From over two-hundred-and-fifty 2024 Michelle Boisseau Poetry Prize entries our judge, beloved poet and recent Bear Review contributor Cass Donnish, chose Michael Martinec's poem "February" as the winner. Donnish saw in the piece what each of our first readers saw and see in it: a poem at once local and global and historical, current and future-forward, new in the associative risks it takes at every leap and turn, while also sounding traditional in voice (I hear Larry Levis whispering near), diction and the meanings that accrue along the line-break junctions where sound links up with sense. We held our conversation, transcribed below, over a single call and an email exchange in the span of about two-and-a-half weeks.  

 

Marcus Myers: Let's start with process and the revision of your winning poem "February," which our contest judge Cass Donnish selected as the winning poem. What went into the composition of this poem? And how did these steps differ from other really good poems you've written and are currently at work drafting? Please know I call few poems great and like to think one day, a hundred or more years from now, your really good poems will stand apart from the rest and rise into rarefied airspace, where I imagine the aura around really good poems turns the blue-violet of those great ones we still read from, like, 1925. Ha!

 

Michael Martinec: Well, the composition of this poem isn't a very good example of my writing or editorial process. I wrote this poem in February of 2022 at my kitchen table one morning while my roommate at the time was on a conference call with his business partners right behind me. Not the most poetic or romantic way to write, but it got the job done, I hope. I wrote the whole poem in one of those demonic flurries that happens to a writer once in a blue moon, a freak accident of sorts. I sat down to write with one line in my head, which was the last bit of the poem, "the world will always become lovers," which is a misreading of "the world will always welcome lovers," which is a line from the song "As Time Goes By" (I'm a big old Hollywood fan and Casablanca is a personal favorite). So, essentially, I wrote moving towards that line or sentiment with a wish to complicate it somehow. I had been wanting to capture the anxiety of the current moment somehow; we'd just come out of COVID and George Floyd protests and Trump 1. I had also experienced some serious loss in my life during that same time and was looking at this world that seemed to me incredibly uneasy. And the main thrust of writing this poem was that I was newly in love. I had been engaged previously and that ended just a couple weeks before lockdown, then I lost a few family members in the short span of a couple months. I didn't handle it super well, if we are to be honest. So, a good part of the anxiety in this poem comes not just from the events of the outside world but my own misgivings, fears, anxieties around falling in love again, and an anxiety about letting another person close to me who will leave or (heaven forbid) die. And I was scared of how I would handle those things if they happened again. What was I doing entering into another intimate relationship? Am I just using this person to heal? Am I using this relationship to shield myself from the events of the world? Am I going to be responsible for hurting this person? Am I building something up to then walk away from it or blow it all up? That's where all of the Sade Abe business enters the poem (also a result of movie watching, and, in this case, In the Realm of the Senses). About halfway through writing the poem I gathered what I was writing about and the rest of the poem basically finished itself. The whole composition was done in about 20-30 mins and then I sent it off to a friend and my professor. That was that, as they say. 

 

Oddly, I didn't do much editing on this poem which is not my usual M.O. Editing is my favorite thing about writing or any creative process and I had to resist fussing with this poem because my professors and friends all proverbial slapped my hand away so I wouldn't change too much. I have brilliant friends who love to give me their opinions, unfiltered, and that is the greatest blessing an artist of any kind can have. I'm not afraid to take a knife to my work, and I also can be guilty of over-editing and needing to find my way back to what made the poem work in the first place. I'm a slow writer in the sense that I don't pump out poems everyday even just for practice. I accumulate ideas, lines, images, etc. until I can feel them coming together in some way and then I begin a poem. In a sense, that is what I did with "February," as well, though in a much, much quicker fashion. 

 

Marcus: Apropos of the opening lines about the snow, how fitting the poem happened in a fury (not a flurry) and could not wait for a better time than while your roommate Zoomed with his business partners: 

 

It’s snowing in Texas.

 

I didn’t see snow

until I was twelve.

That too

was a confused

 

snowfall in June.

