The Book of I.P. (Idle Poems) by Chris Courtney Martin is a colorful chapbook that is as eye-catching as it is memorable. Readers can immediately tell how much soul and personality Martin put into this book–it is all them from the top down, including the cover. The cover art, a digitally altered photo of crystals on a towel, was designed by Martin, and exemplifies the vivid language and imagery contained inside.
The book came together during Martin’s brief respite from screenwriting and is made up of 30 entirely new poems, along with two short essays. The poems vary in length and form, but there is an unmistakable rebellious undertone to all of them. Taking care to pay homage to Martin’s roots and culture, the poems have a voice full of passion and power. In the spirit of Martin’s time in Hollywood and the culture of film industry, the poems all represent an aspect of IP (intellectual property, or a story idea).
I had the great pleasure of talking with Martin about their poems, and they explained that “They’re all stories that I’ve thought about previously, some are older, some are newer. And I just feel like I was gifted the opportunity to rethink what I wanted to do as a filmmaker, as a screenwriter, and as a producer, and to rethink what storytelling can look like, as somebody who’s taken the career track that I’ve taken, because that tends to be very rigid, as opposed to poetry just being all about creative innovation, and especially in a day where most traditional forms have kind of been abandoned.”
Martin also emphasized their love for “sing songy” rhyme schemes in their poetry. Their love for such poetry is evident in poems like “Love, SuperDuke”:
You do things to me
Wonder if you knew me
Once upon a lifetime
The dead tone on my lifeline
In other poems, Martin combines their spiritual influence with melodic stanzas, such as in “American Juju; (& You Thought You Knew)”:
There are no words for
The hoodoo that you do
But it will be heard, yes
The hoodoo you done
I see the bird and he
Tells me what you do
His corpse on the stoop, O, now
What have you done?
There is something in here for every type of poetry lover–rhyming, melodic poems that flow from page to page and demand to be read aloud such as the ones above; witty poems that evoke a smile (maybe even a chuckle) like “A Yuletide Carol” and “Excelsior: A Punctual Haiku”; and poems that call to be read over and over again, revealing a deeper meaning each time, like “$ugar $(HILL)$” and “God Complex”.
Once you manage to pull yourself away from the lovely poems filling the front of the book, you reach the essay section containing “Breaking Breton” and “The Business”. While my personal favorite of the two is “Breaking Breton,” which tells the unfortunate tale of Monsieur Breton, a teacher who is worn down and eventually broken by his students, both pieces have a narrator that make any character shortcomings easily overshadowed by their personality.
The Book of I.P. (Idle Poems) is a big book in a small container. Perfect for a poetry book to curl up with; once you have this book, you’ll be drawn back to it from time to time–whether by the spiritual influences behind the book or by Martin’s passionate voice, you will never know.
The Book of I.P. (Idle Poems)
By Chris Courtney Martin
Alien Buddha Press
Published in 2022
65 pages
Emma Zoe Polyak is a sophomore at Drexel University, majoring in Psychology and English with a concentration in Writing. She is also studying on a pre-med track, with interests in pediatrics and neuroscience. Emma is the co-founder of Artist’s POCket, an organization that provides resources for artists of color and she is the Associate Fiction Editor at BreakBread Literacy Project. She enjoys writing everything from poems to creative nonfiction. In her free time, she likes reading, watching films, listening to music, and spending time with her friends and family.