TtD supplement #270 : seven questions for Scott Inniss

Scott Inniss is a recent graduate of the doctoral program in English literature at the University of British Columbia. Current work includes interviews with poets Kevin Davies, Dennis Denisoff, and Louis Cabri (the last of which is forthcoming in Tripwire). He is also in the final stages of completing a critical monograph on Humorous Tendentious Poetics: Radical Punchlines and Contemporary Poetry. He lives in Strathcona, Vancouver. He is the author of two recent poetry chapbooks: Back Shelve (above/ground press) and Mean Means (Model Press).

His poem “Spring Breakout” appears in the forty-third issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poem “Spring Breakout.”

A: As I understand it, “Spring Breakout” is a mashup or clustering but also recombinatory intervention into certain dominant sociolects and communicative forms of the broadly current moment. Its language is derivative, in its hectoring, enthymemic, and clickbait-ish dimensions, but also inventive to the extent that its locutions mimic at times those of the (punk, hardcore) band name, song lyric, or album title (at least in my imaginings and process). Key influences on this poem include Bruce Andrews, Marie Annharte Baker, and Dorothy Trujillo Lusk—but also William Carlos Williams, in a weird way that I can’t quite figure out. “The pure products of America / go crazy” and all.
 
In part, I think that the poem is a response to a hegemonic media and political discourse whose conditions of possibility find their limit in the binary avatars of Trump-Harris or Trudeau-Poilievre. It’s a poem that enacts a displeasure with a sociopolitical menu of which there are only two items: white supremacist revanchism or official multiculturalist capitalism. I know that many other options in fact subsist. But it’s a structure of feeling. It’s likely also a result of how I put the poem together: with phrases and discursive scraps that I’d find out in the world (as they say) and that I’d bring back home with me, collecting them in a text document on my laptop for several weeks before digging into it all as a type of primary inscription and source (but in fact already highly mediated, of course).

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

A: It differs a lot from the other writing that I’ve been working on of late. Over the past two years, I’ve really stopped thinking about the poem as a terminal form and moved toward conceiving it as part of a series or project (typically smaller than the size of a book). To varying degrees, I conceptualize each project as distinct (at least while I’m in the process of putting it together). I also tend to work on multiple projects and series simultaneously. It’s to keep myself from bogging down too long in any one textual environment, I suppose. I’m working on two quite incompatible text sequences at the moment, for example. The first is a recapitulation in syntagms of Stan Douglas’ famous photomontage Every Building on 100 West Hastings. It uses exclusively found language (which was easy to find but much harder to document and translate across media). The second is a return of sorts to what I understand as “teenage” poetry—but without the obtrusive subjectivity. What it aims for is a type of affective expressivity and relation to lyric but in a more strenuous formal environment. On the page, the two projects read like the work of separate writers, at least to me. If others experience it differently, it’s fine. In fact, perhaps it’s part of a larger goal.

Q: What has prompted this shift, do you think?

A: I think that part of it has to do with the fact that I finally got around to reading Jack Spicer’s Collected Books in its entirety. His particular version of an open poetics in which poems are relational rather than autotelic—I find this quite compelling. Unsurprisingly, it also has to do with the fact that I live in Vancouver, a city in which serial, procedural, and (re)articulatory approaches to poetic text have long histories.
 
Part of what I find (relatively) unappealing about the poem as standalone are the subsequent compositional (and interpretive) structures that it presupposes. Each poem with its own page and identity (in the form of a title). Discrete poems following one after another as the sequence that forms the book.

The forms that interest me at the moment are the variable cluster, block, and sprawl (among others). I like works that stray from the vertical and horizontal ordering principles according to which the book title holds the book sections, which hold the poem titles, which hold the poems proper. I like organization but not in subservience-domination.
 
Off the top of my head, I’m thinking of Pause Button by Kevin Davies, Same Diff by Donato Mancini, Wayside Sang by Cecily Nicholson, and Ogress Oblige by Dorothy Trujillo Lusk (among many others). I’m thinking of pages that look like poems in terms of format but lack proper designation or ascription and such. As a reader, I experience it as semiotically enabling to have some disequilibrium and (mis)order in the table of contents. Poetry as project seems more amenable to such outcomes.

Q: Is it possible for a poem to stand alone? To paraphrase Michael Ondaatje’s paraphrase of Jack Spicer in his introduction to The Long Poem Anthology: The poems can no better live on their own than can we. What are your thoughts on the idea that a poem can exist purely on its own?

A: In the most basic sense, I believe that nothing exists purely on its own. For poems it is thus no different, I imagine.
 
The question is interesting, of course, primarily for what underlies it. Are we talking about the autonomy of the work of art? Is it an issue of mereology—the relation of the part to the whole? What is the ontology specific to aesthetic structure? What is the social life and economy of literature or writing? To what extent is the notion of the standalone poem an allegory of sorts for the self-sufficient individual or citizen?
 
Spicer’s claim is no doubt operating in a negative relation to the New Criticism of his time. It also finds its concomitant in his deep investment in poetic community (as a place of mutual support and reciprocity but also antagonism and dissensus).
 
The idea of the interpretive unity of the poem places particular pressures on the writer and the reader. At times, these pressures are productive and enabling, but this is mostly not the case as things currently stand, in my estimation.

Q: Are there any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? Have you any particular writers or specific works in the back of your head as you write?
 
A: I don’t really think of models or influence directly. I read a lot of poetry because I’m really into it, and this process and experience of reading is part of what compels my own writing. I like to consider influence as a range of syntactic affordances and less as something that pertains to style, idiom, or signification. But it’s there, no doubt.
 
If anything, specific works by particular writers are less frequently in the back of my head than right in front of me on the page or computer screen. At least, this is the case when I deliberately set up formal, palimpsestic relations between what I’m working on and another writer or text. As an extreme example, I have a poem called “Flair Despair” in my chapbook Mean Means, and this poem is a “cover version” of Dorothy Trujillo Lusk’s poem “Anti Tumblehome,” from her book Oral Tragedy. I’ve done this sort of thing quite a few times (though not at all to the same degree) with poems by historical, canonical writers (Shakespeare, Hopkins, Larkin), as well as other Vancouver poets like Daphne Marlatt, Michael Turner, Meredith Quartermain, and George Stanley. I had the good fortune to publish a bunch of these in an issue of West Coast Line many several years ago.
 
Q: I’m intrigued by your current interview project, working through interviews with Kevin Davies, Dennis Denisoff, and Louis Cabri. How did this project begin, and how do these interviews, potentially, exist in conversation with or alongside your writing?
 
A: Various impulses motivate these interviews, which are in fact part of a larger project (or at least this is the plan). I’m a big fan of these poets, but there’s not a whole lot of info about them or their writing online or elsewhere. Part of what I want to do, then, is to fill in some of these gaps. Personally, I want to learn more about Kevin, Louis, and Dennis, how they understand their poetics, what brought them to poetry, some literary anecdotes and gossip, their histories and those of the scenes of which they were (are) a part, the usual things.
 
At the same time, I’m also thinking about the interview project as at least partly archival. There are some amazing unpublished, roughly edited, and incomplete interviews with various Kootenay School of Writing members and affiliates available online on the KSW website, at kswnet.org. As a researcher, writer, and fan, I’m enormously glad that these accounts exist, whatever their “deficiencies” from a conventional publishing perspective. I find them crucial for filling in parts of what is soon to be a predominantly historical record of “avant-garde” writing community in Vancouver from the 1980s to the mid-2010s. In this regard, the interviews aim to add to this body of knowledge, whether we (the poets and I) end up publishing them online, as part of a book, or whether they end up as archival material somewhere for future researchers (of whatever sort).
 
How does this affect my writing? In the standard sense it doesn’t. But in another it does. It affects more my role as a poet, as someone who is in community (of various sorts) with other writers, who has a strong interest in helping and promoting poetry to happen, to have it circulate in various ways. In this sense, I see the interviews as more or less co-extensive with the labour of writing poetry itself. The same is true of the readings that I’ve been organizing as of late.

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

A: So many! It’s too easy to let this question spiral out of control. Ok. Let me choose only five, discounting anyone whom I’ve discussed or mentioned so far.
 
Books-poets that I continue to get a lot of mileage out of include the following: Marie Annharte Baker (all but especially Exercises in Lip Pointing and Indigena Awry), Amiri Baraka the New American poetry and Black Nationalist phases), Paul Celan (the later work, especially in the Pierre Joris translations), Erin Moure (her first five books), and Harryette Mullen (the trio of publications collected in their entirety in Recyclopedia).
 
An impossible question. But these look about right in terms of where I am right now.

TtD supplement #269 : seven questions for Sandra Doller

Sandra Doller is the author of several books of poetry, prose, translation, and the in-between from the most valiant and precarious small presses—Les Figues, Ahsahta, Subito, and Sidebrow Books. Her newest book, Not Now Now, is forthcoming from Rescue Press. Doller is the founder of an international literary arts journal and independent press, 1913 a journal of forms/1913 Press, where she remains éditrice-in-chief, publishing poetry, poetics, prose, and all else by emerging and established writers. She lives in the USA, for now.

Her prose poem sequence “[show me a depressed mother]” appears in the forty-third issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the prose poem “[show me a depressed mother].”

A: This poem excavates the idea that depression and mothering are interdependent—even that perhaps “depression” and “mother” are metaphoric for self-annihilation and care. I remember hearing once that per the DSM IV (back when it was IV not V) women by definition fall under the depression diagnosis—this was a casual observation I heard somewhere and I’m not intending to affirm or deny such a thing—but I’m interested in the ideas both that the medical diagnostic community regularly omits and obliterates everyday female experiences—like motherhood—and that we also have terms like “postpartum depression” to diagnose what seem to me to be absolutely essential, natural, and unavoidable conditions of building, baking, forming, making an entirely new human out of one’s own self’s cells—or just the condition of motherhood more broadly, the constant caregiving, caretaking, prioritizing other humans over one’s proper self—looking after others—that all might lead one to conclude, from outside the house, from inside the room, that such a character fulfills the definition of “depressed” by being unmotivated towards the self, overwhelmed by other. And as she spirals on, the speaker claims a refusal to break that down, while very much breaking that down, performing the audacity of stating what is, showing the mother, putting girls to the front, which we know only happens when some others step to the back. Maybe if the boys in the club were more motherly, the girls could see the band.

