ongoing notes: mid-May, 2026: Dale Martin Smith + Ben Robinson,

You know the ottawa small press fair occurs in a month or so, yes? I already know you’ll be there. Or that zoom-interview that American poet Cole Swensen is conducting in a few days from now, via the Brooklyn Rail, with myself, Misha Solomon and Jennifer Baker on above/ground press? Oh, you should register for that. 

MN/NC/ON: The latest from Toronto poet Dale Martin Smith (who has a title with Wave Books forthcoming, don’t forget) is the chapbook Figures of Speech: Wide Infinity (Eden Prairie MN/Durham NC: Polis Press, 2026), a sequence of equally-sized-and-shaped stanzas, composed as lines that layer, accumulate and tilt across boundaries. You might already knew Smith as the author of a whole slew of titles, including the chapbook Blur (Toronto ON: Knife|Fork|Book, 2022) [see my review of such here] and Sons (Toronto ON: Knife|Fork|Book, 2017) [see my review of such here], and the full-length titles The Size of Paradise (Knife|Fork|Book, 2024) [see my review of such here], which was up for the Griffin Prize, and Flying Red Horse (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2021) [see my review of such here], among others, and the poems of this particular title suggest a far larger project, which could be speculative, or even hopeful, on my part. The poem extends, wraps and bleeds, almost as notes taken during a single or series of family visits, attending family meals and catching world news, numerous threads finding themselves woven into these particular poem-notes. “Magic naps cautiously in light / black fur white inside what’s / left annual family holiday visit,” he writes, “turkey sauce and copper wine / cooking gear the pie crumbs / familial banter or touching of / cell phones and flat screens [.]” The poem, the sequence, frames itself in his childhood home within an infinite moment, an immediate present, of conversation and televised football games, reports of drone strikes and bombings in Gaza, the Persian Gulf; the traces of his father’s recent death and his widowed mother, there in the house. It is a sequence of grief, and its traces, both his and his mother’s and everything else, simultaneous. As the poem begins:

An hour till boarding crab
grass grey wind forlorn or
just plain loss like light
sleep I can’t remember getting
old going for broke in
the poetry engine no one
could tell I was real inside
altered rhythm thickweed and spurge
how hard then set loose
on a blank continent no
promise but gusto a word
unflattens reality whatever that is
in media zones others dying
our leaders pay to drone-kill
with illusion of non-complicity unlike
orcas in the Red Sea
or Persian Gulf wherever pleases
them to sink ships they
go rightly at war with
nothing I believe in today
inside the many photo-albums I
look through with Mom in
afternoon post- and pre-death return
to “moments” where time opens

Hamilton/Toronto ON: The latest from Hamilton poet Ben Robinson [see his 2024 ’12 or 20 questions’ interview here] is the chapbook [A] Sensitive Man (Toronto ON: Knife|Fork|Book, 2026), following titles including his two full-length collections The Book of Benjamin (Palimpsest Press, 2023) [see my review of such here] and As Is (ARP Books, 2024) [see my review of such here]. The poems in this chapbook-length cluster respond to fatherhood and masculinity, and in attempting to navigate both in healthy ways, offering an interesting tether to works such as Dale Martin Smith’s Flying Red Horse (mentioned above), among others. “I didn’t think I was really a dad,” he writes, as part of “Has Anyone in Your Family Ever,” “more / a person who happened to have kids // until a bachelor party where I was making / lunches, wiping spills, laying blankets over // puked-out men. I folded Lou’s hooded towel / and pressed my elbow into the jamb, // stretch my hips for the morning commute.” It is just as much a suite of becoming a father as in being one, learning (as do we all, in regards to parenting) as we move through the steps. It has been interesting to see more poets approach conversations on fatherhood, offering a perspective and openness far different than those of a generation or two past, with poets such as Andy Weaver and Jason Christie, for example, providing their own conversations through the process. Robinson’s poems are gentle, complex and inquisitive, able to hold a great deal across what reads as straightforward thought-lines, writing daily tasks such as haircuts and dentist appointments. There is such a gentle way he writes of dailiness, what for so long might have been seen as too mundane to be captured in writing. As Robinson discussed in a 2023 interview conducted by Kevin Andrew Heslop for The Miramichi Reader:

