TtD supplement #136 : eight questions for Michael Sikkema

Michael Sikkema is the author of 4 full length collections of poetry, around a dozen chapbooks or collaborative chapbooks, and can be found most often in West Michigan, migrating northernly in the summer.

His poem “Eleven Possibilities” appears in the twenty-first issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poem “Eleven Possibilities.”

A: “Eleven Possibilities” is one section of a longer work that I wrote while I was thinking a lot about performance / fluxus / the interconnect of poetry and theater and the like. I was hoping to create something more for the stage than the page alone. I wanted a piece that would work if performed by several voices or just one. I wanted a piece that could be performed by someone who never met me, and could even be continued by someone else without me. It’s an open form that can be stretched and pulled and shaped to fit other people’s purposes. I wanted a piece that could have a separate life on its own, rather than being seen as a window into my soul or something. I wrote “Eleven Possibilities” and the larger text while composing a book called Bug Out Bag, which explores the imagination and art as a form of survival mechanism, much more necessary than “escapism.”

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

A: This piece fits into the Bug Out Bag manuscript because there are other pieces that explore and create an intersection between poetry and performance and multiple voices. It’s pretty far afield though from the newest stuff I’m working on, which is more of an opera-novel-thing (in verse and vispo and a cartoon-prose-poem and a kind of silent play and more to be determined by the muse at a later date).

Q: You seem to work on multiple projects simultaneously. Is this the way you’ve always worked? How does one project fit against another, and how do you keep track?

A: When I was first writing poems, I wrote just one poem at a time and they were mostly about a page long and I thought of them as closed off from one another. As I wrote more and stretched out into longer projects, like long poems, lyric sequences, prose poem sequences, chapbooks, etc, my idea of what a poem was started to change and grow. Finally *poetry* became what I wrote and the single poem was just one shape that could take. I almost never write stand-alone poems now because I feel like poems want to talk to other poems and form larger more complex nervous systems. Sometimes what appears as a stand-alone turns out to have been a stalking-horse for some longer thing that happens later.

For the last decade at least, I’ve worked on multiple projects at a time. Sometimes they end up folding into each other completely. Sometimes one takes shape faster and another gets tabled until the first one is done. Sometimes one never grows legs and doesn’t go anywhere and just chills in the notebook. I write as automatically as possible and then listen to the work, to figure out where it goes later. I compose in notebooks, on oversized paper, on notecards and almost never on a laptop, but when I start to type stuff up, it’s usually clear which project a piece wants to be with. I also end up cutting a lot of writing that doesn’t fit anywhere. Sometimes I go back to that and realize it is something all on its own or maybe a few pieces of it want to be sent out to journals or something.

Q: You make it sound as though your projects evolve rather organically. Do you see your work as a series of interconnected threads, or have you begun to see your writing practice as something larger and possibly singular?

A: I’m convinced that poetry happens all the time/poetry is all time and space and we occasionally visit it at the well, or create portals that let it through. I think of it as a living thing, one huge all encompassing thing that we experience in little bits and strings. I work to stay open to it and get out of the way so the work of poetry can happen. A reader might trace some thread through separate pieces or see an obsession on loop, and that’s great. I see a big nervous system sending messages back and forth through itself. I think books talk to each other just like poems do. I love doing a deep read on a poet or fiction writer and checking out many of their books to see what kind of an animal they make together. I’m much less interested in charting a linear beginning-to-end track of what rhetorical strategies they used or what they were obsessed with though.

Q: What influences brought you to this particular point in your work? What writers or writing sit in the back of your head as you write?

A: Lately I find myself thinking about

Kenneth Patchen / Ruth Krauss / Richard Brautigan

Alice Notley / Bernadette Mayer / Harryette Mullen

Emmett Williams / Alison Knowles / Reggie Watts 

Gary Barwin / Lucinda Sherlock / Steven Wright

Sometimes the names on the list would be totally different.

Q: With four full-length poetry titles and a dozen or so chapbooks published to date, how do you feel your writing has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: Yay! Now, as of last week, it’s five full lengths. I think my writing has taken on more issues, grappled with a bigger worldview, gone deeper into the imagination, and became fully invested in organic form. I think I’m going deeper into speculative poetry that steals elements from other wonderful and sometimes trashy genres. I’m doing more vispo work and thinking about doing more collages. I’d love to collaborate with someone on a graphic novel. Working on an artist book or two sounds really challenging and fun. I would LOVE to find about 2-4 other people who wanted to write stuff for multiple voices that we could perform and have others perform too. I'd like to experiment with looping pedals and sound effects and compose audio chapbooks too.

Q: I’m curious about your collaborative work, as well as your exploration into vispo. What do you feel these explorations allow that might not have been possible otherwise?

A: Collaborations allow the collaborators access to a third mind, a new form of thinking and being. Not everyone can make a collab work with everyone else. When it works, there is a lot of mirroring, experimenting, way-finding, voice-throwing, and finally a sort of third mind that both people are occupying and writing into being. It can be like learning a new language and discovering all the unspoken assumptions that hide under common phrases. It’s a constant state of discovery and navigation.

