12 or 20 (second series) questions with Aaron Burch

Aaron Burch is the author of the essay collection, A Kind of In-Between; the novel, Year of the Buffalo; the memoir/literary analysis Stephen King’s The Body; and the short story collection, Backswing. He edited the craft anthology How to Write a Novel: An Anthology of 20 Craft Essays About Writing, None of Which Ever Mention Writing, and is currently the editor of the journals Short Story, Long and HAD.

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'm not sure. Feels true both that it changed my life in massive ways and also not at all? On a basic level, it feels validating. Like someone cares, like pursuing this is worth it. I think my most recent work feels even more me than anything that came before it. Like I've, to some degree, found my voice. I'm more confident as a writer, and also just as a person, and I think all of that shines through in more confident prose too. It's probably more earnest and more open-hearted, maybe even more fascinated by my obsessions than ever — nostalgia, friendship, growing up, storytelling.
 
2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
Fiction is just always what felt most interesting to me. I write nonfiction, and a little poetry, and read some of those too, but fiction is generally what I want to read, what most excites me. When I first started reading for pleasure during college and then as I graduated, it was novels — Fight Club, The Beach... and then Kavalier and Clay, The Corrections, Geek Love...  — and from there I found McSweeney's and that was all the stuff that just lit up my brain and felt exciting and made me want to read more and mroe, and also write.
 
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?
Everything feels a little different. I wrote a new story over winter break and it came out pretty fast and the first draft wasn't that different from the published version. But I'd been thinking about it for weeks, rolling it over and over and over in my brain. I was busy with classes and I'd told myself I was taking the semester "off" from writing, mostly so I wouldn't feel guilty if/when I didn't while busy, but also to kind of replenish the tank, as it were. And I held myself to it, which meant once my classes finished, this story just spilled out of me pretty fast. It took a couple more drafts of moving pieces around and tightening some language and a few deletions and additions, but it was largely there.

On the other end of that spectrum is a longer project like a novel. I finished a novel last summer and have been thinking about and wanting to start a new one (but was giving myself the semester off!). I have this novel that I started a few years ago but then got overwhelmed with and busy with other stuff. So I've returned to that, and what I thought was "a few years ago" was actually 2017, and new writing is going well, but I can't imagine having a draft done sooner than next summer, and could be way longer than that, and so by then it will have been "in-process" in one way or another for almost a decade??
 
4 - Where does a 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?
Again, it's a little all over the place. With a novel, I normally know it's a novel from the beginning. With stories, I'm usually just writing them here and there and then at some point they start to coalesce into a "book." With my essay collection, A Kind of In-Between, it is all personal essays, mostly short-shorts. I don't think I ever thought those would make up or even be included in a book. They felt like fun little off-shoots as breaks from or when I was getting frustrated with my novel. I really really love everything Autofiction is doing and I love that they are usually these short, tight, fun books and so In-Between kinda happened by accident, with me just wanting to work with Michael Wheaton and Autofocus. I looked around and had a lot more of these short-shorts than I'd realized, and so I just sent him all this stuff and went, "Is there a book here?" There wasn't — not quite, not yet, lol — but he helped me find one.
 
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love doing readings! I don't think they're part of my creative process really though. I do think a lot of what I'm trying to do, in both fiction and non-, is for the writing to sound like you're being told a story, and so that usually goes well for doing readings but it starts from wanting to capture that on the page.
 
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?
With nonfiction, it is often something pretty explicit and specific to the essay — Why did I do that? Why did I respond the way I did? Why do I keep thinking about this? With fiction, there's probably versions of those same questions, though they're much more subconscious. I rarely ask it consciously, but an underlying question that I think is often driving me is how to lean into and convey this fascination with and tendency toward nostalgia that I have, in new and interesting ways. How can I complicate it, how can I make it interesting and engaging, and not just fall into the trap of lazy, one-dimensional sentimentality.
 
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?
Oh, I don't know. This isn't something I think or worry about. My role is to write. And to promote and encourage and champion writers and writing I love. The larger culture isn't really my business.
 
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential. I love it. I love working with an editor who reads a work excitedly and deeply and curiously. One of my favorite parts of writing is working with an editor and having them push a piece to get even better. (And, being an editor, when I can help a writer push a piece to get even better.)
 
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Hm. I don't too much think of writing in terms of advice. That said, there's this George Saunders essay, "Rise, Baby, Rise," that I love a lot. There are two titled subsections: “A Story Is Made of Things that Fling Our Little Car Forward” & “Ending is Stopping Without Sucking.” That's kinda everything there is right there!
 
