TtD supplement #282 : seven questions for Beatriz Hausner

Beatriz Hausner has published several poetry collections, including The Wardrobe Mistress (2003), Sew Him Up (2010), Enter the Raccoon (2012), Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart (2020) and She Who Lies Above (2023), as well as many limited-edition chapbooks, most recently The Oh Oh (2025). Her books have been published internationally and translated into several languages, including her native Spanish, French, and most recently Greek. Hausner writes extensively about surrealism and her translations of Spanish American surrealist poets have exerted an important influence on her own writing. Hausner has edited journals and magazines, including Open Letter, ellipse, Exile Quarterly, as well as many of the books published during her tenure as a publisher of Quattro Books. She is the editor of Someone Editions, and its current project French Letter Society. Beatriz Hausner was President of the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada and Chair of the Public Lending Right Commission. She lives in Toronto where she publishes The Philosophical Egg, an organ or living surrealism. Currently, with Russell Smith, she curates and runs the lecture series Soluble Fish. 

Her poems “Never Body Seemingly” and “We Have Arrived at the Sixth Month” appear in the forty-sixth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “Never Body Seemingly” and “We Have Arrived at the Sixth Month.”

A: “Never Body Seemingly,” and “We Have Arrived at the Sixth Month” belong to a long suite of poems written in the summer of 2015. The impetus was Aaron Tucker’s invitation to interact with The Chessbard, a website he and Jody Miller developed with a view to poetic creation. I am and have always been interested in poetics that come into being when my imagination is allowed to work automatically against, and with constraints, whatever their form. 

Systems of representation of objects, such as bibliographic description, which merges punctuation, letters, numbers and other signs to describe books as objects/artifacts, is something I’ve been attracted to since my days as a student specializing in Book History & Print Culture. So, when Aaron Tucker suggested I work with the notation/description of one of the six legendary chess games between chess master Garry Kasparov and the computer Deep Blue, I jumped at the opportunity. The process of free-associating, riffing from and with symbols is very similar to ekphrastic writing based on visual images, something I’ve been doing for almost two decades. (Most of that work, except for one piece published by Barry Callaghan in Exile Quarterly in 2023, and chosen by Bardia Sinaee for Best Canadian Poetry 2024, remains unpublished, simply because the art that inspired the collaborative creation is by international surrealist artists [Canadian publishers are not allowed to publish books that contain work by non-nationals]). 

The notation for the Kasparov-Deep Blue chess game is comprised of 15 lines of capital letters, lower case letters, plus signs, periods and many numbers (no Roman numerals). I wrote fifteen poems, each based on one line of the notation. The suite of poems follows the order in the notation.

My riffing off each symbol in each line very naturally called upon automatism, so that the very constraint of those tightly represented symbols functioned like doors opening my mind. Parallel to the chess notation I used verse from an anthology of Latin poetry, which I collaged into the poems, when they served my purpose. The Latin poem excerpts are denoted in italics. To “represent” the notation proper, the words that refer to a specific letter, number, or punctuation is Capitalized. 

“Never the Body Seemingly” and “We Have Arrived at the Sixth Month” correspond to the second and fourth lines of the Kasparov-Deep Blue chess game notation, respectively:

7. Nbd2 O-O 8. h3 a5 9. a4 dxe5 10. dxe5 Na6 11. O-O Nc5

12. Qe2 Qe8 13. Ne4 Nbxa4 14. Bxa4 Nxa4 15. Re1 Nb6 16. Bd2 a4

The suite of poems itself is titled The Oh Oh. The individual poems in it were originally written in blocks of continuous text, no breaks. “Never the Body Seemingly” and “We Have Arrived at the Sixth Month” have been structured in a way that turns the original automatic text into poems that function more formally. Both pure automatism and more formal, structured poetics respond and express the surrealist philosophy that guides and defines me.

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

The writing of the poems “Never Body Seemingly” and “We Have Arrived at the Sixth Month” corresponds to a kind of continuum in my process. I have always been guided by an intense need to explore new forms that respond to the voice[s] and themes that obsess me. 

