TtD supplement #161 : seven questions for Khashayar Mohammadi

Khashayar Mohammadi is an Iranian born, Toronto-based Poet, Writer, Translator and Photographer. He is the author of poetry chapbooks Moe’s Skin by ZED press 2018, and Dear Kestrel by knife | fork | book 2019. He is currently working on a full length collaborative poetry manuscript with Toronto poet Terese Pierre, as well as a full length poetry manuscript forthcoming with Gordon Hill Press in 2021.

His poems “Ari Aster’s ‘Hereditary’,” “Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Through A Glass Darkly’,” “Andrei Tarkovsky’s “The Sacrifice’” and “John Carpenter’s ‘In the Mouth Of Madness’” appear in the twenty-fifth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “Ari Aster’s ‘Hereditary’,” “Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Through A Glass Darkly’,” “Andrei Tarkovsky’s “The Sacrifice’” and “John Carpenter’s ‘In the Mouth Of Madness’.”

A: as an avid cinephile I always tried to unite my love of writing with my love of Cinema. These poems are just a few short examples of how I decided to write poetry exploring the intricacies of international arthouse cinema.

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

A: I’ve been trying much harder to engage with other art forms. I have explored dance, music, fine and contemporary arts; but there is a certain sense of belonging that brings me back to cinema. I have been exploring ekphrasis much more but my personal favorite ekphrastic poems have all been about cinema.

Q: What is it that ekphrasis that appeals? What is it about writing poems through other forms? Is this a way of engaging those forms or working your way towards them?

A: Well, ekphrasis contains many possibilities. A poem about a movie can explore its philosophy, it can explore it as an art form, it can explore it as an experience or even explore the very act of watching the movie. I guess the main aspect of it that attracts me to it is the possibility of dissecting a favorite piece of art and perhaps highlighting its appeal for any readers.

Q: Given you’ve a couple of chapbooks under your belt, how was the process of putting together your first full-length manuscript?

A: It was a lot of fun and simultaneously a new kind of challenge. There are many challenges to structuring a full length manuscript that did not exist at the chapbook length. Structure and flow is always important, but the longer the manuscript gets, the more important it is to structure it correctly. Me and my editor are still experimenting with my full length and hope it'll turn out well. It’s always heartening to work with a great editor like Shane Neilson and I have a lot of faith in the manuscript.

Q: With two chapbooks-to-date, and your forthcoming full-length debut, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: I use poetry for expression and developing lucidity in my waking life, so with every stepping stone I see myself heading for more clarity in expression.

Q: Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? What writers or works are in your head when you write?

A: If it was 3-4 years ago, I would have said people like Beckett, Paul Celan or Nicole Brossard, all of whom I worship; but at the moment poets who inspire me are mostly friends whom I frequently share a stage with or read along. There is so much great talent in Canadian poetry at the moment and it gets better every year. I would say at the moment my greatest influence is my partner, poet Terese Pierre.

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

A: A few remarkable ones would be Nicole Brossard’s Ardour, Samuel Beckett’s ill seen ill said, Nathanael’s Je Nathanael, George Oppen’s 21 poems, CA Conrad’s The Book of Frank, Paul Celan’s Threadsuns, Rilke’s Book of Images, Klara Du Plessis’s Ekke, Ahmad Shamlu’s Humble explorers of Hemlock and Hoa Nguyen’s Red Juice.

TtD supplement #160 : seven questions for Hasan Namir

Iraqi-Canadian author Hasan Namir graduated from Simon Fraser University with a BA in English and received the Ying Chen Creative Writing Student Award. He is the author of God in Pink (2015), which won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Fiction and was chosen as one of the Top 100 Books of 2015 by The Globe and Mail. His work has also been featured on Huffington Post, Shaw TV, Airbnb, and in the film God in Pink: A Documentary. He was recently named a writer to watch by CBC books.  Hasan lives in Vancouver with his husband. War/Torn (2019, Book*Hug) is his latest poetry book. His children's book, The Name I Call Myself, will be published by Arsenal Pulp Press in Fall of 2020.

Five poems from his “Umbilical Cord” appear in the twenty-fifth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “Umbilical Cord.”

“Umbilical Cord” is my second poetry collection, a follow-up to War/Torn. In the latest collection, I focus mostly on my new adventures as a dad to Malek with my husband Tarn. There is a mix of letters to my child, with poems that show how we got here, my love story with Tarn and Malek, our child. While War/Torn focused mainly on the struggle of reconciling between religion and identity, “Umbilical Cord” doesn’t mention religion not once. The book highlights the new chapter in my life.

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

A: All of my poems are like parts of my body. So, Umbilical Cord is similar to War/Torn in that the poems are personal, representing certain emotions during certain times of my life. Also, I used the words “umbilical cord” in War/Torn in some of the poems. The umbilical cord imagery itself is repeated again in my second poetry collection. In the second book, I explore with that image further and also focus more on my love story with Tarn and my own parenthood journey and the ups and downs.

Q: Do you have any models for this kind of work? Are there any other parenthood poems or literary works you’ve been looking at or thinking about?

A: Well, last year, I read the wonderful poetry book Q&A by Adrienne Gruber, that’s about her pregnancy and her parenthood journey. I’d say the book inspired me.

