Touch the Donkey supplement: new interviews with Cook, Turcot, Betts, Schmaltz, Zits, Sims and Collis

Anticipating the release next week of the tenth issue of Touch the Donkey (a small poetry journal), why not check out the interviews that have appeared over the past few weeks with contributors to the ninth issue: Sarah Cook, François Turcot, Gregory Betts, Eric Schmaltz, Paul Zits, Laura Sims and Stephen Collis.

Interviews with contributors to the first eight issues, as well, remain online, including: Mary Kasimor, Billy Mavreas, damian lopes, Pete Smith, Sonnet L’Abbé, Katie L. Price, a rawlings, Suzanne Zelazo, Helen Hajnoczky, Kathryn MacLeod, Shannon Maguire, Sarah Mangold, Amish Trivedi, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Aaron Tucker, Kayla Czaga, Jason Christie, Jennifer Kronovet, Jordan Abel, Deborah Poe, Edward Smallfield, ryan fitzpatrick, Elizabeth Robinson, nathan dueck, Paige Taggart, Christine McNair, Stan Rogal, Jessica Smith, Nikki Sheppy, Kirsten Kaschock, Lise Downe, Lisa Jarnot, Chris Turnbull, Gary Barwin, Susan Briante, derek beaulieu, Megan Kaminski, Roland Prevost, Emily Ursuliak, j/j hastain, Catherine Wagner, Susanne Dyckman, Susan Holbrook, Julie Carr, David Peter Clark, Pearl Pirie, Eric Baus, Pattie McCarthy, Camille Martin and Gil McElroy.

The forthcoming tenth issue features new writing by: Meredith Quartermain, Mathew Timmons, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Luke Kennard, Shane Rhodes and Amanda Earl.

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

We even have our own Facebook group. It’s remarkably easy.

Ongoing notes: mid-September, 2013

[Lemonade, lounging on a chair in Sainte-Adele, September 1, 2013] Have you seen the events coming up soon through The Factory Reading Series? HoaNguyen, Dale Smith and Mari-Lou Rowley read on September 21, and Kate Greenstreet, Paige Ackerson-Kiely and D. J. Dolack read in October 21, with the 19^th anniversary edition of the ottawa small press book fair pre-reading on October 11 (readers tba), and the fair itself during the day on the 12^th. Might we see you there?

And my report on the 20th anniversary above/ground press event is now online as well.

Fredericton NB: There is something that endures in the work of Fredericton poet, editor, publisher, radio host and visual artist Joe Blades, producing work now for a couple of decades. His newest chapbook, produced through the BS Poetry Society is CAUTION: paper (Fredericton NB: BS Poetry Society, 2013), a small collection of poems and artworks, a number of which have appeared previously as various mail-art projects, ads in New Muse of Contempt and other venues. The “Danger Be Alert!” (2007) warning, for example, that announces that “Every Season is Poet Mating Season” has appeared previously in a couple of places. There is an element of travel and transit to this small collection, with poems such as “roadkill tribute,” “forest? what forest?” and “capital” (on visiting Ottawa a few months ago) suggest an ongoing journal-keeping through the space of the poem, composing an ongoing lyric much in the same way Gerry Gilbert record-kept Vancouver through his decades of writing.

in srbija

for Marjorie Agosin

in zenta  i stop on cobblestones

in front of colour-patterned brick

and roof tiles of jewish merchant

house in now royal city where jews

no longer live—monument at medical

clinic build where synagogue once

stood—gymnasium repurposed  & i

photograph house wanting story

at beograd book fair  or

related event   david—only

ever meet in beograd though he

now live in calgary  alberta—tells

me his family lost 60 of 65

relatives to germans during wwII

& i overheard someone say  he’s

not a serbian writer  he’s a jew

in kragujevac   german rifles

point at me within shadowed

long lines of rounded-up jews

gypsies  homosexuals  artists

and more—over 2700 killed  mass

grave buried after giving up identity

papers jewellery money freedom

them lives—remember them now

Calgary AB: I’ve been enjoying some of the small items that Paul William Zits has been producing through his 100 têtes Press, all produced very much in the vein of derek beaulieu’s work through the late, lamented housepress and current NO Press. The seventh 100 têtes Press item is the hand-sewn chapbook Silent Suite by Eugene Stickland (June, 2013), a small collection of poems on silence, printed with faded text. Between the strike-outs and the faded text, these poems are almost entirely built on a premise of erasure, taking away even before anything is presented.

