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New Books Network Announcer
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Holly Gattery
Hello everyone and welcome to nbn. I'm your host Holly Gattery and I am joined today by David Martin to talk about his really phenomenal new collection of poetry, Nightstead. This is David's most personal collection to date, and in the collection he elegizes his younger brother, who died by suicide at the age of 23. With a mixture of childhood recollections and anguished immediate perceptions, Neistat produces a complex memorial while pushing against the utmost limits of memory's power. Dislocating experiments juxtapose with searingly direct verse to make a haunting poetic memoir that will remain with readers long after they put it down. David Martin has published three previous collections of poetry and Tar Swan, Kink Bands and Limited Firsts, and he lives in Calgary. Welcome to the show, David.
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David Martin
Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.
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Holly Gattery
It is really a pleasure to talk to you about this book and it definitely has stayed with me. It's truly unforgettable. And my first question for you is, where did this collection start for you? Now, obviously it eulogizes your younger brother, so there's that, but there's having a life experience and then there's deciding to create a piece of art about it. So I suppose I'm asking directly, when did you decide, you know, I'm going to create a collection of poems about this as opposed to perhaps just one poem or a couple poems.
- [02:10]
David Martin
I think I was working towards the subject without totally being aware that's what I was doing. I had been writing some poems. I had a new batch of poems and I sent them to a friend in Calgary named Colin Martin who's not related to me, but he does a lot of poetry editing for me and he's usually the first person to to take a look at things. And as he was reading and kind of giving me feedback and notes on this latest batch. He commented that he felt like a lot of them were returning to childhood memories and kind of a sense of nostalgia and made a few notes like that. And it suddenly dawned on me that what I had been doing was kind of working back towards approaching this difficult subject and writing about it. But I wasn't totally aware initially. And then it suddenly made sense what I was kind of doing. I mean, had maybe been doing it subconsciously, but kind of working towards this subject. And at that moment it was very quick. Then I realized that in the book that I had to write and it became very clear and I suddenly had, yeah, quite, quite a clear direction of what, what I wanted to do with this book.
- [03:24]
Holly Gattery
I want to talk about the rhyme in this book because I have a very, I'm very snobby about rhyming. Like if somebody's going to rhyme, if a poet is going to rhyme in this economy, they better do it well. They, it better be flawless. It better just, you know, better be buttery smooth. And I can remember I opened yearbook and the second poem is called Charm and I was enchanted. Now I think it is one of the best rhyming poems in contemporary poetry. And I read a lot of poetry and well, I mean that's obvious to anyone who listens to my poetry podcast. I read a lot of poetry. I don't even get to talk to, you know, 1, 1, 100 of the poets who I read. But I am happy to be talking to you because I want to know what your secret is. I want you to lift the hood and unpack this for me as possible. Annoying my luck. You're going to say, listen Holly, this is just innate talent on my part.
- [04:27]
David Martin
No, I wouldn't say that. Well, thank you. That's very kind of you to say that about the poem. I think I was kind of shared your opinion about Ryan. For many years when I was a university student learning about poetry, rhyme felt very kind of old fashioned and passe and not very modern and, and all that kind of stuff. And then over time I kind of changed my mind about it. And there's been a number of contemporary writers who are really excellent with rhyme. Canadian poet is Alexandra Oliver, An American poet who lives In Greece is A.E. stallings. And A E Stallings had at some point in her career wrote a short punchy manifesto called Presto Manifesto. And it's all about rhyme and how it's not old fashioned, it's not kind of lazy, but it really, by giving yourself the constraint of having to work with a constricted form or in rhyme or in meter. You force your creativity and imagination into spaces you maybe wouldn't have had to have dealt with otherwise. And you're also kind of engaging with the language itself and in a way, letting the, the language sometimes dictate where a certain line or image goes. And, and I was just blown away by her idea of rhyme. And there were other poets like Michael Donaghy, and, well, now I'm blanking, but, but I, but over time, I, I, I really kind of came around to rhyme. And I had read this other essay years ago about the decline of rhyme. And the idea put forth in this essay was that rhyme used to be kind of the, the magic embedded in the language, making poetry a kind of spell. But over time, when, when rhymes are almost too conspicuous or maybe too flashy, then you kind of draw attention to them and the spell is broken a little bit. Sometimes rhymes can be just sort of on autopilot. I think that's kind of what you're saying is, you know, maybe you, you read a lot of poetry, so you're maybe coming across just kind of an