TtD supplement #198 : seven questions for Cat Tyc

Cat Tyc is a writer/artist who has three chapbooks, An Architectural Seance (dancing girl press & studio), CONSUMES ME (Belladonna* Collaborative) and I AM BECAUSE MY LITTLE DOG KNOWS ME (Blush Lit).  Her most recent work has published in Maggot Brain and The St. Marks's Poetry Project magazine The Recluse.

Her video work has screened at the Microscope Gallery, Anthology Film Archives, Brooklyn Museum, Hauser & Wirth, Kassel Fest and the synthesis gallery. She has directed music videos that have been added to the rotation on LOGO’s NewNowNext and MTVu.

She has been granted residencies and fellowships at Signal Culture and The Flaherty Seminar and has received support from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts.

Her collaborative project Poet Transmit (with artist Victoria Keddie) engages in the connections between poetry, transmission, and performance and has been presented at St. Mark’s Poetry Project, Knockdown Center and MOMA Ps1.

She is the Director of The Home School in Hudson, NY which is a summer intensive / online program with a mission to infuse poetry education with an interdisciplinary approach grounded in the fine arts and multimedia. She has taught writing for several CUNY/SUNY branches, Rutgers University and Northeastern University. She is based in Brooklyn and Hudson, NY.

Her poems “ART OF PRETEND,” “THIS PARTICULAR GOAT,” “THE BEES” and “WHISPER NETWORK” appear in the thirtieth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “ART OF PRETEND,” “THIS PARTICULAR GOAT,” “THE BEES” and “WHISPER NETWORK.”

A: All of these poems are part of a collection entitled XO which is about excavating a path towards love after experiencing various heartbreaks perpetually for several years. Or what I mean to say is that it is a book about love without an explicit love poem in it.

The poem THIS PARTICULAR GOAT is specifically about an astrological reading I had right when I moved upstate in 2019 to escape a situation that felt untenable.

It is also a little bit about the frustration of being a white Latina because sometimes the eruption of witchcraft into the mainstream makes me feel like I have found community in other witches but then I also feel patronized to by people who weren’t raised in it and speak to me as if I wasn’t raised in certain traditions.

The WHISPER NETWORK was a vent after being sexually harassed a few years ago and how desensitized I felt after the fact. In that piece, I am observing my survival mode in action and acknowledging the fact that I got through that moment unharmed but also acknowledging because I had learned how to. It is really different from other things I have written.

THE BEES is about moving to upstate NY. It is partially about hitting dead ends and also relating to nature in a way that felt so much more immediate. In taking in all this knowledge about the natural world. or to be more specific, learning about the interesting politics of bees, I am thinking about the support networks in place in their society and how solidarity doesn’t always come from where you expect it to in ours.

ART OF PRETEND is an unabashedly 2020 ‘welcome to lockdown’ poem. It is about rethinking intimacy in digital spaces and observing how it shifted at that moment in time.

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

A: This work is different from my other work mostly in that I identify mostly as a prose writer.

Writing these poems was a way to process what was happening for me emotionally during a really intense few years and the accumulation ramped up around when I moved. I was commuting to the city for teaching that first fall so I spent an inordinate amount of time on the train for several months and decided to use that time to write poems to deal with the isolation and just use that time well.  The work manifested in a way that is very different from the rest of my practice but also speaks to the constraint of time within how they were produced.

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

A: There are always so many because I ingest a lot of media. When I am at home I usually have a podcast or something streaming. And when I am in motion, I play music.

Since I wrote most of these on the train, I would say that there is some influence from what I am listening to.  I love and listen to so many artists but Mos Def (Yasin Bey), Kendrick Lamar, Princess Nokia and Nas are people that I feel like I was listening to a lot that fall and whose lyrical cadence really resonate with me and kind of stick in my brain long after the music stops playing.

Q: I’m aware that you work in multiple disciplines—not just composing prose or poetry—and I’m curious as to how these various streams of your work interact. Do you see your work as a large, singular project, or are you working a sequence of different threads that occasionally overlap or interact? Do the multiple sides of your work influence each other at all?

A: It is still project by project and they do overlap and have a conversation with each other. Dare I say, occasionally a debate. I mean, how could they not ? - it is all coming from me.

In regards to mixing media, I do feel like I am entering into a place of more intentional integration. Mostly in regards to how the intersection of media and poetics are at the center of my practice which I am excited about.

Writing is always at the core of my work, though. Sometimes the project starts as a poem and turns into a three person collaboration and sometimes a project starts as a sort of an investigation for a type of documentary poetics and sometimes a poem is just a poem.

