TtD supplement #143 : seven questions for Emily Izsak

Emily Izsak’s work has been published in Arc Poetry Magazine, The Puritan, House Organ, Cough, The Steel Chisel, The Doris, and The Hart House Review. In 2014 she was selected as PEN Canada’s New Voices Award nominee. Her first chapbook, Stickup, was published in 2015, and her first full length collection, Whistle Stops: A Locomotive Serial Poem, was published by Signature Editions in April 2017. Her newest chapbook, Twenty Five, is now available from above/ground press.

Two poems from her work-in-progress “Never Have I Ever” appear in the twenty-third issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “Never Have I Ever.”

A: Never Have I Ever is a poetry collection I’m working on based on the sleepover/drinking game of the same name. Each poem in the collection is titled after a different thing that I’ve never done, but some of them are titled after things nobody has ever done (including me) because those things are physically impossible (like knitting a sweater between two continents). I see the collection as a weird subversion of confessional poetry in that by writing about things I’ve never done, I’m breaking that “write what you know” rule, but also, all of these poems are still sneakily about me.

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

A: I like poetry that’s surreal and silly while still being sophisticated in terms of language and wordplay, so this collection fits that description, as does all of my other work. It’s a new topic that I’m excited to explore, but structurally it’s a continuation and an evolution of work I’ve done before, especially Twenty Five and Whistle Stops.

Q: You seem to build projects, having produced both chapbook-length works and a book-length work, each of which was composed around a specific project. What is it about building manuscript this way that appeals?

A: For me, the hardest part of writing a poem is thinking about a conceit or idea for that poem. Once I have the conceit, everything else can fall into place. Building a project out of a single, expansive conceit means that I really only have to think of one conceit per book rather than one conceit per poem in that book. It’s a method that was born out of convenience, but I’ve found that it also allows me create cohesive projects that explore ideas more thoroughly. It also forces me to choose topics that are meaty enough for a whole book or chapbook, and who doesn’t love a thicc topic?

Q: How did you get to a point where you were composing poems as larger projects?

A: After finishing my first chapbook, Stickup, I noticed that it was basically all the poems that I had written up to that point that I thought were half decent. I knew I wanted my next project to cohere better and to have a more complex through-line. I also knew that I wanted to write books, not just individual poems. My poetry friends were writing books or chapbook length projects, and those were fun to read. I think I was exposed to serial poetry and larger projects, and once I knew those forms were out there, I knew I wanted to play with them.

Q: How do you feel this current project extends the work you’ve produced up to this point? You mention this project connecting to Whistle Stops and Twenty Five; how do you see it connecting to and furthering those projects?

A: Whistle Stops in many ways is a response to critiques of serial poems and the men who wrote them. I don’t think we need to do away with forms or modes of writing because certain proponents of those modes were problematic by today’s standards. If Black Mountain was a boys’ club, then I’m going to infiltrate it.

Never Have I Ever in many ways is a response to critiques of confessional poetry. I’ve been fascinated by the lyric I in poetry, and by fascinated I mean I avoid it at all costs. At least, I have avoided it in the past. Somehow, avoiding the lyric I is the difference between a teenage emo diary and serious, grown-up poetry.

I do think there’s also a gendered component to critiques of confessional poetry (at least, that’s what Lynn Crosbie told me once). When women write about themselves it’s confessional, and when men do it, it’s political. I don’t know if I fully buy that, but it’s something worth considering.

The first poet I fell in love with was Sylvia Plath. I do feel like I’ve moved past her now, but I also wonder why we see her confessional poetry as a thing to move past. P.S. it was the “Bastard / Masturbating a glitter” line that did it for me, which should come as no surprise to people who’ve read my poems.

I’ve pushed the confessional and the personal out of my poetry because I wanted to be taken seriously, and it worked for a time, but now I feel like I’ve figured out how to be personal and silly and serious all at the same time. I’ve never done a lot of things. I’ve never done way more things than I have done. If I write about the things I’ve never done I can avoid some of the pitfalls of confessional poetry while still benefiting from its appeal.

