TtD supplement #268 : seven questions for Tom Jenks

Tom Jenks’ most recent books are Melamine (Red Ceilings Press) and The Philosopher (Sublunary Editions). He is also a text artist and edits the small press zimzalla, specialising in literary objects. More information at https://tomjenks.uk

An excerpt from his “Melamine” appears in the forty-third issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the work-in-progress “Melamine.”

A: I’m happy to report it’s no longer a work in progress and is out in book form with the Red Ceilings Press. It’s a sequence of 8 line poems, each 2 stanzas of 4 lines. I have a changing relationship with form. Sometimes, I like to be wholly irregular. Others, I like to set myself a structure and a pathway. That’s what Melamine is. I think of each poem as a set of shelves on which I put whatever was to hand: things I was reading or listening to, what I was eating or thinking about eating, what was going on around me, the only rule being that they had to fit on the shelf without falling off. Poetic chaotic storage.

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

A: My next book The Philosopher, which is out soon on Sublunary Editions is short prose, not exactly narrative, but more linear. I also produce visual work, a mixture of visualisations of literary works (e.g. all the food and drink in The Wind in the Willows, all mentions of “love” and “death” in Romeo and Juliet) and other more concrete-style pieces. That’s a different sort of mindset, all about shape, structure and colour. But it’s the same in other ways. The reasons why I do things remain opaque to me, and long may that continue.

Q: How does any particular project begin? Do you approach first through form, or is it something more organic?

A: I’m nearly always writing or creating in some way, so I always have a lot of stuff floating around. Relationships, threads and connections tend to emerge rather than me willing them into existence. With Melamine, I wrote a few 8 line poems, wrote some longer ones, which I didn’t feel were finished and I melted down into more 8 line poems, which gave them a new lease of life. So the concept emerged from doing. I believe “praxis” is the word.

Q: What is it about examining particular structures that appeals? What do you feel is possible utilizing form in such ways, and such different ways, that might not be possible otherwise?

A: Form, for me, gives a reason to start and a reason to stop. Going back to the line as shelf analogy in Melamine, a set structure like that allows me to put things together that aren’t normally connected but nonetheless somehow can speak to one another. Having a set limit gives a sort of weird compression which I like.

Q: What brought you to this particular point? Were there specific poets or works that influenced these directions and decisions?

A: In terms of sequences, Jeff Hilson’s work, particularly In the Assarts, was something I was rereading around this time, plus Frank Kuppner, who writes long, fragmentary books. More broadly, in terms of style and content, Peter Didsbury and Jeremy Over. I also found myself referring back to my own book Spruce from 2015, a sequence of 99 x 9 line poems, just to remind myself how to do it.

Q: With more than a dozen books and chapbooks going back some fifteen years, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: In some ways a lot, in others not at all. I’ve done all sorts of different things – written work, visuals, conceptual projects – but I think my concerns and interests now can be traced back to then, amongst them humour, the minutiae of advanced capitalism, history and culture in all its forms. At the moment, I’m working on longer, looser pieces, trying to let my voice go where it wants, not taking off the rough edges.

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

A: as well as the aforementioned, Selima Hill, Frank O’Hara, Ivor Cutler, Leonora Carrington, Henry Green, Stuart Mills, psychedelia and, above all, my friends and contemporaries who I won’t attempt to list as I’ll forget to mention someone and they won’t come to my funeral. Actually, not sure I’ll bother to turn up to that myself, as I hear the sandwiches will be awful.

TtD supplement #267 : six questions for Leesa Dean

Leesa Dean (she/her) is the author of a short story collection, a novella in verse, and two poetry chapbooks. Her first book, Waiting for the Cyclone, was nominated for the 2017 Trillium and Relit Awards, and she was runner-up for the 2023 Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize. Her most recent poetry collection, Interstitial, will be out Fall 2025 with Caitlin Press. She lives in the Slocan Valley (unceded Sinixt Territory) and teaches creative writing at Selkirk College.

Her poem “Sleeping with Bats” appears in the forty-third issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poem “Sleeping with Bats.”

A: The poem “Sleeping with Bats” was inspired by an actual event I experienced in my twenties. I was living in Montreal in a small apartment and somehow while making dinner, a bat flew in. He kept doing laps around the living room. I tried to shoo him towards the wide open doors, front and back, but he just wouldn’t leave for almost 24 hours. He didn’t actually read Beaudelaire but I could really imagine him there, hanging upside down from the bookshelf, immersed in such poetry. I was also in a bad relationship at the time—it took years to clearly see the parallels between the bat and I, but there we were, kindred spirits, fully aware of the exit but trapped in the thrill of being in danger.

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

A: This poem is part of a larger collection that will be published by Caitlin Press in 2025. The title is Interstitial and it explores a vast cross-section of themes like women in complicated relationships with themselves, with substances, with their ancestry. Many of the poems are autobiographical. For example, my grandparents were both language minorities (Francophone from Saskatchewan, Hungarian refugee) who traded their languages for their vision of the Canadian Dream at a time where assimilation was the common practice. I write about my mother who was a polio survivor and lived in a body cast for 9 months after being an initial test subject for a process that was brand new at the time. A Herrington Rod was fused with her spine so that she would not end up in a wheelchair. She never told us any of that, didn’t want us to perceive her as a victim, was unable to imagine the beautiful power of empathy. The overarching framework for the book was actually published by you, rob, in 2023-- it was a chapbook called apogee/perigee which consisted of 24 visual poems, all exploring the themes mentioned above.

