Touch the Donkey #5 reviewed in Broken Pencil #68

Touch the Donkey #5 is reviewed by Lyndsay Kirkham in Broken Pencil #68 (the first issue was reviewed in the issue prior). She writes:

Touch the Donkey’s fifth incarnation is a frenetic offering of eight poetic voices, dedicating white space to both emerging and established authors. Purposefully lacking in any cohesive themes, each poet impresses upon the reader a distinctively unique narrative, allowing one to dip in and out of this chapbook’s pages.

    With an unexpected hat tip to Alanis Morrisette’s time on the CanCon television classic, You Can’t Do That On Television and a painfully forced rhyming scheme, pieces like “Green Slime” stand in direct contrast to the philosophical specimen that is Elizabeth Robinson’s “Simplified Holy Passage.” It is in this tug between surreal humour and the profound that Touch the Donkey 5 leaves its mark on the reader, reminding us of the diverse complexity of a life lived.

    One could easily make use of this collection in a self-directed Introduction to Poetry course. A ragbag of poetic forms from found poetry, narrative and humour to free verse and experimental poems are showcased in the two dozen pages edited by rob mclennan.

    Perhaps the most noteworthy piece – one that has repeatedly pulled me back in – is ryan fizpatrick’s “What History?” After a seeming machine-powered rhythm, and a clear attention to sound throughout the entire poem, the final stanza of “Any glorious goal only mined iconography/pooling forward argument. You’re okay/as long as I assimilate my own battles.” exhibits fitzpatrick’s adroitness with language, meaning and enjambments. It’s rare that I finish a poem and immediately search for more of the author’s work, but the selection in Touch the Donkey left me wanting more of fitzpatrick.

    The punctuation-free stanzas of Rob Manery in “More and more” exemplifies the tight, concise and eloquent poetry that is currently elevating contemporary poetry. After “bringing together your most existential moments since 1950,” which is both thematically sluggish and lacking in readability, one’s imagination is employed most eagerly by the found poetry laid out by Christine McNair. Using news clippings to play with the notions of transcription, appropriation and journalism, these digestible chunks of text artfully paint a geography of Atlantic Canada during the 1800s.

    Touch the Donkey 5 is mostly a step of continued growth for the magazine; although one detects the obvious commitment to experimental and eccentric pieces, there is a new awareness in Touch the Donkey 5 of offering up a collection that can feed a wider audience hungry for new poetry.

TtD supplement #31 : seven questions for Lola Lemire Tostevin

Lola Lemire Tostevin has published eight collections of poetry. Her latest, Singed Wings, appeared in 2013 with Talonbooks. She has also published three novels and a collection of literary essays. She is presently putting the finishing touches to a second collection of essays, and working on short stories. Several of her books have been translated into French and Italian. She taught Creative Writing at York University for several years and served as Writer-in-Residence at the University of Western Ontario. 

Her poem “The Poem” appears in the sixth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “The Poem.”

A:  Since you are a poet, I assume you are not expecting an interpretation. I will, however, admit that the seed for this poem was sowed many years ago when I first read that Rilke had not attended his daughter’s wedding, preferring to stay home to write. I also read of another poet who stayed away from his wife’s funeral for the same reason, to write.  This baffled me since I couldn’t imagine making that choice. I can, however, better understand now, in facing a loved one’s death or the indirect loss of a child through marriage, how language can step in and present itself as an alternative presence. Most writers nowadays see language as mere representation, a stand-in, for the thing written, but for Heidegger language was the very essence of being. It was only in language that truth and being could occur and neither could happen outside language. In either case, whether the poem is a mere representation or truth itself, it incarnates an active presence in the face of loss. Perhaps some poets need that presence to get them through certain events. 

Q: What does this mean in terms of your own writing practice? Do you see poetry, or even writing generally, as a tool for helping process and articulate what otherwise could not? Is it simply about having writing as an alternate presence? And we all know that utilizing writing for such a process doesn’t necessarily facilitate great work (although it certainly can); how do you navigate between working to process something and working to articulate something that resonate with a potential reader?

