TtD supplement #304 : seven questions for Steven Ross Smith

Steven Ross Smith enjoys muddling with words and books in Victoria, BC. His writing, swayed by experimenters in early Toronto days, juxtaposes disparate threads, as in his seven-book poetic series Fluttertongue. His decades-long westward migration through Canada’s landscapes implanted continuing amazement and many poetic influences. His fourteenth book is Glimmer: Short Fictions, from Radiant Press, 2022. Most recently, The Green Rose, a chapbook collaboration with Phil Hall appeared in 2024. Smith was Banff Poet Laureate, 2018-21. He is currently absorbed in a rappy-spoken-word album project, as SloLo Smithy, streaming on BandCamp. Also, he’s at: fluttertongue.ca and stevenrosssmith@me.com

An excerpt from his Petal & Fracture, section “sp/lt nds” appears in the fiftieth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about Petal & Fracture, section “sp/lt nds.”

A: Petal & Fracture. This three-part work captures three longish poems, wherein the structures and content of each vary considerably. Each has allowed me to explore language and ideas beyond the edge of my zone of familiarity. I like to think of the works as poetically adventurous. I’m playing with meaning and expectation, personal and political musings, references and prompts, poetic form and structure. These notions seem to be consistent through my writing career of over five decades, though I try to make each visitation go – for me – through a new door. My approach to language as material is heavily influenced by associations in my formative years with other ‘experimenters’ including bpNichol, Fred Wah, and Robert Kroetsch; and by reading such as e.e. cummings, Lyn Hejinian, Roland Barthes, and others; and by the historical movements of Dada and Surrealism; and finally, by movement and sound. In Petal & Fracture I have initiated each section using different starting points and modes. The poems experiment: with verbal and syllabic fracture, play, and meaning; with line and phrase structure; with logic and disjunction; with the concept of verse; with the authorial “I”; and with rhythms that flow and bump. 

The selections submitted to Donkey are from section ii, “sp/lt nds”, which explores, among other things, the fragmentation and breakdown of language, of words and phrases in a leaping kind of way, while still holding or suggesting some form of ‘meaning' or association, coherence within incoherence – how they could link or disrupt, and create a jagged rhythm. It is meant to trouble the reading process, while inviting the reader into a form of self-created – or at least collaborative – play. That’s my summarizing glimpse, though a reader might see other windows.

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

A: It’s hard to say how this work – a couple of years old now – compares to current work. The poems from Petal & Fracture that we’ve selected here, for a ride with the Donkey, seem to reflect several of the elements that run through my work, regardless of the poetic forms and textures I explore – language’s materiality, nature, music, concerns of the day. My attention and my mind seem not to be single-focussed, but rather, carry simultaneity. Otherwise, and regardless of content and form, I find, as I think I’ve said, I write by ear, with attention to the sounds and rhythms of language. Those are what propel me into content (such as it is.) I like mistake and thought’s errant capacities, and I lean to irregularity and a mode of improvisation as compositional drivers. These bents seem to have been with me in some form or other since my start as a poet. My newer work seems to be more prosaic, documentary – I call it “un-diaristic” – but it seeks to hold compositional elements mentioned above.

Q: How do you see this work in relation to, say, the multi-book Fluttertongue? There’s a similar element of the ‘catch-all’ to what I’ve seen of the Petal & Fracture manuscript. Do you see this as an extension to Fluttertongue, or entirely separate? How does one work on something so expansive, and then attempt to move beyond it?

A: Each of the seven Fluttertongue books has a guiding concept or series of prompts – constraints or frames – though with more or less latitude depending on my intentions/unintentions. That work was, yes, expansive, but as said, there were some operative nodes that ‘held’ each individual book. I stopped the series and its uber-title at the 7th book, so I could stop being so self-conscious as I moved along. And I have an affinity with the number ‘7’. So, I made that a punctuation point. A full stop. I wanted new, ‘open’ explorations. I wanted to be – in a newer or different way – more open to ‘receive’. 

I’d not thought of my work as “catch-all”, but I can see how that term might fit. To me “P&F” is separate from the ‘flutters’, but might still be a net; however, I’m not working with pre-set constraints or forms – such evolve now as my ‘pen/mind’ moves. Emanations: Fluttertongue 6 was already moving in that direction. 

Yes, moving beyond one kind of expanse into another is …. expansive? …. unnerving…? How to gain confidence in the work that is unfamiliar? Of course, that’s always a question with new work.

But, back when Fluttertongue began it was a response to a flash in which I felt that all my poems were just one poem, and that ‘one’ poem just intermingled with my previous work, and with all the other poets’ poems drifting in the poetry river, as I thought of it. So, in that sense, I’m just continuing my ‘one poem’ …and rivers are dynamic, absorbent, and constantly changing, but are still water.

Sometimes I feel I’m writing un-poems. But I flow and flutter on.
 
Q: With numerous published collections, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work heading?

A: Well, I half answered this in my previous comments, but to elaborate: Who knows? Is it progress or just change? Is it wheel-spinning? Where do I head? … into the unknown. I’m always starting again. To quote from Fluttertongue Book 3: disarray: 

“In the un is where to begin. I beg un.”

Q: I’m curious: have you any models for the kinds of work you’ve been exploring? Are there any particular writers or works at the back of your head as you write?

A: I don’t have any ‘hard’ models, those to imitate in the forms and flows my poems take (I’m not into imitation anyway), but there are writers, always hovering in my creative and compositional sphere – should I say ‘in my head’ – who inspire and challenge me as I write. I’m thinking of bpNichol who boldly explored modes within and without poetic convention, and who, in friendship and poetry, mentored me. I think of e. e. cummings, (or is he E. E.?) whose shapes and breaks sit in my eye. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sonics and rhythms ring in my ear. Paul Celan’s intentional play with opacity, with ambiguity, gives me the courage to work in, around, and outside clarity. Fred Wah’s, and Gerald L. Brun’s, and jazz musicians’ notions of improvisation push me. And there are all the other writers I admire – Marlatt, Kroetsch, Barthes, Hejinian, Lilburn, Willis – whose narratively adventurous nodes beckon me. Then there’s Dada, sound poetry, John Cage, and Blues. I could go on. But a final tip of my flat cap to Phil Hall, to the influence of his distinctive work, to our friendship over a stretch of time, and to our recent collaborations over the past four years, which have refreshed and re-set me in my poetic explorations.

Q: Had you attempted collaboration prior to that project with Phil Hall? Obviously, you’d worked with Richard Truhlar, Michael Dean, and David Penhale as part of Owen Sound (1975-1984), although that was some time ago. How do you approach collaborative work in terms of your larger writing process? Is it a way to help expand muscles once you return to your own solo works, or is it something else, something other? Were there any surprises while working this project with Hall?

A: My work with Owen Sound, in creating collaborative performance compositions for almost ten years (1975-85), taught me about collaboration – how one contributes, accepts, yields, and weaves the work of several minds. That has stuck with me and been further revealed through several projects: in “DUCT” with five musicians; with Hilary Clark and Betsy Rosenwald (Pliny’s Knickers, JackPine Press); with Ted Landrum, Jennifer Still, Colin Smith, (Table for Four, Jackpine Press). I love to collaborate – it pushes me beyond my own ego. And in most cases the authorial “I” is given up as lines or verses, or spoken elements become communal, not individual. It creates not a bounce back and forth, but a blend. In fact, even if I’m going solo, I’m collaborating, in a sense, with all the other voices in the poetry air – whether I'm aware or not.

To me, the collaborative work and solo work are almost seamless – there might be differentiating concepts or constraints or processes in each mode, but all the acts/actions draw on and develop my poetic and compositional modes. Sometimes a collaboration will draw me into a method – phrasing, subject, structure – I might not have probed otherwise. And in collaboration I bring some solo moves into the pool, but they will likely be shifted too. As for my poetic muscles – yes, stretching and flexing in response to another’s ‘prodding’ has expanded my palette, giving me more to draw on as I set down my arrangements of the alphabet.

