TtD supplement #279 : seven questions for Dag T. Straumsvåg

Dag T. Straumsvåg lives in Trondheim, Norway, and is the author and translator of ten books of poetry, including Nelson (Proper Tales Press, 2017), But in the Stillness (Apt. 9 Press, 2024), and The Mountains of Kong: New & Selected Prose Poems (Assembly Press, 2025), as well as a collaboration with Kingston poet Jason Heroux, A Further Introduction to Bingo (above/ground press, 2024). He runs the small press A + D with his partner, the artist and graphic designer Angella Kassube. His work has appeared in a wide variety of journals in Norway, Canada, and the United States.

His poems “MORNING PHASE,” “ARE YOU STILL AWAKE?,” “SCREEN LIGHT,” “DRIVING AROUND TOWN AT NIGHT TO CHARGE YOUR PHONE,” “LAIDLAW TRIPTYCH: HALF A CENTO,” “BREAKFAST AT CIRCLE K” and “CATHEDRAL” appear in the forty-fifth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “MORNING PHASE,” “ARE YOU STILL AWAKE?,” “SCREEN LIGHT,” “DRIVING AROUND TOWN AT NIGHT TO CHARGE YOUR PHONE,” “LAIDLAW TRIPTYCH: HALF A CENTO,” “BREAKFAST AT CIRCLE K” and “CATHEDRAL.”

A: The poems were written individually over several years, but I think they are connected in that they all deal with communication on some level. There are a few love poems which I’m very happy to have written, and a series of prose poems I call “haiku strings.” Since I fell in love with the prose poem thirty years ago, I've thought about the visual side of it, the short paragraph, the box shape and what you can do within it. I started writing traditional haiku, stringing them together, dropping all punctuation, adding extra space between each line instead, and beginning each haiku with a capital letter. There was something there, but it didn't quite work. I tried writing experimental haiku, poems with no connection, but I wasn’t happy with that either. Then I wrote a few straight prose lines, mixing them with an occasional traditional haiku, following the classic 5-7-5 syllable pattern. To my surprise, I liked it. It forces me to read the poems at a different pace, haikus bleeding into each other, words awkwardly beginning with a capital letter appearing in the middle of a prose sentence, or lines are broken up by unnatural space, all within the  prose poem box. And I like the cracks and gaps that appear visually in the poems, randomly, depending on the font and the font size, the margins, adding breaks and pauses I had not intended and which I have no control over, sometimes opening up to new readings of lines years after I wrote them. Many of the poems came about when Angella and I were talking on Skype—the time difference between Minneapolis and Trondheim (seven hours) would cause some unexpected and fun situations. I’m sure the haiku strings are not to everybody’s taste, but I enjoy writing them very much.

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

A: The haiku string format aside, I think some of these poems contain more autobiographical elements, more narrative fragments, while others may be a little darker. Not consciously, but because you want to address whatever comes your way, you want to find a fitting language, and if possible, a fresh language. Fresh to yourself, at least. Also, I think the inspiration from the classic Chinese and Japanese poets is more visible. Maybe the biggest difference comes from the inspiration I get from Angella. She is a graphic designer and artist, and I find her approach to poems and to reading poems utterly fresh and new. She is the best reader I 've ever met.

I have a new book coming out this spring, The Mountains of Kong: New & Selected Prose Poems (Assembly Press, April 1, 2025), which includes prose poems from the last twenty-five years. As I was finishing it, and as I had just finished a collaboration with Jason Heroux, called A Further Introduction to Bingo (above/ground press, December 2024), it felt like a good time to try my hand at different stuff too. The New & Selected is the result of an almost twenty-five year long collaboration with the brilliant translator Robert Hedin (he is a brilliant poet and editor, too), and the bingo book is the result of a collaboration with the equally brilliant poet/writer Jason Heroux. I have learned a lot from both of them, from their writing and from our email discussions, from our friendships. Some of their stuff has clearly gotten into my poems, and it has made them better. I have been lucky to get to know several great poets, and lucky to call them my friends. The late greats Nelson Ball, Michael Dennis, Louis Jenkins, Clemens Starck, and among the living: Charles Goodrich, Per Helge, Tom Hennen, John Levy, Stuart Ross, Hugh Thomas, Connie Wanek, and Robert and Jason, of course, to mention a few. They all got into my heart and into my writing. But back to your question: I don't think the poems included in Touch the Donkey are very different from other things I have written, but it’s difficult for me to be sure. I guess such things are easier for others to see.

Q: What prompted your collaborative work with Jason Heroux? You say it is difficult to see what might be different, but was there a difference in how you approached your own work due to the collaboration?

