TtD supplement #25 : eight questions for Edward Smallfield

Edward Smallfield is the author of The Pleasures of C, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (a book-length collaboration with Doug MacPherson), locate (a chapbook collaboration with Miriam Pirone), equinox, and, most recently, lirio (a chapbook collaboration with Valerie Coulton). His poems have appeared in alice blue, Barcelona INK, bird dog, e-poema.eu, Five Fingers Review, New American Writing, Páginas Rojas, Parthenon West Review, 26, Wicked Alice, and many other magazines and websites.

His poems “the art of narrative,” “shepherd” and “dolce” appear in the fifth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: One of the first qualities that struck me about your poems is their incredible compactess, as well as their inherent seriality. However small and self-contained each poem may be, they all appear to deeply connect to all the surrounding poems in a very deliberate way. How aware are you of this as you are writing?

A: Thank you for noticing that the poems are compact, and that they have a serial quality. Both are important to me, and it’s gratifying when someone sees those things in the poems.

I’ve always admired serial poems, but it took me a long time to understand how I could write them. Because I believe in absolute freedom in writing, I don’t force myself to write around a subject or theme. I love to write, so of course I write a lot. When I look back over what I’ve written, the most interesting poems invariably group themselves around the same concerns. I don’t think this is mysterious; it seems inevitable that the most vibrant writing would be awakened by what obsesses me most.

Q: Is this how your books are shaped, through a grouping of materials around similar concerns?

Essentially, yes, but it’s messier than that. I usually spend quite a while writing, letting work accumulate, and then a second, separate process is putting a book together. I do want there to be some unity, some seriality, but I don’t use a rigid method. I hope I’m open enough to include pieces that feel right. Probably the most important thing for me is that the writing is allowed to happen “without guidance” and then the shaping of the book is something different—though of course new things can come in.

Q: How do see the poems “the art of narrative,” “shepherd” and “dolce” fitting into each other, or even do they? Or is it too early in their process to get a sense of where they might fit?

A: Those are pieces suggested by movies, now in a file called “cinemetric.” If I happen to write something that seems to relate to the movies, it goes into that file. I’ve been writing these poems for quite a while, and there are quite a few, but the impulse doesn’t feel anywhere near exhausted, so I don’t know what something final might look like, or whether these pieces could fit together in it.

Q: Given your process, how long might a book take to complete, and how many projects might you be working on at any given time?

A: How long it takes to put a book together really varies from project to project. I’ve done some collaborations and those come together more quickly because of the engagement with the other poet. Otherwise, it’s a long process for me—usually several years.

It probably works best for me to work on at least two or three projects simultaneously. If I only have one, I become obsessed, and more than three starts to get complicated.

Q: You mention collaborations, and I know you’ve done more than a couple of them over the years. How did they originally come about, and how do you feel they’ve helped with your solo projects?

A: The first collaboration that I worked on, with Doug MacPherson, became a full-length book, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. The other two, with Miriam Pirone and Valerie Coulton, became chapbooks, locate and lirio.

The collaboration with Doug grew out of a workshop exercise, and just took off. While Miriam and I were collaborating, she was living in Boston and I was in Barcelona, so everything was done by email. Valerie and I are married to each other and live together, so collaboration is natural, and probably inevitable.

For me, working with another poet creates a welcome sense of urgency, a need to respond quickly, and with that urgency comes a great sense of freedom. Since urgency and freedom are incredibly valuable, the collaborations have helped me enormously in my own work.

Q: After some half dozen publications over the past decade-plus, including two trade collections and a handful of chapbooks, how do you feel your writing has developed? What do you feel you might be heading towards?

A: I try not to look too far ahead, in writing or in life. For me, in writing, the most important thing is to be as engaged as possible in the projects at hand. When I look back at my previous work, I can see how things developed, but I couldn’t have predicted that while the writing was unfolding. For me, engagement in the current projects, and not looking backward or forward, creates a kind of freedom that I need.

Q: I wonder, too: how your work as an editor/publisher, running Apogee Press, might feed or hinder your writing? Do you find the balance difficult to negotiate, or is it entirely natural?

A: I’ve been writing so much longer than I’ve been editing that I’ve never felt any contradiction between the two. By the time I started editing, I’d been writing for a long time, and my practice as a writer had been firmly established. Things might have been different if I had started writing and editing at about the same time. I think that reading manuscripts and working on books, along with teaching creative writing, has helped me as a writer, because all of those things have allowed me to read work as it was coming together, as a process, not just as the finished project—a published book.

Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your work? What writers or writing can’t you help but return to?

A: There are so many that I will surely forget a lot. First of all, Valerie Coulton, who happens also to be my wife. Then Williams and Niedecker, though not necessarily in that order. Kathleen Fraser, who was my teacher, and whose work and example have meant so much to me. Among the great long dead, Shakespeare. I consistently reread all of the poets we’ve published, not just their books with us, but their other work too, for inspiration.

Touch the Donkey : fifth issue,

The fifth issue is now available, with new poems by Edward Smallfield, Elizabeth Robinson, Rob Manery, lary timewell, nathan dueck, Christine McNair, ryan fitzpatrick and Paige Taggart.




Seven dollars (includes shipping). From now on, she's smoking for two!

