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: dusie kollektiv 9: Dana Teen Lomax + Juliet Cook

Further to the latest iteration of the dusie kollektiv [see my prior notes on chapbooks by Bronwen Tate and Elisabeth Workman from the same kollektiv here; on C.S.Carrier and Adra Raine here; on gillian parrish and Carrie Hunter here; see the link to my own chapbook here], here are a couple of more chapbook-length works solicited by dusie maven Susana Gardner, produced in/as homage to the late American poet, editor and publisher Marthe Reed.

San Quentin CA: Dana Teen Lomax’ THE-IN-BETWEEN opens with a curious quote by Marthe Reed: “To reencounter / the inbetween, / we must learn / not only to resee / but also to / rearticulate that / which is seen, / more complexly, / anew.” I mention curious, because the formatting sets up Lomax’ short chapbook exploration/homage of columns, seventeen pages of sentence-breaths without break, each set as a singular band, and each focusing on a different element of what she wishes to explore or articulate as an example of “the in-between.” As the first poem reads:

the-in-between-o

f-my-foot-and-wh

en-it-hits-the-gro

ound-touches-the-

earth-kisses-it-if-

i-am-being-poeti

c-or-particularly-

cheery-the-effect

-of-the-weight-w

here-i-am-heade

d-and-why-plus-

how-much-energ

y-i-take-to-get-th

ere-and-not-fore

going-the-why,-o

f-course,-and-th

e-towhee-song-t

hat-i-do-not-reco

gnize-busy-as-i-

constantly-am-wi

th-human-concer

ns-along-on-the-

way…-all-this-fro

m-the-Sundarba

ns’-increasingly-

vital-perspective-

OH: Poet and publisher Juliet Cook’s contribution is DARK PURPLE INTERSECTIONS (inside my Black Doll Head Irises) (Blood Pudding Press, 2019), a suite of short poems that move through the meditations and examinations of lyric memoir. The poems in DARK PURPLE INTERSECTIONS seek to explore and understand gestures, decisions and a sense of balance, including prior relationships, stroke recovery, ageing and depression, and the construction of dolls. “I’m tired of being a last resort,” she writes, in the poem “We haven’t talked in years, but suddenly he wants me again,” continuing: “a suicide hot line inside a middle-aged woman’s body, / stuck on repeat.”

He was tired of hearing about my stroke and my poetry.

From whiplash on the back of the bed stand

to nipple piercings in a biohazard bag.

Dismembered brain

waves

like a broken doll hand.

Letters to Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community, eds. Jennifer Firestone & Dana Teen Lomax

So now we are writing letters. The question on my mind this morning has to do with how we negotiate this task of lettering. (Patrick Pritchett to Kathleen Fraser, December 22, 2006)

One of the most interesting collections of interviews I’ve seen in a long time has to be Letters to Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community, eds. Jennifer Firestone & Dana Teen Lomax (Philadelphia PA: Saturnalia Books, 2008). The idea was simple enough: over the space of a couple of years, the editors solicited various poets across the United States for the sake of a conversation with another poet they wanted to talk to. As the editors begin their introduction:

Letters to Poets developed from an interest in how we could redefine, renegotiate, and extend the concept of collaboration. For this project, fourteen poet-pairs from various regions, races, class backgrounds, sexual preferences, and aesthetics came together and wrote letters during approximately a one-year period. From the start, the Letters to Poets project has been experimental in nature. Having provided no strict formal or thematic guidelines, we had little idea what the poets in this collection would choose to write about. We thought that if poets had the opportunity to correspond with each other over the course of a year, important and intriguing conversations would emerge, prompting further discourse among poets and people in other disciplines. Letters have proven powerful texts. (Consider the correspondences between Dickinson and Higginson, Hughes and Bontemps, Zukofsky and Niedecker, Levertov and Duncan, Celan and Sachs, Silko and Wright, and so on.) We believed the epistolary format would create a sense of intimacy, allowing readers to feel privy to “inside” information about poets’ ideas and experiences.

As stated, there are fourteen pairs of poets, including Anselm Berrigan and John Yau, Brenda Coultas and Victor Hernández Cruz, Truong Tran and Wanda Coleman, Patrick Pritchett and Kathleen Fraser, Hajera Ghori and Alfred Arteaga, Jennifer Firestone and Eileen Myles, Karen Weiser and Anne Waldman, Jill Magi and Cecilia Vicuna, Rosamond S. King and Jayne Cortez, Judith Goldsmith and Leslie Scalapino, Traci Gourdine and Quincy Troupe, Brena Iljima and Joan Retallack, Dana Teen Lomax and Claire Braz-Valentine, and Albert Flynn DeSilver and Paul Hoover. I know I’ve repeated it numerous times, but Alberta writer Robert Kroetsch has always called literature a conversation, so how could such a project not seem obvious and almost basic, in just how appealing it might be for the sake of both readers and participants, and something that Stephanie Bolster and I were very aware of when we did a version of the same about a decade ago, interviewing each other over the space of months, and published online as a single (albeit long) document. But I wonder: is this the sort of project that might be worth a journal taking on as a kind of ongoing project, whether in print or online? Just because the book is finished, does that mean that the idea has to end as well?

Am I wrong to observe that the language of critical discourse has tended—in the last three or so decades—to over-drench our thinking re the making of poems, by smuggling its own list of au courant abstract urgencies into poetry’s more visceral territory? It would appear that many of the current choices pre/scribed from the sleeve of academic authority—patina’d with a certain allure—may have become, at the same time, too revered and yet too familiar, that is, once removed from the actual physical precipice that marks the uneasy edge of writing’s activity. Is it possible that competing concerns (languages) of analysis theory vs. the poet’s invented syntactical/physical arrangements are capable of creating an impasse, even impairing one’s working contract with the imagination? (Kathleen Fraser to Patrick Pritchett, June 25, 2005)