Discipline

by Dawn Lundy Martin

This stunning second collection engages the "disciplines" associated with regimes of powers and sadomasochism. The work interrogates the social and linguistic space between regimes of power enacted on the body, and thereby the soul.

Genres: Poetry, Queer, LGBT, Lesbian

80 pages, Paperback

First published March 8, 2011

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

[Renee Morales · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I envy her in her room. Hers with paint and dolls and handprints. Great green and glowing under blankets with a hand that nurtured the heart of the mouth, purrs into mouth, loves the heart. Heart beating within another—blushing blood—Godc the beating, lit, and doing what it does.”

“hands that stake claims as if staking were logic.”

Martin is a mathematician of language and inflections of violence. Holy shit. Her orientations. Her gestures. Her inventions of a flat gender.

“If we are delivered from evil, where do we arrive?”

“It requires a kind of discipline to wait in waiting of what one waits for.”

And yet

“it is only when I am in a woman’s arms that my body is not a threat”

Us, like “hams, holding on to what was.”

WOW wow wow wow wow wow wow
What is a woman. Nothing. Everything. The empty brown space. Misrecognition in the dark…

[Sally · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perfect book of prose poems. I am left speechless.

[Sophia Chong · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I read Martin’s Discipline, I was shocked by the immediacy and proximity she evokes with her language—her words are sharp, intimate, and cloying to the touch. In a close reading of the passage on page 35, Martin captures the liminality of the marginalized experience through disorientation, the mutability of boundaries, and the voice. The perspective shifts destabilize the piece, simultaneously creating and disrupting established roles, dynamics, and grounding points. The opening line situates the woman as the voyeur looking “outside the window,” yet renders the woman a subject once the perspective shifts to the “glittering ground outside.” However, the boundary itself is questioned: “Symmetry between / what is outside and what is inside, that likeness of coagulation.” The emergence of the “we” invokes an audience of arbiters with the power to label the woman as a “broken witness.” The following line disintegrates the boundary between outside and inside, situating the woman in an amorphous “brown space.” The different points of view and pronouns augment this destabilization, blurring the positionality of the speaker, the woman, and the “we.” The speaker is implicated in the “we” as a witness to the woman, yet notes the commonality in their experiences of otherness: “I, too, am often misrecognized in the dark, even here, / where I had believed I was known.” Martin refuses to pose utopic spaces of communion; instead, she insists on the complexity of spaces where perspectives weave in and out of one another—these are sites of intimacy, danger, isolation, judgement, and surveillance. Here, the boundary between existence and non-existence is fragile: “if the space and the women are brown, what happens to the / empty?” The Black women occupying these spaces are forced to contend with the ever-present “we’s” judgment and prying eye. They are compulsorily assessed by the “we’s” perception of their realness and their ability to interrupt emptiness. The voices within Discipline create a chorus that captures the marginalized experience—though insistent, self-assured, and assertive of their existence, the voices struggle to be heard. In the opening line, the woman at the window “bellows because it is something to do”—the bellow is transformed from a possible form of communication into a futile outlet to pass time—there’s no expectation of a consequence or response. The third person description of the bellow: “her mouth clearly open, sounds clearly emanating” further flattens the act by disembodying and dissociating it from the source. Similarly, the speaker attempts to stake their existence: “a strange sensation to yell out, This is me,” yet knows that they are “being mis-seen and [perceived] human but otherly so.” Discipline is a collection of complexity, urgency, and precision; Martin pressurizes selfhood tight against the external and the internal, leaving readers claustrophobically in awe.

[Heba Malik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Started this at NELP and forgot just how raw this collection of prose poems is. On the body, on grief, on abuse, on illegibility, on dissociation. On being human. On embodied grief. As someone who went through it over the summer, I saw myself a lot in these pages. And it was not closure I found, but rather a humility and recognition that grief is complex and it makes no sense and it can make you go crazy. A few quotable notables:

"When one is told the structure or the method and the staggering absence of, or the omnipresent existence of, it becomes difficult to get on the subway or bathe one's own body. These are acts of forgetting though they appear to be acts of resistance or love."

"Relentless the body leaves the bed. Does things. A day is merry and eager for prosperity"

"Forgetting is a way of misremembering the present [...] Is it finished, you know? In finishing, one forgets."

