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...

TtD supplement #266 : seven questions for Henry Gould

Henry Gould was born in Minneapolis, and lives there now, after 45 years in Rhode Island. His recent books include : RAVENNA DIAGRAM, I-III (Dos Madres Press); CONTINENTAL SHELF : SHORTER POEMS, 1968-2020 (Dos Madres); and a chapbook, PARMENIDES IN MINNEAPOLIS (Lulu.com). His book-length poem, GREEN RADIUS, is available (or will be soon) from Contubernales Books.

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

Q: Tell me about the work-in-progress “The Green Radius.”

A: The Green Radius is a long poem, in 144 parts, which is written in these rhymed, flowing, snaky stanzas, to suggest the constant flow of the Mississippi River, from its source to the Delta. Also the flow of memory, back in time – my own personal time, times of American history, and human time generally, in a sort of philosophical sense. And also this wayward flow of stream-of-consciousness, free-association babbling – which will probably seem incomprehensible or nonsensical to impatient readers.  I started writing it on February 1st, 2023, and finished it in December, on 12/12/23.

There’s an underlying “French connection" to this poem.  Just before I started writing I happened to see an old film of Eric Rohmer, Le Rayon Vert (“The Green Ray”). At first I planned to title the whole poem The Green Ray – but then I discovered another poet had given her recent book that same title, with the same reference to Rohmer! So I changed it, reluctantly, to The Green Radius, which in the end I found very fitting. Oddly enough, just as I was finishing the poem in December 2023, I watched a second very fine Rohmer film, My Night at Maud’s – which seemed to set its seal on the poem.

By “French connection” I refer to this sort of submerged French influence in American history. The course of the Mississippi flows through the old territory of the Louisiana Purchase. So it gave me a kind of cultural slant into the character of the United States, emphasizing New Orleans and a certain French/American ambience. But the poem tries to delve further back as well. The “French” thing leads to St. Louis, and some remarks by Herman Melville (in a short essay called “The River”) about the meaning of that place : where the ruins of Cahokia still remain. I try to delve back a little way into Native American and “prehistoric” dimensions of this land, in the context of the “Trump” era, and the attack on U.S. democracy, and the theme of corruption and fraud in Melville’s Mississippi novel, The Confidence-Man.

Here's a short opening section that brings some of these things into (blurry) focus :

  3


    With a green flash, the last light rose
      from sunset.  On the vertical,
        above the dark horizon
      like a wheat-blade – singular,
    enormous.  Bleeding as the Delta flows
  widening on either side;
melding in diapason
  eleisons of blue and red
    over the mud-green, violet furrows.

2.4.23

The poem is really no longer a work-in-progress : it’s a finished poem, and a sort of work-in-regress. A strategic retreat : Wallace Stevens’ “violence within pressing back against the violence without.” Amazingly enough, early in 2024 the publishers at a small press called Contubernales Books approached me, unsolicited, for a possible manuscript to publish!  This has never happened to me before in my 60 years of writing poetry. The book is coming out within the next month or two. The cover design was kindly donated by the Saint Louis Art Museum, from a massive panoramic scroll painted in 1850 by an itinerant Irish artist, John J. Egan : a visionary panorama called “The Grandeur of the Mississippi”. Also, poet and scholar Gabriel Gudding wrote a sharp, provocative introduction, for which I am very grateful.  Here’s a glimpse of the cover : https://contubernalesbooks.com/green-radius

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

A: I turned 72 this year. Getting older, for me anyway, changes your sense of time, memory, mortality. The Green Radius reflects that, I suppose, in several ways. For one, it’s shorter, more focused, than previous efforts, believe it or not! I’ve written about 10 book-length poems since the 1980s. Forth of July, from the late ‘90s – a trilogy of 3 books, Stubborn Grew/The Grassblade Light/July – is over 1000 pp. Ravenna Diagram I-III, written from 2012 to 2018, is a similar length. Restoration Day, published in 2022, is over 250 pages. The Green Radius has the most dramatic, “quasi-objective” scenario since Stubborn Grew, from 2000 (which is a kind of microcosmic comic-epic set across about 10 blocks of my hometown of those days – Providence, Rhode Island).