I began writing early, while still living at home. I wrote in Spanish, because it was my literary language at the time. Ludwig Zeller, my stepfather, an extraordinary Spanish-language poet was my guide, and the person I largely owe my poetic education to. My first “real” poem was inspired by a party I organized in a studio I shared with university students and artists on Adelaide Street in Toronto. I wrote it very naturally using automatism as a means of coming up with the rhythm and the images that could forge the poem. I don’t know quite how I did it, but somehow the syncopation of all that music entered my inner spaces and resulted in “Sacrificio en clave the percusión,” which I self-translated as “Sacrifice in Percussion Key.” I worked closely with Ludwig in the subsequent draft, learning from him the rudiments of editing. The challenge was, and remains, to create form and structure, without losing any of the expressiveness inherent in the automatic original.

Over the ten years that followed, I concentrated on literary translations, mostly the poetry of Latin American surrealism. I can’t overstate how transforming that experience proved itself to be. I became the poet I am today thanks to the rigorous demands placed on me to create true, expressive linguistic and poetic transfer from Spanish into English. 

I returned to writing my own poetry in the mid 1990s, this time authoring my work using my father’s surname. From this period date The Wardrobe Mistress, and the poems that would constitute Sew Him Up.

My first two full-length poetry collections, The Wardrobe Mistress (2003) and Sew Him Up (2010) explore, through the construct of sewing, of clothes, of the things we don, two themes that continue to obsess me, namely eroticism and knowledge-seeking. Black humour and a sense of longing characterize the mood of the two books.

A shift occurred in me in the late 2000s. I turned to writing a kind of prose poetry that incorporated essay writing and micro fiction depicting the love affair between a woman and human-size raccoon, a being endowed with the capacity of transforming himself into a pleasure tool, at once cyborg and flesh-and-blood-man. In other words, a magic being. The merging of genres suited itself perfectly for the inter-species narrative poetics that became Enter the Raccoon.

Around that time, I became instinctively drawn to writing with constraints, such as the chess notation I used to write “Never Body Seemingly” and “We Have Arrived at the Sixth Month.” I found the process incredibly liberating. A kind of deepening became suddenly accessible: always, what guides me internally is to extract meaning from language and the writing process itself. In other words, whatever techniques I adopt, whatever forms I explore, the point is to open my mind so extremely, as to get the conscious and the unconscious to work as one, together, without barriers. Ideas, images, even concepts emerge in ways that stimulate my creativity, and never cease to surprise me. I admit that it can be incredibly difficult to arrive at that kind of openness, mostly because my existence, at least in the Anglo-Canadian culture I function in, feels like a constant struggle against barriers and limitation. The image that comes to mind is that of Don Quixote, a modern proto artist if there is one, battling those terrifying windmills, believing they are armies…

To automatism and constraints, I added collaging, ekphrastic writing, and other means to my poetic toolbox, to write Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart and She Who Lies Above. While writing those two books I often felt like one of those ancient alchemists who sought to create gold by extracting, macerating, blending and distilling from base metals, what they understood as the essential substances. Writing now finds me at the threshold of yet more exploration of form and content, to arrive at the always-goal, the absolute itself, which André Breton once named “le point sublime.” 

Q: How do you feel your work has developed across, through and since this shift that occurred, as you say, in the late 2000s? What kinds of relationship has your current work with the work from that earlier period?

A: The other day I watched a documentary about Robert Mapplethorpe. It occurred to me that his exploration of Eros, at the time ground-breaking in its capacity to shock, quickly became accepted and even mainstreamed. The reason for this is, I think, the importance and emphasis Mapplethorpe placed on his personal and commercial success. Not that his art and the spirit that imbued it wasn’t deeply invested in the transformation of ideas and society itself, but there is no question that the market, and his place in it, were important to him. In this regard, Mapplethorpe and the art trade that exploded the commercial value of his work fit perfectly within the politics of extraction which perpetuate Capitalism’s takeover of all aspects of society, including the products of the imagination. That is where Mapplethorpe and I part ways, to my detriment as a writer of erotic poetry.

Beginning with Enter the Raccoon, culminating with Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart, and explored in the larger context of its relation to knowledge in She Who Lies Above, all three published by Book*hug Press, I have, over a long period experimented tirelessly with form and language, often taking detours into literary traditions well outside of my own, to find ways of expressing erotic love in its complete, even absolute dimension. Eros is likely to remain a constant in my work, inescapably so, because I see it as creation itself, hence the perfect vehicle for the liberation of the mind and, by extension, the world. 

