12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kit Robinson

Kit Robinson is a Bay Area poet, writer, and musician. He was born in Evanston, Illinois in 1949, and earned a BA at Yale University. He is the author of two dozen collections of poetry, including Tunes & Tens (Roof, 2025), Quarantina (Lavender Ink, 2022), Thought Balloon (Roof, 2019), Leaves of Class (Chax, 2017), Marine Layer (BlazeVOX, 2015) and The Messianic Trees: Selected Poems, 1976-2003 (Adventures in Poetry, 2009). His published collaborations include Individuals with Lyn Hejinian, Cloud Eight with Alan Bernheimer, and A Mammal of Style with Ted Greenwald. Recent poems appear in Brooklyn Rail, Three Fold, Traffic Report, R&R, and The Best American Poetry Pick of the Week.

A collaborator on The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco 1975–1980 (Mode A, 2010), Robinson has taught with California Poets in the Schools, performed with San Francisco Poets Theater and, with poet Lyn Hejinian, produced In the American Tree: New Writing by Poets, a weekly Bay Area radio show of interviews and readings. Kit has received fellowships from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council, as well as an award from the Fund for Poetry. His papers are collected at The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. His essays on poetics, art, travel and music may be found at his website: www.kitrobinson.net. He lives in Berkeley and plays Cuban tres guitar in the charanga band Calle Ocho.

Robinson’s most recent publications are two reminiscences of Lyn Hejinian, one in the Los Angeles Review of Books and another in The Poetry Project Newsletter, as well as an appreciation of Neeli Cherkovski in The Brooklyn Rail. He also recently published reviews of books by Lyn Hejinian, Tyrone Williams, Yuko Otomo, Joel Chace, Maureen Owen, and Barbara Henning.

In a statement on poetics, Kit has said, “Poetry is the heart of language. It’s what’s left after everything else has been taken away. All the instrumental uses of language are completely necessary. We use language to invite people over, order food, build cities, etc. Take all of it away and you are left with poetry. The fundamental truth of language is that it is subject to change. Words mean in new ways every century. Words mean in new ways every year. In poetry, words mean in new ways every moment. Poetry is language on a holiday. Free to go where it will. But it is not jobless. The job of poetry is to continue, despite everything that is pitted against it.”

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, Chinatown of Cheyenne, was hand-set and printed on fine paper by Michael Waltuch of Whale Cloth Press in Iowa City in 1974. It changed my life by offering irrefutable proof that I was a real poet and starting a steady stream of books from then on. My newest book is Tunes & Tens from Roof Books. In it I tried out two new forms: a series of poems written to music and a long poem comprising 73 decimas. It feels good to be exploring new waters.

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

I came to poetry as a teenaged fan of Bob Dylan and a reader of Ferlinghetti, Ginsburg, and Kerouac, which led to the New American Poetry anthology and the New York poets Bill Berkson, Peter Schjeldahl, and Ted Berrigan, who taught weekly workshops at Yale and introduced us students to the Poetry Project scene in the East Village.

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?

After a book comes out, it usually takes me a while to get my arms around a new project. Once I settle on a mode of production, the work usually proceeds quickly. In the 2010s, I hit on a method of writing 60 lines or an hour, whichever came first. I like to write spontaneously and edit only a little.

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?

It used to be the former but lately I tend toward the latter.

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

Readings are a good way to test out the work, trial balloons kind of. I do get off on performing. One never knows while writing how the work will appear to others, and the reading allows for immediate feedback. A good reading will generate a lot of energy in the room. Afterwards people usually want to hang out and talk.

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?

All kinds of theoretical questions, sure. Not that I have all the answers. Ted Berrigan used to say, “To write great poems you have to have great theories. And I do have great theories. I just can’t remember what they are right now.”

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I think the role of the writer should be to look around and see what’s happening and do whatever it takes to write it down. In that sense we are bearing witness. On the other hand, poetry has a phatic function, which is to say, “Howdy! Nice to see you!”

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

That’s a tricky question. Much of the time I’ve found editors and publishers are content to publish my poetry as is, or with occasional suggestions here and there. Sometimes though, an editor will challenge me to rework a piece or be more specific or put more umph in or something. I find I’m quite resistant at first, but I try to comply and afterwards usually recognize that the work is improved by introducing the constraint of another perspective.

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

Have fun!

