#Martyn Crucefix

[alliwanttodoiscollectpoetry]

“Before He Creates us, God speaks to each of us just once.

Then, into the night, he goes with us in silence.

Yet these words, at the start,

His cloudy words are:

Rilke- before he creates us (from the book of monastic life)

[billherbert23]

How Not To Do This

Driven, if not driven wild, by coincidence, I had occasion just the other day to post something by a very old friend, Martyn Crucefix, on a current website, the Ghost Furniture Catalogue, which I’m co-curating with Sophie Herxheimer. The particular coincidence in this case being that it’s Martyn’s own excellent website I always think of as a corrective contrast to this, far more occasional,…

[martyncrucefix]

A Bedroom Paranoia: a new poem

Martyn Crucefix: A bedroom paranoia

[limejuicer1862]

wonderful blog post by Martyn Crucefix

This Thing Called Bhakti: Vacanas and Ted Hughes

[kitchen-light]

Und alles schwieg. Doch selbst in der Verschweigung ging neuer Anfang, Wink und Wandlung vor. And all things hushed. Yet even under cover came a new start, a sign, a transforming.

Rainer Maria Rilke, from Sonnet 1, of Part One, to “Sonnets to Orpheus”, translated by Martyn Crucefix, Enitharmon Press, 2012

[anthonymhowellblog]

POETRY AT THE ROOM

POETRY AT THE ROOM

Saturday 3 March at 7.30 pm – 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale N17 9AS

£5 entry, then donation for refreshments.  8801 8577

Your host Anthony Howell invites you to Celebrate the Sequence and the Longer Poem

With Jacqueline Saphra, Martyn Crucefix, Graham Buchan/Nandita Ghose

Jacqueline Saphra

Jacqueline Saphra’s If I Lay on my Back I Saw Nothing but Naked Women was published by The Emma Press.…

[thisisyournarratorspeaking]

reading notes: feb. 2021

fin:

Children of God by Mary Doria Russell

in progress:

Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard

Tale of Tales by Giambattista Basile (perpetually lol) (trans. Nancy L. Canepa)

Paradise Lost by John Milton

The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in WWII by Svetlana Alexievich

Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. Martyn Crucefix)

other media:

Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (Netflix)

Pretend It’s a City w/ Fran Leibowitz (Netflix)

“Identity: A Trans Coming Out Story” by Abigail Thorn (Philosophy Tube)

notes:

slow month this time around, whoops

Children of God by Mary Doria Russell - the letter to the pope at the beginning is a tool to catch readers up on what happened in the last book. somewhat of a slow start overall

I had my doubts at first but eventually ended up grateful that I’d read the first book so close to reading the second, particularly because a pivotal moment rolled around when a member of the species Emilio fears unknowingly parrots back the exact same words, the same motive, that sparked his own launch into God’s space and it killed me oh my gosh

all over again this month I’m struck by the way the Queen’s Thief series and the Sparrow books occupy parallel tracks in my mind. both manipulate communication and miscommunication - between characters, between you and the narrator - to move the plot forward. and I keep trying to think about how this is done in each. the closest I can get (and it’s not very close) is that Queen’s Thief feels like a dance whereas the Sparrow books are heavily rooted in culture clashes. both gripping! enjoyable! but in such different ways.

(things I want to keep thinking about: is ‘too late’ ever truly too late? what do we do with damage? looking at Children of God alongside the story of Abraham and Isaac (re: Fear and Trembling), particularly between the two Isaacs and their parents.)

Didion: she moves her hands in gestures like Fran Leibowitz does in Pretend it’s a City and I wonder if that’s a habit they both picked up from New York life, or if it’s a mannerism that belongs to their generation.

(I love Fran’s rapid-fire speech, and how she pauses a little after each thing she says to see if it lands - she’s a critic, yes, but she’s also deeply invested, cares deeply about how what she says is received when around those she likes. I’m assuming anyway)

Didion talks about meeting John Gregory Dunne, falling in love with his family, and about how ‘falling in love’ itself is not part of her world - “I liked having somebody there...all I knew was I wanted this to continue.” (and her nephew, telling her a story, talking to her as they both look ahead rather than at each other, and she smiles and laughs and is happy to hear it. and he’s happy to tell it to her in a way she’s comfortable hearing, not headlong but with her regardless)

“They were each other’s most trusted reader.” 😭 and then later: “It was not a good time. Actually, it was a wonderful book, it turned out.” -> you see a bit of a disconnect of someone so used to observing, bent on life feeding art and not the other way around. there was a bit in here where she talked of this traumatic sight she and other reporters witnessed and she was like “it was a great story, it was golden” and. huh. that’s a place to be grateful not to be in. 

Abigail’s sound-effect captions are a work of art to be treasured 

[billherbert23]

The Gairfish Years (1/3)

Here, in a rudimentary attempt at cataloguing, are the front and, where informationative, back covers of Gairfish, the late 80s/early 90s Scottish literary magazine I edited with Richard Price.

