TtD supplement #89 : seven questions for Michael e. Casteels

Michael e. Casteels is the author of The Last White House at the End of the Row of White Houses (Invisible Publishing). In 2012 he was nominated for the emerging artist award in The Premier’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts. He lives in Kingston, Ontario, where he runs Puddles of Sky Press.

His poems “Chapter 59 Preparedness, a Virtue,” “Chapter 60 The Giant Sloth,” “Chapter 61 A Quick Swig and A Small Bit” and “Chapter 62: The Long Ride” appear in the fifteenth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “Chapter 59 Preparedness, a Virtue,” “Chapter 60 The Giant Sloth,” “Chapter 61 A Quick Swig and A Small Bit” and “Chapter 62: The Long Ride.”

A: This series is taken from a larger project, a novel in which each chapter is a prose poem. The project began when a wrote a short series of 3 poems titled 3 Chapters Toward an Epic which was published by Pearl Pirie’s Phaphors Press. They are three very separate poems numbered Chapter 43, Chapter 109 and Chapter 159. I liked the idea that the reader would have to imagine what was happening between each of these poems, and how there was actually much more ‘white space’ to the piece than actual writing. But I then I too began wondering what was happening to my character in the in-between. When I started filling in the spaces I did it very unconsciously. I’d write a random chapter number and then write a poem beneath it. When the poem was finished I’d print it off and tuck it into a binder in order of chapter numbers. As the spaces between chapters began to get tighter I acquired a vague idea of what was going on. As you’ll notice with the four pieces included in Touch the Donkey, the chapters are often more connected by imagery rather than a linear narrative. Different themes (western, mystery, adventure, romance) weave throughout the book, with the main themes being uncertainty and discovery.

Q: How do these pieces fit in to the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: I’ve actually found that this project has hijacked one of my writing voices. Anyone who’s read some of my previous work knows that I’m a big fan of the prose poem, and that most of my prose poems are surreal, first-person narratives. While this project has the themes I listed above running through it, there is also an element of randomness—a few pieces scattered throughout the book with very little tying them to the overall concept. Now when I’m writing a prose poem in a first-person voice I often find myself halfway through the piece wondering if it’ll work with my novel instead of allowing it to come together more unconsciously.

On the flip-side, this project has also pushed me to exercise my other voices, and my other styles of poetry. I’m working on a long poem in third person, lots of concrete/visual poems, some minimalist pieces, and the occasional verse piece. I find that if I keep working at all of my poetic outlets they help to inform one another and keep me from getting bored with any one style or voice.

Q: What first brought you to the prose poem?

A: I came to the prose poem very naturally. Most of my writing occurs in my journal in the form of stream-of-unconsciousness writing. When I'm writing like this I like to let my mind go blank, and write without thinking about what will come next. For me, line breaks often stall my lack-of-thought process, so most of my writing appears in the form of a long paragraph.

Many of my other poems lean to the other extreme, being highly coherent and narrative. The prose poem seems to house these types of pieces nicely, offering a framework for these micro-fictions to fit in.

Q: How easy was it for you to shift from constructing chapbooks to constructing a full-length book? And which do you see as your main unit of composition? Or does it matter?

A: For my first full-length collection, The Last White House at the End of the Row of White Houses the shift between chapbook and trade book came quite easily, thanks to my editor, Leigh Nash. I didn’t have a complete manuscript ready when Leigh approached me about publishing a book through Invisible. We made a plan. I put together all of the poems that I felt were strong pieces and sent them to her, and she made the initial selection. From there I re-worked some of my older pieces, and started writing new pieces that fit with the themes and ideas that were already present in the manuscript. We worked really well together.

My main unit of composition is still the chapbook. I think chapbooks are an ideal form for publishing poetry. Due to length restrictions, they limit you in one way, but they’re also something you could put together overnight if you wanted, so you’re free to publish anything you want. I work in so many different veins of poetry: lyrical, prose, visual, concrete, minimal etc. and chapbooks seem to house each style nicely.

However, after working on The Last White House... I’ve also started thinking in longer forms. My prose-poem-novel would be an example of this. I’m writing it with a book-length project in mind.

Q: Whom have your models been when putting together new work? What authors or works have shifted the ways in which you think about approaching your work?

A: While piecing the project together as a whole hasn’t necessarily been modeled after anyone else, there are poets whose work I keep returning to for inspiration/guidance/education.

One of the biggest influences on this current project is Ted Berrigan’s Clear the Range, a surreal meta-western that began as an erasure project from a pocket western by Max Brand. I’ve read both the source material and the resultant material and I feel like I’ve learned a lot from comparing the two. Many of the pieces in my current project started out as erasures, and I feel like I’ve learned some interesting techniques and moves that I’m able to utilize in my own poems.

My current project continues my explorations through prose poetry, and I’ve returned to some of my favorite prose poets for guidance: James Tate and Russell Edson primarily, but also Lisa Jarnot, Mark Strand, and some of the French surrealist poets.

