Touch the Donkey : new interviews with Berlatsky, Schelenz, Weaver, Bayrock, Berrigan + Solin,

Anticipating the release next week of the fortieth issue of Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], why not check out the interviews that have appeared over the past few weeks with contributors to the thirty-ninth issue: Noah Berlatsky, Robyn Schelenz, Andy Weaver, Dessa Bayrock, Anselm Berrigan and Alana Solin.

Interviews with contributors to the first thirty-eight issues (nearly two hundred and fifty interviews to date) remain online, including: Michael Betancourt, Monty Reid, Heather Cadsby, R Kolewe, Samuel Amadon, Meghan Kemp-Gee, Miranda Mellis, kevin mcpherson eckhoff and Kimberley Dyck, Junie Désil, Micah Ballard, Devon Rae, Barbara Tomash, Ben Meyerson, Pam Brown, Shane Kowalski, Kathy Lou Schultz, Hilary Clark, Ted Byrne, Garrett Caples, Brenda Coultas, Sheila Murphy, Chris Turnbull and Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Stuart Ross, Leah Sandals, Tamara Best, Nathan Austin, Jade Wallace, Monica Mody, Barry McKinnon, Katie Naughton, Cecilia Stuart, Benjamin Niespodziany, Jérôme Melançon, Margo LaPierre, Sarah Pinder, Genevieve Kaplan, Maw Shein Win, Carrie Hunter, Lillian Nećakov, Nate Logan, Hugh Thomas, Emily Brandt, David Buuck, Jessi MacEachern, Sue Bracken, Melissa Eleftherion, Valerie Witte, Brandon Brown, Yoyo Comay, Stephen Brockwell, Jack Jung, Amanda Auerbach, IAN MARTIN, Paige Carabello, Emma Tilley, Dana Teen Lomax, Cat Tyc, Michael Turner, Sarah Alcaide-Escue, Colby Clair Stolson, Tom Prime, Bill Carty, Christina Vega-Westhoff, Robert Hogg, Simina Banu, MLA Chernoff, Geoffrey Olsen, Douglas Barbour, Hamish Ballantyne, JoAnna Novak, Allyson Paty, Lisa Fishman, Kate Feld, Isabel Sobral Campos, Jay MillAr, Lisa Samuels, Prathna Lor, George Bowering, natalie hanna, Jill Magi, Amelia Does, Orchid Tierney, katie o’brien, Lily Brown, Tessa Bolsover, émilie kneifel, Hasan Namir, Khashayar Mohammadi, Naomi Cohn, Tom Snarsky, Guy Birchard, Mark Cunningham, Lydia Unsworth, Zane Koss, Nicole Raziya Fong, Ben Robinson, Asher Ghaffar, Clara Daneri, Ava Hofmann, Robert R. Thurman, Alyse Knorr, Denise Newman, Shelly Harder, Franco Cortese, Dale Tracy, Biswamit Dwibedy, Emily Izsak, Aja Couchois Duncan, José Felipe Alvergue, Conyer Clayton, Roxanna Bennett, Julia Drescher, Michael Cavuto, Michael Sikkema, Bronwen Tate, Emilia Nielsen, Hailey Higdon, Trish Salah, Adam Strauss, Katy Lederer, Taryn Hubbard, Michael Boughn, David Dowker, Marie Larson, Lauren Haldeman, Kate Siklosi, robert majzels, Michael Robins, Rae Armantrout, Stephanie Strickland, Ken Hunt, Rob Manery, Ryan Eckes, Stephen Cain, Dani Spinosa, Samuel Ace, Howie Good, Rusty Morrison, Allison Cardon, Jon Boisvert, Laura Theobald, Suzanne Wise, Sean Braune, Dale Smith, Valerie Coulton, Phil Hall, Sarah MacDonell, Janet Kaplan, Kyle Flemmer, Julia Polyck-O’Neill, A.M. O’Malley, Catriona Strang, Anthony Etherin, Claire Lacey, Sacha Archer, Michael e. Casteels, Harold Abramowitz, Cindy Savett, Tessy Ward, Christine Stewart, David James Miller, Jonathan Ball, Cody-Rose Clevidence, mwpm, Andrew McEwan, Brynne Rebele-Henry, Joseph Mosconi, Douglas Barbour and Sheila Murphy, Oliver Cusimano, Sue Landers, Marthe Reed, Colin Smith, Nathaniel G. Moore, David Buuck, Kate Greenstreet, Kate Hargreaves, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Erín Moure, Sarah Swan, Buck Downs, Kemeny Babineau, Ryan Murphy, Norma Cole, Lea Graham, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Oana Avasilichioaei, Meredith Quartermain, Amanda Earl, Luke Kennard, Shane Rhodes, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Sarah Cook, François Turcot, Gregory Betts, Eric Schmaltz, Paul Zits, Laura Sims, Stephen Collis, Mary Kasimor, Billy Mavreas, damian lopes, Pete Smith, Sonnet L’Abbé, Katie L. Price, a rawlings, Suzanne Zelazo, Helen Hajnoczky, Kathryn MacLeod, Shannon Maguire, Sarah Mangold, Amish Trivedi, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Aaron Tucker, Kayla Czaga, Jason Christie, Jennifer Kronovet, Jordan Abel, Deborah Poe, Edward Smallfield, ryan fitzpatrick, Elizabeth Robinson, nathan dueck, Paige Taggart, Christine McNair, Stan Rogal, Jessica Smith, Nikki Sheppy, Kirsten Kaschock, Lise Downe, Lisa Jarnot, Chris Turnbull, Gary Barwin, Susan Briante, derek beaulieu, Megan Kaminski, Roland Prevost, Emily Ursuliak, j/j hastain, Catherine Wagner, Susanne Dyckman, Susan Holbrook, Julie Carr, David Peter Clark, Pearl Pirie, Eric Baus, Pattie McCarthy, Camille Martin and Gil McElroy.

