12 or 20 (second series) questions with Martha Ronk

Martha Ronk has had intersecting careers as a professor of Renaissance Literature and as a poet. She received her PhD from Yale University and has written numerous articles on Shakespeare’s plays, focusing on the interplay of the verbal and visual—a topic in her poetry as well. Teaching classes on 17^th century literature and on modern and contemporary poetry revived her practice of writing poems leading to poetry workshops at Bennington College. She has taught at Tufts University, Immaculate Heart College, Otis College of Art and Design, and for most of her career at Occidental College in Los Angeles where for many years she taught creative writing and coordinated the campus-wide Creative Writing Program.

Ronk has published eleven books of poetry, most recently with Omnidawn Press: CLAY bodies + matter 2025, The Place One Is 2022, Silences 2019, Ocular Proof 2016 on photographs, and Transfer of Qualities 2013 (the title a quotation from Henry James), long-listed for the National Book Award. Also in 2022 Parlor Press issued A Myth of Ariadne. Her book, Partially Kept, published with Nightboat Books, is in dialogue with Sir Thomas Browne’s Garden of Cyrus; Vertigo, a National Poetry Series selection with Coffee House Press pays homage to W.G. Sebald, and why/why not, UC Press, plays off to be or not to be and is indebted to the play, Hamlet.  In a landscape of having to repeat, influenced by Freud’s essay on “Screen Memory,” won the PEN USA best poetry book of 2005.

Often in dialogue with other authors, Ronk sees her work taking shape in the spaces between various forms, vocabularies, and genres, each volume operating as a coherent whole rather than a series of individual poems.  Besides the profound influences of other authors, Ronk has also focused her poems on paintings, photographs, ceramics, and photograms, and many of her books include ekphrastic poems. Her collection of short stories, Glass Grapes and other stories, utilizes a variety of obsessive, unreliable narrators; and her book on food, Displeasures of the Table—semi-autobiographical, satiric, appreciative of all cooks—recommends reading over eating.

She has received a NEA award, had residencies at MacDowell Colony and Djerassi. She received the Sterling Award for scholarly excellence at Occidental College. Ronk has had readings at numerous bookstores and other venues, was a visiting writer at the University of Montana and at George Mason University. She was an editor of poetry books published by Littoral Press, and has had work included in eight anthologies, most recently North American Women Poets of the 21^st Century, Wesleyan 2021.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I wrote CLAY bodies+matter when I returned to the potter's wheel after a long academic career at Occidental College. It is the practice of making pots on the wheel that is the change in my life. The Clay book is different since it focuses on a specific practice, on the merging of hands and clay, on the emptiness inside a bowl, and on another form of practicing as writing poetry is a practice. I found myself working at both, revising in both arenas, doing research, and thinking about the ways in which they reflect one another. Clay is far messier. I so much enjoyed reading about Japanese practices, their long tradition in clay.

2 -  How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I taught 16th and 17th century poetry, wrote a dissertation on Milton, taught Shakespeare. I love John Donne. I was always drawn to poetry even as a child. I wrote one book of short fiction, Glass Grapes, because I wanted to create an obsessive narrator. I am not sure why this seemed to me to be fiction, but it did. I also find that poetry, for me, has to wrestle more with my interest in the visual. Although many poets don't like to use imagery, I do; I also like to write about photography and paintings: ekphrastic poems 

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
It has depended on the particular project. Some come quickly or in tandem with an experience. Right now I am writing poems that seem distinct from one another,, but it is early days. A book usually takes 4 years and I mean for each project to be a unified book.

4 - Where does a poem  usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?  
I write drafts and individual poems until I have a fairly firm sense of what "book" I am working on; most of my books have been in dialogue with other authors: W.G. Sebalf, Henry James, Shakespeare's Hamlet, or specific places. I like having a partner, another to influence my narrow views.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings? 
As I've gotten older I've been less and less interested and able to travel to give readings. I always enjoyed them, but recently not so much.I always liked listening to the others I was reading with. I'm reading for Omnidawn on Zoom on July 13 with others published in the fall. 

