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.

Meghan Kemp-Gee, The Animal in the Room

 

OFFICE HOURS

They say, I want to know how to do better. I am applying to medical school next year, so I need to make sure I have perfect grades. I was wondering, they say, if we could go over the next essay assignment. I know this paragraph doesn’t make sense. I don’t know what point I’m trying to make. I ask them, What are you really trying to say? They say, I am still adjusting to my medication. They say, Last week I went to the emergency room. Do you know what a panic attack is? I tell them that I think I do. They say, I feel like I have to choose between feeling stupid and feeling scared all the time. I say, I feel like we can figure out this paragraph. I’ll ask you some more questions and then we’ll figure out what you were trying to say.

There are some interesting formal shifts in poet Meghan Kemp-Gee’s full-length poetry debut, The Animal in the Room (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2023). There is something in the way she works her lyric narratives from line-breaks to prose poems, attempting to feel out her own sense of formal opportunity, syntax and shape. “Through her syntax and diction,” she writes, to open the prose poem “THE THESIS SENTENCE,” “the author explores her main theme in a clear and effective way. Through the use of rhetorical devices including metaphor and repetition, the writer emphasizes her argument. Throughout this poem, the meaning is reflected by the form in several ways. In this text, the author has some questions and she asks them using various rhetorical techniques and narrative strategies.” Throughout The Animal in the Room, there are poems that sparkle with inventiveness and wit, as she composes a bestiary of sentences and syntax. Each of her animals, as well as her sentences, retain their wildnesses, even while set up against a particular element of constraint or restraint. Kemp-Gee’s structures do seem exploratory, as she attends and examines her lyric with a careful deliberateness, one that can’t easily be situated. Holding a back cover quote by poet Sue Sinclair suggests a particular lyric formality that Kemp-Gee’s poems might include as a strain, but her overall experimentations eventually contradict, as the pieces here are more interested in structural differences and staggerings of syntax than any specific adherence to narrative form. Instead, her formal engagements, specifically through the prose poems that tether the collection together across a variety of forms, hold shades of the work of Rosmarie Waldrop, Anne Carson or even Lydia Davis:

TEACHING COMPOSITION

I compare a satisfying sentence to the feeling of kicking somebody as hard as you can, square in the chest. The kid in the back row asks, Have you actually done that?

This is very much a book of structures, of sentences; writing of animals and dreams, and the dreams of animals: the brontosaurus, the giant pacific octopus, the Vancouver Island marmoset and the Greenland shark, among others. “I have a question / for the ticks who dream / about being wolves. / My question concerns / orchids and the end / of the world,” she writes, to open the poem “THE BLOODSUCKER,” “concerns / the colour blue and /rare diseases.” This book suggests some remarkable things are still to come from Meghan Kemp-Gee; I, for one, am very much looking forward to seeing what she does next.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Meghan Kemp-Gee

Meghan Kemp-Gee's debut full-length poetry collection The Animal in the Room is forthcoming from Coach House Books in May 2023. She is also the author of two chapbooks (What I Meant to Ask and The Bones & Eggs & Beets) and co-creator of Contested Strip, the world’s best comic about ultimate frisbee (and soon to be a graphic novel).

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Obviously, we poets have to be good at spending a lot of time and energy on our work with very little external validation. I've been so fortunate to have a few big successful milestones recently, including getting into an awesome poetry PhD program and my first book getting accepted for publication at a wonderful publisher. And to be honest, that external validation does work on me! It makes me feel like I KNOW what I'm doing, instead of just hoping I know.

So I feel like my work these days is more self-assured and ambitious. I don't know where that confidence boost is going to take me. We'll see.

More than anything, it means everything to me that other people are actually reading what I write and spending time with my work. That's why I write. It means everything.

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

The mediums I work in most often are poetry, comics, and screenwriting. I'm not sure exactly why, but it's very rare that I have an idea I want to explore through prose more than I want to explore it through a poem or a scene or a comic. The reasons for that are completely mysterious to me, because I really enjoy reading fiction and nonfiction! I just rarely have an impulse towards creating it.
 
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 am a pretty fast, hard writer once I get going! I fear and admire poets who carefully revise and slowly edit over months and months, but I don't work like that!

Whether we're talking about a single poem or a giant project, something tends to blindside me out of nowhere and whine at me until it gets finished. Whatever "it" is, it comes and looks for you. I'm a big believer that if a poem is talking to you, it needs to be written right away, as much as you can. It might not get finished that day, but I'm always grateful when I follow that voice or that whine.

Once I've drafted a poem, I often revise it as many times as I need to, once or twice or twenty times, within the first day or two. I don't need to finish it, but I need to finish it as much as I can. A few of my poems, about 10 percent, get stuck in the early stages, and those are the ones you just put away and wait until you know what to do with them, weeks or years later.

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 used to be a very poem-focused poet. I liked the idea of the self-contained unit, the little room -- neat and tidy and a world of its own.

