Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 384

Profile of Rhonda Douglas, with a few questions, at Open Book: Ontario

My profile of Ottawa writer Rhonda Douglas, with a few questions, is now up at Open Book: Ontario. Douglas launches her first collection of short fiction, Welcome to the Circus (Freehand Books, 2015) in Ottawa as part of the Ottawa International Writers Festival on April 28, and again, at Black Squirrel Books on May 8 with Nadine McInnis and Leslie Vryenhoek.

Sarah Mangold, Electrical Theories of Femininity

The Machine Has Not Destroyed the Promise
Around 1800, the costumed nightmare on the sofa. Dead bridesand mountaineers. For me they are grammatical. Frontier cleaners.A circle of tickets this freckled body. But I should be untrue toscience loitering among its wayside flowers. Pulled out and shutup like a telescope. Let us try to tell a story devoid of alphabeticredundancies. Immortality in technical positivity. If motioncaused a disagreement of any kind we are regarding the sameuniverse but have arranged it in different spaces. That is to bethe understanding between us. Shall we set forth?
I’ve long been an admirer of the work of Washington State poet Sarah Mangold, so am thrilled to finally see the publication of her second trade collection, Electrical Theories of Femininity (San Francisco CA: Black Radish Books, 2015). The author of a handful of chapbooks (including works self-published as well as works produced by Little Red Leaves, above/ground press, dusie, Potes & Poets Press and g o n g), her first book, Household Mechanics, was published in 2002 as part of the New Issues Poetry Prize, as selected by C. D. Wright. Electrical Theories of Femininity, much of which saw print in earlier chapbook publications, is constructed as an extended suite of short poems and prose-poems writing “the history of media archeology” to explore the place where human and machine meet. In an interview posted in issue #6 of seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics, she describes the collection as one that “contains three recent chapbooks, plus the shorter poems written around the same time as the longer sequences. There is a bit of connecting sections and selecting what fits and doesn’t fit to make a ‘book.’” She later writes that “For Electrical Theories of Femininity I had three chapbooks to incorporate plus individual poems which led to more movement and structural overhauls compared to the one long poem and several shorter poems in Household Mechanics.”
In poems such as “How Information Lost Its Body,” “Electrical Theories of Femininity,” “Every Man a Signal Tower” and “The First Thing the Typewriter Did Was Provide Evidence of Itself,” Mangold explores how systems are constructed, manipulated and broken down, even as she manages, through collage and accumulation, to move in a number of concurrent directions. Through the collection, the “Feminism” she writes about articulates itself as a series of conflicts, observations and electrical impulses, such as in the opening of “An equally deedy female”: “She gathered up the scattered sheets / a non-geometrical attempt to supply information // about what was far and what was important / bringing it down into life [.]” Throughout the collection, Mangold’s language sparks and flies, collides and flows in poems that fragment the lyric into impossible shapes.
Setting the Landscape in Motion
As soon as the incoming stream of soundsgives the slightest indicationconsider the real act of movingwhen we figure time as a line or circlewhen mechanical gesture takes the placewhen automatic operations are insertedinto the automatic worldvowels are uninterrupted streams of energyand thought is a movementfrom acoustic signal to the combinationof muscular actssaints and pilgrimssewing machines and machine gunsmade their appearance
This is as much an exploration of perspective, authority and various forms of both real and imagined power, composing her mix of fact, language, theory and obvious delight in regards to sound, shape, meaning and collage. As she writes in “I expected pioneers”: “What people forget about the avant- / garde  forwards and backwards. The Pre-Raphaelites wanted / to bring the background forward. The tyranny of perspective / they wanted all views at once [.]” Further on in the collection, she opens the short prose-poem “Mothers Must Always Prove Their Readiness” with this dark bit of information: “Most missing girls are dead girls.” Mangold’s poems might be filled with an unbearable lightness and sense of serious play, yet remain fully aware of, and critique, what women are still forced to endure.
Custodians of a Fractious Country

They are depicted with great scientific suit sleeves

A single faculty, dandelion, don’t get him started

She’s on pasting chunks of text, sewing collars from the wool of country life

Repeated tones:                       white bread   letters   accent                                                philosophical hedgehogs