Were things wrong

even then, or

was it, as I assumed,

 

magic? Cecilia

is calling from

California. I tell her

 

I’ve been thinking

about temporality…

 

And let me just say, while we’re here, how beautifully the rare snow (er, wintry mix, “mostly ice”), in poem-present-tense Texas, and less rarified snow from a summer trip to the mountains in the speaker’s past, just how sublimely your memory vision becomes the uncanny land- and headscape of 2021. I remember how time not only moved differently—it slowed down, it let the clock tick, tick, tick in my dining room and take its standard measurements, for sure—but it also, lol, let itself be turned inside out, shortened, expanded, fragmented, pulsated, denuded, filtered, buffered, transmitted, streamed and reconstituted by the phones, tablets and laptops in our household. Because a pandemic had happened around my family’s 1912 bungalow in 1918 and 1919, just over a hundred years prior to 2020, and since this home had, no doubt, housed at least one other person who had, while tuned in anxiously to radio and news print info about the pandemic, and I imaged them doing so after having hung up their hats and mask(s), after trekking out for groceries and back (or not! maybe they, as had so many of the willfully ignorant in Kansas City, maybe they resisted wearing their masks, claiming the mandate to wear them pinched and restricted their freedom of choice—and maybe one of these unfortunate souls left their body here? Who knows?). But I pictured time wrapping my family with them in dusty sconce light, in a sort of asynchronous spiritual quarantine of the eternal return, regardless of anybody's politics, enduring a mandatory two months of lockdown here that first year of COVID-19 as a quiet echo of the past century. In this way, the crisis popped time away from its wall and ceiling, like a crowbar prying away crown molding, releasing the dormant spirit from the varnished and painted material of the past like no other. Your poem speaks so clearly to our readers, especially those who, like us poets and artists, think about temporality and how this plays out materially in the memory and imagination, and it especially speaks to those of us who looked for the right language for a poem to circle around time, which is the heart valves of the uncanniest of days past, present, future. 

 

Marcus: And before I stop writing this round, let me share with you and your readers what Cass Donnish, this year’s judge, had to say about it and the topic we’re discussing: 

 

“In the expansive poem 'February,' the line blurs between a capricious climate and the layered dialogues of human intimacy. The conversational pollinates the epistolary; wistfulness transforms into philosophy. The voice here is rooted in specific moments and memories—unseasonable snow, witnessed in childhood—and we are compelled to follow as it morphs, reflects, reflexively moving into realms of eroticism, speculation, and violence before returning to the materiality of people reaching for each other through language, listening for the fragments that form a day, a love, a life.”

 

What Donnish says here about how our intimacies are layered—this really comes through for me in your piece. I enjoy how the piece turns and swings open to vulnerability on the hinges affixed by a misheard line from “As Time Goes By” and a misremembered quote by Cecilia, also a poet. From what I’ve read in your manuscript, some of which you shared ahead of this conversation, you have an impulse toward the confessional. Or maybe the impulse simply points your speaker toward a representation of the personal? But I don’t see much of any masking in these pieces, so maybe I needn’t use the word speaker when unpacking your poems? Could you, um, speak to this? 

 

Michael: Ha! I don't even think he (my roommate) was on a Zoom call, I think he was just on speaker phone, loudly. To drown him out I was forced into myself, so maybe it was a good thing. One thing I forgot to mention in terms of process: I often will play the same song over and over again while I write. I usually expect that song to play for hours and hours while I work, especially if the poem I'm working on is really clicking. I remember putting in my headphones to drown out the conference call behind me - I picked a cover of  New Order's "Ceremony" done by Galaxie 500 (it has a sound I want to describe as slushy).

