tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-52184311129843901792024-03-19T06:59:06.098-04:00Touch the Donkeyrob mclennanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07958889643637765864noreply@blogger.comBlogger314125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5218431112984390179.post-35656704349780795582024-03-08T10:00:00.029-05:002024-03-08T10:00:00.143-05:00Touch the Donkey : tenth anniversary sale,<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7PfhhQudkWde1syMm4D_g5NyJvfBRFQ2iDro8KmbZKZLuHAv0Vpwifa22_mHwzcW_Cu2FeXDLRUSG_RXTg_Ak_OE2KT0DDON_tny1nTF2VFrFnumGTi54Gy3LkPqNrqAFYygVFXXIF1lQj7Ea4_rSbfNnPn58B5wZpLN8LVnMsFMwQ-AYNEaeRFms8pRm/s551/touch%20the%20donkey%20tenth%20anniversary%20colour.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="370" data-original-width="551" height="273" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7PfhhQudkWde1syMm4D_g5NyJvfBRFQ2iDro8KmbZKZLuHAv0Vpwifa22_mHwzcW_Cu2FeXDLRUSG_RXTg_Ak_OE2KT0DDON_tny1nTF2VFrFnumGTi54Gy3LkPqNrqAFYygVFXXIF1lQj7Ea4_rSbfNnPn58B5wZpLN8LVnMsFMwQ-AYNEaeRFms8pRm/w406-h273/touch%20the%20donkey%20tenth%20anniversary%20colour.png" width="406" /></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;">To celebrate the <b>tenth anniversary</b> of the quarterly <b><i>Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal]</i></b>: <b>anyone who subscribes (or resubscribes) anytime between now and the end of April 2024 has the bonus option of three (3) items: three <i>Touch the Donkey </i>back issues of your choice, OR three above/ground press (2023 or 2024) titles of your choice (while supplies last) OR any combination thereof.</b><br /><br /><b>OR:</b> <b>copies of ten (10) different back issues for $50</b> / <b>copies of five (5) different back issues for $25</b> / <b>copies of twenty different back issues for $100</b> / while supplies last on individual issues, naturally / add $5 for US orders ; add $10 for international orders,<br /><br /><b>Issue #41 of <i>Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal] </i>(a slightly larger issue than usual) lands on April 15, 2024: with new work by Julie Carr, rob mclennan, Pattie McCarthy, ryan fitzpatrick, Conyer Clayton, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Amanda Earl, Gil McElroy and John Barlow.</b><br /><br /><b>2023-2024 above/ground press titles include chapbooks by: </b>Sacha Archer, Dale Tracy, Melissa Eleftherion, Kyle Flemmer, Saba Pakdel, Katie Ebbitt, Amanda Deutch, Phil Hall + Steven Ross Smith, Peter Myers, Terri Witek, Pete Smith, russell carisse, Micah Ballard, Clint Burnham, Angela Caporaso, Cary Fagan, Blunt Research Group, Gary Barwin, Lydia Unsworth, Kyla Houbolt, Zane Koss, Ben Robinson, Colin Dardis, Aaron Tucker, Adriana Oniță, Julie Carr + rob mclennan, Stephen Collis, Rae Armantrout, Jason Christie, Nikki Reimer, Noah Berlatsky, Miranda Mellis, MLA Chernoff, Marita Dachsel, Report from the fitzpatrick Society, Kevin Stebner, Meghan Kemp-Gee, Gil McElroy, Robert van Vliet, Stephen Cain, Geoffrey Olsen, Heather Cadsby, Evan Williams, Grant Wilkins, nina jane drystek, Sophia Magliocca, Jennifer Baker, Karen Massey, rob mclennan, Jérôme Melançon, Monty Reid, Jamie Hilder, George Bowering + Artie Gold, Ryan Stearne, Brad Vogler, Andrew Gorin, <i>Report from the Pirie Society</i>, Julia Drescher, Ken Norris, Joseph Donato, Samuel Ace, Stuart Ross, Leesa Dean, <i>Report from the Reimer Society</i>, Jessi MacEachern, <i>G U E S T [a journal of guest editors] </i>#26, Jordan Davis, <i>The Peter F Yacht Club</i> #32 : 2023 VERSeFest Special, <i>Report from the Smith Society</i>, Nick Chhoeun, Ben Jahn, William Vallières, Report from the Iijima Society, Derek Beaulieu, Isabel Sobral Campos, Mark Scroggins, Laura Walker, <i>Report from the Trivedi Society</i>, Nathanael O'Reilly, Lindsey Webb, Jason Heroux and Barbara Henning.<br /><br /><b>Touch the Donkey: Canadian subscriptions $35 for five issues / American subscriptions $40 / International subscriptions $50 / All prices in Canadian dollars /</b><br /><br />To order, e-transfer or PayPal at at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at <b><a href="http://www.robmclennan.blogspot.com">www.robmclennan.blogspot.com</a></b> or <b><a href="http://www.touchthedonkey.blogspot.com">www.touchthedonkey.blogspot.com</a></b><br /><br /><a href="https://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2023/10/aboveground-press-2024-subscriptions.html" target="_blank">Issues are also available as part of the above/ground press annual subscription</a>.<br /><br />Because everybody loves a birthday. Who doesn’t love a birthday?<br /><br />Touch the Donkey. Everywhere you want to be.<br /></span><br /><p></p>rob mclennanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07958889643637765864noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5218431112984390179.post-50041455959509232092024-02-26T10:00:00.000-05:002024-02-26T10:46:36.804-05:00TtD supplement #257 : seven questions for Terri Witek<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVGjxay0qPzHZHufh7nqWiRoDZlhVkDCfTYwGZbeqfLY8JgmM-T2TwzEWbvq7a31cWyHGB4NXKtH-bHo9eaq_ed6HjQaXf9Acv3Vxwzd7h48NHHg5-GnO5UPG_WRs_RxeY8lO4OiItmvg5eFalb867Lc9rINXHub9GUFh-kckrT3w5BQ4FlxoscUq1SnTv/s4032/IMG_7191.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="303" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVGjxay0qPzHZHufh7nqWiRoDZlhVkDCfTYwGZbeqfLY8JgmM-T2TwzEWbvq7a31cWyHGB4NXKtH-bHo9eaq_ed6HjQaXf9Acv3Vxwzd7h48NHHg5-GnO5UPG_WRs_RxeY8lO4OiItmvg5eFalb867Lc9rINXHub9GUFh-kckrT3w5BQ4FlxoscUq1SnTv/w403-h303/IMG_7191.JPG" width="403" /></a></div><b><a href="https://terriwitek.com/" target="_blank">Terri Witek</a></b> is the author of 8 previous full-length books of poems and many chapbooks: the most recent, <i><a href="https://www.anhingapress.org/poetry/somethings-missing-in-this-museum-by-terri-witek?category=Van%20K.%20Brock%20Series" target="_blank">Something’s Missing in This Museum</a></i>, was published by Anhinga Press in 2023, with another, <i>DOWN WATER STREET</i>, imminent from above/ground press. <i><a href="https://terriwitek.com/work/exit-island/" target="_blank">Exit Island</a></i> was a Florida Book Award medalist; <i><a href="https://terriwitek.com/books/the-rape-kit/" target="_blank">The Rape Kit</a></i> was the Slope Editions Prize 2018 winner, judged by Dawn Lundy Martin. Martin calls <i>The Rape Kit </i>“a grand success, the best we’ll get. Fresh, relevant, and heartbreaking” and “a fire in the throat of a culture that has no appropriate language for rape and its aftermath…”<br /><br />Witek’s visual poetics work is featured in <i><a href="https://www.timglaset.com/produktsida/judith-women-making-visual-poetry" target="_blank">JUDITH: Women Making Visual Poetry</a></i> (2021), and in the <a href="https://www.arteidolia.com/waave-global-gallery-women-asemic-artists-and-visual-poets/" target="_blank">WAAVe Global Gallery of Women’s Asemic Writing and Visual Poetry</a> (2021) as well as in arts venues. The poet’s collaborations with Brazilian visual artist Cyriaco Lopes (<a href="http://cyriacolopes.com">cyriacolopes.com</a>) have, since 2005, been shown nationally and internationally: in New York, Seoul, Miami, Lisbon, Valencia (Spain) and Rio de Janeiro. The duo have been represented by The Liminal gallery in Valencia: their most recent collaboration was featured at ARCO, Madrid (2023) where the Liminal won special jury mention. Since 2011, collaborations with new media artist Matt Roberts (<a href="http://mattroberts.com">mattroberts.com</a>) often use augmented reality technology and have been featured in Matanza (Colombia), Lisbon, Glasgow, Vancouver, and Miami. Recent collaborative work with poet Amaranth Borsuk loops the pandemic and the eco-crisis as a crisis of rain and smoke between worlds; that with weaver Paula Damm combines text/textile. Individual and collaborative work has been featured in a wide variety of text venues, including <i>Fence</i>, <i>The Colorado Review</i>, <i>Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review</i>, <i>American Poetry Review</i>, <i>Poetry</i>,<i> Slate</i>, <i>Hudson Review</i>, <i>Lana Turner</i>, <i>The New Republic</i>, and many other journals and anthologies. <br /><br />With Cyriaco Lopes, Witek team-teaches Poetry in the Expanded Field in Stetson University’s low-residency MFA of the Americas; they also run The Fernando Pessoa Game as faculty in the summer Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon. Witek holds the university’s Sullivan Chair in Creative Writing and is the recipient of both the McInery Award and the John Hague Award for teaching. <a href="http://terriwitek.com">terriwitek.com</a><br /><br />Her poems “Foot Sons,” “Cash Sons,” “Package Sons,” “Insider Suns” and “Wreck Sons” appear in the fortieth issue of <i>Touch the Donkey</i>.<br /><br />Q: Tell me about the poems “Foot Sons,” “Cash Sons,” “Package Sons,” “Insider Suns” and “Wreck Sons.”<br /><br />A: First of all, thanks for bringing these “double son” poems into space and air, rob! You are really a nexus of interesting people and poems, and I’m happy to have somehow found my way into your company. <br /><br />Anyone from a big Catholic family like mine knows about multiples—the clothes handed through years of siblings, the matched sets, the confusion with names. As a parent of two very cute small girls (and older kids too), I’m sure you too marvel at how by pairing —as with any ‘rhyme’—you are seduced by similarity into the pleasure of proliferating differences: how could these two things have sprung from the same dna—of language or people?<br /><br />In my case, putting dead son and live son into the same poems lets a pair remix in perhaps the way my own children’s DNA stays in my body. In my book <i>BODY SWITCH</i> one dead boy (the suicide) is stiff and hieratic: I needed a more fun dead sib to liven things up. That one critiques various wars on boys. But here by bringing the live son and dead son into parity—at the beach, in a taxi, etc. they both can be on the move—they get to talk, to disagree, to slant their eyes at me in similar fashion. It was a relief and a great pleasure to write these poems. I am happy to be the one in the back seat digging in a purse for the right change.<br /><br />And technically, of course, multiples offer a way to make motion when you have as little narrative skill as I have. That we all stay on the move (even if dead, even in disaster) offers a brief equity, too.<br /><br />Q: How do these poems compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?<br /><br />A: Thanks for asking this. I have been sorting the double sons into a larger universe and while I started off thinking the kids would stay together, now I’m weaving three different kinds of poems into the mix. One group steps down into tombs as I did last summer with visual artist Cyriaco Lopes in Etruscan Italy (especially Tarquinia): those poems are tiny. Little skinny steps. The third group are 14-liners about the future, spurred by a student’s anguished question. Weirdly these different modes seem to tolerate glancing against/touching noses with each other so far—now I call them all tomb pombs.<br /><br />But really that's just one thing. Cyriaco and I are longterm collaborators and we are currently making little text-image combos to drop into the ad section of my local weekly newspaper—we’re sending each other 5 images then adding /altering each other’s images with text. Amaranth Borsuk and I are just starting to try a video collab that stands next to our dystopian ms<i> W / \ SH</i>, which you were kind to include part of in your chap series. And Cyriaco and I have 2 new little vids, one made with Urayoán Noel at our winter MFA residency—we hardly slept! <br /><br />I’d have to have a bigger cloud for an eye to say exactly what all these have to do with the double sons, but my sense is that like these dear friends, the double sons somehow work as collaborators too. <br /><br />Q: What first brought you to working these collaborations? And what do you find possible with collaborative work that might not have been possible otherwise? How do you see your collaborative efforts, as well, affecting your solo work?<br /><br />A: When I was 4 and my family had just moved into a new house, a boy (also 4!) showed up at the door and asked my mom if the little girl inside could come out and play. His dad was a roofer, and we walked down an alley to a huge pile of sand. Eventually a garage door opened to rolls of tarpaper/stacks of shingles. All much taller than we were. I was like “what IS this stuff?” That’s one of the joys of collaboration—weird materialities beckon. Plus the combo of intimacy and practicality that’s often the best part of any relationship. Plus miracles, as when I met Cyriaco in Central Florida for the first time and confessed (very hesistantly) to writing about Ariadne and he said—I’VE JUST BEEN TO HER HOUSE. He was still tan from Knossos! <br /><br />I’m from a small school in a small town and hanging out with the arts people is definitely my mo. When Katie Baczeski said ‘interact with an animal/not a domestic one’ I ended up thinking about eggs and Clarice Lispector. Not at all on my daily planner. Videoing chickens eating a line from Clarice in seed corn (<i>egg, you are perfect</i>) was such a joy, and the solo book that followed, <i>THE RATTLE EGG</i>, let me turn my lone hometown strolls into something else. I’m forever grateful.<br /><br />Because Cyriaco and I team-teach in the MFA of the Americas, which we helped found, make gallery shows and interactive work that lives in floating locales, we’ve had some wonderful times. When our gallerist Pablo Vindel, featured our work with another duplo at ARCO in Madrid last year it was surreal (did the king and queen really stop by?) But smaller moments really show how collabs weave into/make lives and are just as terrific: here’s a shot from a new thing we call <i>WOVEN</i>. We were considering doing something else in this black box theater at Atlantic Center for the Arts but then one hand in my studio/closet hit ribbon...<br /><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLwS27ntwqqWdK2EqTor64DnPMZBFId1lX0jsBav45r9KRP9rB9glWsTWfMDmZohEiD5UEarc1f_FpRuMENXGJVdhJXBFm-sl9TLTGdeyw-41YmU3_eFORsaPR7vdqIjOCiityTuuwjC6BKSl1Ummk5cyk1D6m2RiR-ZUemc79zk6FnxWJX38EGm-Xocr9/s1920/thumbnail_DSC_2083.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1277" data-original-width="1920" height="357" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLwS27ntwqqWdK2EqTor64DnPMZBFId1lX0jsBav45r9KRP9rB9glWsTWfMDmZohEiD5UEarc1f_FpRuMENXGJVdhJXBFm-sl9TLTGdeyw-41YmU3_eFORsaPR7vdqIjOCiityTuuwjC6BKSl1Ummk5cyk1D6m2RiR-ZUemc79zk6FnxWJX38EGm-Xocr9/w536-h357/thumbnail_DSC_2083.jpg" width="536" /></a></div><p>Q: I’m fascinated by the way you utilize writing as but one element of larger projects, incorporating textiles, movement, collaboration. You make it all sound natural and easy, but have there been directions you’ve wished to go with materials that haven’t quite worked yet? What are those material boundaries that have, as yet, you’ve been hitting against?<br /><br />A: hahaha. Well, I haven’t been able to work the margins for <i>DOWN WATER STREET</i>, my next project with you: literally the end words I need are threatening to fall off the side of the known world! But this is the sort of thing I never work out alone, thank goodness. Mark Strand once said in a workshop that style is a matter of our limitations: that’s been a comfort as well as an actual accurate description. Materially, my skillset is very limited—don’t draw, not good at sewing, don’t cook etc. So if it's bad I just quit—like the time for some reason I brought turmeric in a bowl to what turned out to be a computer-based project (<i>Breathe the Machine</i>). Usually I wander around looking at things until something occurs to me from what the world is handing out that day. I inherited all the slides from the art dept, for example—just didn’t feel right to consign them to a dumpster. Had no idea what to do with them until I was walking around outside and began lifting one overhead. Those slidesky social media drops were lockdown gifts. Do things resist my getting close? Probably, if I thought that way—but I am not interested in mastery of stuff—more like I like noting their different beings. Meantime, it seems pertinent I run up against actually being lost quite often: last month, on my own street, which was something. So I guess I really don’t know the direction I want to go! <br /><br />Q: So perhaps this question is moot, then: with more than a dozen books and chapbooks to your credit, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work heading?<br /><br />A: Oh not moot! I feel the wind at my back and so much ambition! I do think I’m getting closer to what seemed the next move when I started writing “about” art ekphrastically: that I need to get into the paint somehow. Currently that means I’m trying to make powerpoint poetics that seem their own thing, for instance (not explanatory/not decorative). Usually I’m figuring out something as an art form because it’s so there—like seeing marks for water lines on my street. I’ve really been wondering about different forms of mark-making, too; the false doors painted into Etruscan tombs that look like TT. Not sure if these thoughts have an afterlife. But I do feel as if some new work is ahead, like a shadow the sun will shift soon (I hope!) and make.<br /> <br />Community-wise, I’d like to keep growing into poetry’s expanded field with people who know different things and are happy to throw in together and not worry too much about definitions. My students definitely are great tosser-outers and includers—very bracing! And I’ve had great examples from different spaces—shout out to the visual poetics people who picked me up somehow—Dona Mayoora, Amanda Earl, Kristine Snodgrass, Andrew Brenza, Joakim Norling, Francisco Aprile, Nicola Winborn and all who presented irresistible opportunities even though I’m never quite in the same room. My expanded field MFA poetry faculty colleagues like Jena Osman, Ronaldo Wilson, La Tasha N Nevada Diggs, Laura Mullen, Urayoán Noel and Vidhu Aggarwal (and guests like Amaranth Borsuk, Erica Baum, Tracie Morris, Johnny Damm, Brenda Hillman, Edgar Heap of Birds) all commit firmly to the messy future. I hope to be smart and kind like them and stay face forward. <br /><br />Personally, I’d love to be included in more installations—installing is so fascinating—and exhibitions, especially international ones. I loved writing in pencil on a gallery wall. I’d love a publication homebase too. I know where I’m penciled in to be as a person this year but where my work is actually headed “we shall see,” as mom used to say with half-threat, half-relish. I got married at 19 and had 3 kids by 25, so from that point on my life has pretty much been a matter of necessity+chance and walking through painted doors. I had fun making titles for my new future poems, though:<br /></p><blockquote>The Future Won't Calm Us<br />The Future Makes a Little Money<br />The Future Will Not Be a Known Language</blockquote>Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?<br /><br />A: I’m going to take reading as seeing too, as I tangle them. I always open Lispector and Perec and Pessoa and Dickinson (also Howe’s <i>GORGEOUS NOTHINGS</i> showing how what Dickinson wrote on changes everything). Yoko Ono and NH Pritchard. I loved Auden early and that remains. A wooden postcard by Jenny Holzer and paper ones by Ian Hamilton Finlay—these are propped or pinned around. Things people in my family wrote out as children: <i>I CAN BAKE PANCAKES</i> or a crooked list of paint sample hues (Golden Plumeria, Bee Yellow, Icy Lemonade). The sampler my many times great-grandmother sewed without a Q in 1839.<br /><br /><p></p>rob mclennanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07958889643637765864noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5218431112984390179.post-47612752873418529282024-02-08T10:00:00.031-05:002024-02-08T10:16:45.029-05:00TtD supplement #256 : seven questions for Michael Harman<p><b></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLyi92k6xDoEP-vEKa2qmMJGmlOs3YsEwLpLrah3HpZJsIhdYGpARexpim0kTbIy4GQPuP3Y4t_sGZ3nVBpNi7GjqC1hS6hsU3373MKAMdt5fIwLzC67ZTKEjbr4ybExYVwUvBCkSS8NpyqQ1I3CGraIzYQDeBeZQnWeUgKPhyphenhyphent1tjPbojALwhsuoang-m/s4032/IMG_7189.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="312" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLyi92k6xDoEP-vEKa2qmMJGmlOs3YsEwLpLrah3HpZJsIhdYGpARexpim0kTbIy4GQPuP3Y4t_sGZ3nVBpNi7GjqC1hS6hsU3373MKAMdt5fIwLzC67ZTKEjbr4ybExYVwUvBCkSS8NpyqQ1I3CGraIzYQDeBeZQnWeUgKPhyphenhyphent1tjPbojALwhsuoang-m/w416-h312/IMG_7189.JPG" width="416" /></a></b></div><b>Michael Harman</b> lives in Toronto, where he works as a plumbing apprentice and dedicated writer. Beginning with the discovery of modern poets like Stein, Williams, Zukofsky, Harman’s poetry developed alongside a small group of writers, under the tutelage of Michael Boughn & Victor Coleman. His writing in its present state seeks to marry the alliterative flamboyance of Middle English poetry with the innovations of Oulipian, Found, and other constrained methods of composition. His work has been published in <i>Echolocation</i>, <i>Dispatches from the Poetry Wars</i>, <i>COUGH</i>, and <i>Touch the Donkey</i>. His first chapbook, <i>Brittlestars</i> (2016), was published by Shuffaloff/Eternal Network, and subsequent full-length projects arrived as <i>FIRE</i> (2018, Press Press Press), and <i><a href="https://www.spuytenduyvil.net/pearl.html" target="_blank">Pearl</a></i> (2020, Spuyten Duyvil). His most recent book is <i>Plumbing Techniques</i>, which will be published in 2024 by Spuyten Duyvil Press.<br /><br />An excerpt of his “Plumbing Techniques” appears in the fortieth issue of<i> Touch the Donkey</i>.<br /><br />Q: Tell me about “Plumbing Techniques.”<br /><br />A: <i>Plumbing Techniques</i> is my most recent book of poetry. It documents in dramatic fashion my time in trade school, and uses a form of found text writing where each poem is limited to the vocabulary of 1-4 pages from a source text: most often Thoreau’s <i>Walden</i>. I was reading it when I began school, and its sermons resonated with my own reasoning for trying a trade – (he often proposes something like, if you’re a ‘book’ person, you should probably set down the <i>Iliad </i>and go hoe some beans, ... and vice versa). <br /><br />I chose Plumbing because it is by far the best word of the different trades. And “plumbing techniques”, the name of the program I entered, was a natural name for the book I wanted to write. <br /><br />The first poem was an emphatic response to my Nana asking why I wanted (would want) to be a plumber. From there I wrote out the excitement and fear of my first semester in this new world. I tried in my adventures to play the parts of both Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, at times unabashedly grandiose, and at others deeply humbled, subdued. I praised things that I thought deserved immense praise, and playfully teased what I felt needed teasing. <br /><br />Q: How do these poems compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?<br /><br />A: The Serial poems (larger projects) I’ve written have a special feeling to them, and the writing that happens there is markedly different. Usually for me it starts with finding a new method or interaction with the line that becomes in itself the kind of “subject” of the poems. Gestating between these special periods, I try to read more, and write as a means of keeping the muscle warm, often toying around with Oulipian and other constrained forms. Lately I’ve made some playful poems out of novel instances at my job; (I had fun detailing the carnage of my first sewage ejector pit). But overall I’ve never really connected with occasional poems, and only seem to do my best when I have the momentum of a serial propelling me. I think this is reflective of the poets I admire, and have learned from. <br /><br />As far as comparing<i> Plumbing Techniques</i> to the other books I’ve completed – they relate in the general way that they’ve all used a specific method unique to each, and they’ve all been projects of transformation.<br /><br />Q: The binary of the serial/occasional poem sits very much in the Jack Spicer vein; what first brought you to the serial poem, and what do you feel is possible through the form that wouldn’t be otherwise?<br /><br />A: As far as where I got the serial from: when I was 19 I met Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman, at a time when the bpNichol writers group was humming and producing a lot of really interesting poetry. The older writers there shaped my poetics. <br /><br />Part of the induction was, of course, giving me the writers I love; Spicer was big for me early on, bpNichol, Ginsberg and Williams – and most of what pulsed around the Black Mountain and Berkley circles. Later it was Duncan, Stein, Jack Clarke, HD, Zukofsky, Marianne Moore, Whitman ... I don’t want to get too off track – but most of these poets wrote in a serial way; or, at least, each poem was part of a greater opus. The poets I was around drew from all these writers, and combined their sounds with emergent formal innovations. So “serial poetry” is what I grew up around as a writer.<br /><br />The second part of the question ... I can try to give a provisional answer, but I sense lingering the very difficult question of “what is poetry”, which only poetry can properly answer.<br /><br />Something that jumps to my mind is the idea of a poet as someone who sort of waits around for a bolt of inspiration (a special occasion) to hit them; the poet as someone who takes comprehensible feelings and ideas (that could be relayed in conventional speech) and spins them into unnecessarily complicated, fanciful abstractions. It's the erroneousness of the simile that Williams addresses in <i>Spring and All</i>; or Spicer hits with his enigmatic “Not for their Significance. For their Significant”; or Clarke, “I have created the creative.” In short, poetry is not second hand, secondary, or representational. And that, I guess, is, at its worst, what I take the occasional poem to be: aftermath and lifeless. <br /><br />I guess then the serial is, for me, poetry’s proper form. It takes poetry as a Life’s work. – that’s a spiritual answer. Maybe historically speaking it’s the evolution of the narrative poem.<br /><br />Q: I’ve long been fascinated by that group that Coleman and Boughn led. How did you get involved, and who else was around for those sessions?<br /><br />A: I was in Mike’s class at UfT and showed an interest in poetry, though I didn’t really read much, and only wrote teenager-y poems. He was kind enough to bring me in one evening. At first what I heard read there was alien and mesmerizing. I wanted to be a part of it more than anything, so I started reading and writing poetry fervently. I dropped out of school the next year to delve into my new vocation.<br /><br />There were lots of great people and artists there, some of whom I’m still in touch with – but in terms of the poetry – it was Brad Shubat, Emily Izsak, Oliver Cusimano, David Peter Clarke (and Mike and Vic, of course) whose poems I was in the most immediate contact with, and who I tried most to emulate.<br /><br />Q: With a couple of chapbook and book-length publications under your belt, as well as your current work-in-progress, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?<br /><br />A: It’s taken a long time, but at this point I feel like I have my own tuning and sound; and being able, in my projects, to sink into that sound feels about as good and truthful as anything. One noteworthy change since my early twenties is that I don’t feel I try any longer to be philosophical as a poet (though many of my idols are). I notice also, especially in <i>Plumbing Techniques</i>, that drama and silliness are a big part of my natural voice. I could go into things that have changed aesthetically, but in short I’ve just gotten better. <br /><br />My reading of poetry keeps going backwards in time, so while I always return to my 20th Century roots, I’ve been really fascinated with ME poetry, and would like to write something longer than what I’ve done before. But generally, going forward, I just want to write the most beautiful thing that I can, and keep growing as a person.<br /><br />Q: You mention a handful of contemporaries from the bpNichol writers group: are there any other contemporaries that have influenced the ways in which you think about writing, or approach your own work?<br /><br />A: As far as contemporary poets go, I really haven’t encountered anything locally or popularly that compares to the writers I mentioned. And, as naive as it may sound, I'm not sure I will. <br /><br />As far as influences, my favourite books always feel contemporary in a romantic way, and close friends who bring out your best voice are invaluable. Then there are people whose poetry comes in another form: comedians, musicians, athletes. I’m happy to take what they do analogically. Most recently, I watched my plumbing mentor dismantle an old radiator valve. That influenced how I think about writing.<br /><br />Q: Perhaps, then, this question is moot, but who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?<br /><br />A: Off the top of my head: H.D.’s <i>Trilogy</i>, <i>Moby Dick</i>, Shakespeare, Jack Clarke’s<i> In the Analogy</i>, Duncan’s <i>After the War</i>, (recently) Marianne Moore’s <i>The Fish</i>, Mina Loy’s <i>Song for Joannes</i>, lots of Ivan Illich, and anyone and everyone I mentioned above. And Ralph Waldo Emerson, always. <br />It’s not a particularly surprising list, but it’s who I love. <br /><br />I do really want to mention Zukofsky’s Catullus translation. It’s immaculate, and so much fun to read.<br /><br /><p></p>rob mclennanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07958889643637765864noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5218431112984390179.post-81117932034830198132024-01-15T10:00:00.008-05:002024-01-15T10:00:00.137-05:00Touch the Donkey : fortieth issue,<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWCtkVObiibyVH-oNOeaKCTybXO_8cB60KfCiqUBLrFn00g-M2HGL5JhJgUJpCoUWL-J3-xIve5zgGmv4ptC8HILGd2inYzddjBcct21rokT6JmW5EmvIZJNR-bqOKFO7vmT8_0ZCLUnls/s1600/touch+the+donkey+logo.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="784" data-original-width="1600" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWCtkVObiibyVH-oNOeaKCTybXO_8cB60KfCiqUBLrFn00g-M2HGL5JhJgUJpCoUWL-J3-xIve5zgGmv4ptC8HILGd2inYzddjBcct21rokT6JmW5EmvIZJNR-bqOKFO7vmT8_0ZCLUnls/s400/touch+the+donkey+logo.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p>
<span style="font-size: large;">The fortieth issue is now available, with new poems by Ryan Eckes, Dennis Cooley, Michael Harman, Terri Witek and Laynie Browne.</span><br />