Phil Hall and I have, for a long time, been on what I might call a simpatico wavelength, even though our works have been quite different. We met in Toronto in the ‘70s, or maybe the early ‘80s. We’d had off and on contact over the years, but I always kept an eye on his work, and he, I understand, knew of mine. A few years ago – perhaps a decade back – I can’t recall exactly what prompted it – I suggested the idea of collaboration. We finally began such in 2023 when we were each in separate parts of Costa Rica. We initiated a kind of call and response creation over the mountains and jungle canopy by email. We’ve rolled along on a couple of projects since. 

Surprises … I think they came with every line. My method in that Coast Rican collab, in responding to Phil’s lines, was to act quickly on receiving his email, to capture my ‘thoughts’ suggested by his lines, without overthinking or even striving for continuity. I reacted quickly, intuitively, keying in my responses, with the censor turned off, kind of like quick-sketch. Then there would be some refinement. The surprises were the unpredictable notions and words, references and lines that popped in the poetry popper. The result was The Green Rose which you, rob, published with above/ground in an extended chapbook. In it, one fun thing is that no lines are attributed to their creator. The work stands; our names are on it; but there is no individual ‘claim’. You could say the work is by Steven Phil Ross Hall Smith.

Phil’s friendship has become indispensable to me and my poetic gestures nowadays. Our collaboration renewed, reset, propelled, and lifted my poetic impulse from a trough. Our colleagueship expresses community, where poets labour together in their often thankless role. Collaborations also show me there is room for fun – whether light or dark, punning or singing, leaping or following, serious or not, sensible or non. I like a bit of fun.

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

A: I’ve already cited many of the writers I read and return to, but here’s a re-visit. Some years ago, to get back on track, I read eagerly through Jerome Rothenberg’s huge multi-volume anthology Poems for the Millennium. This may be my most-returned-to collection, though I reread Celan a lot too. I read PftM to discover and remind me of the scope of possibilities that can be called poetry. It is an astounding and enlightening gathering, and it swings the poetry door wide open. Otherwise, and to find energy, I rely on reading – along with ‘older’ work by writers noted already – new work I stumble upon – often as a reviewer. (I have a piece in the Saskatchewan Writers Guild’s upcoming Freelance issue called “The Riches and Challenges of Reviewing“.) Among the interesting new books I’ve read and written about (often for British Columbia Review) are Eimear Laffan’s (about)ness, Neil Surkan’s Empties, Kaie Kellough’s Interpositions, Jan Zwicky’s Say It, Michael V. Smith’s Soundtrack, the Costa Rican poet Luis Chavez’ Equestrian Monuments, David Martin’s nightstead, and Tim Lilburn’s Numinous Seditions. I’ve read a lot of Lilburn. I’ve mentioned Phil Hall. These writers and books, and many others, for me, expand the scope of poetry in new and different ways, exploring and exploding its potential. They open my own thinking about poetry. 

Most recently I’ve been thinking about poetry as a community – a community extant and forming since the first utterances, even those not called poetry, and now identified as such, and that have taken many shapes that in themselves define “poetry.” It embraces and forms one of the oldest human communities linked through time. It has unfurled myriad expressions, textures, modes, emotions, concepts, representations, and activities. I wish I could engage in the impossible act of reading, seeing, or hearing it all. This community’s creations – ancient, old, younger, and current – all offer and enable discovery. Such are essential nutrients for my own poetic effort, my own engagement and contribution to and within the community that I have somehow found myself a part of. Therein is my re-energization. 

TtD supplement #303 : seven questions for Elena Zhang

Elena Zhang is a Chinese American writer and mother living in Chicago. Her work can be found in HAD, The Citron Review, and X-R-A-Y, among other publications. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, and was selected for Best Microfiction 2024, 2025, and 2026.

Her poems “The Pantry,” “Neighbors” and “Just Like in the Movies” appear in the fiftieth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “The Pantry,” “Neighbors” and “Just Like in the Movies.”

A: “The Pantry” is part of a chapbook manuscript I’m working on inspired by fairytales. It actually started as a longer prose poem that I wasn’t very happy with, but as I whittled it down more and more, it started to shape itself into something more satisfying. 

Both “Neighbors” and “Just Like in the Movies” came about after I learned about the nonet form, which really appealed to me in its brevity. “Neighbors” is inspired by a Chinese folk tale, while “Just Like in the Movies” began as more of a prayer.

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

A: When I wrote these poems, I had mostly just been writing prose poems and microfiction, so it was the first time I was experimenting with line breaks of any kind. It was also the first (and only) time I tried out a formal poetic form in the nonet. Since then, I’ve become a little bit more comfortable with lined poetry, although I still feel most at home with the prose poem.

Q: What is it about the form of the prose poem that appeals? What do you feel the form allows that might not be otherwise possible?

A: I think it’s all about expectation. When you see a chunk of prose, you go in expecting a story, some sort of straightforward narrative. But within a prose poem, you’re kind of allowed to upend that expectation, to insert surreal imagery, to not necessarily have a story arc or anything really that makes sense, and it just takes the reader onto a strange journey that might feel disorienting, that might make the reader want to read the poem over again in a new light. That kind of unsettling feeling that might evoke surprising and hidden emotions is what I aim for, because it’s the kind of journey that I go on myself when I write the poem.

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

A: I think Ben Niespodziany’s writing has been a huge influence on mine, in terms of introducing me to the absurd and surreal in very short forms, so I always like to go back and read his work to see what is possible. And then Sarah J. Sloat’s erasure poems have also been very inspiring to me, in terms of rhythm and imagery packaged into a tiny, tiny poem.

Q: At what point do you see your work meeting both prose poetry and microfiction? Is there a difference in the way you approach or even attempt to place a piece? Is the difference context, beyond any elements of form?

A: Ah, it’s always been tricky for me to differentiate between prose poetry and microfiction. In the very beginning when I was first starting out, I would read a ton of examples of both and try to figure out what made editors/writers categorize them into each genre, and I could never come up with a clear answer. Some micros read more like a poem, and some poems read more like a micro. There are times when I am trying to write one or the other, and for micros I might try to have a specific character we follow throughout, whereas for a prose poem I can just run with disparate ideas and images. But more often than not, it’s really just a whim whether I submit my writing as a micro or prose poem. I kind of leave that up to the reader to decide.

Q: With two published chapbooks, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work heading?

A: Working on those chapbooks was such a fun and eye-opening experience for me. It pushed me to write around one central theme or character, to try and extend a somewhat loose narrative arc over a series of poems. As much as I like writing standalone poems, I really enjoyed focusing on a certain image, and just reiterating on that over and over again in different ways. So I definitely would like to write more micro-chapbooks, or maybe even a full-length chapbook, in the future. The problem is that it takes a long time to come up with a theme I’d want to stay with for a while. I kind of just have to sit with what I’m writing until I’m struck with an urge to continue exploring a character or image further.

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

A: At the risk of sounding cliche, I think about David Lynch’s work a lot. I don't necessarily rewatch his films very often, as they’re often a bit hard to stomach, but I do think about his philosophy and approach to art, and the few images of his films that stick with me, in terms of dreaminess, atmosphere, and internal logic that is obscure to the audience but is very clear to the creator. Relatedly, I think about the fairy tale form a lot, and how fantastical elements are rarely explained and are simply accepted, and how the violent can occur with such nonchalance, and how archetypes function to pull in the reader. 

Recently, I find myself weirdly drawn to horror films. I’m a huge scaredy-cat, so I’m not delving into the hardcore stuff, but I feel such a connection to the visceral, inexplicable, and surprising elements that can come from horror movies. 

And finally, when I’m feeling really stuck, I always tend to return to Jon Boisvert’s collection BORN, as his prose poems always tend to strike the exact chord of what I want to achieve with my writing.

Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal] : FIFTIETH ISSUE,

The FIFTIETH ISSUE is now available, with new poems by David Miller, Jason Heroux, Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, Laura Farina, Elena Zhang, Daphne Marlatt, Eve Luckring and Steven Ross Smith.

Eight dollars (includes shipping). Until now, this was the only way to get juice from an orange.

