TtD supplement #40 : seven questions for Kathryn MacLeod

Kathryn MacLeod lives, works, gardens and cycles in Victoria, BC. Her books and chapbooks include mouthpiece (Tsunami Editions, 1996), How Two (Tsunami Editions, 1987) and the more recent Entropic Suite (above/ground press, 2012), much of which was written as part of her dissertation: Transgressing Words and Silence: Aesthetics, Ethics and Education (UBC, 2011), which explores the relationship between ethics, aesthetics and education using the limit case of art created in response to the Holocaust. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Companions and Horizons: An Anthology of Simon Fraser University Poetry (2005), Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing Anthology (1999), and East of Main (1989). Recent publications in journals include: ditch (September 2013), dusie (July 2013); seventeen seconds (Winter 2013) and Truck (August 2012).

Her poems “Crows and Gulls,” “Regulus” and “Wandering Star (NYC)” appear in the seventh issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “Crows and Gulls,” “Regulus” and “Wandering Star (NYC).”

A: Although these poems were started at different times, in different contexts, I struggled with each of them for a year or more. I didn’t know what I was trying to do with each poem for a very long time—they all went through many versions and were left for months unfinished. At times, I gave up on each of them.

Rereading, I see that “Crows and Gulls” and “Regulus” are related thematically—both having come from exploring grief and loss. “Regulus” was written in response to the death of a young person, not someone I knew well, but as witness to the family’s tragedy. “Crows and Gulls” is an attempt to write a succinct and precise poem about an experience of loss that is imprecise, ambiguous, and, in some ways, irreparable. A poem about change, the dissolution of meaning, the inability to communicate.

“Wandering Star (NYC)” is the second in a series of poems about traveling to other places, both physically and metaphorically. It is a poem about my love for cities and ideas and philosophies. I wrote it for Maxine Greene, a philosopher who lived in NYC until her death at age 96 this year. Her deep love for art and literature and her understanding of their connection to the day to day world of learning continues to inspire me. A “wandering star,” by the way, is a lovely archaic term for a planet.

Q: How do you see these poems in relation to the work you’ve done prior, from mouthpiece and How Two to Entropic Suite?

A: There was a long gap in time between mouthpiece and How Two (written in the 1980s), and Entropic Suite (2012). When I began studying poetry in the early 1980s, my work, and the education I received, was very conservative. I wrote lyrical poetry focusing on imagery and precise language and structure. It was good training, but restrictive. When I was introduced to the Language poets in the mid-80s via the Kootenay School in Vancouver, it opened up my work and I started to experiment with form. The poetry of How Two and mouthpiece was written during that time. I had been introduced to some of the postmodernist philosophers before I became involved with the Kootenay School, so the ideas were not new to me—just the application in art.

Entropic Suite began during the writing of my dissertation, completed in 2011, which focused on aesthetics, ethics and education, using the work of three artists who created art in response to the events of the Holocaust, and viewed through the philosophical perspective of Kant and Lyotard. The poems in this series were part of my scholarly exploration of these ideas. After a long silence, the poems of Entropic Suite seem to me to combine the sensibilities of both schools to which I had been exposed as a young poet. I no longer feel constricted by either content or form or aesthetic schools. I have a better understanding of why I am writing and who I am writing for. My current work, I believe, reflects a much deeper understanding of the nature of art and the practice of poetry.

Q: How difficult was it to re-enter writing after your long silence? Or was it almost a matter of being triggered by, as you say, new sensibilities blending in with the old?

A: It was not difficult at all, oddly. The poems arose naturally out of the research and writing I was doing—the ideas I was exploring and thinking deeply about as I wrote my dissertation. In the process of working on my doctorate I wrote a number of essays examining the nature of art in multiple mediums, and during that time the boundaries between scholarly and creative work began to blur for me. I had very supportive faculty who encouraged me to explore both with form and content. So although I started writing the dissertation in a more traditional format, I was encouraged by my advisor to go outside those boundaries. One of the great pleasures of working on my dissertations was finding the connections between the scholarly work and the poetry, and placing them so that they worked together. There is such joy in those moments of discovery!

I wrote a few of the poems in Entropic Suite afterwards—that is, after having completed the dissertation. So it was rewarding to see the poems stand on their own, in a separate, but connected project.

Q: Do your poems normally emerge from research?

A: My first reaction to your question was to say no, and then I rethought... In fact, my poems often emerge from something I am reading and thinking and wondering about. So while it may not be formal research, in fact I am often following a trail of questions in my reading and thinking. I often don’t know what I really think about something until I write about it—I have read other writers saying the same thing—and I find this to be very true. In different kinds of writing the outcome is expected to be different, of course. In scholarly writing one is aiming for less ambiguity, while in poetry I hope to embrace or at least rest in the ambiguous. A kind of Buddhist approach to meaning. That tension is always there for me when I write, I think—the tension between trying to fix meaning and trying to open it further.

Q: Who have your influences been for this kind of approach to meaning?

A: I think the influence comes from a number of directions. Most obviously, the language writing influence from the 80s, and from particular poets like Susan Howe, whose work will always be extraordinarily important to me. But even before that I was introduced to the French feminists (Cixous, Irigaray), and although I wasn’t able to synthesize it at the time, they were my real introduction to the postmodern focus on language and the contingency of meaning. I still recall first reading their texts, and while I found them difficult and startling, I understood the significance of what they were trying to do.

Also, and certainly more recently, Buddhist philosophy and practice. The way one struggles in meditation is very much about struggling with the impermanence of meaning. Over time, one can see it in oneself—the tension between longing for permanence and watching it slip away, over and over again.

Each of these influences have had an effect on what I understand about the world, and thus have had an effect on my practice. Each felt familiar, and interconnected. Each allowed me, at various points in my life, to articulate a worldview that I did not previously have language for. 

