Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 379

call for submissions : seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics,‏

Currently seeking submissions of interviews, essays and other critical materials for the next issue of the online journal seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics:

http://www.ottawater.com/seventeenseconds/

The first eleven issues remain online, and recent issues include work by Michelle Detorie, Cameron Anstee, Andy Weaver, Claire Molek, Chus Pato, Michael Boughn, Margaret Christakos, Victor Coleman, Marilyn Irwin, Donato Mancini, Erín Moure, Christine Stewart, Brecken Hancock, j/j hastain, Jessica Smith, David O'Meara, Wanda Praamsma, Amy Dennis, Phil Hall, Joshua Marie Wilkinson and plenty of others.

Send submissions, suggestions and pitches to editor/publisher rob mclennan via rob_mclennan (at) hotmail (dot) com

Amish Trivedi, Sound/Chest

PAINT/SWEEP                               1714
This is the office soshe leans forwardagain. My washtub isblood-spattered and raucous.Even at night, Ican hear the fireworksas they bounce off theengraved faces. Elviswishes he were backin time. My president hasa handle that lacks vision. Inthe doorway I felt the brushpassed of a hand and two miceracing the hands up and down:these many aisles waveringin sawdust. It’s grainyeven when you’ve goneover a dozen times and stillthere are no songs youremember hearing.
In the “After/Word” at the back of his first trade poetry collection (and the first title by new publishing house Coven Press), Sound/Chest (Birmingham AL: Coven Press, LLC, 2015), Providence, Rhode Island poet and editor Amish Trivedi writes:
The titles to these poems come from labels on a discarded card catalogue that I found while wandering around the basement at the University of Iowa’s Main Library in June of 2008. There were several cabinets that were being prepared to go to surplus, and while normally I paid no attention to them, the fact that this one cabinet still had labels drew my eye.
While there is probably no way of knowing exactly what the catalog’s function was, a librarian’s best guess is that they were used for a custom filmstrip collection. What the words and numbers are in relation to has been lost. The filmstrip, though, is that archaic bit of grade school technology that required the teacher to assign a student to turn a knob when the supplemental audio urged her to do so, usually through the use of an annoying beep that caused the inattentive turner to startle and flip the knob quickly but always too late.
My goal was to create a relationship between these words and in most cases, the numbers. Our minds, through the use of language, create relationships between ideas all the time, and I felt that with such a diverse set of ideas existing in one collection, there was little to do but manufacture that relationship.
Through the course of sixty-one poems, Trivedi utilizes the card catalogue phrases as bouncing-off points, composing poems that link through a tenuous series of stitches, including tone, structure and the occasional reference to the library. In a forthcoming interview over at Touch the Donkey , he discusses some of the thematic linkages, writing: “So yes, it’s something thematically I want to figure out better but I don’t want to be heavy-handed with the social aspect of it. I want the poems to function as by themselves. It’s like Sound/Chestwhere not every poem is about being in a library or being in a flood: the poems should have an overall direction but maybe each individual portion can do its own thing and that’s cool.” What becomes less interesting than the relationships between the text and the numbers is the relationship between the binary that exists in each title, and their relationship with the resulting poem, as Trivedi allows the expanse of the archive to enter into his poems, presenting small bits of information and salvage on just about everything. Through the build-up of poems that slowly accumulate into the collection Sound/Chest, one realizes that there is a flood, and there is something kept safe in a drawer, both of which expand, and even multiply, even as they are allowed equal weight. As he writes: “I’ve stolen all the /regrets I know about.”