Most of the time this all evolves out of my desire to work with people. And sometimes a project evolves because I really need to be alone.

Q: I find it interesting that you suggest you work in poetry to process certain experiences. How is this different from the work you’ve been doing with your prose?

A: It is funny to me that you ask me this today because I just got off a call with a friend who just had a traumatic loss and who is struggling with how to talk about it in her work. And I was talking about how art is what I do to save myself so I guess I was encouraging her to try if she wanted to and when I said that I was thinking in particular of this collection of poems but the fact of the matter is that I am always processing something in my work. .

In prose, I do this more as a way of  letting my overthinking self take over and let her freak flag work off some energy.

I am not really interested in work that is clever just to be clever.

When I am being conceptual in a project, I am thinking of it more like a science experiment to test out an idea or just to see what will happen so I have material to work with.

Q: With three published chapbooks, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: Well, I have a full poetry manuscript that could be broken down into chapbooks but I am really committed to the process of sculpting it into a full book. So that’s one that I am in the process of reorganizing.

I have spent a lot of time organizing the papers, notebooks and files in quarantine and have come to realize that outside of the one book of essays I was working on, I really have three and that essays are really where my heart lies near these days.  

The other two projects are in much earlier stages of development and I am developing short podcast series as part of the research and development of writing through those.

I am writing this as the world is “opening” back up so it is a weird time of meeting and conversation but there is some interest in a book of essays I have been working on for over a decade for  an online series and that is all I want to say about that for now so as not to jinx it.

And I wrote this script that I sent to an actor friend who thinks it could be a pilot so that is another interesting thing. I really miss directing and the whole running away with the circus feeling of making a film but it is also really daunting because it means working with a lot of people and I am still in the phase where I am trying to not be stressed out about having multiple dinner plans in one week so you know, we’re just taking it day by day right now.

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

A: I feel like I am always thinking about Eileen Myles’ work. Their book, evolution, has been on my mind quite a bit for the past few years because the poems reflect this position of really looking at the past to try to make sense of NOW in a way that just paralleled my head space so much.

And sometimes when I need to start my engine, I read a little bit of their book about Iceland or Inferno to get back into that head space of finding my ‘voice-ness’.  

I also get a lot of energy from seeing art and just taking in whole day of galleries and I just scribble the whole time. I went down to the city about a month ago to see a new show by one of my most favorite painters, Kathe Bradford.

Laurie Anderson is another artist that I return to consistently as well which some might think strange as I don’t work in sound but think I think she is such an interesting writer in how she kind of writes these layered meta narratives and there is something about the way she bends that opens me up when I am thinking about my work.

The art and writing I feel connected to is the kind that moves you beyond the art because it transcends the form to be something far more impactful than the form itself.

It grabs you and says ‘hey I see you’ and it holds you because the artist has learned how to do that for themselves. Or is at least is trying to and there is something in that trying is what I find most meaningful and inspiring.

I have also read a ton this year but the highlights have been Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, Harry Dodge’s My Meteorite, and Matilda Bernstein Sycamore’s The Freezer Door.

In poetry, I have loved Stephanie Young’s Pet Sounds, Kate Durbin’s Hoarders, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s (another all time favorite poet) A Treastise of Stars and Bhanu Khapil’s How to Wash A Heart.

I have been nibbling on all these books like really expensive chocolate.

TtD supplement #197 : seven questions for Emma Tilley

Emma Tilley’s writing has been published in Popshot Magazine, The Anti-Languorous Project, EVENT, and Poetry is Dead. Her debut chapbook Carp Dime was published by Rahila’s Ghost Press in 2019.

Her poems “SNOW GLOBES” and “HOMEBOUND” appear in the thirtieth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “SNOW GLOBES” and “HOMEBOUND.”

A: “SNOW GLOBES” is about living in the bubble of a small town and not wanting or knowing how to grow up. “HOMEBOUND” explores the idea of being in an unhealthy relationship and trying to control that which does not belong to us, or anyone really.

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

A: At the time the poems were written I was doing a lot more persona poems by making up a character or a situation and exploring it. The same can be said now too, but I am learning to write more from my own experiences and be direct. The subjects overlap in some ways, but it comes with a whole different set of emotions for me when writing and revisiting them. I am also finding myself working on sets of poems with a shared theme that connect with one another more so than individual poems.

Q: Are you finding your poems are interacting with each other more than they had previously? Might this have been since you published your chapbook, possibly? Has the way you see your poems evolved at all since you published Carp Dime?

