TtD supplement #11: seven questions for Susan Briante

Susan Briante is the author of Pioneers in the Study of Motion and Utopia Minus, both published by Ahsahta Press. She is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona.

Her piece “THE PHYSICISTS SAY CONSCIOUSNESS” appears in the third issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poem “THE PHYSICISTS SAY CONSCIOUSNESS” How did it originate?

A: For a while, I wrote poems that intersected with the stock market, then searched for another lens through which to look at my world. I started reading articles about contemporary physics and started writing a series of poems in dialogue with the discipline. I found an article that explained how consciousness could be expressed through an equation. (The actual article is written by a neuroscientist, but the impulse that everything could be mapped by equations struck me as having very much to do with the realm of physics.)

Around the same time, our family dog—a wonderful American bulldog named Moon—passed away unexpectedly. As a result of our dog’s death I was confronted with the problem of explaining mortality to our 3.5-year-old daughter without relying on the tropes of Christianity, no longer part of my belief system. I find Buddhist thought and physics comforting in their world views (not without their own spheres of intersection), but I struggle with how to translate those beliefs and possibilities into a language a child can understand.

Q: I know you’ve been working poems utilizing scientific content for some time, so I’m intrigued to hear that you were working on “poems that intersect with the stock market.” What is the appeal with working on poems utilizing, for a number of readers, might be considered “non-poetic” material? What are the difficulties with attempting to work through such subject matter, and what do you think you bring to the conversation between poetry and science?

A: At the University of California San Diego, Rae Armantrout and the astrophysicist Brian Keating have teamed up to teach the course Poetry for Physicists. At the on-line magazine Jacket2, poet Amy Catanzano has written a series of stunning short essays tracing intersections between poetry and physics or what she calls Quantum Poetics. If you want to read my thoughts about the connections between poetics and the stock market, you can find them in my essay “Notes Towards a Poetics of the Dow” at The Volta (http://www.thevolta.org/ewc5-sbriante-p1.html).

For centuries poets have engaged with the most powerful forces or institutions of their time whether we are talking about the Church or the natural world. Defending poetry against accusations that it had no place in a world dominated by scientific thought, Shelley asserted the poet “beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered.” I find the lyric to be an ideal place to map out connections or to explore what Muriel Rukeyser called “the processes and the machines of process” as a way to understand the human condition.

Q: There is something in your essay that is reminiscent of, say, Picasso incorporating influences of African art into his own, which brings about a wave of new energy and influences into European art, thereby irrevocably altering both. Was it a matter of wishing to incorporate a fresh vocabulary into poetry or the engagement with foreign subject matter that first brought you into the idea? And is what brought you in the same reasons you remain?

A: I think as poets we are always excited by language, so yes there is something in addressing a new vocabulary. I was also very interested in engaging with the economic “crisis” of 2008, which marked the beginning of a new economic normal for many people as well as the beginning of a kind of narrative crisis. We measure of our “health” in the United States through economic indexes like the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Most news broadcasts end with those numbers. But why? That’s not an inevitable choice. The nation of Bhutan, for example, measures Gross National Happiness (http://www.gnhbhutan.org/about/) instead of Gross National Product. I created the many of the poems that make up the manuscript, The Market Wonders, by recording the closing number from the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJI), then plugging that number in a variety of search engines that would lead me to texts. I use those texts and closing number of the DJI to inspire or influence the poems I was writing. You can find examples of them here (http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/october-14%E2%80%94-dow-closes-10015) and here (http://atticusreview.org/may-26-the-dow-closes-down-9974/).

The DJI became a lens for me and as I finished that project, I started to look for a lens. For the moment, science, especially physics, has been offering a new viewpoint for me. In the end, it is often about seeing how these perspectives, sets of knowledge, and vocabularies intersect with and inform the quotidian.

Q: When composing poems utilizing either the stock market or physics, how deeply do you need to understand something before you allow yourself to incorporate it into a poem? Or are you learning as you go, and utilizing information as possible bouncing-off points into further possibilities? Or, as you suggest in your first answer, is it all simply a variation on translating ideas, beliefs, and concepts into another series of possibilities, including poetry?

A: I think it is important to treat any subject matter with respect. Naturally one doesn’t want to get things wrong. I tend to read a lot, deeply but also broadly, looking for intersections between fields of knowledge as well as considering the possible blind spots inherent in whatever viewfinder I choose. I’ve always been attracted to poems that offer glimpses into thought processes. I don’t mean stream of consciousness but a recording of awareness. I don’t ever want to colonize material, using it in service of an argument. The poem is not the 5-paragraph essay. The poems need to be a site of active thinking.

Q: That’s the best description of poetry I think I’ve heard yet: a site of active thinking. You’ve already mentioned poets such as Rukeyser and Armantrout, but what other poets influence your work? What writers or writing can you not help but return to?

A: I’m currently reading Lisa Robertson’s XEcologue (which opens with the stunner: “I needed a genre for the times that I go phantom”) and Nilling. Robertson is such a fierce thinker and beautiful writer. I return to and turn to her work when I need to sharpen my mind. I just finished reading Brenda Hillman’s Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, an amazing conclusion to a poetic journey that begin with her book Cascadia. A stack of books await me later this summer as I prepare to teach a course on the lyric “I” and experimental autobiographies: Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, Alice Notley’s Mysteries of Small Houses, Lyn Hejinian’s My Life and of course Wordsworth and Shelley.

I’m also supposed to be reading Capital in the 21st Century for a reading group, but I have not started it yet.