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
It seems to me that many recent books concern gender, immigration, grief & war, and displacements of various sorts. There are so many gifted young writers from other countries. It is important for poetry to address these issues. I have written an unpublished manuscript on climate change; I will continue to write more about trees, birds, drought, and the environment. (A few poems to be published by The Colorado Review.) As a past teacher, I find myself interested in my relationship to past authors. I am interested in fragility (bodies, clay pots, cultures), in poetry that manages to include conceptual as well as linguistic work: that is, work that asks for deep engagement and thinking. Work that I want to re-read.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?  
See #6 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I wish I had an editor. I do have a poetry group that meets every few weeks and I get good critical readings from the other poets. It helps enormously to have other poets respond to one's work before it goes public.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
"To be a good poet you have to have a good seat." That is, show up. Practice. Show up again. Etc.  It is also good to wait some time to review one’s work.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal? 
As an academic I wrote academic articles on Shakespeare's plays; I also got up early to write poetry before leaving to take my son to school and me to class. I like that both require precision, research, reading, revision etc. I do less academic work now.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?  
I write something most days; I prefer early morning. Other poets often provide inspiration. Also form itself can inspire: choosing to write prose poems or epigrams or dialogues or long poems.  Recently, I found myself inspired by memories of paintings , memories of people I've lost track of or lost.  I also like walking: sometimes, if I’m lucky, a word or stairway or song will fall out as I’m walking: also there are all the things one sees: clouds, trash, a window ledge, leaf.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

13 - What was your last Hallowe'en costume? 
none.  I watched a child put on heavy make-up to be a cat.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art? 
Yes, paintings and especially black and white photographs: I wrote an entire book on photographs: “Ocular Proof.” My first husband was a photographer. I now look at pictures by great potters; I love the paintings of Giorgio Morandi. I like photographs of reflections in water, the idea of correspondences. New to CA I wrote a book about the desert (and HIV): “Desert Geometries,” and another called “State of Mind.” The paintings of Ariadne by De Chirico influenced my book on A Myth of Ariadne from Parlor Press: focused on the vulnerability of women, women’s bodies.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
W.G. Sebald. Edmund De Waal. most recently. Many poets. The Autobiography of Red.  Shakespeare most especially because his plays were central to my teaching for so long. I was moved by the writer Claire Keegan’s new novels.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done? 
I wish I had traveled more. Scenes fill up the brain: I went to Sicily most recently and keep seeing temples in my mind’s eye. And mosaics. And the view to Africa.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I think that moving from the east coast to LA had a profound effect on me as I found it strange, “familiar/unfamiliar’ as I’ve written in The Place One Is.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I couldn’t seem to help it. I think I needed to say things I believed I couldn’t say in any other way. 

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
 I liked the films on tv: Wolf Hall, The Fall.  I listened on Audible to Little Dorrit and have come to appreciate Dickens and his skewering of the wealthy as I didn't in graduate school. I'll never tire of re-reading Hamlet.  

20 - What are you currently working on?  
I'm trying to write about "the specious present" (William James) and time. Trying the operative word. Failing. Etc. Don't all beginnings feel like tripping and falling and feeling as awkward as possible? I keep asking “what is a moment?”  How might I define it or live it or imagine the ends of my own time? Reading his words on time stick with me, pushed me to try to find other ways of expressing the way a moment contains both past and future as well.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Martha Ronk, Clay

 

