Martha Silano : part five

How important is music to your poetry?

Very important. It’s definitely one of the three things I pay attention to while drafting and revising, right up there with meaning and clarity.

Martha Silano : part four

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

I go to my first poetry loves—Robert Bly, William Stafford, the Beats, Ann Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Lucille Clifton, Emily Dickinson. Actually, it depends what I am working on, what my soul yearns for that day or week or month. Last winter I re-read pretty much all of Bob Hicok’s poems. Right after that, I began reading The Poems of Emily Dickinson from start to finish. I’ve been reading her poems since I was fourteen, but I wanted to read them in the order she wrote them—to enter her poetry ‘workshop.’ I follow my bliss in this regard, revisiting books that have spoken to me deeply and resonantly.

Martha Silano : part three

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

My work enters the world in myriad ways. Sometimes I am sitting in an airport and I hear something over the loudspeaker—While maintenance deals with an avionics problem …—so I get out my notebook and jot that down, then continue writing what occurs to me. Or my yoga instructor says “please refrain from efforting.” Efforting? So I go home and try to write a poem about efforting, or lack thereof. I also belong to two writing groups. They’re not critique groups; we generate new work using writing prompts—set a timer for 20 minutes, share aloud what we’ve written. These groups have been very helpful for increasing productivity and striving to make my work more enticing/lively/entertaining (having an instant audience will do that to you).  When a poem feels like it’s getting closer to being finished but I’m not sure, I often send it to a poet friend for suggestions. They’ll catch the unclear/fuzzy places, along with spelling and grammatical errors.  So yes, depending on the kindness of (once) strangers has been essential since the beginning.
  

Martha Silano : part two

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

Oh, yes! I didn’t know how important the sounds of words were – the cadences and rhythms, the use of things like assonance and slant rhyme to keep a poem’s engine chugging along. I also didn’t know how much of writing is revising. Finally, I used to look for something I could ‘relate to’ in a poem. If I couldn’t find ME, I usually didn’t ‘like’ the poem. I’m not looking for mirrors anymore –I’m actively seeking out lives I haven’t lived, stories and situations that aren’t mine at all.

Martha Silano : part one

Martha Silano is the author of four books of poetry, including Reckless Lovely, The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception (winner of the 2010 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize), and Blue Positive. She is co-editor, with Kelli Russell Agodon, The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts for your Writing Practice. Saturnalia Books will release Gravity Assist, a poetry collection, in early 2019. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and New England Review, among others. The recipient of Yaddo’s 2017 Martha Walsh Pulver residency, Martha teaches at Bellevue College.

Photo credit: Langdon Cook

What are you working on?

I am finishing up a book of poems, Gravity Assist, due out from Saturnalia Books in early 2019, working on another book of poems (Glottal Stop), and trying my hand at prose poems and deliberate imitations of the styles of well-known poets.