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</form>rob mclennanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07958889643637765864noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5218431112984390179.post-90091946537552194262023-12-26T10:00:00.024-05:002023-12-26T12:36:16.450-05:00TtD supplement #255 : seven questions for Alana Solin <p><b></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi98-xgd3bb6fY8BeVaV0S1NVsgVb5Rt_0hw-6QhqtzT84nw7KMIf53J_HLS5l4qAqKSpCPOMzs4Atjnyui6BPUj1QGww-KYETnClR_-34mE9qpSpO4xMoYaZmyaTWllH42CGX6F5HJqC9dYExQxkUXVrQRAE0Cm25ZWGSs-MZ9H49Qf_rmdibo3eCKL_jF/s4032/IMG_5784.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="284" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi98-xgd3bb6fY8BeVaV0S1NVsgVb5Rt_0hw-6QhqtzT84nw7KMIf53J_HLS5l4qAqKSpCPOMzs4Atjnyui6BPUj1QGww-KYETnClR_-34mE9qpSpO4xMoYaZmyaTWllH42CGX6F5HJqC9dYExQxkUXVrQRAE0Cm25ZWGSs-MZ9H49Qf_rmdibo3eCKL_jF/w378-h284/IMG_5784.JPG" width="378" /></a></b></div><b>Alana Solin</b> is a writer and collage artist from New Jersey. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in <i>Afternoon Visitor</i>, <i>TAGVVERK</i>, <i>Dusie</i>, <i>Annulet</i>, <i>Second Factory</i>, <i>Tyger Quarterly</i>, and elsewhere. You can find more of her work at <a href="http://alanasol.in">alanasol.in</a>.<br /><br />Her poems “WRACKS CONCLUSIVE,” “RED,” “SUM” and “CELADON” appear in the thirty-ninth issue of <i>Touch the Donkey</i>.<br /><br />Q: Tell me about the poems “WRACKS CONCLUSIVE,” “RED,” “SUM” and “CELADON.”<br /><br />A: I wrote “WRACKS CONCLUSIVE” following sound mainly, but it cohered into a poem about feeling isolated from the past and unable to decipher the future. “CELADON” feels similar, a speaker glassed in and immobilized, watching other objects transform. “RED” I think is about shame. “SUM” is drawn from a number of different unfinished poems, and I think the edges show in it. “WRACKS CONCLUSIVE” and “CELADON” are more or less the same as they were when I first wrote them, while I’ve tried to write “RED” and “SUM” a number of ways.<br /><br />Q: How do these poems compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?<br /><br />A: Removing line breaks allowed me freedom from the emphases that short lines impose. I could rely on rhythm to create structure and not worry about structures outside of rhythm that would require its rearrangement. I think these poems are similar to my other poems in that they are all quite short. I admire long poems and hope to get there one day, but I haven’t figured out how to sustain anything for longer than a page. When I edit, I tend to add little and remove lots.<br /><br />These poems are from a period of time last year when I felt unable to write anything but prose poems, something I hadn’t tried previously. Now, once again, I can’t get away from line breaks. Prose poems are harder to escape from because they are coiled and serpentine, but the escape feels more crucial; in my prose poems I always feel like I’m probing for a way out, while my more recent poems don’t feel so concerned with that process. Maybe line breaks are gimmicks because they lead the reader so specifically, but maybe I need gimmicks or at least want them. Maybe line breaks help a poem imitate speech, and maybe I like to give that guidance. Or prose poems started to feel shuttered, and fumbling for exits started to get tiring. <br /><br />Q: Do you really see such a stark difference between the prose poem and utilizing the line break? What first brought you to the prose poem?<br /><br />A: I think Elizabeth Willis’s collection <i>Meteoric Flowers </i>led me to prose poems. I’ve seen and written them before, but that book was a turning point for me. I was inspired by the jumps in her poems, the logic she engineers, and the stateliness of the form. By stateliness I guess I mean they felt so put-together and whole. I’ve only been writing poems with enjambment lately; that’s just how they’ve come. <br /><br />Q: How do poems usually begin for you? Are your poems self-contained pieces that might eventually cluster into groups, or are you deliberately attempting something more interconnected?<br /><br />A: Pretty often, I construct my poems from bits cut from my other poems. If I like a line but it doesn’t work where it is, I’ll remove it and try to write a poem around it. I take a lot of notes in a lot of TextEdit documents, so I’ll go back through years of those, trying to find bits I can repurpose.<br /><br />I usually don’t set out with the intention of writing a group of poems. I was writing the prose poems for a little while before it became clear to me that something about the form led to something in the voice that linked them into a series. They feel like landscapes compared to other poems of mine that feel more like gesture drawings; maybe it’s just the form tricking my eye, but they feel like they have more of a backdrop.<br /><br />Q: With a handful of poems published in journals over the past while, how do you feel your work has evolved? What do you see your work heading towards?<br /><br />A: My output has flagged in the past year. Sometimes I’ll go two or three months without writing a poem. That habit, which I fight with varying levels of success, makes it difficult to track my writing’s evolution because I feel like I’m always starting from scratch. I’ve just come out of a long quiet phase, and my writing recently has mirrored my older work in some ways; I’m still cutting any word that I suspect of weakness. I think my poems are still recognizably mine. But I’ve noticed that my rhythm has become almost robotic and my tone almost sullen, thanks to an emphasis on weaker syllables/sounds. At first I was put off because I felt like I’d lost dexterity, but now I’m trying to stick with this impulse and see where it brings me. I don’t know where I’m going with my writing, but I’d like to have the stamina to write longer pieces or even a book-length poem. Doing so still feels out of reach, though. I often return to old notes and diary entries when I write, trying to recycle material that hasn’t worked for me before. So while I’m sure my writing is evolving, the path I’m taking feels circular.<br /><br />Q: You mention Elizabeth Willis’ <i>Meteoric Flowers</i>. Are there any other poets or collections you’ve read recently that have sparked your attention?<br /><br />A: I’ve recently been returning this book that a student loaned me in the spring called <i>We Lack in Equipment & Control</i> by Jennifer H. Fortin. It’s fixed on the month of February and meets this cold temporal gridlock with steely vulnerability and dark humor. I’ve been very slowly reading Susan Howe’s<i> My Emily Dickinson</i>. I think a lot of it goes right through me in terms of meaning, so I’m reading it more for the experience.<br /><br />Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?<br /><br />A: Cedar Sigo is a writer I’ll always return to; I think particularly<i> Stranger in Town </i>and<i> Selected Writings</i>. I like reading Bunny Rogers’ tumblr. Susan Howe’s <i>Debths</i> and now <i>That This</i>. And reading my friends always makes me want to write.<br /><br /><p></p>rob mclennanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07958889643637765864noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5218431112984390179.post-11232742393943831512023-12-18T10:00:00.011-05:002023-12-22T16:35:34.265-05:00TtD supplement #254 : seven questions for Anselm Berrigan<p><b></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9hWApldOVuadn8QyKkMbk-94gADIsx4tVDDLNeq_wJ0avb7QwidOiOoP7kYdOq5W9bKvXz8U5v4aN9wiNZvfv4I7-uABFms4mxuLutz2DIxWk0ltI_XjQHVpsR9kqryxM8_ojKr1GGNrSKc75u2Wr0iChlwVl976xTmun9nWAcL9UsUHhV9q8Huh0arlk/s4032/IMG_5783.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9hWApldOVuadn8QyKkMbk-94gADIsx4tVDDLNeq_wJ0avb7QwidOiOoP7kYdOq5W9bKvXz8U5v4aN9wiNZvfv4I7-uABFms4mxuLutz2DIxWk0ltI_XjQHVpsR9kqryxM8_ojKr1GGNrSKc75u2Wr0iChlwVl976xTmun9nWAcL9UsUHhV9q8Huh0arlk/w451-h338/IMG_5783.JPG" width="451" /></a></b></div><b><a href="https://twitter.com/wystandoll?lang=en" target="_blank">Anselm Berrigan’s</a></b> books of poems include <a href="https://vagabondpress.net/products/anselm-berrigan-pregrets" target="_blank"><i>Pregrets</i></a>, <i><a href="https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9781890311438/primitive-state.aspx" target="_blank">Primitive State</a></i>, <a href="https://www.wavepoetry.com/products/come-in-alone" target="_blank"><i>Come In Alone</i></a>, and others. He is the poetry editor for the <i><a href="https://brooklynrail.org/" target="_blank">Brooklyn Rail</a></i>, and also hosts the Rail’s online Wednesday afternoon reading series. <br /><br />His poems “*****,” “Binge Better,” “Theories of Influence,” “Poem written during a zoom meeting” and “Still Here” appear in the thirty-ninth issue of <i>Touch the Donkey</i>.<br /><br />Q: Tell me about the poems ““*****,” “Binge Better,” “Theories of Influence,” “Poem written during a zoom meeting” and “Still Here.”<br /><br />A: They're a strange brew to me. "Binge Better" was written on a nyc subway not too long after some time I got to spend in Kenya at a kind of roving student-based but somehow international open mic bussing from situation to situation -- and then I'm on the train heading to one of my jobs thinking about pigeons and zebras as my affinities. The other poems are a little harder to talk about, or type about -- I think because the writing of Binge Better and the present in Binge Better are overlapped in a state of active remembering as writing. The other poems aren't so conducive to me to locating as writing so exactly.<br /><br />Q: How do these poems compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?<br /><br />A: “Still Here” is maybe close to some of what I’ve been able to write lately. I was in a lot of arthritis-based pain the last few years, and was able to have a surgery done in May that helped alleviate a lot of that pain. Then I had a burst of writing – none of which I’ve typed up – that I think “Still Here” maybe made room for – treating an impulse as a lead and following it and letting things get said then leaving it alone.<br /><br />Q: When you say “leave it alone,” are you suggesting not typing up those particular pieces, but allowing them to inform some of what followed?<br /><br />A: Yeah. Not never typing them up, but waiting a good long while, and reading them frequently, including at readings if one arises. I’ll do some shaping around the edges when I type things up, if needed, but I seem to wait longer and longer to get to the typing. “Binge Better” is not an example of that. I wrote that one in 2017. “Still Here” was written this past February.<br /><br />Q: Do your pieces usually emerge from handwritten first drafts? And what kind of distance exists between those handwritten first drafts and the eventual finished poem?<br /><br />A: I write almost everything by hand. And then I wait a long time to type things up. Waiting makes me change things less. And now I believe I get it in the writing. But that’s after millions of years of fucking around with every micro-bit of space and sound.<br /><br />Q: With a small mound of published titles over the years, including your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work headed?<br /><br />A. On some level I’m just glad to get to write at all – I wrote a ton in 2020 during the first half-year of the pandemic, and then went blank for 2021 and most of 2022. Getting back around to very up on the surface experience and reconnection with friendship as a core has been what’s happening on one level. On another, maybe, I think I did a lot of work in the last ten years to really stretch my relationship to language – it’s resulted in books like <i>Pregrets</i> and <i>Come In Alone</i>, the former a set of slabs, very dense, and written in relation to painting and sculpture compositionally (not ekphrastically), and the latter a run of rectangles written out at the end of the page, clause by clause and totally on the outskirts of sense. That anyone reads these things amazes me sometimes, though I do aim for pleasure for readers on the sonic beat, which sometimes means people have to hear the work out loud to feel like they can get into it. I don’t mind living with that, but I am finding myself in this other kind of autobiographical space lately that feels like a dance between memory and temperament, with the present pressing the issue of being present, if that makes sense. <br /><br />I've been thinking lately about this good-hearted teacher I had in 5th and 6th grades who also very cruelly abused me emotionally after my father died in the summer between those two grades. I think I really stopped trusting teachers after that, and it’s almost bizarre to me right now to know I became a teacher after all of that. I’m saying this because I think maybe I’m working up to write either out of or back into that experience or both. I had this other really disturbing experience a couple years ago, where a student ended a thesis performance by pulling out a big toy gun, finding me in the audience, and unloading it. Everyone seemed to assume I was in on this, and so mostly didn’t react other than with applause. It was the culmination of a lot failure – institutional first and foremost, but also a kind of collapse of trust in the face of the pandemic that just seemed to infect all of us in that particular program. I just this summer wrote a poem called “Fake Assasinated” that tries to get into it a little bit, though it’s a just a drop in the ocean. <br /><br />Also, I had to have my right hip replaced this past May after discovering I was severely arthritic – I thought maybe I had a muscle injury that never healed properly, but once I had the diagnosis things seemed to get worse pretty fast. I feel like I had a six-month crash course on living with a disability, and doing that in a big city – walking hurt every step, and I had to rely on a cane and make it to work and so forth. Now the arthritis pain is gone, and I’m in better shape and figuring out what this ceramic hip I have has to say to me. So I’m saying all of this because I think my writing has changed in tenor since the surgery, and I’m still trying to figure that out. I can’t see that far into the future, writing-wise, and this is not meant to be a mournful preface (I am borrowing “mournful preface” from Fred Moten’s interview in his book B. Jenkins). The ongoing experience of renewal and decay is one of the lines I seem to be walking.<br /><br />Q: It does sound as though you’ve experienced an enormous amount of shifts over the past few years, which can’t help but affect the tone of the writing. Do you consider yourself a different kind of writer now, or are you working similarly with a variation on approach? Or does it all come down to tone?<br /><br />A: I feel freer. That may not make the work read as very different, but the whole experience of writing and making work does feel different in me. I don't have the measure of what I’m doing.<br /><br />Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?<br /><br />A: That’s a harder question to answer, for me, than maybe it should be, because I don’t ever feel like I can stay on top of reading everything I might like to be reading. That’s probably because reading is a big part of my jobs as part-time teacher and part-time editor. And then I always feel behind on those things. Plus when I don’t or do feel pressure I read real dorky things like comic book message boards, fantasy baseball chats, and plot summaries of shows I think I’d like but don’t want to take the time to watch. <br /><br />I’ve read Harryette Mullen’s book-length poem “Muse & Drudge” aloud in writing classes – group readings, where everyone reads a page at a time as we go around – maybe thirty or forty times over the past twenty years, so that has to be imprinted on me. Actually just read it again yesterday with a class of poets. And Kevin Davies’ long poem “Karnal Bunt” I’ve probably read a couple dozen times, and read aloud with groups too. <br /><br />In order to work through this internal agonistic space that had to do with approaching my father’s age when he died, back in 2019, I used Frank O’Hara’s poem “Joe’s Jacket” as a model for a poem I was asked to write for a performance series – we were asked to consider the word “proof” but with no particular constraints. So I decided I’d try to start by listing some things I knew to be true but couldn’t prove, and was able to get to some places and say some things. I love “Joe’s Jacket”. <br /><br />But I love a lot of poems, and I think I get energy from those poems whether I’m thinking about them or not, because they’re permanently with me. There’s a poem by Hoa Nguyen that she's never put in a book that has become, like, my best secret friend. I think about individual poems that way much more often than books, which makes me wonder if we don’t have the role of books all wrong somehow. I just got to hear Dana Ward sing, with his band The Actual Fuck, live in Cincinnati, and that was completely amazing and inspiring. I am, in fact, quite capable of being inspired. And I’m sort of saving Dana’s long poem “Typing Wild Speech” to reread a little later this fall. <br /><br />And all that said, I have been tremendously energized by a bunch of new books that I’ve gotten to read in the last few years – books by Claire Hong, Charles Theonia, Courtney Bush, Chime Lama, Claire de Voogd, Kendra Sullivan, Jed Munson, Tse Hao Guang, LaTasha Diggs, Cliff Fyman, Ari Lisner, and George Albon, in particular. I’m leaving some stuff out. My old friend John Coletti has a new publication out – it’s called <i>Attachment Simply</i> – and it’s unbelievably great. I have a new book in the works, that will come out next year – it’s called <i>Don’t Forget to Love Me</i> – and it has sections, and one of those sections is called “John Coletti Imitation Racket”. So that should tell you something.<br /><br /><p></p>rob mclennanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07958889643637765864noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5218431112984390179.post-10326792348246187072023-11-29T10:00:00.040-05:002023-11-29T10:00:00.127-05:00 TtD supplement #253 : seven questions for Dessa Bayrock<p><b></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9IPDMlEdtN8-xYWaN6XarL7usyMHUIFLCfVJlLdqD92CZNgYqZOErNyp8706UI2CorGamS_WmwiNsnsfkB0UDfrxzm6UqG0WhMnl29Aye575YG-1YVQ2T4McvwSwOVhsyWoSmo_YI-lFS87kzKqXlMkPMOt8fW6lJyPpDlJQMaV1Z2v7YjTmWy_dSj3RS/s4032/IMG_5782.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="325" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9IPDMlEdtN8-xYWaN6XarL7usyMHUIFLCfVJlLdqD92CZNgYqZOErNyp8706UI2CorGamS_WmwiNsnsfkB0UDfrxzm6UqG0WhMnl29Aye575YG-1YVQ2T4McvwSwOVhsyWoSmo_YI-lFS87kzKqXlMkPMOt8fW6lJyPpDlJQMaV1Z2v7YjTmWy_dSj3RS/w433-h325/IMG_5782.JPG" width="433" /></a></b></div><b>Dessa Bayrock</b> lives in Ottawa with two cats, one of whom is very loud and almost always nearby. She ran post ghost press for two years and has published three chapbooks: <a href="https://ghostcitypress.com/2019-summer-microchap-series-1/is-it-about-ruins-and-ghosts" target="_blank"><i>IS IT ABOUT RUINS AND GHOSTS?</i></a>, <i>The Trick to Feeling Safe at Home</i>, and <i>Worry & Fuck</i>. She recently completed a doctorate about Canadian literary awards. You can find her, or at least more about her, at <a href="http://dessabayrock.com">dessabayrock.com</a>, or at <a href="https://www.instagram.com/dessayo/?hl=en" target="_blank">@dessayo on Instagram</a>.<br /><br />Her poem “Winter Poem” appears in the thirty-ninth issue of <i>Touch the Donkey</i>.<br /><br />Q: Tell me about “Winter Poem.”<br /><br />A: Years ago I read a post online from a stranger that said something like <i>I beg you to find ways of marking time that do not rely on the calendar, which link you more deeply to the natural world</i>. It said something like <i>notice the way the trees and flowers respond to the changing seasons. Mark the patterns of birds floating north for the summer and south for the winter</i>. I chewed this idea over and over and to be honest I'm still chewing on it, but I've come to the conclusion that this stranger was describing a kind of personal almanac, which is an idea that really appealed to me. After all, I've always been interested in the idea of time as a palimpsest, with every year laying over the previous one. Sometimes these layers allow things to leak through; sometimes it's like jam soaking into the edges of a book, and sometimes it's more like a greased piece of paper through which I can see the shifting figures and shadows of my previous years as I overlap them. <br /><br />All this to say: one of my favourite additions to my personal almanac is my habit of writing a new year's poem, which happens at a funny kind of crossroads: the year turns over, according to the calendar, but the season is hitting its stride in earnest. It's a strange little intersection where the season says <i>I'm only just hitting my peak </i>while the calendar says <i>we are starting something new</i>. It's a continuation; it's an interruption. It's an interesting time to write a poem. <br /><br />As with most of my poems, many parts of this are metaphorical but also quite literal, and specifically the central image of the boots: at the beginning of the season, I broke the zipper on my heavy duty winter boots and also ripped open the side seam on my traditional autumn / early winter Blundstones. Both went to the cobbler, who lost them for months, and in the meantime I had nothing to wear on my feet. I spent the first half of the winter in three different pairs of borrowed boots, each of which failed me in their own way: I wore a hole through the bottom of the first pair, slipped around in the too-big second pair and had a dramatic fall that I think fractured something in my elbow, and the third pair fit well and stayed water-tight but had absolutely no insulation, and I froze my feet over and over again every time I stepped outside. <br /><br />Winter has never been my favourite season; I hate feeling trapped inside when the weather is bad, and I forget to eat, and every year I have at least one major slip and fall that leaves me gasping breathlessly up at the sky like a beached fish. Writing this poem was a way to write out all the ways the season was trying to trip me up, to rip me up, and all the ways I was still, nevertheless, relentlessly moving forward. And sure, it's not all good; spring means the revelation of everything that's been rotting under the snow before it means flowers. I guess I tried to write this poem in a way that felt sympathetic to winter, that tried to relate the season back in a way that winter would recognize — but also in a way that felt hopeful in a way that winter rarely does, to me. It feels a bit like a compromise, I guess — the same way that new year's seems to be a compromise between the season ramping up and the year ending. <br /><br />When I wrote this poem, it felt like it had been the hardest winter of my life. And it had been — but it was a winter before Covid, and several winters in lockdown showed me how much more difficult and strange a winter season could be. All the same, in all the hard winters I've experienced since, this poem has felt a bit like a loving road map from my past self.<i> See? </i>She says. <i>Spring always comes. And sooner or later the cobbler will find your boots in the back of the shop and call you to pick them up.</i><br /><br />Q: How does this poem compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?<br /><br />A: This poem is honestly one of my favourites from the last few years — a piece that feels pretty representative of what I try to do in my poems, and what I’ve been trying to do for a while, which is namely: unlock the universal through the specific. Sometimes, as I said above, this makes them much more literal than figurative, and I know this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea — I once got a rejection from a well-known Canadian literary mag that basically (and kindly) said: have you tried being less literal? And yeah, I have, and I don’t like it. My favourite poems have always had a clear narrative path, a reliance moreso on simile than metaphor or other abstract imagery, and take on a kind of “braided” form where a central image spins out into several different paths before coming back together at the end. I like my poems to feel conversational, and honest, and this poem accomplishes that goal in a way that I, personally, find satisfying. Which in the end is what I think poetry has to be: first and foremost for myself, and whether or not other people like it is up to them.<br /><br />Q: What first drew you to this kind of conversational approach? And what do you feel might be possible through this that might not be otherwise, say, if you were “less literal”?<br /><br />A: I first started thinking and working in this conversational approach because of Kayla Czaga, whose poems are likewise conversational narratives in a way. I was immediately struck – and immediately in love with – the way that she inserts the names of real people from her life into her poems, which seemed to unlock something for me. I’d read poems for ages where poets would reference someone they knew but obscure the name, in a <i>Poem for A___</i> kind of way. For a long time I respected that utility, but seeing the way that Czaga ignored it or defied it broke things open for me: <i>You don’t have to obscure or hide from the reader. </i>I use this kind of conversational narrative approach to build intimacy, leaning into the idea of telling a story rather than building literary impressions the reader is left to interpret themselves. I think it’s important, maybe now more than ever, to show the reader that the poet is a real person on the other side of the poem. Poems aren’t just thought experiments or art created in a vacuum – they’re moments in time that have been pressed between waxed paper like flowers so they can be saved, seen from all angles, studied, remembered. And, like Czaga, I now use the real names of my friends (with permission!) when they appear in my poems. The poem wouldn’t exist without them, so why would I hide it? It feels like another way of being open with the reader and coming to them in good faith: <i>listen, I’m telling you the truth here, as best as I can</i>. There are other places where truth becomes foggy in poems – but there’s no need to invent places for that to happen. I think it’s stronger if it happens naturally.<br /><br />Q: You mention Kayla Czaga: have you any other models for this kind of work?<br /><br />A: Ada Limón comes to mind; Sabrina Benaim maybe, although she plays with space on the page much more than I do; Chloe N. Clark, although the worlds of her poems are often a little unsettling rather than the more straight-forward worlds of my poems.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />A: My first chapbook (<i>IS IT ABOUT RUINS AND GHOSTS?</i>, Ghost City Press 2019) is still very dear to me, but feels very representative of my poetry when I was just starting out – like Conyer Clayton’s <i>but the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves</i>, those poems were a way to reckon with the jungle of literal nightmares that descended every night for almost two years. When I return to these poems, I’m struck – especially given what we’ve been talking about – about my use of <i>you</i> in these poems -- a figure that the reader slips into, but a slippery you that refers to six or seven different people throughout the chapbook. I don’t use anyone’s name, except in the acknowledgements, which feels like a way of creating distance between me and the reader. <i>You can't know what I’m talking about for sure</i>, these poems tell the reader, as though to pass the confusion of my nightmares onto them. I still use <i>you </i>in a fair number of poems – but for quite some time now it has meant me, as though I’m writing a poem to myself. (Which, to be fair, I usually am.) So this is an interesting evolution, to me – instead of using you to create distance (<i>I’m over here and you are over there and you don’t even know who you are</i>), I’ve started using you to create intimacy (<i>You, by which I mean me, by which I invite you into me, because we are the same, and here is what we are feeling</i>). <br /><br />In some ways these poems feel tentative to me, even as they feel fierce – I was pushing into new ways of writing in response to these nightmares, but also felt like challenging them on the page was giving them more power. Poems felt then to me like songs in a musical: a necessary expression of something that refused to be curtailed by mere dialogue alone. These poems say: <i>I have something to write about and I don’t know what it is just yet</i>. They feel a bit like dumping a tote bag on a table and saying <i>does anyone see my keys in here? </i>I think that’s valid, and that’s useful to some extent, but now I’m looking forward to how I might imagine poetic projects differently. I’m in the early stages of formulating a project on a theme that I can trace through others’ works and through historical records and wrestle with in different modes of writing and thinking, kind of in the vein of <i>A Pillow Book</i> by Suzanne Buffam, which feels like a meaningful and interesting way of levelling up my work. Poems responding to the poet’s own emotions can only go so far, I think – it’s time to find other frameworks and ideas to build into.<br /><br />Q: While you do reference “songs in a musical,” I wonder about the music of your lyric, even within the first-person conversational. How aware are you, if at all, of sound and flow and music as you write?<br /><br />A: Oh, yes. Very aware! I generally draft quickly, and try not to be precious about line length or flow or things like internal rhyme, but once I start editing it’s all about the flow of a piece – any story has a good flow. I read my poems out loud over and over and over again while I’m working on them, trying to make sure it<i> sounds</i> the way I want. I have a pretty good sense of meter, or at least I think I do, because I come from a background of sonnet-writing; sonnets were all I wrote for years and years and years, deadly formal, iambic pentameter, the whole nine yards. There’s something so beautifully insistent about the flow of a sonnet, about the math and structure of it, and while my poems now are decidedly less formal I really try to retain that sensibility of rhythm and flow. Sometimes I’ll work on a poem for ages, and it looks great on the page – but it gets stuck in my mouth when I try to read it out. So back in the box it goes until I can make it line up with my sense of what it<i> should</i> be.<br /><br />Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?<br /><br />A: A poem I turn to over and over and over again is the first poem in Tara-Michelle Ziniuk’s collection <i>Whatever, Iceberg</i>, which is called “What if love existed but you didn’t have your notification settings turned on?”. It’s basically just a series of playful questions which take on a kind of urgency as the poem progresses, as the questions become rephrased, as the meaning of the poem both develops and devolves. The last stanza goes: <i>If a relationship happened but one party fell off the face of the earth? Was the earth love? Was falling? Was soil? Was traffic? Was a plane? Was a face? Was your face love? It was to me. </i><br /><br />That last four-word statement is the only non-question in the poem, and I cried abruptly when I first read it, the same way your body knows to immediately physiologically shoot out exactly two tears from each eye when you get your nose pierced. Although TMZ writes a more abstract narrative in this poem than I would, there’s something so beautifully shifting about its colours and impressions. And then that last line – whew. Like watching dancers whirling across a stage and suddenly, beautifully all stop in the same moment. Finally you can see the image – but also the image has disappeared, because the true image was its motion. I think this poem is exactly like that. I think a lot of good art is like that.<br /><br /><p></p>rob mclennanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07958889643637765864noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5218431112984390179.post-64106160047586479412023-11-21T10:00:00.013-05:002023-11-21T10:20:20.649-05:00TtD supplement #252 : seven questions for Andy Weaver<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirGPWljVOshl-dtdNduKT61nBkiiuHFn5J1V0YIWyiAygAFGiWZEcLHd6_PbMfLvB46pNJ7MccN6oZBzTWavqrDCsZUDVO4iMyIGFqofE38bnkl8j1ETaujMnXFWdAaKjm5y0Ujw46a1L6L82YtAXZgAlR4v5VQG-pP9wMDZ_4WP4BbxbvFPOo7lgctvkh/s4032/IMG_5782.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="310" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirGPWljVOshl-dtdNduKT61nBkiiuHFn5J1V0YIWyiAygAFGiWZEcLHd6_PbMfLvB46pNJ7MccN6oZBzTWavqrDCsZUDVO4iMyIGFqofE38bnkl8j1ETaujMnXFWdAaKjm5y0Ujw46a1L6L82YtAXZgAlR4v5VQG-pP9wMDZ_4WP4BbxbvFPOo7lgctvkh/w414-h310/IMG_5782.JPG" width="414" /></a></div><p><b><a href="https://twitter.com/andyweaver71" target="_blank">Andy Weaver’s</a> </b>fourth book of poetry, <i>The Loom</i>, is forthcoming from the University of Calgary Press. Recent publications are the chapbooks<i> <a href="http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2021/12/new-from-aboveground-press-soi-by-andy.html" target="_blank">So/I</a></i> (above/ground; longlisted for the 2022 Nelson Ball Prize) and <a href="https://ryanfitzpatrick.ca/modelpress/" target="_blank"><i>Ligament/Ligature</i> </a>(Model Press). He teaches creative writing, contemporary poetry, and poetics at York University.<br /><br />His poems “Still,” “Earworms and Eye Rhymes” and “The Language of Obsolescence” appear in the thirty-ninth issue of <i>Touch the Donkey</i>.<br /><br />Q: Tell me about the poems “Still,” “Earworms and Eye Rhymes” and “The Language of Obsolescence.”<br /><br />A: These three poems come from my forthcoming book, <i>The Loom</i> (U of Calgary Press), which is comprised of three long poems about becoming a father and raising two sons. These poems are from the third poem, “The Bridge,” which is written to/about my youngest son. Like many of the parts of the poems, these pieces meditate on the interrelationship of language and experience in relation to love, parenting, and identity.