Touch the Donkey supplement: new interviews with Jung, Auerbach, MARTIN, Carabello, Tilley, Lomax + Tyc,

Anticipating the release later next week of the thirty-first 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 thirtieth issue: Jack Jung, Amanda Auerbach, IAN MARTIN, Paige Carabello, Emma Tilley, Dana Teen Lomax and Cat Tyc.

Interviews with contributors to the first thirty issues (nearly two hundred interviews to date) remain online, including: 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 thirty-first issue features new writing by: Brandon Brown, Rusty Morrison, Yoyo Camay, Stephen Brockwell, Melissa Eleftherion, Sue Bracken, Valerie Witte and Jessi MacEachern.

And of course, copies of the first twenty-nine issues are still very much available. Why not subscribe? Included, as well, as part of the above/ground press 2022 subscriptions! We even have our own Facebook group. It’s remarkably easy.

Ongoing notes: late January, 2020: Machado, Tyc

Don’t forget that the spring edition of the ottawa small press book fair has been scheduled for June 27th! The best of the small press in Ottawa, twice a year since 1994!

Charlottesville VA: Aditi Machado’s latest is the chapbook-length poem Rhapsody (2020), beautifully produced by hand by Brian Teare’s Albion Books, as the second title in series seven. Currently the Visiting Poet-in-Residence at Washington University in Saint Louis, Machado [see her ’12 or 20 questions’ interview here] is the author of the poetry collections Some Beheadings (Nightboat Books, 2017) [see my review of such here] and the forthcoming Emporium (Nightboat Books, 2020), as well as a translation from the French of Farid Tali’s novella Prosopopoeia (Action Books, 2016).

Let us exercise our vocal cords.

Let us draw them out

limbs.

Let us say there is always a longer or shorter

tress, always congruities, blissful, bitter

rhythms, sprung onions splitting, violins in

harmony that is harmonic, chaos that is chaotic,

in sense that is sensible, in here it inheres, out there

rapid rabbits. Let us labor under these notions

as under the cantus planus factory whine.

Let us stumble around, humming, stumbling, humming.

Then something in the shape of leaves,

something in the touching of ‘red.’

The poem Rhapsody explores a wonderfully playful, thoughtful and sing-song meditation on flora, fauna, myths and ordinary speech through the lyric, and the lyric fragment, in a way she describes certain poems from her debut collection in “A conversation between  poet-grammarians” with Serena Chopra published at Jacket2: “the subject feeling itself out in language.” What I have been enjoying about this small poem, this small collection, is exactly that: how she slowly draws out her thoughts, and her sentences, one thought immediately following another. At times, she moves in different directions, but ever forward, as she writes: “Some systems proffer / all vowels alliterate and in all / prose a prosody.” The effect is stunning. Machado’s canvas is large, and complex, and I could easily see this as part of a larger book-length structure, whether set within the context of other poems, or, itself, as a book-length “Rhapsody.”

Brooklyn NY: Lately I’ve been going through two different titles by Brooklyn, New York poet and artist Cat Tyc, her CONSUMES ME (Brooklyn NY: Belladonna*, 2017), produced as #222 in the Belladonna* Chaplet Series, and I Am Because My Little Dog Knows Me (b l u s h, November 2019). I’m fascinated by Tyc’s sweeps of lyric prose, existing somewhere in an odd space between fiction and poetry, documentary and memoir. Unlike Machado, Tyc’s narrative sweeps aren’t propelled via the intricately-linked fragment but an extended rush of accumulated sentences.

That word, imagination, always connects me to the naïve, so I think this is why my first draft of an animal came out kind of cartoonish. Like a street artist drawing at a tourist attraction.

I imagined a cat of human size wearing a button down shirt, gingham, and khaki pants. A belt and the shirt tucked in like a very old man.

So, that is exactly who I meet when I finish climbing down the hole but we both know that it is not right. He is not the animal I am looking for.

He tells me, “I am only a figment of your imagination.” Then looks down at himself, shrugs and said, “Not bad.”

Then he led me down a hallway where behind every corner was a dog.

Every dog I ever cared for when I used to work as a dog walker.

And then there is the door at the end of the corridor and I know before I open it that I will see my dog, Thurston.