A: I’m not aware of a particular “writing practice,” in my own writing, nor do I see the creative act as a tool for process which implies a series of systematic operations toward some definitive result. On the other hand, when I look back at almost forty years of writing I am aware how my work has developed. I certainly don’t mean to imply that creativity is “simply about having writing as an alternative presence” as you say. Creativity is never a “simple” thing. I’m not a Freud fan, but even he, who analyzed everything, admitted that creativity is a mysterious gift which exceeds the powers of analysis. What he touched upon, however, and resisted, was the passage of the “fundament” into form. The creative act inevitably gives form. Does poetry articulate what otherwise can’t be articulated, as you say? I think it’s a matter of different artists giving form differently and some forms are more creative, more pertinent, interesting and innovative than others. Each work creates a presence that wasn’t there before the creative act. Will it resonate with all potential readers or viewers? Of course not. That’s not what the creative act is about. As we know, it sometimes takes years, generations, for an artist’s work to resonate, if ever. But even if it never does, it doesn’t negate the creative act, it doesn’t mean that it wasn’t valid. As to my own poetry, I think I try to maintain a relationship between language as representation and language as its own presence. Being aware of language’s presence, its beauty, history and wisdom, not only hones the reality of language, it forms and hones what it seeks to represent.

Q: Your poetry appears to be very much constructed in the book as unit of composition, constructed as a single suite or grouping of suites. What are you working on currently, and how does “The Poem” fit into such, if at all? Or is it too early to tell? I suppose the real question I’m dancing around: how do you put a poetry manuscript together?

A: Yes, a few critics have referred to my poetry as “long poems.” My writing seems to revolve around what is most dominant in my life at the time of writing.  My early books were concerned with the language I was writing in, English, when I am, by birth, French-speaking. I was also rethinking then my roles as woman, wife and mother. With those first mss I wasn’t aware that the poems in each book were so interconnected, so focused on a particular theme, until I spread them on my dining room table to determine their sequence in book form and discovered that I had been treating, more or less the same subject throughout each book.  Perhaps manuscripts put themselves together?  With my latest poetry book, Singed Wings, the book took on a slant of its own from the beginning.  It revolves around the creative act as the creator faces aging and other so-called “impediments” and challenges. 

I’m not working on a poetry book at the moment. I’m trying to finish a book of essays which keeps getting interrupted by requests for poems. For which I am grateful mind you, but I do have to finish that damn book of essays.  It also deals with the importance of creativity, original thinking in literature, visual art or films which are all extensions of our social structures. Or they should be.

Q: It sounds as though your process of putting a manuscript together is rather intuitive. Over the years, who have your models been when constructing a book? And, with eight collections of poetry, going back to Color of Her Speech (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1982), how do you feel your process has changed? Over the past thirty-odd years, how do you feel your work has developed?

A: Is it intuition or simply a sequential order, often the order in which the poems were written? Could be both I suppose. As for models, I never try to model my writing after anyone else’s although I might have done so by osmosis. When The New Long Poem Anthology edited by Sharon Thesen came out in 1991, I was very excited to see so many of my favourite poets gathered in one collection: Blaser, Bowering, Kiyooka, Marlatt, Nichol, Ondaatje, Kroetsch, Wah, Webb, etc... I had been reading these writers and their long poems in the seventies and throughout the eighties. Most of them didn’t use titles for their long poems which made perfect sense to me. I feel the same way about titles of poems as I do about titles of paintings. When I go to an exhibition I seldom look at titles on those little cards beside the works of art.  Titles impose themselves as too representational or referential and prevent me from seeing with new eyes. The work of art’s full presence is then robbed by its own representation or is confined by its designation which is contrary to what a creative work should project. I prefer to discover the sense of a painting through the act of seeing, or apprehending the language of a poem before being told how to read it.

How do I feel my “process” has changed over the last thirty-plus years? There’s that “process” word again. In fact, in the poets’ statements at the end of The New Long Poem Anthology, I use the word “process” several times. I must have believed in this word then. Now, as the circumstances of my life change, I think of writing mainly as exploration with no end in sight—exploration of different genres, different forms and themes, but mostly to give my life, the “fundament,” form; all the while knowing too well the unrepresentable force buried deeply within it. We’re all a little unstable, we writers, aren’t we? But it’s an instability I wouldn’t, or couldn’t, give up for anything.