Resting and wrestling in and with the unknown. The writers, artists and theorists who speak to me do so because they struggle in this same way. I mentioned the philosopher Maxine Greene previously. She wrote that “informed encounters with works of art often lead to a startling defamiliarization of the ordinary.” We create meaning in our ordinary lives every day; we want meaning to be solid and real; we are so often sadly reminded that it is not. Meaning fails us, and thus we look for new meaning. I imagine I will always write about this. 

Q: Are you working on anything specific at the moment, or simply feeling your way through the poems as they come?

A: I am working on poems as they come, at the moment. I started a project last year, but having gone back to it recently, I realize that it is too soon to see it as a whole. So perhaps it will come together some time in the future.

Q: I know you touched on a bit of this earlier, but wondering: who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

A: I mentioned Susan Howe—I go back to Articulations of Sound Forms in Time over and over, and find something new each time. There are two copies of that book in our house.

I read PK Page and Phyllis Webb when I want to go back even further. I read Mavis Gallant and Nadine Gordimer when I crave fiction, and Annie Dillard to be reminded of the power of observation. I read Maxine Greene when I forget why I write. Most of the time, I read widely, and eclectically.

TtD supplement #39 : seven questions for Helen Hajnoczky

Helen Hajnoczky is the author of Poets and Killers: A Life in Advertising (Snare/Invisible, 2010) and Magyarázni (Coach House, forthcoming spring 2016). Her work has appeared in a variety of magazines and chapbooks, and in the anthologies Why Poetry Sucks (Insomniac Press, 2014) and Ground Rules: best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013 (Chaudiere Books, 2013). Excerpts from Bloom and Martyr have appeared in Dreamland, Lemon Hound, and New Poetry. A portion of Bloom and Martyr was selected for the 2015 John Lent Poetry-Prose Award, and will be published as a chapbook by Kalamalka Press in spring 2016. She blogs http://ateacozyisasometimes.blogspot.ca/ and tweets @helenhajnoczky.

Her “Four poems from Bloom and Martyr” appear in the seventh issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the “Four poems from Bloom and Martyr.”

A: These four poems are taken from the end of a manuscript I wrote last year. All the poems are in the same style, using a discussion of flowers and gardens as a way to explore desire from a feminist perspective. Writing the manuscript was incredibly fun. At the time I had been tinkering with my then manuscript and now forthcoming book for a while, and I had become a bit forestalled while editing. Then in August 2014 in Calgary I had a chance to read with Natalie Simpson whose work I find enthralling, and she talked about taking an approach to writing where she’d write a lot down in a notebook, and then type up the lines she wanted to keep. It had been a while since I’d written something new and I thought, ‘I used to write that way, why don’t I do that anymore?’ So I went back to Montreal and reread Natalie’s book accrete or crumble which is such a dense, rich, and inspiring book that after reading it I wrote Bloom and Martyr in a week and a half, mostly on my phone on the bus to work, on coffee breaks, etc.

Q: How were you working prior to this that caused you to be forestalled?

A: There were a few factors. I started the project when I was in school so it was difficult to dedicate time to work on it. The book, which is called Magyarázni and is coming out in spring of 2016 from Coach House books, is also written in a more narrative style which I hadn’t used much before, so it took a little while to figure that out. The biggest thing though was that the book is about first generation cultural identity and how and to what extent one’s attitude towards and understanding of their cultural background is tied up with their familial relationships and relationships with people in their community, so it was important to me that I get it just right. I wrote it once and it came off unintentionally bitter, again and it came off unintentionally saccharine… I wrote one version that expressed things well but that I found flat so I rewrote it again to make it more engaging. It’s a much more personal work than anything I’d done before and so I got much more caught up in it and focused on making it be exactly what I intended. Bloom and Martyr was the opposite—I didn’t have any plans for it or anything really specific I wanted to capture so writing it was all flow.

Q: I’m curious about the Magyarázni poems: you speak of a difficulty in part, that came from writing out your relationship with your cultural background and community. What prompted you to begin this project, and what were your models, if any? I think of Andrew Suknaski writing out his Ukrainian and Russian backgrounds, for example, of even Erín Moure exploring the language and culture of the Galicians. And might Bloom and Martyr have progresses so quickly, perhaps, due to it being a kind of palate cleanser?

A: Magyarazni germinated for a long time. There’s a wood chest in my parent’s house that my dad carved, and the tulips in his design are what inspired my project originally, particularly the visual poetry in the book. I started doodling tulips in the margins of my school notes with letters at their centre, with the accents used as stamen, long before I had really been introduced to visual poetry. The moment that sparked the project, though, was one night when my dad and I were up late chatting about when he, his sisters, and his mother left Hungary after the ’56 revolution and I thought “I should really write this down.” So, I went and typed up everything he’d said and made a little chapbook of it for him. I wanted to do something more on the topic though, and was fortunate to get a grant for the visual and written poetry book and to travel around Western Canada interviewing people who’d come during or after ’56, or whose family had done so. Originally I’d thought of including the interviews and poems in one book, but the interviews are numerous, long, and detailed and really deserved to be their own thing (which I’m still slowly working on). Though I didn’t use anything from the interviews in this book the people who so generously told me their stories definitely influenced me and the writing of Magyarázni.

For more poetic influences though, Oana Avasilichioaei’s book Abandon, and the way she deals with cultural identity and nostalgia had a huge influence on me. The way Fred Wah’s writes about cultural identity, how that’s tied up with family, and the way he sets all this against the backdrop of the prairie all strongly informed the way I approached writing this book too—there’s a lot of Calgary in Magyarázni. Additionally, in 2007 Erín Moure and Oana Avasilichioaei spoke at the UofC for Translating Translating Montréal, and I have this fuzzy memory of them discussing translating words based on a feeling of the word or based on a word in a third language that the word in the source text reminds you of (I can’t remember precisely what they said and I don’t want to misquote them or misrepresent their ideas, but I believe the discussion was something along these lines), and this idea was key in the writing of Magyarázni. For example, the poem “Belváros”—the word translates into English as “inner city” (so, downtown), but I always hear it as ‘beautiful city,’ because in French ‘belle’ means beautiful. I went to a French immersion elementary school and I started hearing the word that way as a little kid, and I still hear it that way, not as inner city but as beautiful city. Because the project struggles to answer the question of how much one person’s experience of a language or culture can be representative of a community as a whole, I thought it was important to include these little hyper-personal feelings about words in the manuscript.