"At 70 my mother flies on a plane for the first time and is amazed at the sensation of not moving. A sense of things that opposes the actuality of things. This is a memoir of close calls. After a set number of near misses, one catches and stops the heart. If we are delivered from evil, where do we arrive? Between the willing and the damned? This place is perceived as cuts of time, a stack of rectangles in contrasting colors. Cruelty is yellow. Accusation in blue. Perversity, a trail of microscopic scars. Pardon me if I move slowly around the edges and am fearful of ordinary lives. A system of diagnoses says, you're okay, you're not dying"

[charlie shaw · Rating 4 out of 5]

"When one is told the structure or the method and the staggering absence of, or the omnipresent existence of, it becomes difficult to get on the subway or bathe one's own body. These are acts of forgetting, though they appear to be acts or resistance or love"
"There are bodies stuffed in trees-we know that. We see them when we do not anticipate them. Hungry and echoing into chilled air"
"We drift into dreams to escape the dislogic of hunger"
"The I is / more relaxed / when it is hunted"
"At the window, she bellows because it is something to do"
"I want to say this plainly: it is only when I am in a woman's arms that my body is not a threat"
"This is a prayer for prayers, you know, a wanting something equal to a prater, even though I am not a mother"
"I waited all my life for my father to die and when he did I felt empty"
"A hand there, a mouth doing whatever, the body's wound position"
"we think, peace is like a shotgun aimed at the foot"
"Our purposeful living spaces made from taciturn rooms. Entire houses of trapped utterances-mouths saturated with them"
"it's difficult to tell if the joy is real joy or if it's just lack of fear"
"Somewhere along the way I fell into the deep end of the pool"
"However cathedrals were made with seats for holiness as if the body / Could be contained"
"If there are bones for fragile than these, we do not know them"

[Rebekah Weikel · Rating 5 out of 5]

"So tell me, it sings, how can I live forever?"

[Madison Krumins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Raw, unyielding, bare. Poetry about body and the failure of the body. Dawn Lundy Martin fantastically depicts complicated grief in this book.

[Taylor]

whose grief filled napkin?

[Po Ruby · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are sharp, angular, observational poems that speak from a body teetering between danger and safety. Devastating, inescapable, confronting. I loved and will return.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

So good I read it twice! (ive probably revisited this collection more than that over the last decade tho tbh.
--
My copy of ‘Discipline’ has been well-loved for the last 10 years, battered and dog-eared from the attention I’ve paid it. I’m not usually a dog-ear my books kind of reader, but poetry deserves to be lived and worn in, meant to be felt out loud, not just read. I found this copy at Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop with no prior knowledge of Martin’s work, and instantly clung to both the book and poet.

Martin’s poetry has the ability to make you feel each word deeply, even those outside of your own experiences. The body, the search for self, and the “I” are central themes in this collection. Martin's poems often confront the ways in which power structures, such as race, gender, and sexuality, shape and constrain individual identities.

I LOVE all Dawn Lundy Martin collections. When it came time to reach out to writers for a zine I was helping to curate, I reached out to Dawn and fan-girled hard over getting a response back.

Please pick up your own copy and love it as much as I have!

[D'Argo Agathon · Rating 1 out of 5]

A semester and a half of mostly great poetry, then 3 shitty collections back-to-back. A quick summary here: disconnected fragments that tell nothing. A couple of witty phrase turns, but otherwise, 60 pages of eyes glazing over. I thought I might extend this review, but after leading a workshop discussion on it, I don't feel any better about it.

[Joe]

The poem on the hole made it all worthwhile. I mean giving Freud the finger.
I mean the gendering of the assemblage?
Or the opportunities RE: war's siphoning off of violent males from community?
Discipline RE: Foucault? & biopolitics? I dunno...buncha words on a page.

[JK · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not out yet, but I recommend reading it when it does.

[Carrie]

Read the Coda.

[Mills College Library]

811.6 M3796d 2011

[Joe Milazzo · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The I is / more relaxed / when it is hunted."

[Q · Rating 4 out of 5]

Abstract prose poem that dug up many thoughts on writing, being, and memory