12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jordan Dunn

Jordan Dunn is the author of Notation (Thirdhand Books), Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (Partly Press), as well as various chapbooks and ephemeral prints including Common Names, Reactor Woods, and A Walk at Doolittle State Preserve. He lives with his family in Madison, WI, where he edits and publishes Oxeye Press.

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

I published my first book, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, with Partly Press in 2022. Partly Press is edited by Chuck Stebelton and housed at the Lynden Sculpture Garden in Milwaukee, which is a wonderful non-profit that has many missions in addition to running its literary press. This meant that my first book appeared in a location slightly off-center from traditional poetry channels. It felt good to appear in a new space, and that experience helped me feel confident that poets can appear in different kinds of venues.

My new book, Notation, is like Physical Geography in that it’s a book constructed out of other books, and it relies heavily on intertexts to bind itself together. The subject matter of Notation was different for me, however, in that it was partially inspired through more personal experiences, including the loss of several friends. Notation also feels different in that its duration is more containable, and it looks quite different on the page compared to Physical Geography.

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

I’ve always been attracted to the portability of poetry—it is an activity that can be adjacent to whatever life I have at any given moment in time. I’m not positive I’m a poet, but the poets gave me a seat at their table, so here I am, enjoying the good company of poets.

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 don’t know when I am beginning a project. After some time, I notice groups of consistencies, and then I focus on those as points of attachment. Because I am interested in book arts, I often make small handmade editions. So, there’s lots of variability with time and process and drafting.

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?

Accumulation over time is necessary for me. I don’t really attempt to compose individual poems when I’m writing.

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

I used to be more invested in performativity when I would give readings because my writing was focused on permutation, and so the reading event felt like an extension of the writing process. These days, I am trying to focus on lifting static text off the page. I feel like I am struggling with that process because I don’t like it when text loses its subjectivity.

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?

I’m deeply invested in literary community and the answers I can find through friendship with other writers and artists. I’m also interested in natural history and understanding the local ecologies and landscape histories in my area, as well as areas that I visit frequently.

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?

As I understand it, literary writing is rapidly becoming an analog fixture in our culture. That means it could have staying power and be used as a refuge, or it could gradually empty itself of meaning and become irrelevant. Hopefully the role of the writer is to protect against obsolescence.

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

Essential! Thank you to my past editors: Chuck Stebelton, Kylan Rice, and Lindsey Webb.

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

I finished college at the start of the Great Recession. I was living back at home, I was having a hard time finding work, and I was thinking about taking a job that involved writing scripts for a company that produced training videos for corporations. At the time, my dad was an ex-marine banker involved in commercial real estate lending, and when I told him about the job opportunity he said, “What, are you going to be a fucking sell-out?” So, I instead saved up money working in a warehouse, quit that job, and rode my bike across the country. Thanks, dad. XO.

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?

When I’m at my best and my schedule is at its best: I wake up, let the dog out, make coffee, and then retreat to my lower-level workspace. I like to write in the morning before the rest of the house wakes up. Often, the carnival of being a parent means I write whenever I can, and I often wear noise-canceling headphones.

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

I keep stacks of books around my desk and on shelves above my desk. When I stall, I pick up a book and read it until something wants to be transcribed, and then I’m writing again.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Lake Superior white pine.

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?

All of the above. I feel like books are simply placeholders for those other things.

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

Too many to list! A few writers/writings I return to: Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Thomas A. Clark, & Thoreau’s journals, among many others.

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

A thru-hike, like the AT or the PCT.

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?

Hmm . . . working with living things outside the world of finance?

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

Repetition.

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

Weeds in Winter, by Lauren Brown. A few weeks ago, I watched The Lost Daughter.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on a new manuscript that feels attached to the methods used to write Notation. I’m trying to distill two years of daily/occasional writing with infused transcription and travel journals. I’m also working on several little book arts projects that include a disappearing prairie, collages from Thoreau’s journals, images of tidal sand, and images of hackberry bark.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Michael e. Casteels, Furthermore, the Lake

 

The further I walked, the closer I got. To what, I wasn’t sure, but my feet kept moving, carrying the rest of me along with them. They had their own preconceived destination—somewhere they might finally settle down, a little slice of heaven, a place to call home. I was just their solitary witness, a quiet companion, the documenter of their long journey.