But to get to the second part of your question, I do think Bloom and Martyr was a palate cleanse. I’d worked on editing Magyarázni so carefully and for so long that I’d become a bit too caught up in just doing that. Then I took the aforementioned trip and did a couple of readings in Calgary, felt energized, wrote Bloom and Martyr super quickly, and then did a final pass on Magyarázni with renewed enthusiasm and was finally able to shape it into what I’d wanted it to be.

Q: You speak of your visual poetry originally being influenced by your father’s tulip design on a wood chest. I suspect that your time in Calgary might have had an influence on such, but how did you get from those original doodles influenced by your father’s work to considering your doodles as visual poetry?

A: Being from Calgary most definitely influenced my visual poetry. The creative writing classes I took at the UofC introduced me to visual poetry as an active area of contemporary writing for the first time, and there are a number of wonderfully talented visual poets in Calgary (or poets who were there when I was). Knowing these writers got me thinking more about visual poetry as another mode of writing that I could use in my own work. Having had the opportunity to become familiar with contemporary visual poetry, I was more inclined to think about the significance of my impulse to make those doodles and how that reflected my feelings about Hungarian language and folk culture, and this fueled my desire to turn these doodles into a larger, more deliberate and meaningful project.

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 think I end up working on large-scale projects because of my interest in the topics I feel compelled to write about—I want to spend time with those ideas and explore them more fully in longer projects. Bloom and Martyr started out as a set of a few poems, but I enjoyed writing those so much and I was in the right headspace to churn them out, so I followed that impulse until I felt I’d exhausted it and I was holding a finished manuscript. Other projects have taken more planning, but they too start with me writing a poem or two and then if I feel like what I’m doing is working I start thinking about how to expand it into a longer work. I have a stack of stand-alone poems or sets of a few related poems that were published as chapbooks or in magazines, but I often end up thinking about how I could build on these poems and eventually turn them into books too.

Most of the poetry I’ve read has been books of contemporary Canadian poetry, and it seems like a great many of these are based around a single theme or that they have a strong aesthetic, stylistic, or formal unity. This trend has certainly exerted a strong influence on me. I find I gravitate towards poetry books that deal with a single topic or theme, or that have some sort of unifying style or principle to them. I enjoy that reading experience and since it’s a thing I’m fond of as a reader I replicate it in my own work. Because most of the books I really love are written like this, it’s hard to pick a few, but the ones that I find myself thinking about a lot lately are Un/Inhabited by Jordan Abel, The Journals of Susanna Moodie by Margaret Atwood, Clockfire by Jonathan Ball, Execution Poems by George Elliott Clarke, Woods Wolf Girl by Cornelia Hoogland, wild horses by uh, you, rob mclennan, Elimination Dance by Michael Ondaatje, Undark by Sandy Pool, MxT by Sina Queyras, Err by Shane Rhodes, accrete or crumble and Thrum by Natalie Simpson, Winter Sports and Summer Sports by Priscilla Uppal, Waiting for Saskatchewan by Fred Wah, Thumbscrews and Doom by Natalie Zina Walschots, and Amphetamine Heart by Liz Worth. There are so many more excellent examples that I’m not mentioning… these are just those that have been on my mind lately.

Q: With a growing mound of chapbooks and two forthcoming titles under your belt, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see yourself headed?

A: I think that my work is getting more contemplative as time goes on, and that generally my writing is getting more mature in the sense that I’m getting better at writing in the styles that I’ve been fond of and that I’ve been working in for the past few years. Right now I’m mostly looking forward to the publication of Magyarázni with Coach House and the Bloom and Martyr chapbook with Kalamalka—I’m a fan of each press and I’m thrilled to be publishing with them. For upcoming projects, though, I’m currently working on finishing an older manuscript of visual and constraint-based poetry about Victorian corsetry called Tight-Lacing that I started years ago. I’m not sure what I’ll do after that. What I like most about writing is exploring new topics and ideas as they arise, so I’m just waiting to see what comes next.

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

A: Thrum and accrete or crumble by Natalie Simpson are an endless source of inspiration for me—her language is so evocative, and her bending and fracturing of grammar so fascinating that every time I read either book I feel ready to write. I’ve often gone back to Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein for the same reasons. Finally, I re-read The Journals of Susanna Moodie by Margaret Atwood regularly, and I find it particularly helpful to read if I’m working on something narrative.

TtD supplement #38 : seven questions for Suzanne Zelazo

Suzanne Zelazo is a poet and academic currently working in commercial publishing. Her scholarly and creative work engage the modernist Avant-garde. Together with Irene Gammel, she published Crystal Flowers: Poems and a Libretto by Florine Stettheimer, and Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the first major English collection of the Baroness’s poems. She was the founder and editor of the small press magazine Queen Street Quarterly.

Her poems “Ménage à Cinq,” “Brancusi’s Golden Equinox,” “Congruent,” “Under My Dress, A Thousand Startled Moons” and “Cher Ubu” appear in the seventh issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “Ménage à Cinq,” “Brancusi’s Golden Equinox,” “Congruent” and “Under My Dress, A Thousand Startled Moons.”

