We Who Are About To Die: rob mclennan

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan [with baby Aoife at three weeks and two days] currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of nearly 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. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent titles include notes and dispatches: essays (Insomniac press, 2014), The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014) and the poetry collection If suppose we are a fragment (BuschekBooks, 2014). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books, The Garneau Review (ottawater.com/garneaureview), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds), Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com). In fall 2015, he was named “Interviews Editor” at Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and recently became a regular contributor to Drunken Boat. 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

Where are you now?
I am sitting at my desk in my home office, during one of our toddler’s twice-a-week morning sessions at ‘school.’ I have less than two hours, from this moment, to get anything done before I am off to collect her.

What are you reading?
I’m really enjoying Rosmarie Waldrop’s new Gap Gardening: Selected Poems (New Directions, 2016) and about to begin on a whole stack of other titles, including Nelson Ball’s Chewing Water (Mansfield Press, 2016), Laura Walker’s story (Berkeley CA: Apogee Press, 2016), Emily Carr’s Whosoever Has Let A Minotaur Enter Them, Or A Sonnet— (San Francisco CA: McSweeney’s, 2016) and Margaret Christakos’ Her Paraphernalia: On Motherlines, Sex/Blood/Loss & Selfies (BookThug, 2016). I’ve also been rereading Sarah Gordon’s Rapture Red & Smoke Grey (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 2003), after finally achieving contact with the author (after more than a decade trying). I’m also reading Brian Michael Bendis’ incredible work over at Marvel, a company he saved from itself a decade or so back, when he destroyed and rebuilt the Avengers (among other things). I’m really enjoying his current run on Spider-Man; the Miles Morales stuff is fantastic.

A month or so back (on the day our new baby was born, actually), I finished reading Jean McKay’s remarkable Gone to Grass (Coach House Books, 1983). I do so hope she writes more books; I seem to have read them all, now.

What have you discovered lately?
American poet Matthew Henrikson has been a recent discovery, after his incredibly striking piece as part of The Volta’s tribute to C.D. Wright. I immediately worked to get my hands on his new book. Another recent discovery has been Inger Wold Lund, via her small chapbook Leaving Leaving Behind Behind (Brooklyn NY: Ugly Duckling Press, 2015). Incredible wow.

Where do you write?
I used to write in public spaces, but, given I’ve been home full-time with toddler for eighteen months now (since Christine returned to work after her year-long maternity leave), I do the bulk of my work from my little desk in my little home office. Given I spent so many years writing longhand in public spaces, it feels a strange shift. Once every month or two I’m still able to get a few afternoon hours of longhand at my favourite watering hole, The Carleton Tavern, but it might be a few more weeks before I can even consider such (given our newborn).

What are you working on?
Remembering to breathe, mostly. We’ve a newborn as well as a toddler, so things are a bit hectic. I’ve been attempting to complete a manuscript of short stories for some time now, and keep poking away, as well, on a manuscript of poems, “Cervantes’ bones.” But the main goal is the stories: once those are complete, I can once again dig into revisiting my post-mother creative non-fiction project, “The Last Good Year,” before finally returning to my attempt to rewrite “Don Quixote.”

I’m also working on a stack of interviews to appear over the next year for Touch the Donkey (with Meredith Quartermain, Mathew Timmons, Luke Kennard, Shane Rhodes, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Amanda Earl, Buck Downs, Kemeny Babineau, Oana Avasilichioaei, Ryan Murphy, Norma Cole, Lea Graham, Colin Smith, Nathaniel G. Moore, David Buuck, Kate Greenstreet, Douglas Barbour and Sheila Murphy, Oliver Cusimano and Joseph Mosconi), and the usual mound of chapbooks for above/ground press (less than twenty items away from an accumulated eight hundred items), including new and imminently-forthcoming chapbooks by Stephanie Bolster, Braydon Beaulieu, Geoffrey Young, John Barton, myself, Pete Smith, Stephen Collis, Bronwen Tate and lary timewell (among others).

Have you anything forthcoming?
Not at the moment, but that could change.

What would you rather be doing?
I can’t imagine anything better than this.

Two ghazals, for newborn

1.

Map: for she articulates
our new, invented landscapes.

A declaration of staccato kicks
and wails.

A salted, sunny membrane
of gestures, squeaks and snorts.

Exhaustion, multiplied. A cavernous
desire: feral skin, and breath.

Newly birthed, big sister devotes
such rapt attention.

