TtD supplement #222 : seven questions for Nathan Austin

Nathan Austin is the author of (glost), Tie an O, and Survey Says!, as well as the recent chapbooks, in very Variant (Greying Ghost) and a in e’er (Hiding Press). His work has recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in petrichor, P-Queue, Babel Tower Notice Board, Speculative Nonfiction, The Believer, ToCall, and Translation: a Halophyte Collective exhibition. He lives in Los Angeles.

His poems “& every waterfall, the surge and tremble of its own mouth” and “Love is a bird-like mouth that kisses,” as well as two untitled poems, appear in the thirty-fourth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “& every waterfall, the surge and tremble of its own mouth” and “Love is a bird-like mouth that kisses,” as well as two untitled poems included in the issue.

A: These days, most of my writing begins with Google Books searches: I’m fascinated by the strange distortions that show up when the archive misreads its own contents. Scanning errors or passages of text that depart from printing conventions are often transformed into gibberish or read into the wrong language; texts laid out on the page in vertical columns are often read across divisions, which produces strange turns of phrase.

Some of what my searches turn up feels like it’s been worn down by digital erosion until it’s no longer language. Forms like illloriler and bbllue (the clearest evidence in these four poems of this part of my process) remind me of something the tide’s coughed up onto the beach. My eye’s drawn to these misshapen and unsayable lumps; my mouth cannot hold them.

Lately, I’ve been feeding the weathered words and twists of phrase that I find into predictive text generators. That was really central to the process of writing these four poems, in fact. I should say that I don’t have a coding background, so my understanding of how these things work isn’t very sophisticated; I treat tools like these (or Adjunct Travesty) essentially as black boxes: I put something in, and something else comes out. What comes back to me can feel as mysterious and ancient as an echo. It’s often often a fascinatingly-distorted near-imitation, but in particularly delightful moments, it can feel like an uncanny and wholly other response calling out from the electronic beyond.

I should say, too, that I don’t intend to mystify the tools that I use (even as I invoke similarities between my writing process and various “practices of outside”). Of course, neither Google Books nor AI can be disentangled from the economic, social and political contexts that produced them. And, to be honest, I don’t really know what it means to “acknowledge” these things the way I am here--the matter of how to navigate my relationship to these technologies is something I’m still trying to think through and interrogate.

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

A: Like these pieces, most of the poetry I’ve published lately uses some combination of errors from Google Books scans and the output from predictive text generators. In terms of both process and the overall “feel” of the poems that emerged from that process, the ones in Touch the Donkey are probably most similar to my Hiding Press chapbook, a in e’er.

But the longer answer to your question is that I’ve always worked with found material and procedures and sometimes-absurdly-elaborate processes: for Survey Says! I transcribed contestants’ answers from a hundred or so episodes of that old game show Family Feud; for my Greying Ghost chapbook, in very variant, I wrote by using a loosely defined “system” to erase the dictionary definitions of variant word pairs from a few of Emily Dickinson’s poems.

Dictionaries have always been important to my work, and much of the material I used in writing the poems in Touch the Donkey comes from dictionary usage examples and pronunciation guides. And I’m always really interested in the tension between intelligibility and its opposite, and in the ways that writing draws the visual and auditory into sometimes-uneasy contact with one another, as well as the various roles language plays in the relationships between self and world.

Q: I like the idea of the tension between, as you say, “intelligibility and its opposite.” What brought you to this particular consideration? Were there particular writers or works that pointed you in this direction?

A: On some level, I think of engagement with the unintelligible as an inherent part of poetry’s work, whether that takes the form of “expressing the inexpressible” or aiming to reach Louis Zukofsky’s “upper limit music.” I think that poetry’s capacity to dwell in the unintelligible is an extension of its mythic ties to the underworld.

(At some point, I’ll need to interrupt myself to qualify all of this: I’m using the words “intelligible” and “unintelligible” in what’s probably a very imprecise way here. For the moment, I’m thinking of “unintelligible” as covering a range that includes silence, erasure, sound/noise, nonsense, etc. or that creates dysfluent encounters with [one’s “own”] language.)

I’ve been fortunate to learn a great deal from other poets whose writing engages with what I think of as the unintelligible. As a college student relatively new to poetry, I envied pop music’s ability to bury vocals and lyrics in the mix; I was drawn to writing that showed me how to do something similar. Poems for the Millennium (which was new then, and very exciting) pointed me in several directions I’d never considered before—the blues lyrics whose vocal performance Eric Sackheim visualizes as text, or Jerome Rothenberg’s similar “total translations” of Frank Mitchell’s horse songs.

Through that anthology, I started reading Schwitters’ Ursonate and Hugo Ball’s sound poetry—as well as Aleksei Krychenykh’s explorations into the possibility of a transrational language, which I think of as one way of dreaming up a perfect intersection of intelligibility and unintelligibility, signal and noise. From there, I found my way to Susan Howe, whose emphasis on text’s material stuff—the archaic spellings she plucks from the archive and lines scattered across the page—confounded my fluency and allowed me to feel her words as they tumbled around in my mouth, even when I was reading silently. P Inman’s poems felt like gnawing on hard candy; alongside some of Clark Coolidge’s books, they showed me just how noisy poetry can get. And of course Gertrude Stein!

I could go on listing formative influences for a long time…. Instead, I’d rather mention some writers and books I’ve encountered much more recently that have given me a lot to think about when it comes to both the nature of intelligibility / unintelligibility, and the techniques poetry can use to call intelligibility’s limits into the space of poem. Among them are several works that have offered me a lot of food for thought, particularly when it comes to thinking through various ways that unintelligibility intersects with race and gender, as well as performance: M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, Nora Collen Fulton’s Thee Display, Amanda Hurtado’s S ACE P, and JJJJJerome Ellis’ The Clearing, as well as recent reprints of Norman H. Pritchard’s EECCHHOOEESS and The Matrix.