Q: Do you have any structural models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? How easy was it for you to assemble such a wide array of lyric modes into a single, cohesive manuscript?

A: This is an interesting question about structural models. I actually had to create my own structural model for this project--well, I got someone else to do it. I had a specific structure in my head for the 24 visual poems that create the foundation of Interstitial. I drew it out on paper first but it looked more like complex mathematics. Luckily I know a great graphic designer/comic artist, Nathan Vyklicky. He looked at my rough sketch and my list of very specific requirements, like “each poem must be located exactly where the corresponding zodiac house would be located on the provided source chart from the 16th century” and “the apogee poems must be located diametrically opposite from the title of the poem, to mirror a state of apogee.” I couldn’t tell at first if my ideas were even legible to him or anyone, but he went away for a few days and came back with exactly what I wanted. I really value that kind of collaboration and deep listening.

A number of other poems in the collection are prose poems. I am a great fan of prose poetry, Does this come from my background as a fiction writer? Possibly, but I also think there is something incredibly immersive about not having line breaks but still operating in the realm of images, in lyrical language that bends and yaws. I like the look of a dense block of language and think of all the words inside the invisible text boxes as building kinetic energy, as vibrating atoms. I was in part inspired by Ben Lerner’s collection, Angle of Yaw. Our poetic styles could not be more different, but from him I learned a type of journey to the last line where truths are confirmed or completely subverted.

I’m not sure how easy it was to assemble a wide array of modes into a cohesion, but it was enjoyable and also necessary. I think what creates the cohesion, though, is the context: I wrote the book almost exclusively within the two year period between when my father was diagnosed as being terminally ill and when he died, about 12 days after I handed in the final manuscript to my publisher. Talk about Interstitial. Not all of the poems are about him—just a small fraction—but the context spurred this greater question of how we are positioned at any given moment in time. I remember so many different versions of my father. I remember so many different versions of myself. In this manuscript, I allowed those versions to coexist; I allowed the dichotomies to inform and complicate each other.

Q: With two published books, two chapbooks and your current work-in-progress, how do you feel your work has developed? What do you see yourself working towards?

A: To answer this question honestly, I feel like I’m growing up in tandem with my work. I’ve always felt the relationship between myself and my work to be quite porous, a type of Venn diagram where the narrative style or poetic craft and the actual me occupy a large common space. This is especially true of my forthcoming book, but it inherently had to be as I was writing predominantly about the death of both my parents rather than exploring a persona, as I did in my second book, The Filling Station, which was written entirely from the point of view of a Brazilian woman, a fictional character who narrated the life of Manuelzinho, an actual person who appeared in a 1952 poem of the same name by Elizabeth Bishop. Interstitial is very different. If I think about the way I wrote about emotional topics when I first started writing poetry in my late twenties, I think there would have been a lot of anger and that anger would have translated into a narrower kind of poetics. The poems in Interstitial move beyond the immediate emotional plain, the anger and reckoning, to much deeper, philosophical explorations.

Now that I’ve completed Interstitial, I am moving through a second draft of a novel called Tunnel of Stars. I can’t even articulate how excited I am about it. It’s a slightly gothic coming of age story that takes place in my home region, the West Kootenay, but also in Vancouver, New Orleans, Montreal and Morocco. I’m still at the stage where it’s difficult to articulate exactly what the novel is about, but I have surprised myself by writing a romantic narrative with a happy ending. I have traditionally been disinterested in the happy ending, especially in the context of heteronormative relationships, but this narrative is also interrupted by unwanted pregnancies, suicide attempts, entire families dying in car accidents and other significant barriers. I'm interested in writing through an ugly kind of beauty, a kind of beauty that becomes accentuated by life’s legit and ever-present challenges.

Q: I get the sense that you see your work—whether poetry, fiction or visual work—as extended elements of a single, ongoing trajectory. How does a thought or an idea or a sentence announce itself into the shape of a poem or a work of fiction? Do ideas of genre emerge first, or is it something else, something other?

A: I’ve been thinking about how to respond to this question and I keep coming back to Ursula Le Guin. I remember reading her essay titled “The carrier bag theory of fiction” while doing my MFA at the University of Guelph over a decade ago now. The visual of the bag really stuck with me and I suppose I consider my writing in a similar fashion. I’m out there gathering ideas, sentences, images, recurring themes, and they all go in the bag. I imagine this bag to be elastic, able to stretch form, to hold multitudes. I’m not always sure if something will be a poem, an essay or a story when it first emerges, when it goes into the bag or comes out of the bag to be refined. I write and publish in three genres so any of those forms could be feasible for any idea, and sometimes the boundary of the genre isn’t entirely clear in my writing. I’m thinking now of Joshua Whitehead’s essay titled “Writing as a Rupture” (published in Making Love with the Land) where he refers to genre as “boundary and border,” which is something I’ve been thinking about more lately.

I’m currently writing a novel that is mostly fiction, part prose poem, slightly autofiction at points. I have a feeling my work will continue to delineate rather than lineate as I... what? Age? I’m not sure age is the right word here. Continue to expound? I am leaning into hybridity these days and feel validated by the growing number of genre-defying works being published at the moment.

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

A: I’m the kind of person who will pull like 10 books off the shelf and fan them out around me when I need poetic inspiration so I have more of a rotating favourites list. I also have a special area on my bookshelf where I put certain books on display, like talismans, as if the power of those poets might radiate into my writing space and bless me with even just the essence of their poetics. Currently Night Sky with Exit Wounds is staring at me—Ocean Vuong is a damned genius, can’t say it enough. I’ve got Ada Limon’s Bright Dead Things out right now, too. When I want to shake myself out of my language patterns I often go to Canisia Lubrin and Liz Howard’s work. How many poets do I name? I could just fill a page right now.

