Touch the Donkey : new interviews with J-T Kelly, Jennifer Firestone, Austin Miles + Alice Burdick,

Anticipating the release next week of the forty-fifth 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 forty-fourth issue: J-T Kelly, Jennifer Firestone, Austin Miles and Alice Burdick.

Interviews with contributors to the first forty-three issues (more than two hundred and seventy-four interviews to date) remain online, including: Henry Gould, Leesa Dean, Tom Jenks, Sandra Doller, Scott Inniss, John Levy, Taylor Brown, Grant Wilkins, Lori Anderson Moseman, russell carisse, Ariana Nadia Nash, Wanda Praamsma, Michael Harman, Terri Witek, Laynie Browne, Noah Berlatsky, Robyn Schelenz, Andy Weaver, Dessa Bayrock, Anselm Berrigan, Alana Solin, 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 forty-fifth issue features new writing by: Dag T. Straumsvåg, brandy ryan, Misha Solomon, D. A. Lockhart, Lea Graham, Jordan Davis + Larkin Maureen Higgins.

And of course, copies of the first forty-three 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 2025! Our thirty-second year! and the above/ground press postal increase sale, which is happening right now!

We even have our own Facebook group, and a growing (new) above/ground press substack. It’s remarkably easy.

Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, eds. Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone,

 

It was also at Naropa in 1994 where I was introduced to Harryette Mullen and was lucky enough to take a workshop with her. A brilliant teacher, Mullen shaped the workshop around her use of Oulipo-based techniques, folkloric influences, and attention to the demotic and conversational word play. That workshop forever influenced my pedagogy and writing. Likewise, that summer I was first introduced to the work of Bob Kaufman, Ted Berrigan, and Bernadette Mayer, and I took a workshop with Dennis and Barbara Tedlock, who gave a panel on their translation of the Popol Vuk and who said that whenever they speak of their experiences around this work, it involved rain: it did. I took a sonnet workshop with the brilliant Anselm Hollo that initiated my lifelong interest in this form and after which I wrote my first mature poems, a sonnet sequence. It was at Naropa that I heard Nathaniel Mackey give his soul-searing lecture “Cante Moro” on Lorca’s concept of duende. That lecture opened a cross-cultural understanding of bent strings, broken eloquence, and the role of dialogue singing, allowing me to make perceptual links between U.S. Delta blues and the Cham-influenced musical scale of south Vietnamese music, which is also composed of a pentatonic scale with flattened and in-between notes. Delta to delta. (Hoa Nguyen, “WHEN YOU WRITE POETRY YOU FIND THE ARCHITECTURE OF YOUR LINEAGE”)

I’m deeply impressed with the collection Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, edited by Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone (London UK/Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2024), a collection of original essays “by a range of leading contemporary feminist avant-garde poets asked to consider their lineages, inspirations, and influences.” The list of contributors include Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Nicole Brossard, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Brenda Coultas, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Tonya M. Foster, Renee Gladman, Carla Harryman, Erica Hunt, Patricia Spears Jones, Rachel Levitsky, Bernadette Mayer, Tracie Morris, Harryette Mullen, Eileen Myles, Sawako Nakayasu, Hoa Nguyen, Julie Patton, KPrevallet, Evelyn Reilly, Trish Salah, Prageeta Sharma, Stacy Szymaszek, Anne Tardos, Monica de la Torre, Cecilia Vicuña, Anne Waldman and Rosmarie Waldrop. “First I had this impression of Leslie Scalapino bouncing outside of language poetry,” Eileen Myles writes, to open “ACCIDENTAL SCALAPINO,” “like she was kind of there but couldn’t quite stay still in the project of it, or the project of hers. I always noticed who one pals around with in the poetry world and she was I think beloved by Alice (Notley) and Ted (Berrigan) though they’d be the first to describe Leslie as ‘a weirdo,’ a phrase they reserved for the best people and they meant it with the utmost affection.” There is such a richness to this collection, one that explodes across a constellation of names, threads, writing communities and commentaries, both a heft of information for the experienced reader and emerging writer, allowing the best of what be possible across an anthology of poets and poetics. Every essay within this collection is exceptional, each articulation on how one begins, how the poems begin, how one establishes relationships to writing, writers and thinking across writing. “What can it mean for a woman,” Rachel Levitsky offers as part of “PUSSY FORWARD POETICS, OR THE SEX IN THE MIDDLE: READING AKILAH OLIVER AND GAIL SCOTT,” “for radical marginalized women, for a Black woman, for mothers, for a poet, for an experimental prose writer, for a poor woman, an aging woman, a queer woman, a woman who holds no fixed idea or surety over the meaning of the category ‘woman,’ therefore a theoretical and theory-making woman, a nonbinary woman, a trans woman, a trans man or masculine who was once called upon to be a female or a woman, a no-longer-cis woman, a poet and artist, solitary woman, a gazed-upon and scrutinized woman, a dreaming woman, a desiring woman, a traveling woman, a reading woman, a homebody, a woman of autonomous intellect, a friend, to perform freedom or more free-ness amid such conditions?” And then there is Stacy Szymaszek, writing in “VIVA PASOLINI!” a sense of the poem and poet connected to civic responsibility: “[Pier Paolo] Pasolini is the first poet who teaches me to turn existing poetry spaces into spaces for poets to be possessed by civic poetry, a poetry that is imbued with reciprocity between the individual poet and society.” Further on, writing:

