TtD supplement #13: eight questions for Megan Kaminski

Megan Kaminski’s first book of poetry is Desiring Map (Coconut Books, 2012). She is also the author of seven chapbooks, most recently Wintering Prairie (Dusie Kollektiv, 2014), which was recently reissued by above/ground press. Her current work Deep City explores the body and the city as architectures in crisis. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Kansas and curates the Taproom Poetry Series in downtown Lawrence.

Her piece “Sister // Deer” appears in the third issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the extended poem “Sister // Deer.” How did it originate?

A: My second book, Deep City, is going to be coming out next year—I’ll have an official announcement soon—and “Sister // Deer” is part of my new/current project Gentlewomen. The poems in Gentlewomen play around with and revise gendered domesticity through a re-imagining of the voices of female allegorical figures, specifically Natura, Providentia, and Fortuna—giving voice to particularly feminine desires and appetites. The poems consider the kinds of wildness and incivility that arise from a rejection of various forms of cultivation. They also celebrate feral longings and weedy appetites as counterforces to productivity and as a means of reclaiming the wild. As I’ve been working on the project, I’ve become particularly interested in sisters and the idea of sisterhood, in the relation of the allegorical figures to each other and also the relations of the various other women who inhabit the book—lost girls, icy mothers, drowned and ghosted children, and also the two sisters who get their own long poems, “Dear Sister” and “Sister // Deer.” While “Dear Sister” and her correspondences (there’s an excerpt here at Two Serious Ladies) live very much in the suburban domestic sphere, “Sister // Deer” rejects that world. While I think of her poems very much as spoken utterances, as a kind of response to her sister, they are also language eroded through a kind of self-erasure. A resistance to pleasantries and the types of usefulness and meaning that create the language of her sister. The poems aren’t conventional utterances, and they aren’t the type of responses one might expect to correspondence, and “Sister // Deer” herself perhaps isn’t quite human.

Q: Is this a normal part of your composition process: writing around and through a particular subject/idea?

A: I don’t typically start out with a particular subject—at least not an encompassing and defined subject. In this case I started thinking broadly about voice, examining and playing around with the authority of voice and questions about who gets to speak/who gets to be heard. I’m particularly interested in how these questions play out along lines of gender, class, race, and ecological systems. So I guess I had these set of concerns in mind when I started writing. Gradually the voice of Natura came out in the poems—this loving and at the same time brutal mother and sister. That voice developed in the poems, and as I was writing, I started doing research—a whole ton of research. Research into literary history, literatures and theories of the feral, various ecological systems, philosophical explorations of nature and fortune, and allegorical depictions of women throughout history. That research fueled my writing and the project. I guess this is how my compositional process always goes. For me writing poetry is a way of thinking, about the world, about language, about bodies, about architectures, about capital, about how they all fit together. I’m always thinking, and I'm quite often writing, and every once in a while something comes along that coheres into something interesting enough to pursue as a creative/intellectual project. I’m always thinking and writing and doing research—only a small part of the work I create makes its way into the world.

Q: You give the impression that you are very much working within the framework of the book as unit of composition. Is this a fair assessment, or do you focus more on the individual poem, or handful of poems? Are your books constructed as complete units or more as a collection of disparate parts that eventually cohere into larger projects?

A: Sometimes I write a poem or poems and sometimes I work in larger units. I’m always looking for connections, ways in which poems are thinking through something. Sometimes that thought works itself out in the duration of a single poem, though often the initial thread develops into something larger—a series or even a chapbook or book. I’m always looking to raise additional questions and to develop resonances outside of the initial moment or thought. Since I’m hard at work on a book length manuscript, I am currently very much focused on the form of the book. That said, each book manuscript that I work is part of a larger process of inquiry. The book-to-be, Gentlewomen, is only a small part of the larger intellectual/creative project. There are other writings and creations associated with the project, different ways of thinking through some of the material and ideas that are coalescing into the book manuscript. Some of the writing and research associated with the larger project has developed in the form of book reviews, poetics papers and talks, somatic exercises, and even a textile project. And there’s also a lot of research and writing and thinking associated with the project that will never make its way into the larger world. I’m not so interested in being efficient or productive in a way that is readily recognizable, each book manuscript is only a small part of what I am up to.

Q: What else are you up to?

A: Besides the book manuscript I mentioned earlier, I’m working on a few scattered projects. I’m writing some poems about weeds, bodies, connections, and riots and some poems about the prairie. Working on a lost girls embroidery project. Working on a collaborative project with the poet Bonnie Roy. Reading and thinking a lot about the post-human, citizenry, bodies, crisis, incarceration, revolution, and other things for a residency I’m participating in Joshua Tree. And also thinking about all these things in connection with the poems I have been writing about weeds and weedy connections.

Q: Tell me about this upcoming residency: does this mean you’ll be working on a specific project involving “the post-human, citizenry, bodies, crisis, incarceration, revolution, and other things” while there? What are you imagining this project might look like, or are you still in the preliminary research stages?

