Dani Spinosa, Whispering Gallery: Poems

 

There is one student who is attentive and thoughtful in my college Classical Mythology class. She wants to make video games and has played Hades maybe fifty too many runs and she draws me an illustration of a non-binary Herakles wearing a raver outfit with a furry lion hat. She stays after class to talk to me about her final paper. The windows of this room do not open. I wonder if I’ve ever been in a classroom with windows that open. She has questions about the impending strike. The room contracts. I feel the questions’ labour. The clock on the wall moves itself forward again and again. She wants to know which source is definitive. I can’t stop her from taking notes.

The latest from Toronto-area poet, editor, publisher and critic Dani Spinosa is the trade poetry title Whispering Gallery: Poems (Prince Edward County ON: Assembly Press, 2026), following her full-length debut, OO: Typewriter Poems (Picton ON: Invisible Publishing, 2020) [see my review of such here], and the monograph Anarchists in the Academy: Machines and Free Readers in Experimental Poetry (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2018). Furthering her exploration through the typewriter-constructed concrete poem, Spinosa’s Whispering Gallery is structured as a collection of duos—thirty-six two-colour typewriter poems titled via heroines from Greek mythology in alphabetical order, each of which follow first-person prose blocks—each pair held as point, and counterpoint. Alkmene, Alkestis, Andromeda, Antigone, Aphrodite, Ariadne, Artemis, and so on. Through the two narrative threads and multitude of voices, there’s an element of performance to this book-length suite, one that might sit equally at home on a theatrical stage, if one might imagine concrete poems, say, performed on stage (and honestly, why not?). Two actors on stage, each performing one of the two of this collection’s threads. The narrative quilt of her text blocks provide a structural through-line, writing on the many ways and times that women have been abused, reduced and restricted by the machinations, whether passively or overtly, by men.

Yes I am still—I am always—trying to find space for poems. I am looking for writing hours though my friends remind me that the day does not come with writing hours and you have to put them there.

Through both sides of the conversation, Spinosa writes trauma and women. “But I know traumas,” she writes, early on in the collection, “the traumas of women. My women. Other women. The real heartbreak stories. A woman answers the door with a toddler on her hip, bobs her up and down slightly as the cop details her husband’s DUI. A woman must birth her eight-and-a-half-month baby that, she knows, has died in utero while her family goes to their house to dismantle the already assembled crib. Burnt-down house. Stolen car. Missing cat. Kidney stone. One of those real asshole cancers that just doesn’t let go. This is a stupid game. There are only losers here.” From structural point to counterpoint, across these two threads, Spinosa offers a poetry collection of visuals and concrete poems that forms itself into a book-length essay, one that speaks to and through female agency and gendered violence, whether physical, emotional or cultural; a book that writes herself and students through heroines and old gods, a collection that directs itself, in whole, towards the young lady that will make the author an auntie, directing all this talk of agency and possibility into all the hopes anyone could have. This is Auntie Dani writing the world as it is and has been, and as it could be, all for the sake of this new life, an opening salvo of a mentorship, offered open-hearted, without cover or expectation or bullshit. Or, as she writes near the end:

I am here and you are there. Silly thing, that distance. I’ve been saying small, quiet things all morning while the dust and cat hair twirl in great winter angles of light. I hear the little whispers come and go as if it wasn’t me speaking them. I don’t know if you can hear me, but I’ll keep saying this shit anyway.

 

Speak to me as to thy thinkings, as thou dost ferry, (part three,

[catch part one here; part two here]

Thursday, August 20, 2026: Aoife and I went for a wander, for coffee and pastries, walking by the array of lobster traps. So many! We wandered over to the cafe they found the day prior, with quaint wee bookshop. Apparently Rose picked up a copy of Ocean Vuong's novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019) from this charming shop. This is a book I've heard good things about, but can't really ask her if she's enjoying without making it weird, apparently. What kid would want to read something their parents find interesting? Cringe. Still, I am curious to know what she might think about it.

The cool air around water, and the view back to the mainland (if one could see that far, certainly). A morning of a brief walk in one direction, returning for the sake of an eventual spot on the beach. Apparently we're going to the beach? Repeating the brief jaunt we made yesterday evening, nearly losing Christine and Aoife along the shoreline, the walk along the sandy shore not the roundabout direction the car wished to take us (not every line is a straight line, after all).

