– AWP 2014, Seattle, WA
2 days to take off.
Pack: toiletries, clothes, shoes, meds, phone charger, books, poems, umbrella & a GOOD PEN—check in 24 hours before the flight(s) Relax and try to enjoy/fulfill the purpose of the craziest ride I will likely ever be on.
Wednesday, February 19th at 7 pm the winter installment of the Voices Seasonal Reading Series will feature a special evening of literary readings by poets Clare L. Martin and Diane Moore at Carpe Diem! Gelato – Espresso Bar located at 812 Jefferson Street in downtown Lafayette. The public is invited to enjoy gelato, espresso, tea, and pastries while experiencing a unique and enlightening literary event. The event also celebrates the two-year anniversary of this highly successful reading series in Lafayette.
Clare L. Martin’s debut collection of poetry, Eating the Heart First, was published fall 2012 by Press 53 as a Tom Lombardo Selection. Martin’s poetry has appeared in Avatar Review,Blue Fifth Review, Melusine, Poets and Artists and Louisiana Literature, among others. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web, for Best New Poets and Sundress Publication’s Best of the Net. Her poems have been included in the anthologies The Red Room: Writings from Press 1, Best of Farmhouse Magazine Vol. 1,Beyond Katrina, and the 2011 Press 53 Spotlight. She is a lifelong resident of Louisiana, a graduate of University of Louisiana at Lafayette, a member of the Festival of Words Cultural Arts Collective and a Teaching Artist through the Acadiana Center for the Arts. Martin founded and directs the Voices Seasonal Reading Series in Lafayette, LA, which features new and established Louisiana and regional writers and co-coordinates Acadiana Wordlab, a weekly literary drafting workshop. She serves as Poetry Editor of MadHat Annual and Editor of MadHat Lit, publishing ventures of MadHat, Inc.
Diane Moore is a writer of books, short stories, articles, and poetry. Her latest published book is a book of poetry, In A Convent Garden. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in the Southwestern Review, Interdisciplinary Humanities, American Weave, Xavier Review, Trace, The Pinyon Review, and other literary journals. Her young adult book, Martin’s Quest, was awarded a grant that placed it on the supplementary reading list for Social Studies in Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes and was listed on the Louisiana Library Association’s reading list for accelerated students. Martin’s Quest was also a finalist in the Heekins Foundation Award Contest for an outstanding young adult book. Diane has been involved in poetry readings with both former Poet Laureate of Louisiana Darrell Bourque and Poet Laureate of Louisiana, Julie Kane; with New Orleans poet Brad Richard in the Festival of Words program in Grand Coteau, and with the present Louisiana Poet Laureate, Ava Haymon. This year, she published another young adult novel set in south Louisiana entitled Martin and the Last Tribe, the third in a series about the young traiteur hero of Martin’s Quest.
This event is free and open to the public.
You’ve never revealed
your dreams but I guess
the dreamscape:
faces like cold candles,
water-stone eyes,
sewn mouths—viscera.
She was a weaver who imparted
wisdom to her daughters.
She was devout.
Cherish my breast
and the music
of our breathing.
Heartbeat-cadences lilt
in the hours we share.
I cling to you gratefully.
How you touch me with need,
surrendering to life.
First appeared in Melusine, Spring/Summer 2012
A&E LOVE Poetry Night
Friday, February 14th, 2014
6 pm – til
Featuring:
Bonny McDonald and Clare L. Martin
hosted by Margaret Gibson Simon
A&E Gallery
335 W St Peter St, New Iberia, LA 70560
Feast upon the scintillating and salient poetry, fiction, drama, non-fiction, audio, art and multimedia works in MadHat Annual, Issue 15. We have our our “Eye on the World.”
My debut collection of poetry, Eating the Heart First, published by Press 53 is available. Click on the image to purchase directly from Press 53′s web site. Available via Barnes & Noble andAmazon. For more information, or to purchase a signed copy, contact me via the email address below:
THANK YOU
“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.”
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.”
We Wanted to Be Writers excerpted ten poems from the collection if you would like to read samples of my work. Here is the direct link: http://wewantedtobewriters.com/2014/01/excerpt-from-clare-martins-poetry-collection/
“Acting Unlimited Pop-Up Poetry Theatre”
6:15 pm to 7:15 pm, at the Second Saturday Art Walk
(by the statue of General Mouton across from Theater 810, Downtown Lafayette, LA)
Featured poets will be:
Darrell Bourque
James Blanchard
James McDowell (a.k.a. J.K. McDowell)
J Bruce Fuller
Carol Rice
Clare L. Martin
A&E Poetry Night
Friday, February 14th, 2014
6 pm – til
Featuring:
Bonny McDonald and Clare L. Martin
hosted by Margaret Gibson Simon
A&E Gallery
335 W St Peter St, New Iberia, LA 70560
Voices Seasonal Reading Series:
Wednesday, February 19th at 7 pm the winter installment of the Voice Seasonal Reading Series will feature a special evening of literary readings by poets Clare L. Martin and Diane Moore at Carpe Diem! Gelato – Espresso Bar. 812 Jefferson Street in downtown Lafayette, LA. The public is invited to enjoy gelato, espresso, tea, and pastries while experiencing a unique and enlightening literary event. The event also celebrates the two-year anniversary of this highly successful reading series in Lafayette.
