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Your image flickers like a candle’s wick
in time’s dense mirror. What you cannot hold
is all there is. Arrive, depart. The train
warps through the station’s prism, its refrain
refracted coordinates. Fade to gold:
the sun goes down like a child’s magic trick.

read more at Rattle

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Like most people, I wear many masks: husband, father, poet, teacher, skateboarder. I go through phases and this blog has tracked them off and on since 2009. It’s a mixed bag, but hey so is life. If you surf around the archives you’re likely to find an old post I wouldn’t have written today. Others, I might. People change, and opinions and interests change with them. 

I’ve been interested in poetry since I took a (disastrous) intro in college. A few years later I discovered Hart Crane among the dusty alphabets at the Gotham Book Mart. You know how that goes; as Rilke put it, “You must change your life.” 

I’ve been writing and publishing poetry since about 1998. My first poems came out in the (now-defunct) Brooklyn-based journal Pivot. My work has been featured at Rattle, Palette, Valparaiso Poetry Review and many other places (fuller list of publications here). My first collection, Unburial, was published in 2019 by Kelsay Books. Still Life with City was published in 2022 by Pski’s Porch. My first book of translation, Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems of Mario dell’Arco, was published in 2024 by World Poetry Books and was awarded the Joseph Tusiani Italian Translation Prize in 2026, and was longlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. My work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prizes and Best Literary Translations. I am also a poetry reader for Baltimore Review. 

I don’t care much for labels or schools of any sort. I’m most interested in getting into the poem, walking through an unmarked door and seeing what’s inside the room. Re-arranging furniture, so to speak. If that gets done with rhyme and meter or without it doesn’t interest me. I think Dylan Thomas once said that he’d do whatever he had to to get what he wanted from a poem. I think that sums it up nicely. If you’re surprising yourself as you write, you’re probably doing it right.

ℵ

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Contact | marcdimartino at gmail dot com | Instagram | Bluesky

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