Q: With two published books-to-date, a forthcoming children’s book and your recently accepted second poetry collection, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: I definitely am so thankful for these opportunities to highlight my literary voice. After God in Pink was published, I would always read reviews on Goodreads because I’m always open to be a better writer. I appreciated all the feedback I received and I learned a lot. With every book I’ve been working on, I’m learning so much through my publishers, my editors, my peers and myself. I can’t express enough how much I appreciate all the book events I attend or I’m part of, all the interviews, collaborations, feedback I receive as author. I feel so lucky to be surrounded by creativity from all aspects which continuously inspire me to be the best I can be. I want to keep writing and work in different platforms to show that I’m a capable, versatile author. I’m also going to get back into one of my old passions of mine which is screenwriting. I went to Vancouver Film School and I completed the Writing program. I focused on my book writing for a while that I had forgotten all about it. So, I’m in talks with producers which will be future screenwriting projects. At the same time, I want to continue publishing stories that explore topics that are often silenced. I'm grateful for what I do and for everyone who has supported me throughout my writing career.

Q: Has your experience with screenwriting had any effect on the way you approach your poetry or your prose?

A: Most definitely, especially in the way I experimented with both prose and poetry. In God in Pink, there are two narrators and the story alternates back and forth, sometimes creating confusion. I wanted to show the assimilation of the voices and when they’re so different. So the novel felt like a screenplay. In War/Torn, the poem Mosque/Internal is in the form of a screenplay. I took a part from a screenplay I had written while attending Vancouver Film School. I turned the excerpt into a poem.

Q: What made you first shift away from the screenplay to fiction, and further, into poetry? What do you feel might be possible through fiction or poetry that might not be possible otherwise?

A: At the time after I graduated from Vancouver Film School, I was supposed to continue writing screenplays. However, I was still attending Simon Fraser University at the time and I was still working on an English BA. I took some time off of my BA when I focused on screenwriting. After I got back into SFU, during then, I was working on God in Pink and War/Torn. With prose and poetry, I am given the opportunities to experiment with form. Generally speaking with prose, it’s not a common to experiment. Poetry allows you to experiment a lot more of course. I experimented with form for both God in Pink and War/Torn and the act itself helped bring new meaning to the stories. Generally, I find it’s a lot easier to experiment with poetry than fiction—but both experiences have been rewarding.

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

A: I’m always reading, whether it’s a poetry book or a novel or graphic novel. I just finished reading Mona Eltahawy’s The Seven Necessary Sins for Women & Girls, a very powerful feminist manifesto that is detailed in showing how women and girls can destroy patriarchy. It’s brilliant on all levels. The passion that oozes out of the book is quite inspirational. I don’t usually re-read books. I only had to during my Academic career for essays and etc. If I’m reading a poetry book, I’ll re-read the poem to grasp new meaning.

TtD supplement #159 : seven questions for émilie kneifel

émilie kneifel is an artist, poet, critic, translator, and co-creator of PLAYD8s, a video interview series about unproductive exploration. find 'em at emiliekneifel.com, @emiliekneifel, and in Tiohtiáke, hopping and hoping.

Their poems “two siblings visit the third in toronto,” “one last august something,” “i read Marie Howe” and “b/rain fog” appear in the twenty-fifth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “two siblings visit the third in toronto,” “one last august something,” “i read Marie Howe” and “b/rain fog.”

A: hm. they are all summer poems, which i think is significant because during the summer i always feel like the days have already ended, even though they’re really at their longest. the poems’ joy knows its own stakes, i think. the grief in beauty. that sort of thing.

because i often disperse or disappear into my emotional environment, we (the poems and i) are also trying to pry me out, or at least spot me in the goop, give me some grain. we’re trying to figure out how i figure into what happens to me. how am i happening to?

“two siblings” is the kid-greed of burning your tongue on a good thing, “one last” is an attempt to be a reliable narrator, “b/rain fog” tries to catch a symptom that catches me, and i think in “i read Marie Howe” i might be lying to myself. but they’re all wispy for sure. all finite.

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

A: the easiest answer is that they’re distant pieces of a manuscript; the truest answer is that they’re accomplices in my larger life project of trying to make something of this reality, to cup some kind of provisional self. building the manuscript was such a precious, agency-giving endeavour on its own, like playing with healing blocks that only snap into each other when it feels right, that i’m not sure i even want to call it a manuscript, to imply that i want it anywhere but on my shoulder and in nathan and nivi’s inboxes. i think i’m worried that trying to move it would knock the tower over. but i’ve also been trying to ask my fear out. i do want to get to know her better.

by the time this interview is published, a big, big baby will have finally dislodged from my throat: PLAYD8s, a video interview series co-created with nadia davoli where i interview poets, a scientist, an imaginary friend, and my grandmother about how they play. this is related because i feel like it means that my poems can take their dresses off for a while.

Q: Do you have a difficulty in getting work out into the world?

A: probably my greatest difficulty is that i feel so claustrophobic inhabiting anything driven by ego, and “getting work out into the world” feels irreconcilably ego-sticky sometimes. i get the most ooh lala out of the writing itself, so i am always asking myself about the point of the outward step. is it worth it? am i exploiting myself? also a big thing: how can i accomplish something without making others feel inadequate? i guess my for-now reason for doing it despite my doubts is that i want to prove myself wrong. i have to believe there’s a way to do all of this generously. also, well, i think i would like to have the chance of being known. i don’t mean famous; i mean being known, really known. you know? because i think in some ways recognition also often means some form of self-identification. it’s mutual. i daydream about mutually knowing+being known, via art art art.

Q: I’ve always thought that “making” is simply a normal, human impulse. It is each individual’s way of responding, whether to the outside or the inside (or both). To “make” and attempt to put out into the world is simply to engage in a conversation that is already ongoing, between so very many others. Even if one claims that art is insular, and seen only by other artists, it is still a response, so even to ‘make’ is to do so with the possibility of a further response in kind, don’t you think?

