Fourteen Questions for rob mclennan
by Lisa Fishman
June 3-4, 2020
Introduction
The following unconventional interview was inspired by a nearly ten-year conversation between Bill Berkson and Bernadette Mayer. Between 1977 and 1985, the two poets interviewed each other on an endless variety of topics, usually in the form of written correspondence. The book that resulted, What’s Your Idea of a Good Time? Interviews and Letters, is an exhilarating and intimate document of experimental poetics and a surprisingly generative teaching tool. How do poets talk to each other? What do they think about? What do they want to know about each other? What’s their idea of a good time? Such questions can shed unexpected light on the organic practice of poetry and nonlinear processes of poetic thinking.
Unlike Mayer and Berkson, rob mclennan and I have not met in person, and our overall conversation does not span decades. Rather, we exchanged books and began a periodic cross-border conversation a few years ago, and I began to notice how crucial the notion of thinking with other poets is in his own work. Over the course of over 20 collections of poetry, his work is permeated by quotations and references to other contemporary poets both within and outside of Canada. I’m inspired by his answer to #2 below: “literature isn’t all about ‘me,’ but about conversation [. . .] and I’m attempting to have as many conversations as possible.” The following interview took place over e-mail between rob’s home in Ottawa, Ontario, and my sabbatical residence in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia in the early summer of 2020.
mclennan is a tireless supporter and promoter of others’ poetry. He was an early innovator of virtual formats as a way of creating connections between people and expanding readers’ awareness of what’s “out there” beyond their immediate, local poetry scene. Even an initial peek at his blog (http://robmclennan.blogspot.com/) opens a window onto the multivalent ways in which he engages in conversation across aesthetic traditions and national borders. His publishing ventures include above/ground press (chapbooks), periodicities (short video readings by contributing poets) and touch the donkey (a print journal); he also founded and hosts the annual Ottawa Small Press Book Fair.
One of my favorite moments in the following exchange is mclennan’s answer to “How do you know what word comes next [in writing a poem]?” Answer, in part: “I don’t.” Also, I propose that mclennan’s answers to #9 and #14 show us how poems can land unbidden in the middle of a conversation when the conversation consists of genuinely curious, potentially impertinent questions—such as the kind one may ask oneself. Doing so, one may find an “accidental” poem (in my view, the only kind) happening in response.
1. In How the Alphabet Was Made, you write: “Name it, thus. I am reworking. I am trying to write a sentence.” What is difficult, trying, about writing a sentence? Is the “I” trying?
I spent my late twenties and into my thirties attempting to renegotiate my relationship with the narrative “I”; I attempted to remove entirely the “I” from my poems. I’d been years working something similar to the Frank O’Hara model of the “I did this, I did that” poem before realizing I wished to see if I could get the “I” out of the way, so the poem could speak for itself; to focus on what the poem was doing, rather than the speaker who was speaking it. And yet, it took a while to realize that even to remove the “I” in the language of the poem doesn’t remove it from the poem itself, does it?
A sentence is the vehicle one uses to get from a point of thought over to another, across a particular distance. The sentence works not just cover that distance, but to articulate it.
2. Why are the voices of others important to you? I refer to the role of quotation and the principle of inclusion in your work, in which the words of others (attributed) not infrequently appear.
Well, in so many ways, literature isn’t all about “me,” but about conversation. That’s what Robert Kroetsch called it, “a conversation,” and I’m attempting to have as many conversations as possible.
3. How do you feel at the moment about solitude? Has that been a part of your writing practice in overt or covert ways?
Solitude means different things, doesn’t it? I require the space of attention from which to be able to work, obviously, but spent years writing in public spaces. In my early twenties, I lived in a one-bedroom apartment with partner and our toddler, so I had to leave our apartment to work, writing three nights a week in a coffeeshop. By the time I was twenty-four, I was writing six days a week at a corner table by the window at a Dunkin’ Donuts, writing five hours a day. I did that for six years, until the franchise closed, and I found another place to write. I grew up on a dairy farm, so was no longer interested in the absence of people and activity, and have always found that particular silence rather deafening. I enjoy the activity of people around me (although at enough of a distance that I might work), and have been able to write on airplanes and greyhound buses, in mall food courts and just about anywhere. I spent fourteen years of daily mornings at a coffeeshop in Centretown until just a few days before our now six year old, Rose, was born. Now my writing days, or at least, time I attempt at my desk, are structured around the children and their activities. If I have an hour to work, I work; otherwise, I get nothing done.
