TtD supplement #28 : seven questions for nathan dueck

nathan dueck is the author of two poetry collections, king's(mère) (Turnstone Press, 2004) and he’ll (Pedlar Press, 2014), as well as the chapbook @BillMurray in Purgatorio (above/ground press, 2013).

His poem “Green Slime” appears in the fifth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poem “Green Slime.” In your email, you said it was a poem about you can’t do that on television, the young adult television show produced by CJOH-TV in Ottawa throughout Ottawa, infamous in part for introducing Alanis Morrissette, as well as the “green slime,” which has appeared regularly on Nickelodeon over the twenty-plus years since. Why did you decide to write one on an out-of-date kids show?

A: “Green Slime” is a poem from a project I’m working on right now. It’s a series of poems that draws on the pop culture that formed my lazy youth. I was an “indoorsy” child who read children’s books on the same couch that I watched cable TV. I.e., I’m writing poetry that combines childhood stories and shows. “Green Slime” is a poem about you can’t do that on television that I wrote in the form of Lewis Carroll’s “Haddock’s Eyes” from Through the Looking Glass. Because Carroll parodied Wordsworth with “Haddock’s Eyes,” I wrote a parodic poem about a kids’ show. As I was writing, though, I found that legit reference comedy was less fun to write than reverential homage.

Q: How much can you talk about the current project? You seem to work very much on projects that are book-length. Is working in the book as your unit of composition something you do deliberately, or something that evolves quite naturally? How, in fact, do you put a manuscript together?

A: My work-in-progress is tentatively titled “CRTC.” (I'm not sure that I’ll get away with that title.) I’m writing a series of poetic forms and modes about pop culture, but culture that isn’t really “popular” anymore. These are old-timey poems about cartoons, comic books, magazines, video games that have become the white noise of my mind. As I age out of the 18-35 demo, I’m becoming nostalgic for the late ‘80s / early ‘90s static – I can no longer ignore the culture that informed the lifestyle of this slovenly “indoorsman.”

You’re right to point out that I tend toward writing book-length projects. Previously, I’ve written with one eye on the book as a unit of composition, but I’m trying to stop. I’d like to think of “CRTC” as more of a “greatest hits” package, which means I’m focusing on each poem as part of a collection. Who knows, it may turn out to be a book that readers tirelessly flip through like channels during commercial breaks. 

Q: Why are you trying to stop?

A: “Stop” may not be the best word. Maybe . . . reconsider? The reason is, when I look at the book as a unit of composition, I get caught up in writing about particular characters in a specific setting. Reading, then, demands attention for the duration of the book to make sense of any part of the book. I’m interested in developing another sort of aesthetic with this project. I’m trying to write poems that stand on their own.

Q: Your book-length projects so far could each be considered to be response works, from the exploration of Prime Minister Mackenzie King of king's(mère) and the exploration of Mennonite language and culture of he’ll to what you discuss of the new work-in-progress. After two books over the space of a decade and your current work-in-progress, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: I’d like to say that I know where my work is headed, but I don’t. I also don’t know why I took a decade between books. I mean, I’m grateful to have published two books, but don't want another decade to pass before the third. I’m interested in your use of “response works” because the phrase relates to the way I try to parody other texts. I’d like to think that my understanding of irony as developed: where I have been caught up in subverting previous texts, I’m now catching on to juxtaposing texts.

Q: What is your attraction to composing texts using parody or satire?

A: I see parody (not satire,* exactly) as a way to acknowledge my texts as texts -- as language, as material, as footnotes of literature far greater than my own.

* These days, I can’t help but cringe while reading satire – I don’t feel bad about that expression, though, because I’m assuming satire is written through a sneer.

Q: I’m curious about your evolution into more traditionally formal exploration of “Green Slime.” Is this the difference, possibly, between your current work-in-progress and your previous works: the attempt to focus more on the individual poem?

