TtD supplement #272 : seven questions for Jennifer Firestone

Jennifer Firestone is the author of five books of poetry, including Story (Ugly Duckling Presse). She is the co-editor with Marcella Durand of Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-garde Poetry (MIT Press) and with Dana Teen Lomax of Letters To Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics and Community (Saturnalia Books). Firestone is an Associate Professor of Literary Studies and Chair of Writing at the New School’s Eugene Lang College.

Her four poems “From Dream Sequence” appear in the forty-fourth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems included here as part of “From Dream Sequence.”

A: Dream Sequence came from what I consider a failed poetry project. I was part of a poetry salon run by Kimberly Lyons during the beginning of Covid. At the time I felt that my dreams were colorless. In fact, I don’t remember most of my dreams during this time period. Nevertheless, I needed to bring a poem to this salon and I brought a few pages from a dream I remembered. In the dream I was shoplifting, driving around lost, and then suddenly aware that I was teaching a class that I barely ever showed up to. I realized, as I had before, that my dreams were the same old anxieties and fears manifested into “night narratives.” I was a bit humbled by how simple I seemed.

My family loves to share dreams. I try to be a polite audience but I tend to lose interest. Is the reportage of dreams a low-level version of narcissism? From there Dream Sequence took off. Like most of my writing, the work typically evolves from resistance and perplexity. I began to write less about my dreams and more about the act of dreaming. What are the best “conditions” for a dream; is that such a thing? What happens when dreams are blurred with domestic noise and outside interruptions. Can I steer my dreams away from panic and cowardice and more toward desire and potential?

Q: How do you consider this project failed?

A: So the original project (hopefully not this iteration!) I felt failed as it was too self-conscious; I felt my hand in it. I think I was relying on the substance of my dreams to carry the poems, to do its magic and I’m not sure that’s as exciting for the reader as it is for the writer. The surrealists did a good job with working with dreams, so did Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley and many others. But it felt a bit surface to me; it lacked tension. I put these dream-poems away for a year and then came back again and realized I needed to bring in my critique, my doubts along with my dreamworld in relation to the material world. As Rachel Levitsky said to me after hearing me read some of these poems at Familiar Trees, wow a dream writing project that doesn’t include dreams.

Q: How do these pieces compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: My other work right now is more documentary/investigative. Dream Sequence is a series that includes some research about the mechanics of dreaming and other writers’ perspectives about dreams but it’s not as project-oriented. In Dream Sequence I developed a persona who is somewhat unpredictable and subversive. I see the speaker as an anti-heroine of sorts. I’m also playing with the echoes of more traditional romantic poetry, with elements of the rhyme and diction, but transposed to the contemporary time period.

Q: You mention that most of your other works are project-oriented. What brought you to moving through project-based works?

A: I appreciate the grounding of a project-based work but at times the research and approach can feel similar to some of my more academic work. Dream Sequence feels a little more slippery, surprising. I’m not sure where it’s going to end up. Perhaps it’s like dreams where you don't know when they will come to a sudden stop and what the feeling might be that remains with you. Since I’m chairing my department right now and overwhelmed with work and the state of our country and the challenges my family faces, I needed something that could possibly address these various stressors but also be playful and suggestive and beguiling. Additionally, I tend to be restless and contradictory, so if I take on a particular writing approach or aesthetic I tend to abandon that the next time around.

Q: With a handful of published poetry titles under your belt, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: Ah, “progression,” I think that can be a tough word in relation to one’s poetics as poetry/being a poet resist a linear trajectory. I just know that each of my books has some correspondence with the last one but also steps into a different direction formally and topically. I care less and less about trends and hold myself more to my own integrity: am I being too surface? Have I pushed the language? Who is the work speaking to? How does it move from my own habits, affinities and obsessions and reach to the unknown and defamilarized? Does my craft and form meet the needs of the subject? Am I including the broader world versus my own little microcosm? The questions go on. Being a poetry professor for over twenty years, along with participating in several editing projects, have made me more critical, word for word. My students know that I won’t hold back when offering critique. At the same time, I’m not about the “workshop poem,” and can fully embrace a messy, disjointed poem if that’s what the work wants to do. I think as you get older you become more aware of time so for me it’s not just about publishing, it’s about what I can offer that might be useful, joyful, interesting to others. I have many aspirations as I think about future projects. I want to keep exploring subjectivity and language-making as that is what informs our consciousness and awareness in relation to others. I want to continue using the vehicle of a camera and in extension, photography, as a way to investigate framing and perception. I want to keep including animals and plants in my work. I want to keep an eye to what is marginalized and devalued as that is where we can learn and understand systems, preferences and biases. I want to work with a traditional form and see how that will influence my poetics. I want to write long Ashbery-like prose blocks as I love his work very much. I have fallen back into essay writing (last year I created and taught a new course entitled The Poet’s Essay), and hope to write a book-length creative nonfiction about my father’s death but more so about my cultural concerns regarding rituals of grief. I might write a strange play. I am always thinking up new ideas. I also have done numerous collaborative projects and will probably do more. If only I didn't work full-time and have three kids. . .. but this is my life.

