“One for None” – M. G. Martin

by Nancy Lili

“fuck me like a sitcom.” Why did that have to be the line I read when I first opened the book? My sigh of frustration could have blown down more homes than a tornado in Oklahoma. Oh no, I thought, I actually have to read this– and he didn’t even capitalize the letter F– my eyes rolled so hard. I thought, let the migraine begin. I read M. G. Martin’s book of poetry “One for None” from cover to cover and then from back to front, marking every page from top to bottom, trying to make up my mind.

Coquette, that’s what I’d call Martin’s word choice and style. (Other words in the running of this definition competition included “post modern,” “doomed,” and “strange.” None of these demonstrate Martin’s playful intrigue as well as “coquette.”) Martin has a way of mixing images so surreal into one perfect setting– Israel, Kentucky, and outer space are all home to one stanza: “israel: it’s just like kentucky/ but w/more stars/ & a different flag.” The juxtaposition of images like this somehow never fail the reader.

I thought, maybe Martin is just being clever or trying to be funny? I didn’t like that. I thought, Martin must be just another kid joker pretending to like poetry to get into hipster girl’s panties. Too many of his poems mix Brautigan ideals with sea creatures and pancakes and isn’t poetry typically more serious than that? Then again, what’s wrong with coquette? There’s nothing wrong with coquette.

Sometimes I bet Martin is the narrator of a poem, but sometimes he takes on the persona of others like Jean Michel Basquait or homeless men or newborn babies. Sometimes Martin violates catchy phrases as “hooks” in poems, but sometimes the words themselves aren’t special at all (“as a matter/ of fact, the fact/ of the matter”). His choice of imagery, however, are always special and coquette.

“i tripped over the sunday funnies & fell into the microwave like a/ frozen rainbow tear & a unicorn cliche. so stop standing over my/ shoulder.” Where does stuff like that even come from? In this particular instance, the narrator is a homeless person giving a monologue. Martin ends this section of the monologue with a cheery “cha cha cha.” (This is what poetry has come to, my friends.) Martin begins the next section of this poem with an honest question– adding balance to the poem– “if/ there is a god/ who  is just/ why  does history smell/ like this?”

“God” makes an appearance in several poems, most memorably when cast as a porn producer in Martin’s famous creation story poem. (I say famous because I’d seen the video of him reciting it a few times before I ever actually knew who he was. I’m not sure how I stumbled upon the video; I assumed he was just famous. That said, I wasn’t impressed by this famous creation story poem when I heard it nor when I read it. It seemed like a giant gimmick and then I felt bad for God, even though I bet God is used to being part of gimmicks.) Other of Martin’s motifs include: teeth (raisin teeth, braille teeth), time, the notion of history, weather, politics, class, and of course, love. These are all things that belong in poetry.

Part of what I ended up liking so much about “One for None”– because I struggled appreciating it at the start– is the wide range of topics, yes, those juxtapositions. It seems I can’t shut up about it. Those mixings are common to poetry performers, which Martin is. He even labeled the two sections of this book “spoken” and “word” in case the reader didn’t know his roots.

“she walked in wearing a dress/ of wishbones/ & the windows/ suffocated.”

“she worked day after day/ in a train yard/  & trained her brain/ to go the extra yard/ & lose her train of thought.”

“it & i shared/ a cliche called connection.”

I wonder how influence Martin is by Jeffrey McDaniel?

It’s absolutely modern poetry. It’s self-aware. It’s in your face. It’s funny. It’s everywhere at the same time, and hasn’t that always been one of the top five saught-after super hero skills, so isn’t it awesome that his poems own those skills?

That said, I would understand how maybe this poetry isn’t for everyone. My grandma would hate this. Most academia may not love it either. He uses less than five capital letters in the entire book, uses @ frequently, writes “ily” short for “I love you,” sticks “LOL” in your face, and shortens “your” to “yr” every single time. I don’t know about your grandma, but my grandma would call that lazy– she’d call it lazy only if she were ever able to understand what he meant in the first place.

Published by Ink and released August 2010, this may be something readers would like to check out. If you like everything and you like it at once even though maybe you’re sometimes a morbid person or you have bad luck, then maybe “One for None” is for you.