Seven dollars (includes shipping). I'm here to provide the facts about sex in a frank and straightforward manner.
Friday, April 15, 2016
Touch the Donkey : ninth issue,
Seven dollars (includes shipping). I'm here to provide the facts about sex in a frank and straightforward manner.
Monday, April 4, 2016
TtD supplement #50 : seven questions for a rawlings
Her poem “Finish” appears in the eighth issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about the poem “Finish.”
A: “Finish” is a visual poem from my serial work Dump. The series focuses on language discarded at rural Canadian landfill sites. “Finish” was sourced at Kennisis Lake Landfill Site, July 2014.
Q: How does this current project relate to your other works, whether for sound or stage?
A: Via mutual ecopoethics core.
Q: Ecopoethics is something that runs through the length and breadth of your work, and is one of the connecting factors in o w n (CUE, 2014), the three-poet collection that includes work by you, Heather Hermant and Chris Turnbull. How did the collection come about, and what has been the response?
A: Chris is a committed ambulator, and over the years she’s walked alongside many incredible souls. Through a discussion with CUE Books publisher reg johanson, Chris devised the idea to pair three shorter manuscripts into a single collection – with each manuscript by a different author. She approached Heather and me to see what unpublished work might be appropriate, and we puzzled o w n into being. We’ve been fortunate to receive thoughtful reflection from Sarah Dowling, whose afterword is published in the collection. Sonnet L’Abbé and Jonathan Skinner likewise wrote the collection into their springs. I’d love to see this format taken up elsewhere, where longer texts by separate makers commingle.
Q: I’ve long noticed that your text work has been deeply engaged with sound and visual, and often both, in very unusual ways, really blurring the boundaries between text, sound poetry and visual poetry. What is it about the blend that appeals?
A: Most languages are fundamentally visual and/or sonic (with some tactile). My practice aims for sensorial emphasis to resituate the inherited and familiar (language) as simultaneously rooted in the ancestral/etymological and estranged from a dominant semantic.
Q: With the publication of a small number of poetry chapbooks and a trade collection, and a variety of theatre and libretti works over the past decade-plus, alongside, as you’ve described, “community, collaborative, performative, and/or digital efforts in Canadian, Icelandic, Belgian, French, and Australian locales,” how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work heading?
A: Past: Nine of Pentacles
Future: Queen of Cups
Q: Given the breadth of your work, I’m curious about your influences. What writers and artists have been important to your work?
A: Today?
1. Touching 1000 People by Diane Borsato
2. Decomp by Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott
3. The Sea Museum by Marie Darrieussecq
4. Lys: Landskab og Stemmer by Elle-Mie Ejdrup Hansen
6. Turtle Dreams by Meredith Monk
7. Hér, or, Children in Reindeer Woods by Kristín Ómarsdóttir
8. World Rehearsal Court by Judy Radul
10. Sound Education by R. Murray Schafer
Monday, March 21, 2016
TtD supplement #49 : seven questions for Sonnet L’Abbé
Sonnet L’Abbé, Ph.D., is a poet, essayist and public speaker. The award-winning author of two collections of poetry, A Strange Relief and Killarnoe, L’Abbé is the guest editor of Best Canadian Poetry 2014 and was the 2015 Edna Staebler Writer in Residence at Wilfrid Laurier University. She has taught creative writing at the University of British Columbia Okanagan and at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies, and is currently a creative writing instructor at Vancouver Island University.Her “3 Colonizations from Sonnet’s Shakespeare” appear in the eighth issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about “3 Colonizations from Sonnet’s Shakespeare.”
A: Sonnet’s Shakespeare is one of the book projects I’m working on. Its procedure is an allegory for colonialism: I write from the perspective of both colonizer and colonized, “over” the “traditional territory” of English literature (Shakespeare’s text) and attempt to impose upon it my own descriptions of the world. The process is a mode of erasure that works by overwhelming rather than excising, one that hides the original text in plain sight, and attempts a muted bivocality in the reading experience. The original poem exists in its entirety on the same page, but reading it requires a cultural knowledge that remembers what to look for.
For example, the first words of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 31” are:
Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts.The first line of my colonized sonnet, “XXXI,” is as follows:
The academy sabotages promising energies by demonizing a real world.Q: What was it about Shakespeare’s language that made you choose his work to explore “the perspective of both colonizer and colonized,” as opposed to any other writer’s works, or even through composing poems generated through other means?
A: I became interested in the potential of this procedure when I read discussions of erasure poetics that celebrated only the “discovery” or “unearthing” ethos of the erasing poet, leaving unexamined the conditions of the availability of the source text to be used in this way. It seemed that with the resurgence of erasure, particularly in the U.S., the logic of found poetry had moved into a more explicitly appropriative and objectifying stance toward the materiality of text. There was an indifference to the liveliness of original texts that I wanted to overturn.
At the same time, I was feeling creatively constrained by the appealing or counterevidentiary stance of identity politics writing. I wanted new forms and new tones to express my relationships to power. And one of the tones I want to explore is that of my own aggression, opportunism and sense of entitlement.
Like-minded Canadian poets nourbeSe philip, Shane Rhodes and Jordan Abel have all used erasure (on legal documents as well as other writers’ texts) to allegorize the censorial practices of colonialism. I decided to work with the pile-on, the overwhelm strategy of colonialism. If, I wondered, erasure poetry can be an allegory of colonialism’s attempt to eradicate extant cultures, what is the equivalent of colonialism’s propensity to reframe the stories of colonized people, to “talk over” existing voices so loudly that the cultures are, at important levels of voice, silenced? Though colonizers often nearly destroy the legibility and visibility of the presence of original cultures, they are often not fully successful at eradicating that presence.
