Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 96

today is my fifty-third birthday (sigh,

Happy (self) birthday! Over the weekend, I hosted my first in-person birthday gathering since Covid-19 lockdown began. It was an intimate gathering, but a worthy one. Christine re-ordered a variation on the same cake she ordered for my fiftieth, given we had to cancel that party within days of the event, some three years back [see my note on such here]. Might I actually, now, have to admit that I’m in my fifties, and not simply “forty-thirteen”? (I’ve been telling folk that my forties have entered their teen years, after all)

Birthday: a check-in. [see last year’s here; see the year before that] Honestly, I’ve felt breathless since the beginning of the year, pushing to work in numerous directions simultaneously. Christine was poem-ing at Banff Writing Centre for two weeks in January, as well, which had me solo with our young ladies; she worked on the edits for her next-year forthcoming third Book*hug title (a non-fiction blend of prose and poetry), and attempting to feel out the beginnings of what might come next (her fourth book, and third poetry title). On my end, I’ve been pushing on feeling out a book-length essay on literary citizenship, community and reviewing, etcetera, “Lecture for an Empty Room,” having first made scattered notes across those first two years of lockdown. The project was structurally prompted by a series that Wave Books has been publishing the past few years through The Bagley Writing Lecture Series, specifically Joshua Beckman’s 2018 duo Three Talks and The Lives of the Poems (Wave Books). I was seeking a form through which to articulate some thoughts I’ve had kicking around for years, and Beckman’s paired titles (which I’ve found enormously generative and influential since I first encountered them) allowed me the prompting through which to begin. Last fall I even started a substack to help prompt me further through the process (as well as post the occasional other non-fiction entry, including fragments of a fortyish-page essay on collaborating with Denver poet Julie Carr). I’ve already more than a half-dozen entries from the work-in-progress posted through such (among other entries) with another few still in-progress. I am curious to see where the project ends up.

I’ve a novel I started during that first pandemic summer as well, one that furthers a thread or two from a prior manuscript of short stories, itself following a thread from my second published novel, missing persons (The Mercury Press, 2009); might anyone actually follow that particular thread, once all of these pages and pieces are finished and finally published? I’m curious about that, although that level of engagement with each self-contained piece isn’t required. I’ve also been poking at a couple of stories across a further manuscript of short stories, although I haven’t been in any particular rush on that, wishing to at least place that first manuscript before I move too much further into a follow-up (although I think I already have nineteen finished stories and six in-progress in this second manuscript, and thirty-two stories in the prior manuscript).

I’ve been poking, as well, at what might be the ends of a poetry manuscript, “Autobiography,” following a thread that goes back as well, this one to the book of smaller(University of Calgary Press, 2022). And did I mention that the manuscript prior to that appears this fall? World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023): I signed a contract not that long ago, although I haven’t really told too many folk about it yet. I’m looking forward to seeing how it turns out. I’ve also been working the past few months on a third ‘best of’ anthology to celebrate thirty years of above/ground press, out this fall with Invisible Publishing to celebrate the third decade’s worth of publishing. Thirty years, as of this July. And today, the third anniversary of the first post over at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics (I’ll be posting an anniversary editorial over there in an hour or two).

But poems, as I said. I’m circling what might be the ends, but also distracted by other projects the past couple of months. I spent a few weeks attempting a chapbook-length daily sequence of journal poems across the two weeks Christine was away at Banff, taking a following two weeks after she’d returned to get the whole of that sequence polished in a way I was finally pleased with. I liked the idea of playing a bit off Robert Kroetsch’s Letters to Salonika (Grand Union Press, 1983), composed during a period that his wife, Smaro Kamboureli, was away in Greece, visiting home and her mother. As she wrote what became the journal-poem in the second person (Edmonton AB: Longspoon Press, 1985) about being in Greece, Kroetsch wrote his own poems about Smaro being away. Otherwise, the manuscript of “Autobiography” moves, albeit through delay: by holding off, might I therefore extend it? A la Kroetsch himself, a perpetual delay that might allow the manuscript a further, extended life.

[dropping them off Monday morning to begin their week-long March Break forest school daycamp]

And our young ladies, of course. They are smart and clever and ridiculous, of course. I can’t even fathom where most of their thinking comes from, but they are utterly delightful. Rose is in the middle of the Percy Jacksonnovels at the moment, which she’s really enjoying. Aoife regularly makes slime from a kit she has, and I have discovered that I hate slime (messy, gross, always leaving little bits upon every surface) more than I’ve ever hated anything in my entire life. But she loves it.

Birthday, birthday. What is fifty-three? Gadzooks. Even if I live to one hundred and five (which has been the plan all along), I still have less ahead of me than behind. I’ve so much more to do.

As part of that annual checking-in, I’ve been scratching at a birthday-esque poem over the past few weeks, still feeling it out; here’s where a few of the fragments sit so far:

from : condition report

 

 

 

 

First you feel it. Then you bear             : the ache
of musculature, a tendon pull. Go back, eurythmic,
into ether,
                        certitude. Loud when I             dissonance.

A light falls, clatter. The slightest structure.

 

 

 

 

Could scratch my tibia. The white face, powdered.
Eyebrows                     , grift. They seek

            escape.

 

 

 

 

An ache. Synchronic: one dream

at any               given time.

 

 

 

 

Earth               , to earth. I am scratching this
from anecdotes,
                                    as my desire                 for echo.

What might      this hold. What substance.

 

 

 

 

Amid suspicion, reserve. Happy birthday. An engine
of extrapolation. Mirrors

                                                instances. Repurpose facts
to suit the language. The composition

of dictated terms, whether to capture
or contemplate.

 

 

 

 

To manoeuvre                         beyond fault.