I’ve been working with Al Purdy’s “sensitive man” as a draft title for my new poems, but maybe less ironically than he was wearing it, or with a different kind of irony. Yeah, I think I *chuckling* really am just a sensitive person. I’m realizing that more and more. I feel things deeply, and I find the world overwhelming in a lot of ways. And maybe this gets to what we’re talking about, this transcription of the real. This almost Bernadette Mayer idea, that the material is all out there and it’s utterly compelling. But at the same time that it’s compelling, it’s overwhelming, right?

Ongoing notes: TIFA Small Press Market/Meet the Presses’ Indie Lit Market (part four, : Neil Surkan + Beverley Daurio,

Again, this blended sequence. [see my first post on such here; see my second post here; see my third post here]. Might we see you later today at the ottawa small press book fair? We’ve been doing this for more than thirty years now, if you can imagine.

Toronto ON/Nanaimo BC: From Nanaimo-based poet Neil Surkan, following the full-length poetry collections On High (2018) and Unbecoming (2021) [see my review of such here], both from McGill-Queen’s University Press, as well as the chapbooks Super, Natural (Anstruther Press, 2017), Their Queer Tenderness (Toronto ON: knife|fork|book, 2020) [see my review of such here] and Die Workbook (Calgary AB: The Blasted Tree, 2024) [see my review of such here] is Ruin (knife|fork|book, 2023), a title I clearly missed when it first appeared. One might think, with at least two chapbooks I’m aware of over the past couple of years, might a new full-length collection be on the horizon? These are short, rather tight, first-person lyrics that run through meditation, reflection and family, whether working a long, extended, poem-long sentence-thought or compact lyric. I’m curious to see how the poems here might fit with his work from, for example, Die Workbook, what the shape of that potential full-length might be.

Reflection

I’ve come to the mirror and seen
myself for the first time 

in years, not as I fear
others judge me mid-chore 

or with love, but as
a creature who peers 

frankly, knowing neither shame
nor the threat of heaven.

Toronto ON: I’m very pleased that Toronto writer Cary Fagan has been producing a series of reprints and reissues as part of his chapbook press, Found Object, with one of the more recent titles by Toronto writer, editor and publisher (of the late and legendary press The Mercury Press) Beverley Daurio, A Broken Cup (2025). A Broken Cup is excerpted from her full-length poetry collection If Summer Had a Knife (Toronto ON: Wolsak and Wynn, 1987), a book, obviously, long out of print. I’m curious if this particular selection exists as a kind of “selected poems,” akin to a “best” of what that particular full-length had to offer, nearly four decades on, or if an assemblage of poems salvaged into a form that felt self-contained (or a bit of both, really). Without knowing the source, it all becomes speculation. “I am a slow writer; the poems in A Broken Cup were composed over several years,” Daurio writes in her short introduction, “Thoughts from a 505 Dundas Streetcar,” “within this newly electric and alive city. These poems may not seem political, but their very existence felt to me incredibly daring. I love Basho and Hopkins and Thomas and Plath, but I was hungry for writing that breathed the air of this place and time.” Further on, she offers:

Re-reading these poems, I am reminded of these times with fondness, of the living and charmed world created by so many caring, brilliant, open-minded people, and the unwavering light that shines from the lanterns they carried.

Before this re-issue, I actually hadn’t been aware that Daurio wrote poems, far more aware of her as the author of fiction (and one of the finest editors of same, through her time as a publisher). The poems have a timeless quality to them, both of their time and immediately fresh, offering clipped narratives across distances, pointed phrases and descriptive patter. I keep hoping from further prose from her, aware that it has been years since she’s released any new work, and this appearance of a reissue does make me hope that there might be further work possible What other gems might be hiding in Beverley Daurio’s files?

