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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