Touch the Donkey : interviews with Betancourt, Reid, Cadsby, Kolewe, Amadon, Kemp-Gee, Mellis + eckhoff/Dyck!

Anticipating the release in a few days of the thirty-ninth 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-eighth issue: Michael Betancourt, Monty Reid, Heather Cadsby, R Kolewe, Samuel Amadon, Meghan Kemp-Gee and Miranda Mellis. And even this hold-over interview from the prior issue with kevin mcpherson eckhoff and Kimberley Dyck!

Interviews with contributors to the first thirty-seven issues (nearly two hundred and fifty interviews to date) remain online, including: 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 thirty-ninth issue features new writing by: Robyn Schelenz, Andy Weaver, Dessa Bayrock, Anselm Berrigan, Noah Berlatsky, Rasiqra Revulva and Alana Solin.

And of course, copies of the first thirty-seven 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.

Samuel Amadon, Often, Common, Some, and Free: Poems

 

ADVANCED FANTASIES OF THE CROSS-BRONX
EXPRESSWAY

Here the Crotona Pool should be, here still
It is. We don’t erase ourselves. We don’t
Ply our bodies with asphalt and barriers.
Our walls are pinned with some of what
Exists, but one cannot notice every tulip.
All the flora and fauna given a name
Hasn’t been given one by us. The people
List as traffic. Thus traffic grows. It roars
When locked in place, then when it moves.
It piles around us, above us, like papers
We haven’t attended to. We have too many
Solutions. Nights our offices pool with
Us. We overflow ourselves, and cannot
See from where we are about to go.

The fourth full-length title from South Carolina poet and editor Samuel Amadon is Often, Common, Some, and Free: Poems (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2021), following his debut, Like a Sea (University of Iowa Press, 2010), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, and subsequent collections The Hartford Book (Cleveland State University Press, 2012), winner of the Believer Poetry Book Award, and Listener (Solid Objects, 2020) [see my review of such here]. Structured in five numbered sections—three sections of shorter lyrics surrounding a pair of longer sequence-sections—Amadon composes carved moments of narrative thinking, offering poems that perspectives and clarity on two fronts: a selection of straightforward narratives around pools, and a far deeper conversation on being and contemplation. “You can do the work just by starting it.” he writes, to open “POEM THAT WANTS TO BE CALLED THE WEST SIDE / HIGHWAY,” “You can / do whatever you want. A bill / is drafted on a train to Albany, or in a black / limousine. Like how one day I walked / the entire length of Manhattan, except I didn’t.” There is something in the way he writes of pools and twists of geography, surface tension and light to offer a depth simultaneously unfathomable, and slightly out of reach. “Here I am with all the words / I didn’t used to know.” he writes, to open “AT MCCARREN POOL.”

The poems that make up Amadon’s Often, Common, Some, and Free offer a familiar ease, one presented nearly in a conversational manner, offering a unique complexity through straightforward means. “The clarity of the granite,” he writes, to open the poem “AT THE BREAKWATER,” “each piece fit, as if it is / Blue, silver, red as somehow the same color / That holds it together. Last night, I stood in the cold / Across the street from a small white house, held / My fingers up against waves of conversation, warm / Light from table lamps, watched people who didn’t / Want to go in there, but had forgotten.”

Samuel Amadon, LISTENER

 

FABULOUS CORRIDORS

Will I write to myself? I’m asleep in the library, a crack
Of tiny columns opens in my face, lets me read it. I circle

Around like a boy on his bicycle after dinner. If I don’t
Have room for what I pass, I keep looking anyway. My mind

Is at peace, as it settles in, like a colored wedge drops into a pie,
If the answer’s right. bluebirds are like me, moving around

With little dodging feet. I evaluate myself. I feel parched
On a winter’s day. I ramble as I read. When the snow perishes

From the yard, I say this must be very hard. The wind
Falls upon me with sounds from the trees. Here I am.

A little faster. How I love my old book. I set it on my knee.
Pages fall through my fingers, like phantoms. Maybe

I dissolve. Maybe I drone outward into night
Blues. On the palmy beach, I take all my words. What starts

As bubble, ends as foam. My name escapes me. I am
In Florida. I put my notes down. I take

My glasses off. I fill my hull. I race an island, as the current
Drives me. I say what I think. There will never be

An end. I hold my book. I check my page. Here I am.
Into alabaster, out of phosphor. I’m no place new.

South Carolina poet and editor Samuel Amadon’s third full-length poetry title is Listener (New York NY: Solid Objects, 2020), following The Hartford Book (Cleveland State University Press, 2012), winner of the Believer Poetry Book Award, and Like a Sea (University of Iowa Press, 2010), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. A further title, by the way, his Often, Common, Some, And Free, is forthcoming with Omnidawn Publishing.

Composed as a suite of lyric poems, there is something quite fascinating in the ways in which the poems in Listener, the first work of his I’ve read, extend their thinking across the length of a page or two or three; stretch out the narrative, pacing and thought, quite literally an accumulation of one idea or sentence set after the last. His poems further in such a way comparable to the game of dominoes: each line reacting against the others, pushing further, and moving into spaces both entirely possible and unexpected. And his poem endings seem far less full stops that seek to conclude than simply points at which they end. As the ending of his poem “HOT TALK” reads: “My tongue was large. / I couldn’t help but // Hold it in my mouth. / If I said I was // Leaving, it was / The way I wouldn’t. // If I mistook my hand / For yours, I held it // There after / It wasn’t the same.”

I like the pacing of these poems, the way they move and meander, ebb and flow, catching curiosities, observations and wisdoms along the way, such as in the extended lyric “TOMORROWMAN,” a poem that includes: “Reader, / As you turn over your cheddar and bean burrito, // I like you. // I like that you can tell the difference between when // The microwave door is // Open, / And closed, when a bite // Enters your mouth / Still frozen, // And when it’s just a touch cold. // You chew it up either way. / I do that too.” These are poems that work to pay attention, and process the multiple threads of input we’re constantly bombarded with, from climate change, politics and culture to his day-to-day of teaching, family and other interactions. How does one properly and attentively listen, let alone process and discern, when there is far to much to hear? As he discusses the poems in Listener, and the shifts of his writing between book-projects, in a recent interview conducted by Isabella Casey over at Bennington Review:

The poems come out of who I am now—an assistant professor in a small southern city, living with my books and my family who I love, and dealing with the world—and they often feel weirdly suburban and pastoral. They also aim to bring out things that were in my work before, but were less recognizable. I mean probably just to me. I don't expect anyone else is looking at these things so closely, but, for instance, when I look back at Like a Sea now, I see poems written during the Bush administration. The poems in Listener I think capture a similar feeling of what it means to live now with the weight of climate change in the air—or more visibly in the air at least. Obviously, there's something else in the air now.