Q: Through your creative and editorial work, I’ve long had the sense that much of your writing exists in conversation with other writers and works. You mention John Ashbery; what other poets and/or particular works sit at the back of your head as you write?

A: I would say my writing is in conversation with my friends’ work. I feel very fortunate that I’m in conversation with many brilliant writers such as Brenda Coultas, Erica Hunt, Marcella Durand, Evelyn Reilly, Karen Weiser, Cole Swenson, Kimberly Lyons, Albert Mobilio, Anselm Berrigan, Lee Ann Brown, Tracie Morris, Hoa Nyugen, Pam Dick, Anne Tardos, Anne Waldman, Sarah Rosenthal, Eléna Rivera, Wendy, Xu, Tonya Foster, Dana Teen Lomax, Rachel Levitsky, KPrevallet, Julie Patton, Carla Harryman, I’m leaving off many more whom I adore. I think friendships can be overlooked, like you should first scan your bookshelves versus who is breathing besides you. My recent MIT Press collection, which I co-edited with Marcella Durand, Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-garde Poetry, subverts the concept of influence. When you are deeply engaged with others’ writing to the point that the writers form your communities you can’t help but be influenced by them in your own writing. I don’t want to name particular works here as I tend to resist iconization of my favorite books. I am also fickle. I read toward my mood and need. Sometimes Stein is the perfect antidote and sometimes she gives me a headache. I have a genuine curiosity and generous attention to lots of diverse work. Although I tend to write what would be labeled as “experimental,” I’m quite open to various kinds of writing. That’s probably what makes me a good professor and reader of works, as I try not to let my own aesthetics entirely govern my reading practice. I like work where there’s a pressure on and attention to the language, where exploration of the subject and form is self-aware, nuanced: this could be Matsuo Bashō Wanda Coleman, Wallace Stevens or Susan Howe. I also like meaning to be just out of reach—when a poem has intention to some degree but perhaps doesn’t know its full sweep, where I can feel its thinking and struggle.

Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

A: Again too many to list but I’ll try. Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Paul Celan’s Breathturn and Threadsuns, anything Ashbery, Myung Mi Kim’s Dura and Penury, Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, anything Lyn Hejinian and particularly her lecture, “The Rejection of Closure,” Rachel Blau Duplessis’s Drafts, her writings in The Pink Guitar, Emily Dickinson, anything Harryette Mullen. I’ll cut myself off here.

TtD supplement #271 : seven questions for J-T Kelly

J-T Kelly is an innkeeper in Indianapolis. He lives in a brick house with his wife, their six children, his two parents, and a dog. Debut poetry chapbook Like Now (CCCP/Subpress, 2023). Poems in The Denver Quarterly, Bad Lilies, and elsewhere.

His poems “Cult Classic,” “Going Out” and “Aesthetics 101” appear in the forty-fourth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “Cult Classic,” “Going Out” and “Aesthetics 101.”

A: The first two poems go together. I have questions about the movies. Movies are very expensive to make — in terms of money but also numbers of people, hours of work, &c. Poetry is the opposite. It costs no money to write a poem. And yet you can still be killed for it — amazing! Movies are a communal experience — much more so than poetry. When you’re involved in making a movie, how do you fit your creative input with everybody else’s? When you’re in the audience, how do you manage the social aspect of your experience?

And then, of course, there’s the wordy-mechanical part of writing the poems. These two movie poems go together in this way too. I was very much thinking about sentence structure and Gertrude Stein. And I’m perennially thinking about how one sentence leads to another. How does one even stick to a subject? Where is the subject? How does a sentence change a previous sentence?

As for “Aesthetics 101,” I like to think this poem speaks for itself. Except for that part about the teeth. And maybe the Hydra. And the French words.

Q: How do these pieces compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: Lately I’ve been more interested in the Bible. There’s the truism about the King James leaving its footprints all over the English language. But what I’m interested in is how foreign a concept the religious life is. And I’m using the term religious on purpose. Faith is pretty slippery, it’s not accountable. You can have a statement of faith, a creed, but that’s getting back to religion. Religion is repetition, things written down, people gathering together, more repetition, enemies. And I’m religious. And it’s weird to me. Sometimes I’m bopping around my life of schedules and budgets and phone notifications and cars — and then I'll think of Moses walking up into the hills by himself to go talk to God. And I ask myself, “Am I connected to that? How am I connected to that? What are these words I’m reciting that are thousands of years old? Are words that durable? What about words is durable?”

Q: What brought you to attempt these explorations through the form of the lyric, as opposed to through some other manner? Have you any models for these kind of poems?

A: Mostly I write short pieces. I think my average poem length is under 20 lines. One very practical reason for that is that I have six kids. I don’t get much contiguous time for writing. Harder to sustain the things in longer pieces that need sustaining with such short writing times.

But maybe the weightier reason is that by temperament and by long habit I talk too much. And it doesn’t help me. So I’ve been learning to say less. And in writing I find I am drawn to writing that is direct and spare and that doesn’t try to lead the reader from one point to another. “You talk a lot / but you’re not saying anything. / When I have nothing to say / my lips are sealed. / Say it only once. / Why say it again?” Irony and all, that’s what draws me to the lyric.