Vispo is important because I think it cuts straight to our meaning making minds and short circuits a lot of our schooling, both the public institutional kind but also the corporate marketing kind, and can be really intimate. I work with young kids and end up thinking a lot about sight words and the immediate experience and reaction that those words cause. Vispo works similarly sometimes but not in a comfortable recognize-and-move-along fashion. Often it's much more arresting and invites you to spend time with it. It demands that we rethink what reading is.

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

A: I don’t look for poetic inspiration in works of poetry for the most part. I read rabidly and love it and there are books that work as fuel for the fire, but I don’t usually look to a book of poems if my own writing is lacking. I’ll read fairy tales, myths, folktales, legends, sci fi, horror, or articles about the supernatural/aliens/cryptids/surveillance technology/etc on the internet. I’ll stroll through the oversized art aisles in the library. I’ll watch nature documentaries. I’ll watch trash cinema. I’ll do bibliomancy, erasures, exercises, word games. Tynes and I have a library of probably about a thousand books and I return to those often. I reread C.D. Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining once a year or so. I reread Barwin’s Moon Baboon Canoe at least once a year. I reread Tender Buttons pretty often. I reread Mullen’s Muse and Drudge. I reread Patchen’s picture-poems. I reread Descent of Allette once a year. I know I’ll be rereading Jen Bervin's Silk Poems once a year. I adore Micrograms by Jorge Carrera Andrade and reread it a couple times a year.

TtD supplement #135 : seven questions for Bronwen Tate

Bronwen Tate is an assistant professor of Creative Writing and Literature at Marlboro College, a tiny radically egalitarian educational utopia usually buried in snow in southern Vermont. She is the author of seven poetry chapbooks, including Vesper Vigil (above/ground, 2016). Her poems and essays have appeared in the Journal of Modern Literature, 1111, Denver Quarterly, LIT, TYPO, and elsewhere.

Her poems “REPRODUCTIONS OF FRESCOS,” “I COULD NOT ASK OTHER FLOWERS” and “CIRCUMSTANCES LEGIBLE BEHIND THIS WINDOW” appear in the twenty-first issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “REPRODUCTIONS OF FRESCOS,” “I COULD NOT ASK OTHER FLOWERS” and “CIRCUMSTANCES LEGIBLE BEHIND THIS WINDOW.”

A: These three poems are part of a manuscript I’ve been working and reworking for years that I’ve recently started calling The Silk the Moths Ignore. The book has three different formal modes of writing in it: prose versets like these three in Touch the Donkey, little five-line poems with rhyme or slant rhyme inspired by Lorine Niedecker, and sonnets. These three poems grew out of a constraint-based practice where I read Proust in French (which I speak fairly well but not perfectly), looked for words that were at least semi-opaque to me, and then used a combination of my contextual guesses and dictionary definitions of these words to generate language and sparks of juxtaposition for poems. I was interested in what might emerge when I started from material (specific words) rather than an idea or feeling. Over time, however, many sentences, phrases, images were cut. And I wrote into what was left with feelings and ideas and pain. But these poems developed a kind of tonal range or force field from that source work that I think they’ve kept.

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

A: These poems are grappling with sound and language as a material, while also trying to participate in the world of actual people and experiences. This is something I’m continuing to explore in new work. I teach creative writing across genres, so I’m constantly working with students on memoir and fiction, as well as poetry. This means that I’m always thinking about the different goals and trade-offs that happen across genre, and it pushes me to really consider what I want to prioritize or emphasize in my work. At the moment, I’m working on some poems that are deeply sound-driven and some other poems that are animated more by documenting details and events and juxtaposing them in search of insight.

Q: I’m curious about your explorations into sound. What originally prompted this, and what are you discovering?

A: I think poetry has always been about sound on some level for me, ever since I first memorized Alfred Noyes’ “The Highwayman” for the pleasure of being able to recite it to myself when I was 8 or 9 years old. Whenever I write poetry, there’s some element of writing by ear, of repeating words or phrases back to myself and sounding my way to the next sentence or line. Sound connects to the body, to the sense that we know things in our bodies and can feel them before we fully articulate them.

Recently, I’ve been reading Gregory Orr’s A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry with a couple of tutorial students, and he discusses poetry in terms of making space for disorder and chaos and then acting on it with “the ordering powers of the imagination” and of form. I’m interested in how sound can be an ordering power—we give shape to poems through alliteration, rhyme, and other kinds of patterning—while also being a sign of chaos or disorder. Puns, homonyms, and similar forms of sound play reveal a kind of instability or anarchy of language. I'm drawn to both the patterning and the destabilizing powers of sound.

