How did you first come to visual poetry? What is it about the form that resonates?
Most likely through the artworks of Cy Twobly, Basquiat, I had a copy of WSB's Port of Entry and got to browse a copy of The Third Mind (WSB & Brion Gysin) because I couldn't afford to buy it. I enjoyed the mesh of text and images together. You can read a Basquiat painting as much as you can view it.
How does a poem begin?
For my visual works I like to collect older books from thrift stores, old photographs from flea markets, old magazines, newspapers, text books, books with old illustrations, manuals for obsolete office equipment, medical texts. I'll take three or four of these, all with very different subject matter and cut out the text and images I think are interesting or funny and mix them around and build a repetitive loose narrative.
You’ve published work in multiple genres. Do you see your writing as a single, extended project, or a series of disconnected threads? How do you keep the genres straight?
I'm not bothered if the genres aren't straight. Fiction can borrow from poetics. Poetry can have visual aspects. I have a small book of poetry that's collage and playing with exophony http://www.theblastedtree.com/phon-phon Some of my fiction pieces will be written like stanzas, but are not quite prose poems. The text that's in some of my visual work can resemble a poem.
All of the fiction I produce is related to some degree. Minor characters in one story become the subject of a future story. It's fun to go back to something I wrote a while ago and try to figure who one character is by creating a new story. With poetry I want to say that I explore (or question) how language works. How it's flexible and can be manipulated. https://simulacrumpress.ca/2017/11/30/simulacrum-press-2-ululation-by-robert-keith/
Have you a daily schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between other activities?
I've tried to work by a schedule and it never pans out. I don't feel genuine when I force myself to write or create something. When I do have some idea or motivation to work with then I will give myself a realistic goal such as writing 1000 words a day for a month. 1000 words is easy enough to do and leaves something for the next day to carry on with. This is how I wrote my books Honeydew https://www.amazon.ca/-/fr/R-Keith/dp/B08NVL691P and 9999 https://www.amazon.ca/9999-R-Keith/dp/107797843X
What are your favourite print or online literary journals?
Otoliths has been good to me, they've put out a number of my submissions and publish a lot of other great writers and artists in a huge issue https://the-otolith.blogspot.com/2019/07/r-keith.html https://obraartifact.com/issue-5/ I believe it's defuncted, but I liked tipoftheknife http://tipoftheknife.blogspot.com/2018/03/tip-of-knife-issue-29.html Way back a few years I worked with Filling Station Magazine and I really wanted that magazine to be more like Carousel http://carouselmagazine.ca/
Who are some of the writers you are reading lately that most excite you?
I just got the biography of Fernando Pessoa by Richard
Zenith and I'm really enjoying it. Lately I'm reading Dostoyevsky, Irvine
Welsh, Chelsea Minnis, Lydia Davis, Clarice Lispector, Roberto Bolaño, Richard
Brautigan. Kickin It Old Skool with The Arabian Nights. I bought a copy
of Les Miserables and haven't touched it yet.
Latest releases include the novelette HONEYDEW (DumpterFire Press), PLAY DUMB, a short story collection (Dumpster Fire Press) and the poetry collections nadir of sitting duck and ok quiet (Dimensionfold Publishing). His visual art has been presented in galleries in Canada, Malta and Russia.