TtD supplement #153 : seven questions for Ava Hofmann

Originally from Oxford, Ohio, Ava Hofmann is a writer currently living and working as an MFA student in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She has poems published in or forthcoming from Black Warrior Review, Fence, Anomaly, Best American Experimental Writing 2020, The Fanzine, Datableed, Peachmag, Petrichor, and Bomb Cyclone. Her poetry deals with trans/queer identity, Marxism, and the frustrated desire inherent to encounters with the archive. 

Her poems “from that i want,” “in a fight” and “at the doctor’s office” appear in the twenty-fourth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “from that i want,” “in a fight” and “at the doctor’s office.”

A: As implied by the title, the poem “from that i want” is from a longer chapbook project of mine titled, yes, that i want. that i want is collection of visual poems in a similar form dealing with the impermeability and revisability of language, gender, and the body – creating the sorts of spaces I have encountered in my own transition, where multiple meanings, multiple voices, exist simultaneously, growing from the same processes. Those poems are about unlearning and relearning my relationship to my own body and its desires.

“in a fight” and “at the doctor’s office” are both poems from another chapbook of mine titled plastic flowers. the poems from plastic flowers are pseudo-comedic poems about the relationship between one’s own interiority and the current regime of biomedical capitalist production, and the ways in which this interiority and exteriority tumble into one another in disorienting and reflexive ways. They’re a miniature mix of dark comedies, journaling, and communist manifestos. 

Q: How do these pieces compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: All of these pieces engage in the larger interest of my poetic practice in uninterpretability/opacity and the reaching-towards potentiality (namely, a potentiality for a change in the structure of capital, in systems of power and control, in the rotting remains of the bioindustrial directing of desire). More and more, also, my poems have moved to language, the repetition of language, its difficulty, as a vector for creating interesting dynamics of power and collaborative readwriting with my audience. I would say lately the entirety of my poetic interests are in the ways in which poetry could be participatory and interactive, to open up my own author-authority to interrogation so that the reader might also confront themselves.

Q: What is it that prompted this type of direction, towards works that are “participatory and interactive,” and what might that look like?

A: My interest in participatory and interactive writing is, in some sense, both an extension and repudiation of the conceptualists’ critique of authorship. The conceptualists’ interest in effacing or challenging the idea of ‘the author’ in writing is, I think, ultimately a compelling goal for writing—a way to speak to a radical collectivity or cultural memory; however, in so doing, they effaced their own positionality as authors while, in actuality, cemented their own authorship and institutional power through their techniques of collage and re-appropriation. In short, under capitalism, to erase ‘the author’ entirely is to simply have literature turn into another mouthpiece for the present calamity of capitalist imperialism.

This is obviously not anywhere close to a new critique of that movement, but this means my work, vaguely experimental and picking through the crater of the (rightfully) exploded legitimacy of experimental work, has to contend with or salvage usable material, especially as I often find the conventional lyric and where it is right now to often be eaten out from the inside by institutions and tastes and (mis)recognitions which are somehow both too voyeuristic and not voyeuristic enough.

Interactivity, or more generally a writing practice which encourages an audience to become involved in a deeper or more complex method of readwriting, has been kind of my solution to this problem. It gives me a certain capacity to have a steadily unsteady hand on my identity—lacunae and instabilities as pathways and dramatizations of the productive frustrations and opacities within the poems and its operations of certain positions within it. But also, interactivity or nonlinearity is kind of a trap for the reader—they become implicated in the text, and their own position becomes open to confrontation or being implicated in a system of readwriting. Lately I’ve been doing it through the creation of gaps in readerly understanding or the nonlinear arrangement of texts, requiring greater interpretive and speculative effort on the part of the reader. I've even been working in / experimenting with twine, a tool for the creation of genuinely interactive hypertext works. More and more I want to view my readers as collaborators or co-participants; I expect at some point I’ll probably take the necessary plunge and make works directly with my audience (this is maybe what teaching is or should be).

This is a boundary the conceptualists never really crossed (according to my admittedly finite knowledge): instead of effacing authorship to speak culturally about the system of language, I find the value in effacing total authorship as part of my anarchist practice, a potential reduction of the hierarchy between myself and my reader. Maybe I’ve just been thinking about this lately, but for me there’s kind of a draw towards the intermedia writing and event scores of the fluxus movement, a space where something is genuinely asked of you as a reader, an artistic collaboration, a challenge for poetry to move outside the space of the page.

But also, if you want to de-theorize it, my interest in interactivity is in part because of the works which sustained me through the toughest years of my deluded first puberty: weird twine games written and distributed by trans people. But why were trans people writing so many wonderful twine games? We return back to the defending and weaponizing of identity inherent in the interactive exchange.

Q: Is it even possible to erase the author entirely? Any work with an author’s name attached can’t help but refuse complete erasure. And is not language, in its purest sense, a collaborative system? I get the sense that the work you are aiming for simply pushes to acknowledge that fact, and those collaborations; allowing space for the reader to explore. What do you feel are the challenges for attempting this kind of work?

A: Yeah, this is what I was kind of getting at before—I don’t have any illusions that I am somehow really erasing my authorship, my position within language. Pretending there is ‘no author’, even in a readymade, is to lose sight of yourself, your act of language. However, if I imagine space or room or possibility for an encounter with a reader, and I instead almost hypermark my authorship in the space of the writing, to lay bare and frustrate the mechanics of the illusion, then there’s kind of also a demand that someone also recognizes my identity as a trans person, not necessarily in a voyeuristic or confessional way, but one in which they have to do this essential work of untangling and understanding.

In terms of the poets of the past, there have been so many who only later I discovered they were queer; that information had been hidden from me. Authorship is itself a kind of authority, but ultimately the reader has a kind of authority, too, to participate in the words, to imagine and misrepresent that there is some kind of inner life behind the words that is not their own, to suck out the marrow of identity for entertainment.

