TtD supplement #289 : seven questions for Susan Gevirtz

Susan Gevirtz’s most recent books include Burns (Pamenar), Hotel abc (Nightboat) and Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger (Kelsey Street). Her critical books are Coming Events (Collected Writings) (Nightboat), and Narrative’s Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson (Peter Lang). “Sun Worship,” an excerpt from the manuscript Guide School, is a recent chapbook from YoYo Labs. “Doctor Shaman,” another excerpt from Guide School is a chapbook from above/ground [ress, and “The Guides,” another excerpt, is a chapbook from Antiphony Press. She was associate editor of HOW(ever), a journal of modernist/innovative directions in women’s poetry and scholarship. In 2004, with poet and restorer of maritime antiquities, Siarita Kouka, she founded the Paros Symposium, an annual meeting of Greek and Anglophone poets. Gevirtz was Assistant Professor at Sonoma State University, California, for ten years, and subsequently taught in many MFA in poetry programs, and the Visual and Critical Studies and MFA programs at California College of the Arts. With Prison Renaissance and Operation Restoration she has worked as a writing mentor to incarcerated people. Gevirtz has collaborated with sound, visual and performance artists.  She is based in San Francisco.

Her poem “Celebrity Brush” appears in the forty-seventh issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poem “Celebrity Brush.”

A: S: It’s interesting that you call “Celebrity Brush" a poem. I think of it as prose but maybe there’s a bleed between when poetry is the usual register…

“Celebrity Brush” arrived during lockdown —so in a long span of solitary time when many of us revisited the past with a vividness not usually available in the rush of regular life.

Before I went to sleep one night I saw that Brandon Brown had sent an email calling for work for the revival of his online magazine Celebrity Brush — whose purpose was for poets to write about their most exciting encounters with celebrities. I woke up thinking about growing up in L.A. around many famous people and the way my child and teen hood were more profoundly shaped by the many movies I saw in L.A. theaters-- the films were the celebrities. I started writing about the banality of my brushes with celebrities and the chasm between the awe I knew I was expected to feel and the flat line, or even suspicion, I felt when meeting another famous actor, actress, producer, director, musician…

“Celebrity Brush” set a surprise momentum in motion for writing about L.A. child and teen hood encounters with significant movies and foods of the sixties. I realized that the star encounters for me were with the movies themselves, the whole experience of watching movies in a theatre, and the conversations that happened after —and the echoes and insights the movies cast on family and social life. Food being also a big star in those. So now “Celebrity Brush” is the first piece in a manuscript called Movies & Food.

Q: Fair enough! Although sometimes the lines do get blurred, after all. How does this piece compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: Yes, I hope for that blur.
I’ve recently finished Guide School, an investigation into the schools that train guides and the global guide-licensing tourist industry. And an investigation too of the training of readers since the way one is taught to perambulate through a city or through a book shapes perceptions of the foreign and familiar, of theirs/ours. The guides who led me through the “old countries” of my grand and great-grandparents in Vilnius, Lithuania; Kishinev, Moldova; and Odessa, Ukraine; were trained and licensed by government schools that chose to delete Jewish presence from their official tour narratives. 

Guide School records events of feeling, thought and study, inheritances of the destroyed Pale, as not ever what could be called “homeland.” In place of nostos, so without the desire or ability to return, it adheres to the shtetl requirement to record and to practice the Jewish prescriptions that to read and write are sacred acts. It also wonders (wanders in) how to navigate the present territory of accelerated and weaponized fundamentalism in politics and religion, antisemitism among its touch points, at a time when “others” who are not tourists but migrants and refugees are forced into perilous travel and are often depicted as “dangerous.” For many in diaspora return is not possible. And it is perhaps differently impossible for those who were never recognized as citizens of the state in their “old countries.” Guide School documents visits to the places my ancestors are not from but where they stayed, temporarily, for centuries. In this way Guide School is an itinerary of the irreconcilable, an unwriting.

If there is any nostos in Guide School it is for a repeat return to reading, discussing, writing, a Jerusalem that can be remade daily, hourly, in place of the actual geographic place. Guide School is devoid of fantasies of return.

It’s long. Some sections are poetry, some prose and others are both —the bleed. Above I say that it’s finished but it also seems to refuse to finish — a last section, maybe a separate manuscript or Coda, keeps proposing itself.

Q: Given the fact that most writers delineate between genres, I’m curious at the way you blend poetry and prose. Was this an idea that came naturally, or did you have to find permission from another writer working similar forms?

A: Ha! It comes “naturally” —which is to say I am constitutionally unable to write any other way. I’ve tried. I have always been untrainable in the realm of writing in discreet genres. I was exposed to permission for this, or an awareness of it as a viable form of thinking/making early on. But also heavily chastised for any practice of it in grad school. 

Examples of early exposure include My Emily Dickinson, by Susan Howe, For the Etruscans, by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Les Guerrilleres, by Monique Witting, Beverly Dahlen, Norma Cole and Barbara Guest’s work, Samuel Delaney’s essay, “On the Unspeakable,” among others. In my twenties I knew I could think critically but not in the given recognizable forms for critical writing or often public speech. So encounters with these works was revelatory—their formal composition and highly rigorous -but not academic- thinking in poetic and scholarly registers confirmed that I had to follow my idiosyncrasies. I’ve always told students that idiosyncrasies are entrances to work —not to be avoided but the opposite. The question: What does thinking look like on the page? —has preoccupied me forever. I’ve written about this in my “essay” collection Coming Events. 

Q: With numerous published books over the years, how do you feel your thinking, and your work, has progressed? What do you feel your writing working towards?

A: Progress is not on my mind. I think – what needs to happen now? Where is my attention? What is the nature of the noise where the over and under heard converge? --the bleed between. Sounds, taxonomies, dictions--from news, conversation, music, construction, wind etc etc — obsessions come forward from these and propose their forms. Usually one or a few preoccupations overtake and I follow them until they run out. That could be for an hour or years. I read around and abandon all of that reading and thinking and follow what is set in motion. By which I mean dreams from sleep and awake, mis and rehearings, the unhearable. I wonder--work towards an always more vivid occupation of and registering of this on the page. 

Q: How do your poems find their shape? Have you a sense of where the line might lead when you begin, or are your pieces more exploratory, seeing ways through which to find themselves? To begin, do you require a destination, or simply a way to begin?

A: Sometimes shape appears simultaneously as sound, or sound and rhythm take kinesthetic shapes — that is, a form rises from the feeling and sound of words embodied, spoken out loud or sounded silently. 

