Welcome to the website of Rodger Martin — poet, teacher, editor, journalist, director of Monadnock Pastoral Poets.
Rodger Martin is the author of four books of poetry. His latest book, For All The Tea in Zhōngguó was released in 2019. It follows The Battlefield Guide (Hobblebush Books: 2010, 2013) and the selection of The Blue Moon Series (Hobblebush Books: 2007) by Small Press Review, which was one of its bi-monthly picks of the year. Poet Henry Walters says, “In Rodger Martin’s poems and collaborations with contemporary Chinese poets, translation is less a two-way street than a triangulation. We learn … his practice of seeking clues …each one leading the reader a little further into an inexhaustible labyrinth of a language, culture, an aesthetic, and a poetic tradition as different from the American tradition as can be. If you’ve felt ‘this two-headed universe pounding on our temples,’ here is an art capable of holding it together.”
“Landscape mingled with myth” is how Nanjing University’s Zhang Ziqing, translator of Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot and A History of Twentieth Century American Poetry, perceives Martin’s poetry; or, as poet and Harvard Review critic Bill Doreski notes in Heartbeat of New England, his poetry takes an approach that defies classification and grouping, as in “Along the Monadnock Watch” for example, “Martin finds in the death of a moose on a highway a tragedy of classical proportions.”
About The Battlefield Guide
Much of the character of Rodger Martin’s poetry is contained in the opening lines of “Harper’s Ferry” [The Battlefield Guide]. For him there is no Civil War of separate battles. The Vietnam war is equally the Trojan war, the Civil War, WWII, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan…, because his vision takes in the basic humanity of such experience.—B. Eugene McCarthy, author of Sound Ideas (Listen to an excerpt with musicians on the book page.)
Blog
Follow Rodger’s irregular posts on the Monadnock Pastoral Irregular Blog (MPIB) by clicking on the pages menu at the bottom of the page. He calls it irregular because, as he says, “I often have little to add to add to the public discourse.”
If you’d like to have your email address placed on Rodger’s MPIB post notification list, please contact Rodger. Email addresses are not shared beyond the blog.
Video
Winner of the 2024 Stanley Kunitz Medal for Poetry: The complete ceremony at the Worcester Historical Museum, Worcester, MA:
2024 Kunitz Medal Award Ceremony (youtube.com)
A short video of two poems prepared for Pondicherry Nature Preserve in conjunction with Writing The Land.org. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Or97zvAkaU6rJTdF7vnE-ntgJlqnvi2O/view
Interviews
Rodger converses poetry and translation with fellow Hobblebush poet Henry Walters (April 2021): Conversations with Granite State Poets – Rodger Martin and Henry Walters – YouTube.
Rodger blames the typewriter for turning him into a poet in an interview with Sean Hurley of New Hampshire Public Radio at Robert Frost Place in Franconia, NH (April 2014).
Rodger discusses his books The Blue Moon Series and The Battlefield Guide in an interview with Hobblebush Books (September 2013).
A story published by The Equinox, Keene State College’s award-winning student newspaper, about Martin’s work in China.
Credits: Photograph of Mount Monadnock from Gap Mountain by Clair Degutis. Photograph of Sunrise on Pearly Pond by Gordon Ripley