TtD supplement #48 : seven questions for Katie L. Price

Katie L. Price’s writing—critical, creative, and other—has appeared in such venues as Fence, the Journal of Medical Humanities, Canadian Literature, and Jacket2, and with such presses as No Press, above/ground press, and Manchester UP. She currently serves as Interviews Editor for Jacket2, and co-directs the Philadelphia Avant-Garde Studies Consortium. She is the author of two recent chapbooks with above/ground press: BRCA: Birth of a Patient (2015) and Sickly (2015).

Her poem “Alchemy” appears in the eighth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poem “Alchemy.”

A: Alfred Jarry’s painting machine Clinamen has evolved into a poem machine. It lives online, in your home computer, in the dark shadows made by 1’s and 0’s. “Alchemy” is a collaborative piece of writing—written by Clinamen and Katie L. Price. It is not about serendipity, happy accidents, and creativity (in the sense of creating, a new creation), but rather documentation of serendipity, accident, and creativity. It is material evidence that creative forces exist outside of human creativity. To read “Alchemy” is not to read me, but to witness proof of Clinamen’s perverse sense of humor in regards to productivity, and the pataphysical processes that structure our existence.

Q: Is the “happy accident” an important element in your writing? How does this differ from what else you’ve been working on?

A: Happy accidents, no. Accidents, yes. Especially its meaning in the 13th and 14th Centuries. My work has often addressed unfortunate incidents, symptoms and exterior signs of vicissitude, non-essential qualities, and contingencies.

Q: What is it about the nature of such accidents and their contingencies that appeal?

A: I’m interested in writing that has no author, or complicates or implicates or distorts the role of the author. The accidental appeals to me because of its unlocatability, its lack of reason, its uncontrollability. Its lack of authorship. Yet, accidents can be revelatory. For Lucretius, accident is, in fact, the only way to truly create. In the accident’s irregularity, we continue to find the new.

Q: How does this piece fit in with other work you’ve been doing lately? Is this poem part of a larger structure or trajectory, or a stand-alone piece?

A: Yes. It continues a theme that compels me again and again: precise investigation (in/of language) of the circumstantial, the contingent. You might say I’m interested in the inverse of chance operations—surgical operations on extant language that largely occurs by chance, but nevertheless has serious, real-world implications. This piece differs from the work in my above/ground chapbooks BRCA: Birth of a Patient and Sickly in its content, but I’m not yet done exploring these themes in my writing.

I’ve been watching HBO’s The Leftovers, which just ended its second season. The show explores what people do when they can’t explain something, when they are faced with the fact that there is a hidden logic behind the cosmos, but they don’t know what it is. My writing tries to examine the structures that we build around ourselves to make ourselves feel better, to calm our psyches, to make sense of the world—and show them for what they might be: aesthetic sculptures (crafted imaginaries) of existence.

My writing—and pataphysical writing in general (if one can say such a thing)—offers an opportunity for us to examine language that impacts our lives in a concertedly inconsequential setting. What can we learn about how knowledge is formed (by particular discourses and disciplines) by examining their languages, vocabularies, and structures, outside of the contexts that render them ubiquitous? What can we learn by reading a medical report with the same attention we might pay a sophisticated sonnet? What can we learn about how technology structures our lives by close reading a series of glitches?

Q: With a small handful of chapbooks over the past few years, how do you feel your work has developed? What do you see yourself working towards?

A: Publishing two chapbooks last year gave me the fantastic opportunity to share my work more broadly and with a new audience. It has sparked several conversations and ignited several new relationships. One of the pleasant surprises with publishing BRCA: Birth of a Patient and Sickly was the diverse range of types of writers who were interested in the work, quite often for very different reasons. I feel incredibly grateful for the opportunity to discuss my work with others. Both of these chapbooks examine the moment at which a body is de-animated: transformed from a living thing into something dissectible, analyzable, diagnosable, speakable. Conversations re-animate the textual body; in a very real way it feels like witnessing the ghost of a body that never truly existed. I am continuing to work toward a book in hopes that I can raise even more ghosts.

Q: Given that most of what I’ve seen of your work so far comes from those two chapbooks (as well as the poem “Alchemy”), I’m wondering how much of the “de-animation” you reference is a particular thread that runs throughout your writing, or was this was something new emerging through these two chapbooks? Are these two chapbooks part of a singular, larger work, perhaps?

A: De-animation, or perhaps more aptly the mechanical, has been an interest of mine for at least a decade. I am particularly interested in the moment when opposites converge—death and life, the inorganic with the organic, systematicity with chance, logic with irrationality. Jacques de Vaucanson’s mechanical duck fascinates me as much as Adam Dickinson’s cataloguing of all of the toxic materials in his body; while Vaucanson invented a machine that could digest, Dickinson shows how our bodies, like engines, are full of oil. As a reader—and a thinker—I am interested in things that aren’t supposed to go together, but can and do. And I like writing in a way that accentuates or highlights the incongruous. 

I honestly struggle with whether or not BRCA and Sickly are in fact one project and I oscillate. They both investigate the discourse of a certain kind of vocabulary and the ways that language can de-animate a body as I previously described. But I also find them to be very different. BRCA might be the single most personal text ever written—it is the ultimate confession. It is extraordinarily intimate in its coldness. From reading, a reader learns about my heart’s rhythm, my weight fluctuations, my blood pressure, the texture of my breasts, my menstrual cycle, my fears and anxieties—and I didn’t write a word. The most intimate document that exists about me was written by a host of paid, trained professionals. That is profound to me. This is writing that matters, in a real, material sense. Sickly moves beyond, alongside, and within the personal to look at medical discourse and language more broadly (and, ahem, less conceptually)—it manipulates medical language into new shapes to reveal something new. The individual is construed differently when broken into pieces, rearranged, and spliced. I suppose it’s a more conventionally poetic (i.e. “made thing”) than BRCA. It moves from the world of the clinic to a world of cultural discourse about sickness and health.

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

A: Atelos
BookThug
Coach House
Drunken Boat
Edge
Fence
Granary
Hogarth
Information as Material
Jacket2
Kenning
Les Figues
MIT
New Directions
October
P-
Queue
Roof
Singing Horse
Tuumba
Ugly Ducking
Verso
Wave
XY
Zone

TtD supplement #47 : seven questions for damian lopes

Currently the Poet Laureate for the City of Barrie, damian lopes is the author of several books of poetry and a former editor at Coach House Books. His most recent publication, yasser arafat is dead, is a poetry chapbook published by Ottawa’s above/ground press. In addition to poetry, damian continues to work on his first novel.

His poems “you smiled at her,” “under toes,” “lost,” “last inning,” “agape” and “Richard Truhlar in memoriam” appear in the eighth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “you smiled at her,” “under toes,” “lost,” “last inning,” “agape” and “Richard Truhlar in memoriam.”

A: having ignored your question for months, i’m surprised that the poems relate to loss or potential loss. but on reflection, i’ve been writing about that for a while.

with my first book, i began working on book-length projects rather than individual poems. it stems in part from a fascination with narrative combined with the relation between form & content. to me, a collection should make sense, be cohesive before it is fixed & bound.

so these are from a collection of new & old poems, some dating back twenty years, that have never been published in book form, currently entitled away home. it’s gone through many iterations already as i intend to give the book a form the poems weren’t part of to start with.

