12 or 20 (second series) questions with Rodrigo Toscano

Rodrigo Toscano is a poet living in New Orleans. He is the author of twelve books of poetry. His latest three books are WHITMAN. CANNONBALL. PUEBLA (Omnidawn, 2025, a National Poetry Series finalist), The Cut Point (Counterpath, 2023), The Charm & The Dread (Fence, 2022). His other books include In Range, Explosion Rocks Springfield, Deck of Deeds, Collapsible Poetics Theater, To Leveling Swerve, Platform, Partisans, and The Disparities. His poetry has appeared in over 20 anthologies, including Best American Poetry (2023, 2004), and Best American Experimental Poetry (BAX). His Collapsible Poetics Theater was a National Poetry Series selection. His poetry has appeared in the Boston Review, Poetry Magazine, The Bennington Review, The Kenyon Review, The Harvard Advocate, Georgia Review, Yale Review, Conduit, and Fence. rodrigotoscano.com

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first published book was Partisans (O Books, 1999), though, a previous manuscript, The Disparities, had been accepted by Green Integer. That was published two years later. Partisans represented for me further validation of my growing reputation among several avant garde milieus. But basically, it was just a box of books that was handed to me by Leslie Scalapino (editor) on a noisy street corner in the Mission District in San Francisco. I gave some copies to local poetry friends and mailed a few to poets in NYC who I admired.

My most recent manuscript is a book of 100 sonnets. Each line is 10 syllables exactly. Like my recent five books, this future book blends philosophical, critical-ideological, and street-level existentialist thought into a quirky demotic that’s (hopefully) fit enough to confront the times we live in.

I suppose my earlier work was decidedly more haute in its approach to diction. Partisans is more Susan Howe than say, Frank O’Hara, though the book is clearly on its way towards formalizing Toscanoese as my lingua franca.

How does it feel to be fluent in Toscanoese? It’s an odd fit at union or environmentalist work meetings, but it’s been quite the political mating call over the years. Aren’t all poets erotics?

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction? 

I seem to have a great deal of word-stick. Like on flypaper, words get stuck in my head, before plot lines of any kind. I mouth them, ruminate over them. I toss words around like beach balls into unexpecting social gatherings. Words act rather reserved at first, until they discover their native crazed inner cores. Bach is my greatest poetic influence. I’m happiest when cracking open single words and spinning variations on their energies.

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 either writing poetry, or I am not. I don’t fiddle-faddle in the between zone. Once I strike a tone, or historical perspective, or angle of inquiry, I don’t stop till I have a whole book. My desire is to be a contemporary and write like one. I got this overall aesthetic, I think, from the Roman poets. Zeroing in on contemporaries, to me, is the highest form of poetry. Maybe that’s why I’ve never spent a single second in the Rilke cult, or the Oppen cult for that matter.  I’ll surely catch flak for this, but I’m generally put off by too much ellipticality in meaning-making.  

In terms of my process, I’m a notepad hand scribbler. I don’t think left-to-right, nor the opposite, but diagonally right to left, then loop around in swirls. It’s very hard to decipher afterwards, even for me. I also like to keep argumentation real loose for as long as possible, until I smush together strange bed fellows, and tighten up the whole deal with titanium bolts.

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’m miniaturist. I chip away at medium-small stellae. I don’t have long velvety lines like a Jorie Graham, which I greatly admire. I pop out Monk-like cluster chords seemingly from nowhere. My poetics seems to be a balance of improvisation and fugal development.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I always imagine any poem of mine as being read in public, yeah. The ideal settings for each poem, however, vary. Some are dim-lighted lounge poems to be read quietly and received even more quietly, others are hammerhead sharks thrashing in the face of dismayed audiences. 

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 an ardent student of archeology, philosophy, history, economics, political and social movements, and aesthetics. I’m also hot on to people’s weird-think wherever I can find it.  

In my opinion, the most pressing question for a U.S. poet (and the frayed citoyens of nations the U.S. is dragging with it to the gutter) is, what might be the Geo-Political GPS of current culture-making (poetics being a subset of culture-making). That’s it. Location first, subjective babble, second. My new book, WHITMAN. CANNONBALL. PUEBLA. (Omnidawn, 2025) is largely about that.   