A: Ménage à Cinq
(for Roger Conover)

This poem, and the whole collection explores lines of influence, appropriation, again and always collage, but collage as the rhizome of language and consciousness. The poem is a linking of lines by the poets Mina Loy and Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, but it is also queries how their work has become available to us—so the role of the editor—their editors, is also being probed. The modernist scholar Roger Conovor was the first to bring Loy back into the fray when he re-issued Loy’s poems from her only book, Lunar Baedeker (Contact Editions, 1923) along with previously unpublished work, first in 1982 and then again in 1997. While the Baroness did not publish a book during her lifetime, Irene Gammel and I co-edited a collection of her poems for MIT Press where Conover is an editor. The poem is about the amplification of voice in its contemporary moment and in the future moments and voices it inspires. Where one begins and the other ends may be impossible to discern.

Under My Dress, A Thousand Startled Moons

This is about voices on the fringe worthy of centre stage. It is also about falling in love with art and the creative spirit. How does one negotiate the paradoxical seductive intimacy of experiencing art in the absence of its creator—its weird isn’t it?

Congruent

Two sets of points are congruent if one can be transformed into the other by a translation, a rotation, and a reflection. Again this is about influence, Loy’s and the Baroness’s on me, but more specifically, it is about their influence on the men they loved or inspired whose own work would become critically recognized well before that of these innovative female modernists. Of course the perception of the direction of influence under those circumstances becomes not simply unclear, but often reversed. Twining is also central to this project—is the recognition of self in another about belonging, solidarity and confirmation, or is it about the loss of self, erasure and dissolution?

Q: How do these poems compare to other pieces you’ve been working on? Are they part of a larger grouping, or an ongoing series of occasionals that haven’t yet cohered into something book-length? And how might they compare to the work in, for example, your first collection?

A: The poems are characteristic of what I’ve been working on for a while now— a modernist conversation between the Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven and Mina Loy, and a more general consideration of artistic influence. They are all part of the book length project (minus one occasional here). As in my first book, collage is central, but I think the collection explores voice—the simultaneity of voices—very differently.

Q: What is it about the works of Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven and Mina Loy that speak to each other? What is it about their works that still needs to be discussed?

A: For both Loy and the Baroness, collage enabled a dispersal of self, predicated on language as embodiment. Both women daringly redeployed the art form to critique the conventional sexism and pro-war sensibilities which the masculinist avant-garde disseminated. This collection stages an imaginary, sustained conversation between the two poets who in spite of numerous aesthetic resonances and common artist friends (notably, Djuna Barnes and Marcel Duchamp), never engaged with one another. There is no record of any exchanges between the two poets. Their non-relationship thus figures as a curious “absent presence” in modernist cultural history.

Q: What is it about utilizing collage that appeals? What does collage allow that another compositional structure might not?

A: Collage destabilizes meaning, mobilizes verbal and visual puns, performs a resistance to the ontological fixity or essence of the word or art object—emphasizing instead states of perpetual becoming and constructedness.

Q: How do you feel your work has developed over the past decade-plus, from the appearance of Parlance (Coach House Books, 2003) to your current project? Collage was already an important element of Parlance, but your critical work—specifically Crystal Flowers: Poems and a Libretto by Florine Stettheimer and Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven—have obviously made an impact on how you approach your work. What do you feel your writing has gained through exploring early Modernists such as Stettheimer and von Freytag-Loringhoven?

A: With respect to the Baroness in particular, I spent a few years really immersed in her thoughts, her writings, her manuscripts, her wonderful portmanteau words—themselves mini collages, and I think I came to “hear” differently. The Baroness had a voice and an ear like nothing I’d ever encountered—at once hard and whimsical. She is complex, raw and sharp in her perceptions, but she is also deeply humorous. As for Stettheimer, working closely with her writing allowed me a new entry into her painting. Stettheimer’s is a sophisticated, even crystalline whimsy and I think both have found their way into my writing.

Q: How do you feel this is different from your prior work? What has the shift allowed you to explore?

A: As an identical twin, I have long been intrigued by the moment of shared creativity. This work has allowed me to explore the concept of collaboration more explicitly—imaginary or not.

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

A: Anything by Karen Mac Cormack or Sina Queyras. But, I also tend to go the visual arts—like the work of Toronto-based artist Gord Peteran (in particular, a book of essays on his work Furniture Meets Its Maker edited by Glenn Adamson), or the narrative photographs of Janieta Eyre.

Touch the Donkey : seventh issue,

The seventh issue is now available, with new poems by Stan Rogal, Helen Hajnoczky, Kathryn MacLeod, Shannon Maguire, Sarah Mangold, Amish Trivedi and Suzanne Zelazo.





Seven dollars (includes shipping). My god! It's like you've known me all your life!

TtD supplement #37 : seven questions for Deborah Poe

Deborah Poe is the author of the poetry collections keep (in circulation), the last will be stone, too (Stockport Flats), Elements (Stockport Flats), and Our Parenthetical Ontology (CustomWords), as well as a novella in verse, Hélène (Furniture Press). In addition, Deborah co-edited Between Worlds: An Anthology of Contemporary Fiction and Criticism (Peter Lang) and is working on finding a home for her first full-length novel. Deborah Poe is associate professor of English at Pace University, where she directs the creative writing program and founded and curates the annual Handmade/Homemade Exhibit.

Her poems “Proun (sixth)” and “Letter to B” appear in the sixth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “Proun (sixth)” and “Letter to B.”

A: I discovered El Lissitzky’s Proun at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard University in March of 2013. The term drew me in, making me think at once of prose and noun. Proun is a term El Lissitzky’s coined, which he once defined as “the station where one changes from painting to architecture.” When I found Lissitzky’s definition, I was thrilled to think of the proun relative to memory and place. Though his definition was fairly ambiguous, it possessed a decidedly spatial quality, and the aspect of “translating” from one medium to another interested me greatly. I decided at the museum to write my fourth section of keep as “prouns,” wherein I attempted to translate the spatial—the canvas of place(s)—to language on the page.

