Seven dollars (includes shipping). If you want to throw out a box, you have to cut it up.
Friday, July 15, 2016
Touch the Donkey : tenth issue,
Seven dollars (includes shipping). If you want to throw out a box, you have to cut it up.
Tuesday, July 5, 2016
TtD supplement #57 : seven questions for François Turcot
His poem “SOLID GROUND —SIXTH WHALEBONE,” translated by Erín Moure, appears in the ninth issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about the poem “SOLID GROUND —SIXTH WHALEBONE.”
A: In the poem Sixth Whalebone, from My Dinosaur, there is a passage where the father has run aground on a beach, swallowed by the sun. It follows scenes of a shipwreck and a windstorm. In this scene, the father seems dead, lying under the sun. This poem appears just before the end of the book, and speaks again of a disappearance. Here, the weight of memory of a father is heavy, like the whale, like the dinosaur. Both animal metaphors are gigantic, childish and excessive. The dinosaur of the book is at the same time the father, my own father, a man from another epoch whom I try to reassemble, and the absent figure of an animal bigger than nature who fascinates me. This animal has obviously faded, passed away, is no longer living but exists in representation, and that brings me immediately to my own father’s departure.
My Dinosaur is an excavation project, a research that digs around the father figure, whose story is that of a recent past. The whale appears in the last part of the book: here, seven whalebones, seven watery souvenirs of past summers are related. In them, my father, like an enormous mammal of the shallows, arises misunderstood, run aground, in small boats, under water or floating as my memory. I play here with the word “whale”, the cetacean of the depths – another icon of childhood (as the dinosaur of the title) that lets archaic images emerge. On another level, the “whales” refer also to the whalebone stays that stiffened his short collars, small plastic or metal lathes he kept in a small box – the Box of Whalebones stays. Two scales then collide together: the tiny whale, erased, those of the collars of my father that remind me of my memories, and the whale-father, obviously more heavy, the one who navigates in the dark depths of childhood waters.
Q: The structure of exploring childhood through a narrative surrounding the metaphor of the whale is an intriguing one. How does this work compare to your prior books? How does the composition of such a book usually begin?
A: In fact, the exploration of childhood using metaphors is rather recent in my work. I’ve only explored animal forms since My Dinosaur. But after that book, I became more fascinated by child’s play. I just finished a new collection of poems that is populated by many animals. I’ve dedicated the book to my daughter, to the ideas of memory flashes-before-memory, where the poem is a cross of micro-stories, fragments and prose. Dozens of animals punctuate this new project, appearing suddenly, becoming images and representations of fears, laughter, dread, desire, etc. But “animal presences” do not always appear in my first books, where it’s more the “family souvenirs” that I explore, trying to detect and follow the paths of memories.
And to answer your question, each of my books has a precise focal point, a specific subject: a night walk in the forest, a house history, a father, a child. These are the things that fascinate me. I investigate what lives close to me, by creating writing platforms related to family archaeologies. I like that a poetry book presents an architecture, one or many narrative veins, and the “excavations” that I propose in each project are linked to a quest after clues, which are collections of past traces, reconstructions... where the line between imagination and reality is thin. In a way, I follow trails to question memories and to structure them the trails become clear in the writing process. My books are then always related to a narrative deployment, as fiction can be. In this way, poetry becomes close to fiction.
Q: I’m curious about how My Dinosaur, as you say, is “an excavation project.” What first prompted you to explore your own childhood and history in such a way?
A: First, this book was conceived over few years: I spent a long time searching its axes, its voices, its pulsation. To tell the truth, I’d always promised myself that if I were someday able to “investigate,” to write about my father’s world, I’d do so. This Dinosaur, this enigmatic father, before being a book, was a pretext for collecting memories – mine first, his, and all those that I may have invented... I then started to conceive this “character”, because he was one, not just like a parent as seen by a child, but also like a hypothesis formed by a detective, by an archivist faced with disorder, an archeologist in front of too many approximations... And all this was conducted in angular ways, breaking with chronology, so as to get closer to his life.
To circumscribe a life is clearly impossible, for like any History, it can only be uncovered in fragments. It became obvious, in inventing stories of my dad (more than a hundred in My Dinosaur – both ordinary and extravagant) as well as accumulating them, that I would end up telling his story, or a story that seems to be him. To do this, I use lyric poems, fragments of letters, narrative pieces, prose or free variations, in verse form or not.
And then, to avoid pathos, because it’s not always pertinent to hear about someone else’s father, to open up the reading a bit more, I played on biographic strategies, insisting on the anonymous aspect and the daily life of a man who could be or not be my father, especially in the Prehistories section, the heart of the project. I do think My Dinosaur as a book on the Father, but not only mine, for it points in many directions, targeting many epochs. This also creates, I hope, an alternation between distance and proximity in face of this man who could, despite his inimitable presence, be somebody else...
Q: After a small handful of books published over the past decade, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see yourself headed?
