John Martone, Bob Arnold and a few other poets currently make up the Cid Corman School of Ethics and Poetry. They keep their line lean and close to the metaphysical bone, trim the fat from their working vocabularies down to a hundred, solid, one or two syllable words, keep their eyes on the particular to somehow deliver the existential truth to us all. Sometimes they venture near the edge of language itself and come back talking about Buddhism and death, but usually they tell us what it means to garden or build things in ten words or less. Buddha bless the Ciddites one and all. Suck it up, stoicially confront the essential, frame the poem with plenty of blank paper and have done with it. Then make a book of it. I generally approve of the proposition. However, from what I can see it’s a bit of a hit or miss endeavor. Not surprisingly, Cid seems to write Cid poems the best, though a gentleman in the U.K. (whose name slips my mind at the moment), often rivals the master in linguistic subtlety. With Cid and the U.K. fellow less is often more, but with most Ciddites, less is usually less.

John Martone never rivals Cid, but he does sparkle on occasion.

hand axe
mostly
eye

As one who’s marveled at the flaking on a middle paleolithic hand-axe of black speckled flint, I can “dig” the insight, but John, I think–at least from the context–is talking about a less glamorous, more contemporary manifestation:

in this
new world
cut brush

all
morning

bind it
up

yes w
honey
suckle

These poems are from a tiny sequence titled “new world.”

The charm of cutting, binding, picking, planting, brick-laying, and all of the hard drudgery of farm labor is lost on me, though it wasn’t lost on Cid–a city boy from the beginning. I grew up on and around farms, with horses, sheep, pigs and chickens. My father was a farrier and a hay dealer and I helped him do what he had to do to keep us all fed. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t glamorous. Laboring with one’s hands is not always liberating, and those who do so are not automatically ennobled by what they do. Moreover, from where I sit in Japan I can visit shrines and temples any time I want. The good people with whom I work are Buddhists in the same way that many Americans are Methodists, so the allure of an exotic religion that may capture someone’s imagination in Illinois escapes me after living close to two decades in Asia. That old Z-word–Zen–is, as most Japanese say, Buddhism for Americans. Strip away the exoticism and what are you left with? Mostly wee existential reports tricked out in what I like to call “ZENglish.”

“my sweat soaked through this notebook”

For the non-sweating, or for those who have never bent and hoed and picked, this might be an insight worth pondering.

I haven’t truly done justice to the complete sequences, however. They do indeed succeed in building up their own resonances as they proceed, but the lack of “rich” language and invention (the kind I enjoy) and the repeated toodle of ZENglish, tires this old country boy out. On the other hand, I’m certain there are gems to be harvested from these collections for those who have the time to look and savor. Please write to John Martone for more information:

1031 10th Street
Charleston, IL.
61920
USA