The forthcoming fortieth issue features new writing by: Ryan Eckes, Dennis Cooley, Michael Harman, Terri Witek and Laynie Browne.

And of course, copies of the first thirty-eight issues are still very much available. Why not subscribe? Included, as well, as part of the above/ground press annual subscription! Which you should get right now for 2024!

We even have our own Facebook group. It’s remarkably easy.

Anselm Berrigan, Pregrets

 

Pregrets

a century of drawing, endorsed on spine
by the scary amp code for pre-photo
graphic childhood, bystander to a con-
versation (see: religion), micro pigment
ink for waterproof and fade proof lines
sticking out of things, influenced largely
by commercials for plastic toys, forcing
order, Whisp Lou Do (all cutoffs available
via screen in foreground) 0 84511 306
44 8, dark salmon cushion chained to
Its couch, interviews hopefully plunged
Into process, but (a conjunction) no
Loyalty to spatial incidence (produced
as compress), typed arrow, anti-being
in the room, all parentheticals put on
erasure alert, bubble’s imitation voice
speaks out from photo dream the other
night, losing lizard count forty-one to
fifteen, fantasy baseball, “your second
wife”, liquid net, desire for stuffed goat
to make appearance bound to observer

It only took me a couple of years to get around to New York City poet and editor Anselm Berrigan’s prior collection, Something For Everybody (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2018) [see my review of such here], so I thought I should be a bit more attentive to his latest, Pregrets (New York NY: Black Square Editions, 2021). Organized in four sections, the book-length suite Pregrets is comprised of seventy-five poems in total, each of which are no longer than a page in length. Most of the poems in Pregrets are set underneath the title “Pregrets,” with occasional further title-variations popping up along the way: “Pregrets vs. Egrets,” “Pregrets (beginning with two clauses by Clarice Lispector),” “Re to Pre to De, “Greggrets,” “Megrets” and “Freegrets III,” with a handful of “Degrets” and Egrets” thrown in as well, for good measure. In certain ways, Pregrets is composed as a single, endless expansiveness of text, pushing further and further along a singular prompt. “upsided down self-portrait by elder daughter / sees through the scaffolding of his and his / conceptions,” he writes, a third of the way through the collection, in a further of his “Pregrets” pieces. Pregrets offers a particular train of thought speeding through the regret of an action prior to the action itself, the small moments and scatterings of the “pre-regret.” The ongoingness of the line and the lyric, the end of one poem potentially stitching up neatly against the opening of the subsequent poem, is reminiscent of Darren Wershler’s now-infamous The Tapeworm Foundry: And or the Dangerous Prevalence of Imagination (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2000), or even the more recent beholden: a poem as long as the river (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2018) by Vancouver poets Fred Wah and Rita Wong [see my review of such here], both of which offer a single book-length line. Given Berrigan’s line is simultaneously continuous and segmented into individual pieces, as well as the collaged nature of his lyric, the effect allows for multiple readings and possibilities across the poems. What do the scatterings of Berrigan’s poems offer the reader? “your line drawing is the purest & most direct / translation of my emotion,” he writes, mid-way through the collection to open one of his “Pregrets” pieces. He writes everything going on around his immediate, as a way to write a shape around his thinking, and his thinking self. He writes a multitude of possibilities, one that allows the reader to sit within the framework of his poems and attempt to see the larger structure at play. And what a structure it is.

