Carolyn Martin - Poet

“All my life I have tried to find the truth and make it beautiful.” – Sting

The Poetry Box

The Catalog of Small Contentments Launched

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It happens this way …

Yesterday I had the pleasure of reading from my new poetry collection with two fine poets from New York at The Poetry Box’s monthly show. It was another Zoom event that brought together friends and family from around the US and Canada. I have to admit I’m loving not having to dress up, get in a car, and battle traffic and summer heat to attend poetry events. My wish is that live events will return and they will be balanced by online experiences that allow more people in more locales to attend.

In any event, I’d like to share “Mandate,” the first poem in the book. If you pre-ordered your copy, you received a broadside of this piece as well as the code that will enable you to hear me on your phone. Ah, technology!

If you still would like a copy, email me at portlandpoet@gmail.com with that request, and I’ll be happy to put one in the mail to you. The cover price is $16.00 and I’ll pay the postage for you. In the meantime, enjoy “Mandate.” It was written in April 2020 as we were just starting to hear about the deaths from COVID.

Order Nothing More to Lose

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It happens this way…

Therese and Carolyn with their preview copies

 Thanks to all of you who   have already pre-ordered Nothing More to Lose, my poetry chapbook based on based on Therese Kolbert Dieringer’s autobiography, My Life Lived and Remembered – A journey through Hungary, Germany, and America.

There’s still time to order your copy at its pre-publication price.

Deadline: December 1, 2020

About the collection:

Nothing More to Lose is a 60-page chapbook filled with poems written in Therese’s voice.  It contains photos of the Kolbert family as they journey across Germany. It ends with a series of “Corky poems” that capture Therese’s meeting, marrying, and traveling with her dear husband of thirty years.

As Therese says:

“In Nothing More to Lose, Carolyn Martin has read and written my soul. No one has been able to feel what I felt before this poet shared her inspired words with me and now with the world. I spent more than 70 years trying to forget the events that shaped my life and gave me nightmares. Now, through working with Carolyn on both my autobiography and this chapbook, I feel healed. The nightmares are gone. I hope these poems will help readers find courage in the realization we are not here on our own. We are guided by a Higher Power. This book is a good way to end my journey.”

Click here to order your copy today.

 

Nothing More to Lose

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It happens this way …

For several years I had been playing with the idea of writing a series of poems based on the journey of a dear friend whose family escaped Hungary after the Nazi invasion in 1944. They spent the next seven years starving in Germany before finally arriving in the US in 1952. I had helped Therese Kolbert Dieringer write her autobiography in 2007, and her stories of terror, cruelty, and kindness haunted me ever since.

Then, this past July I focused on some ideas about Therese’s journey I had filed away and they began to shape themselves into a poem. I sent it to Therese and asked for her blessing — not only on this one poem, but on the idea of a chapbook based on some of the major events in her life. With tears in her eyes and voice, she said, “Yes,” and this chapbook was on its way.

The miracle to me is that I wrote the 25 poems in it in about six weeks. I never worked that fast before, but the material of Therese’s life was so compelling, that the poems wrote themselves. 

Now thanks to Shawn Aveningo Sanders and The Poetry Box, Nothing More Lose is available for a pre-publication sale price. Read more about the book and how to order it before December 1.

You would do me and Therese a great honor if you would consider reading her story via my poetry. You will be amazed and inspired. I was. 

 

Coming this February …

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It happens this way …

I’m thrilled to tell you that my fourth poetry collection, A Penchant for Masquerades, is scheduled for release mid-February by Unsolicited Press. Thanks to Shawn Aveningo Sanders, owner of The Poetry Box, for the stunning cover, and UP’s Summer Stewart for her astute editing advice.

Unsolicited Press, 2019, 130 pages

ISBN: 978-1-947021-71-6

(http://www.unsolicitedpress.com/store/p202/carolynmartin.html)

About the collection

Martin FinalFrom the universal to the personal, the formal to the experimental, A Penchant for Masquerades takes an unflinching look at the fluidity of truth, time, identity, history, death, and relationships.

Martin time-travels from the Neanderthals, Lucy, and Big Foot to 9/11, then on to the future collapse of a holographic universe. She mines scientific discoveries, nursery rhymes, biblical characters, and the works of Issa, Horace, Yeats, Frost, Williams, Szymborska, and Collins in poems that are both playful and thought-provoking.

Since she believes re-incarnation is a distinct possibility, she suggests that death need not be taken too seriously (“Re-Entry Interview,” “A Case for Sudden Death”). She riffs on an Issa haiku (“Thoughts on a Translation”), sits down to dinner with Horace (“Notes from a Water Drinker”), and promises literary revenge on a reviewer who negatively critiques this collection (“To the Reviewer Who Missed Too Much”).

A lover of all things poetic, Martin has created an eclectic collection for readers who have a penchant for words and who are open to believing in everything and nothing.

My pre-lease price: $15.00 includes shipping.

Email me TODAY at portlandpoet@gmail.com for ordering details.