driving into winter 

dear mom: just a note to tell you i missed you
by a few hours, went through stop signs,
cranked up the radio, but when i got in
there were three cars in the driveway
and dad was in the hall closet with his face
in your coats, he was hugging your coats.
the whole way up i was driving into winter,
not a slow or subtle winter, there’s just
snow
suddenly. 

not the heart of winter either though
the highway’s rather like a spike
and you can fancy somehow driving it
that there is such a thing as control. 

steven and gregg had eaten and nana poured me a brandy
which i didn’t spill, thanks to the shape of the glass.
the green walls were hung with your
natures mortes, also the painting of the empty
café. nothing really dead in any of them,
no acknowledgement of withered apples lying
useful on the grass, no presumption
of comparison.

dad said the nurses sat you up in bed and
combed your hair. i wish i had a picture
of that. otherwise, it’s so easy to pretend
otherwise.

Ongoing notes: TIFA Small Press Market/Meet the Presses’ Indie Lit Market (part three, : Sadiqa de Meijer + Ben Berman Ghan,

[MLA Chernoff at the Meet the Presses Indie Lit Market, receiving copies of their brand-new above/ground press title]

Again, this blended sequence. [see my first post on such here; see my second post here]. Will we see you at the ottawa small press book fair on November 22? Will we see you at the pre-fair reading on Nov 21 at Anina’s Café?

Kington/Toronto ON: Presented as Kingston poet and non-fiction writer Sadiqa de Meijer’s Joanne Page lecture at Queen’s University, October 29, 2024, is the chapbook-length Fieldwork (Toronto ON: knife│fork│book, 2025), which becomes a curiosity, given how recently her collection of essays, In The Field (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2025) [see my review of such here] appeared. “I remember only one conversation with Joanne Page,” the piece begins, “although we saw each other before and after. This encounter happened at the edge of City Park in Kingston. She looked at me, squinting against the sun, and said, We read your essay, we all read it and thought it was really good, we were surprised at how good it was. She was on the organizing committee of Common Magic, a conference celebrating the life and work of Bronwen Wallace. I had submitted a piece about reading Wallace’s work during my early years of living in Kingston and had called it ‘Arguments With The White World.’”

This lecture feels, in many ways, an extension of that collection, offering her thoughts on writing, Page’s work and Kingston thoughts, and thoughts through and around writing and thinking, all prompted by the Page Lectures, and the work of the late Kingston poet Joanne Page (d. 2015). In case you were unaware, the Lecture series was originally founded by Phil Hall during his tenure as writer-in-residence at Queen’s University in 2012, with lecture chapbooks, the “Fieldnotes,” originally produced by Maureen Scott Harris (with lectures in the series by Don McKay, Phil Hall, Daphne Marlatt, Elizabeth Hay, Stan Dragland, etc.), a series since moved onto Kirby’s knife│fork│book. It is rather striking how far de Meijer has come as a writer of non-fiction prose over the past few years, able to weave such musical thinking across such a stunning prose lyric, one heartfelt and grounded in curiosity. As she writes:

This lecture was written. I wrote it in a series of rooms that have left their quiet tracks. The kitchen was sunlit and my mind accelerated. The chair was uncomfortable and I disputed myself. I answered the door and a phrase was lost to me. I used the fast pen, my fingers pushed buttons. Knowing the text would be read out loud, I wrote differently than I would for an essay, because you as the listening cannot insert your own pauses, or read the same line two or thee times over. I didn’t make them, describing occurrences from another millennium and country—writing is miraculous in its dissembling of space and time. I couldn’t tell you what I intended without it, because my mind is unpracticed in what an oral culture would require. We live where settlers attempted for hundreds of years to eliminate orally transmitted languages like Ojibwe and Kanien’kehá:ka, and this was also a violence against the profound linguistic capacities of their speakers. Writing is rigid.