Falling into Silence

You fall so far into silence some times

So deep it feels liquid

Like the temperature of darkness

Like the texture of the night

Like the taste of the stars

Like the smell of God.

Sometimes, thus

Up so falling

You land on the surface of the moon

And howl down on the un- and other-

Worldliness of the broken planet

You once called home.

And if you didn’t know before

Your silent scream reminds you

There is nothing left to say.

The ideas are somewhat interesting, but on the whole the poems aren’t strong enough to allow for the full force of what Stickland is attempting to present. I am hoping that this is simply the first in what will develop to be many more works by the author. On the other hand, I’ve become more and more intrigued by the works of Paul William Zits himself, from the chapbook of visual poems, Bullets (Calgary AB: 100 têtes Press, March 2013) and LEAP-SECONDS (Calgary AB: NO Press, May 2013). After going through his first trade collection recently [see my review of such here], and these two small items, I’m fascinated by Zits’ willingness to explore, experiment and stretch out his skills. The pieces in Bullets strike and fragment, quite literally, in the shape of a bullet that has been fired from a gun. The second small chapbook, on the other hand, LEAP-SECONDS, is a mass of text that very nearly overwhelms, opening almost immediately with both beginning and end before continuing on.

I am in one of the innumerable rooms, and the outstanding characteristic of these rooms is that the doors are always open, or nearly always. From, at least, this, I recall that at one time, work was done by collaboration, by exchange of ideas. Someone was once as likely to be working here at six in the morning as at midnight, if the spirit so moved him elsewhere. At times there would have been feverish physical activity, with experimental testees following schedules from one room to another as if they were trotting in a maze, calculating machines ticking away upstairs, and hidden cameras and microphones recording responses. However the spirit moves, and perhaps to facilitate this movement, the doors are always open, while the calculating machines tick away upstairs and the cameras and microphones recording responses are no longer hidden. The spirit moved them elsewhere. Experimental testees do not follow schedules nor move from room to room as if trotting in a maze. The spirit no longer moves them, or moves them about in places further than can be observed. The spirit moves the feverish physical activity in the calculating machines ticking away upstairs and the cameras and microphones recording, still, in places that can.

Paul Zits, Massacre Street

The rebellion is now a thing

of the past, it is now a page

When a few generations shall come and

go our sad story of the Frog Lake

Massacre may be totally forgotten and

the actors therein consigned to

oblivion, but, these few papers, should

they by any chance survive the hand of

time will tell to the children of the

future Canada what those of your day

experienced and suffered and when

those who are yet to be learn the extent

of the troubles undergone and the

sacrifices made by those of the present

to set them examples worthy of

imitation and models fit for their

practice to build up for them a great

and solid nation they may perhaps

reflect with pride upon the history of

their country its struggles dangers

tempests and calms in those days I

trust and pray that Canada may be the

realization of that glowing picture of a

grand nation drawn by a Canadian poet

Towards the end of Calgary poet and small press publisher Paul Zits’ first trade poetry collection, Massacre Street (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2013), he includes the poem “The rebellion is now a thing / of the past, it is now a page,” centring the collection precisely there, at the beginning. Zits composes his Massacre Street to recreate “a poetic view of the Frog Lake Massacre of April 2, 1885,” structured from the influence of various perspectives on the Canadian historical prairie poem. Zits is working very clearly in a tradition that includes work by Robert Kroetsch, Monty Reid, Aritha Van Herk, Jon Paul Fiorentino and Dennis Cooley, each of whom managed to reenergize both history and the form of “documentary poetics.” An unfortunate result of “documentary poetics,” in Canadian writing at least, is that too many poets have composed poetry collections that merely replicate information on historical and/or literary figures and/or events without adding much of anything, whether to the documentary information or poetic structure. I won’t mention names or titles, but the offenders are many. Zits, on the other hand, seemingly takes as his models the poetics of both Kroetsch and Cooley, falling somewhere between the lyric questioning, tall tales and the perpetual return to the beginning of Robert Kroetsch, and the collage-quilt of storytelling of Dennis Cooley, most notably in his own historical prairie poem, Bloody Jack (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1984). The book is constantly moving, searching, interrupting and questioning everything that is being presented, resulting in an unsettled book on an unfinished question, and one that attempts not to assign blame, but attempt to discover the correct questions.