A: I think my poems are interacting with each other more than they had previously. The poems in Carp Dime came about after discovering how much I loved the prose poem. I was having a lot of fun coming up with a line or a pun and then seeing where it would take me. The process was very lighthearted and organic, and it wasn't until I reread the poems during the editing stages that I began to see more themes in them. These days I find myself wanting to be more structured so that I can put together a longer collection of poems that follow a cohesive theme. I think it helps keep me focused on the work at hand. It also helps me see more clearly the different phases of my life and where I was at when I was writing the work. Since publishing Carp Dime, I have become more critical of the work (or lack of) that I have been producing so the way I have seen my poems has changed. I am trying to rediscover what it means to write for myself and how exciting exploring on the page can be.

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

A: Nancy Lee’s What Hurts Going Down, Lorna Crozier’s God of Shadows and Dina Del Bucchia & Daniel Zomparelli’s Rom Com have all been in the back of my head recently. I would say the imagery, story, humour, form, and characterization within their works as a collective have served as great models for the work that I have been attempting and trying to branch out with the kinds of poems I am writing.

Q: With a chapbook published and your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: I think it’s becoming more authentic to who I am, and I am also taking more risks as I go. The more I learn about poetic form, the more I am trying to see what I can push myself to do. How I can grow and develop with each phase of writing. I see my work growing and exploring more topics that I would have shied away from before. I can only hope that the work evolves in ways I never even would have imagined which is both motivating and exciting.

Q: How do you see those risks revealing themselves? Are you leaning more in a structural direction, with the language or the line, or are you seeking out different areas of subject matter?

A: I see the risks revealing themselves in the kinds of projects I undertake and the ideas I come up with. I’m interested in looking at poetry beyond the page at some point and I think what I’m learning now paves the way for that. It’s also about giving myself permission to try and fail which is something I’ve always been very critical about.

I’ve noticed myself in a bit of a rut lately when it comes to line and structure. There are times when I feel like all the writing sounds the same and looks the same. 2020 was a crash course in grief for me and it’s pushed me to write about subjects that I normally would have been too scared or unsure of how to talk about. It’s also taken up a lot of brain space that would usually be used to explore new ideas and concepts. I’m trying to find the balance again.

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

A: If I need a reminder to bring humour back into my work, I would look to Fredrik Backman or Louise Rennison. Humour is important to me in both my life and my writing – it’s nice to find the right balance for it. Some works that I return to would be Lorna Crozier’s The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things and Diane Schoemperlen’s Forms of Devotion. They always draw me back in and every time I read them I discover something new.

TtD supplement #196 : seven questions for Paige Carabello

Paige Carabello is a writer who currently lives in Denver, Co. Previously her life was in Los Angeles, CA, where she worked as a professional singer/songwriter, voice/acting teacher, and in the music industry. Besides being a lyricist, she has written scripts for musical theatre and theatre.  She is currently working on her first poetry manuscript. She loves poetics and diving into scholarly concepts. Her poems “Site” and “Weeds Worn” appear in the thirtieth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “Site” and “Weeds Worn.”

A: I had been involved in the final stages of my manuscript when Covid hit… literally. Hit me. It was March and we knew little to nothing about Covid, except that it killed “or just lasted two weeks”.  One of the things I have found very grounding during this time of isolation has been taking classes that require my full attention; that have deadlines and expectations. In a recent class with the poet Elizabeth Robinson we   were investigating the lyric poem’s ability to deepen an experience. It was the week of the Great American Nightmare (the election) and this timely assignment allowed me to pay attention specifically to ‘focus’ and intensity— how can the writer hone in, capture that core glimpse of real time experience? One of my foremost intentions with my poetry is to offer the reader an opportunity to really step inside another’s reality, to inhabit the voice. Paring away extraneous stimuli, what do you see?

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

A: The poems I am writing now are different from my manuscript. I’ve been writing a lot of experimental pieces, and just finished studying with Gregory Pardlo, which was extremely liberating! However, I am still working on my writing projects and just finished a chapbook. I’m struggling with the age old dilemma: so much to write, not enough time. (pause for heavy dramatic sigh). I am cleaning up my manuscript of persona poems—which sounds very mature and  disciplined? But I struggle with staying with one project. I pick up a poetry book and even though I’m only a few pages in, suddenly I MUST stop to write! I get triggered easily, so I find it difficult to finish reading anything unless it is assigned.