 

Guy Elston (with Jeremy Luke Hill to the left) announcing Hill's 'Microchimaera' (Baseline Press), as the winner of the 2025 bpNichol Chapbook Award

Calgary AB/Toronto ON: The latest from Calgary writer Ben Berman Ghan, author of a novel, two collections of stories and a novella, is the chapbook of poems Behold the Dead (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2025), providing an interesting stretch of literary genre. Might a full-length poetry collection be far behind? Ghan’s poems stretch across narratives, allowing line breaks and silence between lines, attempting few words but across distances. With meditative elements of breath, staccato pulse and hesitation, composing open space as carefully as he places words. There aren’t many examples off the top of my head of prose writers that move into poetry—the late Alberta writer Robert Kroetsch, certainly, and Kemptville, Ontario writer Michael Blouin come to mind—and there are elements of Ghan’s lyric still firmly held in a foundation of prose narrative, although one he works to punctuate with open space, as the two-part poem “Annihilation” begins:

My body is a river

annihilated

in the hungry eyes of men.

 

Black waves hide a word, a body:

            Dissolve. 

                      Drown.

 

Becoming is the cruellest sensation. 

 

Bloody mouths

drinking in.

 

Ongoing notes: TIFA Small Press Market/Meet the Presses’ Indie Lit Market (part two, : Jacob Alvarado + Drew Lavigne,

[a corner of my table at the TIFA fair, including the shortbread cookies I made] 

Again, this blended sequence, as the weekend of back-to-back small press fairs was a bit of a blur. [see my first post on such here] 

Toronto/Mississauga ON: The debut poetry chapbook by Mississauga poet Jacob Alvarado is I Can Make It All Up To You (Toronto ON: Knife│Fork│Book, 2024), a collection of poems that write around their subjects, their initial prompts; less a sense of being evasive than simply working a different kind of clarity. “Bowie made his deathbed with Kendrick in his headphones,” begins the poem “How Many Times Does An Angel Fall?,” “a shipwreck saluting its reflection. // 3:16 AM: my head hits a wall. / Confetti bursts from my ears like ripped toilet paper.” There’s almost an element of the English-language ghazal (John Thompson, et al) in some of Albarado’s lines, allowing a leap between lines, between couplets, allowing the space between as much narrative space as the space itself. There are times that I do want the author to push further, just to see what else is out there, but there remains a clarity through Alvarado’s lyrics, one that finds itself the occasional wisdom, sharp lines that poke through, such as the final line of “Me and You and Awkward Silence,” that reads: “Depression is a room full of cereal bowls.” I am intrigued by this debut; intrigued by where this particular author might venture next.

Branches

His hands: dew leaves, iced tea, a waterfall.
Dares and truths are both dreams. Two choices; one flesh. 

My shoes were faded by the soaked suede
of summer strolls through sweet grass. 

A clearing. Of throat and brush. 

My legs were oaks. My knees; a forest-fire.

The sun was my heartbeat. Its rays my veins;
its heat my pulse. 

His eyes: acorns, aloe, alcoves.
Needles rained from pine-trees: self-clouding. 

The breeze flew around me but not through me:
    grease in a dewdrop.
Palm sweat: a waterfall, an avalanche, inevitable. 

His back: smooth, steady, slicked. A rockface. 

His mouth: The Devil dawned into God,
The stab of Eden’s gatekeeper, the sun. 

A hickey is a mark of belief.

TIFA fair: Jay MillAr of Book*hug Press, Leigh Nash of Assembly Press + Michael e. Casteels of Puddles of Sky Press

Moncton NB/Toronto ON: From the current poet laureate of Moncton, New Brunswick, Drew Lavigne, comes the chapbook EveningDress (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2025), a title that appears to be his debut, chapbook or otherwise. Lavigne offers poems of narrative richness and gestures that suggest performance, offering descriptive thickness across long lines and evocative meaning. “There is a dress by Paul Poiret,” he writes, to open the title poem, “which I first saw / in James Laver’s Costume and Fashion: A Concise History. / It was called ‘Evening dress: Il a-été primé.’ A fashion plate / from the Gazette du Bon Ton, 1914. / I was ten, and had never seen anything like this / turquoise pleated tunic, over a wrapped hobble skirt, / fastened with a gilded oval gem, bands of the same / fabric twisting down the arms, clasped at each crossing / by round jade jewels.” There is such careful narrative unfolding, unfurling, through his lyrics, one that might provide as much comfort on the stage as on the page.  