It was easy. They walked; I followed.

The path snaked along the lakeside. The sky was a dark canvas the stars punched small holes into one by one. A sickle moon crept up from behind the horizon. A large bird beat its enormous wings, faded into distance. Somewhere a duck quacked, then hushed, and the relative silence resumed.

A few soft waves lapped against the shore with a steady rhythm. The small stones cascading across one another clattered out a soft melody. It was a lullaby, though I wasn’t sure who was being lulled: me, the city, or the lake itself.

The lake sighed. I sighed.

The city drifted off into the night, far above the lake and me.

The latest from Kingston poet, editor and publisher Michael e. Casteels is the debut novel, Furthermore, the Lake (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2025), published as part of editor Stuart Ross’ 1366Books. Following a handful of chapbooks of poetry, prose and visuals, as well as his full-length collection, The Last White House at the End of the Row of White Houses (Picton ON: Invisible Publishing, 2016) [see my review of such here], Casteels’ Furthermore, the Lake is composed as a novel of accumulated scenes that shimmer and ripple, contradict and evolve, across shifting narratives. “A night can drag its feet when it wants to,” he writes, early on, “and that night it wanted to. The occasional car. An infrequent passerby. But when the late hours finally shifted into the early hours, even these ceased. The street lights shone down on nothing but cracks in the pavement.” Casteels’ narrator might be reliable but the scenes they participate in and witness seem to contradict, offering an uncertain view. His prose is composed across short bursts and flash sections comparable to the flash fictions of writers such as Lydia Davis [see my review of one of her most recent here] or Kathy Fish [see my review of her latest here], but one that works a larger shape, although one not necessarily formed across any kind of easy or obvious concrete narrative. One has to pay close attention to detail, even across such lovely passages. And yet, the narrative does progress, moments that build upon moments, a thread within the swirl and field of further seemingly-contradictory elements.

Last but not least, you boarded the train and sat down in a window seat. You looked out at the station platform and smiled. Even from this distance your eyes were tiny lakes that mirrored whatever they saw, and what they saw was me, standing on a shoreline, waving goodbye while you drifted away in your red canoe. Waves drawing you further and further. I didn’t expect to take a second look, but I did: your train long gone for years.

Casteels’ prose has an ease to it, a compelling tone that floats across pages, amid numerous memorable lines and prose-blocks. “The bathtub is surprisingly agile for its age. You’d think it would lumber like a hippopotamus,” he writes, “but it’s more like a rhinoceros charging blindgly into the night. I’m a few hundred metres behind it and losing ground. The bathtub leaps over a white picket fence, rounds a corner, and then it’s gone.” There is something of his shifting narrative reminiscent of Canadian playwright and mathematician John Mighton’s play Possible Worlds (1990; a film adaptation was released in 2000), holding a shifting not of perception but of action, of what is actually being perceived. The unsettling of this foundation is purposeful and beautifully done, and does progress towards an understood meaning, one that rocks a foundation of loss, grief and ultimate through-line, although one that doesn’t unfold or reveal as much as finally allow, all centred around, somehow, this particular image of the lake. “The lake remembers a seagull,” he writes, “but it’s nowhere to be seen. It remembers loons, but they’re gone too. No, wait. I just heard one. A heart-wrenched wail. No response.” As he continues:

This could have been years ago. Or sometime last week. Or three days from now. It’s the type of thing that happens again and again, and once started, can’t be stopped. A strand of hair stuck to your cheek. I brushed it away. It’s the only thing that keeps me from wandering off course. It’s what passes through my mind every time I squirt a little toothpaste on my toothbrush.

Tilghman A. Goldsborough, Object 7 ( ,a spirit loosely, ,bundled in a frame, )

 

2B honest [4 once] i’m still kinda fucked up
from when The Ground moved ..