Anselm Berrigan, Something For Everybody

 

INQUIRE WITHOUT

the men walked on in silence
passing by long ruins of stables
they walked through several
corridors in silence, passing
by several again, the rest keeping
silence, passing by Roxanes, a
commander of a thousand men
trudging the rest of the way in
silence, passing by the Ichiraku
ramen stand and the library
drove east in silence, passing
by Hochstadt, Mönchenholzhausen
and Weimar, across new halls
of silence, passing by an old
and gigantic tree, which has
miraculous properties in the
hearts of those who are thus
in speechless and pensive silence
passing by the slamming stops
for a moment, the eerie silence
passing by again, until there is
one final large slam and the door
to rooms shatters open toward
Silence Passing by Paul Klee
strange moods of silence passing
by without word or comment
facts of striking interest & sig-
nificance, streams of awkward
people, & the silence at hand

I’m behind on everything (as you know), so I’m just now getting to New York “poet, teacher, editor and occasional publisher” Anselm Berrigan’s latest, Something For Everybody (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2018). Comprised as an assemblage of incredibly sharp and predominantly self-contained poems, Berrigan’s is a poetic of accumulation and fragment, one formed at the apex of his collision of words and phrases. One could look no further to the opening of “ILLANELLE,” for example, that writes: “A ginger ancestor played human by takes // Her tickling shines this discarded grinning // My jumbo warp fetish threadbare on the make [.]” His is a poetic of twists and tweaks, writing a wide space and an open form that furthers a trajectory begun by earlier of the New York School of Poets (including, obviously, his parents: Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley). One can see the lineage, although there are elements of Berrigan’s poetic that could also connect to the accumulation of language employed by certain of the Kootenay School of Writing poets, namely Jeff Derksen.

The author of more than a half-dozen full-length works of poetry, Berrigan’s poems in Something For Everybody are sharp, self-aware and playful, employing a variety of structures and rhythms through his accumulations. There is an enormous amount of play here, wryly worked, from sly jokes that centre around a three-word poem, or the five poems set back-to-back that share the same title, “JIM BRODEY.” These poems are most likely composed, one might surmise, in homage for the late poet and rock music critic Jim Brodey (1942-1993) who was, as his Poetry Foundation biography offers, a “literary figure in 1960s New York City, he was friends with many experimental poets, artists, and musicians.” As the first poem for Brodey offers: “It’s getting hard to have me around too Jim / So I write you under yellow light leaning / Into some waylaid framed dimensions tearing off [.]” One might almost wonder if this is a collection that emerged organically, as poems less forming a specific book-length structure, but one of “occasions” that began to shape into a larger structure, thus the “something for everybody.” And yet, these poems are incredibly tight, without a wasted word or loose thread; to paraphrase Canadian poet Don McKay, Berrigan’s poems are “lines that any bird might trust to light upon.”