A: When I look at this decade, I clearly see a focussed movement – the more I write poetry, the more I commit myself. Here I think about both the nature of the topics covered and the way I consider or envisage lyric forms. What is sure is that I constantly search to elude and foil myself, to surprise myself and to place myself in “risky situations” where I explore a specific subject – sometimes a delicate one, with, I hope, an originality. Each of my books is then very different as much in the formal approach as in the architecture or purpose: they point at diverse directions, so that – when I put all my books in perspective, I can perceive the ensemble like a “small constellation”, where each book has its own motive.
And where I see myself headed ? As I mentioned, narrative forms always interest me, so I will probably work on a “novel” over the next few years. I use the word novel, but let’s say a story. And poetry, of course! Also, my new book will be published this fall by Le Cormier (Belgium) and La Peuplade (Quebec). After that, even if I have intuitions, even if I try to imagine the next books, the future is a real riddle...
Q: I’m curious about your relationship to your works in translation. How close do you feel to a book of yours translated into another language?
A: So close... Erín Moure’s translation is clear, sensible, precise, rigorous and inventive. A real poïesis happens – as she mentioned herself in the postface entitled Si Moure traduit Turcot : a Book of Hours becomes a Book of Ours. Also, I had the chance to talk with her about the text, about some questions related to the lexicon, about the different perspectives. Our communication has always been open. I then read the English Dinosaur a few times and felt involved with the translation process. Erín always explained to me her decisions or ideas generously. I learned a lot from those discussions. Also, we both decided to include some pictures – an iconic dinosaur from the Calgary Zoo, and a photo montage of our Dads after the postface. Then, Jay MillAr and Hazel MillAr at BookThug welcomed those propositions and the photograph by Dianne Chisholm – the luminous and melancholic landscape for the cover. Because a book is a combination of details, all those elements make me feel very close to Erín Moure’s work. But, even given this strong feeling, obviously it’s always special when a dinosaur speaks another language...
Your question makes me think of this anecdote. Recently, a friend of mine told me that he really read his book for the first time in English translation. He said that it was maybe the only way to feel a real distance from his work. That’s interesting – the idea of suddenly becoming a new reader of your own book, discovering other strategies... I can understand this posture, but it’s hard to explain.
Q: What authors have influenced the ways in which you put a manuscript together?
A: Well, many, I guess. It really depends on the book I’m working on. Because reading and writing are feeding each other, my projects are influenced by different perspectives. In my previous three books, I thank authors that, for one reason or another, are related to my writing process. For Cette maison n’est pas la mienne, W.G. Sebald has been essential; for My Dinosaur, Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, for his particular lyrical way of writing about the father – and Les heures, by Fernand Ouellette. I have to say that Erín Moure’s books have a very special place in my bookshelves, as well as others by many innovative writers who open spaces between literary genres, playing with possibilities.
Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
A: Julien Gracq’s books have always reenergized me; W.G. Sebald’s prose and narratives strategies (the way he explores archives, history, etc.) have been a crucial influence on my relation with literature; Hervé Bouchard’s “fictions” that hover between novel, theatre and poetry excite me; and all the eclectic work of Daniel Canty – a close friend of mine – with his “unclassifiable practice” and his great translations of Charles Simic, Erín Moure, Stephanie Bolster and Michael Ondaatje. Also, obviously, there is the work of many Quebec poets whom I have been following for a while – Martine Audet, Gilles Cyr, Nicole Brossard, Pierre Nepveu, Roger des Roches, Elise Turcotte, to name a few. And so many talented younger Quebec poets around me, for sure... But it’s funny, to really answer your question, even though I write poetry, fiction and prose authors still occupy a central place in my reading habits. One thing is clear to me: all is in the manner of telling and being told...
Thank you, rob, for this interview.
François Turcot
Montreal – Magdalen Islands, 2016
Wednesday, June 22, 2016
TtD supplement #56 : seven questions for Sarah Cook
An excerpt from her “LOVE POEMS” appears in the ninth issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about “LOVE POEMS.”
A: These poems started with a really basic conceit: I wanted to write one love poem a day for a whole month. I almost always fail at such structured goals, and so I wrote a small batch of them and then abandoned the project (though not the love itself!). Each poem starts with an epigraph from another poem I was reading, either recently or that day, and I like this method because I work well with prompts but not prescriptiveness. So a fragment from another poem becomes a way in, so to say, to a new one.
I’m working on these again because I’ve lately been reading, for example, Lorde’s discussion of the use of the erotic, and especially bell hooks’ philosophies about love. I feel in the midst of a new rush of poems, a continuation where I’m again using epigraphs but this time from prose sources. I don’t know yet if that will change the form of them but I find the idea of it exciting.
I came up with the title somewhat casually at the last minute, for the sake of naming the project, of calling its projected wholeness into being. But it’s probably not a coincidence that Anne Sexton’s book of the same name is very symbolically close to me at all times.
Q: Is working with and from prompts the way you usually compose? How is this current work different from the writing you’ve done prior?
A: I think I do often work from prompts, but I would clarify that most of the time that just means I read a lot. A few years ago, I had this very distinct realization that when I’m experiencing something like “writer’s block,” the trick for getting through that is not to push toward the writing but to read more & more & more.
I want to make this comparison with learning a foreign language: there is so much emphasis placed on speaking immediately that it sometimes hides how much work can be accomplished through active listening. I’m not a parent but don’t babies not talk right away? They’re just surrounded by language for a while, listening. When I surround myself with good poems and good poets, I find ideas or prompts—or I even just occasionally misread a line and then find myself writing the poem that follows.