, it’s hard 2 deal directly && forcefully w/ pressing issues
when there’s so much going on w/o+w/in
&& i don’t kno
where 2 begin .
like , idk if i ever told u
that My Greatest Fear is falling
from a great height..
i don’t think it’s (re:) hitting
The Ground tho; it’s maybe more
fear of the Panic! ,, of the absolute lack
of control as a foregone conclusion rushes
up 2 meet U,,

I’m absolutely floored by the cluster, clash and careening of Brooklyn poet Tilghman Alexander Goldsborough’s second full-length collection, following The Western (1080 Press, 2023), his Object 7 ( ,a spirit loosely, ,bundled in a frame, ) (Brooklyn NY: Futurepoem, 2024). Across what might first seem a jumble of punctuation, shortened words and clipped text, Goldsborough offers myriad delights through an inventive and engaged lyric working at a whole other level of visual and sound effect, one that at turns sits as propulsive and precise, but ever highly purposeful, thoughtful and deliberate. Reading through this collection, I’m curious as to how such poems might sound aloud: performative and gestural, I’d suspect. “The Yung Man is a Modern Person using modern technology {whose / most valuable possession is a wrinkled piece of parchment paper inscribed / with latin text}_trying to Stay-Ahead of this Nothing he sees thru solace in / activities in The Present: getting in academic fights during master classes / at the nearby university_watching hours & hours of Home & Garden / Television, during which he described a 45 second Lowe’s Baumarkt / commercial as ‘…a capitalist assault that just won’t end…’_texting while / driving a 1996 Mercedes E-class sedan along winding county roads w/ the / windows open, blasting CDs he bought back in high school.”

Goldsborough writes the body, the black body, the black body in America, orbiting a series of concentric circles that land each and purposefully upon that radiating self, held without easy recourse in a particular social and political space. “It’s 11.11 & idk what i want.” he writes, to open the propulsive two-part “testimonial of a depressed & disillusioned student / who seeks salvation—or an easy answer—in the / ‘historically black’ nature of an UBCU & doesn’t find / what he thought would be There.,” “& times i speak in this classroom of strangers / abt ‘pure, destructive consumerism,’ ‘white supremacist capitalist / patriarchy’ n other salient / issues. / otherwise i suffer in silence & the comfort of a persistent lowkey buzz / staring blankly & the consteallations on the tiles in the ceiling / or @ the blinds imported from Venice / or  @ the unwritten possibilities on the blank board / or @ the wood pulp taking the form of a table posing as a desk. / i am feeling detached from ‘my community’: this room fully of hyphenated / american youth: [.]” He writes to find and articulate his cultural and political space, his own agency, across a sequence of frays and histories and conflicts. Or, as the poem “domestic iii” begins: “,society frays @ the seam /where / the legs are sewn together . / it was not built 2 last .”

Set in seven poem-sections—“JACQUELINE TOMATENCREMESUPPE ASCHENBECHER,” “C ON ST EL L A TI O N,” “V BROKE IN BERLIN VOL. I,” “TRAUMZEIT,” “EIGHTEEN,,,NINETEEN,” “CDMX TALES” and “NINETEEN,,,TWENNY (2)”—the poems assembled offer a combination of clipped and gestural language, shortened words and syntax and punctuation spread out into constellations. Goldsborough’s Object 7 ( ,a spirit loosely, ,bundled in a frame, ) is the true promise of lyric possibility made flesh.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kevin Holden

Kevin Holden is a poet, critic, and translator. He is the author of seven books and chapbooks of poetry, including Solar, which won the Fence Modern Poets Prize, Birch, which won the Ahsahta Press Award, and Pink Noise, recently out from Nightboat Books. His translation of Jean Daive’s The Figure Outward is forthcoming this spring from Black Square Editions. His work has appeared in several anthologies, including Best American Experimental Writing (Omnidawn) and If Bees Are Few (Minnesota). He has taught at Bard, Harvard, and Iowa and is currently a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. He is also an activist and cares a great deal about trees.