There’s kind of a way I imagine my interactive work as intensely realist, in that sense—I’m depicting the collaborative matrix of interactions inherent to language, its frustrations, its oppositions, its potential for love and recognition. I think in that sense your assessment of my work is correct—an allowing of space, a depiction of the space that reading is.

I think the challenge for that kind of work is that you have to trust that the reader won’t hate you for the frustration you’re causing them. I think about how some people imagine that there’s a contract between the writer and the reader—I don’t believe such a contract, but if there was one, I think my work is breaking it. I think also, when you have a nonlinear text, the reader might come up with a way of reading that you didn’t think of, and if you’re really committed to this kind of practice, there’s a need to accept that possibility of the unplanned. You have to come to terms with the fact that reading and writing already comes with it the possibility of vengeful counterreadings, critiques, refusals to engage with your identity, rejection.

Q: You’ve been publishing work for some time now, although you’ve yet to release a chapbook or full-length collection. What do you feel your work has accomplished? Where do you see your work headed?

A: I don’t know if two years is all that much time in terms of publishing, but I will say that I do have a chapbook in the works which will be released probably soonish. I’ve only been really sending out the manuscript for my full-length collection for a month now—I finished writing it in October. Publishing can be very slow. I edit and change my poems and projects a lot, even while I’m sending them out. If you look at the poems from my full-length manuscript that got published two years ago, they look nothing like how they do now—that’s why maybe it feels like there’s been a long lead-up in terms of individual poems being published even while there have been no books.

I don’t really have any illusions about my work accomplishing anything. A poem cannot really be the revolutionary vanguard or anything. What my poems have accomplished have been what they have done for me: my writing was the pathway out of my conservative and deeply religious upbringing, out of the confines of the gender I was forcibly assigned. My poems are places where I store what I’ve been thinking about—bad jokes, reflections on my progress as a person, things I like making. The value of the poem is its idiosyncratic particularities, the act of finding possibility within a culture and language of death.

Relatedly, I think my work is headed towards a certain kind of idiosyncratic exploration of syntax, and also the representation of syntax (like sentence diagramming). I’ve been playing around with this concept where one could take a phrase to be a part of speech indexing itself, if that makes sense. You can turn any phrase or any part of speech into another part of speech with quotations and meta-reference. For example, you could take a phrase like “to write this way” and use it as an adjective, verb, or noun:

            I am feeling a “to write this way” emotion.
            This “to write this way” grows into a mossy ecosystem.
            Language is “to write this way”-ing the word.

I’m interested in seeing how far one could take this (maybe kind of banal) concept and see how unreadable and bad language might become with multiple deployments and nesting of this technique:

            “To write this way” “to write this way”-s “to write this ‘to write this way’.”

I want to fold this language in half. I want to break it. I want to see what kind of stupid and perspective-shifting things I can get myself and my friends to think about. Books and something like a legacy might be nice, but neither of those things will really matter to me when I’m dead. When I was closeted and hated myself, I cared a whole lot more about what people thought about me when I was dead. These days, I’m a whole lot more interested in the capacity for pleasure now, while I’m still alive, in this short and rare time I get to actually be me.

Q: I like the idea of folding language in half and/or breaking language. Have you had any models for this type of writing? Are there any particular writers or works in the back of your head as you work?

A: I think when I’m thinking about that kind of deforming of language, I’m thinking about quite a few projects by poets about the impossible violence of language, a wish for the pain it causes (and for language itself) to disappear, or be made anew. I think the most recent prominent example I can think of is the work being done in Jos Charles’s feeld (whose language-twisting work is in large part inspired by Paul Celan), the way it is trying to allow for the kinds of spaces of untranslatability that I’ve found my trans identity needs. There is also the way in which M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! twists the actual legal language and slavery outward into a polyvocal inhabitation with the specific violent event of the Zong massacre and its occurrence within the larger genocide of enslavement. Or perhaps I can be cheeky and talk about some of the literal ways in which poets fold language—constructing a mobius strip out of a page in Tyehimba Jess’s Olio, the visual folding and arrangement in most Douglas Kearney’s poetic practice, or the ways in which actual historical poems live their lives within physical objects and manuscripts, the losses and gaps within Sappho’s oeuvre which in themselves language-usurping encounters with non-closure.

I guess I’m talking about a revolt against language generally, which is not an unusual emotion in poets, who obviously have to live with how deeply adversarial language can really be. And I think there’s a certain anarchistic tradition, there, in this idea of a revolt against language. In his Dada manifesto, Hugo Ball asks why he cannot create his own language, and name things in the ways he wishes—the result was his noise poems, and the irrational revolt of Dada in general. I can’t really tell if such a tendency is utopian or nihilistic; in Neon Haze, a piece of interactive fiction written by Porpentine Charity Heartscape, she writes, “I dream of clouds frying and servers crashing and paper burning and language being undone until I can just be a nameless animal.” It is, of course, kind of an impossible dream fulfillable only in, of course, the return-to-material-from-material of death. The character in Neon Haze, Jwlain Seweta, says that line in a way I read as very bitter. Maybe in the utterance it’s an indwelling of bitterness and hope simultaneously. I’m doubtless leaving out tons of people whose writing I love & who influence my kinda-edgy anti-language language stance and who are influencing my practice at one stage or another.

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

A: I tend to find myself returning to Hannah Weiner’s work—its relationship with the page, with the thought, of language as a process in one’s body, language being a container for the liquid of one’s thoughts.

Armand Schwerner’s “The Tablets,” too, feels like an important precursor to my interest in the archival gaps, although I fret over that book’s relationship to the colonial museum system, whether it’s doing enough to undo or undermine a certain troubling attitude in relationship with the past. But his work, the capacity it allows for silence, its use of pictorial poetics, its documentation of gradations of silence, is still important to me.

I cannot help also but have a soft spot in me for Gerard Manley Hopkins and his work with language and form. Maybe it’s the ex-Christian in me.