Q: Have you read Rachel Zucker? She manages the confessional in a remarkably fresh way. But I am curious: what is it about the confessional, per se, that appeals? What do you feel the contemporary confessional mode allows that might not be possible otherwise? What do you feel you can bring to the form?

A: I am a self-described nosy bitch. It gives me great pleasure to learn intimate details about other people. I think being a nosy bitch is the human condition. I like being in on the secret, even if that secret is published and available on Amazon.

Sharing secrets creates intimacy, which I think is the whole point of the game Never Have I Ever. It’s not really about who gets out first or how many fingers you put down. It’s about facilitating closeness. There’s nothing I love more than a four hour deep chat.

I don’t agree with Wordsworth’s characterization of poetry as “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”  Don’t get me wrong, I love a good cry as much as the next guy— but that’s what Joni Mitchell is for. I’ll cry to music and movies all day long, but I want my poetry sharp and punchy. I want poetry to make me feel something, but not at the expense of linguistic precision. That sounds like I’m throwing shade at Rupi Kaur, and I might be. Ariana’s Reine’s Coeur de Lion is a fantastic example of confessional poetry that’s self-reflexive, precise, and linguistically interesting. Mina Loy’s Love Songs to Joannes is personal and vulnerable while still being a language showcase.

Look, you could say that Whistle Stops is confessional, but it doesn’t announce itself as such. I think that makes a difference in the way readers engage with the work. I’m hoping readers will come to Never Have I Ever for the secrets but stay for the wordplay.

I think a lot of readers might be surprised by all of the things I’ve never done, especially given the sexually explicit content of my previous (and current) work. I always win Never Have I Ever.

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

A: Always Mina Loy. Also Jack Spicer, Lisa Robertson, Michael Boughn, and William Carlos Williams. There are others.

I also find it really helpful to read stuff that is completely outside of my own vocabulary, just to shake things up. Recently, my fiancé, Ariel found this little medical handbook from 1694 at the library. Treatment of bleeding from the nose includes, “Let the patient gradually smell the stink of ass’s dung: nettles, leeks, and camphor draw fluid from the nose: it is useful to apply oxycrat to liver and pudenda, and worth keeping this in the mouth.” 1694 was wild.

TtD supplement #142 : seven questions for Aja Couchois Duncan

Aja Couchois Duncan is a Bay Area educator, writer and coach of Ojibwe, French and Scottish descent. Her writing has been anthologized in Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (Coach House Press), Bay Poetics (Faux Press) and Love Shook My Heart 2 (Alyson Press). Her debut collection, Restless Continent (Litmus Press) was selected by Entropy Magazine as one of the best poetry collections of 2016 and won the California Book Award in 2017. A fictional writer of non-fiction, she has published essays in the North American Review and Chain. In 2005, she was a recipient of the Marin Arts Council Award Grant for Literary Arts, and, in 2013, she received a James D. Phelan Literary Award. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and a variety of other degrees and credentials to certify her as human. Great Spirit knew it all along.

Her poem “Initiate, chapter one from The Intimacy Trials” appears in the twenty-second issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the sequence “Initiate, chapter one from The Intimacy Trials.”

A: The manuscript has evolved a great deal over time. However, the architecture of the work has remained the same. It is based on the structure of an actual trial. So Initiate is really conceived of as the beginning of the trial; in this case a trial about intimacy, both romantic and collective. The use of the world trial here is both literal and figurative. It is often `a trial’ to do the work intra and interpersonally to be intimate. And too the judicial system has been designed and used to control the way people connect with one another, whether conferring the rights of husbands to rape their wives, or preventing women from controlling their reproductive lives, or enabling some groups of people to take everything from other groups of people such that their bodies, lives, cultures are radically interrupted and they and their descendants live in enduring precarity. So the notion of a trial felt deep enough to dive into for the explorations I wanted to do in writing The Intimacy Trials. 

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

A: This manuscript is a sequel to another, yet to be published, manuscript Vestigial. Both are exploring intimacy between people and intimacy with Aki, earth, and her inhabitants. I’ve been presencing the earth as a central voice in my work for some time as I hear her talking to me, to us, to all of us.

Q: How did you get to this point in your writing—to be, as you say, “presencing the earth”—and what does that presencing look like? What does that phrase mean to you, and how does it present itself in your writing?