Q: It reminds me of a quote I recall from Meredith Quartermain, how words can’t help but mean. In certain ways, meaning can’t be helped, and even jwcurry once spoke of the difficulty of discussing the simultaneousness of visual poetry: any conversation forces itself into a particular, and therefore arbitrary, order. How much are you working against or even with the possibilities of any potential reader attempting to assemble the pieces of your work together into meaning?

A: “Meaning can’t be helped.” I love that way of putting it: meaning is always there, like it or not; maybe we’re powerless against it. I don’t know that I’d thought of it quite that way before, but the idea resonates with my own experience. Words draw meanings in; I’m interested in the ways they interact once they’re in a space.

I think of meaning in my poetry as emergent and experiential.

Taking procedural approaches to writing allows me the luxury of pretending I’m at least partially outside of the meanings that circulate within a particular poem. That is to say, I don’t begin from a space of “I have something to say,” nor do I aim to arrive at a unified, cohesive message. Instead, I try to listen closely to what the fragments that I’ve collected or generated might have to say when they’ve been set alongside one another, and try to create spaces in which they’ll echo off of one another in such a way that something else—some other uncanny voice perhaps—might be able to find its way in. (Is that what meaning is?)

But I feel like I’m painting myself into a corner here, by focusing too much on signification and semantic meaning; because poetry engages with the materiality of language and text, it invites us to attend to the ways that words engage with our bodies. Every word is a set of instructions dictating what the body must go through in order to call it and its meanings into the world. These fleshy points of contact between body and text are on the hither side of intelligibility; they’re also the stuff of which intelligibility is made. The poems that I like most are the ones that remind me that language’s interaction with the body is (also) meaningful, even if it isn’t the sort of meaning that can easily be parsed.

I think that’s part of why I’m so fascinated by the kinds of things I find in Google Books search results. The nearly-words and digitally eroded text that are sometimes produced by its “reading practice” don’t just pose problems for interpretation; they also confound reading itself and often leave me unsure of how to sound out some of my lines. Nevertheless, they feel haunted by the meanings that their shapes and syllables call out to.

Q: With a small handful of published books and chapbooks under your belt, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: Like pretty much everyone else on the internet, I’ve spent the past week playing around with DALL-E, inputting various scraps of text that I’ve gathered or generated or written over the past few years. I’m not exactly sure what I’ll do with the beautifully unnerving AI-generated visual output, but I’m undoubtedly going to do something. At the very least, I'll use them as writing prompts for myself. Beyond that…

I tend to write pretty slowly—or at least, I’m slow to decide that things are “finished.” So I have a few of these sprawling, prose-ish pieces that have been hovering in a “nearly-ready” state for a while now; they’ve been giving me opportunities to extend some of the ideas that circulate through and around my writing practice.

One of them explores ideas of echo and loss in part by looking at various kinds of transcription between different media; it bounces from YouTube’s automated captions to Jean-Luc Godard’s adaptation of King Lear to the flight paths of bats to human vocalizations of radio static. There’s another one that grew out of the movies and books I used to distract myself from a particularly severe and long-lasting flareup of dyshidrotic eczema on the palms of my hands. As you’d expect, there’s a lot of body horror and a whole array of goops in it; there’s also some digressions into Stan Brakhage’s closed-eye vision, as well. I think I’ve been working on each of those off and on for well over a year (neither is nearly as long as that timeline implies!).

When I moved out to Los Angeles from Brooklyn, I had the idea of writing something in a documentary vein, focused around a few specific central California sites near my childhood home in Bakersfield. That project hasn’t come easily — I’m having a hard time figuring out what shape it wants to take. The few parts of it that have come together have appeared in recent issues of Lune and petrichor. I hope I’ll be able to get more of it onto the page!

Q: What is it about the documentary form that appeals? What do you feel it would allow that might not be possible otherwise?

A: Maybe if I knew what I felt it would allow, I’d have an easier time figuring out how to bring this particular project to fruition!

The idea for the project began in psychoanalysis as part of an attempt to rethink the place where I grew up—to reimagine it as something more than simply the place I’d fled as soon as I was able, and I suppose to make sense of myself. Digging into the ideas of “hometown” and “origin” enabled me to see a strangeness that’s inherent to central California, and that I’d never given my full attention before. On a personal level, I suspect that the book—if it ever coalesces into one—is at once an attempt to make sense of myself and an effort to avoid making sense of myself by displacing that effort. The landscape is particularly rich with the stuff of poetry: I’m focusing on a paleontological site just east of town, Shark Tooth Hill. Twenty million years ago, California’s Central Valley was the not-yet-uplifted floor of a warm sea; the site where Bakersfield (my “hometown”) is now was then just offshore. Much of the fossil bed is on federal land, and protected, but some of it is privately owned, and you can arrange a visit through the local natural history museum. The ground is just littered with the teeth and bones of sea creatures. The soil’s surface is home to a fungus whose spores, when inhaled by mammals, can grow inside the body to devastating effect; below the surface, the geology harbors enormous oil reserves, themselves the fossil traces of the sea that once was there.

My research led me to understand the site as a nexus of settler colonialism, climate disaster, geological change, and interspecies contact—and perhaps as a way to articulate grief in the face of the ongoing disasters that increasingly define our lives. But the procedures and practices that I use in much of my poetry tend towards abstraction, so they don’t really seem up to the task of addressing the particular weave of memory and history and mourning that I’m trying to effect here. The documentary form seems like the sensible choice: while it’s not exactly “non-fiction,” it enables me to work with research materials—and to extend the engagements with archive and textual materiality that are always present in my writing practice.