Monopolized: we have not
learned their language.

2.

Toddler’s outstretched arms,
convinced herself bigger

than she still is, asks: Let me
hold her. Two ducks,

three. The western shoal,

swift curl of seagull, her
newborn deep

and impenetrable.
The contours

of a shapeless day.

Their mother, relieved
she finally out.

On Writing #95 : Claudia Coutu Radmore

The Poetry Three

Claudia Coutu Radmore

Jessica Hiemstra, Lesley Strutt and I meet every month, not to critique our poems, but to talk. We bring poems we’ve read, poems we don’t understand, quotes by critics and writers along with our questions, troubles, and thoughts about writing. What drives us to write, what are our histories. Under our arm we carry the wine of collections and writings that we admire. If we admire a poem but aren’t sure why, that discussion is welcome at the party.

For it is a party;  there’s coffee and a pot luck lunch. Cake. We meet in the morning but sessions tend to continue into the afternoon. There are party games of course, trivia on poetic form or word play, and dark corners for words that kiss, or that might play well together, all in a space  decorated with balloons of philosophy trembling at the ceiling.

Guest lists: who have we invited, who do we want to invite, and did that poet come through the door yet. Walt Whitman? Wallace Stevens? Yes, they are here. Jack Gilbert? Yes. Sylvia is a bit late. Might not come until next time.

Conversation mingles, wanders the room. We catch the tail of how the history of a poem lies in all we know and think. What is voice and why do we love it. How poetry draws from us what we did not know was there to be drawn. How beauty in nature and the human-made beauty of poems is not the same.

In another corner it’s about what ‘things’ in the abstract, mean. What is their function in poems, in a particular poem. Examples and debate, fingertips sticky with olive oil. Touch as movement and time; metaphor, and what it offers that we get from nowhere else.

Aspects of sound, kinds of sound, the sounds our language makes, breath and breathing. How our language shapes us. How even a typo may lead to a better poem as in Malcolm Lowry’s ‘Strange Type’:

I wrote “in the dark cavern of our birth.”

the printer had it tavern, which seems better.

But herein lies the subject of our mirth,

Since on the next page death appears as dearth.

So it may be that God’s word was distraction,

Which to our strange type, appears destruction,

Which is bitter.

A poem from Hopkins; we consider I wake and feel the fell of dark not day, talk about the effect of various kinds of pairs in a poem: feel/fell, dark/day, sights/ saw, ways/went, a dull dough. Hopkins has joined us more than once at the table, lounges on the sofa.

A poem by Anne Michaels from Weight of Oranges/Miner's Pond , ‘Women on a Beach’: Light chooses white sails, the bellies of gulls. Spencer Reece’s ‘Margaret’ :“…As you leave Margaret behind and turn the page, listen as the page falls back and your hand gently buries her. This is what the past sounds like.”

How does personality affect our response to writing or Art. Who are we reading, the poet or his poem. Do we appreciate the work less if we aren’t comfortable with her ethics, or even mannerisms. Where does a poem turn, and does it stay long enough for dessert, along with the lemon squares. It’s serious fun, but fun and excitement none the less.

Topics flow one into the other, from wing to feather to father to family. A poem opens the space to something one of us has read that seems to be related or that adds colour, concept or vocabulary to the conversation. Gillian Sze joins us as we’ve been talking about calligraphy, and ink, and mark making, and eyes. Jane Hirshfield has wondrous things to say, Susan Stewart can always start a good thread, follow up with poems to illustrate a point. 

There’s a sense of the rightness to such discussions. The only place some of us get to experience them is at writers’ festivals or VerseFest, when several poets are on stage throwing ideas out and sharing what they have learned about poetry. They are great, but they are up there and shy poets in the audience don’t contribute. In our situation, one of the best things is how comfortable we are with each other. We don’t have agendas. Ego is a word we might discuss linguistically; I don’t know, the subject hasn’t come up.

A quote from Jessica: I like how we sit down and Lesley always makes sure you're comfortable. I like how at the first meeting we all brought desserts. I like how Lesley calls us the Poetry Three.  I've come to think of us as the gamblers. 

Three is the best number of participants. There is plenty of time for each to contribute, time for tangents and comfortable waffling, and there are no concerns about the dynamics changing if there were more of us.  

