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Literature & Fiction

Bellen, Martine

Poetry

Potes & Poets Press

Poetry. "Quirky, electric poems, spare and challenging."&mdash;Peter Matthiessen "WABAC MACHINE begins innocently enough with the thought that a cat has no real name and proceeds through inexorable dream/dervish/fairy tale logic to a place (the wild?) where nouns dissolve. This is a world of radical flux where self is barely even a construction. Let's call it post-human. There is nothing academic about it. Things loom up and are always something else. Here it makes perfect sense for one 'me' to say, 'I sell temporary kitties in the form of reconstituted sponges.'"&mdash;Rae Armantrout "Martine Bellen invokes a new Muse, a new daughter of Mnemosyne, in WABAC MACHINE. In these poems, Time itself is the traveler-visiting epic, visiting nightmare, mischief and the Land of Heart's Desire. To Bellen, Time is a creature alive for an instant, and the instant reaches very far indeed, in every direction, even so far as the laughter of the gods."&mdash;Donald Revell "Martine Bellen's psychological and linguistic adventures in poetry are unlike anyone else's. Celebrating the instabilities of our experience, her poems maneuver kaleidoscopically between ordinary life and myth or fairy tale, vital human concerns such as identity and dreamlike atmospheres where nothing stays as it appears for long. Her 'host of unlikely divinities' display a reality that is never ordinary, always evocative."&mdash;Charles North

WABAC Machine

Furniture Press Books

Wildness and disorder. Martine Bellen's third collection of poetry taps into the chaotic and irrepressible spirit which inspires artistic expression. Whether exploiting philosophical fragments from ancient Greece or penetrating the rituals of the great world religions, Bellen is in search of a model through which artists might organize the expansiveness of the human spirit."Bellen is a sensualist with a taste for vernacular as refined as C.D. Wright's…—Bellen's giddy, insouciant renderings of our thickly mythic polis seem fresh, and appear to create their author from the tactile fragments of the text."—Publishers Weekly Martine Bellen's Tales of Murasaki won the 1999 National Poetry Series Award. She lives in New York.For the Saturday Evening Girls' Pottery ClubPlease, oh please, spread something sweet Over my shredded wheatThat rests upon this yellow plate, fired in its biscuit state.Mystic swastika hands abound, Fortune, luck, well-being found,And bowls with bands of ducks and trees, ring around the ABCs.Hand-thrown pots incised in ink; Still-soft clay initials sink.Please, today, come sip some tea with small designs, each cup's jolie,The harmony lies not in line But deeper in the object's rhyme.Magic Musee for Joseph Cornell(excerpt)She, who's overconscious of her cage Formed from heat, moisture, frost, concealment,How it drips, freezes, fogs How it forms columnar cracks gashed with glassToward the blue peninsula, gravity flight The visible half of reflectionAttempting to obtain the solidity of an objectOr to remove the clothing of sound, genealogical anxiety, Disrobing at the hotel EdenInventing a way in To that which is built over conceptPochahontas(excerpt)Too far away to be seen singly, they comeTogether. The coat-wearing People. They comeOn floating isles. Carry Thunder sticks. They lookFor back seas where clove And mulberry grow. They comeFrom beyond the gr

The Vulnerability of Order

Copper Canyon Press

Poetry. "Contemporary poems on the ancient past have to be ghosts. They are dragged through the inscriptions of strangers until they become something ethereal and gray. And in that spectral light, as we know, colors become brighter as if shining from rain. This is how I read these poems and find them fresh"&Fanny Howe.

Ghosts!

Spuyten Duyvil

Martine Bellen is a poet of refreshing complexity. Her unpredictable disjunctions and conjunctions and her baroque mix of vivid images and meticulous abstractions make one uncertain whether these poems (in verse composed of prose segments) are precise narrations of the contingent or of dreams or of the former masquerading as the latter. They are full of surprises. —Jackson Mac Low 
 …A wonderful rich music. —Rosmarie Waldrop 
 Martine Bellen’s psychological and linguistic adventures in poetry are unlike anyone else’s. Celebrating the instabilities of our experience, her poems maneuver kaleidoscopically between ordinary life and myth or fairy tale, vital human concerns such as identity and dreamlike atmospheres where nothing stays as it appears for long. Her ‘host of unlikely divinities’ display a reality that is never ordinary, always evocative. —Charles North 
 Bellen’s gradual accretive methods and early invocations of Sappho and Freud should remind more than a few readers of H.D.; the foremother of lyric poetry sponsor’s Bellen’s melancholy victory… —Publishers Weekly 
 Quirky, electric poems, spare and challenging. —Peter Matthiessen 
 Martine Bellen’s poems dissolve the world of ordinary conversation and etch out patterns that demand another kind of world, one in which Satan is satin—but still Satan. And then it comes as something of a shock to find it’s in fact our ordinary world still, which she has somehow gotten from a new angle. A real achievement. —Keith Waldrop

This Amazing Cage of Light: New and Selected Poems

Spuyten Duyvil Publishing

An Anatomy of Curiosity

MadHat Press

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Books by Bellen, Martine