A: It’s through the Summer Forum for Inquiry + Exchange, which is a roving residency program in its second year/incarnation, this summer in Joshua Tree, California. This year’s theme is “Networks of Belonging: Geographies, Citizenries, and the Masses,” and there will be residents, invited guests, and organizers all getting together to collaborate through readings, discussions, presentations, and art-making. I’ve been working my way through the extensive reading list this spring and summer and also making connections through other research that I have been doing on my own. This coming week, we’ll all be together in Joshua Tree. I’ve never participated in something like this before, and I’m excited about the ways in which the residency connects with my previous and current work. I’m also excited about the generative possibilities of this week-long exchange in Joshua Tree and the ongoing exchange after. I’m guessing that this will be the start of something new for me in terms of a poetic project. Mostly though, I’m excited about being a part of a larger community of artists, philosophers, and writers, with all of us exploring and grappling with these larger questions. Writing can sometimes feel like an isolating experience, even if what drives you in your writing is a desire to connect.

Q: After one poetry collection and a small handful of chapbooks (as well as this current work-in-progress), how do you feel your work has developed? What, if anything, do you feel you are working toward?

A: I don’t really think of my work in a narrative of progress—so there’s not really a goal or an end that I am working towards. When I first start conceiving them, my individual book and chapbooks projects feel like they are doing quite different things—experimenting with different voices, forms, subjects, etc—but as I spend more time with each of them, I see connections. I continue to be interested in various geographies and architecture—of the natural and made world, of the mind, of the self, of language, of larger systems and networks. Though, I suspect that describes a pretty broad and encompassing field of inquiry.

Q: Winter seems to be a thread that exists through your poetry. What is it about the subject that compels?

A: Well, this winter was particularly rough in Kansas, as for much of the country. My recent chapbook, Wintering Prairie (Dusie 2014), is a long poem devoted to exploring the season and how it mediates our relation to place, specifically the prairie that spreads across Kansas. Besides that poem, I’m not sure if winter is more central to my writing than any other season. Though, I am often surprised and startled by the length and intensity of the season, and perhaps summer, too, after spending so much time in more temperate places.

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

A: Oh—there are so many! Some current and sustaining favorites include Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Leslie Scalapino, C.S. Giscombe (especially Giscombe Road), Renee Gladman’s Ravicka series, Fanny Howe, Joseph Massey, Terry Tempest Williams, Bhanu Kapil, Erín Moure, Giorgio Agamben, Michael Palmer, Jennifer Moxley, Gina Myers, Jen Tynes, Ji Yoon Lee, Melissa Buzzeo, Pattie McCarthy, Joshua Clover, Cecilia Vicuña, Michelle Naka Pierce, Stephen Collis, Lisa Robertson—so many wonderful writers. And that’s just who’s on the top of my mind this morning.

TtD supplement #12: seven questions for derek beaulieu

derek beaulieu is the author or editor of 15 books, the most recent of which are Please, No more poetry: the poetry of derek beaulieu (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013) and kern (Les Figues press, 2014). He is the publisher of the acclaimed no press and is the visual poetry editor at UBUWeb. beaulieu has exhibited his work across Canada, the United States and Europe and currently teaches at the Alberta College of Art + Design and Mount Royal University. He is the 2014—2016 Poet Laureate of Calgary.
   
His piece “one week” appears in the third issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the extended prose piece “one week.” How did it originate?

A: I was invited by Richard Harrison to be a part of the “Al Mutanabbi Street Starts Here” project with a pair of readings, one in 2011 and one this last spring. Mutanabbi Street is the historic center of Baghdad bookselling, a street filled with bookstores and outdoor book stalls. A car bomb exploded and killed 26 people on Mutanabbi Street on March 5, 2007, decimating this cultural hub. For the 2nd reading I composed a new piece that applies the ideas of conceptual writing. This piece consists solely of press releases outlining the deaths in Iraq during the week that Al-Mutanabbi street was bombed.

Q: Have you utilized this kind of flarf-esque structure before? What do you see as the effect of a piece such as this?

A: Well, I don’t think that “one week” is a flarf poem in the slightest, it works along more Conceptual frameworks. Flarf poetry is written with an eye to what wikipedia says are “rejected conventional standards of quality and explored subject matter and tonality not typically considered appropriate for poetry.” Flarf poems are written to be intentionally corrosive, cute, or cloyingly wacky. “one week” on the other hand is closer to conceptualism whereby it scrapes the internet for language and then presents it back without filter—a means of presenting daily language in a way which draws attention to its poetics—there’s nothing cute or cloying about the reporting coming from Iraq.

Q: Given that such a conceptual framework, as the back cover of Please, No More Poetry: The Poetry of derek beaulieu (2013) suggests, “challenges the very idea of reading,” I wonder about how such a piece is considered in various contexts. For example: an audience in an art gallery reading such a piece on the wall might be more open to its conceptual frameworks, but even a highly-literate literary audience reading the same piece in a poetry journal is still subject to a narrower view. Is part of the purpose of the piece to simply challenge the idea of what “poem” is currently considered?

A: I wouldn’t say that the purpose of the piece is solely to challenge our expectations of poetry, no. That said, Conceptual and Concrete poetry both challenge our reading habits. My friend Christian Bök jibes that the reason why so much text art is unsuccessful is that people don’t like to read standing up. I think that in a lot of ways the reading that we do most often occurs standing up—standing on public transit, walking down the street, waiting in line—and that poetry can only benefit from engaging with this new reading spaces.