Q: What is it about the erasure that appeals? What do you feel you’re able to do or articulate through the erasure that you couldn’t otherwise?

A: My favorite experience while writing is surprise. I love when I’m working on a piece and I have no idea where it’s headed or, better yet, when my idea is totally off-mark, and the poem takes me some place entirely unexpected. Erasure almost always lends itself to this kind of writing. It’s a bit like collaborative writing, in that, the resultant poem is something neither of us could have come up with on our own, but in this case Louis L’Amour or Max Brand are, unknowingly, my collaborators.

The utilitarian in me also likes working with erasure because it’s a form of research. As much as I love writing in this surreal-western genre, I still haven’t banked enough of its vocabulary to write many of my own pieces yet. There are terms I’m still coming across and storing for later use, idioms that I’ve never heard before, types of dialogue that I’m filing away... lots of specifics, like names of guns, or kinds of horses, or rules for gambling games, or the many different ways to refer to the endless desert.

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

A: One of my all-time favorite books of poetry is The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje. I’ve probably read it, in its entirety, a dozen or so times by now, and have read a few pieces upwards of twenty times.

 Whenever I tire of writing I inevitably gravitate back to David McFadden. There’s something so personal, and seemingly simple about his work. It brings me back to when I was first discovering poetry, and it awakens a certain excitement in me.

But what I often find to be the most re-energizing is to find a writer I’ve never read before, or to find something new by someone I love. When I read great work for the first time it almost always pushes me to try something new and different with my own writing, setting me on a whole new trail through a mountain range I never even knew existed.

Touch the Donkey : fifteenth issue,

The fifteenth issue is now available, with new poems by Colin Smith, Michael e. Casteels, Harold Abramowitz, Christine Stewart, Cindy Savett, Jean Valentine, rob mclennan, Marilyn Irwin and Tessy Ward.



Seven dollars (includes shipping). You’re gonna be a four-star brother-in-law.

TtD supplement #88 : seven questions for Brynne Rebele-Henry

Brynne Rebele-Henry’s poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in such journals as Prairie Schooner, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, Fiction International, Rookie, and So to Speak, among other places. Her writing has won numerous awards, including the 2015 Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America, the 2016 Adroit Prize for Prose, and a 2017 Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner. Her first book Fleshgraphs appeared from Nightboat Books in 2016. Her second book, Autobiography of a Wound, won the AWP Donald Hall Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2019. She was born in 1999.

Her poems “Red,” “Autobiography” and “North Dakota & Turpentine” appear in the fourteenth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “Red,” “Autobiography” and “North Dakota & Turpentine.”

A: I actually wrote all three poems about four years ago, when I was thirteen. Red is a new retelling of the Red Riding Hood story. Autobiography is about the moments before and after a loss. I wrote North Dakota & Turpentine when I was thirteen as well. It’s about bodies and failure and strange religions, and inventing new gods. A lot of my work is about inventing gods actually, or about lesbian bodies as a form of worship or religion, which is a concept that I was just beginning to introduce into my poetry when I wrote that piece.

Q: I’m curious about anyone who is producing work at thirteen, let alone work that one might consider publishable a few years later. How were you producing work so early? What kind of activity were you reading, or otherwise engaged in, that prompted such writing?

A: I had incredible writing teachers! They taught me everything I know and really started my love for writing and literature.

Q: Who were those first poets you were reading that prompted your attention?

A: Definitely Sylvia Plath. Adrienne Rich, Anne Carson, and Audre Lorde.

Q: What was it about their work that struck? What was it about their work that you think you absorbed, to incorporate into your own?

A: I think the way that each poet addressed womanhood—or didn’t—really spoke to me.

Q: What do you mean?

A: I’m really intrigued by the various portrayals of womanhood and girlhood or queerness and how different authors represent and address both in their work. I think Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red perfectly captures the young queer experience. It actually inspired me to start writing my first novel, The Glass House, which has two young gay protagonists.

Q: What do you feel you can accomplish with fiction that you aren’t able to in poetry? Or does your sense of the two genres bleed into each other?

A: The objective behind my work, which is to further lesbian voices, remains the same with both genres. With fiction I think that I approach that objective differently, as my focus is on capturing the lives (and by extension the issues), of lesbian individuals. My poetry is more directly about queer issues and sexuality. I think each genre accomplishes my goal, though.

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

A: Currently I love A Little Life by Hanya Yanaghira, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, Difficult Women by Roxane Gay, Makeshift Cathedral by Peter LaBerge, and Ruin by Cynthia Cruz.

TtD supplement #87 : seven questions for Andrew McEwan

Andrew McEwan is the author of If Pressed (BookThug, fall 2017), Tours, Variously (forthcoming from TalonBooks in 2018), and repeater, a finalist for the 2013 Gerald Lampert award, along with numerous chapbooks including Conditional (Jack Pine) and Can’t tell if this book is depressing or if I’m just sad (No Press). He lives in St. Catharines, Ontario.