The most vivid example of this occurred when I was in labor. My even breathing interrupted by contractions revealed that I was in the realm of couplets. I was surprised. But I was being coupled, or had been in the process of coupling throughout pregnancy, so it is not surprising that this was the form labor presented, required. Later, while cradling that baby and nursing her late at night, lines came to join the form:

arm leg kindling gather where water blankets sound 
take her down again again quiet crown

These lines turned into a poem of uneven uncounted (but close syllabically) couplets called “Resuscitations,” the first poem in Hourglass Transcripts* a book focused on the nature of the unnamed time occupied by the primary caretaker and the infant. 

While the form often arises, introduces itself, with word(s) sound, embodied sensation, lines are also a compositional consideration on the page having to do with reading. For example, how does a line length or break direct the reader’s attention? --including myself as a reader. I aim to coerce or invoke as many possible kinds of sense a line might yield — so word order, sound, cadence, are some of the elements that suggest backwards, up the page and down readings… 

A way to begin is an ambush —so I never know the destination— but I can feel the vehicle moving even if I’m blindfolded.

Q: I’m curious as to how your critical writing might influence your poems, and vice versa. Do you see your critical and creative work as separate, or simply individual threads of your larger, more ongoing work? Or is it all part of the same expansive ongoing project?

A: I hope that my poems are critical writing, among other things. 

What does thinking look like on the page?—Again this persisting question. How does criticality appear in writing that is not formally or rhetorically framed as “critical” or “theoretical?” There is writing that’s devoid of critical thought in all genres. What do I mean by “criticality," “thought?” I mean acute attention to “What’s going on?” (as Marvin Gaye puts it). Kathleen Stewart calls this, “atmospheric attunements” —"a capacity to affect and be affected that pushes a present into a composition,….the sense of potentiality and event.” A composition, as an event of attention —a potential realized as a poem or in another form. I address this event of encounter between readers and writers, a capacity for encounter with each other and environments in “Outer Event.” (the last piece in my book Coming Events). Instead of the critical/creative divide I ask what is the event(s) of this work I encounter as maker or reader (co-maker)? An awareness of the “capacity to affect and be affected” is reflexive thought, or criticality.

I’ve done tai chi for forty years. Doing the form has always felt like playing the air, my body an instrument. The shapes the body takes in tai chi are the shapes of the hexagrams of the I Ching. So doing tai chi is a writing in air: a sequence of movements different each time repeated. Like spelling a word with an alphabet, sequential and simultaneous. 

In your question you name “the critical, creative,  individual threads, the ongoing.” My affinity is with “the ongoing” which I take to be the unresolved and returning, an ongoing learning in the sense that Stewart uses “learning” here: “The body has to learn to play itself as a musical instrument in this world’s compositions.” It’s never done, the learning and composing and it’s always changing--What does thinking look like on the page? becomes: How does this instrument —writer, piece of writing, body--play itself? What is the pitch of its “atmospheric attunements?” The ethical and aesthetic converge here I think and keep reappearing in different guises …  —There’s a lot more to say, but I’ll stop here.

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

A: A partial and inadequate list, but:

Any of Barbara Guest’s work, especially Forces of Imagination, If So, Tell Me and Seeking Air.  

The Odyssey, Fitzgerald translation, among others

In the Blink of an Eye, A Perspective on Film Editing, Walter Murch

the Presocratics

Clarice Lispector (any/everything)

Helene Cixous, First Days of the Year (and many others)

Brathwaite, Islands, History of the Voice

The Popul Vuh, Tedlock translation

Jabes, R Duncan, Ed Roberson, Tyrone Williams, Mandelstam, Stacy Doris, Phoebe Gianissi, and the poetry of many close (especially bay area) friends I can’t begin to name

The Essence of T'ai Chi Ch'uan – The Literary Tradition. Translated and edited by Benjamin Pang Jeng Lo, Martin Inn, Robert Amacker, Susan Foe. The Essence of T'ai Chi Ch'uan is a translation of the T'ai Chi Classics, the principles on which T'ai Chi Ch'uan is based. 

Ibn ‘Arabi Alone with the Alone, H Corbin translation

Jon Berger, Another Way of Telling, A Fortunate Man (with photographer Jean Mohr)

Abd al-Rahman Munif, Cities of Salt (Trilogy) 

Much art, many films

--Thank you rob for asking all of these questions! And for your labors in getting the work of so many poets into circulation.

* Samuel Delaney, Shorter Views, Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary, Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1999

*The poem “Resuscitations.” is also anthologized in The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood

Thanks to friend and poet Julia Drescher for recently passing this piece to me: “Atmospheric attunements,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2011, volume 29, pages 445-453.

TtD supplement #288 : seven questions for Sarah Rosenthal

Sarah Rosenthal is the author of Estelle Meaning Star (Chax, 2024), Lizard (Chax, 2016), Manhatten (Spuyten Duyvil, 2009), and several chapbooks. In collaboration with Valerie Witte, she has published the essay collection One Thing Follows Another: Experiments in Dance, Art, and Life through the Lens of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer, and the hybrid work The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow (Operating System, 2019). She edited A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Poets of the Bay Area (Dalkey Archive, 2010). Her collaborative film We Agree on the Sun won Best Experimental Short at the 2021 Berlin Independent Film Festival. Her new collaborative film, Lizard Song, is currently on the film festival circuit. She is the recipient of the Leo Litwak Fiction Award, a Creative Capacity Innovation Grant, a San Francisco Education Fund Grant, and writing residencies at Cel del Nord, This Will Take Time, Hambidge, Vermont Studio Center, Soul Mountain, New York Mills, and Ragdale, as well as a two-year Affiliate Artist term at Headlands Center for the Arts. From 2012 to 2023 she served on the California Book Awards jury.

Her “Excerpt from Untitled poem about a red box” appears in the forty-seventh issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “Excerpt from Untitled poem about a red box.”
    
A: Untitled poem about a red box is a book-length poem about a handcrafted red box the size of a jewelry or takeout box on view in a small, dark, gallery-like space. On the surface of the box are embroidered objects that resemble butterflies or flowers; a poem threads its way in between these decorations. The viewers (a “we” comprising the narrator and readers) are given to understand that the poem, mysteriously, both is on and is the box, and that the poem is about death. Hanging above the red box there appear to be a series of similar boxes in other colors.
 