Introduction

As a child I was certain I could put my hand through the wall, that if I kicked gently my shoe would nudge the other side of drywall. I wanted to feel it all the way through, to go beyond the impenetrability of substance, to be inseparable from whatever it was. Years later a faculty member with large hands taught a ceramics class; could I join it just to do something hands-on, wet, physical, material—other. In graduate school my life was hours in a library writing until late in the afternoon when I rode a bike to share a wheel and kiln in a damp basement. Then a career that included more papers, more words, more essays, until finally now, I have returned to the ceramic studio. I’m drawn to throwing bowls—their rounded usefulness, their similarity to cupped hands holding emptiness itself. Hands and skin and wet—involvement with a material substance. In one’s life one looks for this sort of time when time itself slips by and all else has receded out of consciousness. I find it in writing (often ekphrastic poems), I find it at the wheel, and I also find it in paintings of vessels, jars, bowls: in Morandi, Cezanne, Heda where touch resides within sight.

The latest from Los Angeles poet and fiction writer Martha Ronk, following more than a dozen books, including The Place One Is (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2022) [see my review of such here], is Clay (Omnidawn, 2025), a book subtitled “Bodies + Matter.” Set as a collection of prose poems around producing clay pottery in a studio, Ronk’s poems quickly evolve into a larger conversation around touch, including the tactile sense of building something with one’s own hands, and the tactile sensation of human connection and contact. “when we touch the moving clay we are in the midst of and we are in it,” she writes, as part of the poem “One with matter,” “torqueing, bending, lifting // the work of shaping, of skin, of watery touch, / of breathing with the air that infills the cavity of clay / rounding it out, pushing against the sides [.]” I find it curious how Ronk seems to approach each poem, with titles such as “throwing a bowl,” “Emptiness,” “As a child,” “Porcelain bowls for the Chinese emperor” and “Celadon glaze,” each poem tracing and surrounding her subject as a kind of self-contained wholeness. Her titles exist as umbrellas, or even prompts, allowing her to move outward and explore from that single, seemingly static point. Or, as the poem “What am I before touching something?” begins: “What am I before touching something out there, / some vagueness of limbs, extensions meant for unfolding [.]” A few lines down in the same poem, writing: “no boundary between what’s out there and these hands, [.]”

Some pots seem undefinable. The “Hu” pots from the Han Dynasty (206 BC to AD 220) appear to move and breathe.

Exploring the working of clay and a history of pottery, Ronk’s poems work to bring one back to sense, into senses; as an attention to surrounding detail, and how one might better relate to both environment and other people, connecting to a far wider tapestry of human interaction, culture and history. “Touching—a mode of inadvertency— / holding the bowl,” she writes, to open the poem “Touching,” “spinning the clay, / dipping into chalky liquid, its ultimate color / hidden—how impossible not to envision the past / whether Chinese or one’s own / impossible not to be pulled into geography, [.]” With accompanying full colour and black and white photographs of bowls, Ronk’s Clay is a collection of poems that centre delicate care and human touch, the importance of physical and human connection, and the physical making of objects with care, and with one’s hands.

Martha Ronk, The Place One Is

 

