rob mclennan
Office, November 2, 2021.
Readings
A book of poetry that was important to you when you were starting out as a poet and how has that shifted or remained constant for you over time
Poets of Contemporary Canada 1960-1970, ed. Eli Mandel (McClelland and Stewart, 1971), and others
There are handfuls of books I try to keep close at hand at any given time, knowing how often I might return to them. From my particular seated vantage point in home office, I catch a quick scan of titles by Susan Howe, Rosmarie Waldrop, William Hawkins, Judith Fitzgerald, George Bowering, Jack Spicer, Sawako Nakayasu, Sarah Manguso, Erín Moure, Robert Kroetsch, Anna Gurton-Wachter, Chelene Knight, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Lorine Niedecker and Norma Cole, among so many, many others. Why is there a puppet on the floor? Occasionally the shelves overwhelm. Only today, our five year old suggested I need to give away some of my books. I must have one hundred books, she said. From here I can see my Best American Experimental Writing volumes, issues of FENCE magazine, The Capilano Review, P-QUEUE, Brick: A Literary Journal, Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory, Tripwire, The Believer and Queen Street Quarterly. Just over there, the first few issues of Lana Turner. Anytime I’m asked what titles I return to, I know I only have to look around my immediate vicinity to properly respond. There are easily far more that I simply can’t see from where I am. Books buried underneath other books.
And then, of course, there is my paperback copy of Poets of Contemporary Canada 1960-1970 (McClelland and Stewart, 1971), edited by Eli Mandel. I seem to recall being gifted that particular volume by my girlfriend when we were both seventeen or thereabouts: a book I held onto like a bible of sorts, well into my twenties. This is where I first discovered Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Milton Acorn, Gwendolyn MacEwen and Al Purdy; John Newlove, bill bissett, Joe Rosenblatt, Michael Ondaatje and George Bowering. “The new boundaries of contemporary poetry,” it claimed, from the front cover of a volume published the year of my first birthday. I latched on to at least half of these poets at different points, most likely starting with Leonard Cohen, including “With Annie gone, / Whose eyes to compare / with the morning sun?” (“For Anne”), as well as Margaret Atwood, through her poem “They eat out” from Power Politics (House of Anansi Press, 1971), a poem that begins: “In restaurants we argue / over which of us will pay for your funeral // though the real question is / whether or not I will make you immortal.”
Later on, it would be Vancouver poet George Bowering who would become essential for the kinds of poetry and poetry structures I would begin to approach. Thanks to Ottawa’s libraries and used bookstores, options that my farm-self didn’t have until then, Bowering’s work was foundational, and a touchstone well into my thirties, in how I approached writing, thinking, community, reviewing and the shape of the book as my unit of composition. It was through Bowering’s work that I learned how to be truly attentive to sound, rhythm, pattern and experiment, although I can’t find a single example from this collection of anything of his that stuck with me. That would be for other volumes, further explorations. He has published some one hundred books by now, after all.
Another poet I connected to, after those initial days, was Saskatchewan poet John Newlove (1938-2003), a writer who had landed in Ottawa (“for his sins,” he once said in an author bio) in 1986, only to seemingly disappear. He was considered by most, including Atwood and Ondaatje, to be “the best lyric poet in Canada” during a stretch that ran from 1964 to 1974. His lyric display held a bulletproof quality; lines and lyrics so tight one could bounce a quarter off, or any bird would trust to light upon. “Lady, lady, I cannot lie,” he wrote, to open “Lady, Lady,” “I didn’t cut down your cherry tree. // It was another man, in another season, / for the same reason. // I eat the stone and not the flesh, / it is the bare bone of desire I want, // something you would throw a dog, / or me, though I insult by saying so.” It was for absolute precision he strove, and by the end, precision enough that he spent far more time excising lines than adding further. Between that and his years of alcoholism, he nearly wrote himself into oblivion.
During his final years, we both lived in Ottawa’s Chinatown, with he less than a block away, and we kept an informal correspondence and interaction throughout. I produced a chapbook of his poems through above/ground press in 1999, his first publication of new work since The Night the Dog Smiled (ECW Press, 1986), and was publisher of his posthumous selected poems, A long continual argument : the selected poems of John Newlove (Chaudiere Books, 2007), edited by Robert McTavish, a documentary filmmaker from Regina who had spent years working a film on Newlove’s life and work, and knew the work better than anyone I’d met, before or since. After conversation with McTavish, it was I who gathered and garnered the quotes we used on the back cover by Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood, and solicited Vancouver poet, critic and former Newlove student Jeff Derksen for the sake of an afterword. Until our publishing company dissolved in 2016, and the backstock sold to Invisible Publishing, I’d spent nearly a decade holding the reprint rights to the work of a poet I’d first read in high school; a poet who’d subsequently become a peer, and even a friend. Does it get any better than this?