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

A: This piece is part of a piece—it’s been one hell of a decade! This is part of my ongoing verbal investigation into gender trauma, as relates specifically to mothering and womanning. It’s something to realize the past 10 years of life have been occupied quite publicly by a kind of unfettered misogyny on the American political stage—all the while, personally, giving birth to a female child and caring for a partner with multiply recurring life-threatening cancer. The responsibility of bringing a future woman into such a world weighs on me—even as my hope is that gender dynamics are upended and changed by the time my daughter is conscious, in a teen or adult way, of these forces shaping her life, I am also aware that even being born into and existing in this time is both better and worse for her than ever. Is that all in this piece or in all the pieces all together always saying, it was the butler, the butler did it.

Q: Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting?

A: I think my writing thinks it’s funny. Like Maria Bamford, Kate Berlant, or Tig Notaro’s “stool movement” funny. Specific funny females who wear mental health like a puffy sleeve. But my writing is also willing to admit it might not be that funny, not as funny as my models funny, because maybe sometimes it’s time to be unfunny, or to perform failure and lack of virtuosity as a badge of humble honor. Like, what if Rachel Cusk made less sense and more poetry—and why are we all reading George Eliot these days? I might not be modeling, but I might be in the room. Here’s who’s in my room right now—Olga Ravn, Ali Wong, Claudia Rankine, Maggie Nelson, Mia You, Merve Emre, Xenia Rubinos, Niki de Saint Phalle, Cat Power, Poog. Pissed off people everywhere, mostly women.

Q: Over the years, you’ve composed work both solo and collaborative. What do you feel your collaborative works have allowed that might not have been possible otherwise? What do you think your collaborative efforts added to your solo writing?

A: Most of the collaborations I’ve worked on have been composed with the poet I live with, Ben Doller, so that is a collaboration that’s always happening. Over the years, the form of that collaborative relationship has changed, like, well, like a relationship. That work has always been about the relationship—it’s a very meta relationship—and has probably sped my own return to a sort of talky writing, which is where I started in writing, long ago—as a playwright. I’ve always been interested in the inside joke and writing that is able to take that outside—so this sort of intimate collaboration tends to favor that. But Ben and I are, at heart, very different writers (people) with very different speeds and energies—our recent collaboration, called Not Writing, manifested as me doing lots and lots of writing—I hogged the dance floor and had too much prose, so I just turned back into my own projects—letting Not Writing stay not writing for a bit. (Life and health and parenting and domestication intervene in that space even more than they do in the regular writing space.) Translating is another form of collaboration I engage in and one I’m interested in spending more time on in my elder years (are we there yet?)—I have worked with a brilliant writer and translator, Éric Suchère, and we’ve translated each other’s work over the years, so I have a theory about that sort of reciprocal translation—when you translate your translator, does it become a collaboration? Are you changing each other’s work in ways you wouldn’t if they weren’t also translating yours? And because Suchère is a conceptual writer, I also wonder can you translate a procedure, a concept, or a project in addition to or instead of translating the language? I’m looking into it.

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

A: It’s an infinite regression—golden spiral—internal return. I find myself coming back to ideas, words, rages, places. I didn’t start in poetry, but in performance—playwriting and solo texts for movement—so the more I write, the longer I live, the more vocality rears itself. My work is heading towards more voice—maybe even more voices—maybe it needs to be spoken—maybe it will be. My work is heading someplace where I make recordings of myself reading aloud very, very fast in different voices, and there’s nothing I can do about it.  

Q: You mention working towards voice, but are there other elements of performance you feel that influence, or even underpin, the way you approach text? And how do your texts themselves allow for their own potential performance? Are the visual elements on your page notational?

A: Coming to text via performance—and via film—does create a space where my own writing becomes something other than writing, it becomes a situation. A problem, even. I think of Maya Deren, Gertrude Stein, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Christine McNair—how can writing be a rehearsal? And what is the actual performance of the text—is it the writing itself, the reading after the fact, the uttering of the words, or the desire of words to remain unspoken…? In terms of visual elements, I used to work more with the page in a sense that was rhythmic, and as you say, notational—that may still be true, in that my prose blocks are intended for speed, and my line breaks are intended for breathing. I have a certain way I hear my words in my own head, but that doesn’t mean I’m right.

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

A: Lucy Ellmann—and her mother Mary Ellmann—are constantly with me—we have a family joke in our house about Moby Duck—both of them are tragically brilliant in a way the world remains unprepared for—every phrase contains three puns and staircases to other worlds of intertextualities—even though Lucy is writing fiction and Mary wrote about women writing—both of them work in sentence structures that are more like brutalist office building architectures with a dash of organic modernism—I could live happily with the mother-daughter pair of Thinking About Women (ME) and Ducks, Newburyport (LE) as my only furniture.

TtD supplement #268 : seven questions for Tom Jenks

Tom Jenks’ most recent books are Melamine (Red Ceilings Press) and The Philosopher (Sublunary Editions). He is also a text artist and edits the small press zimzalla, specialising in literary objects. More information at https://tomjenks.uk

An excerpt from his “Melamine” appears in the forty-third issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the work-in-progress “Melamine.”

A: I’m happy to report it’s no longer a work in progress and is out in book form with the Red Ceilings Press. It’s a sequence of 8 line poems, each 2 stanzas of 4 lines. I have a changing relationship with form. Sometimes, I like to be wholly irregular. Others, I like to set myself a structure and a pathway. That’s what Melamine is. I think of each poem as a set of shelves on which I put whatever was to hand: things I was reading or listening to, what I was eating or thinking about eating, what was going on around me, the only rule being that they had to fit on the shelf without falling off. Poetic chaotic storage.

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

A: My next book The Philosopher, which is out soon on Sublunary Editions is short prose, not exactly narrative, but more linear. I also produce visual work, a mixture of visualisations of literary works (e.g. all the food and drink in The Wind in the Willows, all mentions of “love” and “death” in Romeo and Juliet) and other more concrete-style pieces. That’s a different sort of mindset, all about shape, structure and colour. But it’s the same in other ways. The reasons why I do things remain opaque to me, and long may that continue.

Q: How does any particular project begin? Do you approach first through form, or is it something more organic?

A: I’m nearly always writing or creating in some way, so I always have a lot of stuff floating around. Relationships, threads and connections tend to emerge rather than me willing them into existence. With Melamine, I wrote a few 8 line poems, wrote some longer ones, which I didn’t feel were finished and I melted down into more 8 line poems, which gave them a new lease of life. So the concept emerged from doing. I believe “praxis” is the word.

Q: What is it about examining particular structures that appeals? What do you feel is possible utilizing form in such ways, and such different ways, that might not be possible otherwise?

A: Form, for me, gives a reason to start and a reason to stop. Going back to the line as shelf analogy in Melamine, a set structure like that allows me to put things together that aren’t normally connected but nonetheless somehow can speak to one another. Having a set limit gives a sort of weird compression which I like.

Q: What brought you to this particular point? Were there specific poets or works that influenced these directions and decisions?

A: In terms of sequences, Jeff Hilson’s work, particularly In the Assarts, was something I was rereading around this time, plus Frank Kuppner, who writes long, fragmentary books. More broadly, in terms of style and content, Peter Didsbury and Jeremy Over. I also found myself referring back to my own book Spruce from 2015, a sequence of 99 x 9 line poems, just to remind myself how to do it.

Q: With more than a dozen books and chapbooks going back some fifteen years, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: In some ways a lot, in others not at all. I’ve done all sorts of different things – written work, visuals, conceptual projects – but I think my concerns and interests now can be traced back to then, amongst them humour, the minutiae of advanced capitalism, history and culture in all its forms. At the moment, I’m working on longer, looser pieces, trying to let my voice go where it wants, not taking off the rough edges.

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

A: as well as the aforementioned, Selima Hill, Frank O’Hara, Ivor Cutler, Leonora Carrington, Henry Green, Stuart Mills, psychedelia and, above all, my friends and contemporaries who I won’t attempt to list as I’ll forget to mention someone and they won’t come to my funeral. Actually, not sure I’ll bother to turn up to that myself, as I hear the sandwiches will be awful.

TtD supplement #267 : six questions for Leesa Dean

Leesa Dean (she/her) is the author of a short story collection, a novella in verse, and two poetry chapbooks. Her first book, Waiting for the Cyclone, was nominated for the 2017 Trillium and Relit Awards, and she was runner-up for the 2023 Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize. Her most recent poetry collection, Interstitial, will be out Fall 2025 with Caitlin Press. She lives in the Slocan Valley (unceded Sinixt Territory) and teaches creative writing at Selkirk College.

Her poem “Sleeping with Bats” appears in the forty-third issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poem “Sleeping with Bats.”

A: The poem “Sleeping with Bats” was inspired by an actual event I experienced in my twenties. I was living in Montreal in a small apartment and somehow while making dinner, a bat flew in. He kept doing laps around the living room. I tried to shoo him towards the wide open doors, front and back, but he just wouldn’t leave for almost 24 hours. He didn’t actually read Beaudelaire but I could really imagine him there, hanging upside down from the bookshelf, immersed in such poetry. I was also in a bad relationship at the time—it took years to clearly see the parallels between the bat and I, but there we were, kindred spirits, fully aware of the exit but trapped in the thrill of being in danger.

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

A: This poem is part of a larger collection that will be published by Caitlin Press in 2025. The title is Interstitial and it explores a vast cross-section of themes like women in complicated relationships with themselves, with substances, with their ancestry. Many of the poems are autobiographical. For example, my grandparents were both language minorities (Francophone from Saskatchewan, Hungarian refugee) who traded their languages for their vision of the Canadian Dream at a time where assimilation was the common practice. I write about my mother who was a polio survivor and lived in a body cast for 9 months after being an initial test subject for a process that was brand new at the time. A Herrington Rod was fused with her spine so that she would not end up in a wheelchair. She never told us any of that, didn’t want us to perceive her as a victim, was unable to imagine the beautiful power of empathy. The overarching framework for the book was actually published by you, rob, in 2023-- it was a chapbook called apogee/perigee which consisted of 24 visual poems, all exploring the themes mentioned above.

Q: Do you have any structural models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? How easy was it for you to assemble such a wide array of lyric modes into a single, cohesive manuscript?

