Interview by Karen Corinne Herceg
Coming from a difficult family background in the blue-collar city of Binghamton, New York, Richard Martin didn’t have many advantages except for an incisive, inquisitive mind and a unique and quirky sense of humor. However, the quirks often brought him into conflict with established norms. As a high school student, he realized what he was up against and wrote, “I’ve got to get the hell out of here,” and became a rebel. He worked as a hospital orderly and eventually became an educator and prolific poet and writer. Along the way he questioned everything and encouraged everyone else to do the same. He sees writing as a radical act and an appropriate response to acceptance of the status quo, and human fallibility. His mantra is, “I’m falling apart and building something out of that.” He doesn’t suggest solutions but chronicles the contradictions and damage from our righteousness and absurdities. I’ve been fascinated by Martin’s work since we first met in the mid 1980s. His observations are probing without condescension, and his special brand of humor highlights the peculiarities of human nature as well as the mysteries of the world. He is prolific but never redundant. Given the particularly turbulent state of the world currently, I believe his work is extremely relevant, and readers can benefit greatly from his insights.
Martin is the author of nine poetry books, twelve poetry chapbooks, three short story collections, an “anti-memoir,” several pseudonymous publications, and is a contributor to well-known anthologies as well as literary magazines in America, Europe, and Australia. He is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for Poetry and was the founder of The Big Horror Poetry Series (Binghamton, 1983-1996). In February 2022, Martin was the featured poet in the American Center in Moscow’s Meet a Poet event sponsored by the US State Department. Through a livestream, Martin read 15 poems (previously translated into Russian) to an audience of 800. His entire body of work resides in The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries at The State University of New York, Buffalo where new work continues to be added. My review of Martin’s last poetry book, Leakage & Smoke, will appear in a spring edition of American Book Review. Current projects include a short story and a novel. A new poetry volume, Dear Three Pounds, is forthcoming in April 2025. A former Public Schools principal, Martin lives in Boston with his family.
Your oeuvre is vast and impressive dating back over five decades. When did you first feel the impulse to write and how has it impacted your life?
Richard Martin: In eleventh grade, I began to rebel against prescribed writing assignments. I expressed my teenage rebellion on the New York State English Regents Exam. I ignored the ordained topics and wrote what came to mind.
My next radical act was to purchase a notebook and enter my very first line: I have to get the hell out of here. Things were difficult at home, too. I tried to enlist in a Franciscan monastery, but no beads and sandals for me due to my age. I did spend a year in a Catholic seminary before jumping into the boiling pot of the late sixties. I settled on philosophy at Harpur College (now Binghamton University), dropped out for a trip cross country with a friend in my beat-up van Fanny, continued writing in notebooks, resisted the draft, re-entered school, and graduated in 1972. I wrote some poems during that time and read some poets: Rexroth, Roethke, Patchen, Ginsberg, Wright, Levertov, Ferlinghetti, and others.
Then I got married and became a father and an elementary school teacher with a family to feed. One night, I attended my first poetry reading at the State University of Geneseo (I taught in the area). An ex-Marine, Gerald McCarthy, read about his experiences in Vietnam from his book, War Story. They were narrative poems that struck me in the gut. It sparked thoughts about the years I spent working in a hospital as an orderly, washing bedpans, working on geriatric and cancer wards, and days spent in the electric-shock therapy room. The impulse to write about this flooded me. I enrolled in an elective creative writing course with Dave Kelly, the poet-in-residence at Geneseo. He read a batch of the “hospital” poems and said, “Send these out to literary magazines; this will be your first book in three years.” In 1982, I was the recipient of a NEA Fellowship in Poetry for a selection of those poems. I was thirty-two years old and called myself a poet for the first time. Eventually, the poems did become my first book, which was entitled Dream of Long Headdresses: Poems from a Thousand Hospitals published by Signpost Press.
You were a young father raising two children alone and struggling financially. You speak of poetry happening “from the side of the road to the middle of the night…in bars with napkins.” What compelled you to continue despite so many obstacles?