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (short stories to essays to memoir)? What do you see as the appeal?
It's felt pretty natural! I think I moved into nonfiction largely because that's mostly what I teach. One of my most common classes I teach now is an intro cnf class, The Art of the Essay, though my teaching load used to be mostly, and often entirely, comp. But I taught a personal narrative essay in that class, and after doing that for semesters and years, I got inspired. By what my students were writing, and by the readings I was assigning and our discussions of them, and also just the way that I taught them. At some point, I think some version of "I do a pretty good job teaching these, I should try to take some of my own lessons and advice and write them."

My fiction often starts with something that happened to me, something I've observed, something I'm thinking about. And then the process, and the joy, is playing these games of "what if" and letting myself extrapolate and fictionalize and really take it from there. When I first started writing essays, I would have these moments or memories or whatever from my life and I would be unsure if it felt like something usable for fiction or non. But the more I wrote both, the more it started to just feel natural and instinctual.
 
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 don't have much of a routine. With teaching, it's pretty catch-as-catch-can. During the summer, I do often try to write every morning, more or less first thing, usually for anywhere from 2-4 hours. Five days a week feels "right." But that is ideal, and few things ever are. I've had moments of "write every day" practice, but those probably feel more the exception than the rule. This semester, I have classes Monday-Thursday, and it is only a couple weeks in, but I've so far designated Fridays as writing days. I go to a coffeeshop, write longhand for a couple hours. On the one hand, one day a week feels so minimal. On the other hand, every little bit counts, and any kind of consistency is better than nothing! If I can keep it up, I should have as little as a quarter, and maybe as much as half, of a new novel drafted! Which would then be an incredible headstart to take into summer.
 
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Read, read, read. Live life. Do stuff. Read some more.
 
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Rain on concrete.
 
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?
EVERYTHING influences me. Nature, music, visual art, TV and movies, being active. I find just being a human in the world incredibly influential to creating art. I go see live music and some part of me thinks, "How do I translate this — this singer's growl, this lighting setup, this feeling of being in the audience... — to the page?"
 
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Feels almost caricature-like, but Jesus' Son is incredibly important for me, and the book I most often return to for inspiration. In general, everything I read becomes pretty important to my work. I also spend a lot of time and energy with various editorial work — HAD and Short Story, Long, specifically now. I love reading submissions and getting excited about and accepting work and working with writers.
 
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I don't have any specific goals, to be honest. That said, a kinda joke-y answer that is also serious: get an agent, sell a book to a bigger press, make some money from writing, be read more people, win major awards, be championed as a great writer... all that shit, lol.
 
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'd love to say something fancy and cool like movie director, or even actor, though those never actually felt like "real" jobs. That said, "writer" never really did either... and it still isn't! (Not in the paying any bills, anyway.)

If I hadn't become a writer, I bet I'd just have some kind of manager job at, like, a book printer or something. Which is where I worked before I went back to school for my MFA. But even that is book related, as is a bookstore, which is the other thing that jumped to mind.
 
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I don't know that I ever knew it about myself but I think I always liked telling stories and being something of a storyteller. Entertaining people, holding the attention of an audience, making people laugh. And then in college, I discovered these novels, and then lit journals and short stories, and it all just immediately felt exciting and like something I wanted to do and be involved with, and then when I started, it just felt... right. And as I've moved through life, nothing else really quite has.
 
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I've been raving about this book a lot on social media the last few weeks, but I loved Amy Stuber's Sad Grownups. I'm only about 1/4 of the way into it, but Ben Shattuck's story collection The History of Sound is totally knocking me out and I foresee raving about it for a long time to come. And earlier this year I read Bright Lights, Big City and was surprised just how much I loved it.
 
20 - What are you currently working on?
I'm in the beginning stages of a genre-y novel that is a contemporary riff on the Jacob and Esau story from the Bible, set in 07/08.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Lisa Fishman, One Big Time

 

Two weeks is better than one week
which reminds me
this is quarantine, by law
staying in place
14 days
Border Control will call every day
they said, but haven’t yet

I make a list
two moose one loon the single
constant chipmunk
multiple birds
no boats except a metal row

& scruffy kayak

cloud      sky

temptation

to plainest words (“July 10-13”)

