From associate professor of English to management trainer to retiree, Carolyn Martin is a lover of gardening and snorkeling, feral cats and backyard birds, poetry and photography. After decades of writing academic papers and business books, she finally realized that poetry is the way her mind interacts most creatively with the world—in images, rhythms, sounds, and intensities of language. Consequently, for the past fifteen years, she’s settled into the joyful challenge of translating experience into as few words as possible. Her aesthetic is embodied in Jack Kerouac’s comment in Dharma Bums: “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple”; and in Galway Kinnell’s statement, “To me, poetry is somebody standing up . . . and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.” Her poems attempt to be simple in words as they grapple with the complexity of being on this planet at this time.
Carolyn’s poems have appeared in more than 175 publications throughout North America, Australia, and the UK. Her fifth collection, The Catalog of Small Contentments, was published in 2021 by The Poetry Box. She currently serves as the book review editor for the Oregon Poetry Association.
For more, see:
www.carolynmartinpoet.com
Paperback: 50 pages
Publisher: Kelsay Books (April 19, 2023)