But for Spencer evolution was going somewhere

His requests to see the surface tailored but unobtrusive opened my jaws rubbed my neck

Riots erupt

The improbably handsome

A welcomed guest

Insincerity in a culture brings to mind the most mysterious numbers

Three volumes of German-language units to say: (blanche your beans, then ice them)

Her parcels supplement mules with shows of sincerity still in combat

He saw American movies fell for them

You nervous     this one is dancing     Be a woman

You’re not striving to think of Darwin but he’s thrown in

My stomach was pages and gaiety

A short interview with N.W. Lea

My short interview with Chaudiere Books author N.W. Lea, author of the imminently-forthcoming second collection, Understander , is now online at Queen Mob's Teahouse.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Amber McMillan

Amber McMillan is a teacher and writer living on Protection Island BC with her partner, daughter and two cats. Her first collection of poems We Can't Ever Do This Again is out this spring with Wolsak and Wynn.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Having made a book at all means that what I wrote will make it into the hands of someone other than me, and that makes me feel grateful. My most recent stab at things is a collection of short fiction that I haven't finished. I don't know how it's different yet because it has a lot of the same feelings as a book of poems. I know it is different, but I can't figure how just yet.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I'm still thinking about the distinctions between those genres and what they might mean, but put simply, poetry generally comes in smaller, more manageable sizes, and for that reason, was a good starting point for me. By contrast, a novel is a pretty daunting undertaking to my mind. I don't know how people write them, actually. It's very impressive to me that they do.

On a more personal level, the thought has crossed my mind that I prefer to write poetry because I don't have the creative or intellectual stamina to commit to anything longer, and that this might point to a character flaw in me that is worth considering.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
The "project" and the writing can come quickly. The slow parts are the periods where doubt comes in and I'm forced to turn over, defend, and sometimes toss out things that can't be pushed through to the other side for any number of reasons. But that's not really about writing; that process happens in all kinds of different areas in a person's life.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
The beginning is usually a line or a few particular words that I then try to bed into some coherent context. I haven't yet been able to begin a poem with the first word or first line and then write it to the end. I don't think I even want to do that. And I usually write a bigger poem then what I end up with. I write a bunch and then cut out a bunch and then it's done. I can't speak much more on the subject because I've only written one book and I'm not 100% sure how that actually happened.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I realized early that I would never make a good criminal because I'm a person that gets very nervous and clumsy when I feel there are too many eyes on me for any reason, like a public reading or a noon-hour bank robbery, for example.

I hope reading in public gets easier for me, and with that, comes with more pleasure than it does now, but I'm not convinced it ever will. On the other hand, I've noticed that there are folks that seem really comfortable reading in public and what they give is so confident and full that I can't help enjoying the experience of watching. These are people with a lot of practice and some natural talent for humour and sincerity, and that is something to see.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
Maybe the current questions are something like: What's important to say? What's worth putting out there? Why? Then what?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
It's just one way to talk about things. One way among lots and lots of ways. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I think it's essential because everyone needs an editor, but I also think it can be difficult. But so what. Difficult is good too.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
For all its simplicity, "People will always do what they want to do" has turned out to be a very complicated truth, and has given me understanding into many of my life's frustrations. That one's from my mum.

Also, "Just be a nice person." - The Flaming Lips

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I don't have a routine. A typical day is about getting my kid ready for school, going to and from work, grocery shopping, sweeping, feeding the cats, paying bills, and sourcing out ways to get time to myself. 