TRUNCATED/OBVIOUS                         1713
This is the worst say I know:I had this memorized before,so just turn it when—you’remissing—this finger or thatone—to a lawnmower I—heard it like that I—nogo back to the one beforethe jelly—you’re the one whospilled the paste—you’re theone who flushed thepiece of her hair bandand shat on the edge of the—problem I have is withher Father—you’re missingthe beeps and we’reout of people with—fingers.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Ian Burgham

Ian Burgham is the author of five collections of poetry published in Canada, Australia and the UK. Burgham has performed his work in many poetry venues in different parts of Canada, England and Scotland, published in over twenty-five literary and poetry journals and toured Great Britain reading at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and at Canada House in London. His newest work, Midnight , has just been launched by Quattro Books this year. He is winner of the Queen’s University Well-versed Award and Nominee for the ReLit Award. In October he is touring the UK with poets Steven Heighton, Catherine Graham and Manchester spoken-word poet, Mike Garry.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I ‘m not sure the first book changed my life in substantive ways. But what it did was to convince me that someone else felt there was value for others in what I was producing. The idea that what was the result of an isolated act, a difficult solitary exercise, might be meaningful to someone else was almost a surprise. It provided me with increased confidence in showing work to others. Seeing it in print also gave me a new way to look at my poems …and suddenly you felt that maybe they just weren’t as good as they could be.

I think my most recent work is a little more ambitious in a number of ways – but I think my voice remains the same.  One new thing I’ve tried in the most recent book is to link the poems with a continuous narrative that traces a moral and spiritual journey.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
When I was nine I tried to write a novel. It was as hopeless an exercise then as now. I am not a novelist or in any sense a prose writer. I don’t read novels. I can’t. I don’t like the form. I have always loved poetry – initially because it is a form of music, and that is fundamental to my being. My grandmother, with whom my family shared a house as I was growing up, kept poetry books by my Scots and Orcadian grandfathers on the shelf. So poetry was never foreign territory. 

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
A work, whether a long poem, or a thematic collection or an individual short poem arises out of image, sound, but always out of a feeling that declares its own significance. I don’t always know what the feeling signifies. But I start. Then what comes unfolds in a series of hooks and eyes of ideas and emotions. The first drafts are rarely anything but a beginning. And yes, I make notes over a course of time. I go through many drafts, always trying to hold on to where the poem is going. You have to be brave and be prepared to encounter anything and to move toward it, into it. Poetry is not for the fearful.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
As I said emotion, image, music, sound, smell, anything that triggers memory and the insect cloud of ideas – but always emotional significance. I do play with directed ideas later…but they tend to drag the work down into prose. However, my most recent book is more than a collection of separate poems; I started with the idea of linking locations with emotions and images, and it evolved into a narrative.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I read rarely. It is not that I don’t enjoy readings but performance is not writing. As a former musician, I know how performance can feed the ego. In a way, you work with an audience, but you can also manipulate an audience too. Primarily, performing does not engage the poetic mind; it is not the same way of mind and not the same way of being. I prefer making the work to the promotion and performing of it. I think the value in reading is that you, the poet, can hear it and know whether the music and the structure, your word and phrase choices are working. You encounter it in a new way. But my primary audience is my own ear. Reading for others is often valuable as part of the editing process, but it is a distraction. What audiences do when they hear my work, how they react, is not my business or my concern. I just hope that whatever they might find in it is meaningful. 

