David J Bauman (00:00)
Welcome to In Three Poems, the show where we get to know today's poets three poems at a time. I'm your host, David J. Bauman. Our guest today is Chrissy Martin. Chrissy is the author of the new book Whole Holy Hot, published this year by Right Bloody Press. And she's an assistant professor of English at Centenary College in Louisiana. She holds a PhD in poetry from Oklahoma State and an MFA in poetry from Columbia College, Chicago.

She's the poetry director and founding editor for Arcturus, and her work has appeared in Harper Palette, Cherry Tree, Cream City Review, and Minnesota Review. So let's talk poems with Chrissy Martin.

David J Bauman (00:44)
So I'm here with Chrissy Martin

talking about her book Hol Holy Hot that has been on tour. And

Chrissy Martin (00:53)
Mm-hmm.

David J Bauman (00:53)
where are you, what point of the tour are you on right now, Chrissy?

Chrissy Martin (00:56)
let's

see. I I just did a reading in Brooklyn a few weeks ago. I did Denver, Colorado, about two weeks before that. I'm gonna read in Nackadish next week in Louisiana and then Oklahoma in November.

David J Bauman (01:09)
that's making quite a tour. And you're based in you're in central time. Yeah,

Chrissy Martin (01:12)
I'm in Louisiana.

David J Bauman (01:14)
so okay. Well, I'm in Pennsylvania, so it's it's great talking to you across time zones. Welcome to the podcast. Really happy to have you on In Three Poems. Thanks for being here.

Chrissy Martin (01:22)
Thank you.

I'm so happy to be here. This is really wonderful. I was listening to some past episodes and just expressing my disbelief of being alongside these other fantastic poets and yourself.

David J Bauman (01:33)
Thank you. That's very nice. It's so fun to do this because I try to I try to have a wide range of guests. and if anyone is listening and is thinking of of reaching out and asking, I have a lot of requests I'm going through right now, so I will get to you. please don't be dismayed if I don't get back to you right away.

Chrissy Martin (01:50)
You're just popular.

David J Bauman (01:51)
Thank you. I don't know if that's the case yet. I I won't fight you on that. But no, I try to have because I try to have a wide variety of people. Maybe somebody who hasn't published their first book yet. but like

this last last time I was talking with Daniel Lurie who has been like published all over the place and is now a a Stegner fellow.

in the Bay Area that he's just started doing that and he's working on his first collection. I've had some other people that I've already met in real life and people that I've never met before like yourself until, you know, we started talking here and Sometimes, you know, you just had a connection with someone who was I was so happy. Carl Phillips and I have talked

via Instagram about our Christmas trees at one point and so I just felt daring enough to reach out and ask him, hey, would you want to be on the podcast? And he was thrilled

Chrissy Martin (02:40)
That's beautiful.

David J Bauman (02:41)
and said yes. So you never you never know there where the connections are. So I love meeting new poets and also being able to talk with some poets who I've known for a long time. My best friend Joel Showalter was on with me. He and I went to college like a hundred years ago together in in the

state of Indiana and had the same very influential poetry teacher. If you're listening Dr. Brown, you know I'm talking about you. and she was wonderful and we still she still talks to us which is great. I was doing a lot of reading of like how do I start this? You know, did all these YouTube things back in the day but how do I

And

they were saying, Well, start with people that you know and I did and it just boomed from there so quickly. So I'm glad that it's kind of found an interest across the poetry community of talking to various poets and seeing how we all connect to each other 'cause none of us are writing, as they say, in a vacuum, it's all interconnected.

Chrissy Martin (03:33)
Exactly. No, we really are so interconnected and I putting this book into the world, I mean, it's exciting, but it's also scary and daunting and it's this huge task and I just keep coming back to the phrase it takes a village because I feel like I've really had to call upon my like poetry and writing and literary and just human village. and it's

David J Bauman (03:52)
yeah.

Chrissy Martin (03:52)
the only reason I can do this tour and I can do all of this. So it's it takes all of us.

David J Bauman (03:58)
Fantastic.

let's jump right into the first poem, if that's okay with you, which is from Whole Holy Hot, and it's

Chrissy Martin (04:04)
Yeah.

David J Bauman (04:04)
called Postanite Without

Diagnosis.

Pasta night without diagnosis. The water is hot and well oiled, your wide hand dropping salt. When we eat, we watch the melting butter pats on our noodles. I like to think quiet moments like this make me a better listener. You tell me you joined a gym, and I make my face into a smile. I tell you the doctor says she still can't find what's wrong, and you make a frown and eat a meatball.

You don't know how to talk about illness, and sometimes I forget you have a body. I'd love to measure my body only by my body and your body by yours, but neither of us is that flexible. And besides, the bread in the oven is burning. We move to a table outside where there is plenty to look at behind each other's shoulders. I tell you I don't know how to mourn my body.

And celebrate yours at the same time.

So we break out the wine. Toast to something.

Chrissy Martin (05:13)
Mm.

