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.

TtD supplement #5: seven questions for Pearl Pirie

Pearl Pirie has two poetry collections—been shed bore (Chaudiere Books, 2010) and thirsts (Snare Books, 2011)—with a third forthcoming with BookThug in 2015. She has a few chapbooks, most recently vertigoheel for the dilly (above/ground, 2014) and Quebec Passages (Noun Trivet Press, 2014). She runs phafours, a micro press, several blogs, has a gig as literary radio host at CKCUfm Literary Landscape, and has irregular gigs to teach poetry. www.pearlpirie.com

Her poem “fidgety as a snake” appears in the second issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: The poem “fidgety as a snake” engages with the poetic fragment. Your work is notable for its mutability, shifting forms far easier and far more often than most. What is your attraction to working such a multitude of forms?

A:  I like the push-pull of forms. in this series I have been putting in each the element of a cinquain, a bit of earworm made into misheard lyrics/homophonic translation, and some pieces of ghazals, all of which fit together into some intuitive way.

Q: Do you mean the poem “fidgety as a snake” itself as a series, or is it part of a larger construction? Or both?

A: it is one poem. there are several in the pattern. I’m seeing how long I can repeat the pattern with variations while each can feel distinct. I have somewhere around 30 pages of it.

Q: I’m curious: is this normally your process? Are you simply producing until certain works begin to group together?

A: yup.

Q: Given that, how many projects might you be working on at any given moment? And how do you cohere groupings? Are they based on subject, style or something else entirely?

A: I file poems by month. when it’s time to go to a manuscript stage again, I go thru the tags and pull out poems that I recognized as being potentially in a cluster; in the surreal manuscript, or in the Apostrophe and Semicolon sonnets, or haiku or whatnot. those are easy. I have 12 active unpublished manuscripts by theme/style/feel/method/form/simplicity vs. chaotic. these clusters may go out to book length, contract to chapbook, expand back out to book length and contract back to being a few worthwhile poems that may go in a mixed bag manuscript. those I’ll shuffle by gut into an order that links and shifts in energy to the next poem. more like the soft connects of the poem in the issue but on a larger scale.

Q: Perhaps you’re not the one to answer, but do you see any particular threads emerging through the writing you’ve done so far? I’ve seen poems of yours that engage with uncertainty and the possibilities of language as well as history, family and train travel.

A:  I like open-endedness and uncertainty. part of that is in not wanting to be told something and what to feel about it. that is a rude hierarchical relationship—to persuade the reader to feel. I want to be on equal cooperative footing with my reader or writer not part of arm-twisting. at the same time, as a reader, I exclaim, you should read this because x happens. of course, "x happens" is a useless way of conveying what was the worthwhile part. much is the how in storytelling. that said, poetry can be a respite from plot-driven, one-subject, one-mood, one-purpose, one-arc-with-no-extraneous structures.

what subject threads do I use? people seem to remark on my density and playfulness of language as distinctive more than subject threads. once, having read poems about anxiety and cherishing, I left stage to be told "thanks for those, um, laundry poems.” I realize some people aren’t in a pace and place to listen. or maybe certain information only can convey to certain people. a hot potato doesn’t work in a long lob.

I write of history? what isn’t history? there is nothing outside of history any more than there is anything outside of chemistry or physics. but yes, family history in part and larger histories in part as a political act of amending the record of the rich and warmongering. I’d rather archive poverty. I’d rather archive routes to resolution than titillating bits of conflict.

because I was not told family history I felt shut out of the family. shared stories make community. as an adult I begin to collect what I could after decades of gaps in an attempt to own or be owned I suppose. or make pieces make sense. what bias got to it all before mine? what was omitted? can any amount of sleuthing put me back in time to make the data rich again? I can speculate on how it was. but then the present is the same process of inference, partial information, forming patterns to cross-check against future.

I like to direct reader eye to things not about people—the ant as an individual with its characteristics not as a symbol. symbolism and relating with empathy creeps in. the symbolic mind is harder to shake than a private detective behind on his rent.