A: The collaboration with Jason just sort of happened. We were emailing each other and at some point, Jason said, “Hey, that’s a chapter in a micro novel about bingo!” In the past I had always said no to collaborations—I thought I couldn't do it. A bit like some musicians can’t do improv sessions. The fact that we were writing about the bingo hall I had shared a backyard with for decades, made it easier. If I got stuck I could just look out the window and describe what I saw, and I had at least something. Plus, I loved what Jason was writing so much that I just got caught up in it all, and before we knew it we had both written ten-fifteen texts.

I haven’t consciously changed my way of writing or how I approach a new text, but as a result of the collaboration with Jason, and how fun that was, I believe I approach a new text more relaxed now, with less thought. I trust the process of writing more, trust that the new text will need less guidance and managing from its writer.

Q: How difficult do you find the process of working within, or even between, two languages? Does your writing shift depending on the language you are using? Are there places your writing goes in one that it is unable to go in the other?

A: It's challenging in the sense that I think and dream and feel in Norwegian, and my Norwegian vocabulary is much better than my English. On the other hand, I learned English from listening to folk and rock music, from TV and movies, from reading poetry. So the English is deeply connected with the singers and poets and movies that took me to my “dream places” which I would escape to when I was a kid. Still do, I suppose. So it’s more an advantage, really, writing in two languages. On a good day I can take the best from both.

My Nynorsk writing is different from my English writing. No doubt. Most of the prose poems in The Mountains of Kong I wrote in Nynorsk, and most of the poems in Nelson, But in the Stillness and in A further Introduction to Bingo (with Jason Heroux), I wrote in English. The haiku strings in the new issue of Touch the Donkey were easier to write in English, because English has more one and two syllable words than the Norwegian languages, making the 5-7-5 syllable pattern easier to achieve. But I’ve had great help with my English versions from Angella, Robert Hedin, Stuart Ross, Jason Heroux, and the late great Louis Jenkins.

I think my Nynorsk is more multi-layered and nuanced than my English, but thanks to the great help from the ones mentioned above, the difference is less visible than it would have been if it was just me all the time. Actually, my English without their help, would be rubbish. Mostly, it's great fun and a great privilege to be able to work in two languages. I’ve learned a lot from working on translating my prose poems with Robert Hedin. He is brilliant with nuance, rhythm, and sound—just read his stellar translations of Olav H. Hauge and Harry Martinson. And translating Michael Dennis (Spøkjelse i japanske drosjar/Ghosts in Japanese Taxis) and Tom Hennen (Finn eit stille regn/Find a Quiet Rain) from English and publishing them in bilingual editions on A + D, the micro press Angella and I run, has been a joy and very helpful to get a deeper understanding of the English language.

If I write about something that is emotionally difficult, the Nynorsk provides the nuances and accuracy and history I need to go deep, the English, on the other hand, provides the distance that makes me able to write about such things in the first place. So my poems are often a huge mess during the writing process—a mix of Nynorsk and English lines scattered all over the page (and the house). Then, at some point, it either clears up and becomes a poem in one of the languages, or I give up and go to a nearby park at midnight and bury every sentence under a big oak tree there.

Q: With ten books and chapbooks under your belt, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: I think my work has developed fairly well in the sense that I haven’t willed it in any particular direction. I try not to interfere with the texts and surprisingly often they find their own way and form. As I grow older I get slower and less ambitious, though. In the past I wanted to sail around the world, climb the highest mountains. Now I am happy if I have a good night‘s sleep or make a good cup of coffee in the morning. But I hope to write a science based prose poem about coffee mugs one day.

I’ve learned to trust what I write about more than I used to do, that everything has its own value and mystery. It doesn't have to be about the big questions, the big dramas. It used to be the hardest thing, trusting that what I had was enough. That I didn’t have to paint the old chair in bright colors, or to make the new chair look old. They have their own stories and mysteries. If I pay close attention, it's all there: tragedy, comedy, strangeness, wildness, beauty. And more. If I have one ambition left, it must be that I want to show how beautifully strange things are in themselves instead of making anything up. To get better at observing and describing.

The second question is difficult to answer. Or rather, it’s a question I don’t want to know the answer to! It would be nice if my work is headed somewhere that will surprise me. That's the most difficult thing in a writer's life. To surprise yourself.

Q: I’ve long felt that writing can best be considered a collaboration between the writer and the work itself, two sides finding that perfect balance towards something new. How do you see the process?