The lyrics of his “Ride Off Any Horizon” perhaps the most-commonly-repeated lines of poetry through my recollection over the past thirty-plus years, especially during a reading tour I did with Joe Blades, Brenda Niskala, D.C. Reid and Anne Burke in spring 1998, driving our way through his Saskatchewan prairie. As the first section of Newlove’s poem reads:
Ride off any horizon
and let the measure fall
where it may-
on the hot wheat,
on the dark yellow fields
of wild mustard, the fields
of bad farmers, on the river,
on the dirty river full
of boys and on the throbbing
powerhouse and the low dam
of cheap cement and rocks
boiling with white water,
and on the cows and their powerful
bulls, the heavy tracks
filling with liquid at the edge
of the narrow prairie
river running steadily away.
A book of poetry that was important to you at a specific moment in your life
Susan Howe, That This (New Directions, 2010)
The Heart Does Break: Canadian Writers on Grief and Mourning, eds. George Bowering and Jean Baird (Random House of Canada, 2010)
On the evening of August 19, 2010, I witnessed hospital staff pull (at our direction) the final plug on my mother, after she’d lapsed into an unconscious state that she couldn’t return from. I watched her vitals, one by one, reduce down to silence. It took twenty-six minutes. At that point, she’d been sick for forty-three years, a stretch that began three years before I was born, and four years before she and her husband would finalize my adoption, thus becoming my parents. She’d been diagnosed with failing kidneys, and given three months to two years to live back in 1967, somehow managing twenty-two years of kidney dialysis before her third transplant, in 2000, finally took hold. She’d been gravely ill for multiple long stretches over the years, and simply ill throughout. We’d been holding our breath, it would seem, for a very long time.
I was in a bit of a haze, back then. Not long after she died, I ordered a copy of Susan Howe’s That This (New Directions, 2010), and found that this was a book composed from a similar kind of startling grief, as her collection opens with Howe writing out her discovery that her husband had passed away during the night. “It was too quiet on the morning of January 3rd when I got up at eight after a good night’s sleep. Too quiet.” As that first paragraph ends: “Starting from nothing with nothing when everything else has been said [.]” Over the past twenty years, Howe has become one of those writers I find I’m most startled and affected by, not for her wonderful scraps and collages, but for her prose sections. There was something about the opening section of That This that provided an initial spark of invitation, as well: that I too could write openly on and around such grief, which prompted what became my as-yet-unpublished post-mother non-fiction manuscript, “The Last Good Year.”
Simultaneously to this, there was the anthology that George Bowering and Jean Baird edited, The Heart Does Break: Canadian Writers on Grief and Mourning (Random House of Canada, 2010), a collection rife with poets and fiction writers, many of whom I’ve known for years. David W. McFadden would have called that coincidence, although I think my attentions were simply open, and these two books were what my attentions required, and managed to catch. I would recommend either, and even both, to anyone going through their own particular period of grief. Both helped me enormously, and provided an interesting permission for me to write out my own process of moving forward.
A work of theory or criticism
Joshua Beckman, The Lives of the Poems (Wave Books, 2018) and Three Talks (Wave Books, 2018)
Joshua Beckman’s dual essay collections The Lives of the Poems and Three Talks (Wave Books, 2018) are two of the finest collections of critical prose I’ve read in some time: so much so that I’ve been completely unable to articulate how good they are (thus, my lack of posted review). I keep them close at hand in my office, enough so that I’m constantly misplacing them (I can only harvest one from the office stacks at the moment). Unfortunately, this occurs regularly with books I attempt to keep close: had I just put them away on the shelf, I’d be able to locate them again. But what if I need it quickly?
Every time I attempt to sketch notes on these particular works, I end up launching into a whole line of further thinking: opening my own essay-fragments, which have yet to fully cohere. If, as Dorothy Livesay suggested, the best response to a poem is another poem, might the best response to an essay be not a review, but a further essay? I have yet to properly form my response; but I am thinking upon it, a bit more now than I had been. As he writes as part of his introduction:
But what I think I was being asked to do was to expose or to stabilize something inside my way of being an artist, and the idea (simply the idea of that) was very compelling. Compelling I think because I had always enjoyed seeing others do it. I had enjoyed the private letters, diaries, and writing of others on their own work. I had enjoyed lectures and essays in which artists tried to approach a narrative or philosophy of their own practice, and I had enjoyed artists critiquing others as a way of understanding themselves. But in all of what I appreciated, I realize now, was the basic failure and inability to explain. What I had appreciated was the sparks of disagreement or the expanse of tangential imaginative response they caused. And it was less the clarity than the attempt that I loved.
A book in which you were interested by the use of language or form
Renée Sarojini Saklikar, The Heart of This Journey Bears All Patterns, long poem collected in the volumes ichildren of air india: un/authorized exhibits and interjections (Nightwood Editions, 2013), Listening to the Bees (co-authored with Dr. Mark Winston; Nightwood Editions, 2018), and Bramah and the Beggar Boy (Nightwood Editions, 2021).