But this feels too obvious. (I Am Because My Little Dog Knows Me)

6 x 6 : issues #32 + #33

I thought to write

and wrote a language

that I use, I didn’t write to that

language as in a letter or something

but one cannot be blamed

for thinking so. Isn’t it odd

the channels words cut open like

look over here I am stuck in one

and there’s an earthen weight

bearing down with lexical meaning

so it’s really hard to talk any longer

about this, if not entirely

impossible but I’m learning

effective communication skills. (Tony Iantosca)

I’ve long been an admirer of the American poetry journal 6 x 6, produced through Brooklyn’s Ugly Duckling Presse. As the title suggests, each issue features healthy selections of work from six contributors, and the most recent issues to appear at my door include work by James D. Fuson, Lyn Hejinian, Barbara Henning, Tony Iantosca, Uroš Kotlajić (translated from Serbian by Ainsley Morse) and Morgan Parker (issue #32), and Amanda Berenguer (translated from Spanish by Gillian Brassil and Alex Verdolini), Jeremy Hoevenaar, Krystal Languell, Holly Melgard, Marc Paltrineri and Cat Tyc (issue #33). Part of the appeal of the journal, other than the obvious appeal of a journal that supports strong writing, is the variety of form and style displayed in each issue, as well as translations from other languages (and countries), and a list of contributors running the length and breadth of emerging, established and all points in-between. This list can include poets I’ve known the work of for years, to those I’m being introduced to for the first time. Take, for example, this excerpt from Brooklyn based filmmaker/poet/video artist Cat Tyc’s “Memory Is Not a Test”:

10. Being the sixth wheel, she wishes for a bigger dance floor to watch the lunar eclipse from.

More copper than red, and everyone goes home to spoon and make babies.

Baby this, and baby that. They always get the last word.

Her cab driver says, that in his country, it is believed that if a pregnant woman sleeps through an eclipse, her child will not come to term.

His stern sensitivity garnered prudent reservation.

She saw herself in him. Sometimes when no one was looking, she would walk around the apartment without a shirt on.

Just to try on that petulant boy role.

Enough already, it is fall, and she is still swatting mosquitoes.

The author biography on her website writes that her work is “interested in exploring the paradoxes of class,” and her work in this issue of 6 x 6 is enough to make me curious to see what else she’s produced. In a recent interview over at Weird Sister she says: “I am identifying as a writer first mostly these days because that is my primary creative act in this moment in time. The last few years I have been focusing on filmmaking but after a while I found myself wanting to differentiate from the conversations I found myself in. If I called myself a filmmaker, the conversation would always devolve towards film festivals, camera models, distribution models, financing…. All of that felt really disconnected from some of the things I feel most passionate about in filmmaking and making art in general which are story, character development, and directing. After being frustrated in this way one too many times, I remembered that all of those aspects I loved stemmed from writing and I realized it might be a lot easier to get back to my favorite parts of filmmaking if I just stopped and said, ‘Hey, I’m a writer.’ I think creative identity, like most identifying quantities, is for the individual and the individual alone to decide. It also feels important to mention too that in honing my focus back on writing…it helped me reconnect to the literary, or to be more specific, radical poetics, which are at the foundation of my education and have been my primary creative community for most of my life.” Another is poet Tony Iantosca, author of Shut Up, Leaves (United Artists Books, 2015), a poet with, beyond a handful of pieces posted in a variety of online journals, a remarkably small online footprint. As one of his untitled poems from his “Excerpts from Creative Writing” in issue #32 reads: “A cloud in the shape / of a shape. It is shaped / how it’s shaping itself and being /shaped too I suppose because / it’s a cloud. All my problems / shape up to be rainstorm / and then it all becomes / something else entirely.” Of course, one can never overlook Barbara Henning, who has a striking and powerful matter-of-fact meander on life and film reminiscent slightly of the work of Toronto poet David Donnell:

Madagascar

I’m watching Madagascar

with the boys—hilarious

hip city zoo animals end up

in Africa but long to come

home to the Central Park Zoo.

With the emergence of zoos,

pet keeping and animal toys,

John Berger explains that animals

were slowly disappearing from

our daily lives. When the boys

take a bath, Like stretches his

long young thin body under

the warm water and we play

with little action figures

and plastic frogs. Then I put

my feet into the tub, singing

row row row your boat gently

down the stream. Later

it’s raining and we’re together

under an umbrella, walking

through the park. Surely,

radioactive ocean water

from the Fukushima Daiichi

nuclear plant will migrate

around the globe and even if we

don’t die this year, we will

all die eventually, so for now,

let’s hold each other loosely.