I love taking classes: there is a pressure to produce built right in and an opportunity to focus on concepts. Learning excites me, and class allows me to glean insight from poet-teachers who usually teach to their own strengths or feared weaknesses, so I benefit from their eye. I thrive on exposure to new ideas, new writers, new and different interpretations.

Most of my writing is people-centered. I admire good writing about place and natural environments, but to me, humans are the ultimate mystery and magnet. Inevitably, I find my writing is mining the layers of humanity—so writing my green leaf descriptive piece morphs to bug commentary which leads me to infestations... and suddenly I’m in a violent crowd at a clearance sale!

Q: You say you’re working on a manuscript of persona poems: what originally prompted the manuscript and how are these poems presenting themselves? From where do these personas emerge?

A: My concept for this manuscript was fleshed out before I submitted some of my work for an intensive year long poetry manuscript course (at Denver’s Lighthouse Writers Workshop) billed as having “all the details you don’t learn in an MFA program”.  At the time the course was led by Elizabeth Robinson, and she understood what I was shooting for—a book of female persona and identity poems. I know, I know—been done to death and I about fell asleep just writing the description. But as with anything worth much? I think, hopefully, the proof will be in the pieces.

I engage with them as acting monologues—as real glimpses into an other’s reality, with the “other “being some representations of female human existence. Hopefully, recognizable to all humans, regardless of sexual or gender identity— just like good theatre.  Some of my “characters” are pathetic, frustrating, stupid, humorous, lost…they are messy.

Where do my characters come from? Amalgams of concepts, personalities. Imagination. Experience. Curiosity. Passion. Living.

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

A: No, I don’t. I have an understanding of what I need each piece to say or cover, but beyond that? It’s a risk, a leap in the dark. The closest art form would be my experience as an actor, the nearest representational or visual form would be Cindy Sherman.

Q: What is it about Sherman’s work that appeals? And how does that present itself in your writing?

A: I actually created my concept a year prior to seeing Sherman’s work. However, the draw for me is in the opportunity to see differently through inhabiting. Often, when I read persona poetry or poetry “about” someone, there is a distance afforded the reader. The poet has written a “voice”, and this becomes an “other”... sometimes you've got 3 or 4 voices in with you, plus your own narration. In contrast, when I read a play (script), I automatically climb into the characters. They are immediately present, and they become real right now. It is this unique experience I am trying to capture. There are characters and characteristics of human behavior that I am interested in allowing the reader to inhabit more closely.

So, I was introduced to Cindy Sherman by Elizabeth Robinson. In Sherman’s work you can observe from a distance, simply register: here is a a photo of a beautiful woman. An Ugly woman. A Disgusting woman. Or you can ask ‘ who is she, what does she see, what does she say about how we have been socialized?’  What is revealed about the woman in the photograph? And what does my reaction reveal? What makes one woman ugly? Significant questions, all—but. “The Woman” is still being held at arm’s length, within a frame. Observed. Most viewers would agree that knowing about the individual women, or even the women’s back story, would effect our perception or judgement of her. I would like to go in further: what happens to our perceptions when we become the woman?

Q: How was it working with Elizabeth Robinson? Where there any shifts that her workshop prompted in your work, or was it more of a fine-tuning?

A: Elizabeth is a natural instructor and very open to new ideas and challenging boundaries. I often find it tricky, taking class from poets—just because one can publish doesn’t automatically mean one can teach. Elizabeth is an amazing teacher. And yes, she was very instructive in the technicalities of manuscript creation—composition, variation, selection, proximity—and criticism.  However, I think the most vital thing she gave me is her encouragement. I discount most pats on the head, just don’t trust them. Because I know Elizabeth has a discerning eye, and because I had taken several of her “academic” classes, I knew she was highly intelligent and had a deep sense of curiosity. I trust her.

If I had to single out the most helpful experience I had building this manuscript it would be the discoveries I made during my first public reading of the material. Up until that moment, I wasn’t certain my idea had any lift. It was exciting to experience a positive response.

In general, I find reading my work out loud to an audience is immensely helpful. When I read I am able to hear and feel and see what needs to change. Poetry is such a fluid art, and I think reading aloud allows me to experience more fully all the passages in the piece that I didn’t take. It helps me make better choices.