His four poems “from Depression Inventory” appear in the fourteenth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the four poems “from Depression Inventory.”

A: “Depression Inventory” is a series of poems from my forthcoming collection If pressed (BookThug, fall 2017), which attends to the atmospheric, economic, and emotional anxieties of language, and maintains an ambivalence about whether the word “depression” describes an emotional or economic state of being.  Formally, the “Depression Inventory” poems are based on Beck’s Depression Inventory, a questionnaire for self-diagnosing clinical depression. Each poem takes on a question category, teases it apart, and blends in language of economic speculation derived from reports of the financial crisis, and speculation about the depression-like economy of the post-2008 era. They’re anxious and speculative poems that aim for, but never achieve, diagnosis.

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

A: As the first poem in If pressed “Depression Inventory” strongly relates thematically to the rest of the collection. Formally, the use of systems of categorization, diagnosis, and taxonomy have been interesting to me going back to my first collection, repeater, and continues into my current project, a project titled Nature Building collaboratively written with Elee Kraljii Gardiner. I think these systems of understanding and organizing meaning, phenomena, and experience may be used to great effect as a poetic form in ways that complicate their supposed function.

Q: How did the collaborative project come about, and how are you finding the differences between solo and collaborative projects? Do they play off each other, or are they entirely separate?

A: The collaborative project with Elee came about through an inside joke that developed the first time we met. We joked about nature tropes of Anglo-Canadian anthology verse and how these formed much of the landscape in which we developed our understanding of poetry as youth and students. We decided to pull natural imagery from early Canadian anthology poetry (pre-1950) and send them to each other to write around, through, and into. Since that beginning, we’ve departed from this original premise as the conversation developed. As for your second two questions, I’m still figuring these out. Right now I’d say the difference is that the composition and idea development happen in conversation, and over a prolonged period. There are far more delays in development of new directions and ideas as we wait for the next skype call to discuss them. This has been a really great thing, though, and it’s allowed the project to develop in a very natural way. It’s changed the way I think about my solo writing insofar as it’s helping me to see writing as a conversation with my own ideas over days, weeks, years, and to slow down when ideas need time to develop.

Q: I’m always curious to hear how poets build books, especially those first few collections. What or who were your models for putting poetry collections together, and has the process of putting together your second collection been much different than your first?

A: In putting repeater together I thought of it as one integrated project from the start. Even though there are different poems comprising the appendices to the main poem they function as integral parts of the whole. I looked to models like Robert Kroetsch’s Field Work and Seed Catalogue, Kate Eichorn’s Fond, Jonathan Ball’s Ex Machina, and just about all the work of Erín Moure and Lisa Robertson. I liked the way those writers used the book as a unit of composition for delving into different areas of a central, or central group of, concepts.

Now, If pressed is similar in its book form, but felt very different to write. The poem “Of Matter Diverse and Confused” weaves throughout the collection, but the poems between stray and were written without the book as a unit in mind, just related ideas. I’ve been influenced by Spicer’s use of the serial poem in his later books since I started writing, and I’d say If pressed is slightly closer to that model than repeater was. Through the editing process the poems of If pressed became more and more entangled, so the resulting book might seem similar to repeater’s composition style from outside.

Q: With a small handful of chapbooks and a trade collection, with another on the way, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: I’m still thinking on that one. My work has been connected by what I’d describe as a research-based poetics in which I mine an archive for language and turn it in on itself or mix it with another register of language. For me this is also an interest in language environments and the types of thoughts, possibilities, and foreclosures they enact. I was interested in the supposedly non-human language of binary and ways of self-reflecting through language in repeater. If pressed takes on the word and concept of “depression” and writes through early medical nosologies and taxonomies, as well as contemporary financial speculation. If pressed is definitely the most pointed and politically charged work I’ve done. My third book, Tours, variously (TalonBooks, release date TBD), goes back to a similar interest as repeater, insofar as it uses language to look at itself and its possibilities. In the case of Tours, variously, the language of guidance and touring and how the spaces it opens up are demarcated by description. My ongoing work with Elee is opening up the biggest change in my writing, as I discussed earlier, but I wouldn’t think of it as a progression, and it bears many similarities to my previous projects.

Q: How did you end up working such a “research-based poetics,” and what does it allow that you wouldn’t have been able to accomplish otherwise?

A: I’ve always gravitated toward writing that digs into a concept and its archives. I’m interested in the resonances of archives and their languages. It allows me inhabit and combine different types language that are not my own in ways that I wouldn’t be able to otherwise.

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

A: I return to writers like Jack Spicer, Lisa Robertson, Clark Coolidge, Noah Eli Gordon, Caroline Bergvall, Louis Zukofsky, and Erín Moure to immerse myself in a sensuousness of language it's easy to lose an awareness of, especially in the editing stages of a project. I often keep Moure’s O Cididan and Coolidge’s Mine: The One That Enters the Stories out and return to those frequently.