So I decided to make a book where I do, to a British cultural treasure, what British colonialism did to the cultures of my ancestors and to the first peoples of this continent. Instead of erasing by cutting, I erase by surrounding. Instead of erasing by covering up, I erase by breaking up unions and dispersing collective memory.
I chose Shakespeare because I wanted to use a canonical text; I wanted a work that is an uncontested, valued piece of literary heritage for English language readers. If there is such a thing as a cherished literary ‘cultural artefact’ for Anglo readers, I think most of Shakespeare’s better known works qualify. I suppose I could have used one of his plays. But then we wouldn’t engage with the cosmic confluence of my name with this form, I wouldn’t have had to put my ego as front and centre, and the title wouldn’t be as rad.
There is also a mini-tradition of using Shakespeare’s sonnets in procedural work that includes collections like Jen Bervin’s Nets, Stephen Ratcliffe’s [where late the sweet] BIRDS SANG, and K. Silam Mohammad’s Sonnagrams, as well as anthologies, like Paul Legault and Sharmila Cohen’s The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare, and Jeff Hilson’s The Reality Street Book of Sonnets. I’ll play; I'll rep for Canada.
Q: You mention that this is but one of multiple book projects you’re currently engaged with. What else are you working on, and how do these projects relate to each other, or even your two published poetry collections?
A: I’ve been at work in fits and starts on a project originally called Sentient Mental Flower Book, in which I explore the metaphor of the plant-as-human and the human-as-plant. Formally I envisioned it as a poetic reinvention of the sentimental flower book, a form that was a popular and commercial form in the Victorian period, that I have argued is a kind of domestication of the scientific, botanical writing white British and American women were doing at the end of the eighteenth century. I’ve found it hard to generate a volume of poetry on this topic when I have been covering the same imaginative ground for years in other genres: I’ve based both my PhD dissertation and my creative pedagogy for past three years on the intersection of language, plant and mind.
I rewrote one of Virgil’s georgics a few years ago; instead of the poet advising farmers about the best practices and conditions to maximize crops, in my version the poet advises a plant geneticist on the mutation of an aribidopsis thaliana plant. It’s factually correct and draws on over a dozen scientific papers. I thought this was part of Sentient Mental Flower Book; I think now it should be its own short project. I’ve written parts of new georgics based on the rest of Virgil’s, all conceived as speaking to the gods, to city officials and to farmers – but in the age of corporate agribusiness, big pharma, Whole Foods, medicinal marijuana, etc. I’m calling it PHARM.
Both Sentient Mental Flower Book/PHARM and Sonnet’s Shakespeare are about resources, land, territory, husbandry, and the relation of these to culture, language and racialization. My earlier books approach these topics in more lyric ways and are my first and second explorations of the ideas that won’t leave me alone.
Q: You mention erasure works and other procedural works that have specifically targeted Shakespeare’s works. What do you feel your work in the procedural allows or illuminates that more straightforward lyric structures might not?
A: One of the effects of a good traditional lyric voice is a transparency effect, which gives the reader the illusion of a kind of clear access to the movement of the poet’s perception and sense. The voice that covers over Shakespeare in my work is often a lyric (singing, imagecrafting) voice, but it’s impossible to read the text as language representing peak clarity in the tracing of the flow of Sonnet L’Abbe’s perception and bearing. There is always something – preexisting culture – inflecting my word choices beyond my own impulse to choose the best word. “Shakespeare will forever subutter my restated colonial legacy.” Further, I think lyric (a mode I also love to work in) produces a kind of intimacy effect that cannot adequately harness, in its aesthetic frame, certain difficult energies, particularly around racialization, sexualized violence and colonization. I think of women’s writing around victimization, for example. With this procedure, I am forced to choose other language than the first words of rapedness, anguish, anger, defiance, etc that might come to me. I am forced to do this in lyric practice too, but those choices are informed by wanting to key into a certain kind of musicality that marks the text as poetic. With this procedure, my first word choice is already interrupted by the directive to overwrite Shakespeare, and that textual engagement marks the work as poetry, such that my music and image are free to be much more directly political or sexual than what generally works in straight-up lyric.
Q: With two published trade collections over the past fifteen years, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has developed? What do you see yourself working towards?
A: I keep working, writing, to become more and more comfortable with myself and others and to learn to love others and to love being alive. It’s slow work because my writing is an intentional engagement with the social, which means it’s an engagement with how my body lives the social, and therefore an engagement with my own mental and physical health. That I work out various levels of traumas and desires in writing, and that being comfortable with myself involves inscribing myself in weird syntaxes of identity, country, belonging and beauty, is just the way my body figured out its survival. Bringing the body along in the quest to be a wise writer is the greatest intellectual and spiritual work there is. For the longest time I felt people saw only my performance ability, not me. Poetry was always this tense ground of trying to perform and please aesthetically while also acting completely on my own behalf. Sentient Mental Flower Book and Sonnet’s Shakespeare are big performances, but more consciously so. I can now imagine a reader who might come from the same place as I do, instead of always imagining my reader as a ruthless formalist competitor or as a benevolent oppressor. One day I’d like to drop the shield of poetry and venture into the vulnerability of prose. I’m making it sound so pretentious. I just keep trying to be a good writer as if one day the right words will bring me peace. I don’t know which will come first, the book that earns me a sense of belonging, or finding the sense of belonging that allows me to write books from a new place.
Q: I’m curious about your descriptions: the “shield of poetry” and “the vulnerability of prose.” Is this a comfort that comes with your own experience with each specific genre, or is there something else? What is it about prose that you consider opens one up in a way that poetry does not?
A: Poetry opens up to, or invites to play, a smaller, more specialized audience. If someone sits down to read your book or your poem, so much empathy is already there just by virtue of your reader wanting to be in the poetry space. I feel like I retreated to poetry when it seemed no one was interested in my stories. When I was 19 or 20 years old, I wrote thinly-veiled fiction about things that I felt strongly about, and when the work didn’t move my teachers, I stuck with what did. Like I said before, I started out very much wanting to please, and it’s been years of writing and grappling with internalized BS to get past that, to feel that I can please or not, on my own terms. I still want to write prose.
Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
A: The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, edited by Bausch and Cassill, and the Native Poetry in Canada anthology, edited by Jeannette Armstrong and Larry Grauer, are my return-to reads these days. They’re by my bed. The kingpins and queens of hiphop are fuel to me. Writers whose work I go back to:
Wislawa Szymborska, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, NourbeSe Philip, Christian Bök, b.p. nichol, Claudia Rankine, Lisa Robertson, Erín Moure, Jan Zwicky, Rilke, Elizabeth Bishop, Joy Harjo, George Oppen, Anne Carson, Jordan Abel, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Andrea Lee, Nabokov, Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith, Junot Diaz, Sherman Alexie, Louise Erdich, Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson, Alice Munro, George Saunders, Thomas Mann, Donald Barthelme, Virginia Woolf, George Elliott Clarke, Wordsworth, Shelley, Blake, Donne, Milton, Liz Howard, Robin Coste Lewis, Cathy Park Hong, Ronald Johnson, Robert Duncan, Gertrude Stein, what Bringhurst can give me of Skaay, Shakespeare.
Thursday, March 10, 2016
TtD supplement #48 : seven questions for Katie L. Price
Her poem “Alchemy” appears in the eighth issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about the poem “Alchemy.”
A: Alfred Jarry’s painting machine Clinamen has evolved into a poem machine. It lives online, in your home computer, in the dark shadows made by 1’s and 0’s. “Alchemy” is a collaborative piece of writing—written by Clinamen and Katie L. Price. It is not about serendipity, happy accidents, and creativity (in the sense of creating, a new creation), but rather documentation of serendipity, accident, and creativity. It is material evidence that creative forces exist outside of human creativity. To read “Alchemy” is not to read me, but to witness proof of Clinamen’s perverse sense of humor in regards to productivity, and the pataphysical processes that structure our existence.
Q: Is the “happy accident” an important element in your writing? How does this differ from what else you’ve been working on?
A: Happy accidents, no. Accidents, yes. Especially its meaning in the 13th and 14th Centuries. My work has often addressed unfortunate incidents, symptoms and exterior signs of vicissitude, non-essential qualities, and contingencies.
Q: What is it about the nature of such accidents and their contingencies that appeal?
A: I’m interested in writing that has no author, or complicates or implicates or distorts the role of the author. The accidental appeals to me because of its unlocatability, its lack of reason, its uncontrollability. Its lack of authorship. Yet, accidents can be revelatory. For Lucretius, accident is, in fact, the only way to truly create. In the accident’s irregularity, we continue to find the new.
Q: How does this piece fit in with other work you’ve been doing lately? Is this poem part of a larger structure or trajectory, or a stand-alone piece?
A: Yes. It continues a theme that compels me again and again: precise investigation (in/of language) of the circumstantial, the contingent. You might say I’m interested in the inverse of chance operations—surgical operations on extant language that largely occurs by chance, but nevertheless has serious, real-world implications. This piece differs from the work in my above/ground chapbooks BRCA: Birth of a Patient and Sickly in its content, but I’m not yet done exploring these themes in my writing.
I’ve been watching HBO’s The Leftovers, which just ended its second season. The show explores what people do when they can’t explain something, when they are faced with the fact that there is a hidden logic behind the cosmos, but they don’t know what it is. My writing tries to examine the structures that we build around ourselves to make ourselves feel better, to calm our psyches, to make sense of the world—and show them for what they might be: aesthetic sculptures (crafted imaginaries) of existence.
My writing—and pataphysical writing in general (if one can say such a thing)—offers an opportunity for us to examine language that impacts our lives in a concertedly inconsequential setting. What can we learn about how knowledge is formed (by particular discourses and disciplines) by examining their languages, vocabularies, and structures, outside of the contexts that render them ubiquitous? What can we learn by reading a medical report with the same attention we might pay a sophisticated sonnet? What can we learn about how technology structures our lives by close reading a series of glitches?
Q: With a small handful of chapbooks over the past few years, how do you feel your work has developed? What do you see yourself working towards?
A: Publishing two chapbooks last year gave me the fantastic opportunity to share my work more broadly and with a new audience. It has sparked several conversations and ignited several new relationships. One of the pleasant surprises with publishing BRCA: Birth of a Patient and Sickly was the diverse range of types of writers who were interested in the work, quite often for very different reasons. I feel incredibly grateful for the opportunity to discuss my work with others. Both of these chapbooks examine the moment at which a body is de-animated: transformed from a living thing into something dissectible, analyzable, diagnosable, speakable. Conversations re-animate the textual body; in a very real way it feels like witnessing the ghost of a body that never truly existed. I am continuing to work toward a book in hopes that I can raise even more ghosts.
Q: Given that most of what I’ve seen of your work so far comes from those two chapbooks (as well as the poem “Alchemy”), I’m wondering how much of the “de-animation” you reference is a particular thread that runs throughout your writing, or was this was something new emerging through these two chapbooks? Are these two chapbooks part of a singular, larger work, perhaps?
A: De-animation, or perhaps more aptly the mechanical, has been an interest of mine for at least a decade. I am particularly interested in the moment when opposites converge—death and life, the inorganic with the organic, systematicity with chance, logic with irrationality. Jacques de Vaucanson’s mechanical duck fascinates me as much as Adam Dickinson’s cataloguing of all of the toxic materials in his body; while Vaucanson invented a machine that could digest, Dickinson shows how our bodies, like engines, are full of oil. As a reader—and a thinker—I am interested in things that aren’t supposed to go together, but can and do. And I like writing in a way that accentuates or highlights the incongruous.
