New American Poets: Chris Martin

American Music is ostensibly a primer for what one shouldn't do at this stage in contemporary poetry. The tone is too effusive, the perspective too sexed, the references too low, the form too formal, and the content way too New York. What I wanted was to allow a particular consciousness, however fractured or perforated, to communicate something of its experience that exceeded the transactions of prose. This desire took, too put it broadly, an honest approach. For me, the direct way to access this level of honesty was to permit the variegated presences—everything I read, saw, and especially heard—to enter and transform the work, forging a motley chorus of sorts. In terms of its formal aims, I was interested in echoing the voice's unevenness with lines that always swerved past or stopped short of their predecessors, keeping things warbling and unstable.

The formal imbalance of those tercets, I think, led to the more conceptual framework of my second book, Becoming Weather, where disequilibrium becomes an unpredictable yet grounding force for the words. This book is composed of three long poems, the first of which actually began as a failed long American Music-style poem that I flayed into something wholly disparate. This process mirrored its conceptual conceit, which is to comment on how the body is forever subject to anatomizing forces that intend to still or abstract it into some semblance of balance. The second poem, "The Small Dance," endeavors to get the poem back on its feet and chart the resulting dynamics as it staggered around the page. The final poem, "This False Peace," uses a fractured version of prose as an indictment of the promises and uses of peace as an idea. The whole book, as far as I understand it, is an entreaty against balance or equilibrium or stillness. I am interested in forms that might actually conduct something of the body's inherent disequilibrium as it moves, unpredictably and obliquely, through the aforementioned flux of the world.

More recently, my concerns have been drifting around mistakes and songs. It is my small ambition to write the first major work of Mistake-ism, a genre proposed by Harmony Korine with his film Gummo. As for songs, I have been reading up on cavemen and neurobiology and continental philosophy, trying to discover something about the ontological necessity of song. My critical work on rap and the Aboriginal Australian tradition of Songlines has come in pretty handy on this front. I'm thinking of all my latest poems under the tentative heading of Hymns. As I see it, one of the duties a poet can undertake remains the endless enumeration of the universe. Though invention will always be a crucial aspect of poetic work, poets are also here to remind us of the marvel of existence, no matter how banal the territory of the poem gets. And, insofar as we are singing beings, it seems given to us to sing the universe back to itself. Like I always say, keep an open mouth.