But the one book that is always on my shelf facing forward, the one that never moves, is Common Magic by Bronwen Wallace. I love that book with all my heart. I actually have three copies because it’s out of print and hard to get and I keep giving copies away. I actually got a “Common Magic” tattoo in February—a montage of images that embody this idea for me (steam rising from tea, moon phases, wildflowers, the magic of the perennial, the lifeblood of cosmic clockwork) and Simon Gentry from Chateau Tattoo in Salmo turned into a beautiful half sleeve. That’s something I started doing, getting a tattoo every time I publish a book. I’m already thinking of what to do for the next one that comes out in Fall 2025...

TtD supplement #266 : seven questions for Henry Gould

Henry Gould was born in Minneapolis, and lives there now, after 45 years in Rhode Island. His recent books include : RAVENNA DIAGRAM, I-III (Dos Madres Press); CONTINENTAL SHELF : SHORTER POEMS, 1968-2020 (Dos Madres); and a chapbook, PARMENIDES IN MINNEAPOLIS (Lulu.com). His book-length poem, GREEN RADIUS, is available (or will be soon) from Contubernales Books.

An excerpt from his “The Green Radius” appears in the forty-third issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the work-in-progress “The Green Radius.”

A: The Green Radius is a long poem, in 144 parts, which is written in these rhymed, flowing, snaky stanzas, to suggest the constant flow of the Mississippi River, from its source to the Delta. Also the flow of memory, back in time – my own personal time, times of American history, and human time generally, in a sort of philosophical sense. And also this wayward flow of stream-of-consciousness, free-association babbling – which will probably seem incomprehensible or nonsensical to impatient readers.  I started writing it on February 1st, 2023, and finished it in December, on 12/12/23.

There’s an underlying “French connection" to this poem.  Just before I started writing I happened to see an old film of Eric Rohmer, Le Rayon Vert (“The Green Ray”). At first I planned to title the whole poem The Green Ray – but then I discovered another poet had given her recent book that same title, with the same reference to Rohmer! So I changed it, reluctantly, to The Green Radius, which in the end I found very fitting. Oddly enough, just as I was finishing the poem in December 2023, I watched a second very fine Rohmer film, My Night at Maud’s – which seemed to set its seal on the poem.

By “French connection” I refer to this sort of submerged French influence in American history. The course of the Mississippi flows through the old territory of the Louisiana Purchase. So it gave me a kind of cultural slant into the character of the United States, emphasizing New Orleans and a certain French/American ambience. But the poem tries to delve further back as well. The “French” thing leads to St. Louis, and some remarks by Herman Melville (in a short essay called “The River”) about the meaning of that place : where the ruins of Cahokia still remain. I try to delve back a little way into Native American and “prehistoric” dimensions of this land, in the context of the “Trump” era, and the attack on U.S. democracy, and the theme of corruption and fraud in Melville’s Mississippi novel, The Confidence-Man.

Here's a short opening section that brings some of these things into (blurry) focus :

  3


    With a green flash, the last light rose
      from sunset.  On the vertical,
        above the dark horizon
      like a wheat-blade – singular,
    enormous.  Bleeding as the Delta flows
  widening on either side;
melding in diapason
  eleisons of blue and red
    over the mud-green, violet furrows.

2.4.23

The poem is really no longer a work-in-progress : it’s a finished poem, and a sort of work-in-regress. A strategic retreat : Wallace Stevens’ “violence within pressing back against the violence without.” Amazingly enough, early in 2024 the publishers at a small press called Contubernales Books approached me, unsolicited, for a possible manuscript to publish!  This has never happened to me before in my 60 years of writing poetry. The book is coming out within the next month or two. The cover design was kindly donated by the Saint Louis Art Museum, from a massive panoramic scroll painted in 1850 by an itinerant Irish artist, John J. Egan : a visionary panorama called “The Grandeur of the Mississippi”. Also, poet and scholar Gabriel Gudding wrote a sharp, provocative introduction, for which I am very grateful.  Here’s a glimpse of the cover : https://contubernalesbooks.com/green-radius

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

A: I turned 72 this year. Getting older, for me anyway, changes your sense of time, memory, mortality. The Green Radius reflects that, I suppose, in several ways. For one, it’s shorter, more focused, than previous efforts, believe it or not! I’ve written about 10 book-length poems since the 1980s. Forth of July, from the late ‘90s – a trilogy of 3 books, Stubborn Grew/The Grassblade Light/July – is over 1000 pp. Ravenna Diagram I-III, written from 2012 to 2018, is a similar length. Restoration Day, published in 2022, is over 250 pages. The Green Radius has the most dramatic, “quasi-objective” scenario since Stubborn Grew, from 2000 (which is a kind of microcosmic comic-epic set across about 10 blocks of my hometown of those days – Providence, Rhode Island).

Long poems are a kind of curse, for both poets and readers. They magnify, exponentially, the already marginal condition of poetry within society at large. But it’s one of those curses that glimmers with the hope of becoming a blessing. Poetry for me is a kind of work, that gets more fluent and surprising as it goes along. And the phenomenon “poetry” sits up on a high, quaint, old-fashioned pedestal in my psyche – culturally, spiritually. I’m like Edgar Cayce, the sleeping prophet... I sleepwalk in a trance down this outlandish pilgrim’s path – keeping my diary, dating every entry in the sequence. I’m struggling with the moral/ontological state of the world; I’m struggling with my famous predecessors (Pound, Eliot, Dante, et al.); I’m struggling with my indifferent contemporaries; I’m struggling with the moral and political state of my nation; I’m struggling with my own flaws and stupidities. No one writes like me; no one knows my work; that’s the way it is.  Sound familiar? I’m Henry, the Everypoet.

