For a man who deals in the most compact and economic of literary forms, Dionisio Martinez spends words lavishly when he speaks. They tumble out so fast they run together, their edges softened by his Cuban accent. He's fascinated with everything from architecture and philosophy to drama and history. And he has so much to say. He remembers details — the color of the dining room where he wrote his first poem at 6 years old, the year and model of the car his uncle drove when Martinez was 10. He examines an idea, a word from every angle, spinning out its possibilities in all directions.Martinez's physical features are similarly generous. Large, deep-set eyes with heavy lids and a thick fringe of lashes, magnified to owlish proportions by thick-lensed glasses. Those enormous eyes are balanced by equally large, full lips set in a gaunt face with an almost architectural bone structure that echoes through his large, loose frame. This is a face with topography. This is the face of a poet.
The poems Martinez writes are not an easy read. Even scholars, critics and other poets across the nation admit that. But they also say his poetry is worth the time and thought it requires, calling it extraordinary, dazzling, formidable, wildly imaginative, fascinating, witty, cerebral and zany, among other things.
In her selection of Martinez's fourth book, Climbing back, for the National Poetry Series, Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham described his work this way: "This is a … book of interstellar (and intercultural) nightmares, a crashed party called civilization. … Heartbreaking, overstuffed, seeping with history, lonelier than imaginable and truly in-the-face of American culture…"
That loneliness is evident in the man as well as his poetry. "I am the outsider," he says, "the guy who's always been shut out…"
As a young boy in Cuba, Martinez became an outsider as soon as his parents applied for a visa to leave the island shortly after the revolution. Castro imprisoned, terrorized and executed those who openly opposed his revolution and actively marginalized others who did not support him, encouraging scorn and suspicion among their neighbors, coworkers and teachers. "I was tortured and ridiculed in school." He remembers not being allowed to go to the bathroom until he wet his pants and having his books and toys taken by soldiers and thrown in the street. He was 9 that year, and the pain of a young boy humiliated and stripped of his innocence returns to his face when he recounts the experiences.
Finally, the family's home and possessions were seized at gunpoint. "When they show up with weapons," he says, "you don't argue." His father had come to Cuba from Spain with nothing and had built up a good living as a businessman. Now he and his family would return to Spain with nothing to show for years of work.
Martinez spent a year in Spain, and six years in California, before moving to Tampa.
In the leftist counterculture of the 1960s and '70s, Martinez found his anti-Castro views unpopular. Even today, he says, his right-of-center views make him an outcast in artistic and literary circles. "When I dedicated a reading in Atlanta to Cuban prisoners, most people walked out."
For all his political fire, Dionisio's poetry is not, for the most part, overtly topical. "I don't think of my politics as poetic," he says. "It slips in sometimes … there's no way you can escape your time and circumstances, but it's the exception, not the rule." He's much more interested in examining the philosophical and intellectual side of things in his poetry, rather than the mundane and pedestrian. In fact, he says, his poetry is moving away from the literal and becoming more abstract. "I'm interested in ideas from different realms and how they might work together in a poem. … The shift is that you … still hear the wind blowing [in a poem] but the stuff beneath the events is a little broader, a little deeper. The stuff beneath is actually the poem."
Martinez has published four books of poetry, Dancing at the Chelsea (State Street Press, 1992), History as a Second Language (Ohio State University Press, 1993), Bad Alchemy (W.W. Norton, 1995), which was one of 25 books included in the New York Public Library's 1995 "Books to Remember" list, and Climbing Back (W.W. Norton, 2001).
He has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. His work has been included in dozens of periodicals and anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Modern & Contemporary Poetry (W.W. Norton, forthcoming in 2003), The Best American Poetry (Scribners, 1992 & 1994) and The New Republic.
In 1999, U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky invited Martinez to read at the Library of Congress, where he also recorded his poems for the Library's archives.
Despite his success, Martinez is still critical of his own work. "When I'm finished with a poem, am I happy with it? Of course not. But I can say I'm headed in a direction that pleases me. Sometimes the best you can hope for is something that, when finished, rings with your voice."
This article appears in Apr 23-29, 2003.