TtD supplement #302 : six questions for Salem Paige

Salem Paige is a poet and multidisciplinary artist based on traditional Coast Salish territory (so-called Vancouver, British Columbia). Salem holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts from the University of Ottawa with a Major in Communications. Their works revolve around the exploration of identity and discomfort, and can be found in their debut collection of poetry The Third Self (2023, Sunday Mornings at the River Press) and their chapbooks miraculous dead things (above/ground press, 2025), evolution artificialis (2025, Anstruther Press) and to grow roots (2023, bottlecap press), as well as in several dozen literary journals and magazines. They have previously been twice nominated for Best of the Net, shortlisted for the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize and the Bridport Poetry Prize, and longlisted for the ROOM Poetry Prize. More on Salem can be found at salempaige.com or @corpseofapoet on the Internet.   

Their poems “same fish, bigger pond,” “roadkill,” “exhale,” “wildfire,” “how to write a poem about your body” appear in the forty-ninth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “same fish, bigger pond,” “roadkill,” “exhale,” “wildfire,” “how to write a poem about your body.”

A: I wrote "same fish, bigger pond" after moving from Ottawa to Vancouver, which was my first major move as an adult. It made me realize how capable I am, and how it doesn't matter where I live as long as I am growing, and becoming something better than I was yesterday.

"roadkill" was written not about a singular person but moreso a type of person I believe we have all encountered: the type of person who makes everything about themselves, paints themselves as the victim, blames all of their problems on other people or circumstances, and always has an excuse for their bad behaviour. 

"exhale" is about my long-distance partner, and the feeling of being reunited after time apart. of how some people make you feel so complete that being without them is like being without air.

"wildfire" was written at the beginning of a relationship when everything is fast and exciting, and how while it can be thrilling to have something so new and bright, there is also an underlying fear of what happens when things are no longer shiny and new. what happens when the fire burns out?

"how to write a poem about your body" feels fairly self-explanatory. I was writing about my partner in the early stages of our relationship, and wanted to explain how I saw her: the strength, the comfort, the mystery, the way she is so deserving but so unconvinced of it. this poem was the result.

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

A: a lot of these poems are about change and growth and discovery, which is a lot of what I've been writing lately. with that said, I also have been writing quite a bit of speculative future-based poems, within the same world as my chapbook evolution artificialis. those poems are much more narrative than the ones in this issue, which are a lot more personal and connected to my life at the moment.

Q: What has been the process of putting together a manuscript? Is the process occurring naturally, or have you found some difficulty finding a shape to the poems? Does it feel different than putting together a chapbook?

A: my collections all occur naturally – I write poems as they come to me and later discover throughlines either in theme or style or voice or often several things at once. sometimes there are clear gaps and I find I really need to stretch myself to fill them but I absolutely love the creative challenge. chapbooks have been far easier because I tend to assemble the poems that are in conversation and then trim the fat so to speak, leaving only the poems that say exactly what I intend to with the collection. I find it a lot easier to create in excess and then whittle down than setting a goal and building up to it.

Q: Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? 

A: I’d been interested in writing more narrative speculative poetry but hadn’t quite found it executed in a way that spoke to me until I read my friend Mahaila Smith's collection Seed Beetle. The way they built a narrative universe so clearly through a variety of perspectives has helped drive the direction my own collection is taking. 

I also recently published a piece inspired by bill bissett’s work. I love the way he plays with form and style and punctuation.

Q: With a full-length collection and a couple of chapbooks, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work heading?

A: my work has progressed a lot more in the pauses and the breaths between writing more than anything else. it's when I step away from writing and then return that I see the most change – typically as a deeper understanding of what I want to say, and a more intentional way of saying it, as opposed to just vomiting feelings on a page. I see my work becoming more in line with craft rather than intuition as I read more, take more workshops, and continue to develop my individual voice. I see myself moving away from traditional work and playing more with form and language and making shit up. I see myself becoming more strange and i'm excited for that to be happening already and continuing to happen. 

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

A: Mary Oliver. always always always. nature is my reenergizer and clearly was hers too, and her work always reignites my belief in myself. her collection of essays called "Upstream" is one I am always returning to, but any of her poetry collections will bring me comfort. 

Touch the Donkey at a Zine Fair in Sherbrooke QC + at Jarvis Square Books, Chicago

If you are around Sherbrooke, Quebec this Saturday, check out the ZinK (zine + ink) zine fair, where there will be a small mound of copies of the two latest issues of Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal] for free! While supplies last, certainly. Should you be looking to pick up other things at the fair? Oh, yes, certainly. If you pick up a free copy or two or three of Donkey, would I welcome a donation, possibly? Oh, very much so, although it isn’t required. And if you live in or near Chicago, there’s also a small handful of copies for free distribution at Jarvis Square Books! A purchase isn’t required for a copy (again, while supplies last), but you should completely be looking through their fine selection to see what else their store might offer. It is a very fine store! And of course, if you wish to see above/ground press in person, we’re still working on curating our summer anniversary event in Ottawa, but already have plans to appear at the Fisher Small + Fine Press Fair on September 19 (at the Fisher Rare Book Room at the University of Toronto) and this fall’s ottawa small press book fair (our thirty-second anniversary!) at Tom Brown Arena on November 14th. So much exciting small press!

TtD supplement #301 : seven questions for Hannah Brooks-Motl

Hannah Brooks-Motl was born and raised in Wisconsin. She is author of the poetry collections The New Years (2014), M (2015), Earth (2019), and Ultraviolet of the Genuine (2025), as well as chapbooks from the Song Cave, arrow as aarow, and The Year. She lives in western Massachusetts.

Her sequence “A chooser” appears in the forty-ninth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “A chooser.”

A: An extended lyric that meditates on the choosingness that is involved in any making. This not that. Those things here. The poem tries to take the non-neutral activity of selection—the condition of being “a chooser”—seriously but also lightly. Which words are large? How large? Those words, really? Quotidian events witnessed on walks through degraded natural vital northeastern US New England locations: why this now here? Aesthetic, actual, political, metaphysical stuff like that. I wrote it during a period when most of my poems were “about” the earthy transcendence and transaction that is poetry and making poems from, in, and across sites of the everyday and the more-special-than.

Q: What prompted this particular shift?

A: You know, I think actually “A chooser” is a poem just before a shift? It’s got some similar architecture to my book Ultraviolet of the Genuine and was in fact written after I’d finished that manuscript. So it is kind of a tail-end poem. Bottom of full exhale. Natural pause of a particular thought or style of thinking that had sustained a particular moment, an ars poetica moment, in which constellating the fallen modes, disgraced objects, sullen affects became my primary objective as it seemed to me this was what poetry was good for, a kind of recuperation. In this way the big words might be read as jokey and desperate—a joke about how desperate are the poem’s efforts?  

Q: Where are you currently, then? Mid-shift, or further along? What is that process looking like?

A: I am currently more interested in the left margin than I’ve been in a while. Doing word by word writing as opposed to phrasal movements that want space, choreography. I get up very early to write, that’s still the same, but now the work seems (to me) harder, it wants to move faster, get clipped at strange angles, it feels more obdurate—almost punishing. One way to describe this might be “a fury.”

Q: Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? 

A: Amelia Rosselli, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Anna Mendelssohn; I’ve been reading around in outsider psychology from the 1960s—R.D. Laing mostly. He might be there too.

Q: Why outsider psychology? And how do you see it, if at all, affecting the poems?

A: The psychology is for another project (prose) but of course it jumps the prose/poetry barrier. Laing is often mislabeled an “anti-psychologist,” accused, for example, of saying schizophrenia was caused by family of origin. While he was deeply suspicious of medical diagnoses that concerned only behavior and then-emerging-now-prevailing pharmacopsychiatry, he bitterly proclaimed until the end that he had not endorsed that view. However, the social, cultural, phenomenological models of minds, particularly those in extremity, that he did propose are deeply affecting, in part because he wrote so wildly and so well. I recommend “Bird of Paradise” from The Politics of Experience. For me, poetry tracks mind’s movements and for the last few months existential psychology has offered new rhythms, vocabularies to do that.

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

A: I hope it’s getting stranger and, within that strangeness, more accurate.

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

A: Reading is always energizing for me, so I’d say the writers I’ve already listed as important to what’s going on now. I return to Lorine Niedecker, Iris Murdoch, Wong May, Emerson, Montaigne, Marguerite Young, Ernst Bloch, and the work and example of my friends—Dan Bevacqua, Emily Hunt, Sara Nicholson, Scout Turkel, Kai Ihns, Peter Gizzi, Hai-Dang Phan, Ben Estes, Alan Felsenthal, Stacy Jo Scott, Jae Choi, Joanie Cappetta, Patrick Morrissey, Mark Leidner, Anya Klepikov among many others!

