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.