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rob mclennan is the kind of writer who seems impossible in 2008. When I first met rob, he talked of Modernist Poetry as seriously and knowledgeably as if he had spent a lifetime in the academy. We were in a Scottish pub, downtown Ottawa, and our conversation sustained even as he enthusiastically belted out The Proclaimers’ “500 Miles” with a local band. He passed out copies of poems to the other bar patrons, and promoted forthcoming literary events. He behaved as an old colleague: engaging, warm and familiar—not someone with whom I’d had one previous phone conversation. He was lively and serious, young and learned all at once. rob mclennan’s work as a poet, novelist, critic, publisher, workshop teacher—and now, Writer in Residence at the University of Alberta is informed, constantly moving, attentive and simultaneous. He is an autodidact, having completed not even the first month of a BA. mclennan spreads the work of other writers—Canadian and U.S. alike—through his prolific writing, blogging (robmclennan.blogspot.com), touring and publishing. He makes “a living” off of writing and its associated work (although, he will tell you that he’s often late with the rent). He knows the rules and breaks them—or, as he writes in Paper Hotel, “all these years spent colouring beyond the lines.” He is the author of more than a dozen trade poetry collections in three countries. His first novel, white, was just published by The Mercury Press in 2007, and has a collection of literary essays out in the spring with ECW Press, as well as a travel book, Ottawa: The Unknown City, with Arsenal Pulp. He is currently Writer in Residence at the University of Alberta for 2007-2008. When home in Ottawa’s Chinatown, you can find him at a corner table in Pubwell’s, a neighbourhood establishment, where he spends afternoons writing, editing and talking with other writers or anyone else who happens along and asks what he’s up to. LG: One of the things that first struck me about your work is its interest in place: Canada, the prairies, Ottawa, etc. Did growing up on a farm and then taking up residence in the city have an impact on your sensibilities of place or is that far too simplistic? Is there some other essential factor that helps create your poetics steeped in the various places you write about? rm: It could be too simplistic as well as very easily true. I grew up in an area that seemed to feed off its own awareness of historical self, and to a certain degree, still does. Besides that, I grew up on a dairy farm, meaning that not only was the land itself important to my family’s work and life and living, but it meant that family vacations away from the land were difficult, and even further once my mother’s health went south around 1975. When I was seventeen, I picked up a copy of an anthology with the 1960s poetry of George Bowering and John Newlove, and was reading the early work of Leonard Cohen as well. They were all working their version of polis, or place, as William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson would have called it (a big influence on early Bowering). Watching what they were playing with their geographies, predominantly Bowering and his crew, I became very attracted to the idea of recreating my own geographies through whatever lens I was trying to develop; I certainly didn’t see any of what I saw around me reflected in any of the writing, and whatever there was, seemed half a century out of date. Even though I left home in 1989, there was a twenty year gap before any opportunity to properly explore new surroundings after the beginnings of our mid-1970s retreat into the farmhouse. When I started touring heavily in the mid-1990s across Canada, I found I was hungry to learn about where I was, and wanting to know how people lived and acted and reacted to and from their various geographies. I grew up with old-style Scottish Presbyterianism, which is awfully specific; even my ex-wife, with a Franco-Ontarien father and Scottish-decent mother from Prince Edward Island, grew up not that far away from where I did but the sensibilities were completely foreign to mine. How could anyone not be interested in wanting to learn how other people live, and what makes them tick? My grounding sense of geography is two-fold; born in Ottawa and returned at nineteen (where my natural mother lived, worked and schooled, and my adoptive mother born and raised), and raised on the family farm in Glengarry County (where the McLennans have been for 150+ years, and my natural mother, somewhere, was born and raised). There is something so Canadian and even redundant in so many of us working and re-working Northrop Frye’s 1950s “Where is Here?” (the question he suggested Canadians continue to ask ourselves instead of “Who am I?”). It seems to be so much of what our literature seems to be making us do to ourselves, and to some degree, it gets rather tiresome. Aren’t there any other questions in a literature? In my fiction (so far), the geographies are incidental to what is happening throughout the rest of the story; each book works to move more a matter of how the individual characters relate to their surroundings (whether that be internal or external stimuli) than specific works set in specific places. LG: Along the subject of place, talk about what you think it means to be a writer in Canada today? Or how do you characterize the contemporary Canadian poetry/literary world? It definitely seems to have a different sensibility than that of the U.S.