I’ll present these over three posts, this first one covering the initial two issues, slim Oxford-based publications more or less reflecting my research into MacDiarmid and scant Scottish contacts, plus writers from that milieu (the same folk were publishing New Poetry from Oxford around that time).

Then there’s the first issue with Richard, whom I was introduced to by Robert Crawford, and who essentially reinvented it as a proper mag.

[martyncrucefix]

Reading Rilke's poems - 6pm this Saturday in Bristol

I will be giving a reading from this year’s Pushkin Press publication, Change Your Life: Essential Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke. The reading is being organised, and taking place at Heron Books in Bristol as follows: Heron Books Unit 5, The Clifton ArcadeBristol, BS8 4AA United Kingdom + Google Map Join us for Poetry In Herons with Martyn Crucefix Join us in the Arcade after hours for our…

[limejuicer1862]

Chen Xianfa: Five Poems Translated by Martyn Crucefix and Nancy Feng Liang

[anthonywilson]

Guest blog post: David Ferry's 'Lake Water', by Martyn Crucefix

Guest blog post: David Ferry’s ‘Lake Water’, by Martyn Crucefix

This is the second in a series of guest blog posts about poets who have been overlooked and who should be better known.

———

In the French Alps above the Trois Vallées, the woven steel cables of chair lifts and cable cars hang still overnight as if dead and the cold air seals them in icy sheaths. Come morning, when the massive engines whir into action at either end of the lifts, the cables must…

[latefrequencies]

There exists a poet called Martyn Crucefix.

It's people like him who make you stop and think, "How is it that people can have such cool names?"

[martyncrucefix]

Ian Brinton reviews 'Between a Drowning Man'

Here is Ian Brinton‘s recent review of my new Salt collection, Between a Drowning Man. It was first published by Litter Magazine in January 2024. The invitation at the opening of these two remarkable sequences of poems by Martyn Crucefix emphasises both ‘difference’ and ‘ambiguity’, an ‘othering’ which hones attention rather than dulling it. Divided into two sections, Works and Days (forty-nine…

[martyncrucefix]

Two new prose poems at Black Nore Review

Many thanks to Ben Banyard for accepting these two recent experiments in prose poetry. Do check out other postings on Ben’s site at Black Nore Review. Click on Martyn Crucefix – two poems below to read the pieces. Ben’s details are as follows: Ben Banyard lives in Portishead, near Bristol. His three collections to date are Hi-Viz (Yaffle Press, 2021), We Are All Lucky (Indigo Dreams, 2018)…

[martyncrucefix]

A new podcast interview - plus a new review of 'Between a Drowning Man'

I am delighted to announce that Planet Poetry – the long-running, terrific poetry podcast run by Robin Houghton and Peter Kenny have released their new episode which includes an interview with me about my new Salt book. Do listen here: https://planetpoetry.buzzsprout.com/1414696/14024020-bridges-broken-with-martyn-crucefix Stuart Henson has also written a fine review of Between a Drowning Man,…

[billherbert23]

Following recent posts here of things which should have already been posted, here’s a link to Martyn Crucefix’s excellent blog where he posted this kind note on The Kindly Interrogator back in November. - TKI being the volume of translations from the Persian on which I worked with the poet Alireza Abiz, initially as part of his PhD thesis, and latterly because we had the strong sense we could produce a good (in the sense of internally coherent selection) from a couple of volumes of his work.

In the course of his judicious assessment of the book, Martyn had a couple of textual queries about the intro I should answered more promptly and publicly - to the extent that this site is public.

Firstly the unascribed intro was co-written by Alireza and myself: he contributed the succinct history of modern Persian poetry, while I attempted a description of the unique flavour of his work. To give a flavour of that attempt, here’s a paragraph: ‘His work has what feels to an English language reader like a unique but not entirely unfamiliar texture which you could classify as a dialled-down or even buttoned-up surrealism. Extraordinary, terrible things appear to be happening - his speakers move between life and death, and between victim and torturer or even murderer - but no-one, least of all the poet, seems to draw attention to the fact. The impact of his work depends on this extreme tension between the calm of its surface and the unfathomable uncertainty revealed to occupy its depths.’

This division of labours should have been seamless and unambiguous, except I failed to knock out a couple of quote marks around the following paragraph: 

'The book is illuminated by the, properly, tragic insight that, in a world constructed along lines of absolute right and wrong, while it can become tragically clear at any moment who is the perpetrator of oppression, the corrupting influence of dogmas is so insidious that no-one remains entirely innocent, or, if carried along by the paranoias of ideological purity, should be considered completely guilty. It is an insight of immediate relevance to the polarising factions of liberal democracy, which presume themselves capable of right and even righteous thinking, but who are therefore lulled by the seemingly permanence of their governing structures into imagining themselves immune from precisely this temptation toward unequivocality. Our humanity, it implies, lies in our doubt, and, most especially, in our self-doubt.’

Oh well, hopefully it bears repetition here... A few instances of the key thing, the poetry, can be sampled in a PDF here.