Richard Martin's 'Techniques in the Neighborhood of Sleep'

An intimate reflection: Richard Martin’s Techniques in the Neighborhood of Sleep

Richard Martin’s Techniques in the Neighborhood of Sleep is - appropriately, given its subject - a weird and dreamlike meditation on the subject of sleep in all its variances. As a collection of poetry, it lacks a coherent style, but this is not to its detriment; nonsensical lists such as the one entitled “Principles of Sleep” (“1. I absolutely love the planet/ 2. Feel its mute turning inside of me”) give way to whimsical essays very seriously disclaiming the author’s expertise on the subject of sleepwalking - (“This is not an essay on sleep by a gifted somnambulist. It will not offer tips on cooking while asleep or the appropriate attire to don for outings in a neighbor’s backyard. It will not record the passage of time.”) - in a way that feels natural and even charming. The disconnectedness is itself dreamlike, and the consistent subject gives the collection a logical coherence despite the changes in style.

Martin approaches the topic of sleep from a number of different angles, both literal and metaphorical. He is at his best when meditating on the state of dreaming - the way that sensory experience shifts and logic seems distant and meaningless: “In deft acts of levitation/sleep alters the height and speed/of the body.” The dreaming mind is its own animal, one that cannot be easily sketched out in straightforward prose; Martin captures it adroitly in fractured bursts of vivid description.

He is also given to wandering meditations on the nature of identity, almost obsessively returning again and again to the topic of self-interpretation, the question of how a mind comes to know itself in an intimate way - at the level of id, rather than ego. He speaks of a sort of internal self-recognition - or sometimes, a lack thereof - that is almost entirely separate from conscious thought. Again, sleep is an ideal lens through which to observe this; disconnected as it is from the constraints of both reality and consequences, he seems to say, the dreaming mind can become most fully itself. (“Minds are told who they are by time and space/Fueled by nothing, complexity generates split personalities/advancements in social networking.”)

It is his use of sleep and the habits of sleeping to investigate relationships that I find most interesting, however. There is an intimacy in sleep, and in sleeping together, that transcends almost every other intimacy: the ultimate vulnerability, in a way. When he writes of sleep in the context of a romance, it is with a sort of otherworldly quality that belies the day-to-day normalcy of life. “I walked into your body without map or exit strategy - Love with streets of no direction,” he writes. “Meanwhile, life occurred at regular intervals/ We owned a car/ We didn’t/ The kids grew up.”

In Martin’s poetry, sleep strips away the mundanity of love, of the world, of the self to reveal its strange, fractured, beautiful reflection.

Richard Martin is a graduate of Binghamton University a past recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for Poetry. He also founded the Big Horror Poetry Series in Binghamton (1983-1996) and has published several collections of poetry and short fiction. He lives in Boston with his family.