A: so, to be clear, i don’t think i’m some solitary figure living in a cabin in a vacuum; i was built and am being built by both the art i consume and the way i have been loved, and everything i make is inherently entangled with that. but i don’t know that i’m always “responding” so explicitly. i don’t know that it feels like a conversation so much as me wandering off with my backpack & tools procured from living and reading.

maybe you’re right, and maybe i’m strange, but – no, you know what, i’m going to stop hedging. as a kid, i built my whole self around the extrinsic. i know art can be just-mine because it doesn’t feel the way the rest of my life did/does, all pulled out by other people and their nebulous expectations. art is one of the only things that, for me, can have and retain inherent value – a value that becomes muddled once i introduce other people into the equation.

that’s not to say all art is like that; i love to write emails, a form that explicitly expects further response, and i guess i should acknowledge the fact that if something exists observably then, yeah, the possibility of someone else seeing it and responding is always there.

i just don’t know that you can ever talk about art in absolutes (except in this sentence, i guess, har-har). what i said earlier about ego has nothing to do with all art or anyone else at all, really. i don’t think i’m better than someone who does want to be famous or does get the most satisfaction out of sharing their work. it’s hard enough to figure out what makes you feel good in this life without being shamed for it. just like i’m not actually saying art is “purest” in isolation. i just think that for me, right now today, art is a relief because it can be like living alone. i can invite people over; there’s a door (the possibility you’re talking about), but i can also close it, and i get to choose what i put on the wall, and i get to decide when to answer a knock.

Q: How, for you, does a piece of writing begin?

A: i will never stop wanting to answer this question. elsewhere i’ve talked about it as a kind of inciting horniness, thanks to a melissa lozada-oliva tweet, but today i was thinking about the rilke quote “the good writer touches life often,” and how sometimes life also touches us. it felt like such a clean way to explain why trauma can be a starting point for art, because it’s life wrecking its way through your spiritual architecture. so today that’s my answer, that a poem begins when i touch life or when life crashes into me. a kind of generative contact, even if it begins in destruction.

like you, i’m also a critic/arts writer by trade but mostly by nature, meaning that art makes me iiiiiitch. that’s always been about the artist’s perceptual sensibility, how they’re experiencing the contact, what they happen to be noticing. case in point: at the montreal launch of her memoir, carmen maria machado said, “you can look anywhere when you watch a movie,” which shifted my skull.

i’m excited about this answer, because i love the image of a palm pressing into like, a giant iridescent membrane. mostly i’m giddy because i know my answer will change tomorrow, which is its own kind of beginning. my friend, the poet sanna wani, talks about the poetic impulse as a kind of mythical creature that she chases through the woods. there are so many ways to begin!!

my final answer, in a word, locking it in, is: a crush, in every sense.

Q: Have you any models for the kinds of work you’ve been doing, and been attempting?

A: yes, but they’re secret (naming names is like opening the oven while the bread bakes). but also, i feel simultaneously model-less; it’s more that my secrets stretch what’s possible.

to be less precious and give an actual answer to your question, rob: one thing i am swimming behind is the way other people love through their work. manahil bandukwala and sanna wani’s world-trembling collaborative work (autocorrected to “world”); billy-ray belcourt’s in-text citations, these little pecks of gratitude to maybe never be found by the citee. the epistolary form in all its iterations: sent and unsent, always a secret keeper. “i am made from you and i made this! this is made from you! this is made for you!”

Q: You mention that these poems are “summer poems.” Is there a difference in the shape or the tone of your poems through different seasons?

A: oh, absolutely. i think of hydrangeas, which are the coolest and bloom blue/pink/violet depending on the pH of the soil (autocorrected to “soul”). season, smell, time of day — it all leaves an imprint. i experience myself as pretty undifferentiated from my environment, so i think i find embodiment by plucking shreds from the world that have turned a specific colour.

Touch the Donkey : twenty-fifth issue,

The twenty-fifth issue is now available, with new poems by Mary Kasimor, Naomi Cohn, Tom Snarsky, Jason Christie, Hasan Namir, Khashayar Mohammadi, Donato Mancini, émilie kneifel and Guy Birchard.

Eight dollars (includes shipping). For the next sixty minutes, we'll be seeing actual film of car crash victims.

TtD supplement #158 : six questions for Mark Cunningham

Mark Cunningham has two chapbooks out recently: Fail Lure (Otoliths issue 52 and print) and multizon(e) (Right Hand Pointing, text combined with a video by Dale Wisely).

Four poems from his “[future word]” appear in the twenty-fourth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “[future word].”

A: (about Future Words)

Each piece or entry in the Future Words series is an entry in a dictionary of future words, or rather a gathering of meanings that have started to draw together, but whose word has not yet formed. As such, it differs from other dictionaries—perhaps most importantly in that what will be the exact level of connotation or denotation of the elements of each future word hasn’t been settled. As in a real dictionary, I’ve listed the various means in most-common to least-common order, but this is provisional, and you can re-arrange the order if you sense things differently.


(how the series got started)

The series started by accident. I was in an office supply store, and by whim I picked up paperback dictionary that was on sale for a dollar or so. I looked up a word at random, then another, and it struck me that the definitions of the words fit together in ways that neither of their “real” words covered. So now, at random, from a dictionary at hand—"POLARISCOPE: an instrument for measuring or exhibiting the polarization of light or for examining substances in polarized light” followed by “RUNNING MATE: a candidate for office linked with another and more important office, as for the vice-presidency.” I tried various combinations while still in the store: looking up a word, taking its first meaning, and combining that first meaning with the second meaning of the nearest following word that had two meanings. Sometimes the results were interesting, sometimes not. But it was fun, like learning a secret code, and I like doing things that incorporate chance procedures and unexpected results, so I kept at it for a while.