TtD supplement #24 : seven questions for Gary Barwin

Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, multimedia artist, and educator and the author of 17 books of poetry and fiction. His work has been performed, broadcast, anthologized, exhibited, presented, and published nationally and internationally. Barwin holds a PhD. in music composition, and is 2014-2015 Writer-in-Residence at Western University in London, Ontario. His latest book is Moon Baboon Canoe (Mansfield Press, 2014.) His novel, Yiddish for Pirates, will appear with Random House Canada in 2016. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario and at garybarwin.com. “how I watched until the moon” was written in 1986.

His piece “how I watched until the moon” appears in the fourth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Given how productive you are as a writer, I’m curious about the fact that you chose a work nearly thirty years old to submit to Touch the Donkey. What is it about the piece that still draws you in, after so long, and why hadn’t it appeared in print before?

A: The piece is from 1986 when I was 22, and did appear with my serif of nottingham, but only in an edition of about 5-10. I’d forgotten about it and I don’t have any copies of the old shiny Xeroxed version, but I came across the original drawings when searching through a box of old files. (Was I looking for the mummified remains of my youth carefully stored in mortuary jars? My hollowed out copy of Proust with my memories preserved in a hidden diary?) At the time, I was studying at York University with bpNichol and was working through his immense influence on me, and specifically, in this piece, exploring an understanding of the elemental both in language and image. Moon is both an archetypically powerful image in our culture and a potent signifier in literature. It is ripe for semiotic and imagistic play. I love the simplicity of poetic variations on a few elements (both as a system of signs as well as a set of poetic images) like frog, pond, plop in the case of versions of Basho’s famous haiku. Because the set of images is fixed, it allows for a kind of self-reflexive metacommentary. In “how i watched,” there is the moon, a tree, and the watcher, as well as the sentence, “how I watched as the moon was caught in a tree.”

Over the years, I’ve integrated a lot of old work into my new publications; there’s even a piece from around this time in my recent, Moon Baboon Canoe. It’s a pleasure to discover that though I felt I had no clue whatsoever when I was a young writer, I actually occasionally stumbled upon something that is still of interest. It’s a nod of confidence to my younger, uncertain self who not only would be surprised to see my continued interest in the work, but would be astounded at the very notion of how nearly 30 years has passed. That astounds my current self, too.

Q: It seems a conscious choice to have a conversation between your current work and much older work, something David W. McFadden has also done, reworking his three “Great Lakes Suites” novels into a single volume for Talonbooks, for example. Does this conversation allow, perhaps, for a different kind of clarity to your overall production over the past thirty-plus years, or does the clarity appear as more of a patchwork?

A: I think conversation is the right term. Of course, I can see perennial or latent concerns in my past work which continue or are developed in the present work, but often these seem different not only in the context of my writing and my life, but with regards to literary culture in general. We ‘re-see’ certain things in light of what has developed after them (like that Borges piece where he examines how Kafka influenced writers that predated him.) Looking at my own past work, I’m also aware of certain crossroads that I arrived at where I took one path instead of others. Past work allows me to go back and explore these paths (if only to confirm my decision not to follow them.)

You mention McFadden: I’m interested in how he has revised some of his past work. His editor, Stuart Ross tells me (in an interview for Jacket2) that Dave “in revising his early poems for his selected…often got rid of the word love and sometimes replaced it with the word thing.”

But in general—in writing, as in life—I have the sense that regardless of what happened in the past, it was somehow necessary to get you to where you are now, though admittedly, I’m not entirely sure how I could explain how watching all those afterschool episodes of Hogan’s Heroes.

Q: Part of what I’ve always found interesting about your work is the ease in which you appear to move between genres, from concrete/visual poetry, lyric modes, prose fiction and works for children, as well as your years of musical composition. How are you able to move from one to the other so freely, and what do you think the variety of modes have brought to your individual works?

A: I really don’t feel that each genre—or indeed each art form—is any different. I conceive of them in the same way. I suppose that means I think of them each as a semiotic system. It’s the difference between the games of tennis and water polo. There are certain guidelines which establish meaningful behaviours, a framework against which to interpret what happens. I understand, of course, that each genre or art form has a different tradition, a different history of how its material works and how it is interpreted; a different physics of reading.

You know how we speak of “booting” up a computer? I understand that the term booting is actually short for bootstrapping. Early programmers were thinking about the recursiveness inherent in the fact that computers start themselves up using a program that they themselves are running. In other words, computers pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. And so I think of different genres, or art forms, similarly as running their own operating programs. Built into the form is how it operates, how we interact with it. Of course, we are also using the art form to create ‘updates’ to itself.

It’s hard to know what working in different forms does to the individual piece, though I do think that it has brought a sense of possibility, a sense that writing, music, visual work—or indeed any specific work is just one particular iteration of what is possible. And that if there are borders between things, they are chosen by convention and not necessity. It is true though, that as a receiver of a particular form, a different part of the human is addressed. There is a difference between eating a ham sandwich, feeling the wind on your face, and a haiku. I think there are extra syllables in ham sandwich.

Q: Given the fact that you’ve been composing and publishing for some three decades or so, how do you feel your work has developed over the years? Where do you see some of these divergent threads leading?

A: When I was a school teacher, I would hear the term “the spiral curriculum,” which referred to the idea that subjects were revisited over the years with increasing complexity, context, and sophistication. (I think it would be more accurate for the image to be a corkscrew—or a hurricane—rather than a spiral to reflect the upward direction.) In any case, in many ways, this spiralling back to certain concerns is how I imagine my writing. I hope I bring greater understanding, or at least, greater context to the work with each return. So perhaps it’s a case of “exactly the same, just more so.” I feel that I’ve been able to expand my range and technique, to further develop concerns, but also to reflect my development and experience as a person—I turned fifty this year, which, I understand, means I’m not twenty anymore. So my experiences inform the writing: fatherhood (I've three kids...two who are in their twenties), grief, loss, illness of friends and family, of a bewildering complexity of joy, sadness, surprise, and memory. Of the body, of an awareness of living through history. Once, one of my sons pointed at a Saturn V rocket and said, “That’s an old fashioned rocket.” It used to be the future. Now even the Shuttle is a thing of the past.