A: This is an interesting question about structural models. I actually had to create my own structural model for this project--well, I got someone else to do it. I had a specific structure in my head for the 24 visual poems that create the foundation of Interstitial. I drew it out on paper first but it looked more like complex mathematics. Luckily I know a great graphic designer/comic artist, Nathan Vyklicky. He looked at my rough sketch and my list of very specific requirements, like “each poem must be located exactly where the corresponding zodiac house would be located on the provided source chart from the 16th century” and “the apogee poems must be located diametrically opposite from the title of the poem, to mirror a state of apogee.” I couldn’t tell at first if my ideas were even legible to him or anyone, but he went away for a few days and came back with exactly what I wanted. I really value that kind of collaboration and deep listening.

A number of other poems in the collection are prose poems. I am a great fan of prose poetry, Does this come from my background as a fiction writer? Possibly, but I also think there is something incredibly immersive about not having line breaks but still operating in the realm of images, in lyrical language that bends and yaws. I like the look of a dense block of language and think of all the words inside the invisible text boxes as building kinetic energy, as vibrating atoms. I was in part inspired by Ben Lerner’s collection, Angle of Yaw. Our poetic styles could not be more different, but from him I learned a type of journey to the last line where truths are confirmed or completely subverted.

I’m not sure how easy it was to assemble a wide array of modes into a cohesion, but it was enjoyable and also necessary. I think what creates the cohesion, though, is the context: I wrote the book almost exclusively within the two year period between when my father was diagnosed as being terminally ill and when he died, about 12 days after I handed in the final manuscript to my publisher. Talk about Interstitial. Not all of the poems are about him—just a small fraction—but the context spurred this greater question of how we are positioned at any given moment in time. I remember so many different versions of my father. I remember so many different versions of myself. In this manuscript, I allowed those versions to coexist; I allowed the dichotomies to inform and complicate each other.

Q: With two published books, two chapbooks and your current work-in-progress, how do you feel your work has developed? What do you see yourself working towards?

A: To answer this question honestly, I feel like I’m growing up in tandem with my work. I’ve always felt the relationship between myself and my work to be quite porous, a type of Venn diagram where the narrative style or poetic craft and the actual me occupy a large common space. This is especially true of my forthcoming book, but it inherently had to be as I was writing predominantly about the death of both my parents rather than exploring a persona, as I did in my second book, The Filling Station, which was written entirely from the point of view of a Brazilian woman, a fictional character who narrated the life of Manuelzinho, an actual person who appeared in a 1952 poem of the same name by Elizabeth Bishop. Interstitial is very different. If I think about the way I wrote about emotional topics when I first started writing poetry in my late twenties, I think there would have been a lot of anger and that anger would have translated into a narrower kind of poetics. The poems in Interstitial move beyond the immediate emotional plain, the anger and reckoning, to much deeper, philosophical explorations.

Now that I’ve completed Interstitial, I am moving through a second draft of a novel called Tunnel of Stars. I can’t even articulate how excited I am about it. It’s a slightly gothic coming of age story that takes place in my home region, the West Kootenay, but also in Vancouver, New Orleans, Montreal and Morocco. I’m still at the stage where it’s difficult to articulate exactly what the novel is about, but I have surprised myself by writing a romantic narrative with a happy ending. I have traditionally been disinterested in the happy ending, especially in the context of heteronormative relationships, but this narrative is also interrupted by unwanted pregnancies, suicide attempts, entire families dying in car accidents and other significant barriers. I'm interested in writing through an ugly kind of beauty, a kind of beauty that becomes accentuated by life’s legit and ever-present challenges.

Q: I get the sense that you see your work—whether poetry, fiction or visual work—as extended elements of a single, ongoing trajectory. How does a thought or an idea or a sentence announce itself into the shape of a poem or a work of fiction? Do ideas of genre emerge first, or is it something else, something other?

A: I’ve been thinking about how to respond to this question and I keep coming back to Ursula Le Guin. I remember reading her essay titled “The carrier bag theory of fiction” while doing my MFA at the University of Guelph over a decade ago now. The visual of the bag really stuck with me and I suppose I consider my writing in a similar fashion. I’m out there gathering ideas, sentences, images, recurring themes, and they all go in the bag. I imagine this bag to be elastic, able to stretch form, to hold multitudes. I’m not always sure if something will be a poem, an essay or a story when it first emerges, when it goes into the bag or comes out of the bag to be refined. I write and publish in three genres so any of those forms could be feasible for any idea, and sometimes the boundary of the genre isn’t entirely clear in my writing. I’m thinking now of Joshua Whitehead’s essay titled “Writing as a Rupture” (published in Making Love with the Land) where he refers to genre as “boundary and border,” which is something I’ve been thinking about more lately.

I’m currently writing a novel that is mostly fiction, part prose poem, slightly autofiction at points. I have a feeling my work will continue to delineate rather than lineate as I... what? Age? I’m not sure age is the right word here. Continue to expound? I am leaning into hybridity these days and feel validated by the growing number of genre-defying works being published at the moment.

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

A: I’m the kind of person who will pull like 10 books off the shelf and fan them out around me when I need poetic inspiration so I have more of a rotating favourites list. I also have a special area on my bookshelf where I put certain books on display, like talismans, as if the power of those poets might radiate into my writing space and bless me with even just the essence of their poetics. Currently Night Sky with Exit Wounds is staring at me—Ocean Vuong is a damned genius, can’t say it enough. I’ve got Ada Limon’s Bright Dead Things out right now, too. When I want to shake myself out of my language patterns I often go to Canisia Lubrin and Liz Howard’s work. How many poets do I name? I could just fill a page right now.

But the one book that is always on my shelf facing forward, the one that never moves, is Common Magic by Bronwen Wallace. I love that book with all my heart. I actually have three copies because it’s out of print and hard to get and I keep giving copies away. I actually got a “Common Magic” tattoo in February—a montage of images that embody this idea for me (steam rising from tea, moon phases, wildflowers, the magic of the perennial, the lifeblood of cosmic clockwork) and Simon Gentry from Chateau Tattoo in Salmo turned into a beautiful half sleeve. That’s something I started doing, getting a tattoo every time I publish a book. I’m already thinking of what to do for the next one that comes out in Fall 2025...

TtD supplement #266 : seven questions for Henry Gould

Henry Gould was born in Minneapolis, and lives there now, after 45 years in Rhode Island. His recent books include : RAVENNA DIAGRAM, I-III (Dos Madres Press); CONTINENTAL SHELF : SHORTER POEMS, 1968-2020 (Dos Madres); and a chapbook, PARMENIDES IN MINNEAPOLIS (Lulu.com). His book-length poem, GREEN RADIUS, is available (or will be soon) from Contubernales Books.

An excerpt from his “The Green Radius” appears in the forty-third issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the work-in-progress “The Green Radius.”

A: The Green Radius is a long poem, in 144 parts, which is written in these rhymed, flowing, snaky stanzas, to suggest the constant flow of the Mississippi River, from its source to the Delta. Also the flow of memory, back in time – my own personal time, times of American history, and human time generally, in a sort of philosophical sense. And also this wayward flow of stream-of-consciousness, free-association babbling – which will probably seem incomprehensible or nonsensical to impatient readers.  I started writing it on February 1st, 2023, and finished it in December, on 12/12/23.

There’s an underlying “French connection" to this poem.  Just before I started writing I happened to see an old film of Eric Rohmer, Le Rayon Vert (“The Green Ray”). At first I planned to title the whole poem The Green Ray – but then I discovered another poet had given her recent book that same title, with the same reference to Rohmer! So I changed it, reluctantly, to The Green Radius, which in the end I found very fitting. Oddly enough, just as I was finishing the poem in December 2023, I watched a second very fine Rohmer film, My Night at Maud’s – which seemed to set its seal on the poem.

By “French connection” I refer to this sort of submerged French influence in American history. The course of the Mississippi flows through the old territory of the Louisiana Purchase. So it gave me a kind of cultural slant into the character of the United States, emphasizing New Orleans and a certain French/American ambience. But the poem tries to delve further back as well. The “French” thing leads to St. Louis, and some remarks by Herman Melville (in a short essay called “The River”) about the meaning of that place : where the ruins of Cahokia still remain. I try to delve back a little way into Native American and “prehistoric” dimensions of this land, in the context of the “Trump” era, and the attack on U.S. democracy, and the theme of corruption and fraud in Melville’s Mississippi novel, The Confidence-Man.

Here's a short opening section that brings some of these things into (blurry) focus :

  3


    With a green flash, the last light rose
      from sunset.  On the vertical,
        above the dark horizon
      like a wheat-blade – singular,
    enormous.  Bleeding as the Delta flows
  widening on either side;
melding in diapason
  eleisons of blue and red
    over the mud-green, violet furrows.

2.4.23

The poem is really no longer a work-in-progress : it’s a finished poem, and a sort of work-in-regress. A strategic retreat : Wallace Stevens’ “violence within pressing back against the violence without.” Amazingly enough, early in 2024 the publishers at a small press called Contubernales Books approached me, unsolicited, for a possible manuscript to publish!  This has never happened to me before in my 60 years of writing poetry. The book is coming out within the next month or two. The cover design was kindly donated by the Saint Louis Art Museum, from a massive panoramic scroll painted in 1850 by an itinerant Irish artist, John J. Egan : a visionary panorama called “The Grandeur of the Mississippi”. Also, poet and scholar Gabriel Gudding wrote a sharp, provocative introduction, for which I am very grateful.  Here’s a glimpse of the cover : https://contubernalesbooks.com/green-radius

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

A: I turned 72 this year. Getting older, for me anyway, changes your sense of time, memory, mortality. The Green Radius reflects that, I suppose, in several ways. For one, it’s shorter, more focused, than previous efforts, believe it or not! I’ve written about 10 book-length poems since the 1980s. Forth of July, from the late ‘90s – a trilogy of 3 books, Stubborn Grew/The Grassblade Light/July – is over 1000 pp. Ravenna Diagram I-III, written from 2012 to 2018, is a similar length. Restoration Day, published in 2022, is over 250 pages. The Green Radius has the most dramatic, “quasi-objective” scenario since Stubborn Grew, from 2000 (which is a kind of microcosmic comic-epic set across about 10 blocks of my hometown of those days – Providence, Rhode Island).