Let me focus on Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart. In this work, I found my energies in the Troubadours of Provence and beyond, widely understood as the creators of modern verse and, importantly for me, the inventors of romantic love as we’ve come to know it in the lyric and genres such as film. I found my twin in the Countess of Dia, outstanding trobairitz from the 12th Century, whose name, spelled Beatritz, or Beatrice, is also mine. The beauty of expression of her small corpus of work nurtured and inspired me as much as the poetry of the major Troubadours, including Arnaut de Marueil, the Duke of Aquitaine, and Jaufre Rudel, famous for his songs of amor lointain, who died of love. I worked with various constraints, experimenting with form, imagery, and rhythm. The point, throughout, was to extract meaning and express physical desire through language, by collaging (mainly Latin poetry in translation and the lyrics of New Wave and Punk music) and transforming the whole into a great big celebration of my guys’ cocks. The poetry in Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart is explicitly erotic, something that is altogether natural, if we consider language to be the primary tool for honestly expressing the world in all its joyous complexity and dimensionality. It may be that poems such as “The Orgasm Elegies,” inspired in its length and intent in the liberating poetics of bpNichol’s the martyrology, are simply too explicit in their heterosexual love expression for the current zeitgeist, especially since the pandemic, which started just as Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart was being launched in April of 2020.

Q: You mention a number of poets that have influenced the ways in which you approach your work, including the late Toronto poet bpNichol. Have there been any poets more contemporary that have changed the way you think about writing? Who are you currently reading?

A: It is true that I have tended, in terms of influence on my writing, to return to the poets that formed me. They include, but are not limited to the poets of surrealism, including César Moro, André Breton, Joyce Mansour, and Aldo Pellegrini; I return often to César Vallejo, and from Canada, aside from bpNichol, I frequently revisit the work of the late Gwendolyn MacEwen and W.W.E. Ross.

Quebec’s Nicole Brossard and Jean-Marc Desgent are two authors whose writing continues to inspire me. So does Stephen Cain’s. His poetry is pretty astonishing, something I mentioned in another interview you generated, rob! His poetry is dynamic, formally impeccable, and erudite, especially where referencing the Avant Garde is concerned. I consider my poetry to be very different from my late stepfather’s, Ludwig Zeller, but there is no question that his approach to poetics continues to influence me, especially lately, while I’ve been organizing his manuscripts and papers.

I am rereading Ray Ellenwood’s translation of Claude Gauvreau’s opera The Vampire and the Nymphomaniac. And I just bought Volumes I and II of Christian Bök’s Xenotext, a work of great beauty and perfection, though, to the extent that I understand it, I hesitate to accept the theoretical construct that anchors it. I am also reading Bellas damas sin Piedad, an anthology of essays about women surrealists, edited, with a brilliant introduction and supporting texts by Lurdes Martínez, of the Madrid surrealist group. Concurrent with it, and thanks to the good offices of Charlie Huisken, who found the book, I am reading Meret Oppenheim’s The Loveliest Vowel Empties: Collected Poems. Oppenheim was, in my opinion, an extraordinary artist. To conclude, I am slowly making my way through Arni Brownstone’s Indigenous War Painting of the Plains: An Illustrated History, an eminently readable scholarly book that enriches my perception of my very favourite space in the world, the Canadian Prairies.

Touch the Donkey : forty-sixth issue,

The forty-sixth issue is now available, with new poems by Kirstin Allio, Kemeny Babineau, Joseph Donato, Beatriz Hausner, Matthew Walsh, Nicole Markotić, Lisa Pasold, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas and Emily Izsak.

Eight dollars (includes shipping). Are you sure it’s on!? I can’t hear a thing!

TtD supplement #281 : six questions for Larkin Maureen Higgins

Larkin Maureen Higgins is a poet/artist/professor emerita whose poetic and hybrid works can be found in Diagram, Notre Dame Review, Eleven Eleven, Chant de la Sirène Journal, Otoliths, elsewhere. Mindmade Books published her Of Traverse and Template (poems and logographic drawings). With Dusie, she has two poetry chapbooks: Of Materials, Implements and c o m b - i n g  m i n e - i n g s , plus the broadside “Soil Culture, Frankenstein—Grafted.” Additionally, her poems have been anthologized by University of Iowa Press, Tebot Bach, others. Higgins’ visual poetry is included in the Avant Writing Collection/The Ohio State University Libraries and was exhibited at Counterpath Gallery (Denver), Otis College of Art & Design, and more. Over the years, she has exhibited her artist’s books/objects while also creating text-driven performance art for venues such as Highways Performance Space, Counterpath, and BC Space.

Her poems “Open Equation” and “something approximately akin to gliding through” appear in the forty-fifth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “Open Equation” and “something approximately akin to gliding through.”