TtD supplement #86 : seven questions for mwpm

mwpm lives and writes in Waterloo, Ontario. The musings of mwpm have appeared (or forthcoming) in filling Station, (parenthetical), Sewer Lid, Otoliths, Sonic Boom, untethered, and MUSH/MUM.

His poems “16/106,” “16/115,” “after socrates” and “cats hate the rain” appear in the fourteenth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “16/106,” “16/115,” “after socrates” and “cats hate the rain.”

A: I’m fascinated by the idea of redundancy. One must be authoritative in order to deem something redundant, because one must know the big picture before attributing the label – what is required, where does it fit, and (most relevantly) how much is too much.

If I had two stomachs, I would have one stomach too many for a human. But if I had four stomachs, I would be a cow.

I began thinking in redundancy-related riddles. Some of which I adapted into poems. But more often than adapting the riddles themselves, I found I was writing in a sort of riddle structure. Gradually I moved away from sentences that complimented each other in terms of clever content, and towards sentences that were complimentary in terms of length, implementing common words or common letter patterns.

The arrangement of these words/letters may be influenced by aesthetic gratification, or they may be arranged to highlight redundancies in sentences like “it ain’t over ‘til it’s over,” “I’m not laughing at you I’m laughing with you,” or “we don’t know how much we don’t know” in the poem “after socrates.”

“cats hate the rain,” on the other hand, was written explicitly to eliminate redundancies. The poem should be read: “cats hate the rain but they love you.” I have arranged the letters in such a way that repeating letters can be applied to both words, and can thereby be condensed. (“Two birds with one stone” is a horrible cliché, both for being a cliché and for promoting inhumane treatment of animals, but it is undeniably applicable.) Thus a 29 letter sentence is translated into a 23 letter poem. Not much progress, but I am endeavouring to improve upon this economy of letters.

“16/106” and “16/115” belong to a series of poems. My initial goal was to number the poems as a method of tracing the progression of an aesthetic. But ultimately I became too attached to the aesthetic as it appears in “16/106” and “16/115” - in which I break down two sentences and utilize certain redundancies to influence the arrangement of the individual letters, with the hope of extracting new words that do not exist in either of the two original sentences. What began as an exercise in aesthetic inquiry has devolved into yet another redundancy – although I’m not altogether unhappy with the results, reading the poems individually rather than the series as a whole.

Q: How do these pieces fit in with the rest of the work you’ve been doing lately?

A: Aesthetically, I find I’m drawn to fragmentation. There’s something very appealing about breaking down words and finding new ways to arrange letters on a page. Perhaps my true calling is writing crossword and wordsearch puzzles.

The “16/” poems are occasional pieces, drawing from my daily life and whatever I happen to be reading. Whereas “after socrates” and “cats hate the rain” are more deliberate aesthetic efforts. Both feel like prototypes, like blueprints, like cave drawings... My goal would therefore be no less than re-inventing the wheel. If I am disappointed with said wheel, perhaps it is because I am impatient for the advent of the automobile.

Q: Where did your attraction to fragmentation begin? Did it evolve naturally, or are there specific authors that have influenced that direction?

A: For reasons I’m not consciously aware of, I’ve always been drawn to poetry that explores the fragmentation of words; poetry that utilizes inventive techniques that dictate the arrangement of letters on a page. There are a number of anthologies dedicated to this form of poetry, but otherwise I have had to seek out the poets who were so inclined.

I remember scouring libraries for the publishers I knew had an experimental leaning, or for authors who deliberately neglected proper capitalization and punctuation. If the author refused to capitalize their name or their book’s title, then there was a good chance that their poetry wouldn’t be capitalized – which I recognized as a possible gateway to more depraved forms of poetry.

Not surprisingly, my first poems were shameless emulations of the various forms utilized by poets such as Guillaume Apollinaire, E.E. Cummings, and bpNichol. But these emulations were superficial and sloppy.

It wasn’t until I was introduced to Jackson Mac Low that I began to consider the process behind these poems – perhaps owing to the elaborate nature of Mac Low’s chance-based, deterministic methods. So outlandish were Mac Low’s methods that I had to consider the background, the motivation, and whether or not the end is justified by the means.

Q: You say that you’re currently working on a series of poems; how do your poems usually get constructed? As individual pieces or via groupings? How do you see your work evolving?

A: With my series, the “16/” poems, I constructed the poems individually. There was little or no continuity in the content, aside from its resemblance to the aphorisms of someone like... Antonio Porchia. (If my “aphorisms” seem more contrived, it’s because I wanted to stress the importance of formal innovation.) The continuity in this series is derived entirely from the form, and the subtle ways I attempted to adjust the form in order to emphasize a progression.

As I said before, I believe the series to be a failure. The poems may be appealing on an individual basis, but the progression isn’t enough to bind them and form a whole.

Q: I’m curious as to your assertion that you wish “to stress the importance of formal innovation.” Can you speak further on this?

