Touch the Donkey supplement: new interviews with Caples, Coultas, Murphy, Turnbull/Gardiner + Ross,

Anticipating the release next week of the thirty-sixth 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 thirty-fifth issue: Garrett Caples, Brenda Coultas, Sheila Murphy, Chris Turnbull and Elee Kraljii Gardiner, and Stuart Ross.

Interviews with contributors to the first thirty-four issues (more than two hundred and thirty interviews to date) remain online, including: Leah Sandals, Tamara Best, Nathan Austin, Jade Wallace, Monica Mody, Barry McKinnon, Katie Naughton, Cecilia Stuart, Benjamin Niespodziany, Jérôme Melançon, Margo LaPierre, Sarah Pinder, Genevieve Kaplan, Maw Shein Win, Carrie Hunter, Lillian Nećakov, Nate Logan, Hugh Thomas, Emily Brandt, David Buuck, Jessi MacEachern, Sue Bracken, Melissa Eleftherion, Valerie Witte, Brandon Brown, Yoyo Comay, Stephen Brockwell, Jack Jung, Amanda Auerbach, IAN MARTIN, Paige Carabello, Emma Tilley, Dana Teen Lomax, Cat Tyc, Michael Turner, Sarah Alcaide-Escue, Colby Clair Stolson, Tom Prime, Bill Carty, Christina Vega-Westhoff, Robert Hogg, Simina Banu, MLA Chernoff, Geoffrey Olsen, Douglas Barbour, Hamish Ballantyne, JoAnna Novak, Allyson Paty, Lisa Fishman, Kate Feld, Isabel Sobral Campos, Jay MillAr, Lisa Samuels, Prathna Lor, George Bowering, natalie hanna, Jill Magi, Amelia Does, Orchid Tierney, katie o’brien, Lily Brown, Tessa Bolsover, émilie kneifel, Hasan Namir, Khashayar Mohammadi, Naomi Cohn, Tom Snarsky, Guy Birchard, Mark Cunningham, Lydia Unsworth, Zane Koss, Nicole Raziya Fong, Ben Robinson, Asher Ghaffar, Clara Daneri, Ava Hofmann, Robert R. Thurman, Alyse Knorr, Denise Newman, Shelly Harder, Franco Cortese, Dale Tracy, Biswamit Dwibedy, Emily Izsak, Aja Couchois Duncan, José Felipe Alvergue, Conyer Clayton, Roxanna Bennett, Julia Drescher, Michael Cavuto, Michael Sikkema, Bronwen Tate, Emilia Nielsen, Hailey Higdon, Trish Salah, Adam Strauss, Katy Lederer, Taryn Hubbard, Michael Boughn, David Dowker, Marie Larson, Lauren Haldeman, Kate Siklosi, robert majzels, Michael Robins, Rae Armantrout, Stephanie Strickland, Ken Hunt, Rob Manery, Ryan Eckes, Stephen Cain, Dani Spinosa, Samuel Ace, Howie Good, Rusty Morrison, Allison Cardon, Jon Boisvert, Laura Theobald, Suzanne Wise, Sean Braune, Dale Smith, Valerie Coulton, Phil Hall, Sarah MacDonell, Janet Kaplan, Kyle Flemmer, Julia Polyck-O’Neill, A.M. O’Malley, Catriona Strang, Anthony Etherin, Claire Lacey, Sacha Archer, Michael e. Casteels, Harold Abramowitz, Cindy Savett, Tessy Ward, Christine Stewart, David James Miller, Jonathan Ball, Cody-Rose Clevidence, mwpm, Andrew McEwan, Brynne Rebele-Henry, Joseph Mosconi, Douglas Barbour and Sheila Murphy, Oliver Cusimano, Sue Landers, Marthe Reed, Colin Smith, Nathaniel G. Moore, David Buuck, Kate Greenstreet, Kate Hargreaves, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Erín Moure, Sarah Swan, Buck Downs, Kemeny Babineau, Ryan Murphy, Norma Cole, Lea Graham, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Oana Avasilichioaei, Meredith Quartermain, Amanda Earl, Luke Kennard, Shane Rhodes, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Sarah Cook, François Turcot, Gregory Betts, Eric Schmaltz, Paul Zits, Laura Sims, Stephen Collis, 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 thirty-sixth issue features new writing by: Pam Brown, Kathy Lou Schultz, Shane Kowalski, Hilary Clark and Ted Byrne.