After the opening pages, which map out those parameters, the manuscript consists of a series of poems that appear on the lid, in each case followed by an exploration of the poem’s manifestation and meaning. Each poem, we are given to understand, may be the poem––or not. The excerpt you printed in touch the donkey No.47 comprises one such poem and the musing that it generates.

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

A: My most recent book, co-written with Valerie Witte (One Thing Follows Another: Experiments in Dance, Art, and Life through the Lens of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer, punctum 2025) is a collection of essays blending scholarship on the work of these two remarkable choreographers with memoir and poetry. So form- and content-wise, Untitled poem is a distinct shift.

That said, Untitled poem shares some features with One Thing Follows Another. Both take unconventional approaches to ekphrasis. In Untitled poem, the artwork described is imaginary. In the essay book, we moved beyond mere description of the work we addressed, using various postmodern choreographic techniques, and even dancing, as part of the process of generating the topics and formal contours of the essays. Another connection between the two texts is the mix of genres: the essays in One Thing Follows Another are infused with poetic elements, and Untitled poem has an essayistic quality in that it employs an inquisitive, logical tone as it seeks to understand a single encounter with an artwork.

Both of these projects, in turn, inform the work I’ve begun since finishing Untitled poem. Provisionally titled Glitter Stick, my current manuscript explores our relationship to objects––both material “goods” and our objectification of others. It includes research and reflection on the lives and works of 20th- and 21st-century visual and performance artists, which I blend with personal reflections, so there’s that “ekphrasis plus” element again. It’s one long essay punctuated by poems, so durationally and formally it incorporates elements of both earlier works.

Q: You seem to be very much a writer of projects. How did this process come about, and how do projects begin? When you begin something new, are you always feeling your way into a book-length manuscript?

A: As a grad student, I was introduced to the book-length or beyond-book-length project, exemplified in work by poets such as H.D., Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, Kamau Brathwaite, Anne Waldman, Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha, Leslie Scalapino, Lyn Hejinian, Nathaniel Mackey, Alice Notley, and Myung Mi Kim. At some point, Sarah Mangold turned me on to Lynn Keller’s Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by Women. I was both intimidated and excited by the prospect of sustaining a work over the course of an entire book. Over time, I found that the long form suited me.

To write a long poem I need to spend time building a vessel––subject matter and formal constraints––that I’ll be able to sail in for the length of a book. In the past, this has often taken considerable time and several discarded attempts. But I’m willing to enter the void, however uncomfortable, in order to arrive at the next project––it seems to mirror the process of big-C Creation. That said, there’s been a shift of late. Very soon after Val and I finished One Thing Follows Another, I knew the rough contours of the next two books.

But emphasis on “rough.” There’s still a lot I don’t know before I get going on a project. There’s an intuitive (impetuous?) quality to some of my choices. For example, I chose to engage the work of Yvonne Rainer without knowing much about her. I’m interested in this process of making a commitment to something that floats by. (I met my life partner on a street corner.)

As a project begins to take shape, a serendipity kicks into gear––the manuscript seems to magnetize just the right texts, art, conversations, and observations. And I adore the deep dive into research on the topic(s) I’m addressing. 

So I’ve preferred writing book-length works to single poems, which feel more like speed-dating. That said, lately I’ve written single poems here and there, and have found that enjoyable. So I’m not saying no to any approach.

Q: With a handful of books and chapbooks over the past twenty years, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: I’ve always leaned on processes and procedures that sidestep conscious choices in my writing, because I felt my unconscious had access to so much more depth and breadth than my conscious mind. Over time, the wall between my conscious and unconscious seems to be crumbling––or at least, I’m getting more help from the former without losing the latter. For example, I can juggle multiple themes and stylistic elements over the arc of a book while still allowing for lots of surprises along the way. (Without surprises, why write?)

I’ll likely continue moving back and forth on a continuum between prose and poetry––sometimes alternating between books, sometimes within a book. I’ll keep trying to figure out how to make use of whatever movements of mind, obsessions, and experiences are relevant for a given project. Alongside my solo practice, I look forward to more collaborative writing and filmmaking. My fondest ambition lately is to become what I’m calling an apprentice visionary. Given my long habit of borrowing from the dream world and my interest in subverting intentionality I guess I already am that,  but I want to embrace it, amplify it. Weirdly, a number of the long-form poets I listed earlier are also on my list of visionary poets. And of course beyond the poets, divination is practiced in so many forms both “high” and “low”––I look forward to that exploration. This goal of being a visionary-in-training  increases my willingness to keep dosing myself with heavy data regarding our current world, while also helping me commit to radical self-care––both are needed for an entry-level position as a seer.

Q: I’m curious about your phrases “borrowing from the dream world” and “subverting intentionality.” How do these ideas show themselves in your work? Are they a foundational approach? Are they imagistic? Do they manifest as a series of interruptions as you write, creating shifts in the direction of the work?

A: They are foundational; they can be imagistic; they can manifest as interruptions that shift direction.

I think artists in any medium have the opportunity and responsibility to help rouse us all from the trance of narrow self-interest cultivated by commercial and state interests, in order to save what’s best about being human––our capacity to connect with something larger, whether we call that creativity, the human community, earth, cosmos, spirit, or something else. This has been a challenge since long before the invention of the smart phone, the current environmental crisis, and the recent rise in fascism around the globe. But it does seem to me the stakes are growing, if only given the ever increasing role of tech with its poorly understood side effects and capacity to be manipulated for harmful ends.

In dreams and waking visions, and via other tools and techniques that shake up what we think we know (in poetry, think for example of collage, erasure, associational thinking, the music of language), we can gain greater access to a deep and untameable wisdom. That doesn’t mean I would just splat a dream (for example) down on the page and call that a poem. Why would I turn my back on culture, on craft––that glorious dimension of being human? Rather, I’m interested in the dance between conscious craft and the effort to go beyond what I know, in the service of Dickinson’s exhortation to “Tell all the truth but tell it slant —”. There are probably innumerable ways this can manifest in a piece of writing (or in a film––I’ve collaborated on two so far––or any work of art), including the ones you mention, imagery or a surprising shift in direction within a piece.

Q: Has your collaboration with film changed the way you think about the poem, or about writing more generally? What was the process like?

A: I like to think that collaboration, both with people across disciplines (as in the case of the films) and with other writers, has over time infused my solo writing practice with a more collaborative spirit––more of a sense of being in conversation with the empty page, with language, with my source material: “What’s your perspective?” “How do you want to contribute?” “Hey, let’s try this and see what happens.” Beyond that, I don’t see my film collaborations changing the way I think about the poem or about writing. To date, those projects have been initiated by texts I had already written and we went from there. 

