Sonnet IX by J. Michael Martinez

Artist Statement

Covid-19 continues to disproportionately impact communities of color everywhere. For so many months, the virus was all I thought about. It infected my thoughts in my fear for my friends and family, my loved ones. The unknown as uncontrollable. These sonnets were borne of that breathless anxiety. During the first pandemic summer, I practiced a formal escapism: I wrote a sonnet, & a sestina a day for two months.  This, in hindsight, may have been one unconscious method I used to exert an invented control over the uncontrollable.  As the pandemic continued, Trumpian jingoistic rhetoric continued to run rampant, voices of white nationalist rhetoric infecting public discourse, and, then, the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor Daunte Wright, …& so many others killed by the police… yet, for all the horror, the beautiful rise of Black Lives Matter, & the emergence of that summer’s protests. 

As the summer rolled on, my “love” sonnets themselves were infected: for each sonnet, I rendered an “infected” translation, combining the love language with an equivalent number of words, selected by bibliomancy, from white supremacist Greg Johnson’s THE WHITE NATIONALIST MANIFESTO (The W.N.M.). 

Employing a similar process as Tom Mirovski brilliant prompt “How to Make a Nature Poem,” these translations began by distributing DNA codons to represent each word for each individual sonnet, & the language selections from the W.N.M.; after, each sonnet had its own unique dictionary of 64 DNA codons, each codon representing a potential (set of) word(s) from the collected pool of language of both sonnet and the W.N.M.

From the National Center for Biotechnology Information, I retrieved the DNA sequence of Covid-19’s infectious crown, its namesake “corona.”

Appearing as gray text, each infected sonnet, using their individual codon dictionary, has been sequenced, that is, translated, according to Covid-19’s DNA sequence. Text infected.

Bio

A Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project, J. Michael Martinez received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for his first book, “Heredities.” “In the Garden of the Bridehouse,” is available from the University of Arizona Press. His third collection, “Museum of the Americas,” was selected for the National Poetry Series by Cornelius Eady, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and is published by Penguin Press. Penguin Press will publish his next work, “Tarta Americana” in September of 2023. An Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Jose State University, he teaches in their MFA program and lives in San Jose. 

This poem is part of The Los Angeles Review‘s electronic literature folio presented by Letras Latinas and The Poetry Foundation. Please read the introduction letter HERE for more information.

29 May 2023