The way of things. A splash in the water, as Christine and the young ladies wandered the beach, splashed around, collected smooth stones and other items. Aoife, who returned with handfuls of shells and small stones. An hour-plus at the beach, and then a quick jaunt back to Cricker's Creamery for ice cream, and a slip into the post office (to be able to send off my second round of postcards). Ice cream, and then a toy store, en route to the ferry. Where was this? I can't even recall. The children picked up nonsense and insisted on photos by the array of items outside in the yard (but requested that they not be posted, of course). And so, my own.

Naturally, any visit to the island requires as much Lucy Maud Montgomery as possible, so we drove and we drove, heading back to the ferry, but stopping along points as best as possible, none of which interested our young ladies in any way. I keep forgetting that Montgomery married a MacDonald, wondering if he was related in any way to eldest daughter's maternal grandmother, another MacDonald from the island. 

And, to the ferry. The ferry, where I attempted to take notes, but Aoife was more interested in wandering. And so, we wandered. Once landing in Halifax, we were hanging with Christine's brother and his family in their new house, having moved this way after five years in England, a house myself and the young ladies had not yet seen. And to a variety of baseball tournaments over the next two days, although I was already back to Ottawa by the next afternoon, due to my above/ground press event [see my report on such here] on the Saturday night. It would have been good to spend further time in the area, perhaps even visit the handful of folk either Christine or I or both know around this way, but the timing didn't allow. Neither, the drive. I was one night in Halifax, back Friday afternoon; Christine and the young ladies back by Sunday morning. Will we attempt again next year, possibly? Might we ever have enough time?

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Benjamin Gantcher

Benjamin Gantcher is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of a LABA fellowship as well as residencies from the UCross Foundation and the Omi International Arts Center. He is the author of the poetry collection Snow Farmer (2017), a finalist in several contests, and the poetry chapbook Strings of Math and Custom (2013). Gantcher’s first poetry manuscript, If a Lettuce, earned finalist honors in the National Poetry Series and Bright Hill Press contests. His poems and essays have appeared in many journals, including Tin House, Slate, Rhino, Guernica, The Brooklyn Rail, and DIAGRAM. Gantcher was Poet of the Week at Brooklyn Poets and is a former poetry editor of failbetter.

He is the editor, publisher and designer of unbound books, “free, downloadable, printable, foldable, downright handsome books,” that can be found @benjamingantcher, at the unbound books Substack, and HERE.

What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work?

            My daughter was just told that she is curious and courageous because she went to an intense summer program that brought her into contact with different kinds of people in an environment that was designed to stress the kids out physically and mentally. She appreciated the praise but was surprised. She said, “I just do stuff.” That’s how it is for me when I’m writing well: I just do stuff and language comes up. I follow the language or the feelings. For some of the poems in The Coronation of the Ghost, I was trying to transpose a certain kind of motion, the way a drop of pigment unfurls in a glass of water, or smoke billows, but the motion also connects with the flight of a hunting swallow — the way the plucking out of the air reveals where the bug was and the curves and layers of the carnal air. There’s a question in that image: what’s there that isn’t obvious? Sometimes getting at that is more strenuous than at other times. When I’m not writing well, I’m trying to just do stuff, which involves running it through my internal censors who check it against whatever notions are preoccupying me at that time.

            In the context of our violent idiocracy, I ask myself about the utility of poetry. It’s an anxious question, the clashing of pots and pans that drowns out what I know to be true about the vitality of art, but I have tried to answer it in some poems. I noticed, for instance, that my feelings about sirens had changed. When I was small, they meant one thing; now they also summon things that I know about distressingly many places, near and far. I tried to write about the change in imagery and emotion, giving a reader my childhood relationship to the phenomenon of sirens at bedtime and also what they do to me now, tried to make both versions real. 

Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? 

I like to read theory, but I know that my attraction to it is one of my weaknesses in that it gets in the way of making art that is — I lose sight of my experience and set out to write a poem that starts elsewhere. In that vein, I’ve been irritating myself with a current obsession: staking out a political and economic position on art in response to this moment. It’s been important to me to articulate the virtues of poetry and other art in the face of pressing needs for direct political action, but I have needed to keep it separate from the writing. It gets in the way of making poems that are lively and felt, not dragged down by injunctions or sloganeering or meeting what I think are expectations of the moment, serving up ideas that could be stated plainly as not a poem. 