The first film, We Agree on the Sun, has its origins in an essay I wrote for Val’s and my collection One Thing Follows Another called “How Will You Move: Including All of Us in the Dance.” The essay takes the form of an abecedarian––it includes a section for every letter of the alphabet. One of the constraints I used to generate the text was that every letter-section includes instructions (some obvious, some not) for how to enact that letter in dance. Including these instructions was a way for me to inhabit the world of Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti––both by inventing a generative constraint similar to ones they used, and by taking on the role of choreographer. As soon as I came up with this idea, I started dreaming of going full circle and creating a dance piece based on the text. Eventually I decided on a film, which over time can reach more people than a live performance.

The process of making We Agree on the Sun was relatively straightforward. I selected and strung together bits of language from throughout the essay that all connect to one of the essay’s themes, homelessness. I met Jonah Belsky and Ames Tierney (the filming and editing team), and Ayana Yonesaka (the dancer-choreographer), through mutual acquaintances. We had to work fast because Jonah and Ames were about to leave for points east. The four of us started by teasing out layers of meaning in the text. It was important to me that we enact the nonlinear, multivalent nature of the text to the extent possible, and that we balance agreement on certain aspects of meaning with our own responses. The conversation continued through all phases––the choreography, filming, and editing. We shot the whole thing in four hours, and I premiered the film at the &Now literary festival in Bothell, Washington a couple months later.

Lizard Song was initiated when my brother Dave started sending me songs featuring vocals and multiple instruments, which he’d recorded on music creation software, based on the initial poems in my collection Lizard. We decided to make a dance-poetry-music film using the songs. It was a much larger and more complex production than for We Agree on the Sun. Dave flew out from Boston and recorded the five songs at Tiny Telephone, an Oakland recording studio, with Bay Area-based musicians and vocalists I’d found. Choreography director ArVejon Jones created pieces for themself and three other dancers. We shot in multiple locations over a few days with a larger crew. Fairly late in the game, we concluded that using all five songs strung together would result in an overly long piece, and that the film’s tonality was diverging from that of the songs––it was becoming more indeterminate, less contained. Fortunately, composer Penina Biddle-Gottesman stepped in and worked closely with Jonah to create a soundtrack. Because of this late pivot, it took several months to shape the raw footage into a film that cohered while leaving room for viewers to find their own meanings in it. Despite the complexities of the project, I’m very happy that the final piece still reflects the creative input of all who worked on it. Everyone involved located and channeled their inner Lizard!

Once the film was done, Dave and I produced a CD of his music, Lizard Song Cycle, which is also up at soundcloud.com/david-rosenthal-2/sets/lizard-music.

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

A: Since the early aughts, I’ve started more writing sessions than not by responding creatively and critically in my journal to a poem by Celan. When I’ve gone through all the work of his that I have, I dig around at the library for volumes I haven’t read, or start cycling through it all again. Other than Celan, often the closest I come to revisiting the work of poets and writers I treasure is to read new, or new-to-me, books by them. Recently, that’s included volumes by Nathaniel Mackey, Michael Palmer, Renee Gladman, Evelyn Reilly, and Robert Glück––at the moment, I’m stoned on the goodness of About Ed. 

I’d need another me to spend much time going back and hanging out with much of the work that has been crucial for me––there’s always so much more to read!

Touch the Donkey : forty-seventh issue,

The forty-seventh issue is now available, with new poems by Jason Christie, Sabyasachi (Sachi) Nag, Aidan Chafe, Sarah Rosenthal, Meredith Quartermain, Susan Gevirtz and c.a.r. rafuse.

Eight dollars (includes shipping). Today I'm here to tell you about “Spiffy.“, the 21st century stain remover.

TtD supplement #287 : seven questions for Nicole Markotić

Nicole Markotić is author of five poetry books, including Bent at the Spine (Book*hug), Whelmed (Coach House), and her most recent, After Beowulf (Coach House, 2022), which takes on that iconic hero in fun, funky, and freak-loving ways. She has published three novels, Yellow Pages, Scrapbook of My Years as a Zealot, and her Young Adult novel, Rough Patch, and has edited a collection of essays on Robert Kroetsch’s writing, Robert Kroetsch: Essays on His Works. She was poetry editor for Red Deer Press for six years and on the NeWest literary board as one of its fiction editors for over a decade. Markotić currently edits the chapbook series Wrinkle Press, and lives and teaches in Windsor, Ontario.

Her poem “a certainty of bumbles and plumage” appears in the forty-sixth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “a certainty of bumbles and plumage.”

A: Well, what’s more “certain” than those two categories?

Also: my way of getting to the bees and the birds...

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

A: Hmmmm, not sure I can answer that... Sometimes I think I’m working on a series, and one or two poems just don’t fit the rest of what I write (or at least what I’m writing at the time). And sometimes I think I’m trying something entirely new, only to find strange overlaps in my notes or long-forgotten drafts of other pieces.

Poets are perhaps least able to see what we’re up to (at least in the midst of the writing).

I do try to change my habits/modes/methods/form/etc as much as possible as I move through the pages, but I also catch myself falling into familiar patterns (ie, I can’t help but riff off a word’s sounds and suggestive syllabics).

To recap: how the hell should I know?!

Q: What does the process look like for you, feeling your way through new work? Is it a slow assemblage that eventually reveals itself, or are you deliberately pushing through different structures?

A: Well, except for rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, I’m not sure my writing process is ever the same! I often start with a word or sound or phrase that gets to me for some reason. For the “bumbles and plumage” poem, bird sounds took me from the air onto the page, though I didn’t want to replicate the sounds birds make, but rather follow the vitality of those sounds.
 
I would say I do push through structure, with every poem. My first two books of prose poetry tackled the lyric by avoiding it entirely! As all poets do, I need to think about every line break, every indent. At the same time, changing even one word can change the way the whole thing looks on the page. I will choose a word/phrase because I like the look of it, spend days making it “fit,” and then cut it because I’ve edited another part of the poem and this word/phrase no longer makes “sense” for the line. Or: I remember the lyrebird, able to mimic not only other birds, but lawnmowers and camera clicks, which leads me – in a circuitous route – back into the lyric as a generative form.
 
