where the ordinary becomes strange & beautiful

poetry from & an interview with Marthine Satris

Marthine and I first connected over our shared love for nature and place-based stories. She's a phenomenal writer and editor who brings deep attention to the landscapes around us — from the feeling of fog to the taste of sun-warmed blackberries to the looming awareness of slowly eroding coastlines. As Associate Publisher at Heyday, she works to amplify California voices and histories. Outside work, her poetry explores memories, environments, returning home, and so much more. To me, each poem feels like an invitation to slow down and notice the world more deeply.

I’m so excited to be sharing one of her poems here today, with the others we discuss in this conversation to be shared in the forthcoming first print volume of Filter Feeder! Stay tuned.

Where the road ends

Marthine Satris

Land and time -- one and the same,
what a trick of the mind to think
we can hold either still.
Land is the rot of every being,
the work of lichen on rock to incarnate 
an eon. What eats this accretion -- time’s own hunger. 

There was a house here that caught sunsets like breaths,
and a cypress some fool thought could hold back the wind.
Grey cement foundation etches the edge, and in the slump of clay and dust
roots clawed and gripping air, that tree tilts toward its driftwood future.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

ARYA: I’m so excited to be talking with you. To start, could you share a little bit about who you are and what you do?

MARTHINE: My name is Marthine Satris. I live and work where I'm from — the Bay Area — and I'm the Associate Publisher at Heyday, where I specialize in acquiring book projects for our nature list in particular. But I’ve also acquired and edited books focused on social justice and stories from people marginalized within our culture.

I've written poetry since I was a kid, and I got my PhD in English from UC Santa Barbara in 2012 with a focus on a scholarly reading of very experimental Irish poetry — but specifically considering things like: How do we represent material existence? How do we connect with place? What's the importance of regional literature?

These are still the questions that really drive me in writing and editing – how writing can connect people to one another and to place, and how we can share with each other our mental, emotional, physical experiences through language. I returned to writing poetry in a serious way in just the last five years or so — sharing my writing with readers, taking workshops, making time for writing very deliberately, sending pieces off for submission, and getting creative work published are part of a renewed focus for me on my own sense of self as a writer.

ARYA: I love that. I feel like I can see you exploring those questions in the poems you shared with me. Is there a definition for experimental poetry?

MARTHINE: Yeah! Some people call it avant garde or conceptual poetry. The poets I worked on, you could say that they came out of what's called the LANGUAGE school, which was actually really rooted around Berkeley in the 80s. Charles Bernstein and Lyn Hejinian were particular practitioners. It was about seeing language as separated from meaning; like, when you're just dealing with languages as just sounds and context-less text, what can you do?

Some of the approaches that experimental poets have tried have included, "how about if I take all the weather reports from a week and put that on a page, and that's a poem?" Or, "how about if I collage together surrealist-style pieces of found text from advertisements in the news and quotes from people I overheard? What's that going to mean?”

The kind of poetry we usually encounter, which is the kind I write, is the Lyric. In the 20th century American context, in lyric poetry there's usually a solid "I" — a clear speaker who's experiencing life and communicating that experience to the reader. With experimental poetry, instead of me telling you, "this is what I did and what I saw and what I felt," I might put language together in a way that's going make you feel that experience happening.

So maybe that's like … I want you to feel what it's like to walk down the street while scrolling Twitter — instead of telling you I was doing that and what it felt like for me, how can I put words together that will give you that same feeling of slipping into multiple voices and being distracted from the real world? How can I mimic that experience on the page? That's one way you could think about it.

There's so many ways to experiment with how language can communicate. Even though I finished my scholarly work on experimental poetry a while ago, and I don't necessarily write experimental poetry, I'm still inspired by the possibilities of that work.

ARYA: That’s fantastic. I’d love to spend some time talking about a couple of the poems you shared with me — first, are there specific places that you based some of these works on?

MARTHINE: Definitely. Starting with "The sky is touching your body" — growing up on the Northern California coast, the feeling of fog is one of my core pleasures. But I live in Oakland now, where it doesn't come to visit as often. But this one night, it did. And so that poem was trying to capture what that feeling of walking through fog is like and what a place looks like after it’s gone the next morning.

I edited The California Sky Watcher, and I think that book has changed my relationship with the sky and fog. I'm now very aware that our bodies are moving in the sky at all times, in a way. Weather is also something you only really notice and understand over a long period of time as you start to see patterns.