I once wrote a poem about where language comes from that starts like this:

what’s this slick made thing, worded cornered sky tease

of brilliant shadow, slant of blue-memoried tomorrow

We leave each other enriched, refreshed, having gambled and won. There’s a sense of having touched upon new ideas, of having absorbed more than we can remember right away that may spring into our poems later on. Waiting for our next get together is like waiting for Christmas, the next chance to share thoughts about our blue-memoried tomorrows. I think of Yehuda Amichai’s:

what’s this?

this is an old toolshed.

no, this is a great past love. 

Claudia Coutu Radmore is the author of several books and chapbooks. Accidentals (Apt. 9 Press, Ottawa) won the 2011 bpNichol Chapbook Award.

On Writing #94 : Valerie Coulton

On Writing
Valerie Coulton

When I started writing regularly, I would go to a café with some books and read around in them until a stream of language appeared for me. Then I would try to capture that language in its unrefined state.

Later I would go back to select attractive words or lines from the stream. Not so much editing, more extracting my own language as though found.

-

And then it was about being in a conversation, usually with one person, sometimes another writer, sometimes alive, sometimes “not”.

Maybe that’s the thing I’ve found to be the most interesting aspect of my own writing, the sense of a language stream that comes from and goes to “somewhere else”. Getting in touch with this stream is easier in the context of a long project or series.

-

I put some things away for years, then read them again to see what I think outside the proximity of writing. Other things feel ready to serve. I couldn’t say what makes the difference.

-

In my day job, working with designers, I read a lot about creative process. The same things come up over and over again: find stimuli, get as much stuff "out" as you can, set some constraints to work against, iterate, take on feedback from people who really get what you're doing (and ignore the ones who don't). All of these have been invaluable to me, and I come back to them again and again. Especially stimuli and constraints, two infallible ways of dipping into the stream.

-

It's occurred to me lately that writing is a form of dreaming for me. It bends time. I'm alone and not alone. Familiar elements appear in new guises.

-

After my father died, I didn't really feel like writing for a long time. Now I'm starting again, patiently, without a lot of expectation. It's not a continuation or a beginning; it's like seeing someone again after a long time. Will we feel the same way or some new way? Will we still want to spend time together?

-

we are meeting in the halo
feet in sneakers

his enormous pages
the way blood crowds his face

sea of land of sea
                  little cloud meal

Valerie Coulton is a poet living in Barcelona. She has written Anonymous and Lirio with Edward Smallfield, both from dancing girl press. Her other books are open book, The Cellar Dreamer and passing world pictures, all from Apogee Press. New poems are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly.

On Writing #93 : lars palm

first things first

lars palm

writing, to me, is first & foremost fun. all else is beside the point. more or less, anyway. except maybe that it allows me to travel regularly to read

that done

my aim is 2 poems a day. a habit i picked up from an interview with Hugo Claus who said he did 2 pages every day to keep the boring necessities at bay, or words to that effect. they need not even be functional, although usually one of them is. & frankly i write where & when i can. with morning coffee, to wake my head. breaks during bread work. on the road. in a cafe or pub.

very rarely in splendid isolation. or silence. what's there to get those words dancing?

& that dance is important. not so much on the page as in your head

& how to do that? beats me

now that's no kind of answer. so. we take another angle. or angel

there is of course the mechanical side to it. pen & paper. always. staring into a empty word document wipes me blank. then choosing what to type into that word document. choosing what  goes into one of the manuscripts & which one of them. as in selection process

or in the words of Eileen Tabios; ”poetry as a way of life” as opposed to lifestyle which you may change as you wish. & which you choose. or is it silly of me saying poetry chose me. when after all it comes down to me still not having the patience to write any kind of longer prose. not that i crave doing that for now

& as with so many other poets most anything can fit into one poem or other. Phil Whalen's ”graph of the mind moving” comes to mind. & maybe that brings us back to those dancing words. those words entering the reader's head causing tiny earthquakes leaving the landscape looking slightly different than before. or not. most of the time we may not know

& still we persist. why? why not?

tell me why i shouldn't. i'll be sure not to listen

lars palm [photo credit: Petra Palm] lives with his lovely wife & official photographer currently in Malmö where he writes, teaches, translates, edits among other such activities. his most recent (chap)books are all hat, no cattle (gradient books, 2015), & nobody in between (the red ceilings press, 2015) & look who's singing (moria, 2015). as for the future, there's a little thing, 4 long, forthcoming from the Knives Forks and Spoons Press. he's also recently written one-off poems for things like an animation film festival, an empty bullet casing, a lamp & an anarchist bar in Berlin