I like what falls under the etc and like the open box that poetry can be. important stuff will never come up in the structures that exist. the most important things may never be segued into any conversation or poem form, but that doesn’t mean they can’t have a place in poetry.

pointing to different things and the same things differently matters. poems are to expand self and alertness, not reinforce dim old selves. the shape of ideas and the relationship between ideas.  like “laundry” and “launwet”. this false etymology of “laundry” and backformation is immensely amusing. I think the useful isn't just the subjects but the angle of engagement. does the collective utterance make a mandala of a world that is inclusive, playful, thoughtful, compassionate, questioning, curious and about flourishing and resilience? is that my aboutness? if so, I often fail. joy is the hardest thing to write and convey. can a joyful mind access a sorrowful one or the reverse? or do they look like satire to one another?

in some streams of poems I resist aboutness. in some I use the constraints of picking a piece of context to juxtapose or explore one particular line of thought to overturn it and overturn it. I trust a poetry that is willing to upend itself. one sustained thought seems smug. maybe that’s a matter of vestigial class informing permitted emotional attitudes.

Q: Some of this feels reminiscent of the way Dennis Cooley appears to construct poetry manuscripts—out of a collage of pieces that write entirely around, through and from every angle a particular subject, and yet, your process feels far more organic than deliberate. Are there any particular authors or works that stick in your head as you write? If literature is a conversation, who or what do you feel yours is in conversation with?

A: danger, danger, this answer might be long. but also, thanks, this has been helpful in the harried time of assembling chapbooks. good to consider why I’m in this enterprise.

composing isn’t about the manuscript making but an extension of my senses and of processing—that’s probably not uncommon. I can’t say I have a comprehensive plan, strategy and consistent gaze towards examining a few things in particular like Cooley. I have issues I return to like a comedic relationship with hypochondria, but they’re a small part of the bandwidth. and it would cease to be funny if the joke were “run 10 miles underground” as you once put it.

I don’t do serial projects but parallel. rarely have a preoccupation with one project. I seek life balance and cut off obsessive spirals. flow state is something different tho. that may be is what all the poetry seeking is about. that timeless wordless yes.

conversation with who? I prioritize taking a lot in. I go to a lot of readings, from a few a month to a few dozen a month in festival seasons. I consume a books of poetry every 2-4 days, and a lot of articles, blogs, and conversations. a lot of it I don’t understand or know how to appreciate but with a lot of data, the lesser patterns rise. and it’s nice to be in a room where some people are getting blissed out at having their itches scratched even if it doesn’t reach me. I think I like sound poetry more than any other kind of poetry. I don’t compose it or perform it but it seems to move me like I see page or stage poetry moving other people. poetry is more a means to an end—the artifact is gratifying but the end is further out—in being a catalyst for what next for self or for someone else.

I am not usually responding to one work in particular, but the seeds of Vertigoheel for the Dilly started with my version of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life. that was a case of book length boiled down to chapbook length. and there’s Apostrophe and Semicolon of course. there I am responding line by line with a typographical modern humanist world of Astrophel and Stella. but the majority of time and the majority of poems are coming from various reactions, resistances and etc.

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

A: I understand some people re-read certain books annually. there are poets I look forward to hearing what they will say next or who have cadences, angles, densities and dancitites, that I enjoy. and I’m not going to say who all. I don’t have much for touchstones. for years, up until a couple decades ago, I read one translation of the the bible or another, 1-3 times per year which gave me a cultural literacy to a dead culture I suppose since the majority of people don’t have any reference points to biblical allusions or rhythms I use. I bet I'm a hit with a subset of the afterlife set tho. (assuming they aren’'t reincarnated and too busy getting a crash course on how to be the best horsetail they can be in the whole Equisetum genus. ;))

what books do I read to reenergize? something I don’t know enough about. birdwatching. snails. something that makes me slow down such a broadsheet in French by Tadeusz Kantor: la leçon d'anatomie d'après Rembrandt (from les éditions derrière la salle de bains). I tend to read a dozen or more poetry books in parallel as palate cleansers to each other so I can taste each of them freshly. some more dense, some light. some stories, some essays. I like to read things from contemporary and have at least one in the mix from at least last century ago. I’m currently reading DH Laurence’s The Daughter-in-Law. ah, and that is why people would write a play. in novels and poems people sometimes pretend there are more than one pov reflected but it feels puppeteered. this seems more like a snapshot of intersections of actual lives with their separate motivations and we listen in. I don’t need to understand every word. it underscores how much we can understand when even all we have to go on is contrast between page squiggle shapes. no body language, no common culture and point of reference with coal miners, no shared lived experience, no shared dialect or expression and yet staying in it, personalities emerge. isn’t language magic?