Q: What was it that made you want to help shape a collection from work spanning such a long period? Were these older poems temporarily-abandoned, or did they simply not fit into the projects you’d been working on at the time they were composed?

A: i didn’t start out writing books, but poems. some of my early work developed into my first two books. many other poems, published in magazines, journals & small press, weren’t part of those or later projects.

technology plays a part too, & has been an interest. my first poem was published in 1990, the same year i started playing with computers again. but i’ve composed very little poetry on screen: i prefer my notebook to my ipad for composition. my last book was written by hand or on a manual travelling typewriter, then edited on screen.

i think it was new software that convinced me to try & organize my published but uncollected poems, & to sift through work that made it out of the notebooks but remained unpublished. some were about language, some about people, especially my father, while others straddled the two. i struggled to divide them into two separate works before conceding.

i still struggle to get myself out of the way, not to impose a form but tease out the best one there. form & content: interweaving two sets of poems results in a different reading. each poem is an arrangement of words, each book an arrangement of poems. book as poem.

Q: After three trade collections (and current works-in-progress), how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: the plagal cadence
of progress a semi
tone sufficient to
colour the question
              diminishment
not development
but the interstitial
carved moments not
monumental but
mundane goals to
an eye

Q: Your current poetry work-in-progress includes poems going back twenty years. You’ve also been working on a novel for nearly as long. Do the two projects interact in any way?

A: mainly no. the novel spans four decades & continents, ending in toronto in 1973. it’s my grandparents’ & parents’ generation. the poetry is set more recently & can be more personal. but of course there are overlaps, like family, parenthood, emigration… on many levels, all my work – visual, poetry, prose – interacts. poetry & fiction each have their advantages & restraints. ‘the tale is like the telling’ says a goan proverb.

Q: After quite a long stretch of relative silence, how easy or difficult is it to re-emerge? In 2015, for example, you were named the second Poet Laureate of the City of Barrie. How did that come about, and how has it been? Just what is expected of you?

A: fits & starts. in both writing & the business of literature: the reasons are myriad, in flux & mostly mundane. the writing has been more consistent than the business. that’s more where i’m re-engaging in fits & starts. simply, i struggle for the time & head space to write & edit, let alone the significant clerical work of making & tracking submissions. now my work is unfamiliar to editors, so it feels like starting out again without the vigour & confidence of youth. rejection is part of the game & it hasn’t gotten easier.

so, my novel, The Mango Stone, has been a retreat from the business. it’s too difficult to excerpt, i tell myself though in fact five appeared years ago. for several drafts now, i’ve had the good fortune to work with an astute publisher towards a contract. though its not the publication i’m after so much as telling this story the best i can.

both the city of Barrie & its burgeoning arts community have been growing like teenagers. maturing in surprising ways, but still gangly, awkward & shy now & then. our small town heritage still resists the changes of growth. the arts community here is diverse & supportive. the literary community is relatively small, but nurturing & determined. so while i have not been publishing on paper, i have been performing & engaged locally with some regularity.

as Laureate i am working to develop an annual anthology of poetry by students. a decade ago the city chose to invest in our local arts community, to grow it from within. & it’s working. likewise, to promote poetry in our young city, we need to expose our youth to the true depth & breadth of poetry today, & to point out the poetry all around them. our teachers need support because their training is usually too narrow & their time too limited. so i’m starting with one high school & hope to make it an annual thing.

Q: What has the response been to your laureateship so far? I know you’ve produced a small publication as part of an official event, for example.

A: congratulations, invitations, bemusement, wonderment, disinterest, disdain & at least one good sputtering guffaw from jw that we witnessed together. partway into my term as Barrie’s second laureate, most here are surprised we have a laureate, but they are likewise surprised to learn of our parliamentary laureate. we are talking poetry here. most would likely agree that poetry is as relevant to them as higher mathematics. i’d say they’re right. the study of the intense use of language that we call poetry is not that different from the higher maths that result in the computers we call smartphones. both are esoteric but profoundly influential. perhaps essential for life today. so if i’ve found the response somewhat muted, it’s helped me realize that poetry must engage our youth, & continue the natural language play of childhood. poets need to support teachers in fostering the literary arts in schools. the laureateship makes it easier to open those doors.

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

A: Nelson Ball’s poetry & Alice Munro’s stories remind & inspire me.

TtD supplement #46 : seven questions for Pete Smith

Pete Smith, born & raised in Coventry, emigrated to Canada in 1974. After a long detour returned to poetry in the late 1990s. Has published poetry with Wild Honey Press, Poetical Histories, above/ground press, W, Great Works & Oystercatcher among others; reviews & essays in Agenda, The Gig, The Paper, The Capilano Review, Crayon & elsewhere. He has given readings at the Kootenay School of Writing & at the final CCCP in 2006. His first full-length collection, Bindings with Discords, was published by Shearsman in February 2015, and a brand-new chapbook, A NEW LOVE OVER AN ACHING STONE, “a double-cento out of Yehuda. Amichai & Mahmoud Darwish,” is out very soon with above/ground press.

His poems “ANTHROPOCENTRIC POETICS 101,” “RESTRINGING THE SIX-STRING,” “CHARLIE, PROPER” and “UNDER THE INFLUENCE” appear in the eighth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “ANTHROPOCENTRIC POETICS 101,” “RESTRINGING THE SIX-STRING,” “CHARLIE, PROPER” and “UNDER THE INFLUENCE.”

A: They are all what I might call Public Poems, in that they were written in public places & they are quite casual & approachable. The “public” space impacts them in different ways, but the common factor is the way that distractions help me focus my attention, as if I sometimes need something to pitch against, affirming by opposition. Anthrop is from far back, but seems now to connect to “public” by razzing two highly public figures who introduced Bad Wrongs, Cartesian duality & the unimaginative, mechanical applications of Behaviourism. Six & Charlie picked up energy & details from the times & places of writing: the first is cited in the poem; the second written in Far Out Coffee shop on Dundas in the Hastings-Sunrise part of Vancouver where Freya had plugged her Stones iPod into the sound system to avoid hearing stuff she didn’t like during the busy spell. Influence tagged along because of similarity of tone & the connections to varying-degrees-of-public figures in the poetry communities.

Q: You describe “Public Poems” as though they are but one thread of the poems you’ve been working on. Is this how you work, through a loose connection of groupings? And how many other groupings make up your arsenal?

A: I write longhand into a pocket-sized notebook & raid the drafts from time to time for family resemblances so, yes, groupings that way but for predetermined sequences I'll have a particular notebook just for that work. One practical reason for the number of erasure projects is that I can do a bit in the days’ margins, walk away & the “inspirationWinking face” is still there in the source text when I get back to it.

Another grouping I’ve done always Nate Dorward referred to as poems-as-lit-criticism, or words to that effect, but Phil Hall does that so well I can leave them scattered around the cutting-room floor for now.

Similar to “Public Poems” in some respects are what I might term “occasioned poems,” some of those even commissioned, eg, friends renewed wedding vows at their 40th anniversary, didn’t ask for a poem for the event but at the last minute I found myself being tickled by the question “how do you write an epithalamion for the long-married?” & took off from there. So, self-commissioned is more accurate I guess.

