TtD supplement #308 : seven questions for Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi

Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi is the author of DISINTEGRATION MADE PLAIN AND EASY (Piżama Press) and THE BOOK OF KANE AND MARGARET (FC2 / UAP)

His poems “magical morning,” “more,” “pillow” and “arrival” appear in the fiftieth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “magical morning,” “more,” “pillow” and “arrival.”

A: These poems are such an odd sampler platter! It feels a bit like someone is holding a tray of mozzarella sticks beside a teacup of ayahuasca beside a prosthetic leg. What an odd meal! Thank you for showing them some love. 

“magical morning” is a speaker trapped with their strange and violent intrusive thoughts. The voice feels masculine to me. I’d say it’s a man witness to another man’s love and admiration of a cat. Why does this unsettle the speaker so? Why is this threatening? Is it because speaker can’t show the same sort of love and affection? Because of his loneliness, isolation? Whatever the case, his mind is off and running, and the first place it goes is grotesque violence. The speaker is not a violent man. Actually, the opposite, even his violent thoughts make him ashamed, make him feel he must make amends for them. But then when he tries to (secretly) compensate for his violent thoughts, his intrusive thoughts become even more wildly violent. So where did the impulses come from originally? Is it something primordial? Something cultural? There’s something strange and scary and also funny about them. 

“more” came from some floating thought, some voice saying something like, “the more you want, the more you have dreamed of in this world, the more you ultimately lose.” Speaker is chasing that idea. Every thought leads to loss. The shepherd loses their sheep. The person with love loses their sixteen souls. To try and touch something leads to being numb and tangled. But then, it’s not an unhealthy mind, at least I don’t think. I think to lose desire, to renounce desire, is unhealthy. So they’re looking to claim their desires, no matter the barbs they’re going to feel. Either path seems a little depressing though, no? 

Oh “pillow” this one is meant to be part of a series. The series starts out with a mother offering some advice, “if you want something done right, you do it yourself.” But then the advice takes a scary turn. The thing I was thinking about here was depictions of post-apocalyptic cannibalism, a mother encouraging her children to go ahead and eat a murdered person’s body. This is a mother who is ride-or-die, fiercely loyal no matter the cost. She is going to put meat on her child’s plate if she has to throw a stone at a neighbor’s head to do it. But in this scenario, the scene is not post-apocalyptic. It’s a child who is caring for a sick man. Still, the mother has the same post-apocalyptic cannibal attitude. “Slice this man’s December off, and get on with your life.” 

“arrival” is maybe my favorite of all these poems. The most personal. I was writing with a lovely person, the nonfiction writer and poet Noam Dorr, at Western Washington University where we work together. He had just brought my family the most delicious sauerkraut in the world. I told him I was working on writing a sort of everyday spell. Something that I could say that would help me cast off the work thoughts that keep spinning long after work is supposed to be over. Something that I could say to help me reorient the mind, remind myself that my day does not begin at work, it really begins when I return home, and I’m back with my family. That was the goal, to say it upon returning home, and have those work thoughts “close like an incomprehensible dream.” And upon getting to the dinner table with my family, greeting the most meaningful part of my life with more humor and energy. So it’s something of an experimental everyday spell I’m trying on myself! I’ll let you know how it goes . . .

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

A: These poems are pretty different in content and vibe (at least I think so) though they were written around the same time. There’s something in all of them about recovering from an unsettling sentiment. Trying to recover. Throwing some ideas at the wall. 

The poems I’ve been writing lately are so oddly populated with creatures. Donkeys and witches and moths and dogsharks and ghoul-headed lambs. I’m not really sure what is happening here. Also a lot of speakers getting lost in a fog or a trance or some foggy woods . . .

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

A: So many folks doing innovative thrilling work at a level higher than I will ever dream or know or achieve. Maria Bamford. Allie Brosh. Raphael Bob-Waksberg. Anne Sexton. Diane Seuss. Tomaž Šalamun. Réka Nyitrai. There are a couple songs that have recently really inspired me. A haunting and beautiful spell-like song by Loma called “Black Willow” And Daniel Norgren’s song that is a dialogue between parent and child, “Why May I Not Go Out and Climb the Trees.” 

Q: I’m curious in how both poems and songs have influenced your work. How important is music in the way you compose lines?

A: It’s such a great question, because I’m sometimes unaware of the way my ear is leading the poem. Ok, what comes to mind for me. I tend to compose a line to be short. They’re sometimes a sort of impulsive declaration. Like a rock coming down hard and fast against a piece of high-carbon steel. Something like a song lyric. Will this shoot sparks or not? One line is trying to hold the heat and light of the previous line, so it’s often using some of the same kindling. Maybe it’s the repetition of a sound. Maybe it’s a slant rhyme. 