Touch the Donkey : second issue,

The second issue is now available, with new poems by Julie Carr, Catherine Wagner, Susanne Dyckman, Pearl Pirie, David Peter Clark, Susan Holbrook, Phil Hall and Robert Swereda.




Six dollars (includes shipping). Welcome to the Knowledgeum.

TtD supplement #4: seven questions for Eric Baus

Eric Baus is the author of four books of poetry, most recently The Tranquilized Tongue (City Lights, 2014), as well as the chapbook THE RAIN OF THE ICE (above/ground press, 2014). He lives in Denver, Colorado, where he teaches writing and literature.

His poem “THE UNCONSCIOUS COMPASS” appears in the first issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Given that you almost exclusively work within the structure of the prose poem, I’m curious about your attraction to it. What do you think it provides that more open forms might not?

A: One reason for my attraction to prose poems is that the actions and images in my poems tend to wander, modulate, and mutate so by using the sentence and various versions of the paragraph I hope to pressurize or contain the disparate contents. There are so many rhythmic and structural options available within the broad category of prose that I don’t feel like I’ve exhausted the form for myself yet. For some reason I’m able to write and edit with a greater awareness of pace and density in prose than I would be in other forms. For me, prose has a certain built-in velocity to it that I find very appealing.

Q: Some have considered the prose poem a form of near-endless potential. Who have your models been over the years when writing? Who are the writers and works that you can’t help but return to?

A: I read and return to Francis Ponge for his mixture of precise observation and imaginative projection. More recently I’ve been reading Harmony Holiday’s work and learning from the ways that she often moves between sentences, phrases set off with spaces, and lines. I think something that’s often overlooked in discussions of the prose poem is the use of space between sentences and the grouping of shorter or longer paragraphs. I have spent a lot of time thinking about Renee Gladman’s use of the sentence in relation to narrative. I think about the ways that Amina Cain generates immersive atmospheres in her sentences and paragraphs.

Q: How do you go about constructing poetry manuscripts? Are you aware of the book as your compositional unit, or do you focus more on the individual poem, or even the individual sentence? Are your books constructed as complete units or more as a collection of disparate parts that eventually cohere into larger projects?

A: I tend to work by assembling very small pieces together until I start to see patterns emerge. At a certain point I’m able to recognize a handful of formal variants within the larger form of prose poetry. I would say that I do use the book as a compositional unit and that the book emerges out of a collection of individual parts, at various scales, that vibrate against one another. I think of a book as a constellation rather than as a long, continuous scroll. I’ve come to think of my recent poems as prose dioramas or as very short films of a few gestures that eventually accumulate into a language habitat.

Q: What is it about the constellation that appeals? Does that suggest that the poems can be read outside of the fixed order a published collection demands? Can one simply dip into the collection wherever and begin?

A: I definitely consider a certain degree of forward momentum when I’m putting together a manuscript, and there is a preferred arrangement that I hope comes through clearly, but there are subtler echoes and associations that are emphasized by clustering them together in different ways. When I read work aloud from the published books I tend to skip around and pick out themes, sounds, and gestures that might have been dormant if you read the poems in the order in which they were printed. I’m not a very dynamic performer in terms of volume, large shifts in intonation, etc. but one of the ways that performance helps me to think about the poems is by giving me another opportunity to re-sequence them and make new cross-sections of the books.

Q: What is your relationship to the poetic fragment?

A: All of my books have at least a few one and two sentence long poems. I think of these poems less as deliberately unfinished or somehow partial residues from a more complete text than as self-contained, extremely compressed experiences.

My newest book, The Tranquilized Tongue, does contain a handful of true fragments in that they are not fully developed sentences. Some of that has to do with constraints that I used to write that book (I tried to write one poem every day, I generally limited myself to the vocabulary of poems that I’ve already written, and I often used cut-ups as a way to enliven the raw materials.) Sometimes during the course of writing my poem for the day, the raw materials I was drawing upon felt nearly exhausted, so I shifted the scale of the poem to become very, very small to avoid repeating myself or to change the pace of the book to give the reader space to rest before being launched into another dense paragraph. For example, this is one of the fragmentary poems in its entirety:

The Flicker’s Skin

The somnolent.
The transparent.
The corporeal.