And are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I like reading to an audience. I used to perform as an amateur musician, and I miss that; reading to an audience scratches a similar itch. I get nervous before a reading, as I do before I sing, but preparing for a reading has become part of the reading — choosing poems and working through my patter is part of the exchange between me and the audience, which is the point. And reading to a crowd of any size, and sharing the audience with other writers (and artists and musicians), and the audience reacting — everyone could be someplace else, but we’ve chosen to meet in those physical and imaginary spaces. Every person there loves or at least cares about one or more of the readers or language or poetry specifically. When I was starting out I wasn’t sure what a reading was for, although sometimes I could feel the goodness of it. Now I see giving a reading as art-making that can be collaborative.

Are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

            Nature, music, science, visual art, yes! I live in New York City and often think about natural landscapes. Some of the poems in Coronation take the urban landscape as natural. For some that meant an attitudinal shift, accepting that built things are natural because humans are part of nature; for others, it took translation from mundane to marvelous. The idea was to not regret the lack of grass here and the shrieking train alarms and the bad air. The idea is to keep the passage open to delight.

            I read widely and listen to podcasts about all those things and to a lot of music. One of the questions from astrobiology that sticks with me is whether or not consciousness is fundamental in the universe, a fact of matter, which works nicely with how I see the world: personalities everywhere.

            In Coronation there’s a poem that invents a Northern Renaissance painting and alters a Hockney, part of speaker’s memories of a visit through a museum, the context for a meandering reflection, suggesting rooms on rooms of experience, entered and glimpsed. And another one names the video artist Pipilotti Rist in the title — she’s so joyous, whatever else she’s doing, just naming her brightly colors the ironies in the poem. In my previous book, Snow Farmer, there’s an ekphrastic prose poem that interprets a Vermeer. That one I wrote to put a personal, un-art-historical reading into the world.

            I like to work with visual artists, too. I used to, and might again, publish unbound books, a zine series comprised of “free, downloadable, printable, foldable, downright handsome books.” Many of them were collaborations between visual artists and writers. Cornerstone Press let me include facsimiles of three of them, three I did the writing for, in Coronation. I think they came out well in the book, and two represent a kind of parallel play of word art and visual art — not one explaining the other, but each influencing your experience of the other. The third is like the prose poem about the Vermeer but more bananas.

            Years ago I tried to invent writing systems analogous to 20th-century music composition systems, including tone rows and aleatory procedures. I’ve also tried to adapt visual art practices to writing. Serra’s verb list was exciting, as much for the way it looks as it’s generative potential, and I made a four-axis grid of ideas, taking pains to develop handwriting that would look good. It’s a fine artifact but didn’t help me make poems. Another time, I thought I’d divide poems into vertical auras, like a Rothko. All those trials were generative in a caffeinated way — not producing specific works but swirling the energies around. I wasn’t able to find an explanation of Ornette Coleman’s Harmolodics, but the music, the texts I was able to find on it, and the name itself were exciting. I don’t hanker after a system anymore, but liner notes can get me going. I just read about Steve Coleman’s M-base — trying to translate what he describes as a very open system of improvisation into poetry composition is appealing, though, again, I don’t plan to make a system like it. 

            The scope of art in NYC is just one of the gorgeous tradeoffs for the indignities of the subway. And some of it happens right there on the platform! I am grateful for all of it. Recently I got to hear three of my favorite musicians, two different shows at Roulette, a storied organization housed in an elegant old theater, an intimate concert hall. Sylvie Courvoisier and Mary Halvorson played their album Bone Bells straight through. And Marc Ribot played solo guitar; I have his most recent album on repeat: Map of a Blue City.

            I’ve been laboring over a poem about a map of myself and recent ancestors; after this interview, I think I can go back to it with less labor and more pleasure.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Maria Nazos, Pulse

My review of Maria Nazos' Pulse (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2026) is now online at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics.

