Domenica Martinello, “Con”

Long time no see! It’s been a little over a year since my last essay. I’ve been busy with teaching at Victoria College, launching the Victoria University Centre for Creativity, and maybe even writing some short stories? Not to mention the world being on fire, of course. 

However, the school year is mostly wrapped up, and reading Domenica Martinello’s new book Good Want got my HPM brain working again, and so I’m back. 

Martinello is a Montreal-based poet and writer whose second book, Good Want, was recently published by Coach House Press. The cover image seems to be of a group of saints: each figure has a classic halo around his head indicating divine grace, and many have a monk’s tonsure. But the looks on their faces are anything but beatific. They seem to be giving each other side-eye, or looking down in despair. More like a clutch of moody teenagers than a gathering of holy men. It’s the perfect image for Martinello’s collection, which draws much from her Catholic upbringing, but which also delightfully evokes adolescent awkwardness, snark, and conflicted desires from the holy to the profane. I could spend a considerable amount of time with the title “Good Want” and the suggestions that spray out from it – it’s also the title of a terrific poem, one that’s too long for this project to tackle. But let’s leave the questions of which “wants” are “good” for now and get to one of my favourite poems from the collection.

Con


My first time

in a confessional

I was so small I

fit under the sink.

The lord’s house had no

air conditioning.

We had this in common.

I went through my Sunday training

resentful, sweating and pale

as a lump of mozzarella.

Provoked and prodded for weeks

before the booth, I balled

my fists, wracked my brain, finally

apologized for saying a bad word.

Repeated it gleefully

as the holy father told me,

That’s not how

confessions work.

My stomach growled

a low, evil frequency

only the kids licking their fingers

in the nearby pews could hear.

— from Good Want (Coach House, 2024), used by permission

I want to start by thinking about confession. Of course this is a poem about the Catholic ritual. The image of a girl struggling to come up with something to tell her priest, and then giddily repeating the sin by confessing it too enthusiastically, is a delightful bit of fun that could only occur in this context. But the poem itself is also a kind of confession. Clearly written from the perspective of an older self, the memory of that uncomfortable girl seems to be what the poem is revisiting. What’s driving the speaker to tell this story? In other words, what’s the poem confessing?

You probably know that there’s a whole group of mid-20^th-century, mostly American writers called “Confessional Poets,” including Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and others. These poets shook up the literary world by exploring intimate subjects – mental illness, sexual impropriety, family secrets – that seemed taboo for mainstream culture at the time. Confession, for them, implied admitting to something unseemly but true, something dark hidden beneath the surface of civilized life. The excesses of that poetic aesthetic have been well-documented – a sort of scab-picking that functions more as therapy for the poet than a meaningful experience for the reader. But there’s something undeniably powerful about it too, the raw emotion of poems that focus on pain, trauma, or embarrassment, the belly-clenching moments that we carry with us always. 

For us today, it’s unlikely that the events described in “Con” will shock or appall the way some of Plath’s or Lowell’s admissions do. Even if you are a practicing Catholic, my guess is you aren’t too scandalized by what happens. But some of that visceral pre-teen discomfort translates, even for this reader who has never ventured into a confession booth. 

One thing I love about the poem is how it subtly surrounds us with the expectation of wrongdoing. Even the way the poem begins — “My first time” — might suggest some less-than-holy activities until we continue reading and realize how far back into the speaker’s childhood we’ve travelled. Also, why is her family so anxious for her to go to confession? Do they think she has committed a lot of sins? Or is her recalcitrance itself a sin? Notice that the girl had to be “[p]rovoked and prodded for weeks,” which tells me that she held out a long time before finally caving in and entering that intimidating holy closet. Was her reluctance just fear? Or did she have other inclinations that there was danger in the revealing of secrets? Apart from her being small, that stubbornness (and ultimate obedience) is the first thing we really learn about her. Forgive me if I’m reminded of Emily Dickinson’s lifelong refusal to declare herself one of the “elect” at her church, despite considerable family pressure. 

“No.”

So the girl has been compelled to confess, and now she feels compelled – “wracked my brain” – to think of something she’s done wrong. Even a saintly spirit would feel the need to dredge up some hidden dark thought in these circumstances, don’t you think? 

Along the way, Martinello drops a few tasty morsels of heresy: first off, “lord” in the fifth line isn’t capitalized as it usually is in religious contexts. Let’s call that an oversight, or perhaps a subtle anti-authoritarian attitude in the adult speaker who is remembering these events. But the idea that lack of air conditioning is something the speaker and “the lord” have in common is a terrific bit of mischief. Other poems from Good Want refer more explicitly to family poverty, so I’ll conjecture that, for the girl, lack of air conditioning is an economic issue. I love that we can therefore imagine an idea being half-formed in her head that “the lord must be poor like me, which is why his house doesn’t have a/c.” 