To the extent that a poem can have a beginning (and memory of another can be imagined), I began the sixth proun about a GTMO prisoner, after viewing visual artist and poet Janet Passehl’s ironed cloth works. I had been listening to news on Democracy Now about Guantánamo Bay as well as reading a piece in Al Jazeera by detainee Moath al-Alwi, and Janet’s piece River (2010) immediately evoked both shroud and prayer cloth. The relationship between imprisonment, systems of power, and injustice—relative to our disastrous foreign policy in the Middle East—materialized in a cell on the page.

 “Letter to B” takes much of its language from a 2011 email to Brandon Shimoda. I was preparing for an upcoming trip to Tucson and had started working out the relationship between my concept of the sensual infrastructure and memory. (“Letter to B” was an early piece for keep, my collection based on memory.)

Q: How do these pieces connect to your previous work?

A: In his short piece “Towards a Poetics of Monstrosity,” from Lyric Postmodernisms, edited by Reginald Shepherd, Bruce Beasley introduced me to an Italian expression that speaks to that connection.

Italians have an expression I love: rimanere in force, to “remain in perhaps,” not to know, for a while. Like Keats’ negative capability, it’s a soothing respite from the “irritable reaching’” of the intellect toward knowledge and fact. A dispossession of the experience. To stay in perhaps, to linger with the eroticized body of the temporarily or permanent unknown. (1-2)

I love the openness that this Italian expression demands. I love the “placeness” held by perhaps. To pay attention to the colors, the sounds, the changes, and occurrences beyond the surface is to engage the rational and to revel too in the limitless country of the unknown[1]. “Mind coadunates with world in memory of place,” writes philosopher Edward S. Casey.

The pieces connect to my previous work then in their preoccupation with place and with the relationship of a poem to the unknown, the latter of which I think materializes in the correspondence between the abstract and concrete language of a poem.

Q: I’ve always admired just how lyrically packed your poems are: how you manage to incorporate a great deal of information into your poems without allowing the poems to feel overpowered or overwhelmed. There is, it almost feels, such a light touch to your lines, and your sentences. When it comes to how poems are built, what poets have you been influenced by?

A: I appreciate your question and reading of my work; thank you. Milan Kundera asks at the beginning of his novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, “Weight or lightness?” I have thought about that question a lot—how that paradox of lightness and weight gets articulated in life and in literature. I have no doubt this is another way in which my preoccupation with belonging and freedom (home and home-lessness) manifests itself in my work. I read ferociously and across a wide aesthetic range, so there are many, many writers by whom I have been influenced. With regards to “weight or lightness” though, I think first of Bruce Beasley whose intelligence and rigor carries a great deal of information—monstrously rich concrete language—into his poems without overwhelming. Paul Celan and Emily Dickinson come to mind for their unbearable lightness of being. Orlando White and Layli Long Soldier for the simultaneous breath and sink in letter and line. Jorie Graham for her teeth-sunk interrogation into the veiled and underneath.

Q: Much of your work to date seems to exist in that convergence of translation, memory and space. What is it about engaging these elements that attracts you so deeply?

A: I’ve spoken to you elsewhere about preoccupations with place, cultural identity, and notions of belonging and home and how growing up in a military family contributed to those preoccupations. Also, I process the world emotionally very differently from my family and suspect I figured that out pretty early on. I am sure that is foundational to engaging translation, memory, and space over and over again in my writing—trying to speak the same language but knowing often we (the general we) just don’t. For a talk that I gave a year ago for the Equality State Book Festival, “Handmade/Homemade: Between Concept and Making” I spoke about my own process of writing and making books. I discussed how I consider making books as a kind of translation of text into other mediums. Just as we move across multiple grammars when we move between languages, we can move across modes of expression in transforming a text to a book object. We experience different materials and the way those materials manifest in the world. Remaining open to multiple modes of expression is like remaining open to other ways of “speaking.” Thinking about moving between genres like this pleases me greatly. But to get back to your question, I suppose my answer is kind of existential. What attracts me so deeply about engaging translation, memory, and space is how those elements animate my understanding of connection (and lack thereof). I am trying to come to more peaceful terms with that relationship between human connection and ultimately being alone. Dig far enough, I suppose, and we’ll all eventually find that our preoccupations are not unrelated to our limited time on this earth.

Q: How do you feel your work has progressed over the past decade or so, through four published books (three poetry collections and a novella in verse) and a mound of chapbooks? Where do you see your work headed?

A: Over the last ten years, I think my work has become more and more socio-politically oriented with a deeper environmental consciousness. The connections between social justice and the environment have become clearer and more urgent over the last few years. I was reading Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything early this summer, and this passage about the reason for social movements to exist resonated strongly:

. . . . it means continually drawing connections among these seemingly disparate struggles (my emphasis)—asserting, for instance, that the logic that would cut pensions, food stamps, and health care before increasing taxes on the rich is the same logic that would blast the bedrock of the earth to get the last vapors of gas and the last drops of oil before making the shift to renewable energy. (Part 1: Bad Timing)

Over the past ten years, I have also settled into a poetics that is fairly concept-driven. My last two published books of poetry, for example, were Elements and the last will be stone, too, based on the periodic table and art about death respectively. As I mentioned before, my latest poetry collection, keep, is about memory. Another progression is my accelerated interest in prose. I view Hélène, my novella in verse, as a departure from my poetry. In it is my keen attention to language and the poetic line, but there is some semblance of a narrative arc. Last winter I finished my first novel am now seeking a home for it. As for where my work is headed, we shall see. I’m playing around with more elements this summer (there are only 39 of 118 in the Stockport Flats book). I have been awarded a sabbatical for the spring semester and have mapped out a schedule to work on two books, at least one of which will be prose.

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

A: That is an impossible question. I just learned from Sam Kean’s The Disappearing Spoon that the longest word to appear in an English language document was the word for an important protein, the titin protein, on the tobacco mosaic virus. I could write a list as long (and started to yesterday just for fun). The length of titin—189,819 letters—couldn’t hold all of the writers and works, old and new, which energize my work.

