Marty Cain
“I’m admittedly a sporadic and nomadic reader and writer—I don’t have much of a routine practice, and this tendency has only gotten worse once I became a parent. But this desk is probably the closest thing I have to a home base for reading and writing—which, let’s be real!—are the same thing.”
Readings
A book of poetry that was important to you when you were starting out as a poet
Larry Levis, Elegy (Pitt Poetry Series 1997)
The summer after my sophomore year in college, I had way too much free time—it makes me literally ache now, knowing how much I took that for granted—but I spent a lot of afternoons sitting in the sun reading poetry, and this is when I shifted from being someone who liked poems to being someone who full-on drank the poetry Kool-Aid, finding that reading and writing poems allowed me to answer questions I’d had my entire life. I have a very clear memory of ordering Levis’s Winter Stars and walking to the campus post office to pick it up; I read a pretty big chunk of it while walking home, and by the time I got back to my dorm, I’d decided I wanted to read everything he’d written. The next Levis book I read was Elegy. It didn’t have the immediate impact upon me that Winter Stars did, but it’s the one that’s stuck with me over the years as my writing has increasingly strayed from the “I”-centric, epiphanic narrative mode that Levis perfected. It ferments in my brain, I think, because Elegy (maybe by virtue of being a posthumous work) is far rawer than Winter Stars—and while it stages the long, swirling narratives for which Levis is best known, it also pushes the constraints of this form to their absolute limit. My favorite poem in the book, “Elegy for Whatever Had a Pattern in It,” leads the reader through a narrative of acid trips, agricultural labor, spiders, and death, and as its numerical sections progress, they begin to fissure the poem’s lines and its logic; time falls apart, and so does narrative: “all we are / Is the design or insignia that misrepresents what we are” (38). At the end of the poem, Levis suggests that perhaps “we’re put on the earth to forget the ending, & wander. / And walk alone. And walk in the midst of great crowds” (39). The act of wandering is one of violent euphoria; it feels fitting to me that I fell in love with poems while walking aimlessly with a Levis book in my hands. Poetry, for me, has been an act of solitary wandering that led me to a crowd. I’m grateful for this crowd—poetry, for me, is rooted in togetherness—and that’s why I’ve stuck with this shit over the years.
A work of fiction
B. R. Yeager, Negative Space (Apocalypse Party 2020)
I feel an intense intimacy with this novel, almost like I previously encountered it in a dream or nightmare. It’s rooted in small-town New Hampshire, a part of the world that’s very similar to where I grew up (the southeastern corner of Vermont). While most of the contemporary literature I’ve read about the rural northeast is bad, airbrushed, and offensively reduced into a quaintly pastoral caricature, Negative Space dives headfirst into the griminess and horror of rural adolescence; it circles around occult practices, shitty parents, and teenagers taking a weird, fictional salvia-esque drug that’s connected to a suicide epidemic. Despite the fact that Negative Space very much takes place in its own universe, it resonates strongly with the real-world problems of rural New England—the opioid epidemic, mental health crises, etc.—without ever having to mention them directly. It’s fitting that this extremely apocalyptic book was published in March 2020. I’ve never met B. R. Yeager, but I think we’d have a lot to talk about.
A book of poetry from the past five years
Andrea Abi-Karam, Extratransmission (Kelsey Street Press 2019)
Before I found small press poetry, I felt nurtured by the D.I.Y. punk scene in the place where I grew up. Later I would learn, fortunately, that small press poetry can be—and often is—very punk and D.I.Y. One of the most punk books of contemporary poetry I’ve read is Andrea Abi-Karam’s Extratransmission—it begins with a sequence called “KILL BRO / KILL COP” that depicts, among other glorious fantasies, using a tech bro’s luxury credit card to chop off his fingers. But beyond its potent, infectious rage, it is deeply concerned—like any good punk text—with the possibility of communal belonging in the face of violence. Influenced in part by the catastrophic fire at the former Ghost Ship DIY space in 2016, Abi-Karam’s book explores the challenge of fostering outsider spaces in gentrified dystopias. I’ve never been to Oakland—the locale where Extratransmission takes place—but I found this book to be deeply resonant with my own experiences of attempting to foster countercultural art community in Ithaca, NY. Especially this passage:
there’s something still about an empty building, something that is frozen, still nothing even though it could be so many things. a location for generator shows, squat space, a space before it becomes something slick & clean—a place before it is something. tonight it is a place for the fawn to sleep (92).