Q: You mention that this particular project is “shorter, more focused, than previous efforts [.]” Why do you think that is?

A: Poetry for me seems to involve quite a bit of negative capability. Unconciousness, serendipity. As mentioned previously, my getting older has something to do with the pressure to be focused, precise, more intense. But really, my sense is that the stars were just aligned in my pregnancy phase, pre-compositional.  By that I mean the themes, the setting (the Mississippi), and the style seemed to coalesce and work together. The FLOW, the simple water pressure of the river, unlocked a whole set of dams and levees – in memory, in history, in art...  Also, that “violence without” – the sense of danger, of “existential crisis” for my country, in my country, the United States, right now – definitely fueled the intensity of focus, such as it is.

Q: With, as you say, ten book-length poems published over the past few decades, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: In some ways I just keep writing the same poem, over and over, with variations. This theme of “journeying into the interior” is part of all the poems I mentioned previously. It’s been a bit of an Orphic track : me, in a trance, following my Dark Lady, my Eurydice, my Beatrice, into the darkness, into the light.  I feel as I get on with things I’ve become (over the decades) a little more independent of past influences, a little less prone to bombast or mimicry. I hope so anyway. I see my marginality and irrelevance as a very real problem. I don’t blame society or po-biz for that anymore (whereas I used to be pretty snarky, with a chip on my shoulder). I’m trying in my current work to become more clear, more comprehensible. And I feel the only way I can do that is to clarify more forcefully my own intellectual, rational, and spiritual beliefs, my “vision of life” shall we say. This is maybe the real substance of this stumbling pilgrimage I’ve been on for decades. I just finished a new sequence – only 27 pp. long! – and published it as a chapbook, called Parmenides in Minneapolis. I’m trying both to focus more intensely, and SING more resonantly, at the same time. I really like “Parmenides” so far.  Maybe there will be a couple more brief 27-pp. sequels.

Q: Do you have any particular models for the kinds of work you’ve been doing? Are there any specific poets or works in the back as your head as you write?

A: In the early 1980’s, when I was getting ready to write such poems, Hart Crane and Ezra Pound were both powerful influences. Pound for his epic ambition and the interesting way he dove into and absorbed History (I’ve always been big on History). Hart Crane for his absolutely astonishing genius – the way he took on an epic ambition similar to Pound’s, but infused it with music, and grace : an elegant architectonics. I had a fairly conscious motive to “stand with Crane”, against both Pound and Eliot, as a stylistic benchmark, or paradigm – how to reflect a specific AMERICAN spirit and sensibility in literature/poetry.

The other central influence has been Osip Mandelstam. In some ways I found affinities between his lyric modes and Crane’s. But for me, Mandelstam is at the center of my personal pantheon. I am drawn to him as to no other. I learned only later that Paul Celan felt the same way about him.  

Q: What is it about the form of the long poem that appeals? What do you feel is possible in your work through the form that might not be otherwise?

A: As a kid, as a teenager, I read a lot of novels. For me there was no comparable pleasure to that of being absorbed in a fictional dream, like a vast lambent meadow, or a dark forest. I’ve written plenty of short poems. Recently published a book of them : Continental Shelf : shorter poems 1968-2020. But I’m sort of a philosophical monist, an idealist... “The World as Meditation”. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was with God : He was in the beginning, and through Him all things were made. Serious stuff. Behind all our fragmentary trivia and chatter, there is this serious listening silence. I write long poems because I want to express this implicit solemnity, this seriousness behind all things. A poem could be a Gate to the Way. Not in a doctrinaire sense. But life is a “vale of Soul-making”, wrote that agnostic John Keats. The epic, the long poem, express a drive toward wholeness – holism, oneness... Union. The Green Radius is all about “saving the Union”.

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

A: Certain poets have become real or imaginary friends. I mentioned Osip Mandelstam. Another Russian poet I feel very close to is the late Elena Shvarts (we were trans-continental friends for a while). The Vancouver poet Lissa Wolsak is very dear to me. I always go back to Eugenio Montale : he is the warmth of the sun and the music of Europe. Shakespeare has haunted me, literally – and still does (I wrote and published a memoir about that, titled Holy Fool). Another Italian I love is the novelist Giorgio Bassani.  

Now I’m finding some new things – going back to early pre-Socratic philosopher-poets, like Parmenides, Empedocles... and Apollonius of Rhodes, epic poet of the Argonautica. I’m trying to learn a little Greek for that. By way of Empedocles, oddly enough (who was said to have fallen into the volcano at Mt. Etna), I went back to an old favorite, Malcolm Lowry (Under the Volcano) – and through Lowry, to the mysterious and marginalized Conrad Aiken. I feel a special kinship with Aiken.  He wrote a kind of shadowy twin to Hart Cranes’s The Bridge, a long poem, called The Kid, which I find wonderful. The Kid pivots on the story of William Blackstone, a kind of spiritual hermit and scholarly pioneer in colonial Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Before I learned of Aiken’s poem, I had written a chapter for a long poem, The Grassblade Light, titled “The Lost Notebooks”... about William Blackstone. Aiken might just be a forgotten sleeping giant of American poetry. I can identify with that. 🙃

Touch the Donkey : forty-third issue,

The forty-third issue is now available, with new poems by Lisa Samuels, Tom Jenks, Nate Logan, Henry Gould, Sandra Doller, Kit Roffey, Leesa Dean and Scott Inniss.

