Martha Silano: A Visual Interview
Questions and Art by Katrina Roberts
Poet, nature lover, and beloved three-time contributor to The Ilanot Review, Martha Silano was diagnosed with ALS in late 2023. Here, poet and artist Katrina Roberts interviews Silano about herself and her most recently published collection, This One We Call Ours (Lynx House Press, 2024). Silano’s words are interwoven with Roberts’s own graphic responses.
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Martha Silano’s poetry collections include Terminal Surreal (Acre Books, 2025), Last Train to Paradise: New and Selected Poems (Saturnalia Books, 2025), This One We Call Ours (Lynx House Press, 2024), winner of the 2023 Blue Lynx Prize, Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books, 2019), Reckless Lovely (Saturnalia Books, 2014), and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception (Saturnalia Books, 2011). Her awards include North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize and The Cincinnati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Award.
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Notes from Martha Silano during the preparation of this interview: Just a heads up I may not be typing so well by November … and I can’t guarantee I’ll be alive. Thanks so much for your kindness in wanting to speed things along. My voice is very weak due to my illness. I am having increasing trouble being able to sit up and type on a screen, so I am sending what I have! It is getting tough with the neurons vibrating in my brain. I am told my ALS progression is slow, but I am dealing with profound fatigue, muscle weakness, and am limited in my ability to speak, stare at a screen, and eat much more than soup, overnight oats, and smoothies. Still, there are many things that bring me joy, including my two kiddos, my steadfast and caregiving partner, dear friends visiting from near and far, and all things having to do with poetry.
Katrina Roberts: There’s much to be anxious about in the world, but, there’s also tremendous resilience and beauty – that of the natural world and its solaces, of human kindness, of the palpable, assuring confidence of your voice and craft, in the face of all. I’m so grateful for your new book. Which questions spurred you to write This One We Call Ours? Can you speak toward the title more wholly? Can you speak of the poet’s role as namer?
Martha Silano: The title of my book derives from the first poems in the collection, “What They Said.” What I am referring to is our planet, our Earth, what we earthlings refer to as our planet. “What They Said” is about a team of scientists who are counting black holes, of which there could be half a million. We are one of 100 billion planets in our galaxy. I was trying to say something, I guess, about how big the cosmos is, about how small we are, yet we are on this planet, what feels like to most of us a special and significant place. I enjoy naming poems, but often my titles are just the first words of the poem. I am rarely cryptic with titles. As for the book’s title, I liked that it was five stressed syllables – it resonated with me, though I will admit it’s a weird-ass title!
When I enrolled in my first poetry writing class at age twenty-five, my teacher suggested I name my poems. Until then, I apparently was channeling Emily Dickinson. I was reluctant to title my poems, but all in all I think it was a great suggestion as it does help to orient the reader.
KR: What is the story of your own name? How was it to name your children?
MS: Martha was that lady in the Bible who seemed to like to wash Jesus’ feet. She worked hard and didn’t fawn over Jesus, or so I’ve been told. Her siblings were Mary and Lazarus. I never liked my name, so when my boyfriend (now spouse) suggested “Marty,” I was all for it! Silano is Italian. My grandfather was born outside of Naples, in a small town called Villanova del Battista. Many Silanos still lived there when I visited in 1990. To name my son, I read a book of names and chose “Riley.” I liked the sound of it, and it wasn’t a weapon (like, for instance, Dirk). My son was very easy-going and generally doesn’t stress himself out. He seems to enjoy life and move easily through it – sort of like the life of Riley! As a child, my favorite poet was John Whitcomb Riley. I learned a few years after my son was born that he and my son share a birthday. We were going to name our daughter Kelsey, after a creek in the Rogue River Wilderness, but she didn’t look like a Kelsey – she looked more like a Ruby. I think of her as our ruby-throated hummingbird and our ruby-crowned kinglet. To name a child – what a thing! It felt very important at the time. I think we chose well!
KR: What is your earliest memory?
MS: Holding up three fingers when asked how old I was.
KR: How did your own childhood and schooling shape your practice/aspirations as a writer? How did you come to poetry?
MS: My love of poetry began in second grade when my teacher, Mrs. Everett, read aloud an Emily Dickinson poem titled “The morns are meeker than they were—”. If you’re not familiar with it, it goes:
The morns are meeker than they were –
The nuts are getting brown –
The berry’s cheek is plumper –
The rose is out of town.
