Laura Moriarty, Which Walks

 

AN OLD WOMAN WANDERS the pestilential streets. She sees herself from the outside. She feels like an archaeologist of the present. She makes “finds.” At firs, she is afraid to pick up the items in case they are covered in viruses. Eventually she lets go of that idea and many objects appear on her worktable. Some are arranged into boxes. She finds herself to be obsessed with metal, glass, game pieces, marbles, tools, jewelry, and figurines, and with assembling.
            The days come together in the form of these objects and their arranging. The woman’s incessant movement is simultaneously search and research. Gradually the collected items (as with the words and notes collected from each morning’s reading) are assembled. The practice of assembling morphs to one of attaching and building. At a local beach, once a dynamite factory, she discovers a source of sea glass and later, in a nearby town, one of stained-glass remnants. She attaches them to a metal grid with aluminum wire. In a lucky break, she has her first art exhibition of this and other works. She writes in relation to the making and walking—assembling a series of linked pieces called Which Walks. This is where the love comes in. (“PROLOGUE”)

The latest from Northern California poet, editor and writer Laura Moriarty is the poetry title Which Walks (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2025), a book that follows on the heels of numerous prior titles such as Verne & Lemurian Objects (Mindmade, 2017), The Fugitive Notebook (Couch Press, 2014 ), Who That Divines (Nightboat Books, 2014), A Semblance: Selected and New Poems, 1975-2007 (Omnidawn, 2007), A Tonalist (Nightboat Books, 2010), Personal Volcano (Nightboat Books, 2019) and the novel Ultravioleta (Atelos, 2006). Composed during the Covid-19 pandemic, Which Walks presents itself as a book on walking and being, and being present within an unprecedented global event. “reaching back / to owned devices,” the opening walk offers, “feel free, imaginary, / and tactile as the shudder // of daily acquisition, / domestic, time-bound, // vexed by practitioners, / whose practice // like ours, / a consummation, // is thrown up and out / as the poison // presence of each entrance / of nonlife into life [.]”

It has been interesting across the past few years to see the variety, volume and intimacy of literary responses to the Covid-era, a flood of eventual titles we all knew was coming, including 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], Tacoma, Washington poet Rick Barot’s chapbook During the Pandemic (Charlottesville VA: Albion Books, 2020) [see my review of such here] and American/Canadian writer Lisa Fishman’s One Big Time (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2025) [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). Each title, in their own individual ways, working amid and between the two poles of anxiety and calm, navigating the treacherous and uncertain waters of a once-in-a-century global pandemic. Through Moriarty, as her thirteenth walk offers: “appears in the thickets / whose steady readiness // measures the commotion / it is impossible not to feel // as when ‘bacteria don’t know / they’re bacteria’ but do know // they’re real as mental constructs / allow us (me) to execute [.]”

Moriarty composes forty-six pieces, “Which Walks,” set in a variety of untitled section-clusters, each of which hold between a series of short, self-contained pieces, from the opening “prologue” to “symmetry,” “inevitably,” “the fallen world,” “the case,” “slant step,” “future present” and “epilogue.” If the “Which Walk” pieces are composed within the immediate, offering poems of attention and grounding, these other pieces provide larger context, even counterpoint. These interspersed pieces act like links between sections, or perhaps the forest for the individual trees. As she writes to begin “the case”:

The present is blurred or perhaps smeared across the page. Filled with desire. She lives by the seasons whose perspective is never quite right. The pictures behind her eyes emerge. The one of her face, the other of a place she was in, the objects there, the light. Each one many times. She longs for the cafes of her youth but prefers the tables, tables, and trails of the moment. The work. Its blots and curves. Unexpected evidence of everything. “I get stronger as I get older,” she wrote as a young woman. “But never strong enough.”