At the same time, the challenges it poses are real, and I’m not sure how to deal with them. But I think the fact of that challenge is a huge part of what attracts me to the project, too.

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

A: In addition to the writers I’ve already mentioned, the following have been my guides / sources of inspiration for many many years: Stein’s Tender Buttons. Susan Howe’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Chris Marker” especially, but all of her work. Jackson Mac Low’s Pronouns. Georges Perec’s “Think / Classify.” John Taggart’s Loop. Alfred Starr Hamilton. Caroline Bergvall’s “VIA.” Tina Darragh’s on the corner to off the corner.

More recently—and, again, in addition to everything I’ve already listed—Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s Travesty Generator, Ian Dreiblatt’s Forget Thee, Dani Spinosa’s OO: Typewriter Poems, and Joey Yearous-Algozin’s A Feeling Called Heaven have been on whatever the literary equivalent of “heavy rotation” is.

Beyond the written word: Godard’s Lear, Feldman’s Three Voices, Cage’s 44 Harmonies, Eno’s Discreet Music, Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, Cronenberg, Brakhage.

TtD supplement #221 : six questions for Tamara Best

After many years of trying to save the world, Tamara Best fled to the woods of Eastern Ontario to raise vegetables, children, and (occasionally) a ruckus. You can read more of Tamara’s poetry in The Waterwheel Review, Sparked! Literary Magazine, NonBinary Review, Queer Toronto Literary Magazine, a recent anthology with Caitlin Press or watch a video produced by Shatterbox Theater.

Their poems “The Land Between” and “I’ll find, etc.” appear in the thirty-fourth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the “The Land Between” and “I’ll find, etc.”

A: “The Land Between” came from the prompt ‘Bridges’ for a publication last year. I wrote three totally different pieces, but none of them were accepted. So, I kept submitting them. Now, “The Land Between” has a home, and a second piece will be part of a microchapbook this summer. Speaking of home, I live in the “Land Between”, which forms a geological bridge or belt across Ontario. I hop on and off this bridge every time I go grocery shopping, it’s a very abrupt shift of terrain.

I wrote “I’ll find, etc.” with Touch the Donkey in mind. Last summer I met Khashayar Mohammadi through a reading we both presented at. Kess was very generous and gave copies of Sister Language to a number of people, including me and my little local library! After reading the book, I found your interview, and I knew that I wanted to submit a response here. The title is a quote from Christine Baille’s poem “The Cause! The Cause!” I imagine it enacted on stage like a soliloquy, but it could also be called a manifesto. Perhaps I will memorize it to recite whenever I’m asked why I take words apart and put them back together again?

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

A: I’m getting a kick out of the word lately because it was only a year ago that I had my first official ‘publication’, though I actually first started writing and performing my poetry 30 years ago… so really, everything that I have in my bio seems to have happened quite suddenly. However, having embraced being a poet-of-place: a resident of “The Land Between”, similar elements of rural experience are in my most recent writing. Especially since I’ve been working on publishing a full-length manuscript called “History Lessons”, which has allowed me to combine my interest in the past with my interest in nature.

Although I was inspired to write “I’ll find etc.” in the immediate and unfiltered style of Christine’s writing, it isn’t unusual for me to play around with different forms. If anything, I typically do something little bit different in every poem. I swear, I try to write narrative poems sometimes, but inevitably I start mucking about with something or other. Format, syntax, and especially vocabulary. Cutpasted for my own use. In this case, I wanted to find the reasons, so it’s a satisfying feeling to have embraced my intuitive thoughts and feelings. I don’t typically write about writing, so it was a challenge to avoid automatic clichés with the figurative wording, and more of an artistic risk to send in for review. Since this is the most abstract piece that I’ve had published, I’m particularly interested in hearing feedback about it.

Q: You mention you see yourself as a poet of place. How do you see this manifesting itself in your writing?

A: I noticed that a large percentage of my successful poems have been about my ‘neighbourhood’: the aforementioned first publication The Snake Fence (nominated for a Pushcart Prize), a recent piece in an anthology Worth More Standing, an upcoming piece with Untethered Magazine, and of course “The Land Between”. At first, I wondered if it was just a coincidence, but then I remembered my high school poetry teacher* telling me “your work is best when you combine concrete situations with the philosophical” so I’ve decided to lean into it. The reality of rural living is that you spend a lot of time by yourself, driving the same back roads, pondering the same questions, so it makes sense that these tableaux would become anchors for me. Perhaps this would happen wherever I lived, but I feel that Hastings County is especially ripe with potential stories.

As a descendent of settlers, I am profoundly grateful for this land that I inhabit. I grew up volunteering at a pioneer village and doing military re-enactments. Though I stepped back from these activities for many years to reconcile the narrative I had learned, I’ve gone back to being a volunteer at a local historic site. This site is particularly interesting because the last descendent to live there was a Spiritualist, a Poet, and a veritable mine of inspiration. In any case, I think it is important for the stories of what we call Canada to be shared by those who are mindful of colonialism and its devastating impact, rather than leaving them to be lost or worse, half-spoken.

                *Luciano Iacobelli

Q: With a handful of poetry and fiction publications over the past few years, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: I finished the first draft of my manuscript right as covid was breaking out. Until that point no one knew that I was compiling it, so I’ve kind of fumbled through this emergence period. Without a writer’s group or regular open mic session to help me incubate, I was compelled to find writing and mentorship opportunities wherever I could find them. In doing do, I’ve pushed myself to take risks in ways that I might not have encountered otherwise. At first I was trying to regain an edge that I’d lost; now I have a résumé of experience.