AWP Conference Events, Seattle Washington
MadHat Annual (formerly Mad Hatters’ Review) and the Plume Anthology of Poetry 2013 present:
Friday, February 28th, 2014 @ 6 pm to 9 pm
Tap House Grill, 6th Avenue, Seattle, WA
Robin Behn
Wendy Taylor Carlisle
Jim Daniels
Mark Irwin
Katia Kapovich
Amy King
Clare L. Martin
Philip Nikolayev
Nava Renek
David Rivard
Jill Rosser
Bernd Sauermann
Tod Thilleman
Yuriy Tarnawsky
Rosanna Warren
and appearances by your hosts, Marc Vincenz, Jonathan Penton, and Daniel Lawless
Thursday, February 27th and Friday, February 28th from 3-4 pm (both days) at the Press 53 Table for the AWP Bookfair. Tables CC 35-36 (Press 53/Prime Number) Copies of Eating the Heart First will be available at the Press 53 table in limited quantity. If you would like to purchase the book ahead of time for me to sign, you can find online ordering info here: https://clarelmartin.com/buy-eating-the-heart-first/
More dates TBA
*Additional dates are being arranged now. To book Clare for a poetry reading or book-signing, please email martin.clarel@gmail.com or call (337) 962-5886
March 15th, 2004 will mark ten years since my son Adam’s death.
As I compose this blog post so many thoughts are in my head. His conception, my struggle with motherhood at 15 years old, learning that he was disabled, coming to a place of acceptance of that fact and becoming the mother he needed and that I needed to be to him up to the time of his death.
I am thinking about my mother and I going to Wal-Mart to pick out his burial clothes. Towards the end of his life, maybe the last two years, he only wore hospital gowns. We had to guess at his size when picking the blue dress shirt and slacks. The clothes were too large and the mortuary staff pinned the clothes to fit his frail and unusually small body.
I have said this before, that writing has saved my life. But even more so, the people in my life have saved my life. My parents did not abandon me. They supported me through my pregnancy and saw me through college. They cared for Adam when I could not and that in itself is a miraculous thing.
Adam had many caregivers from the time of his birth and the four months in Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, through the years he lived at home with us and from the special human-angels on staff at Louisiana Special Education Center in Alexandria, Louisiana. I know that each and every human that came in contact with Adam was guided by the Divine to see his special and loving nature. Adam taught us more than we could have ever taught him. His disability brought us to understanding, humility and tenderness. We are better for having known him. I am better for having been touched by his gracious life.
Ten years of dedication to the Writing Life. Ten years from March 15th, 2004, the day Adam died. My husband and I were on our way to the hospital to attend to him when I got the call from Dr. Buck that Adam’s heart gave out during a procedure to place a medi-port in him to give him antivirals that were maybe going to save his life.
But we knew he was dying. Adam suffered the last several months of his life with pneumonia and septicemia. The last time I saw him he was surrounded by ice because his fever was 108 degrees and rising. My God! How did he live for as long as he did in that horrible state? A few days after he died, I wrote the poem “Ice to Water.” That poem was the most difficult thing to conjure, and was written through tears, but it saved me.
My being is attuned to love. Even when I am fighting I love my way through the pain. I have had to fight all of my life for self-love, for personal justice, and for reclamation. Ten years of writing and seeking mastery of myself through the work. Ten years of working through grief, working in grief—astounding and excruciating grief. I have gone so far on the path but I am still here mourning.
I was just lying in bed talking to my husband. We were talking about his work and my work. I have made very little money in all these years, but the small amount I have made has been spent on my family. We struggle but my poetry money has made a difference when we needed a tank of gas, a pizza, or a few groceries. As I was talking, my sorrow arose and I cried. Something new is causing me grief, a new disillusionment as I continue on the path.
I have put out so much energy to write, to get published, and to grow a career in a field that does not reward in the ways we recognize as success in this world. That didn’t really bother me all along. My perspective was that this is a holy vocation and I was honoring my gifts but somewhere along the way I got conned. I began thinking of commerce and exchange—what was I getting in return? This led to a deep sadness and more tears.
In this moment, as I reflect on the passing of my son, as I write about just a few details of his incredible life, I am brought back to the reason I committed myself so deeply to this path. Honor. I wanted to honor Adam’s memory, honor my gifts, and honor the people in my life. That I was able to succeed in gaining an audience was gratifying but the whole and holy purpose was, is and always will be for me is the “creative love” in the act of writing itself. I say creative love because my creativity/love is what brought me this far and I will not lose sight of it again.
There are many projects that I bring my energy to and I will continue to do so, but if these projects become grueling or dissatisfying, I will give them up. It is not a difficult thing for me to do at all. I am not paid for any of it, except the money I might receive from selling a book here and there. I am not concerned with a “career” because what is that? I am concerned with the creative act and the product, not so much my stature anymore. I am concerned with leaving a legacy of love, and my energies will be focused from this point forward on projects and people who are aligned with this mission.
Peace.
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
“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.”
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.”
Ten poems from Eating the Heart First are featured today at We Wanted to be Writers. Please do check it out and check out the website–it is a wonderful resources for creative writers!
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
Clare L. Martin 