Language reveals not just what we’re thinking about, but how we’re thinking about particular issues. I approach all writing with a political slant (wanting to resist misogyny, racism, attacks on 2SLGBTQIA+ people, class oppression, and ensuring that poetry takes a stand for justice), but I always approach every topic from the level of language. How does this particular word work in this particular context? How does a changed context undercut or reveal the underbelly of each word? How does spelling variation, archaic definitions, grammar, technological typography, punctuation, etc. create a context through which we read supposedly innocuous language?
 
And then: rewrite again!

Q: I’m getting the sense that sound is important to the way you approach writing. How conscious are you of the way a line, a poem, might sound as you work?

A: This one is a bit tricky as I do pay attention to sound as I’m writing, but: I don’t really foreground that awareness until I have a viable draft. Then I read aloud, emphasizing different syllables and line breaks, and see what I hear going on. For example, in that same Touch the Donkey poem, I chose the word “whacked” for the way it sounded in my head, but then changed it to “quack” when I heard it out loud in the context of other words and lines.
 
I’m always envious of poets who play instruments, as I think they have a direct line to musicality that I’m missing. In Fred Wah’s MHT #108 (“Loose Change”), he plays with rhyme and awkward syntax: “I for be was as can set these el em en t’s” to both beguile and cajole the reader. Or HD’s parsing of rosemary into “rose of memory” in By Avon River. My sound appreciation resides at the level of a pun or word-twist, or even just weird quirk in a word that (erroneously) takes the reader off on a sonorous tangent. Or that sonorously takes the reader off on an erroneous tangent.
 
I can’t say how conscious I am during the writing, but certain words or phrases “feel” right. That doesn’t mean I go with the first thing that I think of; I usually try to steer away from my own writing habits that may trap me inside my too familiar routines. But if a sound reverberates through the next words or lines, then the writing process itself helps generate the ongoing anarchy and commotion that I identity as poetry.

Q: Has there been a shift over the years in how you approach that first moment, and then, to the viable draft? With a handful of books and chapbooks and individual works going back more than thirty years, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: Ah, these impossible questions! 😊
 
I don’t know if I’d call it a shift so much as a deliberate inconsistency. I sometimes start with a word:
 
My entire book Whelmed began because I think it’s funny that certain English words don’t exist without their prefix. I began with a few words (whelmed, couth, gruntled, gregious) and wrote poetic “dictionary” entries for them. Then I discovered just how freaking many words we use that make no sense without their prefix. How do we have words like “refrain” but not “frain”? Or “impervious” but not “pervious”? Suddenly an idea to delve into a few anomalous words turned into an entire book about a strange language quirk that happens over and over and over in English, and we barely notice!
 
I began After Beowulf because the persistent presence of this male hero fascinated me: I notice there’s very little difference between Marvel’s Thor and Beowulf. How little heroic masculinity has changed since the beginnings of narrative poetry intrigued me. And at the same time, there’s been so little narrative attention on Grendel’s mother, a truly neglected literary antagonist. She and Grendel both function as the Other in an otherwise very homogenize society. Yet Grendel becomes a compelling antihero, and Grendel’s mother gets forgotten, or worse—in some books, she can barely articulate a sentence; in some, she’s not even depicted as human (although her son is always humanoid).
 
Some of my books hold together as a cohesive project (as do these two), some collect a bunch of shorter pieces by way of sound or organization or ambition. In Bent at the Spine, I think my main purpose was to make the lineated pieces narrative and the prose pieces disjunctive!
 
My first book, Connect the Dots, I began as a way to take on the lyric address in prose: each section invokes a different “you”: as a way to address the “lover,” as a way to address the actual self, to address plural listeners, as a form of colloquial “one,” etc. Some drafts had a “Horoscope” section, because those always announce to readers that “you” will experience something today. But as much fun as I had with that horoscope one, I cut it (and a few others), because the book evolved into one of family interconnections. So, the initial idea of playing around with lyric address stayed, but some pieces didn’t fit as the book settled into a certain structure.
 
As for the future, I’ve never been great at predictions! At the moment, I’m working poem by poem. They may congeal into a (semi-solid) book, or become one section of a larger manuscript, or get dumped altogether if I come up with something else that ensnares my mind. Poetry is so challenging, and I want to keep challenging myself. To mangle Pound: On with the new!

Q: Your responses hint at the idea that you approach each project, each potential manuscript, as a kind of study. As in the case for After Beowulf, for example, how deep did your research extend? Did you require an amount of research before you began, or is it more organic, through the process of composition?

A: Well, I certainly don’t mean to make my books sound like homework 😊. But, yes, there’s an element of “project” for most of my writing. As for research, don’t get me started on how many Beowulf translations I found! Each one had something to offer, and I usually read and wrote with about seven books (and three online texts) in front of me. There are some incredibly innovative versions, but my favourite to work with were problematic translations: older ones that insisted on a replica hemi-stitch caesura, staid ones that insisted on narrative summation; ones that cut out all the female characters because they just “didn’t matter” to the story. Some of the most useful were children’s books; one represented Grendel as exaggerated and cartoonish masculine humanoid, but Grendel’s mother as an octopus monster. Yes, I may have taken advantage of the worst translations for some of the more humorous portions of my interpretation…
 
The research also took me down very distracting but fun rabbit holes: articles about and artwork depicting Celtic knots, the vital role of freoðuwebbe, a woman who “weaves” together sparring tribal adversaries, usually via marriage (although the word only appears once in Beowulf), same-sex attraction and depictions of sexuality in Mediaeval Anglo-Saxon cultures. I didn’t begin with that kind of research; as I said, much of it was fun diversion. But, my composition process overlaps with how I read, study, explore, and plummet into poetry. I worked with dictionaries beside me, and often stopped “writing” my poetry in order to “translate” a particularly muddy passage. I worked on traditional-type translations to better understand my own approach; and I worked on wildly off-kilter translations, to get at livelier language. After Beowulf is a translation, but (I hope) of the poetics as well as the poetry, using a feminist methodology to weigh in on a feudal society represented as hyper-masculine, and critiquing the way some (often hilarious) critics preserve this jellied text.
 
To be quite honest: I didn’t know I’d undertaken this canonical, epic poem as my next manuscript until I was at least a third of the way through working on it! I wanted to understand Beowulf, definitely in ways he didn’t understand himself. I wanted to loosen Grendel’s mother from the background landscape and relocate her to the foreground of readers’ imaginations.

And: I wanted to write about a dragon!

