Marty Cain, The Wound is (Not) Real: A Memoir

 

In 1992, my older brother had his first life-threatening seizure. My mother tells me I was on the living room floor playing with a toy ambulance, manically opening and shutting the doors. It was in the afternoon. It was in Dover, Vermont. It was possibly summer. They left me with the neighbors. We’re going to have a real good time, the neighbors said. We have some roast beef to feed you. I remember the car moving down the long driveway, entering the dark wood, crossing the edge of what I knew. (“PROLOGUE”)

I’ve been waiting a while to see the finished version of Ithica, New York writer and publisher Marty Cain’s full-length The Wound is (Not) Real: A Memoir (New Orleans LA: Trembling Pillow Press, 2022), after having caught excerpts of the work-in-progress through his chapbook Four Essays (Tammy Journal, 2019) [see my review of such here]. The Wound is (Not) Real: A Memoir is composed as a lyric examination of memory and trauma, set as sectioned prose poem sections that move in and out of surreal imagery, nearly as a kind of long poem reminiscent of the accumulated short sections of Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop’s collaborative memoir-dos-a-dos Cesi nest pas Keith / Cesi n’est pas Rosmarie (Burning Deck, 2002), or even Aditi Machado’s remarkable chapbook-length lyric essay on form, The End (Brooklyn NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020) [see my review of such here].

Opening with his first memory of his brother’s seizures, Cain unfolds the collection as a book of brothers, violence, illness, abuse, sex, memory and self-discovery. “My destruction,” he writes early on in the collection, “I take it with me. I breathe in whole numbers. I breathe in a dream with a gun to my head, and upon my waking, I stand in the shower and kneel in the stream; a field of flowers, the allergens enter, I expectorate softly with my mouth to the drain, I suck in hairs, I suck in piss, I suck in fear that fills my body like an egg and when I slice my arm the yolk comes running. I need a pill. I need a pill for my frantic intestines.” He writes of trauma, and of memory, offering a portrait that occasionally slips out of focus; sometimes necessarily so. This is a powerful collection, one that works to critique and unpack as much as possible, swirling through commentary on poems by Wordsworth and Robert Penn Warren against his own emergence into literary creation and literary thinking. Simultaneously meditative and urgent, Cain slips in and around form as well, blending literary criticism with trauma memoir, critical document and coming out story, providing articulate and comprehensive arguments made through accumulation around both form and survival. “And form is a feeling.” he writes, as part of “WORDSWORTH POEM.” “And form is a garment.” Or, as he writes as part of the extended “ROBERT PENN WARREN POEM”:

Describe your poetic lineage, the white male professor says. This is my first poem about my father.

/

When I consider Warren’s relationship with Time, I often think of his desire to step outside it—to hover above it like film on milk, like a membrane of fog on a pasture… To give the illusion of relinquishing control, but in actuality, wielding it authoritatively—as if to say, I can step outside this poem, BECAUSE I OWN IT, I can survey this Arcadian field from afar, BECAUSE I OWN IT. I can conceal process, blood and bodies, BECAUSE I AM A GOD. I am a white man who owns Time. this is for me, and I WILL LIVE FOREVER.

Spotlight series #40 : Marty Cain

The fortieth in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring Ithica, NY poet, editor and publisher Marty Cain.

The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs, Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Vancouver poet Geoffrey Nilson, Oakland, California poets and editors Rusty Morrison and Jamie Townsend, Ottawa poet and editor Manahil Bandukwala, Toronto poet and editor Dani Spinosa, Kingston writer and editor Trish Salah, Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, Vancouver poet Adrienne Gruber, California poet and editor Susanne Dyckman, Brooklyn poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray, Vernon, BC poet Kerry Gilbert, South Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner, Vancouver poet and editor Adèle Barclay, Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese, Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton, Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski and Ottawa poet and fiction writer Frances Boyle.

The whole series can be found online here.

Ongoing notes: early June, 2019: THIRTEEN, ed. Ali Blythe + Marty Cain

Are you coming by to the ottawa small press fair on June 22nd? And/or the pre-fair reading the night prior? I mean: we’ve only been doing this twice a year since 1994. Why haven’t you made your way over to this? I mean, really. Honestly. What gives.

