On Codes of Public Sleep by Camille Martin (Book Thug, 2008)

Reviewed by Katherine Wootton

If reading is in part a surrender to the mind of the writer, reading Camille Martin’s Codes of Public Sleep means letting go of all coherence and expectation of continuous meaning. Like the nonsense songs of children (with a superior vocabulary), Martin’s poems contain brief moments of intelligible and often quite striking ideas and images, which then recede into the cloud of nonsense verbiage that perpetually surrounds the reader.

One of the pieces, the titular "Codes of Public Sleep", is meant to be accompanied by images (which can be found at http://www.xcp.bfn.org/martin.html) during performance. After perusing these photographs, one gets a better sense of Martin’s intention of capturing an essentially fractured landscape. Yet even with this understanding, it is difficult to gauge exactly what, in the pieces presented in the collection, is intended or described.

Martin’s enjoyment of language is clear – every noun, verb, adjective, and adverb is pushed to contain as much meaning as possible, and yet in demanding so much of word choice the connection between the words falls away. The words, individually, are rich in connotation and definition, but in their isolation fail to convey meaning. A typical line includes something like "… jackhammers dreaming contradictory Doppler effects". The words themselves are interesting and evocative, but strung together may as well be the mumblings from a dreaming sleeper. In "letters letters" the line "the witness is a brute of unreliable diction. speech/" appears, which struck me as rather a propos.

Sound is also key (as it should be in poetry), and while meaning may be at best periodic, Martin pays attention to assonance, as in "seasons alter psaltery" from "Trace Reports". Repetition of various words and concepts (often the language of disintegration, crowds, and space) creates a vague mood, if not a pattern, but it is impossible to catch a through-line of thought. Unlike stream-of-consciousness writing, which doesn’t obey rules of grammatical coherence but tends to make an associative kind of sense, Martin’s barrage of words fails to create an idea of a subject or object.

Some ideas, represented by unique word combinations, resonate, like "in a not-yet town" from "Cleaves" or "finding butterflies in a snowstorm" from "Limnic Realm". It is these brief moments of surprising sense that rescue this collection from total meaninglessness, where Martin provides visually or intellectually inventive and effective images, ideas and metaphors that emerge from the babble.

Martin’s work in this collection is intensely limited as she does not provide a basic sense of what is being spoken of, by whom, or why. She leaves only vague impressions rather than any emotional impact. Rather like dreaming, some moments stand out and seem to perfectly capture a feeling or moment, and the rest fades into a weird garbled half-memory of disconnected, meaningless and random images.