Eight dollars (includes shipping). It's the part I was born to play, baby!

TtD supplement #265 : six questions for russell carisse

russell carisse is currently living on unceded Wolastoqiyik/Mi’kmaw territory in New Brunswick. Here they have resettled from Tkaronto to an off-grid trailer in the woods, with their family of people and animals, to grow food and practice other forms of underconsumption. russell is the author of three chapbooks, the latest, In The Margins. . . (above/ground press 2024). Their work can be found online and in print. Website: russellcarisse.carrd.co Mastodon: @russellcarisse@writing.exchange

An excerpt from his work-in-progress “THAT HEAP” appears in the forty-second issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the work-in-progress “THAT HEAP.”

A: Centuries in the future an archeological team unearth a caché of 500 messages which become the foundational text of the culturally hegemonic corporation Human Effluents And Plastic, and are known as The 500. These messages, all of which are 500 characters long and range from weather reports, advertisements, diary entries, etc, trace the early days and months that follow an apocalyptic event called The Great Coagulation. The earth having become a trash-ball, soon begins to take on monstrous proportions and abilities, thanks to everyone’s favorite corporate empire and its founder, Summer deGuy. The impetus for this project was an attempt to verbalize a pet conceit of mine, that landfill contains the packaging of our collective unconscious, the trappings of our desires, and the materials of our desires when they have been superceded by new material. And so as I tried to find a form the idea began to grow with a bunch of hypotheticals such as, what if trash-ball earth is a body-without-organs, what if water can only be obtained from microscopic deposits, etc. After a few tries at different forms, it was the Mastodon character limit that finally gave this project the conatus to grow beyond a few sketches.

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

A: I am beginning to often feel that the separations between projects, are the result of the perceived need to neatly package a product for consumption, and that my projects are not a disparate as I make them out to be. I do have a few different processes for writing, but I don’t work consistently at any one process, so I find myself reading several books at once and putting thoughts to page/screen in blocks or strings of short text in unrelated sequences. It seems this method lends itself to the 500 character, or 140 syllables, or 100 words, or 14 line, or there about poem/sonnet, that I seem to keep rewriting. It is when the second draft is made that a restraining form is decided upon, sorting into thematic, stylistic, and natural groups, for submitting.

Q: How do you see your projects relating to each other? Do you see your projects as disconnected, a sequence of groupings or something larger, with many, multiple moving parts?

A: My work seems to circle a few concerns, no matter which formalities are being used. These sublime elephants in the room are most often colonialism, climate crises, the bâtise bourgeoisie, and associated effects. I’m sure there are pathological revelations to be had at my expense as well. It is for my own therapeutic reasons that I write, whether disrupting narratives of past traumas, a rewording of something I'm struggling to understand, or just an intellectual exercise of puzzling through a restraint in language. Of course, there’s a large dollop of, “project? I have no idea what I’m doing! Let’s see if this sticks to the wall?”

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

A: I definitely hum and haw over poems I’m working up more now than when I my first chap was published, and the anxiety of leaving something out has changed into its opposite. Looking back, there was a single tone single gimmick to much of my work, which I have been trying to disturb with more humour and forms. There was a time when I saw chapbooks as a stepping stone to trade publication, some presses more than imply this, but as I have had time to read more contemporary collections from the library, plus enjoy the couple of chapbook subscriptions I can afford here or there, I have come to look for where poetry is going in chapbooks, and where poetry has been in collections. Admittedly though, I hope to gain the coveted Triple Spine (a trade pub in poetry, fiction, nonfiction) one day.

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

A: I’m not sure I follow any specific models, but lately I’ve had on my mind George Woodcock and his brand of Anarchism’s connection to the vision of Canada as espoused by the leaders of the Freedom Convoy. It seems this may also point to some of the more poisonous parts of the Romantic tradition past and present. There so many authors I get excited about, a few being; Dionne Brand, Marilyn Dumont, Gary Barwin, and Amanda Earl, each has a unique use of humour, whimsy, and/or irony, that grabs my attention. Adding a manual typewriter to my poetic repertory was the result of the national anthologizing of bill bissett, and bpNichol, by Jack David and Robert Lecker, in 1982, reprinted in 1994, when casual racism, Indigenous exclusion, among other issues, should have given the publishers pause before continuing this version of nation building. Over the last month a couple of my favorite borrows from the public library have been: Resisting Canada; An Anthology of Poetry, ed Nyla Matuk (Montreal, CA: Véhicule Press, 2019), and Canisia Lubrin, The Dyzgraph*st (McClelland & Stewart, 2020).

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

A: If I find myself struggling to write I often turn away from the page for reenergizing. A wander around the garden or the woods, is often enough, but I enjoy painting, and listening to music staring at the ceiling, as well. Even though it’s been a few years, I’ve read Virginia Woolf’s The Waves at least a dozen times, and Derrida’s corpus if only because a lot of his work remained nonsense to me, but over the last bit, I haven’t put down Dionne Brand’s new and collected poems Nomenclature since it arrived a little while ago, after the once through (a second for sections of it) I find myself returning to Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia for a master class in epigrams and biting wit.