A: That's interesting! I don’t know if this answers your question, but sometimes, when I get into a conversation with the work, or characters in the work, I’m having the best time. There may be a back-and-forth conversation going on for hours, days or weeks—in the case of “Cathedral” it went on for years—I started so many different versions of it, and the text said, “Nope. That’s not right.” And I put the poem away. For months and years. But it would always return to me. Then I tried making it into one of those haiku strings, and it finally felt right.

Sometimes I freeze an image or a scene and just walk around it, looking for the best angle. Most of the time the collaboration/conversation with the text is unconscious, though, which I think is vital. Not overthink or plan too much. I love it when the text “comes alive” during the writing, becomes an active part of the writing of itself. Of course, the next morning I may realize that the text is crap, but the process was still great fun.

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

A: I always go back to the poems of Stephen Crane, Olav H. Hauge, Jean Follain, Tomas Tranströmer, Bashō, Issa, Santōka, Tom Hennen, Russell Edson, Daniil Kharms, Harry Martinson, Louis Jenkins. I love Quarrels by Eve Joseph, Shadow of a Cloud but No Cloud by Killarney Clary. I always go back to Joseph Cornell’s shadow boxes, the films by Aki Kaurismäki and Roy Andersson. And my poet friends mentioned earlier in the interview—we got to know each other and became friends much because of the brilliance of their work. It is a huge privilege to become friends with your favorite poets. I will always return to their work, too.

TtD supplement #278 : seven questions for brandy ryan

brandy ryan is a queer poet who likes to slip between genre and form. she has published four chapbooks – full slip (Baseline Press, 2013), once/was (Empty Sink Publishing, 2014), After Pulse (with Kerry Manders, kfb, 2019), in the third person reluctant (Gap Riot Press, 2024). other pieces appear in lockbox, long con magazine, CV2, Windsor Review, and MediaTropes, among others. brandy has become obsessed with collage over the last few years, leaving tiny bits of paper and sticky surfaces in her wake. two collage series appear in Contemporary Collage Magazine 31 and Beautiful Trash Vol. 3. in August 2024, her “strange creatures” collages were part of a group show alongside Gap Riot’s Kate Siklosi and poets Brian Dedora and Kate Sutherland.

An excerpt from her “other ways to hide” appears in the forty-fifth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the work-in-progress “other ways to hide.”

A: “other ways to hide” is a long poem in fragments. i’ve called it a “queer-coming-of-femme,” but it’s also a series of goings-back, an excavation of memory. some of its fragments step into the past – what we never, as Bronwen Wallace would say, “get over” but learn to carry as gently as possible. anger and sadness, mixed in the same soil. other fragments poke around in pockets, those spaces between: queer and straight, bi and lesbian, who i am in the world and how i perform those selves.

the current MS also includes some collage work as another medium in which to show and hide simultaneously, taking up the poem’s threads and weaving them anew.

Q: How does this work compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: hmmm. i want to say that the work i’ve been doing lately is a step away from language and into the visual, which is true ... and – it feels like a different kind of language to me. images instead of words; scissors (or knives) and glue instead of screen and keyboard/pen and page. the concept of “paper” remains the same in both the MS and my most recent work. trying to express something, trying to create shapes that others might recognize. some delightful, others (hopefully) discomfiting. but work that matters, in some way.

Q: What has prompted this shift, as you say, away from language and into the visual?

A: two things. first – i had a crisis of faith early in 2020. i was leaving a full-time agency job that i had taken with the (mistaken) idea that it would support writing poetry. the money was decent, but i was so wrung out from that kind of work that i had nothing left for my creative life. i hadn’t published anything since After Pulse in 2019, and i was getting rejection after rejection after rejection. i know it’s part of this life ... and i’m still trying to learn how to navigate it. i reached out to some of my creative kin and asked for their help. what do they do when they lose confidence in their work? the answers were beautiful and supportive and inspiring. and they led me to this.

second – i needed to get off screens. with the pandemic and my paying job, i am sitting, onscreen, most of my working days. i wanted something handsy, something tangible, to take up. and something beside language, maybe just outside it. that led me to erasure poetry, to which i began to add some collage (what i call “erasage”), after which i set language aside for a bit and have spent time mostly in the visual world. (the launch video for my chapbook explains a lot of this in a show-and-tell, with the bonus of some cute cat pics https://www.gapriotpress.com/season-ten-launch-party). i fell pretty hard. i don't think anything i've made has given me such uncomplicated joy as making collage has.

Q: I’m curious to know if you’ve seen a difference in the work since this push to return. Does it feel different? Do you?

