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Charles Martin
Charles Martin (Poetry, Translation) is the author of four books of poems, including Starting From Sleep: New & Selected Poems (Overlook/Sewanee Writers Series, 2002); What the Darkness Proposes (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); and Steal the Bacon (Hopkins, 1987). His poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Hudson Review, Boulevard, The Threepenny Review, and in many other magazines and anthologies. In 2004 Charles' new verse translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses was released in paperback by W.W. Norton. It was widely acclaimed and received the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. He has also received critical praise for his translation of the complete poems of Catullus (John Hopkins, 1990) and his critical study of Catullus (Yale University Press, Hermes Series, 1992). Charles is the recipient of a Bess Hokin Award from Poetry and a 2001 Pushcart Prize. He was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award from The Academy of American Poets and has received fellowships from the Ingram Merril Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2005 he was honored with the Award for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This year he was also appointed Cathedral Poet in Residence at The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City. Charles frequently teaches poetry workshops at the Sewanee Writers Conference, the West Chester Conference on Form and Narrative in Poetry, the Unterberg Center of the 92nd Street YMHA and at Syracuse University. A graduate of Fordham University, he holds a PhD from SUNY at Buffalo and is Professor at Queensborough Community College (CUNY). He lives in Manhattan and Syracuse with his wife, arts journalist Johanna Keller.
Teaching Philosophy:
As a teacher of poetry, I have always tried to focus on what I think can be taught, the techniques of poetry as seen in the close reading of poems, those of my students and those of my teachers alike. The close reading of poems, the examination of syntax in relation to prosody, is an instructive delight. So is the examination of figures of speech and patterns of sound.
I hold with those who say that a poem exists so that we can talk about it. If it is a good poem, it will want us to talk about it, and it will enjoy our discussion. If it is not a good poem, it may not want to be discussed much at all; it may only want praise, which will do it no good. A good poem is one that improves our ability to talk about it and other poems.
I believe that all poetry has form, whether fixed or free. My abiding interest has been the present day use of measured verse, and I write in measure only because I continue to find it more interesting to work with and explore than free verse. I am happy to encourage students who want to work in fixed forms but nobody should feel pressured to do so. I enjoy reading free verse, and I don't think that writing in measure makes one a better person. I do it for the pleasure of it. Mona Van Duyn once said that the difference between writing in free verse and writing in meter was that when she was writing in free verse her husband got his dinner on time and when she was writing in meter he had to wait until she finished the poem.
In recent years, the question of what we mean by the word voice has come to interest me more and more. What I think now is that it is an error to assume that each poet is his or her own voice (as in "One of the most interesting voices in contemporary American poetry..."). I find it more interesting to think that poets develop voices which alter with their occasions. That development, in, say, a poet like Donald Justice, interests me greatly, and I like to show this development to my students, since I think it is useful to them to see it.
I am myself fond of exercises, and I don't believe in making a distinction between exercise and poem. I think that any exercise can turn into a poem (oh, all right, "a real poem") and any poem involves exercise not unlike the kind one gets when lifting weights. I believe that exercises should be optional since otherwise the contrarians in the group will miss out on them. Exercises may be formal, or they may be exercises in voice, or they may be a combination of the two.
As a teacher, I try to follow the commandment that goes, "Thou shalt teach the ones in front of you and not any others." I try to determine what the student intends by the poem and what the poem intends, and I try to comment helpfully on the mesh between these two.
I have not taught in a brief residency program before, but my preference is for keeping in touch with people by snail-mail, so work will be received in manila envelopes and returned the same way. I will line-edit, and I will make suggestions about the work and about the reading that should nourish it, whether it's contemporary or ancient, in English or another language, poetry or prose.
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