TtD supplement #294 : seven questions for David Hadbawnik

David Hadbawnik is a poet, translator, and medieval scholar. Books include a translation of the Aeneid (Shearsman, 2023); an edited volume, Postmodern Poetry and Queer Medievalisms (Medieval Institute Publications, 2022); and a book of poetry, Holy Sonnets to Orpheus and Other Poems (Delete Press, 2018). He currently lives in the Minneapolis area with his wife and son.

His poems “Screaming,” “Melody,” “Vertigo,” “Squeeze” and “Substance” appear in the forty-eighth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “Screaming,” “Melody,” “Vertigo,” “Squeeze” and “Substance.”

A: I began writing these pieces as “anti-poems” several years ago, coming out of the pandemic, and in the wake of completing my years-long project of translating the Aeneid. The translation had occupied me for about ten years, from 2012 to 2022 or thereabouts. And even though I’d written some poetry during that time – a lot of which was collected in Holy Sonnets to Orpheus, published by Delete Press in 2018 – I’d kind of lost my feel for what was going on in poetry and my place in it. But I was still writing. I had and continue to have a daily notebook practice, which I’ve remained devoted to for almost a decade at this point. So among the things I was jotting down, I started scribbling these sonnet-like pieces.

As it happened, over time, a lot of the pieces did have something to do with family relationships and fatherhood; my son, now 7 years old, is a big part of our everyday life. So that first piece, “Screaming,” was written on my son’s birthday, with him in mind, trying to capture a bit of his spirit.

The next three, “Melody,” “Vertigo,” “Squeeze,” are all examples of starting with a certain phrase or idea and plunging in and riffing on it, without steering it one way or another, keeping it going without pause. The syllabic constraint leads to some interesting line breaks, which I then worked on in revision, in some cases “sanding off” the edges a bit by deleting words that seemed like mere filler, so that some lines only wind up with eight or nine syllables... I had not yet, at that time, read Dale Smith’s wonderful book of sonnet-like pieces, The Size of Paradise; he’s such a great craftsman that he manages to put a lot of disparate ideas together, which still feel cohesive within the poem, while maintaining pretty exactly a ten-syllable line. Everyone should check out that book!

“Substance,” the last piece, has more stops and starts in it; as such, it's a bit of a call-back to a previous mode of writing for me, which carried over into the translation work, shorter sentences alternating with longer ones in the mode of Thomas Meyer, perhaps. 

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

A: In terms of poetry, I’ve been pushing things in a more intentional way, in response to the critical moment we’re in politically and socially, which I consider to be an inflection point where – not to hyperbolize – we’re really balanced between continuing as a project of “civilization,” for better or worse, or falling into a dark period of authoritarian chaos. I’m trying to do so in a way that plays to my strengths as a writer, which involves attending to subtle interactions between people, the way they connect or fail to connect. This seems especially relevant, since there seems to be a real breakdown in the ability to interact with and empathize with others, whether people are moving through a supermarket or sitting in a cafe or just walking down the street. So the recent poems have been an extension of this project, but more focused thematically, and tending to make more use of negative space on the page.

Q: I’m curious: have you any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting in this particular mode? 

A: I’ve actually been involved in an ongoing mail exchange with Chris Vitiello. He’s a prolific, interesting, and challenging poet. I don’t even know how to categorize the type of poetry he’s been writing, which is kind of an extension of the work he was doing in his last published books, Irresponsibility (2008) and Obedience (2012); a lot of what he does is stripped bare of the usual poetic tropes and devices, tending towards declarative utterances that push at the borders of what language can mean. This has pushed me to head somewhat in that direction, so that I’m really focused on the mysteries of the everyday, the space between people, as well as the inner space of myself and others to the extent that I’m able to detect and respond to it, note it down, and turn it into something.

Q: With a handful of published collections over the years, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work heading?

A: I don’t know that it’s progressed. In terms of poetry, I feel I’ve gotten better at recognizing what’s working or not working, and separating the wheat from the chaff so to speak. I don’t waste as much time going down blind alleys. I better understand what my strengths are. But in a lot of ways, I still feel like a beginner, someone who’s still learning. Aside from that, I’m working on a “creative memoir” based on journals I kept during the 1990s, when I lived in San Francisco. A big portion of it was just published in late December. That’s going to be occupying me for a while, as I try to type it all up and edit it. Hanging around with Damion Searls (translator of Jon Fosse, among others) has gotten me excited about translation again, so maybe I’ll hunker down and try more of that.

Q: I’m curious about your work in and through translation. What do you feel it introduces to or allows for your own writing, if anything?

A: I guess I took translation on as part of the learning process, in an Ezra Pound sort of way, which came to me via Diane di Prima, when I studied with her from about 1998-2003. There was just the basic, “ah, I see how this poet is putting things together, constructing lines, keeping the poem alive and moving,” and so on. You can get some of that through reading, but when you’re grappling with the language on an elemental level and having to make those decisions yourself, there’s a lot more to learn, I’d say. So I felt coming out of the translation work on Aeneid and returning to my “own” poetry was like taking off another set of training wheels that helped build confidence in a different way.

Q: Do you see the shifts in your writing due to translation predominantly as structural, then? Did your work in translation broaden possibilities, or simply turn you into different directions?