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

A: My work as a poet has developed in conversation with my work as a scholar, a mother, and a teacher. These other forms of work often feel in competition for time with my poetry writing, but they feed it as well. Over the course of my PhD, I often worked on poems in between work on dissertation chapters in concentrated little bursts in the summer or around a concrete deadline like those of the various Dusie chapbook exchanges. Writing about Lorine Niedecker and her relationship to haiku got me writing poems in the signature five-liner form she developed from this haiku encounter (like these ones you published before). I’ve often written prose poems, and I learned something about lineation there, as well as about compression. Mothering drains me at times, but it also immerses me in the hands-on language lab of new humans learning to communicate—their strange phrasings that show the cracks in language and their joy in rhyme and word play remind me that poetry is vital and centrally human at moments when I start to think of it as a weird thing off to the side that no one cares about. And teaching is a constant reminder to listen to my own better angels. You can’t constantly urge students to commit to regular writing, trust the process, take risks, be ok with not knowing where a piece is going, look for enabling models, and so on, without internalizing some of that advice yourself.

I get frustrated sometimes because I’ve been writing poetry for a while now, but every time I sit down with a new project I feel like I’m starting all over again. Shouldn’t I know by now what a Bronwen poem does or at least how it starts? But I’m also drawn to poetry because of how open it is. I love how many different ways a poem can make meaning. I love to be surprised in my reading, and I want to be surprised in my writing. Looking forward, I want to make work that holds more, that does a better job bringing different aspects of experience together and showing how they touch each other, like Bernadette Mayer writing about Saint Augustine and chopping vegetables for soup. I want to let more in.

Q: You mention Bernadette Mayer; what other poets have helped shape the way you think about writing? What poets and works have been in your head lately, as you continue to write?

A: Yes, I recently participated in an event organized by Becca Klaver where a group of poets all wrote a collaborative homage to Mayer’s Midwinter Day (on midwinter day, naturally) that mirrored the form of the book. I also mentioned Lorine Niedecker above—she and Mayer often feel like lovely balancing impulses: mess and excess and letting it all in from Mayer and restraint and minimalism and obsessive revision from Niedecker.

Memorizing Baudelaire in French was an early enchantment as a fifteen-year-old exchange student in Switzerland. Lyn Hejinian’s My Life and Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red were important for defining possibilities early on. The poets I wrote about in my PhD dissertation—Robert Creeley, Elizabeth Bishop, and Frank Stanford, among others—have continued to linger with me, as have teachers and mentors like C.D. Wright, Forrest Gander, and Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop. I’ve recently been engaging in a sustained way with the poems of Harryette Mullen, both as a scholar, and as participant in one of Hoa Nguyen’s fantastic long-distance workshops centered around Mullen’s work. I loved Jessica Smith’s recent How to Know the Flowers and Terrance Hayes’ American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, and my to-read stack at the moment includes Erika Meitner, Cynthia Arrieu-King, Vanessa Angélica Villareal, and Johannes Göransson’s book of essays on translation.

Q: You mention how time spent as a scholar, mother, and teacher has fed your writing. How do you feel each have shifted the ways in which you approach your work?

A: As a scholar, I’ve learned how to really stay with something, to reread it over and over again and look at it from different angles and within a larger context. There’s a problem-solving or method-focused way this shows up in my writing—if I’m struggling with lineation, say, I assign myself focused reading of poets I see doing interesting and intentional work with line breaks, and then I sit with their work, examining its breaks and swerves.

How many ways has being a mother shifted how I approach my work? So many ways. To describe just one, I sing to my children (3.5 and almost 7) at bedtime almost every night, and I’ve recently been struck by the questions they ask about songs. The current songs on repeat-request are Gillian Welch’s “I Dream a Highway,” “The Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond,” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” and the kids ask things like “How can flowers learn?” or “Do ALL the soldiers go to graveyards?” or “How can the wagon be empty if it’s full of rattling bones?” Now this may just be bedtime stalling, but it’s also a reminder that the urge to notice details and interpret poetic texts is deep in us. I think sometimes we get out of the habit, or encounter this kind of interpretive work as alienating and forced in the high school classroom (the classic “did the author really mean to make the conch shell in Lord of the Flies a symbol of authority?” type question), but humans are fundamentally grapplers with language and meaning. I take heart from this reminder.

As a teacher, I’ve been lucky to work for the past two years at Marlboro College, a very small liberal arts college without typical disciplinary boundaries. We have biweekly faculty meeting as a full faculty, we can co-teach at will across fields, and we work closely with students on intensive capstone projects that almost always draw on methods and practices from across multiple disciplines. We also all eat lunch together in the dining hall, so any given day, I’m talking with colleagues and students about wolf dentition, forest gardening, how writing workshops differ from painting critiques, etc. In fact, I’ve just stepped in from the hallway where I was talking with Amer in Religious Studies and Jean in Theater about a quote from Rumi (the one where he talks about the self as a guest house and urges us to invite our difficult emotions in) and how it relates to theater and the healing of trauma. This ongoing dialogue pushes me to question my own assumptions about teaching and about writing. It also keeps me curious, which I see as a necessary condition for writing.