4. What is reading another person’s poems like, for you? How would you describe what you’re hearing when you’re reading a poet whose work absorbs you? Would you describe it as hearing? And/or as something else?
Sound is something I’m aware of when reading, and when writing. I know certain other writers who read their work aloud as they compose, but I’ve never had to do that. The first, and really, only, time I’m ever reading work aloud is in front of an audience; I can hear it in my head as I write. When reading the work of another, I’m attempting to hear the music, the lyric, of the lines, and the rhythms. I want to understand what the piece is doing on its own terms.
5. When you write, how do you know what word comes next?
I don’t. The process is one of accumulation, collage and carving out until it sounds just right. This can take time.
6. What or how are you hearing when you write? (And/or, would you describe other sensory or cognitive functions as being most present when you write? Such as seeing, thinking, memory, guessing, etc.)
I try to let the words direct as much as possible. I’ve always enjoyed the unexpected collision of words and phrases that aren’t necessarily meant to bang into each other, so if I feel stuck, I often flip through other books to seek words or phrases I can alter, twist and mangle for my own purposes, setting them up against what shouldn’t necessarily fit. The resulting spark from that collision is the poetry; is what allows the poem to emerge.
7. If you were to write the biography of one body part of your own, which would it be and why?
I’m not sure that I would. I’m uncertain how to answer this.
After my mother died, parts of her body were donated for organ transplant, including her eyes. I wondered if I needed to begin waving to strangers, so her eyes might again see me.
8. How would you describe the process and feeling of writing the simply marvelous chapbook, snow day? Have you worked in that mode since then?
That was a six-week process, during which I didn’t really work on anything else. It was a deep dive, attempting to get to the heart of a couple of thoughts that eventually wrapped themselves up into each other. Given the scale of the piece, I required enough attention to hold the whole of the poem in my head before I could attempt to move forward with anything new. I have been thinking that this poem would be the opening of an eventual book-length manuscript, but I haven’t yet done too much to complete the work. I have a subsequent, far shorter chapbook-sequence, Somewhere in-between / cloud (above/ground press, 2019), that might become part of the same manuscript, but I haven’t yet figured out any further sections to continue what “snow day” began. Part of it is simply that I’ve been working on other projects—last fall I was completing a manuscript of short stories, I spent the winter months polishing my post-mother creative non-fiction manuscript and wrapping up the poetry manuscript “book of magazine verse,” and I’ve spent most of the lockdown working on a sequence of pandemic essays—so I haven’t really had the attention span to give to the project. I’m not in any hurry, given I’ve a couple of completed unpublished poetry manuscripts already sitting around my office; what’s the rush to have yet another? The prose poem sequence “snow day” did take six weeks to compose from start to finish, so I would most likely need that kind of attention to write something similar, to further the full-length manuscript. I’ll get there. I’m not terribly worried.
The “snow day” poem is an extension of my decade-plus exploration on the possibilities of the prose poem, something that was originally prompted by reading Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (Burning Deck, 2000), edited and translated by Norma Cole, back in 2010. I’d already been curious about the prose poem, and had noted some interesting examples over the years, but I hadn’t yet attempted to focus my writing on prose poems until that anthology crossed my path in 2010, thanks to Toronto poets Sharon Harris and Stephen Cain (during the time I was helping them move). My full-length collections How the alphabet was made (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018) and A halt, which is empty (Mansfield Press, 2019) and Life sentence, (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) have certainly been steps in that direction, with more overt prose poem constructions occurring in the as-yet-unpublished manuscripts “the book of smaller” and “book of magazine verse.” It was directly between the composition of those two manuscripts that the extended prose sequence “snow day” emerged.