I do feel that, compared to when I was younger, I’m now able to conceive of writing on a larger scale, or rather, perhaps, as the elements as being more rhizomatic, as connecting to other elements in a larger network. By this I mean not only in more developed and complex forms (i.e. the novel, the poetry book as a form, a 40-minute multimedia piece incorporating sound and visuals—all things I’m currently working on) but also a sense of writing as relating to its context in time: present, past, and future.

So where is this leading? Certainly to more approaches to gesamtkuntstwerk (multimedia integrating my various interests) but I continue to want to explore the small and the individual, also. And to be aware of the classic struggle: between the desire for mastery and control vs. uncertainty and experiment. I try to trust the process. To have faith that the writing knows more than me.

Q: You spoke of composing this piece when you were at York University, taking classes with bpNichol, who was said to be, among other things, a great teacher, a great supporter of other writers and a great editor. Overall, what was the experience of taking a class from Nichol as a young writer, and what do you think you learned from him? Does he influence your work still?

A: When I came to York, though I was interested in experimental music, and loved Kafka and Beckett, as a poet, I was most interested in Seamus Heaney. I arrived early for my first writing class and waited. Then this hippyish guy arrived with scraggly dirty-blond hair, carrying a big bottle of Pepsi, and dressed in some kind of velour smock thing. Interesting student, I thought. Of course, that was bp. And he did turn out to be the things you mentioned: a great teacher, editor and supporter. I would bring work in and prepare to be lauded. (He gave great praise to many of his students.) But he wouldn’t allow me to rest on my 17-year old’s laurels, which I wanted to do. He’d read my piece and then—in addition to edits—would suggest a writer who had created a body of work that developed what I’d begun to explore. So I’d go to the library and read a ton of work by that writer. And then the next week, it’d happen again. He read me very well. He knew that, even more than praise, I genuinely wanted to be a better writer. I did also want to earn his respect. He was immensely inspiring, and really blew the top of my writing brain open. The idea that a writer’s knowledge, interests, and writing could be entirely heterogenous. That one should follow one’s interests, whatever they were. That it was about invention and exploration, self awareness as a writer, and possibility. And lack of pretension. But also about community, support of others, DIY and small press. 

And so all these things still influence me. (Well, except for trying not to be pretentious. I like to stay in practice, y’know, for interviews.) I take bp as a model for what a writer could be. And of course, he informs my interest in sound poetry, in visual and concrete work, borderblur, ‘pataphysics, and the quantum relations between the lyric and the experimental. And at home, I wear velour smocks. Or not that I’ll admit to, but I did make a t-shirt with a picture of bp with his arms outstretched and the caption, “What would bp do?”

The large multimedia piece (H: for it is a pleasure and a surprise to breathe) that I mentioned that I’m working on is directly inspired by bp and is intended to celebrated the 70th anniversary of his birth. I’m incorporating computer-manipulated samples of bp performing as well as my own work.

Q: Given your range of modes, what is your normal method of composition? Or do you even have such a thing?

A: I think that’s a really interesting question to ask writers. I wonder how many of us are aware of what is our default mode. I don’t think that I have a “normal method,” but rather a range of different approaches or techniques. In the last hour, I’ve taken a visual poem by Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Bilyk and distorted it in 3D, overlapped several iterations of it using Photoshop and then added some contrasting material based on one of my favourite icons, the speech balloon. (Volodymyr and I sometimes riff off each other’s work on Facebook.) And before that, I was up early this morning because I couldn’t sleep, and, in some sort of hypnogogic state, had the idea for a poem based on the idea of doing origami in reverse, namely, unfolding a paper crane until it became a blank sheet again. I imagined writing lines of a poem to go under each image of some origami instructions (but the instructions would appear in reverse, telling you how to unfold the crane.) I played around with the words concentrating on words which had a sound relation to the word wish based on the idea that if you fold a 1000 cranes in origami you get your wish; this was, for me, somehow related to the current conflict in the Middle East.) I also had a few (terrible) lines based on something like “the architecture of (f)light.” And at some point in the middle of last night, I had read (on my phone) work by and about John Taggart on Jacket2, and specifically, his work relating to Mark Rothko and the chapel he created. I had some notion of abstraction through verbal repetition that I wanted to apply to this text. I tried to add the text that I’d written this morning to the reversed images of the origami instructions, but they didn’t seem to work. I played around with them, being more or less grammatical, repetitive, or having denotative meaning. I eventually deleted almost all of them and the returned to Word whereupon I wrote about seven or eight lines, deleted half of them (the ones which seemed to be too proscriptive or delimiting of meaning) and then added the four retained lines to the image. I posted the image on my tumblr with the caption “origami makes nothing happen,” but think that I will delete the caption as it, too, is too delimiting. These kinds of processes are something like my normal methods for individual works whether created with sound, visuals, or texts. Of course, the novel that I wrote required a very different process. I wrote on the treadmill desk for hours each day and had lots of charts, sticky notes, text files, and so on, but that hasn’t been typical.

