Acclaimed poet Dawn Lundy Martin at Black Poetry Day, Oct. 17

Oct. 12—PLATTSBURGH — Acclaimed poet Dawn Lundy Martin, PhD will reading at Black Poetry Day, Tuesday, Oct. 17 at 7:30 p.m., in Krinovitz Recital Hall, Hawkins Hall, SUNY Plattsburgh.

Martin, 55, is settling into her new post as Professor & Distinguished Writer in Resident, for the Written Arts Program at Bard College after her previous stint as Toi Derricotte Chair in English and the director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) at the University of Pittsburgh.

In Annandale-on-Hudson, Lundy Martin transitions into a radically different life balancing family, work, creative space, and self-care.

Her first full-length collection, "A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering" (University of Georgia Press, 2007), was selected by Carl Phillips for the 2007 Cave Canem Poetry Prize.

She is also the author of "Good Stock Strange Blood" (Coffee House Press, 2017), winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Award; "Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life" (Nightboat Books, 2014); and Discipline (Nightboat Books, 2011), which was selected by Fanny Howe for the 2009 Nightboat Books Poetry Prize.

NEW BOOKS

Wednesday Lundy Martin received a choice of covers for her new book, "Instructions for The Lovers" forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2024.

"This is a book of poems that I was working on shortly before we were asked to shelter-in-place," she said.

"So that's coming out, and I'm working on a memoir. It's a new book project that I'm working on, and it's called 'When A Person Goes Missing.'"

Lundy Martin is behind deadline on the project, which will be published by Pantheon Books.

"It kind of takes its cue from an essay that I wrote a few years ago with the same title, which was published in n+1, which was about my brother going missing for a couple of days and us trying to find him," she said.

"He's older than me. The essay really explores this notion of Black exceptionalism and the converse. When somebody is pegged as the exception, which I was in my family, and then my brother was the way our parents treated him was that he was whatever the opposite of the exception is."

Her brother was a regular kid, and their lives took radically different trajectories.

"He lives a life of poverty," she said.

"He has kind of had some struggles with the law. The book is really attempting to tell the story of my family, but also think about the invisible systems in this country that likes to maintain those divergences in order to sustain itself, right, and to sustain its own animation of the capitalist regime.

"So that's really the exploration of that book. You think that exceptionalism is a great thing, and you feel great when you're exceptionalized, but the flip side of the coin is that there's somebody underneath you and they are not doing so well and they're really creating a kind of bolster for your possibility in the world, unwittingly."

Lundy Martin thinks this chasm is a societal construct.

"I don't think that it's something that has to do with me and my brother," she said.

"I'm using our story as a way to talk about what is happening in society."

MEANING MAKER

In her Feb. 2, 2017, Library of Congress interview, "Life of a Poet: Dawn Lundy Martin," she talks about the breakdown in language and the radical different perspectives people can have while observing the same event.

"I think we are at the same place perhaps even worse in terms of the breakdown of language and communication," she said.

"I think we are at a moment when we have to negotiate lots of different information that we receive about reality and try to figure out like what's real. All that information comes to us through language, and we have to kind of carve out our own sense of what's real in between those language spaces."

Case in point, the reportage on Israel and Palestine in the current news cycle.

"That's a perfect example I think of perspective when it comes to language and the reality of this war because depending on your news source, you have a completely different reality," she said.

"And I'm not talking about, you know, either right wing or left wing or extreme news sources. I'm talking about mainstream news sources. So what I've been doing the past few days is accessing various news sources in order to kind of attempt to tease out some space that feels true to me.

"I think that's a negotiation that we have to all be in this place of a kind of almost, like a democratic relationship to language, which is also I think has to do with the way that we read poems, right. We enter the poem. We read the poems because poems are elliptical by nature, we have to insert ourselves and create meaning in those ellipses."

Lundy Martin thinks the same is true of how we receive information generally through news and other sources.

"We have to enter as meaning makers ourselves just like we do in the poem because there is no singular truth right," she said.

"I think that the more access we have to information through the internet, and all these various news and social media, the more difficult it becomes."

AI & POETRY

It's the early days of AI experience in her estimation.

"AI is learning, learning, learning, and it's learning via legitimate means and it's learning via illegitimate means by the ways in which people's copyrights are being violated," she said.

"I think we're still at the beginning stages of trying to figure out ethical uses for AI. I do think this will become clear to us as AI develops, as it learns more and more and rules and regulations are put into place. But I do think there will be ethical, and maybe there are not ethical possibilities, because I think of AI, with my small experience with AI, as a kind of a collaboration between the artificial intelligence and our imagination."

One of the things that AI can't do right now really well is write poems.

"When I have this conversation with my students, I'm telling them like we're safe for now," she said.

"You're not princes to go to AI because it'll just come back with a horrible poem in order to do your work. So, they are all still really engaging their imaginations when it comes to poetry, which is great. They don't have to struggle through any temptation like that. Students are so overworked that they might be tempted if AI was better at writing poems."

'NEW FORMALIST POET'

Lundy Martin earned a BA from the University of Connecticut, an MA in creative writing from San Francisco State University, and a PhD in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

At the University of Connecticut, Lundy Martin studied with award-winning poet and former Connecticut Poet Laureate Marilyn Nelson.

"Marilyn Nelson was really critical to my formation as a poet," she said.

"I think of Marilyn as kind of a new formalist poet, and one of the things I really learned from her, I just learned the foundations of writing poems and I kind of learned all of the conventional mechanisms via which a poem might emerge, very deeply."

Nelson was an excellent and rigorous professor.

"I was kind of writing narrative lyric poems at that time, trying to write very good ones, and winning some poetry prizes as an undergrad and really feeling confident in that mode," she said.

"It really gave a foundation that I needed to later radically experiment. I have a philosophy that one needs to know the art form in its more conventional sense before one can try out innovations. So, she really provided me with that foundation from which I could later begin to think about innovating."

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