A: that’s such a great question. yes, absolutely. when i first started to write poetry, i was really interested in the play of language, in exploring the page, in pushing words and meanings as far as they seemed to go. that was me coming out of academia, in love with the OED, shedding my 19th century poetry skin, and encountering this wild, fantastic world of experimental poetry. but i had to put it aside in order to afford to live in this city. when i came back ... my sense of language had changed. the communications world i work in doesn't really go for word play and experimentation. things need to be concise, clear, accessible. my poems have necessarily shifted that way also. since i’ve been so deep in the visual work, i’ve had some close friends ask if i’m coming back to poetry. always and of course, because language is my first love. maybe the visual is my way to play and experiment again, while letting the way i am in language be what it is now, rather than mourning what it used to be.

Q: Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting, whether text or visual (or both)?

A: my poetic model, the one i always aim for and fail to achieve, is Nathanaël. i fell so hard for their poetry that i kept a collection, Touch to Affliction, out of the library for a year (accruing U of T library fines the whole time). i didn’t want to let the book out of my reach – but their poetry absolutely is. that's what i’m trying to fail at.

also: Margaret Christakos, who is always exploring different ways to be in/around language. Sachiko Murakami, who writes so beautifully and hauntingly about raw things. Annick MacAskill, who pushes language to its undoing and back again. for poetry that invites me in and keeps me there, poets like Tom Cull, River Halen, Jim Johnstone, Julie Joosten. and when i think of memory, both cultural and individual, and the work poets do archaeologically – Billy Ray Belcourt. Saeed Jones. Liz Howard. Canisia Lubrin.

on the visual side, Tom Phillips’ A Humament was a book i didn’t know i was working in the vein of, until Stuart Ross recommended it. (his erasure poetry is on an artistic level that i don’t have the training for, so another reach i cannot grasp.) Kate Siklosi winds her way between the visual and poetic in murky waters, careful stitches, inky designs. Kate Sutherland and Jennifer Lovegrove, both poets who have found their way into paper and knife and glue. there are a ton of collage artists on Instagram that i could also shout-out, artists who lean into the minimal and discomfitting. That’s a place i like to be.

Q: With four chapbooks under your belt, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work had developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: i’d love to have a full-length published, like this WiP – but am otherwise happy to keep collecting chapbooks, as publishers and presses might be interested in them. there’s something about my attention span and chapbook length that makes sense for me. so, more of that. in process: a death chap, a scent chap, a Burrow chap. more collaborations (including with my partner, Kerry Manders). i’d also love to work harder at bringing these two loves of mine in closer proximity. could i do my own ekphrasis, in both directions? to work with another poet or visual artist on ekphrasis would also be dreamy.

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

A: when i need to re-energize my own work, i go to readings. i haven’t been great at this, since the pandemic started, but it is one of the best ways for me to be in poetry. partly for the poets/poetry i know; partly for the poets/poetry i don’t know. i bring a notebook and pen and am always catching lines that resonate – often for epigraphs and quotes in my own work.

work i return to, Nathanael’s Touch to Affliction and Somewhere Running (their ekphrasis is unlike anything else). Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho (If Not, Winter) and her Autobiography of Red (also “Essay on What I Think About Most” from Men in the Off Hours). Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky With Exit Wounds. Saeed Jones’s Prelude to Bruise. and finally, this opening piece from Lise Downe’s The Soft Signature: “All of these words have appeared elsewhere. Only their order has been changed, to maintain their innocence.”

TtD supplement #277 : seven questions for Dominic Dulin

Dominic Dulin is a poet and musician out of Cleveland, Ohio. They have had poetry published by Iterant, Yum! Lit, Surreal Poetics, among others.

Their poems “E_nve_loped” and “Note on the Type” appear in the forty-fifth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “E_nve_loped” and “Note on the Type.”

A: Both of these poems come from the final section of my poetry book manuscript Double Time. I wrote the book during my MFA at Cleveland State University for my final thesis project. A million thanks to Caryl Pagel for being my advisor and being an irreplaceable mentor — if anyone reading this hasn’t read her work, you should.

Thematically, Double Time deals with doubling, repetition, and challenging/investigating binaries, among other themes. These poems also share those qualities with having near miss puns or direct puns in them. I also had a fairly strict line rule in the book where the poems doubled sequentially (and at a certain point in the opposite way), i.e. the first poem is in couplets, the second is in quatrains, third is in octets, and fourth is in sixteenths (which has its own fancy poetry word that is currently escaping me).

A good amount of the poems in the manuscript have glimmers of the work I was doing at the time. I had a dispatching job for hospital security and police for multiple hospitals, and while it helped me pay the bills for my fiancée and I, it eventually wore on my mental health and I became extremely burnt out. My dad is a cop and I never expected to do anything near the realm of law enforcement, and while I’m glad I know maybe a bit more than the average person about how things work in that (flawed) system, I will never do anything like it again.

