Touch the Donkey supplement: new interviews with Brown, Kowalski, Schultz, Clark + Byrne,

Anticipating the release next week of the thirty-seventh 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-sixth issue: Pam Brown, Shane Kowalski, Kathy Lou Schultz, Hilary Clark and Ted Byrne

Interviews with contributors to the first thirty-five issues (more than two hundred and thirty interviews to date) remain online, including: 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 thirty-seventh issue features new writing by: Micah Ballard, Robert Hogg, Ben Meyerson, Leigh Chadwick, Junie Désil, Devon Rae, Benjamin Niespodziany and Barbara Tomash.

And of course, copies of the first thirty-five issues are still very much available. Why not subscribe? Included, as well, as part of the above/ground press annual subscription! (did you know that above/ground press turns thirty years old this year?) We even have our own Facebook group. It’s remarkably easy.

photo credit: Memphis Donkey by Kathy Lou Schultz,

Pam Brown, Stasis Shuffle

 

my body will know
what to do
     with the vaccine
in two weeks’ time

whatever happens
don’t read me
           any rumi poems
   at my sick bed

  don’t schmumi me (“(best before)”)

The latest from Sydney, Australian poet and editor Pam Brown is the pandemic response poems of Stasis Shuffle (St. Lucia, Queensland: Hunter Publishers, 2021), her second book to appear last year, after Endings & Spacings (Sydney Australia: Never-Never Books, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Stasis Shuffle is a book directly responding to the restlessness of uncertainty, health measures and remaining in place. In this way, Stasis Shuffle adds to a growing list of pandemic-response poetry projects, a list that already includes Lillian Nećakov’s il virus (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2021) [see my review of such here] and Lisa Samuels’ Breach (Norwich England: Boiler House Press, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Brown’s poems appear to be composed in the quick-sketch form of the poetic journal, attempting to capture, through the long form of the book-length poem, a particular period of time from her home in Sydney; composed in an accretion of short lines, phrases and quick turns, in a kind of perpetual ongoingness, akin to a lengthier structure of what might be called “Creeleyesque,” after the late American poet Robert Creeley. “the / it’s-interesting / bla-bla,” she writes, near the beginning of the collection, “question is – // is your slowly accreting poem / morphing into a larger cloud yet – // a major poem / ghosting in to sydney / past the heads, / making its way to ashfield // darker & darker / birds swirling around in it – / leaves / rubbish & debris / full of menace & meaning?”

She writes of memory and nostalgia, situating herself and her thinking through an assemblage of playful breaths and breaks, collage and accumulation, phrases and visuals. While the poems here offer an ongoingness, they also provide a sense of a gathering of fragments collected over an extended period, something reminiscent of American poet and translator Joshua Beckman’s Animal Days (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Her poems accumulate, offering a portrait of a space, of a time; and a texture across a singular lyric.

I borrow history 

       robert johnson’s history

my borrowed allegory

playing a vinyl record
     from 1981 –
                    alice gerrard 

1981          her plaintive song
        rips through me

longing
nostalgia
hankering 

I’ve never even been to michigan

I’ve been
               to 1981

Pam Brown, Endings & Spacings

it crosses my mind
that my poetry days
              are probably done 

am i done with poems
or
are poems done with me? 

more than half a century
       making connections
through strings of words
arranged
not composed
                        mostly vertical
&
       often meandering sideways (“( crossing my mind )”)

The latest from Australian poet and editor Pam Brown is the poetry title Endings & Spacings (Sydney Australia: Never-Never Books, 2021), a small collection composed in three extended sequences: “( crossing my mind ),” “( lingering )” and “( outer spacings ).” The three sequences of stitched lyrics in Endings & Spacings are composed akin to the late American poet Robert Creeley’s longer sequences: stretched-out accumulations of lyric fragments, hesitations and short phrases, one set upon another, furthering a loose thread as far as it might lead. She writes of memory, recollection and time, sketching her meanderings and meditations that seek out the proper questions. She writes of history, and what it teaches, furthering step upon step, one thought leading directly into another. As she writes as part of the third sequence: “‘the past’ / is an invention / that, / once archived, / destroys / the commons // (execrable!) [.]”

Assembled and accrued during the pandemic-stretch, Brown’s triptych explores the lyric, but a particular kind of exhaustion, writing of wildfires and funerals, and long stretches of domestic patter, as in the second sequence, “after months of dark & silent evenings […] what to do when we can’t do anything [.]” Brown’s lyrics keep to small, composed facing outward but low to the ground. These are meditations on anxiety, centred on and around such an uncertain stretch of time; not knowing when the tides might shift, and the uncertainties that pile upon each other through the process, as she writes as part of the opening sequence:

i don’t feel
      authorized to say
      i’m the ‘author’ of my poems 

maybe i’m the image
   my poems make of me     (not that)
               or a sign      (not that either) 

what does a poet
                      do?

As the author suggests via email, given neither book nor press has a webpage, anyone interested in purchasing a copy can contact the publisher directly at: never_never_books@yahoo.com

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions: with Pam Brown;

Since 1971 Australian poet Pam Brown has published many books and chapbooks including Text thing (Little Esther Books, 2002), Dear Deliria and True Thoughts - both from Salt Publishing in 2003 and 2008 respectively. She has also written for film and theatre. She collaborated with Seattle-based Egyptian poet Maged Zaher on a collection of poems called farout library software published by Tinfish Press in 2007. Her next book Authentic Local is due from Papertiger Media in 2010. An e-book of poems, the meh of z z z z , was published by Ahadada Books in 2010 and is freely available here - http://www.ahadadabooks.com/content/view/199/43/

Pam Brown has earned a living variously and, until recently, spent many years thoroughly absorbed in the processes of classification and archiving at a sciences library at the University of Sydney.