—and yet, I’m not sure why. rm: Well, one could say that a part of that question is impossible, since I’ve never been a writer in a country other than my own, or a time other than my own. We have a different sensibility because we live in a whole different country; our standards and foundations are different, despite whatever cultural overlaps we have, now and at the beginnings of both countries. The creative writing programs in Canada aren’t big business the way they are down there, and influence is a tricky thing; small press doesn’t cross boundaries terribly well, and if I weren’t such an active reviewer, most American titles sitting in my office or in my apartment would probably have never made it into my mailbox at all. The CanLit “scene,” so called, is wonderfully vibrant, varied and scattered throughout a seemingly-endless sense of national vs. regional. For some reason, books published out of Toronto are considered national (in attention, sales and distribution) far more than books produced anywhere else, relegated instead into the marginality of strict regionalism, especially in how the mainstream looks at the whole process. Still, there are wonderfully rich ground-level communities in places such as Vancouver, Prince George, Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Windsor, Montreal and Fredericton (as well as other places) that interact, intersect and interrelate quite regularly. We’re still years behind the United States as far as putting our writing online, but even Australia’s Jacket magazine has been featuring more Canadian works over the past few years. I could never get bored with it, although most of what gets the attention does tend to leave me cold; too often I find myself having to hunt down books, chapbooks and authors to find out what’s going on in other parts of the country (I talked about some of this in my essay, “The Trouble with Normal,” originally published in the online Poetics.ca, but reworked for my forthcoming collection of essays with ECW Press, scheduled to appear any day now). LG: The Canadian poet, Stephen Brockwell, has said that “it is essential to regard [your] work with the same eyes you would use to look at a painting by…Greg Curnoe.” I know that you are also a painter. Talk about that intersection between language and painting. What do you take from each that gives to the other? rm: Stephen Brockwell was also talking about something very specific through that comment, about the nature of meaning in my poems, through allusion, collage and various other overlaps he saw between myself and the late London, Ontario artist. There was something spectacular about Greg Curnoe’s approach that I have always found very interesting—it was said that people watched what he was doing because they didn’t know what he would do next. I think there’s something very compelling (and even rare) in that kind of artist, working in whatever field, whether film, television, visual arts or text. There’s an element of that in the work of Christian Bök as well, I’d say. We just don’t know what he might do next. Perhaps that wouldn’t fit in with the goals of all artists, but I find it more compelling than, say, poets doing similar kinds of poems in subsequent books, only better (although I’m sure I’m guilty of the same, here and there). I move where my interest goes, and hindsight (dispenser of great wisdom) reminds how one form can somehow completely open up once, and often only, elements of another is brought in. I know, too, that my poetry became less narrative once I started attempting fiction more seriously in the mid-1990s. I haven’t worked in visual art with any seriousness since moving into my little apartment on Somerset Street West in early 2001; I simply don’t have the space, which I add to my shortlist of disappointments and regrets (delays! always with the delays…). LG: Your work has a curious speed to it. My sense is that it is both deeply attentive to its subject matter even as it quickly moves on to the next thing. It has both a heft and a swiftness to it. In an age where we assign ADD to so much, these attentive turnings seem refreshing to me. What is it that you want from this energy? Talk about the speed and the attention of your work. rm: I think surprise is essential to any art; if you know completely what you’re going to do before you do it, why go through the process? I mean, I know Yann Martel mapped out Life of Pi completely before he started