 

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

Oh, and be sure to catch me zoom-reading today with Calgary poet Kyle Flemming: noon Pacific time / 3pm Ottawa time: a zoom-reading I’m doing from my house (as Kyle from his) for Vancouver’s Lunch Poems at SFU. Might we see you (virtually) there? And Ottawa’s thirteenth annual poetry festival VERSeFest begins this weekend!

above/ground press 2023 #AWP (unofficial) offsite (virtual) readings : five days in March,

As part of the above/ground press thirtieth anniversary (oh, there are some cool things coming up later this year as part of this), I thought it would be both interesting and amusing to host a virtual (and unaffiliated) offsite reding as part of this year’s Association of Writers and Writing Programs annual Conference and Bookfair, which I did, across the five days of the conference over at the above/ground press site. While I’ve never actually attended myself (being unaffiliated with any organization that might assist with funds to attend such a thing), it does seem like a pretty cool destination. An Ottawa one would be nice; should they just host an Ottawa one? And across those five days, I began to ask myself: just how offsite isoffsite? What does it mean, exactly? One suspects that, in the end, we all might discover that the true meaning of #AWP was actually inside of us this whole time.

To see the whole series of participating videos, either link on the individual days’ posts via the above/ground press site, or even head over to the YouTube channel, which also includes more than one hundred videos of poets reading as part of the ‘virtual reading series’ via periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics. Thanks to everyone who participated!

DAY ONE: Terri Witek/Cyriaco Lopes, Ben Robinson, Jérôme Melançon, Melanie Dennis Unrau + MLA Chernoff,

DAY TWO: Jessi MacEachern, Jason Heroux, William Vallières, Lindsey Webb + Julia Drescher,

DAY THREE: Lillian Nećakov, Amish Trivedi, Jason Christie, Laura Kelsey + Angela Rebrec,

DAY FOUR: Derek Beaulieu, Nathanael O'Reilly, Emily Izsak, Jenny Qi + Pete Smith,

DAY FIVE: Zane Koss, Robert van Vliet + Joanne Arnott,

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kerri Webster

Kerri Webster is the author of four books of poetry: Lapis (Wesleyan University Press, 2022), The Trailhead (Wesleyan, 2018), Grand & Arsenal (winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, University of Iowa, 2012), and We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone (University of Georgia, 2005). From 2006-2010 she was a Visiting Writer in Residence at Washington University in St. Louis, and taught at Boise State University from 2013 to 2022. The recipient of a Whiting Award and the Lucille Medwick Award from the Poetry Society of America, she lives and writes in Idaho. 

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

In grad school, a professor warned that there’d be a few years of “flailing” (fun verb!) post-, and that we’d need to lean into it or fall into despair. The transition from immersion in community to solitary writing life can be jarring, and it was (although also generative—I moved back to Idaho and wrote We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone). Having the book accepted was a beacon of connection in that solitary time, saying: There’s a writing world out there and you’re a part of it. That was the main thing. 

The concrete aspect was that first book publication led to what I think of as the best visiting gig in academia: a three-year Writer in Residence position (which turned into four years: long story) at Washington University in St. Louis.  Mary Jo Bang had read my poems in the Boston Review and Carl Phillips had chosen one for Ploughshares, and had the book not been out that April, I wouldn’t have been eligible to start the following September. I owe them eternal gratitude; along with six years as a Writer in the Schools teaching kids leaving the carceral system, it’s the best CW gig I’ve ever had. 

As for then and now: We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone was about desire. Lapis, my new book, is about loss. I wrote about “the wages of dying,” then, before I knew what the hell I was talking about. I suppose many of us do. 

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or nonfiction?

Fiction was there too, back in grade school, but fell away, partly because I suck at linear time and thus narrativity, also because I was fascinated by the sounds of words, their materiality in the mouth and in the ear, and poetry offered more of that, even though the only early examples I had were my lavender-covered Best Loved Poems of the American People, the Bible, and before that, Goodnight Moon, which (the latter) was also where I first connected words to emotions, which is to say that as a lifelong insomniac, Goodnight Moon was a horror story: wtf an old rabbit lady whispering hush? 

I do remember a top-of-the-head-blown-off moment in grade school from a line in The Best Loved Poems, though. There’s a volta in John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” (which I still have memorized and can recite when intoxicated) that stopped me in my tracks—it’s after the first stanza when the collective first person shifts to the simple, devastating declarative—

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
    That mark our place; and in the sky
    The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
    Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
        In Flanders fields.

I didn’t know what WWI was, really, that nine million soldiers died, didn’t know that at 51yo I’d be sitting here in Boise worried about my brother in Tbilisi being reached by potential nuclear fallout over the Black Sea because failed and incalculably traumatized empires die hard—none of that; I just realized that in a poem, dead people can say “We are the dead.” How astonishing. How terrifying. How magical. 

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?

Some poems come quickly and nearly fully formed, while others take months (they used to take years, but I disciplined myself away from that, preferring to work on Whatever’s Next.) And in the mix is a process I think of as poems-become-other-poems—sometimes I write something before it’s ready to be written and don’t understand it, then large portions migrate into newer work where, it turns out, those words belonged all along.

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?

The first two books were written one poem at a time. The third (The Trailhead, 2018) coalesced as I was writing around notions of failed/faux masculinity in the American West, and of women’s spirituality and community as alternatives to that, ideas that felt pressing during the years (2014-2017) during which the book was written. Lapis, though, was written with intention—it deals with the deaths of multiple women, and I knew I was embarking on an act of love and remembrance. The sole purpose of Lapiswas to honor the dead. 

For a while in the poetry world it seemed like the book-length project was the marketable unit of poetry. Now social media has returned the single lyric poem to the forefront. My advice is to write how you write, at whatever pace, and trust that there’s a place for it. 

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

As an introvert, I dread giving readings before they begin, then enjoy them once they start and a connection with the audience is made. But social performance of self has never come easy to me. 