I honestly struggle with whether or not BRCA and Sickly are in fact one project and I oscillate. They both investigate the discourse of a certain kind of vocabulary and the ways that language can de-animate a body as I previously described. But I also find them to be very different. BRCA might be the single most personal text ever written—it is the ultimate confession. It is extraordinarily intimate in its coldness. From reading, a reader learns about my heart’s rhythm, my weight fluctuations, my blood pressure, the texture of my breasts, my menstrual cycle, my fears and anxieties—and I didn’t write a word. The most intimate document that exists about me was written by a host of paid, trained professionals. That is profound to me. This is writing that matters, in a real, material sense. Sickly moves beyond, alongside, and within the personal to look at medical discourse and language more broadly (and, ahem, less conceptually)—it manipulates medical language into new shapes to reveal something new. The individual is construed differently when broken into pieces, rearranged, and spliced. I suppose it’s a more conventionally poetic (i.e. “made thing”) than BRCA. It moves from the world of the clinic to a world of cultural discourse about sickness and health.
Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
A: Atelos
BookThug
Coach House
Drunken Boat
Edge
Fence
Granary
Hogarth
Information as Material
Jacket2
Kenning
Les Figues
MIT
New Directions
October
P-
Queue
Roof
Singing Horse
Tuumba
Ugly Ducking
Verso
Wave
XY
Zone
Thursday, February 25, 2016
TtD supplement #47 : seven questions for damian lopes
His poems “you smiled at her,” “under toes,” “lost,” “last inning,” “agape” and “Richard Truhlar in memoriam” appear in the eighth issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about the poems “you smiled at her,” “under toes,” “lost,” “last inning,” “agape” and “Richard Truhlar in memoriam.”
A: having ignored your question for months, i’m surprised that the poems relate to loss or potential loss. but on reflection, i’ve been writing about that for a while.
with my first book, i began working on book-length projects rather than individual poems. it stems in part from a fascination with narrative combined with the relation between form & content. to me, a collection should make sense, be cohesive before it is fixed & bound.
so these are from a collection of new & old poems, some dating back twenty years, that have never been published in book form, currently entitled away home. it’s gone through many iterations already as i intend to give the book a form the poems weren’t part of to start with.
Q: What was it that made you want to help shape a collection from work spanning such a long period? Were these older poems temporarily-abandoned, or did they simply not fit into the projects you’d been working on at the time they were composed?
A: i didn’t start out writing books, but poems. some of my early work developed into my first two books. many other poems, published in magazines, journals & small press, weren’t part of those or later projects.
technology plays a part too, & has been an interest. my first poem was published in 1990, the same year i started playing with computers again. but i’ve composed very little poetry on screen: i prefer my notebook to my ipad for composition. my last book was written by hand or on a manual travelling typewriter, then edited on screen.
i think it was new software that convinced me to try & organize my published but uncollected poems, & to sift through work that made it out of the notebooks but remained unpublished. some were about language, some about people, especially my father, while others straddled the two. i struggled to divide them into two separate works before conceding.
i still struggle to get myself out of the way, not to impose a form but tease out the best one there. form & content: interweaving two sets of poems results in a different reading. each poem is an arrangement of words, each book an arrangement of poems. book as poem.
Q: After three trade collections (and current works-in-progress), how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?
A: the plagal cadence
of progress a semi
tone sufficient to
colour the question
diminishment
not development
but the interstitial
carved moments not
monumental but
mundane goals to
an eye
Q: Your current poetry work-in-progress includes poems going back twenty years. You’ve also been working on a novel for nearly as long. Do the two projects interact in any way?
A: mainly no. the novel spans four decades & continents, ending in toronto in 1973. it’s my grandparents’ & parents’ generation. the poetry is set more recently & can be more personal. but of course there are overlaps, like family, parenthood, emigration… on many levels, all my work – visual, poetry, prose – interacts. poetry & fiction each have their advantages & restraints. ‘the tale is like the telling’ says a goan proverb.
Q: After quite a long stretch of relative silence, how easy or difficult is it to re-emerge? In 2015, for example, you were named the second Poet Laureate of the City of Barrie. How did that come about, and how has it been? Just what is expected of you?
A: fits & starts. in both writing & the business of literature: the reasons are myriad, in flux & mostly mundane. the writing has been more consistent than the business. that’s more where i’m re-engaging in fits & starts. simply, i struggle for the time & head space to write & edit, let alone the significant clerical work of making & tracking submissions. now my work is unfamiliar to editors, so it feels like starting out again without the vigour & confidence of youth. rejection is part of the game & it hasn’t gotten easier.
so, my novel, The Mango Stone, has been a retreat from the business. it’s too difficult to excerpt, i tell myself though in fact five appeared years ago. for several drafts now, i’ve had the good fortune to work with an astute publisher towards a contract. though its not the publication i’m after so much as telling this story the best i can.
both the city of Barrie & its burgeoning arts community have been growing like teenagers. maturing in surprising ways, but still gangly, awkward & shy now & then. our small town heritage still resists the changes of growth. the arts community here is diverse & supportive. the literary community is relatively small, but nurturing & determined. so while i have not been publishing on paper, i have been performing & engaged locally with some regularity.
as Laureate i am working to develop an annual anthology of poetry by students. a decade ago the city chose to invest in our local arts community, to grow it from within. & it’s working. likewise, to promote poetry in our young city, we need to expose our youth to the true depth & breadth of poetry today, & to point out the poetry all around them. our teachers need support because their training is usually too narrow & their time too limited. so i’m starting with one high school & hope to make it an annual thing.
Q: What has the response been to your laureateship so far? I know you’ve produced a small publication as part of an official event, for example.
