Author: Michael Martone

Michael Martone is currently a Professor at the University of Alabama where he has been teaching since 1996. He has been a faculty member of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College since 1988. He has taught at Iowa State University, Harvard University, and Syracuse University.

CP 7

Play Date

Boston
1989

We watched our kids play, or learn to play since they were very young and learning to do everything all at once. They were figuring how it all worked. This was in Tom Lux’s backyard. Tom wore a Hawaiian shirt. Loud flowers. His daughter and my son, toddlers, got into things now at the drop of a hat. We all wore some kind of hat in the sun. We watched them closely. Without taking our eyes off of them, Tom and I talked about dairy farms (Tom, the one he grew up on. Me, the one I worked on in Iowa before I came out to Boston), how dairy farmers are different, how they name their cows, how they can never leave because the herd has to be milked day-in, day-out. It was, it is, its own kind of exhausted attention. We continued to watch the kids closely as they ran near the pool. We didn’t drink, of course, but I’ll never forget how Tom, deadpan sober, always referred to Glenfiddich as Glenfidget.

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CP 8

Squeegee

Ames
1985

Mark Strand and I watched an art student pull a silk screen broadside of one of his poems. The letters were the last thing to be printed. The fine paper being used had already been randomly stained with horizontal blobs of pastel colors in such a way that no two were alike. The student asked Strand if he would like to try. He pulled the squeegee expertly, the black ink thinning out over the silk. I pulled one too. This was the easy part, I thought, the squeak the squeegee made going slowly over the silk, the words appearing magically below as you pull the ink along. Later, when we went back, the sheets had been hung up to dry like laundry. Strand signed and numbered each one over the number of the whole run. There were artist’s proofs as well that had interesting mistakes. He took home one of those. Some of the numbered sheets were given away at the reading. The rest were sold to raise money for Poet & Critic, the journal I edited. There was something so satisfying, he said, about writing with a squeegee.

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CP 9

Bundt

Swannanoa
2005

Outside it was snowing heavily. The wet snow caught on the pine tree branches and the rhododendron leaves. I had breakfast that day in the kitchen of the dorm where all the Warren Wilson faculty stayed. I didn’t want to go to the cafeteria because of the snow. I was eating a bagel and reading the obituaries of The New York Times to Linda Gregerson who was making her breakfast. That morning, the morning it snowed, I read that H. David Dalquist had died. He was 86. He founded Nordic Ware and invented the modern “Bundt” pan in 1950. He trademarked the name, used modern materials to make it, and added the signature regular folds, a guide for cutting slices. The invention really took off, the obit said, when a recipe for a “Tunnel of Fudge Cake” took second prize in the 1966 Pillsbury Bake-Off. Linda listened raptly, and then she wanted to read the obit aloud, glossing the story as she read. I listened, chewing my bagel. We both thought then that there had to be, had to be a poem in there someplace.

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CP 10

Wind

Northfield, Minnesota
2008

I grew my hair out, not cutting it at all, during the George W. Bush administration. I taught a weeklong workshop that summer at St. Olaf College, sleeping in a hilltop dorm next to a giant wind turbine the turned constantly. Carlton College, across town, had an identical wind turbine turning on another hill. It was like they were signaling to each other. I called Louise Erdrich who lives in Minneapolis. I had a little flip phone. I told her I wouldn’t be able to see her, but that I was in Northfield. I had a break between things and was saying hello. She was at home, she said, but near her computer. She told me that St. Olaf’s had a “webcam.” This was something new then, webcams, and she directed me where to find one. I went outside on the road near my dorm. I found the camera in the eves of a nearby hall and looked up at it. The wind turbine was turning slowly behind me in the distance. I waved at the camera, the phone at my ear. “Your hair,” Louise said, “it’s so long.”

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CP 11

Traps

Baltimore
1978

The only thing we talked about were the cockroaches of Baltimore. Cockroaches began showing up in the poems and stories being considered in the seminars. The program was only one year. Not even a year, really, but the nine months, the school year. Not even nine months as the thesis had to be finished by February so it could be typed and formatted perfectly. We talked more about cockroaches than we did about our poems it seemed. Once, I opened a cupboard door and the back of the door came alive, a swarm of cockroaches. Elizabeth Spires was from Circleville, Ohio, famous for its pumpkins. Her father was an exterminator. She knew about cockroaches, and her father sent new glue traps. You could look inside and see the long antennae of the mired insect waving slowly back and forth. Beth was the only one of us that had a new IBM Selectric typewriter. It had a tiny memory that allowed the machine to erase a mistake. We talked about the cockroaches in Beth’s traps and her typewriter.