And in general there’s a lot of overlap between the people I mentioned in the previous question and this one. I’d also want to mention the work of Never Angeline Nørth, Caroline Bergvall, Juliana Spahr, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Chelsey Minnis, Sean Bonney, essa may ranapiri, and kari edwards. There is also so much crucial writing from outside the poetry space—alt-comix and interactive art—that they can’t be mentioned here for the sake of time & space.

I would also be lying if I didn’t admit that I often return to the poetic practices of friends. I find that the best lessons about writing have been from people I cared about directly and personally, rather than abstract artists from a nebulous personal canon of authors. What reenergizes my work is not really reading, but remembering how lucky I am to be alive and be me and to have friends and to love. It’s corny, but true!!!

TtD supplement #152 : seven questions for Lydia Unsworth

Lydia Unsworth is the author of two collections of poetry: Certain Manoeuvres (Knives Forks & Spoons, 2018) and Nostalgia for Bodies (Winner, 2018 Erbacce Poetry Prize), and two chapbooks: My Body in a Country (Ghost City Press, 2019) and I Have Not Led a Serious Life (above / ground press, 2019). Recent work can be found in Ambit, para.text, Tears in the Fence, Banshee, Litro and others. Manchester / Amsterdam. Twitter @lydiowanie 

Her poems “On Not Having Anything to Shatter,” “Plein to see,” “The Absolute Limit,” “Akron” and “Swimming in the Water” appear in the twenty-fourth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “On Not Having Anything to Shatter,” “Plein to see,” “The Absolute Limit,” “Akron” and “Swimming in the Water.”

A: At the time of writing those poems, I was very focused on doubt and authority; two forces which often sit on a sort of seesaw from one another, one going up as the other goes down. I like to focus on very specific scenes and images, and associate from there, often with detailed movements of the body (realistic or otherwise) contained within the text. How the body negotiates the environment and the power-struggles of the environment it finds itself in. This then allows me a way to explore the worries of the consciousness proper – somewhat let loose from those events surrounding it – it frees up that voice, those solipsistic concerns, to better understand and, well, have fun with themselves. And to reach outward, bridging the gap. I like to think my poems are playful beasts, rollicking around in their own anxiety – if you’ve got it, flaunt it! so to speak.

Q: How do these pieces compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: Well, I’ve been playing with line-breaking more lately and allowing the punctuation to fall away. Primarily I’m a prose poet, and that’s my favourite way to write – there’s a certain madness and intensity and clumsy noisy honesty to it – but I’m also writing some softer, more ephemeral pieces lately, words sort of fluttering about in a papery wind. Even my prose poetry seems lighter as a result. Although that could, of course, just be the weight of dragging something from memory and staring at it too long talking. Perhaps newer pieces always feel lighter by way of being fresh.

Q: What is it that originally brought you to the prose poem, and what do you feel the form allows that might not be possible otherwise?

A: Beckett and visual art. That love of a text that seems to explode out from a pure joy of itself. I never want much to happen in a novel, I just want to be swamped in language. I found that in art often, too, in video projections where one thought collides against another – a barricade. That's what prose poetry allows me; a momentum, rough edges, an immersive pool of experience. And it allows me to hide more than conventional poetry does – the words safe in the close huddle of all the others, shyly sticking their arms up and mumbling Here.

Q: With two full-length poetry books and two chapbooks under your belt so far, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: I would like my work to become more comfortable in its own skin – it is still learning how to dance with itself. I would like my work to spread its fingers, become brave.

Q: You mention you’ve been deliberately exploring the possibilities of the line-break. What prompted this shift, and what has the shift allowed you to see or do?

A: It happened as a response to a few individual poems, so I decided to pay attention to it. I sometimes wonder if I am bold enough to put one word on one line, for example – so I am perhaps playing with that exposure. It is also interesting to see how the voice changes depending on what shape – and therefore in a sense who – it is trying to be. And then to come back ‘home,’ as it were, to the prose poem and see what has become of me.

Q: You mention Beckett, but what other authors or works have prompted you to do the kinds of writing you’ve been exploring? There are lengthy, and wonderfully divergent, lineages of the prose poem throughout Canada, the United States and England, for example, so I’m curious to know what other threads you might have picked at as potential influence?

A: Well, I’m going to say that most of my early influences were not poetry. I was heavily influenced by Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, by the existentialists, by (of course) Kafka, by Milan Kundera, and later (and to a lesser extent) by books such as Dubravka Ugresic’s The Museum of Unconditional Surrender and this wonderful book called Log of the S. S. the Mrs Unguentine by Stanley Crawford. It was the fragmentary I was drawn to, the sentences and moments of experience rather than the whole. I expect I interpreted a lot of things in my own way due to naivety and ignorance, but I think something came out of that too, some way of understanding and writing that came out of my own half-lit path through the maze. I also spent a lot of time with the visual arts, with artists like Christian Boltanski, Sophie Calle, Ilya Kabakov, Louise Bourgeois, Roni Horn; and with films: Sans Soleil, Armacord, Synecdoche New York, ¡Vivan las antípodas!, The Forbidden Room, Distant Voices Still Lives to name a few whose resonance really stays; and lyrics from certain songs ... When you put it all together it becomes a kind of poetry – all that feedback and richness that bounces around and associates in surprising ways. Anyway, finally, I did find out poetry was what I was after, and what I was perhaps already doing; I started reading Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, thanks to a good friend of mine who was more knowledgeable than me in such matters at the time. And now it is also, finally, poetry that influences me. I’ve found some amazing recent collections and made wonderful friends and, with the internet and online literary journals, there is inspiration and influence (and community) everywhere. It is rather impossible (but enjoyably so) to keep up.