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?

Oh boy. Lately, I think of Rukeyser’s famous “I lived in the first century of world wars. Most days I was more or less insane” and my question is: How’d she pull off those other days? I want to learn that. So not theoretical but actual. And always in the back of my mind: how to atone for this country’s sins, how to cultivate wonder and joy amidst horror, are those things antithetical.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Poetry has so many functions, and some of them, as I tell students, are abominable: poetry can be an erasure, a silencing, a means of perpetuating power structures that harm human beings and the earth, can be a violence that’s somatized and changes us and goes on harming long after the words are encountered.  

By contrast, among poetry’s salvific roles, the one most exercised by young writers is the formulation and articulation of a self/selves: poetry as writing the self into being. This is what being young is for. Beyond articulating selfhood, poetry serves, can serve, other vital private functions: pleasure and the cultivation of pleasurable practices (imagination, curiosity, wonder, intellectual rigor, Gladwell-esque “flow,” excellence); a form of radical presence; a grounding technique; a means of facilitating healing and transformation after grief, loss, trauma (flashback to professors who said “poetry isn’t therapy” and the now-realization that this was largely said by dudes needing therapy); survival mechanism; communication with the divine (as prayer, as plea, as conversation, as portal through which immanence might manifest); as elegy/memorial/monument; as talisman or amulet; as seduction, amen.  

As I get older, I find myself less interested in these private functions and more invested in public purposes, and think of poetry as a vehicle to formulate and articulate not just a self but an ethical worldview we take with us into the world to guide our actions—the articulated imagining of a different world we go forward into waking day to build—“Redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future,” Lorde said. Vitally, poetry can be an act of protest, dissidence, samizdat, dissent. As a nearby school district bans twenty-two books “forever”—childlike word—this role feels so very relevant. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I’m blessed to have an extraordinary editor, Suzanna Tamminem at Wesleyan. She’s wise and hands-on and patient and both The Trailhead and Lapis are better for her savvy.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)? 

I’m going to turn to poems and offer a few: 

There’s a moment in Brenda Hillman’s Loose Sugar where the speaker asks, “What will I do while I’m waiting?” and the answer comes back: “Wait harder.” “Wait” as active verb.
Mark Doty’s “Any small thing can save you” has proven true over and over in my life.
And from maybe my favorite passage in all of poetry, from the Ninth Duino Elegy: 

      For when the traveler returns from the mountain-slopes into the valley,
      he brings, not a handful of earth, unsayable to others, but instead
      some word he has gained, some pure word, the yellow and blue
      gentian. Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,
      bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window –
      at most: column, tower… 

Jack Gilbert in “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart” gives his own famous noun-list as he ends with “What we feel most has/ no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds,” but he’s talking about metaphorizing, he’s listing vehicles. Rilke’s making a case for tenors in and of themselves, and I love that. As a woman transfixed by the alchemical nature of reality, its constant shape-shifting and transfigurations, this testament to the ecstatic nature of thing-ness heartens me.

And finally, as we barrel towards 2024: C. D. Wright, from “69 Hidebound Opinions”: “What matters a poetry of indifference? To whom?”

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?

My writing life is about to undergo a huge shift: twenty-five years after I first stepped into the classroom as a T.A. at Indiana University, I’m leaving academia at the end of this semester, taking up copyediting and working remotely. It’s a chance to recenter my work life around my writing life, vs. the opposite, and to labor not for the mythic luxury of exhausted “summers off” but for the actual luxury of a year-round writing practice. In the immortal words of Kelly Kapoor, “I’m too excited to sleep.” 

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I’m a visual learner—I write this in October as the veil thins and I keep looking online at Twombly’s Treatise on the Veil and his color studies for it. And I spent summer by the Payette River gathering river stones, knolling them in misc. trays. And I go for a lot of walks. 

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Sagebrush. 

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?

Wilderness (not “nature”). And visual art. The greatest gift of grad school, actually, wasn’t poetry but going to art museums for the first time in my life. 

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Rich, Oswald, Lorde, Dickinson, Notley, Melville, Morrison, Hawthorne, Woolf. 

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Travel.

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’d like to have been a sculptor, or a goldsmith. I stopped gathering river stones after I found a granite and quartz stone that made me think: Noguchi would have been proud to have made this. 

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

My father owned a bookstore growing up, a Little Professor franchise in a strip mall. He had to decide on how best to feed his family, and because there was a Payless in the strip mall, he went with books. That’s simplifying it a little. But my shoes came from Payless and my books were borrowed from the store. And every day I saw my parents read, which had a huge impact. Reading to kids doesn’t matter that much if they don’t see their parents reading, too. 

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Book: Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob.  

Film: Into Great Silence, which I recently rewatched to start decompressing from 25 years on academic time. 

19 - What are you currently working on?

I wanted to write pleasant poems about Idaho’s rivers, but to get there I had to pass MAGA Ranch Road and election signs for white supremacists, and once I got there I had to listen often to gunfire from across the river, and there was toxic algae in the water, so we’ll see. 