Obstacles are part of the writing process. Life comes with incredible challenges to understand, solve, transcend, or manage. Pain, suffering, and injustice abound. Of course, joy lurks within and without, too. But the years of being a single father were good ones. My son and daughter were fantastic. It wasn’t heavenly, mostly because I’d get tired and annoyed. But I knew how to play with and enjoy children. To a certain extent, we lived freely. When my daughter started kindergarten, she told me she couldn’t leave her seat to get a doll on a shelf, and I let her drop out of school. We went to a local diner, ordered milkshakes, and I told her about Plato’s notion of education and exploring physical movement in the early years. When she reentered kindergarten later in the year, she informed the teacher that a man named Play-Doh said kids should play more. In first grade, my son, a math whiz, got every basic number fact wrong on a worksheet, and his teacher called me for a parent conference. With big red check marks over his work, she asked me to explain his reasoning. He’d written that 6+7=13,000. “Oh,” I said, “he’s just goofing with the ten thousandth place. He knew 6+7 = 13 when he was three.” She said: “You know what I think, Mr. Martin? I think your son comes from an unstructured home environment.” “Is that wrong?” I asked.
Is your writing process more disciplined or fluid?
I write whenever writing happens. I let poems cool down, then revise, and edit. Most of my stories are written on Saturday mornings from eight to noon. Usually, I complete a draft in that time. Afterwards, I refine them. Each day we wake up to multiple worlds of domesticity, work, society, creativity, and absurdity that inhabit our consciousness as the dream world fades like a new moon. Simultaneously, there’s the fanfare of simply being alive in the world of nature. It all plays to our infinitely small attention span. All these worlds and experiences carve pathways in the mind–an invisible alchemist fuses them into voice, vision, and style. For me, writing changes over time as interactions with multiple worlds challenges and inspires the alchemist.
What inspires your creativity?
Poetry and stories are a mixture of spontaneous impulses, moods, emotions, perceptions, insights, dreams, humor, situations, illusions, and delusions. Poems percolate into consciousness via a phrase or image crossing my mind like an arrow and launching a series of rapid associations. Short stories arrive from situations encountered with family, jobs, and society. Years ago, I took a train from Boston to New York City. I was reading a book before the train was completely boarded. The conductor addressed the passengers about the merits of the Quiet Car: no conversations or smartphones. “Please respect the rules folks; we’ve been having a lot of altercations in the Quiet Car lately.” My first collection of short stories, entitled Altercations in the Quiet Car, came out of that train ride. And I did have an altercation with a passenger. I write poems as they happen, let them cool down, then revise and edit.
You’re a master at juxtaposing disparate imagery and thoughts that lead the reader off the expected track and into a world that is often erratic, unexplainable, and frequently absurd. It’s very much in tune with stream of consciousness and flows along many pathways but always with great form and purpose. What is your objective in employing this method?
When someone asked Jack Spicer about his poetry, he said they came via radio, an open window, and sometimes Martians delivered them. I always loved his notion that the poet writes what is being dictated to him without interrupting the flow. I refer to the mind as an alchemist, meaning the total mind – conscious, subconscious, unconscious, via 100 billion neurons in a dance of innumerable connections. This is where all the disparate imagery and thoughts come from in many of my poems. The muse surfaces with shifts and turns. The purpose is in immediacy, being faithful to the “dictation,” and trusting that the content and form of the poem are in harmony. Not all poems make it, and this is not to say there are no revisions. As Franz Kafka wrote: “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside of us.” I think that holds for poems, too.
In his essay, “Projective Verse”, Charles Olsen shares Edward Dahlberg’s belief that “one’s perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception.” Further perceptions (possibly streams of consciousness) establish the erratic, unexplainable, and absurd in my poems. Writing a poem is entering a trance or zone of creation– having fun and playing with language. The writer, translator, intellectual, and educator Guy Davenport made a comment to me after reading my third book. He said, “I’ve read your Modulations with real pleasure, liking the energy of your wit and invention. Everything resonates, and there’s one verbal surprise after another… escaping the all-too-usual triteness of the ametrical [sic] free-form poem that everybody writes nowadays (and reads in an adenoidal whine with fierce seriousness).”
You create a remarkable bridge between levity and solemnity. An example would be your short story collection Buffoons in the Gene Pool. Of course, tragedy and comedy are two sides of the same coin. How do you integrate this in your writing?
Years ago, I gave a reading at D.G. Wills Bookstore in La Jolla, California. After the reading a young woman introduced herself as a comedy writer. She said she enjoyed the hilarious stories I told before reading certain poems. She encouraged me to call The Comedy Store. I called when I returned to my hotel. The line was busy and that was that.
