Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 377

Barbara Henning, A Day Like Today

AT SUNRISE
Instead of meditating, I mopthe floors and hallways.To prevent downloading freemusic, Dutch cable companiesobtain a court order to blockaccess to the pirate bay.In fancy gyms across the city,people steal from each other,yuppie-on-yuppie crimewhile musicians and nightworkers seek the quiet dimof dark apartments. At sunset,I switch on the parking lightsand run upstairs to pee,hoping the police won’tnotice. Then I circle aroundblock after block, finallyfinding a tiny spot betweenB and C, in front of the yuppiebuilding with a doorman,a doorman’s sole purpose,so they say, to provide security.
In the acknowledgments of New York poet Barbara Henning’s newest collection, A Day Like Today (Mobile AL: Negative Capability Press, 2015), the first real experience I’ve had with her writing, she writes that “These poems were composed from daily one page journal entries written in 2012. Many thanks to the New York Times writers (2012) for words and phrases collaged into the poems.” Henning’s compositional method has created a collection of densely-packed daybook-collage lyric capsules, managing to contain an incredible amount of information down the length of each page, as well as a great deal of breathable space between each line (which allow her poems not to collapse beneath their own weight). Bouncing from point to point to point, the shape and the tenor of her poems is reminiscent of the cadence of a number of poems by Cobourg, Ontario poet Stuart Ross, sans his trademark surrealism, as she allows the poems to end up far from the beginning, but still managing a somehow-coherent thread despite the tangents and leaps. Constructed in five sections—“Winter,” “Spring,” “Summer,” “Fall” and back to “Winter”—Henning’s poetic diary reads, in parts, as arbitrary as Gil McElroy’s ongoing “Julian Days” sequence; less interested in temporally placing the poems per se than allowing the random elements of her source material during those periods direct a certain degree of each poem’s movements. One might ask, are the section-headers meant to add or distract, or have they no purpose at all but as reportage itself, letting the reader know in which season each poem began? And yet, other poems do read as reports on specific activity, whether writing that “In the graveled garden / behind Unnameable Books / Patricia Spears Jones / is reading her poems.” (“UNNAMEABLE”), or that “I met Lewis for lunch / at Angelica’s. We eat wee / dragon bowls with mu tea. / Then I bike over to Santo’s / in the rain to make copies / of my poetic prose book.” (“I MEET LEWIS / FOR LUNCH”).
NEW YEAR’S EVE
Mr. Zlobin writes a bookabout Americans and how weinterrogate complete strangers.Two men interrogate a woman,one in gentle, soothing tones,while the other fires staccatobursts of accusatory questions.Her husband is reading a magazinecalled Wired when she repeatsher question. He snarls andcommands that she be still.To issue spoken commandson most Androids, you musttap the microphone gently.In Russia, children are raisedby their grandmothers.An average mother would neverdream of leaving her childwith a teenager. She saysit seems as if he doesn’t careabout her. He stands upin a wild sea storm in the Gulfof Alaska, where a Shell Oildrilling rig runs agroundwith 139,000 gallonsof diesel fuel. The unifiedcommand will be monitoringthe situation. It’s midnightwith fireworks when he walksout while his wife is pleadingwith him to stay. Frankenstein’smonster on occasion turnsout to be rather sweet.

today is my father's seventy-fourth birthday,

A Christmas somewhere in the early 1970s, 1293 Ridgemont (Ottawa).

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Cassidy McFadzean’s

Cassidy McFadzean’s poems have appeared in magazines across Canada including The Malahat Review, Grain, Arc, Vallum, and The Fiddlehead. In 2012 she published a chapbook, Farwell with JackPine Press and in 2013 she was a finalist for the CBC Poetry Prize and the Walrus Poetry Prize. She was born in Regina and studied at the University of Regina and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Hacker Packer (McClelland & Stewart, 2015) is her first collection of poems.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
So much of writing is slow, solitary work. Thinking of my book as an object in the world has given me the feeling that that this thing I do everyday can exist as something visible too. I haven’t been at it long enough to really compare my older poems with newer stuff, and I think I’m working through a lot of the same ideas. I might be getting a bit more comfortable writing about my own life, which I really resisted at first.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I’m drawn to the effects of compression and sound, which I’ve found can be accessed most immediately in poetry. I like short fiction for its similar formal intensity, but my attention, so far, feels most charged when writing a poem.