Round Mirror

It was easy then to walk into the sky
with my mother’s gilded mirror,
stolen from her dark room, held in my hands outside.
Startling then to find in the disc
that everything was upside down.
With little effort I could fly,
or walk among the branches of trees;
then jump from cloud to cloud: going higher,
seeing everything in a way that was strange and new.
Not understanding the danger of falling.
I tripped on the root tangled ground.
I saw the rolling sky, the black trees, the hard earth,
my face like a desperate man, seeing blood.
I fell into the mirror, shattered on the ground.

Dale Martin Smith, The Size of Paradise

 

Dear lord king godly death maniac.
I’m just filling space with phatic utterance.
Surge for entry, dense roots strangled in clay.
Word by word weave Fat Tuesday’s brassy balance.
Liminal king of antiquity’s sunk mores.
Now winter braces hymnals with waste.
No gloves to love with or glow into.
Spin toward disaster—here we so
take it wildly. Listening beyond
where one’s self pretends plantation. Sensuous
cashmere or Thermore. Flannel sheets and wool
the kids wear threadbare. Dream vocal warden’s
venal agency making room for the dead.
A new wind enlivens uncertainty.

I’m intrigued by the latest full-length poetry title by Toronto-based poet, editor and critic Dale Martin Smith, The Size of Paradise (Toronto ON: knife|fork|book, 2024). The Size of Paradise follows prior full-length collections Black Stone (effing press, 2007), Slow Poetry in America (Cuneiform Press, 2014) and Flying Red Horse (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks 2021) [see my review of such here], as well as numerous chapbooks, including from Riot / September 2016, an Inside Out Journal (above/ground press, 2019), and at least two with Kirby’s knife|fork|book: Sons (2017) [see my review of such here] and Blur (2022) [see my review of such here]. The Size of Paradise is composed as a kind of book-length sonnet-scape or sonnet suite, one hundred pages of one hundred untitled poems. These are pieces composed through constraint, albeit one focused more on a gymnastic language than I’ve seen of his work prior, offering an array of poems that each sit self-contained, as a kind of repeated response to a particular prompt. “Promised bomb falls at each step and the dead / persist in long slumber,” he writes, half-way through the collection, “cohabitants / of earthly paradise. Circle the many / objects composing you, insistent / collection folding me in.” There’s a collage-echo to the sentences and phrases assembled here, and I’d be interested to hear how these poems began, almost expecting a response involving the daily motion of composing a poem with the only constraint being the sonnet, a consideration of duration and of writing itself.

I’m curious about the way Smith pushes at the boundaries of the sonnet form, stretching and extending outward in waves, the edges of these poems moving nearly as would lungs. As well, to move through these poems is to move across duration in an interesting way, through the very act of writing, and of reading. “To write is a / residue like beauty,” he writes, early on in the collection, “a deformity / one adapts.” A few pages further: “I can barely sense duration.”

Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market (part one, : Devon Rae + Norma Cole,

Once more, Kate Siklosi and Gap Riot Press helped curate and organize the annual Small Press Market as part of the Toronto International Festival of Authors! And I was totally there for that, with a swath of recent above/ground press titles and my new short story collection with University of Alberta Press and Christine’s new hybrid memoir with Book*hug Press. Naturally, there were plenty of amazing publishers and items there as well [see my two notes from last year here and the four posts I made around the first year here], including Anstruther Press, Gap Riot Press, knife|fork|book, Gordon Hill Press/The Porcupines’ Quill, Inc., room 302 books, Proper Tales Press, Book*hug Press, Nietzsche’s Brolly, serif of nottingham, etcetera (with Simulacrum Press and Puddles of Sky Press unable to attend this time around). Don’t you wish you could have made it? At least there’s another small press fair coming up in Toronto (Mississauga, actually)that I’m participating in soon, for those folk who wanted to catch some further small press excitement (where Christine is on a panel with her new book as part of the same event/festival that day). And you know about the 30^th anniversary edition of the ottawa small press book fair happening on Saturday, November 16, yes? OH, AND IF YOU ARE IN OTTAWA COME OUT TO THE LAUNCH OF MY SHORT STORIES TONIGHT!