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

A: Again, this is a question that depends on a specific moment, on what I’m writing or editing (or even what I’m teaching). And I value too many poets as “influence” to list them all. But, yes, there are some writers that constantly and instantly revive me and my writing… This list could go on and on (and on), but to begin: Marie Annharte Baker, Nicole Brossard, Wayde Compton, Michael Davidson, Roy Kiyooka, Robert Kroetsch, Harryette Mullen, Sachiko Murakami, Bob Perelman, Fernando Pessoa, Gertrude Stein, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Miriam Waddington, Fred Wah, Phyllis Webb. And that’s with me leaving out sooooo many poets that have (and continue to have) shaped me!

But this list also depends on how we define “poetry”: Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter completely recalibrated my brain, especially in terms of what a “novel” could achieve. Sometimes a line from a novel, or an article, or even a review changes what I think is possible. Dennis Cooley’s Bloody Jack proposes poetry, but also a curious and curiouser narrative, full of curious and curiouser word-play (bonus influence mention: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland!). I frequently open bpNichol’s Selected Organs for prose that entices with narrative anecdotes and paronomastic wisecracks. Oscar Wilde’s ridiculous banter and drôle puns allow humour onto the performed page. The first line of Thomas King’s Medicine River, “Medicine River sat on the broad back of the prairies,” introduces a book of stories that is also a novel, but also about how language transports the reader. And sometimes, for no reason, Greta at the stove pops into my brain, turning hotcakes and reaching for coffee beans in Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook. Grinding away James’s voice.

Oh, you’ve got me started… Stevie Smith’s “Thoughts about the Person from Porlock,” showed me how to take on the canon and carry on with other, distracting thoughts. I fall in love a.rawlings’s gorgeous work on soundscapes every time I encounter them. Jordan Abel surprises me with every repeated repeat. M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! guts me with every read. To return to returning: I constantly pull Kroetsch off my shelf for his wild Pessoan romp of characters conjuring up other characters (and author) in The Hornbooks of Rita K; and I return to his “Sad Phoenician” again and again, for “the one who runs after doorknobs” because “the world is not so round as she would have it.” His lines hurtle through the alphabet, enticing with hints of narrative, but ultimately staying on this side of the poetic line, all within an anaphoric delivery that never quits. What lovely and treacherous language!
 
Ugh, knowing this is the final question, I feel the need to mention everyone! Which sounds very erudite and all, but I also delve into children’s books (see Alice reference and Beowulf research, above), street signs, old letters, dictionary entries, history tomes, the comments section on the Bored Panda site. I guess I’m saying I don’t know how to cull my reading sources, or my bookshelves! I’m tempted right now to go and pull handfuls of my old friends down, page through, and see what new wisdom they may communicate to me. Like Lou in Marian Engel’s Bear, I love “old and shabby things,” “things that have “suffered,” and I will dive and dive again into any story about them, and about us.

TtD supplement #286 : seven questions for Lina Ramona Vitkauskas

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas is a Canadian-American-Lithuanian formerly from Chicago, living in Toronto. She is an award-winning, published poet & video poet. She was a 2020 recipient of a PEN America grant for her development of an experimental poetry collection that adapted poems from Vsevolod Nekrasov and Bill Knott. She was also the voice of George Maciunas’ mother in the documentary, GEORGE (directed by Jeffrey Perkins) screened at MoMA and in Vilnius. Her work has been most recently featured in/at: Film Video Poetry Society (Los Angeles); Octopus Film Festival (Gdansk, Poland); John Gagné Contemporary Gallery (Toronto): Post-Future Era with Kunel Gaur, Justin Neely, and Confusions (Ben Turner); Poetic Phonotheque (Denmark); MOCA Toronto (public installation); SIFF (Moldova); Newlyn Film Festival (UK); Festival Fotogenia (Mexico); Midwest Poetry Fest (US); Vienna Video Poetry Festival (Austria); and the International Migration & Environmental Film Festival (Canada). Her website is linaramona.com.

Her poems “Again I wade,” “Epicentre,” “Arising & dissolving” and “Back” appear in the forty-sixth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “Again I wade,” “Epicentre,” “Arising & dissolving” and “Back.”

A: The poems in this chapbook The Deaf Forest of Cosmic Scaffolding are all dedicated to the poet Larry Sawyer, my love and longtime partner after his recent passing.  I'll address two of the poems first:

“Again I wade”
I was beginning to work through several stacks of Larry’s poems (all printed and placed into piles on the apartment floor). I was in awe of his prolific-ness—many poems I hadn’t even seen before, so I was rediscovering him and his work all over again. It was a moving meditation, each night, weaving between boxes (I had to move in the midst of everything) and stacks of papers, carefully placing things in specific piles to categorize them for a future collection. The tortes and clouds represent the stacks and the nature / surreality of his work. 

“Epicentre” is a dedication to a poetic exercise Larry often used—using same lines, juxtaposing different ones to yield different / new results. Kintsugi was on my mind, the Japanese act of taking something broken and using gold to fuse it back together, a metaphor for how I’d been feeling after his death, needing a centre to hold onto, realizing it was going to have to be me, that no one was going to collect the broken pieces to make me whole. It was just me and the cruel March snow / sleet, reading about nebulas, and being present in every bit of sorrow.

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

A: These poems obviously differ from previous work as they are about a very specific thing, the death of the closest person in the world to you, best friend, love, and confidant. My previous work also danced around specific events or things, but in an elusive way. I mostly see this chapbook as an elegy.

Q: Beyond the immediate elements of grief, I’m curious about the engagement these poems might have had with Larry’s work, especially given there was work you hadn’t seen before. Did you feel an influence seep into these poems, or was it a more direct sense of response?

A: It was truly an amalgamation. Reading his undiscovered work certainly had an influence on me. So it was in homage to his style of writing—an intent to poetically communicate with him. Additionally, there is no “beyond grief”. Grief rides alongside us always, it is never something to evade or set aside but something to engage in each moment—emotionally, of course, poetically. So the very act of engagement with his poetry is/was an act of grief, a way to connect.

Q: When approaching writing on and around grief, had you any models for this kind of work? As well, I’m struck by the immediacy of the poems. I know of writers that might take years to compose such vulnerable work, or even allow it to be seen. What was it that allowed you to be so open, and what have you learned or discovered through the process?

A: You learn quickly after the death of your beloved, someone who has been a part of your life for a quarter of century, that there is no timetable by which any forms of expression should come to be. There is no process. Every person expresses loss, every person grieves uniquely—whether it is for their deepest love, their mother, their son. The way death comes to us is a mystery, therefore the way we deal with it in the moment—and/or years after—is just as much an unknown, especially to oneself. You act completely from instinct. 