6x6 #36

I have been told that I walk like a man.

Last night a woman followed me at a party. I see something in you, she said. You’ve been raped. I know because I have too.

I want to ask you: Can you bear the life that you have?

Walking my dog down the street, passersby ask, “How old is he?” My dog is in fact a she. The mounting irritation I experience seems puerile, for what does it matter if a stranger incorrectly refers to my dog as male?

Today a tampon unwrapped and ejected itself into my tote bag.

When you talk about someone, it is a way to talk about yourself.

Sometimes I get a sore back.

One time, at Gussie’s urging, I took the neighbor’s baby for a walk in the carriage and, inspired by passersby admiring my beautiful sister, offered to sell her for three dollars.

When I use my left hand it doesn’t feel like I’m me anymore.

The knot, an associative network that intersects at a hidden center, rising to the surface as a word.

This is the nodal point where discourse forms a hole.

A lunch bag full of donuts. A blank face. This smelly life.

If a topologist cannot distinguish between a coffee mug and a donut, since a malleable donut can be reshaped into a coffee mug, then how do I know whether I am a man or a woman?

I can be one as easily as the other. (Sarah Wang, “An Image Always Precedes”)

I’ve long been an admirer of Brooklyn’s 6x6 [see my prior reviews of issues #35, #32-#33, #30, #26 and #25], produced through Ugly Duckling Presse, and the most recent issue #36, is the final in the series. There hasn’t been much explanation anywhere as to specifically why they’re ending the run of the journal, other than the suggestion that they want to try other things, and the hint that there might be another project come up in its stead. Still: 6x6 is not only one of my favo(u)rite American poetry journals, but one of those (now) late-lamented journals that I’m very disappointed I couldn’t manage to get any work into (along with Nate Norward’s The Gig). So, while I’m sad to see the journal end, I can at least remind myself that multiple back issues are most likely still available through the Ugly Duckling Presse website, which will allow me, potentially, a few more opportunities to discover writers I might not have been aware of (6x6 facilitated my discovery of writers such as Anna Gurton-Wachter (who now has a chapbook forthcoming with above/ground press), Judith Goldman, Cat Tyc, Tony Iantosca, Jon Boisvert and William Minor, among others, for which I am entirely and eternally grateful).

The final issue, subtitled “prodyourheadwithastick,” includes (as it always does) new work by six writers: Anselm Berrigan, Chia-Lun Chang, Cheryl Clarke, Lisa Fishman, Vasilisk Gnedov (translated by Emilia Loseva and Danny Winkler), and Sarah Wang. New York City writer Sarah Wang’s extended prose piece, “An Image Always Precedes,” is incredibly striking, and I’m surprised, slightly, that she doesn’t seem to have a book out yet, despite work published in Joyland, n+1, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Conjunctions, Stonecutter Journal, Story Magazine and The Third Rail, as well as an excerpt of a novel-in-progress in BOMB magazine. I’m quite amazed by how the disparate sentences of her six-page work manages to cohere, even as it moves in multiple directions. Contributor Chia-Lun Chang, a Taipei, Taiwan-born poet, artist and translator, currently a member of the Belladonna* collective, is also the author of the chapbook (already out-of-print) One Day We Become Whites (No, Dear, 2016). Her six poems included in this issue are unapologetically political (concurrently responding directly and indirectly to the current political climate of the United States, and their current President), lyric and restless, and very much make me want to see what else she is capable of:

The Government Makes Me

lie if I want a visa. They paint me

a bunch of aloe. Locked fluid inside

my skin. But I’ve become a cactus

by adjusting to dryness. Others suggest

to mimic a rose. That’d make it easier to

get picked up. No one appreciates aloe,

people squeeze it to swallow and

apply on skin in summer kitchens

only. Check the box for venus flytrap,

to be a frozen predator.

None of the above dare to grow roots

until the government announces

that all of the thorns build a fence

preventing connections

from another side.

What can I say about 6x6? Just read it; just read everything in every issue. I mourn the loss of such a fine journal, yet eagerly await what might just be to come.