I don’t have a direct model for these poems, but they do come out of reading. John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Tom Snarsky, Kyla Houbolt, Jordan Davis, Rae Armantrout. Those are probably the ones I would connect to these poems.

Q: With a published chapbook debut under your belt, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: My work has developed more difficulties, more questions. What kind of poems do I want to write, anyway? And why? God only knows. I am shopping around a full-length manuscript. And I’m glad I didn’t try that when I was young. The anxiety might’ve killed me. Now, and with everything else going on in my life, it really doesn’t have a chance to rise to the surface. Or not for long. I look at the stuff I write, and I wonder if any of the five things I think I do well would even show up on the board of Family Feud. And if all that sounds depressing, it’s really not. I am enjoying writing. I am enjoying working out just what it is that I like and don’t care for, what I would like to see more of in the world and what I needn’t bother with. And I do wonder what to do with this feeling I have that something is building up behind the dam and whether that feeling is connected to a slowly growing desire to write something longer.

Q: Given your chapbook debut wasn’t that far back, what was the process of putting that manuscript together? Has putting that out in the world prompted you to see your work any differently? What has been the response?

A: I was really lucky to work with a publisher who likes eclecticism. He looked at many more poems than could fit in a chapbook and he suggested a grouping. He was really looking for a collection of good poems, rather than a narrative or theme or an arc.

Here’s what the process taught me. A poem is like a syndrome, right? If you have 7 of these 12 things going on, then you’ve got the syndrome. If you only have 5 things, well then you’re pretty sick, but insurance won’t cover it. Ashbery reportedly would give each poem in consideration for a collection an A, B, or C. And you’d think he'd put all the As together and call it a book. But he thought you needed a certain percentage of Bs in there.

Reception has been pretty good for this chapbook. That is, I’ve tried to get it into the hands of people who are part of the conversations if like to be part of. And mostly, those people have been pretty happy to receive it and pretty happy to be in conversation with me. Has it sold well? I believe we have broken even, and I may even get a check in the new year, maybe enough to buy myself a chapbook. If it’s big enough, maybe I’ll get a year subscription to Hanging Loose!

Q: Has this process shifted the way you write, in any way?

A: I’m still writing the same way. That is, I keep one long Google doc open for six months at a time and every day I write in it. Sometimes I pull a poem out of it. At the end of six months I go back over it all and pull out lines I like. Then I start a new doc. Once a year I pull out all the poems and look at them and try to figure out what might hold together.

But when I look at an individual poem, I am asking:

Is this poem big enough? Is there enough of the world in it?
What's the vocabulary of this poem? Does it have all the words it needs?
Is it a serious thing?
Is it any fun?
Does it tell the reader what to do? (A yes would be bad.)
Did I write this poem already?

Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

A: Kenneth Koch. The first poem of his I read is “One Train May Hide Another.” I’d never read anything like that before. I’ve read it aloud to many people. I asked around and got some ideas of where to start with Koch, and I’ve read a fair bit by now. Some favorites: “Some General Remarks,” “The Art of Poetry,” “The Boiling Water,” “The Brassiere Factory,” and my very favorite, “Passing Time in Skansen.” Koch’s poetry is like listening to your favorite teacher talk spontaneously and perhaps at length on a subject they love. I try to absorb from him love, energy, interest, fun, exuberance, daring, curiosity. If I ever think to myself, “Why poetry?” I can read some more Kenneth Koch and respond, “That’s why.”

Touch the Donkey : forty-fourth issue,

The forty-fourth issue is now available, with new poems by Austin Miles, J-T Kelly, Naomi Cohn, Alice Burdick, Melissa Eleftherion, Jennifer Firestone and Catriona Strang.

Eight dollars (includes shipping). Sweet liquour eases the pain.

TtD supplement #270 : seven questions for Scott Inniss

Scott Inniss is a recent graduate of the doctoral program in English literature at the University of British Columbia. Current work includes interviews with poets Kevin Davies, Dennis Denisoff, and Louis Cabri (the last of which is forthcoming in Tripwire). He is also in the final stages of completing a critical monograph on Humorous Tendentious Poetics: Radical Punchlines and Contemporary Poetry. He lives in Strathcona, Vancouver. He is the author of two recent poetry chapbooks: Back Shelve (above/ground press) and Mean Means (Model Press).

His poem “Spring Breakout” appears in the forty-third issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poem “Spring Breakout.”

A: As I understand it, “Spring Breakout” is a mashup or clustering but also recombinatory intervention into certain dominant sociolects and communicative forms of the broadly current moment. Its language is derivative, in its hectoring, enthymemic, and clickbait-ish dimensions, but also inventive to the extent that its locutions mimic at times those of the (punk, hardcore) band name, song lyric, or album title (at least in my imaginings and process). Key influences on this poem include Bruce Andrews, Marie Annharte Baker, and Dorothy Trujillo Lusk—but also William Carlos Williams, in a weird way that I can’t quite figure out. “The pure products of America / go crazy” and all.
 