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

A: To reenergize, I try to choose work that not only amazes and inspires, but that exists a certain energetic distance away from where I’m at—not too far so that my work and it are entirely beyond each other’s gravitational pull, but enough so that I’m shifted from my usual orbit or at least am aware of the larger space around it. There are works that put me in a state that is receptive to listening in particular ways or returning to the idea of works, especially things from when I was young. Sometimes work that creates a kind of creative propulsion isn't necessarily my favourite, or that I would hold out as an exemplar, or that I even particularly like, but rather, is full of a kind of jaunty jalopylike momentum, a galootish exuberance, an arcane and coded chamber music.

I don't really have particular works that I return to as touchstones. The short fiction of Kafka. Beckett’s novels. Myths and fables from around the world. Medieval and Renaissance poetry. Reading Mark Strand or John Asbery in a half-wake hammock-induced reverie. Anne Carson, Yeats. David W. McFadden. Borges. bpNichol. Wallace Stevens. Joseph Campbell. Ron Padgett. Inger Christensen. Aase Berg. Satu Kaikkonen and Márton Koppány. Bruno Schulz.

I’m a messy magpie of a reader, but try to make continuous partial retention a virtue.

Touch the Donkey : happy first birthday!

Touch the Donkey is one year old! For a limited time, five-issue subscriptions will remain at twenty-five dollars, with forthcoming issues including new work by a variety of authors, including (in no particular order) Kathryn MacLeod, Suzanne Zelazo, Mary Kasimor, Edward Smallfield, Rob Manery, Elizabeth Robinson, Jason Christie, Pete Smith, Jeffrey Jullich, Jennifer Krovonet, lary timewell, nathan dueck, Paige Taggart, ryan fitzpatrick, Christine McNair, Lola Lemire Tostevin, damian lopes, Shannon Maguire, Sarah Mangold, Amish Trivedi, D.G. Jones, Aaron Tucker, Stan Rogal, Helen Hajnoczky, Deborah Poe and Jordan Abel.

Including, of course, interviews with a variety of contributors after the appearance of their specific issues. How can you resist?

Touch the Donkey. You wouldn't ask a handsome man like me to wear glasses.

TtD supplement #23 : seven questions for Chris Turnbull

Chris Turnbull lives in Kemptville, Ontario. In 2010, above/ground press published a chapbook of her visual and multi-performative piece, continua, with the full-length version scheduled to appear with Chaudiere Books in 2015. Thuja Press published her chapbook Shingles in 2001. Her poetry has been published in Stroboscope, Spiral Orb, parenthetical, Nerve Lantern, The Volta, ottawater, Convergences, How2, ditch, Dusie, Dandelion, and experiment-o (Angelhouse Press), among others. Occasionally, she has written poetry reviews and interviews, as well as the “On Writing” essay series at the ottawa poetry newsletter. Her sometimes small press mag, rout/e, has more recently become an ongoing footpress project involving placing poems on trails (http://scalar.usc.edu/works/stroboscope-magazine/issue-1).

Her piece, “marsh effect,” appears in the fourth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: I’m fascinated in the short email, possibly written quickly (as emails often are), that you included with your submission: “It’s actually also going to be in cube form, so off the paper – just building it. You’ll see that the base ‘layer’ is the piece I submitted to The Volta – so building on the quadrant idea, in a way. The cube image is going to be part of the stroboscope submission, but the disparity between the built and the paper-dimension is interesting. I haven’t submitted the paper version anywhere, and the cube image will only be from one perspective, leaving the other views suspended.” You have a very clear sense of design and image in your work, one I haven’t seen in too many others; what is it about the three-dimensional aspect of composing visual and concrete poems that appeals?

A: Making the marsh piece three dimensional – as a cube – is a way to move off the page – both in the writing and in the eye-ing/reading. I wanted to work with space, not only create a page by writing on surface. I’m interested in the spaces not defined by the words, the poem, the page, as such, but also the existence of space(s) without the words. While I do have to print the marsh sequence (on transparency), I’m using plexiglass and mirrors to maximize depth, transparency and reflection/refraction. Where I put the mirrors can create other geometrical shapes within the cube itself and also change the appearance of forms outside the cube. I’m curious about what gets eyed, what gets read, what gets avoided (and can’t be avoided).

I’m very careful about certain elements of design in composing and constructing – making the cube requires measurement, cutting, precision, gluing, etc. with physical objects. I have to learn the materials and I make mistakes. I talk to fabricators, Chris at the hardware store, other folks who know about solvents and glues. The guy at the glass shop lends me solvent to try. Making the cube is also highly collaborative as I benefit from the expertise of others and learn the right types of questions to ask. It is essential to the making of the cube that this occurs. I don’t necessarily know how to make what I’m imagining – but I can move toward it by asking and trying. The scraps, scratches, pieces are still there, and so I start again, revisioning, reforming/shaping. I keep the mistakes. They’re physical. I’ve always felt that mistakes are important. It’s good to keep them, or put them aside and come back to them at another time.  They’re opportunities and also elemental to design.

And yet, the marsh sequence (as a temporary title) is also an accrued piece that does sit on a page, in paper form. I made it in sequences; each serving as a poem on its own but also, when stacked, a visual cacophony of sorts. I wonder where the eyes fall, could get lost. Of course, with the page, the eyes tend to fasten, anchor, to the words. Stacking the poems slows the process of reading – very much as one might observe a marsh and only be able to really see surfaces. If to read the poem out loud ~

Cubing the poem in a material, three-dimensional way offers the opening of surfaces and the movement of spaces. It also suggests that viewing/reading (and this occurs on the page too) engenders avoidance. The eye doesn’t always want to let go or move, seek. The cube moves.

