Zane Koss
Caption?
Readings
The first poem you remember loving (and how you feel about it now)
William Carlos Williams, “The Children,” from Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (New Directions, 1962)
Once in a while
we'd find a patch
of yellow violets
not many
but blue big blue
ones in
the cemetery woods
we'd pick
bunches of them
there was a family
named Foltette
a big family
with lots of
children's graves
so we'd take
bunches of violets
and place one
on each headstone
Like many classic Williams poems, it’s a simple one. I think what I loved about it – what I still do – is how it just says what it is. There’s no symbolism to unpack, no meter to scan, no reference to look up. It doesn’t matter what a violet symbolizes (or whether it’s purple, yellow, or blue) or who the Foltette family is. And yet, it’s pervaded by a sense of meaning and melancholy, the fragility of life, and the beauty of a pointless gesture. It’s maybe also the first poem I read that spoke the same language that I did. How nice to be recognized.
I must have first encountered this poem in eighth or nineth grade, through my high school English teacher. A little while later I became obsessed with Williams’s Paterson – which really broke my brain and probably bears most of the responsibility for my wanting to study literature – to find out what that book meant – but this poem was a first step in realizing that poetry could speak to me, in both senses, even a poem as simple as this. The beauty and mystery. So simple, maybe even I could do it.
Looking at it now, there’s a reason it’s less appreciated than other poems by Williams, say, “The Red Wheelbarrow” or “To A Poor Old Woman” – it lacks some of the technical fireworks of those poems – but all the same, its simplicity is enchanting. Anyone could do it, if only you could just say a simple thing beautifully enough.
A poet or book in translation or in another language
Hugo García Manriquez, Lo común (Meldadora, 2018), translated as Commonplace by NAFTA (Cardboard House Press, 2022)
When we read literature
we read the budget
of the Mexican army. (15)
This is, perhaps, cheating as I am one of the translators of the English version of this book; however, it’s a brilliant book that seems to be overshadowed by García Manríquez’s book-length bilingual erasure poem of the NAFTA treaty, Anti-Humboldt (2014), which receives substantial scholarly interest. In Lo común, García Manríquez offers a critique of the interrelation of government funding for the arts and the narco-military industrial complex in his home country of Mexico, woven together with a guidebook’s description of the architectural features of the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, a list of endangered species in Mexico, fragments of the Popol Vuh, and brief glimpses of lyric autobiography.
The way he moves across and between these topoi in the poem’s eight numbered sections was a major condition of possibility for my own shifting between personal, political, and archival in Country Music. While the lines quoted above operate as an emblem of the text, the moment that resonated most in my reading is a sudden rupture of the personal. Up to this point, García Manríquez has given us a lot of facts and numbers – dollar amounts of weapons, model numbers of automatic rifles and attack helicopters, acronyms for armed branches of the Mexican state, scientific names for critically endangered species – and then we catch a glimpse of the poet’s private life that links the violence of the private, domestic, and personal to the violence of military, state, and capital:
Bombers that are an extension
of the impact on my mother’s cheekbone
when I was 17. (25)
García Manríquez’s connecting of the violence of the state with this more intimate and familial violence rocked me and really opened a new horizon for what I thought was possible in poetry. Truly, at a certain point, I wanted simply to write a sort of Canadian total translation, changing not just the language but the referents and context – but that would have been a terrible idea. So, I wrote my own book instead. Or maybe that book is the next book I’m working on.
A poem or book you like to teach
Aram Saroyan, “lobstee” (1969), from Complete Minimal Poems (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016)
lobstee (94)
Aram Saroyan is perhaps most famous as the target of conservative political outrage over a $750 payment for the inclusion of his one-word poem “lighght” (1968) in an NEA-funded anthology twenty-five years after its original publication. Like “lighght” but written a year later, “lobstee” presents a single, misspelled word in the middle of an otherwise blank page: lobstee.
I like to teach this poem on the first day of class, and it works just as well for introductory courses for non-English-major students as it does for upper-level courses focused on twentieth-century poetry. It’s great partially because you can easily turn to it after reading through the syllabus without worrying about how much time is left. But it’s also great because it totally disarms students. Everyone has to approach the poem from the same starting point – doesn’t matter if you’ve mastered every allusion in The Waste Land or if this is your first literature class and English is your third or fourth language.
I start off by asking students to tell me what they can observe about the poem. It forces students to really engage with the materials of language because there’s so little else there: no symbols, no allusions, no grand themes. Simply, what is there and how is it working. It helps to impress on students the level of granular textual analysis that I’m seeking in their essays – if we can have a 20-minute conversation about this one misspelled word, then you can bring this level of attention to all of the words in the texts you write about.
We typically talk about the lobster/lobstee relationship as parallel to employer/employee, which then leads to the question of what exactly it means “to lobst” – the activity of a lobst-er. Once, a student pointed out that it was a key stroke error, that the “e” and “r” are beside each other on the standard QWERTY keyboard, which open onto a conversation about how this poem was likely composed on a typewriter and how we can talk about the ways in which the technology of writing changes how and what we write. It’s a lovely poem to talk about with students!
A book in which you were interested by the use of language or form
Jordan Abel, Injun (Talonbooks, 2013)
Truly, I could have picked any of Abel’s books here. They’re all fabulous, and each takes a different approach to a related set of questions and concerns that stretch between form and politics. I’m interested in Injun for the way in which Abel shifts between conceptual poetry and lyric poetry – or uses a conceptual constraint to generate and then disintegrate lyric poetry. I think Place of Scraps is my favourite – just a visually and emotionally stunning book – but I’ve maybe been more influenced by Injun.