Long poems are a kind of curse, for both poets and readers. They magnify, exponentially, the already marginal condition of poetry within society at large. But it’s one of those curses that glimmers with the hope of becoming a blessing. Poetry for me is a kind of work, that gets more fluent and surprising as it goes along. And the phenomenon “poetry” sits up on a high, quaint, old-fashioned pedestal in my psyche – culturally, spiritually. I’m like Edgar Cayce, the sleeping prophet... I sleepwalk in a trance down this outlandish pilgrim’s path – keeping my diary, dating every entry in the sequence. I’m struggling with the moral/ontological state of the world; I’m struggling with my famous predecessors (Pound, Eliot, Dante, et al.); I’m struggling with my indifferent contemporaries; I’m struggling with the moral and political state of my nation; I’m struggling with my own flaws and stupidities. No one writes like me; no one knows my work; that’s the way it is.  Sound familiar? I’m Henry, the Everypoet.

Q: You mention that this particular project is “shorter, more focused, than previous efforts [.]” Why do you think that is?

A: Poetry for me seems to involve quite a bit of negative capability. Unconciousness, serendipity. As mentioned previously, my getting older has something to do with the pressure to be focused, precise, more intense. But really, my sense is that the stars were just aligned in my pregnancy phase, pre-compositional.  By that I mean the themes, the setting (the Mississippi), and the style seemed to coalesce and work together. The FLOW, the simple water pressure of the river, unlocked a whole set of dams and levees – in memory, in history, in art...  Also, that “violence without” – the sense of danger, of “existential crisis” for my country, in my country, the United States, right now – definitely fueled the intensity of focus, such as it is.

Q: With, as you say, ten book-length poems published over the past few decades, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: In some ways I just keep writing the same poem, over and over, with variations. This theme of “journeying into the interior” is part of all the poems I mentioned previously. It’s been a bit of an Orphic track : me, in a trance, following my Dark Lady, my Eurydice, my Beatrice, into the darkness, into the light.  I feel as I get on with things I’ve become (over the decades) a little more independent of past influences, a little less prone to bombast or mimicry. I hope so anyway. I see my marginality and irrelevance as a very real problem. I don’t blame society or po-biz for that anymore (whereas I used to be pretty snarky, with a chip on my shoulder). I’m trying in my current work to become more clear, more comprehensible. And I feel the only way I can do that is to clarify more forcefully my own intellectual, rational, and spiritual beliefs, my “vision of life” shall we say. This is maybe the real substance of this stumbling pilgrimage I’ve been on for decades. I just finished a new sequence – only 27 pp. long! – and published it as a chapbook, called Parmenides in Minneapolis. I’m trying both to focus more intensely, and SING more resonantly, at the same time. I really like “Parmenides” so far.  Maybe there will be a couple more brief 27-pp. sequels.

Q: Do you have any particular models for the kinds of work you’ve been doing? Are there any specific poets or works in the back as your head as you write?

A: In the early 1980’s, when I was getting ready to write such poems, Hart Crane and Ezra Pound were both powerful influences. Pound for his epic ambition and the interesting way he dove into and absorbed History (I’ve always been big on History). Hart Crane for his absolutely astonishing genius – the way he took on an epic ambition similar to Pound’s, but infused it with music, and grace : an elegant architectonics. I had a fairly conscious motive to “stand with Crane”, against both Pound and Eliot, as a stylistic benchmark, or paradigm – how to reflect a specific AMERICAN spirit and sensibility in literature/poetry.

The other central influence has been Osip Mandelstam. In some ways I found affinities between his lyric modes and Crane’s. But for me, Mandelstam is at the center of my personal pantheon. I am drawn to him as to no other. I learned only later that Paul Celan felt the same way about him.  