The maple wears a gayer scarf –
The field a scarlet gown –
Lest I sh’d be old-fashioned
I’ll put a trinket on.
What’s not to love?! I think I loved best “The rose is out of town.” In that moment of her reading this poem aloud, I decided I loved poetry. We wrote haiku in that class, too. I started keeping a poetry notebook and began writing in a diary at age of nine, and never stopped writing most days in a journal or drafting a poem. I kept my poems private for the most part, though. As an undergrad at Grinnell College, I was told I did not qualify to take a creative writing class because I hadn’t read enough literature and would not know, if someone said I sounded like Steinbeck, who Steinbeck was. Fair enough! I did not enroll in a poetry writing class until my mid-twenties. My poems back then were downright awful, but I kept at it. I was also very lucky to attend workshops and readings with the poet William Stafford, who was enthusiastic once or twice about a poem I shared in class. There were lots of wonderful poets in Oregon when I lived there, and I started attending festivals where Carolyn Kizer and WS Merwin showed up. I was also lucky to have enthusiastic and proud parents, and a poetry writing community that has spurred me on these past thirty-odd years. I don’t know how to write a story, a novel, or creative nonfiction! It took many years to figure out poetry – and that was what I wanted to write most.
KR: Who have been your biggest teachers?
MS: I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to study with David Wagoner. I learned so much from all my teachers, but David Wagoner made the profoundest impact. Wagoner influenced my writing by quoting Stanley Kunitz, who said “a poet must know everything.” I took his instruction very seriously and tried my best to learn the names of all the birds, flowers, trees, and mushrooms of my region, the Pacific Northwest. I also read many books and articles about the cosmos, climate change, and other science-y subjects. I guess Wagoner’s love of nature rubbed off on me. I mean, I already loved everything to do with being out there with the bugs, plants, and birds, but he made me want to write poems about what I saw, heard, and felt.
KR: Might you speak about where you grew up and how that has influenced you as a thinker and writer?
MS: I grew up in the suburbs of New York City. A 45-minute commute to “The City.” From the time I was a little girl, I wanted to be outside! I liked to observe nature – mostly caterpillars and moths—but also to see the robins return each spring, and to dig around in the dirt for worms and centipedes and pill bugs. I also loved tending our giant vegetable garden. I’m pretty sure all those years in my childhood yard made me want to know even more about the natural world. When I took my first woodland hike at age fifteen, I knew what my future would be! But I also loved my trips to Manhattan, mostly to art museums and the Museum of Natural History. But mostly, I wanted to leave the East Coast and get to a place where there were plenty of mountains and trees are nearby … where I could backpack and birdwatch and botanize during my free time.
KR: You live with a wonderful “foodie/forager” – has food inspired your writing? There are beautiful glimpses of delicacies (lasagna/ricotta) in this collection, and I’m struck by how the senses of taste (and scent) enter your creative process/work. What nourishes you in poems, in life?
MS: Food very much inspired the writing of my first book, What the Truth Tastes Like (Two Sylvias Press, 2015), but I have mostly backed away from food, though in my forthcoming collection, Terminal Surreal (Acre Books, 2025), I write about the few foods I am still able to eat, like overnight oats with macerated huckleberries. Pretty soon I won’t be eating much at all, but right now potato soup is my favorite, with pizza soup in second place.
[As for what nourishes me now:] Seeing and talking to/texting with my kids. My life partner and steadfast caregiver, Langdon Cook. Birds. Spiders. Rabbits. Coyotes. Old-growth trees. Lake Washington. Sunrises and sunsets. My daily one-block walk. Learning about the cosmos and Earth and how the human species has caused so much extinction and suffering – humans in general, but colonizers and land-rapers specifically. You’d think I wouldn’t want to read about how Texaco ruined the Louisiana bayou, but this is what I most want to read about.
KR: How has being a mother influenced your work? Being a daughter?
MS: Tremendously on both fronts! Most of Blue Positive (Steel Toe Books, 2006) and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception (Saturnalia, 2011) are about my kids, but every book since contains poems about them. Being a daughter to a supportive and engaged mom was the best. I didn’t know quite how dependent on her love and cheerleading I was until she passed away in 2020.
KR: If you’d not channeled creative energy into poetry, what might you have done instead?
