Martha Ronk's Clay: Bodies + Matter (Omnidawn Publishing, 2025)
Clay by Martha Ronk. Omnidawn Publishing: Oakland, 2025.
I must confess my bias toward Martha Ronk’s poetry. Not just our long-standing friendship, dating back to the early 1970s, but that I’ve published her work here and abroad, collaborated on several poetry and art projects, not to mention that her The Unfamiliar Familiar (2016) was the first in our Magra chapbook series. Those wondrous poems in and about Los Angeles, including the spell-binding sequence addressed to Raymond Chandler, remain an exemplar of what we were able to accomplish with Magra Books. Her newly available, Clay (Omnidawn, 2025), subtitled “Bodies + Matter,” seems not so much a departure for Ronk but a fulfillment of what she’s long been interested in: the ekphrastic. In her numerous collections, Ronk has featured poems, as well as entire sequences addressing photography, painting and ceramics. Of particular interest is her long-time fascination with Italian modernist painter, Giorgio Morandi, who painted with astounding grace and mystery single ceramic pieces. Clay, as Martha notes in her brief introduction, underlines her “involvement with material substance.” Of all her ekphrastic undertakings, this book perhaps is her most urgent, that is, vivid and compelling. Ronk’s approach to these poems underlines the conviction that throwing pots embodies, most fundamentally, one of the most telling of uncertainties: the disjunction between consciousness and things or objects. Again, in her introduction, Ronk describes her attraction for throwing bowls as, “… cupped hands holding emptiness itself. Hands and skin and wet….” From the start the composition of Clay demands a certain attention from the reader. An array of citations, poems, photos of pottery and ceramic objects, practical and practiced observations, as well as photos of hands throwing pottery, all of which offer comprehensive testimony as to the critical place of the often-overlooked sense of touch in art. This extremely well-thought-out and designed volume, a remarkable collaboration between Ronk and designer, River Jukes-Hudson, is an experience of the book which I’ve not come across in some time. Though of a very different historical context and import, what Martha’s new book reminds me of most is that European neo-avant-garde urge toward a total poetry. The reader finds herself so immersed in the world of Clay, that the brilliant contradictions in the first poem, “throwing a bowl” — those impossible facts of language uniquely accessible to poetry – prime the reader to follow the poet just about anywhere:
no matter how open they are seemingly closed
closed seemingly open, that beating under a thin shirt
inside pushing out a pulsing behind closed eyes
veins on the undersides of wrists urgent, trapped
the air inside a bowl held there withheld yet moving out
The paradoxes at the heart of the poem (inside and out, open and closed, hard and soft, solid and liquid) sustain a beguiling music to its resolution, as in the making of a bowl: “… walls enclosing some sort of bowl some tea/ something held close something moving away.” Although difficult to speak of a single poem with this work, my favorite remains the sequence from pages 40-48 (or Celadon sequence). It’s composed of three poems about celadon, then a photo of a splendid celadon bowl, and finally, occupying the recto, facing a technical note on the glaze’s chemistry: “Some pots seem undefinable. The “Hu” pots from the Han dynasty (206 BC to AD 220) appear to move and breathe.” The last poem of the sequence, simply titled “celadon,” seems a kind of ars poetica, not only embodying her attitude toward the visual and tactile arts, but toward the ordering of words themselves. Even the poet’s beloved object of study, Shakespeare, makes an appearance in a fragment from Hamlet’s grand soliloquy, “perchance to dream,” while the poem hovers masterfully in its opening:
no distance between word and
vast profusions spillovers
out of one source a sudden surge…
and then moves deftly and seemingly inevitably to:
no distance perhaps sa slew of words
tactile the connection to the letters
no space between shand drifting to hand
color shading into sshaded green
The poem’s ending isn’t in the least summary or abstract, but a material (tactile) resolution to this lesson in making both ceramics and meaning in poetry. The fingertips and Ronk’s attendant pleasurable thoughtfulness are ever in play. There’s a grand investment of articulation here, in every sense of the word, as the poet carries thought to the smallest and most graceful particular:
pleasure at the tips of branches swhen I say connect
this to sky a grayed-out blue
as yet afloat, amorphous sthe not-yet conceived
thought of sthe under leaf
I ought to stop here as I don’t intend a reading or critique of this book, but rather an emphatic notice of its publication. Clay is an important book by an important poet. Masterfully conceived and presented by all involved, it’s a coming together of so many currents in a poet’s life which make this reader more than glad to be a witness to the work. READ HER.