Dionisio D. Martinez

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Dionisio D. Martinez (born 7 April 1956) grew up speaking Spanish, but his poetry has initiated new possibilities through English. Born on April 7, 1956, in Cuba, he was three at the start of Fidel Castro's revolution and remembers the confiscation of his family's home and personal property. He and his family went into exile in 1965, first living in northern Spain, but then growing up in Glendale, California. In 1972, his sophomore year in high school, his family moved to Tampa, Florida, which has since been his home. In high school, he was inspired by reading T. S. Eliot, Archibald MacLeish, and the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca.

Martinez's poetry is offbeat and radially allusive, assimilating diverse ingredients from the cultures of the Americas and of Europe, painting and music, the highbrow and the lowbrow--composer Niccolo Paganini and painter Jackson Pollock but also the White Sox and advertising. A poem such as "Hysteria," like the map and the newspaper it invokes, folds over and over. The half-humorous, half-panicked recycling of images from various sources--TV and the paper, history and poetry--releases new and unexpected connective energies among them. "The Prodigal Son in His Own Words: Bees" also manically recirculates images, alternating between a decaying house and bee hives, as if to give this prose poem the vertiginous circularity of such fixed forms as the sestina and the villanelle.

Martinez is a poet of gaps, losses, and interstices. While we find no paeans to Cuban American identity in his poetry, we can perhaps infer an indirect expression of his divided cultural experience in his preoccupation with displacement and disorientation, with orphans, exiles, and abandoned houses. "I want to learn / to think in American," says the speaker of "Hysteria," but a skewed relation to the dominant culture helps Martinez see that culture afresh, as though always through the lens of metaphor. "No matter where I go," he writes in "Temporary Losses," "I carry foreign currency." In "Moto Perpetuo," the poet's comments about Pollock's art also describe his own poetics: "how important / the gaps and absences were to him; // how crucial the distances, the gulfs." Martinez's poetry of juxtaposition owes something to surrealist technique and moves with the velocity of cinematic montage. It also recalls the seemingly logical illogic and elusiveness of John Ashberry's poetry. In tone, it is, like the work of the New York school, both zany and insistent, colloquial and authoritative. Its cultural and psychological kaleidoscope of images, puzzling and humorous, has the strange forcefulness of a dream: "how a country / deprived of laughter ages invisibly;"

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