I’m charmed by duel American/Canadian writer Lisa Fishman’s most recent title, the compact and Covid-era One Big Time (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2025), following her debut short story collection, World Naked Bike Ride: Stories (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2022) [see my review of such here], and a handful of prior poetry titles including Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition (Wave Books, 2020) [see my review of such here]. One Big Time is composed as a kind of lyric sketchbook—less a density than an exactness and easy precision—across eight small temporal poem-captures. The table of contents for the collection, titled “TABLE OF DAYS, 2020,” lists her eight lyric poem-sections as “July 10-13,” “July 14,” “July 15,” “July 16-18,” “July 19,” “July 20,” “July 21-22” and “July 23-24.” While the poems offer an immediacy of moments, sketches and relays, the framing sets this firmly as a pandemic response, and a title that suggests the uniformity across that time, the perpetual, endless now of timeless space that occurred within lockdown. “you could just say / not anything / in the forest / under hemlock,” the opening poem begins, “waterbeing going by // meant to write waterbody // but it came out waterbeing / under treebody [.]”

The immediacy of Covid-era responses of titles such as British writer Zadie Smith’s Intimations: Six Essays (Penguin Books, 2020), Toronto poet Lillian Nećakov’s il virus (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2021) [see my review of such here], Barcelona-based American poet Edward Smallfield’s a journal of the plague year (above/ground press, 2021), Toronto poet Nick Power’s chapbook ordinary clothes: a Tao in a Time of Covid (Toronto ON: Gesture Press, 2020) [see my review of such here] and Tacoma, Washington poet Rick Barot’s chapbook During the Pandemic (Charlottesville VA: Albion Books, 2020) [see my review of such here], not to mention my own pandemic-suite of essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2022), composed across lockdown’s first hundred days, find new ground in Fishman’s lyrics. There’s a calm to this collection, even with the framing, the background, of uncertainty across that first Covid-era summer. There’s also something quite graceful to the subtleties of a smaller collection—the poems themselves take up but thirty of the fifty-six pages of this published book, allowing for a great deal of open space, which I very much appreciate here, and seems a smart and deliberate design-response to the requirements of the poems—one fully aware of the lyric geographies she moves through. “The river Niedecker / wrote of minerals / comprising blood / I think she said we’re made of / rock,” she writes, as part of “July 20,” “she of the Rock / River / but I think she said that / near Lake Superior [.]” The immediacy of Fishman’s notes provide something far quieter, more immediate and localized. Fishman offers something intimate, and detailed, through her sketchnotes from the landscape of a borrowed lakeside cabin, somewhere on the Ontario side of the border, syllables across a deliberate wish to retreat and refocus, in part through the very act of writing—“Present location / for nine more days: / up hwy 129 / north of Thessalon / Ontario // North of U.S. / Undone States”—where she holds to solitude, and an attempt, a sense, of grounding calm. “and down there is the lake / full of fish / and there is no reason / to stop writing [.]” Or, elsewhere, as she offers: “Where the lake cuts through the forest it does not / show you.” she remarks. “Go around.”

5:30 a.m.
Morning star and Crescent moon
in dusky light (orange red purple)
an hour later, light’s bright yellow
then silvery yellow
then clear or no color, transparent
light

A novel confused me just this year
bc she was talking about dusk
first thing in the morning, at dawn
so I looked into it and sure enough
dusk is really
a quality of light, not a time of day
(light with colors)

& yesterday “at dusk”
the dusky light was blue

I notice not being tempted
            to say so what (“July 14”)

 

Summer Brenner, Dust

I’m appreciating the ease of San Francisco writer Summer Brenner’s prose through her recent memoir, Dust (New York NY: Spuyten Duyvil, 2024), a book exploring her upbringing and family circumstances: from her father’s distraction, her mother’s deflections and entitlements, and her brother’s difficulties and enduring sweetness. In his blurb for the collection, James Nolan writes how Brenner “captures the tumultuous fifties and sixties of a genteel Jewish family in Atlanta, with the South’s oppressive segregation and anti-Semitism. The family drama is fraught: the brother is a schizophrenic, the mother is a Gucci-clad Medusa, and the father a suicide.” The prose is engaged, engaging; offering the distance of time but an immediacy of enormously rich detail. The language seems uncomplicated, but is crafted, riveting. As she begins the third chapter, “The Toy Store”: “In summer the daylight is nearly white. Its color is dulled by the flat, hot, heavy air. The sky and sun are buried in a white vapor that hangs like a starched sheet. The thick air presses down on everything. The nearby objects—my red wagon, my parents’ blue car, the houses—pulse with the heat around them. From the road, the asphalt sends up zigzag waves of heat.”

