His poem “Didn’t Work” appears in the forty-eighth issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about “Didn’t Work.”
A: Fear is so different when you’re a kid. It’s so different that I wonder if it shouldn’t be classified as a separate emotion from fear as we feel it in adulthood, if there shouldn’t be a separate word for it. I suppose we say some fears are rational and others are irrational, but I don’t think it’d be fair to discount children and their experiences that way, or to assume that we haven’t just become desensitized to things we were right to fear then. All this is to say I wanted to try and revisit that state in this poem, just how sensorially overwhelming the world is when you’re new to it, how it almost feels made to frighten you. At the same time you’re also new to yourself, your impulses and desires and actions are just as incomprehensible and alien to you as the outside world. I think that’s what I was trying to get at with this one.
Q: How does this poem compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?
A: I’m still plugging away at a draft of a novel, so formally quite different! But in a lot of the work I’ve been doing recently I’ve been interested in setting up the world as operating by strange laws (I mean that mostly in terms of like, laws of nature, but sometimes legal ones also) and forcing characters or subjects to wriggle around navigating them, which is represented a bit here.
Q: Are you finding a difference in your approach to writing now that you’ve a published book under your belt?
A: Knowing I was able to get the first book out, I feel more drawn to long-form projects than ever. It doesn’t feel impossible anymore haha. I’ve participated in a couple workshops since, which are great encouragement for producing one-off pieces like this one. But I really enjoyed the work of making the first book and its concept feel internally consistent in a sustained way, so I want to do more of that, though not with the same style or subject matter.
Q: Have you any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? Have you any particular writers or works at the back of your head as you write?
A: I only just recently got to reading Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald and it’s been in the back of my head ever since. The way time operates in that book, the strangeness of this interrupted and yet not interrupted conversation between two people, memory and its attachments to place, all of that. I love how careful that book is with its absurd element, it’s not trying to be cute with it. I want to emulate that.
Q: I’m fascinated by your use of grids, of space. What prompted your particular engagement with space on the page?
A: I have a love of documents like packing slips, invoices, official mail; these non-artistic ephemera have interesting and sometimes beautiful conventions in terms of their use of the page. I find something funny in the way these documents are often designed for legibility, and how when art is presented in those same shapes it often feels less legible.
Also my dad worked with computers, and we always had computer parts around the house when I was little, and I would stare and stare at these computer chips, with their grid network of roads and endless variety of buildings, and I’d imagine factories and apartment blocks and offices and water towers et cetera.
Also I played around a lot with SketchUp, the 3D modelling software, when I got my first Mac, it must have come with it. I would build these crude cities and fortresses out of extruded cylinders and blocks and then fly through them with the camera. I think from that time on I developed an association with the grid as the starting point of anything.
I could go on!
Q: With a published collection, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work heading?
A: When I started writing it was writing without subject matter. I wanted to select and arrange a lot of pretty words. Writing with no sense of personal or political selfhood. Maturing outside of writing has resulted in the maturation of my writing, surprise, surprise. I hope I continue to grow up but I’m very bad at looking ahead. My plan is to keep working and lift my head after the next project ends and see where I’ve ended up. Right now I’m trying to become a better researcher, that’s something.
Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
A: Robert Hass’ The Essential Haiku is a really useful book to have around. Open to relevant seasonal poem, read, look out of window. Always refreshing. There are books I open up once a year like Plainwater or Invisible Cities or Gravity’s Rainbow. The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat and Swamp Angel by Ethel Wilson are summer reads.
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