3 Questions with Natalie Marino
NATALIE MARINO is a poet and practicing physician. Her work appears in Heavy Feather Review, Little Patuxent Review, Pleiades, Salt Hill, wildness, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbook Under Memories of Stars (Finishing Line Press, 2023). She lives in California. You can find her online at nataliemarino.com or on Instagram @natalie_marino
Associate Editor Isabel C. Lanzetta talks to Natalie Marino about their work from Issue 76, available now!
“Self-Portrait as Poem” employs a range of poetic forms to embody the speaker’s experience after learning about another school shooting. How do you see the relationship between form and grief in this piece?
In this poem, poetry itself is a metaphor for the grief all people, but especially parents, feel every time we collectively hear of yet another senseless shooting involving children, the most vulnerable of all of us. Although most mass shootings involve adults, children are disproportionately affected by gun violence. In fact, in 2022, more children died of gun violence than any other cause, including cancer and car accidents[1]. The answer to decreasing death in children in the United States obviously lies in decreasing access to guns. This has not happened yet because preventing weaponized violence against children is not a high enough priority for those stakeholders with political power. The use of various poetic forms embodies the speaker’s experience of grief that children keep dying avoidable deaths, but also that they are unable to protect children from gun violence, because like most parents living their daily lives, poetry itself is not able to directly affect political change.
How do you continue writing in the face of unspeakable violence? What practices or language help you return to the page with care?
The world has always been a violent place, but with the recent increased mass production of automatic weapons, especially since the federal assault weapons ban was lifted in 2004, it is even more so. In fact, in the 1990s, AR-15s made up less than 1% of all guns produced in the United States[2], and in 2020 they made up 25% of all weapons produced here. Having a daily writing practice actually helps me deal with the trauma, however small that is, involved in reading and otherwise being exposed to news stories about horrific violence. According to Transportation Theory, attentive reading of fiction can increase empathy. Something similar happens to me when I read poetry, as it allows me to hold onto my compassion for the world. Two poets who help me remain empathetic are Joy Harjo, especially in her poetry collection American Sunrise and Ada Limón, especially poems like “Dead Stars” and “Instructions on Not Giving Up.”
Is there anything you’d like to share about your poem that we don’t know?
Because I am both a mother of school-aged children and a practicing primary care physician, the important issue of senseless killing of children by perpetrators with violent weapons is also a personal one. I was inspired to write this specific poem after I read about the mass shooting of children at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, in May 2022.
*[1] Villarreal, S., Kim, R., Wagner, E., Somayaji, N., Davis, A., & Crifasi, C. K. (2024). Gun Violence in the United States 2022: Examining the Burden Among Children and Teens. Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
*[2]https://www.statista.com/statistics/1388010/share-ar-15-united-states-firearm-production-historical/#:~:text=In%20just%20three%20decades%2C%20the,Role%20in%20mass%20shootings