Transfer
Much occurs in the glow
behind my eyes.
With every blink, memory
expires, guides me
to a new construction. In
an ideal world,
my mouth works properly,
my hands hold
my skin with love, the
body between
my sheets is my own. In the
conspiracy of
imagination, birds sound
notes above
the coloured truth at high
tide. My open chest
can house many stories
about loss
and unrequired
admiration. I feel every inch of it
like glass. No one mourns
more than me.
No one hopes for change
more than the sun,
the daughter, the carrier
of light through
a lake filled with what
looks like water.
Set in five section-clusters of shorter lyrics—“Expanse (the sea),” “Interlude (the deep),” “Brink (the earth),” “Interlude (the cosmos)” and “Swell (the stars)”—she interplays the elements with the cosmos with a call-and-response, the “interlude” of the Greek chorus, providing asides to the main narrative as part of this main narrative. “I’ve done it because it was what I wanted. / My neighbour’s garden grows mangoes beyond / a rotted fence,” she writes, to open the poem “Rich,” “and I stole one as it they’d require / a descendant if caught. But this trope is old. / This means nothing.”
In the end, myths are the stories we tell ourselves and each other, the stories that warn, catch and inform, stories that can propel us forward, hold us back, distract our attention or inform our world-view, including times when all of the above occur simultaneously. “My mother tried to tell me I was broken,” begins “Dead Living Things,” “and I shut her away. Who died and made her oracle? / Where my mouth falters, my skin reserves.” Oh my, this is good. Myth is a striking and deeply complex debut.
Jordan Dunn is the author of Notation (Thirdhand Books), Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (Partly Press), as well as various chapbooks and ephemeral prints including Common Names, Reactor Woods, and A Walk at Doolittle State Preserve. He lives with his family in Madison, WI, where he edits and publishes Oxeye Press.
1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I published my first book, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, with Partly Press in 2022. Partly Press is edited by Chuck Stebelton and housed at the Lynden Sculpture Garden in Milwaukee, which is a wonderful non-profit that has many missions in addition to running its literary press. This meant that my first book appeared in a location slightly off-center from traditional poetry channels. It felt good to appear in a new space, and that experience helped me feel confident that poets can appear in different kinds of venues.
My new book, Notation, is like Physical Geography in that it’s a book constructed out of other books, and it relies heavily on intertexts to bind itself together. The subject matter of Notation was different for me, however, in that it was partially inspired through more personal experiences, including the loss of several friends. Notation also feels different in that its duration is more containable, and it looks quite different on the page compared to Physical Geography.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I’ve always been attracted to the portability of poetry—it is an activity that can be adjacent to whatever life I have at any given moment in time. I’m not positive I’m a poet, but the poets gave me a seat at their table, so here I am, enjoying the good company of poets.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I don’t know when I am beginning a project. After some time, I notice groups of consistencies, and then I focus on those as points of attachment. Because I am interested in book arts, I often make small handmade editions. So, there’s lots of variability with time and process and drafting.
4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Accumulation over time is necessary for me. I don’t really attempt to compose individual poems when I’m writing.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I used to be more invested in performativity when I would give readings because my writing was focused on permutation, and so the reading event felt like an extension of the writing process. These days, I am trying to focus on lifting static text off the page. I feel like I am struggling with that process because I don’t like it when text loses its subjectivity.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I’m deeply invested in literary community and the answers I can find through friendship with other writers and artists. I’m also interested in natural history and understanding the local ecologies and landscape histories in my area, as well as areas that I visit frequently.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
As I understand it, literary writing is rapidly becoming an analog fixture in our culture. That means it could have staying power and be used as a refuge, or it could gradually empty itself of meaning and become irrelevant. Hopefully the role of the writer is to protect against obsolescence.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential! Thank you to my past editors: Chuck Stebelton, Kylan Rice, and Lindsey Webb.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I finished college at the start of the Great Recession. I was living back at home, I was having a hard time finding work, and I was thinking about taking a job that involved writing scripts for a company that produced training videos for corporations. At the time, my dad was an ex-marine banker involved in commercial real estate lending, and when I told him about the job opportunity he said, “What, are you going to be a fucking sell-out?” So, I instead saved up money working in a warehouse, quit that job, and rode my bike across the country. Thanks, dad. XO.
10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
When I’m at my best and my schedule is at its best: I wake up, let the dog out, make coffee, and then retreat to my lower-level workspace. I like to write in the morning before the rest of the house wakes up. Often, the carnival of being a parent means I write whenever I can, and I often wear noise-canceling headphones.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I keep stacks of books around my desk and on shelves above my desk. When I stall, I pick up a book and read it until something wants to be transcribed, and then I’m writing again.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Lake Superior white pine.
13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
All of the above. I feel like books are simply placeholders for those other things.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Too many to list! A few writers/writings I return to: Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Thomas A. Clark, & Thoreau’s journals, among many others.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
A thru-hike, like the AT or the PCT.
16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Hmm . . . working with living things outside the world of finance?
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Repetition.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Weeds in Winter, by Lauren Brown. A few weeks ago, I watched The Lost Daughter.
19 - What are you currently working on?