I love hearing you read this poem. It's it's it's almost like printing out your work and putting it in a different font and reading it differently. I feel like I'm like paying attention to different line breaks and different moments when I'm hearing this in your voice.

David J Bauman (05:28)
thank you. The first time that I heard somebody read one of my poems I was like what Well, for me I was like I I didn't have a book out, so I thought, Why is this you know, is she was a British actress,

Frances Uku was her name. and she was reading one of my very, very early poems about the moon, and I just fell in love with that poem again because yeah, you're getting outside of your way and you're thinking, I I wouldn't have thought to read it that way. But yeah, that works you know, with the lighting.

Chrissy Martin (05:54)
Yes, yes.

David J Bauman (05:55)
So it's fun to see it slightly through somebody else's eyes.

Chrissy Martin (05:58)
It really is.

David J Bauman (05:59)
we talk about who the speaker in the poem is and and very much this is autobiographical, I'm sure.

I mentioned before we started recording the use of the word body

Chrissy Martin (06:08)
Mm-hmm.

David J Bauman (06:09)
and its repetition almost like an anaphora taking you through the entire poem and that the entire poem is in one body. is what I should ask you.

Chrissy Martin (06:16)
Yes, yes.

mean, like you were saying, I do a lot of filling in details, even for poems that are autobiographical, right? I might change a detail, I might change a quote because I'm trying to capture like the feeling of what happened, even if the exact details aren't true, right? this poem actually is quite

true in terms of like capital T and lowercase T truth. this is one of the rare poems that the first draft and this final draft look very similar

David J Bauman (06:44)
Hmm.

Chrissy Martin (06:45)
which

Probably means that I was writing in a flurry, probably means that I was writing because I needed some catharsis. so just a little bit about this poem. I think this one is more straightforward in terms of the poems in the book. but this was written, I believe, around 2018. I was still undiagnosed, I was like seeking a diagnosis. I eventually got diagnosed with some non-specific arthritis, which pops up in the poem or in the book. but

Seeking a diagnosis and taking care of an ill body can become like a full-time job, right? and in this poem I wanted to think about this complication of how to care for your own body without only caring for your own body. And not letting a loved one's well body be this source of grief, right? but I wanted it to all sort of be boiling under the surface. I wanted

the line breaks to do a lot of that like complicating work. I wanted it to be in one stanza so it just felt quick and associative. I didn't want the reader or the speaker to have a second to like pause and process what was happening. Yeah. I wanted these like continual sort of like we're just barely missing each other. and a lot of these line breaks, you might think, they're about to speak to each other. They're about to actually say the unspoken thing out loud. but instead

toast to nothing and look beside each other's shoulders and the poem sort of turns away instead of turning toward one another.

David J Bauman (08:13)
That's how that's that's one of the things I love about poems is is everything you can read by what isn't said or what's being avoided. And it helps that it's a situation that most people can identify with in some way or another.

My mother had cancer years ago. I've had family members with with scares. I have this strange sort of autoimmune thing that I've been fighting lately, as well as some injuries including nerve damage and whatnot. And and part of it I'm thinking lately, am I I said, Am I just another cis white man whining about getting old? I don't wanna like that. You know what I mean? yet

Sometimes you feel drawn to write about it and not not just for therapy, but you feel so I've been researching ways of doing it. So this is actually

Chrissy Martin (08:56)
Mm.

David J Bauman (08:57)
helpful for me and I love what you do with line breaks. If there was a teacher of mine one time who pointed out she liked what I did with line endings and you could like read down through the ending word and get a whole mood for the poem and you totally do in this with nails, anthem. I say nails, kept, left, redden.

questions help and you're like, Jesus, you can get this

Chrissy Martin (09:19)
Ha ha ha.

David J Bauman (09:19)
mood underneath without actually reading the whole line. And that's some of what is fun about a line too, if it can stand on its own or if it implies things that you you aren't necessarily filling in in big blocks of prose.

Chrissy Martin (09:33)
Yes, I love a line break. I feel like I need to break on a word that is just so delicious that I want to spend more time with it. And you pointed out that like body, body, body. I think

If I'm recalling, I think that happened at first on accident and I kept wanting to change it, right? When we see the same word near each other multiple times, it feels wrong. but I wanted to let it just be like more obsessive and more obsessive, even though this person should be thinking about like their relationship, their communication,

David J Bauman (10:01)
Yeah.

Chrissy Martin (10:02)
but still like this underlying obsession of of body continues throughout. That yeah, thanks for pointing that out.

David J Bauman (10:08)
And it yeah, no,

it's I love it. I was thinking it was almost like an antithesis of of this kind of thing with E. E. Cummings going, I like my body when it is with your you know what I mean? And

Chrissy Martin (10:20)
Yes, yes.

David J Bauman (10:21)
It's not one of the first I it's in the maybe the first half of the book.

Chrissy Martin (10:24)
Yeah, it's it's in the first section of the book. So it comes pretty

David J Bauman (10:26)
Okay.