A: congratulations, invitations, bemusement, wonderment, disinterest, disdain & at least one good sputtering guffaw from jw that we witnessed together. partway into my term as Barrie’s second laureate, most here are surprised we have a laureate, but they are likewise surprised to learn of our parliamentary laureate. we are talking poetry here. most would likely agree that poetry is as relevant to them as higher mathematics. i’d say they’re right. the study of the intense use of language that we call poetry is not that different from the higher maths that result in the computers we call smartphones. both are esoteric but profoundly influential. perhaps essential for life today. so if i’ve found the response somewhat muted, it’s helped me realize that poetry must engage our youth, & continue the natural language play of childhood. poets need to support teachers in fostering the literary arts in schools. the laureateship makes it easier to open those doors.
Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
A: Nelson Ball’s poetry & Alice Munro’s stories remind & inspire me.
Monday, February 15, 2016
TtD supplement #46 : seven questions for Pete Smith
Pete Smith, born & raised in Coventry, emigrated to Canada in 1974. After a long detour returned to poetry in the late 1990s. Has published poetry with Wild Honey Press, Poetical Histories, above/ground press, W, Great Works & Oystercatcher among others; reviews & essays in Agenda, The Gig, The Paper, The Capilano Review, Crayon & elsewhere. He has given readings at the Kootenay School of Writing & at the final CCCP in 2006. His first full-length collection, Bindings with Discords, was published by Shearsman in February 2015, and a brand-new chapbook, A NEW LOVE OVER AN ACHING STONE, “a double-cento out of Yehuda. Amichai & Mahmoud Darwish,” is out very soon with above/ground press.His poems “ANTHROPOCENTRIC POETICS 101,” “RESTRINGING THE SIX-STRING,” “CHARLIE, PROPER” and “UNDER THE INFLUENCE” appear in the eighth issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about the poems “ANTHROPOCENTRIC POETICS 101,” “RESTRINGING THE SIX-STRING,” “CHARLIE, PROPER” and “UNDER THE INFLUENCE.”
A: They are all what I might call Public Poems, in that they were written in public places & they are quite casual & approachable. The “public” space impacts them in different ways, but the common factor is the way that distractions help me focus my attention, as if I sometimes need something to pitch against, affirming by opposition. Anthrop is from far back, but seems now to connect to “public” by razzing two highly public figures who introduced Bad Wrongs, Cartesian duality & the unimaginative, mechanical applications of Behaviourism. Six & Charlie picked up energy & details from the times & places of writing: the first is cited in the poem; the second written in Far Out Coffee shop on Dundas in the Hastings-Sunrise part of Vancouver where Freya had plugged her Stones iPod into the sound system to avoid hearing stuff she didn’t like during the busy spell. Influence tagged along because of similarity of tone & the connections to varying-degrees-of-public figures in the poetry communities.
Q: You describe “Public Poems” as though they are but one thread of the poems you’ve been working on. Is this how you work, through a loose connection of groupings? And how many other groupings make up your arsenal?
A: I write longhand into a pocket-sized notebook & raid the drafts from time to time for family resemblances so, yes, groupings that way but for predetermined sequences I'll have a particular notebook just for that work. One practical reason for the number of erasure projects is that I can do a bit in the days’ margins, walk away & the “inspirationWinking face” is still there in the source text when I get back to it.
Another grouping I’ve done always Nate Dorward referred to as poems-as-lit-criticism, or words to that effect, but Phil Hall does that so well I can leave them scattered around the cutting-room floor for now.
Similar to “Public Poems” in some respects are what I might term “occasioned poems,” some of those even commissioned, eg, friends renewed wedding vows at their 40th anniversary, didn’t ask for a poem for the event but at the last minute I found myself being tickled by the question “how do you write an epithalamion for the long-married?” & took off from there. So, self-commissioned is more accurate I guess.
Coming at the practice from both Cage’s mesostics & Clare’s claim to have “found the poems in the fields & merely written them down” has been a long-term use of ‘erasure,’ or ‘writing through’: source texts include Clare’s ‘Journey Out of Essex,’ WS’s 154 sonnets (done before Jen Bervin’s versions & at one time up at Alterran Poetry Assemblage #6), Sharon Thesen’s selection ‘News & Smoke’ (creating ‘The World in Her Mouth’ by taking one line from each poem in sequence), George Gissing’s novel The Odd Women (as ‘Odden: I Sing’ from Oystercatcher Press) etc, most recently ‘Winterized: The Musical’ out of Peter Culley’s ‘Winterreise’ section of his book The Climax Forest.
I guess a combination of trusting language to know more than I do – well, it’s been around a lot longer than I have – and liking a variety of constraints feeds that practice. At times it’s probably vicarious self-expression but my objective is more for discovery of universal &/or personal “truths” through others' voices & mirror-echoes of shed selves along the route. I’ve also used translations & small read-throughs of “classic” English poems as parts of otherwise standard lyric poems.
Non-verbal texts are also sources, eg a John Adams’ music cycle, photographs of Fred Douglas & Ralph Eugene Meatyard, works in all the arts by Kiyooka etc etc
A longish work-in-progress is ‘A Shadow of his Former Shadow’ which attempts to discover who my extremely private father was works through straight & deliberately distorted memories, through erasures of works important to him, eg, Schubert’s “Winterreise” cycle, Marcus Aurelius (given to me as I left home at age 18 with a “here, son, it’s as good a guide to life as any”).
Trying all in all to be a good servant of the poem, as attentive as possible to word & world, knowing through the late John Riley:
that love/ is never fulfilled/ but the ways/ of approaching/ endlessQ: I’ve long been curious about how a British poet ends up in Kamloops, nestled in the interior of British Columbia, a city you emigrated to in 1974. What originally brought you to Canada?
A: Work & economics. BC Gov were recruiting Psych Nurses in the UK. I’d recently found a stash of copies of Beautiful BC magazine & had a west coast literature-induced fantasy lurking somewhere inside (sorry, Canada). The big institutions in Vancouver coupled with its weather pattern (I’d lived my last 5 years in England on the south-west coast & knew rain intimately) included that location out, but Mr Recruiter started talking about Kamloops’ four distinct seasons, & the villa system & small scale (by that era’s standards) of the institution were very appealing.