A: “Open Equation” is in response to the question posed to a group of Los Angeles-based writers, “What do you say?” With some additional prompts such as “How do you begin in dedication to another?”—I understood it to be a community call for text pieces in which language could be an offering of “encouragement, inspiration, or new beginnings” following our long years of pandemic isolation & continued challenges. I found myself desiring to create a portal of uplift. And, even though my writing was created in solitude, it felt like I was part of a community unified by this global dilemma—needing to soothe our anxieties, at least for a moment, enough to move on to the next task.

The poem’s shape is the trail of a sidewalk path. I inserted some mathematics terminology, which comes naturally since I was a math major in high school. I find the language of geometry to be diagrammatic in my mind, helping me envision imagery and also to embed a kind of visual grounding logic that assists observation &/or metaphor.

In contrast, “something approximately akin to gliding through” is a poem I have been tinkering with for quite some time. It melds my actual childhood ocean experiences with my underwater dreams. The form differs from “Open Equation” by floating across the page, dipping & swaying. Seaweed anatomy terms (stipe, blades, thallus, holdfast) are woven throughout with an idea that these may have additional resonance. This poem was a way of re-living my memories of being in the ocean, with the visceral qualities of a “body” of seaweed interlacing with the human body. I have had dreams—since childhood—taking place underwater, breathing freely.

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

A: For comparison, process-wise: I had never written an entire text poem while walking a neighborhood street; intuitively prompted to take my cell phone from my pocket, pausing my feet periodically to type a line into “Notes,” until the end of my walk marked the poem’s last line—this is how “Open Equation” happened. It was composed within the framework & spirit of spontaneity, from the initial question—thanks to Andrea Quaid & Harold Abramowitz for the prompt.

And with “something approximately akin to gliding through,” I made a list of seaweed anatomy terms, then selected some to swirl a poem around the experience of being among, in the ocean. The poem is all lower case with scant punctuation, just a couple hyphenated words, slashes, apostrophes. 

Usually, by contrast, I’m sitting down, cocooning inside a room, writing phrases in longhand my mind evokes or borrowing segments from previously handwritten notes, & combining these onto gridded notebook pages. Then type, adding/rearranging/deleting whole lines &/or words, & consulting the dictionary. Often experimenting with punctuation marks & typographical symbols—placing/crafting these as architectural linkage for the poem as support for its content/meaning—choosing to only use marks/symbols found typically on a typewriter keyboard (not fancy apps). This is one of the ways I’ve been working lately on poems, especially for tributes to people who “make” things, labor skillfully. Also, & separately, I’ve been drawn to smaller forms, like haiku & hay(na)ku. Having a smaller container to fill with words is a welcomed detour—these tend to be eco-poetic in leanings.

However, the word “lately” feels abstract to me because I’m often returning to ways of working I used years or decades ago (consciously or not) with maybe an added element or updated physical or techie tools. Or perhaps a reconsideration of a poem I wrote 25 years ago or more & finally decide it has some merit to maybe send out—which actually occurred last week!

Additionally, I have intermittent text art & visual poetry projects. Yet I was creating pieces that would fit in these categories when I was in elementary & middle school, doing things like carving linoleum blocks with my own stylized lettering which of course I would have to carve in reverse so when I rolled ink over the block with a brayer & placed a sheet of paper on top, then used the smooth curved part of a metal spoon to rub&press it—finally, carefully pulled the print, & yay, the text was right-reading. I learned about the malleability of language with these kinds of visceral, physical processes at a young age. My father was a printmaker (etchings/serigraphs/monotypes) & painter for his personal creative work & a graphic designer for “a living” income. My mother was a watercolorist & creative in many ways. They were both voracious readers (& so was I, beginning in elementary school), books everywhere. I wish I could’ve taken the Print Shop class (printing press) in middle school—I would have loved that. Yet in my day, girls were not allowed to—nor take Wood Shop, only the boys. However, gladly, my first published poem was included in the literary/art magazine at middle school. In high school I was asked to design the cover for our class commencement ceremony program. With a rapidograph pen, I hand drew (no stencils/templates) my own original alphabet font, then spelled our class name “I Vincitori” + drew a stylized torch symbol, also with pen. I watched the pressman print the covers with the high school’s printing press, while I stood “safely afar” as dictated. During that same time period, what truly thrilled me was I earned an A+ on a poem in my Composition class! (We were studying e e cummings & Ferlinghetti.) Therefore, this working back & forth & sometimes simultaneously with both written words & the visual elements of type & layout-on-the-page is inherent to my creative experience since childhood. Hence why I find it difficult to think of my work fitting into a clear linear timeline when my ways of working overlap through the decades.

