Tag Archives: Looms

Katie Rosenthal interviews Camille Martin on Looms

Katie Rosenthal, a student of Daniel Nester’s at The College of St. Rose, interviewed me about my new book, Looms. I thought her questions were insightful and smart—it was a pleasure to be interviewed by her!

Click here or the image below to read the interview at the Stated website:

STATED INTERVIEW


Camille Martin

“At first I was adrift . . .”: Camille Martin’s LOOMS

Sarah Sarai wrote a terrific response to Looms:

SARA SARAI REVIEW

You can get a copy of Looms at your favourite bookstore or through SPD, Shearsman Books, The Book Depository, Amazon.ca, and Amazon.com.


Camille Martin

Jim Johnstone | Adam Seelig | Camille Martin at the Art Bar (Toronto), Tuesday, April 9

8 pm, Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Q Space / 382 College Street (between Spadina & Bathurst)

After readings in Cobourg, Vancouver, Montreal, Detroit, Columbus, and Lafayette to celebrate the publication of LOOMS, I’m bringin’ it home to Toronto at the ART BAR on Thursday, April 9. My superb co-readers are playwright and poet Adam Seelig (EVERY DAY IN THE MORNING (SLOW)) and poet Jim Johnstone (PATTERNICITY)!

Click here for details at the Facebook invitation:
ART BAR READING


Camille Martin

Photos: Oana Avasilichioaei and Camille Martin at Argo Bookshop, Montreal (Bonus: Zen Snowcat)

          Despite a freak mid-spring snowstorm, diehard Montreal poetry lovers trudged over to Argo Bookshop to hear Oana Avasilichioaei and me read from our recently-released collections: Oana from We, Beasts and me from Looms.
          Below are some photos from the reading, which was watched over by muses Kerouac and Whitman.
          There’s also a photo of Zen Snowcat, which I sculpted in my hotel room and promised to send any who braved the snowdrifts to attend. Zen Snowcat says: “Each snowflake falls in the right place.” No complaints.
          Many thanks to Jean-Pierre Karwacki of Argo Bookshop for hosting the reading and to Erin Moure for the photographs of me in the slideshow below.
          And for any Montrealers unable to attend the reading, We, Beasts and Looms are both available for purchase at Argo Bookshop.

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Camille Martin

We, Beasts by Oana Avasilichioaei: A pre-reading sampler

On Tuesday, March 19, I’ll be reading with Oana Avasilichioaei at Montreal’s Argo Bookshop. The event will celebrate our respective poetry collections published in 2012: Oana’s We, Beasts (Wolsak & Wynn) and my Looms (Shearsman Books). If you’re in Montreal on March 19, please join us.

Wolsak & Wynn, 2012

Wolsak & Wynn, 2012

I’ve been happily engrossed in Oana’s We, Beasts and offer here a sample prior to our reading. The poems in this collection, inspired by fairy tales and fables, have a luminous quality, despite the darkness at their core.

*
where the old road curls into pale blue sky
where rock and pine distill a blurred horizon
backs bend and are divided into valleys

glorified in a field of flags
the Tyrant marches in tight ranks
spells out MOTHER, DIGNITY, FORCE

the story goes like this:
(                                        )
(                                        )
(                                        )
only a hungry ear, a mouth
law speaks in quivers, whips

line by line months break
(here is no child’s game)
incessant in smiles the Tyrant governs
a fist of furrows, knobbed, arthritic

*

No Song

—No peasants, no sepulchres, no bones. A tower, open-mouthed, with no one above its crater.
—No soil that speaks of living, no deity that trains the dying.
—Ruins of a luxury hotel wither two hundred years in the fields. Such is a hospitality of vestiges. Such is finesse. The lastingness.
—Fearful of fevers, no one enters.
—In such peasantless fields, wounds gape uninhabited.

ARGO BOOKSHOP


Camille Martin

Review of Looms on Bookslut

Thanks to Cort Bledsoe for his beautifully-written review of Looms in Bookslut. I appreciate the way he takes the time to delve into and quote from individual poems. Read his review here:

BOOKSLUT

To order Looms:

Z AMAZONCA
Z AMAZONCOM
Z SPD
Z BOOK DEPOSITORY

Excerpts from reviews:

Looms is a wonderful continuation of Martin’s previous collection, Sonnets, in which she explored similar themes as well as playing with the sonnet form. Martin has proven herself to be a solid poet with an ear for language and an inquisitive mind, delving into the big questions we all face. In this collection, Martin has woven a rich tapestry of poems that are well worth perusing.
—Cort Bledsoe for Bookslut

There is such an expansiveness to Martin’s Looms. The poems exist in that magical place where words, images and ideas collide, creating connections that previously had never been.
—rob mclennan

[Looms] has a very painterly, noir feel, alienated and penumbral, taut yet expansive. Impressive and addictive.
—Steve Spence for Stride Magazine


Camille Martin

“A deserted city. We’ll have to imagine it’s in a movie.”