And of course, copies of the first thirty-four issues are still very much available. Why not subscribe? Included, as well, as part of the above/ground press annual subscription! (did you know that above/ground press turns thirty years old this year?) We even have our own Facebook group. It’s remarkably easy.

Touch the Donkey supplement: new interviews with Mosconi, Barbour and Murphy, Cusimano, Landers + Reed

Anticipating the release next week of the fourteenth 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 thirteenth issue: Joseph Mosconi, Douglas Barbour and Sheila Murphy, Oliver Cusimano, Sue Landers and Marthe Reed.

Interviews with contributors to the first twelve issues, as well, remain online, including: Colin Smith, Nathaniel G. Moore, David Buuck, Kate Greenstreet, Kate Hargreaves, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Erín Moure, Sarah Swan, Buck Downs, Kemeny Babineau, Ryan Murphy, Norma Cole, Lea Graham, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Oana Avasilichioaei, Meredith Quartermain, Amanda Earl, Luke Kennard, Shane Rhodes, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Sarah Cook, François Turcot, Gregory Betts, Eric Schmaltz, Paul Zits, Laura Sims, Stephen Collis, 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 fourteenth issue features new writing by: David James Miller, Jonathan Ball, Cody-Rose Clevidence, mwpm, Andrew McEwan and Brynne Rebele-Henry.

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

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

The Olive Reading Series: season thirteen,

Anyone following this blog for any amount of time might already be aware that I’ve long been a fan of Edmonton’s Olive Reading Series [see previous posts here, here, here, here, here and here], currently held at The Empress Ale House. With a featured reader (or readers) monthly during the academic year, each event also features a new chapbook, which also sees limited distribution within the English and Film Studies Department at the University of Alberta. Frustratingly, I don’t have a full run of the chapbooks, but here are some of the recent ones Olive member Jenna Butler has been good enough to send along:

Season 13-1: Iman Mersal’s Anger in its back roads. (Tuesday, September 11, 2012)

The author of four poetry collections in Arabic, poet and editor Iman Mersal is currently anassistant professor of Arabic literature at the University of Alberta, with one collection of poetry translated into English, These Are not Oranges, My Love (New York NY: Sheep Meadow, 2008). Anger in its back roads. is a short selection of her prose poems from three different translators, including this one, translated by Youssef Rakha and first published in English in Banipal 38 – Arab American Authors:

LOVE

            A man decided to explain love to me. Leftover wine, and noon is crossing over to the other side. He was doing up the last button on his shirt as darkness edged into the corner.

Directionlessness, like the moment the screen fades out, and the viewer has to start looking for the exit. In this way he decided to explain love to me, placing the glasses firmly over his ears while I was still naked.

            The room fogged up when he said, “Love is the search for…” I opened my eyes to see hordes of Spaniards looking for gold in Chile. They were hungry and empty-handed, while a Red Indian hid, terrified, behind a rock. When he said, “Love is being content with…”, my fingers started caressing a mountain of dark chocolate, while Ella Fitzgerald’s wailing slipped into my ears. “And it is happiness…” Then I imagined absolutely nothing.

            It must be that I never saw him again, because I don’t remember ever asking him whether love was forgetting his watch by the bedside.

Mersal’s poems weave their way underneath the skin in the most magnificent ways. Her short, meditative poems also manage the difficult tightrope of prose narrative while maintaining the unmistakable cohesion of poetry. One can only hope that a Canadian publisher might be smart enough to take on a collection of her work.

Season 13-2: Sheila E. Murphy’s I don’t often write on purpose I just write (Tuesday, October 9, 2012)

I don’t often write on purpose I just write

A skein of lariats defames heraldic acquisition

Just right for a glut of storage sheds

Where history will not find them

Or their innards

Or the mind beneath them.