A: The postmodernists asserted that everything has been said. While I don’t entirely agree, it is with this in mind that I strive to embolden new forms of “poetry.” I’m reminded, too, of Marjorie Perloff who, in her afterword to Derek Beaulieu’s Flatland, states: ‘what goes by the name of “poetry” is more accurately defined as a form of short prose.’ By that standard, Beaulieu’s Flatland is not “poetry” but a “conceptual text,” which I find very freeing. Post-postmodern poets are free to pursue new forms of poetry without feeling restricted by the standards imposed by an era of poetry (including the postmodernists). Someone like Beaulieu can publish his scribbles under the pretense that the means justify the ends.

Again, I don’t entirely agree that the means justify the ends. Strictly speaking, I believe the end result should be as compelling as the concept. Beaulieu’s concept is far more interesting than his scribbles, and I don’t think a work should be so uneven. Broadly speaking, what Beaulieu has truly accomplished with Flatland is taking “poetry” so far from “poetry” that he has created a wider range for like-minded poets to work within.

That is the importance of formal innovation. Whether or not we succeed, we are widening the range and expanding the possibilities of “poetry.”

Q: You speak of individual pieces and fragmentation, but I’m curious if you’re consciously working towards some kind of larger grouping or groupings of your poems, whether as chapbook or full-length book.

A: When I started the “16/” poems I had hoped to create a larger grouping that would recognizable as a series or sequence based on a form that would become progressively more fragmented – the words would become more fragmented and the arrangement would become more scattered. My perceived failure may be derived from comparing the later poems to the earlier poems and realizing that someone, unaware of the process, would interpret the early poems as “lazy” or “lackluster” version of the later poems.

I have since reworked the poems, conformed them to a common style. For posterity, I decided to retain the titles – which refer to the year of their composition (2016) and the order of their composition. It may appear cryptic, but the poems themselves are cryptic and deserve cryptic titles.

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

A: Too many to name, but I’ll try.

First and foremost is E.E. Cummings. Cummings is the reason I started reading poetry, and later the reason I started writing poetry. I often return to the selection edited by Richard Kostelanetz, which elevates Cummings to his rightful place as a pioneer “not only in linguistic and typographic inventions, but also in sound and concrete poetry.”

There are a number of poets I read and re-read for the standard they set – Jack Spicer for his poetry sequences from After Lorca to Book of Magazine Verse; Paul Celan and Faye Kicknosway for their tone (disquieting); Barbara Guest for the poems of her impressionistic phase with its generous use of space; Anne Carson and Lisa Robertson for their intelligence and for their ability to not only illuminate any subject but animate any subject in the most unexpected ways.

Last but certainly not least is Souvankham Thammavongsa. There’s something absolutely breathtaking about Thammavongsa’s poetry. In order to describe what I find breathtaking I would have to follow Margaret Atwood’s advice... (Was it Atwood who said that a poem is the best response to a poem? or something to that affect...) Perhaps I’ll do that.

TtD supplement #85 : seven questions for Cody-Rose Clevidence

Cody-Rose Clevidence’s 1st book, BEAST FEAST, was released by Ahsahta Press in 2014. They live in the Arkansas Ozarks w their dog, Pearl. 

Their poem, “[Nope],” “from Poppycock & Assphodel,” appears in the fourteenth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poem “[Nope],” “from Poppycock & Assphodel.”

A: hahaha no way

Q: Are you willing to talk about the larger project it is part of, “Poppycock & Assphodel”?

A: .... yes..... but, I do t know how to not be cryptic.  I’ve never been a fan of the personal lyric, I mean, if it sounds good, okay, but like, it just has always seemed to me to be a narcissistic waste of space, like the whole world and all of history and all the ideas and struggles and everything is going on around us, anyway so I hate myself for this project, and also I’m a lil prude and have always been quite private in my own self, so fuck me, here I am, out of a shit relationship that made me feel like I was starving to death, trapped in some medieval torture device, & then I’m out of it and... it was like coming back to life all of a sudden the world around me and the colors and the sensations of being were so... I don’t know so real and full of life instead of this bleak and endless pain, and well also uhm I sort of accidentally was also falling in love, w someone I wasn’t rly sposst to be but it just happens, I guess.  anyway lots of things... &maybe we can just say there's a long tradition of queer poets coalescing sexuality w/th experience of nature, or something.  Or any poets but I think queer poets especially because of... well that’s a whole other thought...Anyway so its a fucking personal lyric and I hate myself because there are really important things in this world that are way more interesting and way more pressing, but well I’m stuck here rn so.

Q: How does the work in “Poppycock & Assphodel” compare to, say, the work in BEAST FEAST?