Lori Anderson Moseman Bruce Beasley’s Lord Brain Paul Celan

Haruki Murakami Sherman Alexie Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine

Jorie Graham’s Swarm Michael Palmer Raymond di Palma’s Works

in a Drawer Harryette Mullen Mei-mei Berssenbrugge Rikki Ducornet

Wallace Stevens William Carlos Williams Bhanu Kapil Judith Butler

Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics WG Sebald’s Rings of Saturn Laird Hunt

Jane Miller’s Wherever You Lay Your Head Edward Said Rebecca Brown

Jacques Derrida Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider James Baldwin Marilynne

Robinson’s Gilead Laynie Browne’s Mermaid’s Purse Ta-Nehisi Coates’s

Between the World and Me Anthony Doerr’s The Shell Collector Lydia Davis

Cole Swensen Junot Díaz Yoko Tawada’s Where Europe Begins Jhumpa

Lahiri Marguerite Duras Roberto Bolaño Maggie Nelson Arundhati Roy

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Elfriede Jelenik Lao Tzu Virginia Woolf

Jeannette Winterson Yasunari Kawabata’s Palm-of-the-Hand Stories Raúl

Zurita’s Inri Cecelia Vicuña Anne Carson Bernadette Mayer Jean

Valentine Etel Adnan Arthur Sze Emily Dickinson Lucie Brock-Broido

John Ashbery Claudia Rankine Kate Greenstreet’s Case Sensitive Meredith

Stricker’s Mistake Zhang Er’s Verses on Bird Michael Ford’s Carbon Elizabeth

Willis’s Address Stéphane Mallarmé Akilah Oliver Elizabeth Bishop Lorine

Niedecker Gertrude Stein Dogen Thích Nhât Hanh Michel Foucault Suzanne

Paola’s and Brenda Miller’s Tell It Slant Suzanne Paola’s Body Toxic Xu Yuan


[1] Hélène Cixous, from “The Laugh of the Medusa:” “Because poetry involves gaining strength through the unconscious and because the unconscious, that other limitless country, is the place where the repressed manage to survive.”

TtD supplement #36 : seven questions for Jordan Abel

Jordan Abel is a Nisga’a writer from Vancouver. Abel’s work has appeared in numerous periodicals, and his chapbooks have been published by above/ground press and JackPine Press. Abel’s first book, The Place of Scraps (Talonbooks), was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Un/inhabited, Abel’s second book, was co-published by Project Space Press and Talonbooks.

His poems “allegory,” “allusion,” “connotation” and “hyperbole” appear in the sixth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: The poems you submitted are part of, as you wrote, an excised section of what ended up as your second published collection:

All of these pieces are from the same conceptual project as Un/inhabited, but were not published in that book for thematic reasons. Here’s a brief description of the project:

These pieces are constructed entirely from public domain novels. On Project Gutenberg, there are 91 freely available Western novels that I copied and pasted into a single word document. That document ended up being over 10,000 pages. I then searched for words that related to the social and political aspects of land. “allegory,” “allusion,” “connotation,” and “hyperbole” diverge from the main conceptual project, but continue to explore issues of context, textual surface and reading processes.

Given that the work fits so clearly into a specific project, I’m curious about what happens to such material after it has been removed from the finished work. Does it become the ‘bonus’ material of Un/inhabited, or might it fall into a further project? Or might this be the only home it sees?

And how much material was removed? Was this it, or was there more?

A: After I finished writing Un/inhabited, there was a lot of material that essentially fell to the cutting room floor. I had been writing excessively, and knew that there would have to be substantial cuts for the project to be thematically coherent. As a result, there were many threads that had to be removed entirely. Some of those threads (minority, oil, afeared, etc.) were closely related to main conceptual project, but, for one reason or another, didn’t fit perfectly. Those threads were probably the most difficult to cut. Other threads (maps, speakers, urgency, etc.) were interesting explorations and worked individually, but were easy to separate from the main project. However, as the project continued, there were several threads that emerged that had coherent and discrete themes that weren’t dependent on the pieces in Un/inhabited. One of those threads explored the deployment of literary terms, and, surprisingly, seemed to be supported by the source text. That thread included many pieces: allegory, allusion, connotation, denouement, dialogue, flash back, hyperbole, identity, metaphor, motif, narrative, personification, simile, symbol, and theme.

To be honest, after I cut those pieces, I wasn't really sure what to do with them. The pieces in Un/inhabited (settler, territory, frontier, etc.) worked partially because they explored themes of indigeneity, land use and ownership. Those pieces were actively working towards the destabilization of the colonial architecture of the western genre. But what were these other pieces doing? What did an exploration of the context surrounding the deployment of the word “allusion” accomplish?

I think, if I were to guess at an answer to my own question, that the thread of literary terms engages with an aspect of the western genre that is, at the very least, unusual. You don’t often think about the western genre being rich with metaphors or allusions or symbols, and, perhaps, it isn’t. But those words are there. Those words are doing something that we don’t normally associate with the traditional foundations of literary studies. There is an exploration here that, I think, subverts the tendencies of literary analysis by compressing and recontextualizing common analytic diction.

Right now, these pieces are not part of a separate project. But they easily could be. I think there’s more there to dig through. Other approaches that could be taken.

Q: Is this how you have been building your manuscripts-to-date, through experimenting with an expansiveness before cutting away to hone the manuscript as a self-contained project? And what percentage of a manuscript might be cut away before you are left with a finished work?

A: For the most part, yes. When I was writing The Place of Scraps, I made a conscious decision to just write as much as I could and then trim the manuscript back later. I had done this partly because I knew that I needed write in order to figure out what was good, what was bad, what was useable, and what had to go. I like your description. Experimenting with an expansiveness before cutting away. Here, I think the experimentation does accurately describe at least part of my process. There’s a certain amount of trial and error that was required for writing The Place of Scraps, and it was often necessary to write through the error before stumbling on something that clicked. Admittedly, with TPOS, about a quarter of all of the writing I did for that project didn’t work and was cut from the final publication.