So I guess my process of being prompted is really a development of my listening skills. Like, even if you’re not a student with homework and people telling you what to do, if you listen well enough you’ll find the things encouraging you to write in response to them. It reminds me of this great line by Ursula K. LeGuin: “Listening is not a reaction, it is a connection. Listening to a conversation or a story, we don’t so much respond as join in — become part of the action.”
Q: You mention Ursula K. LeGuin: what other writers or works have influenced the ways in which you work?
A: Maggie Nelson in a big big way. Kate Zambreno, Sawako Nakayasu (I want to say that Texture Notes was a kind of gateway book for me). Nicole Brossard and specifically this idea of the question(s) that the writer seeks and repeatedly comes back to. Anne Sexton was one of my entry points into the poetry world at a young age, and then I grew out of her, and then I came back to her with a totally different and complex relationship (like she went from being mother to friend). Eileen Myles, whose poems I love but Inferno might be my favorite thing ever. TC Tolbert. Kate Durbin, especially her performances/presentations of self, and her thinking around Lady Gaga. The original Gurlesque anthology was a huge thing for me to discover. A lot of writers whom I found in Women’s Studies classes: Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Judith Butler. Kristeva (and her discussions especially of cyclical vs. monolithic time—that’s an idea often present in my thinking). I think Julie Choffel’s poem, “Serenade, or After Others,” is an example of a truly perfect poem. Diane Arbus—not just her photographs but her texts, her journals—she is a model of thinking for me right now.
Q: After a couple chapbooks over the past five or so years, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?
A: I’m definitely more and more invested in projects, in serial works and the building of little interdependent poemworlds, versus one-offs or things that may work primarily in isolation. I find myself using the space of the poem as a space for thinking through, for asking questions and circling around ideas repeatedly and retracing my steps. I think my poems are becoming more essay-like and my essays more poem-like.
Maggie Nelson talks about knowing the real limitations of language (informed by Wittgenstein), but believing, somewhat romantically, that words are still good enough. I’d like to get to the point where I really know in a big way that to say “words are good enough” and “words aren't good enough” is basically the same thing.
Q: You speak of a kind of meeting-place between “knowing” and “unknowing,” almost as though you prefer working intuitively, but after an enormous amount of reading, research and thought. Fred Wah has referred to composing as a kind of “drunken tai chi,” wishing to slightly throw himself off-balance to keep his skills sharp, but not stringently so. How do you find your own balance between the two?
A: I like this question and it makes me nervous. I talk a lot about being interested in failure, contradiction, ambiguity, but I think constructed failing is much different than actually finding that tenuous space between balance and falling over. I mean, to theorize about the body and intimacy, and to study & read & consume & think, is not the same as actually opening up and being vulnerable. Have you ever tried to fall over—like, pretended to fall for humor? & then have you ever tried to balance your body at the farthest edge of its tipping point? Maybe not actually ever falling down, but feeling your body get close, and that sudden spring of catching yourself? In my experience, the latter is much more frightening—even if you never touch the ground—and tells you a lot more about what it means to find your “safe edge” (thank you, TC).
I have the urge here to quote Mary Ruefle: “You simply cannot learn and know at the same time, and this is a frustration all artists must bear.” I think the process of learning is a lot less stable than how we sometimes conceive of it, growing up in school settings where learning often looks like memorizing and repeating things back to the teacher that you've already heard. Perhaps when we’re the most open to learning, we’re not only starting from a space of unknowing, but entering further into one as well. But that takes courage. I’m an adult and it’s so so hard to be brave. You have to be willing to explode. And that willingness is so much more difficult to achieve than the exploding itself.
Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
A: A lot of people I’ve already mentioned would come up again here. But so many things besides reading reenergize my work: hiking, especially thinking while moving/walking; being around animals; cutting my hair; being near water; roller-blading. Taking instant photos, or just analogue photographs in general. Going on dates with my boyfriend. All these things reenergize my living, and how I move through space, which is how I write. In fact, remembering that my writing life encompasses all of my life is in itself a rejuvenating (and usually difficult) act, it helps facilitate the (self-)permission needed to live how I’d like to write, and vice versa: a lot of stretching, growing bigger; a lot of questions, and leaning into fear rather than away from it.
But also: the amount of times I’ve come back to Anne’s transformation of Rumpelstiltskin:
He laid his two sides down on the floor,
one part soft as a woman,
one part a barbed hook,
one part papa,
one part Doppelganger.
Monday, June 6, 2016
TtD supplement #55 : seven questions for Gregory Betts
His poems “Autopoesy,” “¿Christian Bök?” and “What is the fourth person?” appear in the ninth issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about the poems “Autopoesy,” “¿Christian Bök?” and “What is the fourth person?.”
A: “Autopoesy” is a response poem to Christian Bök’s poem “The Extremophile” from The Xenotext, which ends with these superbugs escalating in badassness until his conclusion where “they await your experiments.” I want to think about them outside of their function for human use, though, which means recognizing in them the defeat of human language; a place that is inaccessible to our projections. Language can take us to that point, but does not have to turn around and flatter us for reaching our personal best.