writing, but I can’t work like that (consider, too, the idea that most of us do what we do because we don’t know how to do it any other way). Sure, there’s a certain amount of mapping and research and reading and note taking, but more an exploration of where it’s all going than an outright blueprint. And still, “mapping” presumes “absolute control,” which is something I never want to have over my material; I would rather have the fearless skill to move where the writing takes me. Relinquishing control can be a scary prospect (moreso for some than for others), but I think it’s the only way the work can be allowed to do something really interesting. There’s something dangerous in second-guessing your own process, especially during the first draft. Fear is good; risk is good. Art is about staying clear of your own safety. I think of it as what poet Fred Wah called “drunken tai chi,” knowing the movements so well through practice that you could do it while still being “off,” and thus bringing skill into surprise (or the other way around). It’s important, I think, to have the practice to then do something further with what is unexpected. Otherwise the surprise will be nothing more than a clever kind of accident. I’ve always been fairly intuitive, and been willing to trust myself as far as that goes; it hasn’t really failed me yet. Along those same lines, Ottawa poet/publisher jwcurry has often suggested that bpNichol wasn’t a great poet because he was great at everything, but because he was willing to try everything and was willing to fail; failure is something a number of Canadian poets have not only talked about, but courted, over the years, including Phyllis Webb, Phil Hall and Jon Paul Fiorentino. Hall even suggests that every poet should have at least one book that, ultimately, fails. “Deeply attentive” is a phrase I would agree with; I’ve noticed that an idea can take hold and sit with me for years, whether a trilogy of poetry collections, or a novel that somehow brought about its own prequel (neither of these have yet seen print). I’ve been nearly a decade writing out a particular character’s story, and don’t feel that I’m even close to being finished with her. I feel as though I’ve barely begun. The first draft (written longhand) is always about speed and attention, writing as much as possible before I run out of steam. Once its entered into the computer, then the process of pouring over and tweaking begins, hopefully triggering another burst (in my workings in prose, predominantly) to take the narrative flow further. LG: You and I did a series of collaborations almost two years ago that are coming out this spring in The Capilano Review. What I remember of that experience—to go back to your rapidity—is how quickly you worked. You seem to love the accidents, the dashed revisions, and the pressure of another writer’s language on your own. Is this true? Talk about your interest in collaborative work with other writers. What do you think we get from it as writers, and how do you characterize the end product which turns into something that does not wholly belong to either writer/artist? rm: Well, when doing something artistic, one never wants to remain still, yes? Collaboration is a good way to force any writer out of the confinements and comforts of their own language; writing is made, first and foremost, out of language, so any time new material is brought into the mix, it can only help. I would certainly love to do more collaborations, but the past two or three years have been overloaded with some major projects—Ottawa: The Unknown City (Arsenal Pulp Press), white (The Mercury Press), subverting the lyric: essays (ECW Press) and Chaudiere Books. There just isn’t enough time in the week. Collaborating is something I wouldn’t mind doing more of, and something I’ve been attempting with others for over a decade—including a renga with a writer in Toronto back in 1996, and another with Dean Irvine, Shane Rhodes and Richard Carter in Ottawa in a crowded busy pub a few years later—but so far, ours is the only one that actually ever got off the ground. I did start a collaboration with the Ottawa visual artist Danny Hussey a few years ago, but it seems to have stalled some time back; I haven’t quite decided if it is still a going concern. I don’t think I’m completely ready to give up on it yet. LG: Along with seeming to work in what could be considered two opposing speeds, I also think your poems include a strange personal or experimental concern even as they seem to deflect grand personal revelations. Can you talk about this tension? rm: I’ve never thought about writing or literature as being “about me,” so the notion of writing as announcing “personal revelations” has never been one that I’ve continued, hopefully lapsed long behind me in my boxes of juvenilia. I was reading an essay recently by Ottawa writer Elisabeth Harvor in The New Quarterly about teaching creative writing to first year university students, and about how they didn’t think