What I learned early on is—there are endless ways to “make” a word, phrase, or sentence. This I find exciting! My continued attention & sensitivity to the layout/form/shape of a poem is ingrained due to my formative years (before grad schools) using a plethora of "typesetting" or letter&symbol “making” processes, handmade to mechanical, such as:

type-high linoleum block for linocut word printing
metal type (using composing stick) & wood type for letterpress
Letraset press-on letters (dry transfer)
Linotype machine (hot metal typecasting typesetting)
platen printing press
Compugraphic phototypesetting machine
layout/paste-up of pre-press book pages the old fashioned way, with X-acto knife & rubber cement or wax
Leroy Lettering 
mechanical inking (by hand) with electrical engineer's symbols template, etc.

The body & mind memories of these “making language” processes, most considered archaic now, are still embedded into my consciousness—still influencing me.

I tend to approach each poem as an individual entity for exploration.
Unless I’ve been given an “assignment” with a deadline to create a particular project, like a chapbook, I tend to jump from writing poem to poem. Assuming, eventually, a natural thread occurs.

Q: I find it curious the process you describe, one of assembling scraps and carving lines. How do you feel this process has evolved for you over the years? Do your materials hold together in the same way, or has something evolved in the ways in which you compose work?

A: Over the years, I’ve been lucky to be invited to create several chapbook manuscripts that gave me full independence. When a project begins with a vote of confidence by a publisher, this spurs me on to experiment. With all of my chapbooks, I began to include some source text material, which I had not done before. For example, Of Traverse and Template (Mindmade Books) contains poems related to motion, movement, & buoyancy, therefore I interjected some language from Galileo Galilei’s Discourse on Floating Bodies (1612) & other appropriate source texts involving road-making & also the book, The Young Surveyor. Extensive commuting to my college teaching job being the catalyst—over hills, highways, coastline. Intertwined with the text poems are my logographic drawings (created with a symbolic language used by traffic accident investigators) as well as visually structural uses of punctuation, as connectivity. One might say it’s setting up a dialectic between verbal/text poems and visual poems, “colliding” on a graphic and conceptual level.

As I think I alluded to previously, I tend to approach each project “anew” yet I know I have more of a “collage” brain, with the tendency to piece things together—even if my single poem or poetry project is entirely written text, which is often the case. It is the “anew” part that seems to bring in “new” components, experiments, curiosities, sources. Keeping the writing/making poetry process alive.

I still seem to focus on the construction aspects of a poem, especially how its form/shape infuses meaning & supports the text. At this moment in time, I'm being drawn to the sound or music of the poem—how it can carry you inside the words, reverberate.

Sometimes I think of a poem as sculpture, with a voice; sometimes as collage; & sometimes as lines of text with breath.

Q: Perhaps you’ve touched on bits of this already, but with a handful of chapbooks under your belt over the years, how do you feel your work has progressed? What do you see your work heading towards?

A: Of course there are endless possibilities when one approaches writing & gathering poems for a book (of any size). I’m just glad I managed to figure out what to include & when to say “finished” for those projects. For me, that is a huge accomplishment! And progress. One can keep writing singular poems forever, & that’s okay too. There is a kind of freedom in not having a specific “container” in mind while composing a poem. And other times, I find having a thematic thread becomes a catalyst for discoveries. As to where my work is headed, I hope to be surprised. I want to keep exploring the malleability of language, how meaning is made. And, hmmm, it is definitely time for me to assemble another manuscript.

Q: After a period of writing, is building manuscripts simply a matter of assembling? Has that process evolved at all over the years? What might that process look like?