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?
I’ve experienced the occasional line entering my mind and a poem feeling intact after the first draft but it’s rare. Revision is when I feel most like I’m writing. I love the feeling of reworking a line, and returning to it again and again. That’s when most writing happens for me.

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?
Usually, I begin with something rooted in the world. A painting or sculpture, a voice or feeling I can’t work out. I don’t start thinking about a book until I have enough poems to start cutting.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I enjoy reading my work aloud, though I get almost giddy with nervousness and anxiety beforehand. I’ve found that reading work-in-progress to an audience can be an excellent catalyst for revision, especially at the line level. 

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?
When I’m working on a poem, my attention is focused on formal and aesthetic concerns, and I think for the poem to be successful for me, it has to be. It’s my hope that the theoretical questions that enter my poems— from questions of gender roles and class to ideas of mortality and metaphysics— will emerge from the personas, images, and sounds I invoke and not the other way around. I prefer approaching these ideas from a sideways glance, rather than head-on, but maybe that will change in the future.

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?
I most admire artists whose primary role is an artistic one. I find myself reading more closely the work of writers such as Alice Munro and Karen Solie who do not have a huge public presence outside of their work. What I gain from their writings are things like how we should live our lives, and what the role of art might be. I guess everything I feel is worth saying I want to put in my poems.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Editors are the best oracles—they reveal my darkest fears about a piece, those things I didn’t want to admit to myself but know I must change.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I’ve been thinking a lot about lines lately. One of my Iowa instructors talks about thinking in terms of the line, rather than line breaks. This has been helpful for me to consider, especially when most poets are no longer using meter to measure the line. I tend to follow my instincts, but if I read a line aloud differently from how it appears on the page, I feel suspicious of myself. Lucie Brock-Broido’s Stay, Illusion and Anthony Madrid’s I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say are two books where the lines feel finely crafted in terms of both rhythm and idea. 

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’m finishing up my MFA, so I try to spend most of the day writing. I’m less distracted in the morning before I’ve had coffee and am still half-asleep. In the afternoon, I read, go to class, or teach.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Reading is the obvious place, but the biggest one. There’s so much that others are doing with language that’s exciting. Kerry-Lee Powell’s Inheritance and Stevie’s Howell’s [Sharps] are two collections that make me to want to do more in my own work.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
My favourite smell is ozone, which always makes me think of my earth-home. On a smaller scale, I love the smell of lilacs growing around my parents’ house in North Central Regina.

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?
The visual arts are a huge part of my writing. I’ve written ekphrastic poems about The Unicorn Tapestries at Cluny, and at the Cloisters in New York. I’ve also written about Rodin’s sculptures, Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, and the drawings of Canadian artist Shuvinai Ashoona. My father and brothers are visual artists, so maybe that’s where my interest stems from. 

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Most recently: Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus , Jeramy Dodds, Thomas James, Amanda Jernigan, Mary Szybist, Emily Dickinson. Living in the US has introduced me to poets like Ariana Reines, Dorothea Lasky, and Heather Christle.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’d like to see more of the world. I’d like to return to places like Greece and Italy, but I’d also like to see the Maritimes and Canadian territories. I want to make time to work at my fiction and hopefully start publishing it. 

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?
It would be nice to do something that doesn’t involve sitting at a desk. I went through a phase of wanting to be a stonemason, but totally romanticizing it. Maybe I was reading too much Old English poetry at the time.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I think growing up surrounded by books gave me the feeling that such a life was possible. I always wanted to write. I stuttered from a young age and still do a bit, the kind where not only do the words not come out, but it feels like you’re drowning on air. I found it was easier to stay quiet, and from the age of 12-18 I kept a daily journal and read as many books as I could get my hands on. I found that in my writing, I could express things exactly the way I wanted to, the way I heard them in my head. People often talk about writing giving them a voice, but maybe my speechlessness gave me poetry.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and Interstellar , which are both kind of about time travel.

