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Thursday, July 27, 2017

TtD supplement #83 : seven questions for David James Miller

David James Miller is the author most recently of CANT, as well as the chapbooks As Sequence and Facts & Other Objects. His poetry and critical writing can be found in: Jubilat, ATTN:, Jacket2, the forthcoming anthology Precipice: Writing on the Edge, and elsewhere. He edits Elis Press, and SET, a biennial journal of innovative writing. He lives with his family in Saint Louis.

His poem “Notes on Spatial Acoustics” appears in the fourteenth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poem “Notes on Spatial Acoustics.”

A: “Notes on Spatial Acoustics” is a series which takes as its starting point Pauline Oliveros’ notion of “Deep Listening.” Nearly each part refers to notes I took while listening to particular pieces of music, which I refer to in the footnotes, or they refer to notes I took in response to listening to environmental spaces of some kind—often some kind of ‘natural’ space. I’ve been thinking for some time about how to articulate the act of listening, as it informs so much of my thinking & activity as a poet. These are just a few pieces from a longer series.

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

A: I’m working on a longer project, for lack of a better word, that’s grounded in the act of listening. “Notes on Spatial Acoustics” fits pretty well, in terms of how the poems are linguistically and logically constructed.

Q: Listening can mean a great many things in regard to writing. How do you see the structure of “Notes on Spatial Acoustics” responding structurally or even visually to particular pieces of music?

A: I guess what I was getting at before is more about articulating the act of listening itself, mostly apart from any association with listening for ‘musicality’ or ‘sound’ in rhythm or meter in poetry. Instead, the (musical) pieces I refer to in these poems are all exploratory pieces, very involved with expanding into the spaces around them as sound, through a restrained compositional performance grounded in the act of listening. Listening happens across time, and is grounded in the conscious and bodily experience of and response to sound—often in those particular spaces where sound events occur. Listening remains open, as opposed to passive hearing, and is unique in this way—it’s based in a kind of open consideration that doesn’t insist on asserting a self in the way so much sound does in our current soundscape. This kind of listening recognizes the limits of sound, and it’s a kind of consideration which I also happen to find necessary to several current social and political issues—in this way, listening is a political act. So I do understand the pieces I refer to in these poems to be political, and I understand the poems as reflecting these same formal/compositional earmarks.

Q: How does this compare to some of your earlier work? How do you see your work progressing?

A: I’m still as concerned with listening as I was in CANT, but I think I’m more interested now in also allowing the poetry to articulate the act of listening topically, as much as it also describes the sound events I’m thinking of or encountering when writing.  Which is not to say this next project is only about listening—I’m also very much interested in approaching ecological and political issues more explicitly.  Stylistically, I’m still interested in ways phrasal constructs can generate certain echoic resonances across poems or sections; I think I’m also increasingly interested in bringing in to the poem less condensed language constructs alongside, or maybe contra to, other language artifacts. 

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

A: My interest in the possibilities of the serial poem began with lyric poems I found broken into parts—even into only as little as two or three parts. As I eventually began reading longer serial poems (here I’m thinking of John Taggart’s poem “Peace on Earth,” or Leslie Scalapino’s book New Time, for instance), I started thinking of the individual, serial pieces as simultaneous parallels of one another, and also as extensions or expansions of one another. It’s still satisfying to encounter poems incorporating such open possibility, and that challenge the lyric as a limited space. Still, the lyric’s limited space is often as satisfying—I think I try to keep the distance between both of these in mind as I’m writing.

Q: This reminds me of what Michael Ondaatje wrote in the introduction of the first edition of The Long Poem Anthology (Coach House Press, 1979), that the poems can no more live on their own than we can. Given your direction into the serial poem, have you moved away entirely from the single, stand-alone poem? Or is there even such a thing?

A: There’s something to that, which the serial poem explicitly acknowledges. The lyric describes a limit that seriality eludes. My most recent writing is serial mainly because of its subject matter. Although, I do actually write the occasional lyric poem—written from the perspective of a personal “I.” I’m not sure right now that I want to do much more with them other than continue putting them in a folder somewhere. For the past couple of years, I’ve been thinking of the lyric’s particular capacity to describe lived, material experience—this seems more and more important to me, given the trend toward an experience of living that’s increasingly mediated through all things digital. Of course, this is one reason why I’m so interested in the act of listening, which for me is connected with the serial poem (at least for now).