Long poems are a kind of curse, for both poets and readers. They magnify, exponentially, the already marginal condition of poetry within society at large. But it’s one of those curses that glimmers with the hope of becoming a blessing. Poetry for me is a kind of work, that gets more fluent and surprising as it goes along. And the phenomenon “poetry” sits up on a high, quaint, old-fashioned pedestal in my psyche – culturally, spiritually. I’m like Edgar Cayce, the sleeping prophet... I sleepwalk in a trance down this outlandish pilgrim’s path – keeping my diary, dating every entry in the sequence. I’m struggling with the moral/ontological state of the world; I’m struggling with my famous predecessors (Pound, Eliot, Dante, et al.); I’m struggling with my indifferent contemporaries; I’m struggling with the moral and political state of my nation; I’m struggling with my own flaws and stupidities. No one writes like me; no one knows my work; that’s the way it is.  Sound familiar? I’m Henry, the Everypoet.

Q: You mention that this particular project is “shorter, more focused, than previous efforts [.]” Why do you think that is?

A: Poetry for me seems to involve quite a bit of negative capability. Unconciousness, serendipity. As mentioned previously, my getting older has something to do with the pressure to be focused, precise, more intense. But really, my sense is that the stars were just aligned in my pregnancy phase, pre-compositional.  By that I mean the themes, the setting (the Mississippi), and the style seemed to coalesce and work together. The FLOW, the simple water pressure of the river, unlocked a whole set of dams and levees – in memory, in history, in art...  Also, that “violence without” – the sense of danger, of “existential crisis” for my country, in my country, the United States, right now – definitely fueled the intensity of focus, such as it is.

Q: With, as you say, ten book-length poems published over the past few decades, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: In some ways I just keep writing the same poem, over and over, with variations. This theme of “journeying into the interior” is part of all the poems I mentioned previously. It’s been a bit of an Orphic track : me, in a trance, following my Dark Lady, my Eurydice, my Beatrice, into the darkness, into the light.  I feel as I get on with things I’ve become (over the decades) a little more independent of past influences, a little less prone to bombast or mimicry. I hope so anyway. I see my marginality and irrelevance as a very real problem. I don’t blame society or po-biz for that anymore (whereas I used to be pretty snarky, with a chip on my shoulder). I’m trying in my current work to become more clear, more comprehensible. And I feel the only way I can do that is to clarify more forcefully my own intellectual, rational, and spiritual beliefs, my “vision of life” shall we say. This is maybe the real substance of this stumbling pilgrimage I’ve been on for decades. I just finished a new sequence – only 27 pp. long! – and published it as a chapbook, called Parmenides in Minneapolis. I’m trying both to focus more intensely, and SING more resonantly, at the same time. I really like “Parmenides” so far.  Maybe there will be a couple more brief 27-pp. sequels.

Q: Do you have any particular models for the kinds of work you’ve been doing? Are there any specific poets or works in the back as your head as you write?

A: In the early 1980’s, when I was getting ready to write such poems, Hart Crane and Ezra Pound were both powerful influences. Pound for his epic ambition and the interesting way he dove into and absorbed History (I’ve always been big on History). Hart Crane for his absolutely astonishing genius – the way he took on an epic ambition similar to Pound’s, but infused it with music, and grace : an elegant architectonics. I had a fairly conscious motive to “stand with Crane”, against both Pound and Eliot, as a stylistic benchmark, or paradigm – how to reflect a specific AMERICAN spirit and sensibility in literature/poetry.

The other central influence has been Osip Mandelstam. In some ways I found affinities between his lyric modes and Crane’s. But for me, Mandelstam is at the center of my personal pantheon. I am drawn to him as to no other. I learned only later that Paul Celan felt the same way about him.  

Q: What is it about the form of the long poem that appeals? What do you feel is possible in your work through the form that might not be otherwise?

A: As a kid, as a teenager, I read a lot of novels. For me there was no comparable pleasure to that of being absorbed in a fictional dream, like a vast lambent meadow, or a dark forest. I’ve written plenty of short poems. Recently published a book of them : Continental Shelf : shorter poems 1968-2020. But I’m sort of a philosophical monist, an idealist... “The World as Meditation”. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was with God : He was in the beginning, and through Him all things were made. Serious stuff. Behind all our fragmentary trivia and chatter, there is this serious listening silence. I write long poems because I want to express this implicit solemnity, this seriousness behind all things. A poem could be a Gate to the Way. Not in a doctrinaire sense. But life is a “vale of Soul-making”, wrote that agnostic John Keats. The epic, the long poem, express a drive toward wholeness – holism, oneness... Union. The Green Radius is all about “saving the Union”.

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

A: Certain poets have become real or imaginary friends. I mentioned Osip Mandelstam. Another Russian poet I feel very close to is the late Elena Shvarts (we were trans-continental friends for a while). The Vancouver poet Lissa Wolsak is very dear to me. I always go back to Eugenio Montale : he is the warmth of the sun and the music of Europe. Shakespeare has haunted me, literally – and still does (I wrote and published a memoir about that, titled Holy Fool). Another Italian I love is the novelist Giorgio Bassani.  

Now I’m finding some new things – going back to early pre-Socratic philosopher-poets, like Parmenides, Empedocles... and Apollonius of Rhodes, epic poet of the Argonautica. I’m trying to learn a little Greek for that. By way of Empedocles, oddly enough (who was said to have fallen into the volcano at Mt. Etna), I went back to an old favorite, Malcolm Lowry (Under the Volcano) – and through Lowry, to the mysterious and marginalized Conrad Aiken. I feel a special kinship with Aiken.  He wrote a kind of shadowy twin to Hart Cranes’s The Bridge, a long poem, called The Kid, which I find wonderful. The Kid pivots on the story of William Blackstone, a kind of spiritual hermit and scholarly pioneer in colonial Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Before I learned of Aiken’s poem, I had written a chapter for a long poem, The Grassblade Light, titled “The Lost Notebooks”... about William Blackstone. Aiken might just be a forgotten sleeping giant of American poetry. I can identify with that. 🙃

Touch the Donkey : forty-third issue,

The forty-third issue is now available, with new poems by Lisa Samuels, Tom Jenks, Nate Logan, Henry Gould, Sandra Doller, Kit Roffey, Leesa Dean and Scott Inniss.

Eight dollars (includes shipping). It's the part I was born to play, baby!

TtD supplement #265 : six questions for russell carisse

russell carisse is currently living on unceded Wolastoqiyik/Mi’kmaw territory in New Brunswick. Here they have resettled from Tkaronto to an off-grid trailer in the woods, with their family of people and animals, to grow food and practice other forms of underconsumption. russell is the author of three chapbooks, the latest, In The Margins. . . (above/ground press 2024). Their work can be found online and in print. Website: russellcarisse.carrd.co Mastodon: @russellcarisse@writing.exchange

An excerpt from his work-in-progress “THAT HEAP” appears in the forty-second issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the work-in-progress “THAT HEAP.”

A: Centuries in the future an archeological team unearth a caché of 500 messages which become the foundational text of the culturally hegemonic corporation Human Effluents And Plastic, and are known as The 500. These messages, all of which are 500 characters long and range from weather reports, advertisements, diary entries, etc, trace the early days and months that follow an apocalyptic event called The Great Coagulation. The earth having become a trash-ball, soon begins to take on monstrous proportions and abilities, thanks to everyone’s favorite corporate empire and its founder, Summer deGuy. The impetus for this project was an attempt to verbalize a pet conceit of mine, that landfill contains the packaging of our collective unconscious, the trappings of our desires, and the materials of our desires when they have been superceded by new material. And so as I tried to find a form the idea began to grow with a bunch of hypotheticals such as, what if trash-ball earth is a body-without-organs, what if water can only be obtained from microscopic deposits, etc. After a few tries at different forms, it was the Mastodon character limit that finally gave this project the conatus to grow beyond a few sketches.

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

A: I am beginning to often feel that the separations between projects, are the result of the perceived need to neatly package a product for consumption, and that my projects are not a disparate as I make them out to be. I do have a few different processes for writing, but I don’t work consistently at any one process, so I find myself reading several books at once and putting thoughts to page/screen in blocks or strings of short text in unrelated sequences. It seems this method lends itself to the 500 character, or 140 syllables, or 100 words, or 14 line, or there about poem/sonnet, that I seem to keep rewriting. It is when the second draft is made that a restraining form is decided upon, sorting into thematic, stylistic, and natural groups, for submitting.

Q: How do you see your projects relating to each other? Do you see your projects as disconnected, a sequence of groupings or something larger, with many, multiple moving parts?

A: My work seems to circle a few concerns, no matter which formalities are being used. These sublime elephants in the room are most often colonialism, climate crises, the bâtise bourgeoisie, and associated effects. I’m sure there are pathological revelations to be had at my expense as well. It is for my own therapeutic reasons that I write, whether disrupting narratives of past traumas, a rewording of something I'm struggling to understand, or just an intellectual exercise of puzzling through a restraint in language. Of course, there’s a large dollop of, “project? I have no idea what I’m doing! Let’s see if this sticks to the wall?”

Q: With three chapbooks under your belt, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: I definitely hum and haw over poems I’m working up more now than when I my first chap was published, and the anxiety of leaving something out has changed into its opposite. Looking back, there was a single tone single gimmick to much of my work, which I have been trying to disturb with more humour and forms. There was a time when I saw chapbooks as a stepping stone to trade publication, some presses more than imply this, but as I have had time to read more contemporary collections from the library, plus enjoy the couple of chapbook subscriptions I can afford here or there, I have come to look for where poetry is going in chapbooks, and where poetry has been in collections. Admittedly though, I hope to gain the coveted Triple Spine (a trade pub in poetry, fiction, nonfiction) one day.

Q: Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? What authors or works, if any, sit at the back of your head as you write?

A: I’m not sure I follow any specific models, but lately I’ve had on my mind George Woodcock and his brand of Anarchism’s connection to the vision of Canada as espoused by the leaders of the Freedom Convoy. It seems this may also point to some of the more poisonous parts of the Romantic tradition past and present. There so many authors I get excited about, a few being; Dionne Brand, Marilyn Dumont, Gary Barwin, and Amanda Earl, each has a unique use of humour, whimsy, and/or irony, that grabs my attention. Adding a manual typewriter to my poetic repertory was the result of the national anthologizing of bill bissett, and bpNichol, by Jack David and Robert Lecker, in 1982, reprinted in 1994, when casual racism, Indigenous exclusion, among other issues, should have given the publishers pause before continuing this version of nation building. Over the last month a couple of my favorite borrows from the public library have been: Resisting Canada; An Anthology of Poetry, ed Nyla Matuk (Montreal, CA: Véhicule Press, 2019), and Canisia Lubrin, The Dyzgraph*st (McClelland & Stewart, 2020).

