MARTY CAIN

The Vermonter in me should say birches, but I fell in love with magnolias while living in the Magnolia State—and my kid’s middle name is Magnolia, so that’s an obvious choice.

On any kind of moving vehicle, I most like to read lyric poetry that feels infrastructural and shaped by the air that surrounds infrastructure—a form made by what it leaves out: think Dickinson, Niedecker, and Johannes Göransson’s translation of Aase Berg’s Transfer Fat.

Luna moths perform just by sitting there—that’s how you know they’re good.

If you know me, it’s not really a secret, but I’d gladly watch School of Rock on loop for the rest of my life.

Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You has a cult following, but it should probably be recognized as one of the most singular literary works of the 20th century. It has more to say about region, the rise of mass media, and community than most of the modernist canon does put together. It’s flawed and messy, but there’s nothing else like it.

A purple that’s almost black.

Deer. I love everything about them. I live in a neighborhood of Ithaca that, while not suburban, has a population density that’s comparable to that of a suburb. Across the street from me is an empty wooded lot where a family of deer live, and recently, the fawns have been nursing their mother in my yard. When I was living in Mississippi, my now-spouse ran into a busy highway to pull a wounded fawn out of traffic, and that was the moment  I decided I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. I have some antlers tattooed on my arm. What can I say! I love deer! They’re gross and elegant at the same time!

 

My initial answer was: I’d say my mood is quite similar when reading both. Much of the time, both attempt to reshape messiness into form.

Then again, I think it really depends upon the kind of fiction (or the kind of history) we’re talking about. I’ve been on a Dennis Cooper kick recently, and his writing feels more like it reshapes form into messiness (it’s reshaping what I thought fiction was, and I dig it).

Yes, and I’m pretty sure I’ve actually written about this in poems more than once (though I could be misremembering). In seashells, I hear the same kind of resonant formlessness that I hear in graveyards, or in the static between FM radio stations, and it’s a motivating force for how I think about art and its relationship to obliteration.

I can’t speak for the human body more generally, but I can say with certainty that they’d be an improvement for mine!

These days I’m either listening to children’s music (Laurie Berkner and Pete Seeger is the good shit), the Grateful Dead (especially the shows from 1972, and especially the iterations of “Dark Star” from that year), or hardcore (Turnstile), or punk (The Chisel).

Mary Shelley and Bernadette Mayer.

Studded belts, but if I’m judging by the kids I see at the skatepark, I think they might already be on their way back.

The derelict factory overlooking the first dam of Six Mile Creek in Ithaca, New York—it has pipes coming out of it and moss and trees growing through it, and it’s where I wrote most of my most recent book.

This is a tough question, and I think it really depends upon how one defines “city,” and whether we’re talking about living in a city or visiting a city. Ithaca, NY is the biggest place where I’ve ever been a permanent resident, so I may not be the best person to answer this question. That said: for me, art is inseparable from the rhythms of locality, the repetitions and familiarities through which community is formed. This can happen in a lot of locales, of course, but I’ve personally felt it most in places that, to quote Raymond Williams, feel like knowable communities: small towns as breathing textual geographies.

My cat Vader.

Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno.

The boring answer is that I’m not sure—but I do believe with an increasing fervor that ghosts exist, and I do think there’s some kind of fundamental linkage between poetry (or, at least, what I take to be poetry) and ghostliness.

Lobsters and lawns.

Wordsworth has a lot more obnoxiousness and pretension—not great qualities on their own, but paired with his talent, I do think they are at the heart of why he’s a fascinating and paradoxical poet. What does Blake have that Wordsworth doesn’t? Fearlessness, and a willingness to lean into chaos. Wordsworth’s 1850 Prelude is a masterclass in how to approach revision like an absolute coward.

Which poet would you most like to see live forever? 

Marty Cain has three cats. Marty Cain has three chickens. Marty Cain has been in a Blink-182 cover band. Marty Cain co-edits Garden-Door Press, and is bailing on academia to help start a DIY community arts center called Ithaca House. Marty Cain is the author of The Prelude, out this year from Action Books.