That I have remained is the greater mystery. In the place & the work.
I’ve avoided academia because of an allergy, so to speak, to over-directed learning. I’ve no doubt misrepresented to myself the way higher learning works, but here I am anyway – with a weird troup of chosen tutors working away in adhd shifts of attention & interest (“a broken-field runner” to steal Paul Metcalf’s tag on Douglas Woolf).
I didn’t step into full-time poethood, have great admiration for those who have, out of cowardice, no doubt, & a hard-to-explain sense that I had to earn the right to write (not by earning a living at any job, but by continuing with that most marginalized group of people – the intellectually disabled: believing that the work of entering into a poem, grasping to some extent its otherness & bringing that over into words touches & is touched by trying to understand the world & needs of non-verbal or barely verbal people in order to interpret an essence of the world to them & to help explain them to their immediate circle of people).
Damn! This was going to be the short answer!
Q: There’s an inference that dismisses the possibility of interacting with other writers, but you seem deeply connected to a variety of British poets, as well as poets currently and formerly around Vancouver and the Kootenay School of Writing. For someone who appears to be writing off the grid, you exist within a rather intricate array of writers. Were you engaged with British poets before you arrived in Canada? And how did you end up meeting so many Canadian poets from your home-base of Kamloops?
A: Shyness, at times pathological, has made interactions difficult from my side. Geography increases the difficulty no doubt.
In Britain, no direct engagement beyond being a consumer of mags which provided different sets of outlook: Stand – toward Europe largely; Agenda – Poundian modernisms; Grosseteste Review – openings toward USA, combo of projective & objective ‘schools’ filtered through a very English light.
Attended readings at the then Cariboo College where I heard but didn't ‘meet’ Birney, Newlove, Bowering et al. (A long parenthesis, 10 to 15 years, takes me into a North American cult/church community where I become an elder & preach regularly – until finally reading my way out of that wilderness – picking up while there some useful self-discipline for essay writing & a preachiness in my poems that I have to guard against).
Real connections began on three fronts in the 1990s: firstly, through the Internet & an email I sent to Nate Dorward I connected up with British & Irish poets I felt at home with & led to the publication of the first Wild Honey Press chapbook; through Nate again I learned of a reading at the ksw whose venue I failed to find then but, thanks to Rob Manery, found it for the next time; the Kamloops Poets Factory where Warren Fulton’s energies created a local scene & we brought in some good writers to read & conduct workshops (my contributions were all through the ksw connection: Mike Barnholden, Aaron Vidaver, Ted Byrne on one occasion; Lissa Wolsak & Lisa Robertson on Easter Sunday, 2000 – Lisa read from The Men). Not so many personal meetings really, lots of recruits I bring in from my reading, not in order to name-drop, but to share my experience in a particular text-world. Exploration & celebration.
Q: That’s actually how we first met as well, through Warren Fulton hosting a reading of mine in Kamloops. How have these engagements over the years influenced the ways (ie – the whats and hows) in which you write?
A: I remember that, with Anne Stone I recall. The reading (books) & the readings (of poets’ live readings) have been for the pleasures firstly & also for learning about content & techniques – what subjects have been tackled, how the poet approaches or recoils from world, self, language’s lines & nets. I guess hearing the poets read helped me unhitch my line & cadence from the deep-rooted plodding pentameter British poets claim as the rhythm of walking thinking & poeming. (Used well, ie with irregular variations & shifts in tempo, the iambic pentameter can still be a good experience and walking is still a great aid to writing, listening to highly jagged music is good too if the need is to shake everything up.)
I sometimes forget how many workshops I’ve attended & need to credit that as an ongoing aid to renewal. For their impacts my memory lands on workshops by Harold Rhenisch (in Kamloops) & Alice Notley & an anti-workshop by Denise Riley (both at ksw). I hope to find my notes from the Rhenisch event, but recall it being useful at the architectural level, Notley for the archaeology of self/ves, Riley for the singing/thinking/self-reflexive & societally-probing levels. The few years when I was attending readings & workshops at ksw were very stimulating: there was no pressure to align aesthetically, but it was really affirming to be “in class” with Lisa R, Sharon T, the Quartermains etc. – an open field still open. Recently I had the ‘honour’ (is I think the right word) of watching a local poet, Paul Liddy (whose work I had hoped to put out in a collection but my awful habit of procrastination, along with pension-income limitations, has stymied: hopefully it will find the publisher it deserves) take a whole swath of finished discrete lyrics & transform them into a more difficult read but a more profound experience. It seems he is muttering “I’m not aiming for ‘applause-gatherers’. I want the reader to experience something of what I went through” – reference is to surgery & subsequent treatment for brain cancer: even without that he’s the genuine “poet maudit” imho. He’s been to Banff a time of two & says he feels he was basically written off as a Bukowski disciple, at a time he’d never read Buk (though Dostoevsky is firmly in his canon).
Yes, watching that reconstruction project happen (“It’s fine”, he reassured me as I got agitated by the loss of these lyrics I’d really enjoyed, “I know what I’m doing” – and he did) was a liberating experience &, along with a recent chat with Donato Mancini, has got me working more boldly on the revision stage.
That was a privileged engagement.
End or it never will.
Q: After a variety of collections large and small over the past two decades or so, how do you feel your work has developed? What do you feel as though you might be working towards?