Q: Have you composed any other pieces along the lines of “one week”?

A: Yes, for the most part it’s the same strategy I used for the majority of How to Write (Talonbooks, 2010). The internet provides an unending source of material, it’s just a matter of where to look and how to choose.

Q: I’ve always had the impression that you predominantly worked on larger projects. What happens with the small one-offs you create in-between, or are they eventually to be part of something larger as well? I’m curious, too, about the piece “from Extispicium” in the uncollected section of Please, No More Poetry. Was it also constructed using a similar strategy?

A: In addition to larger projects like flatland, Local Colour and The Newspaper, I always have smaller pieces on the go in various stages. Those poems are sometimes occasional and sometimes are incorporated in to larger sequences, depends on the piece. Extispicium is a long-term project that combines personal narrative with harvested testimony and phrases from survivors of abuse and bullying.

Q: I’m intrigued at the political engagement of “one week” and the social engagement of Extispicium, elements I haven’t been aware of in your prior work. Is this a relatively new element you’ve been exploring, or simply one that’s more overt? What do you consider, if any, the social responsibilities of art? Or does it live at the level of honest engagement?

A: Conceptual writing (and Concrete poetry) is often dismissed as apolitical. I think that it is, in fact, highly charged within a political awareness of subjectivity, ownership, theft and formulations of the commons. Rob Fitterman’s No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself (Ugly Duckling, 2014) is a perfect example—in it Fitterman has crafted a deeply intimate, deeply personal, lyrical longpoem crated entirely from phrases and confessions he scraped from chatboards and internet postings. Subjectivity and ownership—poetic property—are charged spaces. I would say that my work has continuous engagement with the politics of reading and theft.

Q: As a writer, publisher, editor and critic, you are extremely engaged with a variety of practitioners of Conceptual writing as well as concrete and visual poetries across Canada and across the globe. Who would you consider are the current writers that should be receiving more attention? What emerging writers would you recommend we watch out for?

A: I strongly recommend the emerging poets who have been featured in 89+ / POETRY WILL BE MADE BY ALL especially #girlproblems by Victoria Braun and Space Administration by Ken Hunt ... and there’s a tonne more in that great, foreword-thinking series…

TtD supplement #11: seven questions for Susan Briante

Susan Briante is the author of Pioneers in the Study of Motion and Utopia Minus, both published by Ahsahta Press. She is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona.

Her piece “THE PHYSICISTS SAY CONSCIOUSNESS” appears in the third issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poem “THE PHYSICISTS SAY CONSCIOUSNESS” How did it originate?

A: For a while, I wrote poems that intersected with the stock market, then searched for another lens through which to look at my world. I started reading articles about contemporary physics and started writing a series of poems in dialogue with the discipline. I found an article that explained how consciousness could be expressed through an equation. (The actual article is written by a neuroscientist, but the impulse that everything could be mapped by equations struck me as having very much to do with the realm of physics.)

Around the same time, our family dog—a wonderful American bulldog named Moon—passed away unexpectedly. As a result of our dog’s death I was confronted with the problem of explaining mortality to our 3.5-year-old daughter without relying on the tropes of Christianity, no longer part of my belief system. I find Buddhist thought and physics comforting in their world views (not without their own spheres of intersection), but I struggle with how to translate those beliefs and possibilities into a language a child can understand.

Q: I know you’ve been working poems utilizing scientific content for some time, so I’m intrigued to hear that you were working on “poems that intersect with the stock market.” What is the appeal with working on poems utilizing, for a number of readers, might be considered “non-poetic” material? What are the difficulties with attempting to work through such subject matter, and what do you think you bring to the conversation between poetry and science?

A: At the University of California San Diego, Rae Armantrout and the astrophysicist Brian Keating have teamed up to teach the course Poetry for Physicists. At the on-line magazine Jacket2, poet Amy Catanzano has written a series of stunning short essays tracing intersections between poetry and physics or what she calls Quantum Poetics. If you want to read my thoughts about the connections between poetics and the stock market, you can find them in my essay “Notes Towards a Poetics of the Dow” at The Volta (http://www.thevolta.org/ewc5-sbriante-p1.html).

For centuries poets have engaged with the most powerful forces or institutions of their time whether we are talking about the Church or the natural world. Defending poetry against accusations that it had no place in a world dominated by scientific thought, Shelley asserted the poet “beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered.” I find the lyric to be an ideal place to map out connections or to explore what Muriel Rukeyser called “the processes and the machines of process” as a way to understand the human condition.

Q: There is something in your essay that is reminiscent of, say, Picasso incorporating influences of African art into his own, which brings about a wave of new energy and influences into European art, thereby irrevocably altering both. Was it a matter of wishing to incorporate a fresh vocabulary into poetry or the engagement with foreign subject matter that first brought you into the idea? And is what brought you in the same reasons you remain?