Coming at the practice from both Cage’s mesostics & Clare’s claim to have “found the poems in the fields & merely written them down” has been a long-term use of ‘erasure,’ or ‘writing through’: source texts include Clare’s ‘Journey Out of Essex,’ WS’s 154 sonnets (done before Jen Bervin’s versions & at one time up at Alterran Poetry Assemblage #6), Sharon Thesen’s selection ‘News & Smoke’ (creating ‘The World in Her Mouth’ by taking one line from each poem in sequence), George Gissing’s novel The Odd Women (as ‘Odden: I Sing’ from Oystercatcher Press) etc, most recently ‘Winterized: The Musical’ out of Peter Culley’s ‘Winterreise’ section of his book The Climax Forest.

I guess a combination of trusting language to know more than I do – well, it’s been around a lot longer than I have – and liking a variety of constraints feeds that practice. At times it’s probably vicarious self-expression but my objective is more for discovery of universal &/or personal “truths” through others' voices & mirror-echoes of shed selves along the route. I’ve also used translations & small read-throughs of “classic” English poems as parts of otherwise standard lyric poems.

Non-verbal texts are also sources, eg a John Adams’ music cycle, photographs of Fred Douglas & Ralph Eugene Meatyard, works in all the arts by Kiyooka etc etc

A longish work-in-progress is ‘A Shadow of his Former Shadow’ which attempts to discover who my extremely private father was works through straight & deliberately distorted memories, through erasures of works important to him, eg, Schubert’s “Winterreise” cycle, Marcus Aurelius (given to me as I left home at age 18 with a “here, son, it’s as good a guide to life as any”).

Trying all in all to be a good servant of the poem, as attentive as possible to word & world, knowing through the late John Riley:

that love/ is never fulfilled/ but the ways/ of approaching/ endless

Q: I’ve long been curious about how a British poet ends up in Kamloops, nestled in the interior of British Columbia, a city you emigrated to in 1974. What originally brought you to Canada?

A: Work & economics. BC Gov were recruiting Psych Nurses in the UK. I’d recently found a stash of copies of Beautiful BC magazine & had a west coast literature-induced fantasy lurking somewhere inside (sorry, Canada). The big institutions in Vancouver coupled with its weather pattern (I’d lived my last 5 years in England on the south-west coast & knew rain intimately) included that location out, but Mr Recruiter started talking about Kamloops’ four distinct seasons, & the villa system & small scale (by that era’s standards) of the institution were very appealing.

That I have remained is the greater mystery. In the place & the work.

I’ve avoided academia because of an allergy, so to speak, to over-directed learning. I’ve no doubt misrepresented to myself the way higher learning works, but here I am anyway – with a weird troup of chosen tutors working away in adhd shifts of attention & interest (“a broken-field runner” to steal Paul Metcalf’s tag on Douglas Woolf).

I didn’t step into full-time poethood, have great admiration for those who have, out of cowardice, no doubt, & a hard-to-explain sense that I had to earn the right to write (not by earning a living at any job, but by continuing with that most marginalized group of people – the intellectually disabled: believing that the work of entering into a poem, grasping to some extent its otherness & bringing that over into words touches & is touched by trying to understand the world & needs of non-verbal or barely verbal people in order to interpret an essence of the world to them & to help explain them to their immediate circle of people).

Damn! This was going to be the short answer!

Q: There’s an inference that dismisses the possibility of interacting with other writers, but you seem deeply connected to a variety of British poets, as well as poets currently and formerly around Vancouver and the Kootenay School of Writing. For someone who appears to be writing off the grid, you exist within a rather intricate array of writers. Were you engaged with British poets before you arrived in Canada? And how did you end up meeting so many Canadian poets from your home-base of Kamloops?

A: Shyness, at times pathological, has made interactions difficult from my side. Geography increases the difficulty no doubt.

In Britain, no direct engagement beyond being a consumer of mags which provided different sets of outlook: Stand – toward Europe largely; Agenda – Poundian modernisms; Grosseteste Review – openings toward USA, combo of projective & objective ‘schools’ filtered through a very English light.

Attended readings at the then Cariboo College where I heard but didn't ‘meet’ Birney, Newlove, Bowering et al. (A long parenthesis, 10 to 15 years, takes me into a North American cult/church community where I become an elder & preach regularly – until finally reading my way out of that wilderness – picking up while there some useful self-discipline for essay writing & a preachiness in my poems that I have to guard against).

Real connections began on three fronts in the 1990s: firstly, through the Internet & an email I sent to Nate Dorward I connected up with British & Irish poets I felt at home with & led to the publication of the first Wild Honey Press chapbook; through Nate again I learned of a reading at the ksw whose venue I failed to find then but, thanks to Rob Manery, found it for the next time; the Kamloops Poets Factory where Warren Fulton’s energies created a local scene & we brought in some good writers to read & conduct workshops (my contributions were all through the ksw connection: Mike Barnholden, Aaron Vidaver, Ted Byrne on one occasion; Lissa Wolsak & Lisa Robertson on Easter Sunday, 2000 – Lisa read from The Men). Not so many personal meetings really, lots of recruits I bring in from my reading, not in order to name-drop, but to share my experience in a particular text-world. Exploration & celebration.

Q: That’s actually how we first met as well, through Warren Fulton hosting a reading of mine in Kamloops. How have these engagements over the years influenced the ways (ie – the whats and hows) in which you write?

A: I remember that, with Anne Stone I recall. The reading (books) & the readings (of poets’ live readings) have been for the pleasures firstly & also for learning about content & techniques – what subjects have been tackled, how the poet approaches or recoils from world, self, language’s lines & nets. I guess hearing the poets read helped me unhitch my line & cadence from the deep-rooted plodding pentameter British poets claim as the rhythm of walking thinking & poeming. (Used well, ie with irregular variations & shifts in tempo, the iambic pentameter can still be a good experience and walking is still a great aid to writing, listening to highly jagged music is good too if the need is to shake everything up.)

I sometimes forget how many workshops I’ve attended & need to credit that as an ongoing aid to renewal. For their impacts my memory lands on workshops by Harold Rhenisch (in Kamloops) & Alice Notley & an anti-workshop by Denise Riley (both at ksw). I hope to find my notes from the Rhenisch event, but recall it being useful at the architectural level, Notley for the archaeology of self/ves, Riley for the singing/thinking/self-reflexive & societally-probing levels. The few years when I was attending readings & workshops at ksw were very stimulating: there was no pressure to align aesthetically, but it was really affirming to be “in class” with Lisa R, Sharon T, the Quartermains etc. – an open field still open. Recently I had the ‘honour’ (is I think the right word) of watching a local poet, Paul Liddy (whose work I had hoped to put out in a collection but my awful habit of procrastination, along with pension-income limitations, has stymied: hopefully it will find the publisher it deserves) take a whole swath of finished discrete lyrics & transform them into a more difficult read but a more profound experience. It seems he is muttering “I’m not aiming for ‘applause-gatherers’. I want the reader to experience something of what I went through” – reference is to surgery & subsequent treatment for brain cancer: even without that he’s the genuine “poet maudit” imho. He’s been to Banff a time of two & says he feels he was basically written off as a Bukowski disciple, at a time he’d never read Buk (though Dostoevsky is firmly in his canon).