A: That is such an interesting question. I am deeply connected to the earth, I am part of the earth. We all are. But many people are seriously disconnected from their understanding of our collective sentience, the rhythms of  river, rock, sky. The question that troubles me is what will it take for others to restore this connection and how might my writing be part of what brings them back. I don’t write explicitly for this awakening, but I am always writing toward it.

My writing practice has evolved greatly over time, but the “natural world” has always held both subject and object positions so that the particularities of the English language does not define what is living and what is not. There are actually very few inanimate things in this world. And yet this language that we are bridging one another through (English)reinforces a world view that sentience is limited to a very small number of beings on earth.

Q: With a first full-length collection in print, and numerous works of poetry and nonfiction appearing in journals and anthologies, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: I am still hungry for the space and time to finish one of the four novels I have started and stopped. Novels are too big to be written in the margins of life and much of my writing practice resides there. I have also begun an interconnected collection of essays about people and place and the effects of climate change on land, culture, the present tense. I hope to do a writing residency next year in order to complete this project. Amidst these longer works, I plan to write flash fictions, or micro stories, which come from beneath the surface and emit a jubilant spray.

Q: How easy or difficult has it been for you to shift from poems to prose? And what do you feel each form allows that might not be possible otherwise? What have these shifts been teaching you?

A: I am not sure I have ever differentiated poetry from prose. I write almost exclusively in prose. I do hold poetry and fiction differently. And fiction and nonfiction. Although the hands that hold them are the same.

There is a precision to poetry and an expansiveness. So my prose is different in a poetic context. In fiction, and even in non fiction, the meaning is more direct, more closely bound. In these contexts, my prose is more explicit.

That said, I have always written toward a nexus of forms, a confluence of waters. It is the wild and deep waters at the junctions of these tributaries that I want to swim in. The words ebb and flow from this place.

Q: There is something of the blending of prose and lyric I’ve quite enjoyed about your work. Do you consider genre to be fluid? Are there differences in the ways in which you might approach a poem over, say, fiction or nonfiction?

A: Prose creates compression and expulsion. The sentences throb with juxtaposition and movement. I am most at home in the terrain of the sentence. I absolutely adore the period. So terminal. So controlled. And then to overrun it with words.

This too is possible in poetic lines that break. I am assuming this is what you mean by lyric. But my ear is clunky and I often mistrust my breaks. Go back and break and unbreak. It begins to feel like a kind of violence. So I gravitate toward prose.

In fiction or not fiction—forms that tend to be more fixed in the way that sentences can seem fixed—I am drawn to the lyric, to ruptures in form. Alexis Pauline Gumbs does this to stunning effect in Spill: scenes of black feminist fugivity.

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

Ah. So many. Like most writers my home is filled with stacks of books. But one particular stack is my most treasured. Things get added, and sometimes moved. But many have remained in this cherished placed for years. Some of them are Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead, Eduardo Galleano’s The Memory of Fire trilogy, John Keene’s Counternatives (a newer edition to the stack), James Balwin’s Evidence of Things Unseen, Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette, Chrysto’s Not Vanishing (this book is out of print, which is tragic). There are others. I am finding myself conscious of doing some kind of curation, which isn’t the point, at least not for me. The point is these books, and others, provide worlds I can return to again and again. Because they convey something deeply important about the world and the way words and their arrangement can help us access this in surprising, heartbreaking and soul affirming ways. They break us open again and again. And, in so doing, offer us deeper access to our collective humanity.

TtD supplement #141 : seven questions for José Felipe Alvergue

José Felipe Alvergue is a graduate of both the Cal Arts Writing and Buffalo Poetics programs. He is the author of gist : rift : drift : bloom (2015) and precis (2017). José lives and teaches in Wisconsin.

His sequence “riot: Scott, King, Long.” appear in the twenty-second issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the sequence “riot: Scott, King, Long.”

