TtD supplement #238 : seven questions for Micah Ballard

Micah Ballard is the author of over a dozen books of poetry including Waifs and Strays (City Lights Books), Afterlives (Bootstrap Press), The Michaux Notebook (FMSBW), Parish Krewes (Bootstrap Press), Selected Prose, 2008-19 (Blue Press), Evangeline Downs (Ugly Duckling Presse), Muddy Waters (State Champs), Daily Vigs (Bird & Beckett Books), Vesper Chimes (Gas Meter), and Negative Capability in the Verse of John Wieners (Bootstrap Press), with a new chapbook forthcoming this spring with above/ground press. He also recently co-edited G U E S T #21 : Castle Guestskull (above/ground press, 2022) with Garrett Caples. He lives in San Francisco with poet Sunnylyn Thibodeaux and their daughter Lorca.

His poems “CAJUN WANT ADS,” “IN THE MILEIU,” “ULTRA DAB,” “BALMY VAPORS” and “EXTRA USHERS” appear in the thirty-seventh issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “CAJUN WANT ADS,” “IN THE MILEIU,” “ULTRA DAB,” “BALMY VAPORS” and “EXTRA USHERS.”

A: I'm not completely sure how to talk about my poems other than I attempt to be available to receive whatever it is they may want to tell. I try to keep out the way but also stay tuned into any frequencies they share. It’s my understanding that that’s what most of my favorite artists do (in whatever medium). At any rate, let me try to dive in without too much marginalia because I really don’t know. What I do know is how things feel, where I was, or what I was doing.

“CAJUN WANT ADS” is a place I used to work at in Lafayette, Louisiana, when I was 20. They printed classified ads for a handful of parishes. I’d sit at a Betamax/Atari-esque machine and type all the want-ads that came in via fax. Lots of odd stuff people sell, from bass trolling motors for boats, to dune buggies, alligator eggs, crawfish traps, whatever. The computers were new for that time, and it took a bunch of coding just to type a sentence. The main thing was proofreading, which seemed easy save for competing psilocybin tracers courtesy of the local mushroom field. It did make for a great experience (of having a job while not really being there!). People faxed what seemed to be like crazy little sonnets that described what they were trying to sell. Very personal faxes, written in various accented drawls. We are talking mostly Cajun slang and there was no editing allowed. Had to be how it came in via fax. Anyway, about the poem, I usually start in the middle and move around, collaging thru notebooks of various lines, etc. “I was raised supernatural” was a new one for me, starting a poem by first line. It had been a minute. I was raised Southern Baptist and all I heard three times a week, even into college, was people talking about an afterlife, eternal damnation, repenting...some spoke in tongues about it, there were tons of altar calls, and so on. I guess I was imagining myself sitting at Emmanuel Baptist church stuck with all those curious teenage crushes and thinking about life after death.

“IN THE MILIEU” is a totally random. I stayed up late as usual and Hotboxin with Mike Tyson popped up. I was a bit intrigued (for lack of a better operative) about him taking venom from these toads that hibernate in caves. It seemed like a massive hallucinogenic shift of awareness and he was so articulate about it. Hell no, toad venom?! I guess I pulled some dramatic monologue and imagined Iron Mike in a hotel tripping out and using it as a positive place to deal with a range of things in a variety of ways, etc. I have no idea.

“ULTRA DAB”...Trying to keep it quick here. I guess talking on the phone at work while typing is a good idea! I’m finally never Frank O’Hara. The first thing that comes to mind is that I was reading Because, Horror a fantastic essay collection by my old friend Johnny Ray Huston and Bradford Nordeen. I got it in the mail and was just slammed. So many good lines. I couldn’t help steal some, or act like I didn’t but did. This poem was more like a translation from their book, while texting my friend Sarah Cain about her show, and reading a found magazine on “the new cannabis culture.” Yeah, that’s pretty much it.

“BALMY VAPORS” is kinda similar to the title Ultra Dab, in the sense of achieving vapors! I keep typing vamps. I think this also comes out of some cribbed lines from the above book (promise to give credit!). Anyhoot, this one is from a dream. I woke up and just tracked lines in the dark. I tend to have a super vivid dream life, and Sunnylyn can attest. It often takes 2-3 hours to “snap out of it” what with all the different sleep-movies tracing thru the next day. She always says “write about it” but I’m like nah, no thanks, I’m still living them and can remember every detail. So this one is one of those. Plus “jungle mansion” comes from a painting by one of my favorite poets, Kevin Opstedal, that I had in my “embalming room” office at New College. Yes, it was a mortuary at one time.

“EXTRA USHERS”...When I drop Lorca off at school in the Mission District every morning I always stop by my old favorite, Muddy Waters cafe (most poems since Feb. 2022 are from there; my friends Garrett Caples and Rod Roland just published some and used the name of the cafe as the book). At any rate...this poem was from Baton Rouge to New Orleans and back to San Francisco. Airplanes. Waiting rooms. Funerals. My grandmother had passed when I visited and then my other grandmother did when I visited again. My Aunt Caroline started calling me the Grim Reaper. “I’m not going to dinner to see him, when Micah comes to Baton Rouge he’s the Grim Reaper!”

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

A: Well, I think we’re all making one poem/painting/song/film etc. our whole life? I mean, one hopes. Who said that? Probably everybody. I can’t recall at the moment but I believe and live by that. All the way thru. Sure, “the work” changes as it should, and we alongside it. It does what it pretty much wants. We’re lucky enough to have our dirty long painted nails in the bowl!

How do we remain present as vessels for “the work” is always a question that’s entertaining. I say entertaining because it entertains constantly. I’m not thinking about it, ya know, as predetermined, performance, or after-the-fact, etc. I’d rather be led by an undercurrent willingness to be variable, to take chances, to be led into the unknown, to make mistakes, to be uncomfortable and embarrassing, to be controlled by forces we don’t know about, and somehow trust it all by revealing what’s given.

What I mean to say is that I’m doing the same thing but totally different. I keep notebooks, always walking hills, riding the bus, skateboarding, reading, and picking up lines along the way. I’m going thru a lot of these City Lights handbags and use them as a suitcase of sorts. I still never have a damn pen, and if so, it’s dead. I’m writing with markers and different inks right now (I prefer black). I love a one subject wide-ruled 70 sheet notebook...I usually go with red or purple now, some color that can cast a different aura for the lines. Green is always too Keatsian “divine symmetry” which is cool but doesn’t work anymore. Now I prefer smaller sized notebooks that can help me write like I don’t but maybe wish to? I wear different rings, paint my nails gold, anything that’ll make my hand look different on the page. I should try gloves. Okay, non-sequitur time!

A very real change recently is that I tear pages out of found books (blank ones front/or end; hopefully a good title page!) and I’ll collect them as writing paper. These are usually found on the street or in our neighborhood free libraries (these little stand-alone birdhouse looking things in SF where people place used books in). We’ve got a sick one here in Alamo Square, which I also contribute to.
What I think about most is Muddy Waters around 8:15am and having an hour or so of writing before getting back on the 22 Fillmore bus to work (then later at 11pm catching up to what I was doing at Muddy’s)...Amazing tho, the mornings on 16th and Valencia feel like the same time period as the 90s. Pure energy, sketchy, almost vacant yet not, packed with something in the air that never leaves. A feistiness of random energies. Seems perfect to me. I wouldn’t wish to be anywhere else. It’s the home conjure zone.