TtD supplement #300 : six questions for MA│DE

MA|DE (est. 2018) is a composite creature, a unity of two voices fused into a single, poetic third; it is the name given to the joint authorship of Mark Laliberte and Jade Wallace. MA|DE is the author of four chapbooks, including the bpNichol Award-shortlisted A Trip to the ZZOO from Collusion Books. MA|DE’s first full-length poetry collection, ZZOO, came out with Palimpsest Press in early 2025. A subsequent collection, Detourism, will be out with Palimpsest in 2028. More info at: ma-de.ca

Their poems “ROBIN HOOD MORALITY TEST,” “PRESIDENTIAL FITNESS TEST,” “ROMBERG’S TEST,” “SCHAMROTH WINDOW TEST,” “FAULT INJECTION” and “HAFELE & KEATING EXPERIMENT” appear in the forty-ninth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “Robin Hood Morality Test,” “Presidential Fitness Test,” “Romberg’s Test,” “Schamroth Window Test,” “Fault Injection” and “Hafele & Keating Experiment.” 

A: The genealogy of these poems goes all the way back to our earliest days of collaboration and our debut chapbook, Test Centre (ZED Press, 2019; reviewed by you back in the day!), which was when we first started writing and publishing poems about various types of ‘tests’ — psychological, mechanical, physiological and so on. Years later, the Test Centre poems became relevant again as we were putting together our third poetry collection, Detourism (forthcoming in 2028 with Palimpsest Press). 

Detourism amalgamates six collaborative experiments undertaken during the first six years of our work as MA|DE (2018–2024). The six experiments/sections function like individual chapbooks within the layout of the full collection, and each takes the reader on a journey through a new zone of collaborative poetic potential. We like to conceptualize Detourism as the poetic equivalent of a compilation of ‘B-Sides and Rarities’ — the kind of thing a band releases once they’re a few full-length records into their career.

When we were putting together the “Test Centre” section of Detourism, it was the only one based on an actual publicly released chapbook, and we didn’t want it to be merely a retread of that early release — so we opted to virtually double our original content, writing a large number of new poems about new tests, including the six that appear in touch the donkey. We often wonder if these more recent test poems, written after several years of collaboration as MA|DE, read any differently than the original test poems written during our earliest days of collaboration together. That might be a fun problem for a keen reader to parse! 

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

A: We shift gears a lot in our work — most projects tend to be self-contained, with their own well-defined sets of constraints and collaborative approaches. That’s true, of course, for these test poems, but also true for two other full-length poetry projects we’ve been working on lately. One of these explores a highly constrained form of our own devising and incorporates graphic elements; the other is more intertextual, looser in some ways, very focused on how words interact and are positioned on the page. 

In all cases, what we are trying to maintain throughout our poetry is a distinct ‘voice’ for MA|DE. Regardless of which of us writes a given line or section, it must all conjure what we refer to as our ‘third mind.’ We don’t ever want a reader to be able to look through a text and identify which parts were written by ‘Mark’ and which by ‘Jade.’ Developing MA|DE’s voice, and writing into it, is a process we are continually refining.

Q: I’m always curious how collaborators see their own individual works shifting. Is there a way to return to either of your own work habits or approaches unchanged? What influence do either of you see in your own work from these collaborative projects? 

To answer this, we’ll step out of our collective position for a moment, and respond individually… 

Laliberte: For me, MA|DE has increasingly become a primary artistic concern. So, when I’m conceiving of something new and testing out that idea on the page, I always have to make a decision about whether to introduce it into MA|DE’s ecosystem — based mostly on whether it has a generous amount of space for Jade to slide into and co-occupy. If there is, a process of becoming can begin together … 

If not, I’ll decide that it’s better to cast that idea into the pond of my own solo practice. At this point, MA|DE’s projects tend to be intensive, rigorously conceptualized, painstakingly framed and then fully explored. Therefore, when working alone, I’ve noticed that I’ve become most attentive to the pleasures of short-form writings — investing my time exploring more minimal poetic gestures, and developing a form of bastard/mongrel haiku in particular. Very precise minimalism and wordplay seems well-suited to a single voice. 

Wallace: Writing collaboratively forces me to pay more attention to my own artistic patterns and proclivities, so I can avoid replicating those idiosyncrasies when writing in ‘third mind’ mode for MA|DE. This self-awareness exercise is also helpful for honing my individual voice; it allows me to identify and emphasize the tendencies in my work that seem meaningful, while avoiding various pitfalls (creative ruts, unambitious shortcuts and the like). Collaborative writing also gives me the opportunity to attempt projects that I simply couldn’t do alone because I don’t have all of the skill sets and ideas that Mark brings to the table. Participating in such necessarily collaborative projects sometimes allows me to expand my own individual capacities and other times makes clear my ongoing limitations. I also have to say that having a dedicated collaborative practice like MA|DE does inevitably makes it a little harder to preserve time for my solo work. 

Q: Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting as your combined, collaborative selves? Are you looking at any other collaborations or collaborators for influence? 

A: The most direct influence on MA|DE’s collaborative approach is undoubtedly the artist collective FASTWÜRMS, self-described as “the trademark of Kim Kozzi and Dai Skuse, a they/them joint authorship and poly-disciplinary artist.” FASTWÜRMS was actually Mark’s MFA supervisor at the University of Guelph back in the early 2000s, where he completed a degree in Studio Art. At that time, the idea of a long-term collaborative partnership with its own framework and defined existence, separate from its individual creators, really began to intrigue him — and certainly the way Kim and Dai had intertwined life & art had a lot to do with that. They really do exist in the Canadian arts scene, and at the University of Guelph, as their own kind of collective ‘entity’; they are two people but share one ‘Associate Professor’ designation at the school of fine arts, for example, which is a really interesting victory within the institution. 

Of course, musicians take this approach all the time when they start a band and name themselves. This naming invokes a persona — cynically, it could be viewed as branding, but it’s also a way to aim collective energy at a shared, continually developing creative mythology. And if it’s done right, it expands in service of the work and takes on a life of its own. This kind of shared, creative positionality seems to be a bit less common in other art forms. There are examples of writers who have done it — Michael Field, the pseudonym under which Katherine Harris Bradley and her niece Edith Emma Cooper wrote poetry and plays together for many years, being one example — though this seems to be the exception rather than the norm. More commonly, what we see when writers collaborate is that they tend to do it in a way that tries to preserve their individual voices within the work. This includes retaining their individual names, brought together with an ampersand, which to us seems like a very informal bit of punctuation. One-off or shorter term collaborations are certainly pleasurable endeavours. While this is a completely valid way of working, we chose a more foundational, familial, esoteric path with MA|DE. 

Q: With a handful of published chapbooks, a full-length collection and a further forthcoming, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your collaborations have progressed? Where do you see this particular project heading?

In our early poetic projects we were working to establish MA|DE’s voice, and testing out different approaches to collaborative composition, refining our tone through various poetic projects. As we continue to write together, our focus is shifting toward testing the limits of that voice, and looking for new ways to use it. Most recently, we are seeing if we are capable of writing something akin to a mainstream genre novel, which seems about as far in the opposite direction as we could get from experimental poetry. Genre fiction, of course, requires skill sets related to plotting, character development, et al., and while we may have some of those skills individually, we are still figuring out how they work in practice when we have to create something wholistic at such a large scale. A mainstream fiction voice is rather different than a poetic voice: it requires clarity, concreteness and other things we are happy to do away with much of the time in poetry. We also think a lot about what it might mean to be innovative and surprising within the context of mainstream/genre fiction, which tends to be somewhat more rule and arc oriented than our usual milieu. 