I’m working on a new manuscript that feels attached to the methods used to write Notation. I’m trying to distill two years of daily/occasional writing with infused transcription and travel journals. I’m also working on several little book arts projects that include a disappearing prairie, collages from Thoreau’s journals, images of tidal sand, and images of hackberry bark.
The further I walked, the closer I got. To what, I wasn’t sure, but my feet kept moving, carrying the rest of me along with them. They had their own preconceived destination—somewhere they might finally settle down, a little slice of heaven, a place to call home. I was just their solitary witness, a quiet companion, the documenter of their long journey.
It was easy. They walked; I followed.
The path snaked along the lakeside. The sky was a dark canvas the stars punched small holes into one by one. A sickle moon crept up from behind the horizon. A large bird beat its enormous wings, faded into distance. Somewhere a duck quacked, then hushed, and the relative silence resumed.
A few soft waves lapped against the shore with a steady rhythm. The small stones cascading across one another clattered out a soft melody. It was a lullaby, though I wasn’t sure who was being lulled: me, the city, or the lake itself.
The lake sighed. I sighed.
The city drifted off into
the night, far above the lake and me.
Last but not least, you boarded the train and sat down in a window seat. You looked out at the station platform and smiled. Even from this distance your eyes were tiny lakes that mirrored whatever they saw, and what they saw was me, standing on a shoreline, waving goodbye while you drifted away in your red canoe. Waves drawing you further and further. I didn’t expect to take a second look, but I did: your train long gone for years.
Casteels’ prose has an ease to it, a compelling tone that floats across pages, amid numerous memorable lines and prose-blocks. “The bathtub is surprisingly agile for its age. You’d think it would lumber like a hippopotamus,” he writes, “but it’s more like a rhinoceros charging blindgly into the night. I’m a few hundred metres behind it and losing ground. The bathtub leaps over a white picket fence, rounds a corner, and then it’s gone.” There is something of his shifting narrative reminiscent of Canadian playwright and mathematician John Mighton’s play Possible Worlds (1990; a film adaptation was released in 2000), holding a shifting not of perception but of action, of what is actually being perceived. The unsettling of this foundation is purposeful and beautifully done, and does progress towards an understood meaning, one that rocks a foundation of loss, grief and ultimate through-line, although one that doesn’t unfold or reveal as much as finally allow, all centred around, somehow, this particular image of the lake. “The lake remembers a seagull,” he writes, “but it’s nowhere to be seen. It remembers loons, but they’re gone too. No, wait. I just heard one. A heart-wrenched wail. No response.” As he continues:
This could have been
years ago. Or sometime last week. Or three days from now. It’s the type of
thing that happens again and again, and once started, can’t be stopped. A strand
of hair stuck to your cheek. I brushed it away. It’s the only thing that keeps me
from wandering off course. It’s what passes through my mind every time I squirt
a little toothpaste on my toothbrush.
2B honest [4 once] i’m
still kinda fucked up
from when The Ground
moved ..
, it’s hard 2 deal
directly && forcefully w/ pressing issues
when there’s so much
going on w/o+w/in
&& i don’t kno
where 2 begin .
like , idk if i ever told
u
that My Greatest Fear is
falling
from a great height..
i don’t think it’s (re:)
hitting
The Ground tho; it’s
maybe more
fear of the Panic! ,, of
the absolute lack
of control as a foregone
conclusion rushes
up 2 meet U,,
Goldsborough writes the body, the black body, the black body in America, orbiting a series of concentric circles that land each and purposefully upon that radiating self, held without easy recourse in a particular social and political space. “It’s 11.11 & idk what i want.” he writes, to open the propulsive two-part “testimonial of a depressed & disillusioned student / who seeks salvation—or an easy answer—in the / ‘historically black’ nature of an UBCU & doesn’t find / what he thought would be There.,” “& times i speak in this classroom of strangers / abt ‘pure, destructive consumerism,’ ‘white supremacist capitalist / patriarchy’ n other salient / issues. / otherwise i suffer in silence & the comfort of a persistent lowkey buzz / staring blankly & the consteallations on the tiles in the ceiling / or @ the blinds imported from Venice / or @ the unwritten possibilities on the blank board / or @ the wood pulp taking the form of a table posing as a desk. / i am feeling detached from ‘my community’: this room fully of hyphenated / american youth: [.]” He writes to find and articulate his cultural and political space, his own agency, across a sequence of frays and histories and conflicts. Or, as the poem “domestic iii” begins: “,society frays @ the seam /where / the legs are sewn together . / it was not built 2 last .”
Set in seven poem-sections—“JACQUELINE TOMATENCREMESUPPE ASCHENBECHER,” “C ON ST EL L A TI O N,” “V BROKE IN BERLIN VOL. I,” “TRAUMZEIT,” “EIGHTEEN,,,NINETEEN,” “CDMX TALES” and “NINETEEN,,,TWENNY (2)”—the poems assembled offer a combination of clipped and gestural language, shortened words and syntax and punctuation spread out into constellations. Goldsborough’s Object 7 ( ,a spirit loosely, ,bundled in a frame, ) is the true promise of lyric possibility made flesh.