Chrissy Martin (10:27)
early. so the relationship that occurs throughout the book is is quite stable. It's one of like the more stable, joyful things in the book. and I kind of wanted to show too that like even this relationship that throughout is like stable, joyful, supportive, even this stable thing is like destabilized by illness, by searching, by

I don't know, by this lack of communication, sort of looking and talking past one another.

David J Bauman (10:50)
Yeah, and you're you're also dealing with things like family religious backgrounds and how that relates to, you know

praying for healing, versus the reality of experiencing the pain.

Chrissy Martin (11:02)
Yeah, and you'll notice I there are a lot of hands in the book for many different reasons. because I'm thinking of the concept of like laying hands, which is the faith healing

David J Bauman (11:10)
Yes.

Chrissy Martin (11:10)
you were just mentioning. it's also like a place that I experience my arthritis. it's also one of the motifs that comes up when I'm talking about like the love, the other, right? So I wanted the hand to appear here instead of the face. and so I wanted the the hand even in maybe a a teeny pseudo-sensual moment.

David J Bauman (11:29)
Yeah.

Chrissy Martin (11:29)
to appear at the beginning of this poem too.

David J Bauman (11:32)
And I'm

sorry for anyone on YouTube who just saw my eyes fly wide open. Oscar is usually very good. He's one of my cats about not getting on my desk when I'm recording, but he just leapt up here. You might have seen a little orange tail. So if I gasped or something, or you

Chrissy Martin (11:44)
man. I missed it. So if he comes back up.

David J Bauman (11:48)
if you ever watch the video, you'll see me go, What? Well

Chrissy Martin (11:52)
Sadly my dog is in the other room. I thought he might

interrupt.

David J Bauman (11:55)
Elliot is usually very good and sleeps the studio is basically in my bedroom with a bunch of soundproof stuff around and he usually sleeps through these now. He's very good. He's at my f at my feet sleeping, but Oscar likes to push his limits.

but I I take it from the bread burning in the oven, which is I love to cook and I'm a damn good cook, I'll say it.

But I always burn the garlic bread. I almost always and I take it that's it it feels like that's what happens since, you know, now we've gone outside to a table. And but also

also

can have more of a view and there's maybe less stress to look right at each other during a difficult conversation. Because you have that

Chrissy Martin (12:33)
Yeah.

David J Bauman (12:34)
line where where there is plenty of to look at and then on its own behind each other's shoulders you'd imagine.

Chrissy Martin (12:41)
Something gets put into language just a little bit, right? Like something gets overcome just a little bit, but not enough. And so I wanted us to change location. I wanted us to get out of like the stuffiness of this domestic space that we have sort of laid out so far. but even as we switch spaces, right, we're looking toward one another, we're still not looking at each other.

There is an attempt there at least. Some almost progress has been made. Something has been shifted. and part of the reason I included the the bread burning, not just the impetus for going outside, but these domestic things keep like interrupting what we're almost

David J Bauman (13:17)
Yes.

Chrissy Martin (13:17)
saying, right? which reflects real life, right? Like the mundane interrupts the things that feel so important constantly. They call for our attention nonstop.

And so not saying the thing doesn't mean that no one knows. It means that like we can avoid this tension for a little longer.

Yeah, so naming comes up a lot in this book and sometimes naming is like affirming, sometimes getting a diagnosis and then being able to connect with other folks who share that diagnosis is affirming, right? but sometimes naming is like scary and you want to avoid it.

David J Bauman (13:51)
And sometimes the naming it it feels like okay, at least now I know what it is. I have something to grab onto. But also sometimes it's like, so you're telling me I have a spontaneous chronic what? so that's just describing what I have. It's not d helping anything, you know what I mean? So so it's both

Chrissy Martin (14:05)
Yes Exactly.

David J Bauman (14:08)
it's both like happy that you've got an answer, but also this really isn't an answer You know.

Chrissy Martin (14:14)
Yeah, it's like I've

been listened to, I have more information about myself. and that's why I was careful not to end the book with diagnosis.

David J Bauman (14:23)
Mm.

Chrissy Martin (14:23)
and this was some advice I got from my PhD advisor also, an early version of this draft. my dissertation was an early version of this draft, and she advised me too like you don't want to end on diagnosis because you're gonna suggest, even if you don't mean to, that diagnosis is the end all be all. this is a cure.

Book, because diagnosis can be affirming, especially when you've been sort of rejected so often and not listened to, but it's it's just one piece of information, right? It's not the end, and that's why the poem that discusses diagnosis is is not at the end of the book. It occurs in the middle and then the the conflict still continues.

David J Bauman (15:02)
Yeah.

I like that it's resisting a conclusion,

Chrissy Martin (15:07)
Yeah, yeah. I I wanted this poem to sort of almost have like a flattening effect at the end.

just hold contradiction and not weigh them against

David J Bauman (15:14)
Mm-hmm.