In part, I think that the poem is a response to a hegemonic media and political discourse whose conditions of possibility find their limit in the binary avatars of Trump-Harris or Trudeau-Poilievre. It’s a poem that enacts a displeasure with a sociopolitical menu of which there are only two items: white supremacist revanchism or official multiculturalist capitalism. I know that many other options in fact subsist. But it’s a structure of feeling. It’s likely also a result of how I put the poem together: with phrases and discursive scraps that I’d find out in the world (as they say) and that I’d bring back home with me, collecting them in a text document on my laptop for several weeks before digging into it all as a type of primary inscription and source (but in fact already highly mediated, of course).

Q: How does this piece compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: It differs a lot from the other writing that I’ve been working on of late. Over the past two years, I’ve really stopped thinking about the poem as a terminal form and moved toward conceiving it as part of a series or project (typically smaller than the size of a book). To varying degrees, I conceptualize each project as distinct (at least while I’m in the process of putting it together). I also tend to work on multiple projects and series simultaneously. It’s to keep myself from bogging down too long in any one textual environment, I suppose. I’m working on two quite incompatible text sequences at the moment, for example. The first is a recapitulation in syntagms of Stan Douglas’ famous photomontage Every Building on 100 West Hastings. It uses exclusively found language (which was easy to find but much harder to document and translate across media). The second is a return of sorts to what I understand as “teenage” poetry—but without the obtrusive subjectivity. What it aims for is a type of affective expressivity and relation to lyric but in a more strenuous formal environment. On the page, the two projects read like the work of separate writers, at least to me. If others experience it differently, it’s fine. In fact, perhaps it’s part of a larger goal.

Q: What has prompted this shift, do you think?

A: I think that part of it has to do with the fact that I finally got around to reading Jack Spicer’s Collected Books in its entirety. His particular version of an open poetics in which poems are relational rather than autotelic—I find this quite compelling. Unsurprisingly, it also has to do with the fact that I live in Vancouver, a city in which serial, procedural, and (re)articulatory approaches to poetic text have long histories.
 
Part of what I find (relatively) unappealing about the poem as standalone are the subsequent compositional (and interpretive) structures that it presupposes. Each poem with its own page and identity (in the form of a title). Discrete poems following one after another as the sequence that forms the book.

The forms that interest me at the moment are the variable cluster, block, and sprawl (among others). I like works that stray from the vertical and horizontal ordering principles according to which the book title holds the book sections, which hold the poem titles, which hold the poems proper. I like organization but not in subservience-domination.
 
Off the top of my head, I’m thinking of Pause Button by Kevin Davies, Same Diff by Donato Mancini, Wayside Sang by Cecily Nicholson, and Ogress Oblige by Dorothy Trujillo Lusk (among many others). I’m thinking of pages that look like poems in terms of format but lack proper designation or ascription and such. As a reader, I experience it as semiotically enabling to have some disequilibrium and (mis)order in the table of contents. Poetry as project seems more amenable to such outcomes.

Q: Is it possible for a poem to stand alone? To paraphrase Michael Ondaatje’s paraphrase of Jack Spicer in his introduction to The Long Poem Anthology: The poems can no better live on their own than can we. What are your thoughts on the idea that a poem can exist purely on its own?

A: In the most basic sense, I believe that nothing exists purely on its own. For poems it is thus no different, I imagine.
 
The question is interesting, of course, primarily for what underlies it. Are we talking about the autonomy of the work of art? Is it an issue of mereology—the relation of the part to the whole? What is the ontology specific to aesthetic structure? What is the social life and economy of literature or writing? To what extent is the notion of the standalone poem an allegory of sorts for the self-sufficient individual or citizen?
 
Spicer’s claim is no doubt operating in a negative relation to the New Criticism of his time. It also finds its concomitant in his deep investment in poetic community (as a place of mutual support and reciprocity but also antagonism and dissensus).
 
The idea of the interpretive unity of the poem places particular pressures on the writer and the reader. At times, these pressures are productive and enabling, but this is mostly not the case as things currently stand, in my estimation.

Q: Are there any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? Have you any particular writers or specific works in the back of your head as you write?
 
A: I don’t really think of models or influence directly. I read a lot of poetry because I’m really into it, and this process and experience of reading is part of what compels my own writing. I like to consider influence as a range of syntactic affordances and less as something that pertains to style, idiom, or signification. But it’s there, no doubt.
 
If anything, specific works by particular writers are less frequently in the back of my head than right in front of me on the page or computer screen. At least, this is the case when I deliberately set up formal, palimpsestic relations between what I’m working on and another writer or text. As an extreme example, I have a poem called “Flair Despair” in my chapbook Mean Means, and this poem is a “cover version” of Dorothy Trujillo Lusk’s poem “Anti Tumblehome,” from her book Oral Tragedy. I’ve done this sort of thing quite a few times (though not at all to the same degree) with poems by historical, canonical writers (Shakespeare, Hopkins, Larkin), as well as other Vancouver poets like Daphne Marlatt, Michael Turner, Meredith Quartermain, and George Stanley. I had the good fortune to publish a bunch of these in an issue of West Coast Line many several years ago.
 
Q: I’m intrigued by your current interview project, working through interviews with Kevin Davies, Dennis Denisoff, and Louis Cabri. How did this project begin, and how do these interviews, potentially, exist in conversation with or alongside your writing?
 
