David Martin on the craft of experimental poetry

David Martin has published three previous collections of poetry: Tar Swan (NeWest Press, 2018), Kink Bands (NeWest Press, 2023), and Limited Verse, (University of Calgary Press, 2024). The award-winning poet's work has been awarded the CBC Poetry Prize and was included in Best Canadian Poetry 2025 (Biblioasis). His most recent collection, nightstead, was published by Palimpsest Press in 2026.

Poet David Martin, author of the new collection nightstead.

In nightstead, his most personal collection to date, David elegizes his younger brother who died by suicide at the age of twenty-three. With a mixture of childhood recollections and anguished moments, nightstead produces a complex memorial while pushing against the utmost limits of memory’s power. Dislocating experiments juxtapose with searingly direct verse to make this book a haunting poetic memoir that will remain with readers long after they put it down. In this interview, David discusses the evolution of his writing, and the craft of experimental poetry.

OCW: Has your writing evolved over the years? If so, how? Through writing experience? Reading a lot? Writing courses or communities? A combination, or something else?

Evolution through formal limits and the craft of experimental poetry

DM: I think my writing has changed quite a bit over time, often as I’m working on a particular project or book and trying to push myself to try something new. From experimenting with distinctive poetic voices in a book-length narrative to giving myself extreme formal limits when creating poems (such as only using a lexicon of 850 words), I feel that my poetry has explored new techniques and approaches. With the manuscript I’m working on now, I am focussed on a style that is linear, logical, and patterned, and I’m trying to get as much as I can out of this mode before I switch to something very different: associative, spatial, and open.

OCW: Which authors and/or types of books do you like to read?

DM: I mostly read a huge amount of poetry, both contemporary and canonical. I will also get pulled into some strange collections when doing research for new poems, like books about graphology, placebos, and the history of mesmerism. When I need a break, my go-to author is P. G. Wodehouse, British humorist of the first class.

OCW: If you’ve been published, how did you find your first publisher?

DM: I sent my first manuscript to a publisher I admired (NeWest Press), but I was just in the slush pile like everyone else, though I was fortunate to have my collection chosen. Publishing is not easy, and it takes a tremendous amount of patience, something I’m still working on after many years of writing and sending out work.

Finding inspiration in the "debitage" of other disciplines

OCW: What advice/guidance would you give to writers?

DM: My usual advice is to read as widely as possible, even though I know it can sound somewhat cliché. For me, I’ve found inspiration in scientific writing about geology, historical books about entrepreneurs, and innumerable books of poetry (even poems in styles and forms that I don’t generally gravitate towards). I love making associations and leaps between different types of writing, and that’s often where I come up with ideas. An example from my past work was discovering the concept of debitage as it’s used in archaeology. In essence, debitage is the scrap material left behind in stone tool making, and yet it can tell scientists a great deal about the process, even if the tool itself is not there. I instantly saw this is as analogous to certain poems I was attempting, in which I was left with scraps and fragments and attempting to piece back together a sense of a person or the past.

The importance of time and objectivity in the editing process

OCW: Do you edit as you write, or write and edit later?

DM: I like to get a first draft of a poem down on the page and then let it sit for some time before I edit it. Then I’ll record myself reading the piece to listen for clunky phrases and unintended repetitions. Sometimes I’ll rewrite/retype the poem, which allows me to think of it as still in process and not a fixed piece. Mostly, though, I think time is important, as it lets me come back to a poem with a lot more objectivity and less attachment to something that I’ve made. The time part is not easy, though, as I want craft a poem and see it as complete right away, even though returning to it months later lets me find places to improve it.