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

Oh rob, this is a very interesting question. We sense that other writers do this often, but in a way this approach is very foreign to how we work, either as MA|DE or individually. Both of us are voracious readers (and Mark, in particular, is a huge collector of printed matter), but we rarely read a book twice, even if we continue to ponder certain texts for years afterward. Neither of us is really sure why returning to beloved texts doesn’t happen more … there just seems to be so many new things to discover in the eternal present. To put it another way: there are many authors we admire, but they don’t necessarily animate our current work at any given time. For us, each project we work on tends to have its own set of demands and inspirations. We like to create reading/research lists as we begin to conceptualize a project, which we add to as we proceed. The greatest source of energy in our artistic practice is surprise. Finding new writers and works that speak to us and whatever issues we are in dialogue with is very helpful; coming across a text coincidentally that dovetails perfectly with a current project is very invigorating. The combination of preparation and chance is a heady artistic alchemy. 

If our reading audience is interested in knowing more about who / what we’re reading, there are a few easy places they can access where we reveal what literary energies are lighting us up in the moment: MA|DE recently started a monthly newsletter on Substack — in it, we almost always mention new books we’ve bought or read in a given period, we really geek out on our love of literature there. Also, both of us individually log what we’re reading on Goodreads pretty religiously; those accounts can be accessed here and here!

TtD supplement #299 : seven questions for Joel Chace

Joel Chace has published work in print and electronic magazines such as Lana Turner, Survision, Eratio, Otoliths, Word For/Word, Golden Handcuffs Review, New American Writing, and The Brooklyn Rail. His full-length collections include matter no matter, from Paper Kite Press, Humors, from Paloma Press, Threnodies, from Moria Books, fata morgana, from Unlikely Books, and Maths, from Chax Press. Underrated Provinces is recently out from MadHat Press. Bone Chapel is forthcoming from Chax. For more than forty years, Chace was a working jazz pianist. He is an NEH Fellow.

Four poems from “against which” appear in the forty-ninth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “against which.”

A: “against which” is the title of the third and final sequence of poems in a full-length collection, Bone Chapel, set to be published by Charles Alexander’s Chax Press later this calendar year.  In this series, there are sixty poems total, and eight that begin with the exact words “Against which.”  The remaining fifty-two poems all start with words that make approximate rhymes with “Against which”:  “A guest which,” “Egress glitch,” “Unclenched fist,” and so on.  As I recall, the words “against which” somehow popped into my head, possibly in a dream, though they may have been triggered by “Against which, advance the war,” from Macbeth, a play that I must have taught a hundred times over the course of my career. I honestly don’t remember how the notion of developing an entire sequence occurred to me.

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

A: The collections that have preceded Bone Chapel – fata morgana, Unlikely Books, and Underrated Provinces, MadHat – represent, among other things, a greater focus on spirit as it manifests itself in nature, including human nature, and in an ongoing conversation among thinkers and writers across centuries.  In addition, in Underrated Provinces I began using strict counting as a structural method, especially in the first sequence of that book, where the first poem employs single-line stanzas, the second poems employs two-line stanzas, onto the ten-line stanzas in the tenth piece.  In Bone Chapel, all the poems in the second section employ five-word lines (as well as five-line stanzas), and the pieces in the third and final section employ six-word lines.

Q: What brought this interest in working, as you call it, “counting as a structural method”? What do you feel working such structures allows or provides in your work?

A: I started using this procedure as I developed the sequence entitled “toe” [Var(2x): Joel Chace, toe], which will be the second section in my upcoming book, Bone Chapel.  Five toes led me to five-line stanzas.  Then I thought, “Why not five-word lines?” I enjoyed what happened with that series, so I continued using the method in two sequences that followed.

Q: Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? 

A: Yes, I do.  Just one.  Louis Zukovsky, in various sections of his A.

Q: Explain.

A: About halfway through his tour de force A, Zukovsky started to use lines based solely on word count, primarily five-word lines and even two-word lines in one section.

Q: With a handful of published collections, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work heading?

A: Right now, in this country, it’s extremely hard for me – for most people, I believe – not to feel tremendous concern, if not despair.  I’m being drawn to address political, social, and cultural crises, but to do so while continuing to maintain a wrestling with spiritual crisis.

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

A: There are many.  To name just some poets: Oppen, Zukovsky, John Taggart, Norman Fischer, Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, Harryette Mullen, Nathaniel Mackey.

Touch the Donkey : forty-ninth issue,

The forty-ninth issue is now available, with new poems by Joel Chace, Andrew Brenza, Jake Kennedy, Hannah Brooks-Motl, Salem Paige, MA│DE and Sara Gilmore.

Eight dollars (includes shipping). We're the original odd couple!

TtD supplement #298 : six questions for Sunnylyn Thibodeaux

Sunnylyn Thibodeaux is the author of five full length collections of poetry, as well as over a dozen small books including Witch Like Me from the Operating System. She is a teacher, neighborhood activist and tree enthusiast. She is the mother of a Scorpio and wife of a poet and splits her time between San Francisco and New Orleans. In 2026 City Lights will publish her selected poems.

Her poems “Signs of Life,” “Mailbox Full,” “I am Without” and “Rent Control” appear in the forty-eighth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “Signs of Life,” “Mailbox Full,” “I am Without” and “Rent Control.”

A: Those poems are each their own in such a way, but also stepping back and looking at them I realize I can actually split them into two categories. 

“Rent Control” and “Signs of Life” were written with the setting of San Francisco. “Rent Control” being a sort of list poem history of the building that we've lived in since 2006. 

“Signs of Life” was an intake of my walk home through the Mission District. By that moment in May walking home from SF International High School where I had been working I knew I was leaving the city for New Orleans. I was taking everything in, the beauty, the desperation, the humanity, the culture. That intersection is always bustling. It’s a busy transit corner with 3 bus lines that traverse the city and the BART underground. There are lots of commuters and drug deals, panhandlers and street vendors. That poem is basically a word photograph capturing things that are gorgeous and personable and things that are less than ideal.

“I am Without” and “Mailbox Full” are both poems wrestling with grief. When my mother passed I think the world fell into a haze of bodily movement without being present or aware and I recall sitting on the sofa and just staring at the rug, recognizing that it really needed to be vacuumed, but I was numb and so so sad and seeing all the little bits of everything just made the hurt of missing my mom more real and I just sat sedated in grief. I don't even know how a poem came out in that period of my life. Recollection is spotty. 
“Mailbox Full” was a voicemail I seriously wanted to leave for my dear friend Duncan McNaughton when I called him just as he returned home from the hospital and his mailbox was full.

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

A: Well first of all the grief, while still present, is not as crippling. Observation has always been a part of my writing and I can’t imagine that specifically going away so I think that I could end up continuously writing like any of those poems. Those list poems happen periodically as well as the prose block poems. I have never been one to set out with a project in poetry to where I could say, “This is my plan or this is the style I intend to achieve.” The poem wants what the poem wants, and I can’t always answer for how it comes out.

Q: You mention the word “setting” when describing these poems. Is setting an important factor in the way you approach a poem?

A: Yes and no. Setting is the now, the actual moment of orchestration. It is the presence of itself that allows for the writing to come. Setting, in this sense, is not what we think of in that formal regard as we approach the learning of literature. But also with that said, a place, as in “Signs of Life,” can be everything to the poem. It is more a being present that is important. And being present can also mean being present in memory. It may all find its place in the poem. Not sure if this makes sense. Poetry is almost like a meditation. It’s not where you physically are, but how you open yourself to receive.

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

A: To be honest, I attempt nothing. What happens happens.

I will say, hands down, Philip Whalen. Also, Nathaniel Mackey’s lyric is a tune I sometimes find myself humming.

Q: With a handful of published collections over the years, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work heading? And with that, given you’ve a selected poems forthcoming, has the experience of seeing that process through shifted or expanded your perspective on what you’ve been attempting?

A: I think it’s interesting when you recognize that you’ve settled into yourself, though one should never get comfortable. I recognize my tendency to observe. I also recognize my tendency to interweave reflection. Isn’t that what poetry is? Like that age old advice of “write what you know,” but what we know has to come through a sense of grounding, observation, an intuition. It is not about actually using your head in this matter.

Putting together a selected, I can see that I’ve been writing about some form of nature all of my adult life and the moon is a pretty frequent character. I’m not sure that’s ever gonna change. It’s interesting that you reference what I’ve “been attempting.” I don’t actually attempt anything outside of observing. It’s what I think I work hardest at. We have to sit still to do this and Lord knows this world does not encourage stillness.

