12 or 20 (second series) questions with Patrick James Dunagan

Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco and works as E-resources Assistant in Gleeson Library at the University of San Francisco. He recently edited Roots & Routes: Poetics at New College (w/ Lazzara & Whittington) and David Meltzer’s Rock Tao. His new book City Bird and other poems is now out from City Lights.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Whether it was Josh Filan publishing my chap Young American Poets (2000) or Simone Fattal publishing my full length GUSTONBOOK (2011) having somebody you don’t personally know find your work valuable enough to publish it is a humbling experience that also encourages you onward.

City Bird & other poems differs from my previous published books in so far it is not one entire long poem or poem-series, City Lights poetry editor Garrett Caples invited a manuscript of shorter poems grouped with the long poem ‘City Bird’. I gave him a much too long manuscript along with two other short manuscripts of poems from out notebooks I had typed up. He arranged what is City Bird and other poems.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I suspect it was simply shorter lines, fewer words was more appealing. Learning concision, however, was still required.

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’ve written out of pretty much any and every scenario. In the case of City Bird, it began as a tinkering with the idea of a novelette about a character named Hugh eating a sandwich. I wrote it out in ‘prose’ lines I then later went back over and put into the poetic ‘form’ they now appear in. This also involved some editing of words, etc.

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?
As I mentioned, all my previous published books are one long poem or poem-series and in these cases, as with the poem ‘City Bird’, I did indeed understand it was a whole piece being composed. Generally I would fill a notebook. Then type it up.  

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I have recently been enjoying doing readings and feel as if they’re getting pretty good. Last nite I read without any planning from a collaborative book Three Heads Gone written and published years ago that I hadn’t looked at in years. I just skipped about within the poems at near random yet it felt natural and sounded solid, I believe. I have also often been making little self-made chaps for each solo reading. In other words, reading different poems, usually fairly new ones, every time and arranging them in order with a cover and title, etc.

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 listen to the poem. It more or less writes itself. Generally, and hopefully, it is what I’d like to read. I believe writing and reading are more or less the same thing.

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?
‘The Writer’ is a different thing from ‘The Poet’. I think it is always important to be as aware of as much as possible at all times and always to be learning new things. The writer imposes order. The poet listens in.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Poetry can’t really be edited as such. With book reviews, of which I have written and published hundreds, I have found editors useful at times but probably not essential and I have definitely found them to be at times trying and quite possibly difficult. Editors of poetry magazines/journals are difficult when they reject work, which is the case for me with 99% of my poetry submissions.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
If asked, say yes.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I started writing book reviews many years ago because I found myself always writing in response to reading (still do) but I was having a horrible time publishing individual poems that I sent out (still do) and I wanted to get ‘out there’ and have some skin in ‘the ballgame’. I have at times pretty much merged the two. ‘Twenty-five for Lew Welch’ in City Bird, for instance, originally appeared online as a ‘review’ of the City Lights reissuing of Ring of Bone. I think that’s fun.

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 have no writing routine aside from poems usually going from being handwritten in a notebook to typed on the typewriter to then typed up again and saved as an electronic file. The day starts with bathroom business, radio news, some coffee and a walk through golden gate park, if it's a workaday.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I don’t sweat not writing. I have a nice stack of unpublished manuscripts.

13 - What was your last Hallowe'en costume?
Every day’s Halloween.

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?
Reading is Writing.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Friends have really pulled everything along for me and made it all possible.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Not much that I’m yet aware of aside from some trips with my wife Ava. Going to Iran for a bit, for instance.

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?
I’d have most likely been employed in some fashion in the San Francisco skateboarding community if my folks hadn't up and moved from Orange County, CA to New Ipswich, NH when I was fifteen.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I’d always been reading everything. Living on a dirt road in New Ipswich I started writing in high school classrooms.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I adore books like Genoa by Paul Metcalf and Hart Crane Voyaging by Hunce Voelcker. We just saw Deadpool and Wolverine in the theater, it was silly and highly amusing. I like films that go over 2 hours.

20 - What are you currently working on?
An expanded edition of The Duncan Era: One Reader’s Cosmology. Joanne Kyger suggested perhaps it could be a larger book. I’ve written further since it’s publication on Duncan, Jess, Spicer, and Blaser, which material I have now added, but also I now have some on Joanne herself, along with what I am hoping will be useful reflections on Thom Gunn and Duncan, having recently gone on a bit of a Gunn kick. Whether or not it finds a publisher, is another story.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Isabelle Garron, BODY WAS: Suites & their variations (2006-2009), trans. Eléna Rivera

 

