Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent titles include the poetry collections the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022) and World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), and a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics (periodicityjournal.blogspot.com) and Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com). He is editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com
Read Three smaller studies: in our July 2023 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? Why was the poetic form the best fit for this particular piece of work?
Over the past few years, I’ve been exploring the lyric sentence through line-breaks and other visual rhythms. When my current brood (currently 7 and 9 ½) were smaller, I focused a year on working a book-length suite of prose poems, the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022). That particular focus on the short form emerged from an accumulation of considerations that simply came due, alongside a reduced attention span, as my dear spouse had returned to work after a year-long maternity leave, which altered my days into full-time consideration with baby and toddler. I’d been leaning into the prose poem for at least a decade prior to this, and our daily household allowed for no other kinds of writing other than something short, small and densely-packed, so the project simply felt right for that particular moment. Since the book of smaller was completed, I’ve been attempting to emerge out the other side of that particular prose poem form through visually and rhythmically expanding the lyric sentence. This poem, “Three smaller studies:,” is simply part of that particular trajectory, included as part of the manuscript-in-progress, “Autobiography,” a project which immediately follows the as-yet-unpublished “the book of sentences,” which in turn followed the book of smaller.
Do you have a collection of poetry or even a single poem that acts as a touchstone?
I often return to the work of more writers than I could ever count, but these days, touchstones remain Rosmarie Waldrop, Etel Adnan, Pattie McCarthy, Sarah Mangold, Anna Gurton-Wachter, Robert Kroetsch and Susan Howe, among others. I always feel as though there’s something new to learn through returning to each of their works, so copies of multiple titles of theirs remain close to my desk. Over the past few years, I’ve also been quite struck by the works of Caroline Knox, Benjamin Niespodziany, jos charles and Valzhyna Mort. There are certainly others.
If you didn’t write poetry, how do you think you might access the same fulfillments that poetry offers in your life?
I’m sure I would have figured out some other outlet. I spent much of my teen years drawing, painting and taking piano lessons. Alternately, poetry isn’t my sole writing form, as I’ve also worked across short stories, novels and essays, including the book-length essay.
How do you revise your work?
One might say: constantly. While circling the ends of a poem, I can often run through twenty, thirty, forty printed drafts. I often need to print off the poem to “see” it, and scribble upon that printed page before returning to the screen to print a new draft. It has to feel perfectly, exactly right before I consider it finished.
What are you working on now?
I am circling the ends of the poetry manuscript “Autobiography,” but I’ve not been actively working on that for a while. I’ve spent most of the past six or seven months focusing on a book-length essay on poetry, community, reviewing and responsibility, “Lecture for an Empty Room,” which prompted my substack last fall, to actually push me to further into a project that had been itching at the back of my head for at least two years. I’d like to get back to a novel-in-progress (begun during that first Covid-lockdown summer), have been working a half-dozen short stories, and am constantly working on a half-dozen poetry book reviews. Back in January, I seem to have started a new poetry manuscript: a suite of short suites, working sequences of shorter forms. So far the project is titled “edgeless.”
How or where or with what does a poem begin?
Sometimes a sound or the shape of an idea or a phrase. Sometimes a mélange of words I cobble together in an attempt to explore form, accumulating into something larger around a central core. I’ve been the past year or so wishing to eventually begin a collection of longer, self-contained, single-stanza prose poems under the title “The Museum of Practical Things,” but I should probably get some other projects off my plate before I launch into that kind of attention. I’ve been thinking that after examining elements of the personal across the past decade or so, it might be worth thinking in a different direction for a while. All in good time.
Are there other art forms that inspire or inform your poetry?
If I hear a good line from anywhere it might prompt some thinking. If it impacts or sparks my thinking, it can’t help but impact my writing, whether comic books, fiction, television, superhero films or visual art. I’ve had the same YouTube playlist running in the background as I work, every few weeks returning back to the beginning, for at least three years now. Sigur Rós, Brian Eno, Ólafur Arnalds, Hammock, Tycho, Nils Frahm, Robin Guthrie, etcetera.
How do you make space for poetry in your daily routine?
My writing (poetry, reviewing, essays, editing, fiction, etcetera) is my routine. Mornings are 7am for coffee and school lunches, leaving for various deliveries (two school drop-offs and occasionally wife’s work), and I’m properly at my desk just after 9am. I don’t have to leave to start collecting anyone until 3pm, which still allows me another hour or so beyond that before I begin to make dinner.
What are you reading or watching or listening to lately that intrigues or inspires you?
Ted Lasso was such a well-written show. I haven’t felt such good television writing since Mad Men. The narrative structure to the final season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel was intriguing: quite a shift from the prior seasons. One could say the same of Ted Lasso: the shifts of that third season were quite interesting, and brought out far more nuance than had been there prior. I consider anyone thinking it a weaker season than the first two for having “fewer laffs” or what-not simply weren’t paying enough attention to what was actually going on across those first two seasons.
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?
Most worthy advice has simply been about listening, and being patient. I was already attempting to read everything I could get my hands on. I’ve said for years that the best lesson I’ve learned through writing has been that everything takes its own time, and one has to allow for that, and attend to it.
Do you belong to a writer’s group? If not, where do you find poetry community and feedback?
Across the aughts, there was a group of us that participated regularly in the open set at The TREE Reading Series, which was always an opportunity for a handful of us to share fresh work. We ran some informal group workshop sessions between us through The Peter F Yacht Club during those days as well. More recently, if I feel really stuck on a piece I might offer it to my dear spouse, Christine McNair. She has a fantastic eye.
In terms of poetic style or craft, is there a big question you are trying to find an answer for?
That’s a good question. I suppose in many ways I’m attempting to articulate what is already there, but in ways that might provide a different kind of perspective upon what might already be familiar.