19 - What are you currently working on?
My second collection of poems, Drolleries, which takes its name from the marginalia of animal-human hybrids doodled in medieval manuscripts. I’m also working at finishing my MFA and moving back to Canada.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Stuart Ross, A Hamburger in a Gallery

POLITICAL POEM
This is a political poem.Shortly I will allude to some political things.Not yet, though.First: a one-winged batis dead on my sidewalk.Then: the lake is crispy today.Also: the man in the wizard gowndrove by in a Honda.Now for the political part.Right after I get some Triscuits.I like them with soy cheeseand avocado. Everythingis political. “Even that pieceof chewed gum on the groundwith pebbles stuck in it?” Yes,even that piece of chewed gum.“So when you were sayingyou were going to allude tosomething political, thatwas a trick, you were alreadydoing it.” Eat the rich.
Cobourg, Ontario writer, editor, publisher and blogger Stuart Ross has been enormously productive, with chapbooks produced by numerous presses including Room 3O2 Books, The Front Press, Apt. 9 Press, Silver Birch Press, Pink Dog Press and his own Proper Tales Press (launched 36 years ago), as well as three that were released last year: Nice Haircut, Fiddlehead (Puddles of Sky Press), A Pretty Good Year (Nose in Book Publishing) and In In My Dream (BookThug). The author of more than fifteen books of fiction, poetry and essays, he’s already published two more this spring: Further Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2015) and A Hamburger in a Gallery (Montreal QC: DC Books, 2015). A Hamburger in a Gallery , listed as his “ninth [trade] collection of poems” (a full Stuart Ross bibliography would be interesting to see, someday), is a collection of more than one hundred pages of shorter lyrics and lyric sequences, and even include a small handful of his ongoing ‘one-line’ poems (he is also, among other things, editor/publisher of Peter O’Toole, a journal of one-line poems) that explore elements of the mundane, personal and immediate. Ross’ poetics shift from the surreal to the straightforward, from the concrete to the downright meditative and philosophical, as well as through a strange humour, self-aware and even ironic sadness, and sense of deep loss that permeate much of the collection. “I stagger in my living room,” he writes, to open the poem “IN A FOREST OF WHISPERS,” “wedged between the piano keys / You could go cryogenic / outside your own borders [.]” Some of his political references through the collection also provide interesting counterpoints and connections back throughout the length and breadth of his work, from the anthology he co-edited with Stephen Brockwell, Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen Harper Holiday Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2010), his infamous poem quoting Prime Minister of Canada, Jean Chretien, “A Minor Altercation,” included in his book The Inspiration Cha-Cha (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 1996), to references in earlier poems on wars in El Salvador. As he writes to open the poem “POEM DURING A TALK BY CARLA HARRYMAN”: “We are not happy / until we are almost / noise. To make noise, / the Viet Nam war / is focused on / improvisation, mingled / with kind notes / and protective armour.”
EARNING MY NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE
I have invented a new dental flossthat makes you depressed.It will be a good seller, Dad.
Every time a car goes by my window,my dog reads another George Eliot novel.I will buy her a new bookmark.
Let’s move on to the issue of “size.”The latest issue of Vogueis bigger than the town I live in.
Mark Laba once lived a block awayand I thought that was far.Now he lives in Vancouver.
I worry that the dog is bored.I train her to ride a tricycleand invent a dental floss for dogs.
Have I wonthe Nobel Prizefor Literature yet?
At the end of the collection is a forty-page interview conducted with Ross by DC Books poetry editor Jason Camlot, who deliberately composed a series of “stupid questions” that Ross was meant to answer seriously. It’s a strange, and rather lengthy, read, but occasionally provides some interesting insight into Ross’ work and method. Part of the interview includes:
JC: Can you control your poems?SR: I can control the words and where the lines break, but I can’t control how someone reads it.JC: Can you control how you read it?
SR: No, sometimes I write a poem and I look at it a lot later and suddenly I see a lot of things I didn’t think were there before. So I don’t think I control it.JC: How much control do you have?
SR: Of my poems?
JC: Okay.SR: I choose the words, the lines, the sentences, the breaks. But the poem has its own life. That sounds cliché, but when you write the poem it might have some effect on you and others, and a year later it might have a completely different effect on you and different people. So, I would say I don’t have a lot of control over my poems.