I don’t have words
but your gestures
abound 

amid the ads
demands
doors

chasms of each sta
tion the voice—
consistent 

also in the announcement
made about a delay
for 

. train ahead

Described by Cole Swensen in her cover blurb as a “massive work of tantalizing minimalism” is Parisian poet, critic, editor and associate professor Isabelle Garron’s latest work in English translation, BODY WAS: Suites & their variations (2006-2009), translated by Eléna Rivera (Brooklyn NY: Litmus Press, 2021), following Garron’s collections Corps fut (Flammarion, 2011), Qu’il Faille (Flammarion, 2007) and Face event contre (2002), translated by Sarah Riggs as Face Before Against (Litmus Press, 2008). Produced as an expansive work, the nearly three hundred pages of BODY WAS is a book-length sequence of small moments, gestures and expressions stretched to incredible lengths; stretched not as a way of thinning, but as a way to articulate and pause, each moment fragmented into portions, and where lightning strikes in such slow-motion that every spark appears, if in the briefest sense, self-contained: brilliant, held and heard. “then a shadow / on bodies,” she writes, early on in the collection, “bore / ours in count / er // form naked // in the full / moo // n black [.]” This is an incredible collection of short bursts, a lyric of a single, extended thread or tether, segmented into line and word breaks, offering small points of thought, image and sound. The collection begins with an overheard death, and moves across domestic patter, conversations on the daily immediate, of arrival and being, and someone waiting to be born. “we arrive     .it is night    .you will be born this morning [.]” The fragmented sense of line and lyric, as well as the unexpected placements of punctuation, force the reading to simultaneously suggest a rush, but also a slowness, to catch every element as it stands. Segmented into suites and variations, BODY WAS exists not as an accumulation, but as a singular whole, writing segments that articulate the slippery movement of time itself, both immediate and immediately past-tense. There are elements of this collection that read as a set of improvisations, comparable to works by Robert Creeley, William Carlos Williams or Fred Wah, yet composed in a loose narrative structure that would even allow a reader to pick up at any point. As Rivera writes to open her short afterword, “Points in Time: Where the Body Was”:

It takes a certain amount of courage in this age of the internet, where a plethora of words abound, to let the stillness and blank page speak. What I admire in Isabelle Garron’s Body Was is its combination of lyricism and silence, the rhythm of the language and the way that she is able to let events, the overheard and experienced, move in and out of silence, into the body of the page. What remains of experience is stored in the body and what is written is already what was—the moment is gone. Time keeps moving. What was experienced is no longer the present. The experience is carried in the body. The body makes the text.

 

Aja Couchois Duncan, Vestigial

 

It begins millions of years ago with algal mats at bryophytes.
Late, when the water recedes, the earth is stitched with
gymnosperms, angiosperms, grass fills the open expanse. 

It begins the way all beginnings do. Everything is new, unknown,
cellular. The sun spills its full splendor across the landscape.

It begins with her opening, almost imperceptibly, toward the light. (“Accretion”)

I am very pleased to see Bay Area poet and librettist Aja Couchois Duncan’s second collection, Vestigial (Brooklyn NY: Litmus Press, 2021), following on the heels of her Restless Continent (Litmus Press, 2016) [see my review of such here]. Set in five sections—“Accretion,” “Multicellular,” “Divergence,” “Vestigial” and “Trilling”—the book-length lyric suite writes out evolution as a love story, writing a pair of bodies and their evolution, into being. “She is disoriented by the changes. Some days,” she writes, as part of the second section, “the language of it / escapes her and she finds herself flying too close to the window, / blindly smashing her wings against the glass.” Composed as self-contained untitled prose poems gathered into story-groupings, she writes a story that dips in and through both music and story, writing a suite that almost leans into a ballad, through the structure of the extended prose poem. “If only the body could be read as geology,” she writes, “as time and accretion. / But it is a temporary architecture.”

Hers is an ear very much attuned to the music of what she is attending, one that is reminiscent of the examinations through science and scientific language of Canadian poet Christopher Dewdney (I’m thinking specifically of his four-volume “A Natural History of Southwestern Ontario”), although writing out a more musical lyric, as though Dewdney were composed through the lens and lyric of Vancouver poet Daphne Marlatt, or even Toronto poet Margaret Christakos. “Darwin found such things a problem. The difficult to explain, / to describe. Suddenly flowers appeared in the fossil record. It’s / an abominable mystery, Darwin said. Only ater would it be possible / to trace the evolution of the angiosperm from gymnosperms to seed ferns, the extinct link, and narrate the passage from front to flower.” As Duncan writes to open the second section, “Multicellular”:

Before everything came into being, there was a great deal of waiting for. Waiting for the earth to form, waiting for life to appear.

She waits on her wadikwan, its fragile perch, for him to find her. It takes millennia. When he arrives, he is coated in her murky scent, his body dusted with the damp molecules.

Listen, he says. In the silence she hears the universe.

Four billion years ago, in a galaxy that was not yet named, earth was formed. Explosive and molten, the planet took another billion years to tilt and cool. Eventually it formed a solid crust, cupping water at its surface.

The first life was single cell and microscopic. When the cells recognized themselves in one another, they attached, and in their connection created multicellular species. But such cellular coupling complicates reproduction. Multicellular life requires a germ cell, an egg or sperm, to combine its genetic material. To reproduce.