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CP 12

Blue Rain

Syracuse
1991

I had just started teaching at Syracuse, and, one day a first year undergraduate student walked in my office wanting an independent study in poetry. There was an intro class I told him. He said both of his parents were poets. He felt he was beyond intro. Adam Cohen was his name. We talked more about poetry and poets and then about Greece. Suddenly, I thought to ask, “Cohen?” I asked. “Your father is Famous Blue Raincoat Cohen?” “Yes,” he answered. I had been hired as a prose writer. I was still learning the ropes there, but I signed him up for an independent study class in poetry. He said, “Cool.”

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CP 13

Boxcar

Bloomington
2011

After my reading at Boxcar Books, Ross Gay and I remembered Don Belton who had been murdered two years before, the murderer’s conviction pending. I met Don when we both taught a semester at Warren Wilson. Later, I arranged for him to teach a term in Tuscaloosa. He hired a national van line to move his books, furniture, and clothes to Alabama. I told Ross about the move. The van arrived before Don did. I supervised the unloading at university-owned house. Fort Wayne is the headquarters of North American Van Lines. I grew up thinking it was The City of Blue Trucks. There were always blue trucks cycling through, packed with households looking to land. Indiana, the Crossroads of America. Don shipped a lot even though he had no permanent home then. Don arrived a few days later. I met him on the edge of town so he wouldn’t get lost finding his way home. Don had found a home in Bloomington, Ross said. His books, papers, ephemera are all now stored in the Lilly Library. Then, Ross told me about the trees he was going to plant when the weather turned colder.

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CP 14

Confession

DeWitt
2006

I told W. D. Snodgrass that his book, Heart’s Needle, was the first poetry book I had ever bought. I was a student at Indiana-Purdue University in Fort Wayne in Robert Novak’s class in the spring of 1976. I confessed I read “April Inventory” every April since then. We did a reading together at Le Moyne College. It was the first time I had been back to Syracuse after I left the university there in 1996. He had taught at Syracuse too, for ten years, 1958-68, at a time when English Departments still had classes in rhetoric, speech, and debate. I read first in what was now the standard singsong, voice rising as it nears the end of a line. It was strange and miraculous the way Snodgrass read, an old-fashioned platform speech, delivered stressing the beats, pounding the accents as he scanned with a booming voice, feet stamping. It was stunning to hear poetry delivered that way. I thought of an old scratchy record I heard once of Vachel Lindsay performing, not quite singing singing, a proto-rap. It was exhausting and Snodgrass, at the end, was exhausted.

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CP 15

Tiles

Hudson
1999

One thing I remember about my trip was the famous water tower located on the highest point in Ypsilanti. Janet Kauffman drove us by it on the way to her house in the country. I grew up not too far away in Indiana. It’s a glacial plain and had been swampy hardwood bog until it was cleared and drained. Janet’s place had been a farm, a farm surrounded by farms, farms in fencerow-to-fencerow corn and beans now. Her place had been a farm, but now she was letting it go wild. She was letting the place be what it wanted to be. She wanted me to see how it was coming back, show me how she had broken the tiles, the tiles buried underground. There were pools now and ponds percolating. The ground where we walked was spongy. Bramble and scrub sprouted from seeds that had been dormant for 100 years. Same thing happened when they broke the tiles in the Limberlost in Indiana too. It was wild and beautiful. Her neighbors thought she’d gone mad, she said, and patrolled their properties’ borders looking to staunch the leakage.

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CP 16

Nerf

Chicago
2012

The literary Death Match was held at Buddy Guy’s bar, and Mark Doty and I (somehow) were judges. I first met Mark 20 years before in Iowa when he was teaching at Drake and writing poems with Ruth as MR Doty. We remembered together in between making calls, shooting the losers (Jane Smiley, Major Jackson, Darin Strauss, and Roxane Gay—even though she turned out to be the winner) with spongy darts launched from Nerf guns. It was late by the time we made it out to the street to say goodnight. “We’ve come a long way from Iowa.” The streets of Chicago were filled with drunken poets and writers in town for the AWP convention.

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