So back to the fog as part of the weather: when you can feel the little prickles of fog, it feels to me like the sky is coming to touch you.

ARYA: That’s fantastic, and I completely see it now. I originally read this poem as representing salt marshes, actually, but fog makes a lot more sense!

MARTHINE: One of my favorite things with poetry, with literature in general, is that it's not just my intention behind it; it's also what it means to the reader, and the visions that you carry that make it. A poem or a book is not just a "I tell you what I mean” — you're also experiencing it, and it's meaning something in particular to you. And that gets layered on to what I am putting in it. I really like that.

Related to the weather, I just started my little palms Instagram to be like, what is the weather every day?

ARYA: Yes, the palms Instagram, I love it!

MARTHINE: Yeah! I don't want to just pick the prettiest days. Like, maybe every day needs to have a little celebration, a little noticing, right?

palmsonninth

A post shared by @palmsonninth

ARYA: Absolutely. I love those in-between moments of like, okay, how do we make that every day feel really magical?

MARTHINE: Yes! And that's the other thing I think, with poetry — one of the first poets I ever read and loved was also one of my dad's favorites, Gary Snyder. His work, to me, is all about noticing those little, tiny moments of connection to people, of connection to land, of connection with animals.

One poem I remember starts with how he wakes up because raccoons are clattering around in his kitchen. He wakes up and chases them out, and then is just standing naked in the sky, under the moon, just feeling that … and that became a poem. It's raccoons and kitchen and clattering and bleary, and then all of a sudden, you're in moonlight. And I love that.

ARYA: Yeah, some of the best poetry is so deeply specific in that way. I feel like you do that really well through all of your poems, but "Through the darkening hazed field" does it particularly well to me. Can you tell me a little bit more about this poem?

MARTHINE: So I go back to my childhood home every month or so to spend time there and with my mother. This poem captures one particular time with my kids when we were all at the end of a hard day, and it had been unusually hot, and I needed to get out of the house. So I took my daughter, and we went on a walk, and the fog was doing something weird, where it was rising out of the field instead of coming from the ocean. It was this bizarre feeling of a place that felt familiar suddenly being strange.

Also, the way I got my daughter out of the house was by saying we're gonna see owls. And like, you know, how was I gonna do that?! (laughs) But, magically, miraculously, we were looking for the stars, and I remembered to look up in the twilight, because that's how you see bats, too. And then … a silent owl came through, just in time.

That moment of trying to get some clearness in between chaos is what I wanted to capture. I think this was probably a year or two ago. I write things down right after I've experienced them, and then go back to it later.

ARYA: Familiar, but strange. I love how you describe that.

Inspired by what you said about writing things down as they come to you — you're a very seasoned editor ... How do you balance your inner editor voice with your personal practice of creating?

MARTHINE: Great question. I think for me, in some ways, they're kind of different. Everybody needs an editor.

When I think of my role as an editor, I think of myself not as a writer, but as the first best reader. I'm trying to let a writer know, "Hey, you know, this is what I'm getting as I read this. Is this your intention? Can I offer you suggestions to make my experience as your first reader better?" Because when you when you write something, you can just write it for yourself, but if you're gonna put it out into the world, it also has to be for other people, and so you have a responsibility to make it a good experience for them or a meaningful experience for them, and to value what their reaction and response is, and consider that valid. It's not just what I mean to say, it's what we make together.

My own work, I take as far as I can, and what’s been really valuable to me has been to hand it to somebody else and be like, how is this resonating with you? And I have a few people who have given me really precious feedback on poems and essays that were really important and vulnerable.

As I've been told by writers when I’m editing them, sometimes a reader’s suggestion isn’t the right solution for the writer, but when a reader or editor can share, "hey, something isn't working, consider changing this stanza structure” or “I’m getting distracted here, I don't think you need this part," that reaction has been really valuable to me. I took a workshop where I was reminded about the freedom of playing as you edit. Like, if something's not working in this form, what if you get rid of all the line breaks and start over? You can do that.

So how those two roles fit together for me — I think that you can only do so much with one brain. Collaboration can be really generative, because people may suggest something that you can't think of because you're trapped within what is, and they might see a different possibility.

