John Martone: From 'children's book' 2014

[To describe John Martone as our greatest living miniaturist, as I have in the past, is to go back for me to a time many years ago when Ian Hamilton Finlay & I corresponded about a poetry of small increments (one-word poems & other such concerns).  For Finlay, I believe, some form of minimalism was at the heart of the concrete poetry he was then exploring & developing, & for myself it entered into aspects of ethnopoetics & appeared most clearly in the numerically based poems (gematria) that I was beginning to write.  It’s with someone like John Martone, however, that this approach turns into a life long project, a minimal work of epic proportions, for which the following can serve as yet another instance & perhaps (as “children’s book”) a new direction for his ongoing practice.  (J.R.)]

 

my morning  

a mouse nest

 

 

mouse-hole

holding

a mind

 

 

2 joints of yr

little finger

house mouse

 

 

house mouse —
my thalamus?
amygdala?

 

house mouse
it’s always a children’s book 
 

 

two mice dead of fear in yr live trap

 

 

weak-eyed

feel our way along the wall

mouse & me

 

 

~

 

 

little worms

in the brightness

eye’s floaters

 

 

out of touch

lie down

in snow

 

 

suddenly feeling the river below the ice

 

 

frost-shattered
stone’s
a puzzle 

 

knocking the snow

from yr boots

no one’s home

 

 

~

 

 

in layers

of winter clothes look up

at night geese

 

  

first time

for some

night geese

 

 

night geese
interrupt
a children’s book  

 

 

night geese
the horizon
passes overhead 

 

 

night geese
someone slips
on black ice 

 

night geese
the old
keep up 

 

[Excerpted from children’s book, Samuddo/Ocean publisher, isbn 978-1-304-74129-5, 2014.]