Yellow Rabbits Review #30: Earth Tickets by Jerry Martien

Earth Tickets by Jerry Martien (Bug Press, 2017)
Review by Greg Bem (@gregbem)
 
Some old and beautiful things were lost.
Even things made yesterday—new-glazed
pots, promises, unyielding decisions.

(from “Aftershocks”)
 
Earth Tickets by Jerry Martien breaks little global poetry ground but does a great deal of reconfiguring and shattering amidst the overall voice of the poet. Martien brings forward a language that is straightforward, captivating, and endearing through the experience first and foremost. It is also a language brought forward to be elevated. With poets like Pound and Spicer mentioned across the pages, this book is a series that pays homage to a lineage of distinction, intellection, and elocution. For that, Earth Tickets serves as an enjoyable read that can keep the reader captivated, intelligibly engaged, and fully immersed in a world that is of and yet also beyond its bare self.

The book is divided into five sections, each with themes that are at once blunt and ambiguous: Getting to the Hard Part, Earth without Borders, the Book of Gates, the Road to Heaven, and the Promise of Rain. These miniature books, or sequences, are long enough to create cause and effect through the lyric and the narrative, while also achieving the course by way of flight. The poems read quickly. Martien’s short and playful style is also erratic but also still to the point. There is an atmosphere of the optimal established from poem to poem. The words run off the page and the poems evaporate only to precipitate a moment later. It is very weathered, this poetry, a texture that is knowable but difficult to trace.

                But then o god. It stops. Some inner thing
Upheaves. Core melts. Down. Valve sticks. Open.
Lights flicker. Dim. Go out. The whole free wheeling
Dynamo winds down. Goes silent. Stops. Convulses
Briefly to life. Stops again. The salmon can’t make it
Upstream. The earth will not stay still beneath your
Feet. Your lungs can’t breathe the air. Something
Weird is in the water.

(from “Prayer for the Wild Heart”)
 
It would be difficult to describe the exacted themes within Earth Tickets, but I believe that the name of the collection itself speaks to the “ticket to earth” as a metaphor for the human experience. Of all the subject matter discoverable within the book, it is arguably life, suffering, and death which reign supreme and are directly explored. In some cases, mortality and the afterlife are experienced through ancient mythology. This includes familiar Greek Myths (turned abstractly toward the contemporary lives we lead). In other moments is the displacing effect of the presence of Christianity. Even still there is the spiritual underbelly of the Western coast of the United States, and the calling of Cascadia. Other elements of other religions and spiritual practices beat across the page like an organ connected to reality by blood. The benefit of such consistency is a degree of purpose that never fully emerges but is always recognizably rooted at the book’s core, a core that Martien, I imagine, carries around in his daily practice and general, poetic livelihood.

To think of the personal in poetry writing is something that, based on the writing, can be completely difficult to the writer, or could come naturally. A tension emerges when the personal is involved: a tension of relevance to the reader. Martien is the poet who writes not only for the self, and also not only for the world at large, but for those in the immediate vicinity. These poems tell the grander, autobiographical story that sheds light on a poet who brandishes the lived experience as the source of art. To bring into the mix a sequence of names and voices, much like the sequence of poems themselves, is a risky perpetuation, but in the case of Earth Tickets, this intimacy supports those abovementioned themes. Life, and the idea of living, is one that is supported by other life, by confirmed connections and relationships, the touch and the tender that keeps our reality in check, that is as provocative as it is charming.

the archetype
the soul
the dream
 
but the bomb
the camps
the virus
 
bright human kind
struggling to
outshine its shadow

(from “The Book of Gates”)
 
When I began reading Earth Tickets, I was confused. In one moment, I held a nasty desire for more. There was on one page a moment where I wanted more risk. On another page, I desired grander sound. But wrapped up neatly, as the poems in this book are almost always, the art becomes something of stability, of awareness, and of completeness. I am reminded of the keystone in the historic arch, and how it holds so much structure together. The poem, perhaps, does this in Martien’s life, and it is a keystone, the structure it supports is not larger than life, but is life, large enough but difficult to understand or imagine out of a context. And so, the poems, then, are the providers of context, describers or access points into the life of a man, Jerry Martien, whose individual experiences, when collected into the whole, ramble on in some epic journey. And when the paradigm shifts into this degree of comfort, it is curiously entwined with (reminiscent of, even) the ferocious, alarming resolutions of those mythologies Martien directly describes and utilizes (as analogy) in these spurts of verse.

Crystalline or even pure glass, the reflective nature of Martien’s work ultimately translates across the obvious connections to his life, forming a certain degree of mythology on its own. I found myself, complacently reading in a calm, abrupt manner, relating to these stories and tales as though a familiarity couldn’t be undone. While not universal by any stretch of the word, I think for some readers Martien will strike a chord that reinforces the essence of life and love within us. That beating, that blood, which codes the poems into the system that is this book, is directly comparable to our own selves. Martien has done well to not veer off too many paths in his design of the book, to keep that message of soulfulness and visceral application clear and responsible. To that, we owe Martien a severe degree of thanks.

The wind picks up. Some kind of
song is building down there.
The mallards splash. In the black water
armies of the underworld singing.
A storm overtaking the earth.

(from “Beneath the Imagin’d Earth)