“Whenever the KKK marches through downtown,” Brenner writes, “they pass Leb’s. They deliberately choose a route that passes Leb’s. They wear long white robes and carry their hoods in their hands. They can’t hide behind their hoods. There’s a law now that makes them show their faces.” She continues:

I know about the KKK. I know they burn crosses and do things that I can’t let myself imagine. I know they hate Jews. They hate Blacks, Catholics, and Jews. Because Daddy stands up for the rights of Blacks, I worry they’ll come to our house. I worry they’ll burn a cross in our yard.
            At Leb’s our family likes to sit in a booth by the window. If the Klan is marching, I see them through the window. They’re grinning when they pass us. Or maybe grin is incorrect. Maybe grimace is the correct word. I see how proud and happy they are to march. I’ve been taught you’re only supposed to be proud of good things. I wonder if they think they’re good. I wonder if it makes them happy to hate.

There’s something quite stunning in the way she describes her childhood surroundings, from live-in maids and segregation to her father’s refusal to adhere to those artificially-drawn social and colour barriers, and the later discovery, in her teens, that her father had been a regular visitor at some of those same integrated jazz clubs as she, all in secret from her mother. “I tell Mother that she should go too. However,” she writes, “Mother doesn’t approve of mingling. She believes in rights but not mingling. She thinks mingling is stepping into other people’s business. Or maybe she’s afraid. Maybe equality is better in theory than practice.” Given how Brenner describes how she herself moves with the period, ending up in a commune in California with a small child by the 1960s, the distances she achieves through this break seem incredible. Her parents are set firmly within the context of their settings, as Brenner describes in detail how she lifts herself out of it, and into another.

It is a remarkable story of how one emerges, able to find clarity in one’s surroundings and chaos, and be able to step outside of it, seemingly unhindered by the limitations of her parents, of her community; of where and how she grew up. How she managed to emerge as a seemingly-emotionally healthy, capable and empathetic person. Through all the chaos. Through all the bluster and anger and resentment and turmoil, capturing the detail of a time and a place and a sense of it that is deeply compelling.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Aaron McCollough

Aaron McCollough is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently Salms (University of Iowa Press, 2024). He is also the co-publisher (with Karla Kelsey) of SplitLevel Texts.

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?
To say my first book changed my life would feel strained. At least in the most obvious practical terms, it had little to no impact on my life. I know I had hoped it would lead me to a more concrete professional footing and therefore translate into material change in the form of income. That did not happen. Subsequent books were no more life altering in this sense. That being said, it would be very hard to overstate how much publishing that first book (or second, third, etc.) has meant to me and has meant for keeping alive that part of my life that is "being a poet." So, the first book feels now like it represented a kind of culmination of a long phase of student writing and aspiration while at the same time opening the horizon on an equally long phase of establishing myself in my own mind as a "real" writer (rather than a hobbyist, I suppose). In short, it felt fundamentally validating even if it never served me as a professional credential in the way that publications do in the academic marketplace, and it also established an expectation within me for pursuing further such validation. Twenty-two years later, the need for validation has changed a good bit, but I won't pretend it has completely gone away. I do trust my own artistic inclinations much more deeply now then I did then, confirmed in part through two decades of further reading, writing, and testing of those inclinations in the actual experience of life. Where once I hoped to leverage a livelihood out of poetry (which even then struck me as a somewhat dubious pursuit), I have long been free to let poetry's work be a sufficient end in itself. I believe this translates into something more purely in keeping with my own idiosyncratic artistic vision, which in turn feels more validating than the early accomplishments, if in a slightly different, more wholly personal way.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
The simple answer is that other forms seemed impossible to me whereas poetry did not and so I started doing it. I still don't know how people manage to write imaginative prose, even though I have many close friends who do so very well. Probing a little more deeply, I have always been drawn to the elliptical nature of even the most straightforward lyric writing. The compression and leaping of lyric figuration, as well as the blend of revealing and obscuring that serves as the lyric's engine has always made poetry feel like the most memetic of modes for experimenting with the materials of what it is to be alive. And this sort of experimentation is what I find most compelling about literature.
 
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 have a tidy answer for this question. Process and project for me have tended to be pretty organic and have developed at different speeds. Likewise, some poems have come quickly, some slowly, many more have foundered and been abandoned. On average, I guess I'd say most poems that have survived have appeared quickly and then been revised meaningfully but not radically over the course of a few years. As poems appear, they tend to influence the way I think about the ones that preceded them, which guides the way I revise.