Hari Alluri, Tabako on the Windowsill

  

Windowsill Offering for Eric

In the crematorium’s service room, taking clumsy, ginger turns around the cardboard holding your body, such a thin distance, 4 generations of multi-iteration family scrawl and draw our messages for you to take. An act of reaching. Even here, the squeal and fight of children over markers carries what’s most sombre.

This act of releasing you to mark how we must begin to hold you another way, a promise in touch, which no one can live up to constant: from outside the chapel’s doors, through the service room, around and down the hall—Sade’s “By Your Side” playing off your celebrant’s phone as we arrange ourselves—one hand reaching forward to the next shoulder, in to the shoulders of your closest and your closest blood, finally onto Niki’s.

Hers, the most difficult task. Even as it’s her finger on the switch: when she presses it to give your body to fire—held and utterly alone—none of us are free of it. Our hope, which is also our fear: that we reach across to the other side with you, that the messages we wrote carry us with them in the flame.

The latest poetry title by British Columbia-based “a migrant poet of Filipinx and South Asian descent” Hari Alluri is the collection Tabako on the Windowsill (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2025), a book I’m just getting to now. Subtitled “(poems to burn),” Alluri’s first-person narratives offer quiet gestures composed as direct response, akin to elegy or prayer, both for and to the living, and the dead. “May you outgrow many pairs of shorts, Anak. / And if a dryer doesn’t get them first,” begins the poem “Mountain Walk Offering for My Godson,” “your socks might inch down past your heels / bothering your arch and toes. That pattern will turn / to wearing thin, to changing style.” There’s a calming, soothing effect in Alluri’s lyrics—a gentle and attentive intimacy—even as losses compound across these meditations, so, too, the celebration of life and family, heart and the present moment. These are poems of witness, of gesture, attempting to articulate, appreciate and hold (“capture” doesn’t seem the right word, here) a moment, before it might fade. “Here, on the morning ride to work,” Alluri writes, as part of “A Pavement Sweeper’s Quarry,” “I’m jealous at the trolley doors: they get / to yawn. I would say the city is only mouth if it didn’t hear: we want to stay.”

The strength of these poems are found precisely through the understated way they’re written, attending and appreciating what so often isn’t noticed, caught or spoken. “I will always thank the day I turned towards these mountains here and saw / not the country I feared wants me dead or gone or totally subsumed,” he writes, as part of “Hum Its Dizziness Like Sugar in Tea,” “but / mountains, volcanic. Cousins / to those who made the islands my nanay is from, and beautiful even if they weren’t. // The deities I brought with me and seek, may they never become a pipeline dug into this land.” It might seem out of fashion to compose poems so overtly thankful, both for those the narrator has known and where he now lives, but Alluri manages a grace through the hush, across the foundations of human connection. As well, moving through prose poems, couplets and more traditional lyric stanza-blocks, the twists and turns of Alluri’s sentences and phrases are subtle, offering twists that hide in plain sight, shifting an effect of what one reads against what one might expect to read. The effect, to be sure, is quite striking. This is a book that will absolutely surprise.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jeremy Springsteed

Jeremy Springsteed is a barista and occasional activist living in Seattle. He was one of the founders of the Breadline Performance Series and a member of the ReDrum poetry collective. His work has been published in many places online and in print such as SPREAD, Pidgeonholes, Underwood, Pageboy, Internet Void, Another New Calligraphy, and Limanal Spaces. He is the author of four collections of poetry: A Guide To Getting Lost. (Cyberwit 2022) Salt, Weasel, Corpse, and Other. (Cyberwit 2023) Beneath The Ashes of My Grandfather and My Youth. (Cyberwit 2025) By Wing and Foot. (Carbonation Press 2025)

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book felt like a validation of all the years I had spent working on my craft. All the readings I had organized or taken part in. All the rejections. It alleviated the imposter syndrome.

The first collection was more like a greatest hits than a thematic grouping of poems. As I produced new work I thought of it in a more contingent light. When writing work for this latest collection I would look at those oddball one off poems and find the correct home in the larger body.

While I have always had my themes and return points, my process recently has been looking towards enriching connections in tone and subject. 

