Melanie Marttila's The Art of Floating

Reviewed by Terry Trowbridge

(Latitude 46 Publishing, 2024)

Melanie Marttila’s book The Art of Floating (2024) is a collection of 67 poems about a wide range of topics. Marttila is a detail-oriented observer of her own life, who has skillfully turned her analytic abilities as a writer into a sophisticated study of the geographies, families, and cultures of Canada’s southwestern Ontario cities. For the most part, though, Marttila’s poems return to a common theme of mental health. Over the duration of the poems, a reader begins to experience a 21st-century Canadian concept of what mental health is. And, if that reader has some idea of the history of psychiatry and public health, then Marttila’s poems will seem emblematic of a much different paradigm then what the 20th century offered.

The difference is basically this: the old paradigm of mental health was individualistic. Marttila’s up-to-date observations of mental health show that mental health is social.

In the 20th century, mental health was a personal attribute. Individuals could be healthy or unhealthy based on their psychology. How an individual adapted to their environments, like their workplaces, their families, their friendships, hardships, accidents, and so on, was the focus of mental health professionals. A maladapted person was unhealthy, and a well-adapted person was healthy. Their adaptations were personalized ideopathology and particular to themselves.

Not-so Marttila’s wholistic, gestalt interpretations of a daily life that is more than the sum of its parts. For Marttila, mental health is a complex interplay of generations and places, where relationships evolve into new contexts, and those contexts are the material from which a person emerges, without ever being truly isolated from those other people, times, and places.

The Art of Floating begins with a very short note that Marttila’s poems are being written as part of an inheritance. She tells her reader that the pen she writes with belonged to her father. She notes that the ink smudges (so text in-itself is an imprecisely malleable image of text) and that “getting to the heart of things” is a messy process. Marttila is united with her father in the physical act of writing, the tools to write, the role of writing as a way of life.

After that very brief introduction, The Art of Floating is divided into 5 sections: Drunken Moon (1-22), The Art of Floating (23-36), White Noise Machine (37-52), Lunar Observation (53-76), and Fire and Ice (77-89), followed by endnotes that explain the influences of musicians and the importance of family eccentricities (91-97). Readers should check the endnotes because they are as relatable as the poems.
 
Drunken Moon

Writing in the first-person perspective, Marttila addresses many of her poems to an unnamed “You,” who is definitely not her father (see her poem on page 11, “Two Passions”). There is more than one “You” being addressed in the book, and it could get very complicated because in Ontario’s way of speaking, we tend to use the word “you” when we really mean ourselves. When we explain our own actions, we tend to construct our thoughts with, “You do this. You do that. You have to…” But although Marttila is writing herself and her society, she is not a narcissist. So, in the way that maybe only someone from south-central Ontario can know, we can say Marttila is writing about herself observing you other people, You.

That’s not necessarily trivial. Drunken Moon includes poems about leaving her home in Sudbury to live in Windsor, Ontario, in order to attend a Master’s program in writing and create The Art of Floating. Writing is a technology that can structure the self, an inherently integrative project for poetry to do. There is always a tension during graduate studies between doing research and graduate studies to do me-search. In order to attend the University of Windsor and write her book, Marttila has to leave behind, in Sudbury, her longtime home, her mental map of local physical or cultural geographies, and most importantly, someone, “You,” who she has been deeply in love with, and married to, for a long time. Marttila chooses to prolong the absences in order to create the poetry and recreate herself. Marttila is not alone. The separations are a common experience among Canadians. Canadian geography is dispersed and the economics of being Canadian means absenting oneself from key human and geographical relationships for the sake of income, medicine, and social life. It is difficult to have a culture when everything is a commuter culture.

And, to be random, but random in order to clarify the distinctly Canadian nature of the social dimensions of mental health: The distance from Sudbury to Windsor is 493 kilometers, with scarce roads or transit options. As Marshall McLuhan noted, Canada has always been connected by mass media or electronic devices like telephones and radio. In contrast, a country like Belgium is 280 kilometers across with many more ways to maintain in-person connections. Austria, the home of psychoanalysis and originator of mental health’s public health conceptualization, is slightly longer than Marttila’s psychosocial alienation, at 580 kilometers.

Could the geography of larger, less personally connected/more mediated places, create a different concept of mental health than the shorter distances of denser nations? This seems like a way Canada’s economy, based on lonely distances and outstretched supply chains, evokes a particular kind of personhood, as described in Marttila’s poem about “Huron Church Road” (7-8), a commerce corridor in Windsor.

And then there is snow; a totalizing change to the shape, visibility, temperature and texture of everything. Even the texture of the sound of an anonymous jogger is altered when they add their snow-stepping presence to Marttila’s daily meditations about Windsor’s architectural skyline. Snow is also a sudden, swift rearrangement of the world and one’s place in it. When she observes, “I walk in new-fallen snow;/every step I take is my own,” (5), she wakes up the reader to how arbitrarily and easily originality comes from Winter.