A: I would say the practice of translation, alongside study of medieval poets and poetry during grad school – I had a dual emphasis in Medieval Literature and Poetics – was hopefully a broadening of possibilities, on balance. The most important thing I learned, though it maybe doesn’t always manifest itself in the day-to-day work, is that the idea of translation as a separate category from so-called original work would never have occurred to a poet like Chaucer. It was all just part of the poet’s range of activity. You translate a bit of Virgil here and some Ovid there, shellac some original verses in between, adapt some from Boccaccio and Boethius, and it’s all one poem. What I would like to do is move further in the direction of incorporating as much source material as I can, without worrying about where it’s coming from or what I'm doing with it.

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

A: That changes, but I’d say most re-energizing for the kind of attention to the quotidian that I’m trying to bring to bear is Peter Handke’s early work, particularly The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick and The Weight of the World, the latter of which is a book of his raw, daily note-taking, which was extremely essential to me in establishing my own daily practice a long time ago. Recently, I rewatched Wings of Desire, the Wim Wenders film for which Handke wrote most of the dialogue, and that was incredibly stimulating. Then, too, everything by David Lynch is generative.

TtD supplement #293 : seven questions for Monroe Lawrence

Monroe Lawrence was born on Vancouver Island, Canada. They grew up in Squamish on the traditional territory of the Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw. They are the author of About to Be Young and Gravity Siren.

Their poem “Silt” appears in the forty-eighth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “Silt.”

A: “Silt” dreams an art practice where genres blur, gender toggles and shimmers, dance intersects with (and becomes) architecture, and the sky is recruited as a grafting and projecting of intention onto weather. To make “Silt,” I drew on my experience as audience member to various kinds of art-making in and around public spaces in Colorado, and on memories of films and poems I once experienced in Canada and in Greece. “Silt” is interested in artworks so capacious in their sense of diegesis and surround that a random bird flying overhead might take on the glimmer of the intended, so the frame dilates to include an entire world. As I composed, I spliced together images and affective clusters of language taken from dreams and walks and reading (and a friend’s doctoral thesis) to produce a vision of an oneiric elsewhere. What, in that elsewhere, might art look like? What might architecture sound like? How might buildings or parks feel to be in? And in “Silt” the presence of spaceships and motherships and cockpits—as much as beaches, crabs and wildflowers, the beloved details of our present—helps us, bluntly, ask if that elsewhere might feature in our future, distant or near.

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

A: “Silt” resembles the longer, untitled poems from my forthcoming poetry collection Gravity Siren—some lines long, some short—but here “Silt” has a title, obviously. I like how titles make a poem feel unarbitrary and forthcoming, like a pronouncement, instead of some scrap of unknowable language the reader has stumbled upon. (That’s how I sometimes want my other poetry to feel.)

Q: Has your sense of the poem shifted at all since putting together book-length manuscripts? How do your poems come together to form books? Is it an intuitive process, or something more deliberate?

A: Yes, publishing books has changed how I think of poems. It’s helped me trouble my (and perhaps the reader’s) sense of where the aesthetic “zones” end and begin. I like to think about the arbitrary, conceptual forcefields we erect around poems, around books. What’s less arbitrary—the category of the ‘poem’ or the category of the ‘book’? Gathering text in a codex seems less arbitrary, for me, sometimes, than some idea of a language event truly starting right here and truly ending over there. 

In a practical sense: At the end of many months of polishing hundreds of pages of ‘scraps’, I throw away over half, and spend a final month ordering the remaining scraps into the sequence that is the book. It’s all intuition. But that sequence contains many other possible sequences…

Q: With a couple of published collections under your belt, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work heading?

A: One thing I can say is that I tend to prioritize the excitement of a fresh challenge over the execution of something I know how to do. This explains my attempts to write stories, chapbooks, peer-reviewed scholarship, book reviews, etc. And it certainly explains my turn to fiction. There, I’ve been trying to learn a whole new regime of language use, one that is often entirely at odds with the disjunctive poetic regimes in which I’ve marinated. Building and blocking out a world (“representational” language) calls for sentences that are so different, for me, than the sentences that draw me to poetry. (Often my poetry is not interested in sentences at all.) The free-wheeling excitement of cramming objects and characters and dialogue into paragraphs is for the time being the most exciting literary endeavour. But it’s hard. I wonder if I will ever succeed in unlearning my poetic training and elaborating a new writerly capacity. Anyway, poetry once felt very hard… Perhaps my next poetry project, whenever it arises, will constitute a kind of admission of defeat in some sense—returning, if not to the known, then at least to an unknown I know how to face.

Q: Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? Are there any particular writers or works at the back of your head as you write?

A: This is a question that has preoccupied me for a long time. There was a stretch in my early twenties when I was extremely concerned with eschewing “influence” of any kind—intentionally setting out to prevent my work from imitating or resembling anything I’d seen before. I’m sure I was unsuccessful. But I think that rejection of influence was an entirely fair reaction to some of my previous, even more misguided efforts to mimic writers I had nothing in common with, Cormac McCarthy or Tao Lin for instance. So I did go through the meat grinder of trying to “avoid” influence for a while, which may have been in some way admirable. 