without giving expression to sentiments of sorrow

I will strive to push on

to the end of my undertaking

without tiring my readers

with vain expressions

____

It was in a circle

and a space in the centre being kept for dancing

and the rabbit in the pot boiling, it was all there, head, eyes, feet

and everything together

and Little Poplar was arrayed in some of Miss McLean’s ribbons, ties

and shawls

and another with my hat tumbling over the bank

and another with Mrs.. Delaney’s

and the squaws with our dresses

and before the sun went down they wrapped blankets around her

as if, coming down, she would eat the whole camp up

____

a sea of green interspersed with beautiful flowers and plants

as in the echo after every bomb, charm lying in its wake

it glided along the large rivers and lakes and desired rest

carrying white flags, fishing and waving white flags

or perhaps the pages of a blood and thunder novel

I breathed in the echo of every bomb, a prairie charm delusion

except perhaps when viewed from the deck of a steamer

____

Massacre Street is a large, complex and critical document on a messy and complicated period of Canadian history, a history that, in many ways, Canada is still working to comprehend, and come to terms with. The poems, too, are attempting to find out what happened. Through the poems of Massacre Street, Zits adds a polyphonic and critical gaze, refusing a single point of view but exploring many, and can be read as a poetic sibling to Myrna Kostash’s Frog Lake Reader (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2009), or cousin to Margaret Sweatman’s novel, When Alice Lay Down with Peter (Knopf, 2002). Through exhaustive research and a large curiosity, Zits manages to bring the material a new kind of life. Had only history been written so well before.

I fear I should have lost my small army in this

very big Country

The most applauded warrior wore

a policeman’s old tunic

on the back of which was chalked

a representation of himself

firing into a teepee of sleeping enemies

The horses also were depicted

in convenient proximity

for removal after this

glorious feat of arms

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Paul Wm. Zits

Paul Zits received his MA in English from the University of Calgary in 2010 and is the author of Massacre Street (University of Alberta Press, 2013). For the past two years he has served as Writer-in-the-Schools at Queen Elizabeth High School in Calgary, where he has taught Creative Writing to students in the Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) program.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I’ve had earlier manuscripts that contained work that went on to do well in magazines and journals, but seemed to lack appeal as book-length projects. Massacre Street contains a strong conceptual foundation which is something that I think was, perhaps, lacking in previous work. Like Massacre Street, my previous manuscript, 1843, was a work of poetic non-fiction, but in this case a (re)working of text found in The Illustrated London News. There are quite a few similarities with regards to how I handled the material I was working with, but as I continue to develop my practice, from project to project, piece by piece, I am also constantly re-evaluating my approach to the art form.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
As Kenneth Goldsmith suggests, “[y]ou can do anything that you want in poetry because nobody is fighting for that space. It’s a space that nobody wants. And in that there’s great freedom. Nobody will ever contest poetry.” I think that conceptualizing the work as poetry, or poetic non-fiction, gave me the freedom to approach the project as if nobody was watching. The resulting book is the product of experimentation that would not have happened 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 find that new projects typically develop quite slowly. I get considerable enjoyment from the research-phase of any project, and tend to immerse myself there. Between projects I tend to spend several months experimenting with techniques and new material, truly without a direction in mind. As John Cage advises: “Do not try to create and analyze at the same time. They are different processes.”

