Rob Madden is a writer living on the traditional and unceded territories of the Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations in the City of North Vancouver, BC. His work has been published in Grain, Prairie Fire, SubTerrain and other literary magazines. He holds a certificate in Creative Writing from the Writer’s Studio at SFU from 2005.
You can read there is everything in the April 2024 issue.
Would you like to tell us a little bit more about your poem? For instance, how or why you wrote it, or perhaps provide some extra context?
In 1993 my dad died of a brain tumor at the age of 53. I was 21. When I was in England in 2016, my Auntie Beryl gave me a postcard he had written to her and her husband Jim from the boat he took when he emigrated to Canada. Reading it, holding it in my hand, seeing his writing, hearing his voice in the way he phrased his short note to them, overwhelmed me. For years I had written about my dad: the nightmare mechanics of being terminally ill with cancer, my childhood memories of him before he was sick, and the recurring dreams he haunted in the years since.
I also spent a lot of time imagining what his life was like before I knew him. I wrote stories, poems, and even started a novel exploring what I imagined of his life before having and supporting a family of his own. But holding that postcard was like being given what I was searching for all along—a tiny, keyhole glimpse into this life he lived, and the wonder and appreciation for it that he shared with the people he cared about. It was such a gift. The presence of this man who had meant so much to me returned. All I had to do was pick it up, and read it, and there he was.
I knew I had to share that experience – that feeling of love with nowhere to go finally released by the simple, ordinary, and random gift of a postcard. A friend of mine recently gave me an essay on grief by the Irish poet Seán Hewitt, he ends it with the line “Nothing is lost, only changed.” For me there is something hopeful and true and redemptive in that, and I think some of the feeling in that statement resonates in the words my dad wrote to his friends, words that still echo through me every time I’m struck by the brief and common miracles that populate our daily lives.
Why was the poetic form the best fit for this particular piece of work?
Because poetry engages with loss and language and transformation in a sharp, and momentary way. Because poetry can be about the ordinary in the ineffable, and the ineffable in the ordinary. It’s uniquely suited to show you something, while simultaneously taking it away. It reveals, and then disappears inside itself, and vice versa. I think most people who read poems are active readers, and hyper-aware of the many meanings and allusions we spin out of these short, broken lines. I think this is a piece that needs that liminal space – line breaks, fractured stanzas, irregular punctuation, all of it. Room and rhythm enough for a reader to want to take it in—- and watch it disappear again. The stillness at the end of a line, the possibility in the gaps between words. I hope it creates a space that invites and encourages someone to sit with it, to see, and feel that loss slowly turn into something else.
Do you have a collection of poetry or even a single poem that acts as a touchstone?
I don’t think so. There are many. Too many, maybe. (Editor’s note: Never Ever Too Many!) Some that come to mind at the moment are: Bright Dead Things, by Ada Limon, Go Leaving Strange, by Patrick Lane, Ariel by Sylvia Plath, Sex & Love & by Bob Hicock.
If you didn’t write poetry, how do you think you might access the same fulfillments that poetry offers in your life?
I’d probably do a lot of those things I already do, just without the poetry practice to process them. I’d focus on writing fiction. Probably short, flash, narrative adjacent variants. I’d wander more. Take more notes, and photographs. Listen to more music. Watch more films. Read. Follow the light. Take more trains. Talk to more strangers. Try to find new and more innovative ways to tell all my people that I love them. I’d fill that space poetry takes with all the things that inspire the work in the first place. Then I’d have to find a new way to let it all go.
How do you revise your work?
Normally I write it up again and again on blank sheets of paper, sometimes in a notebook, sometimes with a typewriter, sometimes with both, and whatever comes from that process eventually ends up on a screen. I generate until I find a shape for the work that I like. Then I start editing and printing with a laptop. But there are no hard and fast rules, and some pieces require a tonne of experimentation, and some pieces go back and forth between the editing and generation phases multiple times and some just fall out of a notebook at 5 in the morning and are barely touched again, but that is rare.
As a poet, what does creative success or achievement look like for you?
I don’t like thinking about success or achievement as a writer, they feel like concepts that won’t help me get where I want to go when I write. I like the focus writing brings to my life. I like the process and meditative state it produces in me. I like it when the world drops away and I have a piece in front of me trying to formulate itself on the page. I like to think of myself as someone who wants to help that work manifest itself, whatever that looks like. Maybe failure is a more practical concept. I like Samuel Beckett’s mantra: “Fail, fail again, fail better.” That works for me. It seems applicable, more realistic, and constructive, both as a guardrail to keep on track, and as an expectation that is achievable. But I will say, there is something that happens when I get feedback from a reader that surprises, inspires, or brings energy to the work in some way. A friend of mine told me that he and his girlfriend read my work to each other when they were coming down off MDMA one long lost weekend in Montreal. That felt good, expansive, like a compliment I never knew I wanted. Is that success? Maybe.
