Ilona Martonfi : coda

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

The late Goh Poh Seng, because the first time I heard him read at an open mic event, he said, you are a poet. I attended his Montreal readings, read all his work. We are kindred spirits.

I still google him and listen to him read on his videos. (Goh Poh Seng, a Singaporean dramatist, novelist, doctor and poet, was born in Kuala Lumpur, moved to Canada; Posthumously; Works by Goh Poh Seng.)

Ilona Martonfi : part five

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

I host Rue Towers Writers in my loft. I read the poems aloud. Receiving generous feedback from our eight members.

Founder and Artistic Director of The Yellow Door and Visual Arts Centre Reading Series, curator of Argo Bookshop Reading Series. I share the stage with wonderful writers and musicians.

Invitations to read at other Montreal literary offerings, open mic at Argo Bookshop. Concordia University readings. And several other fine café gatherings.

Ilona Martonfi : part four

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

To wed the “political” with the “personal” the pathos of my poetry is plain. Poems call out and talk back. Expose truths, raise consciousness, one clipping at a time. My book The Tempest, does collage but makes deliberate choices when I put the pieces together. Each item, cut out, becomes one more word, one more symbol.

Offering free verse, prose poems, haibun, and haiku, I use poetry to build on my activism as a tool for achieving goals, taking a stand. My book is composed of poetry of  witness, ekphrastic poems, resistance poems, erasure poems, dream poems, persona poems, elegies. Witness-bearing poetry often comes out of great social tragedies. Exile from place, displacement, the refugee, immigrant. To disappear into a place. The dispossessed. The personal is political.

Ilona Martonfi : part three

How do you know when a poem is finished?

My knowing when a poem I have been working on for several weeks is done is when it closes itself to me. Whatever feels undone I write in another poem. I start the poem over again from a new setting, era, persona, as if I was not really done with what I was trying to get that poem to say. New title, new research. Note taking. Yet, it is not a revision either.

Ilona Martonfi : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

I read the poem "Babi Yar" by Yevgeny Yevtushenko in a magazine. His work focused on war atrocities and denounced antisemitism. It was the 1970s. In blue ink I wrote the poem into a red notebook.

And he was more than a poet - he was a citizen taking a stand. Searching for a tombstone, a historical marker, but finding nothing. It took him two hours to write the poem that begins:

“No monument stands over Babi Yar.
A drop sheer as a crude gravestone. I am afraid.”

Three decades later I publish my first poetry book, Blue Poppy (Coracle Press, 2009). I dedicate the book to my late mother Magda Kovács.

I am artistic director of The Yellow Door Reading Series. Visual Arts Centre Reading Series. And Argo Bookshop Reading Series. Recipient of the Quebec Writers’ Federation 2010 Community Award.

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!