TtD supplement #264 : eight questions for Wanda Praamsma

Wanda Praamsma is a poet and writer based in Kingston, Ontario. Her works include a thin line between (Book*hug, 2014) and aversions // nothing special (above/ground press, 2022). Wanda’s poems, non-fiction, and reviews have appeared in literary journals and newspapers in Canada and the U.S. She is the founder and organizer of drift/line, a poetry and music series in Kingston.

An excerpt from her “how clear” appears in the forty-second issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the work-in-progress “how clear.”

A: In short, how clear is about exploration & transformation of self. It’s about the unmooring, the disintegration, experienced through birthing & mothering. It’s about breakage, on & off the page. It’s about detachment, releasing the clinging, & the possibilities that emerge through that process (much of it explored through the Buddhist concept of not-self).

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

A: There is definitely continuity here from my chapbook, aversions // nothing special (above/ground, 2022). The nothing special section of that chapbook was note-poems from the first two years of mothering, & I spring from there in how clear. But this work is much more improvisational, & the fragmentation of language, & rhythm & breath, are out in front.

Q: You suggest there may have been a shift in your work since you first became a parent. Has the fragmentation of your work become more prevalent, or is it something else, something other?

A: Certainly, yes, more fragmentation as I entered motherhood. Time, lack of it, may have precipitated some of this. Writing in smaller snippets was/is the only way, & so the work does easily get stripped down, broken up. But there is something else. I used to be more interested in the story, now I am more deliberate about language. The words are more heated, the link to linear narrative has broken, & I want to ignite certain edges. I am more clear.

Q: I understand that entirely, how parenting forces a focus of sorts. You have only the time that you have, so you’d better get to it. Do you find you hold your work as a singular project, as opposed to multiple, smaller projects, across such multiple attentions? How do you keep writing in your head with small children?

A: Lots of notebooks, all around the house, in my various bags. The problem is there are so many now, & so many threads to bring together & apart. There are a few projects going at the same time in these notebooks. But when I get to the collage part, I do need to work on just one, zero in.

Q: With a published debut and a chapbook under your belt, as well as your current work-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: I feel like it’s been slow since having my children, but I’m also happy there has been space between works to find new ground, to read deeply & widely. My work-in-progress is almost finished & it’s been an exciting departure from my first book. I mentioned to another poet that I am feeling called to sentences lately & so that may be the next thing, a hybrid memoir of sorts.

Q: I like the idea of being “called to sentences.” What prompted that particular shift, and how is it showing itself?

A: Grief, mostly, I think. My dad died last year & immediately after I knew I would work next on prose that circled around death, & the question of what makes up a life, his & others’. I had already started with an essay on death & illness before my dad died (published in the Queen’s Quarterly in 2022) & I think the next work will build on that. But it’s showing itself slowly, still in all the notes, but hopefully soon I can sit with it a little more.

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

A: I can’t say that I have any models that are pushing me strongly one way or another. I have read many good memoirs, or versions of, over the past years – by Sabrina Orah Mark, Sarah Manguso, Kate Zambreno, Sina Queyras, Kyo Maclear, Anne Boyer, among others. But the hybrid memoir I seem to be angling towards, not so sure, & I am at the beginning of this search. (Definitely want to read Christine’s Toxemia!)

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

A: Laynie Browne’s The Desires of Letters has been very important to me, especially for the work-in-progress, as well as Fred Wah’s Music at the Heart of Thinking. Daphne Marlatt’s What Matters, & many other works of hers. Phil Hall’s Killdeer, and others. And Lisa Robertson, Boat & The Baudelaire Fractal in particular.

TtD supplement #263 : seven questions for Lori Anderson Moseman

For Lori Anderson Moseman’s recent work, see Quietly Between, a 2022 poetry/photography collaboration available from A Viewing Space. Okay and Too Few Words were above/ground press chapbooks in 2023. Her experimental poetry collections include Darn (Delete Press, 2021) and Y (Operating System, 2019). For her earlier prose poems see Full Quiver (Propolis Press, 2015) and Flash Mob (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016).  https://loriandersonmoseman.com

Her poems “Swill-n-swagger,” “Afloat,” “Mid-tide,” “Ripple. Tank.,” “Unremarkable,” “Thread” and “Stick in river’s mouth” appear in the forty-second issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “Swill-n-swagger,” “Afloat,” “Mid-tide,” “Ripple. Tank.,” “Unremarkable,” “Thread” and “Stick in river’s mouth.”

A: Impetus: A flash fiction workshop leader asks for a six-word autobiography. I offer a seven-word fish tale—the opening words of “Swill-n-swagger.” Then I wonder: “why seven seas?” Having moved close to the Pacific Ocean, one of my childhood landscapes, I am once again confronting my fear of wading in, riding the waves. The poem plunges not only into seas I’ve seen but other water/land interfaces floating in my mutating memory bank. Hence the “I lie.” All autobiography is fishy. “Afloat” enacts that process when the unreliable narrator confesses in the poem’s second ending. “Thread”—also a memory piece— tries to puzzle out a connection between humans’ holding objects dear and cougars’ need to prey on deer. “Mid-tide,” and “Stick in the river’s mouth” re-enact recent encounters along the Oregon Coast. “Unremarkable” explores re-enactment but not mine: my partner’s neurological disorder allows them to physically act out dreams in bed. This often poses a danger for me, but so far the threat dissolves as it does in the “Ripple. Tank.”—a poem that withholds the actual bomb threats made repeatedly at a high school across from a YMCA where my limbs swim. All these poems open the first section, “Sound Water,” of my manuscript, Fathom. The rest of that section includes epistolary and ekphratic prose poems that reference writers Barry Lopez and Meredith Stricker, musicians Steve Reich and Maurice Ravel as well as artists Luis Buñuel, Krist Goto, Leah Wilson, and Eva Kmentová, Georgia O’Keefe. We could call these prose endeavors “diary entries,” but they travel in time and place from trauma to bliss. There is Ghanaian dancing at Naropa and mopping up of flood mud in NY’s Southern Tier. On the simplest level, I am composing to meet an assignment I gave myself: write only prose for a year.