A: I think as poets we are always excited by language, so yes there is something in addressing a new vocabulary. I was also very interested in engaging with the economic “crisis” of 2008, which marked the beginning of a new economic normal for many people as well as the beginning of a kind of narrative crisis. We measure of our “health” in the United States through economic indexes like the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Most news broadcasts end with those numbers. But why? That’s not an inevitable choice. The nation of Bhutan, for example, measures Gross National Happiness (http://www.gnhbhutan.org/about/) instead of Gross National Product. I created the many of the poems that make up the manuscript, The Market Wonders, by recording the closing number from the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJI), then plugging that number in a variety of search engines that would lead me to texts. I use those texts and closing number of the DJI to inspire or influence the poems I was writing. You can find examples of them here (http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/october-14%E2%80%94-dow-closes-10015) and here (http://atticusreview.org/may-26-the-dow-closes-down-9974/).

The DJI became a lens for me and as I finished that project, I started to look for a lens. For the moment, science, especially physics, has been offering a new viewpoint for me. In the end, it is often about seeing how these perspectives, sets of knowledge, and vocabularies intersect with and inform the quotidian.

Q: When composing poems utilizing either the stock market or physics, how deeply do you need to understand something before you allow yourself to incorporate it into a poem? Or are you learning as you go, and utilizing information as possible bouncing-off points into further possibilities? Or, as you suggest in your first answer, is it all simply a variation on translating ideas, beliefs, and concepts into another series of possibilities, including poetry?

A: I think it is important to treat any subject matter with respect. Naturally one doesn’t want to get things wrong. I tend to read a lot, deeply but also broadly, looking for intersections between fields of knowledge as well as considering the possible blind spots inherent in whatever viewfinder I choose. I’ve always been attracted to poems that offer glimpses into thought processes. I don’t mean stream of consciousness but a recording of awareness. I don’t ever want to colonize material, using it in service of an argument. The poem is not the 5-paragraph essay. The poems need to be a site of active thinking.

Q: That’s the best description of poetry I think I’ve heard yet: a site of active thinking. You’ve already mentioned poets such as Rukeyser and Armantrout, but what other poets influence your work? What writers or writing can you not help but return to?

A: I’m currently reading Lisa Robertson’s XEcologue (which opens with the stunner: “I needed a genre for the times that I go phantom”) and Nilling. Robertson is such a fierce thinker and beautiful writer. I return to and turn to her work when I need to sharpen my mind. I just finished reading Brenda Hillman’s Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, an amazing conclusion to a poetic journey that begin with her book Cascadia. A stack of books await me later this summer as I prepare to teach a course on the lyric “I” and experimental autobiographies: Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, Alice Notley’s Mysteries of Small Houses, Lyn Hejinian’s My Life and of course Wordsworth and Shelley.

I’m also supposed to be reading Capital in the 21st Century for a reading group, but I have not started it yet.

Q: A number of the examples you mention are poets working within the framework of the book as unit of composition. What is your process of constructing a poetry manuscript? Are you aware of the book as your compositional unit, or do you focus more on the individual poem, or handful of poems? Are your books constructed as complete units or more as a collection of disparate parts that eventually cohere into larger projects?

A: I’ve always enjoyed writing poems in series. It’s a way to avoid the absolutely blank page. That said, I think the book as a unit of composition is very fashionable right now. Maybe that’s reason enough to proceed with caution. The danger of the book project lies in its becoming too focused, so that it stunts rather than inspires possibilities. It’s nice to have an “about” when we are writing, but in the end I think it is more exciting and hopefully rewarding to have a “towards” or an “around.” Lately, I have been trying to go to the page with as broad a sense of freedom as I can muster.

Q: Finally, after two trade collections, as well as your current work-in-progress, how do you feel your work is developing? Where do you think you are headed?

A: With each book and book project, I have had a chance to not only explore new intellectual fields but to teach myself something about craft. I’m still an amateur. I am committed to learning something with each new project.

Yesterday I downloaded an undergraduate plan of study for an astronomy major. I’m not sure I’m ready to take calculus again, but I’ve hung the course plan on the corkboard above my desk as a reminder. That’s what I mean about freedom. Every time I go to the page I want to be there not out of habit or obligation, but because there’s something I can do there that I can’t do any place else.

Touch the Donkey : third issue,

The third issue is now available, with new poems by Gil McElroy, j/j hastain, derek beaulieu, Megan Kaminski, Roland Prevost, Emily Ursuliak, Susan Briante and D.G. Jones.





Six dollars (includes shipping). My good looks paid for that pool, and my talent filled it with water.

TtD supplement #10: seven questions for Catherine Wagner

Catherine Wagner’s most recent book is Nervous Device (City Lights, 2012). Her work has been anthologized in the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry (second edition), Best American Erotic Poems and elsewhere. Her performances and poems are archived on the PennSound, Archive of the Now and Poetry Foundation websites, and her work has been translated into German, Norwegian, Slovene and Bengali. A member of the S(W)OP poetics collective in southwest Ohio, she is professor of English at Miami University and lives in Oxford, Ohio with her son.

Her poem “Notice” appears in the second issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: In “Notice,” you’ve built a short prose piece specifically for the journal composed in what could be seen as “corporate-speak,” a deliberately “un-poetic” language. It reminds slightly of Rachel Zolf’s Human Resources (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2007), in which she works to engage with the almost de-humanizing language of the business work-space. What made you decide to engage with such language?

