Last night I dreamed the librarians held hands and danced in circles and told me to put more grit in my poems.
When I get angsty, information gathering calms me down. As does putting cotton swabs in my ears.
I like certain things better than other things, and by things I mean people.
The public diction I once used seems foreign to me now, as if it is the imprint for a happiness I will never mold myself to again.
Attack my character and integrity once: Shame on you. Attack my character and integrity twice: Shame on me for allowing you do it again.
Character and integrity don’t really belong to me at all. Both are communally constructed, as are self and identity.
It’s interesting how the language of torture works its way into poetry, into everything.
There’s something vulgar about a sandwich whose bread is missing.
I am much more interested in studying people’s behaviors than being on the receiving end of those behaviors.
I fell down today and hurt myself. The fall was complicated and graceless.
My roller derby name: Sylvia’s Wrath.
Misread of the day: I care for impotent waiters.
My summary of status messages I’ve read this morning: I [insert verb] [insert direct object].
Once you realize your brilliance is a constant, the need to rush things will dissipate.
I wonder sometimes if rolling a radio onto a stage is better than writing the word “radio” on a page.
I have nothing to say about the radio that you can’t learn from a radio.
I would be a little nervous if people agreed with me.
My new boots are chick magnets.
Every time we write, it’s like a little bit of culture is extracted from the whole to stand on its own and say, Look at we think. Look at how we feel.
I aspire to virtual locality.
I’m not sure why poems need to make things clear. Why can’t poems make things muddy? Disorient as opposed to orient?
When the poem becomes strange, you know you might have something.
I feel like the read-write culture is going back to being the read-only culture because we figured out the read-write culture is just too much work—on everyone’s end.
I think clogs make my butt look smaller.
Poetry should aspire to be better than its authors.
Social media and digital communications allow us to communicate what we feel independent of feeling what we feel. Typing an emoticon smiley face might be an indicator or placeholder for a feeling that would lead us to smile, but it is often devoid of the actual feeling—a stand-in that serves only to fill space on the screen and to express to someone else an emotion that never took up residence in our bodies.
I would say I have been to hell and back over the past 6 years, but I am not quite sure yet about the “and back” part.
To open up the earth with a crowbar. To scale trees for their sacred fruits. To whisper Thank you, thank you only to hear no You are welcome. To drive elbow deep into whatever we think is ours.
To enter another day of “I” infesting our thoughts. To discern space with a dollar. To apologize, then do more wrong.
Today I measured time by switchbacks, not by minutes.
The triumph of the human spirit is in the striving, the very fact that we strive. It is not in the success or failure of that striving.
Time falls away inside breath.
It is in writing about nothing that we might stumble upon something.
Dana Guthrie Martin :: Now with more mobility and diminished functionality.
That’s it. No more robots in the living room. Period.
My husband tries to sneak little robots into every room, as if I won’t notice.
A gang of crows just flew by my window. Cackling, they have no respect for the sleepy. And I do mean gang, as in street gang. As in, deadly.
If I were oil, I would be crude oil. I would not be the light substance we covet and over which we are willing to compromise ourselves and the earth.
There are too many people in my spanking machine. I think it’s broken. Everyone is just sitting in it having drinks and socializing as if it’s a lounge.
A friend said I would be happier If I valued things beyond people’s mistakes and flaws. Making note of and valuing are not the same thing.
Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you need to accept them and what they do to you in order to be happy.
Don’t ever let anyone tell you where your happiness lies. Don’t ever let anyone make the assumption that you are, or are not, happy.
Interrogate the word happy. Interrogate the assumptions of others. Interrogate everything.
Interrogate the word value, and define for yourself what your values are. Don’t let anyone tell you what you do or do not.
The impulse to create is merely the impulse to live—not the impulse to live well.
What have you accomplished today? What have you accompliced today?
Sometimes people make so many requests of us that we no longer feel like human beings but instead like walking task lists.
Looking for the topic sentence in this essay is like looking for an Easter egg on Halloween.
My process for writing is to write things down.
My defense: They were 50 percent off, so I got 4,700 percent more than I needed.
Sometimes when you see something a certain way, someone will come along and tell you your perceptions are wrong. Please remember you are under no obligation to alter your perceptions on this basis of another’s.
If as Foucault states the soul is a product of culture, that explains why we re-create the culture we know in those potentially revolutionary moments where we are able to remove ourselves from what “is.” Rather than creating something new, we revert to the culture we know not out of habit or because we can’t conceive of something else but because we must re-create what “was”—and in doing so re-create our souls. We are bringing our souls back into being, from the nothingness that threatens to consume them.
If the poem is going to have a chance, we must energize the paper.
I want to unfold everything and see what it—all
Dana Henry Martin 