A: Yep. I took the form of “Green Slime” as a challenge. Carroll dropped a gauntlet I had to run through – metrically, rhythmically, and tonally. We’re living in the age of avant garde, or post-avant, poetry that is based on constraint, so I base this poem on the constraints of another age. (By the way, is it possible to think of constraint-based lyrical poetry as experimental in 2015?)

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

A: Three books from the last year that just won’t stay shelved are Louis Cabri’s Posh Lust, Jeramy Dodds’ The Poetic Edda, and Rachel Zolf’s Janey’s Arcadia.

Touch the Donkey #1 reviewed in Broken Pencil #67

Touch the Donkey #1 is reviewed by Scott Bryson in Broken Pencil #67. He writes:

[…]

The aforementioned sonnets aside – they’re expertly crafted by Camille Martin – several lucid and honest prose entries stand out, in this collection. Across two verses, Hailey Higdon discusses how she has “come to an agreement” with her dog regarding its need to be walked and her reluctance to participate, as she suffers through anxiety (or perhaps agoraphobia). In “Distraction,” Norma Cole examines a variety of memories that hint at the power of silence and absence, and the creativity born from incomplete knowledge.

There’s a consistently bleak – yet oddly gratifying – atmosphere surrounding the majority of these works. Pattie McCarthy sums it up in a way that’s both enigmatic and pitiable, in one of several poems titled “wifthing” (which deal with the history of the wife): “the shape of my midlife crisis is daniel radcliffe.”

TtD supplement #27 : seven questions for Paige Taggart

Paige Taggart is from Northern California and currently resides in Brooklyn. She is the author of two full-length collections, Or Replica (Brooklyn Arts Press, Dec 2014) and Want for Lion (Trembling Pillow Press, March 2014) and 5 chapbooks, most recently I am Writing To You From Another Country; Translations of Henri Michaux (Greying Ghost Press). She has her own jewelry line (mactaggartjewelry.com) that specializes in blinging-out poets.

Her poem “when i dream of a lover a lover dreams of me too” appears in the fifth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poem “when i dream of a lover a lover dreams of me too.”

A: The poem attempts to create a transient state of intimacy, not so much personal intimacy directly, but more an intimacy bound to the poem that is carried over into the reader so that the reader is then, hopefully, bound in this way of intimacy too.... Like an infinite reach for the grander, like an echoing of a mathematical sequence. I was opened by music & made willing & vulnerable to write the poem; I was trying to detach from a body, to be an out-of-body experience.

Q: From what I’ve seen of your work, you seem to favour larger groupings of poems as opposed to stand-alone pieces. Is this part of a larger project of some sort, perhaps even a book-length work?

A: Yes, I very rarely write an individual poem that stands alone and not in the company of other various parts or paragraphs. This piece was written all in one sitting and it doesn’t feel like a part of a larger project quite yet. Maybe at some point it will be. But it will probably end up in the most recent work at hand, which is a manuscript made up of many different styles. I call it a mixtape, at this point, but we’ll see.

Q: I like the idea of a poetry manuscript-as-mixtape, which sounds different than the way you built your first two books. How were the first two manuscripts constructed, and what prompted the shift in construction for your current work-in-progress?

A: The work-in-progress is certainly a shift as both of my books were constructed/written with the whole in mind, specifically sections & styles. I worked in sequences and relied on length to fully flush out a concept or idea that I had shaking around in my skull. One example from Or Replica, the prose sections of the book were really concerned with place/location and how memory affects our most current psychological states. Now, it’s fun & flirty to write occasional poems, or poems that work to stand alone, partly because I don’t feel as compelled to put a book out any time soon, so there’s less pressure to think with regard to book form. So I’m being more myself in some ways, and just writing for art’s sake. The potential of the mix tape is that it contains more music than ever my writing has before.

Q: What is it that allows you to put aside the pressure to write “with regard to book form”? Was the pressure of wanting to publish pushing the ways in which you put together your first two collections?