I tend toward things tactile and kinetic and have been moving toward a ‘built’ poetry, and thinking about it, for quite some time. Looking back, I can see that certain directions I’ve been following, or approaches I’ve taken, have a pattern. For the past few years, I haven’t really had the sort of time, or energy, in a way, that I needed to commit to what is essentially sculptured or installation forms. It takes time to construct the cubes, for example, to think them through. Tanagrams I made in Judy, years ago now, are an early indicator of this direction. Interest in kites as art and functional objects, such as through Istvan Bodocsky or Curt Asker, for example are another. continua (which will be published by Chaudiere Books in 2015) is a version of built poetry in that it is paged but also, in its multi-voice, theatrical possibilities, also aims to be off the page. The footpress, rout/e (wp.me/p4HYkz-1U), whereby poems by others are placed on trails, is also a different foray into this - a sort of stretching of page, a paralleling of page with what’s in the environment, like the woods, where the page doesn’t necessarily at first fit, stuck in the ground, there.

Q: Through all of this work, I’m curious how your installation pieces still have a strong connection to text, specifically poetry. Do you see your installation pieces as works of poetry? What is it about poetry that holds your attention?

A: Not sure how you mean here. The short answer is yes, I do see the installation pieces as works of poetry. I also see them as installation pieces. I don’t think they have to be exclusively one or the other, but then again, I also think it’s not just up to me –

There is something in the forming of the poetry that is consistent with the forming of the cube – not technique exactly, but the process of thinking, the kinetics of making, the filtering that occurs when viewing. The cube adds dimension that can’t be accessed only by page (as physical structure). Conceptually, sure, dimension can be reached – lots of examples of that – by reading poetry, by making leaps…but not physically.

I fail words. That holds my attention. I think, too, I’m interested in the interaction between the poetry, the language, and its effect – in place, personally, in relation to other things. Translation. And poetry is fun – writing can be enormously difficult and a pleasure. Finding poetry or poetic language or forms and recognizing something in them, an affinity of some sort of another, or a way of accessing something deeper or enjoying elements of what the poem is – it has its own sort of expansion.

Q: You mentioned Judy earlier. I know you became involved with an informal association of Vancouver writers during your time at university, some of which was displayed through various issues of TADS, including George Bowering, Jamie Reid, Wayde Compton, Reg Johanson, Jason Le Heup, Aaron Vidaver and Dorothy Trujillo Lusk. What do you think these associations taught you, and how much of it carries through into your current work?

A: Well, first, they became friends, though not all at once, through readings and cross associations. TADs was one venue for an informal collection of writing, but there were many inter-crossings through KSW events, Thuja, Western Front, Aaron, Roger Farr, and Steven Ward had a couple of reading/conversation series, etc. The friendships were engaging and intense in a good way. I think I met Dorothy once, briefly, at one of her readings – it was close to when I was leaving for Ottawa.

One of the things I appreciate about all of the writers you mention is that they’re very committed – to literature, to political or social or artistic stances, to the community they engage with and live in. They open things up and question status quo. I value that and respect them for it.

Like most friendships, you get a good cross-section of influencing factors which are also nebulous, traces.  Friendships and conversations open up possibilities – I like to think in possibilities – I certainly learned about new writers, listened to very challenging writing, read writing that was problematic, or difficult, or edgy. I enjoyed it all. But while some of us hung out at the pub, and there was TADS, we all also did our own things – had other friendships, pursued other interests, worked independently. So, in its way, influence is never really a direct thing – it’s sifted through personal experiences and inclinations. Gerry Gilbert and I would meet at the Grind on Main in the early a.m. hours because of shift work I had at the Vancouver airport and nobody else would be awake. We’d met at a KSW reading and we both cycled. We became friends. I met Phyllis Webb through my undergraduate work; I am very grateful to her – she’s a very concise, intelligent, artistic, woman. Jamie and Carol Reid fostered an interest in the nexuses between art, music, and writing. Renee Rodin became a friend. Some of us met with Aaron Vidaver, Steven Ward, and Roger Farr of informal literary and socio-political conversations. I often think it’s not really how folks influence you in the moment, but how, later, things re-emerge, mix with other experiences, maybe make more sense or reform into a precise thought or a pattern of clarity...without a clear path back to a starting point, necessarily. Some of the writing I’m doing now most certainly does return, in a way, to things I started thinking about when I lived in Vancouver, and when I was travelling, but have percolated, and mixed, with other experiences, other writings, other directions.

Q: You also recently mentioned an association with and an influence via Phyllis Webb – what do you think you learned from the work of Phyllis Webb?

A: I did my honours thesis on Phyllis’ work, specifically looking at it through the practice of collage. I used to camp and cycle on Saltspring; I visited her there toward the end of the thesis work. She has a very penetrating mind and a way of looking at a subject intensely that I appreciated. And she’s multidisciplinary in practice. I learned about spacing from Phyllis’ writing, the visual impact a page can have – perhaps a better way to put it would be to say I learned how to apply things I observe or “see” – such as space, holes, lacunae – tangibly in my writing. She was generous in her support – as were George Bowering, Jamie Reid, etc. She is a more natural mentor for me, had a sort of knowledge and experience that fascinated me. She influenced me as a person; I was drawn to her writing and artwork.

