Steve McOrmond is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Reckon (Brick Books, 2018). A past recipient of the Milton Acorn Award and the P. K. Page Founders’ Award for Poetry, his work has appeared on Poetry Daily and in Best Canadian Poetry in English. A new chapbook is forthcoming in fall 2025 from Baseline Press. He lives in Toronto.
You can read Out of Time in the July 2025 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 the midtown Toronto neighbourhood where I’ve lived for 25 years, the knife-sharpening truck would show up unexpectedly every spring, trolling the tree-lined residential streets, its tinny bell a harbinger of warmer weather on the way. While the poem exaggerates the response, its unscheduled appearance did incite a rush to gather lawnmower blades, grass clippers, garden spades, and kitchen cleavers for sharpening. In the poem, this charmingly improbable anachronism serves as an entry point for a meditation on how the past persists into the present, and how things in our lives inevitably lose their edge with use and time. As I read on a gardening site, “Once you’ve worked with a sharpened spade, you’ll wonder how you ever managed with a dull one.” I haven’t seen or heard the knife truck yet this year, but I hope it’s still out there somewhere.
Is there a collection of poetry that never leaves your (perhaps metaphorical) nightstand?
There are quite a few books of poetry that routinely find their way onto the nightstand, but I’ll single out The Wild Iris by the late Louise Glück.
If you didn’t write poetry, how do you think you might access the same fulfillments that poetry offers in your life?
Hmmm, what would I be doing if I didn’t write poetry…. Playing the ponies, working the high steel, getting day drunk on tequila. I don’t know. I suppose it would be something equally absurd, obscure, and difficult: watchmaker, safecracker, streetcorner doomsayer, troll farmer, Motörhead cover band manager, leech gatherer, octopus minder, Bitcoin miner for a heart of gold, stationary yoga instructor, ragdoll breeder, carny, burn boss, something to do with pallets.
In all seriousness, photography comes closest to scratching the itch. Most days I go out with the camera, I don’t capture an amazing photo, but the ritual of attention is what’s important. It’s the same with poetry. Most mornings I sit down to write or edit, I don’t make a great or even a half-decent poem, but you have to keep searching, stay alert, and keep the muscles limber, so that when the decisive moment does come, you’re ready for it.
How do you revise your work?
Arduously, often over many years. It takes me a long time to make a poem as good as it can be. It’s a terribly inefficient process. Often, the problem is that the poem hasn’t found its final form yet, so it’s walking around feeling uncomfortable in its skin, wearing clothes that are ill-fitting and inappropriate for the occasion.
As a poet, what does creative success or achievement look like for you?
I’ve been at this a while now, and I’m not sure I have many illusions left about what success looks like. Maybe for five minutes in the mid-90s I aspired to ‘make it big’ in the poetry scene, whatever that means. But then your first book comes out, no one shows up to your poetry reading at a bar in Halifax or Windsor or somewhere, not even the event organizer, and you end up reading your poems anyway to the bartender and a bored waitress. As Elizabeth Bishop put it in an interview in The Paris Review, “There’s nothing more embarrassing than being a poet, really.”
That said, I feel fortunate to get to do the thing I love, and to have been able to keep doing it over the long term. I’ve long since stopped thinking of poetry as a profession or career; it’s more of a calling. The pursuit of poetry is humbling and requires the utmost devotion. Ada Limón says “all writing is basically failure.” It’s an idea echoed in the title of Dean Young’s book of poetry, Fall Higher. You’re only as good as your last poem, and that’s a beautiful thing.
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?
Lately, I’ve been obsessed with Arthur Russell (b. 1952, d. 1992), avant-garde cellist, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, music producer, and accompanist to Allen Ginsberg. A true iconoclast, his albums World of Echo (1986), and the posthumous Picture of Bunny Rabbit (2023) are joyously minimalist, weird, and incredible.
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?
My friend and mentor, the late PEI poet John Smith, always encouraged me to focus on sound first then sense, and stressed the importance of spontaneity, surprise, and sprezzatura in a poem. No matter how hard a poem is to write or how difficult its subject matter, whether emotionally or intellectually, its movement should seem graceful, effortless, and inevitable. In Smith’s poems, every line break tempts indeterminacy and requires of the reader a leap into the unknown. For a long time, I had a yellow sticky note on my computer screen with that one word, sprezzatura, written on it in permanent marker.
Do you have a trusted first reader and how did they win the honour?
I bring my first drafts to my wife like a cat proudly presenting a mouse it has caught. It’s a dubious honour, one of the hazards of being married to a poet. But she always sees something I missed. We met in the graduate English program at UNB in Fredericton. She wrote her master’s thesis on the work of Rohinton Mistry. She’s a voracious reader and has a few lines of Dylan Thomas’s poetry tattooed on her side, so she’s overqualified for the job. I feel blessed to have her as a first reader.