Martin Porter was born and brought up in St Helier, Jersey. He started writing verse while in primary school and developed a love of poetry during his secondary school years. His interest in science took him across the English Channel to study at the Universities of London (Queen Mary College) and Leeds, where he pursued his interest in astronomy and astrophysics. He has lived in Jersey, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Wells UK.
Martin interests lie between and within the genres of poetry and micro-prose. He has been active leading and participating in workshops and writing groups in Jersey and New Zealand. His writing has been printed in books and journals internationally, and online. He has been a prize winner and judge in several poetry and flash fiction competitions. He served as a member of the New Zealand National Flash Fiction Competition committee from 2016 – 2019.
Typical recent work can be found in “Bonsai, Best Small Stories from Aotearoa New Zealand”, “Take Flight”: also online in “Love in the Time of Covid” https://loveinthetimeofcovidchronicle.com/ and “Poetry Remake 4”
https://poetryremake4.wordpress.com/.
Martin read several works illustrating the range of his poetry and discussed how he saw poetry’s contribution to popular culture.
I wish you pleasure in listening to this latest programme.
1:25000
Only slightly lost, we find the paper
Folded in an inside pocket. We are there,
Somewhere, one to twenty-five thousand,
A mote of mobile imagining.
And a trickle of blue splits the landscape.
In the orange skein
We untangle a rolling surface pressed
Flat on the map, but filled with pebble,
Outcrop, blades of grass.
On close scrutiny of the stylised code
A shrubby plantation catches the eye
With its little lollipop trees
Springing from the rough green hummocks
Of a rough green pasture.
And a trickle of blue splits the paper.
On the ground
We find no deep black names.
No red carpets are laid on our tracks.
Hidden from the ink are the implicit sheep,
The thin, abstracted cry of a curlew’s mate,
The wide airy volume of the space
The loneliness
The unprintable emptiness of being there
Nude Descending a Staircase No.2
even nudes
have to get from one place
to another
sometimes
this involves stairs
treads and risers
arrayed
ascendant
while stepping down
this is nothing new
no shift
just movementcubed and fashioned
Le Bar aux Folies-Bergère
Édouard Manet, 1882
CHARLOTTE (Off Screen): I’m stuck. Does it get easier?
BOB: No, yes, it does…
(Sofia Coppola, “Lost in Translation”)
Caught between geometry and eternity
laced by fine fabric, cotton and holes,
choker and paste,
she does not say anything.
It is, of course, a presaged cubist ploy.
The reflection is one of disjunction,
almost as if the artist is conniving
with the chandeliered candlelight
in order to multifacet the facts.
Her reverie drifts
around locked doors between hotel rooms,
each with no connection to each,
each with its own concealed presence,
ill defined fellows, fixating,
conversing with a figment of her image
possessed by another.
She is empty among the full bottles.
Her absent gaze has no sparkle
wired into that concentration
that is the beginning of grief
and ends in the ellipsis
of dialog and understanding,
inside space and lost exteriors.
It does not get any easier.
Islander
Les Êcréhou, Jersey
… and paddling from dinghy to shore
remembering sailors
who wrote about shores and oceans green
rolling plains
touching those sentences
looking at strata
running my fingers along lines and discontinuities
these places are marginalia rising from their own myth
creative
with monsters and seabirds and islanders
I once pulled up my anchor
and found, embedded in wave and strand and kelp,
an old lobster pot, broken, no longer a trap.
Today, I returned with poetry between my toes…
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