A: Various impulses motivate these interviews, which are in fact part of a larger project (or at least this is the plan). I’m a big fan of these poets, but there’s not a whole lot of info about them or their writing online or elsewhere. Part of what I want to do, then, is to fill in some of these gaps. Personally, I want to learn more about Kevin, Louis, and Dennis, how they understand their poetics, what brought them to poetry, some literary anecdotes and gossip, their histories and those of the scenes of which they were (are) a part, the usual things.
 
At the same time, I’m also thinking about the interview project as at least partly archival. There are some amazing unpublished, roughly edited, and incomplete interviews with various Kootenay School of Writing members and affiliates available online on the KSW website, at kswnet.org. As a researcher, writer, and fan, I’m enormously glad that these accounts exist, whatever their “deficiencies” from a conventional publishing perspective. I find them crucial for filling in parts of what is soon to be a predominantly historical record of “avant-garde” writing community in Vancouver from the 1980s to the mid-2010s. In this regard, the interviews aim to add to this body of knowledge, whether we (the poets and I) end up publishing them online, as part of a book, or whether they end up as archival material somewhere for future researchers (of whatever sort).
 
How does this affect my writing? In the standard sense it doesn’t. But in another it does. It affects more my role as a poet, as someone who is in community (of various sorts) with other writers, who has a strong interest in helping and promoting poetry to happen, to have it circulate in various ways. In this sense, I see the interviews as more or less co-extensive with the labour of writing poetry itself. The same is true of the readings that I’ve been organizing as of late.

Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

A: So many! It’s too easy to let this question spiral out of control. Ok. Let me choose only five, discounting anyone whom I’ve discussed or mentioned so far.
 
Books-poets that I continue to get a lot of mileage out of include the following: Marie Annharte Baker (all but especially Exercises in Lip Pointing and Indigena Awry), Amiri Baraka the New American poetry and Black Nationalist phases), Paul Celan (the later work, especially in the Pierre Joris translations), Erin Moure (her first five books), and Harryette Mullen (the trio of publications collected in their entirety in Recyclopedia).
 
An impossible question. But these look about right in terms of where I am right now.

TtD supplement #269 : seven questions for Sandra Doller

Sandra Doller is the author of several books of poetry, prose, translation, and the in-between from the most valiant and precarious small presses—Les Figues, Ahsahta, Subito, and Sidebrow Books. Her newest book, Not Now Now, is forthcoming from Rescue Press. Doller is the founder of an international literary arts journal and independent press, 1913 a journal of forms/1913 Press, where she remains éditrice-in-chief, publishing poetry, poetics, prose, and all else by emerging and established writers. She lives in the USA, for now.

Her prose poem sequence “[show me a depressed mother]” appears in the forty-third issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the prose poem “[show me a depressed mother].”

A: This poem excavates the idea that depression and mothering are interdependent—even that perhaps “depression” and “mother” are metaphoric for self-annihilation and care. I remember hearing once that per the DSM IV (back when it was IV not V) women by definition fall under the depression diagnosis—this was a casual observation I heard somewhere and I’m not intending to affirm or deny such a thing—but I’m interested in the ideas both that the medical diagnostic community regularly omits and obliterates everyday female experiences—like motherhood—and that we also have terms like “postpartum depression” to diagnose what seem to me to be absolutely essential, natural, and unavoidable conditions of building, baking, forming, making an entirely new human out of one’s own self’s cells—or just the condition of motherhood more broadly, the constant caregiving, caretaking, prioritizing other humans over one’s proper self—looking after others—that all might lead one to conclude, from outside the house, from inside the room, that such a character fulfills the definition of “depressed” by being unmotivated towards the self, overwhelmed by other. And as she spirals on, the speaker claims a refusal to break that down, while very much breaking that down, performing the audacity of stating what is, showing the mother, putting girls to the front, which we know only happens when some others step to the back. Maybe if the boys in the club were more motherly, the girls could see the band.

Q: How does this piece compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: This piece is part of a piece—it’s been one hell of a decade! This is part of my ongoing verbal investigation into gender trauma, as relates specifically to mothering and womanning. It’s something to realize the past 10 years of life have been occupied quite publicly by a kind of unfettered misogyny on the American political stage—all the while, personally, giving birth to a female child and caring for a partner with multiply recurring life-threatening cancer. The responsibility of bringing a future woman into such a world weighs on me—even as my hope is that gender dynamics are upended and changed by the time my daughter is conscious, in a teen or adult way, of these forces shaping her life, I am also aware that even being born into and existing in this time is both better and worse for her than ever. Is that all in this piece or in all the pieces all together always saying, it was the butler, the butler did it.

Q: Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting?

A: I think my writing thinks it’s funny. Like Maria Bamford, Kate Berlant, or Tig Notaro’s “stool movement” funny. Specific funny females who wear mental health like a puffy sleeve. But my writing is also willing to admit it might not be that funny, not as funny as my models funny, because maybe sometimes it’s time to be unfunny, or to perform failure and lack of virtuosity as a badge of humble honor. Like, what if Rachel Cusk made less sense and more poetry—and why are we all reading George Eliot these days? I might not be modeling, but I might be in the room. Here’s who’s in my room right now—Olga Ravn, Ali Wong, Claudia Rankine, Maggie Nelson, Mia You, Merve Emre, Xenia Rubinos, Niki de Saint Phalle, Cat Power, Poog. Pissed off people everywhere, mostly women.