report : some lately,

It seems we've had so much going on lately, that I've barely been able to think outside of work, toddler, toddler, work, occasional sleep and whatever else happens around here. Pulling some photos off the camera for the sake of download, I've been realizing there's been plenty of activity unrecorded, from visits to travel to book events to simply running and jumping and living; for shame! Brecken Hancock visits regularly with her infant boy, Winter! Amy Dennis and family were here for nearly a week from the UK! We went to Burlington and met Christine's friend Christine's new baby, Elizabeth. Here, for the sake of (some) posterity, a little of what we've been up to lately:

In March, we celebrated my forty-fifth birthday with a publication and a party! (of course) Rose sat with anyone who had ordered french fries (also, of course).


Here she is with Cameron Anstee, enjoying cake.

Later in March, there was our fifth annual VERSeFest poetry festival, including a number of Chaudiere Books authors such as Roland Prevost [pictured] and Amanda Earl.

We headed to our annual Boca Raton [see various reports here], where I took some pictures for a future issue of Touch the Donkey (I think the entire photo-series will be far more appreciated come winter). And did you see there's currently a pre-summer sale for the journal?

Winnipeg poet K.I. Press was in town a while back, and she launched her new Turnstone Press poetry collection in our living room!

Marilyn Irwin was good enough to sit the Chaudiere Books table recently at Prose in the Park.

I've even been able to get the rare late-afternoon out for some writing (if you can believe it).

We launched some books by William Hawkins and N.W. Lea the other night as part of our big Chaudiere Books spring poetry launch [see my report on such here].

Did I mention we went to The Big Apple, en route to Toronto? After years and years, the apple itself is finally open again.

And yes, we've finally been able to allow the young lady to run around, including many local parks, and the jungle of our backyard.

There's probably a bunch of other stuff, but who can keep track? Especially without photos.

Lesley Yalen, The Hearts of Vikings

Dad says a Paterson man lost his mind
On the George Washington Bridge
Another urge to span a gap
Another ride along this terminal moraine.
Now I keep an eye on the break-down lane
For people who may need my help specifically
But the edge of the world is speeding (“Causeway”)
Northampton, Massachusetts Lesley Yalen’s first trade collection of poetry is The Hearts of Vikings (Boston MA: Natural History Press, 2015). The author of a small handful of poetry chapbooks, including This Elizabeth(Minus House Press, 2007) and the beginning in (minutes BOOKS, 2011), there have been more than a few of us clamouring for a first collection to appear. Composed in four sections—“Causeway,” “The Beginning In,” “The Hearts of Vikings” and “Kaddish”—there is something of the collected-chapbooks feel to The Hearts of Vikings, which may or may not even be true (a chicken-or-egg idea: did the book structure pre-date the excision into chapbook manuscripts, or the other way around?), but something that my prior knowledge of her work is distracting me towards. Still, such books can make for entirely cohesive collections, such as, for example, Toronto poet Kevin Connolly’s long-ago first, Asphalt Cigar (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1995).
















The squares are cut out, so that themen stand in them firmly.
When you die. When I feel no quivering leafor breath. When finally deprived.
And the construction and the process of the proof.And afraid. And Beethoven composed his
music for his God. When forced to be bornall alone again. All normal and alone. When
without a thought of authorship you slip allegress from the heavily bolted earth, when
explosions are tearing holes in iron andbalancing on a peg is no option. When tea
is served on a patternless dress, various ladiesintroduced to me by name. At the
borderland of grammar. And I can’t seemto catch their names over the hearing.
Much of what I’ve seen of her work so far (and this book is no exception) seems to favour the sequence, whether constructing a small unit out of untitled fragments, or out of titled poems, both of which manage to accumulate into something larger, abstract and singular. Her poems might be built with a larger framework in mind, but she manages to leave incredible, open spaces between her lines and stanzas, allowing her poems a near-excess of breath, and therefore, life. Yalen’s The Hearts of Vikings writes out a series of shifts, revisions, abstracts and the texture of dreams, set as much in the tangible as in the intangible, slipping even in the grip of her incredible lines. One might say that the entire collection articulates an attempt towards writing out the slippages of identity, from the “Kaddish” that ends the book to the poem “The New World,” that opens the collection: “The passage was a middle whose end was me // let me revise [.]” Does writing out the whom and the what cement, or even reduce, identity, or simply highlight the impossibilities of writing? Who are you, really?
People had texture, dimension, and mass
If you hurled a person at another, it hurt
If you removed a person from a scene, gone.
A person could be embellished, disassembled,
Or held, but it couldn’t slip through fingers
Or be in two places now,
In your lungs or written down,
Sung or eternal or repeated.
Every thing had an inside and a skin,
A face and a tail,
An origin, a due date, an appearance, and dreams.
A box divided all space
Into two areas, no matter where you put it
It insisted on making this distinction.
A person took its place among things. (“The Beginning In”)