Here are a couple of items I picked up at this year’s event:

Vancouver BC/Toronto ON: I’ve been an admirer of the work of Vancouver poet Devon Rae for a while now [see my interview with her via Touch the Donkey], so was very pleased to see a copy of her chapbook debut, THIRTEEN CONVERSATIONS WITH MY BODY (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2024). Rae’s work, at least what I’ve seen, is leaning into what I presume will be an eventual full-length collection of very sharp prose poems around the body, with titles such as “My Lips,” “My Left Leg,” “My Left Shoulder” and “My Breasts,” offering narrative threads and conversation almost as a kind of update on what the late Toronto poet bpNichol (1944-1988) was playing with across his Selected Organs: Parts of an Autobiography (Windsor ON: Black Moss Press, 1987) and eventual, posthumous, organ music: parts of an autobiography (Black Moss Press, 2012). Rae’s poems offer a conversation with and around bodies very different than Nichol’s serious play, one instead that works through and with the differences and culturally-loaded complications of women’s bodies; she writes bodies as both physical and emotional space, one impacted far too often from the outside. “That elsewhere so close we can almost / touch it.” she writes, as part of “Conversation with My Night Body.” These prose poems are damned sharp, and you should be paying attention to them. Rae packs enormous amounts in very small spaces, yet her poems are composed with a deceptive ease of lyric and propulsive flow. As the poem “Conversations with My Uterus” reads:

You are shaped like the child I may not have. I think of myself curled up inside my mother years ago – the fullness of her uterus and the emptiness of mine. Sometimes, I want to return to that dream place. I know she loved being pregnant, I’ve seen the photographs, belly swelling in an Armani dress. And I wonder if I too will become a kiln or remain a vacant room.

Dani Spinosa, Gap Riot Press

San Francisco CA/Toronto ON: Oh, the delight of a new title by Toronto-born American poet, translator and visual artist Norma Cole [see my review of her 2010 To Be At Music: Essays & Talks here], her chapbook RAINY DAY (Toronto ON: knife|fork|book, 2024). Another of Toronto poet and publisher Kirby’s gracefully-produced items, RAINY DAY is a collection of twenty-one short, sharp lyrics offering a myriad of narrative directions across few words and very short spaces. As the poem “Critical Miss” begins: “permanently / beyond chagrin // intrinsic—what is / trinsic?” Alternating between prose poems and slightly longer sequences against short bursts, Cole composes the long line of each poem across a kind of condensed point-form, offering a rhythmic sequence of bursts held in breath, almost as hesitations, or a lyric caught in the lungs. “the darker / room // he talks / blocks,” the unpunctuated four-page poem “NO ACCOUNT SYLLABLES” writes, “of space / and // books of / time // I think / your // hand on / paper // least exercise / leaves [.]” Her lyric compactness clusters, stretches, holds breath. All of which, of course, makes me eager to think that we might be closer to a further full-length by Cole at some point soon, hopefully.

Mum’s the Word

saturation not able inside the magnitudes
scorpion suppression oppression falling failing
oblivious silent objects

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Hamish Ballantyne

Hamish Ballantyne is a poet and translator based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ peoples (Vancouver, Canada). He works in the Downtown Eastside and as a commercial mushroom picker. He has published two chapbooks, Imitation Crab (Knife/Fork/Book, 2020) and Blue Knight (Auric Press, 2022) and published his first full-length Tomorrow is a Holiday (New Star) in 2024.

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?
The first chapbook came out in early 2020 and flew under the radar. My most recent work is more deliberate, for better or for worse.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to fiction and non-fiction before poetry—I wrote a lot of stories growing up. I also wrote non-fiction after a fashion—I used to write small books about animals, the weather, natural history that were 100% made-up. I only came to poetry in my teens, through my friends.
 
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?
It takes a long time to get going, a lot of attempts circling around the same idea, sound, word. Once I crack something, develop an unexpected phrase, then I can get to cruising where a lot of writing happens very quickly. Then the editing again is a slow process, trimming things and developing threads between different poems.