For “Note on the Type”, I wanted to make a sort of anti-note poem. The Shona in the poem comes from me leafing through a dictionary and slowly attempting to learn my fiancé’s native language. A few other poems in the manuscript feature Shona and Japanese (both which I am still learning in my free time at various paces). My rule for — for lack of a better term — foreign languages, is that I tend to only want to use languages which I know or at least am attempting to learn, rather than plugging in a word from a language that I don’t know or don’t have some connection with. I love Joyce, but it seems that he may have done that at times in Finnegans Wake: plugging in words or phrases from other languages without fully inventing himself in them.

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

A: Lately, I’ve been working on poems which are taking the form of sliced/fractured prose blocks. The first poet I read that had poems in that style is Franny Choi, who is a wonderful poet, but I’ve lately wondered whether another poet had crafted poems in the style first. I imagine the fractured prose block (as I’m calling it) has a long(er) history I’m unaware of. It seems a bit distinct from erasure poetry, which l’d imagine has an older lineage. There’s probably a Language Poet that ‘did it first’ I’m guessing. But I’m also currently interested in using forward slashes to break lines, even though the lines in the block aren’t actually broken, not unlike how a short group of poetic lines are quoted in an essay. If I remember correctly, Choi used colons, not slashes, to break up her lines.

Before that, I was working on a chapbook I’m tentatively calling “Face Notes: speak” which uses found language in a similar method I used with these poems. For both DT and FNs, I drew from line lists I either pre-wrote and let ferment, or had on hand. The main difference for the “Face Notes: speak” poems is that majority of the language comes from a text-to-speech app I was using while I was unable to talk after jaw surgery.

Q: I’m curious at the ways in which you are feeling out form. Are there other poets you’ve been attempting to learn from, for the sake of structure or approach?

A: I’d definitely say that J.H. Prynne has been a big influence. While I don’t think he always employs form in a visually obvious way, with his more recent text sequences, I do think he probably thinks about form a lot. Bruce Andrews is another poet which I’ve definitely been influenced by with some of my methods. David Melnick is another poet whose work I am infatuated with and have (hopefully) learned from. I also want to mention Oulipo — as a school of poetry I’d like to learn from — but I still haven’t dove into that realm even though my friend and poet Zach Peckham often mentions them in our conversations. Susan Howe and Hoa Nguyen are two poets I am always trying to learn from. Tristan Tzara (of course) and Bob Cobbing have influenced my interest in form as well. Catherine Wing helped me see form in a different and playful light, rather than in a wholly restrictive, outdated, or stuffy one.

To better answer how I’m feeling out form without name dropping more poets, I’d say that I’m always interested in doing something that involves numbers, experiments, and chance. Employing methods that involve various levels of (non-)control of the poetic outcomes. A sort of poetic fracturing, cut-up, or remix that resists form while still being (perhaps ironically) steeped in it.

Q: Perhaps it’s too early to get a clear sense of it, but how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: I used to approach poetry with a sort of bleeding-heart, blood-on-the-page, Hemingway-esqueness coupled with a heavily Ginsberg influenced cadence. Surrealism also had a huge influence on me around 2016/17 and I felt that since then I was always trying to write, read, and figure out what “experimental” or avant-garde poetry was.

While now, I do in some ways have a better sense of it, I do see that I have gone from a more raw, bleeding-heart poetic approach to a more controlled and language-centered one coupling vulnerability with more “objective” or humorous/ironic language (my haiku practice likely also influenced this movement). As one of my former professors, Mary Biddinger, called it, rather than “bleeding on the page, now readers are seeing blood through the gauze” with my more recent poems.

Maybe I’ll head towards a synthesis of these bleeding-heart vs. language-focused poems or maybe I’ve already stumbled into a sort of middle ground. I think my future work could go either way, or maybe in a different direction, which I am also open to.

Q: What has been the process of attempting to shape a manuscript, and what have you been discovering through that process? Are there poems that don’t fit with the shape, or are you leaning more into a kind of catch-all?

A: I think since working on these poems for Double Time, in the Summer and Fall of 2023, I’ve thought a lot more about shaping a manuscript. Perhaps it’s because the manuscript was so rule based and number dependent — on top of the line sequences, each section had a certain number of poems, and the poems all add up to an even number as well — that I’ve since been more willing to cut poems from more recent manuscripts, where I was much less inclined to before with DT. I’d assume that more recent chapbook rejections have also played a role in this.