I’ll also say that with some poems, I am trying to get back to the joy I had when I was fifteen and playing in a garage band. Hearing what my distorted guitar sounded like striking against / dissolving into another distorted guitar. There is a little of the same impulse there, thinking, what will I sound like today? What if I turn this up really loud?

Q: With your full-length debut, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work heading?

A: I was going to say that these new ones are really weird to me, and I seem to be preoccupied with existential dread and murder and suicide and dreams of horses with big erections. But saying that aloud, I realize, o that’s not weird for me at all. The new visions and obsessions are also the old visions and obsessions. 

One freedom I’ve been feeling though, and again, maybe this is not so new, is I feel a new freedom to let myself leap in and out of the surreal. One moment the vision will seem concrete and tight to me, and then it’s a leap into rabid dog flesh and a head of ash. I’m not sure what this is. As I get older, my old memories feel fuzzier, more dreamlike to me.

Q: Do you see a connection between memory and your engagement with the surreal?

A: Yes, definitely. Sometimes I’m looking to recapture and wander through a feeling I haven’t experienced in a long time. I feel a little bit like the Ghostbusters trying to do this, channel the feeling, bait, it, stand in awe of it, contain it, observe it, almost like I’m trying to put a ghost in the Containment Unit. I guess the equivalent for me is I have to be careful not to let these old feelings run too rampant in my body. I have a gut feeling there’s something dangerous about some of them. 

For example, there’s this old memory I have of sitting in the middle of this grass field at an elementary school I attended. But in the memory I’m older, maybe 19, and I’m waiting in this field for hours, watching the sun go down. And I get kind of scared, because in the back of the school’s grass field, there was a chain-linked fence, the only thing containing some unchecked wildlife back there, not sure, probably just some raccoons? Anyhow, my young brain was a little worried of being near there in the dark. 

When trying to recapture the feeling of being in that dark field, all kinds of strange wildlife emerges in the written work. Sometimes it’s a talking fox with a really large head. Sometimes it’s a moth that’s made of a kind of cream. The line in the poem is something like, “moth mad cream flummoxed under the moon.” 

Ok, I haven’t answered your question very well. I think for me, the connection between memory and the engagement with the surreal is a number of self-destructive thoughts I had, some I still have, and a sort of knowing these thoughts are very natural and unnatural. They feel like a visitation from a creature both very natural and unnatural, like a talking fox or a bit of cream that has taught itself to flap around like a moth.

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

A: I just reread Ben Niespodziany’s book No Farther Than the End of the Street over the summer. Every time I read it, I come out with a new favorite poem. This time, it was his poem “Neighbor” where the characters go to a funeral and the ghost is there, it’s funny and also ominous. Ben is a wonderful friend, person, collaborator, and I’ve asked him to come talk with poetry students I’ve worked with, and I know from talking with him that the reading and creation of poetry is an everyday ritual. When feeling artistically drained I go back to his advice to “read 5 poems in the morning.” Or, “put on a Jon Hopkins song and just start writing.” Or, “find a poem you love and respond to it, line by line.” And I imagine Ben creating poems the way that some folks practice prayer, making time and space for it no matter what. I feel like this energy touches me when I read his book. The poems are short, funny, often strange, surreal, and taste good in mouth if you read them aloud. After I’ve read five of them, I often have the sensation that I’ve refueled. 

O and I just want to say I loved the poems in TOUCH THE DONKEY 50. Especially those by Elena Zhang and Jason Heroux, but really everyone in the issue was inspiring. 

Since becoming a parent, and since getting older, the time and energy to read and write has gotten smaller. But I have found reading with my kids can be highly inspiring and reenergizing. And I love books by Jillian Tamaki, Daniel Handler, Laura Knetzger, Aron Nels Steinke, Raina Telgemeier, Wolf Erlbruch, Kazu Kibuishi, Angela Johnson, Ben Hatke, Mo Willems, Mac Barnett, Dav Pilkey, Roald Dahl, so many more . . .

TtD supplement #307 : seven questions for Eve Luckring

Eve Luckring is the author of Signal to Noise (Ornithopter Press, 2025) and The Tender Between (Ornithopter Press, 2018). She lives in Los Angeles. Ig: @thetenderbetween / BlueSky: @thetenderbetween.bsky.social

Her poems “ENTERING THE FIRST DAY OF FIRST GRADE IN ONE SENTENCE,” “ALMOST SYMMETRIC TANKA,” “WHEN AN ANGEL BECOMES A POEM,” “INSOMNIA” and “AFTER MORANDI” appear in the fiftieth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “ENTERING THE FIRST DAY OF FIRST GRADE IN ONE SENTENCE,” “ALMOST SYMMETRIC TANKA,” “WHEN AN ANGEL BECOMES A POEM,” “INSOMNIA” and “AFTER MORANDI.”