Yes, watching that reconstruction project happen (“It’s fine”, he reassured me as I got agitated by the loss of these lyrics I’d really enjoyed, “I know what I’m doing” – and he did) was a liberating experience &, along with a recent chat with Donato Mancini, has got me working more boldly on the revision stage.

That was a privileged engagement.

End or it never will.

Q: After a variety of collections large and small over the past two decades or so, how do you feel your work has developed? What do you feel as though you might be working towards?

A: The thought of “development” suggests to me some kind of linear path which I don’t recognize. A series of loosely connected circles floating without apparent grounding might be more apt. Much of the writing has been an engagement with other artists in word, image &/or music. I expect to continue that practice as I come across works that touch the on-button. I also have tried to stay open to the daily gifts that come along if eyes, ears, mind, heart are in a state of readiness: I like to think of occasioned as opposed to occasional verse; epiphanies are considered off-the-map, but what are you supposed to do in the face of one, “Nah, can’t write about that it’s too exciting. Besides everyone has felt that.” Sure, but many of us have short memories, & to trigger good memories in our present world seems to me a pretty kind & literally vital endeavour. So, I have a bunch of things slotted under a title “Such as Any Day Might Bring.” Epics are for more grandiose &/or disciplined souls.

What I think I'm up to in poetry has often enough been interrupted by what I see I've actually been up to that I don't claim any overriding poetics other, perhaps, than "despite". The actual world is a good foundation (thinking here of Flaubert & de Maupassant's walks through Paris streets, with the older writer setting the assignment to write about a person they passed by so that he would recognize the person encountered); but an imaginable world cries out to be born.

I recently read a little bit about Douglas Blazek’s long-term project of rewriting a body of work over a number of years (35 years between publications if I grasped it properly) as a process of ripening the poems. That is interesting to me & may lead me to excavate something from a heap of early writing – that would qualify as more of a rescue mission than an organic ripening, but compost is compost.

There is a wealth of lived experience that I haven’t consciously worked with in poetry (preferring to let images, memories surface during the writing & carry a resonance, sort of like the ringing harmonics on the 5th, 7th & 12th frets of the guitar, that let me, at least, know something authentic is afoot). I think I’ll go into prose in a more focussed way – focus, well scattered will have to do & we are firmly in the Age of Fragments. So, stay tuned!

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

A: Ha - that should be easy, but...

I’ll start with a quote I just found in a writing by Anna Mendelssohn (who also published as Grace Lake) who was a member of Britain’s Angry Brigade back in the tumultuous 1960s.

“I followed a few writers for a time in the local literary news

It’s like watching a kid take to the hills, or a colt stagger to its feet.”

I was about to start a list of names, but the “re energize” & “return to” are your key words. That shrinks the list considerably. I find myself going to particular poems more than to whole oeuvres.

David Rosenberg’s translations of Second Isaiah, Song of Songs & the great “justice” & righteousness verses in Joel & Amos. Wyatt, Marlowe, Will Shake. Hopkins - certain poems & the journals. Basil Bunting. David Jones - paintings, drawings, writings. (Hello I’m listing anyway! So be it.) Thom Gunn - the last few books & his essay/review collections. Kenneth Cox - his boringly titled Collected Studies in the Use of English & through that R.C. Hutchinson’s novels the unfinished Rising & Testament for its remarkable narrator Alexei Otraveskov. John Berger. Alan Garner’s Stone Book Quartet. R.F. Langley - poems & journals.

I’ve been rereading with constant pleasure my scattering of Guy Birchard’s books (published in England, Ireland & USA - the ones I have - does CanLit know him?); returning frequently to Phil Hall after hearing a reading on-line when it all came together (recent ‘discovery’ to me, so where have I been in relation to CanLit? – splashing around in the mid-Atlantic I guess). I arrived here in 1974 & took John Newlove & Phyllis Webb for my first guides & they remain such. Roy Kiyooka – who I coin as the Whole Soul Catalogue - paintings, letters, poems. The tapestry in Canada is too rich & I arrived too late. Not enough lifetimes.

Paul Metcalf & Guy Davenport must be mentioned. Metcalf from Genoa: A Telling of Wonders onwards was a writer of wonders & his use of primary sources along with his technique of juxtaposition – “To originate is carefully, patiently, and understandingly to combine” (Poe) is a motto he cites in interview - interests me in his way of presenting materials without the mediation, in several of his books, of a narrator to allow a reader to identify with and a pre-scribed set of emotional responses. Juxtaposition allows the described events to speak in a manner an Internet news item should call ‘raw’. Davenport & the recently deceased English ex-pat to Texas, Christopher Middleton, for their boundless curiosity.

There are several writers I’d add to the list of the return-to question: C.D. Wright, Lisa Robertson, Lissa Wolsak (for poetry that breathes the same air as prayer), Basil Bunting, John Thompson’s Stilt-Jack, 1001 Arabian Nights (my adventure & erotic fountainhead from adolescence onwards).

I find music (early polyphony to Baroque & contemporary, free jazz etc) & visual arts along with long walks to be the best battery chargers. Attempting translation is also a good surge.

Let's close it all off with a phrase from Middleton re a foundation for a way: “Apostrophe, the invocation of a spirit, though now archaic, is still fundamental to the lyric in one form or another.

Thanks, rob, for the chance to wander around here.

TtD supplement #45 : seven questions for Billy Mavreas

Billy Mavreas is an artist and writer born, raised and living in Montreal, Quebec. He has participated in many overlapping scenes, drawing posters first for the punk rock music scene in the late 1980s and then for spoken-word events though out the mid-nineties. International mail-art, asemic writing, local comics, zines and chapbooks all contributed to the push and pull of his art practice.

He is the author of three graphic novels, one book of posters as well as the producer of several chapbooks that move between visual poetry, drawing, collage and comics.

Along with his artist wife, Emilie O’Brien, he operates Monastiraki, a gallery and curiosity shop in the Mile-End neighbourhood.

He has four visual poems, “From A Scholarship Of Insects,” in the eighth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the four poems that make up “From A Scholarship Of Insects.”

A: The four pieces that make up “From A Scholarship Of Insects” act together in concert, they elaborate upon an unfinished poem that we will never read. Instead of presenting that unfinished source poem, I elected to present four divergent trends emanating from it.  I approached each page as a separate tone, a certain gesture or chirping or trace that perhaps an insect of sorts would chance to leave on a page. I considered the hypothetical naming of a group of insects as a scholarship, intending to illustrate rather different academic approaches to their fields of study. We then have subtle muted precision, bold point form, polyphonic chorus as well as straight up English text outlining options, to anchor any wanderings. Each visual treatment is lifted from that text and manipulated until the desired effect is reached.

Q: How do these pieces relate to the previous work you’ve done with visual poetry?

A: Most of my recent work in visual poetry starts with a source text, usually a diagram or even a photograph. This source material then gets extensive editorial treatment as I lose track of what it originally looked like or referred to. The process is essentially radical collage. I manipulate the source and apply layers of cut and paste, veering into directions unheralded.