Experience is very important because without it, my manuscript won’t have an audience. I’m itching to get it published of course, but I need to focus on individual publications in order to accomplish that goal. Chapbooks are a good stepping stone, so I created a shorter version of my manuscript – probably the opposite of what ‘usually’ happens but I had over a hundred pieces to whittle down – the best of the best, as it were. Beyond that I’m curious what themes will start to emerge in my writing, but I see my work getting stronger. I see myself doing readings on a book tour (nerves notwithstanding). And if look far enough, I see myself making an impact.

Q: How does a poem usually begin for you? Are there particular works or authors in the back of your head as you write?

A: “I’ll find etc.” is an exception for me in that it was inspired by a specific author and specific poem. I read a lot, mostly non-fiction, but rarely poetry. If anything, I might use a rhythm or cadence from song lyrics. The tableaux I mentioned is a good way to describe how poems begin: a moment that I can study from all angles. I’m not sure if these tableaux happen because I’m trained as a performer or if I am drawn to performance because of some innate ability, but a poem is really just a kind of monologue/dialogue.

But what is the reason, the cause? Sometimes these moments are like a photograph. It flashes and I’m able to hold that image. Often the thought is so fleeting that it gets lost aka forgotten. The poems that get written are most likely ones that become stuck on repeat in my mind; a record skipping over and over. An earworm. Perhaps annoying, but useful! Other poems are more intentional, and are constructed purposefully. Looking at these patterns, I see that there isn’t really one “usually”: sometimes I use a given prompt, other times I spew out a stream of consciousness and pick through what emerges, often I’m simply a conduit for a message out of the ether, and every so often I reach back into my memories for something that I can work with. I will posit that this flexibility is a bane against the dreaded Writer’s Block [cue dramatic music].

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

A: Bruce “Utah” Phillips is technically considered a folk musician, but he wrote and performed many stories, songs, and poems. I first heard one of the albums that he and Ani DiFranco created in the mid-90s and consider him to be a hero. His work mostly centers on the labour and anti-war movements in the United States. He’s a combination of funny, poignant, and thought-provoking. The video in my answer to question 5 was inspired by the following lyrics from “Natural Resources”: 

You are about to be told one more time that you are America’s most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what they do to valuable natural resources?! Have you seen a strip mine? Have you seen a clear cut in the forest? Have you seen a polluted river? Don’t ever let them call you a valuable natural resource! They're going to strip mine your soul. They’re going to clear cut your best thoughts for the sake of profit unless you learn to resist, because the profit system follows the path of least resistance and following the path of least resistance is what makes the river crooked.

Ha! It has only been in the last two years that I’ve made a point of sitting down to read poetry. I suppose I’ve done everything backwards? I worried that I would be influenced too much; partially that I might accidentally copy something, but also that I would start to over-think comparisons. I wrote a manuscript first, then started publishing, and now it’s time for that new energy. It took me a while to find something that challenged and charged me. Every time I read Lake Baptiste Ungenders Me by Cassandra Myers, I’m stopped in my tracks.

TtD supplement #220 : eight questions for Leah Sandals

Leah Sandals is a writer based in Tkaronto. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in Prism, Room, Filling Station, Freefall and Mom Egg Review. She has read at the Bi+ Arts Festival and other venues. Personal experience and family histories linked to mothering, anxiety, aphasia, young dementia sometimes inform her work.

Her poems “STRESSED TEST,” “PETTY CACHE” and “FEELED GUILDED” appear in the thirty-fourth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the “STRESSED TEST,” “PETTY CACHE” and “FEELED GUILDED.”

A: “STRESSED TEST” and “PETTY CACHE” are part of a series of poems I wrote pre-pandemic when my sister was dealing with a brain bleed of unknown origin or cause. She recovered and is ok now, a few years later, but at the time I felt quite frightened and it brought back a lot of feelings and memories of Calgary, where I was raised, where she lives, and where our mother suffered a fatal neurological disease in the 1990s. My sister was being treated in exact hospital where our mother spent her final months. During that same season of my sister being ill, I was also participating in Hoa Nguyen’s reading and writing workshop focused on C.D. Wright’s One with Others: [a little book of her days]. Some of the exercises and readings we did focused on place, memory and influential women. So... these poems emerged. I’ve also been influenced over the longer term by a workshop Hoa previously led focused on Harryette Mullen’s S*PeRM**K*T and other works. Mullen’s way with rhyme, sound and puns/jokes is something I admire a lot. I wrote “FEELED GUIDED” during some warmer months in 2020, when I was trying to learn more about local alleyway and park plants, and engage my daughter in this (however unsuccessfully) from time to time as well.

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

A: Fairly different, I guess. The past couple of months I’ve been researching East Toronto settings of the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s, the better to write some historical fiction focused on women characters of Jewish, Irish Catholic, mothering and/or bi+ experiences in that time and place. (I live in that area now, and my dad is Jewish, while my late mum was Irish Catholic.)  I’ve also been trying to understand, I think, how prior generations of my ancestors responded to pandemics and overseas wars in their day. I have been making some notes towards poems as well—more just processing daily life, though. Sometimes I wonder if this research I’m doing will end up manifesting more in poems than in fiction—likely because my own writing routines and process need a bit of work as well! Process being a project in itself, for me, I think.

Q: Is the project-based idea the way through which your work is typically generated?

A: No. Most of my work has typically been generated in a workshop setting. I’ve found group reading and writing to be very generative for me.

Q: What is it about the workshop setting that appeals?

