Domenica Martinello’s new collection of poetry, Good Want, was recently long-listed for the League of Canadian Poets Pat Lowther Award. It is a spectacular exploration of family, love, language, and understanding what’s behind what we really want. Martinello is an award-winning writer from Montreal. She holds an MFA from the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was the recipient of the Deena Davidson Friedman Prize for Poetry. There is one thing for sure, you should want to read this book. It’s more than good.
What is a good want?
There’s no such thing as a good want, or a bad want. There’s just wants. That’s sort of where I stand after a book’s worth of poems. I’ve tried to undo the “want less, be humble, stay meek” part of me, as well as the “want more, covet abundance, take up space” part. Each side has an agenda. To want, to desire, is to be human—in other words, complicated. I guess if I had to answer in another way, I’d say a good want is something that gives back as much as it takes.
How does this book compare to your first book? Did it come from a different place?
It came from a more vulnerable, peeled-back place. A place of wanting to write more accessible—for lack of a better word—poems that didn’t require endnotes to explain references. No literature degree or internet connection necessary. There was a pleasurable, almost maximalist sense of deep-diving excess in my first book, All Day I Dream about Sirens. Some people were willing to follow me there, others not so much. I myself love to go back there in my work. But I felt the next phase of my writing would require the risk of capturing that same intensity while doing… less.
There is a wonderful wrestling in these poems, with such things as God, family, love, coming of age, parenting, etc. Is poetry wrestling for you?
It’s wrestling insofar as I constantly question the value of what I’m doing. I come from a blue-collar background. I’m a first-generation high school graduate. I never lose sight of the fact that writing and publishing is a luxury and privilege, and I often wonder if I should be redirecting my energy to help others or add to the world in more concrete ways. Yet poetry is a way for me to understand and reckon with myself and the world. In that sense, it holds value in how it connects me to something bigger. Fostering that connection is a form of energy and allows me to show up in my life more vividly.
Your poems are both playful and controlled. Does this take a lot of editing?
I’d say it does! I write slowly and edit over long periods of time—the playfulness often comes first and then the sense of control via a thousand big and small changes, sometimes over years. My poems really need to breathe for a while before they reach their final form.
You use some powerful epigraphs before sections of the book and before poems. How do these work in your writing? Are they writing prompts or do you add them after?
This is a fun question! I often wonder about other writers and their mode of epigraph selection. I add them as I go and sometimes swap them out later on—but they are never the catalyst for writing. Rather, they’re part of my mental landscape and what I’m reading as I’m in the process of creating. Though it’s indirect, I’m always writing in response to or in conversation with my influences (a big one, in the case of this project, being Mary Oliver). They accompany me and help frame the questions I’m asking.
In our Tik-Tok-short-attention-span world, some say we have lost the craft of the concept music album or the idea of a fully crafted collection of poetry. Your book, however, feels so intentionally thought out; each poem builds on the next. Was that your idea?
Not from the start. If I’m being honest, Good Want’s initial question was basically: do I have it in me to continue writing poems? Is this a “good” thing to do? Do I “want” to keep doing this? As such, after the publication of my first book, I gave myself a goal of writing one short poem per day called a sestet (six lines, six words per line) to figure it out. Just a daily ritual, no pressure, no grand design. So while my first book was in the mode of a concept album from the jump, with Good Want it was not immediately apparent what I was writing or how it all fit together. But it was that trust in the process and risk of failure that helped me discover the book in real time. The sestets, for the most part, did not end up making it into the final manuscript. Instead, they were the soil—or, let’s be real, the manure—which allowed me to intentionally cultivate the rest.
There are some wonderful family moments in many of the poems. How does your Italian family background influence your writing?
I’ve had the thought, more than once, that my parents are the most special and interesting thing about me. My grandparents were an extension of that. For all the beautiful things we inherit from our families, there’s also the traumas, secrets, and so on. It’s a yin and yang. But absolutely, even when I’m not explicitly writing about my Italian background, it’s the lens that colours my world, shaping the things I notice and prioritize.
Every once and a while in this collection there is a mysterious page of eighteen dots in groupings of three. Are they ellipses? The original meaning of the word in Greek is “to leave out” or “fall short”. Are they there to remind the reader that all our wants will eventually fall short?
I love that you thought about the dots! As I mentioned, the collection was born from these little daily sestets that don’t appear in the final manuscript, with one or two exceptions. The dots, which I do think of as ellipses, are an ode to the removed sestets in a way: six ellipses equal eighteen dots. Six was intentional. Though I know about the Greek origins of the world, it wasn’t at the forefront of my mind. It was more about making certain omissions visible, playing with notions of secrecy and silence.
What advice do you have for writers trying to write about deep need or want?
Let go of shame.
What are you working on now?
I go through fallow periods where I don’t write seriously for a while after finishing a project. Until recently I hadn’t written a poem in a year. Now, I’m slowly getting back into it, again through prompts and play, which helps me shake out any leftover pins and needles. Right now, I’m exploring prose poetry as a form and how it relates to my experience of becoming a mother.
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