Phoenix, Arizona poet Sheila E. Murphy has been developing quite the relationship with Edmonton over the past few years, triggered by her ongoing collaboration with Douglas Barbour, collected now in two trade books (and counting), their Continuations [see my review of such here] and Continuations 2 [see myreview of such here]. During my time in Edmonton, they were not only launching the first of their collaborative books, but reading together for the first time. Through multiple trade books, chapbooks and other ephemera, Murphy’s solo work is expansive, very much part of the bpNichol mantra of “the poem as long as a life.” Everything, it would appear, fits into a single, never-ending project; but a fragment of something large, the scope of which we can’t yet see.

One Hundred Ninety-Fourth

Tired eyesight, redaction of inaction, as if dream

released its legs, lived on invisibly as the mute key.

The specific horn lived in worn velvet blue

dented where the bell and valves had pressed too hard.

Imprimatur, wisdom presumed accessible

via remote, next best to pure absorption.

People, non-neighborly, refer to brandnames

of their weaponry, in hope of sharing that taut bond.

In music, a challenge occurs, and the conductor

oversees the change in seating for the innocent.

There is always such a lovely cadence in Murphy’s poems, and her language brings such an unexpected music. These are poems that might require to be heard.

Season 13-3: Titilope Sonuga’s Snapshots (Tuesday, November 13, 2013)

Fearless

Tonight

we are fearless

we will run

with scissors

stare down

a spitting cobra

play chicken

with a high speed train

we have known

our share of pain

swallowed a deeper

kind of poison

we are not afraid

to crash

We will walk

naked

into

the eye of storm

call down lightning

and dare it

to touch us

One of the strengths of this series is very much the cultural range of the writers featured, not simply repeating the same English-language Canadian poets again and again, such as Nigerian-born spoken word poet Titilope Sonuga, who left Nigeria at thirteen to live in Edmonton, where she later achieved a Bachelor of Science degree in Civil Engineering. Author of the self-published Down to Earth (2010), the fierce clarity of her poems in Snapshots are striking, and show just how powerful these poems must be when they’re performed.

Season 13-5: Anna Marie Sewell’s Dark Season (Tuesday, January 22, 2013)

things you give up

arranging six small cups on your kitchen window sill so that

the plum blossom design arcs from cup to cup around

a perfect curvature

wondering whether the world has a place for you

that curvature is now perfected

Author of the poetry collection Fifth World Drum (Frontenac House, 2009), Anna Marie Sewell is Edmonton’s fourth Poet Laureate. The strongest pieces in her small collection Dark Season are the shorter pieces, where the strength of her meditative narratives are boiled down to their essence, keeping to the bare bones.

Season 13-6: Jeff Carpenter’s affordances of fear (Tuesday, February 12, 2013)

1:30 AM, November 12, 2012

North Saskatchewan River, Emily Murphy Park, Edmonton

1.

I fear you least of all the fears afforded me. Your ice narrates and

forgets. Its advent meanders through the forest you forged, in the

valley you forged, through the city you forged. I feared my walk here,

alone in the woods at night. I was relieved to step out of the trees onto

your shore. I could see your other side where all the lights downtown

projected an orange nimbus above us.

During my tenure as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, I was fortunate enough to see the emergence of Edmonton poet Jeff Carpenter. All potential, raging and exploring and seeking, it’s fascinating to see how his work has been developing since, from a publication in The Peter F. Yacht Club and sound-collaborations (as Tonguebath) with glenN robsoN to work in the manifesto issue of The Capilano Review [see my review of such here] and a chapbook with Red Nettle Press, his malachi on foot (2008) [see my review of such here]. What is compelling about Carpenter’s work is its constant movement, even restlessness, not knowing exactly what might happen next. In this small chapbook, poems include title, notation, visual and text, the latter of which exists as a kind of poetic shorthand, whether sketch or notebook offering, all of which cohere into something difficult to explain or trace, and yet, one can’t look away.