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

A: Gustaf Sobin immediately comes to mind, which is funny to me because his writing is very much grounded in the individual poem, but incorporates the serial, and is also very stylistically and thematically linked—I absolutely love his writing. Also: Etel Adnan, Lorine Niedecker, Leslie Scalapino, Akilah Oliver, John Taggart, Peter Larkin, H.D., Brenda Iijima (I see you just published a chapbook by her, that’s excellent!), JH Prynne, Will Alexander, E. Tracy Grinnell, Michael Cross, George Albon... Also, I really love the recent Chika Sagawa translation...

Thank you rob, it’s great talking with you!

Monday, July 24, 2017

Rusty Priske's Reading List now includes Touch the Donkey #9 + #12

Ottawa poet and organizer Rusty Priske was good enough to mention two different issues of Touch the Donkey at his ongoing "Reading List 2017." Thanks so much! He discusses issue #12 here, and #9 here.

Saturday, July 15, 2017

Touch the Donkey : fourteenth issue,

The fourteenth issue is now available, with new poems by David James Miller, Jonathan Ball, Cody-Rose Clevidence, mwpm, Andrew McEwan and Brynne Rebele-Henry.




Seven dollars (includes shipping). I’ll be sleeping downstairs in the visitor’s center.


Wednesday, July 5, 2017

TtD supplement #82 : seven questions for Marthe Reed

Marthe Reed has published five books: Nights Reading (Lavender Ink, 2014); Pleth, with j hastain (Unlikely Books, 2013); (em)bodied bliss (Moria Books, 2013); Gaze (Black Radish Books, 2010); Tender Box, A Wunderkammer (Lavender Ink, 2007). The author of six chapbooks, her collaborative chapbook thrown, text by j hastain with Reed’s collages, won the 2013 Smoking Glue Gun contest (2016). Her poetry has been published in New American Writing, Golden Handcuffs Review, Entropy, New Orleans Review, HOW2, Fairy Tale Review, Exquisite Corpse, BlazeVOX, and The Offending Adam, among others. Her poetry reviews have appeared in Jacket2, Galatea Resurrects, Openned, Cut Bank, New Pages, The Rumpus and Rain Taxi. Reed lives in Syracuse, NY, and is co-publisher and managing editor for Black Radish Books.

Her poem “Albany to Syracuse” appears in the thirteenth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poem “Albany to Syracuse.”

A: Aboard Amtrak, heading home from the city, I awoke outside Albany. The poem makes its way through that corridor, adopts train’s language, a syntax of movement, of inbetween and alongtheway. Travel by train places one in such a strange space, interstitial: present and absent, seeing and being, but only in moments, place-to-place instant by instant. The solitary nature of train rides, each of us pulled down into sealed spaces, defined and separate, delineated by the newspaper, the laptop, the cell phone. The window remains the only conversant, a dialog in flow, in starts and stops, in the conductor’s voice and ticket punch.

Q: How does this piece, if at all, fit in with the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: This piece is of the same character of the work in my Dusie Kollektiv chapbook from 2014, Philip Whalen’s Tulip. It is influenced by reading Whalen’s Collected Poems. I am interested in the simultaneous inward and outward movement of his work, its direct engagement with embodiment and being, the personal fully enmeshed in the quotidian, the political, the environment. His work marries Buddhist mindfulness to a marvelous sense of play. Serious play, playful seriousness: “art as an act of personal delight and as a consolation to solitude.” Solitude, in the aftermath of raising children (staying at home for eight of those years, working while parenting another 15), and as a result of too many cross-continental and cross-Pacific moves, of leaving home-place after home-place, has become an intimate terrain. This poem, like those of Philip Whalen’s Tulip, map a way into a new emplacement. Where am I now? What does that mean to be here?

Q: How does Whalen’s work, for you, connect to that “Solitude, in the aftermath of raising children,” and how does it shift your reading of his work prior to that time?