9. What is a particular memory you have of any of the following:
A. A tree
B. An elementary school classroom
C. A shoe
D. The color red
A. There is a tree in the front yard of the homestead I spent much of my small years climbing. During the summer, the girl from next door would come over, and we would climb together. I might have been seven years old. There was a spot to sit comfortably, just high enough. Any higher would have been too high. Occasionally a branch would shake loose, and we’d pull it free, set it loose in the yard, eventually tossing it over the fenceline. Within a few years, my father would tear out the fenceline, replaced by a line more imaginary. It emerged as a functional line, between front yard and field. Perhaps this is that narrative “I,” again, providing framework and boundaries without having to sit so obviously there. Our black dog, Heather, bouncing happily along with a stick in her mouth, flinging it into the air. There were most likely birds.
B. I remember those, certainly. What do I recall? I think I spent the bulk of grade three behind the classroom door, in the corner, for my trait of being an “overactive socializer” (this was a phrase my kindergarten teacher offered on a form for my parents). I remember watching from my corner vantage-point as my contemporaries did their work, peeking through the small square window in the classroom door.
C. Do I have memories of shoes? After my mother died in 2010, we found some money squirrelled away in her multiple purses, some of which I used to purchase new dress shoes for her funeral. After she died, my mother gifted me shoes.
D. Red was my favourite colour when I was young. I transferred eventually to blue, due to social pressure; boys don’t like red, I was told. They like blue! I think by my early teens, if I had a favourite colour at all (I’m uncertain such considerations are much on the minds of pre-teens), my response would have been both red and blue.
10. Is there an area of knowledge you enjoy spending time in or are curious about besides writing and literature? (History,
science, philosophy, nutrition, other specific arts, etc.)
I am fond of history, but these days I only seem to manage documentaries, if anything at all. Parenting isn’t necessarily conducive to reading longer books of prose, as you might imagine. Last week we watched a three-part documentary on Lady Jane Gray, and another three-part documentary on Charles I of England. There was a really good two-hour doc I saw a couple of years back done by the BBC, I think it was, on the War of 1812, providing a global context to the conflict, far larger than the specifically-Canadian context we’d learned of in school. I had no idea about the Battle of New Orleans, or the fact that James Wolfe had been in Scotland at the Battle of Culloden; he apparently refused to shoot a wounded prisoner, and was thusly sent to the colonies as punishment, where he subsequently became a General. There’s a great part of George Bowering’s Stone Country: An Unauthorized History of Canada (Penguin, 2003) that speaks of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, mentioning that the Plains were named after a ship’s captain who once owned the land, Abraham Martin. Had his brother owned that patch of land instead, the battle might have been fought on the Plains of Claude!
Oh, and I also have some ten thousand comic books. I’m a Marvel guy, through and through, but have been engaged with far more DC material over the past few years as well. I’ll follow Brian Michael Bendis just about anywhere. His run on Action Comics right now is magnificent.
11. Your interest in other writers spans borders and includes many contemporary writers in the United States. What is
your sense of some differences in context and/or poetics in Canada and the U. S.? Do you think there’s potential for
more mutual awareness of things afoot in both countries?
The awareness isn’t new, certainly. Books cross borders far more easily now than they did even twenty years ago, but many of the poets that first caught my attention emerged out of 1960s Vancouver—George Bowering, Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, Judith Copithorne, Phyllis Webb etcetera—and were deeply connected to the Black Mountain and Beat strains of American poetry, culminating in the infamous 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference that brought up, among others, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, Denise Levertov, for a series of lectures, readings and near-legendary parties. I mean, Jack Spicer did a series of lectures out of Warren Tallman’s house during that period. Robin Blaser and George Stanley even relocated to Vancouver. There was an incredible back and forth back in those days, and I don’t think those connections have lessened, in any way. You just have to know how and where to look.
There are shifts between the American and the Canadian lyric, certainly, although I don’t know if I would be able to articulate them at all. The histories are different, despite whatever overlap or interactions we might have. I’d love to figure out a mapping of the American prose poem vs. the Canadian prose poem; I’ve been slowly putting some pieces together, but haven’t managed to fully understand how ours and yours differ precisely, and how they might have arrived. Canadian writing has produced such notables as Anne Carson, Margaret Christakos, Dionne Brand, bpNichol, Sylvia Legris, Erín Moure, Nelson Ball, Dennis Cooley, Jack Davis, Jordan Abel, Marie Annharte Baker and Lisa Robertson. I could go on. One could suggest there is an element of risk in Canadian writing, given the stakes are so low, that allows for certain kinds of experimentation, but I’m sure there are plenty of American examples that might contradict that entirely as a specifically Canadian feature.