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Alcohol, insomnia, vulnerability, quiet and boredom.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Wood stain and varnish. My Opa was a carpenter and had a furniture store in London, ON where he built chairs, tables, etc. He also used the store to show off the unfinished Mennonite furniture he would drive for hours to pick up in his truck. My cousins and I spent a lot of our weekend and after school hours in the furniture store because it was a family-run business and all of our parents worked there. Needless to say, Opa's workshop at the back of the store, the store itself, and the inside of his truck, all smelled like wood shavings, wood stain, and varnish. Even years later, when I no longer went to that store anymore, those smells were always around: on my family's clothes, in the garage, in Opa's second or third workshop that he kept in my mum's backyard. Just all my life.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
My ordinary influence is to address my own troubles by writing them out and trying to solve some menacing, nagging question. So, in that way, nature or music or science can be rigged up to serve any manner of metaphor to achieve that solution. Or to appear to solve. Or to come close to solving.
David W. McFadden also said, "Neither apologize nor forgive," which helps too.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I'm probably in the minority here, but reading criticism at university was the single most important reading I've done. I'm talking about scholarly essays by hardcore academics and theorists. Then later as an instructor, re-reading and discussing that criticism with my students doubled its importance. That kind of reading taught me how to organize my thinking in ways I have leaned on ever since.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I just really want to get over my fear of dogs. It's so inconvenient and makes me feel like such a weirdo.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Since I was a teenager, I wanted to be a doctor. I didn't have the grades though and so my parents encouraged me to go to art school.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I tried a couple of other things first like being in bands and studying drawing in college. These decisions brought good things and I don't regret them, but there's something unobtrusive and civil about writing poems that I couldn't achieve in my earlier attempts at art.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
So, I live with a man who had written a book before I met him. This book contained a life story close to his own. When it was published, I didn't read it and then I didn't read it for a year after it was published. The next year I read it and it was the last great book I read; Nathaniel G. Moore's Savage 1986-2011, which has since won the ReLit Award in the category of fiction, so I guess I'm not the only one who thought it was great.

19 - What are you currently working on?
A collection of stories about living on Protection Island, BC where I've just spent a year. This looks like non-fiction/fiction/poetry and it's hard to do. I've had to face and tread through a lot of questions about the ethics, integrity, goals for, and hidden motivations of having chosen to write this.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Boca Raton: trilogy,

Our third annual Boca Raton visit, at father-in-law’s condo. We spent a week in sunny Florida, arriving in April instead of our usual February [see last year’s reports parts one and two, and the year prior here, as well as a link to the recent chapbook that appeared with poems composed during that first visit], given some of Christine’s recent work-stuffs. Easter in Florida was interesting, although it flummoxed some of the plans that mother-in-law and dear sister might have had for us (Easter lunch/dinner), heading here on the immediate heels of Washington D.C. [see that report here]. Given that Washington was a work-trip, we of course had to return home before flying out again the following day. By the time we arrived on the Florida ground, I was so done with airplanes.

Upon arriving, we spent a few days with father-in-law and his wife, Teri, doing things such as going to lunch on the beach, going to the beach, and simply lounging about. We even found a park with a carousel [a park that, once Rose is a bit bigger, I imagine we’ll be spending plenty more time at]. Rose enjoyed the carousel and the running, the running, the running. She marvelled at the other children, as she does (somewhat confused and intrigued by them). And the running.
I poked at some poems, read some of the books [top photo: Susan Howe's Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974-1979] picked up on our Washington trip (among others), and generally tried not to move around too much. Worn out after an extended period of intense work (see my thirty Jacket2 commentaries, for example) and rather intense few days in Washington (again, see here). Once home, I plan to hit the ground running on poems and fiction and possibly some other schemes, both new and old, but for now, I am deliberately moving at a rather slow speed.
I move through Susan Howe, and Damian Rogers' second poetry collection. I had the wee lass colour upon a variety of postcards with crayon, to send to folk back home. Including a couple to big sister Kate.
We spent time on the beach. Rose, with her beach toys. Me, with my book(s).
Over the past week-plus, Rose was completely thrown off her nap and sleep schedule. Had a meltdown through the Ottawa airport coming here (which really never happens). Full-blown meltdown. At least they shoved us through security super-fast (an unexpected benefit, I suppose). Washington was what it was, so attempting to get her at least closer to her proper schedule while we’re down here. Hoping. Nearing the end of the week, we were starting to return to almost-normal. A couple of wee meltdowns. Hoping we can calm her within a day or so of home.
And then, of course, on Tuesday, we drove down into the bowels of Disneything.
I could have lived without Disneything, and had to be convinced. We spent the entire day there on Wednesday, with the morning at the Magic Kingdom and the afternoon into the evening at Epcot, and I enjoyed it far more than expected. Rose, of course, loved it; she eventually managed to sleep in her stroller, but didn't really let us sit down at all. At all. After ten hours of walking and wandering, rides, feeling overloaded by park and/or attempts to wander through gift shops, we were bone-tired. Sore upon sore.
Rose, who slept during the period between Magic Kingdom and Epcot.
The "Small World" ride was rather iconic, admittedly (I'm one of those who believes it was all 'better before Walt died,' and have good associations with some of the older films, productions, etcetera). I may be aware of some of the newer characters, but could really care less. 