An elder Canadian poet recently mentioned via email that they see the notion and structure of the “Canadian long poem,” as championed through anthologies such as Michael Ondaatje’s The Long Poem Anthology (Coach House Press, 1979) and Sharon Thesen’s The New Long Poem Anthology (Coach House Press, 1992) and The New Long Poem Anthology, Second Edition (Talonbooks, 2001), as no longer in play in contemporary writing. I disagreed, and the first example that came to mind was Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar’s ongoing and expansive lyric assemblage, The Heart of This Journey Bears All Patterns (or “THOT J BAP,” as she calls it). Hers is a poem of attention and ongoingness, composed across multiple poetry titles for more than a decade, at least: starting with her full-length debut, children of air india: un/authorized exhibits and interjections (Nightwood Editions, 2013), to Listening to the Bees (co-authored with Dr. Mark Winston; Nightwood Editions, 2018), and to her latest, Bramah and the Beggar Boy (Nightwood Editions, 2021). Given she requested I blurb the new collection, it also prevented me from reviewing the book, so perhaps this provides my opportunity to comment on the larger structure.
Any form worth exploring or championed requires a particular kind of mutability, and I sincerely believe that the “Canadian long poem” is something that has evolved over the past few decades, enough that I attempted to assemble my own version of “The Long Poem Anthology” circa 2007, including concrete and visual works, and more expansive considerations of the form. Saklikar’s assemblage manages to hold a fine line between linearity and collage, both on the large and the small scale, offering a sequence of projects within projects within projects, intricately assembled to form units that connect together into something else. Am I describing nesting dolls, or Voltron? Possibly both. And there is something very exciting watching the ways in which she combines the tradition of the “Canadian long poem” with traditions and stories from her own blended and assembled backgrounds, languages and cultures, something comparable to another Vancouver poet, Isabella Wang, through her own exploration around and through the North American English-language ghazal.
Saklikar’s is a project that should be revered and studied in the same breath as other great Canadian long poems, including bpNichol’s The Martyrology, Robert Kroetsch’s Completed Field Notes and Dennis Cooley’s love in a dry land. There’s such a delightful and energized way in which her poem includes anything and everything, a phrase that could certainly be used to describe each of those examples, but somehow Saklikar manages to do something unique, and uniquely hers with the extended and ongoing form. Saklikar has clearly absorbed and understood the myriad traditions of the long poem, and furthers the structures into wildly unexpected places; pushing the boundaries of what writing can do, and the formal possibilities of what bpNichol termed a “poem as long as a life.”
Writings
Coordinates
1.
A shovel hits pavement. Christine yanks a prominent weed,
only afterward realizing the triptych of leaves
that could easily infect, spread an itch up each arm. The clusters
of interlude, possibility. Hard facts
and gristle. She showers immediately.
2.
What else the wind gathers, lone hedge
that separates properties, a northern border
parallel to our driveway. Cache of generations of leaves, scraps
of paper recycling, a plastic coffee cup, littered. Simply
the fact of a body: a puff of smoke. The
metaphor of the book.
3.
Mrs. Dalloway says she always purchased the flowers
herself. A consequence trapped in a frame.
Christine steps
from the shower, the figure of rainwater.
Our young girls
chaos around her, the economy
of green grass, laughter , mismatched clothes.
4.
Each morning a collision of sound
and disarray, sidelong
to each printed word. A painted design
of sunlight, steadfast traffic. Yawn of static,
the shadow perennials, our two daughters
set in the backyard, swings. Pre-dawn, quickly dressed
, they prepare
their own breakfast. Upon rising, I
bend toward coffee , retrieve dustpan, broom.
I make my wife tea
The amenity of dailyness. Christine folds the last of our daughters
to bed, the curls
of their bedroom door, and a fresh
deposit of laundry. When each of them born, Christine’s preeclamptic pressure,
a life threatening
montage, discounting the possibility
of further babies,
and the space in the hold. Her IV drip, blood pressure monitor,
weekly medical checks. And where we might even put
a further human in here, every room
but the kitchen
belongs to the cat. A history
of unfinished thoughts, of stretched-out conditions. One perception
immediately follows. Upon landing downstairs, she pours her first cup
and abides. This forest of English: if our words
not exactly precise, we
approximate. Twining’s Lady Grey, named for Lady Mary Elizabeth,
wife of Charles Grey, 2nd Earl. This black tea, with lemon
and orange peel, hot. The end, the end. The unobstructed
view. Such panoramic
can sometimes seem too immediate.
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent poetry titles include A halt, which is empty (Mansfield Press, 2019), Life sentence, (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) and the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics (periodicityjournal.blogspot.com) and Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com). He is editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. In spring 2020, he won ‘best pandemic beard’ from Coach House Books via Twitter, of which he is extremely proud (and mentions constantly). 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.