 

To your point on temporality, during the pandemic, time seemed to move at an abnormal speed and in all directions. For a lot of folks I think time slowed to a crawl. I was still having to physically go into work, sitting in this depeopled space everyday, and it caused me to disassociate like I was living in a white noise machine. It was a space where time was moving at that same crawl for me as it was everybody else and that collective sense felt safe. But the outside world was as much in chaos as was my emotional state, everything was moving at hyperspeed and jumbled. Outside of work, I had little to grab onto; I was in such a state of ubiquitous grief that I wanted the pandemic to continue. There was a shared sense of grief from around the world that felt comforting to me, which was a bizarre feeling to say the least. I didn't want that feeling to go away. I was scared of the day that things would go back to normal again. What happens when we stop grieving? What happens if I'm no longer grieving? 

 

That's a part of what I'm exploring in "February," the way our perception of time and memory will, given the chance, fold in on themselves, speed up, slow down, go backwards, go forwards, mix and distort different moments etc. In your case, you began to contemplate the history of the home you now lived in: what literal and metaphorical ghosts lived with you and your family? For me, my grief in those days resulted in all of these different memories and speculative futures happening all at once and sandwiched on top of each other squeezing out the present moment. I started telling friends I felt a sense of dislocation. I always felt in the wrong spot, the wrong moment - "unstuck in time," as Vonnegut would say.  As a result, the poem is equally dislocated from time and place, despite the definitive setting of Texas, and turns on something(s) being twisted and out of place. As Cass writes about the poem, "it morphs." It is unstable like memory and flows associatively, not with a strict logic. 

 

I have been asked this question of how to refer to the "speaker" of my poems, or some version of it, several times now. And so far I've yet to come up with a truly satisfactory answer even for myself. However, for me, I'm more comfortable if a person reads my poems and says, "In the poem, Michael is doing XYZ." That feels more honest to my work. Claiming a poetic persona or refering to the "speaker" makes me feel like I'm distancing myself from what has happened in the poem or in the part of life that inspired it or my mind that has created it. "Michael" in the poem is very much a fictional version of myself and a fictional version of any event I might depict, but I write from my own sense of the world. I just don't particularly care for any distinction between my poems and myself, not in a way that would require a need to separate the two entities so sharply. Even if the content of a poem ranges wide and abstract, or violent and angry, I'm not writing from the perspective of anybody else. Like I said, not the most satisfactory of answers. 

​

Marcus: Let’s pivot, now, to your early and more recent literary and other media and arts influences. On the phone we spoke of film and Rimbaud, and your work definitely has a kind of Texas hill-country noir or neo-noir sensibility. I sense Larry Levis’ influence, particularly in a kind of duende-like attunement to the world’s abyssal or cosmic song of pained beauty, as those who, like me, love Lorca, Rilke, Frank Bidart and Terrance Hayes might put it. What are your aesthetic influences, and how do you see them showing up in this poem and others you’ve been working on? 

​

Michael: So, I've never read Larry Levis, but I know others who love him. One day I'll read his work--putting it on the list. I do love Lorca and Frank Bidart and Terrance Hayes. I think the connection between all of my influences is the sense of surprise I get when I read, or watch, or listen to their art. I can be pretty jaded when it comes to the art I consume -- I've simply taken in so much of it that it takes a distinct voice to shake the jade from me, so to speak. The aforementioned Rimbaud was the first poet I ever found for myself. I was shocked that this was considered poetry. I thought to myself, "This is poetry?! You can say that?! You can do that and it's taken seriously?!" I have a favorite story I like to steal to relate what it was like to read Rimbaud for me: in some music documentary the crew is interviewing Iggy Pop about what it was like when he first heard the Kinks on the radio as a kid. He describes having this epiphanic moment of "Oh! this is music, you can do this? It doesn't have to be Bach?!" He describes it as something akin to a "punk rock moment." That's how I feel about my early encounter with Rimbaud.

 

In recent years I've come to know and love Henri Cole's work. I read all of his books in grad school and have always reached for them when I'm searching for a spark. His sonnet "Radiant Ivory" is often in my mind as I write, and it leaves me a bit stunned each time I read it. It moves in a swirl and the volta, which are really a succession of voltas, just pull you beautifully to the end of the poem. It leaves me feeling dizzy in the best way. It's a pile of abstract images that resolves into the loneliness of grief. And he imparts a feeling of tenderness like no other male poet that I know of. That exploration and acceptance of tenderness, of softness, of aloneness - that's important to me. I can't overstate how often I turn to his work in life and poetry. He would have definitely been top of mind and bookshelf while composing any poem of mine in recent years. I can say the same of a poem like James Schuyler's "Korean Mums." These poems have wandering minds which I can relate to; they "morph" as we have talked about. These are pieces that take surprising, unexpected turns, either in their changing subjects, or language, or construction.