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I had always wanted to be a writer, not necessarily a poet though. I have a very vivid memory from when I was 13, my depression had really set in the year before and I was doing pretty poorly in school. I was talking with my mom in her bedroom and she was trying to figure out what was going on with me. I was crying, “I just want to write and I don’t even know what that means.”

We were a paycheck to paycheck working class family. I had, as far as I knew, never met any kind of an artist and I had no idea how one became such a thing.

I would work on my silly little stories instead of paying attention to my classes. Stories like– Hitler secretly surviving and taking over a small US midwest town or stories of me being a secret agent with a large base under my parents' rented house.

I would keep falling deeper into depression. I started playing sports to try to fit in with the other boys. Eventually I destroyed my knees and my mental health.

I was having mild auditory hallucinations. I began writing them down, then I began altering them. Eventually I didn’t hear them but they were still in my head.

I took creative writing and was lucky to have a fantastic teacher named Joel Long who introduced me to a larger world of poetry. Joel brought big name poets into the classroom, (the poet laureate at the time Jorie Graham, Louise Glück, etc.)  which was no small feat for our suburban Utah high school. I was introduced to many local poets. He gave me a structure to use. I have never looked back.

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 have two approaches to writing a poem. I have the quick flood, these are usually the more personal narrative poems or the politically charged ones. I also have the extensively researched ones that come with pages of notes and a million open tabs on my computer. The deep research ones are usually history based poems, this is also where science themes creep in.

In both cases there is a first draft revision process constantly happening. 75% of the time I spend on a poem is generally in that first draft process. More often than not the first draft is fairly close to the final, otherwise I am likely to scrap the whole thing and either try another approach or abandon it until it is ready to cooperate.

My revision process is a lot of cutting unnecessary words and then replacing what turns out to be structurally important. I also spend a large amount of time with line breaks and stanza size and shape.

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 stand alone poems generally come when a phrase or image starts running through my head. I sit down and type out the thing occupying my mind. Then I pace and occasionally return to the keyboard to add elements.  It is moments like these that I miss smoking cigarettes.

I love writing serialized poems. I become obsessed with something and try to write poems from various vantage points. In my book Salt, Weasel, Corpse, and Other there is a series of eight poems about the Wieliczka salt mine in Poland. In it there is history, folk lore, science, a tour of some of the stand out features of the mine. I spent months researching and drawing connections to try to inhabit the mine as well as I could through words.

My most recent book was the first time I started with a plan and wrote a large portion of the poems after defining a book structure. To fill it out I found places for several orphaned poems.

For me both possible answers are true but I suppose what I have been doing lately is putting a basic structure of a book together and writing some poems explicitly for that structure and writing others that may or may not find a home there.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Readings have been an important part of my formation as a poet. Hearing when a line cuts through people, or when it just lies face down on the floor. Receiving immediate feedback and interpretations of a new poem is powerful and valuable.

I have been the open mic MC for a few reading series. I would always start the open mic with a new poem which kept me writing. It also put me in close contact with all manner of writers from a diverse skill set. Writing is solitary work so any opportunity to be in community with other writers is to be relished.

I am also a founding member of the ReDrum poetry collective with my dear friend Alex Bleecker. Our troop has been involved in both publishing work and performative work. The performances are always occasional and based on a singular theme (whales, Carlo Zinelli, time travel, etc.)  that the 2-4 poets work towards separately and as a group. Those performances have allowed new ways of looking at what a poem might be.

My first book wouldn’t have been possible without public readings. It helped me to group poems so the flow of the work was more natural. They let me know what was working and what I should focus my energy on.

Then there is the theft. There is no better teacher than hearing someone read a poem that you wish you had written and trying to figure out how you might be able to still write that poem but make it yours.

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?

When I was a junior in high school I told my English teacher that I was getting into poetry and I hoped to be a poet some day. She said to me, “Jeremy, everything that could have been written about the human condition has already been written. What would you even hope to accomplish?” It became my goal to prove her wrong. But how?

Is experience static? Does an era change the experience or at least the voice of the experience? Is today less important than the days of Anne Sexton? Don’t we have anything to contribute?

I remember going to workshops where discussing a painting from the 1800s is an appropriate reference point but bringing up David Bowie in a poem wasn’t. Do we want to be relevant or not? Is this art form only available to the well educated or are we creating art for humanity?