A: Wanting to have a book out in the world made me think about form with more restriction. I have felt so all over the place, inconsistent. The language has always pulled me around, and I felt that if I wanted a book in the ways I’ve always seen books in the world, I’d need to do something different. So I sought control over the text in a way that incapacitated a certain sense of freedom. There are general restrictions for what is & isn’t a “book,” especially for publishing your first book of poetry—like you can’t just do what you want and expect other people to “get it.” After you’ve published several volumes of work, or once your dead, perhaps all the notes, and jumping around is regarded as savant material—and becomes intellectual property in a way it never would upon initially becoming a writer. This doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t have written my first two books, had I been more “free” – I am very grateful that I had wonderful publishers for the first two collections, and these books are fiercely me. But I do feel more attached to the process now that I’ve put aside the pressure to write “with regard to book form.”

Q: I’m not sure how far you are through your “post-book” process, but are you noticing any shifts in your work now that you’ve allowed yourself some freedom from the pressure to publish a book? Is there anything emerging in your poems that you might not have expected? Are there directions you can finally bring yourself to explore that you couldn’t before?

A: I notice the octopus tentacles of varying differences; I don’t really know what I’m writing exactly. A lot of this feels like just “writing” and less like trying to make poems—included is the flexibility to stretch into more an essayistic mode of writing and then I come back to poetry & kind of delve in-and-out of various modes of speech. I wrote a play a long time ago and I’m working on having a few friends act it out.  The performance is not super dramatic. It’s more a dialogue. I also wrote a recent piece that’s kind of a lyric essay that came to me in the form of a dream, and I woke up and wrote the dream down and allowed for various transformations to take place. This piece addresses the very act of writing, which I am deeply questioning. I like exploring that, and I also feel okay with being more political than I used to be.

And about eight years ago I made an attempt at writing a novel, it’s really bad, but I think about doing something with that piece, maybe putting it inside of a memoir type framework—like acknowledging that this happened—ha-ha—that the failure is beautiful! I don’t think I have a particularly interesting life that begs for a memoir, but it is something I think about. I am super interested in memory and the way it plays a role on my current psychological states, and I think a memoir would allow for a kind of vulnerability unmasking, and that maybe it’d help me get over a bunch of my “issues” but I don’t think the writing would necessarily need to be shared or be a book ever! 

Q: What role do you think memory would have in memoir that you aren’t able to explore through poetry?

A: I feel like memory in poetry is something I’m capable of dipping in & out of but I don’t want to occupy that plane for too long. Poetry is quicker & less about perfectly laying out a vision/landscape/place  & persists in that space, occupying all its senses, familiarities & just general formal description. It would be boring for a poem to linger in one place for too long. I like poetic jumping. I like using a memory as a taking off point & then venturing somewhere radically different to keep things in motion—movement & music are key for me in poetry & come way before meaning—looking for meaning means establishing a fixed point with which to attach a concept or idea, often declaring itself through metaphor etc. I want to mean a million things & embody much more space than a narrative allows for. I think if asked to write a memoir of myself it would slow me down. It would be to study specific occasions much more microscopically. 

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

A: I don’t return to any particular writing to reenergize my own work—I always think about other writers and elicit particular moments, phrases, or narratives in my head. I always come back to certain story lines that served as literary experiences for me like in Cesar Aria’s books. After having translated the work of Henri Michaux, I feel fueled by thinking about his work and how it can be read and experienced on so many levels. On a day-to-day basis I quote my boyfriend Sampson Starkweather’s poems in my head or aloud. I listen to music & podcasts to move me out of myself. I think about my friends’ poetry all the time. I don’t have a mentor or a certain fueling agent; it shifts constantly. Every time I read a good book it makes me want to write more. I just finished an excellent first book of poetry, Undercastle by Feliz Lucia Molina.

TtD supplement #26 : seven questions for ryan fitzpatrick

ryan fitzpatrick is a poet and critic living in Vancouver. With Jonathan Ball, he co-edited Why Poetry Sucks: An Anthology of Humorous Experimental Canadian Poetry (Insomniac, 2014). He is the author of Fortified Castles (Talonbooks, 2014) and Fake Math (Snare Books, 2007).

