Richard Martin

Marks

Paradise/Asylum Arts
5847 Sawmill Road

Paradise, CA 95969

96 pages $12

Richard Martin keeps an irascible sense of distance from everything that doesn’t move. The poems are as far from the deadly serious experimental academic avant-garde as they are from conventional mainstream emotive/confessional modes. Somebody is bound to think Richard Martin is not serious. It isn’t that these poems aren’t alive, on the page . . . if you look closely enough you can see their little eyebrows move.

Words have volume.

Someone lit a match

And half of your vocabulary

Landed in the back yard.

                                                   — "Gas Meter"

I walk in fear of saying something naïve about these weird poems because they sound naïve, cartoonish:

the can of headache in the back

of the head opens

He talks about cerebral things as if they were the subject of everyday debate. Richard Martin should have a guest-voice shot on The Simpsons. Then I would watch it.

Consider the world

We make with our brains

The soul is no treadmill

It careens inside of the body

Like a rubber hat

This will hurt you

                                              — "Mushroom of Sensation."

What are Richard Martin’s poems when you see them for the first time?

It’s no accident our brains are made of mud

We’re fortunate to have words

Twist them into wings

Awkward animals fly

                                               — "Elements"

—Dennis Formento