MS: I would have been a plant taxonomist. I fell in love with keying out plants in college. Everyone thought I’d get a second BA in biology and become a scientist, but poetry had other plans. One of my high school English teachers, Ed Romond, invited us to attend a Robert Bly reading. It is another reason why I knew I had to be a poet.
KR: How long does it take you to write a poem? Has your creative process changed from book to book? What sparks your creativity?
MS: It varies. It takes about five years for me to write a book of poems. Some poems of mine have taken fifteen years to finish. Others are ‘done’ in a day. Sometimes the revision process is extensive and the final poem looks nothing like the first draft. Sometimes a poem pretty much falls out of me, with very little revising necessary. I write poems, and then I attempt to create a narrative sequence – a voice moving through space and time. When I was trying to figure out how to order This One …, I thought of my partner Langdon’s Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager (Mountaineers Books, 2011), where the chapters are arranged seasonally. I thought it would make sense to arrange the poems in a similar fashion.
More and more, I feel less in control of what I am given to write. Especially since my ALS diagnosis, I feel like I am not the one in charge. I get inspired by other poets, and feel the need to share stuff I have learned, seen, felt, etc.
It was Lang who told me early on that my poems needed “to go off.” I think he meant to not be boring, try my best to wow my audience, to be unafraid to make bold statements. I am ever grateful.
KR: Re: “When My Brother Texts You Guys Have a Weapon?” What for you has been the act of defiance that you name, buying “up every last carton of sky”?
MS: Despite all the pain, anguish, and death humans have caused, I still believe there are plenty of humans who are kind, gentle, and working hard to save our planet.
KR: In “I Love the World,” there’s such powerful truth in knowing and cherishing the world’s beauties while recognizing its dark tensions, contradictions, syzygies. How might the beauty of a poem hold human horror and ugly truth in crucial ways? I’m reminded of Walt Whitman’s line, “To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle.” How do we reconcile as writers the small joys and the big ones with the global and local heartbreaks? “Because pleasure counts big time.” How do we take “catastrophe” and turn it into a “kiss”?
MS: “I Love the World” is based on a prompt called a Joy and Sorrow Poem. I just did what Shelby [Handler] said. We can and must accept the small and big joys! It is the only way to live through global catastrophe.
KR: Does the sense of time’s constraint prompt a specific sort of generation? How did diagnosis inform your practice? We are, of course, all mortal, but I wonder whether you feel this newer knowledge of imminence and its attendant progressions shifts your sense of voice in ways?
MS: [This One We Call Ours] was written before I was diagnosed with ALS. When I found out I had ALS, my husband suggested that I take all my unpublished poems and write another book. I did that, plus put together my new and selected poems, Last Train to Paradise (to be published by Saturnalia Books in late 2025), but I ended up writing an entire book of ALS poems [Terminal Surreal, forthcoming with Acre Books in September 2025]. So, yes, the matter felt urgent. It damn well did shift my voice! Most of the poems about ALS just kinda fell out of me. It was a given to write about facing an incurable illness. It almost feels like I was possessed – not in control of what I was putting on the page. I can’t quite put into words just how profound it is to be dying one day at a time. I mean, we all are, but I am losing my voice, will soon have a feeding tube, and will eventually stop breathing due to weakening lungs.
KR: Do you have a favorite poem of your own?
MS: My favorite poem is the poem I haven’t written yet.
KR: You’ve experienced the death of parents. Does death scare you?
MS: A little bit, yeah … but mostly I have accepted death.
KR: In “When I Realized Everything Had Been Said” your speaker suggests the crows/spirit move out of sight, but you refute the notion that they “disappear” once “body is char.” What’s your thought about faith? About a life or an existence for creatures/self after this life is over, this chapter, this inhabitance, post-“gravity,” blessed and “zapped with the mystery of the sacred” as we all are. Maybe “we get to travel where the music lives”?
MS: I am an agnostic. I am not sure if we return to Earth as atoms, or if we roam around the cosmos as spirits/souls. I guess I will find out soon enough.
Katrina Roberts is author of several books of poems and visual poems including LIKENESS; Friendly Fire, and Underdog. Her work appears in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Poetry, and The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets. She curates the Visiting Writers Reading Series, and teaches at Whitman College. (www.katrinaroberts.net)
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