            Civic poetry is gnostic in its intelligence and shows an uncomprosmising fealty to language. It gives me an ability to intervene, to refuse, to create a more just reality, to rewire the brain into making better sense. These are not new concepts, although they are new in the way that old poetry can be eternally new and new poets can be possessed by old poets.

One of the strengths of this collection emerges from the variety of responses; however much overlap might occur, each poet leaning into their own unique direction or approach, with the assemblage allowing for an opening of conversation or collaboration over any sense of contradiction. There’s an openness to these pieces, one that can’t help spark an enthusiasm for the possibility of further work. “To unmask our history,” Anne Waldman writes, “we also need to go to poetry.” Or, as Nicole Brossard begins her essay “LA DÉFERLANTE”: “What informs my poetry is not necessarily meaning first. It is mostly how sentences of lines disrupt my reading-writing to create a tension in meaning and prepare new paths toward it. Those paths are what I will call the basis of influence, of resonance, of what becomes the appeal in the intimate space of a text, of an author.” Asking contemporary poets to speak to or about lineages and influence suggest that this collection an extension of an idea from a prior collection, another anthology co-edited by Firestone, the anthology Letters to Poets:Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community (Philadelphia PA: Saturnalia Books, 2008) [see my review of such here], a book she co-edited with Dana Teen Lomax. I recall finding this collection utterly fascinating and a bit envious at the time, equally so for this current work: a book crafted to speak to the best of how community can work, as well as a deeper understanding of each of the works of the contributors, through seeing how their poetics and sense of literary kinship were developed. As the editors offer as part of their introduction:

            The poets in this collection found their ways to their own poetics, identifying their contexts and lineages unbounded by the strictures of their schools, work, and established literary institutions. As Audre Lore states, “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crushed into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” This community of writers resists labels: they invite nuance, error, slippage, and even messiness. They take the terms feminist and avant-garde, claim them, and make them uniquely their own. They know deeply that canons change, that inspiration is subtle, that the path is not so easy or clear. This collection is only the beginning of an evolving dialogue, an opening to a new generation of feminist avant-garde writers to connect to, collaborate with, and support each other. ultimately, it is our vision to gather feminist avant-garde poets who engage with language as a point of contention and potentiality.

 

Jennifer Firestone, STORY

A beach at midday in a foreign land read as a good beginning.

            “White light shoots across the horizon.”

The couple assumed their position as newly formed.

            “Chairs dig into wet sand.”

And so opens New York poet and editor Jennifer Firestone’s fifth full-length poetry collection is STORY (Brooklyn NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019), a title that follows her collections Holiday (Shearsman Books, 2008), Flashes (Shearsman Books, 2013), Gates & Fields (Belladonna*, 2017) and Ten (BlazeVOX, 2019). STORY revels in fragments and narrative threads, and opens with a binary: two threads, almost as a call-and-response, a description-to-action, an action-to-Greek-chorus, that expand and twist throughout the book, evolving to intertwine into something larger. Through, and even despite, the narrative fragments, a story does actually develop: there is a progression of action and development of characters composed via full sentences. STORY develops very much though accumulation, furthering point upon point, one step immediately following another, through dense prose and prose-fragments. There is an enormous amount of play in Firestone’s wide canvas, composing a book-length poem titled STORY, one that works up to, through, and beyond a traumatic event, and how it is both processed and depicted. As she writes: “What is the truth but what we say.”