I enjoy telling stories to friends and family, mostly bizarre or fanciful little tales based on daily life. The comedic and tragic evolve organically. In the titular story “Buffoons in the Gene Pool,” two characters, Marty and Bimbo, discuss the cost of whole brain emulation or uploading consciousness into a computer and the cryonics, cryobiology and cryogenics involved in freezing a body for resurrection at a future date. They converse in the Alaskan wilderness while pretty much freezing to death and waiting for a glimpse of Sarah Palin hunting moose. In “Disasterland,” Earth is the place where all kinds of tragic things occur throughout history. Some of that is highlighted in the story, but the main character, Lloyd, believes his feet are shrinking and he has considerable difficulty putting on his pants to start his day. The coin of tragedy and comedy flips into oneness every time, like light and dark, life and death–as the Buddhists have always known.
Do you see yourself as a social critic and commentator?
The ancient Greek philosopher Democritus was called the laughing philosopher. He proposed the smallest, indivisible element in the material world was the atom. Leapfrog across the centuries, and today we live under the umbrella of inconceivable nuclear weapons. In my poem, “White Man Appears on Southern California Beach,” a disenchanted, pharmacist’s assistant imagines the money he could make by adding U-235 to the multivitamin diet. In his mind, those who consume his brand of vitamins will develop a stronger half-life of survival when the Blast Inevitable arrives. In “Normal Day” (from Leakage & Smoke) lines in the poem suggest stockpiling automatic weapons on every street corner for the easiest access to them. In Chapter 6 (Dog House) in Chapter & Verse, the main character, Martin (no relation), rages against the billions of smartphones on the planet, with the millions more added each year. His wife and children love their smartphones and like Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” prefer to not hear his rants about their addictive qualities and sinister effects on the brain. So, they build him a doghouse as his residence in the backyard. Martin morphs into a dog as the story proceeds, and his wife plots ways to dispose of him.
I’m a social critic via gallows humor in some of my work. Combine the two poems and the story just mentioned, and we get to walk down a street through a shooting gallery, addicted to our phones, with nuclear launch codes drifting through our minds like radioactive clouds. From high school, I was in a vise of contradictions. I couldn’t fathom how Christianity and Capitalism functioned in the same universe of thought and practice until both transformed into Holy Greed. This greed is the dark shadow in mass killings and the algorithms that hook kids and teenagers into spirals of depression and anxiety. We are better than all of that, and I like to challenge beliefs and perspectives that indicate we are not.
How are you inspired to meet such challenges?
Being alive in a crazy and beautiful world is inspiring. I’m dumbfounded by the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) license issued at birth and the Sixth Mass Extinction greeting card in the mailbox as I turn seventy-five. Good, old Earth has been lumbering around the sun for four-and-a-half billion years. It has taken humans, what, 10,000 years, 100,000 years, a mere nanosecond, to come up with these bookends to life on the planet. I remember reading Schopenhauer one night in my early thirties. Arthur had it rough. Supposedly, his mother threw him down the stairs when he was three years old, once she perceived he would be smarter than she. He suggested humans just stop reproducing. Life was a dream between the infinity before birth and the infinity after death, nothing more. Upbeat reading, sitting alone in my apartment. Did infinity even exist? If it did, maybe it blew up like a balloon via the Big Bang into more than 180 billion galaxies with the universe expanding into nowhere. For me, The Big Bang and the stars are everyone’s primal mother. If we would only stop and realize we are all made of the same atomic constituents, probably spiritual, too, we could show compassion for each other. Maybe, we’d realize it’s not all about “dog eat dog” ownership and property. Those are just human constructions and don’t really exist when placed in a cosmic perspective. “All Things Must Pass,” as George Harrison called his third studio album. Keats took care of beauty: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” I wish it were that simple and profound for me. Some days I’m startled by the beauty of it all and sometimes not so much.
What do you see for the future of books and writing, and how do you feel about AI?
There will always be (at least I hope so) poets and writers who write books. The question is, Will there be many people left who will read books? Videos, the internet, social media platforms seem to have surpassed reading (books) for pleasure and knowledge. Reading a book of poems, a short story, or a novel is a vertical exercise of the mind in composing meaning. According to Sven Birkerts in his book The Gutenberg Elegies (1994), this plunge for meaning might even create a soul over time. Who has time for that? We live in the horizontal age with attention spans dwindled to quick fixes of click, click, swipe, swipe.