The gift shop overwhelmed. Every time I entered one, I felt as though I was beginning to shut down. Too much, too much, too much.
Don Quixote in the "Small World" ride, tilting. Ever tilting.
I saw Quixote references in Washington the week prior, also. Is this a push that I should be working to re-enter that novel-in-progress? Finally? I admired the efficiencies of the Disney landscape. The workmanship and the cleanliness. They must employ a million billion people.
I felt overwhelmed by the range and the scope of their reach. Too much, too much. An American version of the city-state, much like the Vatican. Too much.
We wandered the park and rode the monorail (singing, "monorail. monorail. monorail..."). We ignored the characters, given that Rose doesn't know who any of them are anyway. She was happy to run, and sit on the occasional ride. She enjoyed eating. She enjoyed looking at the fish in the "Finding Nemo" ride. 
She enjoyed running. Running. Running.
And in the German Pavillion, where Christine had booked us dinner: misreading the menu and discovering we'd ordered MASSIVE MAGICAL BEERS. The food was incredible, as was the space and the music. I could have ignored the rest, and simply spent the day there.
Back, to hotel: where we almost immediately crashed. Removed footwear as in a cartoon, peeling back layers like a banana, hot steam rising from our sore, red toes and feet. Wooo-ooooo-ooooo-ooooshhhh.








  Three-plus hour drive each way from the condo. Two nights. Rose and Christine some time in the kid-pool before we got into the car. Aiming the drive each way to her afternoon nap (which mostly worked).
Thursday night, upon home, hosting Mark Scroggins and his lovely family for dinner. Given we'd been hosted by them the past two years, we only figured it fair we'd offer our turn. And apparently not everyone else is at AWP (as facebook has suggested). Looking forward to this new critical book he's got forthcoming soon, which I recall him discussing last year.
Our final two days: as little as possible. Sleeping, occasional walks, quietly existing in the condo, aiming to get the wee babe back to some kind of schedule. Slow,

slow, so very slow.

And to Ottawa: to hit the ground running, perhaps. See about re-entering some of those fiction projects...

Peter Culley (1958-2015)

Sad to hear that Nanaimo, British Columbia poet Peter Culley has died, passing away (according to Kim Goldberg) "in his sleep early Friday morning." Condolences to his family and friends.

According to his EPC Page: "Peter Culley was born in 1958 and grew up on RCAF bases in Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Scotland & finally Nanaimo, British Columbia, where he has (mostly) lived since 1972.  His poetry & writings on visual art have been appearing for three decades in a variety of venues." He was the author of, most recently, the poetry titles Hammertown (New Star Books, 2003), The Age of Briggs and Stratton (New Star Books, 2008) and Parkway (New Star Books, 2013). See my review of Parkway, in which I attempt to provide a larger context for his "Hammertown" project, here. The Capilano Review has already posted a small note on their website on his death.

Here is a link to a post on Culley's work by Paul Nelson (where the photo of Culley was taken), and another post by Lisa Robertson from 2013, posted at Lemonhound.

As critic Steve Evans posted yesterday on Facebook:

My thoughts are with Rod Smith, Carla Billitteri, Ben Friedlander, Lee Ann Brown, and all the other FB friends who, like Jennifer and I, are absorbing the news and mourning the loss of the incomparable Peter Culley.

Peter read in the UMaine New Writing Series in the fall of 2005 (with David Perry, and while his great friend since High School, Kevin Davies, was doing his MA here). Just a few summers ago, he returned for our 1980s conference, where he gave a talk about "leisure poetry" (his own take on the poetics of the right-to-laziness) and generally enlivened things with his penetrating, kind, and humorous commentary. I'll miss his presence here on FB—the amazing photographs, the impeccable tips on what to watch next on TCM. Sigh.