A: I think that in many ways, for many years, I bought into the idea that artists and writers should be solitary forces. Of course, this idea was not based so much in evidence. Rather, it was based in ideas about the maverick or solo artist that I somehow absorbed, even after going to art school and learning about artist practice that way. Even though I knew I liked school in general, it took me a while to realize that the group process of just going through something together at the same time – a writing process, a drawing process, a photography process – provided a kind of implicit support or momentum, and was part of what I enjoyed. Naturally, as an introvert, I do enjoy working on my own, too. But groups (or or out of workshop or school settings) provide me with accountability, fellow feeling, a sense of collective endeavour or ritual even when members of a group are working on separate “things” or “end products.”

Q: I’m curious about the nature of these collective endeavors, if the individual works end up existing in conversation with each other, or if any of these collective explorations have ventured into collaboration?

A: Not for me as of yet, perhaps for others. I can be fairly shy, which is why “working alongside” or in the same space is my usual mode. It’s still important for me, even if not explicitly collaborative. I did get to work on a fun (explicitly collaborative) project for InPrint Collective in Toronto in 2019. They paired poets with printmakers. I just really, really enjoyed assisting artist Shirley Mpagi on pulling prints, to be honest! And being in a group visual-art studio again for a while. For more information about InPrint, visit inprintcollective.com.

Q: With a handful of poetry and fiction publications over the past few years, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: Great question! I think my poetry work has developed to be more playful in terms of language. And also more concerned with sound than I could have imagined when starting out. And sillier! My fiction work has shifted to become more engaged with historical settings, which has been a surprise to me. In terms of looking ahead, I have mixed feelings. I know that fundamentally I need to prioritize staying with creative process – to keep writing or making in some way. At times in my life when I have neglected or foregone creative practice/process, I have been a very burnt out and unhappy person. At the same time, there is part of me that would like to focus more on product – getting a chapbook published, say, or a book of short stories. I realize these process/product dynamics can be complementary, not opposed. But what I’m saying is I also know my own biases and tendencies: I’m capable of letting the idea of a future finished “product” supersede the actual “process.” So for now I think what I can best hope for is to keep making work, to get more comfortable and confident with revising, and to connect with communities and structures that support all that.

Q: Do you have any particular models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? Are there any particular writers or works in the back of your head as you write?

A: Emma Donoghue does historical fiction so amazingly well. I guess she is in the back of my mind right now in that respect. Even nonfiction that conjures a time and place terrifically is something I’m trying to pay attention to. At the moment, I'm reading Elspeth Cameron’s And Beauty Answers: The Life of Frances Loring and Florence Wyle, which fits the bill for that. There’s so many wonderful books and authors out there. Alison Bechdel is a perpetual favourite. I recently read Camilla Gibb’s The Relatives, which doesn’t travel so much through time but definitely does through space—and I find a lot to admire in those kinds of transpositions too. Poetically, I enjoy the frankness and form that Kirby’s Poetry is Queer achieves. And in terms of things that can be funny and serious in poetry at the same time, I liked Cody Caetano’s Pleasure Dome Poems a lot as well. These are just a few examples; for sure whatever I’m reading in the moment influences what I think is possible in writing.

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

A: To reenergize my own work, I might actually go browse the library shelves for poetry I haven’t read before. Or make sure I’m reading Poem-a-Day in my inbox. Or read poetry and short fiction that’s in magazines and journals—again with that element of surprise, rather than something pre-planned. Or go see some visual art, or watch a film. I will say some touchstone texts for me that I return to on creative and writing process are Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, and Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland. Even just returning to their key lessons in my mind can be helpful. Sometimes to get a sense of what writing can do, or how sharp it can be, I also enjoy critical writing by Derek McCormack and other top critics. I am looking forward to reading more widely, though, and delving deeper into process works. I have plenty to learn! (And that’s an understatement.)

Touch the Donkey : thirty-fourth issue,

The thirty-fourth issue is now available, with new poems by Jade Wallace, Katie Naughton, Nathan Austin, Barry McKinnon, Monica Mody, T. Best and Leah Sandals.

Eight dollars (includes shipping). You make it sound so sordid.

TtD supplement #219 : eight questions for Maw Shein Win

Maw Shein Win’s poetry chapbooks are Ruins of a glittering palace (SPA/Commonwealth Projects) and Score and Bone (Nomadic Press). Invisible Gifts: Poems was published by Manic D Press in 2018. Win is the first poet laureate of El Cerrito, California (2016 - 2018). Her full-length poetry collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) was longlisted for the 2021 PEN America Open Book Award, shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry, and nominated for a Northern California Book Award for Poetry. She often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers. mawsheinwin.com

Her poems “Thought Log #14” and “Thought Log #18” appear in the thirty-third issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “Thought Log #14” and “Thought Log #18.”

A: On Writing Thought Logs

I started writing thought logs in August of 2020.

Response to isolation, scatter.

Dreams & nightmares, observations, thoughts.

I write by hand, later, I transpose.

Listmaking, highlighting, selecting.

Word lists, juxtapositions, found language.

Each thought log has 16 lines.

Four of the lines have patterns of three.

Fish death, coiffed leaders, splash cellar.

Sometimes a question: How can we propel you?

A fragment: Places with the highest daily reported cases per capita.

Observation: They color coded their bookshelves for social media consumption.

Instruction: Check the field notes before entering the rodeo.

Feeling: When I get nervous on Zoom, I start a conversation about hair.

Mantra: Life can’t kill my rainbow.

Thank you for asking, rob mclennan.

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

A: I’ve been working on a new manuscript. In addition to the ‘logs,’ I’m writing pieces about the body’s possibilities and limitations.

Q: You mention your ‘thought logs’ as a manuscript emerging as a single project. Is this the way you normally put together manuscripts? Do you see each of your published books in terms of a sequence of self-contained projects?