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?
For the most part I think I am an example of the former. In a couple of cases I thought I had a project-level concept in mind from the outset (Little Ease and No Grave Can Hold My Body Down). But, in the end, even those books ended up dictating their own path to me as I went. At most, I think I have a vague idea from the outset of what a gathering of work is going to be interested in, but I tend to learn the real nature of the interest as I'm going and as I'm finishing up.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I don't love giving readings. I'm too shy for that, which means that I have to push past my shyness to perform, and pressing in that way feels inauthentic. In some ways, it feels perverse to make public the product of poetry's very solitary and private work, but that of course is a kind of contradiction, given that the meaning of publication is literally "to make public," and I've pursued publication for years. In short, I don't think readings have much to do with my writing, but I do want (for reasons I can't completely justify) to share that writing with other people. Sometimes I give readings as a result, and sometimes it goes relatively well, although it never feels quite right to 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?
There definitely are. Most broadly speaking, I'd say my poetry is concerned with the place where metaphysics, ethics, memory, and psychology come together in the present moment. In practice, this has always been a kind of soteriological inquiry: of kairos and eschaton and an accounting of a new heaven and a new earth fitfully breaking into lived history, specifically history as lived out through the dot, in the great network of being, represented by my own mind-body-soul.

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?
I have always trusted the idea that artists (including writers) should pursue their own weird paths with as little distraction as possible. They belong in the wilderness, and so their role is outside of typical systems we tend to associate with ideas like "role." First, their role is to be marginal by virtue of their devotion. Secondarily, the products of that devotion may serve the culture, but that's the culture's business, not the artist's.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
It has been helpful to me to have another, trusted person challenge my decisions. It hasn't always been a formal editor who has done this most helpfully, but once the wilderness work is over, I find it very valuable to get feedback from people who know my work and can see with fresh eyes.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Cut the longest swath you can for as long as you can.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I start every day early with an hour of coffee, reading, and contemplation. It sounds a little precious, but I find it makes my life much more manageable. I don't write every day, but often this beginning does lead naturally into writing, and when it does I'm always grateful.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I tend to be in agreement with David W. McFadden, as cited in question 13 below. I tend to go back to reading, always. I guess I'm less inclined than I used to be to think in terms of writing being stalled or not. I want to say that at this point I see living and writing being close enough to one another that I'm writing as long as I'm living, even if there isn't ocular proof left behind. Sooner or later there tends to be some kind of receipt, and that's gratifying, but often I feel like the work that needs to be done first needs to be done in silence. So, I don't do as much conscious looking for inspiration as I once did.  

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Junipers. Honeysuckle. 'Lectricshave.

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.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
The 17th-Century English poets continue to be very important to me in both my work and my life. Dante has continued to figure more prominently in my imagination over the years than I expected. Rilke, Kierkegaard, Bergson, the Black Mountain poets, Ortega-y-Gasset, Deleuze, Karl Barth, Jürgen Moltmann.

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

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?
Priest. Were I not a writer it's hard to imagine being at all, but writing is not my occupation. I've had many jobs, and being a writer has rarely gotten in the way.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I wasn't very good at much else. Or, I seemed to have a talent for writing and less talent for other things.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Last great book was Septology by Jon Fosse. Last great film was Vesper by Kristina Buožytė and Bruno Samper.

19 - What are you currently working on?
I've been writing quite a bit the year since I finished the Salms manuscript. I'm not sure what all this writing might amount to, but formally these are short lyrics. They seem very quiet to me, and I'm not sure how many of them are really even really poems. I've been thinking of them of "figures," so eventually I will have to figure out what that really means.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Sean Howard, overlays

 

PREFACE

Tidelines in &
out of print (the

only ever briefly
laid stress): cloth-

bound back-
wash. So

soon,
the

self’s
worn copy! I

don’t know: gha-
zal? haiku? rain

to snow…Just
gulls, rough

edges

I’m fascinated by Cape Breton poet Sean Howard’s latest poetry title, the deceptively-subtle and sleek production of his wildly inventive overlays (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2025), a book subtitled “( scored poems ),” with addendum “from Sea Run: Notes on John Thompson’s Stilt Jack, by Peter Sanger.” The poems that make up Howard’s overlays quite literally respond to the work and structure of Nova Scotia poet, prose writer and critic Peter Sanger’s critical monograph on the late John Thompson’s posthumous Stilt Jack (Toronto ON: Anansi, 1978), a monograph originally published by Xavier Press in 1986 (a “fully revised and expanded edition” appeared with Gaspereau Press in 2023). As British Columbia poet Kim Trainor writes of the first edition of Sanger’s monograph in a review on her blog back in March 2014, the book is “a meticulous line by line commentary on Thompson’s Stilt Jack,” and Howard’s collection holds to the structure and spirit of Sanger’s short work while entirely dismantling the language. “Canada, still harrowing? Pen / knife (but why?),” opens the poem “IX: SCRAPES,” “scraping star- // light from stone. Keats’ cease / fire (so the world we shut // up…): negatives leave / room for the dark. // Left standing, / children’s // voices / over // the wall.”

