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.