Jennifer Martelli has received fellowships from The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Monson Arts, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Poetry, Best of the Net Anthology, Braving the Body Anthology, Verse Daily, Plume, The Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree, The Queen of Queens, which won the Italian American Studies Association Book Award and was shortlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award, and My Tarantella, which was also shortlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award and named finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. Jennifer Martelli is co-poetry editor for MER. www.jennmartelli.com
Jennifer Martelli’s Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree opens with a quote from The Blue Book of Narcotics Anonymous: “Many times in our recovery, the old ghosts will haunt us.” Haunting–of ghosts, snakes and men–permeate the collection, which asks at its core how it feels to be enclosed decades after being in recovery, how the snake of past addiction “slowly dissolves” the fawn’s “long body” “over days, maybe a month, for the “snake’s juices to break down the / meat so it can shit bone bits, antler buds, flat teeth, and velvet.”Questions like whether politics, forgiveness, and love belong in poetry are explored through Martelli’s movement across New England seasons, the collection’s three sections, and relations with the chasm of iPhones, Zoom poetry readings, and digging out sadness in storage boxes.
Tiffany Troy: How does the opening poem, “Is there anything under that layer,” open the door to the poems that follow in Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree? To me it introduces the motif of the woman and her snakeskin, of its Freudian, environmental and socioeconomic connotations and significance, as well as the chasm between what the speaker wants to be versus what she is.
Jennifer Martelli: This first poem is an ekphrastic response to a painting by the Polish artist, Eva Juskiewicz,, Untitled, after Èlizabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1984). Juskiewicz painted these haunting portraits of women with their faces covered with scarves, fruit, flowers, and feathers. They’re beautiful, but suffocating. This portrait reminded me of William Hurt in the film Altered States. The poem becomes an associative response, starting with the painting, then onto one film, then another (The Mummy redux), and finally, digging into my own fears. The title is a quote from Juskiewicz.
While I was organizing the manuscript, I decided to open each of the three sections with a question that—I hope—is explored, if not answered in each section. The organization of the book is arranged around the last three steps of the 12 Steps of Narcotics Anonymous: an honest and personal inventory; a search for a relationship with a “higher power (my search ended in atheism);” service and love. Each section is a response or exploration of these concepts.
The question in this poem is exactly as you say: what is this “chasm between what the speaker wants to be versus what she is.” This is the conflict in the book: how do I live with or in this chasm? how do I live with loneliness?
Of all my books, Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree is probably my least overtly political. And yet, it was written primarily during the first Trump administration, pre-Covid. Many of the poems echo the line in this first poem, “The father betrayed his daughter because he adhered // to his own mythology, like most fathers.” It is about power, old & monied. Yet, the speaker is able to claim her own atheism, which is (in my opinion) a rejection of that power.
It’s amazing that you bring up environmental connotations. My friend and brilliant reader, Cindy Veach, pointed out all the growing things in this book. I had never realized how many references there were, which just shows how bad of a reader of my own work I am! This helped in my organization, too. I spread flora and fauna throughout the book, trying to put poems in a botanical and/or natural order. And snakes! I’m so glad Eileen Cleary (my editor) was able to incorporate the image of the snake—which I fear—slithering throughout. I guess I’m not as infertile as I thought!
TT: What was the process in writing and putting together the three sections of the collection? Did you write towards a kind of clarity for each of the question or questions posed by the first poem beginning the section or did they come together more organically?
JM: The idea for this book came out of a Mass Poetry panel I was on years ago. The topic was poets in long-term recovery. I’ve been sober for 36 years (at the time of the panel, I was 30 years). We focused on writing, not as newly-sober poets, but questioning how does alcoholism/addiction affect our writing now. This made me think: OK, I’m not writing drug-a-logues anymore; where does my disease manifest in my poetry? And, going back to that opening poem, it’s a sense of being “disregarded,” ignored, alone, lonely. Very ego-driven, I know, but they say one is never really cured! This could border on melodrama, as well!
So, this was the seed and the challenge. During Covid, I attended a Zoom class hosted by Susan Rich and Kelli Russell Agodon, devoted to organizing a manuscript. Guest teachers were January Gill O’Neil and Diane Seuss. This class was a huge breakthrough for me. Manuscript organization is baffling. I had no real tools and no idea what it meant when people said, “Let the poems speak to each other.” From these brilliant poets, I learned:
- Buy a nice spring binder to keep my poems together; these binders allow me to easily get rid of poems and to add. Also, keep a dedicated journal for my book.
- Begin the book with a poem that’s a “key” for the reader, an introduction of what’s to come: concepts, images, etc. My first poem brought in snakes, penises, and fear.
- Think of my sections as scaffolding-interior-moving outward. This was revolutionary because my book was about long-term recovery, and as I mentioned early, I could focus on the last three “maintenance steps,” make them my sections: Inventory-Spiritual/Atheist Life-Service. Any poem that didn’t fit in that section was removed.
- If someone asked me to give a reason for my organization, could I tell them?