Sure, AI will have plenty of important contributions to make in various fields, such as medicine. But like social media, it has a dark side. Imagine a country’s nuclear codes totally controlled by AI. However, I rather imagine us implementing what scientist Edward O. Wilson proposes as a solution to the environmental crisis, where AI and technology can play a role. According to him, we must commit half of the earth to nature to save the various life forms on the planet. He provides a list of the best including the Redwood Forests of California, the Longleaf Pine Savanna of the American South, and the Amazon River Basin. It’s obvious to me that reading books might assist in responding to his crucial suggestion. The light of enlightenment might just turn on in the soul.
What is your favorite aspect of being a writer?
In 1976, my first poem, “Man and the Moon,” was published, in Modern Poetry Studies. It was a great thrill getting published for the first time. Additionally, the literary journal was associated with the University of Buffalo, and more than four decades later, my books of poetry and short story collections reside in The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries at the University of Buffalo. In many ways, this full circle represents the odyssey of my writing career and personal life prior to retirement as an educator.
There were personal tragedies and storms along the way. But really, who can take a boat ride without capsizing many times or being hailed by an unexpected monster, or the mesmerizing song of a siren? Without a doubt, though, the journey was one of my favorite aspects of being a poet and writer. People were all part of it. I met writers and artists across the waves who became my best friends.
My favorite aspect of being a writer, however, was the act of writing itself. That allowed me entrance into zones of silence and solitude, ways to step outside responsibilities and time. These “zones” came in tightly compacted spaces like writing on a napkin in a bar while drinking a glass of wine. Eventually, these zones have opened wider, until I find myself on Mount Nowhere, gazing from the window of my writing room with the option to write as long as I please. It’s quite a view from the mountain. Some days, I drift out the window, becoming a companion of clouds and emptiness. But the same writing principles still apply: write on impulse and respect the odyssey.
What do you find to be the most difficult part of the writing process?
Often, it’s constructing a manuscript. How to select poems or stories needs to gel in my mind before deciding what makes the cut. It’s a time-consuming process, which can stretch over years. I sometimes create 10 to 15 different versions of a manuscript before settling on the final one. During this winnowing process, some poems or stories are replaced with newer ones. The fun, fiery moment of drafting then recedes, and the poems and stories stare at me, asking, “What do you think of me now?”
What are your plans?
I’ve begun a new poetry manuscript, and I’m editing some recent short stories. About a decade ago, I worked with a local musician, drummer Michael Macrides, to create the CD Improvised Trees, a selection of poetry set to musical interpretation from my first five books of poetry: Dreams of Long Headdresses: Poems from a Thousand Hospitals, White Man Appears on Southern California Beach, Modulations, Marks, and Under the Sky of No Complaint. Initial discussions with another artist are underway of producing video recordings of selections from the last four books: Techniques in the Neighbor of Sleep, Goosebumps of Antimatter, Ceremony of the Unknown, and Leakage & Smoke.
What advice do you have for other writers?
None, really. They know it’s something you do, or not, through all of life’s circumstances and challenges.
What advice would you give to your younger self as a writer?
Marry the first beautiful soulmate you meet in a bar; live in a trailer park; have children; ignore those who think they know what you should do; continue to do things ass-backwards; have fun and laugh; make others laugh; read and write; absorb rejection; read and write; marry the second beautiful soul mate you meet in a liquor store; have another child; read and write until you create yourself; recreate yourself as often as necessary; fall apart and put yourself back together; read and write; Love; be of service.
(This interview first appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, February 2025)
About the reviewer: Karen Corinne Herceg graduated Columbia University with a B.A. in Literature & Writing. Her second book, Out From Calaboose: New Poems, was released in November 2017. She publishes poetry, prose, essays, interviews, and reviews internationally and is currently working on a memoir. She has interviewed actor Alan Alda for the cover of Writer’s Digest and novelist Gail Godwin for The Southern Literary Review. Her review of Richard Martin’s latest poetry book Leakage & Smoke will appear soon in American Book Review. She lives in France. Her website is: www.karencorinneherceg.com.