Does the poet have a responsibility to humanity or is it only a responsibility to form?

Is killing the form from lack of interest worth the feeling of superiority towards the unread masses?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

My entire life I have watched the general number of people reading decline. It has been a question on my mind ever since I found myself dedicated to writing. With the advent of the smart phone reading has taken an even greater hit. There has been an all out assault on attention. (Although I am noticing Gen Z falling in love with reading and physical media in general.)

What has always remained though is that artists of other disciplines seem to be drawn to and directed by the thoughts of poets. I think back to earlier eras, Dylan being awestruck by Ginsberg. Rimbaud inspiring Jim Morrison. Kurt Cobain being in love with Burroughs. Patti Smith being both musician and poet and inspiring both is a beautiful crossing.

The poet is the cutting edge. They must live in the past and present because they are the artist that pushes to the future. They are forgotten and in many cases prefer to be an apparition.

They must point forward even if few see their outstretched hand. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

This latest book was the first time I have worked with an outside editor in a meaningful way and I loved the process. The different perspective was very valuable, there were moments where I thought I had something the way I wanted and a few good editorial questions allowed me to see with fresh eyes and make wise changes. On the opposite side there were moments where choices I made were called into question and I had to find a way to justify them and was able to bring the editor to my side. My first couple of books were from a very hands off publisher. I was glad to have those books published and start to get a feeling for what writing towards a book is like but it was a more fulfilling experience publishing with the more hands on approach that I had with Carbonation Press.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

“Put your butt in the chair and close the door.”

So simple and direct. When it comes to writing nothing has proven to be more true. To do a ting one simply has to do it.

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 tend to go through a fevered creation period, followed by a cool off revision process, a rush of submissions and readings. Then I burn out for a bit. I’ll get to the point where I think, “well, you used it all up.”

A line will start to grow in my head. Always the entire time I was “blocked” I was actually absorbing, it just feels different than creating.

Within that routine days look very different. When I am on red hot creation I am in my writing room, at my desk, spinning as many instrumental albums on my turntable as I can. I’ll forget to eat.

Revision period is like looking at a house after a party. Something fun has happened here but I can’t enjoy the memory until the mess is cleaned and everything is put in its right place. 

Submission time is coffee time. It is the closest to professional time I ever spend. And then I wander into the desert until manna.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Every stall has a different reactivation code. Sometimes it is opening every poem I have that is unpublished and making sure I am happy with it and if not revising. Sometimes it is looking for magazines to submit to. Reading poems, always reading poems by my favorite poets or by freshly encountered poets to rejuvenate. Putting on a beloved record and free associate on the keyboard. Ask myself what I want to become obsessed with and go down a research rabbit hole.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Home is a difficult concept. By the time I moved out of my parents house we had moved states 4 times and within those states had multiple moves. Then I was briefly homeless in San Francisco before I finally found what has become my home in the PNW.

When I think of my childhood in San Diego the smell is chlorine and all the summer days I spent at my best friend Dominic’s house where he was an only child of divorce and being largely looked after by his grandfather, a WWII vet named Herb who would swim laps in their backyard pool.

When it comes to my teenage years in Salt Lake I think of the choking aroma of rotting brine shrimp that would blanket the valley as it was blown off the shrinking shores of The Great Salt Lake.

When I think of Seattle it is the earthy smell of wet decaying cedar on a misty path through the arboretum.

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?

Music is huge for me. The number of lines that I have based off of a lyric or melody by The Cure probably opens me up for a copyright lawsuit. When I’m writing I always have music on. I used to be a regular reader at a now defunct reading series called Liner Notes where every poet was assigned one song from an album and had a month to write and perform a response poem to their assigned song. Playing with the connection between music and poetry has always been a driving force for me.

I’m also big on history. I love to try to find myself in a different time and write towards it. Or find an underlooked corner of a figure from the past and try to tease it out. The continued thread of humanity is endlessly fascinating. The never breaking, repeating trends are a rich well for subjects to write about.

Science is a different beast when it comes to my work. It is usually an after thought, “I’ve gone as far as I can go here, let’s see what science says,” rather than science being my jumping off point.