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

A: For song and rhythm, Nathaniel Mackey. For interpersonal connection and reflection, Lou Welch. For grounding in the real life world spin, Philip Whalen. For a pragmatic view of concise awareness, Lorine Niedecker. To learn, Duncan McNaughton.

TtD supplement #297 : seven questions for Laressa Dickey

Laressa Dickey is a dance artist, writer, and bodyworker based in Stockholm whose recent projects explore the politics of care, the effects of state violence on the human body, and space junk. Her work spans disciplines and modalities. She’s the author of the poetry books Syncopations and Twang, among others. Together with sound artist Andrea Steves, she published Radio Graveyard Orbit, a speculative book about space junk. For Bergen Assembly 2019, she and her partner Ali Gharavi created How to Pass Time With No Reference, a multi-media installation about their experiences inside/outside the Turkish prison system. Her artistic research has been supported by the Kone Foundation; she researches the dancer's use of language and the writer’s use to/for dance. She’s a member of the performative collaborations MISLEADING SUBJECTS and WITHING and teaches occasionally at Stockholm University of the Arts.

Her poem “Heart bulge” appears in the forty-eighth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “Heart bulge.”

A: “Heart bulge” is a piece that originated in residency while I was working on an ongoing project called Mammillary bodies. I hope someday it will become a book of lyric essays. I have been working on it, on and off, for about 8 years and it's still going. The Heart Bulge piece was written during an artist residency at Saari Residence in Finland in 2022. I was working in the dance studio with an text called The Ontogenetic Basis of Human Anatomy by Eric Blechschmidt, the phenomenological embryologist. And I was reading and devising movement scores from this speculative embryological text which describes the morphological forces at work in the embryo’s development, forces which lay down the spatial map of us as humans and mammals. I was really interested in those forces as a creative problem and as a way of thinking about the creative process. That something dynamic and increasingly differentiated is forming our particular shape. It’s happening before DNA activation. Something else is at work in us, when we are taking shape. That seemed thrilling!

So “Heart Bulge” was a piece of text taken from that book. It is a moment in the embryological development of the heart before fits itself into place between the lungs—well, this is a creative way of saying it—because as Fanny Howe taught us, language literally fails to deal with actions that occur simultaneously—but before it becomes the advanced vascular system of compartments, it is a bulge in a main vertical vessel. But I took it as a score for a dance process, which led me into writing, eventually.

Heart Bulge as a phrase became a lens through which to think about how our bodies and selves are also shaped by family, by landscapes we grow up and evolve in, by the social body that we grow up inside of. And the simultaneity and complexity of all that happening at once, but also in different temporalities.

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

A: Heart Bulge is different from other things I’m doing now, some of which are boring, like grant applications. What creative writing I'm doing is more collaborative. Together with a collective called WITHING, we’ve made 6 online episodes for Radio Worm in Rotterdam. The episodes are experimental language sessions, let’s say, derived from common scores we work on together, apart. It’s a collective, more programmatic approach to writing—poetic at times, but not necessarily calling attention to itself as such. Nobody in the group has a hold on what we are making—what it is or will be; it’s slippery and yet, we are making it together. I find myself writing things I don’t recognize as me and I love that.

https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2835793/3980073

Q: Is this shifting the ways in which you approach your own work, when you return to it?

A: It’s making me see my own idiosyncrasies through reflecting on the idiosyncrasies of others. I suppose this is really just a reading process, a reading as a writer process. I think moving between the collective and my own work also brings up the question for me about the use of the writer, the use of the singular voice, what it is, how it exists, what it does, thinking of it as material and materiality. And maybe it clarifies the basic conundrum: how do I want to say this? How can I say this?

Q: Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? 

A: I have things I reach for, or reach back to, in terms of syntactic logic, classics like My Life by Hejinian, or the feel of a dance, Dogs of Devotion, made by Jeanine Durning. Maybe the tone of voice, that odd tallness, in Samuel Beckett in The End.

Q: With a handful of published collections, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work heading?

A: Oh man. I feel like I’m finally getting a handle on the sentence and the paragraph, the units of meaning they organize and what they can do. I have developed more tolerance to use “I” in work, in a way I hadn’t, and I am more willing to move into prose, that is, the prose poem, or the hybrid, etc., when the work demands that. I hope to write a novel someday, but I suppose it will be a weird thing.

Q: What do you feel the prose poem allows in your work that might not be possible, otherwise?

A: For me, the prose poem allows a different kind of control of the movement of a text. In it, I can feel access to rhythms, stops and starts, reversals, the impulse toward and subversion of story. It allows my improvisatory thinking to form and holds it in form. Play play play! Probably someone has written this before, but the economy of the prose poem interests me. It’s often sparing, reticent, and yet it can roam across the page. It pretends and promises but ultimately does what it wants. I relate to this as a kind of freedom, a space to grow into and form, rather than being formed by. Though I suppose both are happening simultaneously. Thought is growing and forming lines and sentences, and thought is also being formed by the page and by the limits of the technology and by the limits of me as a person, thinker, writer.

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

A: I often return to Etel Adnan’s Of Cities and Women (Letters to Fawwaz) or her work, In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country, and I do that because of the presence of/in the voice. I read Tove Jansson’s Summer Book every summer and never fail to feel amazed by those stories. About every 5 years, I go back to Gary Young’s No Other Life. I recently read Helen Garner’s diaries and already know that I’ll be back.

TtD supplement #296 : seven questions for Jessie Jones

Jessie Jones is the author of one poetry collection, The Fool, which was published in 2020 with icehouse poetry, and was shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award and a finalist for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. She grew up in the prairies and now lives in Montreal.

Her sequence “Four Methods” appears in the forty-eighth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “Four Methods.”

A: I heard many years ago that Strasberg at the Actor’s Studio by Lee Strasberg, transcriptions of the private acting classes that he taught at the Actor’s Studio in New York starting in the late 40s, was essential reading for writers (I don’t remember why now). So, I dutifully purchased it and put it on my shelf. Years later, I finally read it. In addition to disabusing me of many preconceived notions about “method” acting, it made me appreciate the difficulty of assuming the role of another person, and the effort—expense, even—involved in doing it convincingly. We attempt this all the time in writing—adopting a persona or the voice of “the speaker,” creating characters. I especially appreciated Strasberg emphasizing the strangeness of this impulse, and how drawing a line between the character’s experience and our own deepens what we’re trying to convey and, under ideal conditions, better connects us to ourselves. So the poem is four attempts at inhabiting that strange psychic space, not yet that character and no longer just oneself, preparing to pass from one to the other by way of some sense or emotional memory. This poem and the reading around it also connected me to a broader project, now a manuscript, which is about the consuming nature of being an artist, seeing everything through the lens of creation, the ways it requires a relentless investigation of your past, your interests, even banal daily life for “material.” That makes it sound cynical, but I mean more the unconsciousness aspects. Like great acting, it’s reacting to what presents itself to you and getting involved in it.

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

A: Thematically related, but tonally different and formally denser. Newer works are a little looser and “voicier,” I think. 

Q: What prompts the difference in approach, in your thinking?

A: A higher density of diction can create some welcome distance, which I usually prefer when I’m experimenting with something new or trying to write in a voice other than my own. Sometimes, I switch into that mode almost defensively. In some of the newer pieces, I’m trying to stay closer to whatever is driving the poem and to be a little more comfortable owning an idea or feeling. 

Q: Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? Are there any particular writers or works at the back of your head as you write?

A: Honestly, the biggest one has been Philip Guston, the painter. I’ve been reading and rereading many books about him, his lectures, writings, interviews, correspondence with friends, including I Paint What I Want to See and Guston in Time by Ross Feld. This became a bit of an obsession, resulting in a trip to the UK to see his retrospective at the Tate Modern, one of the highlights of my life. I love his way of speaking and writing about art. It’s gutsy, funny, and most concerned with openness and curiosity. He’s very casual, though intelligent, and a great talker. He wants to bring people in. Finding him felt like the thrill of meeting someone you know you’ll be great friends with. He went through a serious artistic crisis as he was considered to be at the peak of his career, and built a new style from rock bottom that renewed his love of artmaking and redefined him as an artist, even while turning a lot of his fans (including some of his dearest friends) against him. There's something in that experience, I think—the reckoning, the doubt, and, ultimately, transcendence—that made him more comfortable with the mystery of artmaking, the surprise, and to find kinship in trusting what may seem like a mistake. So, I’ve been literally influenced by the way he speaks and writes, which I find so charming, but also by his great capacity to seek and let others into that process of seeking, which is powerful and intimate. While I adore and admire so many writers who seem to drop wisdom fully formed and jewel-encrusted into their works, I discovered how much I like the mess of discovery through Guston.