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

A: If I find myself struggling to write I often turn away from the page for reenergizing. A wander around the garden or the woods, is often enough, but I enjoy painting, and listening to music staring at the ceiling, as well. Even though it’s been a few years, I’ve read Virginia Woolf’s The Waves at least a dozen times, and Derrida’s corpus if only because a lot of his work remained nonsense to me, but over the last bit, I haven’t put down Dionne Brand’s new and collected poems Nomenclature since it arrived a little while ago, after the once through (a second for sections of it) I find myself returning to Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia for a master class in epigrams and biting wit.

TtD supplement #264 : eight questions for Wanda Praamsma

Wanda Praamsma is a poet and writer based in Kingston, Ontario. Her works include a thin line between (Book*hug, 2014) and aversions // nothing special (above/ground press, 2022). Wanda’s poems, non-fiction, and reviews have appeared in literary journals and newspapers in Canada and the U.S. She is the founder and organizer of drift/line, a poetry and music series in Kingston.

An excerpt from her “how clear” appears in the forty-second issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the work-in-progress “how clear.”

A: In short, how clear is about exploration & transformation of self. It’s about the unmooring, the disintegration, experienced through birthing & mothering. It’s about breakage, on & off the page. It’s about detachment, releasing the clinging, & the possibilities that emerge through that process (much of it explored through the Buddhist concept of not-self).

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

A: There is definitely continuity here from my chapbook, aversions // nothing special (above/ground, 2022). The nothing special section of that chapbook was note-poems from the first two years of mothering, & I spring from there in how clear. But this work is much more improvisational, & the fragmentation of language, & rhythm & breath, are out in front.

Q: You suggest there may have been a shift in your work since you first became a parent. Has the fragmentation of your work become more prevalent, or is it something else, something other?

A: Certainly, yes, more fragmentation as I entered motherhood. Time, lack of it, may have precipitated some of this. Writing in smaller snippets was/is the only way, & so the work does easily get stripped down, broken up. But there is something else. I used to be more interested in the story, now I am more deliberate about language. The words are more heated, the link to linear narrative has broken, & I want to ignite certain edges. I am more clear.

Q: I understand that entirely, how parenting forces a focus of sorts. You have only the time that you have, so you’d better get to it. Do you find you hold your work as a singular project, as opposed to multiple, smaller projects, across such multiple attentions? How do you keep writing in your head with small children?

A: Lots of notebooks, all around the house, in my various bags. The problem is there are so many now, & so many threads to bring together & apart. There are a few projects going at the same time in these notebooks. But when I get to the collage part, I do need to work on just one, zero in.

Q: With a published debut and a chapbook under your belt, as well as your current work-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: I feel like it’s been slow since having my children, but I’m also happy there has been space between works to find new ground, to read deeply & widely. My work-in-progress is almost finished & it’s been an exciting departure from my first book. I mentioned to another poet that I am feeling called to sentences lately & so that may be the next thing, a hybrid memoir of sorts.

Q: I like the idea of being “called to sentences.” What prompted that particular shift, and how is it showing itself?

A: Grief, mostly, I think. My dad died last year & immediately after I knew I would work next on prose that circled around death, & the question of what makes up a life, his & others’. I had already started with an essay on death & illness before my dad died (published in the Queen’s Quarterly in 2022) & I think the next work will build on that. But it’s showing itself slowly, still in all the notes, but hopefully soon I can sit with it a little more.

Q: Have you had any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting?

A: I can’t say that I have any models that are pushing me strongly one way or another. I have read many good memoirs, or versions of, over the past years – by Sabrina Orah Mark, Sarah Manguso, Kate Zambreno, Sina Queyras, Kyo Maclear, Anne Boyer, among others. But the hybrid memoir I seem to be angling towards, not so sure, & I am at the beginning of this search. (Definitely want to read Christine’s Toxemia!)

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

A: Laynie Browne’s The Desires of Letters has been very important to me, especially for the work-in-progress, as well as Fred Wah’s Music at the Heart of Thinking. Daphne Marlatt’s What Matters, & many other works of hers. Phil Hall’s Killdeer, and others. And Lisa Robertson, Boat & The Baudelaire Fractal in particular.

TtD supplement #263 : seven questions for Lori Anderson Moseman

For Lori Anderson Moseman’s recent work, see Quietly Between, a 2022 poetry/photography collaboration available from A Viewing Space. Okay and Too Few Words were above/ground press chapbooks in 2023. Her experimental poetry collections include Darn (Delete Press, 2021) and Y (Operating System, 2019). For her earlier prose poems see Full Quiver (Propolis Press, 2015) and Flash Mob (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016).  https://loriandersonmoseman.com

Her poems “Swill-n-swagger,” “Afloat,” “Mid-tide,” “Ripple. Tank.,” “Unremarkable,” “Thread” and “Stick in river’s mouth” appear in the forty-second issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “Swill-n-swagger,” “Afloat,” “Mid-tide,” “Ripple. Tank.,” “Unremarkable,” “Thread” and “Stick in river’s mouth.”

A: Impetus: A flash fiction workshop leader asks for a six-word autobiography. I offer a seven-word fish tale—the opening words of “Swill-n-swagger.” Then I wonder: “why seven seas?” Having moved close to the Pacific Ocean, one of my childhood landscapes, I am once again confronting my fear of wading in, riding the waves. The poem plunges not only into seas I’ve seen but other water/land interfaces floating in my mutating memory bank. Hence the “I lie.” All autobiography is fishy. “Afloat” enacts that process when the unreliable narrator confesses in the poem’s second ending. “Thread”—also a memory piece— tries to puzzle out a connection between humans’ holding objects dear and cougars’ need to prey on deer. “Mid-tide,” and “Stick in the river’s mouth” re-enact recent encounters along the Oregon Coast. “Unremarkable” explores re-enactment but not mine: my partner’s neurological disorder allows them to physically act out dreams in bed. This often poses a danger for me, but so far the threat dissolves as it does in the “Ripple. Tank.”—a poem that withholds the actual bomb threats made repeatedly at a high school across from a YMCA where my limbs swim. All these poems open the first section, “Sound Water,” of my manuscript, Fathom. The rest of that section includes epistolary and ekphratic prose poems that reference writers Barry Lopez and Meredith Stricker, musicians Steve Reich and Maurice Ravel as well as artists Luis Buñuel, Krist Goto, Leah Wilson, and Eva Kmentová, Georgia O’Keefe. We could call these prose endeavors “diary entries,” but they travel in time and place from trauma to bliss. There is Ghanaian dancing at Naropa and mopping up of flood mud in NY’s Southern Tier. On the simplest level, I am composing to meet an assignment I gave myself: write only prose for a year.

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

I got several projects going—each spilling out of each other. A version of Fathom had a fourth section called “Bound Daughter” featuring letters to my ancestors. My goal for Fathom was to hand-sew (stab binding) the “finished” manuscript. I experimented and settled on an 8.5-inch by 8.5-inch format devoting only one page per poem. The prose blocks in “Bound Daughter” were too long to fit on a single page, so now they are their own entity—Reverse Dance. That title is borrowed from a tune for the hurdy-gurdy (vielle à roue) by Andrey Vinograd here. I got turned on to the hurdy-gurdy after seeing Le Vent du Nord here in Eugene. You can hear Nicolas Boulerice here. The opening poem in Reverse Dance addresses a paternal great-great grandmother who (along with her younger sister) came to the U.S. as a “hurdy-gurdy gal.” In 1854, the city of Murrhardt, Germany thought it cheaper to send orphaned teens to San Francisco than to keep them as wards. Previously, I wrote a failed novella about her sister who was murdered by a suitor who then killed himself. For years I’d accepted the account my dad found in an 1857 newspaper, but maybe it is a lie. What if the second gun, the derringer, belonged to my great-great grandmother. “Did you murder your sister’s murderer?” I ask in a letter to g-g-grandma Charlotte.

The second project also springs from a panel book structure I am learning to make. (I just took a fabulous class from Elsi Vassdal Ellis at the Focus of Book Arts festival in Monmouth, Oregon.) The unfolding structure will feature: 1) a heart-shaped Yellowstone agate book was cut-n-polished by my maternal grandfather that my mother bound onto a pounded copper belt buckle she made; 2) tale of my paternal grandmother’s grief after her  brother drown in the Yellowstone River in Glendive; 3) tale of maternal uncle’s deep diving escapades in the same river.

I have been traveling often to Montana to tend to my 89-year old maternal aunt who is losing cognitive function rapidly. To deal with the stress of that, I’ve become obsessed with my paternal grandmother (who died before I was born). When she was 15, her newlywed brother drown in the Yellowstone while bathing. His body, I presume, rode the river. Nonetheless, I keep taking my maternal aunt to see his 1914 grave marker which is a half-hour drive north of Glendive. Why? My aunt never knew him. He’s no relation to her. But she still loves a road trip. She never seems to mind where she goes. She never remembers going. Juxtaposing my “ghost” grandmother’s grief over her brother’s death with my real aunt’s concern about her memory loss is my coping mechanism.

Minding how stories are told keeps me in the present. My aunt: “I told you I fell in the shower the other night. But now (we are in the doctor’s office), I think I fell in my mind. If I had fallen in the shower, I’d have pulled the curtains down. So I must have just fallen in my mind.” The gouge in her ear and the scab on her elbow are ample evidence of a fall, but I love how she uses words as a veil between her worlds. That’s why I’m interested in moments we called “curtains.”

Q: I’m curious about the way you discuss your compositional process, blending elements of music, book binding and hand-stitching. What brought you to your writing being but one element of these larger hybrid structures?

I grew up watching my mother, an outsider artist, making sculptural objects from scavenged junk. Our whole stucco house was her studio/ gallery. Consequently, art play—moving objects in space to sound— is always a part of my literary composition process. The most formative period this kind of hybrid making was when I was earning an MFA in integrated electronic arts at iEAR Studios at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1999-2001).

There, I was in constant collaboration with musicians (Seth Cluett, Warren Burt) and artists (Caz McIntee, Marco Loera). Influential faculty include Tomie Hahn, Curtis Bahn, Branda Miller, Pauline Oliveros.  Silly me, I thought digital integration of image, sound and word would supplant book structures. Financially, I could not keep pace with every-changing software and operating systems. Within five years, my digital work was no longer accessible because it was in “formats” that were obsolete. I turned to making physical zines by hand.