In this case the source text was my own and it was text in the proper sense. Though there was considerable manipulations involved, I also left some text intact in order to position the visual pieces, to situate them in the eyes of the reader, with their source. One can with some scrutiny see how the pieces visually relate to the text provided in the last piece.

Q: I’m curious as to the intersection between your poetry work and your graphic novels. One so rarely sees anyone producing visual poems also producing graphic novels. Do your two forms intersect at any point, or relate to each other at all? Are they unrelated threads, or part of a larger exploration?

A: I’m curious about that too! I’ve made many formalist explorations within comics which work very well with experiments in typography, lettering and script. Also, my drawing style borrows a lot from the gestural strokes of handwriting and my poetry often evokes the details found in hidden corners of graphic work, the corners that are not the main attraction. They both deal with the themes that I explore in general, themes of communication, mystery, invisible worlds and accretion. I tend towards polyvalence in my art, making installation, conceptual work, sound works, sculpture, painting as well as poetry and comics. Every tendency informs every other. I’d like to think it’s all building towards something huge and awesome but we’ll see. It may just all end up as a strange collection of trajectories, oddball folk art museum of the soul.

Many artists I’ve seen who explore visual poetry and comics tend to stay closer to the realm of abstract or experimental comics. In my case my comics have been experimental and I still make abstract comic work but I’ve been tending towards more direct narrative, straight up comic work so to speak, which is a great challenge, whereas my poetry tends way more towards abstraction, conceptual writing and visual poetics. My poetry that isn’t visual is usually rock lyrics, bumper stickers, band names and other stuff that remains more or less private, unpublished or juvenile.

Q: Has the movement “towards more direct narrative, straight up comic work” influenced, in any way, your poetry heading further “towards abstraction, conceptual writing and visual poetics”?

A: I don’t think so. My many tendencies co-exist. As I get on in experience I feel the pressure to give my college best to forms I love. I want to be able to make decent comics that kids can enjoy, that anyone can enjoy really. Some of the power of comics lies in its potential accessibility. As I feel I’ve made some decent experimental comics, I also want the same satisfaction with accessible comics. I’m almost there. I’ll need to simplify things a tad. Work harder at it, too. The same drive would have me want to write at least one decent science fiction short story or fantasy novel. I feel I must honour my early loves.

I also love working in forms that are meant for tiny audiences of like minded people. I want to indulge my love for arcana but I can also appreciate my desire to be straightforward with text as well. In the last year I’ve worked at clear prose writing, anecdotal stuff, quotidian stuff. It’s been very liberating. I’ll end my years writing sonnets or something, who knows.

Q: So your explorations into poetry move beyond concrete and visual, and into text? For poetry: who have your models and influences been so far? What writers and artists have shaped the way you think about the form?

A: I studied literature but that was 30 odd years ago and the usual cast of characters left an impression, the canonical bigwigs we studied from 1989 to 1991. My personal reading though remained in genre fiction so I have always skirted between high and low cultures, as they are described.

My biggest influences in visual and concrete poetry are not individuals but books and not specific books at that. I collect obscure volumes usually dated 1972 that are comprised of text, cut-ups, collage, poetry of all types. A beat up anthology of international concrete poetry I found in a second hand bookshop when I was 16 started this fascination. I want to emulate the aesthetic I find in these books. Another influence is the high contrast black and white xerography and rubber stamping I encountered upon entering the world of industrial culture / mail-art / fanzines in the late 1980s. An early correspondence with jwcurry informed much of what I later did. The alien documents from such mail-artists as Serge Segay and J. Lehmus among many others intrigued me. At the time I was doing a lot of psychedelic lettering and symbol / logo design. A strong machine aesthetic came and informed my hippie sensibility. My experiments with photocopy machines at the time also yielded happy accidents. There’s no looking back, though I still draw by hand I love the results that copy machines give. Nowadays I use digital tech to replicate that effect.

Of course, hooking up with people like Tim Gaze and Derek Beaulieu, who have both been great supporters of mine, has served to strengthen the idea that I should continue doing what I am doing.

Q: How do you feel your poetry has developed over the years? What do you feel your writing might be working towards?

A: My poetry has moved from stand alone poems (whether text or visual) to suites and longer movements of pieces. I like the idea of a series of works pivoting around a central theme or starting point. I hope to address my concerns and desires vis a vis visual poetry with a book length project or two. I need to actualize my book fetish by adding another odd pamphlet into the pile.

I also feel more confident in presenting some of my visual poetry as poetry and not as graphics or visual art. Of course I am ever thankful that my experience in visual art informs me and forces me to maintain certain graphic standards.

My writing will always bend towards a project orientated practice culminating in either a chapbook or a dozen chapbooks or a proper published thing. I enjoy small projects, small suites, etc. but would probably toss it all out if I was able to find the discipline to work on a fantasy trilogy. No joke. Until then though I will continue to divide my time between comics and poetics but there’s no saying that all my tendencies won’t end up between the covers of one book. That would be the dream of dreams.

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

A: There isn’t any one author that I return to time and again except for non fiction authors and genre fiction authors and that’s usually by accident or obligation.

I read mostly in non-fiction, usually studies of mythology, science, spirituality, art history. That stuff is interspersed with forays into SF&F short stories and YA or kids books. I’m always bringing in new books I find and pouring over them. Collections of logotypes, vintage graphic design manuals, old grammars, random scraps and ephemera keep my interest the most. There are many books I revisit and many more I want to read. I’m terribly ignorant of contemporary poetry itself except the work of people I trade with and even then I often fetishize the object and study the form rather than the content. That’s my big admission of the day.

The stuff I do reread is inane humour comics.

TtD supplement #44 : seven questions for Mary Kasimor

Mary Kasimor has most recently been published in Big Bridge, Arsenic Lobster, Horse Less Review, Nerve Lantern, Altered Scale, Word For/Word, Posit, 3 AM, EOAGH, and The Missing Slate. She has three previous books and/or chapbook publications: Silk String Arias (BlazeVox Books), & Cruel Red (Otoliths), and The Windows Hallucinate (LRL Textile Series). She has a new collection of poetry published in 2014, entitled The Landfill Dancers (BlazeVox Books). She also writes book reviews that have been published in Jacket, Big Bridge, Galatea Resurrects, Poets’ Quarterly, and Gently Read Literature. She considers her work experimental—both her poetry and ink/water colors.

Her poems “blue june,” Subtitles,” “red fog,” “clinical observation” and “the tales of embroidery” appear in the eighth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “blue june,” Subtitles,” “red fog,” “clinical observation” and “the tales of embroidery.”

A: I have to be honest and say that other poets influence me a great deal—and perhaps that is true for all poets. Lately I have been fascinated (once again) by Leslie Scalapino’s poetry and her understanding of consciousness as a Buddhist expressed through language—also the idea that all our experiences exist without the limitations of time. So I am playing around with that idea—mostly because I find it so interesting. And that is what I am attempting to do with “blue june.” It’s much easier in theory than in practice—kind of a stream of consciousness thing going on, but it is a writing process that I continue exploring.