During my MFA, though, I realized something that astonished me: Most writers were, by contrast, picking one or two of their favourite writers and shamelessly emulating them as closely as possible. I was shocked by how good, and how actually original, the results were. After an initial period of bitterness, I kind of gave in and started doing this more, too, and often do compose with certain writers in mind. Nearly ten years post-MFA, I sense that this method is actually how the majority of even quite good literary writing is created. Setting out with the express purpose of mimicking another writer, you often sort of “can’t help” but be yourself along the way, and you end up with a novel linguistic creation that, paradoxically, is largely your own. It’s possible I am describing a just basic, Bloomian structure of titrating influence, but anyway. 

I recognize I am sometimes doing something much more groundbreaking than at other times, and sometimes I am just vampirically repurposing someone else’s invention. But I’m less and less bothered by that. My recent poetic efforts (like “Silt”) are extremely involved with the work of J.H. Prynne, his The White Stones, for instance, but that book is so beautiful that I hope that even if my emulations are unoriginal, the resultant surface beauty might be worth it. So influence can carry a sense of duty even if it sometimes carries a sense of guilt.

Q: I would think that writing—in structure, certainly—can’t help but come from writing. Why would you think influence “sometimes carries a sense of guilt”?

A: I think I mean that in a very informal, pragmatic sense of how it feels—to me—to navigate the socially-oriented experience of reading and writing, rather than elaborating some watertight view of what literature is or can be. It’s possible I have a feeling that some writing (of mine as much as of others) is coming too much from other writing—repeating past patterns of thought and language rather than transforming or inventing or intervening. Pound said “Make it new!” and I maybe let that utterance take on the status of all-encompassing, ahistorical injunction. (Probably not the kind of thing you want to do with Pound’s comments.) So the guilt or perhaps shame is a better word emerges out of a cluster of impulses pertaining to originality rather than a distaste for writing that flows from other writing.

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

A: Once upon a time I took a kind of dietician’s approach to literature—very targeted (and enormous) inputs, with the hope of engineering specific and calculated outputs. So if I was writing minimal fragments, I would go on a diet of minimal fragments; if I was writing prose in first-person present tense, I would go on a diet of first-person present tense texts. This is a similarly linear structure of thinking to my response to the “influence” question. I had a sense that if I imbibed enough of x, it would—excuse the image—be extruded out as an excellent version of y. (As you can see from these questions, my approach to poetics is fairly psychotic.) But lately I’m less interested in that input-output phenomenon. I know I’ve read enough to fuel my ongoing projects, and I have less of a sense that I need to “desperately read everything or I’ll die.” I watch a lot more TV, pay attention to the beats, the scenes, the narratology. I read a lot more non-fiction. I see reading as an end rather than a means—the pleasure located more completely in the present than in some belief (also pleasurable) that I’m “hard at work.” My friends Alex Toy, Anna Bonesteel and Lee Cannon-Brown are some of the most fascinating writers and thinkers on earth and I’m blessed to be in daily dialogue with their work.

TtD supplement #292 : seven questions for Frances Cannon

Franky (Frances) Cannon is a writer, editor, educator, and artist based in Edinburgh, Scotland and Burlington, Vermont. She is the Reviews Editor for Poetry Wales, an editorial reader for The Kenyon Review, and an affiliated scholar at Kenyon College, where she recently completed the Mellon Science and Nature Writing Fellowship. She has an MFA in creative writing from Iowa and a BA from the University of Vermont. She is the author and illustrator of several books: Walter Benjamin Reimagined (MIT Press), Fling Diction (Green Writers Press), Willow and the Storm (Green Writers), Tropicalia (Vagabond), The Highs and Lows of Shapeshift Ma and Big-Little Frank (Gold Wake), Sagittaria (Bottlecap), Predator/Play (Ethel), Uranian Fruit (Honeybee), and Grotto (above/ground). She also has a chapbook forthcoming with Ethel: Bitten by the Lantern Fly; and a book forthcoming with Valiz: Queer Flora, Fauna, and Funga.

Her poems “Consider the orchid,” “East Wemyss,” “Self-portrait as the five of cups” and “Scandal” appear in the forty-eighth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “Consider the orchid,” “East Wemyss,” “Self-portrait as the five of cups” and “Scandal.”

A: Consider the orchid:
It’s important to complicate the narrative about our human relationship to ‘nature’—so much of our language and worldview has historically painted nature as other, as an untouchable ideal, wilderness as ‘unspoiled’ and pristine, flowers and butterflies versus man and machine. I am drawn to stories about species which expand and confuse this overly simplistic view of nature—I’m fascinated by beings that hold both the beauty and the bite. 

East Wemyss:
This is a tribute to the people in my life who are proud nerds, celebrating the strangeness of language and science, noticing details that are generally overlooked, such as fossils in an abandoned mine, and insect music.

Self-portrait as the five of cups:
This poem is the result of a prompt that I gave to my own students during a workshop that I co-taught at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop this past summer. I'm interested in tarot as a creative, generative historical material—not as a divinatory tool, but as a thought-provoking tool for visual and mental stimulation. I’ve taught a few courses in various contexts using tarot cards as prompts for short fiction and poetry, and in this case, the prompt was to write a self-portrait poem in 20 lines (10 syllables each) in conversation with the tarot card that picked you. I’m lucky if I find the time to write a poem while my students write.

Scandal:
This poem makes me laugh—although it conveys the story of violence and drama, it’s also a simple story about life in a small town in the Midwest. While teaching at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, I experienced the village as if on a theatrical stage or a sitcom—every minor conflict felt exaggerated and amplified by the local gossip. This gossip included the conversations amongst my students, my colleagues, the townsfolk, and the campus newsletter.