A: Well.... it’s very different... but what happened was this.  After BF I wrote this long, v dense manuscript called FLUNG THROWN &... well I had just read John McPhee’s “Annals of a Former World” and was obsessed with the evolution of early life on earth, & flung. thrown... like I said super dense & well it felt v serious, something about the evolution of consciousness, to feel grief, my friend Amelia Jackie, The Molasses Gospel, has a line “All the pain is worth it/ all the pain is worth it/ just to have one minute/ alive”... & I was like... uhm really cuz... no.  & just something about the vastness of geologic time & to be conscious in whatever way we, as humans, are, in our human consciousness experiencing this tiny sliver of our experienceable world, for like, what, a blip in time, anyway, and also to be honest I got deep into prosody & was just rereading Hopkins, H.D. & Brathwaite, like, trying to learn, on some intimate level, their respective genius’ w regard to, like, how sonic & prosody & meaning can get wove together, anyway, like I said, it’s DENSE (I was also obsessed w this idea that like, if a book of poetry is 18$ dollars, it should... I dunno take more than 20 minutes to read, or like, I wanted, needed, to write something that felt heavy.  so Poppycock & Assphodel became sort of a minimalist jokey slough-off of shit that was too silly to get put in Flung/Thrown, sort of like a catch-all manuscript for one liner's & dick jokes, to like, shake the density out of me.  formally it’s very loose, but where BEAST FEAST isn’t as tight as I’d like it to be, in retrospect, in p&A the looseness was a foundational necessity, like, I had to walk it out or shake it off after the rigor I tried to put into F/Th. and then like I said it’s a totally narcissistic personal lyric, the scope is v close n small, somewhere between my eyeballs & th world, the lines are mostly short & turn v fast, the rhymes are goofy, & like it doesn’t have a bigger philosophical project that underlies it like both BF & F/Th (tried to) do.

Q: How do you feel your work has progressed over the past few years, through BEAST FEAST and beyond? Where do you see your work headed?

A: I don’t know. Not linearly or “progressed.” More like being first possessed in one direction and then another & not knowing which direction next, & more at the whim of it than I used to be, or at the whim of not-it, of not writing, also. I have a project I don’t know how to write, that occupies some of my brain, that I don’t want to talk about because I haven’t even figured out how to think about it, but mostly I feel helpless w language. More than before.

Q: What authors or works have helped influence the ways in which you write, and subsequently put books together?

A: Ronald Johnson, Kamau Brathwaite, H.D., Hopkins, Duncan.  Fin.  Well Paradise Lost a lil.

Q: When you say you feel helpless with language, is this a normal element in attempting to put a book together? How do you work through it?

A: I don’t know.

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

A: I guess to be the most honest, I just find myself rereading those same people over and over. and also sometimes Dickenson, but then I gotta wait a while to clear her out or else I'm just writing Dickenson-wanna-be poems, her prosody's so forceful it sticks in my head. And I reread Tim Early’s Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery sometimes, to be reminded that there can be energy & like, fun, or some sort of vitality in poems & I reread Lance Phillips to sort of shock myself out of, like, being bogged down in some way, either syntactically or with regards to... some sort of structure of meaning in the content, like, when I'm feeling stifled by ways of making meaning that feel dull or that like, dull my senses. But mostly I read science books cuz the worlds so cool & weird. or like, if I'm interested in the world then I'll be interested in writing... maybe... sometimes.... mostly.

TtD supplement #84 : seven questions for Jonathan Ball

Dr. Jonathan Ball writes fiction, poetry, screenplays, and criticism and teaches literature, film, and writing in Winnipeg. Visit him online at JonathanBall.com, where he writes about writing the wrong way.

His poems “EMILY CARR,” “FRANKLIN CARMICHAEL” and “JESSIE & JAMES FRANCO” appear in the fourteenth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “EMILY CARR,” “FRANKLIN CARMICHAEL” and “JESSIE & JAMES FRANCO.”

A: “Emily Carr” and “Franklin Carmichael” are from a poetic sequence called “Group of Seven,” which is from my manuscript-in-progress, The National Gallery. The book explores the role of art in the construction of our personal, social, and national selves.

At the heart of The National Gallery is a simple question: Why write poems? Each sequence attempts not so much to answer this question as to complicate the question.

“Group of Seven” questions the traditional purposes of poetry and addresses its various failures. Each poem is titled after a member of the Group of Seven (including major affiliates, for a total of 12 poems) but refuses to respond to the work of that artist.

The poem “Franklin Carmichael” is effectively a satire of the worst of our nation’s “Canadian content”-style poems but I try to turn it towards something surreal and disturbing. Gary Barwin’s poems, especially his book The Porcupinity of the Stars, was a massive influence on this manuscript.

With my last book of poetry, The Politics of Knives, I tried to draw influence from filmmakers and I have taken a lot also from David Lynch, who in my view always sacrifices sense for tone. I do that to some degree in poems like “Franklin Carmichael” and “Emily Carr.”

In “Emily Carr” I also take a page from Rilke with the final line — “Take this poem into your heart” — which mimics to some degree the final line of “Archaic Torso of Apollo” — “You must change your life.” A different sequence in the manuscript, about my daughter Jessie, draws heavily on Rilke.

“Jessie & James Franco” is a more straightforward poem about my daughter Jessie. She tagged James Franco in an Instagram post where his photo on her wall was in the background and I thought that was hilarious. A lot of The National Gallery is shaping up to be about my daughters, mostly the older Jessie.