Q: If daily practice isn’t a normal part of your composition, what is? And what do you think your series of constraints brought out that hadn’t been in your work prior? Was “THE UNCONSCIOUS COMPASS” composed through a similar series of constraints?

A: I think of reading and listening to poetry and fiction as part of a daily practice. Any conscious, intense, highly directed act of attention feels like writing to me. I try to write something small most days, even if I don’t have time to turn it into a finished poem. I like to have lots of little pieces to forget about and return to later. The difference with the poems in The Tranquilized Tongue was that I wouldn’t stop until I had written one poem that I was happy with each day. It had an interesting effect on my body. Some days I would feel like I could write more than one poem but I held back so that I wrote exactly one. The poems felt like they sometimes dragged me out of bed or out of the shower or away from some other daily activity more than they usually do. I felt both charged and exhausted by that process. Maybe it’s because I systematically avoided pronouns in those poems, but many of them felt like they arrived more from “outside” than other poems that I’ve written. They still feel like an expression of my attention in an intimate way, but the writing often turned into a kind of magnetized listening and paring down.

“The Unconscious Compass” was a poem that I made an initial long sketch for and then I went back and completed it over a few weeks. It began with a line that I wanted to use but that eventually didn’t make it into the poem (“Now what the sky is like is like a hospital for the sky.”). Since I am drawn to certain kinds of vocabulary over and over again and I have some deeply ingrained habits about phrasing and syntax, one of the things that I tried to do with the next manuscript was to extend beyond the boundaries of the shorter poems I had been working on up to that point. I wanted to try to make a longer poem or sequence, but it ended up as a relatively dense one page poem broken into paragraphs.

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

A: Aimé Césaire, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, César Vallejo.

Barbara Guest, “The Blue Stairs”; Nathaniel Mackey, “Bedouin Hornbook”; John Wieners, “The Hotel Wentley Poems”; John Yau, “Corpse and Mirror”; Alice Notley, “At Night the States”; Bernadette Mayer, “The Golden Book of Words”; Eileen Myles, “Not Me”; Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, “The Heat Bird”; Rosmarie Waldrop, “Lawn of Excluded Middle”; Kamau Brathwaite, “Trench Town Rock.”

TtD supplement #3: eight questions for Pattie McCarthy

Pattie McCarthy is the author of six books of poems, including the very recent nulls (horse less press) and the forthcoming Quiet Book (Apogee Press, spring 2015). She teaches at Temple University.

A small selections poems from “wifthing” appears in the first issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Your poetry seems to favour the longer project, from chapbook-length to book-length works. What are the poems in the work-in-progress “wifthing” working with and towards, and how far do you think you are through?

A: I will try not to start this interview with a frustrating answer, but I find it frustrating & difficult to talk about works-in-progress. It’s a big failure on my part. It’s not superstition, or anything like that—it’s just my difficulty seeing the whole from inside something new. "wifthing" is working with the history of the wife. & it’s working through some historical texts that are relevant to the history of the wife—right now I am writing a sonnet sequence while reading The Book of Margery Kempe. The last time I read it, I was an undergraduate & I was certain that Margery Kempe’s mystical insistence on celibacy was simply an excuse for her desire not to have any more children (she had fourteen). But now that I am old (& a mother too), I read her Book quite differently. It’s so fun to revisit the important texts from one’s youth.

"wifthing" came from seeing the word in the OED. I can't recall what I was looking up—but I ended up at the definition of 'wifthing' & knew I wanted to write about it. I just wrote WIFTHING on an otherwise blank page in my notebook. This is how I started to write Marybones, too. I loved the word 'marybones' in Chaucer & made a note : write something called 'marybones' soon.

How far do I think I am through? The poem is a mess, & I am trying not to worry too much about that at the moment. I'd guess I have about one-quarter of it, at most.

Q: Is this a normal part of your process, working from a scattering of notes, research and pieces that eventually begin to cohere into a manuscript?

A: No, not at all. My projects are usually planned out in detail (maybe planned to a fault). The process might not be methodical, but the overall plan is clear. Not this time, though.

Q: Why is this project different? What about it makes it feels more, as you say, “a mess”?

