CEREBRAL SONNETS
Poet plumbs personality
In case you were after a perfect little package of order and chaos at the same time, in Lisa Martin's terrific new chapbook of sonnets, she dedicates a poem apiece to each of the 16 Myers-briggs personality types.
With a voice so conversational you almost don't notice her rhyming couplets, Martin gathers 16 portraits under the precise mathematical branches the Jung-inspired personality test divides up: four combinations of its four sets of binaries.
If you're not familiar with the test, through a series of simple either-or poll questions, it teases out if you favour extroversion (E) or introversion (I); sensing (S) or intuition (N); thinking (T) or feeling (F); judging (J) or perceiving/ prospecting (P).
Thus, an introverted, intuitive, feeling perceiver — a rare type Martin reliably hits whenever she takes the test — would be labelled INFP.
In the poem for that type, she calls God an INFP, while over in ENFJ, wrote the great couplet:
Though Christ was something else, you're God's daughter.
Leavener of spirits. Walker on the water.
“Religious stuff is in my deep material,” Martin says, raised by religious parents who each died young of brain cancer. “That kind of slightly heretical, theological thing will come out whenever I have an opportunity.”
One of the websites she likes, 16personalities.com, labels INFPS a “mediator”: empathetic, speaking their truth and in search of a calling.
This seems like a fine recipe for why someone would perform such an experiment in the first place, though there's a funny twist in Martin's tale.
As performative masked teenagers jump for photos beside us on the cliff over the Dawson Bridge, she notes, “I actually wrote the whole series in the first place because I had been interested in Myers-briggs types.
“So I posted online asking people, `What are your types?' I wanted people to declare themselves. And someone I had kind of a crush on posted his type, and so that's how I got the first poem.
“Sonnets,” she laughs, “they always were for courting, right?”
With a symbolically faceted bird on its cover by Abhi Thambu, Martin called her resulting chapbook collection Typology.
It's being released Friday by anstrutherpress.com, and you can also grab it locally online through Glass Bookshop — currently working on a permanent space downtown by the museum.
She's working on how to do a proper release not involving screens, explaining, “I would give anything for a sparsely attended, slightly boring literary reading right now.”
Typology 's poems cover a mix of specific people and general types.
“Some of them are really like that, for one person,” she says, while others are composites the 41-year-old was finding she didn't seem to know. “Which makes sense, in a way. They maybe aren't the type to post on social media.”
For instance, for ENTJ — extrovert, intuitive, thinking and judging: the “commander,” she wrote a pure fiction.
In psychological circles, the M-B test is not without detractors, starting with its reliance on self-reporting all the way to, “OK, but what do we do with these labels, exactly?” It also sets up those questionable binaries.
“It's like you're either intuitive or you're observant. But how can you really be intuitive if you're not observant?” she asks, spring geese flying overhead. “We're always looking for something that will give us some intel, you know?”
One might find value in meditation, pineapple gummies or live action role-playing in the woods — perhaps even the distant cosmos.
But, says Martin, “For me it does it a little better than horoscopes. Given that I have a twin sister that's so unlike me, that sort of disqualifies them.”
She notes the M-B test can be reductive, “But I think I got excited about it, and wrote these poems, because I came very late to understanding how differently we all are oriented to the world. This was a kind of hack for me, to realize that there are at minimum 16 types.”
A while back, Martin was trying to deconstruct why a friend was behaving a certain way.
“I did these sort of deep dives into her Myers-briggs personality in order to understand why she wasn't really an a-----e,” she laughs, “she was just different than me.
“Are we ever going to hold a conversation where we see eye to eye? Or do we need to understand each other by virtue of how we're coming at everything from opposite angles, and that's always going to be the case?” she asks. “I had to learn to let people be radically different than me.”
This soft approach won't quite remind you of the peacocking hissfest of today's world, but it underlines the fact, for example, that not every breakup is one person or the other's “fault.”
Sometimes, it's just a collision of acronyms.
One of her poems, ISTP, ends with Martin speaking to an ex:
You simply stopped holding my hand before
the grave — not that I blame you — anymore
Martin's two previous poetry collections, One Crow Sorrow (2008) and Believing is not the same as Being Saved (2017) are at times-heart-wrenching, confronting the premature death of her parents and a marriage that didn't make it.
“A lot of my work is somebody died, guess I'll write these poems about it.”
This project, which she wrote PRE-COVID-19, “was a lot more fun.”
Notably, Martin also wrote the words to Listening for What Comes Next, an original song by Jennifer Mcmillan, sung through black masks in an empty Jube, commissioned by Edmonton Opera.
Like a smart patient seeking a second opinion, Martin also burrows into personalityjunkie.com.
On the site, one of the psychologists notes each the 16 types has an underdeveloped skill they want to jump in the order of operations.
“For me, it's thinking. Even though I studied philosophy and am capable to thinking, in terms of personal decision-making, thinking is my most underdeveloped way of doing that.”
She notes her brain makes decisions more in terms of intuition and feeling.”
“So now, a tipoff for me, if I feel that sort of hamster-wheel cognitive functioning — like I'm thinking too hard — I know I'm never going to solve it in that way.
“And then,” she says, “I just automatically relax.”