Q: You reference some of the poems you’ve composed around various works of visual art; how did you first begin writing pieces responding to artworks? Phyllis Webb once said that the best response to a poem is another poem, but what is it about works of art that compel you to respond in the form of poetry, as opposed to, say, an essay or a review, or even another artwork?

A: Well, I’ve also written essays and reviews on various artworks, not only poems. I gathered some of these in my first collection of essays, Subject to Criticism, and in my upcoming collection, At the Risk of Sounding. Regarding Webb’s comment, I would extend it to say that the best response to creativity is creativity, regardless of the genre or form. What I was responding to in my poetry book, Singed Wings, was the creativity of other women who continued to create against all odds, except perhaps for Camille Claudel. She couldn’t overcome the adversity she faced as a woman sculptor at a time when only men were recognized as authentic sculptors with authentic themes. But the other women in that collection were creating into their eighties and nineties or, as in the case of Frieda Kahlo, under incredible physical challenges. I respond to different forms as long as they are genuinely creative—writing, visual art and music—for example, Billy Holiday’s singing, or Pina Bausch’s choreography. I’ve just written an essay on several film makers, including Robert Lepage, who think outside the blockbuster or romantic comedy boxes. I am fascinated by Lepage’s ability to adopt and adapt various forms and transform them into spectacle, spectacular works of art. I have always admired people who could step out of conventional thinking and devote their lives to their art.         

Q: Given the fact that you’ve composed both essays and poems as responses to artwork and other creative works, what decides on the particular form you take to respond? How do you know the response to any given work works best in the form of, say, the poem, over utilizing the form of the essay? What does the form of one allow, or even hinder, that the other might not?

A: The writing of an essay requires a completely different mindset from writing a poem. I don’t think they even originate from the same area of the brain. Perhaps it’s a left-brain, right-brain thing.  Generally, the essay is analytical of someone else’s work and as original as it wants to be it is still organized according to certain rules and guidelines. It should be coherent and make sense in an academic way. Poetry, on the other hand, is sense itself.  It is a “versing” that comes from “reversing” rules and even coherence. When I write an essay I focus on meaning and interpretation as it relates to someone else’s work. When I write a poem that draws access from someone else’s art, I am responding to how the particular work touches me through its many senses. The poem becomes more about how I relate to the work, than about the work itself. “Poetry” means “the first making,” an original act that draws access from something/someone else. The essay has to know what it wants to say, whereas the poem is always more than what it meant to say.

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

A: Interviewers always ask this and I never quite know how to respond. There are so many writers or art forms from which I feel energized. It could be a painting, a poem, a sentence in a novel or an essay which triggers a thought or a “feeling” and sets me writing. Mostly I feel energized by innovative writing; especially work that draws from the past and is recontextualized into new forms and ideas. I have sitting by my desk a pile of books from Bookthug and I love the way many of its writers build on works from the past.  There’s a sense that almost every book from that press builds on memory, not only memories of one’s own past, but memory of earlier writing on which to build. Christine McNair’s book, Conflict, for example, remixes poems such as “Do not go gently into that good night...” or Coleridge, or bpNichol, or Kroetsch... I love that kind of remix, as suggested in her “Time Machine” poem, as if static was surrounding the writer, grasped and recontextualized in the present act of writing; a continuum of traces that extends into the future. This is what Robert Lepage does throughout his work be it stage or film. He borrows from Cocteau, Hamlet, da Vinci, Miles Davis, Japanese theatre, etc... remixes in order to extract his own vision. If I had to choose the work of one person to which I return—which I wouldn’t dream of doing since it leaves out too many—it would have to be Robert Lepage...

Touch the Donkey : sixth issue,

The sixth issue is now available, with new poems by Lola Lemire Tostevin, D.G. Jones, Aaron Tucker, Deborah Poe, Jason Christie, Jeffrey Jullich, Jennifer Kronovet, Kayla Czaga and Jordan Abel.




Seven dollars (includes shipping). Tonight, we'll answer some of your questions.

