American Music

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 96 pages
• Published by: Copper Canyon Press November 1, 2007
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 1556592663
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-1556592669
• Book Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.1 inches
• Weighs: 6.4 ounces

Book Description


"Chris Martin . . . takes the O'Hara city poet eye in his own direction, showing a sweet vision for the distance between public and private spaces."-Jacket

American Music, selected by C. D. Wright from over one thousand manuscripts as winner of the Hayden Carruth Award for New and Emerging Poets, is uniquely attuned to the feedback symphony of a modern city, the lyrical product of "an earnest rage born of the absurd."

Chris Martin's poems reflect all things found in the urban environment: asphalt, subways, technology, strangers, the drudgery of work, the garbage trucks and open parks, fist fights and snapshots, fears and paranoia, loves and joys. Here is the constant sense of life hurtling forward without the time to reflect, within a city rife with opportunities: "I can practically / Hear all those words out / There amassing to make the journey / Inward."

American Music is a jostling of the senses; a decadent descent into the throbbing of a metropolitan world filled with familiar but yet unresolved queries:

. . . it strikes me
That every human being in every passenger
Seat in every car in
Every town in every country
Is having some goddamn
Thought-this is mine.

Chris Martin is a rapper, teacher, and editor of Puppy Flowers, an online magazine of the arts. He holds an MA in poetry, performance, and education from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. He lives in Brooklyn.

About The Author
Chris Martin's debut volume of poetry, American Music (Copper Canyon), won the Hayden Carruth Award. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Reader Reviews
All of the other "products" tagged by Amazon with the "Chris Martin" tag are, when you look closer, associated with the dread Coldplay, shudder. But along comes a book of American Music to confound conventional wisdom and to knock the philistines on their butts. I looked at this book, which apparently won a huge award and was chosen by CD Wright to win the Hayden Carruth Award this year, and I saw a familiar sort of logogram, familiar to those who live here in San Francisco at any rate: the cover is by Simon Evans, the UK visual artist who made his home among us for many years and whose drawings and paintings, drunk with language and sturdy with a love of common weird objects, have iconic status here in bohemia, we aspire to them. I had seen some of Chris Martin's poems over the years--he too, once lived in San Francisco, where he edited an innovative journal called Puppyflowers--but the new work in AMERICAN MUSIC takes what used to be mannerisms, or at any rate Anselm Berriganisms, and brings them to another level. I'm here to tell you, this book is strong and for ketchup it's really strong. The poems, largely in the same meter and clinging to an identical and easy to locate three step visual pattern, are a littlke difficult to distinguish, and possibly even Chris' best friend would not bet money that one is not another, but boring? Far from it. Over the years, on the motley highway of Arcadia, he has learned to vary his subject matter and his lyric inventions so that, like snowflakes, no two pieces are the same and all of them share a brilliant, not to say exquisitely chilly beauty. Behind this writing are the endless choruses of Kerouac's MEXICO CITY BLUES and the rolling algorithms of LEAVES OF GRASS, but Martin makes it all new again. Among these songs of urban decay and transcendence he positions, like a jeweler his rose, some of the most beautiful love poems I've read since the death of John Wieners. Check out "The Harmony of Overwhelming," with its cascades of pure image and feeling wed together like the lordly Hudson itself, foaming and shuddering until an awesome crash of chords at the end, "Not unlike the beauty/ /Of insecte, this apparitional/ Night, this soft, silly/ Music that has become more/ / Meaningful than I could imagine." Wish I had time to feed you more of this indescribably delicious data, but this one you will have to see for yourself to really get your mind around it. By the book's end, you will feel you've been rocketing from coast to coast like a pingpong ball, only considerably more chill, a beatitude speaks from the heart of this poetry like the dream of a cat, a "fluttering/ Hand in a lush/ leafy darkness." Comment | | (Report this)