The case stays open. She reviews her options, asking herself again what is true as she often used to do. Despite delusions and obsessions, she knew it then. Knows it now. She recognizes this as her main skill. Figuring it out, she moves on through

This is a book of attention, of poems composed across a meditative, thinking space, set purposefully and perpetually in the present moment; a book of and around time, both the movement of such and its seeming immobility, a continuous present, offering echoes, even ripples, of time as articulated as well by American poet Stefania Heim’s second full-length collection, Hour Book (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2019) [see my review of such here] or Pacific Northwest poet Endi Bogue Hartigan’s oh orchid o’clock (Omnidawn, 2023) [see my review of such here] or, more specifically, New York City poet Brenda Coultas’ The Writing of an Hour (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]. “(we) submit,” Moriarty writes, as part of “WHICH WALK 6,” subtitled “problem of reversable time,” “to the reversable fortunes // of muscle memory and the / illusive person in the poem // including types of knowing as when // The Land That Time Forgot / or trip into symbolic space [.]” There is something of the fact of the author’s walks and the walking simply the mechanism through which time is explored (which is why I’m not offering a whole list of walking titles, by the way, from Meredith Quartermain to Stacy Szymaszek to Stephen Cain to Cole Swensen to Mark Goodwin). Covid-19 lockdowns, especially across those first unknown weeks that stretched into months, a perpetual and ongoing timelessness, one that fell into a completely unique generational cultural moment. As her prologue suggests, Moriarty uses this period to attempt to find something grounding: “She zooms, and occasionally walks, with close friends and family. They keep each other alive. She continues to work.” She continued to work, even working to return to those poets that originally prompted her writing and thinking, a really fascinating project of returning to one’s literary roots during a period of such deep and continuous uncertainty:

            All of it—walking, writing, assembling, time—seems like a single practice involving lines. Eventually, drawing is added to assembling. The lines of what she now sees is a long poem are written in relation to her arts practice, to her own precarity, and to that of her loved ones, which, terrifyingly, seems to include everyone. She rereads the long poems of her youth by H.D., Williams, and Zukofsky, also rereading Duncan, Brathwaite, Howe, Dahlen, DuPlessis, M. NourBese Philip. She gets all the way through Nate Mackay’s Double Trio and then starts back in at the beginning. She feels at the beginning of something herself, though she has just turned seventy.

The tone and tenor of Moriarty’s Which Walks reminds me that, in his novel Why Must a Black Writer Write About Sex? (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1994), Haitian-Canadian writer Dany Laferrière wrote that he wrote his first book, published in English as How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired (Coach House Press, 1987), “to save his life.” Perhaps Moriarty’s situation through the onset of pandemic might not have been as dire, but it was also impossible for her to know for certain, providing this collection a way through which she might have worked the same as Laferrière, allowing her to articulate her present and remain grounded, through whatever other uncertainties swirled.

WHICH WALK 31

varieties of which

“Oh, that I could fly…”
—William James

as charms of finches, diaries
of doves, and other avians
hover, humming down into,
hunger, delight, and desire
having gone as oneself
around, finding who or what
holds the breast pressed by
feral prayer into folds of
the heart’s feathered weather’s
beating declaration of being
free and aware of the heft
of iridescence in the very air
followed by day’s wary insight
into staying high while abiding
being equivalent to not dying
which is, in turn and time,
the same as flying

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kevin Stebner

Kevin Stebner is an artist, poet and musician. He produces visual art using old videogame gear, and produces music and soundtracking with his chiptune project GreyScreen, post-hardcore in his band Fulfilment, as well as alt-country in the band Cold Water. Stebner has published a number of typewriter visual poems and other concrete work in chapbooks, including Timglaset, The Blasted Tree, No Press, above/ground, among others. and has recently published two books, Game Genie Poems, a collection of lipogram poems written in a Nintendo Game Genie from The Blasted Tree, and Inherent, a collection of 100 letraset concrete poems from Assembly Press. He is also the proprietor of Calgary’s best bookstore that’s in a shed, Shed Books. Stebner lives in Calgary, Alberta. kevinstebner.com

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'm trying to even think of what I would consider "the first" -  and I honestly can't even place it. I simply see what I do as a lineage of artistic output. In terms of the literary,  this was a big year for me, publishing two major works with two incredible presses: Game Genie Poems with The Blasted Tree and Inherent with Assembly Press. To be perfectly honest, the difference in feeling comes from the external, that these projects found such loving and caring homes, that there's been such an overwhelming response to them from their readership. For one so used to indifference (and that sentiment is a universal for the creative, I know, but, boy, it always feels like you're the only one) it's really gratifying to have these books doing what they're doing.