Toronto ON: Edited by Ali Blythe and produced by The League of Canadian Poets is THIRTEEN: New Collected Poems from LGBTQI2S Writers in Canada (April, 2019). Given the plethora of publishing ventures through the League over the years (I discovered the work of Jane Eaton Hamilton through Going Santa Fe, Hamilton’s chapbook produced through the League in 1997 as winner of their then-annual chapbook manuscript contest) I would be curious to know if anyone has compiled a bibliography of the scattering of publications they’ve produced over the years, from occasional books to chapbook, postcard and/or pamphlet series. THIRTEEN includes work by (obviously) thirteen Canadian poets currently producing work: John Barton, Karin Cope, Tanis Franco, Keith Garebian, Kayla Geitzler, Matthew Heinz, Rachel Lallouz, Chloe Lewis, Nisa Malli, Trish Salah, Jane Shi, Matthew Stepanic and John Emil Vincent.

Vaults then

Dizzy hopes for ginseng

To be sent

Nonce hopeful

A chant for it

Cure there or here

Garter makes six

Her or over

Or there

When you turn on me

Rose naïve

Styles of tremble

I want it

Ruse destiny

To secede (Trish Salah)

I’m aware of only a third of the authors in this short mix, so am pleased to be introduced to the work of a number of the other contributors. This collection is an impressive overview of some of the writers currently working in the country, and the purpose of THIRTEEN, then, seems to not only provide, but to acknowledge space, as Blythe writes in the introduction:

I know it has taken decades of the heart’s muscle to build these spaces we can gather, and quite a few more to invite others in to listen. I know good authors who have had to keep hammering on the doors of granting bodies, publishing house, festivals. Then took up positions as doormen to let others through. Then built their own spaces with their own doors.

In my former capacity as editor for a youth literary magazine, in about half the submissions I could tell the young writers were exploring in their writing their gender and sexuality. It’s no necessary for people to have a place to do this in art, especially when it can be so hard to do so in the real world.

America (geography otherwise unknown): I’m very taken with the remarkably-crafted rawness of Ithica, New York poet,editor and publisher Marty Cain’s chapbook Four Essays (Tammy Journal, 2019), an assemblage of four interconnected lyric essays on craft, male sexuality and desire, sexual violence and trauma, all of which bleed the boundaries between the lyric essay and the prose poem in powerful ways, such as in this excerpt from the final of the quartet, which could also be used as a descriptor for the collection:

For the remainder of his life, Wordsworth revised the Prelude. He mediated the adolescent rawness; he made the edges eloquent, the poem more like a formal container for a feeling. Originally, he’d intended for it to be the first part of an epic trilogy, one whose length surpassed Paradise Lost.

/

But he failed. That motherfucker died.

And form is a feeling.

And form is a garment. (“Wordsworth Poem”)

In four essays—“Prologue,” “Robert Penn Warren Poem,” “Kids of The Black Hole, Part II” and “Wordsworth Poem”—Cain explores writing craft through and around elements of personal memoir, attempting to reconcile a number of experiences, including the revelation of his father’s sexuality, and a possible sexual attack by a drunken colleage that he might easily have buried away from his conscious memory (I like, also, that an essay titled “Prologue” is both prior to the collection and part of the collection, the first of the four). There is some dark and complicated material Cain moves through, but he does so in such an open and thoughtful way, and one can only hope that the trauma of these experiences is lessened through the process of writing, thinking and publishing. These are very smart pieces, and I can only hope that this chapbook is but a prelude to an eventual full-length collection, whether with or without these four essays.

I remember a time when we were in a car in rural South Carolina. My brother began seizing in the backseat, then his words ceased to signify, they began to garble and turn like an ocean or the simulated sound of an ocean in a shell you hold to your ear, your own blood / a circular river, I remember his eyes as he spoke, I remember seeing his eyes speak, they said, Listen, I don’t know what it is I’m saying.

They said, There is something true in what I’m saying.