I also want to explore solitude, silence, and stillness as I step back from the community and community- building academia entails. I’ve always loved being alone, and get discombobulated if I spend too many hours in other conditions. Hearing often of late Arendt’s quote about loneliness as necessary predecessor for totalitarianism, as lonely men (or boys) enter the agoras, the schoolrooms, the polling places in terrifying ways, I’m struck by how different loneliness is, or can be, for women—how luxurious, how transformative, how generative. I’m ready for that. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Leah Nieboer, soft apocalypse

 

an argument is rising through the roof
I’m spaced out listening
to the couple next door
on the upper edge of love, or something
lifting off –

I could it seems
skate the length of these powerlines
to Ophiuchus, taking care
not to trip on a constellation of sneakers
dangling where
the others had thrown them off

I believe in love

in the prayers crossing up
this completest dark (“MINOR EVENTS 3”)

I’m fascinated by the deeply precise and dreamy lyric of Denver-based Iowa poet LeahNieboer’s full-length poetry debut, soft apocalypse (Athens GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2023), published as part of The Georgia Poetry Prize as judged by Andrew Zawacki. Across twenty-three poems, ranging from extended lyrics to prose poem stanzas, Nieboer works in lyric clusters, from the assemblage of her individual lines and individual pieces, to cluster-groupings as part of the construction and arrangement of the poems. “failing spectacularly at orderliness the primroses,” she writes, to open the poem “DREAM OF RISKED PHRASES IN SPACE,” “rush hour yellowness // a soft geometry unfinishing // the edges the sentence // giving in to its most // we could say phosphenic [.]” Her extended lyrics pull and fragment, fracture and bend, and manage to simultaneously hold an incredible precision across a landscape, and it is through her lyric fractal and disruption that she offers such unique clarity. “the official measure of // a complete and undeviating /’ orbital oranging everybody,” she writes, as part of “FLASH PROCESSING OF A PRIVATE YEAR,” “this is the year baby // lashing against // the backward infliction of [.]” Nieboer offers a blend of connection and disconnection; almost a tether of disruption that runs through the length and breadth of her text, one that resists the pull of expectation and late capitalism, a multitude of crises, smoke and accident. “in the soft underside of the ashen city,” she writes, as part of “ON A SLEEPLESS NIGHT, KILOMETRES AND / KILOMETRES BELOW WHAT HAD BEEN A / GREAT CITY,” “I dream we’ve written // the end of the movie. I wake up and fine we’ve written only // how do I get out of this production machine.”

Nieboer offers shimmering scenes through memory and her immediate, flashing along akin to landscapes beyond the window of a fast-moving train, or something filmic, disjointed. There is something deeply compelling about the way her lines allow attention to become entirely lost, absorbed. “as it happens,” she writes, as part of the fourteen-page “FORECLOSE ME,” “I have always believed // in the baptismal properties // of yellow // in the way violet // fucks pink into purple // a big promise // a little change // something // falling from your hand [.]”

Laura Walker, psalmbook

 

 

if i could write down

everything you say would

i,   a tree becomes a single thing

water    inexactitude (“psalm 1”)

Berkeley, California poet and editor Laura Walker’s latest, following swarm lure(Battery Press, 2004), rimertown/ an atlas (UC Press, 2008), birdbook(Shearsman Books, 2011), Follow-Haswed (Apogee Press, 2012) [see myreview of such here] and story (Apogee Press, 2016) [see my review of such here] is psalmbook (Apogee Press, 2022), a collection self-described thusly:

In spare, lyrical fragments, psalmbook channels the Book of Psalms as an act of radical listening, “a spirituality of attention” (Cole Swensen). In these poems, Laura Walker re-inhabits the Book of Psalms, King James Version, to channel the voices she finds there. These psalms plumb desire, faith, and loss, a land of hum and sponge where the necessity of belief and the impossibility of belief hunt and sway. i remember you, the psalmist sings; once/ you walked in this land, and made soft thrumming sounds// once you were outlined in paper.

Composed in short sketched lyrics, Walker’s poems weave a blend of response, extraction and exhumation, offering a different life to Biblical verse. Her numbered suite sit in the collection out of order, set in a kind of jumble, and presumably (but not necessarily) correspond to the particular correlate in the King James translation. For example: the collection opens with “psalm 85,” “psalm 8,” “psalm 84,” “psalm 141,” “psalm 16,” “psalm 102” and “psalm 1.” Walker opens a numbering system that hints at her order of composition, but could be anything, really. What is interesting, also, is Walker’s use of repetition, as certain psalm titles repeat, allowing for loops and patterns, echoes and threads of line and lyrics returning with slight variations, offering new ways through a material already presented. The collection begins with “psalm 85,” and ends there as well, offering a kind of cycle through a swirl of psalms. Walker offers, a lyric of philosophical attention; of points and pinpoints, composing a deep attention arrived at through erasure and excision, focusing not on composition but extraction and repetition. This is a book of reconsiderations, of lament and praise, and what lessons she exposes and composes from an often-worn but still vibrant text. “we tell everyone : we are here,” she writes, to close her second poem utilizing the “psalm 1” title, “we are here : / we weave and stray [.]”

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with imogen xtian smith

imogen xtian smith is a poet & performer living in Lenapehoking / Brooklyn, NY. Their work has appeared in Baest, B L U SH, Folder, The Rumpus, The Poetry Project Newsletter, & Tagvverk (among others), as well as in We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics . A 2021-22 Emerge Surface Be Fellow at The Poetry Project & MFA graduate from NYU, imogen’s debut collection, stemmy things , is out from Nightboat Books.

rm - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

ixs - i’m not sure i have an answer to the first question yet—it’s ongoing—& since the book just came out, it’s like a whole new framing of relation reveals itself daily. i def feel exposed in a way i’ve never been—like it’s one thing to read your smutty gay poems to a room of friends, & another thing to have those poems accessible from, like, Amazon.

My recent work feels totally different. It’s like all of this impetus to tell you who i am—that’s done, chapter closed. A first book can be such a catch all (stemmy things certainly is), & now i feel free to concentrate on specific projects that interest me—obsessions, things like that.

How i approach the page is also changing. stemmy things is so maximalist, & i’m finding that playing w empty space slows my thought process & allows me room to vibe. The poems i’m working on these days are all 10-15 pages in length, but very sparse. My process used to involve making a draft, saving it, editing, then numbering & saving that draft, ad infinitum. That all changed though late in 2021 when i was watching Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back—when Beatle Paul just pulls the titular song outta thin air, just messing around. Seeing this amazed me! i was like oh, you PLAY the draft & keep playing ‘till you find what yr looking for. So now i work in one or two rolling documents.