I still like thinking about my poems like that! But ever since I finished writing Animal in the Room I've been increasingly interested in what I could do with sequences and interconnected series of poems, including my chapbooks and full-length book projects. Right now, I love playing with repetition, because it creates alternative realities, rhizomes, new connections. I'm fascinated by those branches, tensions, links, and ligaments between pages. In comics theory, they talk about "hyperlinks" or "arthrology" -- the study of connections between and across texts.

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

I don't have a huge amount of experience with readings yet, but I do enjoy them! I want to do more! I put a lot of care into how my work sounds, because I hope some readers will want to read the poems out loud.

I also really love the experience of reading with other poets and writers, firstly because I like meeting them, and also because of those wonderful, unexpected connections between poems that often spring up at public readings. I love those!

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?

Sometimes I'm concerned that I'm not intentional enough in formulating a theoretical framework for what I'm writing. My process is very form-based -- I like to pick one or more patterns or formal features and just see where they take me. Let the poem go where it wants to go.

But I also recognize that that's just a process, not a theory. If you write like me, one of the things you have to be concerned about, and responsible about, is that a form-first process doesn't absolve you of your authorship. You're still responsible for what the poem does.

So basically, my theoretical concerns, my process, and my questions all have to do with the same kind of thing: how meaning and structure work together, and create each other, again and again and every time we write. And every time we read, or try to understand the physical world, that's also what's happening: meaning versus structure. I guess Meaning/Structure and Theory/Practice map onto each other, to a certain extent.

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 there are many necessary roles for all kinds of writers and artists in our culture. Personally, I think of myself as doing a craft -- my job is to create things that are useful or interesting or pleasing to someone. There's a good Dylan Thomas quote that says that a poem is a contribution to reality. I like to think about my work like that.

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

Last summer I had the great honor of working with Coach House, and with Susan Holbrook to edit my poetry manuscript. I was really thrilled when my book was accepted for publication, but I'll never forget talking to Susan on the phone for the first time. She immediately summarized the whole book in this perfect, insightful, intellectual way, better than I ever could have. I was floored. I think it was the first moment in my life when I felt someone had really understood my work -- not just what an individual poem might mean, but my intentions, and everything I was trying to do on a larger scale. I'm so grateful to her for that moment. I'll never forget it.

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

When I met Phoebe Wang at UNB in 2021 she gave me some wonderful advice: to be patient. She told me that I could write quickly and impatiently, but then I had to be very patient about publishing, career, and everything that comes after. I'm not a patient writer, but I think that was good advice!

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to collaborating on a graphic novel)? What do you see as the appeal?

People have told me they find this weird, but it's always easy and fun for me to move between genres! I enjoy the variety: comics, poetry, screen. They're all very different in terms of skills, audience, collaboration, everything. But the more I work in multiple genres, the more I discover all these interesting connections and transferable skills & techniques. Anyway, the main appeal to me is that I'm just following my creative interests, and following opportunities to work with artists and projects I like.

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 would like to have a regular schedule, but between studying, teaching, writing, and sports, every day is a bit different! On my ideal day, I go to the gym first thing in the morning, then have two or three big blocks of serious work time after that. But the ideal day isn't a real day, is it?

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

I don't usually feel stalled. But I find I'm most productive and pleased with myself when I'm writing towards a project. I like that feeling of a target, where every little scrap of an idea or line seems pointed towards a larger thing.

If I'm not currently working on a project, I invent one, like writing a sonnet just because, or writing about the last TV show I watched, or whatever. If I'm really stuck, I just do some editing of my own poems, or just read someone else's poems. That always does the trick.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

My partner James is a brilliant baker! A pot of coffee brewing and something baking in the oven are the ultimate home-y smell for me.

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?

Movies, nature, and visual art are huge influences and frequent topics in my poems! Recently I'm experimenting with poems about sports and athletes, which is a new and unfamiliar influence.

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

This is such a difficult question because there are too many to narrow it down! I'm just going to throw out four writers who are at the tip of my tongue today because I've re-read them recently: Louise Gluck, Jack Kirby, James Baldwin, Gord Downie, Joy Harjo.

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

In poetry, one of my dreams is to work collaboratively with visual artists or musicians! I'd love to publish a poetry-comic hybrid text, or to write words for songs, operas, or live performances.

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've often considered becoming a yoga teacher! Maybe I'll still do that at some point?

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

Like a lot of us, I think I do this because I wouldn't be completely satisfied doing something else. Or at least I wouldn't be completely satisfied. I enjoy a lot of different types of work. Teaching makes me happy. Coaching sports and playing sports does too. I enjoyed working on movies and doing script consulting. But ultimately I think I need to write. Like your question says, something made me write.

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

Book: Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Film: Fire of Love

20 - What are you currently working on?

I am right on the exhilarating cusp between two big poetry projects!

I just hit "send" on a manuscript called Nebulas, which is about space, strawberries, and Walt Whitman. I think it's the best work that I've ever done and I can't wait to share it with everyone.

My next big thing is a series of lyric poems about dead and injured athletes. I don't want to say too much because it's still taking its shape! It's cooking!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;