<br /><br />Q: How do these poems compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?<br /><br />A: I’ve been working over the last 7-8 years to reconnect more to lyric poetry. Starting out back in the 1990s, I was trained almost exclusively in lyric poetry. Then grad school exploded my understanding of poetry and I became really interested in experimental poetry. Over the years since, my work had moved away from lyric to a pretty abstract investigation of language and other abstractions—my third book, This, went pretty far in this direction. I’ve been working to move back closer to the lyric. At the same time, I’m not very comfortable with writing lyric poetry, and I find that discomfort interesting and productive. So these poems are part of my recent attempt to be more lyrical but without trusting all that much in the lyric I.<br /><br />Q: What is it about writing lyric that makes you uncomfortable? And if you are uncomfortable, why not simply move into another direction entirely?<br /><br />A: Lyric poetry doesn’t have to foreground the I, and it doesn’t have to be a veiled discussion of the writer’s personality/opinion—but I think it still often does both. I tend to like poetry that foregrounds ideas and investigation over emotions and certainty, and I generally think that the world has had enough of white straight men writing about the life of being a straight white man. So, the challenge of writing about the experience of becoming a parent was, for me, about trying to write something that was generalized and intellectualized but not completely abstract or cold. At first, the project wasn’t going to be lyric at all, but the poems were too dry and emotionless, so the lyric provided an access point back to emotion and actuality that the poems needed—but I have been trying to make sure that the poems don’t give in to emotion or personal actuality too much.<br /><br />Q: Do you have any models for the kind of work you’re attempting?<br /><br />A: When I first started the project, my guiding principle was trying to write something that combined John Ashbery and Robert Duncan—Ashbery’s refusal to really discuss anything directly with Duncan’s political interest and open use of his life (Duncan is my favourite poet, but I tend to like his politics and wordplay—his mysticism can go too far for me). The last few years, I’ve been reading a lot of Ann Lauterbach and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and I like how they write what I think of as meditative poems that never really say what they are meditating on. I think they manage to do that more deftly than I can—for better or worse, I find that I need to have some central idea or concern or experience to function as a kind of central spoke that structures the piece. For these poems, it’s parenting, love, and language.<br /><br />Q: When I was first thinking overtly of composing parenting poems, I drew on work by poets such as Margaret Christakos, Pattie McCarthy, Rachel Zucker and Farid Matuk, among others. Have you any specific models for this kind of work?<br /><br />A: I’ve read Christakos, McCarthy, and Zucker, but I didn’t have specific models. Originally, I thought of the poems as meditations on a specific type of love, rather than specifically parenting poems; I still tend to think of them that way, though there ended up being a lot more specifically “parenting” moments included than I expected there would be.<br /><br />Q: You present the impression that you compose poems, and poetry manuscripts, as full-length projects. How did you land at this particular approach?<br /><br />A: My last few projects have been book-length in scope, yes. At first, it was a challenge I set myself, to see if I could do it (the result was my third book, <i>This</i>), and I liked the opportunity to keep looking at an idea or issue from multiple perspectives.<i> The Loom</i> presented itself because I had kids, and I was fascinated by them but also by the change to myself and to my worldview by becoming a parent. Since that book has been completed a few years ago, I've mostly gone back to smaller poems that work individually.<br /><br />Q: With three published books and another forthcoming, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work headed?<br /><br />A: I'm really not that sure how I’ve progressed as a writer. I’ve definitely progressed as a reader of poetry—I read much more widely now than I did years ago, and I hope that breadth has complicated my own writing and keeps it from settling into easy patterns. I think the lyric/experimental divide that has been in my work from the start is still there. I’d like to work to at least partially bridge that divide and find a more successful middle ground that incorporates aspects of both. At the same time, I also still want to write pieces that are more firmly one or the other. I have a few longer projects that are in progress, so I hope those will continue well. For the moment, at least, I like that I don’t really know how to categorize my writing. <br /><br />Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?<br /><br />A: In my day job, I tend to focus on Black Mountain, especially Duncan, Creeley, Olson, and Cage. Those four seem to stay evergreen to me. I also love H.D., and perhaps surprisingly, Pablo Neruda. <br /><br />I like to read Dianne Seuss, Maureen N. McLane, Jordan Abel, Erin Mouré, Dionne Brand. More recently, I’ve been going back multiple times to dip in and out of Helen Hajnoczky’s <i>Frost and Pollen</i> and Nicole Markotic’s <i>After Beowulf</i>, both of which are just confusingly excellent. But when my own writing is stalled, I tend to head to philosophy and literary criticism to kickstart my brain and get it back to focusing on language and its possibilities. <br /><br /></p>rob mclennanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07958889643637765864noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5218431112984390179.post-17231130206992238142023-11-13T10:00:00.032-05:002023-11-13T10:07:18.894-05:00TtD supplement #251 : six questions for Robyn Schelenz<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiubisS-wbalDdlTAamaRSq_NW3gWHA8erM2lkdSI1i02Z8_m86UhEy7IYf_ypZ7lyyJ2utF_FPbGK9lwoNNyeaZBj0bocsikDqw9g8mAa9vI8SJUZh6LWiKPbQ3lsPeuzbIwMwuLawULqI4UqBIZSF4mWTFC9seP1lbJa7l9dxc5rXuMpGmUz1lCR4wWOh/s4032/IMG_5781.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="297" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiubisS-wbalDdlTAamaRSq_NW3gWHA8erM2lkdSI1i02Z8_m86UhEy7IYf_ypZ7lyyJ2utF_FPbGK9lwoNNyeaZBj0bocsikDqw9g8mAa9vI8SJUZh6LWiKPbQ3lsPeuzbIwMwuLawULqI4UqBIZSF4mWTFC9seP1lbJa7l9dxc5rXuMpGmUz1lCR4wWOh/w396-h297/IMG_5781.JPG" width="396" /></a></div><b><a href="http://dusie.blogspot.com/2023/04/tuesday-poem-522-robyn-schelenz.html" target="_blank">Robyn Schelenz</a> </b>is from Birdsboro, Pennsylvania. Her poems are at <i>Maudlin House</i>, <i>The Nervous Breakdown</i>, <i>Words and Sports Quarterly</i>, <i>Gone Lawn</i> and elsewhere. She currently lives in San Francisco, where she works when not doing the bidding of her dog, Donut. Special thanks to <i>Bending Genres</i> and Benjamin Niespodziany for hosting the workshop in which “It was (a new world record)” came about, and to Ben for his thoughtful edits. Her new chapbook, <i><a href="https://bottlecap.press/products/natural" target="_blank">Natural Healing</a></i>, is new from Bottlecap Press.<br /><br />Her poems “It was (a new world record),” “Ice” and “Wildlife” appear in the thirty-ninth issue of <i>Touch the Donkey</i>.<br /><br />Q: Tell me about the poems “It was (a new world record),” “Ice” and “Wildlife.”<br /><br />A: About two weeks into this year, I took a workshop with Benjamin Niespodziany at Bending Genres (both great). Ben shared stuff from Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi (“about the author”) and Sabrina Orah Mark (“Box Three, Spool Five”) and other people I hadn’t read! The first poem came out of there and was surely influenced by those discoveries. I lay on the floor in my parents’ guest room and that came out.<br /><br />That kick-started the love of the prose poem for me. It’s a really interesting form that allows you to do things I like to do in all poems (compression) in a way that allows you to get away with some really maximalist stuff. You can also play with people’s expectations of the story they think they will receive in that form. Particularly with pronouns — I can introduce “they”s and “we”s that play a role in events without really explaining themselves. Which is basically how life feels to me (why I was a sociology undergrad!). There's some autobiographical stuff under the exaggerated framework in “It was” but it’s all stuff it wouldn’t be fair for me to claim in reality. Childishly wanting people to applaud your sorrow and family being the first to ignore that is funny, to me. The only fact in it is how elephants grow.<br /><br />“Ice” I wrote in the winter walking my dog in San Francisco where I live and there is NO ice. But there is fog … as a northeasterner, you’re trained to expect it as you go through life in the winter. Wherever ice is, it generates a story, I think. I could read a huge anthology about ice.<br /><br />“Wildlife” continues a theme – I think transitions and fears can be humorous. Sometimes there are things we are afraid of or would be humiliated by that we can easily imagine and play over in our heads. The world is usually more complex than we think and therefore we are, too. I would love being a brown oxford in the dark corner of someone’s home.<br /><br />Q: How do these poems compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?<br /><br />A: For a while I’ve been sort of obsessed with juxtaposing natural figures with consumerism in hopefully interesting ways. one of the things that came out of the workshop as well was a little snippet about trees going shopping. that could obviously get heavy-handed. but i can’t be the only person who’s looked at a strip mall with its decorative fauna and felt like i’m in a half story. i think surrealism and absurdism can help us tell stories about our natural world which is in an increasingly surreal state. so i have a little chapbook coming out from Bottlecap Press called <i>Natural Healing </i>that leans into all that. Horses going to therapy, bulls relieving anxiety by compulsively shopping, trees going to space, bowling pins being hospitalized when they fall down. I think we are in a very anxious place about how our world is, how we can fix it, and if we even can at all. and hopefully opening imaginative space helps people think about this. Jason Heroux in his books does a great job of animating the world in surprising and empathetic ways. I got his books this spring and was like Oh my god! his work is so pleasing yet so heartbreaking.<br /><br />the short prose poem form is key to a lot of that work. i think it offers some reassurance even if it screws with expectations – paragraph logic is so much of our daily lives. it propels inevitability. and there is also a little of, “don’t worry, this will soon be over,” haha. Which can also generate a little … light doom.<br /><br />Q: How do you see or consider your unit of composition? Are you the author of poems, of chapbook-length manuscripts or of eventual book-length manuscripts? Do your poems begin as solitary creatures that eventually cluster, or pieces of a much larger whole?<br /><br />A: I’ve usually got a bunch of loners, though much as in high school, loners find each other. I’ve got a bunch with “prose poem” buttons on their backpacks. Some with certain tones. A few overtly political. The most recent cycle I’ve been doing is the first time an idea, or even a title, “Natural Healing,” animated a whole and prompted poems on top of what was previously gathered. Which was fun, prompting myself to continue to poetically imagine and dig into that particular vein. It’s like a bunch of poems running around wearing the same hat. And I’m the coach whistling on the sidelines. Working on a larger scale is still beyond my poetic muscles. I enrolled in an MFA just this fall, aka a few weeks ago, in hopes of improving my poetic discipline, organization, muscles, etc. To really think intelligently about how a manuscript can be made. It’s at Saint Mary’s in California with Matthew Zapruder, whose book <i>Why Poetry</i> was really important to me. It’s been really stimulating.<br /><br />Q: What was it about Zapruder’s book that struck? And how have you been incorporating those prompts into your own work?<br /><br />A: I think I spent my teens and 20s getting an unorthodox poetic education. I was really drawn to writers like Apollonaire that I couldn’t read in French. (I only know English, despite attempts at learning half a dozen languages over my life). I loved the blogs of Momus and of Gilles Weinzaepflen, as well as Gilles’ poetic narratives in song under the name Toog (“The General Says” is still a favorite). I never felt like I had an entry point into American poetry or even English-language poetry. Maybe I was scared! But I really liked the heavy estrangement of reading stuff that was in Google Translate, back when it was way less precise. Or by select translators. Christophe Tarkos’ long poem “Toto,” which is translated in “Ma Langue Est Poétique,” is probably still the poem that fascinates me most. Yeah, I know it’s translated, but it puts me in a different perceptual space than anything else I’ve ever read! Some of this was a reaction to a high school friend writing in a very Yeats and Eliot-influenced style and that being the sole definition of poetry. So therefore, I was, by his definition, a prose stylist! But, I was drawn to poetry. So I had to go find my own models.<br /><br />I think Why Poetry helped re-introduce me to American poetry and introduced the concept that finding your own particular models and influences are part of the work of being a poet. It’s not a waste of time or barrier to your own uniqueness. It was an education in language and how individual poems fit into poetry as a cultural resource and how they all feed into each other in a way that makes space for all sorts of individual styles or schools. It also introduced me, meaningfully, to what finding your audience and finding your community really are. I mean, we live in a spiritual wasteland, getting any poetic food is delicious. But sometimes you encounter stuff that makes you go, <i>this is it, this tastes amazing!</i> And that genuine interest is the beginning of finding an audience AND a community, I think.<br /><br />I mean, I found your blogs, rob, through random queries about poetry many times over the years, even as a very, very young poet. It’s such a great and vital education on its own of the limitless possibility of poems. Funny enough, I reached out to Gilles/Toog about poetry once and he referred me to Jennifer K. Dick, a DUSIE author. And she was so helpful in providing the kind of advice about community and audience that I'm echoing. Take workshops, or send letters. Passenger pigeons. People in the poetry world are generous, I think. But it’s helpful to have language to talk about what you really like and what your aesthetic is, and Zapruder’s book gave me a great foundation to start thinking about that.<br /><br />Being a poet is a social affair as well as a personal one. It’s also like being queer -- you have to find your people. Even if it takes a long time. And then you have to summon up the courage to say hi. (I say this as a queer person from Amish country, I would know, haha). Hi can be a big word! But just go for it. Good things start with Hi.<br /><br />Q: Have any of your poems begun to cluster into groups that might evolve into manuscripts, or are you not there yet? How do you see your poems in relation to each other?<br /><br />A: I’m still really in love with the idea of short forms. Chapbooks are like charcuterie for me; you have this delicious transitional meal. You may think you know what you're getting but you don’t actually know half the time, and there’s an emphasis on form. You appreciate it in a different way. That being said, this perspective is probably informed by our warped attention span as a culture and in me personally.<br /><br />With a manuscript, I’m attracted to titles. I like the idea of a title always sort of standing behind individual poems in a collection, informing the interpretation. I haven’t yet come up with the name that would call what I’ve currently got to attention and prompt them to arrange themselves in a longer form. I could imagine a three section book, maybe. Natural Healing, Natural Disaster, and Displacement/Revenge ... or whatever I would call spaghetti drowning the world, like in my poem in Dusie. And then once I get that out of my system, I think I’d like to do something really different, experiment and problematize my way of writing. Like planting crops in a field. You need to and want to change it up.<br /><br />Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?<br /><br />Q: Oh good question … I love picking up Amanda Nadelberg’s <i>Bright Brave Phenomena</i>. Salamun’s “Mute and Time” always gets me with its fourth line. I first read that in translation at Del Ray Cross’ <i>Shampoo Poetry</i>, which has unlimited treasures in it. (Some jerk messed with the old domain but you can read it here <a href="http://shampoo-poetry.com/">http://shampoo-poetry.com/</a> ) <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20080312193159fw_/http://www.octopusmagazine.com/issue10/Ehrenberg.htm#a" target="_blank">I love this one poem by Erica Ehrenberg</a>. Cort Day’s collection <i>The Chime</i> is one I always want to know where it is in my house. Graham Irvin’s <i>Liver Mush</i> is just visceral and cool and reminds me to be my version of that.<br /><br />I love work that reminds me to be playful, joyful and precise all at the same time. Precisely playful. It’s an aspiration.<br /><br /><p></p>rob mclennanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07958889643637765864noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5218431112984390179.post-13278963420353259202023-10-31T10:00:00.024-04:002023-10-31T12:15:43.172-04:00TtD supplement #250 : seven questions for Noah Berlatsky<p><b></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8mvGPIqEAPM7Zv_asxa1n8GiR-FEggPVsVYK9CPjW3N1Rr1ENA7GHenJEYDoffT67lNFk_aNbnomkqA_rA83NUop1pSIhFfv9qSUisY96SLSoofCQStGdQrREc725WvgHTGnPS48oaNcF3DbS1IRzYwHcCCLZ5C6jMWVcVXYH7y_nrhh_JNbcvLFQA3GT/s4032/IMG_5779.JPG" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="336" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8mvGPIqEAPM7Zv_asxa1n8GiR-FEggPVsVYK9CPjW3N1Rr1ENA7GHenJEYDoffT67lNFk_aNbnomkqA_rA83NUop1pSIhFfv9qSUisY96SLSoofCQStGdQrREc725WvgHTGnPS48oaNcF3DbS1IRzYwHcCCLZ5C6jMWVcVXYH7y_nrhh_JNbcvLFQA3GT/w448-h336/IMG_5779.JPG" width="448" /></a></b></div><b><a href="https://www.everythingishorrible.net/" target="_blank">Noah Berlatsky</a></b> is a freelance writer and the author of <i><a href="https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/templeton-press/9780813590431/" target="_blank">Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941/48</a></i> (Rutgers UP 2014). Poetry chapbooks include<i> <a href="https://www.everythingishorrible.net/p/my-first-poetry-chapbook-free-download" target="_blank">It’s Fab</a></i> (Origami Poetry Project 2023), <i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/no-devotions-due-79817682?l=es" target="_blank">No Devotions</a></i> (LJMcD Communications 2023) and a forthcoming full length, <i>Not Akhmatova</i> (<a href="https://www.benyehudapress.com/" target="_blank">Ben Yehuda Press</a>). His chapbook <a href="https://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2023/10/new-from-aboveground-press-send-1999.html" target="_blank"><i>Send $19.99 for Supplements and Freedom: Collages and Uncreative Writing</i></a>, is brand-new from above/ground press.<br /><br />His poems “King of Kong,” “Row Your Cab,” “Practice Makes Kenny G,” “Australia” and “Stuffed Unicorn” appear in the thirty-ninth issue of <i>Touch the Donkey</i>.<br /><br />Q: Tell me about the poems “King of Kong,” “Row Your Cab,” “Practice Makes Kenny G,” “Australia” and “Stuffed Unicorn.”<br /><br />A: This group of poems is all over the place! I started writing 30 years ago, with a 15-20 year break in the middle, but I've only had any “success”, even by poetry standards of success, in the last couple years. That means I have a lot (a lot!) of poems lying around I never got to publish. It’s a heterogenous blob of abortive semi-experimental burble, of which these poems are a small unrepresentative cross-section.<br /><br />I think “Row Your Cab,” is the oldest one here; it’s from 1997 as near as I can tell. I was reading/thinking about/inspired by/parodying the New York Schol poets, especially John Ashbery probably, (though I don't know that it sounds much like him) and maybe Ron Padgett? I just picked four words I found funny/weird and wrote little nonsense glorps with them. I was young(er) and thought I was feisty.<br /><br />“Australia” is I think from a year or two later—maybe 2000-2001? The main influence here is the Chicago theater troupe Barrel of Monkeys, which worked with children to write very short stories and then turned them into these amazing nonsense surreal stream-of-consciousness short short plays. I found their work wonderful and exhilarating, and wrote a bunch of prose poems trying to capture that manic, bonk-your-head-like-a-coconut energy. I think we had also taken a trip to Australia around this time, so we had in fact seen tree cows in the wild.<br /><br />Fast forward to 2022, when I’m writing poems with the vague, unexpected hope that someone might publish them. I saw Penny Lane's wonderful documentary “Listening to Kenny G” at the end of 2021. The movie pushes you to think about why certain art is supposed to be bland and mainstream, and explores just how weird Kenny G is as an artist who in some ways seems to like practice more than music itself. As a Jewish maybe neurodivergent artist obsessed with repetition and process, it really spoke to me. So I wrote a poem about that. Not sure why the goldfish are in there, but I guess they seemed right.<br /><br />“King of Kong,” was inspired I think most directly by the movie “The Reef: Stalked” which I reviewed at the <i>Chicago Reader</i>. But also inspired just by the general Hollywood thing where we're always imagining some monster as a threat to the planet when it's been clear for a long time that the biggest threat to the planet is us. Also I enjoyed fitting all those weird supervillain/monster names into a sonnet.<br /><br />“Stuffed Unicorn” is part of a series of I guess quasi-cubist, Gertrude Stein-inspired sketches of small objects lying around our house. Not sure if my wife bought the plush toy for our daughter or if she just thought it was cute and wanted it for herself? In any case, these were great fun to write.<br /><br />Q: How do these poems compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?<br /><br />A: I think my poetry is united in that I tend to pick up a fairly specific influence or idea and then run with it. Which means that it can look pretty different depending on what the influence or idea happens to be. <br /><br />Right now I’m writing a whole bunch of nonense/surreal/New York school sonnets which take snippets of language from various places and turn it into word slurry. Clark Coolidge’s “88 Sonnets” was the most direct inspiration—though I think I’m only going to get up to 61 or so, I’m running out of steam. They’re related to “Row Your Cab,” though they work more like the poems in the chapbook I’m publishing with you, “Send $19.99 for Supplements and Freedom.”<br /><br />I also just wrote a bunch of dada sound poet things somewhat inspired by the poems of petro ck who edits the wonderful site dadakuku, and somewhat, though more abstractly, inspired by Basho’s famous frog poem. They’re not much like anything I’ve written before...though the repetition echoes the Kenny G poem a bit?<br /><br />Q: You mention an influence from the New York School; what is it about their work that strikes, that you wish to engage with in your own work?<br /><br />A: It’s a somewhat anxious influence...John Ashbery’s snooty impenetrability irritated me for a long time, though I think I’ve more or less made my peace with it now. But my creative writing program at Oberlin didn’t really focus on a lot of avant garde experimental traditions, and the New York School poets were the people I knew about/had access to who saw poetry as a game or a series of weird jokes and pratfalls rather than as an expression of sincere romantic suchness. I like sincere romantic suchness too, sometimes, but I can also find it restrictive and oppressive. A lot of my poems are more head than heart (though I’m pretty passionate about the head) and the New York School was one way of finding that out or exploring that.<br /><br />I recently read the wonderful Craig Dworkin/Kenneth Goldsmith anthology from 2011 <i>Against Expression </i>which is about uncreative appropriation/collage writing. That’s more my jam, and I wish I’d known there were people out there doing that when I began my own collage experiments in 1998-99 or so. But I didn’t, and the New York School was the closest I could get. So I appreciate them for that, even if I wouldn’t exactly say I feel like that’s my tradition.<br /><br />Q: Which leads into the obvious question: who <i>would</i> you consider your tradition? <br /><br />A: I guess I did set myself up for that. What Craig Dworkin calls uncreative writing—collage, appropriation, erasure, and so forth—really speaks to me. But that also means I’m just a packrat and often just sound like whatever I last read.<br /><br />Q: I’m curious about your engagement with “collage, appropriation, erasure, and so forth,” as you say. What do you feel is possible through such forms that might not have been possible otherwise?<br /><br />A: I should say first that my engagement with uncreative writing is in large part that it just sends me; it’s pretty visceral. When I first saw Rory Macbeth’s poem *The Bible (alphabetized)* which is just what it says and has like six pages or something of “be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be”—I just love that. What a crazy thing to do.<br /><br />So there’s that. More theoretically, I think uncreative writing is a way to get away from a romantic confessional “I” and turn words or language into a game, or a mockery, or to bounce different language bits off each other and watch them clash or melt. <br /><br />I just released a chapbook from LJMcD Communication called No Devotions which is a bunch of erasures of Mary Oliver poems. I really don’t like Mary Oliver much for all the reasons you wouldn’t—glib exhortation makes me itch. But at the same time I appreciate and respect that a lot of people get something from her. Manipulating her text is a way to make fun of her writing a bit, but also to try to find something in it that speaks to me or that I can appreciate the way other people seem to. <br /><br />Would it be possible to do that in a more confessional vein? I mean, maybe (I just sort of did it in the above paragraph, right?) But for me it was more fun and more meaningful to try to talk about it in a way that took me out of the equation, perhaps because that mirrors the way I feel like I’m not really able to enter into Oliver’s poems.<br /><br />Q: I like that example of Macbeth, a name I haven’t heard before. The piece you describe reminds me of finding, some thirty years ago or so in a Canadian literary journal as part of a special “sound poetry” issue, someone had reworked the words of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” in alphabetical order, so the recording begins “a a a at at at an,” and so forth, thus striking the narrative out entirely for the sake of seemingly-arbitrary sound. Absolutely marvellous. I’ve been years attempting to figure out who that was and try and get my hands on a recording of it again, but no luck yet.<br /><br />So how do you approach a poem, then, in terms of composition: do you approach from the level of sound or of language, or of seeking a way to mangle and manipulate and simply see what comes?<br /><br />A: The Macbeth is in the anthology I mentioned, Against Expression, along with lots of other goodies.<br /><br />I wanted to add to my last answer that uncreative writing can often be algorithmic-my Mary Oliver erasures remove all words with a letter of my name—and that makes writing a poem into a kind of puzzle or filling in a form. It feels like playing Tetris or crossing things off a list. It’s very comforting (which is what some people get from Mary Oliver, I think)<br /><br />Which is a segue into your next question…I approach poems all different ways I think? <br /><br />I guess they more often start with an idea than a sound or image, but that can be a topic I want to write about (as with “King Of Kong”) or a procedure (like “Row Your Cab”) or something I want to imitate. I get a lot of ideas reading poetry, where I’ll want to respond to an argument or play with a style.<br /><br />Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?<br /><br />A: I don’t have a great answer to this! As I said, I kind of jump off of whatever next thing I’m reading at the moment, rather than going back to things. I’ve got a project inspired by Anna Akhmatova which involved revisiting her work a lot over the past year or so, and a similar thing with Adelaide Crapsey’s cinquains. And I’ve been returning to that<i> Against Expression </i>anthology I mentioned on and off since I got it a year or so back.<br /><br /><p></p>rob mclennanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07958889643637765864noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5218431112984390179.post-8667444959584363742023-10-15T10:00:00.010-04:002023-10-15T10:00:00.141-04:00Touch the Donkey : thirty-ninth issue,<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWCtkVObiibyVH-oNOeaKCTybXO_8cB60KfCiqUBLrFn00g-M2HGL5JhJgUJpCoUWL-J3-xIve5zgGmv4ptC8HILGd2inYzddjBcct21rokT6JmW5EmvIZJNR-bqOKFO7vmT8_0ZCLUnls/s1600/touch+the+donkey+logo.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="784" data-original-width="1600" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWCtkVObiibyVH-oNOeaKCTybXO_8cB60KfCiqUBLrFn00g-M2HGL5JhJgUJpCoUWL-J3-xIve5zgGmv4ptC8HILGd2inYzddjBcct21rokT6JmW5EmvIZJNR-bqOKFO7vmT8_0ZCLUnls/s400/touch+the+donkey+logo.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p>
<span style="font-size: large;">The thirty-ninth issue is now available, with new poems by Robyn Schelenz, Andy Weaver, Dessa Bayrock, Anselm Berrigan, Noah Berlatsky, Rasiqra Revulva and Alana Solin.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Eight dollars (includes shipping). While you're enjoying our Hall of Wonders, your car unfortunately will be subject to repeated break-ins.<br /><br /></span></p>
