A Pilgrim's Progress

By Diane Martin

A Pilgrim’s Progress, my collection of poetry written over fifteen years of exploration and displacement, marks a crucial phase in my development as a poet and writer. Begun in 2000, when I pursued my dream of finally moving to St. Petersburg, Russia, it documents in verse critical moments of élan vital, and my wanderings, and my perceptions of our kaleidoscopically fragmented civilization. We, my band of brothers and sisters, had hopes of different millennium realizations, but the 21st century is devolving otherwise.

The initial poems express hopeful rediscovery and discovery, such as “Pilgrimage” and “Summer’s Eve.” Gradually, conflict and trials appear in the pilgrim’s path. The last poem “Never Mind” marks her resignation to living out vagabond days in surroundings fast becoming alien, owing to a personal situation as much as to societal and political upheaval.

Far from the first time in history that “ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves,” as Shakespeare noted in the cited epigraph from King Lear, but it appears it could be the last, given our descent into the hell of tyranny, climate change, and now pandemic.

I believe that, in part, a poet’s job is to document perception, another part, to bear witness, yet another to warn and ward off evil with the spell of language performing these tasks quintessentially and powerfully. We poets are hybrid conductors, historians, magicians. In Anna Akhmatova’s monumental elegy Requiem, my constant muse cites an incident when, freezing, standing in a line to deliver a package to her son in prison, the woman behind her whispered:

“And can you describe this?”

And I said, “I can.”

Then, something like a smile slid across what had once been her face. *

Many of us also follow a tradition of rebelling against oppression. In their own small way, these poems endeavor to fulfill these obligations while creating objects of beauty, while conversing with other artists. Stepping the stones where brilliant poets walked, inhaling their words, incorporating them into my sensibilities, and transforming the whole into an individual necklace of autobiographical, multifaceted gems is the aim of my craft.

Form is as important as content, which, with age and practice, has become more formal. In these poems, meter, internal and external rhyme, alliteration, onomatopoeia, simile, metaphor, etc., are used seriously and playfully, often ironically, referentially, though rarely strictly. When absent, they show crisis: the world is falling apart. Grief is too severe to adhere.

I do not apologize for refusal to lapse into the simplification and trendy authoritarianism of free verse. Educated in the importance of literary structure, I agree with Stephen Fry in An Ode Less Travelled that Anything Goes is not poetry, but prose... or some other category... like music, but lacking the attributes that make it music. Using traditional forms to write verse with contemporary themes and language now seems to me to be avant-garde.

*My translation.

– А это вы можете описать?

И я сказала:

– Могу.

Тогда что-то вроде улыбки скользнуло по тому, что некогда было ее лицом.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Purcell Press
• Release date: Jun 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781649457233

Diane Martin

This collection of 55 poems is called A Pilgrim’s Progress, written over a 15-year span during the period when I moved to St. Petersburg, Russia, and then to Sansepolcro, Italy, with sojourns in numerous other countries to sit out my alternate three months out of the Schengen zone, as I was not given Italian residency.My exile, not entirely self-imposed, as circumstances and illness forced me to leave San Francisco, CA for a more hospitable and affordable city, wrought much soul-searching, creative production, and many changes. While I had never felt like an insider in my native country, I became a thoroughgoing nomad in others, able to commiserate more fully with my fellow passengers to the grave and experience the sometimes privileged perspective of a genuine outsider, but often one who passes some of the tests of inclusion. This book is the artistic result of my reflections and interpretations, influenced by the landscapes and cultures of my wanderings.

Book preview

A bag full of wishes all scattered,

and flattened like pennies—crushed, strewn on

the railway tracks—glinting as angry

as copper flint. Wet gloves are peeled off.

A raincoat shrugged off soon joins them,

every memory shaken out,

rid of damp stowaways and hidden

dreams, hung across both hooks to dry.

A long green scarf remains swathed around

stiff, trembling, cold shoulders, against

chill midnight and mockingly sodden

blithe spirits prone to haunt coupés of trains.

May 17, 2000

St. Petersburg, Russia

Pilgrimage

for Pierre

My sore feet have stepped these stones before,

but sprightly, as though on the lettuce leaves

of salad days which paved our strolls here,

hand in hand, you once wrote, and not more

romantic than our would-be walks in Paris.

Maybe, though Neva white nights were cer-

tainly more innocent than ribald,

drunken lurching by the Seine, post-disco,

pre-lust, barefoot from too-high heels and wild

mating rituals. On this Field of Mars,

the north wind blows lilac kisses through

my hair, now unsecured as then, when you

picked me a branch, ensuring babushka-

wrath, surefire censure of a crime a-

gainst the State and way, way too much leg.

A dormant order gusts up little

dust storms, sandy stirrings of chaste past

whip up the lone bride’s swept dress, nettle

the photographer who’s been licked by

the eternal flame. Neglected place

with only carved stone to bear witness

to the fallen heroes of the pro-

letariate. If memory serves, broken

bottles, cigarette butts, and their bearers

were forbidden by the old, forgotten

guard. My God, whence that sad, ragged

brass band? Дорога длинная… Those Were the Days?

No more insanity. Look, Peter’s

Summer Gardens, Western rationale.

Long alleys peopled with stone allegor

ies. At the end, a pond, castle.

Didn’t there used to be swans here, Pierre?

June 20, 2000

St. Petersburg, Russia

Shadows

˶Тень моя на стенах твоих..."

My shadow is on your walls…

Anna Akhmatova

…and