Being raised religious but now being not religious it feels silly to say religion but it looms large in my work. I love to use prophetic phrases. Zoroastrianism has been a recent obsession. I have become a massive fan of the YouTube channel ESOTERICA which talks about largely forgotten aspects of western religion and mysticism. I’m a big William Blake fan which I think tends to put me in a space to treat poetry like scripture but like a living scripture.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

My top three influential poets are as follows–

William Blake; his line in Jerusalem, “They became what they beheld,” is something I think about and try to apply to things constantly. How is the world making me?

Paul Celan is another poet that changed my life. I began with his Romanian poems and immediately fell in love with the work. The sparse surreal horror of a cold mechanical future yet there is still a human heart beating.

Antonio Porchia is the one with the least amount of work that I’m aware of but his book Voices was pivotal in my development. The simple one line statements that blossom is a feat that I aspire towards.

Jean Paul Sartre is my go to for philosophy. I destroyed two editions of Being and Nothingness in my 20s. I have referenced his ideas in countless poems; the play of responsibility and freedom in a deterministic world is a puzzle I hope to stare at for the rest of my life.

I have two top tier novelists. I love Günter Grass, The Tin Drum got deep inside of me, in fact the entire Danzig Trilogy remains a top recommendation when someone asks what they should read next.

I am also a big Thomas Pynchon head. I have read all of his work. I try not to be insufferable about it though. The first book of his that I read was V. Chapter Three In which Stencil, a quick-change artist, does eight impersonations blew my mind and I had no idea someone could do that with prose. I was constantly lost and always in a sweaty paranoid state reading it and I became hooked on his style. 

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I have never been on a book tour and would adore it. I love traveling and I love doing readings. Perfect pairing.

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?

It is sort of a  funny question for me because while I identify myself first as a poet, it by no means has nor do I expect it ever would provide me with enough income to not do another job. I have been a barista for the last 26 years and I love it. I have been in some sort of cafe leadership for the majority of that time. I am currently the manager of the flagship location of a popular local doughnut and coffee shop that has a few locations around the Puget Sound area.

When Covid started and I was laid off from the cafe I was working at at the time I thought it would be a great opportunity for me to get a massive amount of writing done and that I would get through every book on my to-read list. I had so many plans but it turned out without having a number of hours in a day being taken from me I had an impossible time at doing anything. I don’t know if it is the working class upbringing that has made me this way but what I have learned is that even if I didn’t have to work a job for financial reasons I need to have some hours dedicated to doing work that has nothing to do with my passions.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I’ve tried other things. When I was a kid I wanted to be an actor. I’ve been a drummer in a few bands. I used to paint and show my work and even sold a few paintings in my early 30s. I was an active anti war political organizer in my 20s.

No matter what other passion projects have come along poetry has always been the main focus. It being the thing that I’m most skilled in certainly helps to keep it as my most important outlet. Not to say I haven’t put a ton of work into growing as a poet and am always looking to expand my knowledge and ability but writing feels like a natural part of me whereas those other pursuits were more like learning a foreign language rather than speaking in your birth tongue.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I recently read 2666 by Roberto Bolano. It was a great sprawling novel that took me on some wild rides all over the world and throughout time. There were some of the most gruesome pages of prose that I have ever read. There were no clear answers other than that men are capable of terrible acts.

I also read Pynchon’s latest book Shadow Ticket. It had all the classic Pynchon elements, strange songs, labyrinths of conspiracy, a dairy magnate that is referred to as the “Al Capone of cheese,” and of course WWII. 

I don’t watch a lot of films. I only keep a netflix account because I need episodes of Seinfeld at a low volume in the background to sleep.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I began my current project thinking I was doing one thing but of course as time has gone on I find that the project has decided it wants to be something a little different. I started the year writing poems about 20th century visual artists and their closest relationships, usually romantic but not limited to that. Of course certain themes began to appear. Then I got a little burnt out on all the research. I felt I needed to step away. I wrote several personal poems about my struggle with depression, friends and loved ones’ mental health, loss of relationships and loss of what one perceives oneself to be. As I have been going about it I have been working on some artists again and am seeing that this is a larger project weaving these elements together. I’m sure a third twist to the project is soon to come as I feel like I don’t have all my elements gathered yet. It is something that I couldn’t have been able to write and execute correctly earlier in my career and it is exciting for me.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;