(how the series turned into Future Words)

This experimental diversion turned into the Future Words series when I reread some material on the psychological and bureaucratic structure(s) of Stalinism, “Stalinism” here indicating not the belief in or acceptance of the ideology strictly of Stalin the person, but that combination of psychological, bureaucratic, and legal functions and structures that reach their clearest (so far) formulation in Stalinist Russia (a large, ponderous state bureaucracy, for example, was characteristic form of the French government following Napoleon and before the 1848 revolution, as Marx points out, long before Stalin, and such bureaucracies are still with us—more so—after Stalin the person is gone). In other words, a content-neutral structure: the chosen group carrying the message of nature or history can be a group of young Russians or middle-aged Frenchmen and the truth not to be questioned can be almost anything, but a bureaucracy can be created to handle it. The idea of manipulating “reality” by manipulating definitions—whether it be planting negative code words in what is supposed to be a positive letter of recommendation (“John is a careful, steady worker” indicating to those who read the letters that “John is a plodder”) or more obviously ideological moves such as coming up with various denotations and connotations of “multi-culturalism” or “racism”—is something people of any ideological position do relentlessly. This, and the memory of every administrator I’ve ever come in contact with, whether apparently “right wing” or “left wing” or “conservative” or “liberal,” started to give a direction to and a use for the definitions I was coming up with (or finding).

More technically, then, to paraphrase terms used by Sidney I. Landau in Dictionaries: the Art and Craft of Lexicography, my dictionary is more synchronic (it deals with a narrow band of time and attempts to represent the lexicon as it exists at a particular point in time—or, in this case, will exist) than diachronic (the attempt to trace the development of meanings over a period of time), but one can piece together etymologies from the entries. The entries also try to reach a balance between descriptive and prescriptive definitions. And, finally, the dictionary is broadly a subject-field dictionary, designed for use by computer technicians, advertisers, psychologists, genetic engineers, human resource directors, and administrators in general—the type of people we’ll only be seeing more of in the near future.


(other works forming a field for Future Words)

The writing that really set the ground for me for an attempt at a dictionary (or some sort of reference book) are the Encyclopedia Acephalica that Georges Bataille and others did in association with the journal Documents, and An Anecdoted Typology of Chance by Daniel Spoerri and others (thank you Atlas Press for publishing translations of both of those). And I’ve admired Rosmarie Waldrop’s Key to the Language of America ever since I read it. The pieces themselves seem to me to be a variation on the mode I use in 71 Leaves (an e-book from BlazeVox) and 80 Beetles (Otoliths). Once the series got started, I didn’t want to read any other reference-work-type writing. I did check other works to make sure I wasn’t just duplicating something already done. I also should mention Bénédicte Vilgrain’s Tibetan Grammar (Burning Deck) and, of course, Flaubert’s “Dictionary of Received Ideas” and Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, as works I’ve enjoyed.


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

A: I think everything I’ve written might be considered an attempt to achieve what I’ll call for the moment a valid non-authority. Valid, in that the piece provides a coherent view of whatever I’m writing about; non-authority, in the piece has no pretension to being definitive (even in a definition: the word hasn’t completely formed yet) or the only view possible.

Over the years, this goal has come to focus on the question of how do you avoid becoming an authoritarian and ideolog yourself when writing about authoritarianism and ideology? You (meaning anybody, including me) probably don’t, entirely—once you step into that area, you have to speak the language of that area to a degree, to paraphrase Foucault and the Situationists. If you start with the idea that “all people’s opinions or interpretations are important, including my own,” it’s easy to narrow down to “my opinion or interpretation is important” if you run into an opinion or interpretation differing from yours. And then to, “my opinion or interpretation is based on my experience, which is important.” And then to “My opinion or interpretation of my experience is not only important, it is more valid than other peoples’ opinion of my experience, because it is my experience, not theirs, so I understand it better,” while forgetting or ignoring that you are now also interpreting other peoples’ interpretations or actions based on how they line up with yours. And then to, “My opinion or interpretation is right and other peoples’ are wrong.”

So, my first book, Body Language (Tarpaulin Sky Press), is a collection of pieces on parts of the body. But I don’t own the topic—anybody can write a poem on the index finger or the collar bone—and I don’t think my piece on the index finger is THE piece on the index finger. In fact, I’d find it interesting to read an anthology of pieces on the fourth toe—what do other people think or have to say about it?

In other books such as specimens (BlazeVox), 71 Leaves (BlazeVox e-book), or 80 Beetles (Otoliths), all of which are made of pieces with simple sentences usually spoken by someone who reveals unintended tangles and contradictions in his or her statement, I try to get one sentence spoken by an “I.” The speaker of the piece is not outside of or immune to the twists and trip-ups that the “he” or “she” runs into. This comes to its sharpest focus, I think, in a forthcoming collection, probably to be titled sort, from Knives Forks and Spoons Press. Here’s a sample from that book:

“The hair on your arms forms patterns that are A) you or B) not you. The committee told him it didn’t count if he gave himself the nickname. I keep confusing mean and median, so I must be average after all. Identity Crisis Doesn’t Change Who You Are. Usually only other people can see the image on your retina.”

(not in quotation marks in the original; here, used just to set the piece off more.)