 

I think it's almost cliché for a poet to name Louise Glück as an influence these days, but Louise Glück. The Wild Iris was the first book of contemporary poetry that I ever bought when I was 14. (Shout out to my suburban Barnes & Noble that has since closed and become a Gold's Gym; poetry section - small and at the back.) I had been through my Rimbaud collected works and wanted to see if there was something newer that I could read. I haven't the slightest idea now why I grabbed The Wild Iris but I did. I purchased Averno at the same time so maybe it had something to do with that. But The Wild Iris was the book, out of the two, that imprinted on me at the time. I've never stopped reading her work. I think reading her work kept me writing poetry when I was young, it showed that a contemporary voice isn't out of reach, if that makes sense. Not that I'm Glück, but Rimaud was long, long dead and so his work existed in the same realm as Shakespeare to me. Glück was alive and working and American and spoke like it, too. I feel like nobody can break a line like Louise Glück. Somebody wrote once that if you took a sentence from her work and laid it flat like prose and then tried to break the lines yourself you'd never come close to the power that she can uncover, seemingly without trying. I think that's true. She was special in a way that will only become clearer with time. And it's not like she was some unknown in her life! She was singular. I aspire to break a line like she does. I aspire to her level of clarity of vision, of openness. Her poems have a brutal honesty that we should all aspire to, a brutality that opened up the poems and opened up the hearts and minds of the reader.

 

Movies were my first way into any kind of artistic world. I used to watch an unhealthy amount of TCM as a kid. I'd check the tv guide at the back of the Life & Arts section in the newspaper for what was playing that evening. I had a few blank VHS tapes I'd use to record movies I wanted to watch, and not having ever heard of most of the movies I based my habits off of the star ratings the newspaper gave them haha!

​

I range wildly, but in terms of purely the images they create I'd say the films of Terrance Malick, particularly Tree of Life, stay with me. Films by Alain Renais, Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad, have had a big influence on not just the images that I wanted to create but the manner in which I relayed them. And in particular a poem like "February" was influenced in its shifting thought process and imagery by the films of Renais. They play with memory, repetition, and of course, perceptions of time, all while moving in some sort of romantic dream state.

​

Marcus: In the poem “Unspool,” originally published in Husk Zine, which you shared with me before we began this conversation, you write about one’s ability to sort of move through time by way of memory-colored perceptions when you, not a speaker, state: 

 

I want to say: my sentences broke, mov-

ing back & forth through time but still

in the same moment, like film reels 

played over each other unspooling different 

scenes from different times, each scene 

semi-dissolved, projected all at once,  

compressed, pressured – a life flattened.

 

In this sense the poem, like memory, has sort of become your time machine or cutting room floor of historical film? If this isn’t overstating it, does your vehicle or room transport you to a documentary or auto-fictional narrative? Are you flexible, or flexible enough, to remain open to changing details or conflating events for a better poem? 

 

Michael: It's definitely not an overstatement—I've referred to my work as auto-fiction before, actually. My memories or life is just a jumping off point, a prompt. I don't think of my poems as documentary nor do I compose them that way. Most scenes and situations in my work are an amalgam of several different things— memories, stories I've heard, stories I've made up, details from my day to day— anything that I feel is related. I sort of smash them all together to see what new thing comes of the smashing. Often, I've thought of the changing of details or conflation of different events as a sort of media transfer. Like if you are adapting a novel into a movie there are scenes that need to move around or be added/subtracted to fit whatever kind of story the writer or director want to tell, or how multiple people are rolled into one to keep things concise and prevent confusion between characters. I'm doing the same thing, just adapting my life to poetry. The general framework is my life, sure, but within the frame I give myself permission to experiment or change something that I think will improve a poem. I'm not sure I feel much need for art to always be mimetic (though, that might be a rather privileged position to take...); I'm a firm believer in facts never getting in the way of a good story, let's say that. 