Q: Your self-description of channeling and being a vessel etcetera is reminiscent of the Jack Spicer notion of simply being a radio of sorts for external signals. Do you see yourself merely as someone who presents poems from an external, ethereal source? How do you see the craft of putting words upon the page?

A: Yes and no via ethereal. I like to receive the radio static and be the antenna but it doesn’t happen as much as imagined. Probably half the time within a poem, things just come from some otherwhere and you’re fortunate they find you. However, it’s up to you to be available in order to be found, then figure out what to do with what’s given. How to translate noise into something tangible, or not.

As mentioned, I often begin in the middle of a poem combining noises (words) then hear how they sound and look together, how they communicate and live with each other. Like, what’s going on, maybe they need company, so I’ll invite more vibrations around them. Soon multiple conversations are happening; when they’re done hanging out, disturbing one another, usually there’s as Williams said, “a discharge of energy” (I’ve always dug that) and there’s this living organism looking back at you. Turns out it’s a poem, or something of the sort. I then read it for a first time to see what’s going on, what we’ve been doing, etc., which is always a surprise. Sometimes pleasurable, other times frightening. I enjoy both.

I basically make collages. Words and phrases are like cut-out pieces of paper that are put together thru sound. I enjoy discovering what they make when beside one another. Let me be clear tho, not all poems are collages (some come straight outta the hand, almost like a trance) but if they are I am part of each clipping, in that my poems are autobiographical. There’s personal emotive counterparts weaving thruout the whole thing. I do have a tendency for encryption which I sometimes enjoy too much. To me, poems are primary continuums of experience and interests that find a way to exist together. We’re in their service and they act almost as a true mirror to show us what we’ve been feeling, what we are feeling, or will soon enough.

Q: Is utilizing the autobiographical a means to an end or an end unto itself? Are these moments you seek to examine, or are they offered as a way through to something else?

A: I would say it’s more of a way thru (portal) into something else. I use the term autobiographical in the loosest possible sense, in that anything I make there’s always a shadow of self, multiple selves, or a conversation with someone else. There’s a human pulse whether it’s mine or projected into, thru, or out of. The ole “objects in a field of objects” where everything is equally important still holds very true. Poems allow all things to speak, the seen and unseen, and they gather the communique for us. They have that magickal ability to reveal the unreal, show you what you don’t know or thot you did, and record your experiences (real or imagined). I love it when they blur these two. Naturally you feel delusional at times. Is this a trap door or an escape hatch? Guess it’s time to find out!

Q: With an accumulated dozen or so books and chapbooks over the past decade-plus, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: Well, I hope the work keeps changing and morphing into whatever it chooses. I don’t care to paint the same thing over and over. There’s bound to be corresponding trace elements from poem to poem, book to book, that sooner or later reveals itself to be “you.” I’d just like to keep doing what I’ve been doing since I moved to San Francisco when I was 23. Basically, just keep living within the poem on a daily basis in order to discover and be discovered.

Q: Your partner, Sunnylyn Thibodeaux, is also a published poet. Do either of you ask the other to look over poems while in-progress for potential commentary? Do you find elements of your work responding to her own? How does one compose differently, if at all, as part of a writerly household of two?

A: We’ve been sharing poems since we met in 1997, and honestly we really don’t share them during composition. It’s usually only after a poem is done with us that we become “first readers” of one another’s work. I’d say altho we have a lot of the same interests and community of like-thinkers and friends, our work’s totally different and our approach to writing, likewise. We appreciate and dig one another’s poetry but we definitely stay in our own lanes while holding each other accountable to what the poem wants. We definitely talk about process a lot, what we’re reading, what we’re up to, etc. I suppose we’ve gained a lucky advantage of living and growing up writing poems and reading beside one another.

I’ll say that there have been occasions when we’re in the middle of a long poem, maybe sequential, or book-length, and we’ll ask one another about ordering sections. Or, more so how the final arrangement of poems in a manuscript communicates. Unless we’re writing a collaboration or editing a magazine/book for our small presses, then we’re actually communicating in the act of...but that’s a different scene or scenario.

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

A: I go to my close friends’ books, and their recent or brand new work. I’m definitely fortunate to have a vast group of poets that I continually talk and/or hang with. Some still live in SF or Bay Area, others elsewhere...really all over the place.

John Wieners and Joanne Kyger, always. David Meltzer, Diane diPrima, Duncan McNaughton, Stephen Jonas, Eileen Myles, Renee Ricard. Lots of translations of other writers.... Whew, too many to name! Definitely John and Joanne tho.

Lately, over the past two years, I find myself going to those free libraries, particularly Alamo Square, a block from our place and a couple from 707 Scott Street (one of my all-time favorite books, John Wieners’ 707 Scott Street). I love picking up random books, bibliomancy style, where you just grab one or two and you can feel if you’re going to get something out of them (lines/poems/whatever). I’ll admit though, I always find myself in Egypt and Atlantis, most recently again thru Edgar Cayce’s trance archives. Stunning and otherworldly.

TtD supplement #237 : seven questions for Junie Désil

Junie Désil is a poet. Born of immigrant (Haitian) parents on the Traditional Territories of the Kanien’kehá:ka in the island known as Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). Junie has performed at various literary events and festivals. Her work has appeared in Room Magazine, PRISM International, The Capilano Review, CV2, G U E S T: A Journal of Guest Editors, and Capitalism Nature Socialism. Junie worked in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, on the unceded and Ancestral Lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh for many years. Junie’s debut poetry collection Eat Salt|Gaze at the Ocean (TalonBooks, 2020) was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay poetry Prize

Her poem “Revolution” appears in the thirty-seventh issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poem ”Revolution.”

A: I wrote this poem in a moment of  funk I suppose. Between the Indigenous Blockades/Land Back movement, Climate change, the pandemic and the racial uprisings (George Floyd), defunding or abolishing the police – I really thought we were poised to have a revolution, general strikes, and people out in the streets. I realized that actually we aren’t necessarily comfortable with upending our current systems. Conversations with my parents for example revealed their apathy and disdain for challenging the status quo, and friends constantly asked “do you want a revolution”? That question in particular stung in the sense that many of us were saying “what about...?” to radical solutions and instead proposing middle-of-the-ground solutions. More truthfully it revealed that some us myself included are comfortable with “armchair revolution” saying the revolutionary incendiary words and statements, but then going about our lives in ways that many folks actually  on the streets fighting for their basics don't have the luxury of doing. I will always refer to Le Guin’s 1973 short story—The ones Who Walk Away From Omelas—this fictional town whose utopia is dependent on keeping a child in perpetual misery. As townsfolk become older and learn the truth of how their town’s utopia is maintained, their initial horror turns either into acquiescence of the status quo or walking away from the  town. I wonder when we’ll stop acquiescing or walking away and actually revolt and demand something better.