My second manuscript is nearly done. It’s provisionally titled weird connections& is filled with lengthy poems influenced by concrete poetry. It’s full of citations & is obsessed w questions like what is language? what is a word before it leaves the body? what’s the relation of naming, thus othering, thus thing-ness to whatever the god-thing is? Also, it’s a love letter to many literary idols. Mostly, it was written during my time as an Emerge Surface Be Fellow at the Poetry Project, guided by the mentorship of Stacy Szymaszek.

rm - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

ixs - Honestly, i’m unsure, but was fortunate as a child in the sense that reading was encouraged & i always enjoyed it. i know i’ve had a notion in the past (perhaps still do) that writing fiction—a novel or something—would somehow be harder than writing a poem. Like, that must be something one builds to. Of course that’s not true, but maybe poems just felt more achievable.

i do remember the first poem i ever memorized—Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar.” What a delightful child i must’ve been…

rm - 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?

ixs - All of the above, emphasis on copious notes. Everything is process though. If the words aren’t coming, i don’t sweat it ‘cuz i know i’m gathering.

rm - 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?

ixs - stemmy things definitely started out as discrete poems (the oldest being from 2017). i accumulated a lot of poems & fragments during my time as an MFA student, but i always think in terms of projects. When it came time to assemble my thesis, i wanted it to be a book––to flow, have rhythms & specific themes. When Nightboat took the manuscript, i began a lengthy process of drafting, re-drafting, making new work & filling in the gaps re the shape the book was taking. i made seven or eight drafts of the manuscript after it was already a manuscript lol!

My new manuscript, provisionally titled weird connections & nearly complete, is definitely project oriented. It’s asking questions about what language is, where it comes from in the body, its relationship to some kind of “godthing.” It’s also about the endlessness of literary life & is full of citations within the poems.

stemmy things wound up peak first book: it’s basically a trans memoir & tries to hold space for every thought i’ve ever had & how i got to them, & then the relationship to culture therein. i don’t wanna do something like that again. The way i hope to carry on working is to pose a question, or set of questions to myself, play around in them for a few months, do some writing, & when i feel satisfied, that’s a book. Ideally no book would take more than a year to conceive & get to manuscript form.

rm - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

ixs - Put me on a stage & i will make something happen! i love love love performing, & it’s definitely part of the process. You can learn a lot about rhythm by reading aloud, not to mention getting some kinda feeling as to how the work lands w ppl.

rm - 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?

ixs - My theoretical concerns vary project to project. i talked a bit earlier about weird connections, its concerns. stemmy things is ultimately about how selfhood(s) form, disperse, form, trans-, & how that process sits in relation to racist, sexist, homophobic, white supremacist & imperialistic society. Necessarily, more questions are posed than satisfied, but i hope the work gets at some perennially important questions.

As for what those questions are—that’s a matter of context, of where one stands in relation to so many factors. i think of Audre Lorde & the necessity of telling the truth of our lives, in relation to the world w / in & around us.

rm – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

ixs - i want to avoid absolutes, & thus won’t speak to what the role of the writer should be. What i will say is that i hope to be useful & accountable to my community(ies), in terms of ethics, aesthetics, questions posed, vibes offered up, etc.

rm - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

ixs - i love collaborating & editor(s) feel essential. In my dreams, i have the kind of relationship w an editor one imagines Brian Eno having w some group or person he’s producing. That kind of entering into process, playing & pushing it in new directions. At the same time, if i’m set on something, i’m set on it, ya know? My wonderful editors on stemmy things all encouraged me to cut poems. Looking at the finished work now, in a sense, they were right. The book could perhaps be more taught, more precise. In my head though, it was always this unruly mass—an overgrown garden or a double album of the rock n’ roll era (think something like Sandanista! or Exile on Main Street, the white album or Sign ‘O’ the Times, which were all actually templates). Sure, you could trim those records down & they’d be perfect in a sense, but you’d miss all the play & weirdness. Looking back, maybe they were right, but also, i had a vision & wanted to stick w it, however it wound up shaking out!

To your question though, i’ll reiterate the essentiality of collaboration, which can happen at so many points in the process.

rm - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

ixs - Once, in a workshop, my friend (the great poet & drag performer) Wo Chan said to me “the love is in the details.” i remember this whenever i’m trying to push against my language, which is whenever i write––to make it more specific, emergent from my materiality & set in relation.

rm - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

ixs - These days i’m working 9-5, more or less, so sadly, that’s how a typical day begins. In my ideal Writer’s Life, i’d wake up around 9, read news & drink coffee, & write from about 10:30 to 4 or 5 in the afternoon. Sometimes i’ll get stoned at night to unwind & will end up editing (w varying results lol).

rm - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

ixs - If the writing isn’t coming at a given moment, i don’t sweat it—just do something else. Maybe it’s a moment to rest, or gather, or fuck off completely. But shifting focus is really it—there’s no shortage of inspiration in the world, just put your body elsewhere, redirect your attention.

rm - What fragrance reminds you of home?

ixs - What immediately comes to mind is cannabis. Living in NYC, there’s a lot of fragrance. So tbh, sometimes it’s the smell of urine & i’m immediately on a subway platform, or it’s the mix of all kinds of food being cooked simultaneously in an apartment building. Maybe i’m away somewhere like in a rural setting, but smell garbage & miss my block. The way a sidewalk smells in summer after it's been hosed off. i say all this sincerely & w a lot of respect—i love my home & take it as it is. It smells like life being lived by the very much alive.

rm - 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?

ixs - All of the above. i love a slow “art” film—they teach me so much about pacing & duration. The same w novels & symphonies. But this list would be excessive, & definitely encompasses all mediums & then some.

rm - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

ixs - The work we do as artists arises from a communal place. Essentially, i’m really into my peers. Lately though, i’d answer this question by naming Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, Cody-Rose Clevidence, Alisha Mascarenhas, Stacy Szymaszek, Aditi Machado, Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta, Valerie Hsiung, Kimberly Alidio, Kay Gabriel, Laura Henriksen, N.H. Pritchard, Rebecca Teich, Wo Chan, Anaïs Duplan, & Rosie Stockton have all been crucial to me in the last year. Bernadette Mayer, June Jordan, Etel Adnan, Diane Di Prima, Lisa Robertson, Dionne Brand, Alice Notley, Bob Kaufman, CAConrad—they’re some perennials (i’m forgetting names, & this is just re poetry!).

