A Brief But Spectacular take on the art of paying close attention to the everyday

Transcript

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Geoff Bennett: Douglas Martin is a poet, novelist and short story writer.

Tonight, he shares his Brief But Spectacular take on the art of paying close attention to the everyday.

Douglas A. Martin, Poet: There’s things that happen in our life that we think might make a good picture, and then we snap them on their — on our phone, and they just actually do not read at all.

And so, for me, I try to write a haiku a day. And I try to find one moment of something that I would want to take a picture of and that I know that will not be captured in technology.

On my way to run, the new bird on the porch tries to practice to fly. I began as a slam poet, actually at 25. And I’m doing this thing now where I’m building longer poems out of individual haikus. A haiku is the Japanese poetic form. We know it mostly in English as a three-line poem that adds up to 17 syllables, five, seven-line, five-syllable line.

But I play with this.

Purple Martin scuttles with worm across south north access my West, possible light rain, I can’t tell, but the birds are flying. So I will go.

One is called “A Run of Haikus.” And it’s about the things that go through my mind as I’m doing the cardiovascular exercise I’m meant to be doing to keep my heart functioning. And then these columns happen. And I know as I’m walking home up the hill and cooling down, if there are things still going through my mind, and I can count it out and remember it, I indeed have a haiku.

Seek shadows under bridge, new sun, path, my footsteps light, echo, breathe into changes as I run uphill beside a sidestream down.

Some of the themes and ideas running through my mind are intimacy, sexuality, the animal world, how to make nontraditional family structures outside of conventional marriage, bloodlines, and how politics enter into the home in these quiet ways sometimes and then often in these very unquiet ways.

A world can be lost.

(Cheering and Applause)

Douglas A. Martin: My name is Douglas A. Martin, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on the art of paying close attention to the everyday.