Q: A number of the examples you mention are poets working within the framework of the book as unit of composition. What is your process of constructing a poetry manuscript? Are you aware of the book as your compositional unit, or do you focus more on the individual poem, or handful of poems? Are your books constructed as complete units or more as a collection of disparate parts that eventually cohere into larger projects?

A: I’ve always enjoyed writing poems in series. It’s a way to avoid the absolutely blank page. That said, I think the book as a unit of composition is very fashionable right now. Maybe that’s reason enough to proceed with caution. The danger of the book project lies in its becoming too focused, so that it stunts rather than inspires possibilities. It’s nice to have an “about” when we are writing, but in the end I think it is more exciting and hopefully rewarding to have a “towards” or an “around.” Lately, I have been trying to go to the page with as broad a sense of freedom as I can muster.

Q: Finally, after two trade collections, as well as your current work-in-progress, how do you feel your work is developing? Where do you think you are headed?

A: With each book and book project, I have had a chance to not only explore new intellectual fields but to teach myself something about craft. I’m still an amateur. I am committed to learning something with each new project.

Yesterday I downloaded an undergraduate plan of study for an astronomy major. I’m not sure I’m ready to take calculus again, but I’ve hung the course plan on the corkboard above my desk as a reminder. That’s what I mean about freedom. Every time I go to the page I want to be there not out of habit or obligation, but because there’s something I can do there that I can’t do any place else.

Touch the Donkey : third issue,

The third issue is now available, with new poems by Gil McElroy, j/j hastain, derek beaulieu, Megan Kaminski, Roland Prevost, Emily Ursuliak, Susan Briante and D.G. Jones.





Six dollars (includes shipping). My good looks paid for that pool, and my talent filled it with water.

TtD supplement #10: seven questions for Catherine Wagner

Catherine Wagner’s most recent book is Nervous Device (City Lights, 2012). Her work has been anthologized in the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry (second edition), Best American Erotic Poems and elsewhere. Her performances and poems are archived on the PennSound, Archive of the Now and Poetry Foundation websites, and her work has been translated into German, Norwegian, Slovene and Bengali. A member of the S(W)OP poetics collective in southwest Ohio, she is professor of English at Miami University and lives in Oxford, Ohio with her son.

Her poem “Notice” appears in the second issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: In “Notice,” you’ve built a short prose piece specifically for the journal composed in what could be seen as “corporate-speak,” a deliberately “un-poetic” language. It reminds slightly of Rachel Zolf’s Human Resources (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2007), in which she works to engage with the almost de-humanizing language of the business work-space. What made you decide to engage with such language?

A: I like Rachel Z’s work. Human Resources doesn’t accept the instrumentality of business-world phrases, it’s derailing them and mashing them into this or that terrine or vitrine. My piece uses businessy phrasing but it's not derailing anything phrasally, it’s a full-disclosure statement and not even ironic. For the first half of 2014, I sent “Notice” to any journal that solicited my work, just changing the magazine/editor names in the first sentence. I had been feeling weird about the way poem publication gets monetized for a shrinking class (mine) of academic laborers (publications get entered into annual activities reports and considered when salaries are re-assessed). Despite K Goldsmith’s recently saying “money has no value in poetry,” I wanted to think about money gets into the poetry game or doesn’t. I hoped the poem would come out everywhere at once to maximize publicly my ROI [return on investment] from the poem, but you were the first and almost the only sucker to take it. Either the piece is too obvious/boring/bad or it’s not what people thought they would get when they ordered from my atelier.

So the poem is aimed at laborers in the poetry factory or field (editors, readers, plus the less-visible laborers who make the field available and usable—papermill workers, custodians, code jockeys) and I seriously did want to thank them in it. I’m not sure that comes off. The tone feels different published than it did on my screen.

Q: I’m curious about the response other journals have had to the piece. As an editor, my original response was one of confusion, given that it wasn’t what I was expecting when soliciting your work, but in the end I decided to trust your judgment on what wasn’t entirely clear to me. What have other journals/editors said in response?

A: One said (this was a student editor of Sonora Review) “We very much enjoyed the political inquiry and discussion your piece evoked, which divided our board of 8 readers in a fruitful way” – so nice! they ended up not taking it. Bathhouse, another one run by students, took it and said it was “perfect for the issue”—I don’t know why. But the issue had lots of interesting stuff in it, look at this. I sent to a couple places that asked for prose pieces and that didn’t fly—one said “it’s not quite the right fit for our categories of content (articles, reviews, etc)—though I realize that’s stodgy.” Everybody has been fearsomely polite like you. Was the piece just confusing, or was it confusing because it wasn’t like my other work you’ve seen?

Q: In my case, a bit of both, I’d have to say. There was a part of me that wondered if the piece was meant as a slight to the editor/journal that had requested such. I find it interesting how your work has been moving away from the lyric and more into the conceptual over the past few years, from this current piece to some of the work in Nervous Device. Given your trajectory of over a dozen chapbooks and four poetry collections over the past dozen years, how do you feel your work has developed?

A: So happy you trusted me, yes. I guess I want to explain some more though it’s awk to explain a fail. I wanted the poem to lay out the labor, and the returns on it, that happen when a poem gets published, and to expose how its publication benefits me actually and monetarily, even if it’s not much money we’re talking about. Sending out the poem to a bunch of places was meant to maximize my benefit, so the poem is taking advantage of poetry laborers as it thanks them. It’s trying to be public about the advantage it’s taking, but I don’t blame you for wondering whether it was a slight. The gesture was blurry.