Things were a bit different for Un/inhabited. The process of exploration through error was much longer, more tedious, and was often paralyzed by the expansiveness of the source text. Each search query I made (and subsequently each piece that became part of the larger conceptual project) had an indeterminable outcome. And, worse, when I began the project, I had no idea what direction to go in or which ideas to pursue. The process tended towards exploring and querying in any and all directions. The result, with Un/inhabited, was that only about a quarter of all the material I produced ended up in the final published version. Which, of course, left a substantial amount of material unpublished and unused.

Q: How did you arrive at such a collage-construction of writing expansively around and through a conceptual framework? Who or what have your structural models been over the course of your work to date?

A: It’s tough to say exactly how I arrived at this model. I think, at least partly, expansive writing comes from the understanding that the conceptual project could, potentially, be limitless. Or that the full conceptual project could be far too lengthy to publish. But, I think, I came to this model of writing because there were very few other Indigenous writers exploring Indigeneity through conceptual writing. So far, I’ve found that conceptual frameworks can allow for different kinds of understandings, different kinds of readings, and different kinds of engagement with Indigeneity.

I think, also, that the concept, as far as I’ve used it, has really allowed me to shift the focus of my writing away from myself and onto other texts. My personal engagement with Indigenous ideas and issues as a member of the Nisga’a Nation, as an intergenerational survivor of the Canadian residential school system, and urban Indigenous person has primarily been mediated through text and the materiality of books. The concept allows me to put those books front and centre.

As far as structural models go, I’ve learned a great deal from many different writers and artists. And my work itself is entirely dependent on the work of others. But the conceptualists that I find very useful to learn from include Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, M. NourbeSe Philip, and many more.

It’s strange, though. It was only after I finished TPOS that I finally read Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip. I’ve always thought that Zong! and TPOS have a lot in common. And it would have made sense for me to read Zong! before I wrote TPOS. But for some reason I missed it, and stumbled into erasure and found text almost by accident.

Q: What do you feel that conceptualism allows you to explore and articulate that you might not have been able to otherwise?

A: So far I think conceptualism has primarily allowed me to articulate a more complex relationship between Indigenous nationhood, textual surface, and foundational literatures. I'm sure, though, that there are many other things that conceptualism could potentially work towards. For me, I think, the most important aspect of using a conceptual framework in my writing was that it allowed me to imagine Indigeneity outside of the tropes of poetry.

Q: Has your writing changed the way you see or understand yourself as Nisga’a? Have your researches expanded or clarified your knowledge, or are you working already from a foundation that is simply being articulated?

A: That’s an interesting question. I would probably say yes. Often, when I’m writing, I’m thinking about how I construct my identity as a Nisga’a person, and, more broadly, how foundational and popular knowledges inform my identity as an Indigenous person. As I write through those foundational texts, as I readjust, question and subvert them, I am unsettling that knowledge and creating a space where identity can be constructed outside of the colonial apparatus.

Q: I interviewed Armand Garnet Ruffo for Jacket2 a while back (http://jacket2.org/commentary/short-interview-armand-garnet-ruffo), and we discussed the line between writing a resistance and writing a presence. Where do you find your work along that same spectrum?

A: I think Armand Ruffo brings up an important point. That if your writing is only resistant, only oppositional, only focused on decolonization, you kind of end up writing yourself into a corner. That resistance alone is somehow insubstantial and unsustainable. More or less, this makes a lot of sense to me, and I think it’s exceptionally important to balance out that resistance with presence. Or perhaps balance out decolonization with resurgence.

In terms of where my writing falls on that spectrum, I hope that both resistance and presence are there. Primarily, the texts that I’ve focused on as source texts have all been written from a settler-colonial perspective, and, I think, have pointed towards the kinds of foundational knowledges that should be resisted. My challenge, so far, has been to articulate an Indigenous presence from within those texts. TPOS is probably my most accessible example of this. From within Barbeau’s voice comes my own voice, an Indigenous voice. In that resistance and disassembly of Barbeau’s writing an Indigenous presence emerges.

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

A: Usually, I return to poetry. But lately I’ve been spending a lot of time reading non-fiction and returning to non-fiction:

Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition by Glen Coulthard
The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King
Decolonization and the Decolonized by Albert Memmi
Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon
Dancing On Our Turtle’s Back by Leanne Simpson
Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto by Taiaiake Alfred
After Canaan by Wayde Compton

TtD supplement #35 : seven questions for Jennifer Krovonet

Jennifer Kronovet is the author of the poetry collection Awayward and the chapbook CASE STUDY: WITH. She co-translated The Acrobat, the selected poems of Yiddish writer Celia Dropkin. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in A Public Space, Aufgabe, Best Experimental Writing 2014 (Omnidawn), Bomb, Boston Review, Fence, the PEN Poetry Series, Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics (Black Ocean), and elsewhere. She has taught at Beijing Normal University, Columbia University, and Washington University in St. Louis. A native New Yorker, she currently lives in Guangzhou, China.

Her poems “John Langshaw Austin (1911-1960),” “Letter,” “The Cold of Syntax,” “Narrative Theory,” “Corpus Analysis of Jennifer Kronovet’s Poetry Collection Awayward” appear in the sixth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the five poems “John Langshaw Austin (1911-1960),” “Letter,” “The Cold of Syntax,” “Narrative Theory,” “Corpus Analysis of Jennifer Kronovet’s Poetry Collection Awayward.”

A: At some point, I convinced myself that it would be sensible to get a master’s degree in Applied Linguistics. I loved taking those classes, being introduced to new methodologies with which to think about language, new stories to explain all the questions about language I ask over and over again, in my work and in my head.