Q: Over the years, you’ve composed work both solo and collaborative. What do you feel your collaborative works have allowed that might not have been possible otherwise? What do you think your collaborative efforts added to your solo writing?

A: Most of the collaborations I’ve worked on have been composed with the poet I live with, Ben Doller, so that is a collaboration that’s always happening. Over the years, the form of that collaborative relationship has changed, like, well, like a relationship. That work has always been about the relationship—it’s a very meta relationship—and has probably sped my own return to a sort of talky writing, which is where I started in writing, long ago—as a playwright. I’ve always been interested in the inside joke and writing that is able to take that outside—so this sort of intimate collaboration tends to favor that. But Ben and I are, at heart, very different writers (people) with very different speeds and energies—our recent collaboration, called Not Writing, manifested as me doing lots and lots of writing—I hogged the dance floor and had too much prose, so I just turned back into my own projects—letting Not Writing stay not writing for a bit. (Life and health and parenting and domestication intervene in that space even more than they do in the regular writing space.) Translating is another form of collaboration I engage in and one I’m interested in spending more time on in my elder years (are we there yet?)—I have worked with a brilliant writer and translator, Éric Suchère, and we’ve translated each other’s work over the years, so I have a theory about that sort of reciprocal translation—when you translate your translator, does it become a collaboration? Are you changing each other’s work in ways you wouldn’t if they weren’t also translating yours? And because Suchère is a conceptual writer, I also wonder can you translate a procedure, a concept, or a project in addition to or instead of translating the language? I’m looking into it.

Q: With a handful of published collections over the years, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work heading?

A: It’s an infinite regression—golden spiral—internal return. I find myself coming back to ideas, words, rages, places. I didn’t start in poetry, but in performance—playwriting and solo texts for movement—so the more I write, the longer I live, the more vocality rears itself. My work is heading towards more voice—maybe even more voices—maybe it needs to be spoken—maybe it will be. My work is heading someplace where I make recordings of myself reading aloud very, very fast in different voices, and there’s nothing I can do about it.  

Q: You mention working towards voice, but are there other elements of performance you feel that influence, or even underpin, the way you approach text? And how do your texts themselves allow for their own potential performance? Are the visual elements on your page notational?

A: Coming to text via performance—and via film—does create a space where my own writing becomes something other than writing, it becomes a situation. A problem, even. I think of Maya Deren, Gertrude Stein, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Christine McNair—how can writing be a rehearsal? And what is the actual performance of the text—is it the writing itself, the reading after the fact, the uttering of the words, or the desire of words to remain unspoken…? In terms of visual elements, I used to work more with the page in a sense that was rhythmic, and as you say, notational—that may still be true, in that my prose blocks are intended for speed, and my line breaks are intended for breathing. I have a certain way I hear my words in my own head, but that doesn’t mean I’m right.

Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

A: Lucy Ellmann—and her mother Mary Ellmann—are constantly with me—we have a family joke in our house about Moby Duck—both of them are tragically brilliant in a way the world remains unprepared for—every phrase contains three puns and staircases to other worlds of intertextualities—even though Lucy is writing fiction and Mary wrote about women writing—both of them work in sentence structures that are more like brutalist office building architectures with a dash of organic modernism—I could live happily with the mother-daughter pair of Thinking About Women (ME) and Ducks, Newburyport (LE) as my only furniture.

TtD supplement #268 : seven questions for Tom Jenks

Tom Jenks’ most recent books are Melamine (Red Ceilings Press) and The Philosopher (Sublunary Editions). He is also a text artist and edits the small press zimzalla, specialising in literary objects. More information at https://tomjenks.uk

An excerpt from his “Melamine” appears in the forty-third issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the work-in-progress “Melamine.”

A: I’m happy to report it’s no longer a work in progress and is out in book form with the Red Ceilings Press. It’s a sequence of 8 line poems, each 2 stanzas of 4 lines. I have a changing relationship with form. Sometimes, I like to be wholly irregular. Others, I like to set myself a structure and a pathway. That’s what Melamine is. I think of each poem as a set of shelves on which I put whatever was to hand: things I was reading or listening to, what I was eating or thinking about eating, what was going on around me, the only rule being that they had to fit on the shelf without falling off. Poetic chaotic storage.

Q: How does this project compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: My next book The Philosopher, which is out soon on Sublunary Editions is short prose, not exactly narrative, but more linear. I also produce visual work, a mixture of visualisations of literary works (e.g. all the food and drink in The Wind in the Willows, all mentions of “love” and “death” in Romeo and Juliet) and other more concrete-style pieces. That’s a different sort of mindset, all about shape, structure and colour. But it’s the same in other ways. The reasons why I do things remain opaque to me, and long may that continue.

Q: How does any particular project begin? Do you approach first through form, or is it something more organic?