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</form>rob mclennanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07958889643637765864noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5218431112984390179.post-90962202556118563452023-10-06T10:00:00.045-04:002023-10-06T10:00:00.152-04:00TtD supplement #249 : seven questions for Miranda Mellis<p><b></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ-h47Gvnnu003urOwQgbiH3KmXtoyK7rlIJDkBBJNaiuzsNDE9FKKVfeNPYxuZylWRJmkPQr1gv-yg6chX-3p_ME5DPHjyIEmqV-yRzqQ4D78Ualuvl6XeWGMzSaep5K-Y2fyjjX2dRPqCqeX-iPENI_hTq4bTU24JmHSfe7dEDhl6QoFWgDZtysW8MlO/s4032/IMG_5015.JPG" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="317" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ-h47Gvnnu003urOwQgbiH3KmXtoyK7rlIJDkBBJNaiuzsNDE9FKKVfeNPYxuZylWRJmkPQr1gv-yg6chX-3p_ME5DPHjyIEmqV-yRzqQ4D78Ualuvl6XeWGMzSaep5K-Y2fyjjX2dRPqCqeX-iPENI_hTq4bTU24JmHSfe7dEDhl6QoFWgDZtysW8MlO/w422-h317/IMG_5015.JPG" width="422" /></a></b></div><b><a href="https://mirandamellis.com/" target="_blank">Miranda Mellis</a></b> is the author of <i>Crocosmia</i> (forthcoming, Nightboat Books); <i><a href="https://albionbooks.net/the-revolutionary/" target="_blank">The Revolutionary</a></i>; <i><a href="https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9780986235542/demystifications.aspx" target="_blank">Demystifications</a></i>; <i><a href="http://xpoetics.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-instead-emily-abendroth-and-miranda.html" target="_blank">The Instead</a></i> (with <a href="https://www.emilyabendroth.com/" target="_blank">Emily Abendroth</a>); The Quarry; <i><a href="http://solidobjects.org/books.php?id=7" target="_blank">The Spokes</a></i>; <i><a href="https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9780981497549/none-of-this-is-real.aspx" target="_blank">None of This Is Real</a></i>; <i>Materialisms</i>; and <i><b><a href="https://www.calamaripress.com/Mellis_Revisionist.htm" target="_blank">The Revisionist</a></b></i>. Originally from San Francisco, she now lives in the woods in Olympia and teaches at Evergreen State College. <a href="http://mirandamellis.com">mirandamellis.com</a><br /><br />Her poems “Utopia,” “No One Told Us” and “on the difference between choreography and improvisation” appear in the thirty-eighth issue of <i>Touch the Donkey</i>.<br /><br />Q: Tell me about the poems “Utopia,” “No One Told Us” and “on the difference between choreography and improvisation.”<br /><br />A: “No One Told Us” explores how difficult it can be to take in and relate to material realities and alterities–however actual, persistent, present, and communicative–for those raised to think and read reductively, and literally, for example, those who read the bible as literal. <br /><br />Which isn’t to say there aren’t wisdom traditions with prescient sacred texts that illuminate reality. In The Lost Steps (1953) Alejo Carpentier described the sacred K’iche’ text Popol vuh as “the only cosmogony ever to have intuited the threat of the machine and the tragedy of the sorcerer’s apprentice.” The “doll people” / robots of the Popol vuh (which you can read as AI or as people who behave mechanistically without heart) are punished for exploiting animals, whereas in the bible Adam is given ‘dominion’ – leave to dominate. Domination reified as ‘natural’ and the overinflation of the singular authority figure (‘the cult of the soul’) forecloses openness to the multidudinous play of voices which together generate open ended questions and living knowledge, which is shapeshifting and changeful. This, in addition to a dearth of affordances for democratic power sharing, in a political economy dominated by the imperatives of capital, is impasse-making. That is, the poem is about mystification. <br /><br />“On the Difference Between Choreography and Improvisation” takes up the possibility of animal liberation as an artwork that combines choreography (a plan, a scheme, a developed ethics, a useable concept, a mobile framework) and improvisation (the <i>kairos</i> moment; the time of action, with its energy of response and imminent intensity, opening the window, leaping out of the lab).<br /><br />Q: How do these poems compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?<br /><br />A: I’m writing a novel, <i>Crocosmia</i> [due out from Nightboat in 2025]. The poems are transiences–switches that open and close with quick little currents. The novel, by comparison, is (an) enduring. It entails, for me, unusual writing problems. Or, a poem is poring over a card, a novel is building a house of cards. <br /><br />Writing poems feels as intimate as thinking and breathing, whereas writing a novel (at least at the moment) feels like constantly falling, with no ground in sight. It feels impossible!<br /><br />Q: If poems are poring over cards, how do you see your unit of composition? Are you the author of poems, of chapbook-length manuscripts or of book-length manuscripts? Do your poems begin as solitary creatures that eventually cluster, or pieces of a much larger whole?<br /><br />A: The poems ‘begin as solitary creatures’ as you nicely put it. Most often they remain that, alone on the page in a file or on a piece of paper somewhere forever, lost to the middens of time or my chaos. The poems in <i>Unconsciousness Raising</i> clustered, like magnetic filings, over a concerted period of time during which I just found myself writing, or catching, poems, one after another, without knowing exactly why they were flying in the window. Almost like a kind of harvest, these poems . . . fruiting bodies!<br /><br />Q: Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? Are there particular writers or works at the back of your head as you write?<br /><br />A: Bob Glück’s sentences are a model for me of how much poetry, mutability, and emotional complexity a completely original sentence can hold, from sorrow to comedy. I like a sentence that swerves unexpectedly. At the level of story, from the beginning of my life as a reader I was ‘imprinted’ (how a young animal learns who and what to trust, described as a process of being written upon!) by such a wide and various readings that I wouldn’t know how to locate a singular model. That said, I feel kinship with what I’ll call mutant feminism, for example,<i> Les Guérillères </i>by Monique Wittig, as well as the radical, prefigurative, anarchist Ursula Le Guin novel <i>The Dispossessed</i>, which was formative. <br /><br />Prefiguration, prolepsis, and enactment are keywords for what I am attempting in my current novel, while living in a complex forest ecosystem which is regularly subject to the harms of clear cutting is motivating the political desire and rage the novel enacts, and seeps into its style, as well as the imagery.<br /><br />Q: What is it specifically about the lyric sentence—something I’ve been the past decade exploring as well, via models such as Rosmarie Waldrop, Anna Gurton-Wachter and Julie Carr, for example—that appeals? What do you feel is possible through this level of sentence-attention that might not be possible through, say, a scattered or fragmented line-break?<br /><br />A: Long ago I read an interview with Lydia Davis about translating Proust and in that wonderful conversation she says, a sentence is a thought. We could ask, of a sentence, what kind of thought is this? How many layers of thought can a sentence hold? In the case of Proust, or, for that matter, Marquez, Beckett, Nanni Balestrini, or Thomas Bernhard, where sentences can be chapter length, or book length, we could say that thought is unending, not periodic, so, no periods. Line breaks and scatters give us gaps, breathlines, pauses, emptinesses, breakdowns, ruptures, quietnesses, simultaneity. In “Bewilderment” Fanny Howe writes “Like a scroll or a comic book that shows the same exact characters in multiple points and situations, the look of the daily world was governed only by which point you happened to be focused on at a particular time. Everything was occurring at once. So what if the globe is round? The manifest reality is flat.” If everything is occurring at once, then what shall the subject, so to speak, predicate, and how? For Howe in that essay it’s an ethical, ontological, and spiritual question. Making choices doesn’t end bewilderment, characters, as she writes, remain as uncertain at the end as they are at the beginning. <br /><br />Like many writers, I also have been making collages and painting for decades, a welcome break from discursivity and conceptuality, a different kind of sense-making and improvisation, yet there is something similar, at times, about the kinds of moves you might make with an image as the moves you might make with sentences–being surprised by a comedic accident, or some unexpected candor, digression or errantry that is satisfyingly exact, open and generative. When a sentence can be experienced as complete, lucid, and yet unfinished and alive at the same time, that’s what delights. <br /><br />To try to answer your last question regarding what might be “possible through this level of sentence-attention that might not be possible through, say, a scattered or fragmented line-break” I wonder if it has something to do with our expectations of sentences, the pointed way a sentence addresses the reader, in contrast with the poem’s more ambiguous sense of address? We expect the poem to do something unexpected, we know that we don’t know where it will go. Perhaps with a sentence, when it does something unexpected, we are more surprised, for example when the second clause relates only in the most elliptical way to the first, and the third one goes somewhere else entirely. I’d wager that people who do this kind of thing with prose sentences by and large began (and continue) as writers of poems. In other words, poetry is a constant.<br /><br />A sentence that seems to exceed its various parts, that feels like the work of more than one writer, as if multiple instruments are sounding, combines the pleasures of prose with the pleasure of music, which is to say, of poetry.<br /><br />Q: With a handful of books and chapbooks under your belt over the past fifteen years, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?<br /><br />A: In terms of changes, <i>The Revolutionary</i> (Albion Books, 2022) was a departure for me in two ways: it was autobiographical and, unlike other books and chapbooks, which took a while to write and even longer to be published, <i>The Revolutionary</i> was written in a short amount of time and published directly after it was written, during (and partially about) my father’s illness, and after his death in 2022. <i>Crocosmia</i> is my focus at the moment. I have been collaborating on an epistolary piece with Rick Moody, a kind of correspondence of short essays. I don’t know where that will wind up, but I do know I’d like to do more collaborations of all kinds on and beyond the page.<br /><br />Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?<br /><br />A: I can’t help but circle back to and refind Etel Adnan, Cesar Aira, Alexander Kluge, Bob Glück, Thalia Field, Renee Gladman, Michael Eigen, Lisa Robertson, Cecilia Vicuña, Shahrnush Parsipur, Lorraine Daston, Giorgia Agamben, Walter Benjamin, Knausgard, Kafka, Lacan, and lately Alejandro Zambra. Along with tarot and the<i> I-Ching</i>, over the years I dip in and out of <i>The Shaman’s Body</i>, by Arnold Mindell, a kind of handbook. I find his articulation of the ‘second attention’ helpful in all kinds of ways. Most recently I read, with great pleasure, <i>About Ed</i> by Bob Glück, <i>City of Incurable Women </i>by Maud Casey, and <i>Glacial Decoys</i> by Luke Roberts. As far as essays, Patricia Lockwood and Jenny Diski are particular favorites.<br /><br />For research for <i>Crocosmia</i>, most recently I’ve been reading<i> Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body</i>, by Elizabeth A. Wilson, <i>Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World</i> by Gaia Vince, <i>Hexen 2039</i> by Suzanne Treister, and various writings by Suzanne Simard, Isabelle Stengers, and Karen Barad. An article on fulminology (the study of the science of lightning) and various readings on ecological remediation and cooperativism have been useful. <br /><br /><p></p>rob mclennanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07958889643637765864noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5218431112984390179.post-83844961609735398542023-09-29T10:00:00.026-04:002023-09-29T10:00:00.169-04:00TtD supplement #248 : seven questions for Meghan Kemp-Gee<p><b></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjPGbf_O8JV0BfHtv42bVFttdnr75CIvl_Di0Ktk9DQ6bY6iX1CD86WCYHO28AopZvU9h1vkPQRm-CFvI5kMzmt4wW-h8nLxZQXQkzWQA43ksxSeNeFM0tGb8bt0kBNdg1LbvmurAH06npd8DP8oMLX_vxDwl6xwdFg6boFLKloJQDdJtdFEi2LS19xCY1/s4032/IMG_5014.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="295" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjPGbf_O8JV0BfHtv42bVFttdnr75CIvl_Di0Ktk9DQ6bY6iX1CD86WCYHO28AopZvU9h1vkPQRm-CFvI5kMzmt4wW-h8nLxZQXQkzWQA43ksxSeNeFM0tGb8bt0kBNdg1LbvmurAH06npd8DP8oMLX_vxDwl6xwdFg6boFLKloJQDdJtdFEi2LS19xCY1/w393-h295/IMG_5014.JPG" width="393" /></a></b></div><b>Meghan Kemp-Gee</b> is the author of <a href="https://chbooks.com/Books/T/The-Animal-in-the-Room" target="_blank"><i>The Animal in the Room</i></a> (Coach House Books, 2023), <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/WHAT-MEANT-ASK-chapbook-Kemp-Gee/dp/B0BHCDZPSR" target="_blank"><i>What I Meant to Ask: A Chapbook</i></a> (Alien Buddha Press, 2022) and <i>The Bones and Eggs and Beets </i>(Small Harbor Editions, forthcoming), as well as a chapbook forthcoming with above/ground press. She also co-created <i><a href="http://www.contestedstrip.com/" target="_blank">Contested Strip</a></i>, the world’s best comic about ultimate frisbee (and soon to be a graphic novel). She is a PhD candidate at UNB Fredericton and lives in North Vancouver. You can find her on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/MadMollGreen" target="_blank">@MadMollGreen</a>.<br /><br />Her poems “Blanket,” “Bike Lock,” “Ice Packs,” “Plane Ticket,” “Winter Coat” and “New Clothes” appear in the thirty-eight issue of <i>Touch the Donkey</i>.<br /><br />Q: Tell me about the poems “Blanket,” “Bike Lock,” “Ice Packs,” “Plane Ticket,” “Winter Coat” and “New Clothes.”<br /><br />A: I wrote these early in September 2021. I remember sitting in a wooden chair on the front porch of my AirBnB during a sudden late-summer rainstorm. I’d just arrived in Fredericton to start my PhD program at UNB. I’d just biked back across the river from campus. I was excited to be there, but I was also completely bewildered, stressed out, and lonely. I didn’t really know anyone in New Brunswick yet. I’d never even been there before! I didn’t know where I was going to live yet, because I’d just moved from Los Angeles to Vancouver to Nanaimo to Vancouver to Fredericton in less than six months, so I was pretty tired of packing up and moving and unpacking. I was reading Phyllis Webb’s “Naked Poems” for Triny Finlay’s poetry class. Reading great poetry always inspires me to write! I don’t know exactly why, but Webb’s work made me want to write something simple, straightforward, just to get my thoughts straight, and that’s where this “Things to Buy in New Brunswick” got its start: inspired by my big list of things I had to buy to replace the stuff I’d left behind in LA or North Vancouver. Looking back, I think that big list of things to buy was my way of itemizing the big leap of faith it takes to land in a brand new place and start all over again.<br /><br />Q: How do these poems compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?<br /><br />A: I just finished writing a big manuscript called <i>Nebulas</i> about astronomy and afterlives, and right now I’m composing some poems about famous athletes. So these “New Brunswick” poems contrast sharply with those in terms of topic and scope – they’re a lot more personal, intimate, and “small” by comparison with a nebula or a celebrity athlete! But I think there are definitely some prose techniques I’m trying out in these poems that I’m continuing to use and develop in all my work. In general, I really enjoy how prose forms contrast with formal elements like repetition and reversal, rhyme and meter. If you do it right, I think you can create interesting tensions between visual and aural forms!<br /><br />Q: I’ve always considered, at least in my own work, visual placement to be notational: that if I wish for something to be read or sound a particular way, then it requires a particular placement upon the page (whereas jwcurry has argued as notation as being far more fluid). What is your approach or consideration for how things are placed upon the page, and subsequently read aloud and/or heard?<br /><br />Honestly, this is a question that I feel I haven’t fully resolved yet. I think my visual poetic practice is still very much in development, catching up to my own knowledge and theories about the relationship between sound and image.<br /><br />Over a year ago, I was taking a poetry class with Sue Sinclair and some outstanding creative writers at UNB. It was probably the best writing workshop I’ve ever been part of; it was a small class full of outstanding poets who also happened to be wonderful, friendly, supportive people and brilliant, brilliant readers. I remember one particular moment where the other students were discussing a single line from one of my poems. They were noting the fact that this was the longest line in the poem, and analyzing that. And I was sitting there, thinking “What the heck are they talking about? It’s exactly the same length as all the others.” But then I realized: they’re not talking about the length the way *I* think about line length. They’re not counting feet or syllables. They’re responding to the line visually.<br /><br />And I’m so grateful for experiences like that, because they really challenge how I was schooled as a poetry reader and poetry writer, and they challenge my own biases as someone who (like you) thinks of visual elements more as “notation” for the primary purpose of the poem, which is to work through sound.<br /><br />That was a valuable reality check for me, not just because it’s good to be aware of how <i>differently </i>different readers read our work. It’s also a good reality check because in my teaching life, I’m keenly interested in the theory of image/text, and how different kinds of composition work as multimodal texts. When I’ve taught multimodal composition and visual composition in college classes, I always encourage my students to think about how texts produce meaning visually. But as a poet who’s actively publishing in all kinds of journals, for practical reasons, I feel I have to actively not-think about those considerations a bit. Poets generally get at least a little bit of input about how our work is presented and laid out on the page, but ultimately there are going to be visual and design elements you’re not in charge of – or at least that are going to be determined in collaboration with your editors, printers, etc.<br /><br />In the future, I think I’ll be a lot more interested in composing more multimodal forms, including visual poetry. A few months ago I wrote a chapbook that’s kind of a mashup between sound poetry, erasure poetry, and fuzzy photocopies of old manuscripts; I’m still a beginner doing work like that, but I loved it and I’d like to try more!<br /><br />So this is all just to say that... I genuinely struggle with this question! I think I’m still evolving, and I have more to learn. I have a pretty strong sense that my poetic practice has yet to catch up to my theories about pedagogy, composition, and multimodality. But I don’t know what that “catching up” is eventually going to look like.<br /><br />Q: You give the impression that you compose in clusters or projects, whether as chapbook-length or larger manuscripts. How do you approach composition? Are you a poet of individual pieces that collaborate to form larger structures, or are you a poet of larger structures from the get-go?<br /><br />A: I used to be very poem-focused. I loved the idea of each individual poem as a perfect, self-contained unit. And I still like that! It’s one of the things I love most about reading poetry, especially short poems – the way that you can walk into a poem and shut the door, like it’s a perfect little room.<br /><br />While I'm still interested in reading and writing single poems like that, I have become more interested in groups and sequences. I think it all started with <i>The Animal in the Room</i>, actually. In the second year of my MFA at Chapman University I had an idea to write a few poems about deer, and then the whole collection just spontaneously grew all these branches and new directions and limbs from there. Once I’d written that way once, I wanted to do it again! And I also learned a lot from the process of editing <i>The Animal in the Room</i>. In our first convo about the manuscript, my editor Susan Holbrook made this amazing suggestion to add a few more prose poems to the collection, so that they could act as a connective tissue.<br /><br />When I wrote another full-length manuscript last year, I was very intentional about that strategy – weaving and interrupting and reweaving sequences and connections throughout. I like the word “intertextual,” meaning poems that connect with each other, both within a collection and beyond. Collage, braiding, cut-and-paste, mosaic, clouds and nebulas – those composition metaphors really inspire me right now!<br /><br />Q: With a full-length collection and two chapbooks under your belt, as well as your current work(s)-in-progress, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you feel your work headed?<br /><br />A: Since completing my MFA in 2017, I think that my work has been trending towards longer sequences – chapbook-length and full-length collections. That’s a bit funny and ironic for me, because I really define myself as a “short-form” kind of poet! But maybe I am growing towards being more of a longer-form type of person, and I’m open to that growth. No matter what I’m writing, I really believe that you have to listen to the poems and let them guide you where they want to go – they’re always smarter and more interesting than you are. So I’m going to keep trying to do that.<br /><br />I’ve recently read a couple of novels-in-verse that really dazzled me, including DA Lockhart’s awesome Bearmen Descend Upon Gimli. I’ve started to wonder, could I try to write something like this? Maybe someday?<br /><br />Q: You seem very interested in examining the boundaries of genre and form, whether from within or between. What drives, or even sparked, this interest?<br /><br />A: I won’t say that form is <i>everything</i> to me as a poet... but it might be pretty close to everything. I think that form was one of the main reasons I originally wanted to write poetry. I’ve always found great satisfaction in the crafty, technical, physical part of writing, whether it’s the puzzles and miraculous surprises you find in received forms, or whether it’s leaning into your formal structures to try to invent something new or pleasing.<br /><br />In terms of “borders,” I think that forms by definition have borders. Forms require something to demarcate space, time, and sound – and even when you don't choose those structures, they have a way of choosing themselves, of choosing you! In my practice, I think all poetry – whether you want to call it “formal” or not – is about pushing against a border, or tenderly caressing one, or trying to locate one, or destroy one. Once you’re in contact or friction with one of those borders, you can do whatever you want with it – obey it, avoid it, put your shoulder against it, bend it, break it.<br /><br />Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?<br /><br />A: There are several poets and several books that just can’t fail to inspire me and get me writing. I’ve never read “Song of Myself” without wanting to write something about it afterwards. Glück’s <i>The Wild Iris</i> is definitely another one like that, and Rankine’s <i>Citizen</i> is another. But I think statistically the all-time champ for me is Elizabeth Bishop. So many of my poems are about her poems, trying to talk to her, asking her questions. A buddy and I used to joke about painting our nails to match the cover of her <i>Complete Works</i>. I feel like there’s about a million new poems I could write hidden in that book.<br /><br /><p></p>rob mclennanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07958889643637765864noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5218431112984390179.post-72935666743174372892023-09-25T10:00:00.021-04:002023-09-25T10:00:00.141-04:00TtD supplement #247 : seven questions for Samuel Amadon<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuIPtv1kbqxhJytvG8wXj7CZDz-6M4S02idQnlfsP1g0yToH9F50ncXDLGEfD_i24Vf8yE4oJdW0dQIA-fKH7gw3IhJowb0ILX30u9_f4SnKO95naCAic6lAG1PVg-WgTisLjZO3D4nMZYUNpa4UayYHPxJdApESCAmVIAFVquNytnd08j9ZRUa71JxM1a/s4032/IMG_5013.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="312" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuIPtv1kbqxhJytvG8wXj7CZDz-6M4S02idQnlfsP1g0yToH9F50ncXDLGEfD_i24Vf8yE4oJdW0dQIA-fKH7gw3IhJowb0ILX30u9_f4SnKO95naCAic6lAG1PVg-WgTisLjZO3D4nMZYUNpa4UayYHPxJdApESCAmVIAFVquNytnd08j9ZRUa71JxM1a/w416-h312/IMG_5013.JPG" width="416" /></a></div><b><a href="https://www.samuelamadon.com/" target="_blank">Samuel Amadon</a></b> is the author of <i><a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/O/bo124043010.html" target="_blank">Often, Common, Some, And Free</a></i> and <i><a href="https://solidobjects.myshopify.com/products/listener-by-samuel-amadon" target="_blank">Listener</a></i>. He is the director of the MFA Program at the University of South Carolina, where, with <a href="https://www.lizcountryman.com/" target="_blank">Liz Countryman</a>, he edits the poetry journal <i><a href="https://www.oversoundpoetry.com/" target="_blank">Oversound</a></i>. <br /><br />His five poems, each titled “DIVERS,” appear in the thirty-eighth issue of <i>Touch the Donkey</i>.<br /><br />Q: Tell me about the five “DIVERS” poems.<br /><br />A: These five “Divers” are five of sixty sonnets I wrote and rewrote between 2016 and 2022. They follow some of the rules. They aren’t in pentameter, but they stick to a decasyllabic line and they rhyme, but not in a pattern. Days and seasons are their subject matter, and they were written during a period when I only had brief moments in the day to write or to rewrite, and so the strangeness of tracking time passing gets mixed up with their composition.<br /><br />Q: How do these poems compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?<br /><br />A: In my 2020 book <i>Listener</i>, I really started playing around with hard rhyme and an omni-present “I” voice. I had this idea about a speaker who is so present that they become like a screen or a background for the poems to play through. These “Divers” poems feel to me like an escalation of the work I was doing in that book. I say “escalation” because the constraints of the form—the size of the line and the sonnet and the need to turn it—go along with what I was already doing with the speaker.<br /><br />Q: I’m intrigued at the structure of individual poems in a project that each share the same title. The late Canadian poet John Newlove composed a handful of poems each called “Autobiography,” and I know it was a structure the late Denver poet Noah Eli Gordon appeared repeatedly throughout numerous full-length titles. What do you consider the relationship between the poems in this project, presuming the entire sixty sonnets share a title? What do you feel is possible through the structure that wouldn’t be possible otherwise?<br /><br />A: I made a number of radical revisions to the whole manuscript. For instance, I decided on a decasyllabic line after I’d written two thirds of the sonnets, and had to go back through and revise them to make that work. I kept making small changes globally like that, and at one point, I went through and re-titled every poem with a different title. I liked the titles a lot, but I felt like with the same title throughout, the sonnets were more dependent on each other to create a larger meaning and narrative to the manuscript.<br /><br />Q: Do you have any specific models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting lately?<br /><br />A: I read lots of sonnets while I was working on this. I had piles of books around the chair where I write, and when I went to write, I’d read sonnets until I felt ready to write one. I think the poems reflect that reading. Largely in ways I couldn’t say exactly, but occasionally I would take a phrase, like “since there’s no help,” which is from a sonnet by Michael Drayton. I like trying to play with language like that as a kind of texture. I guess a lot of the reading I did was trying to find that kind of texture as a feeling in my own voice. I don’t know if that makes sense.<br /><br />Q: What is it about the form of the sonnet that attracts?<br /><br />A: I’ve been interested in the form for a long time, and I think it’s the turn initially that made me want to write sonnets. There’s a mix of constraint and recklessness, I think, built into the volta, which is a combination I find appealing. And I like working within the limited space of a sonnet for similar reasons (and the form just suited the constraints of my writing life over the six years when I wrote this book, where I had very little time to work, and between the pandemic, teaching, administrative responsibilities, my kids, and everything else, it was helpful to have a poem I could work out, initially, in one sitting).<br /><br />Q: With a handful of published books, as well as your current work-in-progress, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?<br /><br />A: <i>The Hartford Book</i>, the first book I wrote, was a collection of narrative poems about my hometown and my screwed up friends. The book had a distinctive voice and style that I didn’t want to limit myself to, and after I wrote it, I actively tried to write in new ways, to see how I could get away from myself. The result was <i>Like a Sea</i>, a book full of experiment, polyvocality, and some constraint based writing. I set myself up on a pattern there, where each book I’ve written since has been in some way a reinvention of my work and a response to what I’ve done before. I doubt anyone else is tracking my books this way—especially since they haven’t come out in chronological order—but it’s helpful for me to think of things this way. I’m just starting to think about what I’m going to do next. I have a couple things I’m thinking about, but not really in a way that I can spell out at this point.<br /><br />Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?<br /><br />A: I read around a lot, and my interests, generally, tend to expand. Yesterday, I read Larry Levis’s first book <i>Wrecking Crew</i>, just because I realized I’ve never gone past the selected and <i>Elegy</i> and I was curious to see where he started. Next, I’ve got a stack of books from Nightboat that came in recently that I’m excited to look at. I go back to Ashbery, to Crane, to my late teacher Lucie Brock-Broido, to Ed Roberson, to Keats and a bunch more. I try to add stuff to what I’m teaching, but inevitably, I end up teaching some of the same poems semester after semester, because they’re useful for talking through some point. Then in my reading for myself and for my own work, I find myself drawn to things that are hard to break down and talk about in those ways or books that I, at least, don’t know what to say about yet.<br /><br /><p></p>rob mclennanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07958889643637765864noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5218431112984390179.post-87517214920813127622023-09-15T10:00:00.068-04:002023-09-18T08:23:14.047-04:00TtD supplement #246 : seven questions for R Kolewe<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPZH1BwYniHjz0Gq5DISmqusoOODHZE81eP0Mbx7npgkf1bGbKYs0sH6j1rrFRj7_GDohJCmxvPHPjmOTkh3l9BH6OKjYmopsU2SQDBRMesXuItLSqNvkeEiGMZ_2e4dnjnAAw6ZzVjTe6DB_jD0tG4EBRzquznSbMErKNtrs-XM1Q8KtV_WSq4lfvSonT/s4032/IMG_5012.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="309" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPZH1BwYniHjz0Gq5DISmqusoOODHZE81eP0Mbx7npgkf1bGbKYs0sH6j1rrFRj7_GDohJCmxvPHPjmOTkh3l9BH6OKjYmopsU2SQDBRMesXuItLSqNvkeEiGMZ_2e4dnjnAAw6ZzVjTe6DB_jD0tG4EBRzquznSbMErKNtrs-XM1Q8KtV_WSq4lfvSonT/w411-h309/IMG_5012.JPG" width="411" /></a></div><b><a href="https://kolewe.net/" target="_blank">R. Kolewe</a></b> has published four collections of poetry, <i><a href="https://talonbooks.com/books/a-net-of-momentary-sapphire" target="_blank">A Net of Momentary Sapphire</a></i> (Talonbooks, 2023), <i><a href="https://bookhugpress.ca/shop/author/r-kolewe/the-absence-of-zero-by-ralph-kolewe/" target="_blank">The Absence of Zero</a></i> (Book*hug, 2021), <i><a href="https://talonbooks.com/books/inspecting-nostalgia" target="_blank">Inspecting Nostalgia</a></i> (Talonbooks, 2017), and <i><a href="https://bookhugpress.ca/shop/author/r-kolewe/afterletters-by-r-kolewe/" target="_blank">Afterletters</a></i> (Book*hug, 2014) as well as several chapbooks. He lives in Toronto.<br /><br />His poems “<i>First, natural thoughts with natural diction.</i>,” “<i>A sort of a song, too.</i>,” “<i>The local shaped by kilometres of ice, kilometres of road</i>.,” “<i>In more deep seclusion.</i>,” “<i>Saturated with glorious colour</i>.,” “<i>Beginning with grammar</i>.” and “<i>And their ways are fill’d with thorns</i>.” appear in the thirty-eighth issue of <i>Touch the Donkey</i>.<br /><br />Q: Tell me about the poems “<i>First, natural thoughts with natural diction.</i>,” “<i>A sort of a song, too.</i>,” “<i>The local shaped by kilometres of ice, kilometres of road</i>.,” “<i>In more deep seclusion.</i>,” “<i>Saturated with glorious colour</i>.,” “<i>Beginning with grammar</i>.” and “<i>And their ways are fill’d with thorns</i>.”