Sentinel
Poetry (Online) #36 – November 2005 Online Magazine Monthly…since
December 2002. ISSN 1479-425X
Interview
A
Worker in the Ministry of Poetry
Interview with
Rob Mclennan
By Amatoritsero Ede
Amatoritsero Ede: It is great to be able to have this
conversation with you, rob. You are definitely a peripatetic figure in the contemporary
Canadian poetic scene. Could you give the reader a brief genealogy of your
literary progression and how you became so central to the
Rob Mclennan: Geez,
how does one begin? I've published ten trade poetry collections with presses in
various parts of the country, over sixty-five poetry chapbooks in three
countries, and toured across Canada ten times, as well as into the United
States and Ireland. I've published poetry, fiction and critical work in eleven
countries. Since 1993, through above/ground press and STANZAS magazine (for
long poems / sequences) I've been the most active (poetry) chapbook press in
A.E.: What drove you to poetry or poetry to you?
R.M.: I was always interested in making things, whether out of
paper or out of words (and sometimes a combination of both), when I was very
small. I took piano lessons, I drew portraits of people from photographs, I
made fake newspapers and drew comics, wrote comic book scripts, all sorts of
things. For whatever reason, by my late teens, I was gravitating more towards
writing poetry and short fiction, and was publishing both in a 'zine we published in our high school alongside the work of
Clare Latremouille and Patrick Leroux
(who have since gone on to great things of their own). In high school, I was
fortunate enough to have a strong social group that was writing, and interested
in writing, including Patrick and Clare and Ann-Marie Seguin
(the mother of my child, who got me reading Canadian Literature, good or bad),
among others. We started a zine to publish our work
when I was in grade eleven, and it even continued (through our English teacher,
Robert McLeod) for a few years after we had all left. By that time, instead of
a discorporate group of us publishing under pseudonyms, it was more of an
official publication of the grade thirteen Writers Craft class (which took so
much of the fun out).
A.E.: Your tenth collection is a return to roots, in a sense. What
was the reason for this idyllic/pastoral preoccupation? And would you say
Stone, Book One is a love poem?
R.M.: Perhaps it is. The whole piece is meant to be the loose
story of a couple in a place much like where I grew up, in a time much like I
imagine (right or wrong) much like the time my grandparents would have met and
married. The poem culminates in the birth of their first child. I had
originally thought that there would be three or four books to the piece, taking
the second one into a further direction, watching the child of the original
couple move through from original awareness to adulthood, but I've only moved
half-way through the manuscript. Also, each poem title in the first book comes
from lines and phrases from the American poet C.D. Wright, taken not only from
poems, but essays and interviews. The second book borrows lines from the late
John Newlove, who was not only the best poet in
A.E.: There is a lot of experimentation in contemporary Canadian
poetry. In how far has this influenced your own praxis?
R.M.: Well, the question always becomes, a lot compared to what,
to where? I can only speak for the writing I know. Canadian poetry certainly
appears (from what little I've seen) to have more obvious experimentation than
British poetry, but I really haven't seen enough to know what the hell I'm
talking about. On the other hand, it has far less than American poetry seems
to. It all depends on the angle you see the work from, doesn't it? I've always
considered, for my own work, if I am going to attempt something that isn't
better and/or different than what has appeared before in the same kinds of
forms, then why go through the whole process? Sure, it's hard to write a sonnet
and that can be an interesting process, but at the same time, so many people
have written sonnets so well, that I don't think the world of literature needs
me doing that, unless I can figure a way to really screw with it in ways that
haven't yet been seen, so I choose to focus my energies working other forms
(although, strangely enough, I accidentally wrote my first sonnet a few days
ago).
Poetry is not what it used to be,
and no longer needs to be what it started out doing. Poetry was originally used
for storytelling, and keeping an aural history. Thanks to novels, CNN, movies,
non-fiction, and various other media, poems no longer need to tell stories. So
the question becomes, what should a poem be doing? If
I have a story to tell, shouldn't I be using the novel or short story form? If
I have an issue to get across, shouldn't I be writing an essay? If I have a
history to tell, shouldn't I be writing a non-fiction book or producing a
documentary for television? It forces the consideration of the poem to move
into further territory, I think. I am interested in exploring that territory.
Of what a poem isn't "supposed" to be. But so many
of these considerations are completely arbitrary. It's poetry; we can do
whatever we want.
A.E.: Who is your muse; or
what is your muse: what inspires you?