What I was trying to get at in the earlier question was that the period in Vancouver wasn’t static. I would say that I immersed myself in many directions – Gene Bridwell at the Special Collections at SFU was a mentor in terms of fostering an interest in small press and leading me gently in directions he thought I might be interested in. George Bowering indirectly (in the ways of his) opened avenues of direction without pressures to pursue them. Jamie Reid and Carol also. The kite maker Istvan Bodoscky in Budapest, whom I met while living there, also was influential in terms of space and movement (and I’ve always loved kites). Heather Hermant, whom I also met in Budapest, and I hung out and went to different plays, music, and experimental events. I went to Budapest for some very specific reasons, one of which was the art scene. I walked in different parts of England. Hung out in Prague. Took milk run buses whenever I could and plonked myself into different spaces and landscapes. Affinities. Gael Turnbull, in Edinburgh, introduced me to kinetic writing and physical objects – again, these were interests I had but I was lucky enough to meet people who were creating things and sparking thinking...Daniel Van Klei, who is an artist, and Oliver Rathyoni Reusz, who is a photographer, both long time friends from Vancouver, have also done this – we just did a collaboration for a marsh sequence, a tangential collaboration. Jason Le Heup and I often tossed ideas back and forth, crazy things, stretching and testing boundaries. I love how his mind works. And his and Chris Walker’s Judy, with its constraints, rules, etc. was a fantastic project, inane and irreverant and deeply fun. I was involved in other things, too, life things, other friends outside the writing community, hiking, cycling, camping, travel – all of these impact the writing I do now.

Q: How have your associations and influences shifted since moving east to Ontario? I know you originally headed to Ottawa for the sake of studying at Carleton University, but have remained, and become part of a loose community of writers in and around the city as well. Has anything changed in the way to approach your work since arriving east?

A: Ottawa has a very generous and diverse writerly community; it’s quite inclusive and friendly. This isn’t a comparison, more an observation. I moved from Ottawa after my thesis work and moved to Smiths Falls, and from there, am still not in Ottawa, but living in Kemptville. I mention this because I had moved out of the writing community, for the most part, for awhile – attended things more occasionally and was very peripherally ‘around’ through invites to read now and again – partially because I let the more public expression of poetry to take a background to my work, community based activities and relationships, interests environmental. I’ve never been particularly comfortable in a public, performative space. I think I published a rout/e issue or two, and some poems under hawkweed press, but I needed some distance, perhaps – writing, of course, but really taking time and thinking, reconsidering, reframing. I knew I wanted something more from writing and took some time to sift through what that meant, how to continue. continua took a long time partially because of that – I was waiting it out, so to speak. Folks like yourself, or Max Middle, jw curry, Amanda Earl, Stephen Brockwell, among others, Ottawa based folks, are consistently supportive, and it’s appreciated – that’s part of what I mean by generosity – a person can slip in and out of the ‘community.’ I wouldn’t say my associations or influences have shifted, exactly, but circumstances changed after thesis work here. The outdoors influences my writing – the landscape here – the marshes, concession roads, trails, the remnants of things has influenced me in a different way than it did when I lived out West or when I travel. I approach writing now, because of circumstances, with a different sense of time than I used to – while I’ve always written somewhat on the fly (in between things, on buses, walking, etc.), now it’s intensified by the activities of our son. And I do think about what I write and how I write and consider how I’d like him to know that writing, poetry, language, space is more than just naming something or metering it out in iambic pentameter, that it’s difficult, that it can be kinetic, that words have power and that they can defuse, carry trauma, be inordinately hilarious. And that writing is not done in a vacuum. At the moment, he’s seeing this in the way plexiglass gets broken on the edge of a table. Not sure how he’s interpreting that... I think coming out east, living in a small town again, has given me a sense of projection and absence that belongs wholly to my experiences here. Reconsideration of forms is a continuation – probably part of how my mind works. That period of quiescence was essential to what I’m able to see and work toward now.

Q: I’m curious about what you might be working on now – you seem very much to work on larger projects, as opposed to a scattering of smaller, individual works. What is your normal compositional process? Is it a collection of scattered pieces that slowly evolve into something larger, or do you work on “projects” from the very beginning?

A: I use notebooks and record ideas, fragments of words & poems, bits of bits that I’ve read, draw diagrams. I don’t record in linear fashion; I just open the notebook. Each time I do that, I come across something I’ve written or noted or drawn or read previously, in whatever order I find it. Sometimes it takes awhile to flip through a notebook to find an empty page, and sometimes I don’t use an empty page. I re-find things, refine them, over time. It’s how I organize my thinking – the bits sit and percolate, iterate, and connections develop, things I pursue further in some form or another. Language is material, for me. It has weight, it bears load, it has depth and dimension. It can be composed or constructed from and into a variety of states. I’d say I do work on, develop, consider writing as a project form that can incorporate a variety of other elements; I’d also say that I work well with scattered pieces that may work toward something larger, that change over time. What I write or make can intersect or interact. My compositional process involves a lot of trying – I don’t mind changing my mind as I work  – there is effect, intent, form, design, possibility, difficulty, mistakes.