2 - How did you come to visual poetry first, as opposed to, say, more traditional narrative forms?
I came to visual/concrete after endeavours into more traditional, prose writing. But after a long hiatus of leaving that type of writing aside (my creative endeavours largely focused on bands and music, community projects, installation art) - but coming through the pandemic, it gave me the time to work on longer-form projects. So out of it came a novel, a music album of Kraut inspired work, and a swath of concrete poems (typewritten and letraset work). I've spoken of this at length, but I don't see myself as a writer per se, I am a multidisciplinary artist, and that artistic endeavour can move into any realm it so wishes, which can develop into novels, poetics, concrete poetics, art curation, wrestling trivia, various genres of music, and so on. It can manifest in any number of things, but this variance of interest forms the variance output.

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'm a many projects, many bands, many books on the go at any time kind of person. In a way, I do my best to simply plug away at projects, not thinking about the end, until at some point, that end arises. Thinking about something taking too long, thinking about what it needs to look like, those factors are already a stress on what should ultimately be a joy: creation! The question seems to be dancing around the unspoken notion of "perfection" - and that word I find a debilitation.
 
In the case of the concrete work in INHERENT, the sheer nature of the process (letraset on paper) doesn't allow for "editing" in a major sense. The letters, once on the paper, are there and cannot be changed once down - or perhaps the editing occurs during the process of the writing itself, the slow and conscious choices that happen when composing. Especially for my concrete work, some come from notes, an inspirational mode where I need to get the idea down, but other times it flows out, letting the letters, or keystrokes, decide for themselves how they move.  Once done, the editorial process consists of what to include and what to leave out, which pieces are strong enough to want to show and include. I would not say I'm a strong editor.  I always attempt to present work as best as possible, but there comes a point where an edit washes away the interesting rough edges, the places where the life of a work lives. Vigour and excitement always trump professional slickness, for me. The goal is never perfection, the goal is documentation.

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 tend to view things as "project" designations. So rarely would I think in larger "book" sized confines. Those might be too daunting, the scale of those might be too vast to see them doable. Within INHERENT, each "chapter title" was its own project in itself. And many of those were published on their own as their own chapbooks ("Agalma" from above/ground, "Peaceful" came out from The Blasted Tree, "Significant" from No Press). Each section was bourne for a single sheet of letraset, and so was only initially thinking about the confines as to how to use that sheet, that was the project. Only after completing a number of those was I even thinking of a "book" as a whole. Working in smaller project modes, and assembling into a larger later, was helpful. Even writing a novel, or working on an album, I would suggest mere looking at the one smaller piece as the project - let's complete this song, let's complete this story arc - and then do that a number of times, to eventually there's enough to assemble into a larger whole. I think that thinking of projects in "book" terms can be debilitating, whereas seeing it as a collection of individual pieces is a more helpful creative mode.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
In this case, releasing INHERENT, I was really confronted with how to "read" it publicly. A book of concrete poems, which purposefully eschew semantic meaning all together. This idea led to the chapbook "Extrins"which I released alongside INHERENT, in which I asked a number of poem friends (concrete and otherwise) the question as to how to read the book. Their responses were inspirational and lovely and curious (but ultimately didn't help me getting closer to "reading" them in public). For the release then, I did a sort of Q&A type events, intended more as a (not dissimilar to the Explication in the back of the book itself) invitational explanation of the work in INHERENT, offering some insights into where it came from, how to engage concrete poetics, and where it came from. In general, I wouldn't consider a reading at all when creating the work itself (so no, not part of the initial creative process at all - I would potentially go so far as to say that if you're thinking about an end audience in general, that would potentially stunt the artfulness of the work in a major way), but how to engage the work publicly becomes a NEW creative endeavor.  