His poems “What History?” and “Kinder, Gentler” appear in the fifth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “What History?” and “Kinder, Gentler.”

A: Both of these poems are standalones written mostly using the styles and procedures of my first book Fake Math – the poems funnily live in a folder on my computer labelled “Faker Math” – meaning the poems are loose improvisations or riffs on something (or more likely a few things) I’d been researching on the internet, often using found language from my internet searches. I like writing these one-offs because they’re quick and don’t require me to compose according to a set of self-imposed style guidelines or constraints that I might work up for a larger project. The process allows for quicker composition – I can knock one off in about 15 minutes – which works because it allows me to try things that might not work or, better, that do work because they carry the germ of something bigger.

Q: What is it about the procedures of your first collection that still attracts you? And do you normally work against a series of constraints? And, if you do enough “one-offs” from the same set of procedures, don’t they actually become their own project (and therefore, no longer “one-offs”)?

A: I think this is exactly it. What I like is the way the looseness of the improvisation can lead into something firmer (but doesn’t necessarily). My second book, Fortified Castles, came directly out of a couple one offs where I began to feed I-statements into Google (“I am so frightened” and “I fell asleep last night” were the first couple, I think), working with the search results. I liked the kind of material that came out so I stuck with it, playing with the shape of the poems themselves as I went. Working into a project from the ground up means that I work from a series of compositional problems or questions – questions that don’t emerge without the experimentation of doing something that doesn’t fit in a bigger project.

As for the procedures around Fake Math (which is a loose version of Google sculpting, which is, I think, a variation or inversion of cut up), they’ve stuck with me because of their malleability and the way that they can push me into surprising textual spaces. That said, Google’s algorithms have gotten too good at finding what you actually want, which is a problem for someone not looking for anything specific. So, I’ve been wondering about the usefulness of the practice going forward.

Q: Would you consider your process pure flarf or simply incorporating flarf into your compositional process? Either way, the process of attempting to remove the author is an intriguing one. What is it about the procedure that attracts?

A: I view Flarf as a historical moment rather than an aesthetic style or process, though it carries forward in the practices of a number of writers who weren't directly involved in the original Flarf group, including myself. Flarf was (is?) a messy proposition, caught between conceptual and procedural practices while also deeply invested in improvisation. I'm not sure what a “pure” Flarf might look like, since it was already an “impure” practice, and, to be honest, it was this messiness that attracted (and still attracts) me to the procedures of that original group, at least as I understood them. What keeps some version of these procedures important to my work is a combination of their flexibility, their ability to push the work forward because of a (seemingly) endless pool of material to work with, and the way that, unlike a “pure” conceptualism that staves off transparent expression by making the author the idea-man at the beginning of the process, it turns composition into a game of improvisational editing, chipping away at the mess of the universe to make something messier.

Q: What is, or at least has been so far, your normal process of putting together a manuscript?

A: Do other writers have a standard process for putting together a manuscript? For me, in my handful of opportunities, the process has been different each time, but the aim shared by all of them was making sure that the poems cohered somehow into a larger picture. What that’s meant for me so far is taking a position between the careful editing and sequencing of seemingly disparate material and the conceiving of a pre-written plan, making sense of that position in a way that helps articulate the specific questions and issues at play in a given project. I’ve found that, increasingly, I’ve moved from organizing my scattered material (what I did in Fake Math) to starting with a strong idea for a book-length project (my next project, Field Guide, which is a guide for spotting extinct species), a move that I suspect has to do with both my interest in the long poem as a genre and the way it seems that the book-length project has become the dominant form for contemporary poetry of all stripes in Canada (a move that I suspect has to do with a perceived marketability of projects with strong conceptual and narrative frames). But of course, who knows? I prefer to work through the what, how, and why of a project simulataneously, letting form, content, procedure, and concept affect and infect one another.