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

A: I would say this poem is my go to style in that it is a commentary, a complaint, a rant if you will. Where it differs is in its length (shorter) and in a couplet. I typically write poems run-on style with no real space to breathe – much like how my thought process works – prose-y sometimes. And it seems like most of my work involves referencing one or the other parent, and this is one of a few that references both. When I first started I always had something that referenced my mother. My current manuscript that I’m working on is more diaristic ( I think) and even more personal – still political though ( I hope)!

Q: What prompted this shift into, as you call it, a style more diaristic?

A: More courage? Perhaps? Settling into what it means to write about what’s important to me. I guess being ok with being a bit vulnerable. Only a little bit though! If I dwell too much on the potential for too much vulnerability I just become paralyzed. At the same time I am learning to just write and not self-edit or self-censure. For this manuscript I had also intended it to be literally diaristic, and follow the trajectory of what it was like the past few years struggling (like everyone else) with making sense of our world in a pandemic, making sense of all the domestic and global escalating conflicts while in the midst of experiencing what felt like my body and health betraying me. Suddenly I couldn’t burn the candles at both ends, but also I didn’t want to. I also struggled (still do) with the fact that it felt like I was abandoning a whole segment of a population BUT at the same time  reckoning with the fact that I don’t want to be paid to care and support folks made vulnerable, I never wanted to participate in the non-profit industrial complex, and the best thing (for me anyways) was to exit that and find other and more sustainable ways to provide care. Still figuring that out while I calm my nervous system!

Q: Have you any models for this new approach, or are you working more on intuition?

A: I think as writers we’re always influenced even subconsciously – I can’t say there is a model per se – and I know I’m not inventing anything new. I’m just doing what works for me. I haven’t been formally trained so I also feel that what may have been “in” or particular styles or models have already been done, and I’m just stumbling on them as I settle more into the business of writing, and as I find more time to savour reading.

That said, I admire Mercedes Eng’s vulnerability especially when she’s reading at public events. I also recently read a poem called “Fear” by American poet Raymond Carver, and then myself and other writers in workshop engaged in an exercise listing our fears. I noticed that my fears have shifted with my recent move and have allowed me to look at those things if not more dispassionately at least with a fresher perspective,and more (self) compassion. I definitely, definitely work with intuition or something. I go somewhere else it seems (!) when I really get into putting words on the page – sometimes I don’t recognize my own words – did I write that? is a frequent question I ask myself hahaha. Intuition is my superpower.

Q: With a published full-length debut and your current work-in-progress, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: I think that one way I’ve developed is more of a willingness to experiment with forms. I’m still a bit reluctant but the idea is not so daunting. I'm liking the idea more and more of a container for “working the page” I’m guessing my reluctance is because I haven’t been formally taught forms. I’m leaning into the idea for now that writing is what I want to do, and that provides a focus if you will, but I’m taking my time. In terms of where I see my work headed, I don’t know but I am most excited about “maturing” and leaning into the craft and discipline of writing and being curious about where I go with it!

Q: Part of what impressed me so much about your full-length debut was the way in which you managed to stitch together a wide array of fragments into a much larger tapestry. Did the form for that project come together organically, or had you a larger structure in mind? How did such a project begin?

A: I definitely relied on intuition to put this together. I didn’t have a sense of the larger structure until I got deep into the manuscript. I was panicking at first that the pieces didn’t connect but then I ended up printing what I had and taping them to a window, moving them around and cutting pieces until I could see a bit of a pattern and flow. Then I started “adding” pieces. Other poems triggered a research bug, so that I could add or subtract pieces. Once it felt like it had a shape, I decided to have three sections. The sections kind of mirrored the journey of how I ended up in Vancouver, but also the larger transatlantic journey of how enslaved folks ended up in the Americas. Largely because it was intuitive, it was such a treat to hear how others read and experience the manuscript. A few folks described it as polyphonic, multi-layered – lots going on.

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

A: I always return to Dionne Brand – she’s my first! – and Claudia Rankine. Brandon Wint is newer and I have been re-reading Divine Animal – the musicality and rhythm and each line just hits you! (I also feel like the trouble with this question is that I feel like I am leaving people out!) I also love going down research rabbit holes and love reading academic articles, or science-y type things.

I just learned that if I’m in a block/funk it makes sense for me to just lean into it and read without forcing things. AND reading quirky or unusual or not my usual go -to is better for me. I recently discovered Gary Barwin’s For It Is a Pleasure and Surprise to Breathe. I had kind of dismissed it in the sense that it was in the to-be-read-at-some-point-pile. Anyway I decided I’m going to pick it up and read it. It just rattled my brain enough to get me out of the writing block. It was quirky, cerebral, with moments of surprise tenderness. Generally though I turn to fiction and again that’s Dionne Brand, Edwidge Danticat ( if I feel a vague tugging for “home”).

I also just read Suzette Mayr’s The Sleeping Car Porter and it was another book that left me shook! I couldn’t get enough. Finally and funnily enough recently (because of my move to an off-grid, remote island), someone recommended I read My Year in Provence ( and this is my year of saying YES to all the things), so I did with some minor reservations, and well I did enjoy it and saw the similarities, and was able to reframe my move.

All this to say that I’m becoming more open to reading all the things, or rather going back to my love of extensive reading without an agenda. I’m finding that reading for pleasure without guilt and without a restriction to genre is much more generative for me. I like the surprise of being ....surprised, moved, challenged. And lastly since I’m going on and on here...there are four writers I follow on social media, 3 are by extension of knowing and following American writer Steven Dunn. He has the the most interesting posts about everything and anything that make you laugh, but he also has great posts that make you think. Anyway his three other friends, Said Shaiye, Jay Halsey, and Jay’s partner Hillary Leftwich all have come out with books recently. But the point of this is that their posts are some of the most reflective thought- provoking posts and musings about life, the writerly life, community and just challenges. I've found myself having to ask them if I can use a quote or two for my work projects.

Touch the Donkey : thirty-seventh issue,

The thirty-seventh issue is now available, with new poems by Micah Ballard, Robert Hogg, Ben Meyerson, Leigh Chadwick, Junie Désil, Devon Rae, kevin mcpherson eckhoff and Kimberly Dyck, Benjamin Niespodziany and Barbara Tomash.

Eight dollars (includes shipping). But today I‘d like to talk to you about a pleasant tasting candy that actually cleans and straightens your teeth.

TtD supplement #236 : six questions for Ted Byrne

Ted Byrne is a Vancouver poet and translator. He frequently writes on poetry and poetics. His most recent books are: Duets, which is based on the Sonnets of Louise Labé and Guido Cavalcanti (2018); A Flea the Size of Paris: The Old French fatrasies & fatras (with Donato Mancini, 2020); and Tracery (Talonbooks in 2022). The Seventh Chamber is an alternative autobiography, a peripatetic perambulation or circular walk, a murder story, a serial poem, and an experiment in translation, punctuated by the unpunctuated choruses of the two sisters from its earlier companion book Beautiful Lies (2008). The second chapter of this work can be found in the fourth issue of SOME.