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I have one concern that may lie behind my writing; in fact, it haunts me. Why do we exist; what is the value of existence? So far the only answer I have is that we exist to make. If you strip away distractions and beliefs in anything, you come to the core of existence which seems to me to be nothing but pain and imperfection. But art gives me reason. It is the divinity of us, or in us, or at least the closest we come to it.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The role of the writer is to write. And what you create can’t be in any way satisfying, beautiful or meaningful without coming from a place of truth. So poets confront and expose and work in truth. That is a damned and unforgiving place. Who wouldn’t prefer distractions? But poets have no choice when they are in the act of making if they hope to make something that is of value. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
It is essential. When I was much younger, I worked as an editor with a number of major poets in Scotland. There wasn’t one of them who didn’t work with one editor, or more than one, during the evolution of their poems. It is essential because comment and advice can strengthen the work. But editors of poetry must be poets themselves. We are often trying to overcome a nervousness that what we are producing is not quite right; there is lots of room for getting it wrong.  An ignorant editor can embrace the nervousness, but a discerning one can reveal where the poetry really wants to go.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Work at the craft and then get out of the way when the poem begins to form. Then, when you think it is finished, put it away for weeks and months – when you see it again you’ll know what needs to be done. And be honest…write honestly or what you produce will have no lasting value.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I write almost every day. If I don’t, I become “antsy”, restless, unhappy. But I can’t work on poems at my desk for longer than 3-4 hours at a time.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Often other poets’ work unblocks me – one word or phrase from a good poem and my imagination and emotions begin.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The sea and salt on a cool day. I am always wondering what and where that place is.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Science is a great source of image, symbol, metaphor and meaning. But so are all the others you have mentioned.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I do not read novels. But the poetry of many others, and the writings of poets on the nature of the poetic process, are key to my understanding of where all this business comes from. However, having said that, it is James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man to which I return often. It was the work that, when I first read it at the age of 17, gave me the first glimpse that the way the world appeared to me, and what my mind did with the ways of the world I encountered, and the words and images that emanated from it, that this was all “normal” for some – I had a community. 

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I have done it. But I would like to again live a life of daily literary endeavour, thought and study in exile in some other part of the world. A life lived in exile is delicious, loaded with new ways of thinking, seeing and feeling. Also I would like to collaborate with a musician/composer on a poetic work. 

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
A stonemason like my grandfathers.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Necessity made me write. I was born with the need and the passion, and never really wanted to do anything else.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Philip Larkin: The Complete Poems , and the notebooks of Jack Kerouac.

19 - What are you currently working on?
I am working on an idea to link a series of poems that focus on the salvation that resides in poverty, humiliation, disease, disfigurement and grief. I am heavily influenced at the moment by the paintings of the English painter, L.S. Lowry. 

[Ian Burgham reads in Ottawa as part of The Sawdust Reading Series with Steven Heighton on June 10, 2015]

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Jessica Smith, life-list

American poet Jessica Smith’s long-awaited second trade collection, life-list (Victoria TX: chax press, 2015), is a remarkable collection of expansive and exploded lyrics stretched and pulled apart to form staccato breaches into memory, multilinearity, meaning and language. As she explains in a recent interview posted over at Touch the Donkey: “I want to use the whole space of the page and approach it like a kind of blend between painting and poem, in that the words are usually arranged roughly left-right, top-bottom, but not entirely. I see the space of the page as already having a certain “weight,” like it’s not a blank/silent space, and that concept was molded for me by John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock and Steve McCaffery. I was also inspired, early on, by installation art, which along with sculpture is still what excites me the most: I want the audience to physically participate in the making of the object.” Structured into two sections—“observation” and “memory” (a selection of the second section published as a chapbook, here)—the poems in life-list, published a full nine years after the appearance of her Organic Furniture Cellar (Outside Voices, 2006), suggest far more might be possible, with further titles in what could simply be the opening work of something far larger. If this is Smith writing out a “life list,” how many entries might there be?
Part of what is remarkable about Smith’s work is her use of fragment and space, allowing the poems such a breadth of multiple readings and meanings, even while allowing a strong intuitive narrative grounding. There is something lovely and deceptively light in the way her poems accumulate so subtly into such hefty, serious weight, pinging across the margins of the book in ways that deserve as much to be heard aloud as experienced upon the page. Further in her Touch the Donkey interview, she responds:
I choose the page as a constraint: Often when I asked for poems for periodicals, I ask the editor about the margins, page size, and font, and then I write a poem specifically for the magazine within those constraints. When I write a larger project on my own, I choose my own visual constraints. I enjoy writing by hand on square pages, but when I transfer drafts to the computer I try to choose standard printer sizes for paper and margins and standard, readable typefaces. I am constrained by the current standards of publishing, but I choose the constraint for myself with an eye to publishing because I want a larger audience than the kind of micropublishing that non-standard pages/typefaces would require. So, yes, I sometimes feel limited by page space, but the limitation is positive. I need boundaries! It helps me concentrate on other things.
Given her use of space, it becomes nearly impossible to replicate the poems in a forum such as this, but one should attempt to read as many as possible online in other places, such as here and here and here.

configurations: pinhey's point (poem)

I've a new poem, "configurations: pinhey's point," on Pinhey's Point, the Ottawa historic site, now online at Monday Night Lit .