Or, rather, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that I’m most influenced by a remark Abel made at a reading of Injun that I helped organize for the Organism for Poetic Research in NYC. When I say “disintegrate” above, I mean that over the course of the poetic sequence that opens Injun, Abel slowly breaks words into pieces, flipping letters upside-down, and scattering them across the page. At the poem’s climax, the page is filled with a field of disconnected letters that don’t cohere into any legible message: “mg xe kr,” reads one cluster.
To perform this piece, Abel has two recordings of himself reading the poem, which he plays for the audience while manipulating them with a variety of devices that would look more at home during a DJ set than a poetry reading. These devices slow and stutter, cut and toque his voice until it too resembles a scattering of illegible phonemes. Abel explained this process by saying that he was interested in writing poems that posed a problem for performance, and then trying to figure out how to solve that problem.
When I started writing poetry (again, more seriously) in my mid-twenties, I eschewed performance – I aligned myself with the anti-performative, post-Language strand of poetics. Abel’s comment, alongside the mentorship of my dissertation chair Urayoán Noel, really opened my mind to performance as something as rich and interesting as text, something that asked questions that I was also interested in asking. These influences helped shaped how I presented my first book, Harbour Grids, in public – accompanied by a field recording of the park where I wrote most of the book – as well as my approach to writing Country Music, which focuses that gap between oral performance and text.
A book of poetry by a friend and how knowing the poet affects your reading
MC Hyland, The Dead & The Living & The Bridge (Meekling Press, 2025)
I find myself considering the genders of labor. The word so mothering: a fertile body at the limit of what it can contain, torn through as a new being enters the world. (from “Essay on Labor and the Body (Gender II)” 71)
MC Hyland is my favourite poet. By this I mean that MC Hyland is my favourite person who happens to be a poet. The poetry MC writes is also very good, but I think (I hope!) she would appreciate this distinction. I think she will appreciate this distinction because her poetics is so rooted in the social life of poetry. Or, in the social life of poets, let’s say. Why can’t I say a straight thing about her? In one of the poetry workshops she runs, you go for a stroll with another poet and then write a poem to them about the walk.
At times, her poetics also proceeds by accumulation. Saying one thing and then another after each other. She has a beautiful book of poems called The End, where each poem, also called “The End,” presents an endless series of trenchant one-liners that give a panoramic view of the underbelly of consciousness in late capitalism:
Labor turns into money turns into cocktails. Thank you for shutting up. Is going camping a euphemism for sex. Taco time. I don’t know why he was such a dick to you. Go upstairs and be the mummy. Where women fell from factory windows. Was he reaching up my skirt or falling down the stairs. This is a serious question. Filling notebook after notebook. Getting out of your own way. I bought your art before you figured out how much to charge for it.
But the book of poetry I want to talk about is her The Dead & The Living & The Bridge. Even if the book calls itself essays, we both know it’s poetry. It’s always poetry to write this beautifully about existence and why any of us bother to make art. And MC has done that. These are beautiful and thoughtful and generous short prose-poems – sorry, I mean essays – that think deeply about the complicated ways that labour, language, book-making, class, gender, capitalism, teaching, poetry, materiality, and having a body are bound together. Bound like a book, as much as the strands of twine. Bound like a prisoner. Just like MC, they’re filled with hope, even if the face of so much darkness. Like her, they are generous and capacious and I want to keep reading them over and over and over again just like I hope she will never die. I don’t think she will.
Writings
From untitled manuscript [drafts]
I could see the writing on the wall
It said “Jeff Sutton Door”
I used to tell people if it wasn’t nailed down I’d take it, because I knew academia was going to flush me out the other side, so I might as well strip out what value I could while I could
I was flushed out the other side
I think it had something to do with class
At my first department event a man in a black collared shirt and tie reached
out to me, so I shook his hand and introduced myself
He was part of the catering staff, reaching for my empty paper plate
People laughed at my faux pas
I made a lot of faux pas
I think it had something to do with class
I used to eat too much at departmental events
I used to drink too much at departmental events
I was too much at departmental events
I was hungover at conferences
I’m sorry I missed your paper because I was violently vomiting fragments of
baby carrot into a toilet on the second floor
I’m sorry I couldn’t pay attention to your paper because I had the shakes and
a splitting headache
I still want to shake the caterer’s hand
I think it had something to do with class
I used to play a game where I’d ask people what their parents did
It got boring when everyone’s parents were lawyers
It got boring when everyone’s parents were professors
I think it had something to do with class
I used to think we were middle class because we weren’t on welfare
I used to think we were middle class because my parents weren’t on drugs
I used to think we were middle class because my dad wasn’t in jail
I think it had something to do with class
Zane Koss is a poet and translator living in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. He is the author of Country Music (Invisible Publishing, 2025), Harbour Grids (Invisible Publishing, 2022) and several chapbooks of poetry. He is the co-translator of Hugo García Manríquez’s Commonplace (Cardboard House, 2022), José Antonio Emmanuel’s Anarchy Explained to Children (Triangle Square, 2025), Karen Villeda’s String Theory (Cardboard House, 2025), with the North American Free Translation Agreement/No América Fraught Translation Argument (NAFTA). He was born and raised in the East Kootenays, B.C., and earned a doctorate at New York University.