A: The thought of “development” suggests to me some kind of linear path which I don’t recognize. A series of loosely connected circles floating without apparent grounding might be more apt. Much of the writing has been an engagement with other artists in word, image &/or music. I expect to continue that practice as I come across works that touch the on-button. I also have tried to stay open to the daily gifts that come along if eyes, ears, mind, heart are in a state of readiness: I like to think of occasioned as opposed to occasional verse; epiphanies are considered off-the-map, but what are you supposed to do in the face of one, “Nah, can’t write about that it’s too exciting. Besides everyone has felt that.” Sure, but many of us have short memories, & to trigger good memories in our present world seems to me a pretty kind & literally vital endeavour. So, I have a bunch of things slotted under a title “Such as Any Day Might Bring.” Epics are for more grandiose &/or disciplined souls.
What I think I'm up to in poetry has often enough been interrupted by what I see I've actually been up to that I don't claim any overriding poetics other, perhaps, than "despite". The actual world is a good foundation (thinking here of Flaubert & de Maupassant's walks through Paris streets, with the older writer setting the assignment to write about a person they passed by so that he would recognize the person encountered); but an imaginable world cries out to be born.
I recently read a little bit about Douglas Blazek’s long-term project of rewriting a body of work over a number of years (35 years between publications if I grasped it properly) as a process of ripening the poems. That is interesting to me & may lead me to excavate something from a heap of early writing – that would qualify as more of a rescue mission than an organic ripening, but compost is compost.
There is a wealth of lived experience that I haven’t consciously worked with in poetry (preferring to let images, memories surface during the writing & carry a resonance, sort of like the ringing harmonics on the 5th, 7th & 12th frets of the guitar, that let me, at least, know something authentic is afoot). I think I’ll go into prose in a more focussed way – focus, well scattered will have to do & we are firmly in the Age of Fragments. So, stay tuned!
Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
A: Ha - that should be easy, but...
I’ll start with a quote I just found in a writing by Anna Mendelssohn (who also published as Grace Lake) who was a member of Britain’s Angry Brigade back in the tumultuous 1960s.
“I followed a few writers for a time in the local literary newsI was about to start a list of names, but the “re energize” & “return to” are your key words. That shrinks the list considerably. I find myself going to particular poems more than to whole oeuvres.
It’s like watching a kid take to the hills, or a colt stagger to its feet.”
David Rosenberg’s translations of Second Isaiah, Song of Songs & the great “justice” & righteousness verses in Joel & Amos. Wyatt, Marlowe, Will Shake. Hopkins - certain poems & the journals. Basil Bunting. David Jones - paintings, drawings, writings. (Hello I’m listing anyway! So be it.) Thom Gunn - the last few books & his essay/review collections. Kenneth Cox - his boringly titled Collected Studies in the Use of English & through that R.C. Hutchinson’s novels the unfinished Rising & Testament for its remarkable narrator Alexei Otraveskov. John Berger. Alan Garner’s Stone Book Quartet. R.F. Langley - poems & journals.
I’ve been rereading with constant pleasure my scattering of Guy Birchard’s books (published in England, Ireland & USA - the ones I have - does CanLit know him?); returning frequently to Phil Hall after hearing a reading on-line when it all came together (recent ‘discovery’ to me, so where have I been in relation to CanLit? – splashing around in the mid-Atlantic I guess). I arrived here in 1974 & took John Newlove & Phyllis Webb for my first guides & they remain such. Roy Kiyooka – who I coin as the Whole Soul Catalogue - paintings, letters, poems. The tapestry in Canada is too rich & I arrived too late. Not enough lifetimes.
Paul Metcalf & Guy Davenport must be mentioned. Metcalf from Genoa: A Telling of Wonders onwards was a writer of wonders & his use of primary sources along with his technique of juxtaposition – “To originate is carefully, patiently, and understandingly to combine” (Poe) is a motto he cites in interview - interests me in his way of presenting materials without the mediation, in several of his books, of a narrator to allow a reader to identify with and a pre-scribed set of emotional responses. Juxtaposition allows the described events to speak in a manner an Internet news item should call ‘raw’. Davenport & the recently deceased English ex-pat to Texas, Christopher Middleton, for their boundless curiosity.
There are several writers I’d add to the list of the return-to question: C.D. Wright, Lisa Robertson, Lissa Wolsak (for poetry that breathes the same air as prayer), Basil Bunting, John Thompson’s Stilt-Jack, 1001 Arabian Nights (my adventure & erotic fountainhead from adolescence onwards).
I find music (early polyphony to Baroque & contemporary, free jazz etc) & visual arts along with long walks to be the best battery chargers. Attempting translation is also a good surge.
Let's close it all off with a phrase from Middleton re a foundation for a way: “Apostrophe, the invocation of a spirit, though now archaic, is still fundamental to the lyric in one form or another.
Thanks, rob, for the chance to wander around here.
Friday, February 5, 2016
TtD supplement #45 : seven questions for Billy Mavreas
He is the author of three graphic novels, one book of posters as well as the producer of several chapbooks that move between visual poetry, drawing, collage and comics.
Along with his artist wife, Emilie O’Brien, he operates Monastiraki, a gallery and curiosity shop in the Mile-End neighbourhood.
He has four visual poems, “From A Scholarship Of Insects,” in the eighth issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about the four poems that make up “From A Scholarship Of Insects.”
A: The four pieces that make up “From A Scholarship Of Insects” act together in concert, they elaborate upon an unfinished poem that we will never read. Instead of presenting that unfinished source poem, I elected to present four divergent trends emanating from it. I approached each page as a separate tone, a certain gesture or chirping or trace that perhaps an insect of sorts would chance to leave on a page. I considered the hypothetical naming of a group of insects as a scholarship, intending to illustrate rather different academic approaches to their fields of study. We then have subtle muted precision, bold point form, polyphonic chorus as well as straight up English text outlining options, to anchor any wanderings. Each visual treatment is lifted from that text and manipulated until the desired effect is reached.
Q: How do these pieces relate to the previous work you’ve done with visual poetry?
