices allow a little wiggle.

That’s what it is about.

I am building around a central image, not always, but habitually.  Images come from things and we get to know things through our senses, sight, smell, taste, hear and touch, so images come from the basic 5 senses—this is basic knowledge of what is concrete and what it abstract in the study of poetry but it is crucial because by utilizing these tools you can transform, imagine, ignite passionate responses, and through words you can bloodlessly crush people in a way they like to or would rather not like to be crushed.   

So when I return I will speak of why I am in pursuit of the image as it is stated at the top of the blog.

 I welcome comments for friendly and heartily espoused discussions.  What I have written here is brief and leaves many questions to me but I wanted to holdback so questions could be put to me and any other readers for discussion.

Secret Hideaway

/ Clare L. Martin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last Christmas we took a little vacation (lakeside cabin, paths, fireplace, good food and drink, snuggly time) and we are set to do the same this year. Our nature getaway is 96 days away and I am already getting excited. The photos above were taken by me last year to document how I like to spend my time at our “place” RELAXING. READING. wRITING. (and sleeping) 

Our winter retreat comes to mind because right now someone is burning sweet wood in our neighborhood. There will be lots of wood burning outdoors in the fire pit/ring and indoors in the cabin’s fireplace. With all of the limbs down from trees that have fallen during the hurricanes around here we should begin to put some pecan and oak up so that it will be well-seasoned for us to bring along.

 

We need this time away.  I want it when it happens but I want it right this very moment too.