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

I haven’t done much translation lately. In the 90s, in preparation for a trip to the Soviet Union, I translated the 600-line Ode on Visiting the Belosaraisk Spit on the Sea of Azov by Ilya Kutik. Not having any Russian, I relied on a rough translation by the author plus a series of working sessions with Lyn Hejinian, who was studying Russian at that time. More recently I translated some fragments from the Latin of De Rerum Natura by Lucretius as part of a study group led by Lyn. The appeal of translation is the challenge of working with another language combined with the opportunity to do things in English one would never otherwise think to do. More broadly, translation opens a transnational conversation that is more important than ever in today’s increasingly nationalist environment. As writers and poets we sense intuitively that we are citizens of the world. The imagination is not restricted by state-controlled boundaries.

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 used to write mostly in the morning after breakfast and coffee. Lately it’s been more occasional, including the middle of the night. I keep a notebook by my bed for recording dreams and sometimes lines of poetry.

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

Sometimes I just sit and wait. This was the way when I was working by the one-hour rule. Lately I might just walk away and come back later for a fresh impetus.

13 - What was your last Hallowe'en costume?

For many years I have attended my daughter’s Halloween party in the same costume, that of King Tut. I wear a coiled snake headdress and wear all black with a fake gold chain.

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?

All of the above. My poem sequence “Tunes” was written while listening to favorite music tracks by artists like Henry Threadgill, Thelonius Monk, Carla Bley, and various African and Cuban musicians. My long poem “Tens” includes many descriptions from nature as well as two ekphrastic stanzas describing paintings by Edouard Manet. For some years I’ve noticed that quotations crop up in my poetry, lines from poems and songs that have lodged in my head, including my some of my own. With “Tens” I decided to add citations in endnotes. Writers cited include Woody Guthrie, Robert Aitkin, Zora Neal Hurston, David Graeber, Douglas Woolf, J.H. Prynne, Sojun Mel Weitsman, Hozan Alan Senauke, Alfred Bester, Erik Larson, Frances Richard, John Keats, John Donne, Dave Van Ronk, Farid al-din Attar, John Cage, Edgar Allen Poe, Jules Verne, Robert Grenier, Arkaadi Dragomoshchenko, Karl Marx, Bob Dylan, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Philip Whalen.

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

OMG, there are so many. Right now I am rereading the Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. Other authors I return to are Joseph Conrad, Clarice Lispector, Mario Vargas Llosa, Donald Westlake, Lorenzo Thomas, Lyn Hejinian, Ted Greenwald, Tom Raworth, Clark Coolidge, Anne Tardos, and on and on.

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

I’d like to visit Japan.

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?

In elementary school I had to fill out a questionnaire that included the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” My answer was “writer.” I think I was destined to be a writer. I made a living writing press releases and marketing materials for the tech industry, and then there’s the poetry. Had I not been a writer, I might have liked to be a musician. Playing guitar and singing was a form of social life I enjoyed when I was younger. To do so professionally would have required more discipline, study, and practice than I could muster at the time. Later in life I did pursue the study of Afro-Cuban music and took up the Cuban tres guitar. My life in music has opened up whole new networks of teachers, bandmates, friends and fellow enthusiasts.

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

I don’t know. My parents were teachers. I think it just came naturally. I like putting one word after another.

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

The Secret History of Costaguana by Juan Gabriel Vasquez. And Touchez Pas au Grisbi
Directed by Jacques Becker.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I seem to be writing poems, not sure yet what they will amount to.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

David Dowker (May 20, 1955 – March 24, 2025)

Sad to hear that Toronto poet David Dowker has died, after an extended illness. He was always quietly generous with other writers, slipping into small press fairs to say hello, making his way from table to table. I first heard his name in the 1990s, through his online journal Alterran Poetry Assemblage, probably first through the SUNY-Buffalo list-serve, offering publication to a whole range of experimental poets and poetry, showcasing work that pushed at the boundaries of what might be possible. He was a champion for experimental writing, although never one to push his own work too hard, although that was there, also. Some of his publications over the years include Machine Language (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2010), Virtualis: Topologies of the Unreal (with Christine Stewart; BookThug, 2013) [see my review of such here], Mantis (Tuczon AZ: Chax Press, 2018) and Dissonance Engine (Book*hug, 2022) [see my review of such here]. I was fortunate enough to produce a chapbook of his, Chronotope (2021), through above/ground press, he guest-edited issue #23 of GUEST [a journal of guest editors] in 2022, and I interviewed him in 2019 for Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal]. He had been an above/ground press subscriber and supporter for more years than I can count, and always attempted to come through small press fairs to say hello if I was ever in Toronto. I shall miss his quiet dedication and attentiveness. He was a kind man.