3:00 AM, October 27, 2012

My backyard, Old Strathcona, Edmonton

5.

The concerned firefighter drove down to Emily Murphy Park on his

day off to find me. I was trudging uphill to work. He rolled up beside

me and said, were you walking on the river? My beard was frozen

over. I said, why do you ask? and faced him. It was Brad, Glenn’s

brother-in-aw. He recognised me too and said something that

sounded like the ice talking to itself. He gave me a ride up the hill and

explained the dangers of the frozen river, its inconstancy, especially

in the city. He told me not to walk on the ice anymore.

Continuations 2, Douglas Barbour and Sheila E. Murphy

beige stillness offers

a lament to seasoned children

held mid air whose longing

through the winter passes

acts of soft retention

treading memory

into a less sweet wine

somewhat drunk and lost to

purpose fall further into white

drift past forested hill up

rise to a portico inward per

vasive votive candles flashed (“xi”)

In Continuations 2 (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2012), Edmonton poetDouglas Barbour and Phoenix, Arizona poet Sheila E. Murphy extend their sequence of ongoing collaborations, producing a rare second volume of a contemporary collaboration between two poets (the two project-based book-length poetry collaborations between Darren Wershler and Bill Kennedy—apostrophe (2006) and update (2010)—might be considered another example). This particular collaborative work is constructed out of numbered pieces made up of long stretches of six-line stanzas, continuing into an ongoing, serial project. As their first volume collected the first twenty-five poems, this collects the same number of pieces, collecting poems “xxvi to l.” Not held to the trade book as their unit of composition, this volume follows up their original, Continuations (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2006), and suggest an open-endedness that just might continue for quite some time. As they write in their “afterword”:

Emmylou Harris, talking about her collaboration with Mark Knopfler, made a point that allusively applies to our work on Continuations: ‘When you combine two unique voices it creates a third, phantom voice.’ Over the years, as we have continued writing this odd serial poem together, it’s that continuing discovery of the third voice that has excited us.

Collaboration tends to encompass a wider reach than individual work typically does, although no such rule is constant. We have liked each other as collaborators because each of us has managed to balance his/her own uniqueness in service of the shared creation.

One of the delights of this collaboration has been our broader sense of subject; there is less sense of tightly controlled ‘about-ness’ to the process. Concepts, referents, even possible sites of imagery, are alive, balancing the roles of receiver and sender in a two-way process where the ‘music’ of what’s being produced provides much of the charge. When writing collaboratively, there’s a comfort and a simultaneous ‘ready for anything’ sensation, as the spectrum of surprise and expectation is touched in various places. On seeing or hearing the other’s response, each of us is often stimulated by the passage just received and read, then drawn into the work by wanting to respond.

Part of what makes this ongoing collaboration interesting is in the experience behind both writers, as Douglas Barbour has been publishing trade poetry collections since the early 1970s, and Sheila E. Murphy has been publishing nearly as long as well, and their collaborative efforts would be difficult to compare to much of their already-published individual works, truly creating something that is different in tone, style and voice. Continuations 2 furthers their collaborations in a similar way to how Toronto poet Jay MillAr composed his ESP: Accumulation Sonnets (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2009), writing on and then on, furthering the conversation through the structure of sonnets, as opposed to short stanzas that themselves accumulate into longer pieces. But what do the accumulations tell us?

how to hold a pose

position possibly as

truths spread slowly through

an evolution of light itself

etched quietly onto wide plates

stretching perhaps the scene

through pose           self

shrinks a posse distance

etchings quiet across

slow scenic plates

evolving into

a positioned truth (“xxxii”)

The first poem, way back in the first volume, opens with the three-line “sturm und / wrangling / with that angel always,” opening with a movement of language as much as music, rhythm and sound as meaning. This second volume continues the play of call and response, where Barbour and Murphy meet in the middle, with less a line that runs a linearity through. One could almost dip into any part of the collection and begin, allowing the meanings of the stanzas to collect. But where the first volume seems to open, this volume deepens, with moments darker than in the first. Just where is this accumulation heading?

beginning now to fade

from the predicted washing

rinsing washing yet perceived

as law while being ignored

because the truth is less

convenient than impromptu edicts (“xli”)

Ongoing notes: late December, 2011

A photo from our recent Christmas party/reading/regatta for ThePeter F. Yacht Club; hopefully we can get another issue out soon. But, of course, a new issue of ottawater is in the works, due to launch in January, and another issue of seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics is forthcoming as well, with new works by Monty Reid, Marcus McCann and others.