Chrissy Martin (15:14)
each other and end up with an answer. Which I I think maybe all the poems we're gonna discuss today sort of hold contradiction closely.

David J Bauman (15:21)
thank you for letting me read that, by the way. Is there anything else you want to say about the process of maybe where the vision or idea of this particular collection came from?

Chrissy Martin (15:30)
So I did my MFA in Chicago I feel like I had this realization of, wait, I'm chronically ill because I had to be in a city that just functioned differently. that like you have to be able to go down the stairs, take the train, stand up, move your body, go up the stairs because the escalators are always out. there's just different demands on

a body and so there are like different rules for what a well body is in a big city. so when I moved to Stillwater, Oklahoma, this is a slower city, it's car dependent. I felt like I was less chronically ill. and

David J Bauman (16:08)
Interesting.

Chrissy Martin (16:09)
Yeah, so when I got to study a field for my comprehensive exams, when I got to really zoom into the literature I wanted to focus on, I decided to study disability studies and mad studies. And that kind of became my entry point. I became really obsessive of disability studies and how to articulate pain. and so that's why I have the epigraphs at the beginning of Elaine Scary, Sonia Huber, who were thinking like, how do we

articulate pain, doesn't pain itself destroy language? and so I spent my PhD thinking about mental illness, thinking about disability and physical illness, doing this research, doing this creative work. and so I started trying to write about the experience of like being in an ill body. I don't know if I'm claiming disabled right now or then, but just trying to figure it out myself. the pop culture elements

came in when I wrote some bachelor poems.

I slowly studied lots of pop culture poems, Tiana Clark's poems being one of them, to learn how to incorporate pop culture in my work. And I found that that was the levity, that was the research that I needed. and once I found the pop culture, that was my entry point to talk back to other disabled women, other mentally ill women, other women who've perhaps been misunderstood or mislabeled. and then I I made

David J Bauman (17:32)
and you eventually you're teaching a pop culture class or were recently, right?

Chrissy Martin (17:36)
Yes,

yes. this was I guess last semester I taught pop culture poetics. and then I taught it a couple years ago too. And I mean, my students I always learn from my students. They always point out amazing things that I hadn't considered and helped me see pop culture poetry in a new way, especially as their pop culture reference points differ. So that's a fun class to teach.

David J Bauman (17:57)
do you want to say about the poem that you chose of yours from the collection today before we read it?

Chrissy Martin (18:02)
ooh,

yes.

so the idea for this poem stewed for a long time. this was an experience that I had that I wanted to write about.

Especially as I was identifying the gaps in this manuscript, I started thinking, no, this manuscript is demanding that poem from me that I know has been brewing. But I didn't know how to write about it because it just felt so vulnerable and personal and squishy. And I didn't know how to approach it, and I was just a little afraid. and then I was doing lots of pop culture research. I was reading Dolly Pardon's memoir, I was reading Paris Hilton's memoir.

David J Bauman (18:39)
And how yeah, both of us, when we were looking over things of I'm sure we're like, yeah, so the second poem is this one. Yeah, so particularly

Chrissy Martin (18:49)
Yes.

David J Bauman (18:50)
timely. And we're recording this not too long before we play it. Sometimes sometimes I'm recording months ahead, but like I've I've kind of caught up to to most of them now. So this episode will be coming live pretty soon. So this is still relatively, you know, new news of of this loss of Dolly Parton.

Chrissy Martin (19:07)
Yes, I am I am reeling. And a few days ago.

David J Bauman (19:10)
So it adds that extra layer now.

Chrissy Martin (19:13)
It really does. and so I'll mention that I I sort of rediscovered this clip that I reference in the poem where Dolly Pardon and Patty LaBelle are playing their nails together on TV. and it reminded

David J Bauman (19:24)
Yeah. yeah. Mm.

Chrissy Martin (19:25)
me that Dolly Pardon recorded some of the instruments of nine to five on her nails. so mine aren't very long right now, but she does

David J Bauman (19:37)
seen her double. That's that's good. That's good.

Chrissy Martin (19:39)
Thank you.

my nails are usually longer than this. I'm I'm embarrassed.

David J Bauman (19:42)
Ha ha ha.

Chrissy Martin (19:43)
but I that little tidbit opened up the poem for me. and I feel like it gave me a way to approach this subject matter that I didn't know how to touch. It gave me some container, it gave me like another experience to braid with my own experience and add some levity.

it's vulnerable and this poem is real and I wanted to make sure that I was sensitive and respectful but still true to my own experience. And so my goal was to root my portions in my own experience. to try to handle this as delicately as possible.

Nail harmony.

Dolly Pardon wrote nine to five to the acrylic zip zip of her nails, like a washboard, a typewriter, a worn out woman's anthem. Wikipedia Dolly Pardon Lead Vocals Nails My friends and I talk how we'd fight off men. It's a game, but not. They say keys, pepper spray, knees. But I've always been partial to nails. When my mother left, she was

For the man with a cruel son, I kept my nails sharp for when he'd draw back, swing. I left deep moons on both his wrists. I watched diamonds redden across his back. When the police came to ask questions, I said protection, smaller. I said fists. I didn't say help. What would they take away when I was the weapon?