I just read this Sarah Brouillette essay called “World Literature and Market Dynamics” that is helping me think about what I was gesturing at in that poem. Whenever I read her I realize that she’s thought clearly through things that my poems think about in chaotic and clumsy ways and I feel relieved. She is talking about our tendency to ignore the inequities the economy fosters in the literary economy. (Pascale Casanova calls this inattention “the denial of the unequal structure of literary space.”) Brouillette diagnoses an “uneven distribution of...agency and ability to author” as well as “uneven access to reading materials and to the means of publication.” Then she calls out a trend my poem fits right into like a fart in the wind: “In these conditions we can observe heightened consciousness about the compromises, complicities, and constraints on literary work and its valorization, and heightened kinds of circular games with reflexive unease about the extent to which particular individuals have the right to represent certain kinds of experience in their writing.” You can see that self-consciousness in “Notice” and all over the place in the uncomfortably privileged writers I read and know, especially the few tenure-track academics out there. Who are not chilling out, who are laborers overworked, some of them, to the point of nervous breakdown, but who have so much more access to the game than some others do.

Anyway I don’t want to write more poems like this, it’s a cul-de-sac, how long can I stay on a sit-and-spin that loathes itself. Do something else, loathe other stuff like prisons that pay immigrants thirteen cents an hour, imitate cicada sound-architectures. I don’t know what I’m doing now or what I’ll do. I can send you a new poem that’s more like my other stuff if you want. Soundplay, passionately inchoate blurting, line breaks, colors, stinky bits, etc. I do want to say that even though “Notice” has a different linguistic texture, it’s not that different from what I’ve been messing with for a while. It’s a lyric, it’s concerned with matters of address, with a projected addressed other who is often a beloved—in this case the reader and the editor.

I think lyric can interrogate frame. I don’t think conceptualism owns that game. I keep on being interested in lyric and in how lyric hooks into historical and economic systems and is this sort of glinting micro-facet of them or bursting blister.

Q: What I find so very compelling about the piece, especially with the explanation of such, is how you are working to push the boundaries of what a poem should be doing, and playing with. What is really being asked of poets when they’re solicited for non-paying markets? I’m slightly disappointed in myself for having to wait for the explanation to fully understand such.

A: I don’t mind poets being solicited for non-paying markets, any more than I mind being encouraged to sing along when I’m by the campfire. Writing poetry is work but that doesn’t mean I think it ought to be waged. I do want to think about the hierarchies involved in the ways poems get processed for and by the market. Both the symbolic/cultural capital market and the market where digits get altered on a screen and you can buy stuff or not.

You asked about the development or trajectory of my work. I am not sure it develops though it changes. It’s always a response to whatever’s going on, it marks experience so I can look at it. It feels rebellious, I put on my fuck-you hat and play around. But putting on the fuck-you hat is increasingly charged and peculiar because how can I be rebellious while being paid as an institutional writer? I guess we’ll see how I cry glitter. I don’t have to cry diamonds like Lady Gaga on the Simpsons (she says it hurts like hell).

Q: Is the poem “Notice” part of a larger, current project? Will it be included in your next poetry collection, possibly?

A: It’s been a slow couple of years for writing and I usually have no idea how poems will start to cohere into a book until I’ve got a big batch. I’m thinking of including other sorts of writing besides poetry – some criticism and essays – in whatever I do next, and “Notice” could go in. I’ll revise it though.

Q: Do you have any difficulty shifting between poetry and criticism, or is it all part of the same large canvas? Poems and criticism don’t often exist together in single-author volumes, yet some authors such as Anne Carson, Erín Moure, Phil Hall and Susan Howe have all built careers on their own take on the “poem-essay.” Where do you see the two connecting in your own writing?

A: When I’m writing about other texts, it’s easier to see where some idea I’m working with came from. It feels more like “applied research.” Whereas I often write poetry in a truancy (autocorrect for trancy) way and have no clue where something came from. I don’t want to oppose the two though. A friend of mine says it takes many years to mature as a critic, whereas poets can write great poems when they’re young. That seems right, because to develop intuition as a critic, you need to read so much, and eventually the texts you read start to connect to one another and to history and feel like a world to you and then you can swim there and feel the currents. That’s when associations could start to generate themselves intuitively. Great critical writers like Rachel Blau Duplessis or William Empson or Kristin Ross or John Wilkinson or Olson in Call Me Ishmael are working intuitively for sure. Not just the poeticky critics. I think of Chris Nealon or younger critics like Margaret Ronda—I admire good critics on the traditional model so much – it’s glorious work to rigorously demand of yourself that you come to terms with some aspect of a tradition and try to define it or redefine it in some way useful to others.

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

A: Well, that is a good question to hit me with right now – I felt dead as poet while writing most of the above (couple months ago) but writing is starting to come back. So I think I know: going for walks, listening to crickets and cicadas, reading anything that I’m reading just because I feel like it (anti-dutifully), listening to music, having sex, sleeping enough and having a life that lets me remember dreams, not letting job take over, singing, waking up early. Listening to ballads and blues, hiphop. Alice Notley, Suzan-Lori Parks, Larry Eigner. Medieval lyrics. The Tale of Genji and long proto-novels with Russian-doll plots like The Water Margin and 1001 Nights. Rae Armantrout, Gwendolyn Brooks, Bernadette Mayer, Clark Coolidge—these people all have a prosody I can’t figure out and I keep trying. Science journalism. People whose sentences kill me—Carlyle, Nabokov, recently CLR James—I am finally reading The Black Jacobins and James’ prose style is kicking my ass; it’s weirdly Carlylean (despite their political differences) but with less grandeur and pirouetting so the argument moves like a flow-chart instead of a cataract. The Greek Anthology, Catullus, Martial make me remember that people have been writing for a long time all kinds of shit about minor things that loomed large to them, people who weren’t good people, who were horrible to one another especially women and slaves as they negotiated the horrible politics of their world, and they wrote great poems and the poems are here and they are dead, this makes me feel better though I want to be good people.