Nearing the end of another year. I find it staggering the amount of changes over the past year, and the year before. How did I get here?

Phoenix AZ: It’s lovely to get this year’s card from Sheila E. Murphy, a tradition I suspect she borrowed from the late Toronto poet bpNichol, sending out some three hundred cards of original material every Christmas for years. A few years back, Grain magazine even featured Nichol’s cards in an issue [see my review of suchhere]. His widow, Ellie, and daughter still send out a stack every year. For a while, Gil McElroy did the same, changing his a few years back from printed card in the mail to a poem over email. Doesn’t this all make you a bit jealous, knowing you aren’t receiving them? Thank you, Sheila, Gil and Ellie!

Toward the Year Twenty-Twelve

I have spent my life rehearsing to become a child.

Holiday jazz dissonance throughout the room

distracts from tonal sentiment

of past tense.

A double bass plucks percussion

next to woodwinds in a minor key.

I watch the toddler riding in its stroller,

and send a blessing

valid as a citizen’s arrest.

Infants and adults, a single species,

propelled by will

amid the soft perfume of being wanted,

faced with disentangling others

from an infinity of selves.

Toronto ON: I don’t know anything about Julie Cameron Gray, but from the first poem of her chapbook Coordinating Geometry (Toronto ON: The Emergency Response Unit, 2011) I am impressed.

After a Stage Performance of Anna Karenina

Ugly, unloved month. How

partial I am to the muddy clouds,

the concrete defining your sightline.

Stone planter, cement steps—

you would be marble in the sun.

Already you’re only enduring,

the quick night curled in the sling

of your scarf. Slip a small coin

down a magic slot and hear

whatever you have to say

come rattling from your mouth.

Surfeit, these graphite branches,

these milk-grey skies of November.

Take my ears, completely,

haul them back through a Russian

Pastoral, a theatre in St. Petersburg.

Drag me through a wedding ring,

a dark velvet train.

There is a slight unevenness to the short collection of poems, but in the pieces that work, there is an ease, an attention that is compelling, such as in the poem “Viral,” that includes the last line, “Collects the small secrets and loose change of your body and builds an aerie in the hollow of your shoulder blades, where it begins to write its memoirs.” It’s as though her poems are still working to discover a balance between ease and seriousness, working still to hold back a formal sense from tripping her up. I am intrigued, certainly.

Vancouver BC: Vancouver poet and critic Stephen Collis’ Lever (Vancouver BC: Nomados, 2011) continues his engagement with the social consciousness of his immediate, with the opening of the first poem, “The Felt World,” that writes: “Sit on a / Pacific beach / watching the ocean / die—acidification / hypoxia toxic / algae blooms to / thermal maximum / the giant carbon / sponge a sink / for tailings / fertilizer killer / microbes hormone / runoff all the / plastic that’s fit / to pitch.” The poisoning of the ocean comes up a couple of times in this small collection, less a theme than an accusation or a desperate realization, both of which they more often should be. The more I read work such as Collis, I wonder why poems and poets aren’t more political, and wonder just how it is that so many on the west coast are? As does Vancouver poet nikki reimer’s that stays news (Nomados, 2011) [see my review of such here], Collis deals with the recent “Occupy” movement in his seven-part “Dear Common” (the idea of the “Common” one that recurs in Collis’ work) as the third section opens:

Vancouver is not a

march or an

occupation but it

seems so in its

unfixed fixity

where we’d

unleash all this

movement

course together

but work on

smoothing the edges

where one breaks

off and another

begins