A: Most, if not all, of these poems were drafted several years ago in a writing exchange with my friend John Levy. At the time, I was struggling to shift out of habituated conceptual and metrical patterns that had accumulated from years of writing extremely short (1 to 5 line) poems. Meanwhile we were in the midst of the pandemic and, like so many others, I was overwhelmed by the extraordinary circumstances of loss upon loss, both in my personal and professional life. Being in a rather humorless and disillusioned place, it was a gift to fill the ruts in my ear with John’s lighthearted conversational tone and unobtrusive craftwork. I committed myself to replying as quickly as possible out of respect for the dialogue, even though I was typically less than satisfied with what I had to offer. And since we most often directly responded to what the other had written, there was this curious voice singing back to me through the endless dark allies and dead ends I wandered into. Recently I decided to revisit those earlier sketches because I am once again in a transitional space after finally escorting Signal to Noise into the world, a book that was achingly difficult to write. It’s always fascinating to trace the connective tissue in work over the years.

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

A: At this moment I am mainly scribbling observations, making notes and image sketches, poking around in some inchoate and slippery musings I didn’t have time to fully pursue while working on Signal to Noise. I am in deep listening mode, reading mode, follow-the-glimmer mode— a winged juncture in no hurry to ground. I am beginning to sense a slight stirring in the body that through the years I’ve come to reliably recognize as the creative force of something new; it has a physicality that gradually increases in pressure, demanding more and more focused and disciplined attention until it can start spilling into some kind of tangible and comprehensible form. It takes it own course in its own time.

Q: Is the process of “making notes and image sketches, poking around in some inchoate and slippery musings” the usual way poems, or poem-clusters, or even manuscripts, tend to begin for you? How do you get from such notes and sketches to finished pieces?

A: Individual poems begin in a multitude of ways. Often a line or two or three arrive in the midst of day-to-day encounters or a memory or a dream or while reading and experiencing art made by others. If possible, I follow the impetus right then and there, though more often than not I need to attend to something else in the moment; and so I try to scribble down what I hear and then return to it later (often while walking) to conjure up the initial impulse again and see where it goes. Much of the time it only goes so far before I let it go. For those lines that have staying power it usually takes me several drafts to figure out where they might ultimately lead and then lots of revising to get to a finished piece. For those experiences that feel especially compelling, but hover beyond language, I return to them regularly until the words arrive… or don’t! The bodily sensations I described in my reply to the previous question are related to this “waiting for words” period, as well as the larger process of envisioning a manuscript—I love imagining what can be constructed using the whole of a book as a structural scaffolding. Lately I’m thinking about the particular scale of chapbooks.

Q: Scale in what way?

A: Primarily in terms of length, though there is a broader range of size and shape in published chapbooks which also offers potential to play in different ways with the page.

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

A: Not yet, no. I am roaming right now. When I wrote Signal to Noise, C.D. Wright’s DeepStep Come Shining and Anne Carson’s Plainwater became helpful models in terms of figuring out structure.

Q: With two published collections-to-date, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work heading?

A: I wish I could tell you where my work is heading, rob. I feel such fundamental structural shifts in the larger forces of culture right now that I’m a bit of a deer in the headlights. One thing that’s been on my mind for a long time is the way generative Ai, for about a decade or so now, has been developing its own languages indecipherable to human beings, rendering its behavior beyond our comprehension (and ability to control.) As Ai increasingly explores all the things language can do when it is not tied to “packages of meat walking around on planet earth,” as historian Yuval Hariri puts it, I think even more about how I use language. Since Ai is not sentient (and thus incapable of emotions) Hariri suggests that one of the most important discussions for humans now is to dig deeper into the ongoing question of the relationship between language and feelings; and I would add, between the visceral language of complex emotions and their manifestations in behavior. Poets and philosophers have been exploring this interplay for eons now, so one question to myself is how can I reach further into what I’ve already been investigating. And with Ai’s critical relationship to the surveillance state, I am thinking about the formal structures of camouflage, inscrutability, nonsense, and erraticism. I have no idea how, if at all, this might manifest.