“Chapter 1” of his work-in-progress “The Seventh Chamber” appears in the thirty-sixth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “The Seventh Chamber.”

A: The Seventh Chamber is a book largely derived from other texts, and includes historical documents and translations turned to its purpose, a work of intertextuality in the proper sense of the word. Not influence, but confluence. I remember writing, in my teens, a prototype of this work derived from the “night town” section of Ulysses, The Barbary Shore, Saint Julien the Hospitaller, and Gwendolyn MacEwan’s Julian the Magician. Sometime in the eighties, I wrote a long introduction to a work that was meant to include a series of several books taking their stories from anecdotes in Marjorie Freeman Campbell’s magnificent A Mountain and a City: The Story of Hamilton – several notorious murders, the Bloody Assize of 1814, the HSR strike of 1906, visits to the city by Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman. Only two of these books have been written. One of them, Beautiful Lies, tells of the murder of Ethel Kinrade by her sister Florence, and the other, The Seventh Chamber, includes the story of the butcher Mike McConnell’s murder of his landlord. In the first of these books, the “essential anecdote”, as Mallarmé called it, is not recounted, although it’s hidden in plain sight on the back cover of the book. The impetus for this approach came from Marguerite Duras’ Emily L. In The Seventh Chamber, the essential anecdote – the murder of Nelson Mills – is told twice.   

Although they can be read separately, the two books are similar in their structure and method. They don’t so much mix genres as oscillate between them. Although I refer to them at times as novels, I more often think of them as serial poems in prose. Alongside or within the “murder mysteries”, which take place in the distant past (in terms of Hamilton time), runs a kind of parallel or imbricated text set in the “present” – the 1970s in Beautiful Lies, the twenty first century in The Seventh Chamber. This second text is partly autobiographical. I’m presently referring to The Seventh Chamber as an alternative autobiography. In Beautiful Lies, the character in this second text is peripherally present in the first and may simply be the narrator or author.  In The Seventh Chamber, this peripatetic character narrates his own story and may or may not be aware of, let alone be the ‘author’ of the parallel texts. There is also a third textual element, a kind of chorus in which, originally, the two sisters conduct a dialogue. These are recognizable by the absence of punctuation. In The Seventh Chamber, the two voices are still busily commenting on the literary unconscious of the work. They are now twins, and toward the end a third voice arises, that of the so-called narrator or author. This may be a device for setting up a sequel made entirely of this unpunctuated choral work.

I recently came across these words of Tzvetan Todorov in his Theorie du symbole which I think apply to the structure of The Seventh Chamber:

It is possible to conceive, in the abstract, two forms of coherence in a literary work. First, coherence between its strata: a certain number of levels can be seen at work throughout the text, harmonious and, in some manner, vertical. A second coherence is at play between the segments of the work – if we cut its continuity into pieces, we will find that each part is necessary and interdependent with the others; this latter is, so to speak, a horizontal coherence.

These books also incorporate translations, as does most of my work. These translated texts are modified in most cases by a slight change of detail – location, time – that allows them to fit into the ongoing narrative. This practice owes something to the work of Rodney Graham, in Landor’s Cottage, for example, or The Piazza. In most cases, but not all, these translations could, with the readjustment of the divergent details, stand as “faithful” renderings of their originals.

The first book, Beautiful Lies, is available from CUE Books. The Seventh Chamber is being published in three parts – in feuilleton, as I like to say. The second part is currently available in SOME fourth issue. I’m still working on the final section and appendices, which I expect to publish soon in a journal or as a chapbook.

Q: I’m curious about how you see this particular project alongside your other works. The way you describe these seems less a matter of individual works than a single, ongoing trajectory, of which this current project is simply the latest in a line. How do you see the trajectory of your work, and the relationships between your projects?

A: I don’t see much in the way of a direct relationship between these works and other projects that I have completed or continue to work on. That is, other than certain methodological procedures: the serial poem, the book as unit of composition (Spicer), the incorporation of translation, my own lyric presence in the text to a greater or lesser extent. What I see when I look back along the ‘trajectory’ to which The Seventh Chamber belongs is a life-long trail of disasters, of failed attempts to write a novel. I don’t read a lot of novels, but when I do get captured by one I am always amazed at the nature of the writing and the labour involved. I don’t seem to be capable of that. I think it’s a result of a certain devotion to lyric, a short attention span, and an inability to write prosaic sentences. On that last point, my effort is always to write sentences that slow reading down, encumber the reader, not ones that move the story along, if there is a story at all. I find it difficult to write sentences such as those that punctuate dialogue, for example: “Joachim sourit, content de pouvoir s’expliquer,” or “Il se retourne et lui fait face.” Or sentences that simply maintain the momentum and bridge events: “In high spirits, we skipped down the steps and across the walk to the front doors of the courthouse,” or “I watched the leafy trees and many banana palms go  by the tram windows.” These examples are taken from two novels that I’m currently reading – novels that I admire and enjoy reading: Anne Dufourmantelle’s Souviens-toi de ton avenir, and Larissa Lai’s The Lost Century.

Q: You mention Jack Spicer, but I’m curious at what brought you to the point of working on, as you say, the book as your unit of composition. Was Spicer an early influence? What other writers or works prompted your preference for the book-length structure?

A: Well, I named Spicer because I’ve always associated that phrase with him. I probably should have said “the Berkeley Renaissance”, since the practice is common to Blaser and Duncan as well – think of The Image Nations, or The Structure of Rime. In “The Practice of Outside”, Blaser refers to the “the special value the poet [Spicer] gave to composition by book.” I’ve seen the phrase attributed to b.p. nichol, but I wouldn’t know where he got it from. I’m not really one of his readers. Anyway, there’s nothing new about this practice. I could just as easily have said Hesiod, Vergil, Dante, Maurice Scève, Louise Labé or Basho. Or more immediately, Pound, Williams, H.D. or Zukofsky. For me, probably my first sense of this practice came from books I read in my teens – Rimbaud’s last two books, Bliss Carman’s Sappho : One Hundred Lyrics, Kora in Hell, Helen in Egypt, Joanne Kyger’s The Tapestry and the Web. My first conscious use of this method was probably the composition, in the early 80s, of a series of dizains modelled on Scève’s Délie.

Q: With numerous published books and chapbooks over the years, as well as this current work-in-progress, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: I wonder this myself. It always begins with reading. When asked if I’m writing, I often say that I’m reading toward writing. Right now I’m reading a lot of Dante and Dante criticism, ostensibly toward the completion of The Seventh Chamber and the writing of an essay on Cavalcanti. I’m reading Anne Dufourmantelle and thinking about the case history as ‘literature’. This began as a work of translation but that project slipped away with her death. I’m reading the Duncan/Levertov correspondence with the intention of writing a short coda to a paper I wrote a few years ago on the Duncan/Blaser quarrel. I’m reading a lot of long poems, I’m not quite sure why yet. And I’m looking again at Rilke’s Vergers with an eye toward translation. At some point I always find myself writing. It surprises me to discover that I’m ready, but I always carry the utensils.