A: Ruins of a glittering palace, a collaborative chapbook with artist Mark Dutcher and Score and Bone emerged as single projects. My full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House emerged from the idea of writing about containers and containment. However, Invisible Gifts was a collection of poems over a period of years which I later organized using a color theme. Overall, I’d say I prefer to be open to both.

Q: How does a poem, and subsequently a manuscript, usually begin for you?

A: A poem can arise from an idea, a spark, an observation, a feeling. The manuscript I’m currently working on arose from my thought logs. I am a listmaker and keep several notebooks with different categories. I try to maintain both a balance of focus and openness to anything I’m working on.

Q: I’m interested in your self-description as listmaker. What first brought you to this point of poet-as-listmaker? What is it about the list that appeals?

A: My father was a chronic listmaker, and he insisted that we adopt this practice. The listmaking began as to-do lists which continue to this day. In my early 20s, I began documenting every music show that I attended, including bands, musicians, dates, and locations. These notebooks are somewhere in our storage unit. I keep lists for many things: books I’ve read (or want to read), jargon and terms for various fields (architecture, graphic design, film, etc.), flora and fauna, colors, thoughts, feelings, inspirations. Listmaking appeals to the part of my brain that wants to sort and organize. I appreciate the sounds and rhythms that can emerge from lists. I think I’ll make my evening list right now.

Q: Do poems, and therefore, manuscripts, emerge from similar structures of organization? Are manuscripts organized from works that require a specific order for the sake of a book-length structure, or are the structures already set in mind as you write?

A: Various sorts of logs and lists are on my mind these days as you know. For my current manuscript, I am using the “log” as an organizing structure. However, I may have an idea about a series of log pieces which I discover may not work in the end. I try to allow myself to be open to changing ideas for structures.

Q: With a handful of publications over the past few years, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: Since the publication of Ruins of a glittering palace in 2013, I feel that my work has developed and evolved in different ways. In Score & Bone, many of the poems are spare and short in length. The poems in Invisible Gifts span almost a decade and range in style from lyrical and narrative to surreal and dreamlike. Since Storage Unit for the Spirit House, I’ve been experimenting with lists as a structure. Over the past two years, I’ve been trying my hand at the braided essay and hybrid forms. Recently, I’ve been writing blood pressure logs.

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

A:

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Victoria Chang
MK Chavez
D.A. Powell
Mary Ruefle
John Yau

… off the top of my head.

TtD supplement #218 : seven questions for Genevieve Kaplan

Genevieve Kaplan is the author of (aviary) (Veliz Books, 2020); In the ice house (Red Hen Press, 2011); and four chapbooks, most recently I exit the hallway and turn right (above/ground press, 2020), with a further, Felines, which sounds like feelings (above/ground press) out very soon. Her poems can be found in Posit, Tinfish, Faultline, Oversound, and other journals. She lives in southern California where she edits the Toad Press International chapbook series, publishing contemporary translations of poetry and prose.

Her poems “On cereals,” “The wonder of the eater,” “The problem of the eater” and “Do not feed the animals” appear in the thirty-third issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “On cereals,” “The wonder of the eater,” “The problem of the eater” and “Do not feed the animals.”

A: I am interested in the problem – and wonder – of consumption. Certainly the pandemic has highlighted and changed our patterns of consumption, and in these poems I was thinking particularly about food: what we need, what we want, how we get it, how we respond to it, its complications.

These are some of the food-related poems I drafted during early Covid-19 lockdowns. Thinking and writing about food – reading recipes, watching Top Chef, making inventories of items in the fridge, listing excesses (and scarcities)– felt like a kind of release from the uncertainty of the pandemic. Food is so tactile and sensory and universal and pleasurable! I thought/hoped that writing food-related poems would be fun and pleasurable and would help ease pandemic funk. Though you can see in these poems, there’s still kind of an underscore of funk.

I actually drafted a few poems titled “The problem of the eater,” as there are so many potential fraughtnesses surrounding the act of eating. The one you’ve selected for Touch the Donkey is one I really like – reading it now, I am still drawn to these seemingly straightforward “sauces” that are “glorious” but can’t be wholly celebrated.

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

A: I tend to be most comfortable writing observational poems, poems that interrogate spaces and relationships and logistical arrangements (see, for example, my recent poems in Posit or Can we have our ball back? Of the poems you selected for Touch the Donkey, “Do not feed the animals” feels in my comfort zone, but the others—particularly “On Cereals” and “The wonder of the eater”—come from different, less intuitive places. This, I’m sure, is partially because they were borne out of my specific intention, to write about food. Writing “On Cereals” also invited me to dig into memory and my history of food allergies; writing in conversation with my memories or personal experiences is fairly uncharacteristic for me.

Q: What, if anything, is prompting this recent move to work beyond your usual comfort zone and into more personal experiences? Have you noticed a shift at all in the poems as a result?

A: Hmm. I suspect Covid-related isolations, combined with the increased focus on the health of the body (as a society, we were all suddenly thinking more about how to keep our bodies safe, and considering how our bodies—just by being present in a shared space—could be creating dangers for others) contributed to this shift inward. Certainly during this period I became aware of thinking about my body not just as a something I inhabit, but also as a something at stake. I was reminded of other times, and other ways, when my body had seemed othered or beyond my control, which felt useful to think about through poems.

In poems, I always want to push beyond my comfort zone! When I’m drafting or writing I’m not always able to articulate to myself where that shift should take place, but later, during the revision process, I’m always thinking about how to move somewhere new in a poem, how to find a different angle or perspective or action.