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I definitely start with a “book,” through which I’ll find a general premise that is constantly driving my practise. Because I work with found text, this premise guides what and how I select and organize this material. By playing with the selection process and by simply moving text around, I find that individual pieces evolve & begin building the larger project. It’s a constant movement back-and-forth from the whole to its component.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I wouldn’t say that I enjoy doing readings, but I consider them an important part of the dissemination of my work. That being said, I wouldn’t say that I consider public readings to be either counter to or part of my own creative process. Similar to Cage’s creating and analyzing, performance is another process. The knowledge-sharing & community-building aspects of public readings, however, are really quite exceptional.

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?
One of the primary considerations behind my writing, you might call it a concern, is the idea of reframing. Quite often it seems that concept-based writing that identifies itself as poetry, at the expense of realizing itself, will leave good writing at the door. In cases like these, whether or not it is an issue of poor conceptualizing, the practitioner should always be at great pains to make great selections. By treating letters, words, even full sentences as you would toy building blocks, separating a string of words from their context, language is quite simply able to do more. I’m finding a tremendous amount of enjoyment by simply selecting text, or employing constraints to select text for me, moving text around – allowing words and discourses to collide with one another.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I firmly believe that the role of the writer is dual: that of critic and innovator. The role of the writer is to question. His or her role is to question but also to suggest at and demonstrate innovation. Whether questioning larger cultural narratives, or questioning narrative itself, the writer is always performing this dual role.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I don’t know that working with an outside editor should be difficult, but it should be considered essential. Any conversation has the ability to yield new insights and a writer should know how best to negotiate & benefit from these dialogues. But it is also crucial that an editor fully appreciate the fundamental concerns of the work. It is important that both parties are disciplined.

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

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I find that a move from poetry to fiction has been a very natural one. I think that movement in any direction would benefit a writer’s craft, but that the move from poetry to fiction holds greater potential rewards for the prose-writer. My most successful moments in writing fiction have always come when the language has taken-on a particularly poetic character.

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?
When I do manage a routine, I tend to take frequent reading-breaks as a reward for managing to write something of some significance. Of some significance to me. I find frequent breaks refreshing & keep my mind properly spread-open.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
When my writing stalls I cut it up. Otherwise, I tend to revisit authors and titles that have either had a significant impact on my practice, The Third Mind (William S. Burroughs & Brion Gysin) for example, or work whose approach might function as a kind of springboard. A few names that come to mind, in reverse-alphabetical order, would be Steven Zultanski, Rachel Zolf, Darren Wershler-Henry, Sina Queyras, bp nichol, Kenneth Goldsmith, Kevin Davies, Christian Bök, Gregory Betts, derek beaulieu.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The smell of juniper bushes.

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?
Influences seem to come from a variety of places and a variety of places at once. I would certainly identify History, in all of its manifestations, as a source of material. The visual arts, which are a significant part of my own background, also seem to play an important role in my work, the principles of collage & montage being two notable examples. I do believe, though, that Conceptual Art carries with it some of the most generative potential for the writer.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
In addition to the partial list provided in question 12, I would identify, in alphabetical order, Kathy Acker, Louis Aragon, John Ashbery, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett, Roberto Bolaño, Italo Calvino, Jean Genet, Alfred Jarry, Chris Kraus, Robert Kroetsch, Mina Loy, George Perec & Alain Robbe-Grillet. I seem to gravitate quite easily to modernist and late-modernist texts, the nouveau roman and Oulipian works.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would like to take my wife someplace extraordinary for a honeymoon.

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?
I have previously studied, at one time, Fine Arts, at another, Anthropology. I suspect that were I not doing what I’m doing, I would either be a printmaker or an archaeologist.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It was really a question of timing, I suppose. While studying at MacEwan University in Edmonton I was introduced to work being done in the English Department at the University of Calgary and made the decision to begin my creative-writing studies there. The experience was significant enough to keep me on this path.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Hebdomeros. Giorgio de Chirico (Exact Change, 1992).

Anti-Christ. Lars von Trier, Director (2009).