Going along with Future Words in the book coming out from if p then q is a sequence titled “Strategy and Tactics,” based on two books by Konrad Becker (Strategic Reality Dictionary and Tactical Reality Dictionary). Becker tries to define ways governments, corporations, and other agencies manipulate the world (in the broadest sense, I think: everything in the environment)—techniques to which Becker gives names such as “Multiple Avatars” and “Attentive Relevance.” Reading the books, I realized that huge agencies weren’t the only ones to use such techniques: I use some of them, or some process similar to some of them, to get through the day, too, and I wrote pieces to exemplify my doing so.

Q: Would you say, then, that all of your work-to-date exists as a singular, ongoing project? How do you see such a project continuing to unfold?

A: It’s tempting to put some developmental order into the past, but that would downplay the overriding elements of chance that have prompted most of what I end up working on—as the example of how the “future words” series got started shows. Of course, one could say that those “chance” events only brought into play an interest that was searching for a usable spur. But I wouldn’t want to have only a singular, ongoing project, at least not consciously. That sounds way too limiting.

Projects I’ve been working on lately, though, do seem to share a common direction: an interest in words as objects or areas of faltering (stumbling, wavering, hesitating) meanings. The very short pieces that make up multizon(e), a sequence that goes along with a video by Dale Wisely on the Right Hand Pointing site (www.issues.righthandpointing.net/multizone) and f(l)ights, a 110-piece sequence that is part of a larger sequence “about” the emergence and development of one-celled life and the transition to multi-celled forms on the Otoliths site (www.the-otolith.blogspot.com/2020/01/mark-cunningham.html) go in that direction. A sample piece from f(l)ights: “it(ch).” The whole sequence could be a 110-page book or it could print out in 8 pages, as it does from the Otoliths site.

Q: I like the term “faltering”: could you expand on what you mean by this?

A: Faltering—

I don’t (I do) mean anything earthshaking by “faltering.” It’s been clear since at least the Deconstructionists (and, really, for centuries before them—as long as there has been puns, for instance) that most words have more than one meaning, and that all those meanings are present at once when you use a word, though you ignore or downplay most of them in favor of the meaning you want the word to have in the context of its use. But the downplayed meanings are still there, and it’s impossible to get the word to settle down to just the meaning you want it to have. There are fault lines ready to shift at any moment and leave you or the word with no stable ground underneath.

In the “future word” pieces, the various strands of meaning are just coming together to form a word, so it’s not obvious what the main meaning of the word will be, though a tone is forming. In pieces such as those in multizon(e) and f(l)ights, the strands of meaning in a word are breaking apart as much as coming together, as in the word “strayt” that I use in multizon(e). Easy enough to find both “straight” and “not straight” there.

I think it was Barbara Johnson who said “meaning is fascist” or something close to that—that to try to control discussion or thought by limiting a word to only one of its meanings while trying to erase all other meanings is authoritarian (a word with varying meanings, of course). That idea is in the background of the “future word” pieces rather obviously. It’s also in multizon(e) and f(l)ights, in the sense that one way of considering an organism is to view it as an attempt to form a locus of control over its environment, which it can never accomplish completely.

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

A: How has work developed? I don't have anything to add, really, than what I put in the previous answers, especially the last one.

Where is it headed? I have no idea. But I will add one of my favorite anecdotes. This is how I remember it: Ray Bradbury tells that when he was just starting out, he would go to get-togethers and tell whoever would listen about the story he was working on. Then when he went to work on the story again, he found he couldn’t write it. All the energy had evaporated when he told people about it: the story had already been told. Finally another excellent short story writer, Henry Kuttner, heard Bradbury talking about a story, and Kuttner told Bradbury to be quiet. Don’t talk about the story, write it. Bradbury followed that advice and became, well, Ray Bradbury. The few times I’ve slipped up and told about what I was working on, the same thing has happened to me: all the energy is drained from the project. So while I really have no idea of what lies ahead, even if I knew, I wouldn’t risk saying it.

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

A: Among poets: Louis Zukofsky (especially 80 Flowers; the title of one of my books—80 Beetles—is nod in that direction); Clayton Eshleman (especially his pieces on painting and paleolithic culture); Will Alexander (do I even really read him? I get halfway through one of his poems and start taking notes on images that are coming to me through the medium--in the supernatural sense—of his poem); and Robert Bly (the prose poems in particular; Bly is one of the first poets I liked when I found poetry years ago). Those came to mind first, but I shouldn’t leave out Maggie O’Sullivan, P. Inman, Jonathan Williams, Susan Howe, Ron Silliman, and Rae Armantrout. And that’s only the English-language poets—but in the last few years translated works, though important, have given way to works doing interesting things with the English language as a specific language rather than a conveyor of images that can be caught more or less in any language.

Also over the last few years, there’s been an increased spur from philosophers (for want of a better word) such as Timothy Morton and Graham Harman. And I’ve always paid attention to studies of visual artists, mostly painters, with Francis Bacon, Jackson Pollock, Joseph Cornell, and Max Ernst leading the pack.

TtD supplement #157 : seven questions for Clara Daneri

Clara Daneri is an artist, poet and illustrator, exploring the relationship between digital and traditional media. She is the visual poetry editor at Penteract Press and she tweets @ClaraDaneri.

Her visual poem “The Tyger” appears in the twenty-fourth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the “The Tyger.”

A: A lot of my poetry is about distorting classic literature into visual representations of the subject matter. I like to choose pieces that resonate with me and have strong imagery, so Blake’s “The Tyger” seemed perfect for this treatment. The face of a tiger is such an iconic image, and Blake’s poem so evocative, I really wanted to play with the idea of “perfect symmetry” within both.