ARYA: Yeah, totally. Our best work is never really done in a vacuum. I love that "The taste of summer" is a two-part poem. It's a really interesting form — what was your thought process like for this piece?

MARTHINE: It began with a fascinating moment — you know how taste and smell, those centers in the brain, are right next to memory storage, so there's a really strong relationship between those senses and memory? That opening moment in the poem where I was eating these blackberries and all of a sudden, was completely transported into the past was so strange. When I eat blackberries in Bolinas, they’re usually cold. But eating them when they've been roasting under the hot Sonoma sun? A completely different sensory experience. And I was like, whoa, I'm back, and I'm a kid again.

The first part of this poem — that was a moment in the late summer of 2021, and I was visiting people I knew, and then going up to one of my dad's good friend's house for the first time since my father’s death — going to a place of enormous memory for me.

Also, there are the blackberry poems that have been so important to me — ones by Seamus Heaney and Robert Hass. And so I'm like, oh, man, can I even write a blackberry poem?!

I read Heaney's “Blackberry Picking” first when I was 17, and Hass's a few years later, and those poems will always be part of how I feel and remember and think about and write about blackberries.

With Heaney's, it ends with this idea that you always hope the blackberries keep and know they will not — the idea of trying to hold on to something, and it always is going to rot away. And with Hass's poem, it has this amazing line in it — "longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.” But yeah, those are iconic ones for me. I'm definitely haunted by those influences.

ARYA: Well, I mean, "The taste of summer" is officially one of MY iconic blackberry poems now. We've talked about this a little already, but could you tell me more about the poets who might influence your work?

MARTHINE: Oh, good question. Yeah, Heaney and Snyder have been a part of my reading life for a very long time. There's also this wonderful poet from Ireland named Maurice Scully. He died in 2023, and he had this super cool life-long poetry project that I loved and wrote about. It was titled so simply: Things That Happen. It's like a life in a poem, and it captures all these little moments, whether it's, "hi, cherry jam, please," or the sound of birds, or "oh, we're worried about making the rent," or the kids running around the house. Just really, really beautiful — again, pulling the ordinary into poetry, finding these rhythms in life’s repetitions that become meaningful.

Studying his work really inspired me to think about what repetition can do — where we get meaning from, what the role of repetition is in poetry — and I think repetition is really core to what poetry is, whether it's the repetition of rhythm, of rhyme, of words that in repetition take on new valances. Whether it's repeating a structure that someone else invented — like a sonnet, right? That idea of creating structures by having repetitions in an ongoing work is very significant to me. I think probably, in my work, there are repeating motifs and things that are drawing on some of those elements, inspired by Maurice, too.

I recently had this amazing salon conversation about the mysteries of time. And the host, Heidi, pointed out that time is kind of like a spiral. Every October is a different October, but it's also layered on top of all the previous Octobers. I think that's how I experience it a lot, especially as someone coming back to the Bay after growing up here. That visual of a spiral is really helping me as I think about repetition and change. Returning to the same, but different.

ARYA: I really love that. Your poetry reminds me of this concept of emergence, where all these little parts add up to something even bigger and greater. I’d love to talk more about structure and repetition in your work — do you ever work with set forms or structures?

MARTHINE: I don't work within received forms. For some reason, that's not my bag — but there's so many different ways that form manifests, and I think it is really important. Forms embody the work of figuring out how existing things can take on new meanings, and of giving yourself something to struggle against. One way to think about form is as a constraint that helps you say something that you couldn't say or wouldn't say without that constraint. It’s important for writers to think, how do I get out of ordinary language into something weird and strange and cool?

"Defamiliarize" is a key term for me within literary theory. Meaning, how do I take the familiar and make it feel weird and new and noticeable to myself and to a reader? And again, one way to do that is to find a form where it's making you fit into it — what are you going to have to do to make that work, you know? And then, some poets create their own forms, like Jericho Brown’s “duplex,” which I’ve had fun playing with. And there's this form called a cento that I just learned about, where it's pulling quotes from other poets or other pieces of work and stitching them together. So forms can offer new creative possibilities, for sure.

One of the things I'm doing that's a little bit more on the experimental side is a pretty long term project. My dad had always written poetry — he'd published a book with a small press in the 1990s, and then put together a self-published collection in 2000, but hadn't published any since then. When he died in 2020, we found all these drawers and bags full of his poems, some of which were notes, scraps, little haiku or bluesy fragments. So what I'm working on is a way to be in ongoing conversation with him through writing with or alongside those poems, because he was so influential in shaping me as a reader and writer.

