[To describe John Martone as our greatest living miniaturist, as I have in the past, is to go back for me to a time many years ago when Ian Hamilton Finlay & I corresponded about a poetry of small increments (one-word poems & other such concerns). For Finlay, I believe, some form of minimalism was at the heart of the concrete poetry he was then exploring & developing, & for myself it entered into aspects of ethnopoetics & appeared most clearly in the numerically based poems (gematria) that I was beginning to write. It’s with someone like John Martone, however, that this approach turns into a life long project, a minimal work like Finlay's of epic proportions, for which the following can serve as a yet another instance & perhaps (as “children’s book”) a new direction for his ongoing practice. (J.R.)]
my morning
a mouse nest
mouse-hole
holding
a mind
2 joints of yr
little finger
house mouse
house mouse —
my thalamus?
amygdala?
house mouse
it’s always a children’s book
two mice dead of
fear in yr live trap
weak-eyed
feel our way
along the wall
mouse & me
~
little worms
in the brightness
eye’s floaters
out of touch
lie down
in snow
suddenly feeling
the river below the ice
frost-shattered
stone's
a puzzle
knocking the snow
from your boots
no one's home
a puzzle
knocking the snow
from your boots
no one's home
~
in layers
of winter clothes
look up
at night geese
for some
night geese
interrupt
a children’s book
night geese
the horizon
passes overhead
night geese
someone slips
on black ice
night geese
the old
keep up
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