ANOTHER COUNTRY

The it in with-it shifts & pivots as a compass needle

vetch, clover, brackish seaweed in heaped up smells

bits of pulverized shell, skeletal casings underfoot

fog banks stoked by fires in the central valley,

scrims cover what yesterday stood as branched trees, a

house barely visible—more memory than memory,

unheimlich as if and as if it had been or could have been

you whom I turn to in near-sleep stumbling over ourselves,

whose arms and legs was it I thought you called

extracting the changed angle between two norths

a skeleton of rusted car seams laid out on the beach

each step unlinked from the one before

each detachable makes up this country I’m pointed into

With more than a dozen published books to her credit, the latest from Los Angeles poet and fiction writer Martha Ronk is The Place One Is (Oakland CA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2022), a collection of prose structures, each of which attend to the line even through her use of line-breaks. She centres her America across the length and breadth of her sense of California, offering the elements of her geopolitical and historical space as a stand-in for far larger, ongoing concerns of colonialism and the Anthropocene, as well as considerations of how geography is constructed, where one sits and where one needs to stand. “Ordinary bits of light on neighborhood leaves,” she writes, to open the poem “NIGHT: A PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT ADAMS,” “trees passed by, // spattered not-very-white on a random number of them, // the canopy of leaves wide enough to hold multiple bits of light // and what I can’t help is how pulled I am into the lights as if my eyes // could focus on multiple places at once which I know they can’t [.]” The structure of her poems is centred in the prose-block, and her narratives work to stitch together untethered fragments into a larger quilt of individual patterns of commentary, including elements of history and ecological concerns. “the place one is is the place that is one,” she writes, to open the sequence “PULLED INTO EARTH, AIR, SKY” early on in the collection, “—nowhere else / and although I can think myself back into some places, / where one is is the only place and everyone’s feet / change underfoot as wet, sand, concrete, pebbles and smooth / operate as adjustments or the particular tree out of the window / one branch hanging down [.]”

There are moments that Ronk does describe two sides of geographies, suggesting the place that one is sits in a space simultaneously unknown, offering two elements, two perspectives, on a singular and multifaceted whole: a place of beauty, suffering, constant possibility and perpetual self-destruction, including that of, as Brian Teare writes as part of his back cover blurb, the “devastating impact of settler colonialism on the Wiyot people of Northern California.” “collected in multiples    piecemeal and over time,” she writes, as part of the poem “SCRAPS OF INDIGENOUS HISTORY,” “stitched with fishing twine    housed in museum vaults // the ongoing    catapulted into waters moving out to // unfinished sentences [.]” Or, as the opening poem, “TO LET GO,” begins: “imprecise morning as if limbs were only loosely threaded in the coming // and going of tides, in flattened grazing land extending into beach sand // going on until far out of view, the imprint of a foot then another, // the time it takes for a seeded oyster basket to mature [.]” It is interesting how Ronk offers line breaks as sentence or phrase-breaks, composed as breaks of thought as opposed to  breath, which allow the accumulations of her sentence-phrases to pile on like logs into a cabin, constructing the house of the poem, such as the poem “LEAVING IS ALSO A PLACE,” that begins:

Leaving moves into us, taking us from this place

where we are and from the place we’re going

into some third bi-furcated in-between

as a swollen door doesn’t quite close,

no furniture floats around the rooms

but all groundings are weakened

tattered bird wings droop from the poles

6x6 #26

JAPAN

I have never been to Japan

but I’m sure they’re doing their best

over there.

:::

Briefly I consider Paris.

I considered it as a place for birds

and then I considered it as a place for

buildings. (William Minor)

With summer comes a number of things, including the summer issue of Ugly Duckling Presse’s 6x6, a journal with lovely letterpress covers produced out of Brooklyn, New York. As each issue includes roughly six pages of poetry each by six authors, this issue is the first I’ve seen (admittedly, I’ve only seen about four issues) without a single author I’ve previously heard of: Steve Muhs, Dot Devota, William Minor, Martha Ronk, Levi Rubeck and Abraham Adams (although there is always the possibility I’ve seen one or two of their names in a journal and managed to let their name slip away from me). After having gone through the issue a couple of times, I have to admit that I’m stuck on the work of William Minor; who is William Minor? His use of repetition is lovely, and his poems evoke a particular kind of rare subtlety that ease into startling places, while leaving plenty of open space in such small containers, spaces that could easily go in a number of directions. I would sure like to see more. His pieces here are reminiscent of some of what I’ve seen from Rae Armantrout, Sarah Mangold and Marilyn Irwin, and suggest far more than they manage to say, and what is said is delivered deceptively straight. Listen to this, the first section of the three-poem “BEIJING,” that reads:

The spectacle of a woman on fire is an ordinary spectacle. Though it takes many flames for a woman to disappear publicly, it only takes one flame for her to disappear psychologically. For some women, standing in a fire acts as a cushion against not standing in a fire. People point this out when pointing to a woman on fire.