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

A: Currently the writers and artists I’m engaged with/re-visiting include Agha Shahid Ali, Laurie Anderson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Fanny Howe, Layli Long Soldier, Joyelle McSweeney, Ozaki Hōsai, Graciela Iturbide, Cornelia Parker, Noah Purifoy, Doris Salcedo, Dianne Seuss, Richard Siken, Kara Walker…

TtD supplement #306 : seven questions for Jason Heroux

Jason Heroux lives in Kingston, Ontario. His recent poetry collections include Like a Trophy from the Sun, A Further Introduction to Bingo (with Dag T. Straumsvåg), and Unfinished Wilderness (Anvil Press, 2026). He was the Poet Laureate for the City of Kingston from 2019 to 2022.

His poems “Midsummer,” “Memorial Orchard,” “November Email,” “Aubade” and “Eventual Harvest” appear in the fiftieth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “Midsummer,” “Memorial Orchard,” “November Email,” “Aubade” and “Eventual Harvest.”

A: These five poems are part of an upcoming collection, called Unfinished Wilderness and they share a spare, reflective, changeful mood. I like the room in these poems, the spaces between some of the lines. They feel a little incomplete to me, in a good way … ongoing … searching. One of them, “November Email,” is a “found poem” taken from an email from Dag T. Straumsvåg. The “Tom” mentioned in the poem is the American poet Tom Hennen.

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

A: Lately, I’ve been writing a single poem a month, so those poems are usually longer, or multi-layered, or sequences. These five are very minimal and concentrated in comparison. They almost feel like lyrical blueprints, structural framing plans, showing where the poem’s beams are positioned. But it all interconnects in the end. I suppose what I’m writing now is like an addition, an extension, to these earlier plans.

Q: Do you see your writing-to-date as a single, ongoing project, or is this an idea that has been more recently appeared in your work?

A: Yes and no. It feels connected together, looking back. But usually seems pretty disparate and scattered in the moment. It’s a little like the weather. Sun. Rain. Cloud. Snow. Hail. Fog. Different temperatures every day, different conditions, but all part of a single, ongoing ecosystem. 

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

A: I’m always searching for open, patient, curious models of composition. These days, I’m following the Charles Rafferty model of writing, which means spending “a month writing down whatever comes into my head” and then “after a month, I take all these pages and start distilling them down …  whittling a poem out of the mess.” I like having pages and pages of words and phrases to play with. I enjoy the challenge of trying to shape a basket of random ingredients into an associative, harmonious meal.

Q: Does this process feel akin to one of stretching one’s muscles, pushing the boundaries of what might be possible, or one of attempting further into the unconscious? How are you finding this Charles Rafferty approach? Have there been any surprises, or even repetitions?

A: Yes, stretching one’s muscles, becoming more flexible, the ability to reach a little further. My favourite part about the Charles Rafferty approach is how it’s inspiring me to slow down, and be more attentive to associations. Previously, my approach was more impulsive, immediate. If a poem didn’t work, I’d abandon the piece and write a fresh one. Now, if a poem falls flat, I’m curious why, and enjoying tinkering with the ingredients to see what changes. One pleasant surprise is being able to sit at the heart of a poem-in-progress. Many of my earlier poems resembled relay races, with the start of the poem handing the baton to the end of the poem. These days I hear some of the humming from the engine room.

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: My earliest poems consisted of an assembly of images, and trying to capture those images in bold, unexpected ways. I’m not as interested in “capturing images” these days. I’ve noticed a gradual shift over time where my poems have become less of a product and more of a process, and I see that continuing forward. A recent work-in-progress was inspired by two things: a painting from one of my high school teachers, and an exploration of a bilingual English-Swahili phrasebook. In the past, I would’ve written two separate poems for these distinct topics, taking deep vertical dives. Now I prefer mixing things together horizontally, blurring the boundaries, and integrating elements together. It’s the idea of “integration” that fascinates me most 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: So many poetic Superchargers help keep me on the road. Don Domanski comes to mind for his ability to balance the earthly here-and-now with the universal everywhere-and-always. Each of his books, from The Cape Breton Book of the Dead (1975) to the posthumous Fetishes of the Floating World (2015) continue to teach me things. I also return to Mary Ruefle often. I love how her work manages to frame the most everyday human experience into something spectacular. Y.S. Lee once gifted me with a mug displaying the words: What Would Mary Ruefle Do? I drink from it daily. Plus I return to Tomas Transtromer on a regular basis for his clarity and associative leaps. His work has been endlessly regenerative for me, and I can see how the poems in his final collection, The Great Enigma (2004), inspired the five poems appearing in Touch the Donkey. The spare concision. The wounded spirit. The stoic acceptance of the inner mystery of it all.