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.

TtD supplement #288 : seven questions for Sarah Rosenthal

Sarah Rosenthal is the author of Estelle Meaning Star (Chax, 2024), Lizard (Chax, 2016), Manhatten (Spuyten Duyvil, 2009), and several chapbooks. In collaboration with Valerie Witte, she has published the essay collection One Thing Follows Another: Experiments in Dance, Art, and Life through the Lens of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer, and the hybrid work The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow (Operating System, 2019). She edited A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Poets of the Bay Area (Dalkey Archive, 2010). Her collaborative film We Agree on the Sun won Best Experimental Short at the 2021 Berlin Independent Film Festival. Her new collaborative film, Lizard Song, is currently on the film festival circuit. She is the recipient of the Leo Litwak Fiction Award, a Creative Capacity Innovation Grant, a San Francisco Education Fund Grant, and writing residencies at Cel del Nord, This Will Take Time, Hambidge, Vermont Studio Center, Soul Mountain, New York Mills, and Ragdale, as well as a two-year Affiliate Artist term at Headlands Center for the Arts. From 2012 to 2023 she served on the California Book Awards jury.

Her “Excerpt from Untitled poem about a red box” appears in the forty-seventh issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “Excerpt from Untitled poem about a red box.”
    
A: Untitled poem about a red box is a book-length poem about a handcrafted red box the size of a jewelry or takeout box on view in a small, dark, gallery-like space. On the surface of the box are embroidered objects that resemble butterflies or flowers; a poem threads its way in between these decorations. The viewers (a “we” comprising the narrator and readers) are given to understand that the poem, mysteriously, both is on and is the box, and that the poem is about death. Hanging above the red box there appear to be a series of similar boxes in other colors.
 
After the opening pages, which map out those parameters, the manuscript consists of a series of poems that appear on the lid, in each case followed by an exploration of the poem’s manifestation and meaning. Each poem, we are given to understand, may be the poem––or not. The excerpt you printed in touch the donkey No.47 comprises one such poem and the musing that it generates.

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

A: My most recent book, co-written with Valerie Witte (One Thing Follows Another: Experiments in Dance, Art, and Life through the Lens of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer, punctum 2025) is a collection of essays blending scholarship on the work of these two remarkable choreographers with memoir and poetry. So form- and content-wise, Untitled poem is a distinct shift.

That said, Untitled poem shares some features with One Thing Follows Another. Both take unconventional approaches to ekphrasis. In Untitled poem, the artwork described is imaginary. In the essay book, we moved beyond mere description of the work we addressed, using various postmodern choreographic techniques, and even dancing, as part of the process of generating the topics and formal contours of the essays. Another connection between the two texts is the mix of genres: the essays in One Thing Follows Another are infused with poetic elements, and Untitled poem has an essayistic quality in that it employs an inquisitive, logical tone as it seeks to understand a single encounter with an artwork.

Both of these projects, in turn, inform the work I’ve begun since finishing Untitled poem. Provisionally titled Glitter Stick, my current manuscript explores our relationship to objects––both material “goods” and our objectification of others. It includes research and reflection on the lives and works of 20th- and 21st-century visual and performance artists, which I blend with personal reflections, so there’s that “ekphrasis plus” element again. It’s one long essay punctuated by poems, so durationally and formally it incorporates elements of both earlier works.

Q: You seem to be very much a writer of projects. How did this process come about, and how do projects begin? When you begin something new, are you always feeling your way into a book-length manuscript?

A: As a grad student, I was introduced to the book-length or beyond-book-length project, exemplified in work by poets such as H.D., Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, Kamau Brathwaite, Anne Waldman, Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha, Leslie Scalapino, Lyn Hejinian, Nathaniel Mackey, Alice Notley, and Myung Mi Kim. At some point, Sarah Mangold turned me on to Lynn Keller’s Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by Women. I was both intimidated and excited by the prospect of sustaining a work over the course of an entire book. Over time, I found that the long form suited me.