autopilot, building a blank rhyme. But I, I see it as more like the, the challenge set forth in one line of poetry, and then the, the connecting rhyme could be a couplet, could be later that, that you've kind of laid down that challenge. How are you going to make that connection with sound? Are the ideas going to chime? Is the sound just going to be a chime with, like, a clashing idea? Is this an enjambed rhyme that you're just going to flow past or you're going to stop and pause? There is the rhyme. I don't know if they use these terms anymore, but, like, masculine and feminine, in terms of the accent placement, was the rhyme ending on a vowel and kind of opening up the mouth? Is the rhyme ending on a hard consonant and feeling like it stops? You're thinking about sound. And I think, I love all that, the technical challenge of it, and I love the, the surprises that you find where the rhyme might take you in a direction that you were not really aware of or planning to go in. And I think maybe that's what happened with the, the poem you mentioned, charm. Because I think the, the guiding principle in that one is the countdown. And even as things are fairly strange and a little odd in its imagery, there's a, a pull or an impending sense of something as we're getting lower and lower and where, where is this going to end? So on the one Sense, it's kind of a childish rhyme, it's a charm. But on the other sense, it has this kind of undercurrent of this countdown. That was a very long answer for you.
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Holly Gattery
I loved it because, number one, I'm a huge fan of foreign poetry, which I know a lot of people aren't. So I love sistinas, I love pantoons, I love playing with form. And I find that form helps me because if I don't know where to go, it's a map I have to follow. And like you said about rhyme, it can force your brain into different directions, different patterns, different, different small and bigger boxes than you would have possibly imagined. And one thing about rhyme is, you're right, I don't like autopilot rhyming. Like, if I hear one more rhyme of love and above, I'm going to. Oh, I'm not going to say anything violent, but it's going to make me very angry. Like, to me, that's a lazy autopilot rhyme. And I'm sure somebody could give me an exception where that rhyme would be the best possible rhyme and it would be beautiful. But for the most part, I find it's just a little bit lazy. But in charm, one thing that I found that really worked for me is, first of all, I didn't. I didn't realize there was a rhyme at first. Now the rhyme is actually quite obvious, so that's, you know, my bad. But I didn't realize it because when I said I was enchanted. Okay, we have the title charm, but the whole poem gives off that dark fairy tale magic that I believe that a lot of us tap into in our childhood very easily, where there is something very whimsical, but very darkly whimsical about the poem. There's the hint of the threat, a hint of danger, and especially as we count down in the poem, it starts with 10 moon cut stones will snake a withered hide nine times, whistling to warn me when you flied. So right away there's a threat, there's warn and lied, and then we're counting down to something that feels both magical and threatening. And I felt like that really set the tone for the rest of the book where you're talking about your brother, you're sharing childhood memories, there is that nostalgia, but there's this constant undercurrent of threat throughout the poem that. Or throughout all of the collection, this poem and the entire collection. And I was wondering if you could talk to me a little bit about dark whimsy. And this is A term that I don't know if Caitlin Galway and I made up on another episode on nbn, but we were talking about how we're really attracted to dark whimsy. And there is a little bit of a fairy tale vibe throughout, not just in this poem, but throughout. That feeling carries. And I would argue that it's hard to balance that and maintain that without suffocating their reader in it. But you managed to do it.
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David Martin
Well, I like your reading and your take on the poem. I think that's a really good explanation of it, about having the whimsical, childlike elements, but also this undercurrent of unease, a possible threat. And I believe there's another poem close by there called this Collective, which again, is. That's a rhyming one. And there's the one I'm thinking of.
- [11:55]
Holly Gattery
There's one called Fabulous where there's the wolf and the lamb.
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David Martin
That's the one I'm thinking of. Yeah. I just can't spot it. And so those ones. That poem is made up of little snippets of plot points from Aesop's Fables and kind of stitching those together because, again, those are often kind of shared in childhood, but they're. They're. They can be very weird and leave you hanging. And you're like, what's. What's the lesson that I'm supposed to learn there? Am I just scared now? And so I, again, was sort of pulling from that tradition in history of childhood literature, nursery rhymes, fairy tales, folklore, which some, you know, sometimes fairy tales and things like that can be terrifying. So it's. It's always been a little strange to me why they're associated with children's literature. You're supposed to, like, tell this to your child to keep them quiet or scare them or something. But so I think. Yeah, your. Your term. What was your term about whimsy? That. That was a good description.