A: In part the messiness is planned (ha! which makes it a foreseen mess). My two most recent books (nulls & Quiet Book) were both planned out in great detail ahead of time—in nulls, I sketched out the shape of the book during research, & in Quiet Book, the structure of the book was balanced very deliberately beforehand. Both of these books had surprises in them for me, of course, but the basic plan stood. I wrote those books simultaneously as well, which is unusual for me. They are twin sisters in many ways. So when I started “wifthing” I was ready for something different. The other part of the messiness is unplanned & not particularly generative—& that is simply that I don’t have much time.

I’m a worrier—but I’m trying not to worry about where the project is going. Marybones was originally supposed to be a ten-page section of Table Alphabetical of Hard Words, but I didn’t stop writing at ten pages. Marybones had no plan, no preordained structure, & it was a blast to write. I keep reminding myself that having no plan can work too.

When I started having children I was anxious over whether to write about them, about becoming a mommy-poet, etc. I soon realized that it was natural for them to be in the work—after all, I spend most of my time talking with them, reading to them, listening to them, playing with them. It would have been very difficult to keep them out of the work. I am attempting to think about this ‘messiness’ in the same way—every once in a while, the way one works changes, often to enormous effect. “wifthing,” if it is going to get written at all, is going to be written differently.

Q: You seem to have already answered my next question: you mentioned once that you started three different projects each with one hand, with an infant in the other. I’ve always admired the way you’ve always included your children in the conversation of your writing, and like that you are working to include the ‘messiness’ of domestic patter as well. Do you think this might change as your children age, and begin to gain awareness of how they are being depicted?

A. I think about this question all the time—how will the children feel about it? I don't think they will care much about a theoretical explanation : the child in the work isn’t “you” exactly, lovebug! That’s a literary construction.

I have a chapbook called ‘x y z &&’ coming out in the fall (Ahsahta Press)—it’s a sonnet sequence I wrote after my third child was born (I wrote a sonnet sequence after each child was born). One of the epigraphs is from Anselm Berrigan’s poem “Looking through a slant of light” : “Sending his mother to the typewriter / To type a poem that would embarrass him / Years later.” That's my preemptive action on this front.

There are things related to the children that I do not write about because they are invasions of privacy, sure. It was harder when they were infants/toddlers because it doesn’t seem as though they have privacy when they are so little – it doesn’t feel like I have privacy during that phase either.

Allison Cobb wrote a review of nulls in which she noted : “This work generates its own codes to shelter the world of the child, thrust under the gaze of medical authority. It is the parent who submits the child to this gaze—and to the gaze of the reader—but with a sense of profound ambiguity.” When I read Allison’s review I was so grateful— because this ambiguity (& ambivalence) is at the center of that book (for me, anyway). Nulls mostly came out of my process of learning about autism— it is most definitely not about the experience of being autistic, because I don't know what that is like— it's about learning a new language, a new history, a new culture. I thought there was a sliver of space in which I could write that book, & I hope I successfully maintained that position throughout. Do I think there are ethical & empathetic ways to include the words & experiences & worlds of our children in our work? Yes. Do I always succeed in being ethical & empathetic about it? No. I know I do not. But I hope I treat them as worthy collaborators always.

Obviously, I think they are brilliant & funny & clever—it would be impossible to resist them getting in the text.

Q: Your books are thick with medieval research, references, images and information. What originally prompted your interest in medieval subjects, and the possibilities of engaging with such in poetry?

A. I’ve been in love with the medieval for most of my life. This definitely has something to do with attending Catholic school—the art! The syntax of Catholicism, too, led me to studying the medieval. I think that most people are irrationally attracted to certain historical periods. The way medieval literature & art employ narrative—fragmented or episodic narrative, specifically—also the sense of simultaneity, layers of time in the work—it makes sense to me. On a more personal note, the lives of the saints were like fairytales for me. I mean, when I was a little Catholic schoolgirl we learned about all the girl-saints, about Mary—& those stories stuck to me. My school taught us a great deal about medieval women mystics, about Joan of Arc, about anchoresses in their cells, & it was very ‘cult of the virgin’ when it came to Mary (at least as far as I remember). Even as a child I think I understood that those stories all had to do with power, with women’s bodies, with literacy. I think the nuns taught us about the mystics to counteract “woman is a temple built over a sewer” & “woman is defective & misbegotten” & the rest of the church fathers (which I also remember well, clearly). When I walk into The Cloisters or the Musée de Cluny or the medieval galleries at any art museum, I want to sit down & think & be quiet. I feel that way in medieval churches as well—it’s what left of religion for me.