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

A: Many of the writers I’ve already mentioned are ones I read to reenergize my work. I deeply appreciate books that give a kind of permission or direct my attention towards something that language is capable of doing, like “oh yeah, that’s possible.” I might turn to Frank O’Hara or John Donne for voice, Ross Gay for syntax and ecstasy, Wallace Stevens for lushness, Lucille Clifton for embodiment, Ada Limón for intimacy, Richard Brautigan or Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit for strangeness and nostalgia, Paul Celan for starkness, Anne Boyer or Maggie Nelson or Claudia Rankine or Kate Schapira for the poem as a site of inquiry. I also love discovering new sides of poets whose work I’m familiar with when I read them with students.

I’m a big nerd when it comes to form, grammar, syntax, etymology, and I often find essays and craft talks energizing for how they articulate the challenges of writing and how people have tackled them, or shed light on some particularity of material. Recently, I’ve been enjoying Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, Robert Hass’s A Little Book on Form, Mary Ruefle’s short talks in Madness, Rack and Honey, and James Longenbach’s How Poems Get Made. I love a good close reading or exploration of technique that gets me thinking about things differently.

When it comes to works I return to, many of these are prose as well, from novels by Dorothy Sayers or Robin McKinley that are like a comfy sweater and a cup of tea, to essays by MFK Fisher, Joan Didion, or Eula Biss that are like a bracing walk. I love spending time with Ursula K. Le Guin’s spirit and intelligence, whether in novels like The Dispossessed or in her essays. Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping makes me want to underline every other sentence. Inspired by some of my colleagues at Marlboro (and by my friend Jillian Hess’s scholarship), I started keeping a commonplace book about a year and a half ago, and I’ve also found that to be a valuable practice that pushes me to select and copy some passages that are speaking to me and articulate what I’m getting from them. I’m hoping to have more time for this kind of slow reading this summer.

TtD supplement #134 : seven questions for Trish Salah

Born in Halifax, Trish Salah is the author of the Lambda award winning, Wanting in Arabic, and of Lyric Sexology Vol. 1, and co-editor of a special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly on Trans* Cultural Production. In 2018 she was a finalist for the Dayne Ogilvie prize. She has a story in the science fiction and fantasy anthology, Meanwhile, Elsewhere and poetry in recent issues of Anomaly, Cordite Poetry Review, Prism International and Supplement. She is associate professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University.

Her poem “Sliding past” appears in the twenty-first issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poem “Sliding past.”

A: “Sliding past” comes out of a feeling of being haunted. They say the unconscious knows neither time nor contradiction, and the poem’s mood is made of several different moments impinging upon one another, or emerging through one another. I think that is what the poem is interested in, the ways in which different temporalities manifest in/as any given present. So there is desire, palimpsest, conflict and contradiction—no contradiction, a bit of all that. It is not a new problem, wondering about how representations of time manifest for consciousness, how much an individual subject can hold, what drops away, what gets written over, etc.

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

A: I have two different manuscripts that I’m working on. The manuscript this will be a part of, and Lyric Sexology Vol 2. For LS Vol 2 I’m reworking the ways in which changing sex, or gender, moving or being in between, have been represented. Lyric Sexology Vol 1 was poetic investigation of archives of sexual minority representation, particularly of the more wildly exotic and often toxic figures and rhetorics of those archives. LS Vol 2 is mainly what I’ve been working of for the two years or so, and it has continued that work focusing upon fantasies of place based (and so cultured, racialized) same sex desires and sex/gender crossing identities, i.e. “exotic” other sexes and sexualities, beyond.... So “Sliding Past” isn’t that. The question about time and memory in “Sliding Past” is also about desire and its capacities, and I seem to be working on a sequence or series thinking about that.

Q: So is Vol 2 a completion of the Lyric Sexology project, or another volume in something more ongoing?

A: Vol 2 is the second part of the Lyric Sexology project, and likely the completion of it, for now at least.

Q: What is it about that? project that prompted a second part? Did you always see it as a multiple-book project? When I became aware of the first volume, for example, I didn’t know if this suggested the first of multiple, or if you were being playful.

A: The archives Lyric Sexology plays in produced figures of sexual otherness that are vast and varied. So it is not about completion. However, within those archives, there are different problematics that stand out.  In particular the second book revisits writing that imagined sexuality and gendered behaviour to be strongly place based, driven by geography and climate. So there is a particular way of writing, about sex and race, that had its roots in imperial travel, the movements of amateur folklorists and sexologists, colonial adjuncts and tourists...and I wanted to give a book to thinking about that.

Q: I’m curious as to why you decided to work this kind of archival study through poetry, over, say, a more traditional essay format or any other kind of critical prose. Was it a conscious choice, or did the form of the project evolve more naturally? And what do you think working such a project via the poem allows that might not be possible otherwise?

A: Before I decided to rewrite these archives with poetry I was working on a dissertation and I sometimes describe Lyric Sexology Vol 1 as the b-side of that work. That said, some poems interested in this kind of inquiry did show up in my first book, Wanting in Arabic, which was finished before I wrote the dissertation. The second volume of Lyric Sexology takes inspiration from Western sexologies of the so-called “Orient” and in that way it has roots in both of my first two poetry collections.

Q: Given this current project is concurrent to Lyric Sexology Vol 2, how do the two manuscripts relate to each other, and how are you able to keep them separate? Does the current manuscript have the sense of being post-Lyric Sexology, once that other project is complete?