20 - What are you currently working on?
I am currently finishing a new project entitled This is Not a P_. The collage-work in this manuscript is meant to reassert what René Magritte had claimed as the “ascendency of poetry over painting.” This is Not a P_., which refers to Magritte’s La trahison des images, turns objects into text, turns the viewer into a reader, offering to him or her freedom to create by salvaging pieces from the collage-works to which they refer.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Ongoing notes: mid-January, 2013

[a snapshot Christine McNair took of my feet during my reading on January 15, when we featured together at Twigs + Leaves in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue QC] Apparently dANDelion has officially made noises about their demise, in their own way. A magazine I very liked, so I am disappointed they are gone. Rumours have the upcoming end of the critical journal Open Letter as well, which, despite being in the air for some time, have yet to be verified.

I’m currently scheming a series of new above/ground press publications for January, February and March, with titles by Wanda O'Connor, Helen Hajnoczky, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Brecken Hancock, Abby Paige, Jordan Abel, Sonnet L'Abbé, Gil McElroy and others; have you subscribed yet? And don’t forget that The Factory Reading Series officially turns twenty years old on Thursday, January 24 with the launch of the ninth issue of ottawater.

Toronto ON/Edinburgh Scotland: At the back of Canadian poet Sandra Alland’s recent chapbook Naturally Speaking (Toronto ON: espresso, an imprint of Paperplates Books, 2012), she explains her compositional process:

I have fibromyalgia, a condition that causes fatigue, cognitive disturbances and severe pain. I once spent two years barely able to hold a pen. One of the ways I cope with fibromyalgia pain is to use voice-activated software – a program called Dragon NaturallySpeaking. The computer types what I dictate. Or so the theory goes.

[…]

            And I like to take things a step further – to mess with Dragon. I sometimes dictate to it in languages it doesn’t understand, cry or laugh into the microphone, mumble or use an accent. In this way, I collaborate more intensely with Dragon. I find out what it thinks I’m saying based on who it thinks I am. I discover the virtual me that’s constructed out of its version of my writing style and vocabulary, but with the added and often contrary aspect of its preprogrammed dictionary and lack of certain vocabulary.

I am fascinated by her use of a frustration into a positive, discovering a way to compose poems as a collaboration between her and the limitations of the machinery, thus discovering a series of pieces that could only have been composed by the two.

having been

sent the means to the past,

they are as she now; looking on.

Men dip the warden of the US, and sexual

pursuant is this, is different: the means to

irresponsibly you know their space.

The soul can be either flamenco or duty.

Will the abled. I lately

juicy in their many years. You’re good as the elegantly.

I always but but but, then say you’re

the bull. Gone.

Want to lose the Baby, though. You can then be but actual.

From “I’ll go on,” the play of its own is still

femme. And I go. I’ve lately means

to be an ape of the year.

One of the central questions of such a compositional process becomes: does intent matter to consequence? Otherwise: do the means justify the ends? Obviously, in this case, yes. Stephen Brockwell played with a variation on the same with an electronic voice recorder for a couple of poems that appeared in his fourth trade collection, The Real Made Up (ECW Press, 2007), including “Untrained Machine Voice Recognition: Joanne.” In Brockwell’s work, he was dealing with issues of voice and communication, and Alland is as well, from a direction slightly askew from Brockwell’s, in that her communication is less an optional one working against time constraints than one that works against the constraints of communication itself: how can one compose poems without being able to lift a bare pen? Alland’s chapbook, made up of short prologue and coda, a section of shorter poems and a section-as-long-poem (the sequence “echoing frida”), echoes elements of language poetry, allowing the language to pinball and spark, but with less of a straightforward through-line than some. The first of the eight-part sequence “echoing frieda” reads:

i/

not whether they seen me

as a human

who never seen him

that little is done to

a man and

bingo! it’s banned

for a lady;

a unique focus

this is May,

the wind at the wetlands begun

babies in debt relief, they bought me

solo

mum

in the Jack Casino got me

Calgary AB: From Paul William Zits’ brand-new 100 têtes Press comes its self-published first publication, his own Ceci n’est pasun: 1960s (excerpt), produced in an edition of thirty copies in November, 2012:

not exactly an aesthetic paradise. As a matter of fact, the unprettiness of the place is very apparent. And I don’t really understand the reason for all the bad taste. It’s no cheaper than good design and the people with money here could certainly hire the same architects that did the U.N. building, for instance, or the U.S. Science Pavilion at the Seattle World’s Fair. A couple of new buildings are going up on Wilshire Boulevard. They are very serviceable, smooth, neat and white – and they look like the box Disneyland came in. The city is full of prop buildings and false fronts, like a movie set, and totally unplanned. Without warning, a gas station will go up beside a big hotel or a private home. There’s no place to hide except behind shrubbery.