I was drawn into the underworld with him, like Persephone. When we are most vulnerable, we can see through the facade of “reality”. The earthly constraints of time no longer exist. There are no magic moments to say or do _XYZ_. The bare truth of existence, the finiteness, the cruelty of life, is all there is. Our mundane experiences hurl at us the confusion of human emotion, we naively try to control life with inane, inconsequential rules around how to act, what to do when death arrives. 

Being poets our whole lives, Larry and I being so intertwined, my writing to—and through—him seemed a natural continuation of our dialogue, the way we should commune. My ache for him to still be alive, his ache, I believe, to be here still, is the thruline, our connection. As Patti Smith sings in “Beneath the Southern Cross”: Oh to be not anyone, gone, the maze of being, skin / oh to cry, not any cry, so mournful that the dove just laughs, the steadfast gasps / ...who grieves not anyone gone...

Q: I’m curious about the relationship between your video poetry and your work on the page. Do you consider these two elements of a single, ongoing poetic, or are they separate? How difficult or easy might a piece adapt from one format to another?

A: I think they are separate though the thruline is imagery. Written poetry still plays a large part in the creation of a video poem, typically it features as a foundation. It’s easier for me to take a poem already written and deconstruct it for a visual medium (video) but always the video poem becomes a second incarnation, calling up and portraying a different look and feel entirely. It becomes its own entity, and I’m usually content with where the medium / inspo takes me. I also collaborate with sound artists / musicians as well as other visual artists, so their perspectives and interpretations are often a pleasant surprise, offering new meaning to the poem.

Q: With your array of video and published work, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: Over time, my written poetry and video work has obviously evolved as I have as a person. Yet I still feel I have so much more to learn and express via video. I’ve been collaborating a lot more lately (as I mentioned) with sound artists. I find a lot of comfort and flexibility in grounding myself in the musicality of language.

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

A: Things I read / hear / see to name a few:

Mina Loy
John Ashbery
Wallace Stevens
Vsevolod Nekrasov
Japanese Death Poems
Roberto Bolaño (The Unknown University)
Lorca
Sergio Medeiros
Akhmatova
Watching Tarkovsky
Listening to David Lynch or Werner Herzog interviews 
Audre Lorde 
Fred Wah
Breton
Listening to James Baldwin 
Listening to Nina Simone
Listening to Marina Abramovic
Listening to Brian Eno
Jeongrye Choi
Lila Zemborian
Jonas Mekas
Aase Berg
Huidobro 
Daumal
Brenda Hillman (practical water)
Simone Muench

TtD supplement #285 : seven questions for Joseph Donato

Joseph Donato is super cool & popular. He is Editor-in-Chief of Block Party and Overlord of Horror Pop Mag. His stories and poems have appeared in Pinhole Magazine, The Ampersand Review, The Hart House Review, and The Foundationalist, among others. His debut chapbook, Toothache, was published by above/ground press in 2023. Joseph enjoys TicTacs, Weezer, and being scared. Instagram: @josephdonato13. Website: josephdonato.ca

His poems “The worst thing to ever happen has happened to me,” “Summer Cleaning” and “Slip” appear in the forty-sixth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “The worst thing to ever happen has happened to me,” “Summer Cleaning” and “Slip.”

A: “The worst thing to ever happen has happened to me”

I’m working on a chapbook about overreacting; experiencing something so trivial and throwing a tantrum because it feels like the most important moment in human history. This poem really encapsulates that experience for me. 

Also, the line “I’m at that age when the world’s against me” is my favourite thing I’ve ever written. So dramatic!

“Summer Cleaning”

A poem about expelling what is no longer needed, trying to scrub the smell of someone from your body to feel clean as you were before their touch. I wanted to capture that desperation, the burning desire to peel off your skin off and shove the crumpled mess to the bottom of the hamper. 

“Slip”

Pottery poetry! Here I explore the phenomenon of memory changing each time a moment is remembered. You can never completely relive the past—it will always appear slightly different in your head, for better or for worse. Can you really believe the good ole’ days when their shape is constantly shifting? We are all unreliable narrators when considering the past tense.

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

A: I wrote these poems at a very low place in my life, if you couldn’t guess. At that time, writing was purely therapeutic. I was able to make sense of those new feelings I was experiencing by pulling them from my head and turning them into poems. I could spend energy working through these poems instead my of much more complicated emotions, which was a very digestible way to navigate this kind of grief. 

I’m delighted to say I’m a little more level-headed now and don’t approach every poem with rage and sadness, at least not so viscerally. 

Q: With a chapbook debut under your belt, where have the poems been going since? How do you see your work, if at all, differently between then and what you’re currently working on?

A: I always think in terms of projects, because I very rarely do anything without a larger plan in mind. These three poems, as well as several others, will appear in my second chapbook (stay tuned). I’ve had one poem from this project published by Pinhole Poetry, and another by THEE rob mclennan for his Tuesday poetry series!

Currently, I am taking a little break from poetry to work on my grad school thesis, which is a collection of short stories. I’m returning to the world of horror fiction for now, but can already feel a couple poems brewing in the back of my skull. Summer does tend to be the season for writing poems.

Q: What brought you to the point of working on poems-as-projects?

A: The deeply engrained need to produce. I was built for capitalism. I loveeee to work and create products. I think it’s because I was raised on Taylor Swift, the queen of production. Turning my art into fully-realized projects brings me so much joy, which might not be the most “artist” thing to say.

When writing with charged emotions like I was here, it was also incredibly helpful to think in terms of a larger project. I could remove myself from the very tangible feelings and instead focus on this hypothetical final product, which served as much needed escapism when all I wanted to do was cry.

Q: Have you any other models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? Are there any particular poets or books at the back of your head as you write?

A: Oh my goodness, Xanax Cowboy by Hannah Green immediately comes to mind. She created the character of the Xanax Cowboy for her to slip into the same way I created this clown. I view these characters as a sort of protective shield from the vulnerability of writing about yourself in less-than-awesome situations. I don’t think I’d be able to stomach an entire collection of poems about myself without any kind of fun, dramatic imagery softening the blow. 

Q: Of course, the question then becomes: why do you worry you’d otherwise lean into composing “an entire collection of poems about yourself” without creating a character? Why can’t you simply write poems that reference things without having to worry about the speaker and/or the narrative “I” interfering?