To write a long poem I need to spend time building a vessel––subject matter and formal constraints––that I’ll be able to sail in for the length of a book. In the past, this has often taken considerable time and several discarded attempts. But I’m willing to enter the void, however uncomfortable, in order to arrive at the next project––it seems to mirror the process of big-C Creation. That said, there’s been a shift of late. Very soon after Val and I finished One Thing Follows Another, I knew the rough contours of the next two books.

But emphasis on “rough.” There’s still a lot I don’t know before I get going on a project. There’s an intuitive (impetuous?) quality to some of my choices. For example, I chose to engage the work of Yvonne Rainer without knowing much about her. I’m interested in this process of making a commitment to something that floats by. (I met my life partner on a street corner.)

As a project begins to take shape, a serendipity kicks into gear––the manuscript seems to magnetize just the right texts, art, conversations, and observations. And I adore the deep dive into research on the topic(s) I’m addressing. 

So I’ve preferred writing book-length works to single poems, which feel more like speed-dating. That said, lately I’ve written single poems here and there, and have found that enjoyable. So I’m not saying no to any approach.

Q: With a handful of books and chapbooks over the past twenty years, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: I’ve always leaned on processes and procedures that sidestep conscious choices in my writing, because I felt my unconscious had access to so much more depth and breadth than my conscious mind. Over time, the wall between my conscious and unconscious seems to be crumbling––or at least, I’m getting more help from the former without losing the latter. For example, I can juggle multiple themes and stylistic elements over the arc of a book while still allowing for lots of surprises along the way. (Without surprises, why write?)

I’ll likely continue moving back and forth on a continuum between prose and poetry––sometimes alternating between books, sometimes within a book. I’ll keep trying to figure out how to make use of whatever movements of mind, obsessions, and experiences are relevant for a given project. Alongside my solo practice, I look forward to more collaborative writing and filmmaking. My fondest ambition lately is to become what I’m calling an apprentice visionary. Given my long habit of borrowing from the dream world and my interest in subverting intentionality I guess I already am that,  but I want to embrace it, amplify it. Weirdly, a number of the long-form poets I listed earlier are also on my list of visionary poets. And of course beyond the poets, divination is practiced in so many forms both “high” and “low”––I look forward to that exploration. This goal of being a visionary-in-training  increases my willingness to keep dosing myself with heavy data regarding our current world, while also helping me commit to radical self-care––both are needed for an entry-level position as a seer.

Q: I’m curious about your phrases “borrowing from the dream world” and “subverting intentionality.” How do these ideas show themselves in your work? Are they a foundational approach? Are they imagistic? Do they manifest as a series of interruptions as you write, creating shifts in the direction of the work?

A: They are foundational; they can be imagistic; they can manifest as interruptions that shift direction.

I think artists in any medium have the opportunity and responsibility to help rouse us all from the trance of narrow self-interest cultivated by commercial and state interests, in order to save what’s best about being human––our capacity to connect with something larger, whether we call that creativity, the human community, earth, cosmos, spirit, or something else. This has been a challenge since long before the invention of the smart phone, the current environmental crisis, and the recent rise in fascism around the globe. But it does seem to me the stakes are growing, if only given the ever increasing role of tech with its poorly understood side effects and capacity to be manipulated for harmful ends.

In dreams and waking visions, and via other tools and techniques that shake up what we think we know (in poetry, think for example of collage, erasure, associational thinking, the music of language), we can gain greater access to a deep and untameable wisdom. That doesn’t mean I would just splat a dream (for example) down on the page and call that a poem. Why would I turn my back on culture, on craft––that glorious dimension of being human? Rather, I’m interested in the dance between conscious craft and the effort to go beyond what I know, in the service of Dickinson’s exhortation to “Tell all the truth but tell it slant —”. There are probably innumerable ways this can manifest in a piece of writing (or in a film––I’ve collaborated on two so far––or any work of art), including the ones you mention, imagery or a surprising shift in direction within a piece.

Q: Has your collaboration with film changed the way you think about the poem, or about writing more generally? What was the process like?