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Holly Gattery
Dark whimsy.
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David Martin
Yeah, dark whimsy. I mean, that. That's a good way to. To categorize it. Yeah.
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Holly Gattery
Mm. Yeah. And I mean, I'm gonna. I wanna get into the poem hereafter, which is one of the, I think, probably the longest poem. I didn't actually mark how long it was, but it feels like the longest poem in the collection. It's broken up into short, shorter sections, though. But before I do that, I want to talk about the. The questions at the bottom of the pages. You're. The poet is speaking directly to someone. Now, I would assume it would be the brother, and I I'm care. I'm saying the poet and the brother because I. I don't want to conflate you with the poet. But then again, this is your most personal collections of dates. So I also feel a little bit safer may the two. But there's a really interesting thread at the bottom of the page where there are questions being asked directly to a you, but a you that is not the reader. But it also. They're deeply personal questions that could be the reader as well.
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David Martin
What do you think? They're sort of an implied you and with those. Those running questions on the bottom of the page. And I think it's okay with this book to. To make that conflation between the poet and the speaker. In some of my earlier books, I was much more consciously taking on a character or Persona par Swan as sort of four different characters, different voices and styles in sort of a historical setting. So that would be kind of weird to directly associating. Associating you with one of those voices. But you're probably on safer ground with this book. And I liked the idea. I'm thinking back now. There was a book by Ian Williams called Word Problems. Really fantastic poems. And he had. It was either on the top or the side. It was sort of this running narrative of a situation or a story. And I liked what it did to my brain as I was reading it because I'm reading the poems. Sometimes the poems were a little bit thick and knotted. I was a little unsure. But then I find that I was just. I was always pulled along with that string of narrative that he was using to connect everything in the book. And I thought maybe something similar could work in my book where even if you hit one of these weird fairytale folkloric poems and you're a little bewildered, you're still kind of pulled along with these series of insistent questions on the bottom. They're always sort of a. Do you remember? Kind of a chant to them. And it's implied that it's to my brother. And in the composition of it, which is kind of interesting, I just wrote sort of a whole page of these questions that I had or would want to ask or if I could ask, sort of, do you remember this? And then I kind of cut them up and spliced them into the different poems. But there would be these happy kind of accidents on certain pages where maybe the question kind of happens to connect or resonate with an image in the poem. And so I kind of liked that the chance element in the placement of the questions ended up sometimes having these surprising connections with the poem. But again, I think the idea was to hopefully keep pulling the reader through, even if you do hit these spots of maybe a little bit of confusion or unease. You'd mentioned unease before.
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Holly Gattery
I didn't find any of your book confusing. Definitely unsettling in the best possible way. What I was thinking when I was reading the chant at the bottom of the page. So for our listeners, David might read some of this later, but just to give you an idea, it starts with do you remember walkie talkie crackle in the backyard as we hid from our older brother behind the playhouse? Do you remember when you sunburned so badly at the beach that your skin peeled and you were howling all night? Do you remember playing horse in the driveway? Do you remember long nights at the hospital? And it goes on. And when I say, or when I said earlier that I felt that me as the reader could be being addressed as well, I would say that I feel that and I think that anyone who had close childhood friendships, even if you didn't have a sibling or a cousin, when there's that shared past of these precious and gone and hopefully not forgotten parts of your life that formed who you are, just reading them put that spongy weight in my chest of everything that's gone and you can't get back. Which is such a powerful tool to use in a collection that deals with a younger sibling's suicide and the loss of that sibling and the not ever being able to have answers to these questions. So, David, my next question is before I ask you to read, is actually going to be about dealing with writing about something that's as tragic and heavy as the loss of a sibling, specifically a loss of a sibling to suicide, but writing about it in a way that does not use the words to make it heavier. What I mean by that is it's heavy. But often I felt like we weren't looking always directly at what happened, but it was reminded me of whenever I go to a funeral and it's open casket, how I'm focus, focusing on everything else, but I'm never really looking at the person. I'm all a flood of other memories with the person or whatever else is going on. But it's almost like I'm seeing the tragedy and periphery while trying to hold everything together around me. And again, I want to talk about hereafter because that's where I feel like this is its most evident and its strongest. But it. It is a feeling that I felt throughout your book and I'd so Again, the question, because I know that I'm doing my typical Holly circling the drain to get to the point sort of question right now is how you've. You deal with a heavy topic without making the poems themselves feel overly offensive, affected, and kind of dripping with sentimentality.