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

I got several projects going—each spilling out of each other. A version of Fathom had a fourth section called “Bound Daughter” featuring letters to my ancestors. My goal for Fathom was to hand-sew (stab binding) the “finished” manuscript. I experimented and settled on an 8.5-inch by 8.5-inch format devoting only one page per poem. The prose blocks in “Bound Daughter” were too long to fit on a single page, so now they are their own entity—Reverse Dance. That title is borrowed from a tune for the hurdy-gurdy (vielle à roue) by Andrey Vinograd here. I got turned on to the hurdy-gurdy after seeing Le Vent du Nord here in Eugene. You can hear Nicolas Boulerice here. The opening poem in Reverse Dance addresses a paternal great-great grandmother who (along with her younger sister) came to the U.S. as a “hurdy-gurdy gal.” In 1854, the city of Murrhardt, Germany thought it cheaper to send orphaned teens to San Francisco than to keep them as wards. Previously, I wrote a failed novella about her sister who was murdered by a suitor who then killed himself. For years I’d accepted the account my dad found in an 1857 newspaper, but maybe it is a lie. What if the second gun, the derringer, belonged to my great-great grandmother. “Did you murder your sister’s murderer?” I ask in a letter to g-g-grandma Charlotte.

The second project also springs from a panel book structure I am learning to make. (I just took a fabulous class from Elsi Vassdal Ellis at the Focus of Book Arts festival in Monmouth, Oregon.) The unfolding structure will feature: 1) a heart-shaped Yellowstone agate book was cut-n-polished by my maternal grandfather that my mother bound onto a pounded copper belt buckle she made; 2) tale of my paternal grandmother’s grief after her  brother drown in the Yellowstone River in Glendive; 3) tale of maternal uncle’s deep diving escapades in the same river.

I have been traveling often to Montana to tend to my 89-year old maternal aunt who is losing cognitive function rapidly. To deal with the stress of that, I’ve become obsessed with my paternal grandmother (who died before I was born). When she was 15, her newlywed brother drown in the Yellowstone while bathing. His body, I presume, rode the river. Nonetheless, I keep taking my maternal aunt to see his 1914 grave marker which is a half-hour drive north of Glendive. Why? My aunt never knew him. He’s no relation to her. But she still loves a road trip. She never seems to mind where she goes. She never remembers going. Juxtaposing my “ghost” grandmother’s grief over her brother’s death with my real aunt’s concern about her memory loss is my coping mechanism.

Minding how stories are told keeps me in the present. My aunt: “I told you I fell in the shower the other night. But now (we are in the doctor’s office), I think I fell in my mind. If I had fallen in the shower, I’d have pulled the curtains down. So I must have just fallen in my mind.” The gouge in her ear and the scab on her elbow are ample evidence of a fall, but I love how she uses words as a veil between her worlds. That’s why I’m interested in moments we called “curtains.”

Q: I’m curious about the way you discuss your compositional process, blending elements of music, book binding and hand-stitching. What brought you to your writing being but one element of these larger hybrid structures?

I grew up watching my mother, an outsider artist, making sculptural objects from scavenged junk. Our whole stucco house was her studio/ gallery. Consequently, art play—moving objects in space to sound— is always a part of my literary composition process. The most formative period this kind of hybrid making was when I was earning an MFA in integrated electronic arts at iEAR Studios at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1999-2001).

There, I was in constant collaboration with musicians (Seth Cluett, Warren Burt) and artists (Caz McIntee, Marco Loera). Influential faculty include Tomie Hahn, Curtis Bahn, Branda Miller, Pauline Oliveros.  Silly me, I thought digital integration of image, sound and word would supplant book structures. Financially, I could not keep pace with every-changing software and operating systems. Within five years, my digital work was no longer accessible because it was in “formats” that were obsolete. I turned to making physical zines by hand.

Poets Deborah Poe, Laura Moran and I offered homemade books for “art” displayed at the first of the High Water Salo[o]n chapbooks. I had started a salon series and the press Stockport Flats in the wake of a 500-year flood on the Upper Delaware River. Deborah Poe went on to curate the Handmade/Homemade series (originally through Pace University). I took a bookmaking class with book artist Laurie Snyder in Ithaca, NY. A few years later I worked with Pauline Myers-Rich at her No. 3 Reading Room & Photo Book Works in Beacon, NY. Now, I am meeting and learning from the book artists in the Pacific Northwest through Focus on Book Arts. The physical challenge of working with knives, papers, glues is keeping my cognitive function alive.

Q: Do you tend to see your work as a singular, ongoing project or an overlapping sequence of self-contained works? How do you keep it all straight?

Both. Lately, a pleasant sensation comes over me often as I realize all my work is one long conversation: iteration plus iteration plus iteration plus …. ad nauseum(?).  Maybe this gestalt is a product of aging. Or, maybe I am getting better at recognizing design principles of gestalt (good figure, proximity, similarity, continuation, closure, symmetry). Nope. I doubt it is increased awareness—just more googling. Overlapping sequences are not confusing to me: such imbrication is vital connective tissue. Maybe I can blame my early training in hypertext.