But overall, sometimes certain poems seem really good once you write them and place them in a manuscript but after a few weeks or months break and a return to them, they don’t land as gracefully as they did before. Perhaps I’m slowly becoming a better editor for myself and my manuscripts.

Q: Are you finding a difference in how you approach attempting to shape a full-length collection vs. a chapbook-sized manuscript?

A: I am finding a difference. I would say once I realized J.H. Prynne, for example, in recent years almost solely releases chapbook-length manuscripts (at an almost intense pace), it gave me some relief and freedom. The freedom to not sit and try to think about ‘what will the next book project be’ but instead think of smaller projects that I feel like I tend to have more stamina or excitement for at the moment. This is also why I sort of gave up trying to write fiction. It isn’t that I think I have a short or ruined attention span or anything but rather that I think I’m more interested in capturing something in language in the moment, or in a short(er) span of time, rather than something in the long term. I don’t doubt that that thinking could also change for me at some point, too; but for now, I tend to be more chapbook-focused.

Q: Finally (and you might have answered an element of this prior), who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

A: Hoa Nguyen, Louis Zukofsky, David Melnick, Lillian-Yvonne Betram, jos charles, Kobayashi Issa, J.H. Prynne — in no particular order. I can’t help but return to Hoa Nguyen’s Violet Energy Ingots, Melnick’s Pcoet, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s Travesty Generator, J.H. Prynne’s Orchard, and Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers. I’ve been meaning to return to charles’ feeld because it really floored me and caused things to click in me on multiple poetic and emotional levels the last time I read it but I think I’ve only read it once or twice.

TtD supplement #276 : seven questions for Misha Solomon

Misha Solomon is a homosexual poet in and of Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. He is the author of two chapbooks, FLORALS (above/ground press, 2020) and Full Sentences (Turret House Press, 2022), and his work has recently appeared in Best Canadian Poetry 2024, Arc Poetry Magazine, The Fiddlehead, Grain, The Malahat Review, and Riddle Fence. His debut full-length collection, My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet, is forthcoming with Brick Books in 2026.

His poems “(Help Me Choose a Photo of) My Engagement Ring (to Post on Instagram),” “I Didn’t Call My Mother” and “Duplex Duplex” appear in the forty-fifth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “(Help Me Choose a Photo of) My Engagement Ring (to Post on Instagram),” “I Didn’t Call My Mother” and “Duplex Duplex.”

A: These three poems have disparate origins, but they’re all explorations of a kind of “queer mundanity” and a discomfort with “growing up” in homonormative ways.

I wrote "(Help Me Choose a Photo of) My Engagement Ring (to Post on Instagram)” for a Hybrid Forms workshop with Sina Queyras during my recent MA at Concordia — we were asked to bring in work to introduce ourselves, and this poem captured a lot of what I was writing and thinking about at the time. It will next appear in my debut full-length, coming from Brick Books in 2026. I wrote “I Didn’t Call My Mother” as part of a writing activity with my fiancé Guillaume Denault. And I wrote “Duplex Duplex,” which owes a debt of gratitude to the form’s creator Jericho Brown, as part of some sort of form-per-day challenge that Carlos Pittella shared with me — I don’t think either of us got past day two or three.

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

A: These poems are a bit “lighter” than the work I’ve been doing lately. And they’re more grounded in the real and immediate domestic sphere. Lately I’ve been writing weirder, wilder stuff about (non-)reproduction that brings in a lot of animal facts I’ve had rattling around in my brain since I was a child.

Q: What prompted this shift towards a lighter approach, and how do those shifts reveal themselves?

A: For better or for worse (probably for worse), I almost always go into a poem with a “topic” in mind, and the topics of these poems couldn’t be taken too seriously. Maybe “light” is the wrong word. Maybe “seriously” is the wrong word. I guess I just wanted or needed the poems to be a little funny, to poke some fun at their domestic trappings, possibly to allow for some of the underlying emotion to exist within them.

Q: Do you consider this a shift in your writing generally, or more of an expansion?

A: Honestly, I hardly consider it a shift. More of a… modulation. I think humour/darkness/weirdness are each always bubbling under the surface of each of my poems, and I sometimes let one or more of them… come to a boil? Humour is particularly difficult for me to modulate. I’ve been told I use it to undercut emotion. I’m not how much of that is conscious.

Q: Do you have any models for the types of work you’ve been attempting? Any particular writers or works at the back of your head as you write?

A: Frank O’Hara, always. Danez Smith has been in my head a lot lately, especially after having had the pleasure of working with them at Banff earlier this year. And lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Nate Lippens’s writing, after devouring his two short novels My Dead Book and Ripcord.