Dolly loves her men, earthly, rail thin. She loves her husband. The way he lets me be free and lets me be me, he don't try to choke me and demand anything from me. The cruel son passed away the cruelest way. Farm equipment tip, teen body underneath, grandmother's house. I am still so sorry

I am still so afraid to wear my nails short. Dolly and Patty LaBelle play their nails together on daytime TV, sing Mamma's little baby love shortenin', shortenin' mama's little baby love shortenin' bread. Patty takes the high notes, voice and nails. Dolly's nails are thicker. Maybe she waited longer for a fresh set, so her acrylics skewed alto. When my nails break to the quick,

Where tissue thin pressons. When the pressons split like the tongue of a snake, even better. When I go home, there are so many truck back window memorials to the cruel son How do we mourn those who made us sharpen ourselves into weapons?

David J Bauman (22:32)
Hmm. Yeah. So much so much going on and beautiful way to to again talk about something without talking about something. I I think there was

Chrissy Martin (22:43)
I'm an expert at that.

David J Bauman (22:46)
there was a clip that from a previous season talking about we gotta talk about it without talking about it because we don't talk about it.

And that was Monica Prince saying that, who's written a lot about, women's violence issues and those kind of things. And I love that you make us forget for a minute that that's what we're talking.

Chrissy Martin (23:04)
Yeah, yeah, and I that's where I hope some of the levity came from. I mean, I wouldn't call this a funny poem or a humorous poem, but like there is some lightness that at least lets you forget the seriousness. But even in the joy and the love, like the quote from Dolly, the way that she suggests her husband is kind and good is that he doesn't

choke and demand. So even that suggests like the the violence that we have become accustomed to and that we are thankful when we don't face.

David J Bauman (23:38)
just the absence of violence rather than the presence of kindness or tenderness, but the absence of violence makes him a good man and that's that's kind of heart gripping for a moment when you stop and think about it, the way you just

Chrissy Martin (23:48)
Yeah.

Well, I too, when the the quote from Dolly, and again, like I I read her whole memoir. I could have just done a book of found poems with Dolly Pardon's work, but I didn't. I guess someone could just read her memoir for that. but I also was struck that she said that she loves her men rail thin. She loves her men small, and I'm like,

Safety, protection,

David J Bauman (24:09)
Yeah.

Chrissy Martin (24:10)
this is maybe I'm looking too much into it, maybe that's what's

David J Bauman (24:12)
Yeah.

Chrissy Martin (24:13)
on my mind, but it f there was there was so much there that it was hard not to just pull so many delicious quotes from her.

David J Bauman (24:19)
Well and then the speaker in the poem here kind of makes that her own without saying, you know

Chrissy Martin (24:23)
Yeah, yeah. I I don't wanna get ahead of myself, but the poem that we'll discuss next, is BBHMM by Tiana Clark, if I can show my hands. and that's one poem that really helped me understand how to write an effective pop culture poem.

So a poem that isn't just about pop culture, but a poem that is speaking with pop culture and that uses pop culture as a way to speak about the thing in a more complex way, as the source material, right? my super early pop culture poems would use the figure and then they'd be gone by stanza three, and then the

David J Bauman (25:00)
Ha ha.

Chrissy Martin (25:01)
poem would just be me, you know, and I'd say, Hey, tricked you, I'm about the po you know, the poem's about me.

David J Bauman (25:04)
It was just the vehicle to get there

to the yeah.

Chrissy Martin (25:07)
Exactly, which, you know, once I realized what I was doing, these weren't published, these were drafts, I thought, I'm recreating the exact harm that I'm critiquing in these poems. Gross. so I wanted to make sure that I braided

the pop culture with the personal, that it came back again and again, and that it wasn't just, I'm gonna talk about Dolly because I experienced a similar thing. Now let's talk about me. My hope is that the personal also like complicates the pop culture, complicates the research.

I feel like pop culture is like turning into our mythology.

David J Bauman (25:42)
Mm.

Chrissy Martin (25:43)
and so the way that we understand ourselves is already filtered through pop culture.

David J Bauman (25:48)
so maybe we should just jump into the third poem.

Chrissy Martin (25:50)
I think it's about that time.

David J Bauman (25:52)
if you want, I could put the link to the music video that it references as well in the show notes and people, you know, after after listening can can get a a whole other level if they're not already familiar with it.

Chrissy Martin (26:03)
I think that's a great idea because so this poem has an epigraph after watching the music video. So to me this is an ecrastic poem that's just responding to the music video, not

David J Bauman (26:11)
Yeah. Yeah.

Chrissy Martin (26:13)
just, that is responding to the music video. So watching the video will help you understand the poem as a whole, so I think so.