<br /><br />A: The raw material of these poems dates back to 2015, when I was preparing to walk the Coast to Coast trail in England for the first time. I was starting to think about “landscape/poetry” which is both immensely generative and the site of a million cliches and cliched echoes of a million critiques of extraction capitalism etc etc. Anyway I started filling a small A6 pocket notebook with poem-scribbles, intending to take the notebook with me on my walk, which I did. (Was I thinking about Basho? Not at the time.) As often happens I didn’t write much at all on that walk (I was ill, and had to cut the walk short) and when I got home I switched to a larger A5 notebook, continuing to make notes and put words to that theme. That eventually led to some poems in the <i>Literary Review of Canada</i>, a talk on the Canadian landscape painter Doris McCarthy, and a chapbook called<i> silence</i>, then published by Knife | Fork | Book in 2019. I put the small notebook aside, and eventually tore out the pages I’d filled and put them in a file folder together with the drafts and versions of the chapbook and related stuff. My intention was to go further with this material but I was also working on what became <i>The Absence of Zero </i>(Book*hug 2021) and <i>A Net of Momentary Sapphire</i> (Talonbooks 2023) so ...<br /><br />When the editorial work on <i>Sapphire</i> wrapped up in 2022 for a while I felt like I was done with poetry. For the first time in years I didn't have another poetry project on the go, although I was writing. “Maybe I’ve driven the poetry bus as far as it will go,” I said to someone. But then I remembered that that old “landscape/poetry” thing had never really been finished, while the other thing I’d been busy with seemed to be pointing to a sort of “conversation in the mountains” (but nothing like Celan’s short story). I’d also been working through Shohaku Okumura's commentary on the 13th century Japanese Zen master Dogen’s essay “Mountains and Waters Sutra,” which has an appendix by Gary Snyder on the connection between Dogen and Mountains and Rivers Without End, Snyder’s long poem sequence. All of that led me to dig out my old notes, and I found the little bundle of A6 pages from 2015.<br /><br />So these seven poems are rooted in what I scribbled back in 2015. But that doesn’t tell you about the individual poems themselves. Should I go on?<br /><br />Q: How do these poems compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?<br /><br />A: The work I’ve published in the past few years has been what I like to call “recombinant,” that is, constructed by taking a source text (all those notebooks, all those citations) and cutting it up into “good” lines and/or verses, and recombining those using some algorithmic chance procedure. So in a way it’s very formal. <i>The Absence of Zero</i> is 256 16-line (four quatrain) pieces (plus stuff), while <i>A Net of Momentary Sapphire</i> is made of 9-line (three tercet) pieces in blocks of 40, except that sometimes tercets are erased. (One part is just 40 tercets.) The quatrains in <i>Absence</i> and the tercets in <i>Sapphire </i>repeat, though not exactly, and not regularly, and the effect, especially when read aloud and at length, can be quite trance-like. Unfortunately these things resist excerpting, though that's less so of the last part of <i>Sapphire</i>, which I’m sure some people will simply read as a group of 40 9-line poems, some of which are better than others.<br /><br />These new poems aren’t like that. They’re certainly citational (google some of the titles and phrases in quotes, look up “trivium” and “quadrivium”) but not at all formal. And the source text is tiny so there’s not enough there to recombine. After writing in the constrained, algorithmic, style of the last two books, these felt very liberating. You could even call them “free verse.” [insert grinning cat emoji 😸 or something] Another difference is that the lines in these poems tend to be quite short in comparison to those books, except for the “Wild Fox” section of Absence.<br /><br />As for the subject matter... Well, it’s hard to talk about what poems are about. They perform what they’re about. These poems share the philosophical perspective of <i>Absence</i> and<i> Sapphire</i>, if that's not too weighty a thing to say about seven short pieces, grounded in quantum mechanics and the Mādhyamaka school of Buddhist philosophy. Sometimes I think I’m just trying to rewrite the Heart Sutra again and again. And failing. I think all of these poems are fundamentally about looking at the world and seeing and saying “it really is broken, isn’t it, and we broke it and there's no fixing it now, but my god some of the pieces are beautiful.” Walking through the English Lake District I kept thinking, you know, this is actually a sort of post-industrial deforested overgrazed hellscape. All those abandoned slate mines. Let's read “Tintern Abbey” again, from that perspective.<br /><br />(I’m trying to figure out if I could have read Stephen Collis’ wonderful “Reading Wordsworth in the Tar Sands” before I scribbled on those few A6 pages. I know I saw it before he published <i>Once in Blockadia </i>in 2016 but I don’t remember when or where. I certainly hadn’t seen “Home at Grasmere” which is also in that book. That great quote from Malcolm Lowry that heads it off! Obviously I read all those poems long before arriving at the “final” versions of these seven poems in late 2022, not that there’s any direct connection. Maybe I’m on a trajectory towards some kind of ecopoetics. But now I’m rambling. Which is exactly what I’d do if we were actually talking, come think of it.)<br /><br />Q: What brought you to exploring through recombination? I know we first encountered each other during Margaret Christakos’ legendary Influency workshops, but was it something in that workshop that prompted this particular interest? As well, what do you feel that exploring through constraint allows that might not be possible otherwise?<br /><br />A: I’d forgotten that we met through Influency! I’ve thought that if anybody comes to write a history of poetry in English Canada, well, Toronto anyway, in the 2010s, Influency would loom large. A number of really good poets came up through those seminars, Liz Howard most prominent among them. Margaret Christakos’ commitment to community and collaboration in poetry isn’t appreciated enough, nor are her own writings. She’s incredibly innovative and original and I keep learning new things from her work. <br /><br />That said, I’m not sure the thing I’ve been calling <i>recombination</i> comes out of Influency, at least directly. I do remember being introduced to procedural poetics of various sorts in the course of those seminars so maybe that’s a source, but a more proximate source is John Cage. I may have said this elsewhere, but I will repeat myself. Or, to put it differently, I will repeat myself here. It will be a lengthy digression on how <i>Absence</i> and <i>Sapphire </i>evolved, so maybe it should be a footnote? Whatever.<br /><br />[Insert stuff here that might be a long footnote, assuming I can find the text I wrote for something else a while back and never used... The problem with writing in notebooks is that they're hard to search!]<br /><br />Constraint comes in so many shapes and sizes. Sometimes it’s procedural, like Raymond Queneau’s <i>Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes</i>, sometimes it’s about limiting vocabulary, like Gregory Betts or Sonnet L’Abbe’s very different takes on Shakespeare in <i>The Others Rais’d In Me</i> and <i>Sonnet’s Shakespeare</i>, or Jordan Abel’s <i>Injun</i>, or the auto-erasures in David Bradford’s <i>I Dream Only of Myself</i>… I think Jacques Roubaud says somewhere that whatever constraint or procedure you use, unless the constraint or procedure somehow serves the overall theme of the work it really amounts to little more than a parlour game. Of course sometimes parlour games are fun, but that’s the difference between George Perec’s <i>La disparation</i> (which does not use the letter e) and Christian Bök’s volume of lipograms, <i>Eunoia</i>: in Perec, the absence means something. <br /><br />Something that constraint gives you is freedom from worrying how a work will cohere, because coherence can be generated by the constraint. Of course the constraint needs to be designed to do that. This also means some of the meaning of the work is performed by the constraint.<br /><br />I’m not sure that answers your question, but it’s a start.<br /><br />Q: With a handful of published books and chapbooks over the past decade or so, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work headed?<br /><br />A: Four books and three chapbooks since 2014: it doesn’t seem that much. But it’s a hefty pile of pages, I suppose. Although my first book, <i>Afterletters</i>, has some coherence, being engaged with the correspondence of Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, both it and my second book, <i>Inspecting Nostalgia</i>, are pretty much just a bunch of poems each. (I guess this is called a “collection.”) The last two books, on the other hand, are more formally structured wholes. (Two of the chapbooks are extracts from these.) So if there’s a progress over the past almost-decade it’s from thinking in terms of individual poems (which might be thematically related) to a book-length thing. Another development is that, while I’ve always revised a lot, I’m now revising a lot more. This is both good and bad: I think the work is more polished, but it takes longer.<br /><br />Where am I headed? I like the idea of large-scale structure, and I like the open-endedness and sort of undecidability of poems (at least the kind I write) but I also find myself craving a kind of density of language and idea that I’m not sure works in poetry. Maybe that means long-form prose. On the other hand I’m also tempted to go in the opposite direction: short, unstructured but interrelated poems, maybe a series of chapbooks... (I think that’s the ghost of the serial poem raising its head again.) There’s also that “landscape/poetry” thing still tugging at me, of which the seven poems in Touch the Donkey we started with are a manifestation. As I said, maybe a kind of ecopoetics: if it has an overall structure I can’t see it yet. Some kind of fractal probably.<br /><br />It might sometimes sound like I have everything planned out ahead of time but it’s not like that at all. There’s a fair bit of contingency, let’s try this and see if it goes anywhere, in my approach to writing: I have lots of files of stuff that once seemed like a good idea and eventually ran aground. At least three books worth.<br /><br />If I had more energy I’d also be writing reviews. I’ve joked about poetry being a write-only medium, and the much-lamented lack of “review culture” is part of that. True, it feels slightly hypocritical to encourage others to write reviews and at the same time say I don’t have the energy to do so myself, but, it would be good not just to have more reviews, and not only of the hot new debuts and award-winners, but also retrospective reviews. A lot of good work vanishes. A lot of work takes a while to understand and appreciate. Etc.<br /><br />Q: It might seem moving backwards through the trajectory of our discussion, but where does a poem, and subsequently a manuscript, begin for you?<br /><br />A: Usually the kernel is a phrase. “A parallel text, I said” is one such, that may or may not be the beginning of something in one notebook. Where does the phrase come from? I don’t often receive dictation from angelic orders, but sometimes phrases do just appear. Sometimes they’re mishearings or misreadings. Sometimes they are actual quotations. I remember reading somewhere the advice to keep a notebook of good lines, but never to make note of where they’re from, and then just appropriate those fragments of text. “File an observation until its context is lost, then treat it as a found object.” I do that, but I keep track of sources. Most of the time, anyway. (M. John Harrison, in his “anti-memoir” <i>Wish I Was Here</i>, excerpted somewhere or other, in this case.)<br /><br />Then once there’s a pile of proto-poems, that might suggest a form or a theme or a coherence. At least that’s how it worked until recently. Now I have a few idea clusters that I'm writing towards, but there are still seed phrases at the core of it all.<br /><br />Nevertheless “inspiration” is unreliable. A more dependable beginning is often just to write down the date, time and place with some notation of the weather, interior and exterior. Right now, for example, I’m sitting at my desk just after 3pm, it’s more or less sunny, the sky is a sort of uniform pale illuminated haze, I’m tired but feeling more or less content, enjoying the more or less quiet afternoon.<br /><br />I’m actually wondering whether it’s really possible to identify the definite beginnings of poems or manuscripts beyond the trace of words on the page. And what if you didn’t make note of the date and time you began to write, everytime you wrote? Yes, I know there are people who work exactly that way. <br /><br />More? This could go on for a while!<br /><br />Q: You’ve mentioned that you don’t have time, despite the interest, to write critical prose, but does that suggest that everything you write and think falls, instead, into the poems? Do your book-length projects exist as a kind of “catch-all” for your thinking?<br /><br />A: Not so much a question of time, as of energy and focus. I’m extremely fortunate to have been able to retire from full-time work at a relatively young age, so, given that I have no family obligations, time is something I have lots of. The dark side of that bright picture is that although the mental health issues which were part of my motivation for early retirement have largely receded (even if pandemic isolation did resurrect some demons) I just don’t have the energy, concentration and focus I had when I was in my 30s or 40s. Where I used to be able to spend 12 or more hours a day writing code or designing software or reading physics papers and even occasionally scratching at a poem, now I’m lucky if I can manage 3 or 4 hours a day of sustained concentration, and that not every day. I’m also really bad at context switching, so I have to focus on one thing during those concentrated hours, whether it’s writing or reading stuff that requires real thought: constant mental triage. It’s frustrating, because I’d very much like to be doing more than I am, such as, for instance, writing critical prose. And it also leaves me in awe of people who can work full-time, raise a family, write substantial stuff, edit, read, etc, and still find time to watch Succession or whatever. That seems completely impossible to me. Outside my focussed time for the most part I read what I call “the news” — stuff like the <i>G&M</i>, the<i> LRB</i>, or the <i>FT </i>(on the internet, which sure doesn’t help with maintaining focus) — and novels, though more and more often I’ll read 50 pages of a novel one evening and then, when I go back to the book the next day, have to read 20 pages of those 50 again, before getting any further. (When I was young I would read a novel in a day! I did that recently with a compelling but ultimately disappointing SF novel. I was up until 4am. Felt like crap the next day.)<br /><br />I don’t read nearly as much poetry as I used to, and most of what I read these days is old stuff. Same with novels, actually. Although I still haven't finished <i>Middlemarch</i>.<br /><br />All that said, does everything I write and think wind up in the poems? Hardly. I have to resist the urge to cram everything in: the result of doing that is likely to be too diffuse, and I think poetry needs to be focussed while at the same time open-ended. What this means is that I often find myself wanting to include something, and then deciding it’s just too much: use this later, I tell myself. An example of this is how, while working on<i> The Absence of Zero</i>, I got really interested in current approaches to quantum gravity and thought some of those ideas might be useful in that book. Nope. Maybe in some future book. One of the reasons I’m more and more interested in extended prose is that I think you might be able to fit more into that sort of container, but that may be wishful thinking. Another consequence of trying to resist the draw of the “book containing everything” is that I compartmentalize ideas into projects: the landscape/poetry thing, the quantum ghost city thing (!), the Donne thing, etc etc. Of course there’s one or more notebooks for each of those, the theory being that it’s easier to focus when writing by hand, but maybe it’s just that I have a notebook fetish. Along with a fountain pen fetish of course. Perhaps also mechanical pencils.<br /><br />Getting back to critical prose, obviously that isn't one of the things I’ve been including in the poetry I’ve been writing, despite the urge to make the poems encyclopedic. (The closest I get is a line in <i>Sapphire </i>about a new book by Lyn Hejenian, and that’s not very close.) Most books of contemporary poetry (I’m looking at the stack of books I bought at the book launches I’ve been to in the past few weeks) can easily be read in an hour at most, but that’s bound to be a superficial read. To really see what the poet is up to you’ve got to read and reread, pay attention to the sound of the poems (read aloud!) trace down any references explicit or implicit that might be there, in other words study the book. Of course it’s possible there’s not much there to study. But if there is, and you’re not going to write a critical piece about the book, how would this show up, say, in a poem you’re writing? A kind of intertextual hommage maybe. That’s definitely something I do, though I’ve never thought of it in those terms. This may be something I need to think about some more. Essay poems? Phil Hall has done that. But that’s not what I'm getting at, I think.<br /><br />Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?<br /><br />A: I look at the stacks of unread books that surround me and in a moment of panic I say Reread?!? What are you thinking??? And while I keep track of what I read I’ve just noticed that I don’t keep track of what I reread. I should change that. I do reread. A lot. But it occurs to me that the books I return to are mostly prose.<br /><br />What does that mean for a poet I wonder?<br /><br />There are three essays (for want of a better term) by the 13th century Japanese Zen master Eihei Dogen that I’ve been going back to since I first encountered them 30+ years ago: Uji (“Being-Time”), Sansuikyō (“Mountains and Rivers Sutra”) and Genjōkōan (one of those impossible multivalent portmanteau coinages Dogen is famous for: one translation has it as “Actualizing the Fundamental Point” (???) but most just leave it as is, with extensive commentary explaining or trying to explain the word). Do I understand Dogen? Not at all, but perhaps slightly better than I once didn’t. I find his language and thought endlessly generative.<br /><br />Then there’s Virginia Woolf’s novel <i>The Waves</i>, but is it a novel or a poem? It certainly doesn’t have a plot, but, again, language, language, language. With no translators harmed in the process. And in the past few years I’ve been spending a lot of time with Samuel R Delany’s early SF novel Nova and Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, both of which I’ve been reading and rereading for 50 years, as well as Jacques Roubaud’s <i>‘le grande incendie de londres’</i>, which I first encountered in 2004 or so, in the English translation of the first volume. Each of those are energizing in different ways: Roubaud for the audacity of his structural conception and how it allows him to work through his deep grief over his wife’s sudden death and then, over the subsequent decades, closely observe the functioning of his memory; Mann not so much for using a variation on the Faust legend to write about Germany’s embrace of Nazi evil (it’s a very obvious analogy) but for the subtlety with which he does it, and then, when you learn a bit about Mann’s own life and begin to realize that significant parts of the book verge on autofiction, it all shifts again; and Delany, telling a simple, old, story but there’s not a word or a scene out of place, and you know every word in every sentence is there for a reason, ok, maybe the prose is a bit baroque at times (which I may be less enamoured of now than I was when I was 15) but I still haven’t tired of it. Also the 1968 hardcover I have with its psychedelic pink and green tarot cover [I should take a picture] (by Russel FitzGerald, a friend of Delany’s who was peripherally associated with the Spicer circle in San Francisco in the late 1950s) has a great interior design, with a really smart use of running heads. I’d love to write a book that used running heads that way!<br /><br />Of course there are poets I reread, but sometimes I think it’s not so much about rereading as having read and reread and knowing that the books are there and I could read them again. Whether poetry or prose. This may be why I’m so attached to books as physical objects. I feel that way about Beckett and Joyce and Eliot and Rilke and William Carlos Williams and Doris Lessing and Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann and Louise Glück for example. Eirin Moure’s<i> Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person</i> (and Erín Moure’s <i>O Resplandor</i>). Lisa Robertson’s <i>Cinema of the Present</i>. Alice Notley’s <i>The Descent of Alette</i>. And there are writers whose works were very important to me once, kind of a background hum of words, but then it occurs to me I haven’t actually read them in quite a while so I pick up some volume and it’s a rediscovery of wonders. In the past few years I’ve done that with Ursula K Le Guin and Vladimir Nabokov, most notably. <i>Earthsea</i> and <i>Ada</i>, oh my.<br /><br />In a note at the end of <i>Inspecting Nostalgia</i> I said “no language stands alone.” All those books behind us... Not to mention the unread ones, or the ones in languages I can't even — <br /><br />Maybe that’s a good place to stop.<br /><br /><p></p>rob mclennanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07958889643637765864noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5218431112984390179.post-67687857941623160312023-09-06T10:00:00.020-04:002023-09-06T10:00:00.141-04:00TtD supplement #245 : seven questions for Heather Cadsby<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhitk552Q2-lpgw4F18sVZ_kqQLODwLpcoO_RY4cBy6INSXebbi6XKbnRzcOxvysURapL1N8f8qRopaSZvOqTvqfhg-a1Bt7vZakp2T8h2bgXaqqBTLevVMzl551WU8mz8wlh7p5WbYXwXfua5dJY8P-lMaXjAANkSM_CrqubB8ekiB4VSYJL-VLJMFz6rN/s4032/IMG_5010.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="328" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhitk552Q2-lpgw4F18sVZ_kqQLODwLpcoO_RY4cBy6INSXebbi6XKbnRzcOxvysURapL1N8f8qRopaSZvOqTvqfhg-a1Bt7vZakp2T8h2bgXaqqBTLevVMzl551WU8mz8wlh7p5WbYXwXfua5dJY8P-lMaXjAANkSM_CrqubB8ekiB4VSYJL-VLJMFz6rN/w436-h328/IMG_5010.JPG" width="436" /></a></div><b><a href="https://www.brickbooks.ca/author-bios/heather-cadsby/" target="_blank">Heather Cadsby</a></b> is the author of 5 books of poetry. The most recent is titled <i><a href="https://www.brickbooks.ca/shop/standing-in-the-flock-of-connections-by-heather-cadsby/" target="_blank">Standing in the Flock of Connections</a></i> (Brick Books).<br /><br />Her poems “How to catch flamboyant bohemians” and “My dinner with Andrew” appear in the thirty-eighth issue of <i>Touch the Donkey</i>.<br /><br />Q: Tell me about the poems “How to catch flamboyant bohemians” and “My dinner with Andrew.”<br /><br />A: “How to catch flamboyant bohemians” came from my interest in Alfred Jarry who coined the word ‘pataphysics to describe impossible problems with imaginary solutions.<br /><br />“My dinner with Andrew” was sparked by a 1981 film titled <i>My dinner with Andre</i>. Two friends spiral into confusion.<br /><br />Q: How do these poems compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?<br /><br />A: Lately I’ve been working on self-pity pieces. So for that, they are more interesting.<br /><br />Q: Can you expand on this?<br /><br />A: As of today this topic is on hold.<br /><br />Q: I’ve been really intrigued by your recent explorations through the prose poem. What brought you to the form?<br /><br />A: I’m not sure where it started but I do know I was a big fan of James Tate’s “The List of Famous Hats”.<br /><br />Q: What do you feel the prose poem allows that might not otherwise be possible?<br /><br />A: I think the prose poem allows for parody, irony, mockery in a pace that can be frenzied or meditative.<br /><br />Q: With five published full-length collections and your current work-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work headed?<br /><br />A: I think my work has progressed in tandem with my life situations. So from early married to birth of children to divorce. I see it headed wherever my life is moving.<br /><br />Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?<br /><br />A: T.S. Eliot’s <i>Four Quartets</i> is a work that I return to. It is full of wisdom, for example: “rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom”. And simple, precise statements: “ash on an old man's sleeve”.<br /><br /><p></p>rob mclennanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07958889643637765864noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5218431112984390179.post-2719041764456694202023-08-25T10:00:00.016-04:002023-08-25T12:01:00.525-04:00TtD supplement #244 : seven questions for kevin mcpherson eckhoff and Kimberley Dyck<p><b></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNu7-EmSYZ45Obfnxveszf5t2OrI7-xUBekPV4t9toHpQd1ayyrJkia9ru9Jf89I5afYrH0DDR2tRyYruUnIrYJs_g1EdKuITNqYpw501E-BVOcCbvuXflrutaxC-SPaK7hv3P6FlJ5ORt6gTHrSSgPQ1MydUEpkLO3fB32MZIoYzD2Ap0zGJWwsYxIN5b/s4032/IMG_3434.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="302" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNu7-EmSYZ45Obfnxveszf5t2OrI7-xUBekPV4t9toHpQd1ayyrJkia9ru9Jf89I5afYrH0DDR2tRyYruUnIrYJs_g1EdKuITNqYpw501E-BVOcCbvuXflrutaxC-SPaK7hv3P6FlJ5ORt6gTHrSSgPQ1MydUEpkLO3fB32MZIoYzD2Ap0zGJWwsYxIN5b/w403-h302/IMG_3434.JPG" width="403" /></a></b></div><b>Kimberley Dyck</b> likes to write, but is mostly mumming and experiencing the world as pooemful. This is her first publication! Originally from te motu o aotea; a small island in nz; she now lives in the okanagan valley, bc. <br /><br /><a href="http://kevinmcphersoneckhoff.com/" target="_blank"><b>kevin mcpherson eckhoff</b></a> has written and published some stuff, but mostly he reads other people’s books to his 2 boyos and teaches mopes and milks goats. Oh, and he has a very quote-comedy-unquote album called <i>Joke Killer</i>.<br /><br />Their collaborative poems “HOW TO WRITE A POEM” and “TO WOO TEARS” appear in the thirty-seventh issue of <i>Touch the Donkey</i>.<br /><br />Q: Tell me about “HOW TO WRITE A POEM” and “TO WOO TEARS.”<br /><br />K2: “How to write a poem” and “to woo tears” are four-eye poems about being the giver and also the receiver, taking life’s sadness and wantingness and painting a wash of love over ideas of obedience and other such god and parent complexities. Our collaboration was a kevinsight proposed shortly after Kimberlent him the writings of Richard Rohr, whose work felt like fresh, inspired, heart-harmonizing interpretations of scripture. For several months we each wrote individual poems reflecting on the themes of Rohr's weekly words, and then took turns mashing our lines together! In the making of each these mix-ups, there are a total of 3 poems: his and hers, and then the offspring, of course!<br /><br />Q: How do these poems compare with the individual projects or poems you’ve each been working on lately?<br /><br />K2: My individual poems oh and I’m writing are mostly sad and lonely lustrous subtropical salt caked verses at the moment in my head while being inundated, while these are happy and hopeful, if not explicitly, then implicitly by relatives and friends in post-covid/, by the fact of their collaborative Oh-my-guts spirit! /-together-again/ too many things /-frenzy/: sketches, screenplays, short fiction experiments, translations, buttfaces!<br /><br />Q: What first prompted the collaborations between the two of you? Is this all you’ve done so far, or have there and/or will there be further?<br /><br />K2: This series of collaborations was prompted by a bouncy kind of belief relief in the joy-power of sharing word energies that rough and tumble the mix of egoic stoic and evolving thoughts within the immanence of this god-shaped not-hole that we are. Yes and we don’t know! Yes and we don't know!<br /><br />Q: Were there any models for this particular collaboration? How did you decide on approach or form?<br /><br />K2: Kimberley, did you have any particular models for this collaboration?<br /><br />Hmmm. Not consciously, but I retrospectively see the model of the risen Christ embedded in creation… As longshore currents travel, they pick up sediment and transport it down the beach in a process known as longshore drift. Longshore drift can form long, narrow outcroppings of land called spits, as well as barrier islands, long islands located parallel to the coast. Barrier islands constantly change as longshore currents keep picking up, moving and redepositing sand. I'm a bit of a drifter… And you, Kevin, what patterns, paths, pals inspired you to collect words in this collab? <br /><br />Probably the main patterns/paths for this collab would be a junk drawer of disconnected or one-off poems done with writer-friends like Jake Kennedy and Jonathan Ball, although none had followed quite the same process. There’s a certain dialogic energy with these, and sometimes a kind of overlapping and quilting of our two voices into one. This nature might be more obvious in pieces other than these two in <i>TtD</i>. In some ways, the poems are extensions of our text-based exchanges about spirituality and everyday life, and as such, Kimberley, you were a main source of inspiration through your invitation to share Rohr’s meditations with me, through your openness to share your own work, and through your willingness to explore organic ways of wording together! (Dammit, I just read yours now and it’s so much better than mine… Now i have to rewrite mine)<br /><br />(Awww no it isn't!) I also wanted to add you as a model or inspiration because of your can-do candid creative initiative and other-empowerment in suggesting that we write out of our responses to weekly readings. That was kindling! So, Kevin next question, how did you decide on approach or form? <br /><br />(You go first this time! I won't read your response before I respond. Also I think we should keep all the brackets and dammits ;)<br /><br />Did I decide?! Died side I’d? Sighed eye dye? We deed seed? Was it I that proposed the collab and proposed approach? For my own poems, I couldn’t always resist my typical loopy language goofs, but also strove for a kind kind of sincerity—not always with consistent results! There was the urge to honour the original inciting texts and find resonance in my own beliefs and daily livings. I suppose these pieces are like a triple collab, responding initially to Rohr’s words, then to one another’s: a three-ingredient potato salad! As for the poem mashing, how did we decide to take turns head cheffing them? Not sure I had any premeditated forms… it was a lot of mix and taste and remix, bake and taste and, if bitter or off, start over! How’d I land on this stupid cooking metaphor?! And Kimbers, how form or approach was your decide on and what?! <br /><br />(Whoops I accidentally skimmed your answer and then waited till I forgot before cooking up my own response). My side lacked decisive. Cautiously meddling pretty word arrangements produced a short- and long-stemmed chop and chunky bouquet. Lightly and with impulse and feeling, not with a lot of thought. Thought produced some remixes from the kevin side that I find most lovely and reading through the collection again I hope to dissect as darlingly my own writing as a practice I can attribute to what I learned from our collaboration. Flowers and food are great metaphors... we keep very busy arranging and mixing in life with the best petals and produce, we are so blessed to do so. <br /><br />Q: Are the formal strategies and conversations shifting throughout the process of attempting a manuscript? How are you seeing the poems impacting each other, if at all?