Poets Deborah Poe, Laura Moran and I offered homemade books for “art” displayed at the first of the High Water Salo[o]n chapbooks. I had started a salon series and the press Stockport Flats in the wake of a 500-year flood on the Upper Delaware River. Deborah Poe went on to curate the Handmade/Homemade series (originally through Pace University). I took a bookmaking class with book artist Laurie Snyder in Ithaca, NY. A few years later I worked with Pauline Myers-Rich at her No. 3 Reading Room & Photo Book Works in Beacon, NY. Now, I am meeting and learning from the book artists in the Pacific Northwest through Focus on Book Arts. The physical challenge of working with knives, papers, glues is keeping my cognitive function alive.

Q: Do you tend to see your work as a singular, ongoing project or an overlapping sequence of self-contained works? How do you keep it all straight?

Both. Lately, a pleasant sensation comes over me often as I realize all my work is one long conversation: iteration plus iteration plus iteration plus …. ad nauseum(?).  Maybe this gestalt is a product of aging. Or, maybe I am getting better at recognizing design principles of gestalt (good figure, proximity, similarity, continuation, closure, symmetry). Nope. I doubt it is increased awareness—just more googling. Overlapping sequences are not confusing to me: such imbrication is vital connective tissue. Maybe I can blame my early training in hypertext.

Book publication creates the strongest “end stop” to a writing obsession. Or newness. Suddenly, I fascinated with thermophiles—those colorful mats of microbes that thrive in thermal pools. My partner and I will be visiting Mammoth Hot Springs at Yellowstone next week as we head back to Montana to tend to Aunt Audree. Maybe the thermophiles I meet will spark some new poems that aren’t ghosts of old ones. [Note: we never made it to the hot springs. In the backroads of Idaho, my husband got very ill. He is recovered now. My fascination with thermophiles is on hold.]

“Keeping it straight” is only important when shopping manuscripts. In question #1, I said I chopped on the last section of Fathom because it didn’t fit the hand-binding format I wanted. Well, I just got an encouraging rejection note (“engaging book” and “it came very close”) from Fonograph  Editions’s open genre contest for the full manuscript ( last section included). Now, I will shop both versions. But I will also use the last section (“Bound Daughters” …see question #2) to start a new manuscript Reverse Dance. The failed novella I mentioned in question #2 is now a ten-page poem with two nine-line stanzas because I needed a long poem to make a stick-bound book in last-week’s book arts workshop  (I used a 4-inch sail needle as the spine). Maybe that poem is part of the new manuscript too. Everything is mutable.

Q: With a handful of published books and chapbooks under your belt, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: Progress? Do you think about your writing within a narrative frame of progress? I don’t. I’d like to do a better job wrestling/resisting the legacy of settler colonialism and white privilege I was born into. That is a life’s work and extends beyond writing, but I hope my current and future poems help me live as a human who does less and less harm to others.

I have a poet friend who wants to win a Pulitzer Prize, and she might just do that. My goals are smaller: at first, I just wanted to outlive my parents. That’s done. Now, I want to outlive my aunt who I am helping. Pretty soon my focus will shift to my sibling and my partner’s siblings. In these “hospice years,” I make short term goals: learn a handful of artist book structures and write work to populate their pages; explore Oregon’s literary presses; study climate change in the bioregion where I live; develop relationships with non-human beings. As I feel my own cognitive decline increasing, I try to immerse in the present.  

Q: I think of progress in terms of progression or evolution, certainly. I’m not the same writer I was five or ten or twenty years ago. Different experiences and concerns prompt shifts in the ways in which I approach or even consider what it is I do. Do you see yourself and your writing in the same way as you did a decade ago, or further?

A: I tend to think of my writing in cycles or orbits. Patterns repeat themselves—not necessarily with the same frequency or amplitude—but they repeat themselves. When I was a kid, I saw this amazing juggler televised (on the Ed Sullivan show?): he didn’t toss similarly shaped objects of the same heft. Instead of five orange balls, he tossed a ping pong ball with a clothes iron and a shoebox and a wet sponge. Then he’d throw in an axe. Not sure when I started describing my writing as juggling, but I did start warning audiences at readings to expect these ingredients: a slice-of-life-experience + plus a pinch of literary theory + some scientific curiosity + a punch of primal drama + some musicality (mind you, not a melody or chorus) + some word play with a tinge of political rage or ambivalence. The particulars and pyrotechnics of these juggling acts were and continue to be influenced by the techniques and preoccupations of my writing communities as well as my body’s bandwidth. When I was younger, I thought our language experiments could one day permanently break the subject/object relations always already in syntax. When I was younger, I thought our protest poetry and the liberation is brought was part of an ongoing progression/evolution improving the material conditions of all beings. Now I see cycles, impermanence, an ongoing _____. Now, I am not able to just fill in the blanks. My writing practice always involves experimental reading, thought play, art play, sound play, body play, water play, dog play and prayer and conversation and listening and +++++. Discerning the quality of the resulting “product” or its place in some literary evolution is a task for ______.

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

A.  Reading Don Mee Choi, Jordan Able and Paisley Rekdal at the same time is electrifying. This summer, my  immersion is in Mirror Nation, Empty Spaces, and West: A Translation. The political power, the historical reach, the technical range, the image/word interaction, the heart the heart the heart. The book designs. The continuity. I love how each of these “new” collections send me back through each writer’s previous work.

I am also reentering Christian Bök’s The Xenotext, Book 1 in response an essay poet Don Byrd sent me. Byrd meditates on AI generated images he and a bot recently created: “But I’m in a fix. I don’t know what I am seeing, even though I am the initiating agent.” I am still trying to respond to Byrd’s essay and images. My gut instinct was to use Bök’s words to help me do that. Now, The Xenotext is becoming linked (weirdly? aptly?) to U.S. electoral politics. I write some postcards to voters in Georgia then I reread Bök’s reworkings of Virgil’s Georgics, Book IV. Bök’s book prompted me to start chapbook, Whittle Gristle (to date it is 27 pages long.)

Today, my answer to your question about evolution of writing sent me back to this 1993 book: I downloaded a pdf of The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science: Cognitive Science and Human Experience Varela, Thompson and Rosch. I have owned hardbound copies of that book twice before; it is a book I like to share.  I return this tome once a decade not because I better understand Cognitive Science but because I have grown more mindful of my daily life.  The first chapter is entitled, “A Fundamental Circularity.” This time around, I might need to read the updated version to see if/how thinking about being has changed.

A book that comes off the shelf more times than I can count is Pentti Saarikoski’s Trilogy translated by Anselm Hollo. I can always find a page that talks to me. “Today a new bird came to the yard / mute / no need to look for it in the book / the bird of the god of song.”

TtD supplement #262 : seven questions for Ariana Nadia Nash

Ariana Nadia Nash is the winner of the 2011 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry for her collection Instructions for Preparing Your Skin (Anhinga Press 2013). She is also the author of the chapbook Our Blood Is Singing (Damask Press 2012). She has received a Macdowell residency and an Academy of American Poets prize, among other awards. Her work has appeared in P-Queue, CounterText, Rock & Sling, Poet Lore, Painted Bride Quarterly, Southeast Review, and other journals. She has taught creative writing at UNC Wimington, University of Chicago, and SUNY Buffalo, and currently teaches at University of Maryland College Park.

An excerpt from her work-in-progress “WE” appears in the forty-second issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the work-in-progress “WE”

A: “WE” tries to think about ecological disaster in terms of collective responsibility. For me that means thinking about collective identity—a sense of global identity and how to give that voice—and what alienates us from this collectivity, which in turn means thinking through mechanisms of atomization and exploitation historically and concretely. So, I’m trying to map out ideas like primitive accumulation, surplus value and profit accumulation, and racialization, but I’m trying to do it through a collective voice that foregrounds the human body, and each individual body's relationship to other bodies, and the metabolic relationship of our bodies with the environment, which is being destroyed.

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

A: Honestly, this piece is the work I’ve been doing lately. In its entirety, it’s almost a book-length poem, and my writing time has been spent revising it and sending out the book project that contains it. The excerpt is a good fragment of the whole, which works similarly, though it tries to build from laying out the problem of alienation and exploitation to manifesting a solution within collectivity and the forms of revolutionary activity that communality makes possible. So the second half of the poem is hopefully heartening. Your question comes at a good moment, though, since I am starting to think about what I want to write next. I’m not quite sure yet, but I’d like it to center the individual more and the tension between individuality and collectivity, as well as more of the socio-historical concrete that makes up activities like labor organizing and other forms of activism.

Q: What prompted you to aim for something book-length? What was it about this particular piece that pushed you in that direction?

A: This is a great question, because the length of the project is so important to me. When I started this work, I was just writing in response to different texts I was reading: poets like Daniel Borzutzky and Layli Long Soldier, and also Marx and Marxist ecological thinkers like John Bellamy Foster. So everything was initially discrete, but despite reading such different works, everything I was writing was coming out very similarly, and I realized that what I was writing had coherence in that I was exploring how capitalism affects the global body. And doing that meant also exploring how capitalism affects individual bodies, what it means for the experience of labor, and aspects of labor’s organization, including racial hierarchies, as well as trying to capture capitalism’s historical instantiation. So, as I went I was, as Lukács says, trying to totalize, which doesn’t mean I think the book touches on everything, but rather that in its fragments and refractions, it tries to give some sense or aspects of the pattern of the whole.

Q: With a published collection and chapbook under your belt, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work heading?

A: This project is very different from my earlier work. My first book was centered around an “I” that was definitely a persona for myself. The book was very interested in the way that self-identification coheres and fractures in relation to identifications with others, with trauma, and over time. The poems experiment some, with ekphrasis, voice, and form, but they stay firmly within the lyric tradition. My chapbook is composed of entirely formal poems – particularly obsessive forms – and persona poems that try to think through motherhood and childhood, particularly in relation to violence and trauma. These were not about my personal experience, but they were an attempt – on the part of a young woman – to grapple with questions of intergenerational trauma as I contemplated the possibility of parenthood later in life. The chapbook was very influenced by Ai – a very underappreciated poet. I’m very proud of both, but this later work turns fairly completely away from myself as a locus of meaning. My work labor organizing and becoming a mother enters into it -- but I didn’t write from a place of self-exploration but social exploration, which often meant trying to get outside of my own experience as much as possible.