“¿Christian Bök?” is not a question for Christian, but a question of language, names, and limits. I also recognize that these writers have approached similar questions about the limits of language from very different perspectives. It is also an acknowledgement that Margaret Atwood has already written a book about the projection of human technology to the point where they (our machinic other, our aliens) do not need us anymore, and certainly do not await our experiments. The longer I spend in CanLit, the more I realize that the answer is almost always “Margaret Atwood”; and the question too.
“What is the fourth person?” is culled from a series of questions my 4 year old son asks me every night before bedtime. He gets one such question a day and we discuss it at length, so he chooses carefully. These questions are taken in sequence over the course of three weeks; they are the probes of a learning imagination sent out over a room, a country, a planet, a universe.
Q: How do these poems fit with some of the other work you’ve been doing lately? Would these pieces be considered “occasionals,” or are they potentially part of some larger construction?
A: They are occasional pieces, responses to my daily life and current reading. They fit in with the ongoing arc of my work lately though, including an essay on the same theme called “I Object: Writing Against the Contemporary.” https://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/ESC/article/viewFile/25505/18783
Q: Your essay speaks to a shift from human creation to “inhuman artifice,” and writing the impossible; beyond lyric into metapoetry and other attempts at reducing and even erasing the authorial self. How do you feel these poems fit into that attempt at a “post-post-language” (or whatever it is you might wish to call it), and how well do you think they have achieved some of these goals? Just where do you see this new way of seeing writing headed?
A: Well, it’s an oxymoron, of course, to write a poem beyond human language. It’s like my old joke to invite people to name me one thing you cannot say. But given the climate crisis, the total and ruinous domination of humans over the entire planet (nothing is wilderness, everything is permitted), it behooves us to shift the nonhuman into the forefront of our consciousness. I’ve been working on the role of humour, especially nervous laughter, in this kind of self-consciousness – and I suppose I see these poems in that context. In this, I follow Wyndham Lewis’ formula for humour as either humans behaving like machines or machines behaving like humans. Except I’m not looking for a redemption of the categorical human, more like the dispensation of our rule. Back in 1999, I had the opportunity to study with Toby Foshay, one of the world’s top scholars on Wyndham Lewis, who was at the time training to be an eastern orthodox monk. He said of that line by Lewis that in our nervous laughing we can feel the abyss barely held at bay.
Q: I’m curious at your exploration of humour. Contemporary poetry has always had an uneasy relationship with humour, in any form, often to the point of dismissal. Why do you think that is? Or do you even agree? Is this something you’re conscious of?
A: I’m not sure I fully agree; the heirs of the contemporary lit that I value held Charlie Chaplin as a champion proto-avant-gardist every bit as much as the Marquis de Sade. The line between jokes, pranks, and literary experiments has always been a fine and fading one. Is a published blank book really that different from a recorded crank call? One of our top contemporary poets collected and sorted boxes of Alpha-Bits, categorized them and pinned them into an entomologist's cabinet. Another poet spilled a box of Alpha-Bits onto the floor of a poetry reading, rolled around in them naked, and then “read” the letters stuck onto his body. Twee! There are half-a-dozen contemporary poets with one foot in literature, one foot in stand-up comedy, and one foot in blown metaphors. And even beyond the humour that laughs at the world as it is, at its failures and foibles, I’m particularly drawn to a kind of laughter that does not attempt to resolve or overcome difference, that takes pleasure in the collapse of systems, and points at the mess with scatological glee.
Q: Isn’t there an inherent irony to constructing writing on the collapse of systems? Does that make the work you’ve been doing lately a series of gestures on collapse, reconstruction or repurposing?
A: Inasmuch as irony signals a schism between the message and the meaning, all poetry is ironic. It’s the solitary, consistent mark of difference of a poem from a recipe. But it isn’t just the collapse of systems by itself that I’m interested in — it’s the double vision, the rubble and the edifice, intertwined, suggested by each other. The human and the machine, the way we constantly move back and forth. McLuhan writes about clichés as an internal technology through which discourse hardens and accelerates the reception of shared knowledge. Our experience in the world ossifies, in other words, into technology even as we glean the world through such ideational devices. Lewis’ notion of humour is latent in every daily experience.
Q: After a small handful of books and chapbooks under your belt, how do you feel your work has developed? You say these poems fit within the current arc of your work generally – both critical and creative – but where do you see your work heading? What are you attempting to move away from?
A: I wouldn’t say I’m going in any specific direction, as if I was trying to go somewhere. I try to keep myself open to learning, and my writing changes as I do. From If Language on, though, I’ve always been interested in how we speak through each other’s words. I’ve been moving away from literary lineages, though, and become increasingly interested in public language and the building of public resistance movements. My Boycott book, for instance, looks at the rather vacuous and highly repetitive language of boycott movements around the world, including from all political orientations. It seems appropriate that there is a hollowness in the language of strategic withdrawal, a shared screech of outrage and overstated piety, but I am myself a boycotter of various things and so admire the earnestness motivating even fallow words. It is one of the few political mechanisms left to the general public that consistently works. It is also, however, a tool only available to people with money enough to withhold, so it is deeply entrenched within existing power politics. So while I have been previously interested in how something radical could be said in and even against the general economy of language, I have become increasingly interested in the extensions of that into public and political spheres.
Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
A: Every year I read at least one new Margaret Atwood book, mainly because she has written a new book in every year of my reading life. I keep coming back to Sheila Watson and Marshall McLuhan, both of whose work touch on such rich veins of myth and apocalypse, ritual and the hint of redemption. Borges, Blake, and Neruda keep cycling back, as does my first literary love with Dostoevsky. If I had to pin my reading down to one author, though, in some kind of awful hypothetical exercise, I would stick with bpNichol. I don’t love or even like everything he wrote, but I deeply admire his engagement with theory, philosophy, and myth, his realization of astonishingly twisted ideas, and his commitment to building experimental, interdisciplinary literary communities. You can feel those aspects ripple through all of his works, and they are like arrows of possible directions for more, weirder, smarter works.
Thursday, May 26, 2016
TtD supplement #54 : seven questions for Eric Schmaltz
His poems “Automation” and “Capital” appear in the ninth issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about the poems “Automation” and “Capital.”
A: “Automation” & “Capital” are drafts from a larger project entitled The Assembly Line of Babel, a small exhibition hosted by the Niagara Artists Centre (NAC) in the Dennis Tourbin Members Gallery in late summer 2015.
In general, the pieces in this series consider processes of making objects & meaning in a ready-made culture. Reflecting on the relationship between Capitalism, machines, & language, one might argue that linguistic acts which conform to normalized spelling, grammar, & syntax make meaning “automatic.” I see this exhibition as a way of offering a playful intervention into how we think about language, signification & automatization.
Q: How do these pieces, and this project, compare to other pieces you’ve been working on?
A: These pieces, & this project, is in close proximity to much of my published work especially other visual texts like MITSUMI ELEC. CO. LTD.: keyboard poems (above/ground 2013), Pages Loading… (No Press 2014), YOU WILL NEVER AMOUNT TO ANYTHING (No Press 2015). These works emerge as a result of my fascination with machines, & ideas of mapping, process, systems, & materiality. While a chapbook like MITSUMI might be considered as a kind of mapping of the materiality of a writing machine, poems like “Automation” & “Capital” depart from this idea. They are much more about process, construction, & potential.
Q: MITSUMI ELEC. CO. LTD.: keyboard poems was composed, in part, as a response to the work of Paul Dutton. What is it about Dutton’s work that prompted such a response, and how successful do you feel, in hindsight, your response was?
A: MITSUMI might be less of a response & more of a collusion with Paul Dutton’s inimitable The Plastic Typewriter. Both The Plastic Typewriter & Mitsumi share an interest in deconstructing the writing machine & mapping the aesthetic possibilities of a machine in ruin. But there are, of course, various departures in terms of technique: Dutton was able to use the carbon ribbon of the typewriter to transfer the surface of the machine onto the page, for example. Mitsumi required black paint, a scanner, & computer software for the pieces to be rendered––which is perhaps significant in that it symbolizes a submission to the machine itself.
Q: Do you see your work-to-date as a single, ongoing project, simply broken up into smaller parts?
A: Recently published works suggest that there is a single, ongoing project since the concepts at play are closely related––machines, visuality, materiality, & so on. But no, there is no single ongoing project. There are other, unrelated projects dwelling amongst the hard-drives: lyric texts composed during hallucinations; a long poem meditating on ideas of home, locality, & memory; delirious poetic-critiques of spectacle & consumerist culture as well as audio/video collaborations referred to as xenoralities.
Q: I like that your work does have that feel of being interconnected, and yet moves in a diverse range of directions. When creating new work, who have your models been? What writers and works have influenced the ways in which you create work, whether visual or text-based?
A: I consider my network of influences to be quite sprawling. Creatively, I am indebted to a vast number of poets, musicians, artists, mentors, & thinkers. The list seems interminable, but in truncated form, I look to the usual suspects: bill bissett, bpNichol, Judith Copithorne, Steve McCaffery, The Four Horsemen as well as writers such angela rawlings, Lillian Allen, derek beaulieu, Nathalie Stephens, & kaie kellough. I’ve also benefited (& continue to benefit) from the mentorship & support of numerous poets, but especially Gregory Betts, Stephen Cain, & derek beaulieu. All of that being said, I try to locate my work within an expanded field & find stimulation in the work of visual artists such as Kelly Mark & Micah Lexier; producers of house, techno, & IDM; graphic designers & illustrators; academics & para-academics; department stores; street artists; filmmakers; & programmers. With every encounter, I seek to draw out an idea & place it among a constellation of thought within which I try to locate my work.
Q: After a small handful of chapbooks, numerous pieces appearing in journals online and in print, as well as in a variety of gallery shows, how do you feel your work is developing? What do you see yourself working towards?
A: Modular projects––chapbooks, pamphlets, journal publications, & the small gallery––have been my preferred mode of production & dissemination thus far. These have provided an appropriate testing ground for ideas & have assisted in locating myself within a thematic, aesthetic, & political framework (another ongoing process). From here, it makes the most sense to work toward a full-length book project within which I hope to more fully flesh out some of the ideas I currently have in play, but while I do that I must also respond to an impulse to expand my sense of the field & find new ways of thinking, producing, & building.
Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
A: There are texts with which I have a deep affinity: The Sorrow and the Fast of It by Nathalie Stephens (2007), Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists by a.rawlings (2006), & fractal economies by derek beaulieu (2005), each of which I tend to return to when scheming new projects.
That being said, there are so many texts coming out at an accelerated rate & I want to consume them all. There is little time to turn back: read the present, think of the future.
Monday, May 16, 2016
TtD supplement #53 : seven questions for Paul Zits
A selection from “dlog, dlog” appears in the ninth issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about the poetry from “dlog, dlog.”
A: This sampling is part of a new collection, dlog, dlog, or bullet trouble, through the head and in the heart, that reimagines the circumstances around the death of Alex McPahil of Hesketh, Alberta, in 1926, and the subsequent trial of his sister Margaret, charged with his murder. My approach to this book is a little different in that I’ve sought to write it without knowledge of the results of the trial. As the examinations play out and the evidence is recorded, and as I become more immersed in this material — her case file and the trial transcripts — my own position oscillates, with the character of Margaret then moving back and forth from aggressor to victim, and the convoluted nature of this composite characterization enables her to embody something of both. Both brother and sister become these knotted aberrations, grotesqueries that are at times monstrous and at others quite stunning, at times sickly and at others impressive in their strength. Often they carry opposite qualities at once. “Margaret is devoid of colour” is an earlier poem in which I first began to explore these kinds of defining features in Margaret, and when I begin to make inquires into her agency. To achieve these aims I’ve endeavoured for the work to take on a strong surreal quality, employing a variety of cut-up techniques and collage-work. “warm summer afternoon underclothes,” “Q. Did you do anything else to try to help him,” and “it wasn’t so dark” are later poems devoted to Margaret and also serve to advance the narrative. Folded into these poems are excerpts from an interview with Catharine Robbe-Grillet as well as cuts from English fairy tales and articles on the history of feminist film. The poems take their source from relatively stark statements made during the trial, and are elevated by these additional source texts rendering key moments, or key revelations, more complex and provocative. “he was bleeding at the mouth” is built through accumulation — a technique that I developed and refined for my second manuscript, “Leap-seconds”) — and captures Margaret’s attempts to attend to her dying brother. Through the transcripts, one learns that her behaviour at this point was quite abnormal (at one point prying open her brother’s mouth with a spoon in order to pour wine down his throat, and which is later found fastened between his teeth by the responding officer), so I wanted this manic burying of Alex’s blood to further convey Margaret’s frenzied state of mind.
Q: Much of the work I’ve seen of yours so far explores and reshapes historical documents related to a variety of prairie Canadian histories that aren’t often discussed. What is it that attracts you to reworking such specific histories and their materials?
A: First, I would say that my interest revolves around questions of representation, and the frames that distinguish various forms of writing. When I find moments of overlap in these frames, I tend to take notice. As in the documentation informing Massacre Street, the appropriations in dlog, dlog often seize upon unexpected poetic ventings. Secondly, the archive is where I satisfy my passion for stories, history and collecting. My work requires that I am a skilled collector and my poetry collections are often just that, a catalogue of my selections. And I am certainly most attracted to the histories that, as you’ve said, aren’t discussed, as they tend to be the histories that are least subdued. There is no question that I am drawn towards the grotesque, so you will often find that my work in some part explores aberrancy, in image, in character and in behaviour.
Q: You seem very much to be constructing books as large-scale projects, as opposed to collections of stand-alone poems; projects built around particular subjects and structures. How did this process of building poetry books this way begin, and what writers and books have been your models?
A: I don’t know that I experience the world (or have the urge to respond to it) in such a way that would accommodate a practice built upon writing collections of stand-alone poetry. I find that my attention is better kept, and my interest sustained, by pursuing projects that are larger in scale. But even in the larger scale works I can locate a variety of different literary modes, such as autobiography or conceptualism. There are traces of my own history and of the everyday, so there very well may be some parallels between my collections and works that collect stand-along pieces. The suggestion that the work might not be so obviously shaped by my experience neglects the fact that experience is made from a fabric of sources, and countless writings. And so I indulge myself in the research component of my writing projects, and feel wonderfully at home in archives. dlog, dlog is a little different because I have chosen to write this collection without a clear indication of how the actual story ends. As I work through the transcripts, the poems are responsive to new evidence and lines of questioning. What’s captured, in fact, is a personal response to these accumulating testimonies, as I consider and compare new information to conclusions I’d drawn previously. But perhaps I’m straying too far from the question. And I hope that this response hasn’t been too disconcerting for your readers. As for model texts, a couple of examples would be Gro Dahle’s A Hundred Thousand Hours (Ugly Duckling Press, 2013) and CA Conrad’s Book of Frank (Wave Books, 2010).
Q: What is it that drives you to explore such archival material through poetry, as opposed to fiction or non-fiction? Are there things you feel that poetry allows that another genre might not? What is it about the form that drives you?