As mentioned, I’m working on the first part of a collaboration with angela rawlings on a cube sequence. It started as a paper based cube series (one layer was in The Volta in 2013) which I worked on over time and made into a stacked plexiglass prototype. I wanted to see what would happen if I made plexiglass cubes – I wanted a high amount of transparency and layering that I could not get on paper; I wanted the depth of the cube. I added some mirrors for refraction and placed the entire piece outside to elaborate on space and movement. The piece in Touch the Donkey is the paper version. I’d been thinking for awhile, alongside this, about collaborating – creating more cubes with work by others – and asked angela if she’d like to participate. Following this, I have another plexiglass series I’ve been thinking about and am letting sit until the logistics are clearer and I have some time to develop it in the way I want. Background thinking. I’ve an outdoor monster series that I worked on this summer from my notebook, and will continue into the fall. Some of it informs an ms-ish piece. There are some things with continua I want to do. rout/e, the footpress project, will have another series of poems in collaboration with Petrie Island (http://www.petrieisland.org/). Lately, I’ve been involved with the work of Agnes Martin, and the work of Octavio Armand, among others, fumbling in Spanish while working in plexiglass, measurement, acetate, and angles.

Should also say I’ve a most-ms of short prose and poetry that is sitting while I think about if I’m done with it. I may just toss it.

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

A: I read a lot of different things as a matter of course – fiction, non-fiction, poetry, policy, scientific things. I read a lot of writing in translation. I enjoy short stories that require leaps or are inane or are complicated. What energizes me is the outdoors, exploration, visual symmetries/asymmetries. I return to books somewhat in the same way I use my notebook – looking for something else on my bookshelf, I recross someone’s writing. The best way for me to answer that question of particular books I return to would be for me to give away my books and see which ones I have left to the last. I’ve had to delete my list of particular touchstones, because that list leads to another list, which leads to another…like anyone, I think.

TtD supplement #22 : eight questions for Lisa Jarnot

Lisa Jarnot is the author of six books of poetry including Joie De Vivre: Selected Poems 1992-2012. Her biography of the San Francisco poet Robert Duncan was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in Jackson Heights, New York with her husband and daughter and works as a freelance gardener.

Her poem “Part Five: The Sublime Porte” appears in the fourth issue of Touch the Donkey (the same piece appeared previously in Prelude #1).

Q: Tell me about the poem “Part Five: The Sublime Porte.”

A: “Part 5: The Sublime Porte” is part of a long work in progress, a growing book-length poem. I began it in 2009 after my daughter was born. Pressed for time, I decided to write three words a day. At the end of every year of word-gathering, I cobble the phrases together. The book is evolving to be a record of the quotidian—family life, social and political incursions into the everyday domestic scene, and also child development.

Q: With one section a year, that could potentially become a rather lengthy compositional process. How many sections/years do you think the finished manuscript will have? It also makes me curious about how you feel the shift in approach is changing your writing; how do you feel this project is different from your previous book-length work, or even the way you see your individual poems?

A: I’ve never written a book-length poem before, and have always wanted to, so the opportunity arose through the circumstances of slowing down to be a parent. I expect the book will sprawl on until it comes to some organic finishing point. I’ve joked that it will be 18 years/18 sections, but I really don’t know how it will play out. My work has always been based on sprints of lyric/musical energy, so this is in fact very different that my other works. I think it’s important to include motherhood, domesticity, the household in poetry—the labor-value of these things is always underestimated. And the clarity of children’s insights are overlooked because they are smaller and lesser than us. I am very keen on the idea of democratizing the relationships between children and adults. This is one of my reasons for not sending my daughter to school—I don’t want her to be talked down to and "taught"—I want her to grow autonomously. All of that gets filtered into the poem.

Q: You’ve already published a small handful of poetry collections—Some Other Kind of Mission (Burning Deck, 1996), Ring of Fire (Zoland Books, 2001/Salt Publishing, 2003), Black Dog Songs (Flood Editions, 2003), Night Scenes (Flood Editions, 2008), and Joie De Vivre: Selected Poems 1992-2012 (City Lights, 2013)—so I’m curious at the deliberate movement to change the ways in which you compose new work. Prior to this, did you focus on the individual poem or the book-length collection as your unit of composition?

A: My work has been various. Some Other Kind of Mission was composed as a book of visual collages interspersed with prose poems. Ring of Fire and Black Dog Songs were mostly individual poems. I’m not sure there’s a determined thought behind any of it—it’s just what works in the moment. At this moment I can make time to jot down a few words a day and once a year I can sort them into a composition 6-8 pages long. So, that’s the form.

Q: Given the compositional shift, what differences are you noticing in the work you’ve been producing as part of this “growing, book length poem”?

A: The tight lyric quality of my previous poems is absent, in parts. What happens is that the piece is held together by subtle repetitions that accumulate over time.

Q: As your daughter gets older, how aware is she that she exists in your writing, and are you concerned that she might resist a certain kind of depiction? How do you, as both writer and parent, engage her in terms of “subject”?

A: Yes, good question. Right now we work fairly collaboratively. She often accompanies me on stage, and lately is keen to do some kind of interpretive dance while I perform. I do sometimes joke that she is writing the whole poem. A lot of the more interesting language is hers. I am not sure what will happen if or when she says “stop writing about me.” I mostly take my cue from Bernadette Mayer who wrote beautifully about her kids when they were little. I think it worked for her because she was so respectful of her kids—of what they had to contribute to the world.

Q: Given the long months of note-taking for this work-in-progress, are you working on any other writing projects at the same time?

A: Not writing projects usually, no. I keep thinking of a Robert Duncan lecture where he says his vocation is poetry but he won’t let it interfere with his life. I feel that way—I want to spend time with my family. I also find it harder to prioritize poetry-writing now that it’s clear that the planet is in the midst of a massive extinction event. The ego-driven aspects of poetry feel pretty hopeless given the fact that there’s likely no generation to write forward toward. It’s a paradigm shift I think, recognizing the end of homo sapien and wondering what human culture even means.