Q: You mention the poet Ai; what was it specifically about their work that sparked your own? And have there been any other poets or works that have been influencing your current directions?

A: Ai wrote over her long poetic career entirely in persona poems. There are a couple of poems that are drawn from her biography, but these are indistinguishable from the others, and this alone is a remarkable experiment in selfhood and voice. She also often enters into the voices of working-class people -- who continue to be under-represented in literature – and also the voices of people who perpetrate violence. Increasingly, I think non-violence is an untenable position in the face of climate catastrophe, racist policing and mass incarceration, and other forms of capitalist exploitation. The slow violence that millions are experiencing daily cannot be met only with non-violent forms of resistance, though those are incredibly important too. Anyway, other poets I’ve been reading recently include Martín Espada, Ch’oe Sūng-ja, Mahmoud Darwish, and Noor Hindi, all writers whose work embodies the spirit of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist resistance. Particularly right now, I find it so important to read Palestinian voices, particularly those that can situate the current Israeli violence in a longer history of oppression.

Q: What role do you think literature holds in such moments, and how do you approach the political through the form of the poem? Do you see poems as witness, as document? As call to action? Or something other/further? How does one write around such topics without looking like a tourist?

A: Yes, bearing witness and calling to action, to arms, in the sense of putting our bodies in service of social transformation. I think that poetry, at its best, does both and illuminates underlying causes, and in doing all of this in a form that can, even for a moment, bring people together, maybe enacts the very kind of collectivism that I think is needed. And yes, this issue of not looking like, or more importantly, not being a tourist, or worse, a settler-colonist (though there is a historical relationship between the two that points to the very problems with being a tourist) is at the center of my struggles with this writing. I’m not sure I always succeed. Particularly in trying to write about exploitation, racism, and the impacts of climate catastrophe, and in doing so thinking about collective identity, and using “we,” which implies an “I” who is representing the voices of others, I have worked to try to avoid appropriation and speaking for others, rather than with them. I do know that the kind of solidarity I’m looking for in the text, and that I think we are all in need of to respond to global catastrophe, cannot be found in expecting people to dissolve their differences in service of some abstract togetherness, nor can it be forged if we don’t see the forms of exploitation and the liberatory potential we share. The poem is about that, so at least I hope in centering that complexity, I avoid the worst pitfalls of “tourism” poetry.

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

A: A lot of poets I’ve mentioned already fall into this category, especially Ai, Daniel Borzutsky, Layli Long Soldier, Martín Espada. I’d put James Wright, Pablo Neruda, Don Mee Choi and Lucille Clifton in that list, so many more. I’ve spent a lot of time in the past few years with the work of nineteenth-century African American poets Paul Laurence Dunbar and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and I think their work and their model for poetry – their real concern for everyday life and its liberatory forces – is going to influence my future writing. And sometimes also I find that the most reenergizing reading I do isn’t poetry but other genres: Marx, Charlie Post, John Bellamy Foster, Thulani Davis, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Hadas Their, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò – all thinkers who help illuminate questions of inequality, race, climate catastrophe – and also novelists like Sembène Ousmane and Emma Donoghue. I’ve been coming back to these two novelists again and again for the way they tell stories of individuals and also societies in motion simultaneously. I’d like my poetry to do that.

TtD supplement #261 : seven questions for Grant Wilkins

Grant Wilkins is an occasional poet, printer and papermaker from Ottawa who has made a practice of doing strange things to other people’s words. He has degrees in History & Classical Civilization and in English, and he likes ink, metal, paper, letters, sounds and words, and combinations thereof.

His poems “Fragments from: Stutters And Space (Recycling Poetry And The Obsolescence Of Language)” and “Becoming (after Stuart Ross, after Paulette Claire Turcotte)” appear in the forty-second issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “Fragments from: Stutters And Space (Recycling Poetry And The Obsolescence Of Language)” and “Becoming (after Stuart Ross, after Paulette Claire Turcotte).”

A: Both of these illustrate my general approach to creative projects, which, in addition to always being processual in some manner, often involves sponging up other people’s good ideas, or glomming onto any interesting figments, fragments, strategies or devices I happen to encounter, and using them as a starting point for something of my own.

To take the second project first, “Becoming” came out of an idea I picked up from Stuart Ross during one of the very cool series of “Razovskyville” livestreams that he made through the first spring/summer of the pandemic.

(I continue to hope that Stuart eventually does more of these – he’s a really engaging guy, and I found his deep dives into poetry and poetics incredibly interesting)

Anyway, somewhere along the way Stuart mentioned this “writing between the lines” strategy – maybe it was a writer’s block solution, or maybe it was an exercise he taught to students, I can’t recall – but the idea was to find a poem you liked, and then write a line or two of your own in between each line of the poem – something that worked with the poem, something that fit structurally, thematically, rhythmically or whatever – and then erase all of the original lines, and use that as a starting point.

I quite liked this idea when I heard it, and filed it away for future reference.

Sometime afterwards, I encountered Paulette Claire Turcotte’s remarkable poetry – first through her chapbook SAID OR said, from the late John C. Goodman’s Trainwreck Press (2021), and then her book What the Dead Want (Ekstasis Editions, 2019), both of which blew me away. After reading through Turcotte’s work a couple of times, I think Stuart’s writing exercise popped into my head simply as an excuse to stay engaged with her poetry for a while longer, to dig a little deeper into it.

Anyway, “Becoming (after Stuart Ross, after Paulette Claire Turcotte)” is my “writing between” take (as opposed to a “reading through” or “writing through”, which are two of my more usual approaches) on Turcotte’s “LEAVING: I” poem from What the Dead Want.

*

I’d describe my “Stutters And Space (Recycling Poetry And The Obsolescence Of Language)” project as the final state of the serial accretion of several different approaches and ideas that ended up getting piled on top of each other in a vaguely geological sort of way.

Originally, it started out as my entry in the 2022 edition of CV2’s 2 Day Poem Contest. My approach to that was to do a rough-and-ready diastic reading-through of the two sources I was using (Margaret Atwood’s The Circle Game and John Dee’s Hieroglyphic Monad), randomize the results, and then use this raw material as the starting point for the contest poem.

I wasn’t crazy about my first take on the poem, and although I tried re-editing the result after the contest was over, I was never very happy with the way that worked out. I really did like the way the raw material I was using worked together though, how it had been configured by my process… so, as with “Becoming”, I stashed it all away for future consideration.

(Although the specifics will vary from project to project, my diastic “reading through” method often results in many pages of text fragments and lines that I’ve sifted out of my source texts, randomized and broken up into blocks.)

Anyway, a while later Chris Turnbull passed along a book of Leslie Scalapino’s poetry & images that she thought I’d be interested in… and she was right: Crowd and not evening or light (O Books, 1992) hit me like a ton of bricks. I loved the fragmentariness of it, the elusiveness, the implied stoppages and silences, and the focus on little shards of often lexically insignificant text.

This general form seemed like a perfect fit for my collection of fragments, so – because I wanted to generate a bunch of short pieces without over-thinking it all, I went through my blocks of sifted text with different coloured pencils, circling, squaring & underlining the different fragments I wanted to use with different poems. After assembling and tweaking these fragments, I ended up with a sequence of a dozen pieces that I thought worked quite well – including the four you’re printing in Touch the Donkey.

After I finished this, I realized that I also really liked the look of the multi-coloured circles and lines on the pages of my sifted-text blocks… so I reprinted the pages in a large type size, redid the lines and shapes in more brightly coloured ink pens, and then went at the blocks with whiteout, removing a fair bit of the text.

The resulting pieces still seemed incomplete somehow, so I dug through some Phyllis Webb poems looking for questions… which I tacked to the bottom of each piece, one question per.

(I was surprised by how few questions Phyllis Webb asks in her poetry)

Anyway, the full “Stutters And Space (Recycling Poetry And The Obsolescence Of Language)” sequence is now a small chapbook manuscript of seven of the text-fragment pieces (like you’re printing in TtD) and seven of the coloured-circle pieces. I like the way it works and looks, though I realize that by adding colour to the equation I’ve made it much less likely that it’s going to find a publisher.

Q: I’m fascinated by the engaged and recombinant collage aspect of these responses. How did you come to reworking such overt engagements with other works? Most writers might be attempting variations on work they admire as a way to think through new ways to approach work, but rarely so overt as “response works” in their pieces as yours. What brought you to working this kind of poem?

A: One strand of this, I think, comes out of the fact that I am exclusively a process poet, and that everything I do necessarily begins with words that I’m not the author of. Depending on the project this can be a text – or a piece of a text – that another writer has written and that I’ve applied some sorting, sifting or transformational process to. Sometimes it will be text that I’ve gathered on my own in some other way – words or lines I’ve seen or heard in passing, signs, menus, headlines, etc. I’m often inclined to think of myself less as a writer and more as an arranger – or maybe a re-arranger – of the work I do and the words I work with.

Although the “Stutters and Space” sequence did end up as an unexpectedly extreme example of serial reprocessing – like a text caught looping back and forth between parthenogenesis and cannibalism – it still ultimately followed the general approach that I first came to through bpNichol’s Translating Translating Apollinaire (Membrane Press, 1979), and from there followed back to John Cage and Jackson Mac Low, and their range of chance, indeterminant and non-intentional forms of writing.

I’ve found Cage and Mac Low’s general approaches particularly appealing, in that they worked to remove – or at least to minimize – the place of the writer’s ego in their work. Ultimately, I’m not a poet who writes from inspiration or aspiration: I don’t have much I'm trying to say as a writer, and except in the broadest aesthetic sense I don’t really have an agenda I’m trying to carry forward.

I – as a subject “I” – don’t need or want to show up in any of my poems. They aren’t about me – they are about whatever ideas, images or meanings my processes and poetics have managed to sort out or shake from the texts I’ve chosen to work with. To quote Cage from his book Silence (Wesleyan University Press, 1961): “I have nothing to say / and I am saying it / and that is poetry / as I need it.”

The other, more prosaic strand to this is that I came to poetry writing after having spent quite a few years focusing on letterpress printing and papermaking – both very physical and very material forms of art-making – and I can see this way of working with poetry as being very much in the same vein. In many respects, the materiality of moving little bits of lead type around in a galley to set an Archibald Lampman sonnet is quite similar to rearranging words and text fragments extracted from a Margaret Atwood poem.