Q: With two published chapbooks and a full-length debut forthcoming, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work heading?

A: I feel that I’ve moved away from try to engineer or engender a certain reaction (usually shock) in a reader. I try to give in to mystery and open-endedness, and to bring in more and more research-creation. I see my work, or at least I hope I see my work, heading to a place that is at once formless and accessible, that doesn’t fit neatly into any categories but can be relatively widely read and enjoyed.

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

A: Sorry for the delay on this last answer, I had to go to my spin class. (Do NOT edit this out. Your readers need to know that I am newly very into spinning.)

Because of my ongoing desire to “complete tasks” due to an obsessive, productivity-pilled mind, I rarely return to works. Am I allowed to admit that? I think Grease and The Wizard of Oz are the only movies I have seen multiple times.  Anyway — to reenergize my work, I read a poem from The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara and use some element of the poem as a prompt. Also, I take workshops and studios to reenergize my work — I always love Sarah Burgoyne’s poetry studios, which have been immensely inspiring and productive for me. Recently, I took a great workshop with Susan Gillis hosted by the QWF, and I’ll be taking one with Jay Ritchie this spring. I also have a generative poetry group (with André Babyn and Sasha Manoli) and a workshop/reading group (with Madelaine Caritas Longman, Patrick O’Reilly, Carlos Pittella, Melanie Power, and Sarah Wolfson) and the work of all those incredible poets is always reenergizing. I also read non-poetic work to power my work — lately that’s been stuff like Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, edited by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson.

TtD supplement #275 : eight questions for Jordan Davis

Jordan Davis’s books include Shell Game (2017), Noise (2023) and Yeah, No (2023); he has edited several publications including The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Hat, Teachers & Writers, The Collected Fiction of Kenneth Koch, The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch, the Apple iOS journal Ladowich, CCCP Chapbooks, several titles for Subpress Collective, and most recently a monthly publishing poetry on “Jewish-ish themes,” The Nu Review. He is also a former poetry editor of The Nation.

An excerpt from his “the book of how’s that going to work” appears in the forty-fifth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the work-in-progress “the book of how’s that going to work.”

A: I’ve had this notebook since the early 90s, absurdly thick cover, banana paper with threads and dirt-like imperfections in the surface, the absolute opposite of something too nice to write in, but not junk either, and I’ve carried it to five or six different homes thinking “someday I’ll know what to do with this.” That didn’t happen, so I wrote every wrong thing I could think of.

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

A: These poems exist, which is a significant difference.

Q: Is utilizing the notebook the usual way your poems, and your projects, begin? How do poems move from notebook to completed?

A: It is. I get to the end of the notebook, and then I see what’s there.

Q: Do you see a difference in how poems emerge through working the notebook, versus any other process? And what other processes might you use to compose work?

A: Every notebook does act on my brain like a specific kind of container, and what I find congenial at one time may turn out later to be too confining or too expansive. Time is the real constraint — I use what I can find when the time emerges. Index cards… let’s talk about that another time.

Q: Did the shapes of your notebook pages inform the shapes of your poems? I’m thinking of those long, thin poems by William Carlos Williams, as he composed first drafts on his prescription pads.

A: These poems, yes. I want the work to be shapely but it’s the shape of the mental object I care about — the pathway of the experience of the poem. Other poems, the notebook acts more as a collecting plate, a radio telescope.

Q: With a handful of published books and chapbooks under your belt, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: I go where the thing I have to say is, but I haven’t liked to go where the things I dislike are. I’ll probably have to wade into what I dislike now. And there’s so much to dislike.

Q: I’m curious as to what some of that “wading into what you dislike” might look like, and what the process and results might be. Should I even ask?

A: I see a lot of a willed kind of poetry — self-seeking, self-mythologizing… often pretty but in a way you see coming. It clearly serves a need, but at the expense of deeper needs, in my opinion.

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

A: Poetry, if it’s any good at all, is for rereading. I’ve been rereading Kenneth Koch; it was just his centenary (February 27). I find something new every time I read him. For me, editing books and chapbooks by other poets is a form of rereading that helps me see what I want better. What renews my love of poetry, or rather, what gives me the feeling I enjoy most, is to find new poets I want to reread.

Touch the Donkey : forty-fifth issue,

The forty-fifth issue is now available, with new poems by Dag T. Straumsvåg, brandy ryan, Misha Solomon, D.A. Lockhart, Dominic Dulin, Lea Graham, Jordan Davis and Larkin Maureen Higgins.

Eight dollars (includes shipping). You might remember me from such dates as last night's dinner.