This is the aspect of the poem that I don’t want to give up on, that in the midst of the humour (and there’s more coming) there’s a serious unorthodox religious education under way, one that is as much a part of the girl’s coming-of-age as the physical changes that will also be a part of her adolescence.

_{A plate of resentful mozzarella}

But first, a bit more fun. I’ll admit that the first image that really hooked me into this poem was the comparison the speaker makes between her young self and a “lump of mozzarella” – it’s just brilliant and hilarious. The unreasonable pallor, the damp greasy glow of a pre-teen’s skin, the sounds of the word “mozzarella,” the implied fat and salt and melt – I just love everything about it. Even the idea that mozzarella could be “resentful,” which makes no sense and makes perfect sense. The image vividly evokes the combination of desire (I mean, who doesn’t love mozzarella?!) and disgust that is the central experience of the book’s narrator. There’s also a bit of socio-cultural tension being alluded to in the evocation of an Italian, fairly bland cheese (don’t @ me) in a broader environment of French Quebec, where many of these poems take place, and which cherishes certain ideas about what constitutes good cheese. The pièce de résistance here is how, immediately after the comparison to the lump of mozzarella, the girl “balled / my fists,” so that the after-image of the cheese and her sweaty, chubby fists blur into each other. The line break makes sure we don’t miss it. Chef’s kiss.

When the girl finally thinks of something to confess, it shouldn’t surprise us that it has to do with language. We are in the memory of a speaker who is now writing this poem, after all. And once the floodgates are open, it’s hard for her to stop. But let’s give credit to the priest for not over-reacting to her “gleeful” repetition of her blasphemy: “That’s not how / confessions work” is a pretty mild response, considering, and it jumps out at me as something that could be referring to the poem as well. If “Con” is a kind of confession, then the priest’s admonition – that we shouldn’t just take pleasure from repeating and compounding our sins – resonates in a different way. Note that, even though we can easily imagine one of the words that is repeatedly erupting from the girl’s mouth, the poem refrains from sharing it. Maybe the adult speaker has taken some of her penance to heart after all?

This brings me back to the poem’s title. “Con” might just be an unusual abbreviation of the practice being described here. But “con” can also mean “against,” as in “pro vs. con.” Is this poem against confession? Also, “con” can refer to trickery, as in “con artist.” So is the poem implying that the confession booth is a kind of con, a trick that the church uses to control its parishioners? Or is the girl’s foul-mouthed penance a way of conning the priest into allowing her to repeat curse words? Maybe the poem itself a con, a trick that gets us readers to sympathize with her misbehaviour by sandwiching it between the family pressure to practice religious traditions and the heretical demands of a feisty child? Are we the kids licking our fingers in the pews in the poem’s final line, waiting for our turn at confession, or for the narrator to re-join our community of hungry hooligans? 

_{“I am to entreat you, request you, and desire you to con your parts by tomorrow night”}

One other possibility: “con” is an old-fashioned word for studying something very closely, often associated with learning it by heart. In Midsummer Night’s Dream Peter Quince begs Bottom and his fellow actors to “con” their parts in his play. Any good Catholic has, in this sense of the word, conned the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, maybe the Apostles Creed, etc. It’s a way of describing a knowing that’s in your bones, that’s ingrained and permanent, part of who you are. 

For me, “Con” is at least in part about that knowing, about the way the girl (and the narrator remembering her) is assimilating her heritage — its traditions, rituals, and terminology — as well as the conflicted way she responds to it. The discomfort and the practice do not have to be mutually exclusive; in fact it’s clear that they function alongside each other. The mild scolding of the priest and the tummy grumblings, the quiet connection between her hot house and the lord’s, the rival expectations of family and peers, and the awkward awakening into self-consciousness. Flannery O’Connor wrote that “anyone who has survived childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days,” and this poem’s blurring of purposes between religious and creative practice is what, for me, makes it more than a funny memory of an embarrassing childhood episode. As much as this girl is coming into her own body, she is also coming into an awareness of the power of language, and into her spiritual self. The adult speaker of this poem may or may not go to confession as much as her family would like, but the memory and its resonances are vivid, ongoing, and even inspiring.

Some poems can be similar to performing confession, or perhaps to speaking to a therapist: we think through our past actions, re-evaluate, try to understand ourselves more clearly, and perhaps resolve to be better. “Con” reminds us that no matter how hard we try to use introspective activities to improve our spiritual selves, we still must pursue perfection through the trappings of the body, a body that hungers for touch, for air conditioning, and for mozzarella.