A: The bigger project, scenery, begins with the premise that all of these sites of national status-as-identity formation have become “scenes.” These scenes include textual scenes, mnemonic scenes, performatic scenes, speculative scenes, etc. I think of “riots” as such scenes as well, given how they live in our cultural consciousness. And “scenes” doesn’t always mean a 2-dimensionality in a bad sense. Merely in the sense of our unpacking. The media life of demonstrations can be emotionally charged, and have long lasting effects on our personal research into who we are in relation to group anger, or the nation state, the police, or place. But there’s no mistaking that unless one is on the ground, we’re getting these scenes through some form of media. In “riot: Scott, King, Long,” I investigate my own conscious awareness of anger, racialization, nation, and action through the Dred Scott decision, the LA Riots, and this photo out of Charlottesville of a man, Corey Long, using an aerosol flame thrower on a white supremacist. My own status as a naturalized citizen is articulated in the Dred Scott decision through the inherent anti-Blackness of premising America’s recognition of “person” in Colonial precedents, and triangulating citizenship against Black being and potentially assimilated beings. The same liberalism is, in fact, established much earlier in Bartolomé de las Casas “In Defense of the Indians.” The LA Riots, for me, bring up a very similar paradigm, where model minoritism played a huge role in how Black anger was mediatized in relation to South Korean American grief and vigilantism. But more than this, there are voices from the LA Riots (including Rodney King’s) that are not asked to weigh-in until much later, after the riots. I include here Kiki Watson and Reginald Denny, in fact. What they say later, in the full volume and dimension of language, about a moment that is compressed into scenery during its happening is really enlightening. And though we don’t have it all yet, I think something similar will come out of the images we have from Charlottesville. That is the speculative aspect of it. Which is why in the book itself I distort the image of Long wielding the flamethrower in defense. That optic distortion of text, I hope, mimics an acoustic speculation, or how it is that acoustics exist in space, bouncing off surfaces, exhausting itself, finding rest in reflection. Of how the acoustic, in poetics, is always an accompaniment to the optic life of language (its own scenery), or the taking it in, the senses and emotions that feel out for language and metabolize it into the thoughts and perspectives that once embossed on our surfaces somehow stand for who we “are” to others.

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

A: I’ve committed more fully into the “document,” or using documents as sources for poetics. A couple of things inform this. I was reading this piece on the Demise of the Nation State by Rana Dasgupta about a year ago, where he cites the inability of “information” to cohere the disparate attributes we previously called “the nation.” And it struck me the extent to which documents work within that network of “information,” and that there must be something latent or explicit in the document worth cross examining against a mode of language resistant to the kind of surface texture, of permanence, “nation” in this paradigm is meant to stand for. But it also seems like a lot of my friends right now are talking about sound and acoustics. And in fact I can remember a really long time ago I actually talked about the “sound of democracy” in a job interview that I don’t think went very far. But my friend, poet, and bookmaker Andrew Rippeon has really been working on the poetics of sound in fascinating ways, including textually material ways, and intellectually, ways that account for able-diversities and thus unsettle conclusions on who makes-listens. I was also at a reading recently where the poet Nick Gulig was talking about his book ORIENT coming together, and hearing him describe listening/watching/reading information, or the news, made him aware of “static” and how we’re all producing “static.” This got me thinking about the cross overs I’m working with in scenery––image, text/document, sound, speculation. But also resolved my commitment to the document in a more current project, asylum : after nation, where I’m textually building a border wall out of found sound/document, which begins to topple in the emergence of static, or acoustic processes that signal the death of cohesive nationality, but nonetheless do cohere in another fashion. I think this particular piece, “riot,” signals the beginning of my full on commitment to this building a poetics out of the facticity of the document that measures out the senescence in the organism that has for so long relied on documents upholding some sort exceptionalism, or supremacy, or dictated power.

I suppose technically speaking, it also signals my preference to work––compose, revise, edit, arrange––in Illustrator. This might seem silly, but I do think the artboard right now, for me, is like a type base. It’s more like a letter press to me than a ‘canvas’ because of how text must still be “set” in it, even if along vectors. It’s become more intuitive for me to move from the acts of reading, or note taking, or scribbling, to Illustrator than to anything else, like Word for instance. I think we have to talk about these technologies, because a lot of things change in terms of how we frame “intentionality” or meaning, or quite simply the ocular performances of reading when technologies begin to confront one another, but are otherwise merged without affair in the preference to just seeing the world as “information” or as cohesion.

