Chris Martin The Thief

I took home two books from NCC to read over the summer. As part of the Creative Writing Project, I read books to see if we want to invite the authors for our Literature, Live! reading series (don't ask me about the exclamation point--I had nothing to do with it).

I grabbed American Music by Chris Martin because the cover is kitschy. Ironic--I go for the cover with the ketchup bottle. Then I started thinking of that name. Chris Martin. Chris Martin. Isn't he Gweneth Paltrow's baby daddy? Isn't he the guy from Coldplay? I don't know if Gwen's baby daddy is the guy from Coldplay or if either of them is named Chris Martin, but it's the first thing that jumped into my head. Then I looked at the guy on the back cover. Hmmm, if he shaved and got a haircut, maybe he could be that guy from the "Yellow" video. Plus, the collection is called American MUSIC. Then I realized that the poet is from the midwest and I don't think Coldplay or GBD is, so this is a different Chris Martin.

I started reading and started to get annoyed by the last stanza. Every poem ends with a single line stanza. As I kept reading, the annoyance melted away and I got into the groove of interesting images and fun wordplay and use of big words I've never heard of that I have to look up. A lot of city scenes. A lot of allusions to other works.

Allusion--meaning alluding to other texts or art or pop culture. Martin takes that one step further and basically steals. That's what all good poets do. On the back cover, he says that plagiarism allowed him to say what he needed to say more clearly. I love a thief who knows how to use his stolen goods properly.

Now I'm obsessed with figuring out what words came from where. I'm pretty sure anything in italics is from another source. So far, I'm convinced that half of it all comes from Don DeLillo simply because he's the guy I've used for epigrams (epitaphs? epigraphs? epipens? epilady? the quote before a poem begins if the poet writes the poem based on an idea from the quote, whatever epi something it's called). However, there's a whole slew of writers and musicians in the back that Martin gives credit to. See? It's stealing with credit.

I don't think the artists involved would mind. Martin takes their words and wraps them within his own strategically and gracefully. Some of this stuff is out there and some repetitive, but mostly, it's a fresh look at living. A lot of critics compare him to O'Hara; if so, Martin has yet to find the really wacky drugs.