Q: What is it about the form of the long poem that appeals? What do you feel is possible in your work through the form that might not be otherwise?

A: As a kid, as a teenager, I read a lot of novels. For me there was no comparable pleasure to that of being absorbed in a fictional dream, like a vast lambent meadow, or a dark forest. I’ve written plenty of short poems. Recently published a book of them : Continental Shelf : shorter poems 1968-2020. But I’m sort of a philosophical monist, an idealist... “The World as Meditation”. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was with God : He was in the beginning, and through Him all things were made. Serious stuff. Behind all our fragmentary trivia and chatter, there is this serious listening silence. I write long poems because I want to express this implicit solemnity, this seriousness behind all things. A poem could be a Gate to the Way. Not in a doctrinaire sense. But life is a “vale of Soul-making”, wrote that agnostic John Keats. The epic, the long poem, express a drive toward wholeness – holism, oneness... Union. The Green Radius is all about “saving the Union”.

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

A: Certain poets have become real or imaginary friends. I mentioned Osip Mandelstam. Another Russian poet I feel very close to is the late Elena Shvarts (we were trans-continental friends for a while). The Vancouver poet Lissa Wolsak is very dear to me. I always go back to Eugenio Montale : he is the warmth of the sun and the music of Europe. Shakespeare has haunted me, literally – and still does (I wrote and published a memoir about that, titled Holy Fool). Another Italian I love is the novelist Giorgio Bassani.  

Now I’m finding some new things – going back to early pre-Socratic philosopher-poets, like Parmenides, Empedocles... and Apollonius of Rhodes, epic poet of the Argonautica. I’m trying to learn a little Greek for that. By way of Empedocles, oddly enough (who was said to have fallen into the volcano at Mt. Etna), I went back to an old favorite, Malcolm Lowry (Under the Volcano) – and through Lowry, to the mysterious and marginalized Conrad Aiken. I feel a special kinship with Aiken.  He wrote a kind of shadowy twin to Hart Cranes’s The Bridge, a long poem, called The Kid, which I find wonderful. The Kid pivots on the story of William Blackstone, a kind of spiritual hermit and scholarly pioneer in colonial Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Before I learned of Aiken’s poem, I had written a chapter for a long poem, The Grassblade Light, titled “The Lost Notebooks”... about William Blackstone. Aiken might just be a forgotten sleeping giant of American poetry. I can identify with that. 🙃

Touch the Donkey : forty-third issue,

The forty-third issue is now available, with new poems by Lisa Samuels, Tom Jenks, Nate Logan, Henry Gould, Sandra Doller, Kit Roffey, Leesa Dean and Scott Inniss.

Eight dollars (includes shipping). It's the part I was born to play, baby!

TtD supplement #265 : six questions for russell carisse

russell carisse is currently living on unceded Wolastoqiyik/Mi’kmaw territory in New Brunswick. Here they have resettled from Tkaronto to an off-grid trailer in the woods, with their family of people and animals, to grow food and practice other forms of underconsumption. russell is the author of three chapbooks, the latest, In The Margins. . . (above/ground press 2024). Their work can be found online and in print. Website: russellcarisse.carrd.co Mastodon: @russellcarisse@writing.exchange

An excerpt from his work-in-progress “THAT HEAP” appears in the forty-second issue of Touch the Donkey.

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

A: Centuries in the future an archeological team unearth a caché of 500 messages which become the foundational text of the culturally hegemonic corporation Human Effluents And Plastic, and are known as The 500. These messages, all of which are 500 characters long and range from weather reports, advertisements, diary entries, etc, trace the early days and months that follow an apocalyptic event called The Great Coagulation. The earth having become a trash-ball, soon begins to take on monstrous proportions and abilities, thanks to everyone’s favorite corporate empire and its founder, Summer deGuy. The impetus for this project was an attempt to verbalize a pet conceit of mine, that landfill contains the packaging of our collective unconscious, the trappings of our desires, and the materials of our desires when they have been superceded by new material. And so as I tried to find a form the idea began to grow with a bunch of hypotheticals such as, what if trash-ball earth is a body-without-organs, what if water can only be obtained from microscopic deposits, etc. After a few tries at different forms, it was the Mastodon character limit that finally gave this project the conatus to grow beyond a few sketches.