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

A: I’m currently going back to Vahni Capildeo and Karen McCarthy Woolf a lot. There’s this collection Nowhere Nearer by Alice Miller that is quiet and lonely and beautiful – like a drifting iceberg in the middle of an abandoned airfield in Berlin. And I’ve been enjoying Crispin Best’s work online for a number of years, and am pleased to hear he finally has a full collection (Hello) coming out in November with Partus Press. His stuff is playful and light and frivolous with just the most amazing profound surprises thrown in – like being punched in the gut by a lollypop. What else? Certain go-to online journals such as Train, Stride, Litter, Blackbox Manifold, Datableed. And prose poetry anthologies like the recent Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry and The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem – those two should keep me happy for a while.

And thank you for these questions. I always find it a useful and engaging way to think about my own processes and practice as well.

TtD supplement #151 : seven questions for Ben Robinson

Ben Robinson is a poet, musician and librarian. He has published three chapbooks – Mumbles in Hollywood, California (Simulacrum Press), The Sims in Real Life (The Blasted Tree) and TALKING GIBBERISH TO STRANGERS (above/ground press) – and has more work forthcoming with The Alfred Gustav Press. He has only ever lived in Hamilton, Ontario on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas. He is @bengymen on Twitter.

His poems “OPEN4BIZ,” “Democracy Is Just the Name of Another Café,” “Hotdog in a Hamburger City” and “Est. Time Travel to Downtown” appear in the twenty-fourth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “OPEN4BIZ,” “Democracy Is Just the Name of Another Café,” “Hotdog in a Hamburger City” and “Est. Time Travel to Downtown”.”

A: These days, for better or worse, I seem to be writing three different kinds of poems, two of which are represented in the poems included in TTD. “Hotdog in a Hamburger City” and “Est. Time Travel to Downtown” work in a narrative mode where something strange happens in my day and then when I sit down to write my imagination runs wild with it, amplifying certain details. “Democracy is Just the Name for Another Cafe” and “OPEN4BIZ” are a little more observational but they use a less linear, kind of collagey structure with short two/three-line stanzas.

HD: I wrote this one after my last visit with Gary Barwin while he was the writer-in-residence at McMaster and the Hamilton Public Library a couple of years ago. There’s a great hotdog cart on the McMaster campus so I got one for the trip home and then when the bus pulled up I wasn’t done eating. I hope some of Gary’s spirit is in this one.

ETT:  This one was an unsuccessful entry in CV2’s 2-day Poem Contest. For the contest, they give you a list of ten words that you need to fit into a poem. I kind of tried to skirt the rules by jamming most of the required words into the monologue in the middle. I imagine the judges were quick to realize that. With the kind of poems I write, I didn’t see any other way to get feckless in there without butting it up against something like pieces of shit. Even though the poem didn’t place in the contest I still liked it and hoped I could do something with it. I pulled a couple of the more obvious ten-dollar words out (commodious and roric) in the hopes of disguising its origins a bit. I’ve spotted other unsuccessful entries from last year’s contest out in the wild as well.

I’m pretty sure there was one in Stuart Ross’ new book. We’re like a secret society of loser poets now, you see the word frisson in someone’s line and you just know.

DEMO: I was waiting for the bus on Halloween morning last year and a guy standing very close to me puked everywhere without much warning so I decided to hold onto that. There’s a cafe downtown in Hamilton that is right across the street from an army barracks so there are always soldiers coming in for coffee in fatigues and berets which is definitely strange. This one also has some elements of what I’ve been calling “social media centos” where I try to redeem some of my time spent on Twitter for poetry purposes. A couple of the images in the poem are loosely based on pictures I liked on Twitter.

O4B: This one is basically all true. I had just moved to a new neighbourhood when I was working on this poem and I was collecting all these little fragmentary images and eventually, a theme started to appear. It can be hard to tell when these ones are done but I try to wait until I get the feeling of the individual pieces beginning to hold together, to congeal. Not that I’m a baker but I think of it kind of like dough, or maybe like good packing snow.

Q: How do these pieces compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: These pieces are all part of a chapbook manuscript that will be published by above/ground press,
Department of Continuous Improvement, and are also part of what will hopefully be my first full-length collection, tentatively titled The Humans Are Dead, We Are the Humans Now.

These poems are fairly representative of both the chapbook and the collection as a whole. Perhaps the only missing thread is the third of the three kinds of poems that I mentioned above — more realistic narrative prose poems. As a whole the collection focuses on life in the city — the chaos and humour and absurdity — as well as the false divide between the human and the animal, the urban and the natural. There’s a lot of garbage and vehicles and animal life in the poems. Lots of movement both formally and in terms of commuting/transportation.

Q: What has been the process of putting together a full-length collection versus putting together your handful of chapbook-length manuscripts? Is it simply a larger version of the same process? Was there a difficulty in reconceiving work that had been produced as part of a smaller unit into part of a larger structure? What have the differences been?

A: In some ways, the goal has always been a full-length collection. I grew up, like many of us, as a lover of books and so the logical extension of writing poems was to eventually put together a book of them. Lately, I’ve been trying to interrogate this fixation with having a book to my name as a means of legitimating myself as a writer. I’m worried about rushing into the first one and wishing I had been more patient later on. You hear of writers being embarrassed by their first books and trying to keep them out of print, but I also realize that I have to start somewhere.

I don’t know that the collection is a larger version of the chapbook, at least not always. Lately, I’ve been interested in writers who seem to work exclusively within the format of the chapbook and do not seem to be interested in full-length collections. Fracturing that linear understanding of poem >> chapbook >> collection has been freeing for me. Seeing a writer like Amanda Jernigan list her chapbook The Temple alongside her full-length collections at the front of her new book has helped me to value the format more (and why not, those Baseline Press chapbooks are nicer than most trade books).

The difficulty for me in trying to assemble my first collection has been one of scale. I come to poetry via music and so sequencing ten poems for a chapbook had a clear analogue in the album, whereas I had no frame of reference for putting sixty pieces in order. Because The Humans Are Dead is not built around a discernible sequence, the structure of the collection became apparent very slowly as I have been writing the poems that comprise it. I didn’t consciously set out to write in a certain direction, I simply started writing poems and then, when those poems were finished, I took a step back to see who and what was in there. It has been interesting to see how some poems from three or four years ago that felt like bizarre outliers at the time presage some of the writing I’m doing now and fit seamlessly into the manuscript.