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

A: My work tends to focus on the relationship between content and form. My first real venture into visual poetry was a triptych of female forms whose skins are made up of romantic poems about feminine beauty. Another work is an erasure palimpsest using text from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with Karloff’s iconic Monster. An upcoming piece, due to finish up Penteract Press’ pamphlet series, sees me retell Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit using only emojis. 

Q: What is it about reshaping or erasing text that appeals to you? What do you feel that utilizing the words from other texts allows that might not be possible otherwise?

A: It’s about exploring the relationship between word and form – bridging the gap between literature and the visual arts. By using existing works as my starting point, it gives me a constraint with which to work – I have to find a solution to the “problem”. If I were working with my own words, I don’t think that solution would be as satisfying, as I would have too much control over the outcome.

Q: I’ve heard that as a descriptor for art-making: we create problems that we can then solve. Is this how you see your practice? Who have your models been for this kind of work?

A: I always produce my best work when I have an initial starting point – a blank page/canvas is not a thing of inspiration for me, so I think that statement is true.

My husband, Anthony Etherin, has shown me what can be achieved with the right balance of freedom and constraint. Our founding of Penteract Press together has exposed me to so many great poets, and in the last few years I have taken great pleasure in seeing what can be done combining word and form. I don’t think I have any direct models, but I have taken a lot of inspiration from some of the poets with whom we have worked including Christian Bök, Mary Frances, Chris Warren, Lucy Dawkins, Kate Siklosi and psw.

Q: With a handful of pamphlets and other ephemera under your belt, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your working heading?

A: I’m definitely more confident now – at first, I was very nervous about how my work would be received, but feedback has been good, so that spurs me on to keep trying new things. It has been really great that people have started reaching out to solicit work from me – that encourages me to continue. I haven’t created that much output yet, so I am still finding out what my particular poetic practice is. I am really keen on this “Icons” theme of working with well-known pieces that resonate with me, and this is forming into the early stages of a book – I just wish I had more hours in the day (but I guess most poets have the same problem)! Between working full time and helping to run Penteract Press, finding time to work on new pieces is challenging. Most of my poetic work requires a lot of concentration, so I have to have a few clear hours where I’m able to be totally focused. The book will come, in time, but at the moment building up the press takes precedence. However, if I’m feeling particularly inspired, I somehow manage to find the time!

Q: How many “Icons” have you produced so far, and how far do you see the project going?

A: I am looking to produce a short book, so perhaps 30 – 40 in total. So far, I have about seven, so still a way to go… I have had a few frustrating false starts with concepts that didn’t work out in the end – but that’s all part of the process!

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

A: I must admit, I don’t tend to revisit things on purpose for inspiration – it tends to be a more of a coincidental process when it happens.

I find my twitter feed very inspirational as so many of the people I follow are so generous sharing their work, as well as retweeting things that they admire both in poetry and visual art. It’s a lovely thing to scroll Twitter and come across an astounding painting/ visual poem you’ve never seen before, or be reminded of a forgotten favourite.

Outside of Twitter, Anthony helps me a lot. When I am stuck in a creative rut, we talk, and bounce ideas off each other. Maybe clarifying a half-formed idea, or helping me find a point of inspiration (“Aria”, which features in our “Reflections” anthology was a direct response to the bilingual palindrome he had written with Pedro Poitevin).

TtD supplement #156 : seven questions for Zane Koss

Zane Koss is a non-resident alien currently living in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. He was raised on the unceded territories of the Ktunaxa and Secwépemc nations. His critical and creative work can be found in the Chicago Review, the /temz/ Review, CV2, Poetry is Dead, and elsewhere. He has published three chapbooks of poetry, Invermere Grids (above/ground, 2019), job site (Blasted Tree, 2018) and Warehouse Zone (Publication Studio Guelph, 2015), with one further chapbook forthcoming from above/ground press. Zane is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at New York University, where he researches Canadian, Mexican and U.S. poetry in the 1960s and 1970s.

His poems “ghosts,” “telephone,” “for marianne moore” and “no theses on poetics” appear in the twenty-fourth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “ghosts,” “telephone,” “for marianne moore” and “no theses on poetics.”

A: I don’t often write short, “stand-alone” poems like these – I tend to work best on longer projects where I can slowly chip away at a task, rather than waiting for poems or lines to flutter into my head, which happens so rarely. So, it's kind of weird to publish a bunch of them.

I wrote “telephone” after a phone call with my mom in 2014 while I was living in Montreal. My mom worked as a HCA (health care assistant) and at the time was on “home support,” driving out to all the far corners of the valley to visit people who need assistance from a health care professional to continue living (or dying) independently. Her mind has a wonderful (and at times frustrating) way of cutting back and forth between topics that is, I think, at the very heart of poetry, as well as a tendency to mispronounce or combine words and an incredible knack for storytelling. Both my parents have that. All very poetic. When I first wanted to be a writer, I only wanted to be as good a storyteller as my parents are, as good a practical joker as them. They both have a talent where you can never tell if they’re being serious or pulling your leg, and I don’t mean like for a minute or two, I mean like I feel like on their deathbeds they’re going to wink and go “Gotcha!” and it'll have all been one long joke. About what, I don’t know.

“for marianne moore” was written in summer 2017 in Brooklyn while I studied for my comprehensive exams for my (still on-going) doctoral degree and gardened on our little patio where we grow morning glories which I find endlessly fascinating. I really like Marianne Moore’s work, but hadn’t read any of her poems in a couple years before that summer. I’m always sort of amazed she wasn’t (or at least isn’t considered) more influential than she is. She’s such a generative writer.