A: Great question. This poem, “Sliding Past” belongs to a project that has been evolving along side the Lyric Sexology books. For a while I was calling it Solidarities, and thinking it would mainly be poems of, well, solidarity, that performed the action of being in solidarity, and poems that were about how one makes political commitments. Now I’m thinking Solidarities, maybe? because the more I work these poems about solidarity, the more I see that they are also about complicity and desire and phantasy and other questionable, less certain things.

In terms of keeping the manuscripts separate, it is not an issue most of the time. I do know what I’m writing and can see if it is in dialogue with other pieces that also clearly belong in the same book. And the Lyric Sexology Vol 2 poems are mostly written out of/about four different sites, Toronto, Dawson, Beirut and the moon. However there are occasional exceptions, poems which could equally belong in either book. Then it is a more difficult call.

Q: How did you first began working on book-length poetry projects, over, say, crafting individual, stand-alone project? How did you get from starting to think about writing to working on the book as your unit of composition?

A: I don’t know that I work with the book as a unit. I mean, for a long time, you’re just writing poems, and seeing what they say to one another happens after. But I will say that at a certain point in my writing poems with 19th and early 20th sexological source material, I knew they not only belonged to one another, but also needed other poems to be written, poems that engaged with ethnography, autobiography and later discourses on transgender. Some of which I was writing anyway and already. So I saw in the relationship between these poems, written and unwritten, the outline of a possible book. Then I was invited to submit my manuscript to Roof, and it needed to be finished, to have some coherence...I wrote a lot that year, got rid of a lot too, but in the end I knew that the book would necessarily be incomplete, would need to be continued. And so Vol 1 and Vol 2.

Regarding, Solidarities, maybe I would say that the taking shape of the manuscript is a little different. I’ve been writing all this work, for years, that is NOT Lyric Sexology, and that begs the question, what is it? Does it have its own coherence, its own set of interrelations? And I’ll be honest, I’ve wondered whether these poems that I’m gathering under that title, whether they are one or two things themselves, or possibly more. For now, though, I’m leaning towards their interconnectedness.

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

A: Oh, so many. I suppose, among my contemporaries I could say especially Ching-In Chen, Sina Queyras, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Margaret Christakos, Dawn Lundy Martin, Nathanaël, kari edwards...and more broadly, Phyllis Webb, Gregory Scofield, Agha Shahid Ali, Edmond Jabès, Dionne Brand, Paul Celan, Etel Adnan, Mahmoud Darwish, Erin Mouré, Édouard Glissant.

TtD supplement #133 : seven questions for Hailey Higdon

Hailey Higdon is the author of the poetry collection, Hard Some, available from Spuyten Duyvil Press. Her recent chapbooks include A Wild Permanence (Dancing Girl, 2018) and Rural (Drop Leaf, 2017). She currently lives in Seattle. Find her online at haileyhaileyhailey.com.

Her poems “Upstream,” “Wake Up We Send Trouble to Each Other” and “I’ve Been Told There’s a Roller Coaster” appear in the twenty-first issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “Upstream,” “Wake Up We Send Trouble to Each Other” and “I’ve Been Told There’s a Roller Coaster.”

A: Both “Upstream” and “I’ve Been Told There’s a Roller Coaster” were exercises in automatic writing. “Upstream” was the offshoot of a journal entry written on a trip to Hawaii. It sort of pairs with another poem I wrote at the same time while sitting at a café in Pāhoa a few months before the volcano erupted. I watched a man take up an entire table, not order anything and loudly talk to the busy waitress about another waitress who was wasn’t working that day.

“I’ve Been Told There’s a Roller Coaster” was written before bed one night. It’s basically my way of processing samsara. There is this dog that yaps all night in our neighbors yard. I started thinking about how long life is, how much we repeat the same things that make us unsatisfied, and how it erodes the parts of us that are abundant and confident and hopeful and good. I think this is related to consumerism—compulsive consumerism that pushes people away from dreaming big or feeling big outside of the goal of stuff. I know I carry this narrow fatalism around. I count on the people I love to remind me it is there and to remind me of the glimmering margins outside of that space.

“Wake Up We Send Trouble To Each Other” is a poem I have difficulty describing in language outside of itself. I can tell you what I am thinking about now, if that helps. I’m considering the narrowness that grips and bottlenecks our relationship to our interior life, our loves and our community. Someone flushes up next to us and tries to make a connection, and how many times do we miss it? We are so uncomfortable as integrated beings, and it’s not exactly our fault. It’s terribly hard to see both the hard parts about the world (and ourselves) and also see the good parts and the so-so parts. More often than not everyone agrees to be looking at the deficit instead of the dream life. I mean that in several ways—the emotional deficit we carry, the community deficits brought on by systems—systemic racism, our broken healthcare system, legal system, work—we end up paralyzed and staring at these gaps (the trouble) instead of dreaming beyond them. And it’s self-perpetuating because that dream doesn’t even appear to exist when we are inside those broken systems—we don’t even believe we can develop the capacity to visualize it. We think the capacity to dream becomes available only when the gaps are closed. Like an agreement to dream about things later, once the system is fixed, but we can’t fix the system without the dream. And all this—this way of being in the word—it has an impact on our bodies that we carry with us and internalize in a larger multi-generational way.