TtD supplement #9: seven questions for Susanne Dyckman

Susanne Dyckman is the author of a full-length volume of poetry, equilibrium’s form (Shearsman Books), and three chapbooks, Counterweight (Woodland Editions), Transiting Indigo (EtherDome) and Source (above/ground press).  Her writing has appeared in a number of journals, most recently the EtherDome Anthology, As if it Fell from the Sun.  She has been a finalist for the Ahsahta Press Sawtooth Poetry Prize and the EPR Discovery Award, and a winner of the Five Fingers Review Poetry Award. Her home is in Albany, California, where she hosts the occasional Evelyn Avenue summer reading series.   

Her poem “Across the Street” appears in the second issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poem “Across the Street.” How did it originate?

A: The starting point was a boo-k of street photographs by Vivian Maier. I often use a visual image as a writing prompt, and am especially drawn to photography, most often urban landscapes. I’d heard of Maier a few years ago and was intrigued by her story and her work.

I find cities, their histories and inhabitants, compelling, so I easily engaged with Maier’s art. My process was to randomly open the book, look at a photograph and respond. I did not intended to describe the visual, but to use it as an entrance into a poem. Focusing on a physical image allows me to move out of myself, before moving back in. A type of tension develops between the external and the internal, and I find that generative. We all bring ourselves to the page, but I don’t necessarily want to start with myself. The image is the beginning, the first “other” with whom I am having a conversation. I allow myself to go elsewhere if I need to do so, and in this work I moved beyond the photographic frame, while still, I hope, holding its sensibility. 

Q: Is response a normal part of your process?

A: It very often is, because to respond is to be engaged with something or someone, and that allows for an interaction through language that is of interest to me. I experience more energy in the process if there is a sense of some conversation/communication taking place through sound, meaning, and placement of words, as well as the blank spaces on the page. The sensed dialogue may actually be a monologue, but the spirit is one of connection.  

Q: Is this part of a larger work that might end up seeing publication as a trade collection? What is your process of putting together a manuscript?

A: It will be part of a longer work (as I’m still writing this project), though I don’t know that it will be book length. I’ve found that trying to extend a series of poems, to continue with a theme or specific approach just to have more pages, is usually unsuccessful. I sense when a group of poems is finished, or, to put it another way, they tell me when they’re completed. I work best when I’m not looking ahead to what might be an end product, but stay in the present, with the writing.

That said, different projects can be combined, and may be more compatible than I would have initially thought when first writing them.   

Putting together a manuscript is a great pleasure, whether it’s my poetry or another’s. I enjoy playing with how various parts might fit together, and how different arrangements alter the reading. Of course, attention to language is a key part of the process. How do the words of one poem lead into those of another? Where does one land and start again, poem after poem? Switching page order can create an unexpected, but no less effective, reading of the work.          

I also think about how the pages appear in sequence. Are longer poems best set off with shorter ones? What’s the density of the words on one page, and what should follow? Just as I often use a visual image as a starting point for writing, I put together a manuscript with the visual in mind. When we pick up a book of poems we are not only reading the words, we are reading the shape of the poem, looking at its placement on the page, noting blank spaces as well as text.

Q: After one poetry collection and a small handful of chapbooks (as well as this current work-in-progress), how do you feel your work has developed? What, if anything, do you feel you are working toward?

A: I have another full-length manuscript that hasn’t yet found a home, and I’ve been working on a collaborative project with the poet Elizabeth Robinson. With the collaboration, there is an interaction of our very different voices and a resulting element of surprise that moves the work outside of the realm of authorship. Though it’s often clear who wrote which lines, it’s sometimes less easy (occasionally impossible) to identify, and that’s pleasing, because the poems then become something other than our individual contributions.  

I’m not sure how to answer the question as to how my work has developed. That’s asking me to be more self-aware than I may be. Over the last year I have been writing in a journal every morning, mostly free-writing. This is not an uncommon practice for writers, but I set myself a goal of being disciplined about it for a full twelve months (I’m now on month eleven). I’ve filled many notebooks and I’m looking at that material to see how I might make poetry of it. I suspect that the work will have a different tone than my other projects, though maybe not. It’s all still very new, so I can’t yet say if I’ll find it successful, but I have many pages of raw material to draw from.

Q: I’m always curious about writers who work collaboratively. How did the project originate, and how, if at all, has the process of collaborating affected your individual work?

A. It began, at Elizabeth’s suggestion, with a plan that we each write a response to the same poem, preferably one of a writer whose work is quite different than ours. As we both happened to have the same edition of Vallejo’s collected, those poems became our starting point. We would alternate choosing one of his poems, each write a response, and then compare the result. The writing has since moved on from that initial prompt.

Has it influenced my work? I think I can say yes, but mostly that it has influenced my writing within the collaboration. In this kind of process there is always the echo of the other when one sits down to write. I am having a conversation with Elizabeth, so her language and sensibilities are on my mind. I will either write in contrast to that, or allow for some blurring, that is, write with a sense of what I think is her voice, though it is not always a conscious decision at the time. When we read our pieces together, it allows me a better understanding of how we each approach our own poetry. And, as I mentioned earlier, there is kind of delight that can result when blending the work.

Q: How far has the collaboration progressed so far, and what are you working towards? Are you attempting a full-length manuscript of such, or something more ongoing?

A: We didn’t begin the project with a full-length book in mind (the initial plan was, simply, to have fun), but the work has progressed, so that’s now a possibility. 