Noah Eli Gordon, The Word Kingdom in the Word Kingdom

A FACT CUTS ITSELF IN TWO on the landing below the Book of Dreams. Becomes part flowering muscle, half a piece standing in for the Queen. But what of the magistrate, up in arms & waving from the margins where there is endless commerce & an amaranth on the sill? & the window itself? Its hypotheses & electronics? The white wires will stand for science, lines in the author’s poker face taken on faith. Betraying the historical underpinnings, a pin pulled outside of Alexandria. (“THE LAUGHING ALPHABET”)
Colorado poet, editor and publisher Noah Eli Gordon’s ninth poetry collection is The Word Kingdom in the Word Kingdom (Brooklyn NY: Brooklyn Arts Press, 2015), a collection, as his notes at the end acknowledge, “composed and revised variously between 2000 and 2013.” Given the amount he’s published over the past decade—including Figures for a Darkroom Voice (with Joshua Marie Wilkinson; Tarpaulin Sky, 2007), A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow (New Issues, 2007), Novel Pictorial Noise (Harper Perennial, 2007), The Source (Futurepoem Books, 2011) and The Year of the Rooster (Ahsahta Press, 2013), as well as the work-in-progress “The Problem”—it’s curious to interact with a collection of his that include some of the first writing of his that I really connected with, discovered via his chapbook Acoustic Experience (Pavement Saw Press, 2008). Gordon appears to work on multiple projects concurrently, which means that some of the work in the current collection might even pre-date a couple of his entire already-published poetry books. Going through the poems that make up The Word Kingdom in the Word Kingdom, and being aware of so much of his other poetry books have been constructed as book-length projects, this collection almost appears as a collection of stray poems, composed over an extended period as comparatively stand-alone pieces that simply accumulated. The linkages between the poems are there, both in tone and structure, even amid the variety of prose poems, short sequences and tight lyrics. Jack Spicer referred to such disconnected or stand-alone pieces as “one night stands,” and Gordon, now, has a collection of such, akin to Toronto poet and BookThug publisher Jay MillAr’s Other Poems (Nightwood Editions/blewointment, 2010), or Vancouver poet George Bowering’s book of magazine verse, In The Flesh (McClelland & Stewart, 1974), which itself riffed off Spicer’ own “Book of Magazine Verse” from The Collected Books of Jack Spicer (Black Sparrow Press, 1975). In his “Afterword” to the collection, Gordon writes:
This is where the poem begins: the Word Kingdom. When I was about twenty, I remember sitting in my room one night, annoyed with something my housemates were up to, and a bit bored with whatever my other friends were doing. It was one of those evening[s] where you just feel aimless, off-balance, agitated. There was something gnawing at me, but I didn’t know what. Then, out of nowhere, a procession of sirens passed by my house. I mean there were fire trucks, police cars, a few ambulances, lots and lots of noise—sudden, alarming noise; then, nothing. It was dead silent for maybe a second or two before the sirens picked up again. This time they seemed to come from every direction, as though they were surrounding the house. But the pitch was off, all wobbly, a weird vibrato, like electronics trying to run on nearly dead batteries. The sound wasn’t coming from the sirens at all. It was an animal sound. It was every dog in the neighborhood at once attempting to imitate the noise. It was the word kingdom. None of them could do it quite right, but damn were they going for it. It felt simultaneously sad and triumphant. It was the exact moment I decided to be a writer. I’m not writing the noise of the sirens, nor am I writing the noise of the dogs. I hope my poems take root in the silence after the two have sounded: mimetic chatter and babble paradoxically from intellection to imagination. The word kingdom in the Word Kingdom.
The collection reads as though Gordon, over the years, has been utilizing short lyrics as a way to sketch out a series of commentaries on contemporary poetry, and this is simply the accumulation of pieces that could easily have been written as short essays. These are notes on form, structure and subject, playing off a level of cultural expectation in poetry, with the occasional playful jab or exploration at elements of his contemporary field, as a number of his titles suggest, such as “A THEORY OF THE NOVEL,” “FOR EXPRESSION,” “QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY,” “AGAINST ERASURE,” “ARS POETICA,” “ANOTHER COMMENT ON THE TEXT” or the three poems titled “BEST AMERICAN EXPERIMENTAL POETRY.” I find it curious that Gordon has chosen to explore ideas of poetry through the form of the poem (much in the way that Stephen Brockwell and Peter Norman once collaborated in a conversation on the form of the sonnet through the form of the sonnet, or Mark Truscott’s short prose pieces on poetic brevity). His is a call to action, attention and an engagement with form over fashion, such as in the poem “EIGHT MEDITATIONS ON ENORMITY, PETRIFACTION, AND WORK,” that includes: “But wasn’t there much left to learn from the old ways? / Hadn’t we heard a literal train of thought approaching from / the past?” In a field of poetic discourse that is too often far too unpoetic and staid, Gordon’s notes on form are a welcome relief.
CONTINUED ETHICAL ENGAGEMENT OF THE NARRATIVE TRADITION
Concise articulation wasn’t what we’d wanted, exactly.I’m not so sure the line matters. I’m not so surethe line matters. You don’t just get on a motorcycle and becomea kind of historical category. First, they considered foundinga unified artistic school with a coherent program. Them, the sunagain disappeared over hilltops. Was this the extension of powerby an expansionist idea about the world being purely internalized?Think: childhood but with the irony, an unattainable conditionin which we collectively float. It takes at least as much scrutinyas standing on one shore and looking at another. Instead, we spenda lot of tie staring at ink stains. Call it disregard for whateverone proposes as the latest craze of substantive adherenceand simplistic acquiescence to wallpaper wallpaper wallpaper.Look imaginatively at a pineapple and disappear. Look imaginativelyat a pineapple and disappear. The poem isn’t interested in helping you.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Anne Champion