I’m reminded strongly, here, of José Esteban Muñoz’s beautiful analysis of empty queer punk spaces in Cruising Utopia. And I am reminded, too, of poetry and punk as technologies of utopian potentiality.
Writings
from 2010 TACOMA SUBGARDEN NAVIGATOR
[NORMAL, IL > CINCINNATI, OH]
I shit for the first time in three days
I fall asleep with MTV on
& the next morning on the road
I think of redundancy as the empty churches
of Bloomington give way to prairie
grain elevators anatomically rupture
WET AND GOLD and SPREAD OUT like concrete bruises or
nurtured monoliths of horniness in rain as green disentangles
I’m making 85 angularly sneezing to close my eyes
for a second JESUS IS COMING at you LIVE standing
in a vat of fishy water and they hold a Colt 45
to your eye if you try to drink THIS GUN PINK /
AND BRANDISHED this truck a war machine
or nomadic destroyer crossing Cold War networks
and Mike Watt said punk was “touring and taking control”
but I’m not even in control of this Tacoma
or sex or myself
or my postdoctoral stipend
I will start a poetry & punk venue
or else commit suicide
I want //
to stop
in Indiana to write it down but
my phone-arm says a tornado is coming
like actually coming! so then I’m in Cincinnati
in hills again once again able to triangulate
afore my body cracked sidewalk & sky
a motorized ball of thread unravels
from my chest connecting to roads
that appear on my phone like a slithering hellion or
heroin moving through my hometown
MYSELFFFFFFFF AM HELLLLLLLL
the babies bonking skulls on coffee tables
and vacant skeletons of MIDCENTURY PHARMACIES
towers GOOD TIME TONIC towers wash over
to pad the sonic corners
of my toddling brain the rain
is like fat-ass bullets outside Aditi’s house we move
couches and set up chairs and drink wine & I
have that feeling I’ve wanted this whole time
[PERMEABLE]
where I know the room before my body
[AND ECSTATIC]
emptied out
THIS BOOK COULD BE YOUR LIFE
or not apart
[BUFFALO, NY > HAMTRAMCK, MI > CHICAGO, IL]
I enter Buffalo
I squeeze Joe’s arm
the lightning sets in
so we uproot the reading
from the public commons
to Sgro’s house and set up chairs
AN INCLOSURE ACT of poetic skin
and upstate weather
a woman gives me a rave bracelet
while gripping my hand / I wake up
on the West Side with a splitting headache
I don’t feel like writing
fuck this shit!
I slept on an air mattress that sank
into hardwood planks
TO BE CRADLED BY AIR over night
I cross the border into Ontario
and smoke with Molli
on a Hamtramck street corner
who tells me parenting is continual self-
forgiveness & I WILL FUCK UP
or am fucking up currently feeling
hunger, shame, something
moderately unnamable or fungible
toddling behind the illusory curtain
Isaac says everyone he knows
is sad
I take a drag
I SEE YOU! says Mae in my brain
and I am totally fucked
in a cheap hostel sleeping
by the bookstore with a hyperactive dog
who buries wet nostrils in my palm
AM I FUCKING UP! as I shower
with marmorated stink bugs dry and
stuck a bathmat swampy from
the podiatric archive
not bad for fifty bucks
the road’s unraveling endlessly like foamy
dreaming of Mae hugging my legs
on a bridge to nowhere; am I
fucked in memory or waking
spurred by the smell
of Gary Indiana EYES
OPEN to city lights with my mother driving
thru Chicago SPLIT OPEN by carnal highbeams
, , ,
The Mountain Goats: I HAVE TWO BIG HANDS
AND A HEART PUMPING BLOOD
they flattened neighborhoods
to build highways of flooding
sandy tongues of the city
yawning debris by the lake
which built more city
Gwendolyn Brooks: sit where the light corrupts your face
or the GHOST-LIKE SPHERE OF IT
Marty Cain is the author of three books of poetry and hybrid writing—most recently, The Prelude (Action Books, 2023). Individual works appear in Best American Experimental Writing, Fence, Denver Quarterly, mercury firs, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Mississippi and a PhD from Cornell University. He is currently a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell. In Ithaca, NY, he co-edits Garden-Door Press and co-organizes Ithaca House DIY, a community arts center that centers poetry and alternative print cultures. Marty was recommended to Etcetera by Joe Hall.