Then he didn’t speak. Then his eyes shifted to one side, his mouth like a garage with nothing in it. Then trickling saliva, neck limp and hanging. I remember my mom saying something. I remember the car speeding up and a force pushed me back, we ran through red lights. I don’t remember whether I was scared.

I remember a time. (“Prologue”)

Queen Mob's Teahouse : Chris Muravez interviews Marty Cain

As my tenure as interviews editor at Queen Mob's Teahouse continues, the thirty-fifth interview is now online: Chris Muravez interviews Ithica, NY poet Marty Cain. Other interviews from my tenure include: an interview with poet, curator and art critic Gil McElroy, conducted by Ottawa poet Roland Prevost, an interview with Toronto poet Jacqueline Valencia, conducted by Lyndsay Kirkham, an interview with Drew Shannon and Nathan Page, also conducted by Lyndsay Kirkham, an interview with Ann Tweedy conducted by Mary Kasimor, an interview with Katherine Osborne, conducted by Niina Pollari, an interview with Catch Business, conducted by Jon-Michael Frank, a conversation between Vanesa Pacheco and T.A. Noonan, "On Translation and Erasure," existing as an extension of Jessica Smith's The Women in Visual Poetry: The Bechdel Test, produced via Essay Press, Five questions for Sara Uribe and John Pluecker about Antígona González by David Buuck (translated by John Pluecker),"overflow: poetry, performance, technology, ancestry": kaie kellough in correspondence with Eric Schmaltz, Mary Kasimor's interview with George Farrah, Brad Casey interviewed byEmilie Lafleur, David Buuck interviews John Chávez about Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing, Ben Fama interviews Abraham Adams, Tender and Tough: Letters as Questions as Letters: Cheena Marie Lo, Tessa Micaela and Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Kristjana Gunnars’ interview with Thistledown Press author Anne Campbell, Timothy Dyke’s interview with Hawai’i poet Jaimie Gusman, Hailey Higdon's interview with Joanne Kyger, Stephanie Kaylor's interview with Kenyatta JP Garcia, Jaimie Gusman’s interview with Timothy Dyke,Sarah Rockx interviews Gary Barwin, Megan Arden Gallant's interview with Diane Schoemperlen, Andrew Power interviews Lauren B. Davis, Chris Lawrence interviews Jonathan Ball , Adam Novak interviews Tom Stern, Eli Willms interviews Gregory Betts and Jeremy Luke Hill interviews Kasia Jaronczyk, Karen Smythe and Greg Rhyno.

Further interviews I've conducted myself over at Queen Mob's Teahouse include: City of Ottawa Poet Laureate JustJamaal The Poet, Geoffrey Young, Claire Freeman-Fawcett on Spread Letter, Stephanie Bolster on Three Bloody Words, Claire Farley on Canthius, Dale Smith on Slow Poetry in America, Allison Green, Meredith Quartermain, Andy Weaver, N.W Lea and Rachel Loden.

If you are interested in sending a pitch for an interview my way, check out my "about submissions" write-up at Queen Mob's; you can contact me via rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Marty Cain

Marty Cain is the author of Kids of the Black Hole (Trembling Pillow, 2017), a book-length pastoral elegy about punk rock and southern Vermont, as well as www.enterthe.red, a digital poetry supplement. His creative and critical work appear in Fence, Jacket2, Boston Review, Tarpaulin Sky, Banango Street, Action Yes, and elsewhere. Presently, he is pursuing a PhD in English Language & Literature at Cornell University, where he studies rural poetics. With Kina Viola, he edits Garden-Door Press.

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 my first book, Kids of the Black Hole, three years ago, halfway through my MFA, over the course of about three months. The original draft didn’t change very much between then and when the book was eventually published, but my relationship to the book feels hugely different. When I first wrote it, it felt like a viscerally intense catalog of things I’d been thinking about for years; it also felt like the first time I’d been able to represent my own experiences in any kind of totalizing way. But since then, I’ve begun to feel more like the book has its own kind of unconscious. I’ve realized, much after the fact, that it was a way of thinking/writing through trauma I didn’t yet have the language to process. My second (currently unpublished) manuscript, The Wound Is (Not) Real: A Memoir, largely attempts to dig deeper into these ideas—to analyze and understand trauma rather than to merely depict it in an immediate way.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I actually came to fiction first, and have a draft of a god-awful novel the world will fortunately never see. In college, a professor encouraged me to write poetry instead, and being ridiculously dependent on external validation, I quit fiction and became a poet. It was a good decision!