A: What I hope that I’m doing through my work is causing the lines between these genres to attenuate. But there still remains something largely pragmatic about the use of language in fiction, with some wonderful exceptions of course, while poetry remains for me the language of excess and alterity. Poetry is about shared meaning, whereas fiction, and non-fiction, still feels predicated on authority. As poetry, my role is deemphasized and I find great freedom in that. And that freedom will hopefully be felt by the reader as well: The text has it’s own unity, of course, but the unity that the reader establishes is part of its totality. Sometimes it’s merely a case of locating moments of excess within the archival texts, otherwise I use collage techniques to produce these excesses. Within this excess of language characters take shape, episodes surface, and so forth, but narrativization is largely withheld. I think that to appropriate archival material for the purposes of fiction writing, consequently, means to ascribe that material with a particular authority. All of this being said I am reading much more fiction these days (although Liz Howard’s Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent stands out as a singular highlight in poetry this year), so it’s not surprising to see my work making some small movements formalistically towards the novel. Konrad Bayer’s The Sixth Sense has exerted a tremendous influence on my work since I discovered it a couple of years ago, and is a beautiful illustration what the novel is yet capable of.
Q: What was it, specifically, about Bayer’s novel that struck you? And, given you mention fiction as an influence upon your work, are you working your way towards composing fiction? Or are you deliberately pilfering fiction for structural influence for the sake of a more expansive poetry?
A: I borrow the following line from the novel for use as an epigraph to “Leap-seconds”: “time? goldenberg said in astonishment, and several days later, after thinking the matter over, he said, it is just a cutting-up of the whole, by means of the senses.” What is remarkable about the novel is its chaos. One takes a truly theatrical surrealist expedition through the spaces and times of Bayer’s text. It’s a jumble and it’s paranoid and it’s irreverent (with regards to the structural rules governing composition, or the consistent expression of time reference). The fragmentation is reminiscent of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck. I find myself thoroughly entertained by the task of sorting the pieces of works like these. It’s assaulting, there is no question about that, but the humour and imagery and poetry achieved really has no parallel. Who would not be taken in by lines like this: “he sat there before the open window as if before a curtain with these two hills in front of his nose sagging at the middle like the mattress on his bed with this sky like the old rug in front of the stove round like the trees in front of him out there or in there with this branch like the glowing stovepipe at this position of the sun”? I am both working my way towards composing fiction, yes, and, certainly, deliberately pilfering fiction for structural influence for the sake of a more expansive poetry. Sometimes the fiction writers get it right and sometimes they even do it better.
Q: With a trade collection under your belt, as well as a number of chapbooks, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?
I certainly see threads from one collection to the next, consistencies in terms of motif, subject matter, the value that I ascribe to language and poetry, but the greatest progress has been made in balance. There are aspects in my earlier work that read incredibly stilted to me now, an imbalance between image and sound, for example. Imbalances between the discourses I fold into the major texts that I am working with. I’m a better collector now. The selections that I make are braver. I feel that my sensibilities have matured, enabling me to better align the form of individual pieces, or suites of poems, to their content. I don’t drive this relationship as I have in the past, instead allowing it to follow more intuitively, reducing my reliance on the intellectual filter. With regards to the second question, in his novel A Time for Everything Karl Ove Knausgaard writes the following: “And as each new age is convinced that it constitutes what is normal, that it represents the true condition of things, the people of the new age soon began to imagine the people of the previous one as an exact replica of themselves, in exactly the same setting.” The notion of making this fallacy of presentism explicit, rendering history in terms of modern values and concepts, is compelling to me. As I continue to work with and expand my current techniques in my exploration of non-narrative representations of historical reality (see Hayden White), I expect my work will begin to more fully embrace presentist interpretations, to more explicitly interrogate issues of bias and morality. Regardless of where I see it headed at this very moment, I expect that I will continue to work in archives with the passion of a collector.
Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
A: I love this question. The poetry of: John Ashbery, Heimrad Bäcker, Jonathan Ball, Charles Bernstein, Anne Carson, Paul Celan, Margaret Christakos, Jason Christie, CA Conrad, Gro Dahle, T. S. Eliot, Kenneth Goldsmith, Sue Goyette, Brecken Hancock, Robert Kroetsch, Larissa Lai, Ezra Pound, Sina Queyras, Natalie Simpson, Gilbert Sorrentino, Rachel Zolf, and Steven Zultanski. The prose of: Kathy Acker, Georges Bataille, Samuel Beckett, Walter Benjamin, Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Luis Borges, William S. Burroughs, Blake Butler, Italo Calvino, Leonora Carrington, Anne F. Garréta, Jean Genet, Pierre Guyotat, Tyler Hayden, Hilda Hilst, Alfred Jarry, Jacques Jouet, Franz Kafka, Chris Kraus, Édouard Levé, Tao Lin, Clarice Lispector, Robert Majzels, Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Robert Walser. A top nineteen list of works: Blood and Guts in High School (Kathy Acker), Babyfucker (Urs Allemann), Watt (Samuel Beckett), The Sixth Sense (Konrad Bayer), The Hearing Trumpet (Leonora Carrington), The Book of Frank (CA Conrad), A Hundred Thousand Hours (Gro Dahle), The Songs of Maldoror (Isidore Ducasse), Coma (Pierre Guyotat), Ohmhole (Tyler Hayden), With My Dog Eyes (Hilda Hilst), Automaton Biographies (Larissa Lai), Suicide (Édouard Levé), Ballon Pop Outlaw Black (Patricia Lockwood), Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy), Life: A User’s Manual (Georges Perec), Lemon Hound (Sina Queyras), The Voyeur (Alain Robbe-Grillet), and Janey’s Arcadia (Rachel Zolf). Thank you, reader.