Q: I’m curious about the ways in which your writing and your translation work interact with each other, if at all. Do you see them as separate threads, or something intertwined? How does one impact upon the other?

A: I’ve always treated my translations as part of my writing, whether they were literal or entirely divergent. The earliest translation I remember writing was a short poem of Apollinaire’s. It took its place in the chronological ordering of my own poems. In the poem he addresses his mother in a way that corresponded perfectly to the situation I found myself in at the time – living on my own in a rooming house. And so it’s been for me since then – not living alone in a rooming house, but situating the place of translation within my ongoing work. The only exception to the practice I’ve just described is the translation I did with Donato Mancini of A Flea the Size of Paris: The Old French fatrasies & fatras. As the first translators of this body of work into English, we felt a responsibility to the poems and to the reader that we could not shirk. Donato is presently doing more adventuresome things with the fatrasie form. With regard to ‘literal’ and divergent translations, some examples of the former would be the Mallarmé translations in Beautiful Lies and The Seventh Chamber, or the translations of Ponge that I published years ago in Raddle Moon; some examples of the latter can be found in my most recent books, Duets and Tracery, or the ‘translation’ of Canto 28 of The Purgatorio in Beautiful Lies – loosely based on the Dante, it is written in prose but retains all the features of terza rima.

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

A: I’d have to say Mallarmé’s prose poems, including Igitur, Dante’s Comedy, H.D.’s wartime writings, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, Walt Kelly’s Pogo, Cocteau’s film Orphée, Robert Duncan’s Passages, André Breton’s Vases communicants, Agnes Varda’s Cléo de cinq a six, Bach’s Cello Suites and Partitas and Sonatas for violin, Beethoven’s Late Quartets, maybe Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, Celan and Hölderlin, Lyn Hejinian, Godard’s La Chinoise, Julia Kristeva, The Cocteau Twins, Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton, Maya Deren’s Ritual in Transfigured Time, Eliot’s Four Quartets, Plato’s Phaedrus, and so on. At the very least I’d need Dante and Hegel.

TtD supplement #235 : six questions for Hilary Clark

Originally from Vancouver, Hilary Clark now lives in Victoria, BC. Before retirement, she taught English for 25 years at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon. She has published three books of poetry, her first, More Light (1998), winning the Pat Lowther Award for 1999. The most recent is The Dwelling of Weather (Brick, 2003). Besides writing new poetry, she is singing in a choir and working on translations of poetry, mostly French Surrealist and Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle).

Selections of her work-in-progress “My Muted Year” appear in the thirty-sixth issue of Touch the Donkey.

This is now a completed manuscript she is readying for submission.

Q: Tell me about “My Muted Year.”

A: “My Muted Year” is a sequence of around 124 untitled prose poems composed at intervals over the year 2020, the year of the most stringent Covid lockdowns and restrictions. I started it in November 2019 and ended in November 2020. It began when, after a period of rejections and anxiety, I decided to restart in a non-threatening way, by handwriting nine prose lines in a notebook per session. There was no intended topic: the sentences were prompted by rhythm, by whatever came into my mind, by forays into the dictionary, and by repetition of earlier fragments in the sequence. As I usually do, I used chance procedures and associations to interrupt intention. The individual poems may contain traces of narrative, but they are connected not by narrative but by repetition and variation of seasonal and other motifs, some inspired by location (West Coast), some by the Covid context. Motifs from a life overturned.

Over the whole, there is an “I” voice that mostly monologues. There is also a second voice that addresses the “I” in a snarky but sometimes off-base way. The effect is a compromised dialogue in which each side talks past the other.

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

A: This sequence has been my only poetic project for the last few years. It has grown out of an earlier unpublished manuscript: both originate in constraint procedures and develop by surrealist disjunctions and imagery that is often dream-like. (The new sequence has further required that, in revision, I work out forms of repetition, in particular identifying themes and creating variations.) Another continuity with the earlier manuscript is that both include playful and conflicting voices. I think the voices have been a solution to my ongoing struggle with/against lyric beauty: they make a unified ‘I’ impossible. And as a bipolar person, I find they both reflect and give me some control over the endless noise in my head.

My other projects at present are translations of French surrealist and Oulipo poems by Marianne Van Hirtum (Belgium) and Jacques Roubaud (France). I have also translated a sequence by Normand de Bellefeuille (Québec) from La Marche de l'aveugle sans son chien (2000). I am still a newbie along with many other emerging literary translators. In its constraint procedures, imagery, and often-illogical transitions from one sentence to the next, “My Muted Year” has been influenced by the poetry that I translate (just as my translations are shaped by my poetic practice).

Q: What originally prompted you to work with constraint and repetition in such a way, and what do you feel those structures provide that might not be possible otherwise?

A: There was more than one prompt: In my graduate work especially, and in university teaching and research, I worked with Modernist and Surrealist authors. In a context of wars and revolutions, avant-garde writing undermined unified subjectivity and narrative logic, often composing paratactically, by association or dream logic. These are the main emphases that have shaped my approach to writing poetry. I am presently immersed in Surrealist works, translating them from the French.

As well, over time I have become interested in the French Oulipo group, whose authors work/play from constraints: sets of rules, as in games. (Think of older forms, like the sonnet. Think of Eunoia by Christian Bök.) Here content is not intended beforehand but emerges as the game is played. As Jacques Roubaud, eminent Oulipean, puts it: “I will say / That a constraint opens up a possible / World of language. With this, I / Hold a passkey.”*

So these influences, plus that of the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver—where I took workshops in the 1980s—have shaped my writing. Lyn Hejinian’s writing has been an inspiration, in particular her prose-poetic memoir My Life (1980) and her more recent book The Unfollowing (2016), in which, she claims, the non-sequitur is the main principle of development. In composing from sentence to sentence in 14-line units, “[n]othing was to follow—or nothing follow logically” (Preface).*

It’s in my nature to “mute” myself and avoid starting with a bald intention such as “I will write about my experience of the COVID lockdown in 2020.” And I like writing chained poems rather than writing a self-sufficient lyric or narrative poem. I don’t know how to write one of those. They are complete units, whereas my individual poems are not so much complete in themselves as taking on meaning from those that precede and follow, extending with indefinite or potentially no closure. (Of course, the sequence has been practiced by many Canadian poets.) Here, repetition serves as a kind of memory for the reader, a way of holding things lightly in mind.

1st * Jacques Roubaud, “Les contraintes,” Churchill 40 et autres sonnets de voyage 2000-2003 (Gallimard, 2004), p. 45. My translation.
      
2nd * Lyn Hejinian, Preface, The Unfollowing (Omnidawn, 2016), p. 9.