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 still stewing on this one, frankly. In some ways, Inherent was attempting to be free from exerting my own control and ideas into it. Can these poems have their own voice, not an authorial one? But I wonder how possible that is. A good question that: what are the current questions? Maybe that's a theoretic concern in itself - we've said all humans can say, perhaps there's a message from the structure of typefaces and synergy that can give an insight? My newer series I'm working on I'm leaning more into titles, each being more of a piece of wishful thinking, a hope, for what these poems could embody.  Putting a little more of myself, giving a little less distance.  I wonder if that changes the nature of what these poems do? (I'll answer your questions with even more questions...)

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'll stretch this to an artistic thinker in general - writer, musician, visual artist, game designer, pro wrestler, etc... The role I see is that for the artist to fight the mundanity and ubiquity of our society as a whole. And this need not be an overt political, need not be a gigantic pipe bomb of an act - they can be tiny little pieces to chip at the darkness. The creative act is a defiant act in itself, an exertion of individual ebullition.  And there's a kinship in that. Even those making bad art, at the very least we have that, I'll be on board with anyone chipping away at that poison control of ubiquity.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Difficult, certainly.  So much of the work I do, either being constraint based, or very process-based - essentially both being uneditable - the poems simply become what they are. There are no better synonyms, only one word can fit the confines, or once a typewriter keystroke is made, or letraset put to paper, there is no going back.  The only real edit sometimes is to cut the whole poem or not.  Through my process, though, I tend to self edit. Make more than you need and keep the cream. Make 10 , keep the best 7 or 8. That usually allows me to end up presenting the best of the bunch.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
The best piece of advice comes from (one of) the best songs of all time, "Academy Fight Song" by Mission of Burma, the penultimate line of the song being "I'm not judging you, I'm judging me" - to me, this has meant to that the outside world is always going to have something to say, a culture of poison is going to constantly be in your ear, telling you you're not good enough, holding you to some unattainable benchmark, a comparison to another's success. Whereas, you just simply put it on yourself, the little bit you can control, holding yourself to your own standard, holding yourself accountable to your own fabric.  I may not always succeed, but that change of focus on my little corner, on me and what little artistic output I can accomplish, that focus is the best thing I've found to keep the bitterness at bay.

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 try (and the advice I give to others, is) to do one creative thing every day. This can manifest as a written poem, and concrete poem or two, writing a song, writing a chapter in a book. Those are obvious examples. But it could also be something as small as writing down one good line in my notebook, finding a chord change to steal, making a mix tape, researching typefaces, sending mail to pals, stapling zines, reading something you'll use later... It's about never making your art a chore, or an obligation, but something that remains exciting, something that's responsive to inspiration and the muses, something that's still joyful when you sit down to do it. What you make doesn't have to be grandiose, it can be minorly incremental, and that's valid.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I've spoken on this before in "Make a Thing" - my zine of encouragement to friend who are making art in general. But for me, I've found is that getting stalled on projects and writer-block cannot be controlled.  The muse moves as she likes and she cannot be forced. The solution then is to have MANY projects on the go. When you're stuck on one, pick up another. I don't know where this novel is going, I can't find a chorus to this song, etc. Move on to something else and come back to it.  As long as you're exerting that creative muscle in some manner, it's staying active. This will inevitably leave room for the muse to return, giving you time to find that tidbit that reinspires the project from before.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
n/a

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?
(Related aside: I discovered McFadden as a young teenager while I was working as a Page at the Red Deer Public Library. I had shelved a copy of (the brilliantly designed and ever charming) A Trip Around Lake Erie, was wildly taken with it, and I've been studying and collecting him ever since. I'm only missing a few titles. He remains my favourite Canadian "writer" writer). Though, I'll disagree with the man here, mostly in it's small limits - I'm very much a proponent of the "if you're an artist you make art" mind, and that to limit oneself to one mode of art is a stunt on oneself and one's artistic output.  Art comes from Art, gotta go much wider. Writing is one way it manifests, certainly. And all that to say I am collector scum, eater or media, student of culture, high and low alike, - Yo La Tengo's kraut-like chooglers, Lungfish and Daniel Higgs' poetic esotericism, Kenny Omega's pro-wrestling matches, cassette culture, circuit bending. Ultimately as a punk, someone involved in DIY and hardcore, and all that surrounds it, that mindset remains the biggest influence in my work, and especially in how I approach it, what's behind it, the ethics of it.  Art comes from art. The net is wide.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Why are these exclusive? I write, and do something else!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Kit Robinson, Tunes & Tens

