Micros from Martone’s Memoir
by Michael Martone
[Three pieces from Michael Martone’s new project—a memoir in prose poems.]
Cake
I-35, Iowa
1983
Iowa State University lent me a car (I didn’t have a car) to go to the Des Moines airport to pick up Czeslaw Milosz and drive him back to Ames for a lecture and a reading. A Polish math professor went with me. On the trip there, we talked about the work in the fields. Milosz had just won the Nobel Prize, and on the way back, I pointed out the harvested and turned fields on both sides of the highway. The dirt looks like chocolate cake, he said. The math professor in the back seat said then that they were going to speak in Polish now, and they did all the rest of the way back to Ames. I understood nothing.
Spade
Cambridge
1990
Everyone thinks Harvard University is rich, but it is cheap when it comes to phones. My office at 34 Kirkland Street was next to Seamus Heaney’s, and we shared a party line that rang all the time. The calls were almost always for him from all over the world. I took messages, and when he returned, we would have lunch in his office to review them. We would also talk about gardens, and how we missed having one in the city. When I left to take a new job in a city where I could have a garden, Seamus gave me a garden spade, a ribbon around its handle which is, after all these years and many gardens, still there, hanging by a few threads.
X-Acto
Syracuse
1993
During the small talk at dinner that night, I wanted to ask Louise Gluck about the X-Acto knife. Her father, I thought, had invented it for use as a scalpel, but it couldn’t be cleaned. We had been talking about the white space between the print in a collage. I mentioned Francis Ponge and how she was interested in every day objects like soap and knives. Louise cut in right there: “She, she said, “wasn’t a she but a he.” Right then dessert arrived.
Recently retired after 40 years of teaching, Michael Martone’s new book, PLAIN AIR: SKETCHES FROM WINESBURG, INDIANA, will be published by Baobab Books in 2022.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of these three micro-memoir pieces? I now have nearly 100 of these micro memoirs. These three were written in August of 2021 for the August Poetry Postcard Fest. So they were written to specifically fit on a postcard and since they were about mundane meetings with famous writers, I composed them on a mechanical typewriter. I consider myself, of course, a “minor” writer and think of minor in musical terms. So I think of these pieces as duets with major and minor keys. by Michael Martone On Administrative Leave, the Postal Inspector Waits in Line at the Even here, the end of the earth, wanted posters are posted. Have you tracked me down? What word’s been sent? What, what do you want? A Camoufleur at the Natick Soldier Systems Center Digests Mychildrenlookrightthroughme,throughthescreendoorwhereIstandstill,foregroundflattenedintobackground,twenty-fivewords hiddeninthisoneword. A Chemist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health To get that loud color, that safety yellow? Lead chromate. It’s the only way. Its aftertaste is sweet like sponge cake. It stains the teeth.
Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He has taught at several universities including Johns Hopkins, Iowa State, Harvard, Alabama, and Syracuse. He participated in the last major memo war fought with actual paper memoranda before the advent of electronic email. Staples were deployed. The paper generated in that war stacks several inches deep, thick enough to stop a bullet. Martone learned that the “cc:” is the most strategic field of the memo’s template, and he is sad to realize that fewer and fewer readers know what the “cc:” stands for let alone have ever held a piece of the delicate and duplicating artifact in their ink stained and smudge smudged fingers. It, like everything else, is history.Three Memos
Sunrise, Maine, Post Office to Ask If He Has Any Mail Held General Delivery
Reports Finding Failure of the UCP Digitalized Pixilated Pattern in Afghanistan
Dips a Finger in a Freshly Opened Paint Can
Tell us more, if you could, about your series about federal employees that these wonderful pieces are a part of. I started writing these pieces in response to the current political anger directed toward the “public” sector and “faceless” bureaucrats. As the rhetoric of cutting the federal government became more pronounced, I wanted to meditate on all the things it actual does, benign or not, efficient or not. I will miss the post office, Amtrak, even the page program in Congress. I thought micro fictions were the perfect way to get at the “vast” complexities of that “Washington.”
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.
Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.
Upcoming
05/04 • Leath Tonino
05/11 • Chris Pellizzari
05/18 • Chris Clemens
05/25 • Clayton Eccard
06/01 • TBD
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06/22 • TBD
06/29 • TBD
07/06 • TBD
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07/20 • TBD
07/27 • TBD
08/03 • TBD
08/10 • TBD
08/17 • TBD
08/24 • TBD
08/31 • TBD
09/07 • TBD
09/14 • TBD
09/21 • TBD