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

A: Ah! My creative work shifts through genres as though through seasons or tides; I wrote a flurry of poems leading up to this chapbook, and now I am mostly writing nonfiction, fiction, and illustrations, as well as a wide range of editorial projects.  I’m primarily focused on editing an anthology titled Queer Flora, Fauna, and Funga, forthcoming with Valiz Press in 2026. Keep your eyes peeled midsummer! I’m often motivated to write poems as a creative response to intense life events, moods, adventures, misadventures—I would be thrilled if an idea for a poem presented itself soon, but I’m also content to wait for the inspiration to come naturally. In the meantime, I’ll be writing, editing, and drawing.

Q: How does your work in different forms—poems, fiction, nonfiction and illustration—interact? Do you see each of these as separate threads, or are they in conversation? 

A: Themes bleed together between these varied forms, and most of my work is hybrid in that it incorporates text and image together. The forms of poetry and prose stay relatively separate, although I tried an experimental ‘conversation’ between these forms recently—I wrote a poem that encapsulated the mood and plot of my unpublished novel manuscript. I enjoyed the challenge and the result; this type of poetic constraint is fruitful for me.

Q: How did you get to the point of working such hybrids? Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? 

A: I have always been inclined to blend forms and genres. I’m inspired by many hybrid authors; a few that come to mind are Lynda Barry, Alison Bechdel, and Bianca Stone. I read a lot of graphic novels; Drawn and Quarterly is perhaps my favorite publisher of comics and illustrated texts. 

Q: With a handful of published titles, whether as author or illustrator or both, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work heading?

A: There are a handful of forms and genres that I have been working towards throughout my writing career, and I haven’t yet achieved—one is to create a fully realized graphic novel/graphic prose book. All of my hybrid works include text and image in various formats, such as single-paged pieces of visual poetry, or typed prose with alternating illustrations, but I have not yet been able to carve out the time and space required to create a graphic novel in which all of my text is fully integrated into the visual art composition, handwritten and incorporated into the design of the page. If that sounds confusing, it is! I find that creating graphic texts is three times as much work as the mediums of writing or artmaking on their own—the synthesis of the two feels like another medium all its own. SO, that’s a goal of mine. Another goal is to publish a full-length book of fiction, either a novel or book of short stories. I have books in many genres and forms, including autofiction, poetry, and nonfiction, but I haven’t written more than a handful of short stories, and I’ve been sitting on my novel for too many years. Time to get this book out there, it’s like a guest that has overstayed their welcome. 

Q: I’m curious about your movement between Burlington, Vermont and Edinburgh, Scotland. How do you engage with these two very different literary landscapes? Do you see a shift in influence or engagement impacting your work at all, as you spend time in each?

A: I have spent two decades in Burlington, on and off, so I am more familiar with ‘the scene’ so to speak, but every time I move away I feel as though I have to re-acquaint myself. It’s such a small city (a town, really), which means that everyone knows everyone else in the literary world of Vermont. There are only a handful of literary publishers, and only a few bookshops and performance venues that consistently host literary events in Burlington, including Phoenix Books, and a roaming open mic that migrates around various coffee shops and bars. I have a lot of affection for this scene, and in contrast, the literary community of Edinburgh currently feels vast and intimidating, because it is so new to me. However, that means I have a lot to explore, and there are many more possibilities; countless bookshops, performance venues, literary festivals, living rooms, pubs, publishing houses. I have attended a few open mics at a bookshop called Typewronger, which is a tiny and truly delightful space (although it gets a bit crowded!) I also often attend readings and book launches at the Portobello Bookshop, Lighthouse Bookshop, and Toppings & Co Booksellers. So much more to learn and explore. I also find that the creative work I have produced in Scotland is less personal and more research-based; perhaps because I don’t have as many interpersonal connections there (yet), so the subjects that I seek and find are in libraries, botanical gardens, museums, and other archives. 

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

A: Very recently, I ‘discovered’ the work of Eva Baltasar, a Catalan poet and novelist. I found her books on the shelves at one of my favorite bookshops in London, Gay’s the Word. Three slim novels—I’ve consumed the first two: Permafrost and Boulder—and I can’t wait to read the third, Mammoth. I have been reading a lot of poetry collections, piecemeal; I just started a new job as the Reviews Editor for Poetry Wales, and this requires researching new titles from global poetry presses, and reading short samples and poems rather haphazardly. I wish I had time to read every new poetry collection in full! I did manage to read and thoroughly enjoy Joelle Taylor’s C+nto, with the added layer of seeing Taylor perform their new collection, Maryville, live in London recently. Taylor rewrites the history of the underground queer culture of London to include a utopian butch lesbian bar. More, please!

TtD supplement #291 : seven questions for Adam Haiun

Adam Haiun is a writer and poet from Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. His first book, I Am Looking For You in the No-Place Grid was published with Coach House Books in 2025.

His poem “Didn’t Work” appears in the forty-eighth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “Didn’t Work.”