TtD supplement #30 : seven questions for Christine McNair

Christine McNair’s first collection of poems Conflict was published by BookThug in 2012. The manuscript, and then subsequent book was shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, the Archibald Lampman Poetry Award, the Ottawa Book Awards, and the Re/Lit award. Her poetry chapbook Pleasantries and Other Misdemeanours (Apt9, 2013) was shortlisted for the bpNichol chapbook award. Her chapbook notes from a cartywheel was published by Angel House Press in 2011. She works as a book doctor in Ottawa.

Her poem “The language of the text is the original and as transcribed.” appears in the fifth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poem “The language of the text is the original and as transcribed.”

A: The poem developed diagonally out of some genealogical work that I was doing in online archives. I like finding the weak cracks in provincial genealogical and newspaper databases to see what leaks out. In this instance, I was searching out deliberately surnames of relatives in the area in which they lived. So most, if not all, of the stories here relate somehow to persons to which I am related on my father’s side. Specifically, the fragments come from the Daniel F. Johnson database of the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick. You can read more about his transcriptions here: http://archives.gnb.ca/Search/NewspaperVitalStats/Default.aspx?culture=en-CA. In part, the lure of working with this material was that these notices were transcribed by one individual. Working in a system of stories that is almost arcanely scribal. Passing along the local news and genealogical detritus to the paper of the day to an archives to a man who transcribes it to the online system where it is searchable to me. The refrain is tagged onto every entry as a warning for human flaw. There is something so beautiful and hopeless about these little news bites. They sat in my notes for quite some time before I tried to gather them into the poem.

Q: Given that the information is, as you suggest, predominantly attached to a variety of paternal family members, how does that impact upon your relationship to the finished poem? Is the poem a way in which to enter or absorb potentially familial data?

A: It’s more like listening on the other side of the wall. Or playing a game of telephone. The story distorted by the string of the medium. The particular details about which I know nothing but would have been intimately awful or beautiful. How I’m connected to some of these stories by blood but the stories themselves have been erased from memory except in these excisions. How the individual moments of our life – birth, death, tragedy – are reduced down into simple little paragraphs. How those things are flatly or coyly talked about.

Q: I know that archival work is an aspect of your day-job as a book conservator, on top of your interest in genealogical research, but I’m less aware of how you explore archival research for the sake of your poetry. Is this an ongoing engagement, or something that occurs very occasionally? How does the archive impact your writing?

A: I use it as raw fodder. I’m concerned with its inherent virtue and vice. I suppose I’m quite conscious of the limitations of the archive. Its extreme importance and yet how it can only capture limited aspects of a thing. That the totality of preservation is impossible. All the factors within the material (cultural, societal, individual, physical) which can define its continued existence. I spent a lot of time during my studies reading about the conservation of artefacts lost through attrition or war or indifference. The language of conservation and the archival blurs into my work in part because to me it’s not an alien vocabulary.

Q: How does this poem fit into what you’ve been working on since the appearance of Conflict?

A: I’m not sure. It’s part of a second manuscript and it relates to the pathways I’ve been following relating to blood and memory in the blood/body (or lack thereof). The impermanence and generational utter amnesia.

Q: I know the process of putting together your first collection was very different from how you put together your second collection. Is this a matter of simply the difference between projects, or do you feel that your compositional process has shifted since the publication of Conflict?

A: I don’t know what my process is yet. I know that Conflict was written en masse, quickly, with fervour. Charm was slower, pick-a-bric, made up of different elements in alliance. I think my time is more scattered now than when I wrote my first manuscript. I had the luxury of time and solitude. I wrote the majority of Conflict when I lived alone, was on EI, and had a luxury of time to think. I was broke but I had lots of time to be alone. Now I work full-time, work 10-20 hours per week on a small press, am married, have a small child to share care of and live in a house that seems to always need need need. My (now nostalgically beautiful) small apartment is a dream state. I think Charm is a reflection of trying to work out my edges in the midst of that kind of overwhelmed state. I’m overwhelmed. With excess both good and bad. 

Q: When you say “work out my edges,” are you suggesting that your poems (and compositional methods) tend to pattern the clutter of your attention? If you are feeling scattered, are your poems scattered, or are they attempts to reign the chaos in, and comprehend a clear path?