A: This is a tough one to answer! Essentially, I’m still weirded out by the concept of people reading the work I put out and then knowing about me, which I know isn’t the most productive feeling to have as a writer who wants to publish. That’s why I love using characters, or humor, or messing with different forms, to ease the tension of vulnerability. I think of it as wearing a cheap Halloween costume: I can present a fun, fabricated version of myself, but people can definitely still tell it's me under there. Plus, I take a lot more enjoyment as a poet inventing ways to write personally while still maintaining some level of mystery and intrigue. It makes the whole “people will read this” idea something I can look forward to instead of dread.

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

A: I run several creative writing programs at the library I work at, where I have the privilege of reading new work from dozens of local writers. Some of these writers have been honing their craft for years, some are starting right now. 

This variety of work, often themes and forms I’d not necessarily seek out for myself, teaches me different techniques and ideas that ultimately influence my own writing. I leave every program with refreshed energy and a burning desire to get to work on something new.

TtD supplement #284 : seven questions for Kirstin Allio

Kirstin Allio received the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize from FC2 for her 2024 story collection, Double-Check for Sleeping Children. Previous books are the novels Garner (Coffee House Press), Buddhism for Western Children (University of Iowa), and the story collection Clothed, Female Figure (winner of the Dzanc Short Story Collection Competition). Her stories, essays, and poems are published widely, and her awards and honors include the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award, the PEN/O. Henry Prize, and fellowships from Brown University’s Howard Foundation and MacDowell. She lives in Providence, RI.

Her poems “Shipwreck,” “Moon, Tide (Matter, Pattern),” “Sky Writing (Matter, Pattern),” “Afterlife” and “Fiction” appear in the forty-sixth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “Shipwreck,” “Moon, Tide (Matter, Pattern),” “Sky Writing (Matter, Pattern),” “Afterlife” and “Fiction.”

These five prose poems, or poetic prose, are moving parts from Matter and Pattern, a genre-fluid work-in-progress. 

“Shipwreck” is a protest poem and it won’t settle, or finish. Soapbox: We’re in a fugue state of euphemism regarding the natural world. We need a new language game for what we limply and self-exoneratively call “climate change.” I’m looking to Robert MacFarlane’s Is a River Alive?, Jorie Graham in To 2040, Alice Oswald’s mythic river poems. And responding in “Shipwreck” to the cry from a line of graffiti that appeared on the concrete wall of the tidal river that’s directed through Providence, RI toward Narragansett Bay: “Where will we go when the water rises?” 

The story behind the story of “Moon, Tide” (Matter, Pattern)” is insomnia—an insomnia so galvanizing to itself that it feels like fate. A city is erased in “Sky Writing (Matter, Pattern),” as graffiti is erased by the rising tide in “Shipwreck,” and the sky itself erases sky writing. Can we throw a wrench in the march of conformity, or death? Re-shuffle a fate that might be as structural as pattern? 

Then comes the afterlife. What is it? Is it? I imagine a waiting room, like in “Sky Writing,” or an airport—liminal space where time hovers anonymously. And the the uncanny sentience of the armadillo—who knows the time zone of the animal? Maybe the answer is in “Fiction,” which draws the afterlife and the spirit of animals toward a miniature experimental epistemology. 

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

A: They are a departure from the vertically long and drapey, like tapestry, intensively lineated poems I’ve been writing since I started writing poetry. They are single-story still lifes. They’re short, but what they share with my novels, actually, is that they’re not formally surreal, but they snag on mystery.

Q: What do you mean when you say your poems “snag on mystery”?

A: I have to either extend my metaphor, or wriggle out of your question! The poems aren’t mysterious, but they’ve got mystery’s wool in their wire fence. That would make mystery the sheep. Mystery could also be the fence, a matrix, and the poems could be the sheep. I’m reading Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? for half an hour in the afternoons in the wind blast of a standing fan. I love sheep—I was born on a thousand-acre sheep farm. Beasts of burden for our metaphors. Same word for singular and plural. Odysseus clinging like a human parasite to the belly of the Cyclops’ sheep to escape the cave— 

I’m working mostly with really plain language that’s expected to do things like logicize, define, show, and tell. What’s the most mystery I can suggest from the least mysterious language?

Maybe it has something to do with my exhaustion with technology—being cut off from my own attention, overwhelmed, out-humaned—already outlived by AI by millions of years’ worth of data. 

Q: With a handful of published titles under your belt, how do you feel your work has developed? What do you see your work heading towards?

A: I’m trying to feel my way toward a narrating voice that’s sustainable and flexible, low maintenance, that I can take anywhere. I’ve backed myself into tight corners of extreme, hyper-sculpted style and intensive systems of experimentation with no daylight between form and content in previous novels and poems. Discipline! Constraint. A sense of performance, even ritual, in my relationship to myth, to classical mythology and psychological essentialism. At the moment, I’m unraveling a novel into poetry, and I’m also working within a novel-length fictional essay—autofeminism, I’m calling it—maybe—to find a looser, nimbler, more intimate voice I can take to places I haven’t been before. 

Hélène Cixous calls women’s writing spaces the chaosmos! 

Q: Is this something purposeful on your part, attempting to embrace the chaos, the accident? What might this allow that wouldn’t be possible otherwise?

A: I think I’m always working on a continuum between form and freedom. I don’t see them as opposites or antagonists but as co-conspirators, co-dependents. Opening the writing toward chaos, accident, as you say, the un- and informal, is a way to find form: in the new work, the form might be hyperrealism. The quick line that captures the whole posture, history.

Q: Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? What poets or works, if any, might sit at the back of your head as you write?

A: This project is definitely taking heart from experimental works like Malcolm de Chazal’s synesthetic collage Sens-Plastique, Stuart Dybek’s superflash fiction, Rosmarie Waldrop—entirely. Kimiko Hahn describes the hybrid, “hodgepodge” zuihitsu form as comprised of spontaneity, suggestion, and irregularity, and I find I’m bumping into that spirit in the dark.

I love this nail-polish red and black (a black sun? Eclipse?) book Hackers by Aase Berg with its off-kilter, vernacular, oracular aphorisms: “The machines are on,/the source code pecks./There you are no longer loved,/you’re observed.” Ana Božičević in New Life is working with huge, belly-of-the-beast ache and acerbic efficiency: “Sometimes I ride on my horse/Singing/Like a shepherdess/To another shepherdess…”

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

A: I don’t have a very correlative or satisfying answer to this question! I’m a slow and impressionable reader, so often just a sentence or a line from whatever’s at hand does the trick of filling the well, starting strange wind across the surface of my own writing.