A: I like Rachel Z’s work. Human Resources doesn’t accept the instrumentality of business-world phrases, it’s derailing them and mashing them into this or that terrine or vitrine. My piece uses businessy phrasing but it's not derailing anything phrasally, it’s a full-disclosure statement and not even ironic. For the first half of 2014, I sent “Notice” to any journal that solicited my work, just changing the magazine/editor names in the first sentence. I had been feeling weird about the way poem publication gets monetized for a shrinking class (mine) of academic laborers (publications get entered into annual activities reports and considered when salaries are re-assessed). Despite K Goldsmith’s recently saying “money has no value in poetry,” I wanted to think about money gets into the poetry game or doesn’t. I hoped the poem would come out everywhere at once to maximize publicly my ROI [return on investment] from the poem, but you were the first and almost the only sucker to take it. Either the piece is too obvious/boring/bad or it’s not what people thought they would get when they ordered from my atelier.

So the poem is aimed at laborers in the poetry factory or field (editors, readers, plus the less-visible laborers who make the field available and usable—papermill workers, custodians, code jockeys) and I seriously did want to thank them in it. I’m not sure that comes off. The tone feels different published than it did on my screen.

Q: I’m curious about the response other journals have had to the piece. As an editor, my original response was one of confusion, given that it wasn’t what I was expecting when soliciting your work, but in the end I decided to trust your judgment on what wasn’t entirely clear to me. What have other journals/editors said in response?

A: One said (this was a student editor of Sonora Review) “We very much enjoyed the political inquiry and discussion your piece evoked, which divided our board of 8 readers in a fruitful way” – so nice! they ended up not taking it. Bathhouse, another one run by students, took it and said it was “perfect for the issue”—I don’t know why. But the issue had lots of interesting stuff in it, look at this. I sent to a couple places that asked for prose pieces and that didn’t fly—one said “it’s not quite the right fit for our categories of content (articles, reviews, etc)—though I realize that’s stodgy.” Everybody has been fearsomely polite like you. Was the piece just confusing, or was it confusing because it wasn’t like my other work you’ve seen?

Q: In my case, a bit of both, I’d have to say. There was a part of me that wondered if the piece was meant as a slight to the editor/journal that had requested such. I find it interesting how your work has been moving away from the lyric and more into the conceptual over the past few years, from this current piece to some of the work in Nervous Device. Given your trajectory of over a dozen chapbooks and four poetry collections over the past dozen years, how do you feel your work has developed?

A: So happy you trusted me, yes. I guess I want to explain some more though it’s awk to explain a fail. I wanted the poem to lay out the labor, and the returns on it, that happen when a poem gets published, and to expose how its publication benefits me actually and monetarily, even if it’s not much money we’re talking about. Sending out the poem to a bunch of places was meant to maximize my benefit, so the poem is taking advantage of poetry laborers as it thanks them. It’s trying to be public about the advantage it’s taking, but I don’t blame you for wondering whether it was a slight. The gesture was blurry.

I just read this Sarah Brouillette essay called “World Literature and Market Dynamics” that is helping me think about what I was gesturing at in that poem. Whenever I read her I realize that she’s thought clearly through things that my poems think about in chaotic and clumsy ways and I feel relieved. She is talking about our tendency to ignore the inequities the economy fosters in the literary economy. (Pascale Casanova calls this inattention “the denial of the unequal structure of literary space.”) Brouillette diagnoses an “uneven distribution of...agency and ability to author” as well as “uneven access to reading materials and to the means of publication.” Then she calls out a trend my poem fits right into like a fart in the wind: “In these conditions we can observe heightened consciousness about the compromises, complicities, and constraints on literary work and its valorization, and heightened kinds of circular games with reflexive unease about the extent to which particular individuals have the right to represent certain kinds of experience in their writing.” You can see that self-consciousness in “Notice” and all over the place in the uncomfortably privileged writers I read and know, especially the few tenure-track academics out there. Who are not chilling out, who are laborers overworked, some of them, to the point of nervous breakdown, but who have so much more access to the game than some others do.

Anyway I don’t want to write more poems like this, it’s a cul-de-sac, how long can I stay on a sit-and-spin that loathes itself. Do something else, loathe other stuff like prisons that pay immigrants thirteen cents an hour, imitate cicada sound-architectures. I don’t know what I’m doing now or what I’ll do. I can send you a new poem that’s more like my other stuff if you want. Soundplay, passionately inchoate blurting, line breaks, colors, stinky bits, etc. I do want to say that even though “Notice” has a different linguistic texture, it’s not that different from what I’ve been messing with for a while. It’s a lyric, it’s concerned with matters of address, with a projected addressed other who is often a beloved—in this case the reader and the editor.

I think lyric can interrogate frame. I don’t think conceptualism owns that game. I keep on being interested in lyric and in how lyric hooks into historical and economic systems and is this sort of glinting micro-facet of them or bursting blister.

Q: What I find so very compelling about the piece, especially with the explanation of such, is how you are working to push the boundaries of what a poem should be doing, and playing with. What is really being asked of poets when they’re solicited for non-paying markets? I’m slightly disappointed in myself for having to wait for the explanation to fully understand such.