A: Whalen lived a rather solitary life and that inflects his work. Raising children is very often lonely work, particularly when they are young. All one’s time and attention is given over to them, except when they, and you, are asleep. Though one sees others, all too often it is in the context of the children or navigating their needs. The public library, a play group, swim classes, a playdate. There is little emotional or physical space in which to claim a life of one's own. Nor is this labor particularly valued, further heightening one’s isolation. Knowing now that reality, I would not choose again to live out in the country in a foreign nation with a newborn and a six-year-old! As to how that solitude shifted my reading of Whalen, I don’t think it did. I read him first as an undergraduate as part of a course on the San Francisco Renaissance, but at that point my interests and attention were drawn to poets such as Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. It was only much later, in the context of a workshop with Hoa Nguyen, that I immersed myself in his work over a sustained period. Interestingly, it is the parallels between Whalen and Berssenbrugge, in the quality of their attention, that draws me to their work.

Q: With five full-length books over the past decade or so, as well as a small handful of chapbooks, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: The work has numerous impulses, the collections moving in response to rather divergent aesthetic and compositional concerns. Right now I am finalizing a manuscript of work based in my years in Louisiana, work largely documentary in form, often using found and collaged language, as well as handmade maps and other visual elements. The evolving work the “Albany to Syracuse” poem belongs to is more meditative and personal, composed in direct engagement with and response to the landscape and context in which I find myself now. Environmental concerns and place-sensitivity are active in both projects. My most recent published collection, Nights Reading, is an overtly political and feminist one, robed in the garments of language simultaneously sensuous and ironic. I don’t think there is an arc to my work so much as investigative impulse in dialogue with a profound love for this marvel, the spinning world transiting the heavens. Delight and disgust, wonder and horror, an abiding curiosity and (com)passion about all of it, compose the weft of the work, the question How do we live now? always just beneath the surface.

Q: You mention a shift in, as you say, “direct engagement” in your work since moving from Louisiana to Syracuse, New York. Has your work always been influenced by your immediate landscape, or is this something that has become more overt once you moved north? Is this you working to understand your new home-space through your writing?

A: Developing a sense of place, of centering myself in the flows and forms around me has been important to me for a long time, I suppose since I last lived in San Diego. We moved to a north county coastal neighborhood in ‘89 and it was in that context that my attention to the landscape and its history, its weather, the tides, the geography of mesas and canyons, the nexus of human and other-than-human that defines it became explicitly integrated with my writing. Place, however, has always been a means of grounding myself and locating myself, partly in response to moving around so much as an adult. Whether in Bloomington, Indiana, Perth, Western Australia, Lafayette, Louisiana, or Syracuse, the need to know where I am and what that requires of me in return underlies both the writing and daily life, the foundation from which all else proceeds.

Q: When you say this piece is “of the same character” as other work, does that mean there is work you’ve been doing lately that falls outside of this same character? Does your work, then, consist of a single, steady line of composition or a series of ongoing lines?

A: The documentary work for my Louisiana project is driven by a similar impulse, or at least began that way: to find a way into place. But Ark Hive, the Louisiana manuscript, quickly moved into a more investigatory mode, engaged in research, analysis, and questioning, a project informed as much by the archive as by the intimate. This poem, like those in the chapbook, returns to the latter. Though I already suspect the archival impulse will soon enough enter the writing, as well: the way history insistently levers its way through the present moment, reconfiguring what and how we know, how we are and where.

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

A: Ah, lovely question, especially when restoration and reenergizing are so necessary now, post-presidential election catastrophe here in the U.S. Tonya M. Foster’s A Swarm of Bees in High Court has been important this week. Alice Notley, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Laura Mullen, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Bhanu Kapil, Claudia Rankine. I have recently been reading the new kari edwards’ collection succubus in my pocket (EOAGH), and that has been invigorating, as well, and writers whose work is breaking through now such as Mg Roberts, Yolanda Wisher, and Kimberly Alidio. These writers return me again and again to the urgency of writing, its potencies as well as the sheer amazon strength and wonder of language in bearing our fraught, miraculous world into vivid focus.