This is BBHMM by Tiana Clark. After watching the music video, I too want to be naked, zebra striped in the almost dried accountant's blood, sticky and sucking, a fat blunt inside a Louis Vuitton suitcase brimming with the newest money. This

Is another way to see myself too, in the way Rihanna nooses a white woman up by her smooth feet, a blue blooded pendulum swaying, as her beautiful tits look more perfect than ever. Why did that image excite me so? No, not the tits, but the simulated lynching.

It feels so damn delicious to say bitch, bitch better, bitch better have my money inside my mouth. I hate it when people talk about black artists being capitalists. Why can't we thrive in something rich and green too? And let us be loud about it. Let us be loud without consequence. Remember when we were dating, we were

I wanted you to pay for every meal, and yes, the movies taught me that love was someone reaching for the check first. But there's no such thing as a free lunch. Someone has to pay with a fruit from their body. Yeah, I'm spreading my legs for someone else, because I'm hungry, and always at the end of some kind of altar.

Even now I'm paying for my doctor to reach and scrape inside me to say I don't have cancer. She tells me I need to start thinking about babies because of my age. I think, bitch, I'm not ready. There will always be tithes and offerings. At my church, they called it first fruits.

My mother gave me quarters, and as a kid, I waited for the clink at the bottom of the bucket being passed. I believe God heard this too. Somewhere, someone is counting the cash behind a velvet curtain. Once a boy said, Suck it, bitch, with his heavy, dense hand at the back of my head, pushing. Pushing is another way to mean pay me what you owe me.

I didn't forget. Yeah, I see the total at the bottom of the receipt. I have so much debt. I am forever in the wettest red.

Tiana Clark. She's a force.

David J Bauman (29:02)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Amazing poem to read. I wasn't actually familiar with this piece. I knew I can't talk about the trees without the blood. but I didn't I didn't remember having read this poem then I just I had to go see the video and then it was even more but what what brought you to it? What brought you to this choosing this is the one I wanna do?

Chrissy Martin (29:18)
Yeah, it was it was a few things. I as I mentioned, this is one of the poems that taught me how to write pop culture poems in an effective way, in an ethical way, in a way that enriched both the pop culture and the personal that I was putting in there. two, I mean I I wanted to include a pop culture poem because pop culture is so like central to this book and to the way that it thinks.

I mean, also, this is a complicated poem that is doing a thousand different things with its language, with its form, its ekphrasis and I'll just note one thing that really excites me about this poem This is a poem

David J Bauman (29:52)
Yeah.

Chrissy Martin (29:53)
responding to a piece of art.

And if you're calling this poem ekphrastic then you're calling the music video BBHM art. And I love that. I mean it is a piece of art.

David J Bauman (30:01)
Yeah. Yeah. yeah.

Chrissy Martin (30:04)
I mean it really is. Anything Rihanna makes is art.

David J Bauman (30:05)
And

you know, and when you when you talk about is it Adrian Rich about interested in in poems that can disturb and enrapture, And there's definitely things that are disturbing, but also like like why did I find that arousing or why did that

Chrissy Martin (30:20)
Mm-hmm.

David J Bauman (30:21)
very dark thing actually get me excited

Chrissy Martin (30:23)
I mean, you're you're sort of pointing out that like the speaker is implicating herself too in this poem. And that's one thing that

David J Bauman (30:29)
Yes, she's

Chrissy Martin (30:29)
really like excited not excited me, one thing that really made pop culture poems click.

David J Bauman (30:36)
Mm-hmm.

Chrissy Martin (30:36)
That like, if I'm, let's say it's real housewives,

If I'm critiquing the Real Housewives in a poem, it might seem like I'm suggesting no one should engage with it, that I am above it, right? but if I'm also implicating myself, saying, I'm watching this and and I'm ooing and awing and I'm engaging in this scandal, right, that I'm not sure how to respond, then it's a different type of critique, right?

David J Bauman (30:58)
And there's something that resonates

when you're willing to implicate yourself you're willing to be the villain a little bit. You

Chrissy Martin (31:03)
yeah, and that's another way, again, that like I didn't think one-to-one, this poem inspired this poem. I wasn't like looking at BBHMM when I wrote Nail Harmony, but sort of reflecting. I realized that was one thing I I did in that poem too, is that I'm like implicating the self, saying, I don't know how to do these things, I don't know the answer. not that I have to have an answer, but I can just say when I don't know, which is so freeing.

David J Bauman (31:28)
but when you look at it, the form is so different, as you were saying. very broken up.

wide cesuras in the middle of lines, more line breaks, and yet at the same time there's something about the form that holds it together because it's almost entirely four line stanzas,

yeah, I guess that's even th it's all four line stanzas. and yet you wouldn't think that to look at it.

But I love kind of grappling with that visually and thinking, well, obviously the poet didn't just do this for i I'm not saying I I need to make it into a sudoku or a crossword puzzle and figure out

Chrissy Martin (32:00)
No.

David J Bauman (32:01)
why they did it this way necessarily, but just to enjoy the process of what does this do to me when I read it in this form.

