The poetry of Rita María Martínez has appeared in literary magazines, such as Gulfstream, Ploughshares, MiPOesias, Diagram, Mangrove, Gargoyle, Tigertail: A South Florida Poetry Anthology, Stephen Minot’s Three Genres: The Writing of Fiction/Literary Nonfiction, Poetry, and Drama (8th ed.), and Burnt Sugar, Caña Quemada: Contemporary Cuban Poetry in English and Spanish.
Earlier this year, she published her first chapbook, Jane-in-the-Box (2008), by the March Street Press. Her publisher describes the poems –
In Jane-in-Box, the literary Jane Eyre is updated and unleashed into the twenty-first century. Lured by designer clothing and cosmetics, Jane’s consumerism is driven by the need to heal emotional wounds in poems like “Fashion Remedy” and “Jane Eyre: Heiress, Avon Lady, Plastic Surgery Junkie.” Each poem is a smartly annotated, hauntingly revisionist homage to Jane Eyre. A fan of high and lowbrow art, Martínez molds a series of sexually charged images from the vast storehouse of popular culture. Poems such as “Cross-Dressing” and “At the British Museum” attempt to reconcile conflicting depictions of female sexuality.
Smitten with Charlotte Brontë’s Gothic tour de force, Jane Eyre, since she was a teenager, Martínez resurrects familiar characters in “Mortification Tryptich,” “Rochester Triptych,” and “Vintage Bertha,” while brewing her own blend of Gothic romance.
She was born and reared in Miami, and earned an MFA in the Creative Writing Program at Florida International University.
Like so many things Miami, her poems straddle comfortably both the English and the Spanish, the Cuban and the American. They resonate with familiar classical themes going back to our common European heritage, while making the local, the autocthonous resonate with the universal.
Going Bananas
My father rises each morning
to the fourteen varieties of banana trees
he’s cultivated with unrivaled
care, each tree casting shade across our lawn,
each racimo an offering my father hacks
with his machete, a small cruelty
he performs like a doctor circumcising
a newborn, though I like to think
he is unburdening these trees,
casting weight off the tired trunks
of his Aromatic; his Honduran Goldfinger
and its hybrids (Fhia-3 and Fhia-18);
his twenty-two-foot tall Saba,
tallest banana tree in the world;
his Apple Sugar, a.k.a. Mansano;
his plátano Enano: Dwarf Cavendish,
sweet midgets sacrificed
to the blender for smoothies;
his Jamaican Red, his Cuban Red;
his Misi Luki; his Mysore; his 3640;
his Gran Nain; and my favorite, Orinoco—
plátano Burro he hauls into the house
with the pride of a hunter.
When he enters the kitchen wearing
his sweat-stained Going Bananas T-shirt
my mother stares at the shoot
dangling from his hands
like a third arm and smiles,
though I know she’s thinking
of resin that’ll cling to the cutting board
and her fingers, but he submits los plátanos
like a boy bringing a drawing
to be exhibited on the refrigerator door,
so she strips, slices, mashes, fries
until they’re crunchy, sweet and salted,
tostones, mini-sunflowers humbly
acquiescing beside the breaded steak
on my father’s ivory dinner plate.
Barr: Rita, thanks for doing this interview. Before we start with the usual questions, Going Bananas has a ceremonial, almost ritualistic air about it. How did you think of writing this poem? You must have seen your father working in the yard countless times. What was it that made you sit down and write about it?
Martínez: Going Bananas is dedicated to my father. He has a green thumb and is obsessed with bananas. He is also a lover of knowledge and is a voracious reader. I had fun writing that poem. It was initially published in Ploughshares, then in the anthology Burnt Sugar, edited by Oscar Hijuelos and Lori Marie Carlson, and eventually was included in the latest edition of Stephen Minot’s Three Genres, the same textbook I used during my first creative writing course. Going Bananas is lighthearted and playful and I love playful poems; I like to have fun when I write. A lot of people seem to respond to that poem. This surprises me, because I don’t think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written. Food, however, unites people. They break bread together and they share with one another. Some good tostones can brighten up anyone’s day. I recently heard that eating bananas makes you smarter. Don’t know if that’s true. I’d ask but my dad but I am pretty sure he is biased.
Barr: The climax of the poem (and that’s what I love about your poems, they are like little stories), is when your father brings the plantains into the house and your mother looks at him. She knows the cut branch is going to bleed sap and stain something.
Martínez: My father walked into the house wearing a straw hat, holding a machete in one hand, and the large banana shoot in the other; he looked like a Cuban Crocodile Dundee. I could tell he was looking for praise from my mom; he was acting as if he had just returned victorious after grappling with a wild tiger. The whole scene just seemed amusing to me, but I suppose I was also a little awed at my father’s ability to create, to coax nature to create.
Barr: How do you write?
Martínez: Many of my poems were sparked while reading the poetry and fiction of others. I stop reading, grab a legal pad, and start writing. I’ve written many of the Jane poems at my parents house, so perhaps being there helped me channel this poem. I write in cursive on a notebook and use a gel pen. Afterwards, I type the text into the computer and revise as I go along. I also stuffed my ears with earplugs, so I wouldn’t be distracted by any noise! I have this unbelievable super-hearing, which is more of a curse than a blessing.
