Chris Martin's American Music

‘we are never / Quiet, never quite / Free from the hallucinations / Of meaning’

It’s all pattern recognition.  Our minds constantly scan our portals on the world, eyes, ears, etc., looking first for threats or sex or donuts, and not too long afterwards  for meaning.  How does this word, this action, this object, this person fit or not fit with existing patterns in my head?  Chris Martin’s poems seem to both provoke or replicate our restless, drifting minds- what Zen calls the monkey mind .

At the semantic level, his short lines provoke us by setting a direction and changing it at the line break.  For example he exploits our interest in sex with lines like,

“I thought it terribly

important to bed

A woman of learning

To feel The Sonnets”

Or

“a nearly,  

chinless woman flashes me

Her smile only to withdraw it”.

This biological imperative gets named specifically in “Fertility for Dummies” when he notes,  ‘my biology attends / To the shapes my looking / Constructs and I am here / To appreciate the manner in which / A smoking woman / Wades through asphalt.”  I appreciate his… well, appreciation for our romantic attentions, but in “The True Meaning of Pictures” he goes beyond  sex as distraction and presents romantic love as the only solution to the ‘fantastic terror of existence.’  As Andrew Marvell  similarly noted in “Dover Beach” “Ah, love, let us be true / to one another”,  Martin concludes more broadly that ‘Our feelings instruct/ Us and yet / It’s the only thing/ To be done, Right?’

Yet more often, it seems Martin refutes this search for meaning, playing with our need for pattern, for narrative.  There’s a fatigue built into these poems.  For a maybe 10 stanzas, I connect the dots like the poem is a word game that, unlike crossword puzzles, I might enjoy.  Yet the poems resist my search for resolution.  In “American Music” he starts with a bald man at an adjacent table, drifts into the contrast between emotion and the marketplace, and then lands in Bhutan.  As we move into modernism, we’ll see more poems that resist narrative or perhaps any meaning.

The (post)modern sense of alienation  that results from a lack of agreed upon meanings, shows up In “Jokes for Strangers” as the ‘twenty first century’ ‘airshaft’ and even the ‘empty drawer’ which feel like metaphors for all of us ‘composing jokes for strangers.’   This seems confirmed as an ‘urban mirage’ which evokes a Matrix-like sense of futile, hallucinatory lives. 

“True Meaning of Pictures” promises meaning but offers instead the central image of each of us ‘moonlighting as both / Actor and director in a film” in which “you get so fucking lost / In the production that it’s days / Later, piss running down your leg / That you remember to call cut”.  That pretty much sounds like each of us at the end of first quarter, no?