Chrissy Martin (32:08)
Yeah, and and I thought it would be difficult to read this poem out loud because all of this cesura because all of this space, but it really pushes the music, especially the way that she writes and breaks. It feels so damn line break delicious to

David J Bauman (32:23)
Yeah.

Chrissy Martin (32:23)
say bitch pause bitch better slash bitch better have line break my money inside my mouth. I I could write an essay on just that sentence.

David J Bauman (32:34)
Yes.

and there again, I guess, when you're looking at music and you don't expect the musical anaphora to be a word like bitch and to have the poet or the speaker in the poem say, I love saying that. I love that out.

Chrissy Martin (32:49)
Yes.

David J Bauman (32:50)
when someone has angered you or wronged you, there is something about being able to put that into certain words that is helpful. Or even

Chrissy Martin (32:57)
It's true. And that

David J Bauman (32:59)
just when you're frustrated or hurt or angry, sometimes, you know, there they they they there are even people who say it's healthier sometimes to just say it. Maybe not to hurt somebody.

But I think some of the healthiest, most well rounded people I know are also amazing at cursing. So

Chrissy Martin (33:17)
Every time the fall semester rolls around, I have to sort of clean up my potty mouth.

David J Bauman (33:22)
Ha ha ha ha.

Chrissy Martin (33:23)
which is more complicated when I'm teaching pop culture poetics because I'm reading poems like this in class.

David J Bauman (33:29)
Imagine me

trying to be a librarian. I am the loudest librarian you've ever met.

I'm the one who gets shushed, especially if I'll say something and then wait, there's people in the room.

Chrissy Martin (33:39)
I'll just say, jumping on what you were saying a second ago, that like the word bitch also is transformed throughout and then made less joyful. I mean, we have this moment which I don't know, is kind of almost funny. The doctor says, she tells me I need to start

David J Bauman (33:54)
Yeah.

Chrissy Martin (33:54)
thinking about babies because of my age. I think, bitch, I'm not ready.

David J Bauman (33:57)
Yeah. Yeah.

Chrissy Martin (33:59)
And only bitch is in italics. And there's this like moment of humor, this moment of using bitch differently. then bitch comes back as a violent gendered insult. but we have that moment where the speaker just gets to like use the word bitch deliciously, in f in frustration and anger.

David J Bauman (34:16)
And and I think she uses the italics usually through here. pay me what you owe me is in italics.

Chrissy Martin (34:21)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

David J Bauman (34:22)
there's no such thing as a free lunch. Those are th they feel like they're quotations, and so bitch is her word, but she's also quoting it.

Chrissy Martin (34:29)
each time it comes back in it's we're understanding it differently. We're repeating it, but we're understanding it anew.

Yeah, this this is a rich poem, right? Like

David J Bauman (34:37)
Mm-hmm.

Chrissy Martin (34:38)
pay just gets transformed throughout, right? Like we we end up thinking about like the body as currency. this is such an embodied poem as well.

I think one of the the last things maybe I'll mention about BBHMM and I might have implied this before, but I felt like this poem and other poems like it give me and gave me permission

To take the media that I love and take it so seriously, to call it art, to call it research. And I really do research the the pop culture work that I engage with fully, the way that you were describing at the beginning of our call. You were talking about a pop culture poem that you wrote. and what you described was like the process of archival research and interviewing individuals, right?

David J Bauman (35:23)
it's funny how much research you can put into one or two lines or an image. But it makes it feel

Chrissy Martin (35:27)
Yes, yes, I said.

David J Bauman (35:29)
alive that way when you when you really wrap your brain around it.

Chrissy Martin (35:33)
It does and and this poem is like complicated and researched and I don't know, gorgeous and artistic and I could write an entire dissertation on it. I feel like this poem and poems like it give me permission to just dig my teeth into the art, the research, the language that I love, and just let it be part of my work.

David J Bauman (35:52)
but just at the moment I I want to say Tiana herself helped us with getting the permissions for this poem and was enthused about us reading it. So thank you, Tiana Clark, for that.

Chrissy Martin (36:05)
Thank you, Tiana Clark. We are so appreciative. And I've

David J Bauman (36:07)
Absolutely.

Chrissy Martin (36:08)
and I've heard in my sort of poking around research, if I'm not

David J Bauman (36:11)
Ha ha ha.

Chrissy Martin (36:11)
wrong, I believe that Tiana Clark credits Hanif Abdur Akib and his Carly Ray Jepsen poems for giving her permission to write a pop culture poem like this. so

David J Bauman (36:22)
Awesome.

Chrissy Martin (36:23)
I just sort of mention that legacy of folks giving each other permission because they seem to be impressed by the art of one another.

David J Bauman (36:29)
And do you think people like maybe avoid maybe I shouldn't write pop pop culture because maybe that's too frivolous?

Chrissy Martin (36:36)
I think so.