Jessie is 17 now and it has been a difficult few years of late, although that is in no way her fault. We’ve had an interesting life and she’s very much at the age where you find yourself reflecting on life as she nears legal adulthood and you have so many more things to worry about (in the teen years) than you once felt that you had to worry about.

I’ve been very lucky because she’s the best daughter in world history but it’s still an emotional time. So, I’ve found myself writing the kinds of horrible, emotional poems I hate. So I puncture them with humour and horror and surrealistic turmoil.

Q: What do you think it is about the “Why write poems?” question that requires response, even if only complicating more? Is this a question you see currently in the culture, or is this more of an individual query?

A: It’s hard for me to answer this question in an interview, because it is a complex question that I am still thinking through, and the book will be my answer. I will just say that it is a question for the ages, and certainly one for this age, and a constant question for any good poet. (… and also for someone like me!)

Q: I’m curious about your attraction to the book-length project. Did it evolve naturally, or are there specific authors that have influenced that direction?

A: Somebody (I forget who, I think it was derek beaulieu) pointed out that I had done a book about books (Ex Machina) and a book about theatre (Clockfire) and a book that is in many ways about film (The Politics of Knives) and expected I would do a book about visual art next. I brushed the idea off but it stuck, and eventually I noticed that I have a number of poems that mimic techniques from visual art, the way that The Politics of Knives contains some pieces that mimic film techniques. 

I also became very interested in the film Texas Chain Saw Massacre and specifically in how the murderous cannibal family in the film is portrayed as an enclave of creators — they cook, they construct sculptures, decorative furniture, and of course masks from their victims, the film ends with an interpretive dance, and there are odd objects that seem entirely artworks, like a clock with a nail driven through its face that hangs suspended in a tree.

Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a masterpiece, and was actually somewhat controversially made part of the permanent collection at NY’s MOMA. Anyway, I was thinking a lot when I wrote John Paizs’s Crime Wave about how postmodern art and related aesthetics have vaulted “failure” to the height of something like an artistic value, and seeing TCSM again in a cultural moment awash in controversies made me think a lot about the ethics of art-making, so those ideas started to dovetail towards what I saw myself expressing in poems.

I was also commissioned by Gallery 1C03 at the University of Winnipeg to write a poem sequence about Guy Maddin’s collages, and I have already mentioned that the poems of Gary Barwin and Rilke have been stuck with me over the past few years. I found myself writing more personal poems, but also spinning out strange, dark poems that seem to focus on moods and seem more “painterly” in a sense, like this one, which doesn’t have a title yet:

I walk three hallways
In the first I carry
A cup of blood
And seek my name
In the second the moon
Cannot see
What it loves
In the third I hold hands
With a torch
And its shadow
I promised to meet you
But I’m gone

Natalee Caple gave me some great edits on that poem, and her poems in A More Tender Ocean are other ones that I’ve found myself returning to. Of course, there are the standbys that always influence me, like Lisa Robertson.

I consider myself a horror author, and Tony Burgess and Thomas Ligotti are the two great influences on everything I do at the moment.

The manuscript for The National Gallery has grown much more organically than my other poetry books, which were more concept-driven. However, it’s gotten to the point where I am taking control of its growth and directing it more fully, as it nears something like completion.

Q: I’m fascinated by your work in the ekphrastic, especially since it appears to have grown organically, as you suggest, over multiple book-length projects. What do you feel as though you’re able to achieve through writing poetry around other genres – theatre, film and visual art – that you wouldn’t be able to otherwise?

A: The two main things that I achieve through working in ekphrastic modes are avoiding direct discussion of my emotions — so much so that when I actually address an emotion I’ve experienced, it serves as a shocking turn in the poem — and marrying my academic interest in art with my creative art-making.

I love writing a poem that works as a poem and stands alone but also has an interesting and complicated relationship to somebody else’s artwork. It’s a way to inspire yourself and to create and also be analytical and critical in a sense. I have always been ambitious, and it is also a way to associate yourself with your artistic heroes.

Christian Bök once told me something along the lines that if you open your book with a quote by Kafka, now you are in competition with Kafka. You have to be more Kafkaesque than Kafka. I like the challenge of that concept. When I wrote my poem “K. Enters the Castle” in The Politics of Knives, I was very much thinking in those terms. How can I take what Kafka was doing and extend it beyond Kafka? What would Kafka write if he had watched Tarkovsky’s films, like I had?

I have always loved art and my art-making is fundamentally an expression of that love for art. My first “real” poems came out of transcribing song lyrics. I grew up mainly in a small town far away from anything like a music store and I would get “new” (to us) music when a friend went into the city and brought CDs back and then would record unlabeled cassettes for me.

I always wanted to know the words but I went to high school in the age of grunge and everyone mumbled and slurred. I would lay in front of the cassette player and transcribe the lyrics, stopping and starting, rewinding, playing things back. Eventually, of course, the Internet came, and you could look up song lyrics. When I did, I discovered that I was wrong in many instances.

