Matt Robinson : part one

Matt Robinson has published six full-length poetry collections, including Tangled & Cleft (Gaspereau Press, 2021) and Some Nights It’s Entertainment; Some Other Nights Just Work (Gaspereau Press, 2016), as well as numerous chapbooks. He has won the Grain Prose Poetry Prize, the Petra Kenney Award, and The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, among others. Robinson is on the poetry editorial board of The Fiddlehead and he plays a fair bit a beer league hockey when pandemic restrictions allow. He really likes dogs and cats and sandwiches. He lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, NS, Canada), with his family.

What are you working on?

Right now? Well, as of now I’m just starting to write random poems again—the odd poem here and there—having just published a new book in Fall 2021. For the last while I was mostly revising and editing poems from that collection. Generally speaking, I work through times when I am mostly editing / revising OR mostly writing new poems. 

But in the last few weeks, having done my usual recharging—which involves a LOT of reading—I have started to cobble together some new poems. Shorter, lyrical pieces, mostly: which is also fairly normal for me.

If I’m being honest, I am not a particularly disciplined or “regular” writer. I don’t have a strict schedule of any sort. I write and edit in fits and starts. It’s always been that way. I suspect that will remain the case. As poems start to accumulate, I’ll eventually look at collecting them and organizing them in some fashion. In all likelihood, that’ll look like a chapbook manuscript at first. 

This is all to say in a round-about way that I don’t have a particular project that I am currently engaged in.