In some ways the distinction between the chapbook and the collection feels analogous to the short story and the novel; there is some relationship between the two though the possibilities are different. Sometimes an excerpt of a novel can make a great stand-alone story, other times not so much. Some of my chapbooks feel like they could swell and deepen to become longer works but sometimes I get to 20 pages and think, this idea has run its course. I have two chapbooks coming out that are excerpts of The Humans Are Dead and if you read the chapbooks together you would have a good sense of what that manuscript is like. I also have a couple more experimental works coming out as chapbooks which I don’t have any plans to try and assemble into a trade book at this point.

Overall, the process has forced me to try and gain some perspective on what it is I have been trying to do in my poems for the past few years, what has been successful and how those successes might connect. I enjoy a more unconscious approach to poetry because it provides a lot of excitement and surprise for me but I’ve had to learn to use my analytical mind in the process of collecting – beginning to interrogate what is happening below the surface, what I seem to be fixated on. Writing my first query letter was difficult for me because I hadn’t been thinking about what the poems were about while writing them, at least not in any overarching sense. Now when I am writing, I try to be more conscious of what I might say about the work so that I have some language to describe it when necessary.

At this point, the process of assembling seems to be ongoing. I imagine, in some sense, the manuscript will continue to change and shift until the book is fixed in print and I can no longer add or subtract from it. Poems are still being added every so often but the process has certainly slowed from the frenzy of about a year ago where they seemed to come one after another. Maybe the fact that the poems are still coming means that the book is not quite done and I am rushing, however, I wonder if that Paul Valery quote that “Poems are never finished - just abandoned” holds for books as well. Regardless, the manuscript is feeling more and more fixed as time passes. Maybe that means it is done, maybe that means I am just tired of looking at it.

Q: Perhaps it’s too early to know, but with a couple of chapbooks under your belt, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: My progression has been an ongoing process of trying to be more comfortable with writing like myself and embracing my particularities. My favourite writers and musicians and artists are the ones who find a way to have their unique personalities come through in their work, who make the kind of work that could only have come from them. I think about someone like Anne Carson who writes so firmly through a classical lens and is unapologetic about it.

Part of that process for me has involved embracing humour. Before I had ever read in public I don’t think I understood the effect humour could have on how a poem is received. At one of my first readings, there was a man in the back with a huge laugh and I guess whatever I was doing was hitting with him and he just kept going off and it messed with me to the point where I was having to pause after certain lines to wait for him to quiet down. Up to that point, I hadn’t been thinking of the poems as particularly humorous so I had to reevaluate things after that reading. Since then I’ve been trying to embrace humour in a way that doesn’t rely too heavily on punchlines or cleverness but instead deepens and broadens the work.

After a reading, someone once told me I reminded them of Dr. Seuss which I was kind of offended by at first because his work is so silly and I had this idea of myself as a serious poet. That being said, I’m learning to embrace elements of children’s literature in my work — the play, the imagination. My grandmother recently told me one of my poems reminded her of a scary children’s story and I like that. Some of the poems start as these seemingly innocent narratives which I then try to take somewhere a little more surprising or complex — subverting the expectations of those simple stories to make them engaging for adults.

Something else I’ve been trying to embrace in my writing has been my upbringing in the church. At the same time that I've been steeped in the musicality and play of children’s stories I also have the rhythms of high religious language in my mind. For a while, I didn’t know what to do with all that Bible inside my head because that’s not something you see a lot of in contemporary literature. For me, it comes through in some of the allusions but there’s also this King James Version prophetic voice that can surface at times. The combination of the two modes, a voice meant for children and a religious voice, makes me think of this illustrated children’s Bible I had growing up where they took these wild stories about plague and war and tried to make them slightly less terrifying for children by illustrating them with colourful cartoons. Maybe what I’m doing is the inverse of that. Poems for adults in the guise of kid’s literature. Regardless of what’s going on, I find that tension of high/low, dark/light, humorous/serious to be interesting.

Q: You mention the Bible, but what other works or authors first brought you to the kinds of writing you’ve been attempting? What other writers are in the back of your head as you write?

A: Early on it was Michael Ondaatje. Poems like “The Cinnamon Peeler” and “The Story” and most of Handwriting had this really beautiful mythic quality that I was drawn to.

Most recently my encouragement has come from:

Kim Hyesoon — “I wept, wondering how I would ever use up all that ink, writing about all the unjust deaths, with my tiny pen as skinny as a butterfly’s hind legs?”

Tongo Eisen-Martin — “By the time craft starts it’s almost too late to accomplish anything that’s outside of your day-in-day-out practice. As long as I’m really getting it in outside of the craft then the politics just plays out naturally.”

Christian Wiman — “There is no clean intellectual coherence, no abstract ultimate meaning to be found, and if this is not recognized, then the compulsion to find such certainty becomes its own punishment.”

Ali Blythe — “I could say something / beautiful if I only had / until this pencil ran out. / I would be so careful.”

bill bissett — “trying so hard to build we can’t help / but destroy each time.”

Matthew Zapruder — “I’ve heard Bob Hass say, when talking about what to do when a poem feels stuck, to ‘put the problem in the poem.’ Bring the ongoing conflicts you are feeling, the limits of your understanding, into it. Articulate those struggles. Open yourself to the reader.”

Q: You mention working with Gary Barwin during his time as writer-in-residence, suggesting a bit of an influence there. What is it that talking to him allowed for you and your work?

A I’ve been going to see the various writers-in-residence for a couple of years now. I didn’t do the MFA thing so finding ways to approximate that kind of mentoring has been important — people to help direct my reading, help navigate publishing and to critique my work. The WiR program, in particular, is nice because the visiting writers get paid but there’s no charge for the writers who come to meet with them. The idea that these writers are available in this way still kind of blows my mind.