Finding time for it can be an issue, as the collaborative writing has to take place along with our own independent projects and the other needs and distractions of daily life.   Much of the exchange has been long-distance, via email. When we’ve been able to be in the same location and sit together with the poems, the work has come together quickly. Because of these challenges, distance and time, I don’t know when we’ll turn to one another and say “it’s finished”, though I imagine that day will come. The creation of a third voice is such an interesting process I’m not sure I really want to see the work to end.

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

A: I always return to Wallace Stevens. He was the first poet to expand and deepen my sense of what language can do, and I never tire of him. Initially, and I’m talking about early in my poetry reading and writing life, I didn’t always understand him, but his work made me realize that understanding a poem as a traditional narrative didn’t matter. His language sang to me and that was enough.

“The Prologue” to The Canterbury Tales is another favorite, one I revisit often to remember how fun reciting can be, how poetry is a truly physical act as sound forms in the mouth.

There are, of course, many other poems that evoke a “swoon” response, work that makes me wish I’d written it myself. I’m tempted to list them all, to give those poets credit for being an inspiration, but then that wouldn’t be answering your question.

So, Stevens is the one.   

TtD supplement #8: seven questions for Susan Holbrook

Susan Holbrook’s poetry books are the Trillium-nominated Joy Is So Exhausting (Coach House, 2009), Good Egg Bad Seed (Nomados, 2004) and misled (Red Deer, 1999), which was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the Stephan G. Stephansson Award. She teaches North American literatures and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor. She recently co-edited The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson: Composition as Conversation (Oxford U P, 2010).

Her poems “As Good as I Get” and “Layman’s Terms.” appear in the second issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: I’ve always enjoyed your engagement with the deceptively straight narrative line, something that continues in the poems “As Good as I Get” and “Layman’s Terms.” What is your specific attraction to engaging the sentence?

A: I guess the relentless exposure to sentences in our daily lives, with their grammatical orthodoxies and go-to syntactical layouts, make them kind of irresistible to me as vehicles for expansion and play. I love grammar—my favourite essay is Stein’s “Poetry and Grammar” where she lays out her idiosyncratic passions for punctuation and parts of speech—and enjoy the sentence as a unit. Sometimes I riddle the syntax and sometimes, as in these two poems, the syntax is familiar but the terms pop out. Both these poems feature sentences which accumulate, rather than participate in the larger arc of a paragraph. I draw the line there!

Q: What is it about the accumulation that appeals?

A: I think of a traditional paragraph as a dogwalker holding a bunch of leashes, each sentence-dog tethered to the main man.  In a more cumulative structure, dogs just keep running into the park, one after another—you never know when they’ll stop! There are interesting relationships among the units, but they do not involve cause/effect or subordinations so much as resonances—it’s democratic. No alpha dog. And there’s a nice processual, self-generating energy that gets going. A few years ago my students complained that I always suggested they rewrite their submissions into list poems. They were right, I did. It was a way to get them to relinquish some intentional control, see where a series might lead them.

Q: Your books so far appear to be structured less as a grouping of poems than as a series of pieces composed as different answers to a central core of questions. Are these poems part of any kind of larger grouping? What is your process of putting together a manuscript?

A: Wow, I’m excited to hear about a “central core of questions”! So far my process has really been one of writing poems now and then until I have enough for a book (takes about 10 years!), without any overarching project or through line. But it’s true that all my poems share some persistent concerns—when writing I think about how we shape and are shaped by language, about how to invite people in to a more intimate relationship with words, how cultural critique can be animated by defamiliarization’s prodding to sensation/awareness.

Q: Does that mean your process is more a matter of accumulation? After two trade collections over the past fifteen years, how do you feel your work has developed?

A: Yes, I guess that’s right! – the poems pile up slowly, and I don’t know what’s coming next. An interest that’s developed over time is in conceptual work, in organizing more poems using found material. But your question prompted me to look back at misled, and then at the pile of stuff I’ve got on the go now—looks like I’ve always had this penchant for mixing aesthetics. I enjoy reading work across poetic ‘camps’ and hope to be that flexible as a writer, too.

Q: What are some of the writers and works you’ve been engaging with lately? What influences are you aware of in your current work?

A: I’ve been pleasantly overwhelmed of late with spectacular work to be seriously engaged with. As a poetry editor at Coach House, I get to dig into wildly exciting work. Coming out this season were two books I got to edit: Sina Queyras’s MxT and Brecken Hancock’s Broom Broom, both phenomenal. I’ve also been working on an introductory textbook on poetry, so I’ve spent several months revisiting a few ‘classics’ and skipping through the centuries, therefore getting a sense of a kind of inexorable poetic energy in the world that’s buoying. I also have some perennial fonts of influence, poets to whose work I turn and return—Harryette Mullen and Robert Kroetsch, to name two.

Q: What appealed to me about the two poems you sent along for Touch the Donkey are for exactly what you’ve been describing, the combination of accumulation, sentence and list, and the rush that comes from wrapping lines across line breaks, as though each stanza is meant to be seen as a single, extended breath. Is the breath something you’re aware of during composition? Are these poems that would be performed as a kind of breathless rush, a slow and steady stream, or more of accumulative pace, picking up speed along the way?