On the eve of December 21, my penultimate end-of-the-world poem, this one from Looms:

*
A deserted city. We’ll have to imagine
it’s in a movie. Beneath a listless dome, walls
crumble into backlit dust. Flames on a hillside swarm,
tattered auburn fishes in the autumn wind. Glints of dying
light fall on unmoored mountains whose thoughts of home
come to nothing. Everywhere, flocks of matter dip pale snouts
into inky ponds. We’ll have to imagine someone watching
that movie. No one left to forget irrelevant seeds. Some left off
praying to the mother of a tarnished idol presiding over a flock
of angels, breath attended by golden lice. Others
paused long enough to view dusk’s leisurely descent
over the white noise of crashing surf. All found something
to swear by before it was too late. Photogenic dullards jazzed
in the waning light. A ship’s captain jingled his coins
before staving in the ship. Embers in a hearth
illuminated fish bones on plates.

NIBIRU

Sonnets and Looms are available from the following vendors:

Small Press Distribution
Book City in Toronto
Apollinaire’s Bookshoppe
Amazon.ca
Shearsman Books.

Cheers!


Camille Martin

Fiddling While Earth Burns: Poems for the End of Time

          I’m obsessed with The End, with the smorgasbord of choices for Armageddon that Neil deGrasse Tyson cheerfully ticks off: asteroid, caldera eruption, mega-tsunami, black hole. Not surprisingly, some of my poems have an apocalyptic theme.
          So in honour of the rapidly-approaching December 21, 2012—of the dreaded cataclysm that Mayan astronomers predicted (unless they just got tired of chiselling)—I’ll be posting poems to while away the countdown to the terrestrial torch. The first poem is below.
          And what would 2012 prophesies be without a little shameless commercialism? I’m selling poetry, not opulent underground condos, but then, to paraphrase William Carlos Williams, survivalists die miserably on doomsday for lack of what is found in poems.
          The clock is ticking, but you can still get a copy of Sonnets and Looms from the following vendors: Small Press Distribution, Book City in Toronto, Amazon.ca, and Shearsman Books.
          Help keep my kitchen, where I’m hunkering down with proper Canadian garrison mentality, stocked with beans and rice during these anti-climactic end times.

from Sonnets:

*
From a helicopter at night, an aerial
view of a city. In the dark, gigantic
iron statues loom with an ominous
aura of permanence. The people
who live in the city obsess
about the possibility of doomsday
erupting among their soaring
buildings and effigies. Of the end
they’ve made a fetish, chatting
about it at cocktail parties as if
it were the latest vogue. They believe
that it could happen at any moment,
so they no longer bother
to make their beds in the morning.

2012


Camille Martin

 

“Poetry, Art, Music—and the Gift of Synesthesia” (an image essay in Talking Writing)

A couple of years ago, Talking Writing published some poems of mine from Looms, a manuscript that has recently been published by Shearsman Books.

Martha Nichols, one of the editors, recently approached me about writing an illustrated essay about what it’s like to work in three disciplines: poetry, collage, and music.

I invite you to have a look at the resulting featured spread in Talking Writing and to explore the rest of the issue, which will be added to during the next few weeks.

Click the image below to view my collages and essay:


Camille Martin

Looms “expansive”: mclennan

Many thanks to rob mclennan for his lovely review of Looms!

“There is such an expansiveness to Martin’s Looms. The poems exist in that magical place where words, images and ideas collide, creating connections that previously had never been.”

In his review, rob generously included a couple of poems from the book. If you’d like to read more from Looms, you can order a copy at the following vendors (click to link):

                                                                     

On Cross-Pollination: An interview with Camille Martin by James Pickersgill

My “world premiere” of Looms will be in Cobourg, Ontario, about an hour’s train ride east of Toronto.

Poet James Pickersgill put together some thought-provoking interview questions in advance of the reading. Below is a sample, and the complete interview can be found here.

Q – Camille, it is not at all true that poetry is your single creative outlet. You are known as a collage artist, too. You are an editor yourself … and a translator. Your own work has been translated into other languages as well. You have been a university teacher. You’ve organized poetry reading series. You’ve had radio shows and you blog actively on the internet. When listed like that, these activities might sound like an array of separate pigeon-holes but I suspect that there is a lot of cross-pollination, so to speak. What is the nature of this creativity as you experience it: one spark that finds many openings to jump into flame, or, can it be distinct and separate creative impetuses?

Camille Martin – I love the idea of cross-pollination. In fact, I think my primary creative impulse is to bring together: to merge or to juxtapose. It’s the basic impetus for the metaphor: to bring unlike things into dialogue. And for me, that goes for disciplines as well. I was reading and seeking out poetry on my own from an early age, though I didn’t begin writing it in earnest until my late 30s. But my first creative expression was musical – I was trained as a classical pianist since I was six years old, and I went on to get a graduate degree in piano performance. I was also intensely interested in visual art. I’ve always felt a desire to bring the arts together. So now, in the autumn of my life, I have the pleasure of doing all three: making collages, writing poetry, and setting my poetry to music. I think these disciplines are sparking conversations among each another.


Camille Martin

LOOMS now at SPD

Always happy when my books arrive at Small Press Distribution!