Q: With three poetry titles, as well as your current work-in-progress, since the late 1990s, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: When my last book of poetry was published, as a prof I had to focus for a while on publishing academic articles. These qualified me for a SSHRC grant to do research that interested me and satisfied the powers-that-be. By 2015, when I retired, I had poems and manuscripts but no luck at all in placing work until last year, 2022. In the meantime, something must have been happening: the writing I started doing around the time of retirement and since then has been a little different than my earlier, more lyrical books. When I am composing now, I am directed by voices in my head that go back and forth: my lyric I-voice arouses satirical retorts and abuse from another voice or voices. I still turn to admire-this-beauty! phrases about flowers, light, and weather, but my writing shows some humor now in the gap between lyric and satirical voices.

Thus for some years, while my poetry was backgrounded, it shifted somewhat in . . . style? preoccupations? This shift may be associated with the increasing pressure/fear of extreme weather, especially wildfires here in BC. It is also associated with aging: I’m 67 and some of my friends have died already. Working at a job is a distraction from one’s mortality; retirement and an aging body brings it clearly into view. These morbid concerns flick through the prose poems in “My Muted Year.”

As for where my writing is headed, who knows? I hope it gets closer to the quick of my experience. Every new project might be the last. Every new project is a new beginning.

Q: I’m always interested in multiple generations of writers within any family, and over the years, I’ve asked numerous writers about their experiences with being the offspring of writers, but rarely I’ve been able to ask from the other direction: your son, Winnipeg poet Julian Day, recently published his chapbook debut, and has been publishing poems in a whole slew of journals over the past few years. What is it like to have a child who has followed your example? Are the two of you able to discuss writing? And how different from or similar to your work do you see his?

A: My husband teases me (repeatedly) that my son Julian publishes more than I do. No, I tell him, it doesn’t bother me: it’s a special source of happiness. Julian is in his early 40s, which was my age when I published my first book More Light (1998). He has worked on his poetry and submitted it over many years now, and his patience is bearing fruit. He also edits + doc: a journal of longer poems; the 4th issue appeared this month. As for me, I’m at the other end of the journey—older, no wiser.

It is gratifying to have a child who is as mad about poetry as I am. He knows his Canadian poets, and I give him books by British poets, plus classics like Dickinson and Blake. We discover our reading favorites together: we both admire Robin Robertson, John Burnside, and Alice Oswald. We don’t discuss technique or poetics, or share poems, that much. My poetry and his are somewhat different, mine being more constraint-based and influenced by North American experimental poetry and poetics. I won’t try to characterize his!

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

A: These works and authors reenergize, inspire imagery and/or techniques in my work:
Buddhist texts, Tibetan Book of the Dead. Classical Chinese poetry. Japanese haiku and renga. Surrealists, Oulipians. Contemporary Canadian and Québecois poetry: Normand de Bellefeuille, Susan Andrews Grace, Louise Halfe, Sylvia Legris, Tim Lilburn, Daphne Marlatt, Don McKay, Mary-Lou Rowley, Steven Ross Smith, Anne Szumigalski, Fred Wah, Phyllis Webb, and more. Contemporary American poetry: Will Alexander, Forrest Gander, Peter Gizzi, Lyn Hejinian, Brenda Hillman, Fanny Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, Cedar Sigo, and more.

These works and authors must be deep in the folds of my brain: they have a permanent place in my imagination, from years of listening, reading and teaching:

The Odyssey; Greek tragedies; Sappho; Ovid; the Bible; Dante’s Inferno; Marlowe, Dr. Faustus; Shakespeare’s tragedies and The Tempest; Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; Grimms’ fairy tales; Carroll, Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking-Glass; Keats, Dickinson, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Pound, Joyce, Woolf, H.D. The Wizard of Oz (film).

TtD supplement #234 : seven questions for Kathy Lou Schultz

Kathy Lou Schultz is a literary historian, scholar, and poet. She is the author of The Afro-Modernist Epic and Literary History: Tolson, Hughes, Baraka (Palgrave), as well as four collections of poems, recently Biting Midge: Works in Prose (Belladonna) and Some Vague Wife (Atelos). Her first poetry collection, Re dress (San Francisco State University), was selected by Forrest Gander as the winner of the Michael Rubin Poetry Award. Her poems are published in Bombay Gin, Cleaver Magazine, Fence Magazine, Fourteen Hills, Hambone, Marsh Hawk Review, Miracle Monocle, Mirage #4/Period(ical), P Queue Literary Journal, New American Writing, and other journals. Her poetry manuscript in progress in tentatively titled Mother(g)ood: A Report from America.

Schultz’s articles have appeared in numerous scholarly journals including Contemporary Literature, Jacket2, Journal of Modern Literature, Plume Poetry and anthologies: Some Other Blues: New Perspectives on Amiri Baraka, The Companion to Modernist Poetry, and From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice. New work on Askia Touré’s Songhai!” is forthcoming in Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics and a solicited article on Claudia Rankine and Muriel Rukeyser will appear in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century American Poetry and Politics. A book on Claudia Rankine is scheduled for release in August 2023 from Lake Forest College/Northwestern University Press.

Her poems “To: ‘To Elsie’:,” “A rouse is a ruse is a rose” and “Class (A Manifesto) Again” appear in the thirty-sixth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “To: ‘To Elsie’:,” “A rouse is a ruse is a rose” and “Class (A Manifesto) Again.”

A: “To: ‘To Elsie’:”
The poem is an epistle that talks back to WCW’s “To Elsie,” tossing images back at it, by only using words from within the poem itself. First, let me say that Spring and All is a gift, but this particular poem has always bothered me. My reaction is visceral and fiery. For me, this arises from the use of working-class caricatures in the poem: “mountain folk from Kentucky,” lusty railroading men, and finally “Elsie.” The poem isn’t really to her; rather, it is tossed somewhere in her direction. She’s not even a person, she’s “some Elsie” (emphasis added). Sure, William Carlos Williams, too, is “some doctor,” but he’s constructing a field of knowledge about “the pure products of America” through the prism of the “broken brain,” “ungainly hips” and “flopping breasts” of a mixed-race woman who works as a servant in his house. The poem can be read as a critique of class, race, and capitalism; after all, Elsie reveals “the truth about us” but Elsie is dehumanized in this process. Elsie isn’t “us.” She’s “them.” The poem also invokes the “I, Too” of Langston Hughes. (I have an ongoing catalog in my head of poems either addressed to “America,” or that use “America” in the title.) I also attempt to emulate Williams’ carefully sculpted link breaks. Spring and All and Paterson are genius, but that’s also why I’ve obsessed over “To Elsie” for 15+ years. (Or, I could say something smartish but vague about rewriting female figures used in great male modernists’ writing—and I may actually continue to try to do that—but the first part of my response is more honest.)

“A rouse is a ruse is a rose”
This is another poem in conversation with a poem: using Gertrude Stein’s language to engage and re-read Stein. There is so much energy and so many diverse language concepts in “Sacred Emily” to rediscover when you go back to the text, though the line “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” floats about in one’s head in perhaps a vague way. This re-immersion in Stein allowed me to recapture some of the sassy sensuality and humor in my earlier work. It’s a mode that reconnects me to my body and makes me feel alive (in contrast to the dissociative deadness brought about by big life changes and the daily horror show of current events).