It's fun. I can do it in so many different ways. I can write back to them. I can leap off of them. I can collage some of them together and do a haiku series. Something I want to try after learning about the cento is to put together different pieces that all collect around a theme, or to pull apart one of his notes and rewrite a poem using his words, but do it my way. I’m finding a lot of room to play and continue that conversation and, hopefully, always keep his influence close to hand and heart.

ARYA: That's so lovely. I think I saw the first three from that series in Flyway Journal. I love how you describe it as being in conversation continually. I lost my dad years ago, and I've also learned that continuing that conversation can happen in so many different ways — whether that's through art or music or something else. And it makes sense to me that you're thinking of it as a long-term project.

MARTHINE: I'm so glad you have music for that connection. It's a loss that doesn't go away, and you start noticing, oh, life is now bittersweet in a way that I didn't know it was going to be.

ARYA: I completely agree. It’s clear to me that all your work is influenced by so many intricate, personal experiences — has your work, whether that's your poetry or your professional work, changed or influenced the way that you interact with your in-person community?

MARTHINE: Oh my gosh, totally. My poem, "Where the road ends" — I think I could only write that because I worked on Rosanna Xia's book, which is "California Against the Sea," and came to the realization that this place I love so much — my hometown, Bolinas — is gonna have to be abandoned at some point or fundamentally changed to accommodate the fact that the whole thing is built on the edge of cliffs that are wearing away, and that sea level is rising.

Another thing: working at Heyday, one of the things I've learned from my colleagues who've been here for a long time is how much relationships matter. It's not just about publishing one great book, it's about building relationships — and to prioritize that, rather than just be like, this is the best, coolest book I can get. Well, what is this contributing to the community? And how does this author contribute to the community? And how can I give back to that community in my work?

So, I really do my best to be a good literary citizen, as Faith Adiele put it once. I go to readings. I buy other people's books. I celebrate books that other presses put out in the Bay Area. I subscribe to literary journals, because I am an enthusiast for everything we're creating here together. After a few years, I was thinking about how I go to all these readings, and then I was like, "Hey, maybe I should try to participate in them, too." And so I did that for the first time in years and years last March. That felt really cool too, to be like, I've been here, supporting everybody, cheering on my authors, inviting other people to celebrate my authors, gathering people in these different places — and hey, I'm gonna also put my voice in here as well. I really love Oakland, Berkeley, and San Francisco for that. I think we're building up this cluster of people who are really interested in shaping literary scenes, which I love.

I've definitely learned something from every book I edit, whether it's about how the Diablo winds connect us to the Great Basin; about how to make nettle pesto, which is delicious; about why wasps are attracted to meat! Every book makes me look at the world differently, and everything I work on shapes my questions, like what does it mean to conserve and preserve? And how does that relate to my memory or my feelings of, "this is what my childhood was like, so I want everything to be that way," versus accepting and adapting to change?

I also think, as a white woman who's married to an Indian immigrant, one of the things I really appreciate at Heyday is being able to be in allyship and open up the gates to voices that have not been included in the major stories of California history, and really being fine with being on the sideline celebrating other people. I have learned so much from people whose experiences are different from mine, and I value how they offer a way to get outside of what I think I know and into other parts of culture and ways to experience the world, and other ways of looking at this place we're in. I think my work in combination with being the mother of mixed-race kids and experiencing my husband's lens on the United States — which is ... real, real gloomy right now — I'm like, okay, I'm gonna hold that alongside my love for this place where I feel so strongly rooted. Not everyone feels at home here, has found acceptance here.

ARYA: Absolutely agree. I think holding the knowledge that things need to be better alongside a deep love for the places we come from and are living in now is so important and special. And I adore your work!

MARTHINE: I'm so glad these poems resonate, and thank you for loving the books we make at Heyday too! It's really such a joy to have a reader connect with what you're trying to do.

ARYA: Well, thank you so much for spending the time with me and talking about them in more depth, it's been an absolute joy. I'd love to ask you questions forever if I could!

MARTHINE: Thank you so much for doing this work of curating and editing and inviting people. I really celebrate that. Everyone needs an editor, so thank you!

ARYA: Oh my gosh, it's my honor.