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David Martin
Well, that's a good question. And it's. It's difficult. I like your analogy of holding something in your periphery, being aware of it. It's the elephant in the room. But in a way, you're trying maybe not to look right at it because that it might be overwhelming, it might be too intense. And perhaps in my case, if the whole collection had that direct intensity on that one tragic moment, then maybe it would be too much. So there are poems that are just more kind of poems from my life or my family as my kids are growing up. But then it's still kind of in the periphery you're sort of thinking about or you're haunted with that idea of. Of. Of my brother, or I'm haunted by it. And those questions at the bottom are kind of keeping that insistent for you. It would. Yeah, it was definitely a challenge to write. This was something that. It happened 19 years ago, and it's only very, very recently that I could even talk about it. It's a little strange now, actually, to be talking about it in public, considering that I wouldn't really mention it to, like, close friends, even people who knew my brother. And so for many, many years, it was kind of tucked away out of a sense of. Of shame, I suppose. And it was. Yeah, it was a challenge to. To face this and to write about it, to think deeply about it and. And, yeah, to sort of hold it in the. The periphery of my mind without letting it turn into an abyss. I guess that. Which is maybe what could have happened.
- [21:27]
Holly Gattery
Yeah. Thank you for that.
- [21:29]
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- [21:56]
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- [21:58]
Holly Gattery
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- [21:59]
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- [22:29]
Holly Gattery
So, considering we've talked about the poems a lot, and I'm really eager to let our listeners get a little sample of them just to see what we're talking about. Because again, this is, this is stunning, these poems. And I mean, I knew what I was going to be reading because I, you know, I, I read what the book was about, so I knew, but I wasn't prepared for how it was going to be presented and how it felt. So, as I've said before, enchanting and magical, but with that, that kind of silvery sharp thread, you know, kind of like a metal peeling when somebody's working with metal and the metal is peeling off the grinder, it's that, that kind of like glinting edge to it as well. That's just that, you know, you want to touch it, but you, you're afraid of getting hurt as well. And it's such a really wonderful quality. So I'd love for you to read to us from your collection, Nightstud, please.
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David Martin
Well, maybe I'll read the Charm poem, since we were talking about that. This is early in the collection. It's called Charm. Ten moon cut stones will snake a withered hide Nine times whistling to warn me when you've lied. Eight blankets stitched for dawn's measly throttle. Seven ways to pray the apple lock it in a bottle. 6 trickling doll eyes weeping truly lifelike. 5 funeral mourners shush a sugared tyke. 4 hours of swelling wasp stings on the neck 3 years balance in leaping from a deck. 2 truant hands pair hearts for estuaries 1 lonely tooth that marries your contraries. None on the pool deck the siren's mangled cry. None in the pool to beat the water running dry. And maybe this is another one that's not again, it's we were talking about. It's not always directly related to the that signal moment that we know the book is about, but when we read it, we kind of have that fairly close just to out of our sight line. So this is a poem called Target Practice at dusk. No willow perched grackles, no feet grazing fields no leaves ticking before them. The mind of autumn not there, but light not pomegranate. Two brothers. Yes A rifle steady against a barren truck's hood, aiming at the cans lined up on a hump of dirt just over there. Was that my first time holding a gun? Or last silhouettes ring out and tumble backwards we flattened a path to the empty house. No grackle split at reports, no leaves gathered at the wheels or at our feet.