Oh—Women in Concrete Poetry 1959-1979 is, like, my bible.   

rm - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

ixs - Make large-scale concrete poems & have gallery show.

rm - 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?

ixs - Musician or filmmaker or gardener—like weird groundskeeper vibes—, maybe a theater actor. Hard to say really—making poems is the only thing i’m good at!

rm - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

ixs - IDK honestly. i love to read, & that might inspire one to write, but who knows? Haven’t ever thought of it in opposition to doing something else.

rm - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

ixs - As far as poetry goes, Kay Gabriel’s A Queen in Bucks County, Sawako Nakayasu’s Texture Notes, Gabrielle Octavia Rucker’s Dereliction, & Valerie Hsiung’s To Love An Artisthave felt so generous. i’m halfway through Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman, which is obviously fucked up & brilliant, & my train book is Love Me Tender by Constance Debré—i love love love her long sentences, full of terse bits broken by commas.

A friend, noting my love of / for LESBIAN NUNS, gifted me The Bell by Iris Murdoch. Side Affects by Hil Malatino& In Praise of Risk by Anne Dufourmantelle have been constant companions in 2022. Same w Gravity & Grace.

At the top of my to-read list are Cat Fitzpatrick’s new novel in verse, The Call Out, Nico Vela Page’s Americón, & Chelsea Manning’s new memoir, README.txt.

Films…hmm…i’m riding high off seeing Bergman’s Persona & Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express at IFC earlier this year. It’s spooky season & i love horror, so Bride of Frankenstein & Ken Russell’s The Lair of the White Worm have hit the spot.

i’m also trying to learn more about my own desires by uping my intake queer porn.

rm - What are you currently working on?

ixs - medically transitioning into the all around hottest version of myself

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Dennis Cooley, body works

 

quite the you

quite the me
thod, the art
hritic shoulders

the thud of door—

one big shudder
one bent shoulder

drags the week in & out,
the ends bedraggled

he is a carpet hung from winter
whack whack
an old woman knocking
the cold off course

of course we rehearse
our methods and lists of hers & his
         trionics as they inolve

the bones in a wrist
that spin & threaten
        to pop

Given the ways through which beloved Winnipeg poet, editor, critic, teacher, anthologist, theorist, mentor and publisher Dennis Cooley has worked as a poet over the years, the notion of a trajectory of his writing as seen through a sequence of published book-length poetry collections is less than straightforward; certainly far less straightforward than anyone else I’m aware of. His published work exists as less than a straight line than a complex tapestry, often producing chapbooks and books excised from lengthy manuscripts composed across years (and even decades), offering selected book-sized collections awash with myriad threads, some of which connect to some works over others, all of which spread out endlessly from whatever central point where his work once began.

Cooley’s latest collection is body works (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2023), and the acknowledgments offers that “Earlier versions of some of these poems have appeared in books (sunfall, soul searching, passwords) […].” For readers more familiar with elements of his recent poetry titles—including The Bestiary (Turnstone Press, 2020), cold-press moon (Turnstone Press, 2020) and The Muse Sings (At Bay Press, 2020) [see my triptych review of such here]—it might be less obvious as to the details of these earlier titles, which refer to his poetry collections Sunfall: new and selected poems (Toronto ON: House of Anansi Press, 1996) and Soul Searching (Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1987), and his travel journal Passwords: Transmigrations between Canada and Europe (Kiel, Germany: l&fVerlag, 1996). I’ve written repeatedly over the years on the notion that Cooley works up projects into potentially hundreds of manuscript pages before selecting something that might be more of a publishable shape and size, and honestly, there can’t be that many contemporary poets not only working at his rate of production (I don’t know an exact count, but I’d think he’s published well more than two dozen full-length poetry collections since the late 1970s) that are simultaneously working on poetry manuscripts across such a lengthy scope of time. Or is this simply Cooley returning to earlier ideas, and pulling at older threads for the sake of seeing them further? There were pieces published in his recent The Bestiary, for example, that first appeared in print in the 1990s, and one might recall that two of the three acknowledgments for The Muse Sings also included passwords and Soul Searching, which may even suggest he might be working both: extending ongoing threads and returning back to picking up what had long been set aside. Or are multiple manuscripts sitting simultaneously on his desk, allowing him to prod and poke at various at different points of his attention?