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Valerie Witte

Valerie Witte is the author of a game of correspondence (Black Radish Book, 2015) and the chapbook, The history of mining (ge collective, 2013). Her writing has appeared in various journals, including Diagram, Dusie, Barrow Street, VOLT, Interim, and Alice Blue. In 2014 she began a collaboration with Chicago-based artist Jennifer Yorke. Their artist books based on her manuscript Flood Diary have been displayed in the exhibition, “Quotidiean/Elements of the Everyday: Water,” held jointly at the CelerySpace gallery in Berkeley, CA, and La Porte Peinte in Noyers, France. A native St. Louisan, she now lives and works as an editor in the San Francisco Bay Area. Follow her musings and her work at @shellthief (Twitter) and valeriewitte.com.

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?
I am still figuring that out! My first book, a game of correspondence, was just published, and I think the main change is that when I tell people about it, they get very excited. So that is fun. It is (roughly) about the ghosts of relationships that still haunt us. My newest (unpublished) book I think is much less about relationships than my previous work was, probably because I am in a happy one finally. :) It is more about the body (the minor deformities that we all experience, and mine in particular), the evolution of human skin, and the history of silk. In this way, it is both internal and external, but not as relational as my other work.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to fiction first! I grew up writing stories, or at least filling notebooks with partial stories. I majored in Fiction Writing in college. But my fiction wasn't very good. After college, I began reading my brother's poetry books--he had two boxes of them and they were at my parents' house, where I was now living. I fell in love with Sharon Olds, Robert Hass, Charles Simic, and others. I don't count them among my inspirations, since I write very differently from them now, but that is how I came to poetry.

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?
It's pretty slow. The book I just finished took over two years, and it's only 50 pages. It was particularly slow. Sometimes it takes me about a year to finish a manuscript. I do lots of drafts and rewriting and tweaking. The form can change five or six times during the process. I've been able to start the last two manuscripts at residencies, which has been a very positive experience.

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?
I am always working on a project--usually a whole book. I collect text from various outside sources as well as my own journals and writing. And I compile them with some kind of theme in mind, or one emerges over the course of the note-gathering. But I can't just write a one-off poem. I have no idea how to do that anymore!

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I both enjoy doing readings and am terrified of doing readings. I am always looking for ways to make them different. Sometimes I bring audio recordings that accompany my performance. Sometimes I ask friends or members of the audience to participate by reading different sections or "voices" in the poems. I am still usually super nervous, and I really want to get a lot better at putting on an engaging performance that resonates with the audience.

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?
How to use poetry to understand deeply human things like deformity, aging, physical and emotional pain, relationships. I am very interested in the environment and exploring issues related to climate change. I am currently thinking a lot about story and mystery--what do you do when things go missing or mysteries go unanswered...and why are we so fixated on resolving such mysteries.