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

Back in 2009, Cannibal Books published a chapbook of mine called Identity. I'd published two little ones before that, but this was a different experience. The publisher of Cannibal, Matthew Henriksen, deeply, passionately believed in the poetry. There’d been validation of my work before, but this came from another space, an editorial one, and outside of the contexts of people I knew or of an academic program. Matt was extraordinary, and I got to know him more at the Frank Stanford Festival he organized in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He convinced me that I was doing something significant. That my work was unusual. There's a lot to say about him, that time, the press’s energy and community. For me, in short, he made me feel that my work merited being published in book form, that that was something that needed to happen. When my first full-length book, Solar, won the Fence Prize, that was something on a larger scale of course, and the attention the book received was very meaningful to me. But that earlier work with Matt, on something that was “only” a chapbook, was really important and encouraging. As to how the more recent work compares, I’d say it’s… stranger? It’s certainly gotten more complex. Matt was actually one of the people who convinced me that the stranger and “harder” work was the right trajectory, that it was rarer, surprising, unique. I think Pink Noise is definitely a further step along that path. In certain aspects it might actually be more “accessible” than Solar, but it is likely also deeper, more dimensional, and more complex.

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

For me it was always poetry. I like novels, but poetry, once I began reading it, spoke to me and seemed right; it made sense to me in a much deeper and more immediate and natural way. I came across The Waste Land more or less by accident when I was eleven years old. It felt true, like a world, and like magic. It harmonized with how I felt and perceived, I suppose. (Syntactically, emotionally, musically, imagistically.) It was that way onward. I also started writing poetry around that time. I've never tried writing fiction. I do write essays, and philosophy is very important to me. But the novels I care most about are often considered to be “closest” to poetry: Woolf, Faulkner, Genet, Toomer… Poetic grammar just feels... accurate. And where beauty resides. I can't imagine it otherwise.

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’d say it comes and goes. When it’s there, it often comes fairly quickly, but then the process of putting it all together is slow. And there are lots of notes and scribbles, but when something feels like it’s happening as a “poem,” it’s usually quick (and often close to what will be its final shape). The process of arranging the pieces is more arduous, especially as some of the poems and sections are quite long.

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose 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?

They begin in perceptions, feelings, or in the words themselves. I think I’m mainly an author of pieces that combine into larger projects, but fairly early on, once there are more pieces and different kinds, I’m trying to think of how they will come together and harmonize into a book.

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

After all this time, I still get nervous before readings. But I do enjoy doing them, and I think hearing the work is important. The poems’ sound is very central for me, and they are usually pretty musically dense. I certainly write hearing them in my ear, and the poetry’s internal architectures become clearer when read aloud (especially as they often involve distortions of grammar). I often read at a somewhat fast pace, and that’s intentional; there’s an intensity and a kind of heaping up of rhythm that is important for me.

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?

I’m interested in the way in which poetry is or makes reality. I suppose, in a sense, these are Modernist (or adjacent) concerns. There are things said by Vicente Huidobro and Tristan Tzara that feel very right to me. I also feel close to something Paul Celan said: “I try to reproduce cuttings from the spectral analysis of things.” And to various aspects of the polyhedron that is Objectivist poetics. I don’t know if there are theoretical concerns “behind” the writing — the writing is, I’d say, just itself, emergent and organic — and I’m certainly not trying to write so as to “demonstrate” or enact some theory. But there are theoretical questions and apparatuses out in the world that interest me, for sure. Adorno’s aesthetic theory feels right. Wittgenstein. I’m interested in the poem and the book as their own monadic worlds, being or extending into reality. And I believe that poetic objects are like bundled up cross-sections of perception, feeling, and actuality cohering in language and sound. And they are formed. And in all this there is a kind of politics, to which, it seems, your next question speaks. So, the questions the work is trying to answer, as it were, regard the nature of this word I keep using, “reality.” And memory and desire, for example, are just as much a part of that as grammar and physics. Lastly, queerness, in all its own kaleidoscopic entanglement, is central for me.

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?