In her 2019 interview for Touch the Donkey, she spoke of her work-in-progress, which was a sequel to her then-unpublished manuscript of Vestigial, adding how

Both are exploring intimacy between people and intimacy with Aki, earth, and her inhabitants. I’ve been presencing the earth as a central voice in my work for some time as I hear her talking to me, to us, to all of us. 

Q: How did you get to this point in your writing—to be, as you say, “presencing the earth”—and what does that presencing look like? What does that phrase mean to you, and how does it present itself in your writing?

A: That is such an interesting question. I am deeply connected to the earth, I am part of the earth. We all are. But many people are seriously disconnected from their understanding of our collective sentience, the rhythms of river, rock, sky. The question that troubles me is what will it take for others to restore this connection and how might my writing be part of what brings them back. I don’t write explicitly for this awakening, but I am always writing toward it. 

My writing practice has evolved greatly over time, but the “natural world” has always held both subject and object positions so that the particularities of the English language does not define what is living and what is not. There are actually very few inanimate things in this world. And yet this language that we are bridging one another through (English) reinforces a world view that sentience is limited to a very small number of beings on earth. 

 

Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, SIR

 

Granny mama said that you wanted to name him Master.

Master never came outta my mouth. I always knew his name would be Sir. I named him Sir to honor my lineage, so that it would not be disrespected. The carrier of the name didn’t matter anybody could have been named Sir. You could have been Sir if you were first.

I’m fascinated by Berkeley, California performer, writer and artist Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle’s book-length poem SIR (Litmus Press, 2019; now available only through the author’s website). SIR is structured as a collage of image, text and archive to explore family, power relationships, segregation, racism and inter-generational trauma. Through a scrapbook of lyric prose, archival material, including family photographs, Hinkle writes on the histories and implications of being black in America, specifically her eldest brother, named “Sir” by their mother at birth (full name: Sir Antany Marquis Lavonne Hinkle), so anyone speaking to him would have to begin with respect. Hinkle explores the history of Louisville, Kentucky and her own brother’s name, including his own discomfort with it, referring to himself, instead, as “Anthony.” She writes: “His pants sag low as if he has a sack of shit in them. He wears a huge watch. His eyes squint when he is amused. He walks through life like anyone else. One step at a time. You would never know that his name is Sir and sometimes neither does he.” SIR exists as an expansive, loving and critical portrait of a name and a family, a time and a place; citing family photographs and a family shaped through and by an ongoing history. She writes archive and theory, trauma and naming, and how the name their mother gave her first born child both revolves and responds to elements of power and disparity:

They have been calling him by a name that is not his name and furthest from his name as his name can be. He hated Sir and still does. Even as I write this sentence he navigates the world with it under his skin. Tucked away in the cotton fibers of his birth certificate. Scared to make it emerge. Is it really fear I wonder? Is its use no longer needed? Fear comes through power. Power is the result of fear. What if he were named Power? Would he tell people his name was Strength, or even better same ole same ole same ole Anthony?

Opening as a map of his name, she evolves into an exploration of self and her larger family, including the lineage of her own given name. She explores her family’s history and genealogy. She writes of Louisville slave owner Captain Aaron Fontaine (1753-1823), from the park that bears his name across his former landscape, through her attempts at researching the names and details of the slaves he owned, and any potential descendants. She writes of the difficulty of a history she can’t fully research, and fully articulate. “I romanticize about a place that I cannot name. It is always on the top of my tongue but gets lost in the slippery saliva,” she writes, “and drifts back down my throat. Forming a knot, walking a fine line between choking, loving western shoes that hurt my feet and running around barefoot on the hot Kentucky cement.” Hinkle’s SIR is multi-faceted and expansive, with a lyric heft created through the deep dive she takes across her research, from the framing of her brother and her brother’s name into numerous acts and individuals that brought their mother to that point, and continue to affect their entire family. Hinkle’s SIR is framed very differently than, say, Charlottesville, Virginia poet and editor Kiki Petrosino’s White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia (Louisville KY: Sarabande Books, 2020) [see my review of such here], a book that covers a similar geography and history. SIR is far more intimate, more personal; writing her brother and his discomfort, and their mother’s discomfort. If White Blood is a book about how history impacts the present, SIR is a book about family, and how history impacted them and still does, directly and in an ongoing way; how their mother chose to respond, as an exploration of how that response ripped outward.

If we had a grandfather and a great grandfather would they have named him Sir? Would he have been a Jr.? Would Sir have been needed? If we all had arms and muscles to swing from, to laugh and cry with us, to have their two cents put in and have it be the final word would Sir need to be named Sir? If in our neighborhood the S.W.A.T. team was not kicking down doors left and right because young men had taken over whole apartment buildings for drug houses would Sir need to be named Sir? If we didn’t care about black men at all in the world and wanted hate to eat them up, with he need to be named Sir?