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 can’t prescribe anything for other writers, but for me, it’s important to be as historically aware as possible, taking into account the dialectical relationships between classes, nations, and empires; that is, to be maximally mindful of all that goes into the creation of cultures and attitudes of one’s time.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I’ve had very liberal and generous press editors for the most part, editors, who bend “my way.” On some occasions they’ve contested my pieces, or parts of my pieces. I push back when necessary, but I also cede to their recommendations quite a bit. If you look at my home webpage, it reads Poet, Rhetor. Those two archetypes contest each other on a daily level.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

“At all costs, write”— something like that (I forget who said it). I works for me, I think, but again, only if and when I’m in writing mode. Come to think of it, I disagree with that advice. I would actually encourage most young poets to always keep the option of quitting very close to them, especially American poets. If they’re just writing out of sheer egotism, and little else, then the poetry is likely to be deficient of all that goes might to into Public Address. Langston Hughes is a master of avoiding needless egotism.

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 write best between 5:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m. submerged in warm tub water, a towel over the lamp above me to dim the lights just right. 

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I stop writing. I respect stalls. My default thinking is that I have nothing to say, that’s for a reason, a reason that goes quite beyond me. I have to be completely empty of anything to say, before firing up another round of something to say.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Laurel Sumac (native to Southern California / Northern Baja California). Eucalyptus bark. Sea salt in the mouth.  

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?

Noting people’s speech rhythms and intonations is key for me. Musical principals, techniques, and harmonic effects, are foremost in my mind.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Man, I don’t want to get into this writer idols thing. I’ll say that right now, I pay closest attention to the poets of the Baton Rouge and New Orleans scenes. That’s plenty a barometer in order gauge what’s going down. There’s some rip-roarin’ poets down here, let me tell you.

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

What I really want right now is to have my latest manuscript of 100 sonnets published! I really do think that the collection will make a significant contribution to the art of sonnet writing in the U.S.

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?

Wait. I do have another occupation. I’ve worked in labor movements, environmental and public health for over thirty years. But if I were to click my heals and pop into another reality, I would have loved to be a composer of music, maybe in a band). But honestly too, I often daydream, “wouldn’t it be cool to be a public poet!” 

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Poetics is the discipline of the between of all disciplines. Who couldn’t be madly enthralled by that?

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Henry Goldkamp’s Joy Buzzer and Dylan Krieger’s upcoming No One Is Daddy are two books I really love. Edgar Garcia’s Cantares too. There’s so many.

I’ll admit, I was very moved by Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour movie. I went to a matinee in the early winter of 2023, and I literally was the only one in the theater for about half of it.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’m currently working on a new round of dialogues on poetry. People can check out The Dialogues I’ve done so far, with people like Julie Carr, Paisley Rekdal, Roberto Tejada and others.   

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Brandon Kilbourne, Natural History: poems

 

On the trail of oblivion’s beasts,
their lives now nothing more
than tales sealed down in deposits
of bones sown epochs ago,
we have traveled across the globe
in search of their fabled remains
as this glacier-scraped latitude,
the lengths ventured to retrieve
their stories like something out of
the myth of seafarers after the gold
of a ram’s flayed fleece, its wool
lying at the world’s known edge
lustrous as a hearth’s flame— 

Leaving camp each morning,
trudging over dips and tussocks
of moss and following the treeless
valley, we come to the outcrop,
set about the sweat-beading business
of shoveling away overburden,
combing the hillside’s scree
for the telltale hue and texture
betraying weathered-out bone,
scrappy inklings leading us
to where in the quarry we’ll settle
on our knees, our focus trained
on the revelations of broken strata. (“Gilled Beginnings”)

The full-length debut by American poet and research biologist Brandon Kilbourne, and winner of the Cave Canem Prize, is Natural History: poems (Minneapolis MN: Graywolf Press, 2025), a collection described as one that “illuminates the intersections between science and poetry and brings the role of the evolutionary biologist to life.” Poets have certainly been attending and mining scientific information and research for moons, but there is something of Kilbourne’s approach reminiscent of such as American poet Lorine Niedecker (see also: “Lake Superior”) or Ottawa poet Monty Reid (specifically The Alternate Guide, although he’s long written about and through his work in natural history museums—Drumheller’s Royal Tyrrell Museum and Ottawa’s Museum of Nature—across multiple collections): the poems as a result of the research that emerged from their day-job, allowing the poems as a kind of secondary and extended response to that initial data. “Carcasses / hand-arranged from field notes resurrect / the world without handprint smokestacks,” Kilbourne writes, in the third poem in the six-part sequence “Dioramic Idylls,” “pretend we haven’t devoured the Earth, / leaving our eyes to probe their glass / eyes. Their thick skins’ presence / dissolves the distance, / anchors in the firsthand fauna / of photographs and nature films— [.]” There is something of the sense of not only what Kilbourne has learned through his years of studies, but what else he’s learned, what elements and truths not directly related but essential to that particular craft. He speaks of the natural world and its possibility, but also its inherent fragility, threatened through progressive and entirely destructive human activity.