- [25:21]
Holly Gattery
Thank you for that. So we. I really want to get in to talk about the poem Hereafter, which is, I feel, like a kind of a foundational poem in the piece. I think it's the piece where I felt you slash, the poet and me as the reader, were looking most directly at everything that this collection. Not everything. Looking at the moment that this collection is constantly circling in memories and again, out of the periphery sometimes, and even through, as you said, you know, with your family now, thinking about the. The thing that's always in the back of everybody's head, this moment that's defined you and changed everything. So it starts with the line, someone had to go, so I went there. And you're talking about going into your brother's space, his apartment, his living space, presumably after he's been found or after you realize what's happened and, you know, it really plunks you right in the middle with lots of detail, detailed what this living space was like. And it's a poem that has a really interesting cadence because while we're most directly looking at the suicide, at the aftermath of the suicide, it's also not linear, which I loved because I find that memory is not linear.
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David Martin
You.
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Holly Gattery
You feel one thing, and that one thing leads into thoughts of a bunch of other things that don't necessarily occur to you with any kind of temporal logic. So it's not like this happened first and this happened. Everything bleeds into everything else. So I'd love to hear about this poem, how it started, how you nurtured it into being.
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David Martin
Yeah. This poem is probably the heart of the book. It was the hardest to write, but probably the one that I needed to write the most. And I. I think it was tapping into a whole store of memories that I had pushed aside for so many years, and in a way, being kind of surprised how much I did remember. And I like your description of it When. When those memories do come flooding back, maybe all in one moment, it's not in sort of a logical linear sequence or a neat history. It. It. It's very jumbled. And the poem even kind of talks about this, though. I know this is out of order and maybe I'm missing things, but this is The. The way that those emotions and memories came back to me and then kind of transferred to the construction of that poem. So hopefully for the reader that it is that same kind of process that they might experience in suddenly recalling such a strong memory that they have that maybe they hadn't thought about in years. And it is kind of tangled and loops back on itself at times. Originally, it was sort of written as one continuous poem, and I felt that was, like, too much. I needed these little breaks, so I sort of chopped it up and put a little pieces, parts on each page kind. They're. They're almost hidden, but embedded in this poem there are some rhymes. And again, at that point, I was just trying to slow myself down a little bit as I was writing. I think if I was just going to barrel through and write down everything, it would come out in this unstoppable flow. And by forcing myself to have these tiny little sonic connections, it. It slowed me down a little bit, and it didn't become kind of like a runaway stream of consciousness. They. For. For most poets, they tend to explore themes and ideas and subjects that are very personal to them. That hasn't always been my style as a poet. And so it was kind of strange for me to suddenly feel quite exposed in a poem. There's no Persona, or. It's very clear that it was not a Persona. That's. The artist is kind of stepping behind like a mask to speak from. And so that was. Yeah, that was a challenge for me to feel comfortable being in that space. And it's not necessarily a space that I want to go back to too often. I don't know how some poets can do that. They can kind of reveal everything. And in general, that's what I felt with this book was in some senses, I felt like I was giving away too much, that I was showing too much. And then other times I would read the collection and be like, well, I'm not saying enough. And I would kind of go back and forth between these two ideas of what I was doing, that maybe things were too hidden or maybe too exposed. I kind of went back and forth on that a lot. So I hope it is a balance, but that's. That's up to the reader to decide.
- [30:59]
Holly Gattery
I don't know who said it, but I think it's a very common belief or a goal in poetry and writing in general to tap into something that is so specific, it's universal. And that's what this piece and this whole collection feels like. There's a part of the poem hereafter on page 59, for those following along at home, that reads, end the weeks and months of silent dinners with my parents, barrage of letters and cards that trickled, then one day stopped, and companies to call to settle his debts, and the truck to be towed, cleaned and sold for scrap. And the appointed counselor soothing, but whom we later caught in a cackle on her phone before we left, announcing, without intending to, that the world has no time to stop her death. I mean, anyone who's ever lost anyone knows exactly that feeling. When the world is going on and everybody cares. And then it seems like the momentum of that care slows, trickles, stops. It's. It's not a blame. It's not saying you anybody more, but it's an observation.
- [32:17]
David Martin
And, well, yeah, recognizing that the world slows down and takes notice of what has occurred, but in a very quick turnaround, goes back to busy, everyday things, which makes sense, but for the. The people who are kind of within that tight circle of grief, it's bewildering and how the world can even kind of continue after such. Such a thing has happened.