For five years, from 1997 until 2002, she was the poetry editor of the Australian literary quarterly Overland and currently co-edits Jacket magazine. She is also associated with HOW2 and Fulcrum magazines. Born in Seymour Victoria, in her imagination Pam Brown lives in Hellbourg, La Réunion, in real life she is currently doing time in Blackheath, in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney.

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 book was printed at night, clandestinely, on paper and card offcuts at an offset printery where a friend worked during the day. It was an after-hours ‘underground’ publication. It was 1971, in Melbourne. The book, ‘Sureblock’, was anti-copyright - ‘if anyone wants these poems use them’, said the flyleaf. And they were used - two films were made from poems about a couple of female outlaws and poems turned up in womens’ liberation newspapers and other magazines.

It changed my life in that publication meant that I met more artists, filmmakers, and other countercultural people than I already knew. I was also invited to read poems in public for the first time. So I suppose that was formative.

The poetry changes as the poet does. Some might call it ‘development’ or maybe you just become more practiced as the years roll on.

On reflection, and without trying to be, I’ve been a different person each decade of my life. I think that’s natural. So the poetry evolves alongside everything else.

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

I knew about poetry from my paternal great-uncle with whom I lived as a small child. He read Ralph Waldo Emerson. And from my maternal grandfather who owned an advertising agency and liked modernism. I was attracted to poetry at high school and then I began to read beyond the curriculum. I also liked song lyrics and wrote songs.

Most fiction seemed to me to require a huge self-interest on the writer’s part. It seemed mostly autobiographical. I couldn’t imagine sustaining that degree of self-involvement for the length of a novel. I did love Dylan’s Tarantula and great, huge books like Nicolai Ostrovsky's How the Steel Was Tempered - both autobiographical - and lots of other novels, especially the existentialists, but I knew I was a poet, not a novelist.

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?

It’s a process of accretion and, yes, it starts with notes. Not copious notes, but notes nonetheless. I write much more slowly these days than I did at first, and even more slowly than I did a couple of decades ago.

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose 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?

As I said, it begins in notes - on a scrap of paper, in a margin of a book or magazine I’m reading, on a computer file, in a notebook - and then continues. So far, I have not thought that I am writing a ‘book’ as I compile poems. I generally assemble a collection when I have a group of poems that seem ready for publication (every few years or so). I would like to do something more conceptual though - a long poem that is a ‘book’. I might yet do that.

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

Readings don’t inform my writing process. But I do see them as part of the life of a poet. I enjoy reading even though sometimes I have wondered what I’m doing there. You know, when the poem bounces off the back wall and heads right back to you. I don’t read frequently because there aren’t many public poetry readings in Sydney.

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?

Yes I do. But my concerns are usually in flux (as is the world at large). The questions I pursue are probably about looking for ways to live, how to live ‘now’, how to continue. I’m not sure what the ‘current’ questions in poetry are. Though I do read poetics (and some philosophy).

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?

Hmmm. There’s a definite disconnection in Australia between writers as public figures (and the state-funded institutions that support that notion) and ‘writers’. As a poet I have my own scene or group of other poets, like-minded or not, but interested in the work, in ideas, in politics, in publication, in talking to each other and so on. I am entirely uncertain of how the poetry scene perceives its societal tasks.

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

The editors who have published my poetry have all been very good to me. That’s been fine.

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

Relax.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

I’ve only done that once, back in the early 1980s. The resulting collection, Keep It Quiet, has been overlooked. I enjoyed writing prose, for about a year - my prose style was not very conventional. Lots of parataxis in there.

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?

I don’t have a writing routine, although I do seem to spend a lot of time at the desk. I write when poetry occurs to me, when I have something to think about, otherwise I remain silent.

If I’m writing poetry it seems to slot in sometime towards the afternoon or evening.

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

No particular poet, but I might spend time wandering through Walter Benjamin’s ‘Arcades’ or some essays on poetry or some philosophy.

13 - What do you really want?

I suppose I’d like to have my poetry work for readers. To have my intentions received and enjoyed even if that might involve some degree of puzzlement.

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?

Yes, - especially art of all kinds, music, film, video, some science, philosophy, architecture.

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

There are too many to list.

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

In poetry, as I hinted earlier, I think I’d like to write a long conceptual poem.

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?

Poetry is a preoccupation, a compulsion. I’ve never earned money from it. My employment has been various yet, often steady. I suppose would have liked to have a trade - maybe as an electrician or perhaps have been involved in some kind of science.

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

It was something to pass the time when I was ill with the mumps aged 7 or 8. I’m certain it began then.

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

Claudia Rankine : Don’t Let Me Be Lonely - An American Lyric.

Samson & Delilah by the Australian indigenous filmmaker Warwick Thornton.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A poem called ‘Spirulina’. I have just proofed my forthcoming book of poems Authentic Local (http://www.papertigermedia.com/). I am editing for Jacket magazine. (http://jacketmagazine.com/00/home.shtml). Writing short reviews of poetry books for Overland Literary Journal. (http://web.overland.org.au/) Trying to keep my blog going. (http://thedeletions.blogspot.com/) and collecting material for the electronic component of a forthcoming Trans-Tasman poetry symposium (http://thedeletions.blogspot.com/2010/02/trans-tasman-poetry.html) hosted by the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;