A: I’m nearly always writing or creating in some way, so I always have a lot of stuff floating around. Relationships, threads and connections tend to emerge rather than me willing them into existence. With Melamine, I wrote a few 8 line poems, wrote some longer ones, which I didn’t feel were finished and I melted down into more 8 line poems, which gave them a new lease of life. So the concept emerged from doing. I believe “praxis” is the word.

Q: What is it about examining particular structures that appeals? What do you feel is possible utilizing form in such ways, and such different ways, that might not be possible otherwise?

A: Form, for me, gives a reason to start and a reason to stop. Going back to the line as shelf analogy in Melamine, a set structure like that allows me to put things together that aren’t normally connected but nonetheless somehow can speak to one another. Having a set limit gives a sort of weird compression which I like.

Q: What brought you to this particular point? Were there specific poets or works that influenced these directions and decisions?

A: In terms of sequences, Jeff Hilson’s work, particularly In the Assarts, was something I was rereading around this time, plus Frank Kuppner, who writes long, fragmentary books. More broadly, in terms of style and content, Peter Didsbury and Jeremy Over. I also found myself referring back to my own book Spruce from 2015, a sequence of 99 x 9 line poems, just to remind myself how to do it.

Q: With more than a dozen books and chapbooks going back some fifteen years, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: In some ways a lot, in others not at all. I’ve done all sorts of different things – written work, visuals, conceptual projects – but I think my concerns and interests now can be traced back to then, amongst them humour, the minutiae of advanced capitalism, history and culture in all its forms. At the moment, I’m working on longer, looser pieces, trying to let my voice go where it wants, not taking off the rough edges.

Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

A: as well as the aforementioned, Selima Hill, Frank O’Hara, Ivor Cutler, Leonora Carrington, Henry Green, Stuart Mills, psychedelia and, above all, my friends and contemporaries who I won’t attempt to list as I’ll forget to mention someone and they won’t come to my funeral. Actually, not sure I’ll bother to turn up to that myself, as I hear the sandwiches will be awful.

TtD supplement #267 : six questions for Leesa Dean

Leesa Dean (she/her) is the author of a short story collection, a novella in verse, and two poetry chapbooks. Her first book, Waiting for the Cyclone, was nominated for the 2017 Trillium and Relit Awards, and she was runner-up for the 2023 Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize. Her most recent poetry collection, Interstitial, will be out Spring 2026 with Gaspereau Press. She lives in the Slocan Valley (unceded Sinixt Territory) and teaches creative writing at Selkirk College.

Her poem “Sleeping with Bats” appears in the forty-third issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poem “Sleeping with Bats.”

A: The poem “Sleeping with Bats” was inspired by an actual event I experienced in my twenties. I was living in Montreal in a small apartment and somehow while making dinner, a bat flew in. He kept doing laps around the living room. I tried to shoo him towards the wide open doors, front and back, but he just wouldn’t leave for almost 24 hours. He didn’t actually read Beaudelaire but I could really imagine him there, hanging upside down from the bookshelf, immersed in such poetry. I was also in a bad relationship at the time—it took years to clearly see the parallels between the bat and I, but there we were, kindred spirits, fully aware of the exit but trapped in the thrill of being in danger.

Q: How does this piece compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: This poem is part of a larger collection that will be published by Caitlin Press in 2025. The title is Interstitial and it explores a vast cross-section of themes like women in complicated relationships with themselves, with substances, with their ancestry. Many of the poems are autobiographical. For example, my grandparents were both language minorities (Francophone from Saskatchewan, Hungarian refugee) who traded their languages for their vision of the Canadian Dream at a time where assimilation was the common practice. I write about my mother who was a polio survivor and lived in a body cast for 9 months after being an initial test subject for a process that was brand new at the time. A Herrington Rod was fused with her spine so that she would not end up in a wheelchair. She never told us any of that, didn’t want us to perceive her as a victim, was unable to imagine the beautiful power of empathy. The overarching framework for the book was actually published by you, rob, in 2023-- it was a chapbook called apogee/perigee which consisted of 24 visual poems, all exploring the themes mentioned above.

Q: Do you have any structural models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? How easy was it for you to assemble such a wide array of lyric modes into a single, cohesive manuscript?

A: This is an interesting question about structural models. I actually had to create my own structural model for this project--well, I got someone else to do it. I had a specific structure in my head for the 24 visual poems that create the foundation of Interstitial. I drew it out on paper first but it looked more like complex mathematics. Luckily I know a great graphic designer/comic artist, Nathan Vyklicky. He looked at my rough sketch and my list of very specific requirements, like “each poem must be located exactly where the corresponding zodiac house would be located on the provided source chart from the 16th century” and “the apogee poems must be located diametrically opposite from the title of the poem, to mirror a state of apogee.” I couldn’t tell at first if my ideas were even legible to him or anyone, but he went away for a few days and came back with exactly what I wanted. I really value that kind of collaboration and deep listening.

A number of other poems in the collection are prose poems. I am a great fan of prose poetry, Does this come from my background as a fiction writer? Possibly, but I also think there is something incredibly immersive about not having line breaks but still operating in the realm of images, in lyrical language that bends and yaws. I like the look of a dense block of language and think of all the words inside the invisible text boxes as building kinetic energy, as vibrating atoms. I was in part inspired by Ben Lerner’s collection, Angle of Yaw. Our poetic styles could not be more different, but from him I learned a type of journey to the last line where truths are confirmed or completely subverted.

