Chris Martin Visit Preparation

(So this Chris Martin is Chris Martin the poet, not Chris Martin the Coldplay singer? Ohhhhhhh....)

Initial observation: like the pigs and Sleeping Beauty's fairies, Martin's lines in his poems clump into trios. The single line at the end acts like a landing point, so I wonder, does he ever struggle fitting his poems into 3n+1 lines?

His poems move along like trains pulling cars of different shapes and sizes. The different faces inside flash by one after another, because enjambment and a lack of periods prevent eyes from resting on a single element for too long. His poems brim with tired laughs at life, with lines such as "Moonlighting as both / Actor and director in a film / About the fantastic terror / Of existence, a comedy / Of course, and you get so fucking lost" in "The True Meaning of Pictures." "Jokes for Strangers," too, speaks of deeper truth while using words with light-hearted connotations, such as in "All twenty-first-century / Day long I compose these jokes / For myself and strangers."

Martin isn't afraid to use polysyllable words like those in "I Am Not a Cinematographer" with "Disembodied, a woman's narrow / Currinesque nose bifurcating the slope" or in "Blood on the Tarmac" with "Vaults its merciless / Incomprehensibility from the shallow." Martin also gives us heavy glimpses of brief moments. "A blossom of birds issues / From an abandoned skyscraper or traffic / Enacts its unwitting algorithms / Of pulse, it is in" not only contains four short lines of the poem "American Music" but also two complete pictures of birds and traffic, each worth the usual thousand words.

Some of Martin's poems contain more narrative than others. The first half of "Grandpa Was a Salesman" makes the reader question the purpose of the title of the poem, as it jumps from "At Fire Island, the gleam / In the glasses of the Business Man Business / Man peddling Duracell AAS" to "About a robot made entirely / Of panthers, yesterday I" to "Constantly until my braces / Were removed, my dad." Like the train analogy earlier, the constant blending of completely different scenes allows Martin's poems to act like a dream. The dreamer doesn't react to any discrepancies or drastic changes in plot while asleep, much like how Martin maneuvers smoothly through his ideas.