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

A: I’m so grateful for the phrasing of your question, rob! Whenever someone asks “who is your favorite poet” I break out in mental hives—I visualize a top hat full of hundreds of little white paper strips and my hand plunging in, snuffling around, trying to pull out THE one name! So, my consistent go to’s  are C.D. Wright, Lucille Clifton, and forever Emily Dickinson. I recently took classes by Layli Long Soldier and heard readings by Hanif Abdurraquib; both very musical writers. I’ve recently rediscovered Marilyn Nelson and Natalie Diaz, and I’m currently reading Kevin Young’s anthology, African American Poetry, and Natalie Trethaway’s work. Because I just finished a class on her life and work, I’m still caught up in Lorine Niedecker's writing— she is simply masterful. My pandemic favorite for a lift was Khadijah Queen’s I’m So Fine; but my favorite immersive experience was Thomas A. Clark’s Farm By The Shore. There are many more, of course. So many poets, so little time….

TtD supplement #195 : seven questions for IAN MARTIN

IAN MARTIN is a “lumberjack-looking motherf***er” who writes poems and lives in Ottawa. IAN’s writing has appeared recently in n-o-b-o-d-y, Neutral Spaces, The Puritan, ottawater, Cypress, The Wild Literary Magazine, and SURFACES.cx. IAN has published five chapbooks, most recently I DON'T TRUST SKINNY PEOPLE (Ghost City Press, 2018). When not writing, IAN makes small video games and complains online. [ www.ian-martin.net ]

IAN’s poems “MOTIVATION” and “roguelike” appear in the thirtieth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “MOTIVATION” and “roguelike”.

A: “MOTIVATION” is a game poem about resentment and comparison. When I’m at my lowest, I get jealous. I see my friends succeed and feel like there’s no success left for me. I forget what I actually want in my life and start thinking about how I could get what they have. When the other person is doing the same thing, you get an unhealthy dynamic where you’re both motivating each other through spite to live up to a standard that neither of you really wants. I wrote this pre-pandemic but I think that now more than ever, we’re increasingly reliant on social media and increasingly disenfranchised by capitalism, and both of these things cause us to dehumanize each other and see humans as competitors. The actual enemy is the system and the standard that’s been set, but it’s easier to beat down and destroy something tangible, something flesh and blood.

“roguelike” is a poem about the video game genre of the same name. A roguelike usually involves conquering a large environment by defeating enemies and collecting more powerful equipment, all while making sure you eat, drink, and rest enough to stay alive. If your character dies, then they die forever – you have to make a new character and start from the beginning with nothing. Earlier roguelikes (and the original game, Rogue) are lonely, esoteric, and challenging. The graphics are just a series of text symbols on a black background, leaving much to the imagination:
 

(Above: A screenshot of NetHack, a roguelike game.)

You often find items with mysterious names and no clear purpose. You have to use them to see what they do, and sometimes they hurt or disadvantage you. The environments are large and wonderful to explore, but they’re incredibly dangerous, and you don’t stay alive for long. But as you continue to die and return to life, you learn, you get better, and you stay alive for longer.

These early roguelikes have a lot of mystery and magic to them, and their technological restraints and limits infuse them a lot of poetic value. My poem is just a very short ode to the genre, but there’s a lot more in these games that I’d like to explore through poetry, especially with their text art and symbology.

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

A: Like most of my writing these days, these poems are about lonely people in hostile environments, either of their own making, or of someone else’s. They’re little dioramas to find yourself in, to figure out who you are and what’s around you. It’s not always easy to find yourself in art. Sometimes you have to make something vague and strange and just drop yourself into it and see how it feels and what it does to you. Maybe it’s somewhere you needed to be but didn’t know existed.

I’ve always sort of unwillingly liked difficult, hostile games. I always complain about how frustrating they are, and how I never want to play them because I get so angry, but there’s something very satisfying about conquering something that hates you and wants to see you fail. Of course, these games don’t actually hate you: they’re cruel on the surface, but their purpose is to give you a challenge that you can learn to overcome. But that’s the nice thing about hard games – as bad as they get, they’re still controlled environments with clear rules and boundaries.

Poems, like games, can create these rich worlds that you live in for a moment, where you’re all alone, and you have to figure out where you are and learn how to survive. Little microcosms where you earn something that you can take with you when you leave.

Q: I’m curious about creative types who work in more than one type of genre, but haven’t spoken to anyone prior to you who works so actively within poetry and gaming. The ways in which you describe your attraction to gaming and the types of writing you’re attempting make me wonder how the two sides of your creative self interact, if at all. Does your work with gaming influence the ways in which you approach writing, and vice versa? Or are you simply attracted to these two different structures due to the commonalities you see there?