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

A: I am beginning to often feel that the separations between projects, are the result of the perceived need to neatly package a product for consumption, and that my projects are not a disparate as I make them out to be. I do have a few different processes for writing, but I don’t work consistently at any one process, so I find myself reading several books at once and putting thoughts to page/screen in blocks or strings of short text in unrelated sequences. It seems this method lends itself to the 500 character, or 140 syllables, or 100 words, or 14 line, or there about poem/sonnet, that I seem to keep rewriting. It is when the second draft is made that a restraining form is decided upon, sorting into thematic, stylistic, and natural groups, for submitting.

Q: How do you see your projects relating to each other? Do you see your projects as disconnected, a sequence of groupings or something larger, with many, multiple moving parts?

A: My work seems to circle a few concerns, no matter which formalities are being used. These sublime elephants in the room are most often colonialism, climate crises, the bâtise bourgeoisie, and associated effects. I’m sure there are pathological revelations to be had at my expense as well. It is for my own therapeutic reasons that I write, whether disrupting narratives of past traumas, a rewording of something I'm struggling to understand, or just an intellectual exercise of puzzling through a restraint in language. Of course, there’s a large dollop of, “project? I have no idea what I’m doing! Let’s see if this sticks to the wall?”

Q: With three chapbooks under your belt, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: I definitely hum and haw over poems I’m working up more now than when I my first chap was published, and the anxiety of leaving something out has changed into its opposite. Looking back, there was a single tone single gimmick to much of my work, which I have been trying to disturb with more humour and forms. There was a time when I saw chapbooks as a stepping stone to trade publication, some presses more than imply this, but as I have had time to read more contemporary collections from the library, plus enjoy the couple of chapbook subscriptions I can afford here or there, I have come to look for where poetry is going in chapbooks, and where poetry has been in collections. Admittedly though, I hope to gain the coveted Triple Spine (a trade pub in poetry, fiction, nonfiction) one day.

Q: Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? What authors or works, if any, sit at the back of your head as you write?

A: I’m not sure I follow any specific models, but lately I’ve had on my mind George Woodcock and his brand of Anarchism’s connection to the vision of Canada as espoused by the leaders of the Freedom Convoy. It seems this may also point to some of the more poisonous parts of the Romantic tradition past and present. There so many authors I get excited about, a few being; Dionne Brand, Marilyn Dumont, Gary Barwin, and Amanda Earl, each has a unique use of humour, whimsy, and/or irony, that grabs my attention. Adding a manual typewriter to my poetic repertory was the result of the national anthologizing of bill bissett, and bpNichol, by Jack David and Robert Lecker, in 1982, reprinted in 1994, when casual racism, Indigenous exclusion, among other issues, should have given the publishers pause before continuing this version of nation building. Over the last month a couple of my favorite borrows from the public library have been: Resisting Canada; An Anthology of Poetry, ed Nyla Matuk (Montreal, CA: Véhicule Press, 2019), and Canisia Lubrin, The Dyzgraph*st (McClelland & Stewart, 2020).

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

A: If I find myself struggling to write I often turn away from the page for reenergizing. A wander around the garden or the woods, is often enough, but I enjoy painting, and listening to music staring at the ceiling, as well. Even though it’s been a few years, I’ve read Virginia Woolf’s The Waves at least a dozen times, and Derrida’s corpus if only because a lot of his work remained nonsense to me, but over the last bit, I haven’t put down Dionne Brand’s new and collected poems Nomenclature since it arrived a little while ago, after the once through (a second for sections of it) I find myself returning to Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia for a master class in epigrams and biting wit.