Marttila, still enwrapped in the architecture of Windsor as an economic hub, protests against her temporary separation from her husband because the Master’s degree is now her job, “the weight of rusted girders and/reams of wasted words./ivory towers will fade,/long before you and I” (11). She begins to oscillate between times and places, adding poems about rural farm life and relationships with animals (12-13, 14-15). Her love life, though, is not interpolated through urban economies and earthbound distances. Instead, her love life is articulated in images of transcendence in alternative spheres, as in her poem “Astronomy Lessons” (22).

The section entitled Drunken Moon sets the scene for creating the poems of the book. The creative writing gig’s urban context engages a different self than her Sudburian life beforehand. The writing project is characterized by dramatic distance form her subject, even though, perhaps ironically, perhaps the genius of poetry as a literary form, her subject is the one thing nobody can get distance from: herself.
 
The Art of Floating

Next, Marttila shifts focus to an image of floating in water, in a way that her father taught her to do. She describes the immersive experience. This multigenerational lesson in immersion begins a section of poems about ecology.

Birds begin to populate Marttila’s poems as protagonists and antagonists. A courtship relationship between a pair of birds seems entirely visual, until it is abruptly complete: “some unseen signal – then, they flutter and fly” (29).  Time, also, becomes redefined by damage, death, and healing on nonhuman timescales. A forest is not what it seems, “friends on the journey/until the clear-cut/with the pretty sign/declares: replanted 1992/As though it were a blessing” (30). Replanting trees where a forest used to grow is different from clear-cutting, but still an act of elimination of that old forest.

The poem ironically titled “antidote” (33) remarks upon the kind of couples’ relationships that last not because of love or positivity, but because of any given number of pressing, external concerns. Possibly, not least of which, those reasons include chronic pain, “a shifted disc” that sets itself as a constant presence and then a parallel annoyance to the contrivances of those relationships. The next poem, “a marriage made” (34), uses repetition to emphasize the self-loathing that attends such contrived relationships. Whether Marttila’s repetitive refrains about sinning connote self-loathing, or exhaustion, or something else, the meanings are gleaned through the experiences of the reader and the overall layered effect of the poems in their entirety. Not least of which effects, of course, being a question of if the poem is about Marttila’s parents (until this point her mother has not been specifically mentioned even though her father has been).

Parallelism, between being immersed in one’s environment and immersed in one’s household relationships, also gives new meanings to travel. The poem “north from Thule” (35) is about the novelties of exploring. The poem “The Healing” (36) reflects on the revivification of life that comes from new sexual experiences, without denying the damage of metaphorical clear-cutting of the past.
 
White Noise Machine

White Noise Machine is a series of portraits of other people. Previous sections of The Art of Floating reported events, idiosyncrasies, and generally went about meaning-making about the situations in Marttila’s life. White Noise Machine, though, is portraiture. Portraiture is as relative an artistic genre as any other genre of poetry, and Marttila is self-aware by including herself in the portraits. She tends to address her subject, and asks, not who they are, but something closer to who are you relative to me?

Some of the poems work like suspended animation, attempting an amber-like stasis in time, like “why sometimes i don’t even bother” (39), that offers a list of reasons she loves the You who she writes about. Others are exercises in comparisons that she cannot claim work, but that by attempting the comparison she aspires to a more intense relationship: “I try to/contain you…I try to/contain myself…join me in delirium, and/we shall be intertwined…contained” (40). Sometimes, the portrait is one of change. You is replaced by a new person, and the previous You is irretrievable from the new one: “you are not the mother she remembers/shaven head revealing shunt/paralyzed face unrecognizable” (41).

In some poems, like “infant crawls” (42-43), Marttila reflects upon the inability of a portraitist to share every sketch with their subjects: “this is my memory. i do not ask my mother if she/shares it” (43). What Marttila could be highlighting is that some memories define oneself, and to risk them being either contested or confirmed could be a fundamentally dissociating mistake. When “a contemporary picture reveals the dress in question” (42), details of memory might cease to be constructive because they are revised and replaced by the contemporary picture, or maybe they are changed even by the act of discovering that a picture exists. Marttila’s writing reveals that crafting portraits of our immediate family, as they existed in the past, is a treacherous enterprise because, if those portraits are dear, if the seemingly innocuous components make up some of our deeply entrenched memories of touch, smell, expression, etc., the subject of the portrait becomes an authority figure capable of undoing the legitimacy of ourselves.

One of the folksy, perhaps local, components of southern Ontario’s culture is that pets and animal companions are vital, irreplaceable parts of mental health. The titular white noise machine of this section is a purring cat from the poem “perfect mystery” (49). For many Ontarians with pets, mental health is only an intelligible concept if it is understood as a shared way for pets and humans to be in the world together. Marttila connects the veterinary mystery of the unknown mechanism of purring to the unknown contents of cat dreams. There is a certain symmetry in the unaccountable mechanisms of human joy, and the unknown human subconscious (unaccountable and unknown, often, mostly to ourselves).
 
Lunar Observation

A diary of the sky: Marttila draws from tarot imagery and the vocabulary of lunar astronomy to invent a kind of diary-based, backward-looking astrology. Marttila documents the daily phases of the Moon as a literary conceit for writing metaphors of what she does not inherently, atavistically know about herself.

