rob mclennan : coda

How important is music to your poetry?

Without music, there is no poetry.

rob mclennan : part five

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

For years, my go-to was George Bowering, a poet I’d first encountered during my high school years. Influences were multiple during my twenties, from John Newlove, Leonard Cohen, Margaret Atwood and Barry McKinnon to bpNichol, Artie Gold, Robert Kroetsch and Judith Fitzgerald, among so many, many others, but Bowering was always my anchor. From him, I learned a consideration of writing my local, and the importance of reading (and supporting) my contemporaries. Every time I read any of his essays, or picked up an anthology he’d edited, it sent me off into dozens of other directions in my reading, which I’ve very much appreciated. Through him, I discovered TISH, the Kootenay School of Writing, the Vehicule Poets, Coach House, Talon, Quebec writers in translation, etcetera. The field was ever-expanding, and seemingly had no limits.

Some of my staples over the past decade or so include Pattie McCarthy, Rosmarie Waldrop, Margaret Christakos, Sawako Nakayasu, Alice Notley, Julie Carr, Susan Howe, Jennifer Kronovet, Marcus McCann, Kate Greenstreet, Anna Gurton-Wachter, Erín Moure, Jordan Abel, derek beaulieu, Ryan Murphy, Cole Swensen, Gil McElroy, and pretty much anything translated by Norma Cole. Amelia Martins had a first book I couldn’t put down for a very long time. Layli Long Soldier should have won every award going for her first collection. There are far more names to list, but I suspect we haven’t infinite space.

Really, the way one thinks about writing is constantly mutable, and evolving, or at least should be. Just about anything can change the way one thinks about writing, even a poem I might not necessarily find terribly interesting, discovered in the middle of some literary journal, might have some small kernel of “oh, what’s that?” in it; something I might want to consider including in whatever I end up doing next.

rob mclennan : part four

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

Very much so. I’ve spent the past decade moving through the sentence very differently, having shifted from the line and breath break of the lyric staggering across the page (which made up the bulk of my poetry during my twenties and thirties) to the allure of the lyric sentence, working almost exclusively in the prose poem.

One might argue that that is less of a change of consideration than simply an evolution of structure.

I’m far more aware, now, of many of the tools of poetry, from allusion and collision to breath and sound, yet there are still moments in my reading where I catch something that I hadn’t considered previously, something that I wish to consider incorporating into my own work (I presume every active writer goes through this process life-long, right?).

In certain ways, I am still writing what I have always written: poems that attempt to capture particular moments through condensed language; moments that contain meditations upon my immediate, including geography, family, friends, reading and thinking. Over the years, I’ve worked very deliberately to reduce the “I” in such poems, but I don’t know if it is possible to erase such completely, at least in certain types of poems. Even the invisible eye still remains.

And yet, I know I’ve been attempting to incorporate more political elements into my writing the past couple of years. One doesn’t wish to sound false by referencing something political, so the challenge becomes in how to speak of something in a way that is not only appropriate, but appropriate to the poem. I’ve always envied Milan Kundera for his equal considerations of social, political and personal throughout his fiction; one element doesn’t exist above any other. I’ve also been prompted by seeing particular works by Christine Leclerc, Jordan Abel, Stephen Collis, Layla Long Soldier, Eve L. Ewing, Shane McCrae, Morgan Parker and so many others that are doing absolutely incredible and essential writing (something I’ve been seeing far more over the past decade, as well), and I wonder how I can engage in my own ways. I think we are moving past the point where one can simply ignore the political when composing literary work.

rob mclennan : part three

How do you know when a poem is finished?

Experience.

rob mclennan : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

I’m not entirely sure. I remember seeing Dennis Lee on Mr. Dressup somewhere in the 1970s. I’ve always found the sounds and mechanics of words rather curious, and would play with sounds before I entered school. Discovering the word “me” in “home,” for example. I know I was a big reader, and somehow knew more French before I began kindergarten than I’ve ever managed since.

By the time I entered my pre-teens, I was attempting just about everything, from painting with acrylic and watercolours, to comic books (I sent a script attempt to Marvel at one point), to my years of piano lessons, and sketching out lines in notebooks. I had even entered the Kiwanis singing competitions, or whatever it is they were called, during middle school.

By the time I hit grade ten, I’d a social group that was engaged with writing, and I kinda fell into that, writing short stories and poems at a furious pace (some of that group included Clare Latremouille, Franco-Ontarian playwright Louis Patrick Leroux – we knew him only as Patrick back then – and musician Chris Page). During those high school years, my eventual partner and mother of my first child was also instrumental in supporting those early attempts at writing (as were others, but she was by far my most consistent supporter, even if she claimed she hated everything I was writing), offering me multiple books, and introducing me to works by Alice Munro, Margaret Lawrence, Al Purdy, Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findlay, Robertson Davies, John Newlove, George Bowering, Michael Ondaatje, Elizabeth Smart, Margaret Atwood, Richard Brautigan and others. “If you’re going to write, you have to read,” she said.

By my final year of high school, I’d managed to place first in the Carleton University High School Writing Competition for a short story (I discovered years later that Ottawa writer Wes Smiderle, who I became friends with somewhere during our thirties, placed first in playwriting the same year).

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.