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

A: Most of my newer work is the product of a very slow, seeped-in process. These poems are much more immediate.

Q: What prompted you to explore automatic writing? In your view, do the resulting poems differ from the poems composed through your “very slow, seeped-in” processes? Is there a difference?

A: Yes, they are quite different. My “very slow, seeped-in” process has led me to write longer, more personal poems. I think this difference can be felt also, when reading these pieces compared to reading some of my other work (e.g., Hard Some or Rural). Honestly, I use automatic writing to remind myself that a poem is usually always there, so long as I take the time to sit down and find it.

Q: With a half dozen or so chapbooks over the past decade, alongside a full-length collection, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: I have always struggled with the problem of having too many ideas and not enough persistence. This may be why I have a lot of chapbook length things, but just one book. And why the one book is made up of lots of tiny books. As I get older, I am learning how this operates in me. How I can spin my frenetic energy inward toward one large hovering thing, instead of a million little things. Hard Some was one of those large “things.” Lately, I have been working on a series of essays—my next big hovering thing. They work for me because I can have a sort of loose thread between them, and still feel able to explore separate ideas. They hover around pregnancy, motherhood and the fertility process that accompanies assisted reproduction for queer folx. Oh yeah, and they are also all about trees.

Q: What was the process of putting together your full-length collection? I would argue that it was remarkably coherent, despite being constructed out of chapbook-length sections. What did you learn from the process of putting that collection together?

A: One thing led to another. I wrote the section “Yes & What Happens” first. After that, I couldn’t let go of the form. So I wrote another long poem in the same form (“A Wild Permanence”), then came “Breaker,” then “Children.” Though they were separate chapbook length poems, they were always a part of the same continuous thought process and they remained connected loosely in form—all written in small prose blocks.

The work followed me through a couple of years in my life where I was going through dramatic personal changes. When “Children” was done, I no longer felt tied to that form, so the book felt done too. The most important thing I learned was to wait. It took me much longer than I expected to find the right words for each poem. There was no rushing. Every bit of the book was considered slowly.

Q: What writers or works have influenced the way you write? How did you get to a point where you are writing in sequence, aka chapbook-length units?

A: Here’s what I know: I was and am heavily influenced by my partner, the writer Tanya Holtland. Mostly, it’s the way we manage to build writing into our lives that determines the forms that are available. She also writes very slowly and carefully, and after we met I started to see that way of writing as more valuable than I had in the past.

While writing Hard Some I was reading Will Alexander’s Compression and Purity. I can see his imprint strongly there. I love getting lost in his cosmos. I was also reading Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, Ngugi’s Globalectics, Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit, and Eckhart Tolle. I was spending a lot of time with my friend, the former-Seattle poet Maged Zaher, and I know his language trickled into the book. Other influences that come to mind in my writing life—Juliana Spahr, Maggie Nelson, Frank O’Hara, Joanne Kyger, and Hannah Weiner.

Mostly the chapbook length forms come from my inner sense of time, and how much material I decide one poem can hold within a certain time frame. I’m not sure there was a journey to get to that place. It’s just what happened.

Q: Finally, and perhaps you’ve already answered this, but who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

A: This list hasn’t changed much over the years—Lorenzo Thomas’ Dracula, Joanne Kyger’s Collected Poems, Aime Cesaire’s Collected Poems, John Cage’s Silence, Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation and This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, anything by Vonnegut. And my friends. I read my friends when I’m stuck.

TtD supplement #132 : seven questions for Emilia Nielsen

Emilia Nielsen’s debut book, Surge Narrows (Leaf Press, 2013), was a finalist for the League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Body Work, her second book of poetry, was published by Signature Editions in spring 2018. She is also the author of the scholarly text, Disrupting Breast Cancer Narratives: Stories of Rage and Repair published by University of Toronto Press in 2019. She recently joined York University’s Health & Society Program in the Department of Social Science as a tenure track Assistant Professor in Arts, Medicine and Healing.

Her suite of poems “NOXIOUS SPECIES” appears in the twenty-first issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “NOXIOUS SPECIES.”

A: I’d like to say the primary inspiration for these poems came from a weed manual published by the Government of Alberta, the Alberta Invasive Plant Identification Guide: Prohibited Noxious and Noxious. And this is true, in part.

But these poems also came about because of finding myself newly in Edmonton, Alberta. I had spent three long summers as a fire lookout in northern Alberta years previous but for three years I actually lived year-round in the province and more importantly as part of a neighbourhood. I was spending a lot of time out walking with my very energetic puppy in Mill Creek Ravine. There, neighbours not only get together to clean up garbage each spring, they also participate in weed pulls because plant species like garlic mustard and Himalayan balsam are transforming—and some would say irrevocably changing—the natural ecosystem.