A: Fear is so different when you’re a kid. It’s so different that I wonder if it shouldn’t be classified as a separate emotion from fear as we feel it in adulthood, if there shouldn’t be a separate word for it. I suppose we say some fears are rational and others are irrational, but I don’t think it’d be fair to discount children and their experiences that way, or to assume that we haven’t just become desensitized to things we were right to fear then. All this is to say I wanted to try and revisit that state in this poem, just how sensorially overwhelming the world is when you’re new to it, how it almost feels made to frighten you. At the same time you’re also new to yourself, your impulses and desires and actions are just as incomprehensible and alien to you as the outside world. I think that’s what I was trying to get at with this one.

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

A: I’m still plugging away at a draft of a novel, so formally quite different! But in a lot of the work I’ve been doing recently I’ve been interested in setting up the world as operating by strange laws (I mean that mostly in terms of like, laws of nature, but sometimes legal ones also) and forcing characters or subjects to wriggle around navigating them, which is represented a bit here.

Q: Are you finding a difference in your approach to writing now that you’ve a published book under your belt?

A: Knowing I was able to get the first book out, I feel more drawn to long-form projects than ever. It doesn’t feel impossible anymore haha. I’ve participated in a couple workshops since, which are great encouragement for producing one-off pieces like this one. But I really enjoyed the work of making the first book and its concept feel internally consistent in a sustained way, so I want to do more of that, though not with the same style or subject matter.

Q: Have you any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? Have you any particular writers or works at the back of your head as you write?

A: I only just recently got to reading Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald and it’s been in the back of my head ever since. The way time operates in that book, the strangeness of this interrupted and yet not interrupted conversation between two people, memory and its attachments to place, all of that. I love how careful that book is with its absurd element, it’s not trying to be cute with it. I want to emulate that.

Q: I’m fascinated by your use of grids, of space. What prompted your particular engagement with space on the page?

A: I have a love of documents like packing slips, invoices, official mail; these non-artistic ephemera have interesting and sometimes beautiful conventions in terms of their use of the page. I find something funny in the way these documents are often designed for legibility, and how when art is presented in those same shapes it often feels less legible.

Also my dad worked with computers, and we always had computer parts around the house when I was little, and I would stare and stare at these computer chips, with their grid network of roads and endless variety of buildings, and I’d imagine factories and apartment blocks and offices and water towers et cetera.

Also I played around a lot with SketchUp, the 3D modelling software, when I got my first Mac, it must have come with it. I would build these crude cities and fortresses out of extruded cylinders and blocks and then fly through them with the camera. I think from that time on I developed an association with the grid as the starting point of anything.

I could go on!

Q: With a published collection, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work heading?

A: When I started writing it was writing without subject matter. I wanted to select and arrange a lot of pretty words. Writing with no sense of personal or political selfhood. Maturing outside of writing has resulted in the maturation of my writing, surprise, surprise. I hope I continue to grow up but I’m very bad at looking ahead. My plan is to keep working and lift my head after the next project ends and see where I’ve ended up. Right now I’m trying to become a better researcher, that’s something.

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

A: Robert Hass’ The Essential Haiku is a really useful book to have around. Open to relevant seasonal poem, read, look out of window. Always refreshing. There are books I open up once a year like Plainwater or Invisible Cities or Gravity’s Rainbow. The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat and Swamp Angel by Ethel Wilson are summer reads.

Touch the Donkey : forty-eighth issue,

The forty-eighth issue is now available, with new poems by Sunnylyn Thibodeaux, David Hadbawnik, Adam Haiun, Laressa Dickey, Tanis MacDonald, Monroe Lawrence, Jessie Jones and Frances Cannon.

Eight dollars (includes shipping). It’s ultramodern, like living in the not-too-distant future.

TtD supplement #290 : seven questions for Aidan Chafe

Aidan Chafe is the author of the poetry collections Gospel Drunk (University of Alberta Press) and Short Histories of Light (McGill-Queen’s University Press), that was longlisted for the 2019 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. He is also the recent winner of the 2025 ONLY POEMS Poet of the Year prize. He lives and works on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples (Vancouver, BC).

His poems “The Truck” and “Pillow Talk” appear in the forty-seventh issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “The Truck” and “Pillow Talk.”

A: Both poems were written around the same time when I was tinkering with prose forms. I had been reading James Tate, and loved how he was able to embed dialogue into his verse. 

“The Truck” comes directly from an experience I had with a friend a few years back, after he bought a truck. I’ve been fascinated and terrified by the explosion of enormous trucks that appear on the roads, often in larger, more aggressive forms. It’s almost like these trucks have evolved from velociraptors to T-Rexes. 

I wrote “Pillow Talk” in one go, a day or two after playing the board game Wingspan with my partner and some friends, and subsequently researching that most birds come from a unique species. I enjoy writing from different voices, so having to write from two birds’ POV was a blast. I wish more poets explored dialectal approaches to writing. The personal, confessional “I” (or popular “i”) is becoming exhausted.

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

A: A: These poems are more experimental and less lyrical. I have always enjoyed trying my hand at different styles, techniques and forms. I remember after publishing my first full-length book the exceptional poet Catherine Owen wrote in a review that I appeared to be donning forms like different hats: trying one on, taking it off, putting on another. At first, I took that feedback to mean I needed to eventually find a consistent, signature voice and style. Looking back now, I’m not so sure. I feel the need to explore. I love trying on different styles. 

To go back to your question, many of my newer poems are different shapes. I’ve become less interested in lyric forms and more interested in prosy satire, as well as poems that venture into the absurd and the surreal. I’m also not as interested in mining my adolescence and early adulthood trauma. I presume this is a metamorphosis that occurs with many writers. A difficult question arises: after writing to find peace, and peace is found, what do you write next?