“Class (A Manifesto) Again”
This poem exposes the undercurrent of thought of a working-class person who has made it into spaces where they don’t belong. Or, should I say “I”? I was born in a place so remote that there is no hospital and it would take you days to get there--if you could find it at all. Find Burke, South Dakota on the map. Go. The majority of people don’t realize that there are locations like this in the U.S., have no idea what life is like there, or if they do, they don’t associate them with me. I often am in places where I don’t belong. And class rage is real. And class privilege, or lack of it, persists. Most professors (and many poets and artists) are from middle or upper-middle class, educated backgrounds. They have generations of college and graduate degrees behind them, access to resources, and choices I never had. One goes along through daily life thinking that they’ve “made it,” or that they’re “equal” now, but that gets thrown back at you in unexpected moments. So one is many things at the same time: a person with racial privilege, from a working-class background, now “educated,” unexpectedly a mom, now living in a violently misogynistic place that makes no sense, reviled by some for being in an interracial relationship or for experiencing sexual and gender identity along a continuum when people would be much more comfortable if you would just “pick a side.” People mainly want you to shut up about anything that doesn’t support their narratives and expectations—but these narratives and expectations are propped up by assumptions, rather than actually getting to know a person. This poem is also a clapback to those who thought they could intimidate me or who tried to make me feel small or ashamed. Also re: “dynamite in their skulls,” all credit to Calvin C. Hernton.

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

A: “To: ‘To Elsie’:”
I place this piece with, “Below these bluffs,” a poem I wrote for my son, and for/after Elizabeth Treadwell, who I think is one of the best poets of my generation. I place these two poems together, because in each I think I got something right in the form. https://www.aspasiology.com/kathy-lou-schultz-in-response-to-elizabeth-treadwell.html

“A rouse is a ruse is a rose”
Stein, Stein, Stein. My poems in Some Vague Wife (Atelos) are divided into three sections, each with an epigraph from a woman modernist: Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf. I’m still trying to listen to what these writers have to say to me. Sometimes transmissions are garbled, but the spirits want you to play.

“Class (A Manifesto) Again”
My poem, “Core Curriculum,” published in Marsh Hawk Review, Fall 2020, addresses some of that same material—but “Core Curriculum” is much more poem-y, built out of neat quatrains employing some fierce enjambment. https://marshhawkpress.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/MHR-Fall-2020.pdf

Writing about embodied experiences of class is difficult, unless it’s content-driven by recognizable working class professions, like mining, often about male experience.

Does anyone understand what I’m writing about? Do they care, or are they resentful, and want me to be quiet about it? Am I messing things up for them? Who is my audience?

“Core Curriculum,” by the way, refers to the first two years of study at Columbia University in NYC. The “Western Tradition,” etc. It’s about my experience of encountering all of that as a working class, rural, first-generation college student, and as a young woman beginning to articulate a feminist critique and vision. And why were the authors we studied all very particular kinds of white people? I began working in Black Studies at the same time I discovered feminist studies, when I was 18, 19 years old. I was very purposeful about it.

So, these poems consider, in part, what it meant for me to encounter that “Western” tradition, as an experience of being “educated.” I still have those books, and as a scholar, I study the epic, so it added up to something. But I was always one working off campus “in the community.” People found this so amazing. How do you reach “the community”? I am the community! My dad is the guy trimming the lawn with amazing precision, but you don’t see him.

Q: With a handful of poetry titles over the past twenty years, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: My first book, Re dress, was an accident. San Francisco State University ran a book contest every year and my friend, Catalina Cariaga (we were both in the MFA program) convinced me to enter. I wasn’t ready for all of that, so I thought, I’ll do this as an exercise in how to put together a manuscript, laying out all the pages on a big table and seeing what might cohere or surprise. I really took pleasure in that process of making, meditation and silence. But then I won—poet Forrest Gander selected my manuscript for the Michael Rubin Award—and I panicked! There’s no going back and “fixing” it at that point. Ha. But I look back it now and I’m amazed at how bold it is, how it thinks about sexuality, everyday life, form, white space, and found material. I also participated in the book design: I chose the photos and the ink color and worked with photographers (Lori Eanes, Deborah Allan) and designers (Jim Brashear, Glen Helfand) on the palimpsestic overlay on the cover, the trim size, the book flaps (I love the book flaps!) where the blurb, author photos & bio are printed.

In addition to Gander, Kevin Killian, Robert Glück, and Myung Mi Kim wrote blurbs for me. Bob and Myung were two of my primary teachers. How lucky I was! I prize that time in my life and the writing community: even when it was fraught, it was wonderfully alive. Gander compares my work to Stein and Rosmarie Waldrop. If only. I want to build on that potential and what lives in the book, reclaim the audacity to go full speed ahead into that charged material, busting and remaking form. You see in there the combination of prose, fragment, collage, and highly sculpted lyrics. I want to figure out how to do that again.

Jill Stengel made the chapbook Genealogy for her wonderful a+bend project. Genealogy is a long poem that actually is my most autobiographical collection in terms of recounting events. I want to include it in a full-length book. I’ve had a couple nearly-successful manuscripts that presses were interested in, but I need to revisit that project. I’ve spoken a bit about Some Vague Wife above. All thanks to Lyn Hejinian and Travis Ortiz for including me in their fantastic series. I was still funny in that book, while thinking deeply about literary history, and the other obsessions of my work: gender, sexuality, class. It has all that weird prose in there too, which is maybe my true form, but then the experimental sonnets are pretty good. I’m still figuring out form!

Belladonna in NYC published my last chapbook. I love Belladonna! Biting Midge: Works in Prose arrived in my mailbox after I left Philly for a job, and I never made it to the reading in NYC (I’m still sad about that) because by then my life had blown up and I was too sick to travel. Being so far away from my writing communities in the Bay Area and the Northeast: Philly, NYC has really thrown me off my axis. Not only am I separated from poets and publishing projects and attending fantastic readings nearly every week, unrelenting trauma and toxicity alienated me from my own work. I didn’t think that was possible. It’s miserable. But there is a new project, tentatively titled Mother(g)ood from which some work has been published. There’s a long piece in the “Hybrid” section of an issue of Miracle Monocle, published by the Univ. of Louisville, and a shorter one in Bombay Gin, both based in prose blocks. And I want to start publishing a journal again. Those issues of Lipstick Eleven that my friends and I edited and published together are pretty great.

Q: You almost make your work sound like an ongoing sequence of random occurrences, ranging from deliberately-prompted projects to certain accidents. How do your poems or poem-projects usually begin? How do poems find themselves grouped into chapbook or larger manuscripts, if at all?

A: Poetry and life are random and accidental, but my answers probably reveal more about how I felt about writing the poems, rather than the work that I actually did. Feeling vs. doing.