A: Yes, I do think about breath—probably because Fred Wah was a mentor, and he is so much the brass player, the music a function of the lungs. “Laymen’s Terms” proposes a voice, the ‘expert’ explaining technology using esoteric/odd/poetic analogies. I varied sentence length and compression there to vary the pace.  I noticed that absurdity can be delivered effectively both when it’s adagio and when it’s presto! Either way the listener doesn’t learn much more about broadband, but might enjoy the worlds these laymen’s terms open up. The poem ends by telling us “that’s what you want,” something I was thinking about in “As Good as I Get,” which is a collage of found bits from advertising. These companies name their products so as to imply they’re selling ‘values’, so I used the sonnet (roughly!), traditional conveyer of values. The gentle pacing of sonnet is bombarded by relentless slogans and testimonials so the resulting self-portrait is hyperventilated.

Q: Is utilizing found material something you engage with on any sort of regular basis? Is this one of the structural threads one might find throughout your writing?

A: Yes, in fact the word “found” doesn’t even seem right anymore, because in the digital age we are just swimming in the stuff. Material is calling out to be cut, spliced, reshaped, translated, etc. all the time. It’s kind of a funny experience, now, to start with a blank sheet. Doing conceptual pieces alerts us to the borrowing that is part of our every utterance, so I’m more aware of the citational quality of even my “original” work.

TtD supplement #7: seven questions for Julie Carr

Julie Carr is the author of six books of poetry, most recently 100 Notes on Violence (Ahsahta) and RAG (Omnidawn). Think Tank is forthcoming from Solid Objects. She is also the author of Surface Tension: Ruptural Time and the Poetics of Desire in Late Victorian Poetry (Dalkey Archive, 2013). She is the co-editor of the forthcoming collection, Active Romanticism, which will be out from University of Alabama Press in late 2014. She teaches poetry and poetics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and lives in Denver where she helps with Counterpath gallery and Counterpath Press.

Two poems from her work-in-progress “REAL LIFE: AN INSTALLATION” appears in the second issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the work-in-progress “REAL LIFE: AN INSTALLATION.” How did it originate?

A: Like a lot of poets, I found myself in a situation where I had a number of manuscripts sort of lined up, ready to send out or even slotted for publication, and it seemed to be happening too fast. It was the summer of 2011, and my partner Tim said to me, you need something to write that will take you at least five years. In response I created a process for myself – I would write every day from labor day to labor day to labor day, beginning in 2011. I did not allow myself to read back what I’d written, except at three-month intervals, and then I could do only very slight cleaning for spelling and stuff. That way I was always writing into an unknown, forgetting what I’d done the day before, keeping it strange and off-balance. Of course themes and forms emerged, but they’d shift pretty regularly, and I had to allow that, since I was not editing at all. At the end of the two years, I had twelve sections and a total of almost 600 pages. Now I am editing, forming, shaping, and cutting most of it. The editing process will take as least as long as the original writing took. Probably longer.

The title came from my daughter, who was four when I started. She’d often refer to things and events as “real life,” in order to distinguish them from stuff that was happening in her imagination, in her dreams, or in stories and movies. For kids at that age it’s important to clarify, since so much is going on all the time that is not “real life” (and they are often unsure what is and what isn’t real). I started to notice that when adults use the phrase “real life,” they usually mean work, or the mundane, the everyday, as opposed to art, sex, love, illness, dreams, play – pretty much anything that is any fun or has any intensity attached to it qualifies as not real life! I thought I’d trouble the term, while also thinking a lot about labor, work, economics – throughout the writing.

I began thinking about installation art first because I always am, but second because of a talk Fredric Jameson gave in which he claimed that the artists of the future will all be installation artists, or something like that. I can say more about that if you like.

Q: Certainly!

A: What I remember from Jameson’s talk (and I think this is a talk he’d been giving a lot that year around the country) was the idea that 1) we are in a time of rampant presentism with no clear or even muddy vision for the future and no memory of the past, and 2) that all artists are now curators or installation artists, gathering materials and arranging them, rather than making them. I don’t agree with either of these ideas, though certainly I can see where they come from. Instead I see a lot of people struggling to imagine new futures and working toward them (in art and activism), and I see a lot of really relevant art that is in no way “just” a gathering together or curating. Nonetheless, the idea struck me enough to make me want to explore directly what it might mean to think of my writing as installation art. Often, long before hearing this talk (and this is probably because of my theater/dance background) I've imagined or dreamed my poems happening in spaces – I hear the voice recorded, see some kind of event or dance or architectural structure that illuminates, supports, or otherwise IS the poem.

When I was little I used to love, almost more than anything 1) amusement parks and 2) the plaster Easter eggs where you can peer into one end and see a little scene of bunnies and kids in spring clothing, or whatever. Both of these are installations – big and small – created worlds. I think I want my writing to act like that.

And so, Real Life has many imagined installations running through it, some that could be constructed, and others that could not. My friend Christina Battle, a filmmaker, is collaborating with me on a work that will bring these written installations into conversation with moving images.

Q: Your five poetry collections, including RAG (Omnidawn, 2014) are each constructed as large, expansive book-length projects as well. How does this current project relate to what you’ve produced before? How is it different?

A: You’re right about that! One day perhaps I’ll write a book of discrete poems – what Spicer called one night stands. But for now, this is how my mind works. Right now I’d say that Real Life is different because of the process of creating it. I want to hold off on understanding for as long as possible – to keep it unstable and unknown. So far that has been the case – it is too long and too wide for me to be able to see the whole of it. Eventually I assume that won’t be true, but for now it seems important to be patient, to let it unfold to me very slowly. There are certain topics that I find urgent and modes of expression that I’ve explored in relation to those topics. Here I want to push myself to find a way to not settle too quickly. I should say that there are two other books coming out before this one – and I’ve been working hard on these as well – so Real Life has also been a kind of background project at times. A form of meditation. A practice. Ongoing and continuously strange – as I’ve also been writing these other things with very different modes of attack.