A: I don’t mind poets being solicited for non-paying markets, any more than I mind being encouraged to sing along when I’m by the campfire. Writing poetry is work but that doesn’t mean I think it ought to be waged. I do want to think about the hierarchies involved in the ways poems get processed for and by the market. Both the symbolic/cultural capital market and the market where digits get altered on a screen and you can buy stuff or not.

You asked about the development or trajectory of my work. I am not sure it develops though it changes. It’s always a response to whatever’s going on, it marks experience so I can look at it. It feels rebellious, I put on my fuck-you hat and play around. But putting on the fuck-you hat is increasingly charged and peculiar because how can I be rebellious while being paid as an institutional writer? I guess we’ll see how I cry glitter. I don’t have to cry diamonds like Lady Gaga on the Simpsons (she says it hurts like hell).

Q: Is the poem “Notice” part of a larger, current project? Will it be included in your next poetry collection, possibly?

A: It’s been a slow couple of years for writing and I usually have no idea how poems will start to cohere into a book until I’ve got a big batch. I’m thinking of including other sorts of writing besides poetry – some criticism and essays – in whatever I do next, and “Notice” could go in. I’ll revise it though.

Q: Do you have any difficulty shifting between poetry and criticism, or is it all part of the same large canvas? Poems and criticism don’t often exist together in single-author volumes, yet some authors such as Anne Carson, Erín Moure, Phil Hall and Susan Howe have all built careers on their own take on the “poem-essay.” Where do you see the two connecting in your own writing?

A: When I’m writing about other texts, it’s easier to see where some idea I’m working with came from. It feels more like “applied research.” Whereas I often write poetry in a truancy (autocorrect for trancy) way and have no clue where something came from. I don’t want to oppose the two though. A friend of mine says it takes many years to mature as a critic, whereas poets can write great poems when they’re young. That seems right, because to develop intuition as a critic, you need to read so much, and eventually the texts you read start to connect to one another and to history and feel like a world to you and then you can swim there and feel the currents. That’s when associations could start to generate themselves intuitively. Great critical writers like Rachel Blau Duplessis or William Empson or Kristin Ross or John Wilkinson or Olson in Call Me Ishmael are working intuitively for sure. Not just the poeticky critics. I think of Chris Nealon or younger critics like Margaret Ronda—I admire good critics on the traditional model so much – it’s glorious work to rigorously demand of yourself that you come to terms with some aspect of a tradition and try to define it or redefine it in some way useful to others.

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

A: Well, that is a good question to hit me with right now – I felt dead as poet while writing most of the above (couple months ago) but writing is starting to come back. So I think I know: going for walks, listening to crickets and cicadas, reading anything that I’m reading just because I feel like it (anti-dutifully), listening to music, having sex, sleeping enough and having a life that lets me remember dreams, not letting job take over, singing, waking up early. Listening to ballads and blues, hiphop. Alice Notley, Suzan-Lori Parks, Larry Eigner. Medieval lyrics. The Tale of Genji and long proto-novels with Russian-doll plots like The Water Margin and 1001 Nights. Rae Armantrout, Gwendolyn Brooks, Bernadette Mayer, Clark Coolidge—these people all have a prosody I can’t figure out and I keep trying. Science journalism. People whose sentences kill me—Carlyle, Nabokov, recently CLR James—I am finally reading The Black Jacobins and James’ prose style is kicking my ass; it’s weirdly Carlylean (despite their political differences) but with less grandeur and pirouetting so the argument moves like a flow-chart instead of a cataract. The Greek Anthology, Catullus, Martial make me remember that people have been writing for a long time all kinds of shit about minor things that loomed large to them, people who weren’t good people, who were horrible to one another especially women and slaves as they negotiated the horrible politics of their world, and they wrote great poems and the poems are here and they are dead, this makes me feel better though I want to be good people.

TtD supplement #9: seven questions for Susanne Dyckman

Susanne Dyckman is the author of a full-length volume of poetry, equilibrium’s form (Shearsman Books), and three chapbooks, Counterweight (Woodland Editions), Transiting Indigo (EtherDome) and Source (above/ground press).  Her writing has appeared in a number of journals, most recently the EtherDome Anthology, As if it Fell from the Sun.  She has been a finalist for the Ahsahta Press Sawtooth Poetry Prize and the EPR Discovery Award, and a winner of the Five Fingers Review Poetry Award. Her home is in Albany, California, where she hosts the occasional Evelyn Avenue summer reading series.   

Her poem “Across the Street” appears in the second issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poem “Across the Street.” How did it originate?

A: The starting point was a boo-k of street photographs by Vivian Maier. I often use a visual image as a writing prompt, and am especially drawn to photography, most often urban landscapes. I’d heard of Maier a few years ago and was intrigued by her story and her work.

I find cities, their histories and inhabitants, compelling, so I easily engaged with Maier’s art. My process was to randomly open the book, look at a photograph and respond. I did not intended to describe the visual, but to use it as an entrance into a poem. Focusing on a physical image allows me to move out of myself, before moving back in. A type of tension develops between the external and the internal, and I find that generative. We all bring ourselves to the page, but I don’t necessarily want to start with myself. The image is the beginning, the first “other” with whom I am having a conversation. I allow myself to go elsewhere if I need to do so, and in this work I moved beyond the photographic frame, while still, I hope, holding its sensibility. 

Q: Is response a normal part of your process?