All my poems are “experimental,” and I am always thinking about how and what words mean together and what happens when I split them up, with punctuation, without punctuation, and upper and lower case letters; the spacing of my lines is also something that I pay a great deal of attention to. “subtitles,” “red fog,” and “clinical observation” all have elements of the above. I had never used asterisks before, and that may be a small thing, but I wanted to see how that would affect the poem, “subtitles.” The words in my poems are added and deleted over and over again while I search for the right words that feel what I mean. My poems are generally not what I consider narrative, but I do believe that I have some or several story lines in my poems. These poems are a part of what I can't share with people in ordinary language or conversation, so what I am thinking about become poems.

In the poem, “the tales of embroidery” I am telling a story; even though the narrative is not straightforward, it is happening within the poem. On occasion I like to write my version of a fairy tale. I was raised on fairy tales and stories about the saints (which are fairy tales, in a way). This fairy tale is dark and I want to evoke a feeling for those long ago people who were peasants. I cannot tell a story or narrative in a linear way because I find that uninteresting, so I have to make sure that I take the reader (and that includes myself) into many different loops and paths that may seem unrelated but do contain parts of the “story.” No narrative is exactly what it seems, and it can be interpreted and understood differently by different people. As I re-read this poem this evening, I realized that I had done something that I wasn’t even aware of—and that is what is so wonderful about writing poetry.

Q: This routine of addition and subtraction; is this how your poems are normally composed? How do your books and chapbooks, then, come together? Would you say your work focuses more on the individual poem than, say, the chapbook or book-length collection?

A: I was working on a very short poem this morning and had this sudden idea for several words in the poem. I could almost see them in front of me. I didn’t know if the words would work or not, but I could just as easily remove them as I added them—and that is how I write. I suppose most poets work that way, since poetry is a mysterious process. I need to have the freedom to write what is important to me at the moment or to figure out—at least—what I may want to write about. I can’t seem to force an idea—I am one of those organic writers.

Several years ago I wrote poems for a chapbook about my years as a single mother. I was not happy about it, even though it was easier in some ways because I knew that I would be writing it from the different perspectives of myself and my children, and I knew where I was going with the collection. However, I didn’t like it. It lacked the magic that I feel when I usually write poetry. I almost felt as though I was cheating.

In my latest book, The Landfill Dancer, the poems were written spontaneously. My friend, Jeff Hansen, wrote a review of the book for his blog, Altered Scale, and was able to unify the poems, and he did that in a brilliant way (in my opinion). I won’t paraphrase what he said, but I will simply direct you to his blog, AlteredScaleBlogSpot.com.

I know that unless my brain changes a great deal, I will continue writing my poetry by shaping the spontaneity of words and form and deciding what I am writing about as I write.

Q: I’ve heard say that half of any draft involves attempting to comprehend what has already been accomplished. On this notion of constructing a poem via accumulation, collage and subtraction, who have been your models?

A: If I understand what you mean by accumulation, collage, and subtraction, I would have to say that Frank O’Hara has been a model for me in terms of constructing a poem using collage. What he does that is so interesting is use versions of his sensory world and pushes them together using language and art to create poetry. His poetry trembles and bursts and ricochets with human energy. Also, he was a very visual poet, and he used visual creations in so many of his poems. It seems to me that O’Hara used the every day accumulation of—once again—those very sensory details, almost piling them up like oil on a canvas, and then adding more detail to make his poetic life and work even more interesting.

Getting the words out onto the paper, using what I see both inside myself and outside in the world and using what I hear—like picking up conversation when I’m in a room or standing in line with many people, or listening to jazz while I am driving—all of this is fair game for use in my poems. However, with the accumulation of words, I need to re-form it into some type of cohesion or coherence. The poem continues to change form as it goes through drafts. I also change the meaning with a word that I think works better.

I haven’t thought about the importance of Frank O’Hara’s poetry in my poetry for a long time. There have been many other poets who have also been very important to me as far as giving me insights into how I develop my poetry, but I think that O’Hara has had the most influence on me in terms of his poetic energy and the way that he draws his images together into these poems that work so well.

Q: After a small handful of poetry chapbooks and books to your name, how do you feel your work has developed? What do you see your work possibly working toward?

A: I find myself somewhat naive about the poetry world. I lived in a small community where anything experimental is unusual—and there wasn’t much poetry. I don’t have an MFA, so I wasn’t exposed to the more business end (how to get yourself out there) of poetry and the new groundbreaking poetry that was happening—like LANGUAGE poetry, for example. My poetry life began in the 1970s, in the world of lyrical and/or narrative poetry. I wrote poetry for quite a while and then quit for 10 years for two reasons: I felt as though I had exhausted my poetic voice and I had two children that I raised by myself.

I got turned onto Frank O’Hara and Barbara Guest, and my world changed. I needed and wanted to write everything that I could possibly write. I fell in love with poetry again. I sent my poems out for publication—and quite a few were published, but I didn’t know anything about how a person gets known, therefore creating more opportunities to get work published. I still don’t know how to do that. That being said, I will continue writing poetry, and hopefully my poetry will continue changing. It’s strange though—there is (I think) this tendency to want poets (visual artists, musicians, etc.) to continue creating with a certain repetition in style. But maybe I’m wrong. I hope that I continue writing poetry until I die, and I hope that it doesn’t get silly and ridiculous and old. I would love to have more books out, but if it doesn’t happen, that doesn’t mean that I will quit writing poetry. I have had a recent conversation with myself about that.

I think that in much of my poetry I am creating my own mythology. I can’t seem to write about feminism (and I am a strong feminist) or other important political/human conflicts, even though I am also very political. It is difficult for me to write about how I feel—putting the human element into the poem. Perhaps it would be interesting to write poetry that still has my voice but is more personal—about how I feel. As I think about this, I realize that it would be difficult because I don’t use bluntness, but I write at an angle, if that makes sense.

If I plan to write until the end of my life as Mary Kasimor, I will need to continue being innovative just for myself, if not for anyone else.

Q: I’m quite fond of the way you “write at an angle,” as you say. You mention Frank O’Hara and Barbara Guest—are there any contemporary poets you’ve been reading lately that have shifted the way you think about writing?

A: There are a number of contemporary poets whose work is wonderful. I go through periods when I will read work from one poet and then move onto another. I can’t say that my favorites contemporary poets have shifted my perspective on writing—they have probably made the whole process of reading and writing poetry more interesting and exhilarating.

One poet whose work I think is wonderful is Eleni Sikelianos whose poems are full of surprises; she makes wonderfully surprising jumps and connections between metaphors, images, ideas in her poetry. Anne Carson is unbelievably talented. Her earlier work is incredible, and she seems to have become even more experimental over the years. I have Lyn Hejinian’s Saga/Circus next to me. I find the way that she puts her fiction together in all surprising ways. She is also an amazing experimental poet.

I have written reviews for several of Jared Schickling’s books. I have just finished reading his most current book, Two Books on the Gas. I haven’t yet figured out how he makes his strange observations and quirky word associations so interesting, but he does. I admire his work because he is so original.

My good friend George Farrah is also a poet whose work I admire. He had a strong influence on getting me to return to writing poetry after my 10 year hiatus. He is also an artist who paints abstract oils. George does this wonderful visual poetry with language. He seems to be applying the same principles to his poetry as he does to his visual art. Several of his visual poems appear in the Summer 2015 issue of Otoliths.

These are only a few of the many poets whose work has enlarged my passion for poetry because their poetry is beautiful and interesting in ways that I value.