Zits’ Ceci n’est pasun: 1960s (excerpt) is constructed out of a series of prose fragments and lengthy descriptions, set as a collage of sorts, including jarring and broken language, nearly distractedly so. It’s interesting in how he works to stretch a narrative out as a line that refuses to straighten, and possibly even obscure. Might there be more chapbooks providing further excerpts, or do we have to wait for the potential full-work to appear?

a community of communities stretching giantlike among the lovely hills and valleys of southern California. Its tempo is a unique blen of city life and country living, and its attractions for the visitor range from sun basking and sunset viewing to dining in world-famous restaurants, shopping on beautiful Wilshire Boulevard, theatergoing, deep-sea fishing, and seeing such interesting places as Spanish missions, radio and television studios, and spacious parks with beautiful tropical plants and flower.

Apparently Calgary writer/editor/publisher derek beaulieu has something forthcoming with the press as well. To find out more about 100 têtes Press, write c/o 508, 1900 – 25a. St., SW, Calgary AB T3E 1Y5.

Houston TX: I recently received a copy of the beautiful and utterly charming Epithalamium, an ode to the unlikely marriage of Paul Klinger and Dawn Pendergast (little red leaves, 2012). According to the note at the back of the collection: “Dawn Pendergast and Paul Klinger were married on November 24^th 2012 in Galveston Texas. They met in Tucson, Arizona in 2004 while studying creative writing. They now live in Houston with two black cats and an ever-growing collection of 99¢ records.” Pendergast, editor, publisher and seamstress for little red leaves, is the author of leaves fall leaves (2011) [see my review of such here], and Klinger, the author of at least one chapbook I can find reference to online, the Occasion in the Mosaic Distance (dusie, 2007).

IN WATERMELON SUGAR

Softly we are Richard Brautigan and we have nothing to do with hippies and we fish for trout and keep some of the trout in there because we are Richard and we like to look at them. It suits us to have this mustache and to touch it periodically like one might touch a butterfly sitting there and wipe the crumbs away from something special that we have just eaten and enjoyed.

DP, 2005

Poet-partners who collaborate certainly aren’t new, and some of my favourite Canadian examples include Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier’s (as Lorna Uher) No Longer Two People (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1981) and Roo Borson and Kim Maltman’s Transference of November/Snow (Kingston ON: Quarry Press, 1985), not to mention the collaborative manuscript Christine McNair and I have been working over the past year or so. This small collection between Pendergast and Klinger is structured as a kind of call-and-response, with poems composed between fall 2004 and 2007 going back and forth between the two. How do their poems speak to each other? Given that we were working our own wedding plans and wedding pieces during the same period, I’m interested to see how two other poets decided to approach their own response, working backwards through their shared histories to find poems written to each other, or that spoke to one another. This small book is, as I said, utterly charming, and feels like an opening to a longer, larger conversation, one that I am interested in seeing more of, possibly. I am curious, too, to know if either of them, coming up closer to the actual day itself, might have written something new on the subject?

JUNGLA PHONE

i am in my vine with you

i am in my vine spending

some time with you

i am in the vine, you are

not the branches. you are

in the vine with me

thereof not of the vine.

love and a vine is mighty

because there is a history

of love and a vine and men

talking to one another

after this way. After this way

to the tunnel where I make

you out, I make you out

in the tunnel which is

clogged with vines

which are dripping

with the berries you must

eat in the afternoon because

you love sugar more than

spiritual highness. You are

sugar as of eating it yesterday,

I eat the sugar too and so

we are sugar gliders, yesterday

because

we have vines and sugar tunnels

in which I’ll make you

out like a check or something

that I’m writing in the dark

PK, 2007