I think people get nervous about

Putting subjects that don't feel poetic, putting language that doesn't feel poetic, right? And I find that folks who are really worried about that are maybe haven't discovered a lot of poetry that does this yet. I just had my first week of the semester. I I teach at Sentenary College in Louisiana, and in my poetry class on day one, a student was saying that they thought poetry wasn't for them because they were only taught poems that were.

a certain type of poem.

David J Bauman (37:07)
Yeah.

Chrissy Martin (37:08)
And then they discovered this Philip Larkin poem, I think they said Toads. and they said, well, I can do that. Like I love that.

David J Bauman (37:15)
Yeah.

Chrissy Martin (37:16)
That speaks to me. and so if you don't feel like you have permission to put the strange pop culture and the language you love in your work, I think read more work that does that. and engage with more poetry that is doing that work because there's so much beautiful

poetic work that that engages with strange language and engages with pop culture.

I'm I'm teaching a poetry workshop this semester and I I change the theme each time and I'm sort of theming it poetry in the present tense, which means that we're teaching or we're reading really contemporary books and we're also thinking about like poetry as an an active thing. but I mentioned that because we just read a big selection of poems from twenty twenty six and the patterns that are emerging are basically the title of this book. Like, how can I

hold this extreme grief, but also perhaps some hope and some joy at the same time.

David J Bauman (38:10)
And now there's so much information going at us, it's hard not to despair. and you're desperate for something to share some joy about as well. And so maybe that's that's the challenge of of our time is, you know, how do we do both of those things and responsibly?

Chrissy Martin (38:24)
Yeah, I think so. And I think that's a a trend that is happening right now in poetry of twenty twenty five and twenty twenty six. But I do see like a reaching toward hope. And even if that hope is like an imagined future or an imagined alternative self, there is this reaching toward hope that doesn't erase the harm and the negativity and the darkness, but still there's something hopeful in in poetry of this moment.

David J Bauman (38:51)
That's that's good because personally I've read dystopian things and such, but I I've kind of had enough right now.

I mean, there's a lot dystopian that we haven't learned from yet. and maybe we still need to be reminded, but it'd be good to have some of that stuff to work toward as well, right?

Chrissy Martin (39:08)
Yeah,

we need need a little bit of lightness, a little bit of joy

David J Bauman (39:11)
Yeah.

Chrissy Martin (39:11)
somewhere.

David J Bauman (39:12)
Well, thank you. What t tell me where you're going next on the tour, what you're what you're doing. you've you're you're into the school year now, so probably you're gonna be more pinned down.

You've you've come on the tail end of the summer. Yeah.

Chrissy Martin (39:23)
Yeah. Slowing down just a little. Yeah,

so next week I will be at NSU in Nackadish. I actually one of the professors there invited me to read because they found one of my Real Housewives poems online. So, pop culture poems. I'll be at Oklahoma State University in November. I'm still working out the rest, but if you would like me to read, I'm happy to to travel and read. but that's where I'll be

Physically, for the next few months.

David J Bauman (39:53)
And we'll put links to your website as well. but go ahead and say what the URL is for your website.

Chrissy Martin (39:58)
Yeah, Chrissy Martin Poetry dot com. That's where you'll find me.

Yeah, there's a contact form. You can just email me directly, message me on Instagram. I'm always happy to to chat poems or or just chat.

David J Bauman (40:10)
Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast and reading with me and reading some amazing poems and getting the chance to talk about them with you has been an absolute joy thank you for being here.

Chrissy Martin (40:20)
Yes,

thank you so much, David. Thank you for for spending time with my work and for talking about poetry with me today. And thank you for also giving me a little bit of space to to think about my Queen Dolly Pardon for a little longer.

David J Bauman (40:32)
yes, yeah. I know. I know. Heartbreak emoji right there. Yeah. Absolutely.

Chrissy Martin (40:38)
A legend and icon forever.

David J Bauman (40:41)
it's an honor to be able to to f stumble into finding ourselves t basically doing a little bit of a Dolly Parton memorial in this show as well. So thanks for that.

Chrissy Martin (40:49)
It really is. Yes. Thank you.

David J Bauman (40:52)
All right, well you've been listening to In Three Poems. I'm David J. Bauman, your host, and we've been talking with Chrissy Martin, and we'll talk to you next week.

Chrissy Martin (41:02)
Sea,

David J Bauman (41:04)
Thanks for listening to In Three Poems. If you're enjoying the podcast, do me a favor, please drop a note in the fan mail link in the show notes. It could either be a text message or it could also be an audio message, and we'd love to hear from you. I'm David J. Bauman, and our guest this episode again was Dr. Chrissy Martin. And we read two poems from her debut book of poetry, Hole Holy Hot by Wright Bloody Publishing that came out in April.

Of twenty twenty-six. And Chrissy also read a poem by Tiana Clark, BBHM from I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood by Tiana Clark in 2018. It was read here on the podcast by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. And special thanks also to Tiana Clark and Eileen O'Malley. And that's it for this episode of In Three Poems.