Michael Dennis : part one

Michael Dennis published his first chapbook, quarter on its edge, in 1979. Since then he has published several books and over a dozen chapbooks, his work has appeared in numerous magazine and journals. His most recent collection is Bad Engine — New and Selected Poems (Anvil Press, 2017) edited by Stuart Ross.

Dennis was born in London, Ontario, grew up mostly in Peterborough, Ontario and has resided in Ottawa, Ontario for the last thirty years. He lived in P.E.I. for year in the mid-80s and Czechoslovakia in 1989–90.

For the past five years Dennis has been producing a blog, Today’s book of poetry where he writes about books of poetry he admires. He posts a new blog every two or three days. So far Dennis has written blogs about 711 contemporary books of poetry.

Dennis is semi-retired from a career of varied employment. Dennis has installed public art for the Canada Council Art Bank, the Canadian Museum of Civilization, the Ottawa Art Gallery and numerous other arts organizations. He ran a small boutique hotel, The Cartier Inn. He drove taxi and trucks, worked in an ice-cream factory, worked on the motor line at Ford in Windsor, Ontario for a couple of years, a copper mine in northern Ontario. Dennis opened his own non-profit English as a second language school in Jablonec nad Nisou, Czechoslovakia and so on. Now he is supported by his wife and lives the life of luxury afforded most poets.

Photo credit: John W. MacDonald

What are you working on?

I recently sent a new book/manuscript of poetry to Anvil Press.  They published my most recent collection, Bad Engine.  Of course I’m hoping they’ll publish this new book, Low Centre of Gravity.  So that is heavily on my mind, but for the moment I’ve been able to set that aside.

I’m doing a chapbook with Larry Cowan’s Monk Press, my tentative title is Sad Balloon.  Those poems are finished, sort of.  I often work with Stuart Ross as an editor because he is a complete pro and he always makes my poems better.  Stuart has been helping me with Sad Balloon.  He also edited Bad Engine and he gave Low Centre of Gravity a good going over as well.  All of that to say that I will still have some homework to do once Stuart returns those poems to me.

Stuart and I have been working on a collaborative project for a couple of years.  Thus far it has produced one small chapbook called The Dagmar Poems.  But we are sitting on a pile of work that we like and do have plans for it.  These are poems that we wrote one line at a time, Stuart would write a line and then I would write a line, and so on.   Either of us can decide when a poem is finished.  Stuart and I are hoping to get together soon to put the finishing touches on our project.

rob mclennan contacted me recently as asked if I’d be interested in doing another chapbook with his above/ground press.  And I’m excited about that.  rob has published my work several times in the past and I’m happy about doing another one.  When you publish with rob there is simply no telling where it might end up, his distribution seems hits a wide swath.

Marilyn Irwin publishes chapbooks with her Shreeking Violet Press and we’ve talked about doing a chapbook together sometime in the next year and I’m certainly excited about that.

My biggest time consumer these days is my blog “Today’s book of poetry.”  That takes up a two or three hours every day.  I try to post a blog/review of a different book every other day, although lately it has been more like every three days.  I’m getting old and bad engine is starting to smoke.   The best unintended consequence of the blog is that I get to read a lot of poetry, daily.

I don’t really have a strict writing schedule for my own poems.  I often feel like I am not writing enough but then when I collect them all up I’ve usually got more poems than I thought.  I certainly worry about it a lot less than I used to.