Q: After two trade collections, multiple chapbooks and your current work-in-progress over the space of nearly a decade, how do you feel your work has developed?

A: This is a huge question, rob, and I’m skeptical about linear narratives about the development of any artist’s work, but I do think that over the course of the last decade I’ve slowed down and gotten more deliberate in the way I put things together. I’m writing much less than I was in my twenties and things tend to fall into larger projects and sequences that need lengthy periods of editing to make them work.

In the spirit of this, I just wrote and deleted the same sentence three times. The sentence said something about craft and politics and the defended distance between them in the loudest and most reactionary corners of contemporary poetry criticism that sometimes act as if craft and politics aren’t deeply connected (hint: they are). What I wanted to say is that my relationship to these poles (craft, politics) has shifted, but I stopped myself because I’m not sure how. I’ve gotten relationally messier and formally cleaner. I’ve moved to longer forms with more iteration that attempt to retain an unpredictability. I’ve ached to find ways to cut to the chase politically while also smuggling that politics into a seemingly tame package. I’ve moved to uglier content. I’ve gotten more laughs by being more sincere. I’ve tried to undercut expectations through long form set-ups and disruptions. And mostly, I’ve increasingly tried to give myself the time and space to work out increasingly complex sets of ideas that emerge from simple problems and hunches.

Q: You started publishing during your time in Calgary, when you were involved in a vibrant community of writers, publishers and critics that surrounded the University of Calgary and filling Station magazine. Now that you’ve been in Vancouver for a while, are you noticing any difference in how you approach writing, publishing or a literary community? Is there even a difference? And, might the long-dormant MODL Press ever return?

A: Moving from one city to another is tough and I’ve only just started to get my legs in the literary community in Vancouver after three years, which, for a number of reasons both political and historical, is weirdly segmented in ways that I won’t go into here. My community here leans toward the academic, mostly because I’m tied to SFU for school and work, so I find myself hanging out with poets who are also attached to the institution – not only established poets like Jeff Derksen, Steve Collis, and Clint Burnham, but also my grad student poetry peers like Amy De’Ath, Natalie Knight, Joseph Giardini, Deanna Fong, and Chris Ewart (among a bunch of others), which doesn’t include the wider intellectual community I’m involved in. Outside the institution, my field of affinities is more scattered (though it includes a bunch of great, but very different folks like Daniel Zomparelli and Danielle LaFrance), since I don’t necessarily have time to commit to an ongoing organization, publication, or series.

As a result, my collaborations or curations that in Calgary might have been more explicitly literary are far more academic now. I’ve written or co-written a number of papers for academic journals, conferences, and community publications. I’ve collaborated on the organization of last 3 SFU grad conferences with a bunch of fantastic folks. Deanna Fong, Janey Dodd, and myself are updating the Fred Wah Digital Archive that Susan Rudy started at the University of Calgary. Even the humour anthology I did with Jonathan Ball has an academic edge. I find myself moving toward that Poet-Critic hybrid that maybe used to be more common or more recognized. Something like that.

As for MODL, the joke always was that the reason the name is spelled wrong is because it was never a model small press. I’m not ready to give it up quite yet, though I’m on a permanent enough hiatus that I put an end date on my cv. I’m hoping to get my shit together enough to finally finish the Meghan Doraty chapbook I promised to put out a couple years back (I’m sorry, Meghan!). That said, before I left Calgary, I threatened to sell off the press and its assets (a paper cutter and long-arm stapler) to anyone who might be interested for $50 and a flat of beer – if anyone’s interested, they know where to find me.

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

A: No one specific, I try to read a lot and from different sources – my reading habits are largely a matter of public record on Twitter. I gravitate mostly toward poetry, theory, blog posts, and reviews (but not book reviews). But, in the last few years, the most important text for me creatively has proven to be internet comments, the uglier the better. Don't let anyone suggest that you shouldn’t read them, even though, really, you shouldn’t.

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.