Robert Hogg (March 26, 1942 – November 13, 2022)

As the family announced on Friday, Ottawa-area poet of Vancouver’s infamous TISH era, retired organic farmer and Carleton University English Professor Bob Hogg died “surrounded by family at the Ottawa General Hospital” on Sunday, November 13 after a further and extended bout of cancer. Echoing Cameron Anstee’s own wonderfully-elegant reminiscence, Bob was generous, kind and quiet, although a particular kind of self-effacement that often managed to get him and his work overlooked, and not taken nearly as seriously as it should have been. His was an unassuming kind of intensity, standing aside or even within with his usual quiet yet chipper glum demeanor. Following school-stints in Vancouver and Buffalo, the Edmonton-born and BC-interior raised Bob landed in Ottawa (soon picking up farmland an hour south, near Mountain) in the late 1960s for a job at Carleton University, and helped quietly shape more than a couple of generations of poets and thinkers around town, whether from inside or beyond the boundaries of his classroom.

I met Bob during my final year of high school in May 1989, attending his week-long poetry mini course at Carleton University. I don’t remember a single other attendee during that week (did any of the rest of them go on to do any other writing/publishing?), but Bob had us writing poems, and introduced us to the work of multiple Canadian poets. He showed us a video of Earle Birney’s infamous poem “David,” and had us all purchase a copy of Gary Geddes’ anthology 15 Canadian Poets x2 (Oxford University Press, 1988), a book I carried around like a bible for at least a decade (my copy is now in fairly rough shape, but includes numerous signatures). In hindsight, I’m frustrated he didn’t speak to (or even acknowledge) his own writing career, allowing us that knowledge, at least, that he could speak to the experience of writing from the inside, instead of purely speaking of and around the work of others. I do recall, at least, Rob Manery (one of his students at the time) coming in and talking about small publishing (others of his students during that period included Louis Cabri and Christian Bök). Was Manery the one, during that particular class, who introduced me to The Carleton Literary Review? Bob was encouraging of our attempts, but mainly left us to our own devices; spending his time offering us different examples of how it was done, as well as time for us to go off to write on our own (numerous of us would choose to write down by the banks of the Rideau River). It would be a couple of years wandering through Ottawa literary circles before I even knew that Bob wrote poems himself, with the publication of what would be his final trade collection before he died, There Is No Falling (ECW Press, 1993). I think I might even have attended the launch of that, possibly even via The TREE Reading Series, just shy of my tenure as co-director. When Rob Manery and I founded the WHIPlash poetry festival in 1996 (I would organize two further annual fests solo before it fell apart), I began to solicit new work from him for a chapbook, a question that became, gently, repeated over the years. It would be sixteen years before he would offer me anything. He was caught up in farming, and the literary life, it would seem, had been temporarily set aside.

I remember a post-reading drink somewhere in the 1990s or even beyond at The Manx Pub with Bob, following a George Bowering reading somewhere: George waving his arms and yelling, “Twenty bucks says my buddy Bob can take anyone here.” Bob smiling, head down, both chuffed and embarrassed. My buddy Bob. He was around, but not that often, until he suddenly was. Having retired early from Carleton to focus on organic farming, his presence in Ottawa literary circles dwindled for a stretch, until he began to wind down the business, and then it almost appeared he had exploded and was immediately everywhere simultaneously, with a flurry of chapbooks and poems online, whether directly posted to facebook or in journals online and print. He returned full-force. Why hadn’t anyone published a selected poems of Robert Hogg? It is one of my frustrations of having shuttered Chaudiere Books when we did: Bob was long overdue a selected poems, something that would provide both a context and an acknowledgement of his published work-do-date (something I said moons back, for The Capilano Review), even before the realization that, according to his lengthy bio, he was actively working on at least a half-dozen full-length collections over the past few years. He was around, and I managed to produce three chapbooks by him in total (including a second, which was simply an updated “one more poem” of the first one); he read as part of The Peter F. Yacht Club Christmas/holiday gatherings, including in 2019, or last year’s online version (catch his video as part of such here). He even has further poems forthcoming in an upcoming issue of Touch the Donkey.