TtD supplement #274 : seven questions for Alice Burdick

Alice Burdick writes poetry, essays, and cookbooks in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. She is the author most recently of Ox Lost, Snow Deep (a feed dog book/Anvil Press), and of Deportment, 2018, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Book of Short Sentences, 2016, Mansfield Press, Holler, 2012, Mansfield Press, Flutter, 2008, Mansfield Press, and Simple Master, 2002, Pedlar Press. Her practice often includes collaboration, and recently her poetry has been used in Woodlight, a series of three films created by Hear Here and Erin Donovan. Her poems have appeared in Aubade: Poetry and Prose from Nova Scotian Writers (Boularderie Island Press, 2018), GUSH: Menstrual Manifestos for Our Time (Frontenac House, 2018), Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian Poets Under the Influence, An Anthology of Surrealist Canadian Poetry (The Mercury Press, Fall 2004), as well as other anthologies. She is the author of many chapbooks, folios, and broadsides since 1991. Her essays have appeared in Locations of Grief: an emotional geography (Wolsak & Wynn, 2020) and My Nova Scotia Home: Nova Scotia’s best writers riff on the place they call home (MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc., 2019). She has authored three cookbooks for local publisher Formac Publishing. From 1992-1995, Alice was assistant coordinator of the Toronto Small Press Fair, and has been a judge for various awards, including the bpNichol Chapbook Award.  She is also a freelance editor, manuscript assessor, and workshop leader.

Her poems “Little envelope,” “Ancestry, a small corner” and “All the faces” appear in the forty-fourth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “Little envelope,” “Ancestry, a small corner” and “All the faces.”

A: Sometimes poems have specific origins and sometimes they don’t. And sometimes I can remember where they started and sometimes I can’t! I think “Little envelope” came from thinking about the witching season and how the idea of haunting is related to memory and trauma. And then it went to accepting the chaos of possibility. “Ancestry, a small corner” is based on a moment during a trip to visit my ancestors’ neighbourhood in the Bronx, and the connection to place but concurrent inability to know what might be called the whole truth. “All the faces” came from a prompt upon viewing Hannah Hoch’s collages and then followed my own brain’s collage of thoughts about existence, birth, community, erasure and absurdity. I like to keep it light and heavy.

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

A: They are definitely in the same realm – ie writing about memory, family histories, representation and imagination. I want to always play with lines because that aspect of writing, even when it is heavier stuff, is highly enjoyable.

Q: Is that a main function of how your poems get built, the movement of playing with lines?

A: I would say that there is a logic that reveals itself in the making of the poem through the lines, and the structure and conversation of lines and stanzas. I relate it a lot to improvisational music, where something is formed through that play, even if it is serious. I have to not know where it is going. But I definitely know that that is frustrating to some readers! That’s okay.

Q: How did you evolve into working this kind of poem-discovery? Too often readers claim to require a narrative logic, but your work actively resists that (in the most marvellous of ways, I’ll add). How did that come about?

A: Thank you! I think at a certain point, reading a great variety of poets and listening to a swath of musicians and taking in the wide world of art and performance, I realized I could be influenced by all these but not need to imitate anyone specifically. Also, although I appreciate when others receive my work well, I don’t think I’ll receive great riches or fame etc from it, so that in itself is somewhat liberating.

Q: With a handful of published books and chapbooks over the past three-plus decades, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: I think over time I’ve become more comfortable with the weirdness of my writing and so the writing shows that. There are more long poems and sequences. I also see the performing of the work as an increasingly integral way of receiving it, and this is because the music of words and sounds is much more a thing I invite into the work. So I’d like to maybe record performances and do more live ones, with musicians.

Q: You’ve produced three cookbooks over the years. How does this work connect to your literary work, if at all? How does one approach writing a cookbook after decades of writing and publishing poems?

A: The cookbooks are a separate venture. I definitely use editing skills in the recipes as a lot of the ones I’ve addressed have been historical recipes using earlier methodologies and measures in some cases. So in a practical sense they use form, which I know about but don’t use in a straight-up way in my poetry. The closest relationship the cookbooks have would likely be to my essays, in that they are “real”. I enjoy the cookbooks because they are a form of my work that is truly popular and people aren’t as afraid of recipes as they are of poems!

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

A: I particularly love New York School poets and Modernists. Give me something spare and give me something rambling. Give me something very personal and give me something very imaginative! Do wild and simple things with language! Lorine Niedecker, Edmond Jabès, Bernadette Mayer, Frank O’Hara, Nelson Ball, Marina Tsvetaeva, Charles Olson, Ron Padgett, Emily Dickinson. These are some of the folks I return to!