Q: You reference some of the reviews you’ve been doing lately. How does reviewing help with the consideration and development of your own work?

A: I view writing poetry and writing reviews as both creative, but I use different parts of my brain for each. Obviously, writing poetry is more creative and writing reviews requires more of an analytical approach. I have come to appreciate the various poets’ work that I have reviewed. I respect and appreciate the poets’ work, but since these poets’ voices are so different from my poetic voice, I mostly focus on analyzing what and how they write and say their poems—and sometimes that is difficult.

I don’t know if writing reviews so much helps in the consideration and development of my poetry except to stretch my imagination/intellect to understand what is and isn’t obvious and then to try to write about it. As I am writing this, it has occurred to me that I have developed a more professional eye towards my poetry since I am also writing critically about other poetry, not so much in terms of whether it is “bad” or “good” poetry but in what the poet is attempting to do and how the poet is doing that. That and reading and writing over the years have all contributed to my skill and passion as a poet.

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

A: I have the anthology, Poems for the Millennium, Volume 2, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris. I think that I’ve re-read it eight times! I don’t read everything in it, but I will just decide who I am in the mood to read. The book has exposed me to poets whom I've never read—such as many of the post-WWII Japanese poets. Also, small doses of Gertrude Stein and John Cage are very fun to read. And there are so many others.

Anne Carson, Leslie Scalapino, and Nathaniel Mackey are several poets who re-energize me. Obviously, they are very different stylistically, and I confess that I don’t always understand where Scalapino and Mackey are taking me, but that’s okay. Their words and poetic voices are wonderful.

I am most interested in poets who break open the language and forms of poetry. It makes me feel heady and as though anything is possible—which it isn’t really, but it helps free me from the traditional constraining sense of language and form.

Touch the Donkey : eighth issue,

The eighth issue is now available, with new poems by Mary Kasimor, Billy Mavreas, damian lopes, Pete Smith, Sonnet L’Abbé, Katie L. Price, a rawlings and Gil McElroy.





Seven dollars (includes shipping). Until now, this was the only way to get juice from an orange.

TtD supplement #43 : seven questions for Amish Trivedi

Amish Trivedi is the author of Sound/Chest from Coven Press, and the chapbook The Destructions from above/ground press. His poems have most recently been in Sink, Entropy, Open Letters Monthly, NOÖ, The Laurel Review, and Kenyon Review Online. His reviews have been published in Sink, Jacket2 and Pleiades. He is the managing editor of N/A and lives in Normal, Illinois, where he is pursuing a Ph.D.

His poems “Rejected Verse,” “The Three Imposters,” “The Witnesses,” “Lights Out” and “Waiting” appear in the seventh issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “Rejected Verse,” “The Three Imposters,” “The Witnesses,” “Lights Out” and “Waiting.”

A: The manuscript as a whole, I guess, is something about anxiety. Not of some kind of internal nature but about the world around us. What I mean is that it’s a terror of the future—an uncertainty that’s creating an anguish. I think these poems cover a lot of things quick: race, religion, not taking care of one’s health. I think these things cause anguish and I think, in a Hölderlinian sense, it’s the poet’s job to reach back away from the abyss. I think you’ve got to start by examining that abyss. I think for a lot of folks the abyss is within: their own neuroses, etc. Maybe I’m getting older but I guess I care less about myself and my stupid shit and more about the world’s stupid shit. Maybe. Maybe they are intensely personal and I’m not seeing it yet.

Q: Why did you consider anxiety, specifically, something worth exploring? I know a number of poets that utilize their work as ways to explore and express anxiety as a means of a call-to-action via social, political or even environmental concerns. Is it the anguish, as you say, that you are attempting to assuage or explore with your work? Do you wish to soothe or to startle?

A: Well, I think anxiety is basically the stem of everything: isn’t it more or less the basis of much of our action as individuals and societies? I will say that a lot of poets who deal with anxiety in their work do a much better job than I think I can do, but I’m hoping that anxiety is the base, the roux if you will, of the manuscript. It’s a jumping off point in these poems. Just like in Sound/Chest, where the library and the card catalog are where we begin, I think anxiety is that place here. I don’t know that there will be a call to action, as it were, mostly because I think people do that much better than me. I adore Mark Nowak, of course, but I realize I could never do what he does for others through my writing as he does through his. I think I’m probably much too selfish for that yet. Startle or soothe? Hmmmm... I’ll have to think on that one. Certainly not soothe but startle doesn’t sound right either. Maybe just infect others with anxiety too.

Q: Is this something you’re still feeling out? How far are you through the current manuscript, and how does it compare to your prior work? What is your process of putting together a poetry manuscript?

A: I guess page wise, I am around 62 pages and more and more of the poems keep getting picked up. I guess, in my mind, I thought I’d only send poems out once the manuscript was done but my ego/anxiety/whatever got the better of me, so I started sending them out. The first set was Entropy and I just heard from Alice Blue Review who loved the poems. Go figure. So yes, it’s something thematically I want to figure out better but I don’t want to be heavy-handed with the social aspect of it. I want the poems to function as by themselves. It’s like Sound/Chest where not every poem is about being in a library or being in a flood: the poems should have an overall direction but maybe each individual portion can do its own thing and that’s cool.

I suppose this is, more or less, the third manuscript I’ve really worked on. Oh sure, I start little things here and there and I’m like “YEAH! THIS IS GOING TO BE A BOOK!” but then realize it’s a terrible idea or maybe it functions as a smaller thing—whatever. In this case, I thought I was writing poems that would be the second half of another manuscript but realized a) that manuscript functioned fairly well at 30 or so pages and b) these poems had somewhere they were going. As I wrote more and more, I think they started taking on all these ideas I got from teaching, like, what makes these kids get up in the morning? Like yes, we drank in college (probably too much) but it was always in the middle of some argument about the larger issues of the world. I feel like a lot I’m just hearing excitement over the act by itself, which scares me a little, you know? So that kind of thinking is falling into this manuscript. I don’t know—yes, I want to make sure it’s all connected nice and pretty—like for sending around but perhaps the connections are there and I’m too invested in the manuscript as a whole? It’s hard to say, I suppose.

Anyways—I guess I do kind of think of a manuscript as a THING versus a bunch of poems together. I think it’s two-fold: my favorite books now are the ones with an overall concept and I think that one should want to read the whole thing, to have something happen over the course of reading a whole book. Fiction writers know this well: even short story collections have SOMETHING that ties them all together. I think for this manuscript, it’s about all these bits of concern for....everything. I guess what I’m saying is that I would like to be more like Radiohead :)

Meanwhile, of course, there’s Sound/Chest the book and then there’s the manuscript (Your Relationship to Motion Has Changed) I’m sending around now and then, I guess, there will be FuturePanic at some point to also be sent around. (And yes, I’m aware of the two titles being similar and am very bothered by it. But maybe there’s a reason for it I can't yet find.) I’m learning that being a poet in the world means having a drawer full of manuscripts and I'm BECOMING ok with that. It’s a very slow process.

Q: bpNichol spoke once about how certain manuscripts connect, suggesting that they do even if only composed by the same hand. As long as the book makes sense as itself, however it connects doesn’t really matter, I don’t think. It sounds like much of the anxiety of the process of putting together manuscripts for you is in the fact that your process is still forming, which is a good thing. What do you see as the biggest lesson you’ve learned through the process of attempting to put together multiple manuscripts?