A: I definitely think I’m attracted to the two forms for similar reasons; they’re both about play, they’re about working within limitations, about creating worlds and spaces to explore. Until recently, I worked with the two forms pretty separately. In the past few years I’ve made a more conscious effort to combine the two, but I still tend to fall back into using one or the other. I’m still used to thinking of them as separate worlds, and there aren’t a ton of spaces where those things come together. (Though I’m finding opportunities – I just published a game with canthius, which mainly publishes written prose and poetry. Wild!!!)

But I think that working in any one artform inevitably affects how you do the other, whether it’s conscious or not. Since I’m actively making games and writing poems, all those ideas are always jumbled in my head and I’m always thinking about which ideas would fit best in what format. I have a pretty clear idea of what I want to communicate and evoke through my art, and poems and games to me are just different tools for realizing that vision. Sometimes one is more appropriate than another, sometimes I can combine them and do something really great.

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

A: “MOTIVATION” is pretty directly inspired by gamepoems, by writers like Holly Gramazio and v buckenham, as well as Yoko Ono’s collection, Grapefruit. I started thinking about this format after reading Harry Josephine Giles’s primer on gamepoems a few years back, which got me interested in trying to more consciously merge games and poems in my art. “roguelike” is mostly inspired by the writing style of old roguelike games, but also by some local Ottawa poets who have written about the video games they’ve played, like Leah Maclean-Evans’s poems about Stardew Valley, and Marie-Andrée Auclair’s poem about a Skyrim mod.

I’ve also been really into poems/poetic games made with the Bitsy Game Maker, like these by Sean S. LeBlanc, nat underscore content, mark wonnacott, and Sarah Gould. What I love about poems made in Bitsy is that they have physical space that you can move through. The text is hidden around and can be read in different orders. Bitsy is a very restrictive engine: the game space is small, you can only use three colours, and the player can only walk around and read text. Again, I think there’s a lot of poetic potential in these limitations – there’s only so much you can actually show, so there’s always a lot of power in the gap between what’s visible and what’s implied.

Q: I’m curious as to how you build your poems as being “inspired” by different games. Are you using the game as a prompt, or attempting to articulate something about the game itself in the poem? Are the ideas around any particular game utilized solely as a jumping-off point, or are you attempting to replicate structure within these pieces?

A: It depends on the piece. With “roguelike”, I’m trying to articulate something about this type of game, about how the game is designed and how it makes you feel while playing. I’m also trying to capture the aesthetics of the genre in the poem: the worlds of roguelikes are huge and empty, and the descriptions of the environment and the items you find are sparse. Poems are also often about space and economy, so I’m trying to make a connection there. And as a game designer, I’m just really interested in the evocative potential of game systems and rules, so writing poems about those systems is another way to look at them and think about the intentions behind them.

I’ve also written pieces where I use the game more as a jumping-off point to talk about something else. For example, I have a poem about Pacman that uses the game as a touchpoint to then think about human bodies, what we do with them and what they were “made for”. As a game character, Pacman is made to eat pellets. But does he actually want to do that? Or does he just not see any other options?

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

A: Looking back at my first chapbook, I think some of the work could use some tightening, but it all feels recognizable next to the work I’m doing now. I’ve always been writing about loneliness, alienation, and escaping to better worlds. I think over time, my work has gotten more specific and more personal. Not that there wasn’t a lot of me in my early work, but my current work is very tied to my own specific preoccupations and identity – I’m writing a lot of video game poems lately, my last chapbook was about navigating the world as a fat person, and I’m publishing more poems about my gender identity and how I fit into prevailing narratives of gender. My earlier work spoke more generally about feelings of alienation, and now it’s more about the specific mechanics of alienation, and about figuring out and filling the gaps and problems in current discussions of identity and belonging. I think I’m going to stay on that path for a while.

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

A: My most read book of poetry is still probably the collected works of Alfred Starr Hamilton. I’m always trying to get there, wherever those poems live.

TtD supplement #194 : seven questions for Amanda Auerbach

Amanda Auerbach is a poet and literary critic. Her book What Need Have We For Such as We was published by C&R Press in 2019, and her poems have also appeared in the Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Fence, and Conjunctions.

Her poems “Riverdale City, IA,” “Fantasy Fantasies,” “Fitted Sweater” and “In-Voice” appear in the thirtieth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “Riverdale City, IA,” “Fantasy Fantasies,” “Fitted Sweater” and “In-Voice.”