Gary continues to embody a spirit of possibility in my mind. He seems undaunted by the constraints of genre or even medium (something I imagine comes partly from his time studying with bp). I had been thinking about how I might incorporate my other life as a musician into my readings before I saw Gary play saxophone at one of his. I asked him about it recently and he said something like “they’re both just going on stage and making sounds” which is, of course, true and may seem obvious but that helped me relax about it all.

Last year Kate Cayley was in residence and she was also amazing to work with. So smart, so perceptive, so many good questions and reading recommendations. We worked through multiple steps of revision on a particular poem of mine which was helpful. She also put me onto Maggie Nelson which I’ve been taking full advantage of. Kate had different strengths than Gary and that is part of the beauty of the program — each year a new writer, a new perspective. If nothing else the appointments have led to engaging conversations with kind and interesting people.

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

A: I go back to Stuart Ross’s selected Hey, Crumbling Balcony! and You Exist. Details Follow. for the anarchy and refusal to play by the rules and pure imagination. I go to Tongo Eisen-Martin’s Heaven is All Goodbyes for the breadth, for a voice that feels like it could go on forever, effortlessly spreading out over the pages. David McFadden’s selected poems Why Are You So Sad? is a place I turn for reminders about simplicity and clarity, about not getting caught up in the details all the time. Natalie Shapero’s Hard Child for poems that are taut and lean, considered and intricate in ways that I don’t always understand. Mikko Harvey has been a more recent discovery but I’ve already read his collection Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit twice. I love the turns in those poems. They move so quickly in unexpected directions. And what a title.

Touch the Donkey : twenty-fourth issue,

The twenty-fourth issue is now available, with new poems by Mark Cunningham, Lydia Unsworth, Zane Koss, Nicole Raziya Fong, Ben Robinson, Asher Ghaffar, Clara Daneri and Ava Hofmann.

Eight dollars (includes shipping). As an actor, I depend on my remarkable looks.

TtD supplement #150 : seven questions for Denise Newman

Denise Newman’s poetry collections are Future People, The New Make Believe, Wild Goods, and Human Forest. Newman is also involved in video and social practice projects that explore gaps between language and reality, and for many years she has collaborated with composers providing lyrics for choral works and songs. Her videos have been screened at Southern Exposure, The Lab, the AIA in SF, and at the Whitney Museum in NYC in conjunction with a reading by Anne Carson. She has received a Creative Work Fund grant, two PEN awards and an NEA Fellowship in translation. She has served as a juror for the California Book Award since 2014, and teaches at the California College of the Arts.

Her “Six poems from: The Redesignation of Paradise” appear in the twenty-third issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “The Redesignation of Paradise.”

A: The Redesignation of Paradise comes out of a two-year poetry project at the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden with poet Hazel White. With staff, visitors and volunteers, we created a public poem in the form of a humongous index. Throughout our time in the garden, people kept bringing up the concept of an earthly paradise, often with a sense of sorrow and even guilt (as in, we’ve blown it). After the project was over, I came across this quote by Kafka:

    We were created to live in Paradise, and Paradise was designed to serve us. Our
    designation has been changed; we are not told whether this has happened to
    Paradise as well.

It got me wondering about what’s happened to paradise. Is it buried under our despair? Does it need redesignating or would obsolescence be better? If we were able to change our thinking about paradise, might we find a more sustainable course? These were some of the questions I was thinking through as I wrote these poems. The final section, the title poem, imagines life on earth as paradise.

Q: How do these poems relate to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: These are the first poems I wrote after we completed our work at the garden. I had been accumulating ideas and images that could not be expressed in the public project and when it ended, the poems came flooding out. The other sections didn’t happen that way. I had no master plan; each section arose slowly out of the concerns of the previous one.

The main way this work differs from earlier writing is that humans are portrayed within a larger context of natural processes. The plant experts, including Hazel, who’s written many books on horticulture, taught me how to see and show the animation of flora, and the inextricable links between humans, flora and fauna. The humility of the gardeners often impressed us; as one told us, “the garden corrects you.”

In the title poem I found a way to decenter the human by using pronouns in a more fluid way. I wanted to disrupt language’s propensity for distinguishing and categorizing to show how enmeshed we are with everything else. An awareness of these interconnections is perhaps the closest we can get to paradise on earth.

Q: Is this the way you usually put together a manuscript? How do your books begin, and how are they shaped?

A: I do months of reading and noodling around before something starts to take shape. How that usually happens is a particular sound or rhythm catches my interest, and once I have this DNA sample, I can build the whole work from it slowly, word by word.

I love the concentration of books with a single focus, but I’ve only been able to write two such collections. I never know what the scope of my questions and concerns will be. Sometimes they need an entire book to excavate, other times, just a quarter of one. It took four years to pull together my latest book Future People. The two long poems needed something else to glue them together, but I felt completely emptied of words. I started making videos of simple forms, like ants carrying letters that I made out of bread. When I finally returned to writing, I felt as if I were beginning over again. I began working with the etymological meanings of words alongside their current usage. These short contorted poems were the glue I was seeking to hold everything together.

Q: What brought you to this point? What authors or works are in your head when you are structuring a manuscript? Is this a process that evolved organically, or have you had templates in mind?

A: My books evolve organically. I never use templates; whenever I place restraints on my writing I rebel immediately—the same goes for diets. One structural element that I’ve used in almost all of my books is a counterpoint poem or section. I’ve found that it’s useful to make a radical shift in perspective or tone to throw the other parts into relief. In the third section of The Redesignation… I write about my native land of NJ. It’s called “Garden State of Total Reinforcement” and circles around a family visit where I consider my own conditioning away from paradise toward private ownership and the alienation of competition.