It is this section, Lunar Observation, that places The Art of Floating in the midst of a regional literature about mental health. In Ontario’s cities, there is always a stream of weekend zine fairs and book fairs, small scale conventions, and art sales akin to flea markets. On the tables of those fairs are scads of zines, chapbooks, stickers, art made by trained skills or by self-taught found-object multimedia. Amongst all that work is a perennially burgeoning literature of self-care and mental health, ranging from the most bureaucratic of public health advocacy, to the most non-linear eclecticism. This tabling literature is a cultural component of mental health in a provincially regulated unevenly by a distributed hodgepodge of private and public medicine. This creative literature serves multiple interlocking purposes, from institutionally-inspired writers doing public outreach, to authors doing ferocious critiques of those institutions and their systemic clinical and socioeconomic limitations. (Put another way, there is no CAMH [the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health] without zines decrying CAMH; and vice-versa there are no unbounded zine fairs and creativity cultures without CAMH implied at the margins).

If the book until this point has been autobiography in the form of poetry, Marttila’s autobiography is styled in a way that the poems are recognizably conversant with clinical psychology and public health. Experts in those fields could workshop Marttila’s poems to express programming or self-care benchmarks, to find a kindred soul trying to organize her life around her distances from her relationships, and more.

Lunar Observation, though, is a deinstitutionalized dialogue. Marttila endows her naturalism with the weight of mythologies. She turns the art of keeping a diary into a poetics, as a means of observing nature in order to question herself. Marttila might find a fandom among Wiccans, New Agers, Celtic-inspired Christians (who like the songs by The Waterboys, for instance), and strongly feminist Neo-Pagan-inspired artist subcultures. Moongazing is also an activity that Marttila can share with readers of any age, including teenagers or younger readers who haven’t had time to cultivate the long-term relationships with people and places that Marttila critically examines.

It is for these reasons of popular culture and accessibility that Lunar Observation is probably going to be the section of poems that defines The Art of Floating’s evolution over the next decade. Audiences will respond to these poems, alone, or in informal workshops, high school courses, book clubs, or while interviewing Marttila for a podcast. They will be the most dynamic and yet the most interpretable poems, even if for no other reason than that everyone everywhere who can see the Moon engages with the same phases, craters, and luminous insights.
 
Fire and Ice

Fire and Ice consists of meditations about the connections between the most abstract and the most empirical concepts. Those connections are more-or-less constructed out of places. For example, in the poem “Golden Ratio” (79), Marttila considers the Fibonacci sequence in seashore objects, and the tactile sensation of touching sand. They are connected by a whimsical desire to be at a saltwater beach. If this connection between spirals, touch, and yearning for a place seems tritely over-obvious, it is not necessarily so. Readers encounter this short poem after 79 pages of cumulative imagery. Numeracy and literacy are both integral to self-knowledge, and their interplays are (distinctly unlike the curvaceously linear Fibonacci sequence) nonlinear.

Marttila continues to develop opposite cosmologies. In “relativity speaking” she emphasizes that the study of physics and the analysis of dreams are both cosmological pursuits. That she is a poet and she is married to a physicist means that the daily grinds of both analytical frameworks construct their household rhythms.

In “Encoded” (82), Marttila comments on the presence of the neutrino observatory in Creighton mine, near Sudbury. Perhaps her insight that the observatory transforms “a mine into a temple” is apt because of the drastic cutbacks to Laurentian University that eliminated the Physics department. The neutrino observatory is obviously part of daily life for the denizens of Sudbury, and progressively less pronounced of a presence as the Trans-Canada Highway extends away from it. Without the intensity of a local Physics department to train the community thought on a research focus, the cultural significance might transform into something more mythopoetic and eclectically personalized.
 
In Conclusion

Reading The Art of Floating on the terms in which it is advertised, as a mediation about mental health, offers Ontario readers a familiar, almost archetypal mirror of our mental health experiences. Marttila writes about the social dimensions of mental health and the mental geographies of Ontario. Whether readers in other provinces or other countries will encounter the same familiarity, or the same social reinterpretation of what mental health really is, could be an interesting literary conversation. Critical consciousness can emerge from agreement and disagreement, comparisons and contrasts. Hopefully, opportunities for such dialogues will present themselves in 2024 and many times over the next few years.

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Pushcart Prize nominee, researcher & farmer Terry Trowbridge’s poems are in Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Carousel, Lascaux Review, Kolkata Arts, Leere Mitte, untethered, Snakeskin Poetry, Progenitor, Miracle Monocle, Orbis, Pinhole, Big Windows, Muleskinner, Brittle Star, Mathematical Intelligencer, Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, New Note, Hearth and Coffin, Synchronized Chaos, Indian Periodical, Delta Poetry Review, Literary Veganism and ~100 more. His lit crit is in BeZine, Erato, Amsterdam Review, Ariel, British Columbia Review, Hamilton Arts & Letters, Episteme, Studies in Social Justice, Rampike, Seeds, and The /t3mz/ Review.  His Erdös number is 5. Terry is grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for his first 2 writing grants.