<br /><br />K2: Formalities and convos for this project have stalled while other life things get sorted. My google docs has gone into the cloud, and so without looking back at the poems to remember fully I'd say they impacted each other just as we as a creative triad did; never running out of material or words to add or repeat. There is repetition in the poems as in the meditations for as culture shifts, bodies age, and our worlds change, life still revolves on its axis, the one constant: love, which emits waves so that even though we cycle in the same space not one cycle is the same. We still write about the centre, nature sings about it and seekers still find it. That was me kimberley; kevin do you have anything to add? <br /><br />I second all the what you said! I’m not sure we’ve gotten to a point where the poems lucidly envision an overall manuscript yet, although the potential seems clear given the premise and practice. I’m sure the strategies of process and form will shift in ways that organically evolve and inform new poems—I just suspect we’re not deep enough into the project to recognize these shifts. Or perhaps such manoeuvres are subtler and more difficult to perceive than what feel like the larger, more obvious ones inspired by constant shifts in our inner and outer worlds: changing seasons, family dynamics, cultural happenings, job demands, communitying, our understandings of our faiths, etc. I appreciate your words like “axis” and “waves” and “cycle” and “centre”… they make me think of a solar system with all of these outer elements as planets and moons and comets, and unseen inner forces like gravities, UV light, and cosmic rays, and at our core is this sun, a belief in god as love that powers everything, but even that is hurtling through space at a crazy velocity on its own trajectory to who knows where. And our poems are what happens when our solar systems intersect, the overlapping of atmospheres, confluence of electromagnetic radiation, the collision of asteroids. Just please don’t ask how our newly confirmed alien friends factor into this silly analogy! <br /><br />Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize either of your own works? What particular works can’t either of you help but return to?<br /><br />K2: Kai pai! You start these ones Kevin; maybe aliens will somehow inform your answer to this next set of questions ;) <br /><br />Okay! I’m a bad reader. Horrible. My reading practice is lazy and random and embarrassing… I only get to a few books each year—contending with endless essays during the academic year kinda burns me out… patheticsadface emoji. But I love reading to my boys! Axe Cop, Lord of the Rings, Dr Seuss, Bone, Amulet, anything Star Wars… but there’s also some aspect of performance there (i.e. doing character voices) which changes the reading action for me, makes it more enticing and rewarding, as does relishing the boys’ reactions to plot twists and tensions. Also, attending readings generally energizes my work more than reading books… perhaps my drive is fuelled by community? I recently read and loved <i>Lizard Telepathy, Fox Telepathy</i> by Yoshinori Henguchi, and some of my perennial return-to-ers include Dianne Williams and Lisa Robertson and bpNichol and Flarfers and Queneau…<br /><br />(I don't know if I'll get to this quickly :) but I will!)<br /><br />(No rush ever! Enjoy your folks!)<br /><br />I read on the toilet or holding a book in one hand and a hose in the other; but rarely am I sitting or watering for long. At the moment I have a few books on hand from authors who share the same landscape as me, and I keep coming back to these because I love this place I call home now: <br /><blockquote>“Called here by some other beat<br />in my blood<br />by blue sky & turquoise”<br /><blockquote>~Michelle Doege</blockquote></blockquote>And I love to hear “chocolate lilies, shooting stars, columbine, and the oh so delicate calipso orchid” (Virginia Dansereau) as if they are friends we have in common.<br /><br /><p></p>rob mclennanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07958889643637765864noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5218431112984390179.post-1589515816510221312023-08-15T10:00:00.042-04:002023-08-16T11:11:43.401-04:00TtD supplement #243 : seven questions for Monty Reid<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbd0rkc8p-N-6UQpuGbWcLEzcB8r5bcpdc_pWx5EtX9_tzKj_DGhh8S7zikBL2HDmQHDaEIpLHI5yobLmeQC4ICvarToTrgZ-fUJDJ0vXpAq2g_Nc5gM_Fp_97SwDGllxEhTDuRQUEKpGXzN5x-XNoM_uwbeeWi-Saw69EIy2OITUmH_VU-UoQjkrEoz99/s4032/IMG_5011.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="286" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbd0rkc8p-N-6UQpuGbWcLEzcB8r5bcpdc_pWx5EtX9_tzKj_DGhh8S7zikBL2HDmQHDaEIpLHI5yobLmeQC4ICvarToTrgZ-fUJDJ0vXpAq2g_Nc5gM_Fp_97SwDGllxEhTDuRQUEKpGXzN5x-XNoM_uwbeeWi-Saw69EIy2OITUmH_VU-UoQjkrEoz99/w382-h286/IMG_5011.JPG" width="382" /></a></div><p><b><a href="https://twitter.com/montyreid" target="_blank">Monty Reid</a></b> is an Ottawa poet and gardener. Author of a dozen poetry collections and many chapbooks (including 5 from above/ground), his latest book, <i><a href="https://49thshelf.com/Books/T/The-Lockdown-Elegies" target="_blank">The Lockdown Elegies</a></i>, will appear this fall. <br /><br />A cluster of poems from “The Lockdown Elegies” appear in the thirty-eighth issue of <i>Touch the Donkey</i>.<br /><br />Q: Tell me about “The Lockdown Elegies.”<br /><br />A: The Lockdown Elegies is a sequence of poems that is either too early or too late, a farewell to something that hasn’t disappeared yet, a premature consolation or a belated recognition. Fragmentary, slightly aphoristic, sometimes funny and sometimes scared, the poems address the stresses, the isolation and the contradictory responses in evidence to the ongoing pandemic. They try, repeatedly, to pretend it’s over. <br /><br />The entire ms is indeed an elegy, for my father-in-law Jack Hill who passed away during the second lockdown. He didn’t have Covid, but the virus certainly complicated his last days. Scattered throughout the ms are short poems dedicated to other friends who have died during this period. The overall tone is subdued, but not bleak. The opportunity for quiet humour is frequent, whether it be a quick celebration of toilet paper or sex on zoom. The poems are deliberately short, disarmingly straightforward, and tenacious in their hold on the world.<br /><br />While contemporary events aren’t front and centre in the poems, they contribute to the background anxiety, whether it be climate-change-driven forest fires, horrific residential school discoveries, shortages real and imagined, mask anxiety, anti-vax campaigners, etc. The virus itself doesn’t make much of an appearance in the poems, altho it too is clearly airborne around the edges. What is at the heart of the work is the sense of loss, but also a search for the conditions that make grace possible<br /><br />Q: How do these poems compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?<br /><br />A: This gathering of poems, all very short, respond to a specific situation, a situation shared, at least in part, by most Canadians. The thematic linkage is not unusual for my work, but the focus on something so public and politicized is a bit different. Taken together, they don't constitute a long poem – they lack the necessary attention span, and one of the things I lost during the pandemic was the ability to pay attention to much of anything for very long. So these are the fragments that remain. You can see the poems looking around for some scaffolding to enable coherence, whether it be dreams or prayers or govt policy, but none of it’s convincing. All you’re left with is the people you love. I think this book is more desperate than my other recent work.<br /><br />Q: While you’ve worked intermittently on book-length works across your writing life, it would seem your past decade-plus of work has been far more focused on these larger projects, from this forthcoming work to your lengthy poem on espionage to “Host,” a project I recall hearing you read during the mid-aughts at the Ottawa Art Gallery. Has you been aware of a shift, or is this simply the way you’ve always worked?<br /><br />A: Now that I think about it, most of my books, going back to the 1970s, are groups of interconnected poems. <i>Karst Means Ston</i>e grew out of my grandfather's rather spotty memoirs, <i>The Life of Ryley</i> was about life in a small Alberta town and<i> The Alternate Guide</i> grew out of a natural history project I was working on for the provincial museum In Edmonton. Most of the others (<i>Dog Sleeps</i>, <i>Garden</i>, <i>Meditatio Placentae</i>, etc) are gatherings of less-than-book-length sequences. Collections of short, unlinked poems are fairly rare in my published work. Maybe the best example would be <i>These Lawns</i>. So that compulsion has been pretty consistent for a long time now. But what I notice has changed is the scale of the projects. There are 365 espionage poems. The parasite project (<i>Host</i>) keeps expanding as new and fascinating parasite species are described. Recently, I’ve been trying to curtail this tendency by writing short poems (haiku-length) and shorter poems (haiku-like, but missing a syllable) but usually this results in the combination of the short pieces into much longer chains. I think I’m doomed.<br /><br />Q: What is it about the linked sequence or book-length project that appeals? What is it that you feel the structure allows that might not be possible otherwise?<br /><br />A: Here are some things that make it attractive:<br /><br />1. carrying capacity – it can be a poem with history in it, a la Pound or Brand or many others, but it can also accommodate dreams and memories and music and documentation and whatever else you might need. It gives one room to develop a thought, or to let your mind wander. Sometimes that can result in a tiresome pastiche, but sometimes you get a brilliant new recipe. <br /> <br />2. coherence, but not too much of it – most of my favorite long poems – like <i>Seed Catalogue</i> (Kroetsch) or <i>Naked Poems</i> (Webb) or, more recently, Hannah Sullivan’s<i> Three Poems</i> or Laura Walker’s <i>Psalmbook</i> – tend to be fairly focused, but I also like the sprawl of David Antin’s talking poems and the meander of<i> The Martyrology</i>. While there is probably a narrative impulse at play in most long poems, it’s frequently disrupted and detourned, and sometimes that’s where the most interesting poetry occurs. And in the pandemic, everybody;s narrative got a bit messed up<br /><br />3. persistence over time – lyric poems traditionally step out of time, but long poems step right into it. Their duration is the point, the ending is deferred, and you have to stick with it to get to the best parts. So they require a certain amount of patience, which is an undervalued virtue in the twitterverse. And there’s Bob Kroestch’s famous ‘delay’, crucial in both love-making and in poetry.<br /><br />Q: With over a dozen collections going back to the 1970s, including a selected with Anansi in the 1990s, how else do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work headed?<br /><br />A: While I do appreciate whatever attention my work attracts, I do understand that it situates just a little off to the side of the main streams of Cdn poetry. I’m ok with that, and it leaves me with room to work on material that doesn’t always generate clicks but may have huge impact in other contexts – like espionage in Canada, or cell biology. But to tell the truth, I have no clue where my work is headed.<br /><br />Q: I’ve long considered that <i>Disappointment Island</i> (2006) was a geographically-between collection, almost untethered, given how deeply everything prior to that was bound to Alberta. Your collections since have been linked to other considerations, whether geography or otherwise, from Luskville, Quebec to your Beacon Hill backyard garden, and into notions of, as you say, “espionage in Canada, or cell biology.” How do you see your work in terms of geography, or even those shifts through and beyond specific sites?<br /><br />A: I think you’re right about <i>Disappointment Island</i> as a transitional book, but <i>Karst Means Stone </i>(1979) was definitely a Saskatchewan book (although Anne Szumigalski was soon to advise me, rather primly, I couldn’t be a Saskatchewan writer because I’d “reneged in my soul”) and all those Alberta books were also linked to other considerations, from birds (<i>The Dream of Snowy Owls</i>, 1983) to map-making (<i>The Alternate Guide</i>,1985) to Burgess Shale fossils (<i>Flat Side</i>, 1998). So geography is certainly a factor, but never the exclusive factor. And while I’ve always been interested in geography at a macro level (as in continental drift, ice-free corridors, sea level changes, etc), I live at the local level, house and garden and playground, and that’s what I tend to write about. So the espionage poems came about because Canada’s spy agencies are housed two blocks away from me and I see them everyday, and the parasite interest grew out of my work with natural history collections. In my poems, I find that attention to the local is what makes the larger interests/issues possible, and there is often great danger and misadventure when the larger issues overwhelm the local, inescapable as that sometimes is.<br /><br />Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?<br /><br />A: For long-term sustenance – Phyllis Webb, Yehuda Amichai<br /><br />For short-term recharge – Lisa Robertson, earlier Don McKay<br /><br />Current - Jorie Graham<br /><br /></p><p></p>rob mclennanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07958889643637765864noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5218431112984390179.post-32242830574852545022023-08-09T10:00:00.015-04:002023-08-10T09:54:36.680-04:00TtD supplement #242 : seven questions for Michael Betancourt<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZBkyuBLKg6tjMDY01OxINZS8qb33TSfNYN_Nf66H3B4XCV-20a6DHWVbvn6u0sILm-xusvrF3Mzw1lfTtdm2nMi7oDY7ypQegWCnMJrFS1qam1LclGQ7ahYodOIIz54PzRVjHUEgrFiuwRgtLtDBSEAhzd-PGqCtkc_uR54CbWyBWjb9jRjaug8frb5vg/s4032/IMG_5008.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="325" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZBkyuBLKg6tjMDY01OxINZS8qb33TSfNYN_Nf66H3B4XCV-20a6DHWVbvn6u0sILm-xusvrF3Mzw1lfTtdm2nMi7oDY7ypQegWCnMJrFS1qam1LclGQ7ahYodOIIz54PzRVjHUEgrFiuwRgtLtDBSEAhzd-PGqCtkc_uR54CbWyBWjb9jRjaug8frb5vg/w434-h325/IMG_5008.JPG" width="434" /></a></div><b><a href="https://www.noirzvisualpoetry.com/product/noirz-46-michael-betancourt-thoughts-without-words/" target="_blank">Michael Betancourt’s</a></b> work with asemic poetry has been published in <i>Die Lerre Mitte</i>, <i>aurapoesiavisual</i>, and <i>Utsanga</i>. He is also a pioneer of “Glitch Art” who began glitching in 1990 who has made visually seductive movies and statics that bring the visionary tradition into the present, setting the stage for the contemporary mania for digital materiality. His diverse practice is unified by a consistent concern for the poetic potential of the overlooked and neglected possibilities of errors and mistakes in recognition, which equally informs his approach to asemic poetry and media art. By emphasizing the central role of audience perception, his aesthetics encourages the viewer to find poetic meaning in their everyday life. He is a board member of the Art of Light Organization. <br /><br />His visual sequence “Recursive Glyphs” appears in the thirty-eighth issue of <i>Touch the Donkey</i>.<br /><br />Q: Tell me about the visual sequence “Recursive Glyphs.”<br /><br />A: My work with Typoetry tends to be formal, concerned with questions of reading and recognition—even when it's expressive and evocative. <i>The Recursive Glyphs</i> are a series of typoems made with a very restricted set of requirements: each is composed from only four letters in no more than four typefaces, which are then collaged and arranged. Glyphs are a common element of computer interfaces, but they are typically automatically generated, serving as visual icons. Because any attempt to read mine creates weird loops of mis/recognition, they’re “recursive”—they can only refer to themselves, always pointing back to their own arrangement, rather than to anything else. At the same time, since these typoems were created to have an iconic character, giving this series that title seemed appropriate.<br /><br />Q: How do these poems compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?<br /><br />A: These are typical of my work right now. It’s a moving target. New ideas change my approach, which then makes more new ideas, changing things still more. (And thus recursive!) These are, in a sense, challenge works: self imposed restrictions that become a big part of how the piece comes together. Working with only four letters was surprisingly easy, but avoiding familiar or recognizable words in selecting the letters quickly become important so I wouldn't think too much about their meaning as words. That made the play of suggested words and letterforms easier to embrace. Nothing definitive ever really emerges, but that's by design.<br /><br />Q: What first prompted you to work on visual poetry as a form? How did you get here?<br /><br />A: When I started in the 1990s, my typoems weren’t something I was taking seriously, and I rarely (if ever) saved the things I was making. They were a way of playing with language, and to see what I could do with Adobe Illustrator, but they weren’t something that I tried to show. Then we had the Covid Pandemic and I was corresponding with Michael Jacobson from the Post-Asemic Press about an introduction I was writing for a book of Marco Giovenale’s asemic poems. In the course of things I showed him some of my little experiments and he was enthusiastic about them. His enthusiasm was a bit of a surprise, and it encouraged me to send them out. When I was first doing these, the reactions were almost always negative and that made making them no fun, so I just stopped showing them to people. The kinds of things that happen to language in these poetics has provided me with a way to think about writing and reading without necessarily considering what these glyphs actually mean, and that has always been very exciting.<br /><br />Q: Have you any models for the types of work you’ve been attempting?<br /><br />A: Depending on your point of view, there are three answers to that question: yes, no, and not exactly—and they’re all correct! “Typoetry” was originally proposed for typographic (concrete) poems created by Hansjörg Mayer in the 1960s, and my work definitely belongs to that lineage. Both Mayer and another visual poet/typographer of that era, Norman Ives, are reference points for what I’m doing, but they worked with physical type. Because I’m using vectorized typography, there is a greater fluidity and ambivalence to my work. The difference in medium—physical lettering versus digital graphics—means what I do is related to their earlier works, but they can’t really provide models for how I do things.<br /><br />Q: How do you feel your work has progressed since the 1990s, and where do you see your work headed?<br /><br />A: That’s hard to say, since I didn’t keep those earlier works, but I think they were much simpler, more legible, than they have become. As to where things re going, I really don’t know. It all depends on “ah ha” moments as I keep working, what kinds of things occur to me and what I do with them. There’s always a tension between becoming more abstract and more legible—and I feel like that’s the balance that I’m currently working through, maximizing their ambivalence, while trying to keep them interesting. But it’s always hard to make predictions, especially about the future.<br /><br />Q: You suggest a moving target: is this the same reasoning behind the interest in the sequence, wishing not to present a single, fixed point, but a progression of sorts?<br /><br />A: Yes, very much so. I am by training and inclination a movie maker, so continuums, sequences, and progressions are a “natural” part of how I think about my work. Plus, all language, whether written or spoken, takes place in series—and only becomes meaningful from that modulation and context.<br /><br />Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?<br /><br />A: This is likely going to sound strange, but I mostly read philosophy. Stiegler, Wittgenstein, Barthes, Flusser have all been close to the top of my recent re-reading list. My work builds from conceptual rather than aesthetic or poetic ‘sources,’ and I don’t rely on inspiration for what I’m doing because I work every day. There is always something new to consider and engage. However, I am constantly looking at the visual poetry in my library, putting it along side Glitch Art and historical abstraction. David Zwirner did an exhibition of mid-twentieth century Cuban abstraction a couple of years ago called <i>Concrete Cuba</i>, and I recently bought the catalogue, which is very exciting (and very different from what I’m doing myself).<br /><br />Thanks for letting me talk about my typoems and what’s happening in them!<br /><br /><p></p>rob mclennanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07958889643637765864noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5218431112984390179.post-38180515334390624432023-07-15T10:00:00.009-04:002023-10-10T08:38:44.379-04:00Touch the Donkey : thirty-eighth issue,<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;">The thirty-eighth issue is now available, with new poems by Samuel Amadon, Amanda Earl, Miranda Mellis, Michael Betancourt, R Kolewe, Monty Reid and Meghan Kemp-Gee.</span><br />
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</form>rob mclennanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07958889643637765864noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5218431112984390179.post-52902962293800012822023-06-08T10:00:00.049-04:002023-06-08T15:53:35.775-04:00TtD supplement #241 : six questions for Ben Meyerson<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJ7qGteeu9fYwG8FiSxTWrZ2jE5kSh5fSfcn4K9iEDxhi6Lon8Ya1nKUKaJAMlEvZ9X6HkBof6mIsI68zllcQO-OK2DLZEtuutrR6HuN8TyiLiVaMmeo4IRQ1MY-qNcWFfl2glH1WxQdEG5omWD-MRzA8DlaUD-oJG5JLIK3v5CvG8KSRhWSjDZFsxcQ/s4032/IMG_3433.JPG" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="310" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJ7qGteeu9fYwG8FiSxTWrZ2jE5kSh5fSfcn4K9iEDxhi6Lon8Ya1nKUKaJAMlEvZ9X6HkBof6mIsI68zllcQO-OK2DLZEtuutrR6HuN8TyiLiVaMmeo4IRQ1MY-qNcWFfl2glH1WxQdEG5omWD-MRzA8DlaUD-oJG5JLIK3v5CvG8KSRhWSjDZFsxcQ/w414-h310/IMG_3433.JPG" width="414" /></a></div><b><a href="https://benmeyersonmedia.com/" target="_blank">Ben Meyerson</a></b> holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota and an MA in philosophy from the Universidad de Sevilla. He is currently a PhD candidate in comparative literature at the University of Toronto. He is the author of four chapbooks: <i><b><a href="https://benmeyersonmedia.com/project-menagerie/" target="_blank">In a Past Life</a></b></i> (The Alfred Gustav Press, 2016), <i><b><a href="https://benmeyersonmedia.com/project-holcocene/" target="_blank">Holcocene</a></b></i> (Kelsay Books, 2018), <i><b><a href="http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2019/09/new-from-aboveground-press-ecology-of.html" target="_blank">An Ecology of the Void </a></b></i>(above/ground press, 2019) and <i><b><a href="https://sevenkitchenspress.com/our-authors/" target="_blank">Near Enough</a></b></i> (Seven Kitchens Press, forthcoming in 2023). His poems, translations and essays have appeared in several journals, including <i>Interim</i>, <i>PANK</i>, <i>Long Poem Magazine</i>, <i>El Mundo Obrero</i>, <i>Great River Review</i>, <i>The Inflectionist Review</i>, <i>Rust+Moth</i>, and<i> Pidgeonholes</i>. His debut collection, entitled <i>Seguiriyas</i>, is forthcoming from Black Ocean Press in the fall of 2023.<br /><br />His poems “Summer Storm,” “Under the Antigua Iglesia de San Miguel in Guadix” and “Living Together” appear in the thirty-seventh issue of <i>Touch the Donkey</i>.<br /><br />Q: Tell me about the poems “Summer Storm,” “Under the Antigua Iglesia de San Miguel in Guadix” and “Living Together.”<br /><br />A: All three of them are trying to reckon with the delicate uncertainty of contact between two cultures, either in real time or in memory. “Summer Storm” describes one of the many times when the basement of my childhood house was damaged by flooding, but it’s really about Jewishness and the ways in which occupying a home has taken on particular significance for diasporic Jews, who have constantly navigated living situations in which they have been minorities relative to other dominant cultures. In the home, life takes on a shape, and that shape delimits and forms the continuous, cyclical (re)production of collective memory, thereby overcoming whatever might have threatened to interrupt or destroy that communal remembrance and serving as insulation against the dangers of the outside world – as I observe in the poem, “the will to have becomes the will to remember.” Practices of remembrance tend to perform the annihilation of their own content over and over for the sake of its preservation – memory destroys and renews itself all at once so that it can exist both as a subject of discourse and as an inarticulate dimension of somatic experience or an undecidable inflection of voice, producing a yearning that renders it doubly present, a pang that both pulls the individual into a choral relationship with the community and leaves them isolated in their own body. Memory, then, is always “dying so that it is never to die,” purposive in its self-compromising process of preservation and yet purposeless when it generates a feeling of loss in us, having never set out to hurt us.<br /><br />“Under the Antigua Iglesia de San Miguel in Guadix” looks at similar questions from a totally <br />different angle, and moves beyond the scope of Judaism to consider the layering of Muslim and <br />Christian history in Andalusia, which was ruled by several Muslim dynasties from the 8th century until 1492, when the Emirate of Granada finally fell to Christian forces in the culminating phase of what was known as the “Reconquista.” Within the next decade or so, all the Muslims in Spain were forcibly converted to Christianity, and just over a century later, the Spanish crown ordered the expulsion of these Moriscos (converted Muslims) from the country. In the poem, the layering of Christian and Muslim history in Andalusia is literal: the Iglesia de San Miguel, which is located in Guadix (a town in the Sierra Nevada mountains about an hour’s drive from Granada) is a church that was built atop the remains of a mosque – a relatively common phenomenon in Spain during the years following the Reconquista. Even after the Moriscos were expelled from the country in 1609, the churches remained intertwined with the mosques. My goal in the poem is to demonstrate the ways in which the absence of one culture is constructed and reconstructed by the layering of history – stones atop stones, then memories atop memories. I’m interested in the pressure of that layering. On the one hand, it’s definitely destructive, and reproduces the violence that set it into motion – after all, “each brick is deaf to its brother.” On the other hand, though, it exerts a kind of pressure that’s much more generative, that adds rather than subtracts: a more expansive sense of space and time, a “pearl that erupts from what enfolds it.” So where does that leave us? I had to end the poem, because I didn’t know. Histories alway seems to be caught up in a double-bind whereby their accretion is both destructive and generative all at once, but as I stood in the thick of that dilemma on Calle San Miguel, the weather was unseasonably hot even for July in Andalusia, and I was sweating, my attention wandering. The idea of the destructive and generative dual-motion of historical accumulation became a bit of a brain-worm for me, though, so I do revisit that theme at greater length over the course of my book <i>Seguiriyas</i>, in which all of these poems are set to appear.<br /><br />“Living Together” is my attempt to write something that looks like a love poem even as it continues to explore the same sorts of relations that I address in the other two poems: cultures doing their best to come to an understanding and remembering one another once that fragile understanding has been ruptured. It’s about two people sitting beside one another, but also about two cultures attempting to do the same, and then the way that fraught cohabitation gets reproduced and perhaps idealized in memory. Given its proximity to “Under the Antigua Iglesia de San Migul in Guadix,” one might be tempted to read “Living Together” as a tacit critique of Américo Castro’s rose-tinted conception of the medieval period in Spain as a time of “convivencia,” in which Christian, Muslim and Jewish communities coexisted in relative harmony; that interpretation would certainly be fine with me! <br /> <br />Q: How do these poems compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?<br /><br />A: The three poems in question share some thematic affinities with the poetry that I’ve been writing more recently in the sense that I continue to be interested in the ways in which the back-and-forth between communal and individual memory accumulates both in bodies and on a historical or intergenerational scale. However, I’ve been trying to expand my thinking on that front and explore how the constructive-cum-destructive dynamics of memory might relate to some of the oldest philosophical fascinations – in particular, I’m drawn to the presocratic thinkers’ persistent attempts to delineate the substrate of all being, its composition and its movement – generation, destruction, preservation and exchange are central physical and social principles in the ontology of thinkers like Anaximander and Heraclitus, and they resurface in the work of many of my favorite modern philosophers. Since memory (and especially diasporic memory) seems to operate according to permutations of the those same principles, it is my hope that in elaborating a correlation between memory and ontology, my poetry might be able to function as a space in which they are constantly bringing one another to life and extending into a whole host of more particularized concerns, including but not limited to: the establishment, codification and enforcement of legal authority, the interplay between property and debt, communal attachment to territory, and the foundational ethical imperative that orders one’s encounter with another. All of that might sound rather grandiose when put in such terms, but in practice I’m mostly writing about rivers, rock and soil formations, tree roots, light and shadow – my goal has been to describe a rock or a river in such a way that I end up at, say, a consideration of state power and the practice of keeping ledgers, and that approach has led me to experiment a lot with form in an attempt to tweak my own mode of attention. I’ve been playing with sonnets and ciphers, I’ve tried to use visual spacing that approximates the layout of medieval musical notation, and I’ve had a good time attempting to translate the discursive arrangement of Talmudic commentary into a poetic register. All of that tinkering has impacted the ways in which I’ve been building imagery, using rhythm and cadence, and ordering my thoughts. That said, there are still plenty of resonances between what I’m working on now and the poems from<i> Seguiriyas</i> – I like to revisit motifs, and I’m as guilty as most other writers of falling too often into my favorite patterns of speech, no matter how hard I try to be mindful of my own habits. I am not remaking myself so much as finding pressure points in what I’ve already done and then turning them into loci of something a little more modest than transformation – ‘adjustment’ is very nearly the word I’m looking for here, I think. <br /> <br />I should also mention that I’ve been slowly but steadily translating the poetry of Javier Egea into English over the course of the last several years. Egea was one of the most prominent Andalusian poets of his generation and published his most important books in the 1980s and 1990s. Having come of age as a writer in the wake of Francisco Franco’s long-lived fascist dictatorship in Spain, he was deeply concerned about the ways in which poetry could be complicit with such ideologies, even in cases wherein complicity was the opposite of its intent. Accordingly, he made a point of drawing rigorous distinctions between the sincerity of lyric expression and the truth about the material conditions of the society from which that lyricism has emerged. The influence of his sensibility and rhetorical inflections has accreted over time in the stylistic choices that I tend to make in my own work, so that’s one thing that unites the pieces that make up the <i>Seguiriyas</i> manuscript with the poems that I’m writing right now: all of them have been produced in concert with my ongoing engagement with Egea.