Q: I like that you’re allowing your uncertainty to develop, and not letting the conscious mind interfere with what the unconscious mind is creating. I’m curious about your development into utilizing the book as your unit of composition (as opposed to the poem). How did this evolve? You mention Jack Spicer, but who (else) are your models?

A: I’d say my first influence in working this way was Lyn Hejinian. I read her first when I was about 27, and she blew my mind. Before reading My Life I had a very different idea of what a book was and what it could do. I was into minimalism, abstraction, the odd meditations of Rene Char, Tomaz Salamun, Denise Levertov, Emily Dickinson. My Life broke something open for me, even though I still love all those authors! Also, early on I read Michael Palmer quite a lot, and his sequences were a big influence as well. Cole Swensen’s work was a huge influence on my first and second books – especially her Noon, which I read constantly for at least a year.

After that, Zukofsky’s “A” and Vallejo’s Trilce – both of which I read with others over long periods of time – and these reading experiences were so rich, unprecedented in their slowness and depth – I’m so grateful to the people in that reading group for the time we spent with those authors. Williams’ Paterson is one of my favorite works to teach and reread. I love it for its struggles and all that is unresolved there. And Olson’s Maximus has also been wonderful to spend time with, to teach, to attempt to get inside. More contemporary writers that have influenced me in this way include Eleni Sikelianos – her California Poem especially (in terms of form – I love all her work), and Anne Carson for how she blends genres and forms throughout books.

Q: A number of the works you mention engage with narrative and personal information in rather interesting ways. How conscious are you about including your personal and domestic life in the conversation of your writing? Is this something you think might change as your daughter ages, and begins to gain awareness of how she is being depicted? What are your boundaries?

A: Well, first, there are three kids, and the oldest is 16. Just for the record.

I feel like there’s a question inside your question. Maybe something like – is it ethical (or polite) to depict one’s kids in one’s work? So, yes, I think it is fine, inevitable, and important. Because I’m interested in the human – in all of life, which must include relations, especially those most intimate (but not only), it would be entirely false of me to somehow exclude children from writing.

I’m not at all interested in writing that places boundaries around what can and can’t be written about. That said, I would not reveal someone else’s secrets, or willfully embarrass a child or anyone else. When I’ve had questions about my material – about whether it embarrasses a person or reveals something they don’t want revealed, I simply show it to that person and ask them directly. So my boundary is exactly that – I let the person decide and only one time has a person said “No. Please don’t include that.”

All three kids are aware that “they” appear in poems – and sometimes, in fact, their own poems have appeared in my books – credited of course. I think they understand what others also understand – that all of “real life” is filtered when written. It is and isn’t truth. It is and isn’t them. They write about me too! And even when they say things that are not true to me, I understand that what they write is true to the writing. I’m pretty sure everyone around here has a healthy understanding of writing as complex in its relation to truth.

As for the first part of the question – there are so many issues that this brings up, I hardly know where to begin. First, I’ll say that the question is loaded for me with concerns around gender. Women have historically been shamed out of writing the “personal,” or shamed for writing about “domestic” issues (read Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh for a great satirical attack on the way women’s writing has been mocked for being too involved in intimate matters). I resist that shaming and I resist any division between the personal and the political or the private and the public, because all of these divisions are gendered, and have been for hundreds of years. My personal and domestic life is my civic life, is my political life, is my public life. There is no way that my house is not political – it speaks about class, it speaks about education, it speaks about race. There’s no way my work as a teacher or a publisher is not intimate. That work speaks about love, desire, friendship, emotion.

One of the thrusts of Real Life: An Installation is to put pressure on the very question you are asking – but I’ve been putting pressure on that question ever since my first book, and I suppose I’ll always be doing that.

Q: I like hearing that your children are writing, and that you are including – credited of course – some of their poems in your books. What do you think you’ve learned about writing, whether generally or your own, from your children? What have you discovered through seeing your own work through their perspectives?

A: I learn from them that it’s great when you can write each letter in a different color.

And here’s an anecdote: when my middle daughter was about six she drew a self-portrait around which she wrote the words “There is no escaping me.” My youngest’s first written sentence was “I like myself” (I lak m sef). This has something to do with their personalities. But also, both of these statements are useful for writing. Whatever and whoever we are, that’s always going to be in the writing no matter how hard we might try to depersonalize it. There is no escaping the self, so you might as well face it. On the other hand, as I was saying to some friends yesterday, writing is this strange process of constantly coaxing ourselves to fall back in love with ourselves (or at least to like ourselves), because if we are too disgusted we just can’t do it. So there’s this facing and this forgiving that have to happen all the time.

Q: After five published poetry collections (as well as this current work-in-progress), how do you feel your work has developed? What, if anything, do you feel you are working toward?

A: This is a hard question to approach. One doesn’t like to sum up one’s work or to claim goals that will inevitably shift anyway. Also, I resist narratives of progress in relation to making art. But I do know that for a while I’ve been setting a goal, in one way or another, of more range, freedom, or wildness. At the same time, I’m also interested in how each book creates its own boundaries, whether those be in terms of form or content – a book ends up describing itself and I’m trying to be aware of what each given project wants to do or be.

To be a bit more specific, I'm working toward a couple of prose books right now (in addition to Real Life, and another book of very short poems, Think Tank, coming out soon from Solid Objects). I’m trying to teach myself to write essays I’d want to read. And, to that end, I’m studying various writers who push the essay form. One of these books is on the topic of confession (literary confession, more or less). The other is a collection of essays about poetry and affect, which will take me a long time to finish.

I guess if I could say anything about what I’m reaching for I’d say maximal range, maximal intensity, and more patience. And one day I’d like to write a novel – maybe when I am very old.