So not only was I curious about the names of these plants and how to identify them, I was implicated in their histories of migration from Europe and settlement into areas just like the one I was walking in. This history maps onto colonial settler migration and with my own ancestor’s obsession with bringing all manner of species from Europe. The best response to invasive plants seemed to be pull them out, as I did with a bunch of creeping bellflowers happily growing in my front yard. (Truth be told I missed them the next spring when only a few remaining plants bloomed, exactly as planned.)

So, I’m also beginning to understand that my own thinking is rather limited—no surprise!—and that we would all be best served by turning to the work of Indigenous scholars like Nicholas Reo who are rethinking how best to understand the problem so-called “invasive species” present. (I recommend listening to Reo’s interview with Rosanna Deerchild on Unreserved and reading a bit more about his work here.)  

I also happened to reread Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris and was captivated all over again by the speakers of those poems. And the acerbic voice of “Witchgrass” especially.

Then there was hateful anti-immigration rhetoric—and actions—coming from the President of the United States, which was in the news and on the radio in constant rotation and was as vile then, a year and a half ago, as it is now.

Somehow all of this bubbled up and into the voices of these plants, these noxious species. (Or at least I think it did!)

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

A: These poems seem pretty different from the other types of work I’ve been doing lately.

I’m just surfacing after going deep into a bunch of university-situated grant writing, and in the biggest proposal directed to SSHRC, I’ve proposed a “research-creation” project that aims to explore illness memoir—through reading, writing and talking—but to do so through more experimental or genre-bending means. I had to really think through what it might mean to employ autofiction (or even autotheory) in trying to get at something that is personal but so quickly can become a bit boring to me unless I’m engaged with some play on the page or play in the mind or play in conversation. I’m not that interested in recounting “the facts.” (And I’m pretty sure only some people are interested in reading work like that.)

In terms of other poetry projects, if I think in terms of book-length works and the kind of poetics that motivated my previous books, Surge Narrows and Body Work, it’s beginning to feel like I start fresh each time I approach a new writing project. This is not something I planned to do. But I’m beginning to understand that it does keep things interesting. It’s like I’ve given myself permission to become a different poet each time I start a new book. I’m not sure that others would agree but that’s what it feels like to me!

Q: You reference thinking in terms of book-length works: how did you get to the point of thinking as the book as your unit of composition? What do you think influenced your evolution to the book over, say, the individual poem?

A: I’m curious about that too because it seems undeniable that I do now think in terms of a much longer unit of composition. On the one hand, I think struggling to put together my first manuscript of poems forever changed my thinking in terms of both the deliberate organization and the culling required. But I also think that reading key books at impressionable times like Lisa Robertson’s The Weather or Maggie Nelson’s Bluets encouraged me to think of how a book can be a sustained exploration of a concept or atmosphere. This probably speaks more to the fact that I enjoy books where all the parts intrinsically belong, even if the inner logic might not be immediately apparent.

Q: When you speak of sustained exploration, do you think in terms of a thesis or argument that your book-length works explore, or more of a pulling apart of an idea, to see from multiple perspectives? What do you see your poems attempting to do?

A: That is such an important distinction! I’d like to think I’m doing more pulling apart than argument-making. In my thinking a “sustained exploration” is actually an open ended and exploratory process. For all my bluster about loving books that have a delicious sort of inner logic that does not mean they must be tidy. Too much tidying up seems to produce writing that can feel a bit restrictive (even didactic.) Generally, I’m disinterested in being told what to think or feel. So, I guess my poems do attempt to present multiple takes on a given situation or reality and to follow that line of thinking until I run out of steam.

Q: With two full-length collections under your belt, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: Maybe it is a bit more nuanced? I’m not sure, exactly. Maybe I’m just less committed to certainty.

I do know that throughout the process of writing Body Work I was very interested in playing with form and content. And if an idea took hold, I was keen to pursue it for as long as I could sustain the writing.

So, I’m not sure exactly where my work is headed. I guess I hope not to repeat myself, even though I’m fully aware that each of us has a few preoccupations that we will likely return to time and again. And I take some comfort in that.

Q: You’ve already mentioned Louise Glück, but have there been any other authors or specific works in your head as you’ve been working this particular manuscript?

A: Anne Carson’s Short Talks. First published in 1992—I probably read it ten years after that—it was recently re-released by Brick Books and now includes a gorgeous introduction “Glass, Slag: Short Talk on Anne Carson’s Hewn Flows” by Margaret Christakos which helped me better situate so much of what I first found so arresting. As Christakos says, “Short Talks does not frontally expose the aroused scruff of any one self; it is a book of indirect addresses from a chorus of individual voices gesturing personae” (p. 16). The brevity, and originality, of those prose poems. Those speakers, those voices.

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

A: To re-energize—and to challenge—my own work I read Dionne Brand, Sylvia Legris, Sina Queyras, Lisa Robertson, Rita Wong, and others. (Currently, I’m looking forward to Janet Roger’s Totem Poles and Railroads and Cecily Nicholson’s Wayside Sang.) In addition to those already mentioned, I can’t help but return to Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. And H.D.’s Sea Garden. Also, Brand’s No Language Is Neutral.