A: No, that’s not what I mean. I mean more substantively, finding out where I begin and end. Where the edges of what/who I am is in relation to the things I love, do, participate in, exacerbate, believe. Self-definition. Contemplatively standard.

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

A: Random and omnivorous gulps of my bookshelf. A fat and heavy pile to bring to a restaurant where I can drink bad coffee and read. Often bring some of these in the mix: Paul Celan, Threadsuns (translation by Pierre Joris). Elisabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Nathanaël, The Sorrow and the Fast of It. Elizabeth Bishop, Poems. Other things I can’t think of because the question empties everything out of my head.

Touch the Donkey : near-summer sale,

Until the end of June, purchase six issues for the price of five! Either pick up the first six issues of Touch the Donkey for $30, or, for the same price, name your starting issue, and call it a subscription! We're already working on the first few issues of 2016. There's plenty more to come...

Touch the Donkey #1 gets a shout-out from Rusty Priske

Rusty Priske was good enough to give Touch the Donkey #1 a shout-out today over at his blog, giving a highlight to the work of first issue contributor Hailey Higdon. Thanks much! Of course, every issue is still very much available.

TtD supplement #29 : seven questions for Elizabeth Robinson

Elizabeth Robinson’s most recent books are Three Novels (Omnidawn), Counterpart (Ahsahta), Blue Heron (Center for Literary Publishing), and On Ghosts (Solid Objects). On Ghosts was a finalist for the 2013 Los Angeles Times Book Award. Robinson is currently working with the homeless of Boulder, Colorado, and co-editing Instance Press and the literary periodical pallaksch.pallaksch.

The opening sections of the sequence “Simplified Holy Passage” appear in the fifth issue of Touch the Donkey and are forthcoming this month as a chapbook through above/ground press.

Q: Tell me about the poem “Simplified Holy Passage.”

A: I was thinking about your question, about where the poem sequence “Simplified Holy Progress” came from while I was walking my dog around the lake today. It seemed as though the mundane act of walking with the dog was pertinent. The poem emerged from conversation with my dear friend (and wonderful, oh wonderful poet) Jack Collom. We were having breakfast together and he was telling me about his daily calisthenics, the routine of which he then described as “simplified holy progress.” I think I was taken with the idea of a pilgrimage as embedded in a very routinized activity, and I took the phrase home with me.

I was also thinking of the way Jack describes his poems as “shaggy.” He doesn’t tidy them up, they have loose threads that trail off, and gesture in directions that exceed what any given poem does. I tend to be a compulsive tidier. I cut and edit out. So I wanted to adopt the idea of simplified holy progress as being a practice that welcomed in the quotidian, could be kind of conversational, and could distract itself from any given direction while still imagining some idea of the whole. To state the obvious, anything that works in this sequence is tribute to Jack. I admit that I am nervous about this writing, it’s changes of direction, its willingness to risk incoherence. But inasmuch as it became a kind of daily calisthenic that let me stretch my muscles, that’s okay.

Process: moving through my daily life, I tried to add a bit every day to see what would accrete, and I let my personal concerns and travels enter into the poem. So this poem is also a tribute to another poet, Beth Murray, with whom I was corresponding during her final months as she navigated cancer and redefined healing—again, (re)imagining some idea of whole.

Maybe I realize as I write this, that the rhythm running underneath this shaggy, distractible poem is a sense of being accompanied by generous friends and fellow writers like Jack and Beth, who give all permission for exploration.

You, rm, included in that accompaniment.

Q: How does the structure of this particular series of explorations and accumulations differ from other pieces you’ve written? I’m thinking, even, of the series of poems composed utilizing words and phrases gifted from friends. Are all your poems constructed from slow accretion?

A: I was writing, as I said, to/from my friend Jack Collom, and he writes with a tremendous sense of play, but also, in my view, intimacy. Anything is welcome into the poem. And, as I said, my writing tends to be (or so I think) clean and sometimes even minimalistic. Over the past couple of years, I’ve played a lot with keeping a great deal of open space on the page so that the poem can speak in different ways.