The bar man prepared several ornate tropical drinks repeatedly.

Presumably the ambulance crew patiently rattled protocol while lifting.

Presumably another tourist couple hopped into the back with humanitarian kindness.

Presumably the day was pitch perfect and the sea roamed mercifully.

Presumably there was a call to loved ones, a call to a doctor.

Presumably you thought this was your first call in marriage.

Presumably you thought many times I’ll write this.

A low moan pitched to the deep side shakes itself.

Jennifer Firestone, GATES & FIELDS

This place a concrete place

A place to be bought and sold

A place or stationary object

First come words then memories

Then parting words

The trees!  shhh  The trees!

A whistling has begun   shhh

A whistling has begun

Here and beyond here

Here and beyond (“GATES”)

Brooklyn poet and editor Jennifer Firestone’s latest poetry title is GATES & FIELDS (Brooklyn NY: Belladonna*, 2017), an extended sequence of fragments via nine titled sequences. Composed as a series of indirect missives on grief and loss—“GATES,” “FIELDS,” “SHE,” “LEAVING,” “GONE,” “SHE,” “CHORUS,” “GATES & FIELDS” and “SHE”—there is a sparseness to Firestone’s short sketched fragments, one that packs in an enormous, and enormously restrained, emotional content while utilizing sound, rhythm and repetitions, echoes and precision. On the back cover of the collection, Susan Howe offers that GATES & FIELDS writes “through the fierce silences at the heart of grief.” As Firestone writes: “A lineless horizon with no individual markings [.]” The restraint and tight lyric also brings a slowness to Firestone’s poems, forcing attention on every word in sequence: “The room contains / Feeling, how a room / Breathes / The body fixed / The mind / Unsettles [.]”

And when it flattened the word silence leaving or left the silencing

Though flattened what is seen what movement imperceptible

Spirals, escapes, distills, what we say energy, matter (“LEAVING”)

The extended poem of GATES & FIELDS, skirting up against and through specifics into an allusive exploration on grief is reminiscent of Ottawa poet Sandra Ridley’s Silvija (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2016) [see my review of such here]. Recently shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, Ridley’s is another extended lyric exploring grief and loss through a sequence of poem-sections. Where Ridley moves deeper into more tangible details, Firestone’s GATES & FIELDS moves, instead, through the elegiac into a kind of mournful, hopeful song, or even dream-state. There are times that the lyric abstract of Firestone’s poems make me feel adrift, with little to hold on to, but the lyric beauty of the poems are unmistakable.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jennifer Firestone

Jennifer Firestone is the author of Flashes (Shearsman Books) Holiday (Shearsman Books), Waves (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs), from Flashes and snapshot (Sona Books) and Fanimaly (Dusie Kollektiv). She is the co-editor of Letters To Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics and Community (Saturnalia Books), and an Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College (The New School).  She lives with her family in Brooklyn.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
It didn’t. My first book, Holiday, began as something I wrote on part of a napkin during a trip.  It took several years to fully conceptualize and develop.  Then I had twins, and then I had a book. I was happy but it was just another event. Not to sound ungrateful, because I’m not, but I think there might be too much emphasis placed on the “first book.”   Holiday was a very specific project in which I was deconstructing tourism, “master” artists/masterpieces, and ideas about the expectations and pressures of a vacation.  My recent projects are more expansive; they’re less about specificity and more about layering and nuance.  But the tracking of perception and the projections of perception is what’s kept constant. I’m also fascinated by the use of the camera as a way to zoom in and out of perceptions and track how things are staged or constructed. I think the camera has been a tool throughout my work.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
As trite as this may sound depression and sensitivity during my youth brought me to poetry. I wrote fiction also but the open and exploratory quality of poetry lured me in.  Poetry helped me filter and mediate what was occurring in the world around me and my relationship to it all.

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 work both slowly and quickly.  To begin with I usually have a surplus of fragments hovering and then I work fast in a manic kind of way.  I begin to fill in with notes and research—this takes time.   I revise heavily as at some point I try to let go of aspects of my ego and accept what the poem is or hopes to be.  I also periodically archive project ideas and slowly, slowly collect notes on those over several years until I start playing with them and seeing the project that might be evolving.