Anne Champion is the author of Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013) and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017).  Her poems have appeared in Verse Daily, The Pinch, Pank Magazine, The Comstock Review, Thrush Poetry Journal, Redivider, Cider Press Review, New South, and elsewhere.  She was a recipient of the Academy of American Poet’s Prize, a recipient of the Barbara Deming Memorial grant, a Pushcart Prize nominee, a St. Botolph Emerging Writer’s Grant nominee, and a Squaw Valley Community of Writers Poetry Workshop participant. She holds degrees in Behavioral Psychology and Creative Writing from Western Michigan University and received her MFA in Poetry from Emerson College.  She currently teaches writing and literature at Wheelock College in Boston, MA and is a staff writer for Luna Luna Magazine.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book, Reluctant Mistress, didn’t significantly change my life.  The process of writing it taught me a lot, both about myself and about craft.  Publication was simply a goal completed that allowed me to move on and dedicate my energies to other projects.  The best part of publication was having readers who fully understood my work.  I’m so humbled and grateful for the warmth of the poetry community—that simply means everything.  It gives my life a sort of fulfillment that I never dreamed I’d have.

My new collection set for publication by Noctuary Press, The Dark Length Home, is a collaborative collection that I wrote with the incomparable Sarah Sweeney.  It was an experience I treasure.  I generally have a plan as I sit down to write a poem. I know what images I will focus on, I know what story I want to tell, and I have a general idea of how it will end.  With Sarah, we alternated line by line.  I had to let go of control, and it was exciting.  Poems would take turns I didn’t expect, and I had to adapt to tones and voices that were not my own.  I’m really proud of how we navigated the process, and I think it pushed me in new directions.