Before even seeing the acknowledgments for body works, the poems here did remind of some of the subject matter of passwords: writing on the body and its limitations, as he had been negotiating some health concerns during that time (there’s a whole long stretch of prose journal in that collection composed directly from his hospital bed). As he has done with multiple poetry collections over the years, Cooley swirls his poems around a particular subject or idea, exhaustively writing poems that explore and examine, eventually compiling a manuscript from the excess (other examples include: his 1999 poetry title Irene [see my Globe & Mail review of such, shockingly still online, here], composed around his mother; his 2003 title seeing red, offering Dracula poems; and his 2013 title the stones [see my review of such here], writing poems on his beloved prairie landscape). Set in six sections of short poems—“for the time being,” “disjointed,” “the body abroad,” “the body politic,” “body works” and “the heart of the matter”—body works offers threads of multiple other interests and concerns familiar to even the occasional readers of Cooley’s work, from fairy tale characters to talk of his father, playfully referencing his namesake homonym, coolies, and his descriptive stretch across that familiar prairie landscape. In all, there’s less of a sense of his usual playful lyric bounce across this collection than a selected precision, one that focuses his usual leaps into something more purposeful, deliberate; as though the play is not the thing but, instead, a particular kind of navigation. “where she runs the air is forked,” he writes, referencing a limp in the poem “she pulls up lame,” “and filled with misgivings [.]” In a poetic style that often moves at breakneck speed in one hundred directions at once, seeing a lyric that moves at half that speed in only forty or fifty directions, at least for Cooley, feels akin to slowing down.

Cooley writes of and around the body, utilizing the core of his subject to articulate memory, utilize sound and cadence, all of which is propelled across the length and breadth of his lone and long-standing prairie syntax. Through playful swirls around the subject of the body, there are certainly ways one might compare this particular work by Dennis Cooley to the late Toronto poet bpNichol’s classic Selected Organs: Parts of an Autobiography (Windsor ON: Black Moss Press, 1988), a manuscript around the body that was only published in full more than twenty years later, as organ music: parts of an autobiography(Black Moss Press, 2012) [my review for Arc Poetry Magazine seems to have fallen offline]. Given some of the poems Cooley wrote in passwords were initially prompted by health issues something that might have prompted Nichol as well? Cooley writes of a limp and even a gouty foot, writing the body as spiritual and physical space in all its glory, absurdities, strengths and occasional failings.

As I’ve writ in other places, Cooley has long constructed poetry collections around a central core of an idea or subject, swirling his lyric around an endless array of fragments, fractals and perspectives, and his book on the body simultaneously and in turn explore the internal and philosophic, the theological and the purely physical. As the back cover offers: “Here, the body is neither a site of conflict nor a place of spiritual weakness, but instead a vessel of experience that works in harmony with the intellect.” This is a collection by a mature poet nearing eighty years old, after all, although it would be curious to understand the balance between the poems first composed during his forties and fifties to ones composed more recently. “its time is done,” he writes, to open the poem “time’s up,” “& from time to time, / yours is too— / right on time, it would seem, / you got off on the wrong foot.” It is curious to see Cooley’s usual wild flurry of energy and syntax slow for the sake of pause, composing a meditative hush held but not overwhelmed by his usual breathless, breakneck lyric speed, one that allows for a lyric of accumulated, sequenced moments of pure, almost breathless, thought. As the second half of the poem “where we unravel,” that offers:

             your bones, my father,
do not fall into meadows of light
nor waters more supple than skin

the Estevan City cemetery the sound
        clay and gravel make
              the scrape of concrete
     [posture is normally upright
      the bright blood broken

  :  :  :  :  :
full fathom five thy father lies
                nebulae & carbon

new from above/ground press: eleven new (January-March) titles,

Night Protest, Ben Jahn $5 ; Poor Rutebeuf, Translated by William Vallières $5 ; tattered sails (after un coup de des), second printing, Derek Beaulieu $5 ; WAVE 1.0, Isabel Sobral Campos $5 ; P E S T / (Zion Offramp 65-70), Mark Scroggins $5 ; The Alta Vista Improvements, rob mclennan $5 ; Report from the (Brenda) Iijima Society, Vol 1. No. 1, edited by rob mclennan $7 ; genesis, Laura Walker $5 ; In Which Archibald Lampman / Translates Arthur Rimbaud, Grant Wilkins $5 ; Report from the (Amish) Trivedi Society, Vol 1. No. 1, edited by rob mclennan $7 ; DEAR NOSTALGIA, Nathanael O’Reilly $5 ;

keep an eye on the above/ground press blog for author interviews, new writing, reviews, upcoming readings and tons of other material; as well as this week's 2023 #AWP (unofficial) offsite (virtual) readings!

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
January-March 2023
as part of above/ground press’ thirtieth anniversary
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button (above). Scroll down here to see various backlist titles, or click on any of the extensive list of names on the sidebar (many, many things are still in print).

Review copies of any title (while supplies last) also available, upon request.

Forthcoming chapbooks by Zane Koss, Peter Myers, Gil McElroy, Ben Robinson, Miranda Mellis, MLA Chernoff, Terri Witek, Geoffrey Olsen, Jessi MacEachern, Pete Smith, Julia Drescher, Robert van Vliet, Brad Vogler, Samuel Ace, Joseph Donato, Leesa Dean, Nick Chhoeun, Jordan Davis, Andrew Gorin, Marita Dachsel, Stuart Ross, Angela Caporaso and Isabella Wang, as well as issue #37 of Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], G U E S T [a journal of guest editors] #26 (guest edited by Adam Katz) and the 32nd issue of The Peter F. Yacht Club, just in time for VERSeFest 2023! And there’s totally still time to subscribe for 2023, by the way (backdating to January 1st, obviously).

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Erin Wilson

Erin Wilson grew up in a rural community on Manitoulin Island, Canada. Her work has appeared in journals including Dalhousie Review, CV2, Verse Daily, Tar River, in the anthology Worth More Standing, Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees, and in numerous other journals internationally. Her works include Blue and At Home with Disquiet (both full-length collections with Circling Rivers) and The Belly of the Pig (chapbook, Dancing Girls Press). She has been long-listed for the CBC Poetry Prize. She makes her home now in a small town on Robinson-Huron Treaty territory.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

On the surface, my first book didn't change my life at all. But underneath everything, there was this actualization of a belief I had held since I was a child. It was a private vindication. I was a writer. My second book, Blue, is a book about depression, motherhood, grief and the transformative power of art. It has a more cohesive theme and purpose.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

It's a very strange thing. My husband (James Owens, who also writes poetry) and I were just trying to decipher why this has been the case for us. It comes very honestly and has its roots in the essence of who I am. Language has always been a living entity to me. I am and have been alert to it since my beginnings. It seems to be a facet of the fabric of me -- body and mind woven tightly together. Some people have ruddy complexions and gnarled fingers. Some people have one leg shorter than the other. I have 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?