Barr: I often wish we had developed earlids, as well as eyelids.
Martínez: Earlier this week I was rereading Wuthering Heights. I know it’s a classic, and I know many readers are absolutely obsessed with this book. However, I have always extremely disliked the main characters, Heathcliff and Catherine. They are very flawed individuals. But I decided to give the novel a second shot, and put my hatred of Heathcliff on hold. While rereading Wuthering Heights, I had an idea for a new Jane Eyre-related poem, titled “Letter to Edward.” In the chapbook, I have a poem titled “Letter to Bertha.” Now I am toying with the idea of writing additional Jane Eyre-related poems and turning them into another poetry collection. Wuthering Heights vividly describes the moors and touches on insanity and cruelty, so rereading it sparked an idea for a new poem, where I compare Healthcliff to Rochester.
Some of the Jane poems were written after reading A Room of Her Own, The Madwoman in the Attic by Gilbert and Gubar, Wide Sargasso Sea, or Angela Carter’s short stories and others. I wrote a good chunk of poems while commuting on the metro, though I usually like to write in bed during the late hours of the night when it is quiet. I am not a morning person, so I envy writers who roll out of bed and start writing.
Barr: Believe me, there’s nothing to envy about waking at 2:30 in the morning, which is my latest approach to attacking my novel.
Martínez: I am of a different breed.
Reading Jane Eyre II
I covered it with clear contact paper,
wrote my name in caps across the foredge in black
marker.
The bloated book rested on my desk like a rainbow
trout.
Mrs. Lund poised on the stool, her bangs and bob stiff
like a man in a toupee, face primed with a thick coat
of concealer. She hinted the secret at the heart of the
text –
I spotted it in her eyes whenever she laughed, flung her arms like tentacles, crossed her legs,
private insanity hidden insider her wisteria wool
skirt, tucked out of sight like Thornfield’s third-floor
tennant, Linda Blair’s precursor, the basket case
languishing in bed.
I read in bed, on the bamboo love seat, beneath the
shade
of my father’s banana trees. I scarfed the pages like
pork rinds,
yuca chips, crackers slathered with guava jelly.
I binged constantly, sunk my canines into text
while Blur’s Boys and Girls wailed in the background like
Bertha on speed.
I carried it for weeks inside the outer pocket of my
Eastpack
like Tic Tacs, a passport, a compact I’d flip open
during lunch, between class, before soccer
practice — the Bantam
paperbacks lodged between Agnes Grey and Wuthering
Heights
at Adolph’s bookstore, its spine red-orange like papaya
pulp.
I plucked it from the shelf and stared at the cover –
the forlorn wedding dress yearning for Jane’s scapula,
her small breasts, the warmth of her hips when she
walks
across the bedroom and steps into wedding slippers,
then into absence, the foot’s descent consuming as
quicksand,
the subtle curve of her arch sheathed by glass.
Barr: Why Jane Eyre?
Martínez: I read it as a junior in high school and was captivated by the plot. It’s a page
turner. Thackeray could barely put the book down when he first read it and gave it a glowing review. I am fascinated by the story. The plot has all the right ingredients: mystery, romance, adventure. The reader really gets to know Jane and is able to live inside her head. One traces her life from a young age. By the end of the novel, the reader knows every intimate detail of Jane’s life—much in the same way the reader gets to know Pip from Great Expectations or Bailey from the movie It’s a Wonderful Life. Jane Eyre is the story of an underdog, and audiences usually root for underdogs. Characters like Edward
Rochester, Bertha Rochester, St. John Rivers, and Blanche Ingram are also extremely memorable. I’ve found myself relating to different characters during different stages of my life. And Charlotte’s prose is very poetic and beautiful. There’s a reason it’s a classic.
Barr: Would you call your poetry feminist?
Martínez: Yes, I consider my writings to be feminist, though there are times I dislike the
label. No offense to Chaucer, Milton, or Shakespeare, but at age sixteen it was refreshing to read a novel penned by a female—a novel which is part of the literary canon. Poems such as “Cross Dressing” and “Reading Jane Eyre II” are a tribute to Charlotte Brontë and other female authors who wrote pseudonymously. Female authors were judged on a different scale. Brontë wanted the reader to approach the novel in an unbiased manner—to reserve judgment according to the literary merits of the work as opposed to the gender of its author. “Letter to Bertha” and several other poems are attempt to address the important issue of female authorship and female insanity and its treatment.
Barr: Thank you, Rita.
Rita María Martínez will read this Sunday, September 28, 2008, at 6:00 p.m., along with other graduates of the Florida International University M.F.A. program, at Books and Books, 265 Aragon Avenue, Coral Gables (305.442.4408)
Photos: picture of Rita María Martínez, courtesy of the poet, picture of banana leaves, Gonzalo Barr; Sources: Rita María Martínez, “Going Bananas,” Ploughshares (Spring 2004) and “Reading Jane Eyre II,” Jane-in-the-Box (2008)