I’m working on other collections, and I always want to challenge myself in terms of topics that I obsess over and formal constraints.  I am trying to do something new with each one.  At some point in time, I started to feel like I was writing about the same thing repeatedly, and I needed to challenge myself.  I definitely think I’m doing that with my new work.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I actually came to fiction first.  I wrote stories from the time I was a child and I studied primarily fiction through college.  However, at some point in my college experience, poetry simply started to become the genre that spoke to me most forcefully, moved me most emotionally, and served me as a writer.  Once I started writing poetry, I stopped writing everything else.  I still read all genres of writing religiously, but poetry allows me to express what I want in a variety of creative ways.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
The initial draft work comes quickly to me. I’m usually struck by an image, a line, or a concept and it harasses me until I begin to interrogate it through writing it down.  I’ll shape it into a poem fairly fast.  However, the revision process is often long, tedious, and torturous.  I have a group of writers that I bring drafts to and rely on for revision advice.  I’ll often play with various forms and structures, going back and forth between new and old drafts.  Sometimes the revision comes within weeks, sometimes I keep tweaking a poem for years.  Some poems I finally abandon and throw away.  Regardless, the final draft rarely looks like the original.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Within the last few years, I have focused on making a book from the beginning.  It seems that, in terms of both getting a manuscript published and in reader’s experience of the work, it’s best to have a cohesive collection.  My first two collections (one which is unpublished), did not really begin as a “book” per se, though I tried to structure them so that they look at specific themes.  In writing them, I was simply writing poems about all different things that inspired me.  Now, I generally start with a vision for a book, and focus my writing on exploring that vision.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Public readings are necessary to the process, as they get your writing out in the world and allow you to expose it to new people. I enjoy performing in front of crowds, so I’ve always enjoyed readings. However, after my first book, I did so many readings that I had to take time off from it—I got very burned out, and I just wanted to hole myself away and focus on new work.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I don’t have specific questions, but I do have obsessions that I’ve been exploring for years.  Some of my obsessions include female sexuality, feminism, sexual liberation, abuse, war, race, and oppression.  In terms of questions, I always think of my poems as interrogating a wound.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
In many cultures, poets are revered.  When I was doing activist work in Palestine, Palestinians would always tell me that I was a messenger for God, because “a poet speaks God’s pain.” I found this sentiment lovely (though it certainly put a lot of expectation on my work!) 

I think writers are important in that artists play a role in creating culture, reflecting cultural values, and capturing the sentiments of a historical moment.  No matter what you are writing, you are writing in the context of culture and history; thus, we have a very important responsibility to respect that and reflect deeply upon the issues of our time.  We need to be creatures of empathy and morality, though we may not be perfect ourselves—in our writing, we should be striving for the better world.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
It’s essential for any writer to work with other people.  Many people think of it as such a solitary profession, but I really don’t think it should be.  Our work is not read in a vacuum, and it shouldn’t be written in one either.  We need an audience and we need feedback to perfect our craft.  I’ve never had a bad experience working with an editor.  In fact, I quite like my editors! 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I saw Michael Cunningham speak when I was in college.  Someone asked him what advice he could give to young writers. His answer was simple: “It’s going to take a really, really long time to see your work in print.  You are going to be rejected a lot.  You have to be really patient and really determined to keep trying and keep writing.”  It seems like common sense, but I really took it to heart.  I don’t let rejection bother me.  I just keep focusing on trying to make my writing better and make my projects become something I’m personally proud of.  Even if they never see the light of day, the process of writing is still very fulfilling to me, in and of itself.  I want my work to be read, but I don’t make publication a measure of my happiness as a writer.  When I have success, I consider it a bonus to something that I already love, something that is a major part of who I am. 