I’m surely influenced by other writers and their books, but their influence is so deep that I can’t see it myself. The Danish poet Inger Christensen, whose novels I’ve translated, has two single-poem books that perfectly merge form and content. One is called alphabet and is structured by the alphabet and the Fibonacci sequence. She uses numbers and letters to structure a comprehensive view of life on Earth in all its beauty and horror. The other book it focuses on how language mediates reality and the poems are ordered by line and syllable count with subheadings of the different functions of prepositions. Susanna Nied has brilliantly translated both of them. One day I’d like to write a book with a complex structure that’s integral with meaning and yet almost invisible as Christensen does.

Q: I’m curious about the potential influence that translation may have had on your writing. How do you see your translation work interacting with your own writing? Is there a conversation that occurs between the two, or are they entirely separate threads?

A: This week I did a translation exercise with my beginning-writing students using Bashō’s famous frog haiku. They were arguing over the difference between leap and jump. One said that leap has an up connotation, which didn’t match the following line. I loved that they were getting into the subtle differences between words. That kind of attention to language is the main way translation influences my writing. Also, you’ve got to know a text inside out in order to do it justice; after working so closely with it over time, it becomes part of your consciousness. It’s the same as reading a book over and over. Eventually you begin to understand on a deep level how its form and meaning work together. Maybe you can’t say how exactly, but you know it with your whole being. I have the luxury of working only on books that excite me. I’ve also been lucky to have a personal connection to the authors I’ve translated and have learned a lot from our behind-the-scenes conversations. You might not see a direct relationship between my writing and the translation work, but the influence is significant, like the way living in a big city seeps into one’s writing.

Q: You’ve been working for many years in video, as well, and I have the same question: how do your video works interact with your writing? What does being aware of the visual allow for your text-based projects?

A: My first language is images and so I feel very at home making videos. I’m the kind of writer who writes out of a struggle with words rather than the Mt Vesuvius kind. As with my poems, the videos are tied to observation, of mostly off-to-the-side phenomena. Then I add another element to see what happens, like the bread-letters I get the ants to carry. In another video, I have snails dragging sentences. There’s a lot of trial and error, and the process is very playful; I love the physical part of making videos.

Filming is a lot like writing when I’m away from my desk going about my day with the piece I’m working on in mind. It might influence a conversation or what I notice as I walk around. A few years ago I started inventing little practices, like simply saying hello to everyone who crosses my path. These physical engagements make me more present the same way the camera helps me focus on what I’m filming. Editing is basically the same process for both disciplines. Meaning emerges indirectly through juxtaposition and patterning.

Making videos has made me more aware of what’s special about poetry. Since consciousness is tied up with language, writing can show us how the mind works more directly than any other art discipline.

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

A: One book I read over and over is the Shōbōgenzō by the thirteenth century poet and Japanese Zen teacher Dōgen Kigen. His essays enact rather than explain the mystery of existence. He does this through metaphor and ingenious turnings of phrases. Emily Dickinson and Inger Christensen’s poems nourish me in a similar way and I often carry around individual poems of theirs to read on the bus or waiting in line. I also read a lot of fiction in translation. One writer I often return to is Yoko Tawada. Her books blur the line between reality and fable and because of this, they offer startling insights about our time.

TtD supplement #149: seven questions for Alyse Knorr

Alyse Knorr is an assistant professor of English at Regis University and, since 2017, co-editor of Switchback Books. Her most recent book of poems, Mega-City Redux, won the 2016 Green Mountains Review Poetry Prize, selected by Olena Kalytiak Davis. She is the author of two other poetry collections, a non-fiction book, and two poetry chapbooks. Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, The Greensboro Review, and The Cincinnati Review, among others.

Her poems “Alyse Knorr,” “Love Poem to a Scattered Deck of Cards,” “Gratification,” “Progressive Exposure” and “Potentiality” appear in the twenty-third issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “Alyse Knorr,” “Love Poem to a Scattered Deck of Cards,” “Gratification,” “Progressive Exposure” and “Potentiality.”

A: “Alyse Knorr” is the newest of this bunch—I wrote it using my phone’s predictive text feature and learned a lot about myself and what my phone knows about me in the process. I wrote “Love Poem to a Scattered Deck of Cards” using another digital technology—Google Translate. I started with a poem of mine in English and translated it into another language, then another, then another, again and again until it became much stranger and more interesting. The end of “Gratification” refers to moulins—vertical shafts in glaciers formed by water boring down through the ice. Alaskans really do call them “forever holes,” speaking to the very low survival rate should you happen to fall into one. I learned this fun fact while I was walking around on a glacier during my three years living in Alaska. I wrote “Progressive Exposure” in response to Marianne Moore, attempting to emulate her use of syllabic form and quotations to create interesting tonal shifts and juxtapositions. The source texts for the quotes include Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native and some self-help books about the fear of flying, a phobia I managed to cure during my time in Alaska—perhaps by replacing my fear of flying with a fear of moulins. Finally, “Potentiality” is about the crisis of identity that can occur during an anxiety spiral, and during the transition onto or off of anti-depressants.

Q: How do these poems relate to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: The digital technologies I used to compose “Alyse Knorr” and “Love Poem to a Scattered Deck of Cards” are all also used in a chapbook of poems forthcoming from Ethel. All the poems in that project were written by predictive text or voicemail transcription. The dark tone of “Potentiality” and “Gratification,” and the use of source texts in “Progressive Exposure,” are showing up in some of my recent writing about motherhood and gardening, two endeavors that have become inextricably linked in my mind lately, and both of which I keep relating to death.

Q: What do you see as the appeal in utilizing digital technologies for composing poems, and how did this first begin? What do you feel you are able to do through these processes that might not be possible otherwise?

A: I think that predictive text or Google Translate or my phone’s voicemail transcriber can create a strangeness in language that’s similar to the strangeness in, say, a toddler’s use of language. With both digitally produced language and toddler-speak, there’s often a wonderful internal logic clashing with a totally bizarre surprise—and this clash is really impossible to create without the kind of distance that one can have when one is producing language without any meaningful grasp of what it means. For instance, the phrase “You look like a thing and I love you,” which appears in one of my poems, was generated by a machine learning algorithm that was attempting to write pick-up lines. What I love about it is that it does follow the structural logic of pick-up lines: “You look like....” but then adds in the total bizarreness of “a thing” clashed against the sweet sincerity of “and I love you.”

