Quotidian Pain, A Review By Barbara Purcell
Chris Martin’s fourth poetry collection Things to Do in Hell (Coffeehouse Press, 2020) is a meditation on middle age, Middle America, and middle-of-the-road choices made in the day to day. The kind of life that can only be led by a “cis-straight-white Roth IRA” poet (in Martin’s words) grappling with his role as both passerby and participant in an unwell world. A rather clairvoyant feat given these poems were written prior to the pandemic and protests now pummeling the American consciousness.
The book begins with a play on Whitman’s words:
The pains of heaven are with me
And the pleasures of hell are with me
Martin has reversed the words “pleasure” and “pain,” though it doesn’t change a thing—which is the book’s punchline: heaven and hell are the same thing.
The opener is aptly titled “Epilogue,” straight from the proverbial Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come: the poem paints a bleak picture of a used-up planet, depleted and destroyed by humanity’s voracity. The final line—a word, really—cut off by our self-induced extinction.
The two poems which follow also convey this sense of urgency, though they end up getting bogged down by their respective devices. “Zealous” is an ekphrastic ode to architect Siah Armajani’s recent retrospective at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis. Its larger abecedarian structure (as Martin refers to it in the Notes) is certainly ambitious, as is “Palinode,” a pantoum which scrolls up the page with its dutiful quatrains and measured repetitions. Both of these poems are so structurally sound however, that it is difficult to detect any movement from within.
It isn’t until we reach the eponymous poem “Things to Do in Hell” that the collection really gets cooking, an eerily prescient laundry list for this century’s maladies:
Pull down the statues of your ancestors
Get down on your knees
Read Kierkegaard
Pick the kids up from Montessori
Lose your appetite
Linger.
Martin’s sense of humor continually greases the interchangeability between the sacred and the mundane. Lines such as, Blame those closest to you (the big ticket items) and DVR Homeland (the tiny tasks at hand) get checked off life’s little laundry list with equal aplomb.
His hilarious poem about suburban ennui, “If You Lived Here You’d Already be Dead,” describes nextdoor.com as the “panopticon” of our times—a prison tower with a 360-degree view of your neighbors’ dirty little deeds. Its final line yet another a funny flip:
I’m not calling the cops, the cops are calling me.
Martin resides in Minneapolis with his wife and children. Like many of us who find ourselves living a thousand miles from our former lives in places like New York City, moving to the middle of the country is both a practical decision and a consolation prize. America is a neatly folded sheet of paper, with people from the coasts constantly sliding into its center crease.
His poem, “Pain and Mercy,” addresses this small dilemma. I still can’t afford California Martin laments, though conceding later on in the poem, California can’t afford California.
And in “Everything Else” he eulogizes his former life in NYC, as well as the city itself—which has gone from edgy to uptight in as many years:
Before everything in the Village went Froyo & Chase
Before money was money
As we moved forward we held hands
And to many it appeared that we were searching for a missing child.
In “A Big Hungry Us,” he weighs his options between having his freedom and having a family. Surrendering to the ineluctable and irreversible decisions which will now outlive him:
Your water broke at midnight
And everything broke open.
That notion of something breaking—but not broken—is most evident in his paean to his son, “A Small Human Being Breaks Everything.”
with a wail, breaks his eyes open with hunger and loneliness. We can’t hold
anything together except
love, which grows even
as it breaks…
Martin really gets at something with these lines, the near impossibility it takes to be in this world, and the unquestioning act to stay in it for as long as possible. He is at his best when upholding difficult dialectics: beauty and breaking, America and hysteria, heaven and hell.
“YRUOK” is a question in light of the answer:
Another day made of acetate and other people
The melting pot in a meltdown
And I see you flossing a gray Lexus SUV
Toward the cooling towers of delusion
Extreme makeovers and gerrymandered hearts
With tweets where the silent pauses used to go
But the petrochemical disaster stocks skyrockets
And the masks become, what, our faces?
Artist Simon Evans has done both the book cover and interior illustrations—simple, satirical drawings which have been placed like visual chapter headings. A receipt from Staples (though the store has been renamed Hell) and a cassette tape labeled “Augmented old world of grief lasts forever” provide additional angst. The book’s cover art—an old beat-up remote control—seems well suited for these 55 poems: each one a different channel leading back to the same thing.
The poems which tend to focus on a single word—white in “Flags of Surrender” or say in “It’s Like They Always Say”—feel out of place, however. A stylized nod to the spoken-word style of another era which detracts from the startling insights Martin has made in the here and now. This out-of-stepness culminates with “Y,” with its references to Malcolm X and the cops and the Y chromosome itself: each line of the poem begins with the word “because,” which inadvertently builds bluster rather than momentum.
What Martin does so expertly, again and again, is mix the centuries of strife with the pain-in-ass of today. Going from micro to macro and back again, calling midlife a “drop ceiling” and noting “the airplane inside us was running out of pretzels.”
Things to Do in Hell is the dad bod of poetry collections, chronicling the strain of these times with the quotidian pain of a man who likely eats at Le Pain Quotidian. And that’s what makes it so delicious.
Things to Do in Hell
Poetry
by Chris Martin
Coffee House Press, October 2020
112 PAGES
$16.95
Barbara Purcell is an Austin-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in the Austin Chronicle, Canadian Art, Glasstire, and Sightlines Magazine, among others. She is the author of Black Ice: Poems (Fly by Night Press, 2006) and has contributed to three anthologies including Word: An Anthology by A Gathering of the Tribes. She is a graduate of Skidmore College and a native of North Jersey. For more info, please visit www.barbarapurcell.com.