[(A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering)] [Author: Dawn Lundy Martin] published on

Cave Canem Poetry Prize

by Dawn Lundy Martin

Dawn Lundy Martin’s work is neither language poetry, which rejects the speaking subject, nor strictly lyric, which embraces the speaking “I.” It might best be described as poetry where, in the words of Juliana Spahr, “the lyric meets language”--both an investigation into the opacity of language and the expression of a passionate speaker who struggles to speak meaningfully.Martin’s poems bend the form into something new, seeking a way to approach the horrific and its effect on the psyche more fully than might be possible in the worn groove of the traditional lyric. Her formal inventiveness is balanced by a firm grounding in bodily experience and in the amazing capacity of language to expand itself in Martin’s hands. She explodes any pretense at a world where words mean exactly what we want them to mean and never more nor less.The poems are neither gentle nor easy, but they make a powerful case that neither gentleness nor easiness is appropriate in the attempt to contend with the trauma and violence that are an inescapable part of human history and human experience. Martin’s book acknowledges the difficulty but not the impossibility of utterance in trauma’s wake, and it ventures into the unimaginable at many levels, from the personal to the cultural.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published October 1, 2007

About the author

Dawn Lundy Martin is a poet, essayist, and conceptual-video artist. She is the author of four books of poems: Good Stock Strange Blood (Coffee House, 2017); Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books, 2015); which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; DISCIPLINE (Nightboat Books, 2011); A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering (University of Georgia Press, 2007); and three limited edition chapbooks. Most recently, she co-edited with Erica Hunt an anthology, Letters to the Future: BLACK WOMEN / Radical WRITING (Kore Press, 2018). Her nonfiction can be found in The New Yorker, Harper's, n+1, and elsewhere. Martin is a Professor of English in the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. She is also the recipient of a 2018 NEA Grant in Creative Writing.

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 2 out of 5]

[Review forthcoming]

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

Recommended by Natalie Martinez

3.5 stars

I will make no pretense about my relationship with poetry. I don't love it, and mostly I don't love it because every single poetry instructor I ever had drove home the high school reading of poetry, ie "it means what I say it means." I will make no pretense about my ability to assess in an objective way, as I am the poet illiterati. But I love that my pal Natalie continues to challenge me by recommending poetry to me, because poetry IS challenging. It is learning to read in a different way, and learning to read different content. I embrace that challenge, and want to honor it. So, here's what I can do with this challenge: I can talk about how the poems make me feel, what they make me think about, and how they are/ are not successful in evoking strong images. I will also try and mentally connect the book to Natalie, ie what does she find engaging, useful, or artistic about the work. So thank you for bearing with me during this review.

I was struck initially by this line on the back of the book: "Martin's poems bend the form into something new, seeking a way to approach the horrific and its effect on the psyche more fully than might be possible in the worn groove of the traditional lyric." Starting with the death of a father figure in the first poem, the captured smells and sounds of sitting with the body, is incredibly tangible. It evokes the Southern gothic of my youth, firing images of "A Rose for Emily." Having spent many days in sick rooms, and rooms with dead bodies in them, I know exactly of the way that the geography of a space is forever altered by the loss.

That tangibility shifts into a love poem, "The Symbolic Nature of Chaos." But this is not a love poem found on a Hallmark card. This is a love poem of a different sort: lust becomes the apocalypse, with upheavals of landscape and upheavals of body, with bodily betrayals masquerading as gothic mansions of the heart, hurtling through space in the arms of cyclones, a "graceless figure, [with] unexuberant claws" (7).

"After the Death of a Young Poet" begins a series of poems about black identity. Imagery includes pulling skin off like an orange rind, "you peel." However, the inner conflict keeps one from pulling completely. There is also a contrasting of soft and hard body parts for protection, questioning, "What is it like to feel female? Explicitly? A body that feeds. Is food. Is gnawed on. One that kneels. A facilitator. Organized joy. A corporeal caving in, arranging the joist. Cooing."

A body is acted on, and acts on the bodies of others. But we are more than just our bodies...we have to be, don't we? Intersections of identities collide, haunting the narrative voice. Blackness must communicate with femaleness, and then those identities collide with the identities of those of their lovers. This is the stuff of modern fantasy: worlds unfold, lovers come together, "evil" lurks to challenge the (s)heroes.

Those (s)heroes wander the landscape of the apocalypse, fighting viscerally more than tangibly to maintain themselves in a world of chaos. Copper-scented bloody battles of the mind are the strength of Martin, these internal, metaphorical battles, and I can't help but imagine this taking place in McCarthy's THE ROAD or existing as a side story in a MAD MAX movie.

My only quibble is that, thematically, the book falls apart by the end. While there might be intense hyperbole here around doing something new (ie and this might sound judgmental, but "new" generally translates into choppy or staccato), it does tend to result in more of the same: emphasis on sound or placement of words with little concern for thematic cohesion.

[angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

she said, when i fuck them, i think i can make them love me.
i said, when i fuck them, i think i can get something back.

[Poets.org from the Academy of American Poets]

Prepare for the 2010 Poets Forum in New York City (October 28-30) by reading Martin's newest book of poetry, and check out the Poets Forum 2010 bookshelf for the latest collections by each of the poets participating in the Poets Forum. Happy reading!

[Laura Heller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Went to a reading in which Dawn read some poems from this book & some from another book. Great voice, both in person and on the page. These poems require revisiting in order to get their fullness.

[Mills College Library]

811.6 M3796g 2007

[Rodney]

Very challenging and powerful. Packs such an emotional punch that I opened it each time with a sense of dread. Recommended.