<br /><br />Q: What do you feel exploring the poetries of other languages allows your work, and even your thinking, that might not have been possible otherwise?<br /><br />A: Well, there’s the general benefit of exposing oneself to writers and poetic modes that lack representation in the English language, of course, but even more importantly, I think that reading poetry across languages has helped me to develop more of an intuition about what a poem actually is – or, to put it in more precise terms, to intuit a certain selfsameness proper to ‘poetry’ that persists from situation to situation. This is different than saying that I know in certain and rigorous terms what a poem is (if I knew that, then I suspect writing would suddenly lose a lot of its luster for me); instead, I am developing a sense of how a poem appears to me. Poetic conventions differ across languages, cultures and eras. Accordingly, we can observe how rhetoric, meter, tropes and even modes of subjectivity have been constructed according to divergent ideologies, linguistic foundations and historical precursors, how they remain in flux and continue to accumulate into diverse practices and traditions. Moreover, no two languages possess exactly the same palette of sounds or grammatical idiosyncrasies at their disposal. And yet, amid such divergences, a poem – whatever that is – remains identifiable in some way. I’m hesitant to systematize things much more than that, but I suspect that if it is the case that poems in so many different registers, epochs and linguistic milieus chime forth as ‘poetry’ in such a manner, then there must be some convergence of intention and attention whose modality conditions and propels that emergence. I don’t claim to know with any degree of precision or surety what constitutes this poetic convergence between intention and attention, but I do know that exposing myself to its many different manifestations across languages teaches me to be aware of when it is happening and to identify certain of its features that feel especially important to me. <br /><br />I should add that there are also translators out there whose work helps me in the same way, because in each translated piece, they self-consciously attempt to preserve what Walter Benjamin would call the poetic language’s “after-ripening,” and the English-language version is transparent about the fact that it is always performing a process by which it curates for itself what cannot be prescinded from the poem’s identity as such. A couple of examples that come to mind as I write this response are Erín Moure’s English-language renderings of Galician-Portuguese cantigas in <i>O Cadoiro</i> and a recent dual-translation of Miguelángel Meza’s poetry from Guaraní into both Spanish and English by Meza, Elisa Taber, Carlos Villagra Marsal and Jacobo Rauskin, entitled <i>Dream Pattering Soles</i>.<br /><br />Q: With four published chapbooks and forthcoming full-length collection, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?<br /><br />A: I can only speculate. Those five collections of poems span a period of fairly dynamic – and non-linear – growth for me: the first chapbook consists of poems that I wrote when I was eighteen and nineteen years old, while the most recent chapbook (<i>Near Enough</i>, which is set to come out next month, if all goes according to schedule) and the full-length (<i>Seguiriyas</i>) largely include poems written throughout my mid and late twenties. Like most, I changed a lot over the course of that first decade of adulthood. As a result, the development of my poetic work is difficult to extricate from my maturation as a person, which is still very much – sometimes too much – a work in progress. Some of that is connected to place: I’ve moved around quite a bit, and the palette of images from which I draw has come to incorporate aspects of the landscapes that I’ve inhabited. I’ve also grown more particular in my interests, and that particularity has allowed me to cultivate a more granular sensibility in my poems – large chunks of<i> Seguiriyas</i>, for instance, arose from extensive research relating to the history and cultural exchanges surrounding flamenco music in Andalusia, and that kind of reading has furnished many of the poems written over the course of my years in Granada and Sevilla with a discursive depth that would otherwise be absent. <br /><br />Most significant, though, is how the role of poetry in my life has evolved. From the outset, I was busy cultivating multiple interests at once: I was invested in philosophy and literary studies on an academic level, and poetry and music on a creative level. At first, I viewed poetry as something that could act in counterpoint with my academic pursuits. While I believed that my poems ought to be informed by concepts that I was also considering in a more scholarly register and that they ought to engage with other texts and challenging ideas, my poetic project, in my estimation, was something separate from the rest of what I did, a repurposing of all else that I’d picked up into a larger and more personal movement of lyric exteriorization (“the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” as Wordsworth put it) that could only ever be related abstractly to the ideas that I’d encountered in my philosophical or theoretical reading; on a concrete level, the lyric opening of the poem as it moved through me had to exist entirely unto itself. Slowly, that conviction began to change. It was easiest, first, to see the similarities between what I was doing with poetry and what I was clumsily attempting to do with the songs that I would write and record in the bedroom of whatever apartment I happened to be renting at the time. But over the course of the time I spent doing my MFA in Minneapolis, I came to realize that poems could be used to build philosophical arguments, and that the flow of lyric exteriorization that I felt as I wrote wasn’t really internal to me at all in its inception: rather, it was my mind attuning itself to a much larger and more comprehensive movement proper to events on every stratum of being, an emergent unfolding that was historical, systemic, material, political, semiotic, somatic and psychic all at once. Whatever it was that came from inside of me was only a vertex of what could be called upon. I remember being somewhat embarrassed at myself for having absorbed such a truth into my practice so belatedly. Suddenly, my academic work and my poetic work seemed to be permeating one another far more directly – the barrier between them had collapsed. As I continue forward, I see that mutual permeation intensifying. As I mentioned earlier, much of the formal experimentation that I’ve been doing in the past year or two has been in the interest of working out a poetics that both constructs its world by way of chiasmatic linkages between microcosms and macrocosms and excavates its surroundings with granular attention to historical detail. I’m repeating myself, but the goal is to be able to move from stones to state power and then return to the stones. We’ll see how that goes in the long haul – even as I try to write in concert with the concepts and methods that I’ve laid out for myself, I have plenty of days where all of those concerns fall out of my brain and I find myself sitting down and simply writing a poem, just as I’ve been doing ever since I was a kid. I suspect that I’ll need to do both of those things if I want to get much done in the years to come: I’ll have to arrive at some kind of equilibrium between the philosophical apparatus that frames my projects and the purposelessness that allows the words to keep on tumbling out.<br /><br />I’d also like to do a poetry collection in Spanish one of these days! I may as well start speaking that into existence sooner rather than later.<br /><br />Q: Having spent time living on either side of the Canadian-American border, did you encounter a difference in poetry or approach? How did your experiences encountering communities or writing differ, if at all?<br /><br />A: That’s a good question. I should preface my response by saying that I doubt many of my observations will be new to a large proportion of your readers, but here goes: I think that many of the differences are reducible to a question of scale. In the States, there are so many more people writing poetry and clamoring to be heard than in Canada. Given that vast gap in numbers, I’d say that there are fewer real opportunities to go around ‘per capita’ in the US than in Canada, and so the poetry world south of the border has become much more of an attention economy. In Canada, poets still have the luxury of being more self-contained if they so choose. I’ve noticed that difference when it comes to institutions, too: Poetry Foundation is such a tastemaker in the US (despite its somewhat spotty track record), and it’s sitting on a massive $257 million endowment – there’s nothing like that in Canada, as far as I’m aware. A side effect of institutions like Poetry Foundation is that taste becomes somewhat centralized, and the books and writers that are getting buzz there also tend to be the ones that are on trend in MFA programs, at AWP conferences, etc. On the one hand, there’s an occasionally pleasant feeling of mass connectedness that arises when you know that you’ve read something in common with just about every other MFA student in the country, but on the other hand, it does produce situations where everyone expects your reference points to be the same as theirs. For me, that quickly became a locus of frustration. In Canada, it’s much easier for a small, local or individually run operation to become known on a national scale (at least in my experience – I’ve recently been reading more about the Mimeograph Revolution in the States half a century ago, so perhaps things weren’t always the way they are now) and I think that’s a good thing. Although the amount of competition – and corresponding professional despair – that I’ve observed in American poetry communities induces a pressure cooker environment that, at the best of times, can elicit bursts of productivity in me, I do prefer the situation in Canada overall, because I think fewer talented writers fall through the cracks in the Canadian poetry community. With several notable exceptions, American presses are less hospitable to writers looking to place their first books than Canadian presses and often rely on monetized contests rather than submission windows, which creates a multi-tiered prize economy and often coerces emerging poets to produce the kind of work that they feel is most likely to succeed in a contest-based model. Such pressures exist in Canada, too, but they’re less pronounced, because a large proportion of Canadian presses do not run those kinds of judged, prize-oriented competitions.<br /><br />In terms of poetics, my sense is that preferences and allegiances run the gamut on both sides of the border. I’ve often noticed certain stylistic and thematic trends making their way into Canadian poetry a couple of years after they’ve caught on in the States, and I have never seen that same influence happening in reverse on a large scale. That’s not surprising, though – the sheer size of the American poetry scene means that it’s a lot easier for Canadians to come across zeitgeisty American poetry collections online than it is for Americans to stumble onto, say, the most recent Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize winner (I poured one out for the Griffin’s domestic category as I typed that). However, I’ve found that Canadians tend to have more exposure to poetry from the UK than Americans do and that as a result, Canadian poetry is more likely to feature some of the precise-but-understated phrasal and grammatical cleverness that has been a strength in contemporary British poetry – but obviously I’m making gross generalizations here, on a number of levels. <br /><br />I do think that there used to be more stylistic distinctions between what was written in Canada and what was written in the States, but the internet has done away with a lot of that. Now, most of the stylistic differences that I see are mediated by history, I think – discourses surrounding race, indigeneity and national identity are not exactly the same on both sides of the border, though they do strongly echo one another, of course. <br /><br />Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?<br /><br />A: Well, I suppose the first name on my list has to be Geoffrey Hill, because whenever I dive back into his stuff, I emerge feeling ready to write, and uniquely empowered to do so. There’s something about his grim, irascible energy and deep engagement with history that has spoken to me ever since I was a teenager. I revisit Nathaniel Mackey’s <i>Splay Anthem</i> very frequently – the way he plays with time and breath has been hugely influential for me over the years. Since childhood, I’ve been drawn to Yeats’ early and mid-career work (up to and including <i>The Wild Swans at Coole</i>), Blake’s prophetic books, and Crane’s <i>The Bridge</i> (which crept into the mix starting in my high school years), so rereading that material allows me to recapture fragments of my own early, irreplicable fascination. Federico García Lorca has been a real source of poetic impetus for me over the years – his collections <i>Romancero Gitano</i> and <i>Poema del Cante Jondo</i>, in particular. Increasingly, I find myself returning to the work of José Heredia Maya – especially his books <i>Penar ocono</i>, <i>Experiencia y juicio</i> and <i>Charol</i>. Heredia Maya, a Gitano poet, offers a standpoint that entirely escapes Lorca, and does so with a depth and wit that compel me to reassess his work each time I pull it off my shelf. Octavio Paz’s Piedra <i>de sol</i>, Basil Bunting’s <i>Briggflatts</i> and A.F. Moritz’s <i>Sequence </i>are three long poems whose immersive cadences and sensory richness never fail to pull something worthwhile out of me. Jorie Graham’s poetry has had a similar impact, as has Jan Zwicky’s, and in both cases I am often inspired by their ability to produce real, direct philosophical insight without isolating it from the way their writing appeals to the senses. And when I want to declutter my poetic imagination, I often turn to Jack Gilbert’s books (especially <i>The Great Fires</i>), W.S. Merwin’s work from the ‘80s and Yehuda Amichai. <br /><br />There have been several collections published more recently that have persistently lured me back and renewed my enthusiasm for writing in moments when it has flagged: Liz Howard’s <i>Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent</i>, Ishion Hutchinson’s <i>House of Lords and Commons</i>, Nicole Raziya Fong’s <i>Oracule</i>, Jennifer Elise Foerster’s <i>The Maybe-Bird</i>, Jose-Luis Moctezuma’s <i>Place-Discipline</i>, Aracelis Girmay’s <i>The Black Maria</i>, Josh Fomon’s<i> Though We Bled Meticulously</i>, José Felipe Alvergue’s <i>Gist: Rift: Drift: Bloom</i>, and Peter Balakian’s <i>Ozone Journal</i>.<br /><br />I have to admit, though, that reading philosophy reenergizes my poetry at least as much as reading poetry does. I am certain that Spinoza’s <i>Ethics</i> has been the spark of just as many poems in me as any literary work out there.<br /><br /><p></p>rob mclennanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07958889643637765864noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5218431112984390179.post-77282934048358512512023-05-25T10:00:00.047-04:002023-05-25T10:00:00.137-04:00TtD supplement #240 : six questions for Barbara Tomash<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgA6Hhni7mvsgXsE4-yUwq0KU7Yh0IEok9AWWX9Wx9L6C_4DcCjt2SWRA78oE6-vvGaCM9NYPyZTMl-pcF7VL5p4KbVpfz1ubwDRKUSHxNKu9R4eQWkfOyX4h9fiy1rWCWR5fa_lpM_YMxhankaAbhBFWiDX2qRdpSEvWKcXgp__r9dlft1XRGYZ8KB8w/s4032/IMG_3432.JPG" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="468" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgA6Hhni7mvsgXsE4-yUwq0KU7Yh0IEok9AWWX9Wx9L6C_4DcCjt2SWRA78oE6-vvGaCM9NYPyZTMl-pcF7VL5p4KbVpfz1ubwDRKUSHxNKu9R4eQWkfOyX4h9fiy1rWCWR5fa_lpM_YMxhankaAbhBFWiDX2qRdpSEvWKcXgp__r9dlft1XRGYZ8KB8w/w351-h468/IMG_3432.JPG" width="351" /></a></div><b><a href="https://www.lighthousewriters.org/users/barbara-tomash" target="_blank">Barbara Tomash</a></b> is the author of five books of poetry including, most recently, <i><b><a href="http://www.apogeepress.com/her-scant-state" target="_blank">Her Scant State</a></b></i> (Apogee), <i><b><a href="https://blackradishbooks.com/authors/barbara-tomash/" target="_blank">PRE-</a></b></i> (Black Radish), and <i><b><a href="http://www.apogeepress.com/arboreal" target="_blank">Arboreal</a></b></i> (Apogee); and two chapbooks, <i><b><a href="https://www.dropleafpress.com/store/of-residue-by-barbara-tomash" target="_blank">Of Residue</a></b></i> (Drop Leaf Press), and <i><b><a href="https://www.palabrosa.net/blog/awomanreflected" target="_blank">A Woman Reflected</a></b></i> (palabrosa). Her writing has been a finalist for The Dorset Prize, the Colorado Prize, The Test Site Poetry Prize, and the Black Box Poetry Prize. Before her creative interests turned her toward writing she worked extensively as a multimedia artist. Her poems have appeared in <i>Colorado Review</i>, <i>Denver Quarterly</i>, <i>Conjunctions</i>, <i>New American Writing</i>, <i>Verse</i>, <i>Posit</i>, <i>OmniVerse</i>, and numerous other journals. She lives in Berkeley, California, and teaches in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University. <br /><br />Her poems “Of Love,” “Of Transit,” “Of Equipoise,” “Of Sightings” and “Of Seawater” appear in the thirty-seventh issue of<i> Touch the Donkey</i>.<br /><br />Q: Tell me about the poems “Of Love,” “Of Transit,” “Of Equipoise,” “Of Sightings” and “Of Seawater.”<br /><br />A: The five poems in this issue of <i>Touch the Donkey</i> were written as part of poetry manuscript in process (working title: <i>Amid Foliage in the Dark and in the Sea</i>). All the poems in this manuscript share the same form of a narrow rectangle with justified margins and no punctuation. <br /><br />I come to poetry from the visual arts, and I remain interested in how the sound and sense of a poem shift according to how the words are arrayed on the page. <br /><br />While writing the first poems in this narrow box-like form, I evolved a process of researching various questions about the ancient and ongoing intersections between our human species and other species on earth and joining this with my writings about my daily life and with excerpts from the things I have been reading. I like assembling a glossary of words and phrases and then feeling out connections between these disparate things as I go. Forgoing the use of punctuation can free the words gathered inside the frame to assemble and reassemble themselves, even as I write them down. I enjoy this fluidity within the process, seeing how fragments seam together in unexpected ways allowing for shifting meanings, multiple readings. I have always loved the wonderful modernist tool of collage, which imitates, I believe, how our minds work, the jump cut that transports us, rather than the smoothly paved road of continuity. <br /><br />I wrote “Of Equipoise” by a different method than most of the other poems in the manuscript. I gave myself the exercise of condensing one of my books, <i>The Secret of White</i>, into the narrow rectangular form of a single poem. It was exhilarating and oddly satisfying to see how seventy collected pages representing years of writing could be distilled to fit into one small container. (At this point, there are several other poems in the manuscript which I wrote using fragments gathered from each of my published books.) “Of Transit” also stands out within the body of the manuscript. It is the only poem written from a third person perspective, and its momentum derives from a continuous narrative flow and syntactical progression, rather than from an acceleration of images in juxtaposition. As I revise, I am considering whether “Of Transit” ultimately belongs in the final version of the manuscript.<br /><br />Q: How do these poems compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately? <br /><br />A: When my exploratory writings begin to hint that they have potential to grow into a book, it is easy for me to become mono-focused. Recently, I have been writing only poems belonging to <i>Amid Foliage in the Dark and in the Sea</i>. Since I don’t have concurrent work to which I can compare these poems, I’ll have to look back a bit to answer this question.<br /><br />In the past few months, with my editor Valerie Coulton at Apogee Press, I was preparing my newly released book <i>Her Scant State</i> for publication. It was a pleasurably absorbing process of selecting a cover image and helping with interior design and proofreading, etc. <i>Her Scant State</i> is an erasure of Henry James’s novel <i>The Portrait of a Lady</i>, and the most obvious connection between it and <i>Amid Foliage in the Dark and in the Sea</i> is that both were written under the pressures of creative constraints. The process of writing <i>Her Scant State</i> involved keeping strictly to the novel’s words (adding no language from outside the novel) and to their order (but I allowed myself free rein with punctuation and with form on the page). <br /><br />My previous book, <i>PRE-</i>, was also written within constraints, and it shares collage as a compositional method with <i>Amid Foliage in the Dark and in the Sea</i>. The creative constraint in <i>PRE- </i>is that all the poems spin out from dictionary definitions for words beginning with a particular English prefix. All the language is found, but fractured and juxtaposed with a freehand approach—so, not surprisingly, my proclivities for certain kinds of ideas, images, and language emerged and circulated. One of these preoccupations is human presence in nature and its paradoxical merging and alienation—which brings us to what we could call a thematic connection with <i>Amid Foliage in the Dark and in the Sea</i>. Where these books part company most notably, I think, is that <i>Amid Foliage in the Dark and in the Sea</i> includes a more active first-person speaker in many of the poems. Though that speaker is not consistently autobiographical, its presence springs from my own sense of urgency about the perils of our political and social circumstances today.<br /><br />Lately, I’ve been revisiting some prose writings I began fifteen years ago—and for these I am not working with compositional constraints at all. But it is too early to talk about what these pieces are like, or what they are not like, or what they may become. <br /><br />Q: I’m curious about your exploration of the constraint: what brought you to first utilizing such compositional processes, and what do you feel is possible in your work through the constraint that might not be otherwise?<br /><br />A: As I mentioned, I worked as a multi-media artist before I began writing. At first, I attempted writing short stories. Out of curiosity, I took a poetry class—I had never written a poem—and I fell for poetry hard, even obsessively. I remember the tactile sense I had with the very first poem I attempted, transfixed by the endless options and permutations possible in “breaking” lines. That sharp focus and concentration on form was a continuation of what I had been doing as a visual artist—the experimentation, the sense that a poem was an object, made from language patterns and play, yet full of ideas, of thinking on the page that wasn’t necessarily struggling to <i>tell</i> anything. I hadn’t felt that thrill of the malleability and physicality of language when I was writing short stories. Writing my first poems reminded me of standing in front of a Kandinsky painting as a child—I felt both awkward and at home—as if I were hearing a new language I understood perfectly without being able (or asked) to translate a word. I thought also of the paintings of Pierre Bonnard. In his works “the subjects”—the people, the objects—are often at the periphery, as if they are about to fall out of the frame; the center may be empty. And I wanted to find a way to write this same movement or spin, to find in language a center replete with absence. Here was a beauty I really wanted, that seemed to spring from the formal necessities and constraints of artmaking.<br /><br />For me, as artist turned writer, process and intention always go hand in hand. I am often more committed to a mode or method of writing than to a subject or theme. I trust ideas to percolate up during a writing process in ways that will surprise and interest me and take my thinking further—in fact, leave me in a state of creative bewilderment (Fanny Howe) that I value. Because I love the materiality of words, I’m curious to let them have their way with me, to act on me, with accident, chance, and randomness—it is this love of process, and of words as objects, as portals to new perceptions, that engenders my attraction to formal constraints. A formal constraint asks that I drop old habits of putting together words and start anew. Pushed beyond the limits of my familiar experiences with language I find images, sounds, and even thinking, that the constraint itself seems to set free. It is a fruitful collaboration. The well-known irony of constraint is that what at first seems to be a limitation turns out to be an opening up of new terrain.<br /><br />Of course, projects start in various ways. Each of mine has called forth its own logic, calling on a different writer in me. Not all of them work consistently with constraints. The elegiac origins of<i> Amid Foliage in the Dark and in the Sea </i>gave the project its form. In spring of 2018, just as my book <i>PRE- </i>was released by Black Radish Books, the press’s founding publisher and managing editor, Marthe Reed, died suddenly. She was an irreplaceable poet, teacher, and social activist in the prime of her life. As a person new in her orbit, I felt lucky to have known her, and also the sad finality of the loss of any continuing friendship and collaboration. Marthe wrote an essay titled “somewhere in between: Speaking Though Contiguity,” and that title alone, when I began to think about writing in her memory, recalled a box-like unpunctuated form that I had previously tried out and then put away. What could I find in that “somewhere in between,” in the narrow space inside the justified margins? What could working without punctuation and instead by use of shifting juxtapositions reveal about the meaning of “speaking through contiguity”? <br /><br />I continue to be particularly moved and excited by the visual arts, by their revelations about the world through the act of framing and re-framing things, changing angles of perception. Art’s recording of variations, shifts, and movements holds for me the essence of reality. The use of constraints helps me write into this reality by offering radical modes for composing language within the unforeseen, the unknown. Writing the first poems in the narrow box-like form in <i>Amid Foliage in the Dark</i> and in the Sea, I came to see the page more as a window than as a container, a translucence that shapes and makes possible perception, while above my desk, the actual window, filled with tree branches, became the scrawled-upon page.<br /><br />Q: With a handful of published books and chapbooks 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 heading?<br /><br />A: It’s hard to say if my work has progressed, or if it will ever progress. A progression suggests following a road directly to some locatable end, with interesting stops along the way. Instead, my work tends to move in either a circular or a branching pattern. (I think, again, of the tree that fills my window.) Each of my five books diverged stylistically and formally from the one that came before. Such abrupt departures may not be conducive to a forward motion, but they do offer the pleasure and adventure inherent in a new start. I am circling back these days—in another kind of beginning again—to making drawings (which I haven’t done in over thirty years) and revisiting prose I wrote fifteen years ago. Likely there is an imaginative core from which all the books and projects have emerged, and to which I keep returning. I couldn’t even begin to put into words what that core might be. <br /><br />Q: You say you came to poetry from the visual arts: what moved you to shift genres so radically?<br /><br />A: The shift was more subtle, more gradual than it sounds. During the years I was making visual art, I had a desire to connect my work more directly with my love of reading—I wrote diaristic entries on my paintings, recited excerpts from <i>Daisy Miller</i> in a video performance, used recorded dialogues in installations. I created assemblages, installations, and video works from the assortments of bulky found objects and raw materials I’d drag home in my small car. Over time, the thrill of the physical object began to wear off—I wanted a more direct conduit to the immediacy of imagination. The notion that as a writer I could spend a few seconds gathering tools and supplies—a pen and a notebook—rather than days or weeks of heavy lifting and building was very appealing. But underneath everything else that turned me toward writing was something more basic to my emotional life. As a child uncomfortable in my own skin, in my own family, I read and read—stories, novels, biographies. Reading was an alternative skin, an alternative body I could become whole inside of. I found intimacy and truth in the reader and writer exchange, so, for me the writer has a deeply human, even primal role. I think one of the ways the method of erasure (as in <i>Her Scant State</i>) appeals to me is that it allows me to plumb the mystery and potency of the reader and writer connection in an unabashed and imaginatively assertive way. Yet, it’s not so surprising that as a writer I have missed the physicality of artmaking—the whole-body involvement, the wide movements of the arms. It has been a pleasure recently to find out that even within my mono-focused style of working, I can make both poems and drawings. I’ve dreamed of using a broom to spread painted words on a wall. This may be why I often find an exciting new connection to my books when I read from them to an audience—the poems take on palpable physical presence in my body and in the room. <br /><br />Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?<br /><br />A: Innovative women poets reenergize me. I think of Anne Carson, Kathleen Fraser, Lorine Niedecker, Barbara Guest, M. NourbeSe Philip, and so many more. But most sustaining to my writing practice have been my writing groups and writing partners. Their creative projects inspire my own and we share processes from day one, when things are raw and messy. Without having to make any vows, we share a commitment to each other’s work. My joy and sense of fulfillment in seeing my writing partners’ manuscripts through final revisions and on to publication grounds me in the pleasures of my own work. During the last few years, in this odd pandemic period of isolation and zoom meetings, my writing groups have proliferated—an unexpected bonus in tough times. <br /><br />I often return to George Oppen’s “Psalm.” The poem begins “In the small beauty of the forest/The wild deer bedding down—/That they are there!” The exclamation point that punctuates the simple statement “That they are there” slays me every time. The poem—which ends with the odd and delicately stunning syntax of “The small nouns/Crying faith/In this in which the wild deer/Startle, and stare out”—fulfills for me the lost promise of every religious service I attended as a child in love with words. I sat in the synagogue and listened intently to a mishmash of bad translation from Hebrew and a contemporary liturgy that never seemed to say anything. I was amazed that words could be so disappointing. I listened and read along and was confounded and bored out of my mind. Whenever I read Oppen’s “Psalm,” I find what I urgently needed then and still need now—I can’t put it into words, but the poet has.