Q: Does a poem usually begin with form, or language, for you, or through elements of subject?

A: Great question. My poems either come from language or subjects. I tend to write and collect lines, images, or ideas of what I may, or may not write about; if the line or idea continues to resonate and I can’t shake it, it often leads to a poem. 

For instance, with “The Truck” I had a few ideas, but I was struggling to find a way to write it so that it would capture everything I wanted to say. 

It started from a WhatsApp group chat I was a part of years ago. The group was a beer league hockey team. The conversation that week—often about NFL fantasy teams, skipping work to golf, impromptu weekend Vegas getaways to avoid being with the wife and kids—was singularly focussed on trucks (what truck they have, what model and brand was the best, specifications about engines and other parts etc.). For awhile I tinkered with iterations of a found poem quoted directly from dialogue in those truck conversations, but it felt voyeuristic and petty to expose and cherry-pick their conversations like that. So I scrapped it, and eventually months later I wrote “The Truck”.

It might surprise some how long it can take to finish a poem. Poets are anything if not tenacious.

Q: With two poetry collections under your belt, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: In terms of form and quality, my poems have always tended to be sonnet-length, so I’m trying to write longer ones. I want to think my poems are smarter and more succinct (I mean doesn’t every writer want to think their writing has gotten better over time!?). I’m less preachy than I used to be, and my work balances ambiguity and insight a lot better than it used to. I would often force a clever line in order to make a point, or to simply show off and appear smart. I’m not doing as much of that anymore. With that said, I think the most satisfying poetry is also entertaining, so I still try to think of ways to surprise and excite the reader. Oh, and I’ve allowed more nonsense and non-sequiturs into my verse—that’s been fun for me! 

As for process, I’m more comfortable with a stream-of-consciousness approach. Wake up and write without a plan. Or sit down for 20 minutes after work and see where my mind wanders. The benefits of free-writing is that it can circumvent one's inhibitions and inner critic. I would have never felt confident in this approach before. I used to have to have a line or several, or at least a conceptual idea of what the poem's going to be about, before I put serious effort into making a poem. Now, I’m able to trust my instincts.

As for where my writing is headed, I don’t know. We’ll find out.

Q: I’m curious about your engagements with the sonnet. What do you feel the form provides that might not be possible otherwise?

A: Yeah, I wrote a sonnet series (near “crown”) in my last collection Gospel Drunk in a section titled “Drowning Man Sonnets”. The sonnet is an excellent container. It can hold as much and as little as you want. Rules and constraints can be helpful for poets. We are often a messy and imaginative bunch, so having goalposts (fixed rhythm and/or end rhyme) and sidelines (14 lines) keep our ideas on the pitch. I mixed metaphors there, but I think you catch my drift. Anyway, sonnets are great for keeping the imagination accountable to the page. They’re also, for me, the perfect length of poem. If you can’t get down what you want to express in a sonnet, poetry may not be your form.

Q: If you see sonnets as the perfect length, how do you make your way from there to assembling manuscripts? Do you see yourself as the writer of poems, or of collections? Or is there a difference?

A: After I write enough poems, I start to think about a collection. That’s when I begin arranging and ordering them in ways that fit (by theme, style, contrast etc.). I find it difficult to order poems in a manuscript. I’ve received advice in this area from stacking all your strong poems together at the start to putting them into thematic piles. I dunno. Some of my favourite collections are say 50 different poems that stand alone by themselves. It’s like I’m being introduced to 50 strangers, and they’re unique and wonderful in their own sort of way.

As for the second question, I’m a writer of poems. I see collections as simply a home for these magical creations. Is there a difference between being a writer of poems or a writer of collections? I suppose. I evaluate collections for their summative strength and ability to wow me. I often read long poems, book-length poems, and get bored, and tired of them after a few pages. I can almost predict what’s coming next. There’s no element of surprise or wonder. That said, there are a few exceptions. Frank: Sonnets by Diane Seuss and Wayside Sang by Cecily Nicholson come to mind.

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

A: Love this question. I usually turn to American poets. Jeffrey McDaniel’s Splinter Factory, Tony Hoagland’s Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God, Bob Hicok’s Insomnia Diary; I really love the language in Kiki Petrosino’s collection Hymn of the Black Terrific; and I love the playfulness, wit in Michael Bazzett's chapbook The Temple. As for Canadians, I reread Kayla Czaga and Raoul Fernandes a lot. I’ve also become a fan of Chris Banks’s work. His latest collection, Alternator, I read in one sitting. So good. So smart. Mmmmm....I’m trying to think of other stuff. Oh, there was a collection a few years ago that I liked—Shifting Baseline Syndrome by Aaron Kreuter.