Poetry. The title of LOOMS signifies the weaving tool as well as the shadowing appearance of something. These “woven tales” were inspired by Barbara Guest’s statement that a tale “doesn’t tell the truth about itself; it tells us what it dreams about.” The strands of their surreal allegories converse, one idea giving rise to another, and the paths of their dialogue become the fabric of the narrative. In a second meaning, something that looms remains in a state of imminent arrival. Such are these tales, like parables with infinitely deferred lessons.

“In tightly woven tapestry, Martin’s ‘backstreet songs’ re-invent a music of knowledge that navigates the hucksterism and catastrophe threatening our planet. The movement of her threads is fugue-like, punctuated by oboes and clarinets, mockingbirds and cicadas. Here, in the dream-space of time-lapse film, forms of life and ideas collide and morph, rippling through centuries of human consciousness to unravel as quickly as they ravel. Here, above all, Martin makes it possible to dance among our ‘origins in snake oil,’ our ‘crusades to mirages’ and our ‘accidental fictions’.”—Meredith Quartermain

“A dreamscape on the outskirts of town, ‘in the badlands of the vernacular,’ these hopeful, haunted poems populated by children and prisoners ‘hover between’ realms domestic and exterior, real and imagined. Like candles described herein, this book gives off a melting, tactile glow.”—Arielle Greenberg


Camille Martin

A box full of the mysterious woman playing blindman’s bluff among neurons

click image for Shearsman Books page for Looms

My box of Looms has arrived, and copies distributed to five Goodreads winners.

Shearsman Books has a pdf sample as well as a handy list of links where you can order the book.

Many thanks to Tony Frazer, publisher extraordinaire of Shearsman Books.

May the poems in Looms bring you pleasure!


Camille Martin

Enter at Goodreads for free copy of Looms

As the official publication date of Looms nears, I registered the book for the Goodreads giveaway. It’s free to enter, and at the end date I’ll mail copies to the winners (selected by Goodreads using some algorithm that’s beyond my poetry-addled brain to fathom) . . .

Click the image below to enter at Goodreads:


Cheers!


Camille Martin

Looms now available: check for pre-order discounts

Looms, my fourth book of poetry, is now available for pre-order from your favourite bookstore and online sources.

At the bottom of the Shearsman Books page is a convenient clickable list so you can choose your preferred source and compare prices—you may wish to check for pre-order discounts (The Book Depository has one, last time I checked).

Looms is my second title published by Shearsman Books, and I couldn’t be happier with the way it came out. The cover features one of my collages, Blind Man’s Bluff, and the publisher, Tony Frazer, did a beautiful job (as usual) designing and producing the book.

Publisher’s description of Looms:
The title of Looms signifies the weaving tool as well as the shadowing appearance of something. These “woven tales” were inspired by Barbara Guest’s statement that a tale “doesn’t tell the truth about itself; it tells us what it dreams about.” The strands of their surreal allegories converse, one idea giving rise to another, and the paths of their dialogue become the fabric of the narrative. In a second meaning, something that looms remains in a state of imminent arrival. Such are these tales, like parables with infinitely deferred lessons.


Camille Martin

“Their species is finally getting somewhere . . .”: Angel House Press (National Poetry Month)

Another poem from my forthcoming Looms (Shearsman Books) has been selected for a National Poetry Month series:

click to link to the poem at Angel House Press

Thanks to Amanda Earl, poet and publisher of Angel House Press!


Camille Martin

The Toronto Quarterly: “perfidy shows up with its pleasant molecules”

A poem from my upcoming collection, Looms, kicks off The Toronto Quarterly’s National Poetry Month parade. Thanks to Darryl Salach!

Click to see TTQ.


Camille Martin

Shearsman Books to publish Looms

Shearsman Books rocks my world — again! Like my previous collection (Sonnets), Looms will appear from Shearsman, a UK literary press that publishes about sixty new titles per year.

Poets who have published with Shearsman include Mark Scroggins, Maxine Chernoff, Tony Lopez, anne blonstein, Carrie Etter, Joseph Massey, Lisa Samuels, Eileen Tabios, Tom Clark, Anne Gorrick, Michael Heller, and Scott Thurston, to name only a few.

Among Canadian poets, Erin Mouré has published three books of translations of the poetry of Chus Pato for Shearsman.

I’m in fierce company.

Unless predictions of Doomsday 2012 come true, Looms will loom on the horizon in fall 2012.


Camille Martin

The return of the rogue . . .

More posts arriving soon, including samples from poetry books that have taken off the top of my head lately.

Meanwhile, please have a look at my newly spruced-up website—it’s leaner and cleaner and easier to navigate:

http://www.camillemartin.ca

Enjoy the perusing. Comments welcome!

In other news, I recently completed a new collection of poems, “Looms.” I used the Toronto New School of Writing‘s Manuscript Midwives program and went through intensive and gratifying editing sessions with poet Phil Hall, who has an uncanny ability to figure out what you want to do and help you do it better. I’m excited about this new manuscript, which is getting encouraging feedback from poet friends who’ve read the manuscript and heard my readings from it, most recently at AvantGarden.

And onward to a new poetry manuscript with the working title “Cambrian Blues.”

Cheers!

 


 

Camille Martin