Wednesday, May 4, 2016
TtD supplement #52 : seven questions for Laura Sims
Her poems “Olga, who dresses, “Though I didn’t inter these bodies myself, Olga,” I’ve done my time in the hippodrome, working” and “I’ve been kinda bored” appear in the ninth issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about the poems “Olga, who dresses, “Though I didn’t inter these bodies myself, Olga,” I’ve done my time in the hippodrome, working” and “I’ve been kinda bored.”
A: These poems are part of a series I call “The Olga Poems.” They started in response to spam mail I received from a “Russian Bride” looking for companionship...I don’t have the original message, but something about the language, which was stilted, vaguely sexual, and expressed emotional vulnerability stirred something for me. It wasn’t just the sorrow I felt for this anonymous woman-as-commodity, but also the complexity of emotions I felt toward the man on the other end...who is he? Why is he trying to buy companionship? Why is this something that men are entitled to do? I felt compelled to explore this murky area of human experience (I like murky areas of human experience). The speaker’s voice, which is the voice of the man, kind of popped out of me and I ran with it.
Q: In your “12 or 20 questions” interview, you said: “Usually a new direction for my work starts suddenly—I write a poem, and it’s somehow different, and then if I write a few more like it, I recognize that it’s building into something larger. Right now I’m writing poems in a voice that takes me over—so the voice is dictating this new direction, this new series. Whenever that voice quiets, I’ll be done.” Was that in reference to the current project? And is this a normal part of any new project, catching a particular voice and seeing where it might take you?
A: Yes, that was in reference to the current project, though this project (the Olgas) is on hold for now. I kind of lost the thread of it somehow, and got distracted by something else. Newer work. I’m not sure at this point if the Olga voice has “quieted” for good, or if it’s only a temporary pause. I would like to keep writing the Olgas if I’m able. I’m not sure “catching a particular voice” is a normal part of every project for me, though. Sometimes it starts with an image or a line (overheard or read), and if it continues I follow it, so I guess the impetus is not always the voice. But that particular series, the Olga series, was/is definitely voice-driven.
Q: What is it about book-length composition that appeals to you? Is this something that you deliberately work with your poems, or something that simply evolves as your projects build?
A: I’m not sure. I like the idea of the fullness of exploration the book-length composition allows you...that you can take a thing and look at it from so many sides, or explore a voice, a persona, an idea in depth. It’s immensely satisfying. I didn’t write this way when I was younger, but after I published my first book, I think I started to see that it was possible to publish books (hallelujah!), so I began to write towards that end...rather than seeing what I wrote as discrete pieces, I began to see them as part of a larger whole.
Q: Have you had any models for your book-length projects, or have you simply felt your way intuitively through composition? And would you ever return to single, stand-alone poems, or might such a thing no longer be possible?
A: It seems to be the way of many poets now, so although I can’t identify specific models right now, they are legion! I think of it as being intuitive on my part, but I’m certain the zeitgeist has had some effect. And it’s certainly possible I would return to the single, stand-alone poem, though it would feel weird at this point. Perhaps that’s merely force of habit? It’s hard to say.
Q: After four trade collections and your current work-in-progress, how do you feel your work has developed?
A: In the last two years or so, my work has changed quite drastically (from my perspective). I’m interested in doing new things with the line, in loosening my grip on the line and being more forthright (in a twisted way) than abstract or elliptical. Maybe it’s a mid-life crisis, I dunno. I’ve been writing some fiction, and I always read a lot of fiction and non-fiction, so that is surely influencing my poetry, too.
Q: I’m curious about the idea of loosening your grip on the line. Can you expand upon that? Do you worry your lines were becoming too constrained?
A: I guess I just tired of being so constrained. Loosening my grip on the line means letting things be less mediated, less perfected—letting raw emotions and thoughts break through, and (more importantly) letting them stay where they are, as they are. Playing with rhythm and rhyme, using less severe line breaks, being more playful in general. Letting my sense of humor show. I’ve been so serious! Though again, this is from my perspective, and an outside reader might not perceive such a change. Though after I’d read my new poems aloud the other night, I said to someone in the audience afterward that I felt the poems I’d read were “very different for me,” and he said, “They sure are!”
Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
A: These days I keep returning to Berrigan’s Sonnets and Berryman’s Dream Songs for this “new” way of writing and being in the line. “I can’t help but return to” the poets in my course packet, because I’m teaching them...and they’ve been teaching me and energizing me in return: Frank O’Hara, Maggie Nelson, Bhanu Kapil, Claudia Rankine, Russell Edson, Gregory Pardlo, Wanda Coleman, James Wright, Cathy Park Hong...and many others.
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