R.M.: Ha. I don't think I really believe in the muse. I believe in
doing the work; doing the reading, doing the writing.
What inspires
me is the joy of discovery that comes from both the reading and the writing of
new material. I know writers who map out what they are going to do in their
fiction, for example. I don't work that way. I would prefer to begin and see
where the story goes, and be surprised at the compromises and collaborations
that occur between myself and the text. I want to be amazed by it, and will
accept nothing else these days. I want to be stunned by a piece of writing,
whether my own or someone else's.
A.E.: Canadian poetry, it appears, desires to consciously create
an identity for itself. In you own view what is responsible for this.
R.M.: rob: That was a very 1960s notion, of the self-discovery
(the Dominion of Canada turned 100 years old in 1967; thanks to the
Constitution in 1982, July first went from Dominion Day to Canada Day). Many
people worried about that notion of identity, and many people didn't. Even now,
many have argued that the identity has been long achieved, but some are still
looking for it, not believing that it has been achieved. I think much of it
comes from not really having a sense of what other identities are in other
countries, and knowing how to compare.
It doesn't help that we have that
annoying older brother still living just a bit south of us. Some say our notion
of identity came through the War of 1812 (what the Americans called "
But writing identity is a whole
different thing. There are arguments that we didn't have a Canadian literature
until the 1960s, while other claim earlier in the century, even though there
were books being published by authors here in the 1860s. It gets very
complicated.
A.E.: Voice in poetry here is close to the idiom of everyday
speech, I note. Is it conscious or is it part of the desire to create of an
‘authentic’ Canadian voice?
R.M.: Was it Gertrude Stein who said that writing has to be as
close to living as possible? I don't remember. I could have the credit
completely wrong on this one. I have always considered (for my own work), that
to write of the world, I also have to live in the world. I find it strange to
hear a writer proudly exclaim that they don't own a television. Good, bad or
otherwise, television (and movie) culture is a part of the world we live in.
Mass culture doesn't necessarily mean bad. The division of high and low culture
as being "bad" vs. "good" I find rather small-minded, and I
think it causes the writing that comes out of it to lose a whole bunch of
credibility. I'm not arguing that a piece of writing can't speak to me unless
the author watches The Simpsons, but to exclude a whole
element of mass culture and still profess to work within the bounds of the
world seems a strange consideration to me (but I've never pretended to
understand too many things). I read multiple newspapers every day, read poetry,
fiction and non-fiction, watch new movies almost every Saturday with my lovely
daughter, watch hours of both good and bad television, and own over six
thousand comic books. There is something to be learned, I think, from every
medium.
I suppose the question, too, comes
out of who I think I am speaking to when I write. I don't want to exclude a
reader through the language I use (but, at the same time, I do want a reader to
work for it).
A.E: How do you find the time to write, given your ubiquitous
activities – book-fairs, readings, mentoring, and other artistic public
preoccupations?
R.M.: I've always been able to juggle a million things at once.
Every time I've tried to set things aside to finish one or two projects, I end
up starting others. I think it's simply how my brain works. It helps that I've
been doing this full-time for about fourteen years now. When I started doing
all of these things, I honestly thought (naively, perhaps) that it was an
essential part of the job of the writer to write reviews, organize readings and
go to other people's readings, mentor the ones behind me (as the ones ahead of
me have mentored me), and other such things. I've always thought... how can I
imagine anyone going to my readings if I won't go to anyone else's? And when I
started publishing, I saw how easy it was, and thought that it could be a way I
could help the writers around me, by making little books of theirs. I started
running readings to help promote the authors and the books I'd made of theirs.
I started running the
A.E.: I would expect you have a hand in the organising
of the Ottawa International Authors’ festival, the resounding successful
fall edition of which has just come to an uplifting close?
R.M.: I'm not involved at all in the organization of the festival.
I do socialize regularly with the organizers, and I make recommendations, some
of which they take. I have been involved with every festival so far, which has
been pretty cool. They've done so much to help not only the writers in the
A.E.: What directions are you likely to take in your subsequent
creative activities?
R.M.: I've been working on fiction for over a decade, which most
people don't know. After abandoning three novels, I'm trying to get another
three novels finished, and have since started a collection of short stories (I
keep hoping to get one of these finished and placed). I've got manuscripts in
varying degrees of completion of three collections of literary essays, and have
also been doing genealogical work for about fifteen years (all the Mclennan / MacLennan lines in Stormont and
A.E.: Thank you very much for your time.
©2005 Amatoritsero Ede and Rob Mclennan
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