Tuesday, 27 March 2018

rob mclennan : part one


rob mclennan [photo credit: Stephen Brockwell] lives in Ottawa, where he runs a reading series three blocks away from where he was born. His latest titles include the full-length A perimeter (New Star Books, 2016), and the chapbook snow day (above/ground press, 2018). Household items, his second poetry title with Ireland’s Salmon Publishing, appears this spring. His author page exists at: http://robmclennanauthor.blogspot.ca/

What are you working on?

I’m not sure. I just spent the past two months working on a poem called “snow day,” which I recently produced as a chapbook through above/ground press. I usually produce some kind of handout for my birthday party, so I gave myself a deadline of that, once I realized, early on, that the poem was moving in a particular direction. With that done, I’ve been poking at a couple of “seventeen word poems,” after being solicited for such. I’m not sure what will happen with “snow day” post-chapbook, if it evolves into a larger manuscript or not. Given the prose poem elements of the work, my immediate impulse is to move in an entirely different structural direction with whatever might be added as a further section to assist it into becoming a full-length manuscript. Perhaps I’m channelling Susan Howe, wanting my prose section to sit beside something torn apart and restructured. I’m not sure yet.

Really, now that I spent the bulk of last year starting and finishing the poetry manuscript “the book of smaller,” I really should be getting back to those three short stories I attempted to complete last fall. I’ve another gathering of small projects to get off my desk first, including a scattering of reviews for the blog, and two different anthology projects, as well as the literary walks I’ve been building for Arc Poetry Magazine.

I suppose the real answer is: reviews.

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