Q: I’m curious about your development into utilizing the book as your unit of composition (as opposed to the poem). How did this evolve? Who are your models?

A. I think the last time I wrote single, short poems (or ‘loosies,’ as I call them in my head) was in graduate school. bk of (h)rs was my first longpoem project, & since I was working from the form of medieval books of hours I had the overall structure of the book from very early on. It was such a pleasurable experience that I have (mostly) written book-length poems or series since. The booklength project is more accomodating of research—& when I wrote lots of prose poems, I was very happy with how many words could potentially fit in these long, wall-of-text poems. Probably the first ‘model’ for me, when I was a graduate student, was Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Drafts—or really just Rachel, in general, as a poet with an intense work ethic. Long poems were in the air at Temple University then (seems like they still are now, in fact). I was reading Susan Howe for the first time—& her work is profoundly important to me, always—also Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, Cole Swensen’s Noon & Oh, Anne Waldman’s Iovis—& then I worked backwards in time—Loy, Williams, H.D., Stein, etc.—because even though I was familiar with shorter work by these poets, I had not read many (if any) long poems before that time. The work I was reading raised important questions about the whole & the part, the role of the fragment, hybridity, research poetics, etc. The book is a manner of working, not just an object or product. The booklength poem is also time, a long time—you get to know a longpoem very well, whether you are reading or writing it.

Q: Given this engagement with the long and book-length poem, what is your relationship to the poetic fragment? Do your lyric fragments accumulate, or do they come together as a more sustained idea of book-length structure?

Once upon a time, I spent hours doing research, chain-smoking, coffee-drinking, working. Even then the poems were pretty fragmented on the sentence level. Writing now requires that I allow for interruptions— even when I am not actually writing in the presence of my children (which happens a lot), part of my brain is always occupied by them. So I learned a new way of writing. I imagine everyone must learn new work habits at different stages of their writing careers— this just happens to be mine. The hope is that the interruptions, the fragmentation, the abrupt on & off of it will be generative. I certainly have a greater appreciation for urgency in writing practice. Going back to your question about writing the children into poems, at first I wanted to resist this because (in part) I was thinking : who wants to read another mommy-poet? But honestly, I ask that question about a lot of my work— reading over pages of notes about the iconography of hair in medieval art, I wonder who else could possibly be interested in a poem made from this? I just finished reading Sasha Steensen's House of Deer, & in "Personal Poem Including Opium's History" she writes : "Or, instead, remember something Claudie once said: / Risk sentimentality or who will care about your damn poem?" Notions of risk shift. Back to fragments— if a poem shows us a mind at work, if a poem includes its process, then we must start at the fragment. To 'include' is to contain as part of the whole. The beauty of the fragment is that it is the whole & a part.

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

Some of the poets mentioned above—Susan Howe, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, etc. Lorine Niedecker has become more important to me in recent years—in part from teaching her work, & from reading it as a whole, as a long project written over the course of an entire writing life. I am fortunate to live in Philadelphia, & so I turn to my fellow Philly poets to reenergize my own work—Jenn McCreary & I have a collaboration coming out this year from the Little Red Leave Textile Series, which I am super excited about. Kevin Varrone & I talk about writing all the time, & I am astonished by his work every time I read it. I just finished Frank Sherlock's new book & got a real charge from it. Also Ryan Eckes has a new one coming out this summer, which I've read in manuscript, that is so good I almost missed my train stop twice because I couldn't stop reading it. The community of poets in Philadelphia is an embarrassment of riches.

I am currently away on vacation & brought the following books : Julie Carr's RAG, Sasha Steensen's House of Deer, W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn (I read it every summer), Susan Howe's The Europe of Trusts (which I also read about once a year), & Caroline Bergvall's Drift (which I haven't started yet—I think I'll wait until we reach the sea to begin). For wifthing I am reading several histories of domesticity, of goodwives, & of childhood in the middle ages.

Thank you so much for this, rob!