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?
Of course she has one! I think it can be whatever the writer wants it to be, to an extent. I think the role of artists in general can involve many things--to entertain, enrich, and enlighten. I don't think the writer has to feel she must change the world or be directly political. But I do believe in contributing to the community and that sharing one's work with others is a key element of being an artist. I feel some obligation to help "get the work out," so I volunteer in a small press, and I helped form a collective that exchanges mail art and engages in collaborative projects and happenings.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I have rarely worked with an outside editor--thus far. My chapbook I edited myself; and my book book was lightly edited--they were very kind to me! I work professionally as an editor, so I feel that I have a deep understanding of the process and would work well with editors in general. I definitely believe strongly in the editing process.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I was an intern at a performing arts center in college. My manager was a musician, and he kept a binder of his rejection letters. I thought this was odd, but he said those are what make you work harder. So in general I don't feel upset when I get rejected. It's just part of the artistic process--and it does make you work harder.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (solo to collaboration)? What do you see as the appeal?
I love collaborations. I have been working with a visual artist, Jennifer Yorke, for about a year. She created artist books based on my Flood Diary manuscript that have been exhibited in Berkeley and France, and we are now working on videos based on a new manuscript I wrote called Silkyard. She is amazing to work with, so I feel very lucky. Neither of us knows the first thing about video, but we are eager to learn, and as she says, not afraid to fail! The appeal to me is both the process and joy of working with another artist, and creating something unique and new, different from a book.

11 - 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'm afraid I don't have much of one these days. I am trying to write on the train to and from work now. Otherwise, I just slip it it when I have time. It's a challenge.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Still trying to figure that out! Probably music mainly and poetry books that I love. I also try to get out in nature as much as possible. I get most of my ideas on my morning walks--it's one of the few times in my day where I am disconnected from the world, so it's a very valuable time to me.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Hmm...trees and grass?

14 - 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 just read a long article about thermonuclear reactors. And I've written about cryogenics and researched the development of the Apollo Spacesuit. Yes, science seems to find its way into my work quite a bit. I love music, it's really my passion, but it doesn't find its way into my work directly very often. I listened to Wilco's "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" a lot when I was writing one of my manuscripts--I think exactly one poem in the manuscript references the album.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
For poetry: Barbara Guest, Laura Walker, Rusty Morrison, Robert Creeley, Emily Dickinson, Bhanu Kapil. But I mainly read a ton of articles, essays, and news in places like Slate and The Atlantic. I obsessively read TV and film reviews.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Anything that combines writing with other art forms--I love to sing and I play drums (not well yet), so bringing those into a performance is a goal/fantasy; the video Jennifer and I working on; maybe an art installation based around my work. 

17 - 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 think it could be really amazing to be a massage therapist. It seems like it would be wonderful to combine something physical, using your body, with helping someone else feel better and heal.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I don't know, I don't remember a time when I wasn't writing. When I was very little, I wanted to be an art teacher. But other kids' skills quickly surpassed mine. So I think that is partly why I am a writer--because it is something I have worked a lot at and am somewhat able to do. :) But also I just feel compelled to do it and it's the thing I do that always brings meaning to my life, for which I am very grateful.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Book: Citizen, by Claudia Rankine; film: This was a while ago but I loved Stories We Tell, directed by Sarah Polley.

20 - What are you currently working on?
Not sure yet. :) I am thinking a lot about the missing Malaysian plane from 2014. I am obsessed/intrigued that something so big and all those people can simply vanish. I am interested in exploring mystery--the human need to understand tragedy--including the morbid curiosity around it. Like the cultural obsession around the podcast Serial. I am also thinking about something related to hemispheres. Where any of this will go is yet undetermined...

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Profile of Ben Ladouceur, at Open Book: Ontario,

My profile of Toronto poet Ben Ladouceur, author of Otter (Coach House Books, 2015), is now online at Open Book: Ontario.

Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part three,

[Hugh Barclay, with his Thee Hellbox Press] Another listing of titles picked up at our most recent fair! See part one here and part two here, obviously. How much is too much? (We might need to build more shelves)
Ottawa ON: It’s nice to see a new small press offering from Toronto poet (and longtime editor of the Surrealist Poets Gardening Association) Lillian Nećakov, her chapbook The Lake Contains an Emergency Room (Ottawa ON: Apt. 9 Press, 2015).
The Lake Contains an Emergency Room
There are pacifists and mongrels sitting herethere is no window to look out ofyou hold a small puddle of blood up against your cheekoutside, I imagine the clouds are bluewe have been waiting hoursit has been 16 yearswe wait our turnyou can no longer hold a pencilthe doctor looks like a roosternight is finishedthere is no smell to painthe needlework is shoddythe door remembers us.
There is an odd humour and compelling candor to the surrealism of Lillian Nećakov, one that seems very human in nature, exploring the surrealism of such tangible subjects as gardening, the nature of origins, making soup, or a stroll through the park.
Step Away
Let’s return to an empty chairor we could weed the gardensomething to silence the hauntinga thing to teach us to carve boneun-mouth the meannessun-speak the dark promisesmurmuring over our lakes
let’s return tonightto our child’s skinselfish, shirtlessbruisedlet’s rage against the tonguestich togetherall our dead relativesand lingerregretlesson the wind.
Ottawa ON: After an extended period working on a variety of other projects [see my recent Jacket2 piece on him here], jwcurry has been publishing again recently, with some recent oddbits including the collaborative (and hand printed) tchts(jwcurry and Rachel Zavitz) produced as CURVD H&Z 474 (31 oct 2014).
shadow planetsmithereensat impact
The small collaboration between curry and Zavitz is one of but a long line of collaboration he’s been doing with multiple writers over the years. There is something about this short sequence of three-line stanzas that have the tautness of (English-language) haiku combined with an incredible precision that presents the illusion of a single (as opposed to double) hand present in every line. To order a copy, or inquire about other publications, write him c/o his new address: #302-28 Ladouceur Avenue, Ottawa ON K1Y 2T1
Another recent publication is the gestetnered INDUSTRIAL SABOTAGE #64, as jwcurry writes in the colophon, “the ‘selfstarterkid’ issue,’ the first to appear (after a long hiatus: #63, Messagio Amor Some More, was issued 13 april 2008),” featuring writing by a host of regular and irregular contributors to curry’s wealth of publications: Michael e. Casteels, M.R. Appell, P. Cob_, Lenore Cochrane, Jon Cone, Judith Copithorne, Marilyn Irwin, Lance LaRocque, Billy Little, bpNichol, Jim Smith, Hugh Thomas and Rachel Zavitz. One thing I’ve always admired about curry is his patience, fully aware that he has said that for his letterpress printing, he has to like a poem to produce it not once, but up to one or two hundred times (which makes one wonder how many published pieces would actually survive the same criteria, even from their own authors).
Apple
apple,so to say, never againuneaten
someone gave me a bump on the head (Hugh Thomas)

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Melissa Bull

Melissa Bull is a Montreal-based writer, editor and translator. Her writing has been featured in such publications as Event, Prism, Lemon Hound , The Montreal Review of Books and subTerrain. She edits Maisonneuve magazine's "Writing from Quebec" column. Her translation of Nelly Arcan's Burqa of Skin was published in 2014 and her first collection of poetry, Rue , was released in April of 2015.

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 guess it remains to be seen. I’ve been writing and publishing for a long time, but my first book just came out in April. Some of the poems in Rue are several years old, and I’m excited to think about all the shiny new projects I want to focus on next.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I didn’t, really -- I like to do all kinds of writing, poetry and fiction and non-fiction. The trick is more identifying what genre to work a particular project in. But I when I started to write, when I was around five or six years old, poetry was my way in. It felt like a departure from the way we use language every day. There was something conscious and purposeful about it that I liked.

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?
I’m not a copious note-taker -- I’d rather use that writing time for writing writing. Poems usually take me a lot of rewrites. And then I forget about them and find them and rewrite them again. But I’m a fan of deadlines. I’ve worked as a professional writer and editor for a number of years and I like to just get out of my own way and get stuff done.

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?
I’ll get a line in my head that won’t go away and I’ll just write it down and see what the next lines are. Rue is very much a collection of poems written about my life over the course of almost a decade. My next poetry collection began as a book, as more of a realized project that I have to work towards. It’s also, thankfully, not at all about me.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I like readings. I like them as a way of getting various branches of writing communities together, or of discovering new-to-me authors. When I’m giving a reading I try to keep it pretty brief so that no one gets bored or uncomfortable and we can get to the hanging out part faster.

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?
It depends on the project. Class and bodies almost always come into play. My next poetry collection has a more theoretical concern, but it too is about bodies and class.