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 think more and more I find myself working on a book from the very beginning. I have a lot of ideas for books, execution is harder.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
No I'm not, but it's getting easier. I do spend a lot of time thinking about how the poem sounds out loud, it's just that I don't think I'm the best reader. I'm working on that too.

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?
Yeah I think I do but I don't know if I can phrase them adequately outside of my writing. For one thing, I'm invested in the unscalability of poetry—the impossibility of extracting meanings from the full density of the text as it's written or read aloud. Poetry has an inbuilt resistance to the frictionless translatability demanded by late capital, and as such has huge potential to safeguard threatened histories, lifeways, idioms, sounds.

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?
There's clearly a lot of anxiety in Western liberal democracies right now about the role of the writer in culture, and I think it has a lot to do with the hunch that no one reads anymore, with a liberal insistence that the crises of late capitalism are actually a result of people failing to communicate properly and we need to bridge dialogue in our polarized societies etc. I've seen a few too many thinkpieces about empathy—I'm suspicious of those.  

I don't see any sort of privileged role for writers in the larger culture, but I think literary writing is important. Documenting histories, imagining futures and alternative presents, transgressing the boundaries of language etc. I am less concerned about the role of the writer and more about the role of writing in the culture—because as worried as people are about the crumbling institutions of literature, about changing modes of reception, about shrinking readership, writing—the inscription of language—remains dynamic and participatory.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I like it! I haven't been to a writing workshop or class since high school, so working with Rob Manery on my most recent book was a nice/new experience.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
One time we were driving down a logging road and a big rig came flying around the corner and my friend went halfway off a cliff trying to avoid getting hit. His van was kind of teetering there for a minute but the trucker hopped out, got some chains, and dragged it back on the road. The trucker (Walter) thought the whole thing was pretty funny and just said "keep 'er between the ditches" before he blasted off again. Good advice. But maybe the chestnut there is that if you almost kill someone you should at least drag them out of the ditch with chains.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation)? What do you see as the appeal?
The two have a very close relationship for me. Translation is generative, it allows me to play and experiment more freely, because there's material there to work with, there are some parameters. The nothing of the white page can be pretty restrictive, I get stuck with what's easy for me. So in times where I'm not writing much or I don't have much going on in my head I'll turn to translation for a while to get the wheels turning.

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?
I try to read before work every day, to make sure that I do something on a workday that isn't just work. Then I try to carry my notebook with me everywhere I go so I can write on the bus or when I'm walking around. Essentially I try to absorb as much as I can, from as many sources as possible—and eventually something in the confluence of film-music-poetry-natural history-history-philosophy-novels-newspapers will congeal into a thought, and once I have about four or five thoughts that have been sitting in my notebook for a while the writing will start to take shape in my head as I walk around.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Writing that's familiar, people like Peter Culley, Philip Whalen, Hoa Nguyen, Roberto Bolaño. But also I turn to a less exacting form of reading, skimming big books I have lying around. And music, and movies: Pedro Almodovar, Lucrecia Martel, Mike Leigh. Recently I had a long day of no writing and watched a ten-minute documentary about a family in Louisiana that poaches rabbits as they get flushed out of the corn by the big agribusiness threshers. That opened the floodgates.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Creosote! Docks! Low tide!

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?
I think David W. McFadden is drawing a distinction between literature and life which we must strive to destroy at every instant!

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
The writing of Michael Cavuto, Fan Wu, Tessa Bolsover, Tara Bigdeli, Cecily Nicholson, Dale Smith, Aime Cesaire, Cesar Vallejo, Fred Wah. Michael Taussig, Clarice Lispector, Gogol, Sergio Pitol.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Go to the Brooks Peninsula.

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 would love to work on an oyster farm.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I always just liked the idea of stacking a bunch of papers I wrote on.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The Secret Ladder by Wilson Harris. Cave of Forgotten Dreams by Werner Herzog.

20 - What are you currently working on?
A book of poems about the speed of sound and gambling.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;