I’m not sure how easy it was to assemble a wide array of modes into a cohesion, but it was enjoyable and also necessary. I think what creates the cohesion, though, is the context: I wrote the book almost exclusively within the two year period between when my father was diagnosed as being terminally ill and when he died, about 12 days after I handed in the final manuscript to my publisher. Talk about Interstitial. Not all of the poems are about him—just a small fraction—but the context spurred this greater question of how we are positioned at any given moment in time. I remember so many different versions of my father. I remember so many different versions of myself. In this manuscript, I allowed those versions to coexist; I allowed the dichotomies to inform and complicate each other.

Q: With two published books, two chapbooks and your current work-in-progress, how do you feel your work has developed? What do you see yourself working towards?

A: To answer this question honestly, I feel like I’m growing up in tandem with my work. I’ve always felt the relationship between myself and my work to be quite porous, a type of Venn diagram where the narrative style or poetic craft and the actual me occupy a large common space. This is especially true of my forthcoming book, but it inherently had to be as I was writing predominantly about the death of both my parents rather than exploring a persona, as I did in my second book, The Filling Station, which was written entirely from the point of view of a Brazilian woman, a fictional character who narrated the life of Manuelzinho, an actual person who appeared in a 1952 poem of the same name by Elizabeth Bishop. Interstitial is very different. If I think about the way I wrote about emotional topics when I first started writing poetry in my late twenties, I think there would have been a lot of anger and that anger would have translated into a narrower kind of poetics. The poems in Interstitial move beyond the immediate emotional plain, the anger and reckoning, to much deeper, philosophical explorations.

Now that I’ve completed Interstitial, I am moving through a second draft of a novel called Tunnel of Stars. I can’t even articulate how excited I am about it. It’s a slightly gothic coming of age story that takes place in my home region, the West Kootenay, but also in Vancouver, New Orleans, Montreal and Morocco. I’m still at the stage where it’s difficult to articulate exactly what the novel is about, but I have surprised myself by writing a romantic narrative with a happy ending. I have traditionally been disinterested in the happy ending, especially in the context of heteronormative relationships, but this narrative is also interrupted by unwanted pregnancies, suicide attempts, entire families dying in car accidents and other significant barriers. I'm interested in writing through an ugly kind of beauty, a kind of beauty that becomes accentuated by life’s legit and ever-present challenges.

Q: I get the sense that you see your work—whether poetry, fiction or visual work—as extended elements of a single, ongoing trajectory. How does a thought or an idea or a sentence announce itself into the shape of a poem or a work of fiction? Do ideas of genre emerge first, or is it something else, something other?

A: I’ve been thinking about how to respond to this question and I keep coming back to Ursula Le Guin. I remember reading her essay titled “The carrier bag theory of fiction” while doing my MFA at the University of Guelph over a decade ago now. The visual of the bag really stuck with me and I suppose I consider my writing in a similar fashion. I’m out there gathering ideas, sentences, images, recurring themes, and they all go in the bag. I imagine this bag to be elastic, able to stretch form, to hold multitudes. I’m not always sure if something will be a poem, an essay or a story when it first emerges, when it goes into the bag or comes out of the bag to be refined. I write and publish in three genres so any of those forms could be feasible for any idea, and sometimes the boundary of the genre isn’t entirely clear in my writing. I’m thinking now of Joshua Whitehead’s essay titled “Writing as a Rupture” (published in Making Love with the Land) where he refers to genre as “boundary and border,” which is something I’ve been thinking about more lately.

I’m currently writing a novel that is mostly fiction, part prose poem, slightly autofiction at points. I have a feeling my work will continue to delineate rather than lineate as I... what? Age? I’m not sure age is the right word here. Continue to expound? I am leaning into hybridity these days and feel validated by the growing number of genre-defying works being published at the moment.

Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

A: I’m the kind of person who will pull like 10 books off the shelf and fan them out around me when I need poetic inspiration so I have more of a rotating favourites list. I also have a special area on my bookshelf where I put certain books on display, like talismans, as if the power of those poets might radiate into my writing space and bless me with even just the essence of their poetics. Currently Night Sky with Exit Wounds is staring at me—Ocean Vuong is a damned genius, can’t say it enough. I’ve got Ada Limon’s Bright Dead Things out right now, too. When I want to shake myself out of my language patterns I often go to Canisia Lubrin and Liz Howard’s work. How many poets do I name? I could just fill a page right now.

But the one book that is always on my shelf facing forward, the one that never moves, is Common Magic by Bronwen Wallace. I love that book with all my heart. I actually have three copies because it’s out of print and hard to get and I keep giving copies away. I actually got a “Common Magic” tattoo in February—a montage of images that embody this idea for me (steam rising from tea, moon phases, wildflowers, the magic of the perennial, the lifeblood of cosmic clockwork) and Simon Gentry from Chateau Tattoo in Salmo turned into a beautiful half sleeve. That’s something I started doing, getting a tattoo every time I publish a book. I’m already thinking of what to do for the next one that comes out in Fall 2025...