We love the artistic underdogs, the experimentalists, the lovely weirdos — who or what might you get creative joy or energy from that others might not be aware of yet?
Crow Gulch by Douglas Walbourne-Gough, Gigglepuss by Carlie Blume, Fishing for Leviathan by Rodney Decroo, The Clichéist by Amanda Lamarche, Music from a Strange Planet by Barbara Black, Holden After and Before by Tara McGuire.
What are you working on now?
I am working on a chapbook to be published in June by Pinhole Poetry entitled second hand smoke.
How or where or with what does a poem begin?
A poem begins with anything, or nothing. Usually in a moment, but not always. Sometimes a memory, sometimes a fantasy or a projection, and sometimes it’s just an observation of something that feels overlooked or important in a way you can’t quite understand. A stubbed cigarette, a wrong number, the stuttered ignition of a faulty starter motor. Sometimes there’s an emotional charge, a question of why this and not something else, a sense of that gap between what we experience and what we know. Sometimes there’s a character, or a relationship between characters to pay attention to. Sometimes it’s as thin and slippery as a mere presence, or absence. Maybe this is where the writing starts – a notebook, the back of a torn envelope, a repeated detail burning itself into your mind until you get it down. For me there’s just a sense of needing to tell someone something, something important enough to want to get it right. It’s that deep urge to come closer to a kind of understanding, however loosely held, within you, but you know it needs to happen on the page, for someone else to read. So, it has to be a poem.
Are there other art forms that inspire or inform your poetry?
Yeah, all of them. For me, photography, music, and film especially. There is something of the snapshot in poetry for me. That accidental and frozen feel of a moment in time that resonates with what poetry is capable of. The movement and rhythms we feel in a song. The edited juxtaposition of a series of shots in a scene from a film. All things that inform and inspire the work on the page. I love how interrelated poetry can be. How fluid and dynamic it can take these influences if we let it. I want to write a piece as roughly knotted with desire as a scene from Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together, or a character who brightens at the edges like Hamilton Leithauser’s voice when he belts out a lyric in a half-empty bar, or an image that gives you that vague and soul warming feel of a Saul Leiter still, shot through a steamed café window in the city of New York in 1961.
How do you make space for poetry in your daily routine?
I get up early. I give that time to notebooks. I spend one day of the weekend at the library downtown. I try to take moments during the work week where there’s space for a breath and stretch into the silence between and under all the things in our lives. I look for clues. I follow patterns. I pretend my life is a code I’m trying to break. Of course, it’s not, but I carry a small notebook anyway, just in case. I think I’m going to write it all down, but usually I don’t. So, whenever I can, I get up early.
How did you begin writing poetry? Was there a specific inspiration or reason?
I began writing poetry because I was asked to. For years I wrote essays, short stories, screenplays. I loved that work and submitted it to my local creative writing program at SFU in Vancouver in 2005. I got accepted by the program but was told I’d be in the poetry cohort. I had never written a poem in my life. But I figured, that Miranda Pearson, the poetry mentor that year, knew something I didn’t. So, I gave it a shot and I’m still going, so Miranda must’ve been onto something.
What are you reading or watching or listening to lately that intrigues or inspires you?
I am reading some friends work these days which is excellent, but not a lot of published material lately. I’m watching Instrument, a 16mm musical document of the band Fugazi between 1987 and 1996, and it’s mesmerizing. And I’m listening to a lot of different things, but especially to anything a good friend of mine posts on his Instagram story feed — @ultimazembla, and that is endlessly inspiring.
Have you ever received advice (or has there been something you’ve learned on your own) about writing or revising poems that has made you a better poet? What was it?
What I’ve found generally, is that advice is only helpful if it inspires you to find a way to keep going. That every opinion on craft has a shadow opinion or opposing perspective that can be equally helpful if it supports what you want to do. All advice needs to be tempered with that knowledge. If it’s helpful, and you need and want that help, then use it. Live by it even. Until it’s not useful, then throw it out, and go again.
Do you belong to a writer’s group? If not, where do you find poetry community and feedback?
I have belonged to many writer’s groups and workshops over the years. I think it can be a great and valuable tool to generate conversation, and build those connections that can end up creating community. But in the end the primary community is the one that has the faith and trust to meet you on the page. That nexus between a writer alone in a room with those words in front of them, and a reader, in some other room, with those same words, and that similar imaginative work that connects us to each other in all the ways we will never tire of trying to understand.