<br /><br /><b><a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/29449/psalm-56d212ff620c5">https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/29449/psalm-56d212ff620c5</a></b><br /><br /><p></p>rob mclennanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07958889643637765864noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5218431112984390179.post-19633962949373805172023-05-16T10:00:00.010-04:002023-05-16T10:40:58.104-04:00TtD supplement #239 : seven questions for Devon Rae<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidkMNSB3So_wNKXPJWX5jl0FYHdYhpd2hECJ97v5rTsMpIt8bCkhOc2MOKKy_g0GXKzN-xsKvUTjPbPaAK-aH6c6OhgPAP_ofbWT0QbLt0yRDShLK8PuW8nV4BtcNGufT5m57eZRjT1z1lc5PiQH4YTavUiQ80grX_xLb1WKhHYPtBSa7GHVxxjCBCfw/s4032/IMG_3431.JPG" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="303" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidkMNSB3So_wNKXPJWX5jl0FYHdYhpd2hECJ97v5rTsMpIt8bCkhOc2MOKKy_g0GXKzN-xsKvUTjPbPaAK-aH6c6OhgPAP_ofbWT0QbLt0yRDShLK8PuW8nV4BtcNGufT5m57eZRjT1z1lc5PiQH4YTavUiQ80grX_xLb1WKhHYPtBSa7GHVxxjCBCfw/w404-h303/IMG_3431.JPG" width="404" /></a></div><b><a href="http://www.canthius.com/issue-10-feed/2022/10/3/interview-with-devon-rae" target="_blank">Devon Rae</a></b> is a queer writer who grew up in Montreal. She now lives in Vancouver.<br /><br />Her poems “Conversation with Her Body,” “Conversation with My Hands,” “Conversation with My Appendix” and “Conversation with My Uterus” appear in the thirty-seventh issue of<i> Touch the Donkey</i>.<br /><br />Q: Tell me about the poems “Conversation with Her Body,” “Conversation with My Hands,” “Conversation with My Appendix” and “Conversation with My Uterus.”<br /><br />A: I’m fascinated by the etymology of the word “conversation.” The root of the word means to dwell with or keep company with. These four poems are conversations with my body, where I explore what it means for us to live together. Conversations between my body and other bodies are also captured in these poems.<br /><br />Q: How do these poems compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?<br /><br />A: I started writing prose poems on the theme of “Conversations with My Body” in 2020 and haven’t stopped! These poems are part of this project.<br /><br />Q: What prompted you to work in the form of the prose poem? What do you feel is possible through the form of the prose poem that might not be otherwise?<br /><br />A: I have no idea what prompted me to start writing prose poems – it just happened. A prose poem can fool the reader into thinking that the text they are about to read is not a poem – they look so innocent and orderly! I love the duplicitous nature of this form.<br /><br />Q: Have you followed any particular author or example for your forays into the prose poem, or are you working more intuitively?<br /><br />A: I am working more intuitively. But <i>Tender Buttons</i> by Gertrude Stein always inspires me.<br /><br />Q: Have you noticed an evolution in your poems since working through this particular project?<br /><br />A: Yes, absolutely. The poems in this project are becoming more mysterious and surreal. As Mary Ruefle writes about poetry practice: “Something stranger and stranger is getting closer and closer.”<br /><br />Q: Do you see anything beyond this particular project, or are you not there yet in your thinking?<br /><br />A: I am definitely not there yet! <br /><br />Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?<br /><br />A: Reading poetry, or other writing by poets, always reenergizes my work. I often return to <i>Letters to a Young Poet </i>by Rainer Maria Rilke and <i>Journal of a Solitude </i>by May Sarton. I have my mum’s copy of the former and my dad’s copy of the latter, so these books feel like they are part of an inheritance or poetic lineage. I also frequently reread <i>Odes</i> by Sharon Olds. This book always invites me to be more irreverent, vulnerable, and daring in my work.<br /><br /><p></p>rob mclennanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07958889643637765864noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5218431112984390179.post-25131915804608120992023-05-05T10:00:00.037-04:002023-05-05T10:00:00.135-04:00TtD supplement #238 : seven questions for Micah Ballard<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJvE4xz3x_BzJvsbfPUJwxyxN4n6mBX_GHlmK6LOAKBBVEDR39kgFhbR_Cs1yle6NPJjrQ4DKfTYh-ANg2nsyRJnzH7DvXJDCnj3mESpLtpMlS2d4uprsc7z0wOgpgmrDRjk5KiJXbtpwAlQvwss9HP9rQpLBlZvc8ruH1oAT_A0hoGdui9ww1gyZEDg/s4032/IMG_3430.JPG" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="297" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJvE4xz3x_BzJvsbfPUJwxyxN4n6mBX_GHlmK6LOAKBBVEDR39kgFhbR_Cs1yle6NPJjrQ4DKfTYh-ANg2nsyRJnzH7DvXJDCnj3mESpLtpMlS2d4uprsc7z0wOgpgmrDRjk5KiJXbtpwAlQvwss9HP9rQpLBlZvc8ruH1oAT_A0hoGdui9ww1gyZEDg/w395-h297/IMG_3430.JPG" width="395" /></a></div><a href="https://www.usfca.edu/faculty/micah-ballard" target="_blank"><b>Micah Ballard</b></a> is the author of over a dozen books of poetry including <a href="https://citylights.com/poetry-published-by-city-lights/waifs-strays/" target="_blank"><i>Waifs and Strays</i></a> (City Lights Books), <i><a href="https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9780988610866/afterlives.aspx" target="_blank">Afterlives</a></i> (Bootstrap Press), <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Michaux-Notebook-Page-Poets/dp/1732943915" target="_blank">The Michaux Notebook</a></i> (FMSBW), <i><a href="https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9780982160015/parish-krewes.aspx" target="_blank">Parish Krewes</a></i> (Bootstrap Press), <i><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51835626-selected-prose" target="_blank">Selected Prose, 2008-19</a></i> (Blue Press), <i><a href="https://uglyducklingpresse.org/publications/evangeline-downs/" target="_blank">Evangeline Downs</a></i> (Ugly Duckling Presse), <i>Muddy Waters</i> (State Champs), <i>Daily Vigs</i> (Bird & Beckett Books), <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23716009-vesper-chimes" target="_blank"><i>Vesper Chimes</i></a> (Gas Meter), and <i><a href="https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9781946741073/negative-capability-in-the-verse-of-john-wieners.aspx" target="_blank">Negative Capability in the Verse of John Wieners</a></i> (Bootstrap Press), with a new chapbook forthcoming this spring with above/ground press. He also recently co-edited <i><a href="https://guestpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/2022/02/issue-twenty-one-castle-guestskull.html" target="_blank">G U E S T #21 : Castle Guestskull</a></i> (above/ground press, 2022) with <a href="https://www.wavepoetry.com/products/garrett-caples" target="_blank">Garrett Caples</a>. He lives in San Francisco with poet <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sunnylyn-thibodeaux" target="_blank">Sunnylyn Thibodeaux</a> and their daughter Lorca.<br /><br />His poems “CAJUN WANT ADS,” “IN THE MILEIU,” “ULTRA DAB,” “BALMY VAPORS” and “EXTRA USHERS” appear in the thirty-seventh issue of <i>Touch the Donkey</i>.<br /><br />Q: Tell me about the poems “CAJUN WANT ADS,” “IN THE MILEIU,” “ULTRA DAB,” “BALMY VAPORS” and “EXTRA USHERS.”<br /><br />A: I'm not completely sure how to talk about my poems other than I attempt to be available to receive whatever it is they may want to tell. I try to keep out the way but also stay tuned into any frequencies they share. It’s my understanding that that’s what most of my favorite artists do (in whatever medium). At any rate, let me try to dive in without too much marginalia because I really don’t know. What I do know is how things feel, where I was, or what I was doing. <br /><br />“CAJUN WANT ADS” is a place I used to work at in Lafayette, Louisiana, when I was 20. They printed classified ads for a handful of parishes. I’d sit at a Betamax/Atari-esque machine and type all the want-ads that came in via fax. Lots of odd stuff people sell, from bass trolling motors for boats, to dune buggies, alligator eggs, crawfish traps, whatever. The computers were new for that time, and it took a bunch of coding just to type a sentence. The main thing was proofreading, which seemed easy save for competing psilocybin tracers courtesy of the local mushroom field. It did make for a great experience (of having a job while not really being there!). People faxed what seemed to be like crazy little sonnets that described what they were trying to sell. Very personal faxes, written in various accented drawls. We are talking mostly Cajun slang and there was no editing allowed. Had to be how it came in via fax. Anyway, about the poem, I usually start in the middle and move around, collaging thru notebooks of various lines, etc. “I was raised supernatural” was a new one for me, starting a poem by first line. It had been a minute. I was raised Southern Baptist and all I heard three times a week, even into college, was people talking about an afterlife, eternal damnation, repenting...some spoke in tongues about it, there were tons of altar calls, and so on. I guess I was imagining myself sitting at Emmanuel Baptist church stuck with all those curious teenage crushes and thinking about life after death.<br /><br />“IN THE MILIEU” is a totally random. I stayed up late as usual and <i>Hotboxin with Mike Tyson</i> popped up. I was a bit intrigued (for lack of a better operative) about him taking venom from these toads that hibernate in caves. It seemed like a massive hallucinogenic shift of awareness and he was so articulate about it. Hell no, toad venom?! I guess I pulled some dramatic monologue and imagined Iron Mike in a hotel tripping out and using it as a positive place to deal with a range of things in a variety of ways, etc. I have no idea. <br /><br />“ULTRA DAB”...Trying to keep it quick here. I guess talking on the phone at work while typing is a good idea! I’m finally never Frank O’Hara. The first thing that comes to mind is that I was reading <i>Because, Horror</i> a fantastic essay collection by my old friend Johnny Ray Huston and Bradford Nordeen. I got it in the mail and was just slammed. So many good lines. I couldn’t help steal some, or act like I didn’t but did. This poem was more like a translation from their book, while texting my friend Sarah Cain about her show, and reading a found magazine on “the new cannabis culture.” Yeah, that’s pretty much it.<br /><br />“BALMY VAPORS” is kinda similar to the title Ultra Dab, in the sense of achieving vapors! I keep typing vamps. I think this also comes out of some cribbed lines from the above book (promise to give credit!). Anyhoot, this one is from a dream. I woke up and just tracked lines in the dark. I tend to have a super vivid dream life, and Sunnylyn can attest. It often takes 2-3 hours to “snap out of it” what with all the different sleep-movies tracing thru the next day. She always says “write about it” but I’m like nah, no thanks, I’m still living them and can remember every detail. So this one is one of those. Plus “jungle mansion” comes from a painting by one of my favorite poets, Kevin Opstedal, that I had in my “embalming room” office at New College. Yes, it was a mortuary at one time.<br /><br />“EXTRA USHERS”...When I drop Lorca off at school in the Mission District every morning I always stop by my old favorite, Muddy Waters cafe (most poems since Feb. 2022 are from there; my friends Garrett Caples and Rod Roland just published some and used the name of the cafe as the book). At any rate...this poem was from Baton Rouge to New Orleans and back to San Francisco. Airplanes. Waiting rooms. Funerals. My grandmother had passed when I visited and then my other grandmother did when I visited again. My Aunt Caroline started calling me the Grim Reaper. “I’m not going to dinner to see him, when Micah comes to Baton Rouge he’s the Grim Reaper!”<br /><br />Q: How do these poems compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?<br /><br />A: Well, I think we’re all making one poem/painting/song/film etc. our whole life? I mean, one hopes. Who said that? Probably everybody. I can’t recall at the moment but I believe and live by that. All the way thru. Sure, “the work” changes as it should, and we alongside it. It does what it pretty much wants. We’re lucky enough to have our dirty long painted nails in the bowl!<br /><br />How do we remain present as vessels for “the work” is always a question that’s entertaining. I say entertaining because it entertains constantly. I’m not thinking about it, ya know, as predetermined, performance, or after-the-fact, etc. I’d rather be led by an undercurrent willingness to be variable, to take chances, to be led into the unknown, to make mistakes, to be uncomfortable and embarrassing, to be controlled by forces we don’t know about, and somehow trust it all by revealing what’s given. <br /><br />What I mean to say is that I’m doing the same thing but totally different. I keep notebooks, always walking hills, riding the bus, skateboarding, reading, and picking up lines along the way. I’m going thru a lot of these City Lights handbags and use them as a suitcase of sorts. I still never have a damn pen, and if so, it’s dead. I’m writing with markers and different inks right now (I prefer black). I love a one subject wide-ruled 70 sheet notebook...I usually go with red or purple now, some color that can cast a different aura for the lines. Green is always too Keatsian “divine symmetry” which is cool but doesn’t work anymore. Now I prefer smaller sized notebooks that can help me write like I don’t but maybe wish to? I wear different rings, paint my nails gold, anything that’ll make my hand look different on the page. I should try gloves. Okay, non-sequitur time!<br /><br />A very real change recently is that I tear pages out of found books (blank ones front/or end; hopefully a good title page!) and I’ll collect them as writing paper. These are usually found on the street or in our neighborhood free libraries (these little stand-alone birdhouse looking things in SF where people place used books in). We’ve got a sick one here in Alamo Square, which I also contribute to.<br />What I think about most is Muddy Waters around 8:15am and having an hour or so of writing before getting back on the 22 Fillmore bus to work (then later at 11pm catching up to what I was doing at Muddy’s)...Amazing tho, the mornings on 16th and Valencia feel like the same time period as the 90s. Pure energy, sketchy, almost vacant yet not, packed with something in the air that never leaves. A feistiness of random energies. Seems perfect to me. I wouldn’t wish to be anywhere else. It’s the home conjure zone.<br /><br />Q: Your self-description of channeling and being a vessel etcetera is reminiscent of the Jack Spicer notion of simply being a radio of sorts for external signals. Do you see yourself merely as someone who presents poems from an external, ethereal source? How do you see the craft of putting words upon the page?<br /><br />A: Yes and no via ethereal. I like to receive the radio static and be the antenna but it doesn’t happen as much as imagined. Probably half the time within a poem, things just come from some otherwhere and you’re fortunate they find you. However, it’s up to you to be available in order to be found, then figure out what to do with what’s given. How to translate noise into something tangible, or not.<br /><br />As mentioned, I often begin in the middle of a poem combining noises (words) then hear how they sound and look together, how they communicate and live with each other. Like, what’s going on, maybe they need company, so I’ll invite more vibrations around them. Soon multiple conversations are happening; when they’re done hanging out, disturbing one another, usually there’s as Williams said, “a discharge of energy” (I’ve always dug that) and there’s this living organism looking back at you. Turns out it’s a poem, or something of the sort. I then read it for a first time to see what’s going on, what we’ve been doing, etc., which is always a surprise. Sometimes pleasurable, other times frightening. I enjoy both.<br /><br />I basically make collages. Words and phrases are like cut-out pieces of paper that are put together thru sound. I enjoy discovering what they make when beside one another. Let me be clear tho, not all poems are collages (some come straight outta the hand, almost like a trance) but if they are I am part of each clipping, in that my poems are autobiographical. There’s personal emotive counterparts weaving thruout the whole thing. I do have a tendency for encryption which I sometimes enjoy too much. To me, poems are primary continuums of experience and interests that find a way to exist together. We’re in their service and they act almost as a true mirror to show us what we’ve been feeling, what we are feeling, or will soon enough.<br /><br />Q: Is utilizing the autobiographical a means to an end or an end unto itself? Are these moments you seek to examine, or are they offered as a way through to something else?<br /><br />A: I would say it’s more of a way thru (portal) into something else. I use the term autobiographical in the loosest possible sense, in that anything I make there’s always a shadow of self, multiple selves, or a conversation with someone else. There’s a human pulse whether it’s mine or projected into, thru, or out of. The ole “objects in a field of objects” where everything is equally important still holds very true. Poems allow all things to speak, the seen and unseen, and they gather the communique for us. They have that magickal ability to reveal the unreal, show you what you don’t know or thot you did, and record your experiences (real or imagined). I love it when they blur these two. Naturally you feel delusional at times. Is this a trap door or an escape hatch? Guess it’s time to find out!<br /><br />Q: With an accumulated dozen or so books and chapbooks over the past decade-plus, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?<br /><br />A: Well, I hope the work keeps changing and morphing into whatever it chooses. I don’t care to paint the same thing over and over. There’s bound to be corresponding trace elements from poem to poem, book to book, that sooner or later reveals itself to be “you.” I’d just like to keep doing what I’ve been doing since I moved to San Francisco when I was 23. Basically, just keep living within the poem on a daily basis in order to discover and be discovered.<br /><br />Q: Your partner, Sunnylyn Thibodeaux, is also a published poet. Do either of you ask the other to look over poems while in-progress for potential commentary? Do you find elements of your work responding to her own? How does one compose differently, if at all, as part of a writerly household of two?<br /><br />A: We’ve been sharing poems since we met in 1997, and honestly we really don’t share them during composition. It’s usually only after a poem is done with us that we become “first readers” of one another’s work. I’d say altho we have a lot of the same interests and community of like-thinkers and friends, our work’s totally different and our approach to writing, likewise. We appreciate and dig one another’s poetry but we definitely stay in our own lanes while holding each other accountable to what the poem wants. We definitely talk about process a lot, what we’re reading, what we’re up to, etc. I suppose we’ve gained a lucky advantage of living and growing up writing poems and reading beside one another.<br /><br />I’ll say that there have been occasions when we’re in the middle of a long poem, maybe sequential, or book-length, and we’ll ask one another about ordering sections. Or, more so how the final arrangement of poems in a manuscript communicates. Unless we’re writing a collaboration or editing a magazine/book for our small presses, then we’re actually communicating in the act of...but that’s a different scene or scenario.<br /><br />Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?<br /><br />A: I go to my close friends’ books, and their recent or brand new work. I’m definitely fortunate to have a vast group of poets that I continually talk and/or hang with. Some still live in SF or Bay Area, others elsewhere...really all over the place.<br /><br />John Wieners and Joanne Kyger, always. David Meltzer, Diane diPrima, Duncan McNaughton, Stephen Jonas, Eileen Myles, Renee Ricard. Lots of translations of other writers.... Whew, too many to name! Definitely John and Joanne tho.<br /><br />Lately, over the past two years, I find myself going to those free libraries, particularly Alamo Square, a block from our place and a couple from <i>707 Scott Street</i> (one of my all-time favorite books, John Wieners’ 707 Scott Street). I love picking up random books, bibliomancy style, where you just grab one or two and you can feel if you’re going to get something out of them (lines/poems/whatever). I’ll admit though, I always find myself in Egypt and Atlantis, most recently again thru Edgar Cayce’s trance archives. Stunning and otherworldly.<br /><br /><p></p>rob mclennanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07958889643637765864noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5218431112984390179.post-33511439827377738202023-04-24T10:00:00.022-04:002023-04-24T11:08:39.729-04:00TtD supplement #237 : seven questions for Junie Désil<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkkyCp9khhzMBRk8T7Yux2WCqZrdc7j8Z2-VOAtL-Yk1YBJC3w6MAv7cKOvNUnY-gI4mkvaKwBIfwcxXT7kWUidlK_i-UzDexdTXIXURTei7m7nVMXVACayYTOChQc6K6jr0nfq5PmdB7S3QZ-KnF-2DURcJguUYcxLLDzyYug66xIYq9fQBEk2wZZQA/s4032/IMG_3429.JPG" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="292" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkkyCp9khhzMBRk8T7Yux2WCqZrdc7j8Z2-VOAtL-Yk1YBJC3w6MAv7cKOvNUnY-gI4mkvaKwBIfwcxXT7kWUidlK_i-UzDexdTXIXURTei7m7nVMXVACayYTOChQc6K6jr0nfq5PmdB7S3QZ-KnF-2DURcJguUYcxLLDzyYug66xIYq9fQBEk2wZZQA/w389-h292/IMG_3429.JPG" width="389" /></a></div><b><a href="https://juniewrites.com/" target="_blank">Junie Désil</a></b> is a poet. Born of immigrant (Haitian) parents on the Traditional Territories of the Kanien’kehá:ka in the island known as Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). Junie has performed at various literary events and festivals. Her work has appeared in <i>Room Magazine</i>, <i>PRISM International</i>, <i>The Capilano Review</i>, <i>CV2</i>, <i>G U E S T: A Journal of Guest Editors</i>, and <i>Capitalism Nature Socialism</i>. Junie worked in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, on the unceded and Ancestral Lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh for many years. Junie’s debut poetry collection <i><a href="https://talonbooks.com/books/eat-salt-gaze-at-the-ocean" target="_blank">Eat Salt|Gaze at the Ocean</a></i> (TalonBooks, 2020) was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay poetry Prize<br /><br />Her poem “Revolution” appears in the thirty-seventh issue of <i>Touch the Donkey</i>.<br /><br />Q: Tell me about the poem ”Revolution.”<br /><br />A: I wrote this poem in a moment of funk I suppose. Between the Indigenous Blockades/Land Back movement, Climate change, the pandemic and the racial uprisings (George Floyd), defunding or abolishing the police – I really thought we were poised to have a revolution, general strikes, and people out in the streets. I realized that actually we aren’t necessarily comfortable with upending our current systems. Conversations with my parents for example revealed their apathy and disdain for challenging the status quo, and friends constantly asked “do you want a revolution”? That question in particular stung in the sense that many of us were saying “what about...?” to radical solutions and instead proposing middle-of-the-ground solutions. More truthfully it revealed that some us myself included are comfortable with “armchair revolution” saying the revolutionary incendiary words and statements, but then going about our lives in ways that many folks actually on the streets fighting for their basics don't have the luxury of doing. I will always refer to Le Guin’s 1973 short story—<i>The ones Who Walk Away From Omelas</i>—this fictional town whose utopia is dependent on keeping a child in perpetual misery. As townsfolk become older and learn the truth of how their town’s utopia is maintained, their initial horror turns either into acquiescence of the status quo or walking away from the town. I wonder when we’ll stop acquiescing or walking away and actually revolt and demand something better.<br /><br />Q: How does this poem compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?<br /><br />A: I would say this poem is my go to style in that it is a commentary, a complaint, a rant if you will. Where it differs is in its length (shorter) and in a couplet. I typically write poems run-on style with no real space to breathe – much like how my thought process works – prose-y sometimes. And it seems like most of my work involves referencing one or the other parent, and this is one of a few that references both. When I first started I always had something that referenced my mother. My current manuscript that I’m working on is more diaristic ( I think) and even more personal – still political though ( I hope)!<br /><br />Q: What prompted this shift into, as you call it, a style more diaristic?<br /><br />A: More courage? Perhaps? Settling into what it means to write about what’s important to me. I guess being ok with being a bit vulnerable. Only a little bit though! If I dwell too much on the potential for too much vulnerability I just become paralyzed. At the same time I am learning to just write and not self-edit or self-censure. For this manuscript I had also intended it to be literally diaristic, and follow the trajectory of what it was like the past few years struggling (like everyone else) with making sense of our world in a pandemic, making sense of all the domestic and global escalating conflicts while in the midst of experiencing what felt like my body and health betraying me. Suddenly I couldn’t burn the candles at both ends, but also I didn’t want to. I also struggled (still do) with the fact that it felt like I was abandoning a whole segment of a population BUT at the same time reckoning with the fact that I don’t want to be paid to care and support folks made vulnerable, I never wanted to participate in the non-profit industrial complex, and the best thing (for me anyways) was to exit that and find other and more sustainable ways to provide care. Still figuring that out while I calm my nervous system!<br /><br />Q: Have you any models for this new approach, or are you working more on intuition?<br /><br />A: I think as writers we’re always influenced even subconsciously – I can’t say there is a model per se – and I know I’m not inventing anything new. I’m just doing what works for me. I haven’t been formally trained so I also feel that what may have been “in” or particular styles or models have already been done, and I’m just stumbling on them as I settle more into the business of writing, and as I find more time to savour reading.<br /><br />That said, I admire Mercedes Eng’s vulnerability especially when she’s reading at public events. I also recently read a poem called “Fear” by American poet Raymond Carver, and then myself and other writers in workshop engaged in an exercise listing our fears. I noticed that my fears have shifted with my recent move and have allowed me to look at those things if not more dispassionately at least with a fresher perspective,and more (self) compassion. I definitely, definitely work with intuition or something. I go somewhere else it seems (!) when I really get into putting words on the page – sometimes I don’t recognize my own words – did I write that? is a frequent question I ask myself hahaha. Intuition is my superpower.<br /><br />Q: With a published full-length debut and your current work-in-progress, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?<br /><br />A: I think that one way I’ve developed is more of a willingness to experiment with forms. I’m still a bit reluctant but the idea is not so daunting. I'm liking the idea more and more of a container for “working the page” I’m guessing my reluctance is because I haven’t been formally taught forms. I’m leaning into the idea for now that writing is what I want to do, and that provides a focus if you will, but I’m taking my time. In terms of where I see my work headed, I don’t know but I am most excited about “maturing” and leaning into the craft and discipline of writing and being curious about where I go with it!<br /><br />Q: Part of what impressed me so much about your full-length debut was the way in which you managed to stitch together a wide array of fragments into a much larger tapestry. Did the form for that project come together organically, or had you a larger structure in mind? How did such a project begin?<br /><br />A: I definitely relied on intuition to put this together. I didn’t have a sense of the larger structure until I got deep into the manuscript. I was panicking at first that the pieces didn’t connect but then I ended up printing what I had and taping them to a window, moving them around and cutting pieces until I could see a bit of a pattern and flow. Then I started “adding” pieces. Other poems triggered a research bug, so that I could add or subtract pieces. Once it felt like it had a shape, I decided to have three sections. The sections kind of mirrored the journey of how I ended up in Vancouver, but also the larger transatlantic journey of how enslaved folks ended up in the Americas. Largely because it was intuitive, it was such a treat to hear how others read and experience the manuscript. A few folks described it as polyphonic, multi-layered – lots going on.<br /><br />Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?<br /><br />A: I always return to Dionne Brand – she’s my first! – and Claudia Rankine. Brandon Wint is newer and I have been re-reading <i>Divine Animal</i> – the musicality and rhythm and each line just hits you! (I also feel like the trouble with this question is that I feel like I am leaving people out!) I also love going down research rabbit holes and love reading academic articles, or science-y type things.<br /><br />I just learned that if I’m in a block/funk it makes sense for me to just lean into it and read without forcing things. AND reading quirky or unusual or not my usual go -to is better for me. I recently discovered Gary Barwin’s <i>For It Is a Pleasure and Surprise to Breathe</i>. I had kind of dismissed it in the sense that it was in the to-be-read-at-some-point-pile. Anyway I decided I’m going to pick it up and read it. It just rattled my brain enough to get me out of the writing block. It was quirky, cerebral, with moments of surprise tenderness. Generally though I turn to fiction and again that’s Dionne Brand, Edwidge Danticat ( if I feel a vague tugging for “home”).<br /><br />I also just read Suzette Mayr’s <i>The Sleeping Car Porter</i> and it was another book that left me shook! I couldn’t get enough. Finally and funnily enough recently (because of my move to an off-grid, remote island), someone recommended I read<i> My Year in Provence</i> ( and this is my year of saying YES to all the things), so I did with some minor reservations, and well I did enjoy it and saw the similarities, and was able to reframe my move.<br /><br />All this to say that I’m becoming more open to reading all the things, or rather going back to my love of extensive reading without an agenda. I’m finding that reading for pleasure without guilt and without a restriction to genre is much more generative for me. I like the surprise of being ....surprised, moved, challenged. And lastly since I’m going on and on here...there are four writers I follow on social media, 3 are by extension of knowing and following American writer Steven Dunn. He has the the most interesting posts about everything and anything that make you laugh, but he also has great posts that make you think. Anyway his three other friends, Said Shaiye, Jay Halsey, and Jay’s partner Hillary Leftwich all have come out with books recently. But the point of this is that their posts are some of the most reflective thought- provoking posts and musings about life, the writerly life, community and just challenges. I've found myself having to ask them if I can use a quote or two for my work projects.<br /><br /><p></p>rob mclennanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07958889643637765864noreply@blogger.com0