Not that long ago, I attempted to write a bit of an overview of his recent work via a review of his Apt. 9 Press chapbook, seeing the shifts in his writing since his “re-emergence,” watching as he deliberately worked and re-worked poems finished and half-finished from his own archive. Part of what made these experiments interesting was through the way in which his poems moved through prior stories and structures, but wasn’t a poetry stuck in the past: it was a poetics that strived to move ever forward. His work was attempting to push ahead as best as possible, but with a foundation he’d long-established as a young writer, influenced by the likes of Robert Duncan and Edward Dorn, almost in a way that set aside other explorations via structures influenced by numerous of his contemporaries. The work since There Is No Falling attempted a structure set simultaneously in an immediate present and that distant past, working to tether the two points across such thin, unbreakable lines of staggered lyric.

The last time I saw Bob in person was at a book launch this past summer for Michael Blouin, held at a brew-pub I hadn’t been aware of, within walking distance of our wee house. He’d had another surgery, and his throat sounded rough, but he was in good spirits. As I went to leave, the bartender told me he’d paid for my drink. When I sent Bob an email to thank him, we realized that the bartender had simply conflated “Bob” and “rob” in their tabs. I didn’t mean to buy you a drink! he wrote. Unbeknownst to Bob, I’d been working on the Report from the Hogg Society festschrift for a few months, attempting to cohere a series of loose threads. He sent along an email on Wednesday, November 9^th that he was heading home for the sake of palliative care the following day, asking me to let everyone know that he couldn’t make it out on Saturday to the ottawa small press book fair. It would be the following day when Theresa Smalec sent out a group email to inform us that we should be sending Bob emails immediately, offering our support and good wishes. If you’ve anything to say to him, now’s the time. By Friday, I had a nearly-complete draft of the festschrift, which I sent along as a pdf (normally the subjects are completely unaware of the publications until finished copies land on their doorsteps), to which he responded, by Saturday afternoon: “Oh, how glorious to see this at such a time.  Thanks and of course for so much support over the years!  Looking forward to it!” I mailed them off by Wednesday as an overnight, but he’d already passed.

I shall miss his quiet and even uncertain certainty, his measure of anxious and uncomfortable calm, always there until he isn’t, and now no longer, perhaps having already taken everything in.

To further your reading of Bob’s work, I’d recommend the lengthy interview we did for Touch the Donkey, the “Six Questions” interview we did, or the even lengthier interview Ken Norris conducted with him for periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics. He had a lot going on, and I’m gratified, at least, that he supposedly has three full-length volumes forthcoming: one from Chax Press, and two further from Ekstasis Editions. I just hope someone takes up the work of attempting to see where some of those other poems might land.

Jennifer Bartlett, The Hindrances of a Householder

Everything can be illuminated by water

or most things.

The two women in the black of mourning

knelt by the river in exact tandem, ad

they spoke softly.

The film, like life itself, had minimal

plot and extraordinary beauty.

the film, like life itself, was

slow and maniacal. And when

we walked the village afterwards

in search of just the right martini

I thought of the same steps I had

taken years earlier in preparation

for mourning, and I was not unhappy.

I found myself charmed by the short lyrics of Jennifer Bartlett’s latest poetry title, The Hindrances of a Householder (Victoria TX: Chax Press, 2018), a small, book-length poem-memoir around love, friends, exes and reading, all of which circle around the crux of the poem: a first-person lyric on the physical body. She writes on what is possible, what is necessary, and how connections are made, lost and found. The author of three prior poetry titles—Derivative of the Moving Image (UNM Press, 2007), (a) lullaby without any music (Chax Press, 2012) and Autobiography/Anti-Autobiography (theenk Books, 2014)—and co-editor of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (Cinco Puntos Press, 2011), as well as an in-progress biography of the late American poet Larry Eigner, her small volume The Hindrances of a Householder is a book-length first person meditation composed as short sketches, set alongside actual small sketches to accompany. Most of her lyric is relatively straightforward, with curious and unexpected lyric turns. This small book is utterly charming, smart and unselfconsciously subtle and delightful.

Jennifer of the boyfriends who hate her.

Jennifer of the hospice for dying animals.

Jennifer of the reading glasses.

Jennifer of the poems.

Jennifer of the love for the married man.

Jennifer of compassion and empathy.

Jennifer of argumentativeness.

Jennifer of the loaded pistol.

Jennifer of the smoking gun.

Jennifer of the hiding.

Jennifer of loss.

Jennifer of letting go.

Jennifer of the Emma and Dion and

James and Tori and Carol.

Jennifer of the Jim and Andrea and

Jeffrey and Nancy and Joel.

Jennifer of the books.