- [32:44]
Holly Gattery
Yeah, and you know, the. That poem that. What I mentioned and what I just read was so specific to counselor cackling, you know, being caught having a little laugh, the dinners, the truck being towed for scrub. These are very specific things, but they're also very interchangeable with something anybody could have experienced. So I was thinking to myself about how whenever I go into a classroom to talk about poetry or wherever I'm going in my role as a poetry ambassador for the world, I'm the poet lord of a very small region, but I carry it with me to people standing beside me in different regions. They're just trying to pick up their prescription. But I'm rambling about poetry is that, you know, people can say I don't read poetry or I don't care about poetry, but I was thinking, reading your collection, about how whenever I'm at a funeral or even at a wedding or at these pivotal times in our lives, what do we turn to? Poetry. People are reciting poetry. And I thought, imagine how much better the world would be if, when people felt the immensity and the intensity of these emotions, instead of picking up a gun and doing something dangerous, imagine if everyone just tried to write a poem instead. And how your poem was, or your whole collection. But that poem in particular was a really important reminder to me of how poetry really connects us. About how your poems are in no way, in my opinion, stylistically simple. They're actually quite Exquisite and complex, but they were. They were difficult to read. I. I did not at any point find myself confused. That said, I did remind. Have to remind myself many times to slow down. I'm thinking specifically about the poems where the words are really playing with the whole stage of the page. So they're really spaced out. They're, you know, you have to slow all the way down. So this is not scrolling on TikTok. This is Take a deep breath and follow each word to the next word. And sometimes the poems are crossing pages too. And one of my final questions for you is about this. It's about your method, if you have a method you can put into words, of using the stage of your page. In other words, despite the very serious themes and experiences explored in your novel, as we talked about in that very first question I asked her, maybe it was the second. Now there's an element of childhood play, and I found that reflected in the form of the poems as well.
- [35:26]
David Martin
Yeah, there's the number of poems that use the page or the double page as sort of a field for experimentation and play. Pulling words apart to find words within words, moving words far away. There's one where I want the reader to read like the right side of the page and then hop to the left and they're kind of going back and forth. There's other ones where you have to read across the gutter of the book and maybe kind of hold open the book a bit more open. So I was interested in that, the physical sense of the page, of poetry, what that could do. Often that physical placement can translate into temporal changes. So if something's. If your eye just has to go a little bit further to find that next word, you're kind of given a natural pause. It's maybe not that much, but you're directing the flow of the reader and their experience of the poem. And hopefully that contributes to some kind of intellectual and emotional reaction to. To what they're reading. It was. It was a challenge at times to get things to line up just right and. But I was. I'm very happy with. With how they look on the page. That was one of my favorite aspects of, of the book. And there's, there's. There's a few poems where there's even multiple ways to read it. You could read across from the left side to the right across. You could read down on the left and then read down on the right. So there's sort of almost these options in how you approach the poem and put the ideas together. And maybe it's yeah, not sort of one over determined path about how you have to experience this poem. That's another thing that I was kind of interested in.
- [37:28]
Holly Gattery
Yeah, I had fun with them. So it added an element of play to reading. So partial concordance to a missing person on page 16 and 17. I remember reading and David gives you hints of how you're supposed to read this. I just didn't. So, for instance, the poem on the left hand side of the page when it's open is right justified all the way over, closer to a stage at the gutter. And then the other ones on the right side of the page, it's left justified. So like they're smooching. The poems are smooching in the middle of the page or trying to. And so when I was reading it, I was like, oh, I wonder if David knows that you could read this right across. And I'm like, oh no, he definitely knows that it's supposed to be that way. And then I started looking for it everywhere and I went back because I don't think I picked up on it at first, which of course was fine. But it really invites the reader to slow down to, I think fittingly, and with a greater, you know, message for the book as a whole, to slow down and be present. And if there's. I mean, there's nothing like the loss of a loved one to remind you to do that. But this book is also a reminder to slow down and be present in the book, in this moment that you're reading this book, to consider the multiple ways that one could go about understanding this poem and then on a broader level, the multiple ways that we understand and we interpret and parse out memory, which is a huge theme in the book as well. And before my standard last question, that is the last question I have for you, which is about the exploration of memory in this book. Because, you know, we've kind of talked about it a little bit already about how memory isn't necessarily this linear. A linear experience, you know, from it. It's not like we go from, you know, I was born. And then there's a word I'm looking for here, and I think it starts with a C, but it's escaping me right now. But it's not like chronological. There we go. It's not chronological. That's the magic word. It's. It's everything happening all at once and as I said, things bleeding into each other. So that's all well and fine to experience memory like that, but when, in my opinion, this is a this is a holly thing. I believe that there's memory and then there's creating art. When you're trying to create art out of memory, it has to be something if, especially if you're thinking about having it published, that someone can interact with and make some kind of sense of it. And I found that I did not have a problem making sense of what you, you had created. So perhaps, perhaps just for me, perhaps for other writers, poets, artists out there, what was your approach to creating art out of memory? Was there any kind of guiding principle that you had while you were writing these poems?