Part of what I’ve been more attracted to over the years has been the lyric of the sentence, both in prose and in prose poetry, that has emerged from writing translated from French into English. There is something really musical in the sentence that so much English-language writing seems to miss. The work of Lydia Davis, for example, is a delight. She has also worked in translation, so there might even be a correlation there. Most of the prose poet examples I might think of over the past decade that have excited me have been American––Sawako Nakayasu, Amelia Martens, Anna Gurton-Wachter, Rosmarie Waldrop, Julie Carr, Layli Long Soldier—although I can’t for the life of me figure out why anyone reads Russell Edson. There’s no music to it. I just don’t get it.
12. Do you frequently spend most of the day writing? In other words: How do you manage to write as much as you do?
I’ve been writing full-time since about 1991 or 1992. Early on, I caught a Margaret Atwood quote along the lines of ‘If you want full-time out of it, you have to put full-time into it.’ While my eldest was small, I ran a home-daycare so I could afford to stay home and wrote three nights a week—7pm to midnight—in a coffeeshop. After that relationship broke apart, I began writing my days in the donut shoppe, taking Saturdays off to spend with my daughter. Since my more recent children were invented (Rose is six-and-a-half and Aoife is four), I’ve been working, as I said, around their schedules, whether school or preschool (Rose will be entering grade two this fall, theoretically, and Aoife is old enough for junior kindergarten, although we have yet to decide if, given global pandemic, what we might do for all of that, especially since junior kindergarten is considered optional). I have the attention to give to writing, and deliberately didn’t bother with employment or post-secondary; I just wanted to write, so I wrote. And I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. I can get a lot done in a short amount of time, but I’ve also been nearly thirty years working that particular muscle.
13. Being the partner of a poet, Christine McNair, can you talk about how that informs your writing and/or revision
process and/or your productivity?
I like very much having a partner I can bounce ideas off. And she so easily achieves in her writing what I feel as though I constantly struggle to do not even half as well—her gymnastic language skills, layering and staccato cadence of the line. Her work forces me to up my game to keep up, and this can only be good. She’s also a remarkably skilled editor, so occasionally I do offer work for her to look at if I’m feeling stuck, but between my own productivity and the normal human capacity to read the work of another, I attempt this infrequently.
14. Last question, choose A or B:
A. What can you see if you look around you right now?
B. What is a recent dream you can remember?
I see an awful lot of books. New poetry titles by Dennis Cooley, Noor Naga, Roger Farr, kirsten ihns, Alice Jones, Paul Zits. Anne Boyer’s A Handbook of Disappointed Fate; Fanny Howe’s The Needle’s Eye; Robert Kroetsch’s The Lost Narrative of Mrs. David Thompson; Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics. An email from Derek Beaulieu, just now. A photograph on my desk of my dear wife. A cup of pens. Three binder clips. Aoife’s stuffed bear, abandoned on my office floor. An array of postage stamps, and recently-received letters. My Doctor Who coffee mug. Stacks of Believer magazine and Brick: A Literary Journal. A kinder-egg. An errant quarter. The movement of my wee children (that’s more of a blur). But have I answered A or B?
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent poetry titles include A halt, which is empty (Mansfield Press, 2019), Life sentence, (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) and the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics (periodicityjournal.blogspot.com) and Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com). He is editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. In spring 2020, he won ‘best pandemic beard’ from Coach House Books via Twitter, of which he is extremely proud (and mentions constantly). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com.
Lisa Fishman is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition (Wave Books, 2020). Along with four chapbooks and a pamphlet published to date, she has a collection of stories, World Naked Bike Ride, forthcoming next year on Gaspereau Press in Canada. Her work is anthologized in Best American Experimental Writing, The Ecopoetry Anthology, The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral, American Poetry: The Next Generation, and elsewhere. A PEN/Robert J. Dau Story Story Prize and Pushcart Prize nominee, Fishman lives in Orfordville and Madison, Wisconsin, and is an editor at Poetry Salzburg Review.