Set in four sections of poems—“THE CURIOUS INSTITUTION,” “MEMORY MUSEUM,” “DISPATCHES FROM ELLESMERE” and ‘BLINDFOLD WONDER,” along with a Forword by the Pulitzer Prize-winning former United States Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey—there’s such a thickness, a heft, to his lyric, offering poems that push entirely through his subject with incredible detail, moving through information as only a poet might, seeing connections and movements across a wealth of possibility. He writes scientific detail from a foundation of knowledge, but just as much beauty, wonder and a sense of magic, as the poem “The Oceanographer,” a poem subtitled “Inspired by the Carta Marina of Olaus Magnus,” begins: “I know the swirls and eddies of these seas / like the lines navigating my own palms. / I have traveled the seas to all the world’s / corners—spice harbors beyond the map’s / borders, merchant ports brimming with ducats, / the rock face caves of runners and smugglers. / My time on these waves has wizened my brow, / while the salt winds have gnawed my hair brittle / and lashed knuckles clenched round my raised spyglass.” There is such joy, such appreciation, through these poems, composed as explorations through enormous possibility. Or, as Trethewey writes as part of her introduction:

Among the perspectives of explorers and scientists, visitors and guides of Natural History is that of the poet himself. As a research biologist working more than twenty years in natural history museums, Dr. Kilbourne has examined the artifacts and plumbed their meanings. The result is a complex meditation on wonder and devastation of the natural world and an elegy for the earth by an observer who sees, clear-eyed, the ways it “premonishes disappearance.” Aptly, the wonder of the poet is likened to a marvelous universe wherein early trips to the American Museum of Natural History kindled the desire for scientific knowledge long before the understanding of its dark underbelly.

The opening poem of the third section, “The Location We Look For,” subtitled “Arriving on Ellesmere Island,” that includes: “The location we look for lies underground, / now a memory repressed down in rock / recalling this island before it was even / an island, where a fish and its near kin / tinkered with fins to bear a body’s weight / and free themselves from water, back when / this land beneath our feet sat at the equator / and was teeming with tropical swamps, / horsetail forests towering above the water, / before its landmass traveled the oceans, / tectonic clockwork conveying its shores / to the Arctic amid drifting continents.” Or the ending of the poem “Dead Reverence,” that reads:

Tending to this skeleton on this far northern
outcrop, jacketing its fragile form with layers
of moistened toilet paper following by layers
of wet plaster, we unearth this fossil with a reverence
that I’d wager was alien to this fish when alive:
long without any flesh to devour or motions
to still, its ramshackle remains at last unlock,
like diorama fauna revived by our imagination,
the due awe never found while it was breathing.

new from above/ground press: Cahill, Earl, Cavaleri, Niespodziany, Comay/Fagan, Birchard, Chernoff, la Rocque, carisse, Hill, Nećakov, Siklosi + Bjerg/Jung,

BAD TEMPOR, Jimmy T Cahill $6 ; SOCIALLY AWKWARD GHOST, Amanda Earl $6 ; Studies, Micah Anthony Cavaleri $6 ; The Man, a sequence of foolish men, Benjamin Niespodziany $6 ; The Sun Will Bleach It Away, Rebecca Comay / Cary Fagan $6 ; DIDIKUY, Guy Birchard $6 ; SLOPTIMISM of the WILL, MLA Chernoff $6 ; Circling the Black Sun, Lance La Rocque $6 ; That H uman E ffluence A nd P lastic, russell carisse $6 ; a nest, a burrow, a lea stone, Jeremy Luke Hill $6 ; The World is Beautiful, Lillian Nećakov $6 ; household: meadow, Kate Siklosi $6 ; eyesore, Johannes S.H. Bjerg and Charlotte Jung $6

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
October-November 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each

And did you see my report on this past summer's above/ground press 32nd anniversary event?

To order, send cheques (add $2 for postage; in US, add $3; outside North America, add $7) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button (above). See the prior list of recent titles here, scroll down here to see a further list of various backlist titles, or click on any of the extensive list of names on the sidebar (many, many things are still in print).

keep an eye on the above/ground press blog for author interviews, new writing, reviews, upcoming readings and tons of other material; and you know above/ground press has a substack now? sign up (for free!) for announcements, and even new features! catch recent/forthcoming interviews with Guy Birchard, Jill Stengal, Lillian Nećakov, Cary Fagan, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ken Norris, Michael Sikkema, Ben Ladouceur, Nathanael O'Reilly, Micah Ballard, Lydia Unsworth, Amanda Earl, Buck Downs, russell carisse etc.