their stories were interesting enough to write about. She suggested that perhaps they were too close to the subject, and made them all write about their bedrooms back home. I think I might just be there as well, presuming that very little of mine is interesting enough. I really can’t imagine too much of my growing up or subsequent personal life as being of any interest to anyone; my life might have adventures there and here, but was about as normal as I could imagine (perhaps the fault lies there, in my own lack of imagination…). LG: The poet, Kate Greenstreet (whose chapbook you published) and I were talking a few weeks ago about how you don’t seem to separate the life you live and your life as a writer/editor/publisher. What would you say about this? You are so prolific in all that you do. Do you just incorporate work into all of your living? Or is there a hidden seam? rm: How does one keep writing and living separate? When my daughter was little and I was running the daycare, I was doing my ten-hour days, five days a week with three toddlers, but only writing from 7pm to midnight at a coffee shop on Elgin Street three nights a week. Are these separations of identity or simple opportunity? Are these determinations merely about scheduling? I mean, I’m still a writer when I’m hanging out with my daughter Kate, and still a parent when I’m putting a manuscript together. It’s all the same self. It’s part of, I think, also why I refuse to call myself a “poet.” The term by itself reduces my whole life to a simple fragment of what my day-to-day is about. I prefer the term “working writer,” if anything. Really, I would just rather people use my name and leave the whole thing alone. LG: You have been called by the generous Canadian poet, Dennis Cooley, the “Johnny Appleseed of Canadian poetry.” Talk about your ideas behind above/ground press and your other presses’ distribution. It strikes me that you value production and getting poets’ work out to the public more than the “book as objet d’art.” Is this true? How do you see yourself in relation to presses like greenboathouse in British Columbia, a press that gives a lot of attention to the making of the book? What ideas drive your presses? rm: Cooley has been calling me that for a few years now; the first time I actually met him, I was a naïve young poet touring west in 1997 with little more than a Via Rail pass and a box load of chapbooks that I spread across the country. I wasn’t even old enough or aware enough to know that a tour such as that couldn’t really have worked, but somehow it did. Jason Dewinetz at Greenboathouse Books does magnificent work, but he’s a designer, where I barely squeak by (Chaudiere Books, ottawater and Poetics.ca are designed by other people). He also has different publishing goals than I do; getting the work out there is more important to me than creating beautiful objects I then can’t afford to give out, and so much of my above/ground press aesthetic depends on the handout/exchange (as bpNichol called it, the “gift economy”). I like the idea of introducing readers and other writers to each other’s works; it’s what drives my reviewing as well, and why so much of it appears for free on my blog. Most folk don’t have the time or the inclination to go through the stacks of material to discern what might be interesting, or go through what might be little available outside of its area of creation. One can claim that I have very little but time, so why not pass along some of the things I’ve picked up along the way? There are certainly other writers out there doing the same online, including John Tranter with Jacket magazine, or Sina Queyras and Ron Silliman with their blogs. LG: This last year has been really big for you: you became Writer-in-Residence at the University of Alberta, and you had a novel come out. Can you talk about the impact of both these events and do you see them as different than the other avenues in your career? rm: I’d been wanting to do a writer-in-residence gig for a while now, and, until the position was offered, I was thinking of waiting another year or two until my daughter was older; I’m realizing that, basically, the position requires me to do what I’ve been doing for years already. Even so, my version seems to be far more public than others, as I’ve been going to their events, blogging about and promoting Edmonton events, authors and books, publishing out of my office, organizing events, and even posting nearly a hundred interviews online since I got here, through my “12 or 20 questions” series (robmclennan.blogspot.com). It all feels as extension of what I’ve been doing in Ottawa for nearly twenty years as it is; what’s the difference? I’ve been attempting fiction seriously since 1995 or so, and have two abandoned novels as well as three more I think I want to finish while I’m here (I have to stop starting up other projects if I think that’s going to actually happen), so it certainly feels a reward and acknowledgment of over a decade