“no theses on poetics” was written in response a talk on poetics I attended that rubbed me the wrong way. I wanted it to be a dialogue poem written with a friend who was also slightly perturbed by that talk, but nothing came of it. I don’t think the friend really understood that I was trying to initiate a dialogue. I’m against making poetry “useful” in ways that can be too easily assimilated into the current capitalist organization of society. Better to be useless than to do research that aids in war-making or surveillance or whatever. I also love the manifesto form while finding it inherently ridiculous and often politically awful, so this poem is both a serious attempt at writing something resembling a manifesto and a send-up of that rhetoric.

And “ghosts,” I have a stupid fear of ghosts that keeps me up at night the first time I’m sleeping in a new place if it has any hint of creepiness. If I stay long enough that fades, obviously, as I get used to the creaks and squeaks of a given structure. This poem floated into my head ghost-like in the night after realizing that Kate and I have lived in our current Brooklyn apartment longer than anywhere since our parents’ homes growing up, and the types of relationships one forms with the physical structures you inhabit. And how our time here in Brooklyn is necessarily limited by my visa. It’s both our home and necessarily not. Is this response too long? I think they’re all longer than the poem they’re meant to explain, and also not really about the poems.

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

A: So, as I’d mentioned, the poems published here are different from my typical work because of their short length and lack of a processual apparatus. (i.e. I didn’t think out a method of generating form or content prior to beginning any of these poems; they simply burst out of me, much less systematically.) For example, at the moment I’m working on a manuscript in which I’ve been collecting observations – trying to limit myself to sense impressions and perceptual data only – glimpses, glances, and sounds – no conjectures or conclusions – from my neighbourhood in Brooklyn, particularly sense impressions of the appearance of the surface of New York Harbour. I’ll collect this data for a couple months – much of it fleeting, in passing, minor jottings – and then arrange this data into 4 x 4 grids composed the letter “s” repeated and symmetrically space on a page. And each phrase inserted into the grid has to hang itself off an “s,” so that everything is anchored in space to the grid. It sounds very neurotic now when I describe it. (I use the same form, except with a “v,” in my recent above/ground chapbook, Invermere Grids, btw.) I’ve gotten up to three sets of 32 grids each, so it’s a book-length manuscript now. Of course, the observations sort of get away from pure sensation and into politics and history, because sense comes thru the body which is always political – how our bodies experience (space) depends on what those bodies are or how they’re read by the forms of power that structure life (within that space). Anyhow, rather than having a big neurotic apparatus like this, “ghosts,” “telephone,” “for marianne moore,” and “no theses” just appeared to me on a given day, without intention or forethought. Which is fairly unusual for me.

Q: What is it about the processional apparatus that appeals? What do you think is possible through such processes that might not be possible otherwise?

A: I mean, it’s partially because I am interested in process – in seeing how things are made, in seeing things that in their “finished” state are still in the process of emergence, of inchoate-ness – I always love books of poetry that are structured as “rough drafts,” “notes” or “journals,” like Francis Ponge’s The Table, for example. And also because I like how process-based poetics help to undermine the whole myth of the divinely-inspired poet-genius. I want to undermine that idea because I didn't write poetry for most of my 20s because I never felt I was “inspired” enough. It was only in my Master’s degree encountering the work of poets like Louis Dudek – who has poems that are just collections of random ideas and images all collaged together into a whole – or Charles Olson – whose poetry often enacts the process of its composition, picking thru archival materials, and making passing comments on that matter – that I began thinking again “Oh, maybe I can do this.” (This attitude is also why I’ve always loved punk music. You come away from shows thinking, “I could do that,” but no in the derogatory sense of the “Oh, my child could paint that,” but in a very anti-hierarchical sense – the whole do-it-yourself ethos.) Back to processes, I think the other thing too is that poetry is and has always been about the types of freedom that can be found in constraint – whether those constraints are the fourteen lines of a sonnet or rhyming iambic pentameter or forcing yourself to transcribe everything that happens in a single day. And given that rhyme schemes no longer feel innovative – and thus no longer present that same sense of producing new knowledge or whatever – it’s important to find other ways of exploring the limits of language and thought. Using a process or constraint forces you outside the box of standard modes of writing and thinking, which I see as central to the task of the poet.

Q: I find it curious that you moved from studying Dudek to composing using constraint, a line that doesn’t, at least for me, have obvious connectors between them. Without taking anything away from what you absorbed from Dudek and Olson, what other poets and works have assisted in developing your current approach?

A: You know, you’re totally right. When I wrote that, it seemed like an obvious leap, but it’s not. I think maybe a bit about the compositional process of En Mexico (1958), insofar as Dudek wrote a bunch of fragments that he then later arranged into the poem as it was published, there’s something processual there, but you’re right that he was sort of anti-constraint, in terms of his dedication to “organic form,” at least in his mid-career work – though we might argue that “organic form” is a type of constraint, a sort of anti-constraint constraint. There’s no escape.

But yes, in terms of actual writers who provoked an interest in constraint, I definitely think about Lyn Hejinian’s My Life a lot, or Lisa Robertson’s Cinema of the Present. Or Bernadette Mayer. I even would go back to Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” and his other tape recorder poems, how they walk that line between free composition and a compositional process that acts as a sort of constraint. I think that’s what my current grids project is sort of doing, in a way that joins Hejinian to Mayer to Ginsberg to Dudek: the idea of a process that governs both how you collect the raw material of composition, and how that raw material gets arranged after the fact. And that sort of resembles Dudek’s compositional process in En México, anyway.