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I don’t really have one.  As a professor, I try to sneak in writing whenever I can.  I dedicate myself most to writing when I have time off.  I don’t think a writer needs to write every day to be a real writer; part of being a writer is experiencing life and processing the world mentally and emotionally.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I go to books of poetry that I know have powerfully moved me.  When I re-read books that changed me, I usually feel inspired immediately. Or I look for new books of writers who are exploring themes that I’m interested in.  Whenever I find a poem I wish I wrote, I get very excited about going back to writing and experimenting on the page.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I don’t think I’ve fully figured out what home means to me.  I feel at home in a lot of places.  I feel most at home when I’m traveling far from home. (Though I miss my cats!)

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I know a lot of writers that dabble in other arts or use other arts for their inspiration.  For me, personally, books really do come from books.  I love all forms of art and I try to expose myself to it as much as possible, but they rarely explicitly influence my work.  Whereas writers influence my work constantly.  I wouldn’t change or experiment if it were not for what I’d seen other writers do.  I get most inspired while reading. 

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
There’s so many!! This is always the hardest question because I want to rattle off a long list. Sylvia Plath is really my backbone as a poet. If it were not for her, I would not be a poet.  She showed me how to write about rage, pain, and abuse with such musical grace, and I still think no one holds a candle to her metaphors.  Anais Nin influenced me in terms of sexual liberation and feminist themes.  I also love Louise Gluck, Tarfia Faizullah, Traci Brimhall, Sharon Olds, Mark Doty, Sandra Cisneros, and Junot Diaz.

In terms of my life outside of work, there are several poets who have been an incredible support system: Lisa Marie Basile, Mary Stone, and Kristina Marie Darling, to name a few. I also greatly admire their writing.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Work in a refugee camp in the Middle East.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I would be a full time activist and community organizer.  That’s hard to make a living doing, but I’m so inspired by revolutionaries that sacrificed everything for social change.  I was really inspired by young peace activists that I met in Palestine; they are doing such creative things!  I’d love to be fully immersed in that.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I write because I have to.  Words haunt me, and if I don’t get them out then I’ll lose my mind.  I write to know who I am and understand the world better. I write to increase my sense of empathy for others. I write because I simply have no choice.  It gives my life depth in ways that nothing else does.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I recently read Nelson Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom . As an activist, I found his voice to be monumentally inspiring, full of wisdom, dogged patience, and compassion. 

I don’t see a lot of movies (I’m more of a TV gal), but I really loved Selma.

19 - What are you currently working on?
I’m currently working on revising a manuscript called Graveyard of Numbers which is the result of a Peace Delegation that I went to in Palestine.  The manuscript documents the many stories I was told by locals in documenting the horrors of war and military occupation.  It also ties in issues of race and oppression in American culture.

My next manuscript, which I’ve started the process of writing, will be Odes and Persona poems to famous historical women. So far I have poems to Annie Oakley, Amelia Earhart, Judy Garland, Sylvia Plath, Harriot Jacobs, Anne Frank, and others.  I hope to have a broad range in terms of race and sexuality, including transgender women and men.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

dusie : the tuesday poem,

The Tuesday poem is two years old, with more than one hundred new poems and counting! Since April 9, 2013, I've been curating a weekly poem over at the dusie blog, an offshoot of the online poetry journal Dusie (http://www.dusie.org/), edited/published by poet and American expat Susana Gardner.
http://dusie.blogspot.ca/
The series aims to publish a mix of authors from the dusie kollektiv, as well as Canadian and international poets, ranging from emerging to the well established. Over the next few weeks and months, watch for new work by dusies and non-dusies alike, including Steve McOrmond, Lily Brown, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Beth Bachmann, Harold Abramowitz, Sarah Burgoyne, David James Brock, Elizabeth Treadwell, Shannon Maguire, Mary Austin Speaker, Victor Coleman, Charles Bernstein, Jennifer K Dick, Eric Schmaltz, Kayla Czaga, Paige Taggart, Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Lillian Necakov, Liz Howard, Jamie Reid, Jennifer Londry, Rachel Loden, a rawlings, Jenny Haysom, Jake Kennedy, Beverly Dahlen, Kristjana Gunnars, Eleni Zisimatos, Pete Smith, Julie Carr, Natalee Caple, Alice Burdick and Phinder Dulai.
A new poem will appear every Tuesday afternoon, Central European Summer Time, just after lunch (which is 8am in Central Canada terms).