A: The first one I wrote in this couplet style was “Fantasy Fantasies,” in the summer of 2018. It was written in the glow of starting to psychoanalyze myself in certain prose poems I had started to write (not published here). All of these couplet poems gave me the feeling of spinning out a single, super slight or even trivial impression as far as it would go, with the couplet feeling relatively effortless and punchy. I enjoyed exploring how impressions beget different kinds of speakers. A speaker, for instance, defined by the after-impression of wearing her hair in a clip to work out or a speaker tethered to the after-impression of saying, in teaching Frankenstein, “The creature is created.” I enjoyed playing with the stereotypical idea of a woman as someone who cares a whole lot about trivial things – what would that look like if it were true?

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

A: I’ve mostly been writing flash fiction lately. Poems often depend on emotional urgency, and I appreciate fiction as a break from that. The artificial-feeling formal constraints like the couplets can also help me escape from the personal or cultural emotion-driven poem. I just kind of keep an eye out for the kinds of experiences or emotions that would best translate into the kind of form I’ve decided to work with.

Q: What is it about poetry that demands, as you suggest, an emotional urgency over your explorations into flash fiction? What is it about the poem that provides that push, that draw?

A: There is that Wordsworthian way of looking at things, of the lyric as an instance of being gripped by overpowering emotion. But it’s also the fact that the lyric asks for a certain kind of attention to each word that fiction doesn’t ask for and kind of breaks the silence, disturbs the universe. Fiction doesn’t have quite the same pressure. There is this default of people who want to curl up with a book or want to be entertained, participate in a fictional consciousness. I’m a poet who likes reading poetry books, but even then it feels like a commitment. I’ll keep reading books of poetry and enjoy them once I do, but I’m lazy so I’d rather lay around and read a novel. Also there’s the fact that I write in third-person for fiction, so the consciousness I narrate isn’t making any kind of claim for attention.

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

A: I don’t really have models in mind, though when it comes to fiction-writing it feels like all kinds of things become relevant. I have been teaching a course on the Bronte sisters, so perhaps them especially.

Q: Do you approach the individual poem any differently since the publication of your first full-length collection?

A: That’s a good question – I definitely do! I think on the level of the larger project and kinds of experiences are relevant to that. The first book for me was partly about becoming a poet, but then future books (I have two more manuscripts of poems, one for each year at Iowa) have different subjects and forms that go with them. These poems published in Touch the Donkey come from a larger project oriented around self-analysis, going to therapy in an extended way for the first time, living alone for the first time.

Q: Given all of that, how do you feel your work has progressed since you began publishing? Where do you see your work headed?

A: I see myself mostly writing fiction for a little while and editing what I’ve written and trying to get it published. I wrote a poem the other day, which was the first poem I’ve written in almost a year, and then I wrote another one that was actually good/ actually a real poem. So maybe what I’m wanting to do is find a slower pace for writing poetry. I think that will make writing a poem feel more special. Perhaps trying to write a poem once a week is a good plan, just to stay in the practice.

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

A: There is nothing regular, though I have to say that Dorothea Lasky always makes me want to write by tricking me into thinking that it will be easy. The last thing I read, which energized me to write, is the first few pages of DuMaurier’s Rebecca, that disembodied voice that is more potent than a person.

 

TtD supplement #193 : seven questions for Jack Jung

Jack Jung is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. He was born in Seoul, South Korea, and immigrated to the United States. He received his BA in English from Harvard, and an MA in Korean Language and Literature from Seoul National University. His translations of Korean poet Yi Sang’s poetry and prose are published in Yi Sang: Selected Works by Wave Books.

His poems “Flower” and “Informant” appear in the thirtieth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “Flower” and “Informant.”

A: When I was working on “Flower” I was trying to fight my tendency to simply write out whatever imagery that came to my mind – I only wanted to hold on to one single aspect of it, its color like the flower's color, and stay true to it against the constant stream of imagery that wanted to make it anything more than a yellow flower. I was also thinking of William Carlos Williams’ poem “To a Solitary Disciple” and how that poem refuses to go along with beautification of an object with flowery language and, well, try to present clarity of the thing itself. As for “Informant”, the poem came out of my uneasiness about being a translator – and I think I was trying to express my uncertainty about the morality of translating literature from people who were oppressed into a language of immense political, economical, and cultural power. I wondered, as a translator, am I part of the equation that continues to help sustain a certain hierarchy in the world? “Informant” wasn’t trying to answer that question, but perhaps a way of expressing that question.

Q: Do you often attempt to engage with questions or concerns with your poems?