A: It very often is, because to respond is to be engaged with something or someone, and that allows for an interaction through language that is of interest to me. I experience more energy in the process if there is a sense of some conversation/communication taking place through sound, meaning, and placement of words, as well as the blank spaces on the page. The sensed dialogue may actually be a monologue, but the spirit is one of connection.  

Q: Is this part of a larger work that might end up seeing publication as a trade collection? What is your process of putting together a manuscript?

A: It will be part of a longer work (as I’m still writing this project), though I don’t know that it will be book length. I’ve found that trying to extend a series of poems, to continue with a theme or specific approach just to have more pages, is usually unsuccessful. I sense when a group of poems is finished, or, to put it another way, they tell me when they’re completed. I work best when I’m not looking ahead to what might be an end product, but stay in the present, with the writing.

That said, different projects can be combined, and may be more compatible than I would have initially thought when first writing them.   

Putting together a manuscript is a great pleasure, whether it’s my poetry or another’s. I enjoy playing with how various parts might fit together, and how different arrangements alter the reading. Of course, attention to language is a key part of the process. How do the words of one poem lead into those of another? Where does one land and start again, poem after poem? Switching page order can create an unexpected, but no less effective, reading of the work.          

I also think about how the pages appear in sequence. Are longer poems best set off with shorter ones? What’s the density of the words on one page, and what should follow? Just as I often use a visual image as a starting point for writing, I put together a manuscript with the visual in mind. When we pick up a book of poems we are not only reading the words, we are reading the shape of the poem, looking at its placement on the page, noting blank spaces as well as text.

Q: After one poetry collection and a small handful of chapbooks (as well as this current work-in-progress), how do you feel your work has developed? What, if anything, do you feel you are working toward?

A: I have another full-length manuscript that hasn’t yet found a home, and I’ve been working on a collaborative project with the poet Elizabeth Robinson. With the collaboration, there is an interaction of our very different voices and a resulting element of surprise that moves the work outside of the realm of authorship. Though it’s often clear who wrote which lines, it’s sometimes less easy (occasionally impossible) to identify, and that’s pleasing, because the poems then become something other than our individual contributions.  

I’m not sure how to answer the question as to how my work has developed. That’s asking me to be more self-aware than I may be. Over the last year I have been writing in a journal every morning, mostly free-writing. This is not an uncommon practice for writers, but I set myself a goal of being disciplined about it for a full twelve months (I’m now on month eleven). I’ve filled many notebooks and I’m looking at that material to see how I might make poetry of it. I suspect that the work will have a different tone than my other projects, though maybe not. It’s all still very new, so I can’t yet say if I’ll find it successful, but I have many pages of raw material to draw from.

Q: I’m always curious about writers who work collaboratively. How did the project originate, and how, if at all, has the process of collaborating affected your individual work?

A. It began, at Elizabeth’s suggestion, with a plan that we each write a response to the same poem, preferably one of a writer whose work is quite different than ours. As we both happened to have the same edition of Vallejo’s collected, those poems became our starting point. We would alternate choosing one of his poems, each write a response, and then compare the result. The writing has since moved on from that initial prompt.

Has it influenced my work? I think I can say yes, but mostly that it has influenced my writing within the collaboration. In this kind of process there is always the echo of the other when one sits down to write. I am having a conversation with Elizabeth, so her language and sensibilities are on my mind. I will either write in contrast to that, or allow for some blurring, that is, write with a sense of what I think is her voice, though it is not always a conscious decision at the time. When we read our pieces together, it allows me a better understanding of how we each approach our own poetry. And, as I mentioned earlier, there is kind of delight that can result when blending the work.

Q: How far has the collaboration progressed so far, and what are you working towards? Are you attempting a full-length manuscript of such, or something more ongoing?

A: We didn’t begin the project with a full-length book in mind (the initial plan was, simply, to have fun), but the work has progressed, so that’s now a possibility. 

Finding time for it can be an issue, as the collaborative writing has to take place along with our own independent projects and the other needs and distractions of daily life.   Much of the exchange has been long-distance, via email. When we’ve been able to be in the same location and sit together with the poems, the work has come together quickly. Because of these challenges, distance and time, I don’t know when we’ll turn to one another and say “it’s finished”, though I imagine that day will come. The creation of a third voice is such an interesting process I’m not sure I really want to see the work to end.

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

A: I always return to Wallace Stevens. He was the first poet to expand and deepen my sense of what language can do, and I never tire of him. Initially, and I’m talking about early in my poetry reading and writing life, I didn’t always understand him, but his work made me realize that understanding a poem as a traditional narrative didn’t matter. His language sang to me and that was enough.

“The Prologue” to The Canterbury Tales is another favorite, one I revisit often to remember how fun reciting can be, how poetry is a truly physical act as sound forms in the mouth.

There are, of course, many other poems that evoke a “swoon” response, work that makes me wish I’d written it myself. I’m tempted to list them all, to give those poets credit for being an inspiration, but then that wouldn’t be answering your question.

So, Stevens is the one.   