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 some ways it’s no different from any person’s role I guess. To notice specifics. To be present. The books I’ve loved have shown me new ways of thinking. Not just new ways of thinking about a thing, but they’ve structurally shifted the way I think, the way I see. Which is exciting and cool. I love it when that happens.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I want to be edited. And I make sure I find a few key brains, in addition to my editors, to revise my work, always. I’m grateful to have friends who will take the time to think about my work and offer up some comments to help make it stronger.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I’m a late bloomer so for a while everyone was just telling me to publish -- and they were right! You should be publishing, when you’re a writer.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation)? What do you see as the appeal?
When I was a teenager I learned the now-out-of-date and problematic term “woman of letters” in a literature class and it gave me a happy feeling, a kind of kick of “yes!”  -- I felt that’s what I wanted to be -- a cross-genre writer. (All the letters, all alphabet, give it to me.)

Re: translation, I get super excited about good work and I am so happy to have a skill that helps me share good work from one community with another, particularly as Canada’s franco and anglo communities can be pretty ignorant of one another’s arts.

But I’m just a big, happy, excited fan of language and the many things it can do. I feel provoked and engaged and useful when I write or edit or translate.

11 - 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 have day jobs, so I usually write at night, and on weekends. What I do is I work at an office all day, then come home, have dinner, hang with my partner, then have a coffee and kickstart my brain and make myself work for several hours. It seems work-a-holic-y, I know, but the truth is I think having constraints really helps me be more efficient with my time, and it keeps me from dithering too much. So it works for me.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I’m paranoid that I’ll wake up without another idea one day, so I stash lots of beginnings or ideas for stories around, so I can flip around from project to project if something stops working. I usually have a few things on the go so I just push one thing as far as I can then work on the next one until I can’t figure out where to go with that anymore, and so on.

Just being involved in a lot of projects and committing to deadlines takes care of most inspiration issues. I’m way less woo-woo about the mystery of it all and more trusting that things will come and will right themselves if I just sit down and work it out.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
My partner’s cooking. I come home from work every evening to him cooking us dinner. He also bakes bread every week, which fills our whole apartment with amazing smells. (I’m a very lucky person.)

14 - 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?
Man, if I could do all the arts I would. My writing is definitely a response to other arts -- it’s just that I can’t respond to those arts with those arts. Otherwise, I don’t know. My writing just about the stuff I think about, obsess over, can’t avoid.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I’m interested in writing that’s authentic, sharp, surprising, smart. I read journalism and non-fiction and poetry and fiction… I like to make sure I’m out of my comfort zone and keeping myself thinking and engaged. But I always feel badly, too -- there’s so much more I could be reading. The FOMO of literature.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
So many things! Learn to sail. (Though maybe I should learn to drive first.) Translate a bunch of novels. See more of Europe. Learn Danish. Improve my Spanish. Visit Mexico. Learn silversmithing and make my own jewellery. Be rippling with muscles.

17 - 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 have day jobs that allow me to lead an alternate life to that of a writer every day. I’ve worked a lot as an editor for various publications, and right now I’m a manager for an IT company. It’s important for me, for the way I learn about my limits and my capabilities, to participate in that “outside” world. I like it.

When I was in my early 20s I thought about becoming a minister for a while. I remember thinking that if I did that I couldn’t be as free in my writing, though, like I wouldn’t be able to say or publish dirty, judgy, sexy things. So I guess that worked out.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
When I was a teenager and getting ready to apply for colleges, I debated between studying music -- I played the flute -- and studying literature. Ultimately, for me, writing and literature seemed limitless -- you can write about anything. And I never auditioned for music school -- just went right for the books.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Naja Marie Aidt’s Baboon is my favourite book lately.

I just saw that movie While We're Young in the theatre, and I mostly liked it. I watched Boyhood on a plane recently; it was good. Mostly I’ve been streaming some fun Scandinavian crime shows, though. My favourite is Annika Bengtzon . A crime-solving, tough-broad reporter with great hair! The best.

20 - What are you currently working on?
A collection of poetry, a collection of essays, I’m translating two plays right now. I’d like to wrap up my collection of short stories soon… and get back to my novel. I’m finishing up my MFA soon and my thesis will be a novel translation. I’m looking forward to getting into that, too.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;