I remember one specific song — Pearl Jam’s “Ocean” — I was almost totally wrong, like 90% wrong. And I looked at Eddie Vedder’s lyrics and “my” lyrics and I liked my lyrics better. Then I started writing original song lyrics to replace the lyrics in my favourite songs, and moved to poems from there. I had been interested in writing beforehand, but this is when I started to seriously write.

So, in a way, my earliest “real” attempts at writing were very much a form of ekphrastic writing and, in many ways, I have just continued that trajectory.

Q: After a handful of books and chapbooks over the past decade-plus, how do you feel your poetry has progressed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: I’ve become more interested in poetic sequences and poetic “groups” where you have maybe individual, stand-alone works but also a sense of cohesion or development. I like the juxtapositions between things. With The National Gallery a lot of the poems have titles that don’t relate directly to the content of the poems, and it creates an interesting tension sometimes to puncture or subvert or ironize the more typical title-body relationship. This is something that I stole from David McGimpsey, and in his honour a suite of poems is called “Food Court” and are all titled after fast food restaurants.

I’ve also become more interested in narrative, especially experimental narrative, and I’ve honed in more fully on violence and horror. In many respects my technical approach has broadened and I’ve experimented formally more as I’ve concurrently narrowed my thematic interests.

I find that my work keeps returning to the question of how to live in a world where we feel more and more connected to each other but less and less connected to power. We gain more freedom in our personal lives but feel less free in the world. Then we see violence as a shortcut to connection and control. My work more and more wants to understand that violent impulse as it manifests.

I keep drawing closer to horror. Horror has a clean structure and is ontological in nature. It questions the nature of reality through offering the monster as the truth of reality — a frightful truth that everyone works to deny. The fundamental anxiety that is expressed in horror, at its purest, is Are we wrong? And the answer of true horror is always We are wrong.

In horror, the struggle is less against that monster than against the reality of the monster. The threat in horror is always a symbolic threat, a fate worse than death, and the monster represents the fate worse than death. The challenge of the truly radical horror story is simple and precise but powerful: How do we accept the presence of this monster? How do we accept its truth? How should we suffer the fate worse than death? 

Since I have this increasing interest in narrative, and in horror, all of my writing plans after The National Gallery, and most of my actual writing over that last five years, has been in fiction and nonfiction and screenwriting.

Thematically, The National Gallery keeps asking the question you’ve asked: Where do I see my poetry headed? The answer it keeps returning is Into Oblivion. Maybe that will open a new space, a space of true horror, and I will find that space to be more poetically productive. Or maybe it will be my last poetry book.

Q: Through all of this, what holds you to poetry? You’ve worked in film, and you talk of being drawn closer to horror: why poetry, over moving further into film, or even prose? What is it about the form of the poem that brings you back?

A: Well, in fact I am moving further into film and prose. I’m abandoning poetry. I don’t know if I will come back.

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

A: I read poets, which is perhaps why I have kept coming back to poetry, to follow on your previous question. I feel like poetry is functionally language made strange, defamiliarized, and in poetic works often nothing else needs to happen. There’s a purity of function in some ways. In poetry, I go back to people who surprise me, and who work in long lines and prose poems or sequences, generally. Lisa Robertson, Sina Queyras, Jenny Boully, Erín Moure, Natalee Caple.

That said, there are a few things I keep returning to, often to reenergize, and many of them are not poetry. I have eclectic tastes. This list is going to seem deranged.

I keep returning to a few films: Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Psycho, and In the Mouth of Madness by John Carpenter, for various reasons, and the films of Guy Maddin and David Lynch and John Paizs, who I wrote a whole book about. The Mirror by Tarkovsky as well. A few TV shows, like The Wire and Bojack Horseman and The Larry Sanders Show and Arrested Development.

There’s a documentary about Jerry Seinfeld called Comedian that I consider one of the great films about the creative process. Comedy in general is something I truly value on a writing level. Steve Martin is my favourite comedian. His act at its height was a brilliant meta-level parody of a stand-up routine where punchlines aren’t the focus or source of the laughs. A lot of other comedians and comedy shows, definitely.

I find rappers fascinating. There’s something about their intensity alongside their wordplay. Poets who don’t listen to rap music are beyond my comprehension. Rappers and comedians are the great poets of our age.

I value intensity. I value tone over sense. I return to a few books and authors religiously. Truly radical horror writers like H.P. Lovecraft, Tony Burgess, Thomas Ligotti. Melville’s Moby-Dick. Kafka’s work. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is a perfect novel.

The single thing I seek the most when I feel like I need something new in my work is something new from an author new to me. Something I have not read and have never seen before. Right now, I’m reading A Void, Georges Perec’s novel that doesn’t contain the letter E. I’m listening to Kendrick Lamar’s album DAMN. I’m going to watch Guy Maddin’s The Green Fog.