I’m actually rather uneasy about these poems because they aren’t tidy at all and bring in personal (as in biographical) information. I just let the associations swerve and I tried to write daily and keep some kind of thread continuous. I am not at all sure that they are successful. I did not go back and read the work in order to respond to your question, and, well, there’s been quite a lapse anyway from my last response to one of your questions. I’m a little bit afraid that if I went back and re-read, I’d go into a paring-down frenzy, but I don’t think that would be true to my original intention and my desire to honor Jack in the experiment of writing the poem.

Q: I’m curious about this idea of deliberate discomfort, attempting to keep the poem more open, more “shaggy.” Was this a one-off experiment with a deliberate looseness, or is this something you might see creeping into your future writing?

A: Well, I do strive not to be too consistent in what I do as a writer. And that’s what friends are for, right? To tell us that we are repeating ourselves, or repeating our gestures. But I really don’t think I will be cultivating shagginess in my work overall. It just makes me too uneasy. 

Lately, I’ve been responding to my work and workplace—I’m working with homeless people at a day shelter. And I am surprised to find how narrative the things I’m writing. I think that might be because I am in a position where people just stand and talk to me, and I hear many, many stories every day. I guess I am currently interested in the intensity and proliferation of story and how stories can collage themselves onto each other (though that might be a result of my deficiency at absorbing everything that’s coming at me). And then the stories also start to sort themselves into patterns. It is definitely untidy, but rather than trying to foster the untidiness, or even simply accept it, I’m just holding onto the current for dear life and seeing where it takes me.  The very possibility of living in a world that is primarily oriented toward narrative (as these client stories are, and insistently!) is discomfiting to me, because I tend to encounter the world as a place in which patterns arrange themselves and create meanings.  I don’t think I’m really that narrative in sensibility, so this is another mode of discomfort.

Q: How are your books usually constructed? As a sequence of deliberately-constructed projects, or do the projects emerge through the process? Simply: that your work appears to focus compositionally on the book-length project, as opposed to the individual poem. How do you see your work unfold?

A: My work unfolds variously, and most projects develop over several years. The question might be: what is the difference between preoccupation and curiosity?

I find myself thinking a certain way, or about certain things, and then kind of circle around that process.  Sometimes, the bigger idea of what becomes a book emerges slowly over time, and I discover it as I go along. That might be a slow-growing preoccupation. Other times, it’s more clear from the start that there’s a theme or a driving inquiry that directs what I am working on. I wonder if that would be a more overtly curiosity-driven kind of project. 

I do admit to being fascinated by what constitutes a book, and I read others’ poetry books to see how they deal with creating a whole. I think that a good book of poetry sets up a variety of tensions, and that these should manifest in the book in ways that, at least a little bit, startle the reader. The poems need to talk to each other, and find the right balance of concord and disagreement in the conversation they make—that applies to both content and form.

I guess because I am so interested in the conversations that emerge between poems, I am less and less engaged with what single poems do, unless perhaps serial poems or sequences.  For instance, I love the idea of including in a collection or sequence a fragment that would just be nothing on its own, but which, when placed properly, can galvanize the work around it.  I am also interested in manuscripts as being constituted of rhythms, maybe rhythms of attention, and how you might create a rhythm of sustained attention and then break it and juxtapose it against something that moves in a more staccato way.

I could go on about this forever.

Q: This makes curious about your compositional models. What writers, and even, what specific works, have influenced the ways in which you put together a manuscript or grouping of poems?

A: I know you probably despair of me because it takes me so long to respond to your questions. Often these days my job is so exhausting that I just need the weekends to do tranquil things like laundry. Re: compositional models, I would say that there are a few poets whose mark on me is indelible. One of the early, cherished influences would be Creeley. The way he can use spareness to create poems that are so resonant, so charged, continues to be very powerful for me. Listening to Creeley speak his poems in collaboration with Steve Swallow (jazz bassist) helped clarify for me what I already recognized intuitively—the idiosyncratic rhythms of individual voice within language, and how these have meaning. That is, I think we tend to cite a poem as “expressive” (or a voice or an artwork) as though to be expressive were in excess of the central value and communication of that artwork. But Creeley’s poems are expressive so intrinsically and on so many dimensions.