With forthcoming chapbooks by: Glenn Bach, Travis Sharp, Sonja Greckol, Frances Cannon, Stuart Ross and Jason Camlot, David Gaffney, Kevin Spenst, Jill Stengel, Mrityunjay Mohan, Buck Downs, Salem Paige, Robert van Vliet, David Phillips and probably others! (yes: others,

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12 or 20 (second series) questions with Guy Elston

Guy Elston is a UK-born, Toronto-based poet. His debut collection is The Character Actor Convention (The Porcupine's Quill, 2025). His poems have appeared in The Literary Review of Canada, The Malahat Review, The Ex-Puritan, Grain, Geist and elsewhere. He is a member of the Meet the Presses collective.

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?

Publishing my chapbook Automatic Sleep Mode gave the confidence and direction to focus more on what I’m better at, moving away from more directly ‘confessional’ stuff to the kind of persona, character and dialogue work that makes up a lot of The Character Actor Convention. 

They encourage you to ‘find your voice’ as a poet. Finding that ‘my voice’ could be many voices – or that I could push my voice into many different personas – was very exciting for me.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

As a kid I wanted to write fiction, not poetry. I wrote some bad short stories. A turning point was picking up Raymond Carver’s collected poems and realising I preferred his poetry to his short stories. Then the bug bit me.

I like the idea of poetry as literary popcorn, literary snacks, literary hors d’oeuvres. You can eat something mind-bending and delicious. Then another, but sadder. Then another, but funnier... and you never really get full. Just tired.

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?

Poems tend to either come together fairly quickly, or not at all. (Apart from the ones that take years. Or never get finished. Or started.)

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?

Poems start in my notes app, graduate to the notebook, and then to the laptop. I like the move between the different mediums to test, break and refine. 

For The Character Actor Convention, it’s very much a book of individual poems. I’d like to work on something with more of a full-length concept in future.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

My poetry tends towards the page, and I’d usually rather read a poet’s work myself than hear them do it. But I’m getting into the performance side of poetry more, which I think is necessary given the theatricality of a lot of my poems. I like doing readings, particularly when they’re full of hundreds of adoring fans.

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?

My girlfriend teases me by describing my poetry as - ‘What if a chair was sad?’ - and really, can you think of any greater theoretical concern than that?

I don’t see my poetry as truth-telling, proclamation, or a call to action. I see it more as storytelling, and I like being comfortable with ambivalence and uncertainty.

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?

The only role of a writer is to exist. While writing, I suppose.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Essential, and something I’ve really enjoyed. Shane Neilson helped me to push my poems into new forms and places. Thanks, Shane!

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

I thought that Kathryn Maris wrote something like ‘If you want a life in poetry, you can have one’. But now I can’t find this quote anywhere. Perhaps I dreamt it?

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?

Not much of a routine – writing poems happens in and around everything else. The notebook stage of writing a poem, which is the biggest chunk of the creative part, typically happens in parks, at the lake, or late at night.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Books, news articles, random magazines, Wikipedia. Non-fiction is usually what gives me a jumping off point – if I read enough interesting stuff, something will get me going.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Horses.

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?

Any other type of artform – definitely.

Science – very much so, I love getting ideas from science articles and headlines. Part of the fun comes from my inability to think scientifically.

Nature – not at all. I can’t write about nature. I think it's already speaking for itself.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

My most influential poets would be people like Simic, Tate, Strand, Szymborska, Milosz, Selima Hill, Michael Bazzett, Matthew Sweeney. Robert Browning. People with an inclination towards storytelling and/or a pinch of surrealism.

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

Write some kind of Pale Fire-like metatextual piece with fictional footnotes from unreliable historians and such.  I know I have to try.

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?

When I was a child, adults would tell me that I should become a lawyer when I grew up. At least that didn’t happen.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I can’t remember wanting to do anything else. I loved reading from when I was very young. I remember being about 8, and saying something like ‘when I’m reading a book, I feel like I’m in another world’, and my sister rolling her eyes.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Book – The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington. A wild and empowering ride.

Film – I finally saw Metropolis the other day. Kick ass!

19 - What are you currently working on?

More, more of the same! But better...

12 or 20 (second series) questions;