of attempts. Working with Bev Daurio (editor/publisher of The Mercury Press) has been just wonderful; I feel completely humbled and overwhelmed to now be part of a press such with a history and a list. I just hope we can continue working together on future projects. I’ve been pretty lucky over the years to work with some pretty impressive publishers, and hope to continue publishing relationships with Talonbooks, ECW Press and The Mercury Press for as long as they’ll let me. I’m finding the impact of the writer-in-residence position pretty interesting, for a whole bunch of reasons. Consider the shift in geography, just by itself: when I was nineteen, I moved an hour’s drive west from the farm to Ottawa, and now I’m nine months in Edmonton. I even wrote an essay about “anticipating Alberta” that was published a few months before I arrived on the on-line journal Danforth Review. As Ottawa writer Elizabeth Hay wrote to me in an email in September, “You’ll be like Creeley, shaking off his easternness.” The first few weeks in Edmonton were somewhat hard, and a bit overwhelming, but I’m slowly figuring it all out; honestly, I’m starting to even wish it was a two-year term, like the playwright-in-residence. I just can’t learn a new city properly in nine months. Between the novel and the writer-in-residence stint; both seem to give me attention and consideration in ways that I don’t think I have before. It’s getting harder to dismiss me, I suppose. I’m used to carrying copies of my books around with me day after day, but I’m selling far more copies of the novel than I ever had with poetry; what is it about the genre that people take more seriously, and presume more accessible? I remember thinking the same in 1999 when I was touring with writer Anne Stone, and watching more people who didn’t go to readings purchase her “difficult” novel (her second novel, Hush) from her on the train than my relatively-straightforward poems (my second poetry collection, bury me deep in the green wood). I know how arbitrary it is; when the film version of the Michael Turner poetry collection Hard Core Logo came out, the book was reprinted with a single word altered on the back cover, calling it “novel” instead of “poetry,” presumably so the sales would have a chance. I think genre is very interesting to play with, especially the arbitrariness of calling something “novel” as opposed to anything else, and have been reacquainting myself with writers such as Nicole Brossard, Michael Ondaatje (pre-The English Patient) and Sheila Watson to be reminded of what just might be possible, perhaps. LG: It’s the new year…so what would rob mclennan’s poetry wish be for 2008? rm: It certainly is the new year; I’m even answering your questions while sitting in the Ottawa International Airport lounge on January 2, as I prepare to return for the second half of my Edmonton, post-Christmas. Poetry wish? I would certainly love to make some headway into American publishing. Now that I’ve got these older/big projects out of the way, I’ve got a few more that need pushing along. But the new year has barely begun; last year at this time, I couldn’t even imagine being in Edmonton, or having a novel actually published; what does this next year have in store? All I can think of is in terms of the next five months, before I leave this writer-in-residence position; I’ve got a collection of literary essays and a travel book on Ottawa out in February and March, and have poetry and creative non-fiction manuscripts I’ve started since arriving in town that I’d like to get further along, as well as a couple of larger fiction projects I’d like to get finished. ~~
Born in Ottawa, Canada's glorious
capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of
over a dozen books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction in three
countries, he is editor/publisher of
above/ground press,
Chaudiere
Books, ottawater (ottawater.com),
Poetics.ca (with Stephen Brockwell) and editor of
numerous other anthologies and single-author poetry collections with
publishers across Canada. He is spending the 2007-8 academic year in
Edmonton, as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta. He
regularly posts reviews, essays and interviews on his increasingly
clever blog at robmclennan.blogspot.com.
Lea Graham’s poems, translations, reviews and articles have been published in or are forthcoming in journals such as Notre Dame Review, American Letters & Commentary, Mudlark, Shadow Train and The Worcester Review. Her work was included in two recent anthologies, The City Visible: Chicago Poetry in the 21st Century, and The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel: Second Floor. Her chapbook, Calendar Girls, was published in spring of 2006 by above/ground Press in Ottawa. She is currently Assistant Professor of English at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Lea Graham was born in Memphis and grew up in Northwest Arkansas.
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