TtD supplement #289 : seven questions for Susan Gevirtz

Susan Gevirtz’s most recent books include Burns (Pamenar), Hotel abc (Nightboat) and Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger (Kelsey Street). Her critical books are Coming Events (Collected Writings) (Nightboat), and Narrative’s Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson (Peter Lang). “Sun Worship,” an excerpt from the manuscript Guide School, is a recent chapbook from YoYo Labs. “Doctor Shaman,” another excerpt from Guide School is a chapbook from above/ground [ress, and “The Guides,” another excerpt, is a chapbook from Antiphony Press. She was associate editor of HOW(ever), a journal of modernist/innovative directions in women’s poetry and scholarship. In 2004, with poet and restorer of maritime antiquities, Siarita Kouka, she founded the Paros Symposium, an annual meeting of Greek and Anglophone poets. Gevirtz was Assistant Professor at Sonoma State University, California, for ten years, and subsequently taught in many MFA in poetry programs, and the Visual and Critical Studies and MFA programs at California College of the Arts. With Prison Renaissance and Operation Restoration she has worked as a writing mentor to incarcerated people. Gevirtz has collaborated with sound, visual and performance artists.  She is based in San Francisco.

Her poem “Celebrity Brush” appears in the forty-seventh issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poem “Celebrity Brush.”

A: S: It’s interesting that you call “Celebrity Brush" a poem. I think of it as prose but maybe there’s a bleed between when poetry is the usual register…

“Celebrity Brush” arrived during lockdown —so in a long span of solitary time when many of us revisited the past with a vividness not usually available in the rush of regular life.

Before I went to sleep one night I saw that Brandon Brown had sent an email calling for work for the revival of his online magazine Celebrity Brush — whose purpose was for poets to write about their most exciting encounters with celebrities. I woke up thinking about growing up in L.A. around many famous people and the way my child and teen hood were more profoundly shaped by the many movies I saw in L.A. theaters-- the films were the celebrities. I started writing about the banality of my brushes with celebrities and the chasm between the awe I knew I was expected to feel and the flat line, or even suspicion, I felt when meeting another famous actor, actress, producer, director, musician…

“Celebrity Brush” set a surprise momentum in motion for writing about L.A. child and teen hood encounters with significant movies and foods of the sixties. I realized that the star encounters for me were with the movies themselves, the whole experience of watching movies in a theatre, and the conversations that happened after —and the echoes and insights the movies cast on family and social life. Food being also a big star in those. So now “Celebrity Brush” is the first piece in a manuscript called Movies & Food.

Q: Fair enough! Although sometimes the lines do get blurred, after all. How does this piece compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: Yes, I hope for that blur.
I’ve recently finished Guide School, an investigation into the schools that train guides and the global guide-licensing tourist industry. And an investigation too of the training of readers since the way one is taught to perambulate through a city or through a book shapes perceptions of the foreign and familiar, of theirs/ours. The guides who led me through the “old countries” of my grand and great-grandparents in Vilnius, Lithuania; Kishinev, Moldova; and Odessa, Ukraine; were trained and licensed by government schools that chose to delete Jewish presence from their official tour narratives. 

Guide School records events of feeling, thought and study, inheritances of the destroyed Pale, as not ever what could be called “homeland.” In place of nostos, so without the desire or ability to return, it adheres to the shtetl requirement to record and to practice the Jewish prescriptions that to read and write are sacred acts. It also wonders (wanders in) how to navigate the present territory of accelerated and weaponized fundamentalism in politics and religion, antisemitism among its touch points, at a time when “others” who are not tourists but migrants and refugees are forced into perilous travel and are often depicted as “dangerous.” For many in diaspora return is not possible. And it is perhaps differently impossible for those who were never recognized as citizens of the state in their “old countries.” Guide School documents visits to the places my ancestors are not from but where they stayed, temporarily, for centuries. In this way Guide School is an itinerary of the irreconcilable, an unwriting.

If there is any nostos in Guide School it is for a repeat return to reading, discussing, writing, a Jerusalem that can be remade daily, hourly, in place of the actual geographic place. Guide School is devoid of fantasies of return.

It’s long. Some sections are poetry, some prose and others are both —the bleed. Above I say that it’s finished but it also seems to refuse to finish — a last section, maybe a separate manuscript or Coda, keeps proposing itself.

Q: Given the fact that most writers delineate between genres, I’m curious at the way you blend poetry and prose. Was this an idea that came naturally, or did you have to find permission from another writer working similar forms?

A: Ha! It comes “naturally” —which is to say I am constitutionally unable to write any other way. I’ve tried. I have always been untrainable in the realm of writing in discreet genres. I was exposed to permission for this, or an awareness of it as a viable form of thinking/making early on. But also heavily chastised for any practice of it in grad school. 

Examples of early exposure include My Emily Dickinson, by Susan Howe, For the Etruscans, by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Les Guerrilleres, by Monique Witting, Beverly Dahlen, Norma Cole and Barbara Guest’s work, Samuel Delaney’s essay, “On the Unspeakable,” among others. In my twenties I knew I could think critically but not in the given recognizable forms for critical writing or often public speech. So encounters with these works was revelatory—their formal composition and highly rigorous -but not academic- thinking in poetic and scholarly registers confirmed that I had to follow my idiosyncrasies. I’ve always told students that idiosyncrasies are entrances to work —not to be avoided but the opposite. The question: What does thinking look like on the page? —has preoccupied me forever. I’ve written about this in my “essay” collection Coming Events. 

Q: With numerous published books over the years, how do you feel your thinking, and your work, has progressed? What do you feel your writing working towards?