A: This is such a great question because, truly, there is so much thought that goes into a manuscript. Since I’ve been a hands-on maker of books, I like to see each poem printed out on a paper page, then shuffle these around to spot possible new juxtapositions I hadn’t thought of related to sequencing. With the chapbooks, each page size being 8-1/2” x 5.5” (half letter size) made it easy for me to tape all the pages to the bathroom wall from near the ceiling to the floor! (My only blank wall space at the time :-) This way I could physically move around the ordering & get a clear overall view of how the pages worked, holistically. I could walk past this wall installation daily, noting a possible need for linkage or contrast (or edit), being sensitive to rhythms, varying poem placements on the page, their shapes self-contained or merging/extending, & how did this affect the content of the read? Numerous elements to consider yet usually this becomes an organic or intuitive reckoning, eventually, because of being able to see it in total in actual size all at once. Obviously, I know there is computer software that can simulate this way of assembling a book, but not to true size, unless one has a huge film screening room hooked up to a computer ;-) Yet I’m now positive that my hesitation for creating a larger manuscript between 60-125 pages has been because it would prevent me from using my “natural” way-of-working process. However, I’m ready now for the challenge to try an alternative method. 

Since a larger manuscript would include poems written during a longer time period, it might be a chance to revisit work from possibly the 1990s through 2025. Maybe. Time will tell. I’m still thinking a stack of poems will be shuffled, for sure, to see what unexpected linkages may arise or what poems float to the top & stay for consideration. I’ve worked within an eclectic assortment of forms, from prose poems to the more abstract. With poems published by presses that don’t exist anymore. I’m getting excited about delving into what combinations could possibly serve each other in intriguing ways.

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

A: There is such an extraordinary pool of poets I can dip into for nourishment & the gift of permission, to continue writing inspired by innovative thinking & experimental techniques. When I read Alice Notley’s “White Phosphorus” the first time, it was exactly the necessary example I needed to see/read—as fragments/phrases becoming an accretion of language, gathering layers of meaning. Since I am not a linear thinker, yet someone who jots down pieces of text to later thread together, Notley’s individually quotation-marked word-fragments spoke to me. I felt welcomed to accept my inherent way of working, & that building a poem out of multiple text fragments was intrinsic, useful, & could be dynamically effective. Alice Notley was extraordinary at this, & much more. I was also lucky to take a poetry workshop from her circa 2001 at Beyond Baroque in Venice/Los Angeles, which I am especially grateful for. Notley was/is a brilliant spirit. 

Coincidentally, I was fortunate to have a funded sabbatical project (2014) which enabled me to fly to & stay in New York for several weeks of special events, one of them being a reading by both Alice Notley & Rosmarie Waldrop at Poets House!

Which brings me to Rosmarie Waldrop’s Driven to Abstraction—a book I am thrilled to re-visit.  When I was a younger person writing poetry, I was told that mathematics & philosophy didn’t belong in poems. Yet these subjects interested me, so I continued to include references to geometry & various philosophical-leaning terms. When I came across Driven to Abstraction, her poetry was incredibly nourishing to me—I continue to be enamoured with Rosmarie Waldrop's use of language, her intellectually curious prose poems investigating abstraction historically, psychologically, mathematically, philosophically, seems everything—as an exceptional creative force of the mind, rhythm & sound. And her other books, too—endlessly engaging.

I add to this list Gertrude Stein, her many books, especially Tender Buttons, continue to rejuvenate. The linguistic play, “verbal cubism,” sounds & visual arrangement of words. Knowing the writer is not required to have a traditional narrative to capture the interest of a reader—in actuality, I learned from her—that inventive experimentation draws attention to language.

In addition, Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary always brings me a smile. Firstly, its title, because personally I literally would fall asleep with The Random House Dictionary of the English Language: The Unabridged Edition, in my bed—a massively large, thick hardbound book (gifted by my parents). Turning my body around during sleep would cause a hip or arm to hit the book corners & leave a bruise. That’s when you know you are committed to your dictionary! In Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary, I get revitalized by her elastic, inventive use of language, her humor & social commentary within serious word play. Her prose poems adventurously crafted with the use of word games: acrostic, anagram, homophone, Oulipo N+7, parody, pun. And the table of contents reads as an abecedarian. A never-ending joy to read & re-read.

This poet/writer book list is definitely not comprehensive, there could be an entire volume of names & book titles I re-visit for their energizing merits, yet I’m adding a few more names without accompanying explanations to keep this answer from being unmanageable—they are (in a random list):
Emily Dickinson, Lisa Robertson, Will Alexander, Lyn Hejinian, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Coral Bracho, Cecilia Vicuña, Myung Mi Kim, Anne Carson, & many more.

I must add, in this quest to wrestle with language, braid it into something creatively meaningful, layered, it has been invigorating having community to do this within. I’m enormously thankful for the numerous workshops & classes over the decades & into the present—the facilitators, teachers, participants, editors, publishers, & poet friends—who have propelled my writing. And for poetry readings, to hear the language!