Touch the Donkey : twenty-first [fifth anniversary!] issue,

The twenty-first issue, celebrating five glorious years, is now available, with new poems by Michael Cavuto, Michael Sikkema, Bronwen Tate, rob mclennan, Amanda Earl, Emilia Nielsen, Hailey Higdon and Trish Salah.

Eight dollars (includes shipping). But today you'll see me in my greatest role.

 

And don't forget the fifth anniversary subscription sale, which continues until the end of April, 2019! featuring the entire Touch the Donkey catalogue and the above/ground press backlist.

TtD supplement #131 : seven questions for Lauren Haldeman

Lauren Haldeman is the author of Instead of Dying (winner of the 2017 Colorado Prize for Poetry, Center for Literary Publishing, 2017), Calenday (Rescue Press, 2014) and the artist book The Eccentricity is Zero (Digraph Press, 2014). Her work has appeared in Tin House, Colorado Review, Fence, The Iowa Review and The Rumpus. A comic book artist and poet, she has been a recipient of the Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, the Colorado Prize for Poetry and fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. You can find her online at http://laurenhaldeman.com

Her poems “THE LITTLE CENTURY” and “Progress Diary” appear in the twentieth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “THE LITTLE CENTURY” and “Progress Diary.”

A: These two poems come from an ongoing project called Team Photograph, which is a mashup of poetry and graphic memoir (comics) that I am working on right now. Much of it revolves around soccer – I played a lot of competitive league soccer in the Washington D.C. area when I was growing up, and we often played in parks near Civil War battlefields. I am investigating the overlap of professional sport and warfare in those strange places, as well as touching on ghosts, forgotten history and hallucinations. These two poems come from a section of the book that examines the ideas of tribalism, brainwashing and group mentalities.

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

A: The work in Team Photograph is a bit darker than my first two books. It is more structured too: it exists in a multi-layered narrative, so it’s much more story-driven than work in my previous books. There are challenges to this, but it also means that I can really streamline and focus the poems from start to finish. And these poems are all paired with the graphic memoir sections – comic book style – so it has been really satisfying to watch it all come together.

Q: What brought about these shifts in structure and narrative, as well as this increase in darker content?

A: I actually think that my first two books, Calenday and Instead of Dying, were a departure from my preferred way of working – I really like to have an obsessively-built structure and scaffolding behind projects. Those first two books came out of a time of disarray, a time of chaos unfurling from new motherhood and the sudden loss of my brother. I love those two books, and they do what they needed to do: they navigated bedlam and turmoil in real time. This new project allows me more space to really orchestrate the framework. This is also the first time I am consciously integrating comic-book-style graphic memoir into the architecture of a book of poetry, instead of just as extramural pieces. Exciting stuff!

Q: How, exactly, are you integrating the “comic-book-style graphic memoir” elements, and what do you feel this allows that might not have been possible otherwise?

A: The manuscript of poetry is divided into seven sections, and there is an underlying “story” – a researched history – for how all the poems fit together. But many of my first draft readers were having trouble finding the connections because, well, it's poetry, and poetry isn’t often outwardly explanatory. So I needed another way to invite the reader in and explain the connections. I had been drawing individual “poetry comics” for my first two books and I just love that medium: sequential-art works incredibly well with poetry. So I decided to take that idea further and create seven illustrated section breaks for the manuscript – little essays in comic form that explain the next movement through the narrative, and through the extensive research that I have done for the book. And so far it has been really exciting! The visual components I am creating really compliment and add to the poetry in a way I never expected. I love it.

Q: Have you any models for this kind of work? I know Sommer Browning has been playing with such for years. And then, of course, there was the late Toronto poet bpNichol, who played with just about everything, including poetry comics, producing the first underground comics published in Canada, back in the 1960s.

A: I do. My absolute all-time favorite cartoonist is Chris Ware. I read his masterpiece Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth when I was 19, and I was stunned, intoxicated, completely awed by the book. It still awes me to this day. I consider him a poet as well because of the way he uses the cadence and syntax of language to control the reader’s pace. And the way he pairs the panels and the words, with such considerate coordination, is nothing short of magical to me. I also love Alison Bechdel’s work, Bianca Stone’s poetry-comics, and almost every single thing I find in CAROUSEL Magazine. CAROUSEL is a Canadian mag and I adore it!

Q: I’m curious at your exploration of poetry-comics, over, say, any exploration into the text itself as visual, ie: concrete/visual poetry. Is it the narrative of poetry-comics that compels?

A: It’s strange because I am also using visual text-based poetry in the collection, like erasures. The comic sections act as a counter to those abstractions – they provide a more straight-forward expository function in the book, yes.

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

A: Kiki Petrosino, Shane McCrae, Heather Christle and Sabrina Orah Mark are among my favorite writers right now – and when I want to remember why I write, I read them. I am currently reading Sappho again too, because I have been feeling this almost animal need for ancient thought (a very wintery desire) and, oddly enough, the Twitter Sappho Bot reminded me to return to her!