A: I think what usually happens for me is that I would start with an image or a music of certain phrase (or both), and start writing until I realize there is some question or concern that emerges out of it. That is certainly what happened with both “Flower” and “Informant” – I wasn’t thinking that I will write about a flower being nothing else but being yellow, but the lines “You are yellow/ Yellow is not a flower” did start that poem because I simply liked putting those two statements together, and when I continued, I began to see the question or concern I was chasing. Same with “Informant” – I like wearing heavy boots everywhere, and sometimes you get this wonderful sense of lightness when you take them off – how the whole question of translation spurned out of that – I am not sure, but perhaps the lightness I felt was something I desire as a writer – to be free of it, all the while knowing that isn’t possible.

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

A: Interestingly enough, “Flower” and “Informant” seem now like bookends of a phase I was going through with my writing. I wrote “Flower” around 2018, and “Informant” was in 2020. In between, I started a series of poems in which I pushed myself to radically change my style. I am still working on those, but “Flower” and “Informant” seem to come from a different place than these other poems I am working on. The difference is that these two poems are much calmer and tend to be reflective about the subject. I think in the ones that I am working on now I try harder to be ‘in-the-moment’ with them, and they are very extravagant in how they use the language – decadent even. In these two poems and my older poems, I guess I am being almost ascetic in how I write, while more recent work I wanted to be as over-the-top as I can possibly be.

Q: How do you mean by “over-the-top”?

A: Well, let’s see...I guess I was so used to reading and writing poems that valued plain-spokenness for a long time. It struck me one day that I was writing as if I was allergic to the musicality of language. Rhyming, alliteration, assonance, and even chant like repetitions – all those devices that are very up front about the incredible range of sound that exist in the language – you hardly ever see them. I wanted to be exuberant in my use of them and see where that leads me. Perhaps I am practicing some type of necromancy.

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

A: Despite never really thinking about this consciously, I think Yi Sang has been and will be a huge part of my influence. I hesitated to admit this part about my writing before because, well, for a Korean poet to say that Yi Sang is their influence would be like saying I am influenced by part of my landscape or by one of the constellations. It is already there and not exactly something you have discovered for yourself. However, as his translator and as a Korean American writer, I think I am beginning to see that his influence is manifesting in a different way through me. How they manifest, I think, is what my poetry will show.  

Q: What is it, specifically, that attracts you? And which came first: your work translating his writing, or his influence upon the ways in which you approach your own work?

A: I started translating Yi Sang in college, when I was taking a poetry workshop led by Jorie Graham. She had recommended to us that if we know another language, one of the best ways to learn composition was to translate poetry. I asked my mother about Korean poetry, about which I knew basically nothing at the time. (I came to America when I was 12 years old, right out of elementary school). Of all the poets she showed me, Yi Sang was the one who caught my imagination – simply because I had never seen anything like his poetry – I didn’t even know what he did could be called poetry then. I think I started to translate him almost immediately. At the same time, I was learning about many of the American poets for the first time, too: William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Sylvia Plath, Robert Hayden, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Wright, John Ashbery and others. I think out of all of them Hart Crane and Yi Sang share a certain vision – though what that vision is I will have to think more deeply about – but right now I could say that it has something to do with a poet of cosmic sensibility (or spirituality) living in modernity’s alienation. I think they both deal with this by pushing the rules of their language to their limit until something pulls through from that cosmic side of things, and I think that’s what I would like to approach as well.

Q: And finally, I know you’ve answered a bit of this, but who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

A: Other than Yi Sang and Hart Crane, and some of the other poets I have listed, Don Mee Choi’s translations and original poetry have constantly inspired me since I first started reading them. The work she started in Hardly War and continues in DMZ Colony that showcases this virtuosic presentation of docu-poetry is astounding. My friend Emily Jungmin Yoon’s A Cruelty Special to Our Species shares this sense of docu-poetry and contending with the legacies of one's identity as a member of Korean Diaspora. Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution was another book of poetry that opened my eyes on how brilliant use of language and investigation of one’s past and future can expand poetry’s horizons. I recently had a pleasure to listen to Monica Youn read her poem “Detail of the Rice Chest” that was recently published on Harper’s, and I have been obsessed with it ever since.

Touch the Donkey : thirtieth issue,

The THIRTIETH issue is now available, with new poems by Dana Teen Lomax, Amanda Auerbach, Jay Millar, Cat Tyc, IAN MARTIN, Paige Carabello, Emma Tilley and Jack Jung.

Eight dollars (includes shipping). My good looks paid for that pool, and my talent filled it with water!