If you wish to receive notices for poems as they appear, just send me an email at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com.
So far, the Tuesday poem series has featured new writing by Elizabeth Robinson, Megan Kaminski, Marcus McCann, Hoa Nguyen, Stephen Collis, j/j hastain, David W. McFadden, Edward Smallfield, Erín Moure, Roland Prevost, Maria Damon, Rae Armantrout, Jenna Butler, Cameron Anstee, Sarah Rosenthal, Kathryn MacLeod, Camille Martin, Pattie McCarthy, Stephen Brockwell, Rosmarie Waldrop, Nicole Markotić, Deborah Poe, Ken Belford, Hugh Thomas, nathan dueck, Hailey Higdon, Stephanie Bolster, Jessica Smith, Mark Cochrane, Amanda Earl, Robert Swereda, Colin Smith, Sarah Mangold, Joe Blades, Maxine Chernoff, Peter Jaeger, Dennis Cooley, Louise Bak, Phil Hall, Fenn Stewart, derek beaulieu, Susan Briante, Adeena Karasick, Marthe Reed, Brecken Hancock, Lea Graham, D.G. Jones, Monty Reid, Karen Mac Cormack, Elizabeth Willis, Susan Elmslie, Paul Vermeersch, Susan M. Schultz, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, K.I. Press, Méira Cook, Rachel Moritz, Kemeny Babineau, Gil McElroy, Geoffrey Nutter, Lisa Samuels, Dan Thomas-Glass, Judith Copithorne, Deborah Meadows, Meredith Quartermain, William Allegrezza, nikki reimer, Hillary Gravendyck, Catherine Wagner, Stan Rogal, Sarah de Leeuw, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Arielle Greenberg, lary timewell, Norma Cole, Paul Hoover, Emily Carr, Kate Schapira, Johanna Skibsrud, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, David McGimpsey, Richard Froude, Marilyn Irwin, Carrie Olivia Adams, Aaron Tucker, Mercedes Eng, Jean Donnelly, Pearl Pirie, Valerie Coulton, Lesley Yalen, Andy Weaver, Christine Stewart, Susan Lewis, Kate Greenstreet, ryan fitzpatrick, Amish Trivedi, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Lina ramona Vitkauskas, Nikki Sheppy, N.W. Lea, Barbara Henning, Chus Pato (trans Erín Moure), Stephen Cain, Lucy Ives, William Hawkins, Jan Zwicky, Rusty Morrison, Jon Boisvert, Helen Hajnoczky, Steven Heighton, Jennifer Kronovet and Ray Hsu.

prose in the park + the ottawa small press book fair!

Yes, there are two book fairs coming up in Ottawa, if you can believe it:

Prose in the Park: June 6: the first of what suggests as an annual event, comparable to when we used to have Word on the Street in town (remember those?). Big, medium and small publishers will be displaying and selling their wares, and a number of authors will be reading throughout the day. And of course, Chaudiere Books will be there as well (thanks to Marilyn Irwin...).

the ottawa small press book fair: June 12 (pre-fair reading) and June 13 (fair itself): co-invented by myself, I've been running it twice a year since it was founded way, way, way back in 1994. Quite honestly, the best of the small press. If you love great writing, small publishing and a whole ton of local materials that you might not otherwise be aware of, this is your event.

And then, of course, Congress is happening right now at the University of Ottawa, which also includes a book fair.

We live in glorious times, I'd say.

Guthrie Clothing: The Poetry of Phil Hall, a Selected Collage

Guthrie Clothing: The Poetry of Phil Hall, a Selected Collage, appearing in September as part of the Laurier Poetry Series from Wilfrid Laurier University Press, is now available for pre-order! Otherwise, see my recent piece on Phil Hall over at Jacket2 here, as well as my piece on our first meeting on the project out in Perth, Ontario. Exciting!