AN ODE TO LIFE
Lisa Martin’s poetry honours bad parts, too
Book launch: Lisa Martin, Believing is Not the Same as Being Saved Where: Audreys Books,
10702 Jasper Ave.
When: 7 p.m., Wednesday, March 29 Admission: Free
FISH GRIWKOWSKY
Even superficially — a book being judged by its cover — Believing is Not the Same as Being Saved is a sad and beautiful object. Tucked inside an otherwise empty lifepreserver floating calmly on twitching water, the declarative title begs two questions: “Believing in what, precisely?” And: “Being saved in a general or more metaphysical sense?”
While Lisa Martin’s second book of poetry doesn’t presume to fully solve these mysteries, the title certainly fits the book’s rather personal, narrative exploration of various presumptions of what we deserve wandering through the human condition. As she declares in the titular prose poem, which surrounds the death of a girl at her childhood summer camp: “I flicked off a switch that summer as I walked. I wanted to understand darkness, the quality of my heart: not light, but spark.” Then, “Believe me: I want to sing, despite everything. I want to believe we all could be saved.”
Repeatedly, with something cooler than mercilessness, death visits throughout this non-fiction novel-in-poetry, chasing the fact Martin and her twin lost their first parent to cancer when they were eight, then the other when they were 23. Cleft in two, the second half of the book orbits the more recent dissolution of her marriage. The sonnets and prose poems are more curious than sentimental, more philosophical than self-pitying. Strong, in other words. Healed … to a degree.
We meet at her sister’s house under the mounted skull of an elk, laughing at a project her friend once proposed of poets reading their work with their mouths full of food, and getting into what motivates a person to transmit beauty from a diary of sorts, written over a decade — what’s lost and gained. With crisp intelligence behind darting blue eyes, she takes on all questions.
Q Your PhD this fall sounds interesting.
A It could change, but what I applied to do is to look at representations of death and representations of nature in classic children’s novels. I’m looking at the way consolation for death is usually offered in terms of nature, and asking a kind of question about how that changes in an era of climate change. If we normally console them by putting death in the context of the natural world — and we’re destroying the natural world and the kids know it — then how do our stories change?
Q How did this book come to be?
A The first poems in the books were sort of hangover poems. I was writing about my mom’s death and illness. I wrote them in 2005, that long ago. My mom died of brain cancer, and my dad died of brain cancer when I was eight, so all that deep imagery was already there. Then I had a baby in 2008, and my whole thinking about what to write about encountered this new thing I had to work my way into. For the second half of the book, it’s having babies, becoming a mother, and then divorce. All that stuff had to kind of … come. I really just sat with the material until I felt like I had something worth my readers’ time.
Q How conscious were you of the overall tone? There’s a lot about survival, but there’s almost a nihilism …
A (Laughs) Relative to my first book this is pretty light. I guess my poetry is kind of heavy, but there’s that Nietzschean idea that you have to affirm life with all of its suffering and terror. Life affirmation is where I’m going, but I don’t want to get there by cheating — I have to get there genuinely.
Q Bowls show up symbolically; your mother is a river.
A Making my way in the world I assign things certain meanings. When I’m working on a poem I’m just sort of harvesting that that I’ve already done for myself.
Q It really feels like a novel written in poems. Do you think of it as a linear narrative?
A When I’m assembling a collection I’m performing an autobiography of the time in which the poems were written by working with the thematic development of the poems. There are a few out of chronological narrative, but not an awful lot. I’m tracing an arc of thinking.
Q Right, and you’re already dealing with loss bringing this work together, and then you encounter more of it.
A The divorce was such a profound rupture. The thinking I was developing had to also stop abruptly, and something new had to start. For a long time, the working title was The Book of Opposites. I was thinking about how do the things we think are opposites sort of live together?
Q How do you imagine your children growing up will encounter this? What’s your responsibility to them?
A There’s nothing about them that is exposed here, but there is stuff about the marriage. Because it takes a high level of literacy to read these poems and understand them — a five-year-old couldn’t — I’m hoping poems are encoded in a certain way when they get it they’re at a developmental level where they’re ready to understand the story. I had to be accurate and kind enough.
Q When you do readings, people come up to you with their reactions — is that part of why you do this?
A Yeah, totally. I love it when you get some sort of genuine connection. Someone came up to me once and told me she had read the whole book at Vi’s for Pies just after getting divorced and cried the whole time. You remember that. You want to get into somebody’s process and do the thing literature has done for you.