A: Progress is not on my mind. I think – what needs to happen now? Where is my attention? What is the nature of the noise where the over and under heard converge? --the bleed between. Sounds, taxonomies, dictions--from news, conversation, music, construction, wind etc etc — obsessions come forward from these and propose their forms. Usually one or a few preoccupations overtake and I follow them until they run out. That could be for an hour or years. I read around and abandon all of that reading and thinking and follow what is set in motion. By which I mean dreams from sleep and awake, mis and rehearings, the unhearable. I wonder--work towards an always more vivid occupation of and registering of this on the page. 

Q: How do your poems find their shape? Have you a sense of where the line might lead when you begin, or are your pieces more exploratory, seeing ways through which to find themselves? To begin, do you require a destination, or simply a way to begin?

A: Sometimes shape appears simultaneously as sound, or sound and rhythm take kinesthetic shapes — that is, a form rises from the feeling and sound of words embodied, spoken out loud or sounded silently. 

The most vivid example of this occurred when I was in labor. My even breathing interrupted by contractions revealed that I was in the realm of couplets. I was surprised. But I was being coupled, or had been in the process of coupling throughout pregnancy, so it is not surprising that this was the form labor presented, required. Later, while cradling that baby and nursing her late at night, lines came to join the form:

arm leg kindling gather where water blankets sound 
take her down again again quiet crown

These lines turned into a poem of uneven uncounted (but close syllabically) couplets called “Resuscitations,” the first poem in Hourglass Transcripts* a book focused on the nature of the unnamed time occupied by the primary caretaker and the infant. 

While the form often arises, introduces itself, with word(s) sound, embodied sensation, lines are also a compositional consideration on the page having to do with reading. For example, how does a line length or break direct the reader’s attention? --including myself as a reader. I aim to coerce or invoke as many possible kinds of sense a line might yield — so word order, sound, cadence, are some of the elements that suggest backwards, up the page and down readings… 

A way to begin is an ambush —so I never know the destination— but I can feel the vehicle moving even if I’m blindfolded.

Q: I’m curious as to how your critical writing might influence your poems, and vice versa. Do you see your critical and creative work as separate, or simply individual threads of your larger, more ongoing work? Or is it all part of the same expansive ongoing project?

A: I hope that my poems are critical writing, among other things. 

What does thinking look like on the page?—Again this persisting question. How does criticality appear in writing that is not formally or rhetorically framed as “critical” or “theoretical?” There is writing that’s devoid of critical thought in all genres. What do I mean by “criticality," “thought?” I mean acute attention to “What’s going on?” (as Marvin Gaye puts it). Kathleen Stewart calls this, “atmospheric attunements” —"a capacity to affect and be affected that pushes a present into a composition,….the sense of potentiality and event.” A composition, as an event of attention —a potential realized as a poem or in another form. I address this event of encounter between readers and writers, a capacity for encounter with each other and environments in “Outer Event.” (the last piece in my book Coming Events). Instead of the critical/creative divide I ask what is the event(s) of this work I encounter as maker or reader (co-maker)? An awareness of the “capacity to affect and be affected” is reflexive thought, or criticality.

I’ve done tai chi for forty years. Doing the form has always felt like playing the air, my body an instrument. The shapes the body takes in tai chi are the shapes of the hexagrams of the I Ching. So doing tai chi is a writing in air: a sequence of movements different each time repeated. Like spelling a word with an alphabet, sequential and simultaneous. 

In your question you name “the critical, creative,  individual threads, the ongoing.” My affinity is with “the ongoing” which I take to be the unresolved and returning, an ongoing learning in the sense that Stewart uses “learning” here: “The body has to learn to play itself as a musical instrument in this world’s compositions.” It’s never done, the learning and composing and it’s always changing--What does thinking look like on the page? becomes: How does this instrument —writer, piece of writing, body--play itself? What is the pitch of its “atmospheric attunements?” The ethical and aesthetic converge here I think and keep reappearing in different guises …  —There’s a lot more to say, but I’ll stop here.

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

A: A partial and inadequate list, but:

Any of Barbara Guest’s work, especially Forces of Imagination, If So, Tell Me and Seeking Air.  

The Odyssey, Fitzgerald translation, among others

In the Blink of an Eye, A Perspective on Film Editing, Walter Murch

the Presocratics

Clarice Lispector (any/everything)

Helene Cixous, First Days of the Year (and many others)

Brathwaite, Islands, History of the Voice

The Popul Vuh, Tedlock translation

Jabes, R Duncan, Ed Roberson, Tyrone Williams, Mandelstam, Stacy Doris, Phoebe Gianissi, and the poetry of many close (especially bay area) friends I can’t begin to name

The Essence of T'ai Chi Ch'uan – The Literary Tradition. Translated and edited by Benjamin Pang Jeng Lo, Martin Inn, Robert Amacker, Susan Foe. The Essence of T'ai Chi Ch'uan is a translation of the T'ai Chi Classics, the principles on which T'ai Chi Ch'uan is based. 

Ibn ‘Arabi Alone with the Alone, H Corbin translation

Jon Berger, Another Way of Telling, A Fortunate Man (with photographer Jean Mohr)

Abd al-Rahman Munif, Cities of Salt (Trilogy) 

Much art, many films

--Thank you rob for asking all of these questions! And for your labors in getting the work of so many poets into circulation.

* Samuel Delaney, Shorter Views, Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary, Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1999

*The poem “Resuscitations.” is also anthologized in The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood

Thanks to friend and poet Julia Drescher for recently passing this piece to me: “Atmospheric attunements,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2011, volume 29, pages 445-453.