As for poets, I’ve also been lately influenced by and found a similar kinship with the works of Sara Nicholson, whose first two books (The Living Method and What the Lyric Is, both from The Song Cave) marry the linguistic and philosophical rigour that I love with a humour and casual ease that I aspire to.

Q: With a published full-length collection, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work heading?

A: I feel my work has deepened since my first collection. It’s still very much me, still my style, but perhaps holds less back, which feels great. There was a lot of nervous energy around my writing in the past; I was afraid my practice would slip away from me, that I wasn't worthy of doing it, not educated enough to write intelligently. That’s gone. Now it’s just a part of my life that grows with me. My next project, which I’ll dig into as soon as this manuscript is wrapped up, is larger in scope, more narrative, more researched, more outside of me, and will, I hope, stretch me creatively and formally. I’m a little bit afraid of it! But I think that’s a good sign. 

Q: Do you see your work in terms of projects, then? How did you move from someone who works on individual poems to someone who works on projects?

A: No, I don’t usually see my work in terms of projects, at least not at first. My first book and the manuscript that “Four methods” is a part of came together over time, poem by poem, and became a project as thematic unity between the pieces emerged. I like that approach and the way it allows one’s particular, timely interests to guide the writing. Only when I start to notice a pattern do I narrow my focus and read in a more directed way that will nurture the rest of the work to be written. With my first book, this didn’t really happen until I was at the very end. With the new manuscript, it happened more quickly and was more obvious from looking at the books I was reading—they all seemed to lead me to the same point. 

The next book, “the project,” however, requires me to think of it as a unified whole from the beginning because it’s more narrative, adopts a particular form and vernacular, and will require more planning. All very new, exciting territory. I’m not sure why the move to a project is happening now, but I suspect it’s a way to stay interested and not get too comfortable. I’ve also been working on a collaborative novel for the last two years with another writer, and thinking large-scale narratives for so long might have tunneled into my poet brain.

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

A: There are so many! It’s hard to narrow it down. But the more consistent mainstays are Lisa Robertson’s The Weather, Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette, John Ashbery’s Flow Chart, Elizabeth Willis’ Meteoric Flowers, Lucy Ives’ Orange Roses & The Hermit, Fred Moten’s The Service Porch, and Peter Gizzi’s Archeophonics. I have noticed, though, that I may have greedily overdrawn those accounts and need to start developing a new set of resources for this phase of life and writing I’m in. Reading “forward” as opposed to “backward” has proven useful for me over the last few years, as has trying to broaden my conception of what can generate a poem. In the past, I had to read a poem to write one, and now I can read an essay or academic paper or work of philosophy or a novel and feel equally energized. I also regularly return to Pitch Dark by Renata Adler, my favourite novel. I recorded me reading the first chapter of it for a podcast called Women Reading this spring and it was a totally new way of engaging with a very familiar text. There were so many things that I had missed or breezed by in prior readings! I feel like as I age, I also see new things in my favourite works, so reading them again now is a little like reading them for the first time. They’re speaking to a very different person.

TtD supplement #295 : seven questions for Tanis MacDonald

Tanis MacDonald (she/they) is the author of Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female as well as six other books. She has won The Malahat Review’s Open Seasons Award for Nonfiction twice: in 2021 for her essay on female friendship and in 2025 for her essay on adoption and ancestry. Her next book, Tall, Grass, Girl, is forthcoming in fall 2026 with Book*hug Press. Tanis is the former host of the Watershed Writers podcast and was a Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University for many years before retiring early to gad about and do cool shit.

Her poems “Decimal Dance Party,” “On hearing that it is time for me to decide,” “For Real” and “Prognosis” appear in the forty-eighth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “Decimal Dance Party,” “On hearing that it is time for me to decide,” “For Real” and “Prognosis.”

A: I crave the strange when life gets a little repetitive. I like low-culture-high-culture mash-ups and mishearings and false profundities and flash absurdities. I write narrative poems, too, though with a poem, narrative is always relative, but I like the process of shaping happenstance and an accrual of images (and “misimages”) to create not a portrayal, but an unarticulated space where a portrayal could be. That sounds fancy, but I don’t mean it to be. I think it’s how many people – including me -- perceive the world on an everyday basis: not always seeing the thing itself but instead the swirl around it. For a poem like “Decimal Dance Party,” the collaging of those moments as best and second-best is both absurd and familiar, just as the small events themselves are. “For Real” takes up an old question of the nature of reality. “Prognosis” is so named for the couplets’ interrogation of mental processes. And did I decide? All the time!

“For Real” will appear in my forthcoming book, Tall, Grass, Girl, and the rest are from a manuscript in process.

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

A: In my forthcoming book with Book*hug, Tall, Grass, Girl, I have styled a poetic narrative: low on declaration, strong on using language to convey the difficult.  I’ve been refining that kind of narrative about escaping violence and becoming tall (my metaphor for thriving) for a while, and it has been a tonic more recently to switch up my perspective to an “I” that is less lyrical – that is, less personal and contextual – and more gleefully declarative and happily grouchy. I can see, looking at these poems now, how they have emerged from a mind crammed with detail and external influences and are focused on not only how meaning is made, but how to make it bounce. The moment with the library patron was something I overheard  and knew that it was a piece of the mosaic I was assembling about how different generations speak to, dance with, remember each other. Sometimes I think the most important skill writers can practice is the ability to recognize patterns.

Q: What brought about this particular structure, and how different is that compared to some of your prior work? Is approaching a collection as a self-contained project, whether through structure or content or both, how you usually approach building collections?

A: One manuscript begets another, if we are lucky, and I have questions outstanding from Tall, Grass, Girl that will make appearances in the new manuscript. That said, building a collection is different every time.  Content is so dependent on structure. Writing the new poems keeps my head above water as I undergo a big life change and I am guessing that they will find their places in a lyric dialogue about being an aging badass.  

I’ll never be done with the lyric mode, but I am forever questing to discover places where prose and poetry meet and where I can cartwheel with language as much as I want. Poems (and do) turn into essays, and vice versa, and sideways, and like a cement mixer: literary chimaeras are my jam.

Q: Is that how manuscripts emerge, from a series of outstanding questions? And it suggests you see your work in a kind of trajectory, yes? How does that sense of trajectory show itself within the context of book-length, theoretically self-contained, works?

A: I can’t speak for anyone else, but inquiry is important for me as a fuel for writing, especially poetry. Which doesn’t mean that this is an intellectual exercise: not at all. The writing mind is a curious mind, all the better to approach a single subject, or a single question, from a variety of angles. In terms of a trajectory – well, yes, but not a consciously planned one, and not a trajectory that needs to have special importance to readers, necessarily. When I am putting a manuscript together – or testing out poems to see if they could speak to each other in a manuscript – that’s when I start thinking consciously about what I’m asking (myself, the reader, the poem). If we are talking about how manuscripts look and feel after they are published as books, the trajectory is likely to be mysterious to everyone but me; and if we are talking about me as the person generating the work, then the trajectory – as I see, hear, or feel it – is everything. Everyone gets from one book to another somehow and this kind of inquiring bridge is one of the ways I do it.

Q: With a handful of published collections over the years, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work heading?

A: To the moon and back!

On the best days, the work of poetry makes me think better, breathe more deeply, feel in the world instead of feeling like I’m drifting through space. If progress has been made – such as it is, in poetry – it’s because I’ve discovered something and surprised myself. I think I am becoming both more energetic and more relaxed as a writer –energetic about possibility and relaxed about what the outcomes may be. Changing my life to invest in art over a daily grind is a big shift, and I hope that my work is heading towards a harvest of everything that can grow from my decades of (literary) planting.