Poetry Month via Chaudiere Books!

Over at the Chaudiere Books blog, we're celebrating National Poetry Month with new poems every second day for the entire month of April! Watch for new work by Chaudiere authors and friends alike, including Janice Tokar, Helen Hajnoczky, Joe Blades, Kayla Czaga, Hugh Thomas, Sarah Mangold, Pearl Pirie, Stan Rogal, Lea Graham and derek beaulieu, among others.

And of course, watch for new spring titles by N.W. Lea and William Hawkins!

Nikki Sheppy: three new poems, Jacket2

My 30th and final January-March 'commentary,' "Nikki Sheppy: three new poems," is now up at Jacket2.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Randall Potts

Randall Potts is the author of Trickster , published in 2014 by the University of Iowa Press, Kuhl House poetry series. His previous collection, Collision Center was published by O Books in 1994. A chapbook, Recant: (A Revision) was published by Leave Books in 1994.

His poems have appeared in: American Poetry Review, the Antioch Review, Canary, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Five Fingers Review, Iowa Review, Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, O/4 Subliminal Time, O•blek, Poetry Flash, The West Marin Review, Unsplendid and other periodicals.

He received an MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa and has taught creative writing at the University of San Francisco and California College of the Arts. He lives in Berkeley, California.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My new book, Trickster is very different from my first book, Collision Center. As Andrei Tarkovsky wrote, “The greatest thing is to be free in your work.” Trickster depends on clarity, simplicity and song. It’s a poem cycle intended to be read from beginning to end like a novel rather than as a traditional collection of poems. It engages with the world as a place where all things are equal: “a blade of grass/equal to the suffering/of a lifetime.” And also “where a fly with one wing, keeps/tipping over in the grass, where/the ants will have him.”

My first book, Collision Center and the chapbook “Recant (A Revision),” were both published in 1994 and were self-conscious excursions into syntax, politics and collage-based writing at the limit of the lyric. After Collision Center was published, I wanted to write about different experiences that required a different kind of process to activate and represent. The experience in my collage-based process existed only at the moment of composition. I wanted to be able to capture experience as something active in my life, not just in my head at one specific moment.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I was attracted to poetry because of its speed, immediacy and risk—I still am. John Ashbery’s Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror and John Berryman’s Dream Songs were important gateways to writing for me. I’ve always read haiku to help me distill language. Paradoxically, I probably read less poetry than any other genre because I like to spend time with a poet and read their work exclusively.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I write slowly. I spend most of my time gathering material and I delay writing a first draft as long as possible. I believe not writing or delaying writing is a vital part of my writing process. When I begin do to compose drafts of poems, I work quickly, usually in longhand in a notebook or on loose notes, revising printed drafts in pen. Inevitably, every poem is unique; some take shape quickly, others become shape shifters.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I work poem-by-poem. I have a general idea about the subject of various groups of poems, but the overall narrative arc of a book usually comes last. Even with Trickster, which is structured like a novel, the narrative arc was one of the last elements of the book to take shape.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I recently read with poet Malachi Black and we collaborated on an unconventional reading format. Instead of each reading for a block of 20 minutes, we took turns reading. We each read sets of poems; each set got longer and we alternated sets. The reading developed its own momentum as we shifted voices and became a song of its own. I think the normal reading format is long and monotonous. Poetry needs a better delivery system—I think film is a better medium for spoken poetry than live readings.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
For me, poetry inevitably raises questions about human nature and conscience. As an art practice, I think poetry is an ongoing conversation among human beings about the nature of being human. At this particular moment, we’re witnessing the collapse of the human world, so it’s even more urgent that we understand human potential and how we might change the way we live. As Joseph Beuys said, “…the problem is to understand that man is first a being who needs nourishment for his spiritual needs, and that if he could cultivate and train his primary nature, this spiritual nature, he could develop whole other energies.”