But in terms of the grid project, there’s one original source and then a second influence that helped shape the project’s direction. The first is the rapper Madvillain, weirdly, because I don’t really listen to him a lot. I’m not sure the order of how this came together, but I wanted to write odes to rap lyrics that would use something of the constrained form of the sixteen bars of the rap verse to give shape to a poem that is more visually than sonically tuned, to pay attention to the visual quality of language in rap music. So, the sixteen point four-by-four grid is a visual corollary to the sixteen-bar, 4/4-time, rap verse. It was something that came to me while listening to Madvillain – the words were just so spatialized and architectural, it suddenly made sense as a visual grid. Everything I know about using sound in poetry was learned trying to write these odes to rap songs while listening to them, trying to borrow rhythms or sounds or words or textures. I’d always thought of my writing as primarily visual until then. which also was around when I started getting more opportunities to perform excerpts from my second chapbook, job site, at readings, which now feels like a very auditory poem.

The second big influence was Stephen Ratcliffe. I stumbled across his book CLOUD / RIDGE at Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop, and I’d been wanting to do poems out of pure sense perceptions, and he’d been doing it – beautifully – for like two decades, using these incredibly constrained verse forms in a monospaced font. Initially I’d began writing the grids dedicated to rap verses using Times New Roman, which made it incredibly hard to line the grids up with the words. And Ratcliffe’s sort of authorized me to go for it – to do really phenomenological, sensory, observations and to do it using monospaced font, which I’d already seen in Larry Eigner and Robert Grenier, of course, but something about the way Ratcliffe did it in very constrained stanza forms – which Eigner is much more voluptuous and Grenier usually quite minimalist – and suddenly it all clicked: the sixteen point grids, the monospaced font, the really phenomenological observations, the process of gathering and arranging data, etc.

That’s one very teleological reading of my last seven or eight years of my reading and writing (and listening!). Certainly, there are other projects and ideas on the go in excess of the above or that shoot off from the same materials in different directions, but that’s how I moved from Dudek to the grid project. And I think each of those writers (and musicians) adds something along the way.

Q: With a couple of published chapbooks under your belt, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your working heading?

A: I don’t know about “developed.” I don’t feel like my current project is necessarily better than my first chapbook, Warehouse Zone (2015). I think a set of interests and concerns has certainly started to cohere – there’s a coherent universe of ideas that I am inhabiting now. I’ve moved from trying to have a signature stylistic tic toward having signature questions, I guess, although I still have certain stylistic tics, but they’re much less at the center of my self-conception as a writer. Well, now that I think about it, maybe I’ve learned a few things since my first chapbook. Refinements of technique, things I would do differently, more deftly, if I had to write that project again. Probably stick closer to the constraint, and play less for humour. I think I wasn’t confident enough to pursue a completely austere vision at the time. Usually, though, I’m more worried by the feeling that my best work is behind me, rather than the feeling that I’ve grown as a writer. The worry is that I’ll never write anything better than whatever is in the rearview mirror – which is unnerving both for the obvious reason, and because that past work isn’t particularly great either. I feel like I haven’t broken out, and yet I’m already in decline. Maybe I’m still inchoate. Time will tell.

As far as where I’m heading, I’ve got the grids project to finish editing, and another thing in the works where I’m thinking about my background – my whiteness, my rural-ness, my blue-collar parents, etc. – through a critical collaging of lyric statement and quotations from country music – my love/hate relationship with country music – which will maybe also be about punk music too. Something similar to “conference report” in tone and concern (published on / temz / Review this past summer), but more formally adventurous. I think my politics emerged out of listening to a lot of radical punk music as a teen, and later exposure to critical theory in academia only gave philosophical background to what punk had already taught me. Mostly, I just want someday to write a poem as compelling as a really good song.

Q: You mention a potential focus on your background – “my whiteness, my rural-ness, my blue-collar parents”; how might something like that look?

A: To be perfectly honest, I have no idea. Which (I hope) is sort of the point of writing poetry. It’s an effort towards getting myself to think more critically about these things – in life not just in art – and I’m hoping to learn something that I don’t yet know through that process. It’s all still so inchoate at the moment that I don’t want to talk about it too much. Like most of my writing projects, I tend to mull something over for a year or so, and then when I reach some sort of understanding about what the project will be, it gets written in a fairly condensed period of time, usually without much editing afterwards. Let’s say the editing happens before the writing part. And I’m still in that stage right now. The only things written so far are a couple false starts that will probably get dismantled before they’re recycled into the final project, similarly to what happened with the grids.

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

A: In the last week or so, I’ve been really energized reading Diane Di Prima’s memoir Recollections of My Life as a Woman. What a fantastic book. I think the best book I read before that was Stephen Collis’s Almost Islands about Phyllis Webb. Those two books both gave me a lot of energy for writing poetry and faith in art more generally. As far as writers I return to, I feel like I don’t return to writers much these days, unless it’s for my dissertation. I wish I had more time to read without it being immediately weaponized for my work. And there’s so much poetry that I’m constantly learning about that I find it hard to linger. If there’s anyone I return to semi-regularly, it would have to be William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein. Or Daphne Marlatt, Lisa Robertson and Lyn Hejinian, depending on what I’m looking for. The last book I read that I immediately thought “Oh, I can’t wait to re-read that” was Marty Cain’s Kids of the Black Hole, but I haven’t gotten back to it yet. I’m also always reading work by my buddy, Mike Chaulk. His writing always gives me that “Damn, I wish I’d written that” feeling. And that always makes me want to write more – in case I somehow manage to write something as good as he has. Aditya Bahl too. His expanding “translation” of a single poem by Muktibodh knocks me flat, and just sets my brain whirring! It’s so good!