Q: What is it about the form of poetry that attracts you so deeply? What do you feel possible through your work with the poem that might not be possible otherwise?

A: Leonard Cohen wrote “If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.” And I wonder: what’s a burning life, and do I have one? And Emily Dickinson: “When I feel like the top of my head has been taken off, I know that that is poetry.” And Kafka: “words should be an axe for the frozen sea within us.” I think of all these elemental ways of describing poetry as explosive, and ash, and metal striking salt and ice. 

Poetry is the best form to convey not that which is unsayable, but that which defies, and is sometimes betrayed by, the limitations of the declarative statement. To state something baldly can be, ironically, a form of misdirection; it suggests limited meaning, limited affect, limited narrative. But the implications and language work of poetry allow room for the extraordinarily human: lived contradictions, everyday oddnesses, and simultaneously felt emotions (think of times you have been grateful and guilty, or angry and relieved, or joyful and exhausted). Its music, and the way it reaches for our inner organs, is another attraction of poetry; prose can do that too, but it’s poetry’s raison d’être. If I can spend time each day in a space where this is possible, in what I’m reading or what I’m writing, then it’s a good day.

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

A: The Poets:
Lisa Robertson, Erín Moure, Phil Hall, Adrienne Rich: all poets who light my mind on fire. I have been reading and thinking about their work with line, language, repetition, and lyric for decades.   
Marge Piercy, Lucille Clifton, and Kim Addonizio for their audacity and sheer breath-changing effect of their poetics.
Emily Dickinson (whose Tell It Slant Festival held each September is an online must-attend) and Jay Macpherson for reminding me to touch base with formal work.
Shakespeare and Yeats for the music.
Rumi for surprise and to reset my brain.

The Prose Writers:  
Melissa Febos for her spirit of risk.
bell hooks for her combination of compassion and sternness.
Louise Erdrich to remind me where I’m from and who I owe.
Toni Morrison to remind me to stay conscious. 

TtD supplement #294 : seven questions for David Hadbawnik

David Hadbawnik is a poet, translator, and medieval scholar. Books include a translation of the Aeneid (Shearsman, 2023); an edited volume, Postmodern Poetry and Queer Medievalisms (Medieval Institute Publications, 2022); and a book of poetry, Holy Sonnets to Orpheus and Other Poems (Delete Press, 2018). He currently lives in the Minneapolis area with his wife and son.

His poems “Screaming,” “Melody,” “Vertigo,” “Squeeze” and “Substance” appear in the forty-eighth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “Screaming,” “Melody,” “Vertigo,” “Squeeze” and “Substance.”

A: I began writing these pieces as “anti-poems” several years ago, coming out of the pandemic, and in the wake of completing my years-long project of translating the Aeneid. The translation had occupied me for about ten years, from 2012 to 2022 or thereabouts. And even though I’d written some poetry during that time – a lot of which was collected in Holy Sonnets to Orpheus, published by Delete Press in 2018 – I’d kind of lost my feel for what was going on in poetry and my place in it. But I was still writing. I had and continue to have a daily notebook practice, which I’ve remained devoted to for almost a decade at this point. So among the things I was jotting down, I started scribbling these sonnet-like pieces.

As it happened, over time, a lot of the pieces did have something to do with family relationships and fatherhood; my son, now 7 years old, is a big part of our everyday life. So that first piece, “Screaming,” was written on my son’s birthday, with him in mind, trying to capture a bit of his spirit.

The next three, “Melody,” “Vertigo,” “Squeeze,” are all examples of starting with a certain phrase or idea and plunging in and riffing on it, without steering it one way or another, keeping it going without pause. The syllabic constraint leads to some interesting line breaks, which I then worked on in revision, in some cases “sanding off” the edges a bit by deleting words that seemed like mere filler, so that some lines only wind up with eight or nine syllables... I had not yet, at that time, read Dale Smith’s wonderful book of sonnet-like pieces, The Size of Paradise; he’s such a great craftsman that he manages to put a lot of disparate ideas together, which still feel cohesive within the poem, while maintaining pretty exactly a ten-syllable line. Everyone should check out that book!

“Substance,” the last piece, has more stops and starts in it; as such, it's a bit of a call-back to a previous mode of writing for me, which carried over into the translation work, shorter sentences alternating with longer ones in the mode of Thomas Meyer, perhaps. 

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

A: In terms of poetry, I’ve been pushing things in a more intentional way, in response to the critical moment we’re in politically and socially, which I consider to be an inflection point where – not to hyperbolize – we’re really balanced between continuing as a project of “civilization,” for better or worse, or falling into a dark period of authoritarian chaos. I’m trying to do so in a way that plays to my strengths as a writer, which involves attending to subtle interactions between people, the way they connect or fail to connect. This seems especially relevant, since there seems to be a real breakdown in the ability to interact with and empathize with others, whether people are moving through a supermarket or sitting in a cafe or just walking down the street. So the recent poems have been an extension of this project, but more focused thematically, and tending to make more use of negative space on the page.

Q: I’m curious: have you any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting in this particular mode? 

A: I’ve actually been involved in an ongoing mail exchange with Chris Vitiello. He’s a prolific, interesting, and challenging poet. I don’t even know how to categorize the type of poetry he’s been writing, which is kind of an extension of the work he was doing in his last published books, Irresponsibility (2008) and Obedience (2012); a lot of what he does is stripped bare of the usual poetic tropes and devices, tending towards declarative utterances that push at the borders of what language can mean. This has pushed me to head somewhat in that direction, so that I’m really focused on the mysteries of the everyday, the space between people, as well as the inner space of myself and others to the extent that I’m able to detect and respond to it, note it down, and turn it into something.

Q: With a handful of published collections over the years, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work heading?

A: I don’t know that it’s progressed. In terms of poetry, I feel I’ve gotten better at recognizing what’s working or not working, and separating the wheat from the chaff so to speak. I don’t waste as much time going down blind alleys. I better understand what my strengths are. But in a lot of ways, I still feel like a beginner, someone who’s still learning. Aside from that, I’m working on a “creative memoir” based on journals I kept during the 1990s, when I lived in San Francisco. A big portion of it was just published in late December. That’s going to be occupying me for a while, as I try to type it all up and edit it. Hanging around with Damion Searls (translator of Jon Fosse, among others) has gotten me excited about translation again, so maybe I’ll hunker down and try more of that.

Q: I’m curious about your work in and through translation. What do you feel it introduces to or allows for your own writing, if anything?

A: I guess I took translation on as part of the learning process, in an Ezra Pound sort of way, which came to me via Diane di Prima, when I studied with her from about 1998-2003. There was just the basic, “ah, I see how this poet is putting things together, constructing lines, keeping the poem alive and moving,” and so on. You can get some of that through reading, but when you’re grappling with the language on an elemental level and having to make those decisions yourself, there’s a lot more to learn, I’d say. So I felt coming out of the translation work on Aeneid and returning to my “own” poetry was like taking off another set of training wheels that helped build confidence in a different way.

Q: Do you see the shifts in your writing due to translation predominantly as structural, then? Did your work in translation broaden possibilities, or simply turn you into different directions?

A: I would say the practice of translation, alongside study of medieval poets and poetry during grad school – I had a dual emphasis in Medieval Literature and Poetics – was hopefully a broadening of possibilities, on balance. The most important thing I learned, though it maybe doesn’t always manifest itself in the day-to-day work, is that the idea of translation as a separate category from so-called original work would never have occurred to a poet like Chaucer. It was all just part of the poet’s range of activity. You translate a bit of Virgil here and some Ovid there, shellac some original verses in between, adapt some from Boccaccio and Boethius, and it’s all one poem. What I would like to do is move further in the direction of incorporating as much source material as I can, without worrying about where it’s coming from or what I'm doing with it.

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

A: That changes, but I’d say most re-energizing for the kind of attention to the quotidian that I’m trying to bring to bear is Peter Handke’s early work, particularly The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick and The Weight of the World, the latter of which is a book of his raw, daily note-taking, which was extremely essential to me in establishing my own daily practice a long time ago. Recently, I rewatched Wings of Desire, the Wim Wenders film for which Handke wrote most of the dialogue, and that was incredibly stimulating. Then, too, everything by David Lynch is generative.