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 have a more difficult time coming to the discrete poem but I’m doing it more lately as it is a challenge for me.  I think serially and therefore write that way. I like the work to be able to stretch out its legs.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Yes public readings are crucial. I’m nervous reading my work but I do it often and am appreciative of the community event of a reading.  I also “hear” the work in a different way when I’m reading in front of an audience. Usually the parts that are weak or disingenuous ring loud.

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 don’t know how to write without theoretical concerns. I’m more drawn to the questioning aspects of writing than the answering.  My concerns are always why a poem versus any other type of writing.  I am curious to push at what makes me identify as a poet.  I also am always working against the desire to play with language, sound and the page versus the “meaning” or intent (not that these variables are mutually exclusive), but I look at the posturing, the gesturing in a poem and wonder about it…where it comes from, how it arises, is it qualified, does it have to be.  And of course the big question of why even bother, why poetry?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be? 
Whoa. These large questions scare me. I don’t like the word “role.” It makes me feel I have a job of some sort and I’d rather work less than I do. On a very basic level I think we all have poetry (whether we know this or not) and poetry and poets can encourage people to think discursively, to stay in the place of investigation and questioning.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Definitely essential. I wish our culture had the means (maybe it’s interest too) in really editing each other’s work. I would welcome the insight and I think a lot of books could use some additional editing. And of course the relationship can be difficult between a writer and editor. Any collaboration is, right? You might think you’re a good communicator BUT…   I will say though I am also quite interested in alternative publishing routes such as collectives and such.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Myung Mi Kim would speak about how a poem can absorb “invisible research” so that the ideas one might look into don’t always have t be so explicitly tacked on to a poem.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I like the exploratory form of an essay.  I just need the prose to be flexible and meandering in its attempt at a trajectory. All my work is critically reflexive and so it excites me to hold on to my aesthetic and grapple with the demands of a particular form.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Oh gosh. I respect those who have a strict routine. My routine is really no routine. I have three small kids and so I write in jumps and fits. I’ve learned to be informed by this as a poetics of some sort—having to create within disjointedness. I presented a paper on this called “The Synergy of Poetics and Motherhood” for the Belladonna: Advancing Feminist Poetics And Activism Conference.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I read books, particularly poetry books, just flipping through them to sense the texture, visual layout etc. The look of a book can excite me or just reading words without context helps.  I also generally want to write when I see art if the experience itself is not too sterilely institutional. Also geography helps.  Going to a different place, different air, colors, hits the refresh button on my brain.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Cigar smoke.

14 - 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?  
Art makes me want to write. I just visited a Carrie Mae Weems exhibit at the Guggenheim and told my students to carry their notebooks and take “poetry notes.”  I get into a very engaged but calm place around art. But really all materials/disciplines are up for grabs. I think a poet should mediate as many forms as possible.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Emily Dickinson, Kamau Brathwaite, Lyn Hejinian, Lorine Niedecker, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Harryette Mullen, Gertrude Stein, Susan Howe, Charles Olson, Barbara Guest, John Ashbery, Edmond Jabès, Paul Celan and many others.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done? 
Maybe perform.  Actually I am performing now in a new performance art group that I co-founded called Wonder Machine, and I think in an ideal world I’d even go more in that direction. I took drama when I was very young as it was sort of the place for drifters, weirdos, etc. I’d like to sing and just push the edge of what I can do performatively but that still has artistic value to me.

17 - 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?
Well I guess I’d be a shrink. I mean I think I’d be a good one but I’d probably get too wrapped up in people’s stuff. I do it now as is.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I realized writing was a site of investigation, querying and plotting that I didn’t find the space for in other areas. It felt generous and in a way unyielding which perpetually keeps me challenged.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Joseph Harrington’s Things Come on. I haven’t seen a film that’s wowed me in a long time. What jumps in my head is Breaking the Waves. Oh but the documentary Blackfish is really strong and hard to watch.

20 - What are you currently working on? 
I’m working on the collaboration that I mentioned previously which involves text that I wrote, photographs from urban geographer Laura Y. Liu, sound by composer and musician Daniel Goode and performance by noted feminist and writer Ann Snitow.  I’m also writing a long poem entitled Story, which is the telling of a particularly harrowing event that happened at a beach while simultaneously the telling and resisting telling of how that story is constructed. Last, I’m working on a manuscript of poems that investigates the icon Mother Goose and its publishing history.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

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)