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 varies from project to project, but I tend to write pretty quickly. Preserving the immediacy of poems is very important to me, so I tend to not revise too much. (I do, however, obsessively shift around the way I sequence and frame pieces in manuscripts.)

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 think pretty much exclusively in terms of larger projects, and the books that have influenced me the most are almost exclusively “project”-oriented (Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, Frank Stanford’s Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, C.D. Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining, Hiromi Itō’s Wild Grass on the Riverbank, everything by Aase Berg, etc.).

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Public readings are integral to my process. I was really excited about punk music when I was growing up—its ethics of self-sufficiency and communal performance—and I strive to reproduce the same philosophies in my practices as a reader. When I have the money, I try to tour as much as I can.

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?
Again, it varies from project to project, but most of my work—and particularly my first book—is interested in the limits of narrative and the temporally confined literary “self.” What happens when poetry—through excess, through ecstatic feeling, or whatever—explodes this narrative frame? What happens to the self, to time? I’ve studied the pastoral for a number of years, and what interests me the most about this literary mode is its representation (and often, concealment) of time and labor. In contemporary culture, we’ve witnessed the violence of ahistoricism—of ahistorical whiteness, of “alternative facts,” and so on. But rigidly linear, rational versions of history feel oppressive, too. I’m interested in how we cope with this problem through writing—how we might envision new histories, new expressions of subjectivity, new versions of time that gesture towards utopian possibility.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
There’s many different kinds of writers, so I don’t think I can ascribe a universalizing role for all of them. But for poets? I think it’s the job of the poet to defy authority; to fuck shit up; to gesture towards new ways of living and surviving. (I’m not claiming that I fully achieve any of these aims, but I try my best.) Perhaps most importantly, poetic language can represent living, feeling experience in a way that rationalist language cannot.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Most editors I’ve worked with have not been terribly prescriptive, which tends to work well for me. Shout-out to Megan Burns at Trembling Pillow Press, who is amazing.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Jane Springer told me not to worship prize culture, institutions, and the other forms of capital that dominate the poetry world, and I’ll never forget this.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I’m working towards a PhD in literature right now, which forces me to move between genres whether I like it or not. While I identify as a poet more than anything else, I also get excited by having to work within (and subvert) constraints—like, say, scholarly conventions. My creative work continues to move in more of a multi-/anti- genre direction, so this feels natural, anyway—and my work is also very influenced by critics and theorists with wild and provocative prose, like Glissant and Kristeva.

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 tend to write in cycles. I hardly write at all for most of the year, and then maybe for several weeks or a month, I irresponsibly push aside all other obligations and do nothing but write. Taking that time away from actually producing text—to just read, think, experience—is important to me.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I turn to my other obligations, to my friends, to anything. When I don’t feel like writing, I just stop.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The smell of wood burning.

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?
Definitely music. And bookmaking. That’s still book-related, I guess, but hand-making chapbooks with Kina Viola at Garden-Door Press sometimes feels more empowering to me than writing poetry.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I’ve already mentioned a few, but must of them have been older, so here’s a few contemporary folks that have influenced me greatly, or who I read recently and loved, or who I just think are really fucking good: Tim Earley, Carrie Lorig, Lucas de Lima, Joe Hall, Nikki Wallschlaeger, Cody-Rose Clevidence, Steven Dunn, Sara Nicholson, and many others.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
An art installation. I’m interested in the relationship between text and physical space, but haven’t had many chances to explore this.

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’d probably be a visual artist.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
No idea. I start to feel extremely anxious if I’m not doing something creative, and writing is probably what I’m best at, so that’s what I do.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, which somehow, ridiculously, I’d never read. The last great film… I thought It Comes at Night was incredible, though a lot of people seem to have disagreed with me.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m not working on anything right now, but I’m starting to send out my second manuscript, which is concerned with trauma, the essay, temporality, and rural life.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;