Every project is different. Sometimes poems arrive as finished products while I am driving, and I struggle to get them down blindly in a notepad on my lap, while not taking my eyes from the road. When I can pull over, I try to make sense of the scribbles before all is lost. Other poems take years of observations and note taking, not to mention emotional development. I am only just now beginning to learn how to become humble to the needs of the poem. But we race death, and so I have to find the balance between waiting long enough to allow pieces time to mature and getting projects accomplished before I am naught.

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 definitely an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project. However, there are a few different voices (registers) I write with. (See above: racing death. I try truth from every angle.) The voice determines which project the poems will call home.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I'm the kind of writer that is at home in the woods or in a field of grasses or beside a swamp or on a hill of fern. I greatly enjoy reading to ditches. I've known a red pine or two to seem to enjoy a few particular pieces I've written. I get shivers thinking of the rapt attention given me by granite. I'm thinking of trying an audience of snow-locked birches soon.

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 think the current questions are the same questions that have always existed. I am alive. Am I alive? What am I? Am I? What is this world that I believe I'm experiencing? What is time? What is language? My god, where has it come from?!? How do I take what is ephemeral and get it to stay, with meaning and value?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

“You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.” Wendell Berry

“A Poet is called upon to provoke a spirtual jolt and not to cultivate idolators.” Arseny Tarkovsky

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I laugh. Sometimes difficult. Sometimes essential. Usually, with retrospect, at least interesting. There are a lot of personalities and voices to be negotiated.  (Deep gratitude to Jean Huets of Circling Rivers.) Also, this is how one begins to learn to become humble to the needs of the poem. There is a critical time when the poem leaves our hands, and while it technically remains ours, it is no longer ours.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Read. And widely.

“What I do is me: For that I came.” Gerard Manley Hopkins

“...go crazy or turn holy.” Adélia Prado

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 begin every day by reading the rounds of new publications, hoping to encounter something that will trigger a desire to pursue a new way of thinking, hunt down a particular piece of art, music or philosophy. If new publications don't have inpact, I turn to books. Usually by reading my favourite authors, something is ignited. Then I open my notebook and begin. If there is really no spark, I head to the woods. I always keep a notebook with me. I'm always looking, listening. Usually in the woods there are words to be taken down. Swamps rarely disappoint. If I have to go to my day job, I am quickly bereft. If I am lucky, a heron will fly overhead while I'm en route. If I'm really lucky, it will pass overhead during Beethoven's Sonata No. 31 in A-flat, Op. 110, Adagio ma non troppo. Need to give this movement a common name. Maybe The Heron's Sonata.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Books, nature, music, art (Wyeth, Turner, Whistler, Rothko, Morandi, Hammershøi), walking, which is a form of attention and a kind of prayer. It loosens one from the self and brings new perspective. I suppose all of these things are attention and prayer. Actually, deep attention is prayer. Also, by spending time with my children who are now young adults. They always have something to teach me about what it is to be a person and what the world is like these days. (In many ways, on my own, I operate as outside of the world as possible. No cell phone. The systems that are in place have corrupt underlying principles. If you have to buy it, don't trust it. And what isn't for sale anymore?) If I can stay away from the news (which is important but should be taken in small doses like medicine), CBC radio.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Woodsmoke, pine, a particular patchouli incense, homebaked bread...

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'm from rural roots. Our family art was skinning beavers, surviving winter and putting up preserves. And those things are art. I don't quite know how I became what I am now, except to say I've always been hungry for the holy. Yes, books, the old ones, the great ones, works in translation, music (Hildegard von Bingen, Bach, Purcell, Beethoven, Kissin, Gould, Pärt), philosphy and art.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Lawrence, Tolstoy, Steinbeck, Stegner, Berger, Chekov, Fowles, Lispector. Gosh, the poets: Eliot, Thomas, Whitman, Roethke, Rilke, Celan, Gilbert, Rexroth, Thompson, McKay, Brett, Lilburn, Lowther, MacEwen, Crozier, Atwood, Szymborska, Tsvetayeva, Miłosz, Vallejo's Human Poems, Jaccottet, Tranströmer, Hauge, Carruth, Charles Wright, Hass...The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry is essential reading. Basho, Issa, Buson, Santōka -- the haiku poets keep me sane.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Walk more. Always more. Please, body, let me be able to continue to walk. Experience more art in person.

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?

In another life -- I wish I would have been a farmer, to have really developed a hands-on understanding of the interrelatedness of the natural world.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

My need, my nature.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

The Tree of Man, Patrick White

Ordet

19 - What are you currently working on?

Three or four books simultaneously. One will be ready for submission this coming winter, the majority of the poems having already been published. The others need time. I am curious to see how they develop. I'm inside the unfolding of them, as ignorant (and excited) as anyone.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

the book of smaller : two further reviews, (plus a bunch of others,

My 2022 poetry title, the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press) has garnered two further reviews over the past week! Nate Logan was good enough to write up a review for DIAGRAM, and Eric Schmaltz was good enough to write up a review for Canadian Literature. Thanks so much!

As well, I've even managed to put together a page on my author page linking all the reviews I've managed to find from over the years of various of my work. I mean, that only took how many years to get around to compiling? There are far more reviews of my books (and chapbooks, even) than I had thought! So that was good also. Check that out here.