TtD supplement #6: seven questions for David Peter Clark

David Peter Clark is the author of two chapbooks: feathereDinosaurs (shuffaloff / Eternal Network, 2012), and the upcoming PENTACLES : A Tunnel Glimpse (BookThug, 2014). His poems have popped in publications such as BafterC, COUGH, Echolocation, House Organ, RAMPIKE, and Yellow Field. He was the editor of COUGH II, and along with Jonathan Pappo co-curates/hosts(?) UHOH, an art performance series/beast in Toronto. Holler: davidpeterclark@gmail.com

His poem “On the Way to the Tranzac on March 7, 2013” appears in the second issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: “On the Way to the Tranzac on March 7, 2013” is very much an extended, fractured “occasional poem,” an “I did this, I did that” poem, akin to works by Frank O’Hara and even David W. McFadden. What is your attraction to the occasional poem, as opposed to any larger construct?

A: Well, the occasionals are not more attractive than a larger construct; the larger construct is so dominant in my work that the occasionals allow for a breath of something different: a breath for me, and a breath for the audience, which in the case of the occasional poem is an event audience first. When I wrote “On the Way...” I had a reading at the Tranzac. This was during a time where much of my work foregrounded music over syntax. “On the Way...” allowed for the audience to maybe feel like they could do a little less work to receive what's going on. At the COUGH III launch my friend Oliver Cusimano read some great philosophical music to near silence and then named a doughnut to cackling laughter. The relief of contrast soars. Also, occasional poems for readings allow for an eye contact whenever you say “you.” The yous get less royal. The place and date in the title extend those timely intensities into the ever aging page they might then appear in (like Touch the Donkey). If you lay down all these different qualities on spectrums like Zukofsky’s integral, the hip and archaic, the timely and aphoristic, the subjective and objective, types of persuasion, etc, etc, you get a world of contrasts you can explore as tempos, timbres, volumes and rhythm. I’d be missing a valuable instrument if I didn’t have the occassionals. There’s also the ramble and the rest, heh.

Q: So would you say the occasional poems are ones that eventually become their own larger construct? I think of works by Jack Spicer, Jay MillAr or George Bowering, all of whom had collections of one-off poems. Given such, there was something of the “one-offness” that became less so, and more of another series of pieces that fell into a larger construct. Is this something you see your own occasionals doing, or are they purely occasional?

A: It’s funny you should ask that because although “On the Way...” escaped the grips of the larger construct, I’m currently at a phase where occasionals can be absorbed into it. The construct is in the serial mode à la Spicer and Duncan, and for a while would pass over anything in the first or second person. It had no taste for the exposed I, and occasionals could live out their lives in the ears of audiences or crunched up in the boxes of epistle targets. Mat Laporte and I were bouncing inquisitive pieces back and forth without worrying about where they would end up, perhaps thinking that writing that way was even more free of the State and other monsters. Now, although it won’t always be the case, the construct is happy to gobble the occasionals right damn up.

Q: What other larger constructs have you been working on?

A: You might have seen some of the Pentacles around. I’ve come across this coin which makes phonemic and syntactical suggestions as to what must be written. It’s opened some kind of transdimensional tunnelling. It might be the Zahir Borges spoke of. BookThug will be releasing a chapbook of some of the first explorations in the fall. The eighteenth pentacle merged with the mansions of the moon Yeats explored in A Vision. From there I had to consider different desires, masks, fates and creations as I walk or am walked through the affective space of this magical coin. Spicer said “Some poems you never get out of.” Let’s just say I’m a little worried, rob. (Nervous laughter)

Q: From what you’ve said so far, your influence appear very deliberate. If literature is a conversation, who or what do you feel yours is in conversation with?

A: Yeah, I hear this. It’s been an exploration. Although I can’t say the influence is deliberate, I sure can see a certain thread. And I’ve tried at times to shake that thread up. Mat, who I mentioned earlier, helps organize a Contemporary Reading Group which helped lead me to Alli Warren, Julianna Spahr, and Fred Moten. Some stuff you read tells you to stop writing this instant and go help somebody, while other stuff spurs me on. I never know what the conversation’s about. The work seems in conversation with inquest, the weird, desires, animality, and science limits. It’s in conversation with imagination? Is this a cop out answer? Are all answers cop out answers?

Q: Possibly, but then again, possibly not. Your Contemporary Reading Group sounds pretty entertaining, even enviable. How long has that been going on, and who else is in it?

A: Oh, unfortunately I’ve only made it out a couple times when I don’t have work. However, I can keep an eye on the works being read and give ‘em a shot.

Q: How did you first get involved in COUGH?

A: Jay MillAr and Jenny Sampirisi were running the Toronto New School and I took a class with Stephen Collis. After that I took a San Francisco Renaissance class with Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman. At the end of the run the group put some work together as a new Open Space as a nod to the original mag of the same name. For a couple of years after that people continued to meet up along with new faces. We discuss, critique, and enjoy each other’s works near weekly. Michael and Victor have been around writing longer than the rest of us and strongly felt there were those out there who would want to see the work. We agreed to rotate the editor for this new book and that was really the only rule. This became COUGH. The contributors get a few copies and hand them to those they think would want to engage with it.

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

A: Beyond other works of poetry I find fuel in theory texts and rhetoric journals. Right now I’m enjoying Graham Harman and Kamau Brathwaite. I keep returning to the Black Mountain constellation, but I doubt I'll ever stop rereading James Merrill’s "The Changing Light at Sandover." Eric and Marshall McLuhan's "Laws of Media" and the tetrads within are always a very useful way of looking at words as well.