Q: What does that mean in terms of your current work-in-progress? Does that make the process of collaboration and composition far more important than what you might end up with?

A: I guess I just don’t see the work as something to be left for future generations. So, I guess we’re here now and this happens to be what I do, so I’ll keep on doing. Definitely sounding it out in readings is interesting to me. That does feel collaborative, having it listened to.

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

A: James Joyce usually. I don’t read a lot of poetry, but I do go back to Robert Duncan. Mostly I am interested in history, and in the kinds of things that get shelved under “nature writing”—field guides, wilderness survival, and foraging handbooks.

TtD supplement #21 : seven questions for Lise Downe

Lise Downe grew up in London, Ontario. She studied art at the Beal Art Annex and was influenced by many of the artists who were active in London at the time – Greg Curnoe, Jack Chambers, Patterson Ewen, and many others. She painted for many years before turning her hand to poetry.

Her most recent book is This Way, published with BookThug in 2011. Previous publications are Disturbances of Progress (Coach House Books, 2002), The Soft Signature and A Velvet Increase of Curiosity – both with ECW Press (1997 and 1993). In addition to her writing, Lise is a jeweler and maker of small sculptures. She lives and works in Toronto.

Her poems “Current Events” and “The Sash of Time” appear in the fourth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Something of yours that has stuck with me for years sits at the opening of The Soft Signature (ECW Press, 1997): “All of these words have appeared elsewhere. Only their order has been changed to maintain their innocence.” It is such a small statement, but it captures something of the attention you give to the arrangement and rearrangement of words and phrases. What prompted you to include such at the opening of the collection?

A: Essentially I was noting that all of the words have been in use in the English language for a very long time. Each time we speak or write (and think (?!)) we use varying arrangements of words. The poems are other arrangements – they move outside typical patterns and associations. Perhaps, too, it is an introduction that might open up an understanding of the poems to those who might be confused by the writing, to see the language as malleable.

Q: In an interview posted at Open Book: Ontario (posted August 23, 2012) you described your fourth poetry collection, This Way (BookThug, 2011) as “a progression of previous work; a consideration of how we are confounded by seeming contradictions in life and a need to loosen habitual ways of thinking or approaching the world and language so that it is possible to experience it as something new.” One gets the impression that your entire body of work is an ongoing exploration of how to experience language as “something new.” Over the years, how have you managed the patience and curiosity to continue with such skill and deep attention? How does one continue to make it new?

A: I think the biggest challenge is to notice what has or might become an habitual inclination – and then to interrupt it. And those interruptions, ideally, foster something unexpected. Similarly, the process might involve a slant on something familiar that casts it in a new light.

It seems a fine line to balance the charged atmosphere of language and yet not have it feel leaden or overly precious. It is a bit of a juggling act.

Q: One could say that the beauty of what you describe is that it sounds remarkably simple, and yet, can be incredibly difficult. How would you describe your method of composition? Do you focus on the individual poem, or are you constantly working towards something book-length?

A: I start with an individual piece and over time see what develops. Frequently there will be a particular quality (of voice or structure, types of imagery/references) that I’ll want to expand on and dig deeper – to play with in a variety of combinations. Variations on a theme. These have comprised sections of books, but have never (to date) been book length.

Other poems ‘stand alone’ but have a thread of continuity that ties them to others I’m working on.

Q: The sequence “Arranged Tributaries” – originally produced as a chapbook by Tortoiseshell & Black in 1996 (coincidentally, my first interaction with your work, published soon before we read together in Toronto), and later incorporated into The Soft Signature – is an example of one of those expanded pieces, yet you predominantly appear to work in shorter self-contained pieces that group together. Is this leaning toward the shorter, self-contained lyric grouping over the extended series a difference of interest, purpose or attention?

A: A grouping develops when I want to work with permutations of a given piece. It may be quite ‘literal,’ for example, if it involves repeating the same number of lines in a section. Or it might be about sustaining a similar quality of pace or movement. So it begins with my seeing that there are numerous paths of possibility in a given arrangement. This ties into a fascination I have with working with multiples. It’s a process of composition that fascinates me, whether it be in writing or with the construction of physical objects – the experience of singularity within a seeming sameness.

Q: Tell me about the poems “Current Events” and “The Sash of Time.” Are they stand alone, or part of a larger structure?

A: These two poems will probably form part of a larger structure – I’ll see over time if they might comprise a section of a book. This seems the most likely, given the way my books have materialized to date.

My writing process over the last number of years is quite different from the first few years I was writing. Early on I had more time on a regular basis to engage in my own work, much less so now. This makes for a curious objectivity. It has been several months since I last did any writing, so I’ll find out (soon, I hope) when I get back into it if there is a renewed energy to carry on with some of the directions I’ve taken.

Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your work? What writers or writing can’t you help but return to?

A: Under a broad umbrella I’d include the meditations of Gertrude Stein and Michael Palmer, John Ashbery for his humour, abandon and total immersion, Elizabeth Bishop for her seeming simplicity and the particular ‘rightness’ to her phrasing and imagery. I’ve been recently rereading older books by Clark Coolidge – including At Egypt and The Crystal Text – but also his more recent 88 Sonnets. Outside of poetry I’ve always been interested in non-fiction. I’ve been dipping back into a large volume titled A Universal History of Numbers by Georges Ifrah and some of Guy Davenport’s essays in The Geography of the Imagination.