To maybe address your question about “response works” more directly – ultimately, I don’t think I view most of what I do as actually being responses to the writing or the writers I’m engaging with.

(There’s an asterisk here: the “Belonging” piece certainly was a response to Turcotte’s poem – a respectful one, I hope – but it’s also probably the least “processual” thing I’ve written in ages.)

Maybe it’s a matter of semantics, but to my mind, the idea of “response” in this way entails an element of intentional interrogation that I don’t think I’m usually engaging in.

The specifics will vary a lot from project to project, and the results will vary a lot from process to process, but what I think I’m doing is using my process to shake images, ideas and meanings out of texts that were already there – even if just in some atomized state.

In many respects it is, as you noted, a form of collage-making. Depending on the project, I may just let these newly sorted images and sequences stand where they emerge, with not a huge amount of editing – the text of Reading The Great Classics Of Canlit through Book 5 of bpNichol’s The Martyrology (above/ground, 2022) – came out that way, as the result of a straight diastic reading-through of the book, with no intervention to the “index” words and as little as possible to the “wing words” that accompany them.

In contrast, the first “Stutters and Space” sequence involved the reading-through of the Atwood and Dee texts, with the resulting fragments then being thoroughly randomized, resorted, and laid out in blocks of ten lines. I then went through these blocks with an eye to picking out bits and pieces that looked like they’d work with the sense of fragmentariness I was trying to get. After I’d assembled the dozen pieces that came out of this, I did some further editing to both break things up even more, and to smooth things out… with the four pieces in TtD being amongst the final results.

In the end, the two source texts provided a lot of the images and imagery that show up in the final pieces, and the contents of the source texts certainly provide the backbone of both parts of the text of the larger project… but I don’t really see the final result as being a response to either of the original texts or the authors in any useful way. Maybe it’s a reinterpretation, after a fashion, but I don’t think it’s a response.

Q: I know you worked for some time with jwcurry as part of the sound poetry and performance choir Messagio Galore, as well as doing your own solo sound performances. How did the experience of working with curry affect the way you approach your current work? How did your ongoing work with sound affect your current work with text?

A: Certainly, getting involved in curry’s Messagio Galore project (I participated in Messagios # 6, 7 and 8) turned out to be incredibly important to the way that my writing and performance practices have developed, and in the people and ideas I’ve ended up connecting to.

From my perspective, the first one – Messagio # 6 – was the most significant. The idea of me performing – anything – in front of an audience was simply not something that had been on the books before that, so the way that it worked out (with the largely sound-based Messagio performances) opened up avenues for me that I hadn’t thought about before, and that I’m still exploring. I’m never going to be really comfortable in front of an audience – but now I know that there are things I can do and ways I can do them… which helps a lot.

As a performance, Messagio # 6 was wrapped around a multi-voice reading of John Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing.” I’d been aware of Cage before then, but getting to see the other performers working with this text on an almost granular level gave me a huge appreciation for Cage, and led me to further explorations of his work, his ideas and his influence – to the point where now, as already mentioned, he, with Jackson Mac Low and bpNichol, are main anchor points of the literary universe I work in.

The opportunity to interact that closely with the other members of the Messagio group also turned out to be very important to me. Sandra Ridley, Carmel Purkis, Roland Prevost and the late John Lavery were the other members, along with curry, the host/arranger/leader of the project. I already knew everyone involved at the point that we started, but it was still a tremendously enlightening and formative experience getting to see these folks working on the material we were performing up close and personal like that – and Sandra and Carmel in particular have remained important voices in my ear.

Possibly the most important result of my participation in Messagio # 6 is that – as well as leading to my taking part in iterations 7 and 8 – it led directly to an invitation to join in the literary responses that visual artist Michèle Provost commissioned for three of her gallery exhibitions, via Max Middle’s AB Reading Series.

The first of these – ABSTrACTS / RéSuMÉS (http://www.micheleprovost.ca/abstracts) – required me to write poetry in a much more focused and considered way than I had before, and not just as the sporadic experimentation that I’d been doing up ‘til then, which had been largely for my own amusement. In hindsight, it was exactly the motivational kick that I needed, exactly when I needed it, and ultimately, I think, that’s what really got my writing practice going.

In terms of sound and my current work, I am still playing around with sound poetry and with ideas about the making and arranging of sounds. In recent years I’ve also begun to pay much more attention to how the rhythm, rhyme and metre of my non-sound poetry works as well – and have gained a greater appreciation for how these things can inform the way a piece is read on a page, as well as heard. So for me, perhaps belatedly, sound has become relevant textually, as well as sonically, for a lot of what I do.

My experience with sound work has also led to have a finer appreciation of – and an interest in working with – elements of voicing, vocal space and breath… as may or may not be evident in the way the “Stutters and Space” pieces are composed.

Q: With a handful of published chapbooks and journal publications under your belt, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: One significant element in my progression as a poet has been to fully accept the fact that the processual route that I’ve taken in poetry-making – or the mode that I’ve chosen, maybe – is broad enough and allows for work that’s expansive enough that I no longer worry about the fact that I don’t write “real” poetry, in any traditional sense.

I am not, and I was never going to be, the sort of poet who wrote because I was inspired by the sight of a sunset, a snowstorm, or an ancient vase. That whole Wordsworthian “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" thing (recollected in tranquility or not) just doesn’t work for me – I’m never going to be a poet who writes pithy observations about the world as it goes past my window, or who feels compelled to write about my unhappy love affairs, my traumas or my latest meals.

I’m not knocking poets who can do this – good poetry can be written about anything – but I can’t do it: my little brain just isn’t wired that way… and this is something that it actually took me a while to come to grips with.

Fortunately, having initially started writing poetry using very mechanical modes of word, text and sound sorting, I’ve been able to broaden my approach to and my understanding of the notion of processing. Getting into the work of writers like Erín Moure, Caroline Bergvall, M. NourbeSe Philip and Lisa Robertson in more recent years has really helped to expand my thinking about, well, the process of poetic process – and to inform and fill out the model that I first built out of the work of bpNichol, Cage and Mac Low.

Anyway, the more time I spend exploring notions of poetic process the wider and more adaptable this mode of making seems to be… and the happier I am to continue going in this direction.

In terms of where my work is headed… there was a not-yet-fully-formed idea about breath & breathings that came up while I was working on the last stage of the “Stutters and Space” sequence that I think will require further exploration. Of course, I’ve also been feeling like I want to do some more mesostic pieces... which will require a source text/texts and a general approach… I’ve also come to appreciate the potential for collaborative projects… and I’ve also been thinking about the idea of manifestos… So, who knows where I’m going, really?

Q: Do you see yourself attempting larger manuscripts, whether in terms of a larger-scale project, or through assembling certain of your shorter texts into a book-length structure?

A: I do have several projects that have ended up as book length manuscripts, more or less unintentionally. One wasn’t so much a poetry project as it was a faux translational thing, but I do have a poetic response sequence (a response to Michèle Provost’s Roman Feuilleton exhibition (http://www.micheleprovost.ca/roman-feuilleton) that resulted in my going through the alphabet twice, generating 48 pieces running about 70 pages or so. I’ve also used the diastic reading-through approach of my Reading The Great Classics Of Canlit through Book 5 of bpNichol’s The Martyrology chapbook on all but the last book of The Martyrology. Book 9 is giving me trouble because so much of it is musical score, which I haven’t figured out how to handle yet. Once I get that sorted out though, the whole thing will certainly be book length.

Ultimately, I tend to approach my projects as just that – projects – as texts and processes to be combined, as ideas to be worked out, as experiments to be run. I’m not usually thinking about things like length, form or final destination when I’m in that mode – I’m mostly just concerned with whether or not they’ll do something interesting, whether they’ll teach me anything, and whether they’ll be interesting for anyone else to read.

One side effect of this broad approach is that a fair number of my projects end up being awkwardly sized or inconveniently formatted, from the point of view of trying to get them published. It’s not that publication isn’t on my radar when I’m writing – I’m always really happy when something I’ve written finds its way into print – but I tend to see it as something to worry about later, after the thing has been created, and something that will be dependent on the quality of the work – which is what I prefer to work towards.

Having said that, one of the things I’m going to try to do this summer is to finally put some effort into knocking some of these projects into coherent shape, and get them out the door, looking for homes.

Q: You seem to wrestle with calling what you do “poetry” and with the designation of “poet,” so I’m curious as to how you consider what you do. Do you see your work entirely as non-authorial but recombinatorial? At what point does reworking another text turn into authorship? In the context of the kinds of work you’ve been doing, is this sort of naming important?

A: That’s one of those questions, right? Naming and labeling this sort of thing isn’t usually very important… except when sometimes it is.

As I think I implied earlier, it took me a while, but I did eventually to come to grips with the idea that what I am doing is best described by the phrase “writing poetry.”

I realize that this comes off sounding like a tremendously precious bit of head-up-my-assery, but I was – and still am – very much aware of the fact that what I write isn’t in the same ballpark as – and isn’t even really the same sort of thing as – what Sandra Ridley writes, or what you write, or what Sneha Madhavan-Reese writes, or what Stuart Ross writes. There doesn’t really seem to be a better label for it though – or at least not one that wouldn’t always immediately require a long explanation. So, because I’m not interested in making these things more complicated than they need to be, I just kind of uncertainly go along with the idea that yes, OK, this is poetry, which ipso facto tra-la-la-la-la must make me a poet.

To be honest, I expect that a large part of my uncertainty about these labels is simply a hangover from the fact that for the first 15 years or so of my hanging around the edges of the literary world here in Ottawa I didn’t write poetry: for a long time it was entirely normal for me to go to a reading and be the only one – or one of the only ones – in the audience who wasn’t a poet. So maybe this is just me still just trying to convince myself.

Having said all that, the labels “poet” and “poetry” are actually fitting a little better with what I do these days. As I said earlier, the work of Moure, Bergvall, Philip and Robertson have been particularly helpful in showing me new approaches and paradigms, and in giving me new contexts and models through which to view the notion of authorship – poetic or otherwise. Everything I produce still starts with text that I’m not the author of – but the longer I do this the broader my take on what constitutes poetic process becomes, and the more flexibility and nuance I discover in how I can work with texts, and what I can do with or to them.