Q: How did you get to this point in your work? What brought you to putting together manuscripts as such expansive projects? Or is manuscript even the wrong word for your potential end-point?

A: I think I’ve always been trying to accommodate the “expanse”––I think maybe I’m just now starting to get an idea of the arc an expanse can take, to function as something like a manuscript. But I’ve always been drawn to work that… you put it down, and it’s down, meaning “it” as the particular book or whatever. Finality in other words. But you pick up something else by the same writer and it's new, and at the same time you’re back to where you were, in terms of your own thinking. Your thinking while you read. So maybe I can see “arc” better now, there’s methods for composing that let me see it all at once, like I mentioned before about Illustrator, and I’ve just encountered more and more work that excites me into trying more stuff. I’m thinking really specifically here of Myung Mi Kim for instance.

Q: What is it about Myung Mi Kim’s work that strikes, specifically? And what is her work prompting?

A: Maybe just generally, we are historical beings and are existentially aware. This is a condition poetry is built for. What it means to say “historical being” or “historical subject,” that’s something Myung’s work has always spoken to me on. The room the work spares for leaving that shoreline I guess, that’s something the textuality of the work that also really appeals to me. Atticus Finch put out a chapbook excerpt from her Penury that still just makes me marvel at how expansive poetry is. Commons still does this to me too.

Q: Given you are working, in part, with the document, what do you feel working in poetry and poetics allows that wouldn’t be possible through other forms, whether literary prose, visual art or non-fiction?

A: I think in some ways all of these genres could/sometimes do transcend expected sites of language. Russian Avant Gardists called it “factography.” Maybe what poetics allows for, more fully, is relation. Fred Moten would probably call this an aesthetic “wandering.” I think in work like Divya Victor’s it makes me think of “resemblances.” Craig Santos Perez’s work, which is full on docupoetics, engages the principle/practice of incorporation/unincorporation via the document, and this then resonates with the historical politics of territory and national status his work has us consider. I guess that’s the thing also, if the poetic voice, if lyric, functions via the expectation of voice, and initiates the consequence(s) of recognition as such, then the document is the architecture within which voice must always be an acoustic reality. It’s the walls and others against which voice, in the abstract, must always reverberate in its being actual. Because in other genres, except maybe non-fiction, wherein a lot of creative non-fiction maybe dances a bit closer to lyric nowadays, the document might be in service of the contained narrative, in poetry the consequence remains more embodied in the relationship of voice-witness. I should also add that scenery, where “riot” comes from, really gets into a lot of memoir for me, probably for the first time ever. The particular documents I engage with open that door for me.

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

A: I think I’m becoming more comfortable in a question based, or problem based poetics, where each book is a sustained meditation of sorts. I used to worry that this model doesn’t really accommodate itself to publishing, including journals, but I’m finding that there’s always a place for different poetries. I’m developing along the lines of this awareness and enjoyment of community I suppose. It’s funny because when I work with students there’s still in them an anxiety over publishing as an industry/profession, and this idea that it’s monolithic. I think a lot of faculty in the “professionalization” of writing are guilty in proliferating this myth. Even at my own institution I don’t think the “creative writers” consider what I do as “writing”––at least not all of them as a group. But I see myself continuing to engage poetics in this way of a question. There are other projects I still want to work on that might turn out differently, like this work I’ve been playing with on the arrival of African music to the Gulf Coast of México, from the Yucatán Peninsula to Veracruz. Who knows what that will be like. I also want to get my hands on a letter press and start doing more handmade things as well. Andrew Rippeon and I, Andrew is at Dickinson right now and is an amazing printmaker and bookmaker, we are going to start working on a small run hand made book soon and I’m excited about that.

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

A: I picked up a copy of Hugo García Manríquez’s Los Materiales a while ago and that helped reenergize me a bit. I also like reading Hanif Abdurraqib. He has a new book, a “love letter,” to A Tribe Called Quest. I’ve been enjoying reading it. Though most of what I read, honestly, are children’s books! I think in terms of thinking of writing and reading (which is kind of like listening), it’s music that often affects how I’m working––literally what I’m doing on the page. Juana Molina and Violetta Parra have been two axes for this project in particular.