Ideally, it is a role of truth, beauty, complexity, rigor. Perhaps to be guardians of language. For a long time, I’ve felt that there is a politics of estrangement in aesthetic work, a resistance to the flattening of thought and experience that is inflicted by commodification and capital, one that is made possible through the complexity and strangeness, through the distortions and reformations of grammar and thought, that are in poetry. This is, along various axes, a Marxist sentiment. And it also suggests something as simple as the awakening and expansion of consciousness. I believe this. But lately, as we seem to be entering an era that is sometimes called “after truth,” I also believe that poetic language — in its particularities and nonconformities, but also in its perceptions, accuracies, and recordings — is necessary for holding on to how things really are, as weird and complex as that realness is. Among other things, this is to say that poetry is also a form of vigilance and witness. In a very pragmatic, honest sense, the “there there” is slipping away in social media algorithms, AI, and political misinformation. Poetic language can and should work to resist that. Though poetry’s relation to truth is an ancient topic that could be exfoliated forever, one thing that is accurate, however complicatedly, is that it can be “extra true,” so to speak. Practically, there’s a small audience, surely, especially in the US. But that doesn’t mean the “role of the writer” is any less real.

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

I often find it helpful. It can be clarifying when it’s difficult to see the forest for the trees.

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

For poetry, “make it new”? For life, the Heart Sutra.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translations to essays)? What do you see as the appeal?

They’re doing quite different things, and they each involve or require, for me anyway, pretty different “mental states.” If I’m really in the rhythm or mood of poetry, it would be difficult to pivot suddenly and try to write essayistic prose. So, they would come in different phases, at different times. That said, they are also just different forms or focal points to which to turn attention, so sometimes the rotation is not as hard. All of the forms are difficult, but I’d say that translating poetry especially can be very intense cognitive labor. In a sense, it’s also nice, because you’re working off of something that is already “there,” a surface, not trying to bring something into being all on your own, as it were. Anyhow, each mode and activity can say and show different things and do so differently. And that multiplicity feels valuable.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

It’s a little sporadic. When I was at Iowa, I had the open time to write every day. That was also part of the culture. Sit at the kitchen table, go to a café, write things. That’s the luxury and also (kind of) the responsibility. I don’t really have the space to do that now. Hopefully there’s time and “head space” for notes, scraps of things. And then windows open where more fluid or focused work is possible.

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

Nature (or the thought of it), woods, rivers, snow. And to other art, pretty much all genres. For a bare language engine, Modernist fiction. For something like a world aspect ratio, “art” film like Bergman or Tarkovsky.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

That’s a beautiful question. I’ll conflate it a bit with “childhood.” I grew up in more than one place. Succinctly: for my father, woodsmoke; for my mother, honeysuckle.

14 - 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?

Oh, absolutely. I’d say all of those. The natural world is extremely important to me, trees and forests especially. There’s a lot of math and science in my work, especially topology and geometry. Ballet, lots of music, maybe especially electronic and minimalist, and lots of painting, particularly abstraction of the 20^th Century.

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

For poetry: Paul Celan, Leslie Scalapino, Louis Zukofsky, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Emily Dickinson are some. For philosophy: Adorno, Thoreau, and Wittgenstein. And the novelists I mention above, especially Woolf.

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

In life, go to the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. In art, somehow make a film?

17 - 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?

Perhaps visual art curator. (Maybe of sculpture, specifically.) I’ve written on art history and theory at points in my life, and a long time ago I almost worked at The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. In completely different directions, maybe a math teacher or psychotherapist.

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

Perhaps it’s a cliché, but I honestly can’t imagine not doing it. It’s a fundamental part of me and my perception of reality. It’s how I hold on to the world.

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

I will do 2x2. László Krasznahorkai’s Seiobo There Below and J. H. Prynne’s Poems 2016-2024; Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on a book called Firn. It’s a book of long poems/sections, and the title is a kind of snow. I also finished a translation of a book of Jean Daive’s that I’ve titled The Figure Outward; it’s coming out from Black Square Editions this spring.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;