I’m not sure that I’m totally comfortable with “On Cereals” in its final state here – the poem feels like a shift in its couplet organization, its breaking punctuation, its leaps in time. My sense is that Touch the Donkey is a safe, engaging place to share poems that feel a little risky, which means it’s also a journal that I’m especially grateful for.

Q: Are there any particular models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? Have you any particular authors or works in the back of your head as you write?

A: I started these poems while I was reading journals and anthologies pretty widely. Some of the journals I love and turn to frequently to look for cool new poems are The Rumpus, Ethel Zine, Waxwing, Conjunctions, Sugar House Review, Dream Pop Press…. I find I especially like reading smaller journals – like Touch the Donkey – which often feel like venues that are willing and able to take some more risks in the writing they present. In terms of poets whose work particularly spoke to me during this period, I think of Matthew Olzmann, Cintia Santana, Brian Teare, and Mónica de la Torre. Right before the pandemic began, one of my students had introduced our class (and me!) to the poet Yone Naguchi, and his work became really interesting for me to explore – I became curious to dig into how his work deals with complexity and simplification and shifting repetitions.

Q: With two published poetry collections, as well as a small handful of chapbooks, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work heading?

A: In some ways my second full-length collection (aviary) was a reaction to publishing my first book. I started writing the poems in (aviary) when In the ice house had just come out and I was doing a lot of readings. At these readings, I realized that writing so many short, spare poems (as I did in that first book) meant that as a reader standing in front of audience, I suddenly had to do a lot of work—and a lot of talking! In the poems that later became (aviary), one of my goals was to write longer poems, to fill the page with words, and to write poems to would specifically resonate off the page and into the room as I read them aloud.

I’m not sure that this kind of deliberate contrast is something I’ll continue in future book projects, but I can say that I’m always excited to do something new, or at least that feels new to me. If I’m not surprising myself as a writer—in the subjects or projects I take on, in the modes or methods of my writing—, then I feel like I’m not trying hard enough.

One thing I love about chapbooks is how they often remain outside conventional publishing practice. I mean, they’re not sold in most bookstores, they don’t often have ISBNs, they can be beautiful and tangible book objects, or they can be inexpensively and quickly produced. I think of chapbooks as excellent venues for veering off a traditional path, for trying new things, and for re-thinking the unit of the project or poem.

I imagine my poetic work will continue to head in many directions. I can’t predict what type of writing I’ll be interested in years from now, but I do know that I’ll continue to write new poems, keep surprising myself and my readers, push myself to try varying forms, subjects, and modes, and continue exploring what a poem—and what a chapbook, what a full-length collection of poems—can be.

Q: It sounds as though you have different structural ideas for collections depending on their potential size, whether the chapbook-length or the full-length. How much of the shape of a structure emerges before a piece or manuscript is written? And would you consider folding chapbook-length works into larger collections, or might that contradict?

A: My general process is that I draft a lot, and I like to explore different forms and presentational possibilities in my drafting. Later, once I’ve gathered a group of poems that feel done-ish, and perhaps similar in theme or structure or approach, I look to see what might belong together, how one poem might fit with another and become something more. I might have a general topic or premise in mind early in my writing process, but I tend not to write toward a project or mode. Instead, I find the through-line later. Even with I exit the hallway and turn right, my 2020 chapbook with above/ground, which consists of a single long poem, I didn’t have any idea during the writing process what form those lines might ultimately take. It was only after I’d finished drafting those pages and pages that I thought about how to best present the lines; it was later on that I realized I might create visual hallways for readers to walk down, and that what I’d written made the most sense as a single long poem. I suspect that if I’d had the form (a chapbook, one long poem, narrow lines, harsh enjambments, etc.) in mind while I was drafting, the poem would have turned out like something else entirely.

I love thinking about books and the various forms that books—and poems—can take! I want to reject a hierarchy of importance, like thinking a full-length book is necessarily “better” or more fully formed than a smaller book or chapbook. Instead, I am glad for some poems or small collections to exist on the edge, in the more ephemeral and informal space of the chapbook or artist’s book. A different expectation from and experience with the reader can be created when poems are encountered in more varied forms. As a writer, too, I appreciate the freedom of thinking that not everything needs to be a book, not everything needs to be a chapbook, certainly not everything needs to even be published or read. That said, I also am excited about the possibilities of an evolution—I certainly think that a collection that first appeared as a chapbook could later transform and be read differently when folded into a larger book, or when presented in another, unexpected form.

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

A: Some of my touchstone poets are Marianne Moore, Gwendolyn Brooks, Wallace Stevens, e e cummings, Emily Dickinson…. These are poets whose work, their sense of form and language and movement, often feels surprising to me, so I choose their poems and other writings to return to when I’m feeling a little poetically lost. I also love reading contemporary writers! When I’m perusing literary journals, or—let’s be honest, the internet—I almost always linger on poems by Mary Ruefle, Sawako Nakayasu, Vievee Francis, Vi Khi Nao, and Lisa Robertson. I’m fascinated by these poets, who often seem to be working on projects that are larger, deeper, or more complex than a single poem; at the same time, they remain very attentive to the poem on the micro level: the word, the line, the potential for strangeness. I find energy and inspiration in tracing how these poets might be thinking through both these macro- and micro- levels simultaneously.

TtD supplement #217 : seven questions for Sarah Pinder

Sarah Pinder is the author of Cutting Room (Coach House Books, 2012) and Common Place (Coach House Books, 2017). Her writing has been shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Awards, and included in magazines like Geist, Arc and Poetry is Dead. She lives in Toronto.