A: Most of my recent work in visual poetry starts with a source text, usually a diagram or even a photograph. This source material then gets extensive editorial treatment as I lose track of what it originally looked like or referred to. The process is essentially radical collage. I manipulate the source and apply layers of cut and paste, veering into directions unheralded.
In this case the source text was my own and it was text in the proper sense. Though there was considerable manipulations involved, I also left some text intact in order to position the visual pieces, to situate them in the eyes of the reader, with their source. One can with some scrutiny see how the pieces visually relate to the text provided in the last piece.
Q: I’m curious as to the intersection between your poetry work and your graphic novels. One so rarely sees anyone producing visual poems also producing graphic novels. Do your two forms intersect at any point, or relate to each other at all? Are they unrelated threads, or part of a larger exploration?
A: I’m curious about that too! I’ve made many formalist explorations within comics which work very well with experiments in typography, lettering and script. Also, my drawing style borrows a lot from the gestural strokes of handwriting and my poetry often evokes the details found in hidden corners of graphic work, the corners that are not the main attraction. They both deal with the themes that I explore in general, themes of communication, mystery, invisible worlds and accretion. I tend towards polyvalence in my art, making installation, conceptual work, sound works, sculpture, painting as well as poetry and comics. Every tendency informs every other. I’d like to think it’s all building towards something huge and awesome but we’ll see. It may just all end up as a strange collection of trajectories, oddball folk art museum of the soul.
Many artists I’ve seen who explore visual poetry and comics tend to stay closer to the realm of abstract or experimental comics. In my case my comics have been experimental and I still make abstract comic work but I’ve been tending towards more direct narrative, straight up comic work so to speak, which is a great challenge, whereas my poetry tends way more towards abstraction, conceptual writing and visual poetics. My poetry that isn’t visual is usually rock lyrics, bumper stickers, band names and other stuff that remains more or less private, unpublished or juvenile.
Q: Has the movement “towards more direct narrative, straight up comic work” influenced, in any way, your poetry heading further “towards abstraction, conceptual writing and visual poetics”?
A: I don’t think so. My many tendencies co-exist. As I get on in experience I feel the pressure to give my college best to forms I love. I want to be able to make decent comics that kids can enjoy, that anyone can enjoy really. Some of the power of comics lies in its potential accessibility. As I feel I’ve made some decent experimental comics, I also want the same satisfaction with accessible comics. I’m almost there. I’ll need to simplify things a tad. Work harder at it, too. The same drive would have me want to write at least one decent science fiction short story or fantasy novel. I feel I must honour my early loves.
I also love working in forms that are meant for tiny audiences of like minded people. I want to indulge my love for arcana but I can also appreciate my desire to be straightforward with text as well. In the last year I’ve worked at clear prose writing, anecdotal stuff, quotidian stuff. It’s been very liberating. I’ll end my years writing sonnets or something, who knows.
Q: So your explorations into poetry move beyond concrete and visual, and into text? For poetry: who have your models and influences been so far? What writers and artists have shaped the way you think about the form?
A: I studied literature but that was 30 odd years ago and the usual cast of characters left an impression, the canonical bigwigs we studied from 1989 to 1991. My personal reading though remained in genre fiction so I have always skirted between high and low cultures, as they are described.
My biggest influences in visual and concrete poetry are not individuals but books and not specific books at that. I collect obscure volumes usually dated 1972 that are comprised of text, cut-ups, collage, poetry of all types. A beat up anthology of international concrete poetry I found in a second hand bookshop when I was 16 started this fascination. I want to emulate the aesthetic I find in these books. Another influence is the high contrast black and white xerography and rubber stamping I encountered upon entering the world of industrial culture / mail-art / fanzines in the late 1980s. An early correspondence with jwcurry informed much of what I later did. The alien documents from such mail-artists as Serge Segay and J. Lehmus among many others intrigued me. At the time I was doing a lot of psychedelic lettering and symbol / logo design. A strong machine aesthetic came and informed my hippie sensibility. My experiments with photocopy machines at the time also yielded happy accidents. There’s no looking back, though I still draw by hand I love the results that copy machines give. Nowadays I use digital tech to replicate that effect.
Of course, hooking up with people like Tim Gaze and Derek Beaulieu, who have both been great supporters of mine, has served to strengthen the idea that I should continue doing what I am doing.
Q: How do you feel your poetry has developed over the years? What do you feel your writing might be working towards?
A: My poetry has moved from stand alone poems (whether text or visual) to suites and longer movements of pieces. I like the idea of a series of works pivoting around a central theme or starting point. I hope to address my concerns and desires vis a vis visual poetry with a book length project or two. I need to actualize my book fetish by adding another odd pamphlet into the pile.
I also feel more confident in presenting some of my visual poetry as poetry and not as graphics or visual art. Of course I am ever thankful that my experience in visual art informs me and forces me to maintain certain graphic standards.
My writing will always bend towards a project orientated practice culminating in either a chapbook or a dozen chapbooks or a proper published thing. I enjoy small projects, small suites, etc. but would probably toss it all out if I was able to find the discipline to work on a fantasy trilogy. No joke. Until then though I will continue to divide my time between comics and poetics but there’s no saying that all my tendencies won’t end up between the covers of one book. That would be the dream of dreams.
Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
A: There isn’t any one author that I return to time and again except for non fiction authors and genre fiction authors and that’s usually by accident or obligation.
I read mostly in non-fiction, usually studies of mythology, science, spirituality, art history. That stuff is interspersed with forays into SF&F short stories and YA or kids books. I’m always bringing in new books I find and pouring over them. Collections of logotypes, vintage graphic design manuals, old grammars, random scraps and ephemera keep my interest the most. There are many books I revisit and many more I want to read. I’m terribly ignorant of contemporary poetry itself except the work of people I trade with and even then I often fetishize the object and study the form rather than the content. That’s my big admission of the day.
The stuff I do reread is inane humour comics.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)