This kind of attuned ear for cadence-as-meaning is so alive in Niedecker’s work too.  I reread poems by Creeley, Niedecker, Spicer, and Beverly Dahlen every year. I reread a good deal of Barbara Guest’s work too, but especially her essays which satisfy the way poetry does (as do Robin Blaser’s essays). I think that Niedecker, Spicer, and Dahlen are all masters at pacing and sequencing. That is, they know how to create tension, suspense, and movement with the way they use the page and make pages speak to each other. I am reading and rereading Dahlen’s “The Rose,” published as one of the textile series chapbooks by Little Red Leaves.

As for making a manuscript, I study that in every book I read. I was lucky to work as a graduate student with Keith Waldrop who is pretty much a genius in this way. He does some kind of sleight of hand and poems that were just okay are suddenly singing in unison. So I read his books and Rosmarie’s books with a lot of attention. I like books that operate in a way that I wouldn’t necessarily expect or wouldn’t assemble myself. Paul Vangelisti’s book Two puts together two very different (formally and tonally) sequences. I don’t think most poets would have been nervy enough to place together poems that function in such different ways, but the combination is ultimately bracing, startling in a good way. Kim Lyon’s The Practice of Residue is composed mainly of the long (and amazing) title poem. If it were my manuscript, I would have let that long poem stand alone. She decided to include some shorter poems after the long one. In the end, I like the way this compels the reader to read backward from these shorter poems to what came before them. She uses the shorter poems to upend the momentum of the long one, but also to draw out some of the ideas the come earlier in the book. It surprised me and I think it works.

Q: With more than half a dozen poetry collections back a decade or more, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed, or working towards?

A: For me, the writer’s nightmare is that the writing will run out, that there won’t be anything left to explore, anything in which I can get entirely engrossed.  But over time, I think I have gained confidence that writing is a lifelong process for me.  I don’t think of process as being linear and necessarily developmental, as in building into something ever larger, ever better.  I think of it more as veins and capillaries—either you are sending blood into new tissue, or you are just noticing that those smaller tributaries are getting nourished. You start paying more attention to different parts of the organism, parts of the process and their motility.

I just don’t know if writers get better, but the writers whose work I most value always stay interesting. That’s my aspiration: to stay productively restless.  But to be a little more specific, the things that are interesting me right now are multiple.  I’m really interested in the page as an expressive field—how blank space can speak and create rhythm.  I am really enjoying writing essays. If I have an essay project, I will think about it eagerly during the week and then spend time on it over the weekend.  I feel as though my mind is a different shape when I’m writing an essay.  And I hesitate to jump on the bandwagon, but all the play with hybrid genre writing intrigues me and is resulting in such inventive and alive work, so I am playing with some of that too.  Lately, because I am working at a day shelter for homeless people, I hear (as aforementioned) stories all day, and the narrative shape of one story and then many stories colliding is fascinating.  So this is a way of thinking anew about narrative and what its value is and where it is more than an overdetermined form (beginning/middle/end)—how can narrative be an expression of humanity that elicits and instills value?

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

A: In the past couple of years, I’ve written many, many blurbs for books. Maybe too many, but then again, I think it’s an honor to be asked. This is writing that consistently reenergizes my writing. This may have to do with the way I am interacting with the book—reading and writing about it, but it is also a function of feeling involved with new writing, with the writing that is happening right now. These new books help me to feel like a participating member of a writing community.

Authors that I’ve returned to frequently in the past few years: Beverly Dahlen, Rae Armantrout, Robert Kelly, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Day, Brenda Coultas, Kimberly Lyons, Mary Butts, Jean Valentine, Fanny Howe, Cole Swensen, Eileen Myles, C.S. Giscombe, Myung Kim, Evelyn Reilly, Claudia LaRocco, Jack Collom, Norma Cole, Laura Moriarty. Recently engaged with new books by Laura Sims, Susanne Dyckman, Jean Donnelly, Lisa Lubasch. I can’t really enumerate all that’s good out there.

Then I have a dedicated couple of shelves—sort of the if-the-house-catches-fire-and-I-need-to-grab-stuff-fast—that includes Creeley, H.D., Niedecker, Blaser, Spicer, Guest.