Ilona Martonfi : part one

Ilona Martonfi is a poet, editor and activist; she is the author of four poetry books, Blue Poppy (2009), Black Grass (2012), The Snow Kimono (2015) and Salt Bride (2019). A fifth volume, The Tempest is forthcoming from Inanna Publications in 2021. Her work has been published in five chapbooks, and in numerous journals across North America and abroad. Recently, her poem “Dachau Visit on a Rainy Day” was nominated for the 2018 Pushcart Prize. She is the founder and Artistic Director of The Yellow Door and Visual Arts Centre Reading Series, and Argo Bookshop Reading Series. She is also the recipient of the Quebec Writers’ Federation 2010 Community Award.

What are you working on?

On a cold January downtown Montreal winter day I am editing my fifth poetry manuscript The Tempest (Inanna Publications, 2021) for the last time. And another last time.

I remember filling in the Inanna Author Questionnaire:

26. Below, please provide a description of your book. We will use these for promotions of your book. We’d like to hear your take on the book. Short, succinct description (two, maximum three sentences):

Like the mythological figure she describes as “ensnared in long tentacles of hair, skeletal, toothless, chiseled in white marble”, Martonfi has hewn her own spare lines to recast her book’s obsession with the politics, violences, and musics of the oral.

Ordering the poetry book of about sixty poems asks: What is your book about? Does a particular aesthetic carry those themes? That speak to each other. What seem to be your concerns? Mood. Tone. Dominant images, speaker. Setting. Season. Introduce the questions, issues, characters, images and sources of conflict that concern you and that will be explored by the book.

Ordering my collection was to make the book work as a whole work.

Today I proof for the word “purple” I used 5 times!