A: I like to think that collaboration, both with people across disciplines (as in the case of the films) and with other writers, has over time infused my solo writing practice with a more collaborative spirit––more of a sense of being in conversation with the empty page, with language, with my source material: “What’s your perspective?” “How do you want to contribute?” “Hey, let’s try this and see what happens.” Beyond that, I don’t see my film collaborations changing the way I think about the poem or about writing. To date, those projects have been initiated by texts I had already written and we went from there. 

The first film, We Agree on the Sun, has its origins in an essay I wrote for Val’s and my collection One Thing Follows Another called “How Will You Move: Including All of Us in the Dance.” The essay takes the form of an abecedarian––it includes a section for every letter of the alphabet. One of the constraints I used to generate the text was that every letter-section includes instructions (some obvious, some not) for how to enact that letter in dance. Including these instructions was a way for me to inhabit the world of Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti––both by inventing a generative constraint similar to ones they used, and by taking on the role of choreographer. As soon as I came up with this idea, I started dreaming of going full circle and creating a dance piece based on the text. Eventually I decided on a film, which over time can reach more people than a live performance.

The process of making We Agree on the Sun was relatively straightforward. I selected and strung together bits of language from throughout the essay that all connect to one of the essay’s themes, homelessness. I met Jonah Belsky and Ames Tierney (the filming and editing team), and Ayana Yonesaka (the dancer-choreographer), through mutual acquaintances. We had to work fast because Jonah and Ames were about to leave for points east. The four of us started by teasing out layers of meaning in the text. It was important to me that we enact the nonlinear, multivalent nature of the text to the extent possible, and that we balance agreement on certain aspects of meaning with our own responses. The conversation continued through all phases––the choreography, filming, and editing. We shot the whole thing in four hours, and I premiered the film at the &Now literary festival in Bothell, Washington a couple months later.

Lizard Song was initiated when my brother Dave started sending me songs featuring vocals and multiple instruments, which he’d recorded on music creation software, based on the initial poems in my collection Lizard. We decided to make a dance-poetry-music film using the songs. It was a much larger and more complex production than for We Agree on the Sun. Dave flew out from Boston and recorded the five songs at Tiny Telephone, an Oakland recording studio, with Bay Area-based musicians and vocalists I’d found. Choreography director ArVejon Jones created pieces for themself and three other dancers. We shot in multiple locations over a few days with a larger crew. Fairly late in the game, we concluded that using all five songs strung together would result in an overly long piece, and that the film’s tonality was diverging from that of the songs––it was becoming more indeterminate, less contained. Fortunately, composer Penina Biddle-Gottesman stepped in and worked closely with Jonah to create a soundtrack. Because of this late pivot, it took several months to shape the raw footage into a film that cohered while leaving room for viewers to find their own meanings in it. Despite the complexities of the project, I’m very happy that the final piece still reflects the creative input of all who worked on it. Everyone involved located and channeled their inner Lizard!

Once the film was done, Dave and I produced a CD of his music, Lizard Song Cycle, which is also up at soundcloud.com/david-rosenthal-2/sets/lizard-music.

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

A: Since the early aughts, I’ve started more writing sessions than not by responding creatively and critically in my journal to a poem by Celan. When I’ve gone through all the work of his that I have, I dig around at the library for volumes I haven’t read, or start cycling through it all again. Other than Celan, often the closest I come to revisiting the work of poets and writers I treasure is to read new, or new-to-me, books by them. Recently, that’s included volumes by Nathaniel Mackey, Michael Palmer, Renee Gladman, Evelyn Reilly, and Robert Glück––at the moment, I’m stoned on the goodness of About Ed. 

I’d need another me to spend much time going back and hanging out with much of the work that has been crucial for me––there’s always so much more to read!

Touch the Donkey : forty-seventh issue,

The forty-seventh issue is now available, with new poems by Jason Christie, Sabyasachi (Sachi) Nag, Aidan Chafe, Sarah Rosenthal, Meredith Quartermain, Susan Gevirtz and c.a.r. rafuse.

Eight dollars (includes shipping). Today I'm here to tell you about “Spiffy.“, the 21st century stain remover.