TT: In addition to looking at art and continuing your engagement with the writing community, who are some of your influences, literary or otherwise, in the writing of this collection?
JM: I have a handful of sonnets in the collection which were completely influenced by Diane Seuss’s Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl. In the collection, Seuss has a section of four sonnets called “The American Sentence,” a term coined by Ginsberg: 14 unrhymed lines, which line with 17 syllables across the page. Each line is a haiku, stretched out! I loved—I still love—this form, with its strict counting and its ability to hold both the image and the emotion.
As I was ordering the book, I thought about Jennifer Franklin’s If Some God Shakes Your House and Yona Harvey’s You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love. I was in awe of how Jenny repeated three forms throughout her book. I don’t have strict forms repeating in mine, but I tried to be aware of a circularity to the images, meaning, I tried to have repetition in each section: a question, a flower, a blade, a snake, etc. Yona Harvey’s book taught me to really look at the shape of the poems, their spacing. This book excited me, not only because of its poems, but how they existed, how they seemed to breathe. I tried to vary the forms of my poems, though I tend to write in a long line an awful lot!
TT: Turning next to structure, how did you organize poems within each of the three sections and why?
JM: I decided to use a loosely seasonal organization within the sections. My feeling was that time had passed for the speaker (this was an adult dealing with beliefs and emotions from childhood, especially earlier in the book). In this way, time had stayed the same! I wanted the circularity of the seasons: how things change, but come back the same. Because I came to embrace the growing things in this book, I thought a season approach was fitting. Section I begins in late spring/summer and lasts a year, ending where it started in “Night Snake;” Section II begins in spring and ends in early fall with “The Hunter;” Section III begins in spring and lasts a year, through the following late summer, with “Blades.”
I wanted each section to begin with a question, followed by flowers or animals; each section has a bowl and a blade as well; each section ends with animals that may be frightening. I wanted echoing and repetition to anchor the book; I wanted the reader to hear these images as well as read them. The whole book is encircled by a snake, which may represent both the speaker’s fear (my fear), as well as an inward look.
TT: How do you manifest your fear through the poetic forms that are deployed in the collection? By that, I mean you have poems in couplets, tercets and monostitches and you use rhyme and repetition very cognizantly.
JM: Great question! As I’ve mentioned, I wanted variation with the forms/shapes, really more for how the poems looked. I’m not sure I’m always consciously aware of an emotional connection to the form of a poem. I may become interested in a form—the sonnet, say—and will revise with that form in mind. Maybe I want the constriction of a sonnet for that poem, which feels emotionally claustrophobic. The couplet is my default form! While revising, I have to remind myself of this and really ask if this is the right shape: can these little rooms hold all this emotional furniture? I remember writing some poems in the book—“Snakes” and “Meat,” for instance—while I was reading Erika Meitner’s Useful Junk and decided I wanted thicker poems, without stanzas, but with extra spacing between the lines. Something instinctive kicked in. My poems without lineation—the prose poems “Growing Out My Bangs” and “The Memory Floor” as well as the Zuihitsu, “Oloid”—may be my more vulnerable poems. In a way, they allowed me to speak plainly, not to worry about the line break, which causes tension. But, even within those lineless forms, I tried to stay aware of sound, rhythm, and rhyme. When I’m writing and/or reading poetry frequently, the sounds come easier, or more fluidly.
TT: What can aspiring poets learn from you in treading the balance of writing vulnerability towards truth/ light/ change?
JM: To aspiring poets, I’d say don’t worry about form in your drafting of a poem; form might come during revision. Or, you might start with a form—which can force some great language—and ultimately abandon the form, but keep the sounds! A teacher once said to throw in that one emotional truth as a direct statement (almost like a thesis), and surround it with description and imagery, just to see what happens. I think of Jane Kenyon’s poem, “Frost Flowers,” where she has this killer moment in the middle of all this description of dusk: “My sarcasm wounded a student today. / Afterward, I heard him running down the stairs.” The whole poem, all its imagery, turns on this screw. A line or two of sincerity can illuminate a whole poem. It’s a leap I try to take.
TT: What are you working on today?
JM: I’m working on two manuscripts, which started as one manuscript a few years ago! The first is made up mostly of epistolary poems. It’s very political and began as letters to the six conservative Justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. It’s also about physical violence and my own abortions, so it’s personal as well (I guess everything is). The book has a lot of cats in it, too! I’m at the ordering stage and I’m continually pulling poems out of my spring binder. It feels good to be ruthless during this horrid time!
My other project is a response to the 2018 remake of the film, Suspiria. After reading Dorothea Lasky’s The Shining, I realized I can delve into a film poetically. This has been a fun project—dance, body horror, and Tilda Swinton! The horror seems to match this moment in this country. I’m still writing for this book (I think), so we’ll see what happens!
TT: Do you have any closing thoughts for your readers of the world
JM: I’ll say what every poet says: read poetry, write poetry! Also—look at other forms of art: dance, painting, photography, sculpture, film, music, etc. Be in the world, engaging with it in however you can or are able!