One might say that Howard’s project responding to Sanger’s text is very meta, set as an homage to an homage, a response to a response, riffing off Sanger writing on Thompson. “Key / note,” opens Howard’s “XXXV: GREENS,” “silence’s / tonic: soon, a // plenty. History’s / dead aims: as Joyce // might sway, gnaw- / ledge is dour…(Me- // thodically, Occam cuts / the world shaving: High // Table, Apollo’s spoon / on the moon.)” The poems are precise, playfully clipped and exact, seeking the moment within the moment, within and around the boundaries of Sanger’s own possibilities, and Thompson’s as well. Howard’s poems are precise, but packed with a density that is both wildly propulsive and accumulative, offering a joyfully-jagged rhythm and staccato that display him clearly having an enormous amount of fun across this myriad of collaged lyrics. As the poem “BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY: SEVERAL SELVES” begins:

Blackouts: child’s-eye, searchlights…(Everywhere, sold-
iers, compulsory figures.) Cold War: atoms, butterflies &

wheels. (Learning class, Manchester’s grammar.) Ill-
fitting, often, sign & sound: after the storm, find-

ing language’s anchor. (On course in the
woods? Trout make themselves

clear?) A while, Dylan
Thompson: double

vision,
loose

locks.

Whereas the notion of the response or translation is more familiar in other corners of contemporary (experimental, avant-garde, what have you) poetics—whether bpNichol’s Translating Translating Apollinaire: A Preliminary Report (Milwaukee: Membrane Press, 1979), Erín Moure’s Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person (as Eirin Moure; Toronto ON: Anansi, 2001) or more recent book-length projects responding to different poetry books through her own individual poetry-length works by American poet Laynie Browne [see my review of her latest here; see my interview with her on her ongoing projects here]—it is a form and approach less visible across those working more formal lyrics. One can cite poems here and there, certainly, including the endless array of responses to Wallace Stevens’ 1917 poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” but very few in the way of book-length works, making this poetry title a kind of formal outlier (and an absolutely delightful one).

Echoing the structure of Sanger’s poem-by-poem critical response, Howard’s overlays is structured with three opening poems—“PREFACE,” “INTRODUCTION” and “BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY: SEVERAL SELVES”—prior to the body of the collection, a section titled “NOTATIONS TO STILT JACK,” made up of the opening poems “EPIGRAPHS” and “THOMPSON’S PREFACE” before launching into thirty-eight Roman Numeral numbered poems (a la Thompson’s original ghazal-sequence) to close the section with the poem “CRITICAL ESSAY: JONAH’S ROAD.” The book then ends with Sanger’s own piece responding to the response of his response to John Thompson’s infamous ghazals, the short essay “NIJINSKY’S LEAP: AN AFTERWORD,” that opens:

Sean Howard invited me to comment on his book. He suggested I might respond to his use of Sea Run as framing context for Overlays. I accepted, hoping to say something useful about my intuition that prose commentary, even when as focused as that of Sea Run, can only be penultimate in nature and can only be complete when it is renewed in poetry. I connect that intuition with Mandelstam’s remark in his essay “Conversation about Dante”: “a metaphor can be defined only metaphorically.” In other words, it takes a poem to know a poem.

It can’t be overstated the effect that Thompson’s original Stilt Jack had on Canadian writing, introducing the English-language translation of the Urdu structure of the ghazal [see my review of the 2009 issue of Arc Poetry Magazine, “A Gathering of Poets for John Thompson” here], a structure furthered as well by Phyllis Webb (I think it was Agha Shahid Ali who introduced the form into the United States). I think it is fair to consider Thompson, and his work, beloved across elements of Canadian poetry, especially upon the east coast, making this a project not just of playful and inventive structure, but in loving homage. It is an absolutely delightful work. And, in a similar spirit, might some further critic attempt to look at the three works in tandem, or even attempt to respond in some other, further way?