 

But for me, "Unspool" is less a form of willful time-travel (though it is that too) than simply the way I was moving through the world, that state of constant, benumbed grief, when I started writing it.  I wasn’t trying to consciously relive any memories; I was lost and seeing all sides at once which kept me from finding a way through my grieving. I got lucky in the sense that it seemed to sum up my (then) current project and simultaneously opened me up to experiment with my poems; shifting memories and subjects and images in poems, often seeing words or images repeat, then complicating themselves in different poems and scenes. I wanted to convey a sense of incessant deja vu. I know I just said "I don't feel the need for art to always be mimetic," but I mean that in terms of the relation of facts to a memory or story. In essence, my manuscript was about relaying, trying to mimic, the way grief affected and infected every aspect of my living. Selfishly, perhaps a bit petulantly, I wanted to plop these chaotic feelings in the lap of the reader, or whomever crossed my path, for as long as  they could stand it.

 

Marcus: Your statement, “I was lost and seeing all sides at once which kept me from finding a way through my grieving,” fascinates me, as I’m sure it will any of our readers interested in elegy and the relation between strong, i.e., unspeakably raw emotion, which poems in every lyric mode need beneath them like a current of air to help us lift our voices on their wings. The elegy, like auto-fiction, depends on a kind of reifying self-reflexivity, one in which the person or life-formation lost to a real or symbolic death gets resurrected by ruminative scenes from the past. While this postmortem self-examination has always made for good elegiac verse, or even odes once the poet has let the weight of time and the loved one’s being move through and out of their bodies and into the sunlit world again, it doesn’t make for being well because such flights into the past become a tether to traumatic or unpleasant events, or these enormous, clipped wings in the present.

 

Do you ever wish you didn’t feel so deeply? Which begs a related line of questioning: Do you think we feel more acutely because we’re poets, conditioned as we are by our aesthetic tastes and sensibilities? Or do you think we—or you, please don’t feel you have to take on my risky overgeneralization by speaking for all of us—became a poet because you feel as acutely as or more so than most? 

 

Michael: Yeah, well, what I can say with certainty: that state of mind was not ideal for any healing or remaining in any kind of present moment. 

 

 As for the how or why of “why I became a poet:”I think I had no other option than to become a poet. It just fit. I do think that it was something that was going to happen eventually. I'd tried other creative outlets and nothing held my attention or accomplished the level of communication of feeling that I wanted. Specifically, I accomplished a level of communication with myself. That was the draw long before using it as a means of communicating my feelings to the world – it was how I made sense of myself. And I first wrote a poem long before I read any poetry. I haven't thought of this memory in a million years, but the summer I was twelve I went on a boy scout trip to Colorado. If you've never been to one of those it's basically summer camp where you take merit badge courses. I wasn't exactly in love with doing that for a couple weeks away from my friends. In the "Nature" merit badge course one of the requirements was to go sit in nature for 30 minutes or something and describe what you saw. Without thinking about it, I broke my lines on the page. And I enjoyed writing, the act of it. Funny enough it was at this camp that I first saw snow, the "confused snowfall in June." I hadn't thought of that in a million years or hadn't put those two aspects of that trip together. 

 

Anyhow: Did I have a natural inclination towards poetry because of my interior, inward looking nature? I think so. But at the same time I've gained great depth of feeling by chasing poetry, art, aesthetic sensibility - exploring other people's points of view gives us a greater sensitivity to the world and to our own personhood. So, both. Both is my answer - I am a poet because of both. 

 

Marcus: Thank you, Michael, for your poem and conversation. I'm so glad we at Bear Review have gotten to meet you.  

 

Michael: Thank you, too, Marcus and everybody at Bear Review and Cass Donish for selecting my work--I'm honored.