- [40:22]
David Martin
Well, maybe it was the attempt to balance direct personal experience with also poetic forms, but also bringing in a set of ideas to kind of counterbalance things. Specifically, there's a number of books, kind of classical ideas and medieval ideas about the art of memory. So that's another thing that's kind of woven into the collection are these strange ideas that philosophers came up with hundreds of years ago about training the memory, building the memory palace where you can store all this information. There's these, there's some images in the books of these really weird memory wheels that people kind of came up with. And so maybe again, maybe it's a sense of balance, that there is the dark whimsy, there's the personal, but also kind of some classical ideas to consider. Some poems are maybe more about my life, but in the periphery we still know we're thinking about this event. Some poems are more direct and maybe by holding all these different aspects, different techniques and different ideas that you can create a fairly complex book that will engage the reader, which would be a different experience than if I had written this as a memoir or written this as an essay. I would, I would structure it in a very different way. And I'm thinking about, yeah. How to engage the reader, how to give them enough so they'll come along with me, but also leaving enough room for them, the reader to kind of use their imagination and engage with things. It's not, I don't want kind of an over determined sense of how you have to experience this book. Let you can pull things out that resonate with you. Certain ideas, certain images. Yeah, I don't know if that's a guiding principle.
- [42:35]
Holly Gattery
It's enough of a guiding principle for me. So thank you, thank you so much for that. So my final question for you is a question I ask all of my guests, which is, what are you working on now? And I ca. You know, I caveat this with the understanding that it's okay to work on Nothing too. Your answer can be, I'm not working on anything right now, Hollywood.
- [42:56]
David Martin
I've got a few things on the go, so that's okay. In. In a complete opposite vein, I have a book of children's poetry that's about. Done working with a friend who's an artist. So it's an illustrated book or children's problems, kind of in the vein of Dennis Lee's Alligator Pie. And so that's really exciting to use something completely different and then a new collection of poems which is. I feel like it's. It's getting close. And I think this new collection is. Is. Is a reaction to what I did in Nightstead, which is. It's very much putting on the. The mask or the Persona of different people and different voices, maybe out of a sense that I've revealed too much in nightstand. So this is a book about con artists and art forgers and thieves and pickpockets. And it's called Cheats. It's about how we feed and deceive ourselves with language and ideas. And so it's. It's. It's each of my books, I try and make quite a conscious change in style or theme. So I think this upcoming one will be very different than my spend.
- [44:10]
Holly Gattery
I do not say this easily, but I'm super excited about both of those, you know, children's poetry, all for it. Not just because I have four young kids, but because it's something that's really, really necessary and needed. I mean, reading Charles Silverstein as a kid was, you know, I can still almost recite from memory the poem almost perfect, but not quite. And I read it so long ago. So amazing. And then I love the idea of Cheats. I think that's phenomenal. And, you know, for any artist listening, I think this is a really strong, strong reminder to write what obsesses you, because if. If somebody had asked, you know, assigned that topic to me, I'd have no idea what to do. But I'm so interested in somebody else. I'm so interested in reading somebody else, doing it. That sounds phenomenal. So for our audience, who I know have probably been listening this whole time, but in case you've forgotten, we were talking to David Martin about his wonderful collection of poems, Nightstead, which was released with Pamela says press in 2026. David, thank you so much for joining me today, and I look forward to having you back to talk about whatever wonderful book you write next or publish next. We know what you're writing. Whatever gets published next, I should say.
- [45:28]
David Martin
Thanks so much. This has been really wonderful. Foreign.
- [45:42]
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