Her poems “Hide and Seek – Jack Whitten (1964)” and “Beautiful Mourning – Christina Quarles (2017)” appear in the thirty-third issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “Hide and Seek – Jack Whitten (1964)” and “Beautiful Mourning – Christina Quarles (2017).”

A: These pieces were generated out of an ongoing ekphrastic writing project I started early on in the pandemic.

The Milwaukee poetry bookstore Woodland Pattern had been publishing these weekly ‘Prompts Against Anxiety’ by different poets during the initial shelter-in-place period, and Jennifer Nelson wrote one about ekphrasis (writing about art). (Here’s the link to her original prompt: https://woodlandpattern.org/project/ekphrasis-yourself )

One of the things that I’ve missed most throughout pandemic time is going to art galleries. Nelson’s initial prompt got me exploring different collections online, and back into more active relation with looking at visual art again.

I’m in Toronto, and the public library here has a really great inter-library loan system, so I eventually drifted over to books. I started working my way through the library’s selection of show catalogues and artists’ monographs to take home and pour over. I’d choose pretty arbitrarily, starting with books newest to the collection, and following my nose through the various sub-categories work was sorted under (genre, time period, location, etc). I encountered both of these artists' work through this method, and it felt like such a wild, lucky accident with each of them.

I took on this project to try and get started with writing again, at a time when I was feeling pretty empty. I’d set Sundays aside as my day to sit with my stacks of library books and write – and tried, for the first time in a really long time, to write in pencil on paper, rather than using a computer. I’d look for works that made something in my brain feel crackly and woken up, and try to follow that feeling around a bit. Both of these works gave me that feeling.

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

A: I haven’t been doing a lot of other writing work right now, and have leaned more intently into working on pottery and quilt making during the pandemic. Both of those practices involve assembly and intuitive thinking, or thinking with the body, and orienting towards making shapes. Writing these ekphrastic works also feels like an extension of that assembly and shape-making – what is there on the page of these monographs? what’s here in the room, or going on with my body? how do i make them relate to each other?

Q: Does that suggest you see all of these processes – pottery, quilt-making and writing – as individual threads of a larger, singular practice?

A: I have spent a lot of time feeling like a brain in a jar, in terms of how i relate to my physical self.  pottery, quilt-making and writing all are part of a larger process of getting very granular with the idea of gesture and movement – looking closely at feel.

Q: Part of how I was originally introduced to your work was through your self-published small chapbooks, which felt very much a part of your compositional process in putting together that first collection. I’m aware that you haven’t been producing as many of those small items since, but do you feel your process has shifted since the publication of your full-length debut?

A: An early part of my second book, Common Place, also showed up as a chapbook first, called Salt. I still think of zines and small press as a space for me to experiment, and concretize ideas while keeping things loose and quick. Zines have always felt a little giddy with the tactility of the process – I still lay everything out with tape and scissors. Making a zine of these ekphrastic poems is part of the arc of the project, I think.

With writing book length work, I’m more focused on the idea of the long thought, or keeping the tension of a through line. Knowing that I could take the time and space to think in longer units of measure was a cognitive shift for me.

Q: It’s good to hear I’m not the only one designing chapbooks through scissors and tape! But I’m curious about the ways in which you construct books: were the structural arcs of both collections similar? Were you, each time, working on a collection, or, through the process of chapbook-building, working towards a collection? Or was that all the same thing?

A: i made both books through the process of accrual. with my first book, cutting room, chapbook making was an exercise in thinking of how discrete poems were in conversation together, and then a larger project of figuring out how each of those chapbooks fit together as a book-sized unit. with common place, the project was more intensely constraint based – i had to write a page a day, with the idea that i was writing something long and thinking through a sequence of ideas (about capitalism, ideas of community and togetherness, embodiment, encounters with land) until it felt finished. i put out the chapbook as sort of a stop on the way – my memory is that it’s as much as i had written at the time.

i was in a reading group – the contemporary poetry reading group – for several years where we’d meet once a week and read a whole book of poetry out loud together each time. a lot of what i was writing through the project of common place felt in parallel conversation with things that came up in the group.

the reading group helped me to make the container i needed to think in a long-form poem format. a piece of making a chapbook of the early work from that manuscript felt like it was about documenting the thinking i was doing, to share with the friends and people i’d been thinking alongside with.

i still feel a little hungover after doing something very procedural in long form – i keep looking for the next sequence of constraints that’ll feel like enough of a container that what my next book will look like becomes clear... but i don’t know if it’s going to actually happen that way, this time. the pandemic really wiped every slate for awhile, and i feel more at a remove in my life than i did before. everything feels like a process of trying to assess what’s going on right now - what's the weather? where am i in it?

Q: What initially prompted you to explore the form of the long poem, and what do you feel you learned through the process? Was there a particular work or works you were going through in your reading group that suggested moving in that direction?

A: most of my work had focused on the short form, and the idea of taking things away – i did (/do) a lot of heavy editing of my poems to pare them down. i wondered about the process of adding more in as a way to get myself thinking about what makes a poem feel finished in a new way. anne boyer did this long sequence called ‘money city sick as fuck’, which was a series of 100 poems she wrote and posted on tumblr in one day – that was a helpful catalyst. we also read alice notley’s descent of alette, and i remember it really fucking me up, both in its style and content.

Q: I suppose you’ve already answered an element of this, but who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

A: julie joosten’s nought, and her deep thinking about cognition and relation. mercedes eng’s work, esp. prison industrial complex explodes. kaie kellough’s magnetic equator. june jordan has a massive collected works called directed by desire – i was in a workshop once taught by alexis pauline gumbs where she used it for bibliomancy, and i’ve returned to that practice a bunch, just opening the book at random to see how jordan changes the landscape. and finally, i’d follow lisa robertson anywhere.