Years later, I thought it would be sensible and interesting to write little essays about the factoids and personalities I came across in linguistics, but just like my other sensible plans, the project morphed, became entwined with poetry, the language I think with on the page. These poems—they are and aren’t essays, they are experiments and research and reportage.

I always found the very term “speech acts” to be so hopeful and concrete about what language can do, and then I found Austin to be such an interesting figure. Hangul, the Korean script—I’m a little obsessed with its history and design. I’ve been trying to find a way to include informative information in something that is a poem for a long time. “Corpus Analysis” is true in that I actually treated my first book of poetry as a data set, and is untrue in that my methods yielded very unreliable results that I further adulterated. The other two poems are a bit different, they more try to evoke something I sense about how language works and feels.

Q: How do these poems fit in with what else you’ve been working on since the publication of your first book? Are these poems part of some kind of larger structure, or is it too early to tell?

A: I recently did complete a manuscript of poems that all dance around in the field of linguistics; it’s called Loan Words. Or, at least, I think the pieces in Loan Words might be poems. In it, there are also case studies, semantic analyses, dialogues, reinvented definitions, and many other forms that are also in the form of a poem. Some of the poems have real facts, some are vehicles to do new research without the constraints of science, and in some, I am the subject of study. One of my professors, when I was studying linguistics, off-handedly mentioned that many of the most important applied linguists were mothers who studied their children. I was lucky to have that seed, to suddenly be able to observe with purpose when my son was born. The manuscript started then, in some ways, and then moved further from home as he grew.

Q: How does this differ from the studies that formed the poems of Awayward?

A: In Awayward, the experiment that the poems were based on was that of living in China and seeing myself as foreign. I tried to position my brain to see the new as a given and to see myself as a culture I was encountering for the first time. There is no good definition of the lyric, but, for a minute, let’s say that the lyric was the muscle I was using to write. Or the compass I was using to explore.

The studies in the current manuscript—they are mutts. They are in relation to the essay but think with the lyric. They are written from an I intent on being, not the lyric I, but the non-I that is clearly an I in linguistic studies. Is the problem of using language to describe language like the problem of saying I in a poem? I’m still working on that.

Q: One of the more curious pieces in your submission is the poem “Corpus Analysis of Jennifer Kronovet’s Poetry Collection Awayward.” How did this piece come about?

A: In real life, real linguists look at large data sets of speech or writing from a large subset of people to learn things about how language is used. That is a very quick and dirty definition of corpus linguistics. I looked at a small data set by one person—me—to make up something about how I use language.

Do most people, after a few years, wonder if they actually wrote their first book? I did write Awayward, a version of me did, at least. In that poem, I studied my book as if I didn’t have access to the book, as if this data obtained through corpus analysis was all I would ever know about the book, the place it came from, the person who wrote it, etc. The poem is about as far as you can get from legit linguistics work, and yet, I feel like by using the tools linguists use, I created a generative and playful distance from my own writing, found another way to study language with language in this endless room of mirrors I’m playing inside.

Q: Does it actually feel as though a different person wrote Awayward? I understand the feeling, and yet, it wasn’t that long ago that Awayward was published. Do you consider that your approach, as well as the poems themselves, has really changed that much over the past five years?

A: It’s not that I feel disconnected from the book—I think I’m still writing out of the same concerns—I feel disconnected from the act of writing it, from a kind of access to and trust in language that’s changed for me. I don’t give myself over to sound and syntax and disjunction with the same hopefulness, although I’m glad I did. Maybe I will again. I think there’s also something about giving readings that leads to distance. Once you read the same poem in public a couple of times, it becomes separate, a thing. The book is an object outside my head, which is amazing—I’m always trying to refresh the way I think.

Q: I’m curious about the idea of approaching a poetry manuscript as a “data set.” What did you mean by this? I’m curious, too, about who some of your influences have been for the kinds of poems you’ve been writing. Has it been a handful of writers influencing the larger canvas of your work, or a series of writers and writings that have produced works that have influenced you in smaller, accumulative ways?

A: I mean it totally literally. I plugged the words from Awayward into a program that generated a list of the words in the book from most used to least. The poet Brett Fletcher Lauer showed me how to do this. He used to do it with his work, to see how he could use a really specific word again and again without realizing it. Sometimes he thought the word was a crutch and took it out, but sometimes it just means the word is where you are. Until someone pointed it out to me, I had no idea how many times I mention knives in Awayward. I didn’t know I kept going there. Of course, it makes sense: my father collected knives my entire childhood, took me to knife shows, subscribed to the magazine Knife. I was raised with knives in my brain and they tore through the poems without my realizing it.

There are a bunch of writers I read before and during writing Loan Words who expanded my sense of the hybrid, of what can be done when the lyric marries other forms, how fact can enter a poem: Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal, Thomas Sayers Ellis’s Skin, Inc., CD Wright’s One with Others, Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution, Lisa Robertson’s Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office of Soft Architecture, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee. These books blow my mind with their awesomeness. I had Susan Howe and Rosmarie Waldrop in my thoughts too because I often do.

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

I’m very lucky to have had two amazing teachers whose work continues to teach me when I read it: Mary Jo Bang and Carl Phillips. I often like to read an Oppen poem. I can reread Inger Christensen’s alphabet over and over and be moved differently each time. A Danish friend actually just bought me a copy of the original, which I’m excited to look at alongside Susanna Nied’s brilliant translation. But to be honest, I love reading new books. I’m more likely to be reenergized by something I’ve never read before mainly because there is so much exciting work coming out from the US and abroad. And great presses and friends point me to the things I’ll love. Right now I’m reading a lot of contemporary Chinese poetry in translation because I’m living in China. Zephyr Press is publishing terrific, essential books. Reading them is one of the ways I’m trying to get my real life in China to meet up with the poetry land that’s in my head.