In Genealogy and Mother(g)ood, I write with the purpose of constructing long poems that I intend to be a set of serial poems. Genealogy came together rather quickly (or so it seems to me now). I kept making additions until it felt “finished.” I wrote it in San Francisco, the only place I’ve ever really felt at home, but between my past and then-current selves lay a large gulf of understanding  and experience: the picture on the cover of myself and two siblings with my dad on the farm. Reconstructing that experience is challenging because I don’t really remember it—though I deeply feel it, a gaping loss my father never really got over. Mother(g)ood goes to the heart of one of the deep sicknesses in the U.S.: the hatred of women and the obsession to control our sexuality. The patriarchy fell on my head harder than ever before when I had a baby in the South. The deep disregard for women is illustrated that by the fact that the U.S., a wealthy nation, has the highest maternal mortality rate among “developed” countries. I don’t especially want to write about this, but I have to.

Tremendous crisis can affect one’s ability to remember and the memories you do have are strangely fragmented. When I was younger, I could stick with a project from beginning to end, writing on the bus on the way to work, during lunch (my version of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems), or thinking about lines and sounds while at poetry readings, at the doctor’s office, etc. I always had a notebook, recording everything. Now, I find poems on my computer that I have no memory of writing. None. So it becomes a process, then, of gathering the individual poems and seeing how they speak to each other, like I did with my first manuscript. These types of collections are less popular now; however, many books have themes and audiences seem to want that.

Q: What brought you to constructing long poems/serial poems? Do you work through accumulation, or have you a specific direction in mind before you begin?

A: As a reader, I’m interested in long form works that can’t be contained on a single page. (That was one of the primary aims of Lipstick Eleven: providing space for long poems.) I’ve been in love with Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead for decades, even as her work went in and out of print. Contemporary icons include Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Nate Mackey.

I’m less interested in those short poems whose aim is a “gotcha” or “Ah…” at the end. Though of course many shorter poem are brilliant; Amiri Baraka’s poems have taken you somewhere by the end, but certainly not where you expected. I work by accumulation, followed by often painful revision. I don’t know where I’m headed in advanced. The poem reveals itself to you as you work. The same goes for scholarly writing.

Q: I’m always fascinated by American/Canadian conversations around the long poem, given the lineages of these particular threads might share common markers, but have otherwise wildly different trajectories. What do you feel is possible through the form of the long poem, as opposed to a collection, suite or otherwise-bound assemblage of shorter pieces, that might not otherwise be possible?

A: The long poem allows an extended explorative space for world making, the creation of unique extended forms, and the use of multi-media. Important eras and writers include: American Modernism (William Carlos Williams), 30s Modernism and the lineage of documentary modernism (Rukeyser, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Claudia Rankine), Midcentury Modernism (Langston Hughes in the 50s), women who published and published in HOW(ever) and HOW2 (Kathleen Fraser, Beverly Dahlen), Language Writers (Lyn Hejinian), Black Arts-era epics (Askia Touré). Hughes’s multi-column ASK YOUR MAMA: 12 MOODS FOR JAZZ with it musical instructions, Mackey’s epistles, or Hejinian’s versions of My Life require a long poem format. I also love Canadian writers Gail Scott, Lisa Robertson, and Nicole Brossard. The long poem continues to delight and obsess: I was invited to speak at an international conference on the long poem at the Univ. of Basel in Switzerland. Rachel Blau Duplessis gave a keynote.

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

A: In addition to the writers named above: Emily Dickinson, Harryette Mullen, C.D. Wright, Claudia Rankine (especially some of her earlier work), George Oppen, Myung Mi Kim, Erica Hunt, Juan Felipe Herrera, Paul Celan, Tyehimba Jess, etc.

TtD supplement #233 : seven questions for Shane Kowalski

Shane Kowalski lives in Pennsylvania. He teaches creative writing at Ursinus College. He is the author of Small Moods (Future Tense Books).  

His poems “Brassiere” and “Valuable Observations” appear in the thirty-sixth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “Brassiere” and “Valuable Observations.”

A: Both “Brassiere” and “Valuable Observations” were written spontaneously. I didn’t want to think too much about them, nor did I know too much about what they’d be. I just wanted to feel them out, basically. “Brassiere” begins with an image, while “Valuable Observations” begins with an absurd setup. It was kind of easy to follow those initial impressions to their logical conclusions. (At least “logical” to the pieces themselves).  

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

A: These are part of an ongoing project of writing I’ve been doing for over ten years now. I post them to my tumblr, sometimes with minimal revision. There’s over 2500 of them now. They are all short, prose-poem-ish, weird short tales, whatever the mood is that day. They are separate from the longer pieces I take my time with.

Q: How many of these shorter pieces might see further publication, whether in chapbook or book form? How are pieces such as these shaped, if at all, into manuscripts? And are your longer pieces posted to your tumblr as well, or are they seen as something different, requiring alternate spaces?

A: It’s tough to say. I regularly send shorter pieces out for the fun of it. I had an idea of just grouping them into mini-chapbooks over the years and trying to get them published that way. So that they may never be fully together in a big collection. I kind of liked that idea of fragmenting all of them. Or denying them togetherness in some way.

My longer pieces aren’t posted to tumblr, no. They definitely require a more private space, where I can tinker with them and figure out their moods.

Q: Are there further differences between these structural threads apart from length? Do you approach the longer poems differently than your shorter works? And what brought you to the point of working these two separate structures simultaneously?

A: I think the differences lie in the voice. If it feels like the voice needs more space, more scenery, then I’ll most likely indulge that. The shorter pieces always seem to have a more hyper-focused, crystalline voice, while the longer pieces have that novelistic, baggy voice. Otherwise, the distinction between long or short is merely incidental or superficial, and it feels good to toggle back and forth between those calibrations.  

Q: With this stretch of poems posted to tumblr and a book under your belt, as well as your various works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: This is a hard question to answer. I can’t even say for sure if my work has indeed developed? I presume it has? That seems better than staying stagnant? I can imagine the trajectory of the work has been greatly influenced by things in or of the moment: books I’m reading, music I’m listening to, people I know, my job, all the stuff that happens in life, etc. To that end, I have no clue where my work is headed. I hope new and interesting spaces. I just like to keep writing and not think too much about it.

Q: I am interested in the suggestion you have of denying your work a potential “togetherness,” offering instead through pieces posted individually, and possibly grouped, but only in chapbook-sized collections. Is this lack of interest in “togetherness” prompted by wishing to remain open to moving in multiple directions, or something other?

A: Hmm. It’s honestly probably remaining open to moving in multiple directions. I love changing my mind! Who knows—it could also be a fear of commitment? I think there’s a suspiciousness in “togetherness.” Why are all these poems and/or stories together, really? It seems like there’s a foundation of randomness or of the arbitrary underneath it all.  

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

A: Lydia Davis, most likely. It’s tough because there’s so much work I go back to because I’ll weirdly remember it out of the blue. It won't be with me for a great while or I’ll let it drift from view, but then I’ll be going through my bookshelves or something online will remind me of a certain book and I’ll have to go and read it again. This happened recently with Night Moves by Stephanie Barber. It’s this book published by Publishing Genius that culls a bunch of Youtube comments about Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” into a really cool artifact of collective online melancholy and memory. It’s a cool little book.