Q: With a handful of chapbooks and a full-length poetry collection over the past few years, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: The main way my work has developed over the last few years is that I’ve expanded out into other genres. My most recent book, Super Mario Bros. 3, is a work of non-fiction, and I've been publishing some short stories and working on a libretto. Poetically, I think my use of form has grown more intentional over time, and I see it continuing that way into the future.

Q: You mention a chapbook of poems composed and assembled as a grouping of poems similarly constructed. Is assembling a group of poems that share structural concerns or themes your usual process of putting a manuscript together? How do your books and chapbooks get built?

A: I put together my three novels in verse by starting with a set of characters and then following those characters on their journeys. Mega-City Redux, the most linearly narrative of the books, is about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena Warrior Princess, and Special Agent Dana Scully going on a roadtrip together to find a city where women can live safe from misogynistic violence. Copper Mother is about a time-traveling human scientist and a group of aliens visiting Earth, and Annotated Glass is about a character named Alice recovering from a break-up as she re-visits the childhood loss of her sister. My chapbooks have been more linked by theme or form. Alternates follows the same two women through a series of alternate universes, and Epithalamia groups together a series of love poems set in different U.S. states. 

Q: I’m curious about your attraction to the form of the novel-in-verse. Why that form over something more straightforwardly narrative, or even a sequence or suite of more narrative lyric poems? What do you feel the form of novel-in-verse allows or provides that might not be possible otherwise?

A: I like the term “novel in verse” because of the inherent hybridity it implies. I also like how the word “novel” connotes a character-driven narrative, which seems to fit my work since it’s so character-focused. When I think of a sequence or series of poems collected in a book-length project, I think of them as being more thematically linked, whereas when I hear the term “novel in verse,” I tend to picture something like Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red—a more plot and character-driven piece.

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

A: Actually, Autobiography of Red and Anne Carson in general are always favorites of mine, as are Jack Gilbert, Claudia Rankine, Joy Harjo, and Sappho.

TtD supplement #148 : seven questions for Robert R. Thurman

Robert R. Thurman is an artist, musician, and poet. Thurman is the author of SYSTEMS (2015), CONNECTIONS (ZimZalla, 2017), MACHINE LANGUAGE (Spacecraft Press, 2018), SIGNALS (edition taberna kritika, 2018), and DIAGRAMS (2019)

Robert’s work has appeared in The Harvard Advocate, Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion, Coldfront Magazine, Columbia Journal, The MIT Journal of Arts and Letters, and The Monarch Review. His work has been exhibited internationally.

His poems “SIGN LANGUAGE,” “DETECTOR,” “REGULATOR II,” “CONSTRUCT” and “CENTRIFUGE” appear in the twenty-third issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “SIGN LANGUAGE,” “DETECTOR,” “REGULATOR II,” “CONSTRUCT” and “CENTRIFUGE.”

A: What really intrigued me was the way geometric forms, numerals and letters could be combined poetically into something unique.

These machines are a combination of those three components without recourse to the word. They are only locked in place until the reader engages them.

Q: How do these pieces relate to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: My new work still combines these geometric forms, numerals and letters but leaves a combinatory set of elements that almost resemble mathematical shorthand. I just released DIAGRAMS with introduction by Craig Dworkin.  Available here http://robertrthurman.com/selected-publications.html

Q: What is it that brought you to working these kinds of visual structures?

A: I created a new mode of poetry I hadn’t seen before with a form that is singular and signature and yet, not predictable or repetitive.  I began as a geometric painter and also love schematics.  I’ve always been able to visualize geometric shapes so this type of work came natural to me.

I’m interested in the inner workings of letters and numbers. The physicality of them is something I don’t think is considered enough.

For instance looking around a room and visualizing everything – doors, windows, chairs – made up of the letter Z.  Give the Z real substance but don’t bend the letter. Don’t treat it as pliable, but rotatable, collapsible, from only three sections. Is Z a folding chair? A table? A person sitting in a chair, reaching for something on the table? Z or any other letter is a form or mold in which cognition is poured.

Q: There are many who have worked with letterforms over the years; have you any models for this type of work? Were you attempting to create something entirely out of scratch?

A: With a few exceptions, the works I saw which experimented with letterforms seemed to be recycling ideas way too much, in my opinion.

So yes, I built something from scratch by using exact and accurate schematics which treated letters and numerals as part of the machine and vice versa. Even the title of each piece, the courier font typeface, and the order seen, should be viewed as working parts of these SYSTEMS.

Q: Are you the author of individual pieces that come together to group into chapbook or book-length manuscripts, or are you the author of projects? How do you see your compositional process, and the process of putting together collections?

A: Each work can stand alone or be used in multiples for different projects. Each is also a part of one mechanism. Each work has a specific title but is also known generically as SYSTEMS, both individually and collectively.

I can understand using the terms chapbook, book-length manuscripts, et cetera, as descriptions, but I rarely see my work as such. I approach them as projects.

For instance, my compositional process may involve building several variations or versions of a certain poetic machine which I design with the ability to utilize interchangeable or modified parts (poems). This possible integration can create distinctive works that stand alone or become one more mechanism (poems inside poems) that work as another part of SYSTEMS.

Q: With a handful of titles over the past few years, how has your work developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: These projects have not been released sequentially but the evolution and interrelatedness is discernible. The work has evolved by concentrating more energy into designing poetic structures whose parts can initiate a rotating, undulating, almost trancelike animation; with elements that can be later incorporated into other machines.

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

A: First on the list would have to be Charles Wright’s Black Zodiac especially “Apologia pro Vita Sua, III” anything from Breece D'J Pancake Trilobites is a stand out. The Gospel Singer and A childhood: the biography of a place by Harry Crews are excellent as well.