Book publication creates the strongest “end stop” to a writing obsession. Or newness. Suddenly, I fascinated with thermophiles—those colorful mats of microbes that thrive in thermal pools. My partner and I will be visiting Mammoth Hot Springs at Yellowstone next week as we head back to Montana to tend to Aunt Audree. Maybe the thermophiles I meet will spark some new poems that aren’t ghosts of old ones. [Note: we never made it to the hot springs. In the backroads of Idaho, my husband got very ill. He is recovered now. My fascination with thermophiles is on hold.]

“Keeping it straight” is only important when shopping manuscripts. In question #1, I said I chopped on the last section of Fathom because it didn’t fit the hand-binding format I wanted. Well, I just got an encouraging rejection note (“engaging book” and “it came very close”) from Fonograph  Editions’s open genre contest for the full manuscript ( last section included). Now, I will shop both versions. But I will also use the last section (“Bound Daughters” …see question #2) to start a new manuscript Reverse Dance. The failed novella I mentioned in question #2 is now a ten-page poem with two nine-line stanzas because I needed a long poem to make a stick-bound book in last-week’s book arts workshop  (I used a 4-inch sail needle as the spine). Maybe that poem is part of the new manuscript too. Everything is mutable.

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

A: Progress? Do you think about your writing within a narrative frame of progress? I don’t. I’d like to do a better job wrestling/resisting the legacy of settler colonialism and white privilege I was born into. That is a life’s work and extends beyond writing, but I hope my current and future poems help me live as a human who does less and less harm to others.

I have a poet friend who wants to win a Pulitzer Prize, and she might just do that. My goals are smaller: at first, I just wanted to outlive my parents. That’s done. Now, I want to outlive my aunt who I am helping. Pretty soon my focus will shift to my sibling and my partner’s siblings. In these “hospice years,” I make short term goals: learn a handful of artist book structures and write work to populate their pages; explore Oregon’s literary presses; study climate change in the bioregion where I live; develop relationships with non-human beings. As I feel my own cognitive decline increasing, I try to immerse in the present.  

Q: I think of progress in terms of progression or evolution, certainly. I’m not the same writer I was five or ten or twenty years ago. Different experiences and concerns prompt shifts in the ways in which I approach or even consider what it is I do. Do you see yourself and your writing in the same way as you did a decade ago, or further?

A: I tend to think of my writing in cycles or orbits. Patterns repeat themselves—not necessarily with the same frequency or amplitude—but they repeat themselves. When I was a kid, I saw this amazing juggler televised (on the Ed Sullivan show?): he didn’t toss similarly shaped objects of the same heft. Instead of five orange balls, he tossed a ping pong ball with a clothes iron and a shoebox and a wet sponge. Then he’d throw in an axe. Not sure when I started describing my writing as juggling, but I did start warning audiences at readings to expect these ingredients: a slice-of-life-experience + plus a pinch of literary theory + some scientific curiosity + a punch of primal drama + some musicality (mind you, not a melody or chorus) + some word play with a tinge of political rage or ambivalence. The particulars and pyrotechnics of these juggling acts were and continue to be influenced by the techniques and preoccupations of my writing communities as well as my body’s bandwidth. When I was younger, I thought our language experiments could one day permanently break the subject/object relations always already in syntax. When I was younger, I thought our protest poetry and the liberation is brought was part of an ongoing progression/evolution improving the material conditions of all beings. Now I see cycles, impermanence, an ongoing _____. Now, I am not able to just fill in the blanks. My writing practice always involves experimental reading, thought play, art play, sound play, body play, water play, dog play and prayer and conversation and listening and +++++. Discerning the quality of the resulting “product” or its place in some literary evolution is a task for ______.

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

A.  Reading Don Mee Choi, Jordan Able and Paisley Rekdal at the same time is electrifying. This summer, my  immersion is in Mirror Nation, Empty Spaces, and West: A Translation. The political power, the historical reach, the technical range, the image/word interaction, the heart the heart the heart. The book designs. The continuity. I love how each of these “new” collections send me back through each writer’s previous work.

I am also reentering Christian Bök’s The Xenotext, Book 1 in response an essay poet Don Byrd sent me. Byrd meditates on AI generated images he and a bot recently created: “But I’m in a fix. I don’t know what I am seeing, even though I am the initiating agent.” I am still trying to respond to Byrd’s essay and images. My gut instinct was to use Bök’s words to help me do that. Now, The Xenotext is becoming linked (weirdly? aptly?) to U.S. electoral politics. I write some postcards to voters in Georgia then I reread Bök’s reworkings of Virgil’s Georgics, Book IV. Bök’s book prompted me to start chapbook, Whittle Gristle (to date it is 27 pages long.)

Today, my answer to your question about evolution of writing sent me back to this 1993 book: I downloaded a pdf of The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science: Cognitive Science and Human Experience Varela, Thompson and Rosch. I have owned hardbound copies of that book twice before; it is a book I like to share.  I return this tome once a decade not because I better understand Cognitive Science but because I have grown more mindful of my daily life.  The first chapter is entitled, “A Fundamental Circularity.” This time around, I might need to read the updated version to see if/how thinking about being has changed.

A book that comes off the shelf more times than I can count is Pentti Saarikoski’s Trilogy translated by Anselm Hollo. I can always find a page that talks to me. “Today a new bird came to the yard / mute / no need to look for it in the book / the bird of the god of song.”