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I experience being a writer as living within the practice of writing.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Mark Levine was my editor at the University of Iowa Press for Trickster and he was phenomenal—he rigorously engaged with the poems and the arc of the book. I’ve never worked with an editor who could collaborate in such a seamless way and I found it exhilarating. The conversation that developed between us over several months of editorial work was a huge gift to me and to the book. 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“Don’t be a Writer, just write.” Anonymously, spray-painted down the hallway of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in 1987.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I don’t have a set routine for writing. I write short notes and work on revising drafts whenever I can. To compose drafts of poems, I need long uninterrupted blocks of time, so I work when it’s quiet enough to work.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I constantly watch film—
As I wrote Trickster, I reread Lowell, Berryman (the entire Dream Songs ), Roethke, Plath (Plath’s original version of Arial) and later Larkin. I also discovered the poetry and essays of Robert Bringhurst. I read Nijinsky’s diaries, and numerous non-fiction books on ecology, ethnographic records published by the Smithsonian in the early 20th century documenting Native American and First People’s oral traditions and Paul Radin’s translation of the Winnebago trickster cycle Trickster, including his field notes held by the American Philosophical Society library in Philadelphia.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Cat. I can’t describe the scent, because I don’t consciously smell it, it simply registers.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Art often finds its way into my poems. The practice of making art is a theme that runs through Trickster. The last section is a single poem that extends fragmentary writing in Joseph Cornell’s files and diaries into complete lyrics. Another poem, “Fable” was written to accompany an exhibit by Esther Traugot. The poem “Hare” alludes to a performance by Joseph Beuys. “Metamorphosis” references a Picasso exhibit in San Francisco. At its best, art is an act of conscience that can be transformative and poetry can extend and inhabit that experience.

I experience the “natural world” as the Real; it’s the single most important and unifying force in my work. It’s also become a force of extinction we’ve activated, Nature is no longer passive or consistent, but instead has become an overwhelming counter-force to human activity. The way we’ve altered our relationship to Nature has huge implications for the lyric, which has traditionally seen Nature as a consistent cyclical activity rather than as a living being. We need to renew and heal our relationship with Nature by recognizing flaws in our own human nature. Or to put it another way, as Laszlo Krasznahorkai says, “Evil is not some kind of natural force that continually embodies itself in man...it doesn’t even exist independently of man.”

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Right now, I’m immersed in the prose of Clarice Lispector and Laszlo Krasnahorkai.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’d like to live someplace sustainable, remote and wild.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I’d like to make films. 

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I don’t question my desire to write; I can’t stop writing, so I simply accept it. I’ve come to understand the practice of writing as the way I move through the world.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Seiobo There Below, by Lazslo Krasznahorkai, is a masterpiece.

I spent 2014 watching an astonishing retrospective of
Less recently, The Turin Horse by Bela Tarr (supposedly his last film) and Melancholia and Antichrist by Lars von Trier influenced the tone of some of the last poems I wrote for Trickster.

19 - What are you currently working on?
I’m working on a series of prose poems. Trickster was built on the line, so I’m trying to clear my head by writing sentences before I inevitably return to the line.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Touch the Donkey supplement: new interviews with Rogal, Smith, Sheppy, Kaschock, Downe, Jarnot, Turnbull + Barwin,

Anticipating the release next week of the fifth issue of Touch the Donkey (a small poetry journal), why not check out the interviews that have appeared over the past few weeks with contributors to the fourth issue: Stan Rogal, Jessica Smith, Nikki Sheppy, Kirsten Kaschock, Lise Downe, Lisa Jarnot, Chris Turnbull and Gary Barwin.

Interviews with contributors to the first three issues, as well, remain online: Susan Briante, derek beaulieu, Megan Kaminski, Roland Prevost, Emily Ursuliak, j/j hastain, Catherine Wagner, Susanne Dyckman, Susan Holbrook, Julie Carr, David Peter Clark, Pearl Pirie, Eric Baus, Pattie McCarthy, Camille Martin and Gil McElroy.

The forthcoming fifth issue features new writing by: Edward Smallfield, Rob Manery, Elizabeth Robinson, lary timewell, nathan dueck, Paige Taggart, ryan fitzpatrick and Christine McNair. And, once the new issue appears, watch the blog over the subsequent weeks and months for interviews with a variety of the issue's contributors!

And of course, copies of the first four issues are still very much available. Why not subscribe?

We even have our own Facebook group. How magical is that?