 

Known as one of the formative figures of the Bay Area Language poetry movement, Kit Robinson’s later poetry is in my mind some of his best, and his latest addition Tunes & Tens is no exception. During his years employed in the burgeoning tech industry in the 80s and 90s, Robinson embedded his poetry in the interstices of his working day by writing on the job, a practice Michel de Certeau called “la perruque,” the French term for a worker’s own work disguised as work for his employer. At times, this involved sampling computer jargon and business-speak and torquing it toward contrary ends that released it from its productivist logic, while at the same time integrating references to business travel (airports, hotel lobbies) and his daily commute. Rather than situating his poetry outside the labor that dominates our day-to-day lives, confining it to solitary retreats freed from material concerns, Robinson situated his practice squarely inside the machine, what his colleague Robert Grenier called “the counting house,” referring to his own job at a corporate law firm in the Bay Area at the time.
            Now in retirement, references to Robinson’s travels continue but the language of the workplace has given way to the rituals of his day-to-day life, which includes practicing and performing in Calle Ocho, an Afro-Cuban charanga band in which he plays the tres, an acoustic guitar with three doubled strings. It’s only natural then that the first section of Tunes & Tens begins with a series of poems written “after” jazz titans like Henry Threadgill, Thelonious Monk, Don Cherry, Carla Bley, and Billie Holiday, as well as the great late, dear friend of the poet’s, Lyn Hejinian, to whom the book is dedicated. (Tim Shaner, “On Kit Robinson’s Tunes & Tens”)

I was curious to see the latest collection by Berkeley poet Kit Robinson, Tunes & Tens (New York NY: Roof Books, 2025). Despite having heard his name around for some time, this is the first collection of his I’ve seen, and I’m appreciating very much Tim Shaner’s introduction, which does provide some helpful context, especially for a collection that provides a shift through Robinson’s larger work, responding to Robinson’s own shifts into retirement from regular employment. “I think to write freely,” the poem “BEAUTIFUL TELEPHONES,” captioned “after Carla Bley,” begins, “Like Spinoza / But not in Latin / Rather a dessicated English / Is my preferred medium / Bits of history / Cling to the underside of speech / A ray of hope in a glass tube [.]”

As Shaner speaks of in his introduction, the collection is built in two halves: the “Tunes” section, offering a selection of self-contained poems, each of which are composed as respond poems, sparked by the music of a variety of jazz greats, Cuban bands or the work of the late American poet Lyn Hejinian, and the “Tens” section, “a serial poem comprising 73 ten-line stanzas or decimas,” each of which riff their own reactions to an array of very different prompts, whether referenced or otherwise. Composed from January 2, 2023 through to November 17 of that same year, each stanza offers a casual and clear glance that lands straight at the heart of the matter, writing meditations and clarifcations that might even echo short essays, comparable, in certain ways, to Anne Carson’s infamous Short Talks (Brick Books, 1992). “Off the coast of France near Cherbourg / In an important battle of the American Civil War,” he writes, to open “XXIV,” “The U.S.S. Kearsarge attacked and sank / The Confederate boat the C.S.S. Alabama / On June 19, 1865, an event depicted / By Edouard Manet in his first known seascape / And first painting of a current event / The picture was displayed in the window / Of Alfred Cadart’s print shop in Paris / Barely a month after the incident took place [.]” There’s almost an element of Robinson’s work that provides an echo of surrealist poets Stuart Ross or Ron Padgett, but without the surrealism, offering curious turns and a deceptive smoothness to the lyric that underplays its nuance, even as Robinson alters phrases akin to a trick of the light. Later in the sequence, as poem “LV” reads, in full:

The idea of writing and writing are not the same
The idea of a river and a river are totally different
A river requires tributaries and a mouth
An idea needs someone to occur to
The mouth is speaking but it’s only words
If I could, I would sing you a melody so mild
How many different kinds of bird have occupied these
      trees?
The idea of a poem and a poem are next door
      neighbors
There is no such thing as silence
Someone or something is always making a sound