A: Yeah, I think ultimately it will be really hard to avoid. I mean, I like the idea that I could completely undo my own writing style and do something completely different, but I suppose the thing I am learning is that it’s ok to do what I do (however you define such a thing) as a writer. The only thing I really never want to do is get complacent. I don’t want to get to the point where I’m writing something and it’s just going out. That would be awful to me. Yes, I like to go quickly from writing to submitting, but I always want to have my work judged and harshly before someone takes it. My process is still forming and I think I always want it to be forming and never form. I think if writing/collecting/publishing/whatever ever becomes automatic for me, I could see that being the point at which I quit doing it. If it feels like I’m writing something over again, I can’t see wanting to do it. I’m always amazed by musicians who are putting out albums as they age. Haven’t you hit that chord like a million times? Haven’t you sung about that before? How do you keep going when you hit that point? Maybe they have yacht payments to make, which I don’t assume will ever be the case for me.

Putting together multiple manuscripts: They are all different, it seems. Sound/Chest, in a way, was very intuitive. I feel like the order, the sequence, occurred more or less naturally, with some helpful tips from Forrest Gander, who read it before we worked on my MFA thesis. He was very interested in the way the pronouns shifted and I, as ever, was fascinated by J.J. Murphy’s Print Generation. Memory? Film—yeah these things are all coming together here. Somehow those poems kind of came out over a year plus. The next manuscript (in-waiting) was much more difficult. First, it was ten long poems which were all couplets. I think one rejection note I got on it called it an “insistence of the form.” I liked the idea for a long time but realized it was too much. I think I wanted to get away from writing short poems and started writing longer ones but realized that maybe longer wasn’t working for me. Ultimately, it got cut, cut again, resequenced (this time with help from G.C. Waldrep and Joseph P. Wood) and it kind of came together in that process.

This new manuscript? I know where it’s going. I keep printing it out, thinking I’ll get it in order one of these days, but I don’t even know where to begin. Opening poems, like opening tracks, need to get the reader. In my head, it’s the first poem I wrote (Milk Thistle, which Michelle Detorie kindly posted on Entropy) but now I can’t get away from that and I probably should. I think the order will help me understand what’s lacking as one reads through. I hope it does, at least.

Q: I would suspect a lack of change is more a matter of fear than complacency. If you’ve been doing work long enough, it becomes far more frightening to try something new that might actual fail. And yet, that would be exactly the point when one’s writing would require it the most. Although I’m curious: what made you found the journal N/A and what effect, if any, has it had on your own writing?

A: I think you’re quite right, but I think it has to do with a level of success, a status quo. Successful work becomes a kind of formula in a way. I don’t mean just knowing what works for you: I mean continuing to do that in order to maintain something beyond the work (publication etc.). I’m sure we all can make a list of poets, other writers, musicians, etc. that do this.

It’s that thinking that led me to N/A in a way. I didn’t want formula. I didn’t want to build issues around work that fit together and I didn’t want to worry about particular aesthetics. I guess that’s kind of a lie: I can’t avoid my own aesthetic and François and I have a great tug and pull. I think sometimes I’m the one pulling to the middle and François is pulling us to the outside. We’re behind on the current issue because lives have gotten in the way but not because we’re having any kind of issue with what we want N/A to be (at least I don’t think so). I guess, to an extent, N/A is about being the place to play. We took a work of Kate Colby’s that was her testing her own sort of definition of what she had been doing. I like that. I like getting work from folks that THEY are unsure about. I like publishing work that might have our readers saying “Huh” versus “Oh man—this is great!” I think the work is great, of course, but I want it to be part of a conversation and part of a process. We like folks that aren’t afraid to fail and we as a journal aren’t afraid of failure either.

Oh—my own writing: I’m not sure. I think reading submissions has shown me a lot of what’s going on, more widely I think than reading journals at times. I think sometimes I learn more from the poems we reject than the ones we take. It forces you to decide what you want your journal’s name on every time you choose it or reject it. It has also made me more patient (I hope). Taking six months reading my submission? Yeah—I realize you’re not doing this all the time. It’s ok.

Q: It sounds as though patience is one of the elements that has emerged through your experiences as an editor/publisher (which is a good thing). I wonder about your development into utilizing the book as your unit of composition (as opposed to the poem). How did this evolve? Who are your models?

A: This is kind of a big problem, isn’t it? I feel like it went really quickly from writing good individual poems to focusing on a whole project. I remember writing this poem called “Banryu, Not Banryu” (which is in Mandorla 14 if anyone’s interested) and thinking “Well, that’s it. I’m not going to write 50 poems like that one, and this isn’t anything I do normally.” You remember how music used to be big on singles? And there were songs that didn’t fit on albums, like Dylan’s “Positively 4th Street.” We’re still cool with this in poetry, which is nice: you can publish a poem you like and wipe your hands of it, to an extent. I do wish I did more of this because I think it would allow me to reach a bit more, to test more things out (like the Banryu poem).

Models: Rae Armantrout is obviously still big for me (so much that I asked her to blurb Sound/Chest literally seconds after Jessica told me to start getting blurbs). I feel like she takes her aesthetic and takes on a THING. She does what she does so well and puts it into a topic/concept/whatever. That said, I feel like I’m torn between being project-oriented and being collection-oriented. What I mean is that I’m not working on a specific task but I also don’t want a book to be made up of just whatever I am working on. I’m not sure if anyone’s really doing that now. We’re in the concept album period of book publication, aren’t we?

Other models: I guess I am always trying to live up to former professors/mentors, etc. When one of them likes something on Facebook or writes something positive, I get all happy and stuff. I realize that’s probably ridiculous, but they are incredibly talented folks and I feel like they all do such amazing work that I’m constantly feeling like they are the folks to impress with my work. Sometimes I do it but it never feels like enough. Maybe that will go away with age.

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

A: For some reason, I always get back to Rimbaud. I’m not quite sure why he pulls me in like he does, but I have that big orange colored translation with the French also in there. I don’t know French at all but sometimes I just read it out loud as best as I know just to hear it. Beyond that: always philosophy. Probably not cool but in the last few years I’ve turned to Heidegger. Not for the politics, of course, but the whole of Language, Poetry and Thought is huge for me. I don’t know if it’s obvious at this point, but the Existentialists are major for me. I also watch a lot of standup comedy or TV shows based on standup. Louis C.K., even Marc Maron points out, seems to do what a poet ought: step beyond themselves to understand the actions of humans and interpret for the rest of us, which sounds like to me like poets reaching back away from the abyss, etc. It’s kind of amazing to me how all that works. Besides, I enjoy laughing, so that’s always good. Armantrout, of course, specifically Up to Speed. I feel like I’ve nearly worn through my copy. We’re presently away from our boxes of books, but the list of things I keep with me are probably interesting: The Dream Songs, Our Lady of the Flowers (which Johannes Göransson put me on to a few years back). Emily Dickinson, of course. I reread Glenum’s Maximum Gaga at least once a year just to jostle my brain a little. It’s nothing like anything I could ever do and that’s what I love about it.