TtD supplement #8: seven questions for Susan Holbrook

Susan Holbrook’s poetry books are the Trillium-nominated Joy Is So Exhausting (Coach House, 2009), Good Egg Bad Seed (Nomados, 2004) and misled (Red Deer, 1999), which was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the Stephan G. Stephansson Award. She teaches North American literatures and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor. She recently co-edited The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson: Composition as Conversation (Oxford U P, 2010).

Her poems “As Good as I Get” and “Layman’s Terms.” appear in the second issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: I’ve always enjoyed your engagement with the deceptively straight narrative line, something that continues in the poems “As Good as I Get” and “Layman’s Terms.” What is your specific attraction to engaging the sentence?

A: I guess the relentless exposure to sentences in our daily lives, with their grammatical orthodoxies and go-to syntactical layouts, make them kind of irresistible to me as vehicles for expansion and play. I love grammar—my favourite essay is Stein’s “Poetry and Grammar” where she lays out her idiosyncratic passions for punctuation and parts of speech—and enjoy the sentence as a unit. Sometimes I riddle the syntax and sometimes, as in these two poems, the syntax is familiar but the terms pop out. Both these poems feature sentences which accumulate, rather than participate in the larger arc of a paragraph. I draw the line there!

Q: What is it about the accumulation that appeals?

A: I think of a traditional paragraph as a dogwalker holding a bunch of leashes, each sentence-dog tethered to the main man.  In a more cumulative structure, dogs just keep running into the park, one after another—you never know when they’ll stop! There are interesting relationships among the units, but they do not involve cause/effect or subordinations so much as resonances—it’s democratic. No alpha dog. And there’s a nice processual, self-generating energy that gets going. A few years ago my students complained that I always suggested they rewrite their submissions into list poems. They were right, I did. It was a way to get them to relinquish some intentional control, see where a series might lead them.

Q: Your books so far appear to be structured less as a grouping of poems than as a series of pieces composed as different answers to a central core of questions. Are these poems part of any kind of larger grouping? What is your process of putting together a manuscript?

A: Wow, I’m excited to hear about a “central core of questions”! So far my process has really been one of writing poems now and then until I have enough for a book (takes about 10 years!), without any overarching project or through line. But it’s true that all my poems share some persistent concerns—when writing I think about how we shape and are shaped by language, about how to invite people in to a more intimate relationship with words, how cultural critique can be animated by defamiliarization’s prodding to sensation/awareness.

Q: Does that mean your process is more a matter of accumulation? After two trade collections over the past fifteen years, how do you feel your work has developed?

A: Yes, I guess that’s right! – the poems pile up slowly, and I don’t know what’s coming next. An interest that’s developed over time is in conceptual work, in organizing more poems using found material. But your question prompted me to look back at misled, and then at the pile of stuff I’ve got on the go now—looks like I’ve always had this penchant for mixing aesthetics. I enjoy reading work across poetic ‘camps’ and hope to be that flexible as a writer, too.

Q: What are some of the writers and works you’ve been engaging with lately? What influences are you aware of in your current work?

A: I’ve been pleasantly overwhelmed of late with spectacular work to be seriously engaged with. As a poetry editor at Coach House, I get to dig into wildly exciting work. Coming out this season were two books I got to edit: Sina Queyras’s MxT and Brecken Hancock’s Broom Broom, both phenomenal. I’ve also been working on an introductory textbook on poetry, so I’ve spent several months revisiting a few ‘classics’ and skipping through the centuries, therefore getting a sense of a kind of inexorable poetic energy in the world that’s buoying. I also have some perennial fonts of influence, poets to whose work I turn and return—Harryette Mullen and Robert Kroetsch, to name two.

Q: What appealed to me about the two poems you sent along for Touch the Donkey are for exactly what you’ve been describing, the combination of accumulation, sentence and list, and the rush that comes from wrapping lines across line breaks, as though each stanza is meant to be seen as a single, extended breath. Is the breath something you’re aware of during composition? Are these poems that would be performed as a kind of breathless rush, a slow and steady stream, or more of accumulative pace, picking up speed along the way?

A: Yes, I do think about breath—probably because Fred Wah was a mentor, and he is so much the brass player, the music a function of the lungs. “Laymen’s Terms” proposes a voice, the ‘expert’ explaining technology using esoteric/odd/poetic analogies. I varied sentence length and compression there to vary the pace.  I noticed that absurdity can be delivered effectively both when it’s adagio and when it’s presto! Either way the listener doesn’t learn much more about broadband, but might enjoy the worlds these laymen’s terms open up. The poem ends by telling us “that’s what you want,” something I was thinking about in “As Good as I Get,” which is a collage of found bits from advertising. These companies name their products so as to imply they’re selling ‘values’, so I used the sonnet (roughly!), traditional conveyer of values. The gentle pacing of sonnet is bombarded by relentless slogans and testimonials so the resulting self-portrait is hyperventilated.

Q: Is utilizing found material something you engage with on any sort of regular basis? Is this one of the structural threads one might find throughout your writing?

A: Yes, in fact the word “found” doesn’t even seem right anymore, because in the digital age we are just swimming in the stuff. Material is calling out to be cut, spliced, reshaped, translated, etc. all the time. It’s kind of a funny experience, now, to start with a blank sheet. Doing conceptual pieces alerts us to the borrowing that is part of our every utterance, so I’m more aware of the citational quality of even my “original” work.