the
book of smaller, rob mclennan
University of Calgary Press, 2022
Jérôme Melançon: Hi Kim, hi Margo. So to get this started: I’m not sure what goes on with the gestures accomplished in these poems. I wouldn’t call them imaginative, but I wouldn’t call them descriptive, either. Maybe they’re a form of denotation? Trying to name things? What would you call that – what is rob doing?
Kim Fahner: I think he’s documenting each day. While it’s not as narrative as Bronwen Wallace’s work, the book of smaller has that sort of sensibility about it. Wallace used to talk about how we should look for the extraordinary in the ordinary rhythms of life. These short sentences that rob writes remind me, as a reader—and as a person—to take more careful note of what’s happening around me. When I read this book of poems, I feel like I’m a voyeur, seeing things that are private and that, as a result, feel more endearing and weighted with meaning than they might otherwise. Does that make sense?
Margo LaPierre: Absolutely, Kim! There’s a sense of daily taking-stock that reminds me a bit of a scientific or anthropological method, but of the self, of one’s family and communities. “Endearing” is such a great word because I feel this is what rob’s writing does—it’s precise but not calculated. It’s ground-level but expansive. What exists between imaginative and descriptive? It’s like he’s putting pins in experience, creating a map of life, like a shorthand. An emotional, experiential shorthand. And yet there’s a repetition of blood to the point that it’s like experience—time—is bleeding out, and the writing is a way to suture it. In rob’s poem “Failed senryu,” (63) he writes: “I don’t mean to get all parallel. How the day never varies. Like a hemorrhage.” There is a practice in his work that seems to want to show snapshot over artifice. If this collection were a photograph, it would be a candid one.
K: Oh, Margo—I love the ‘putting pins in experience, creating a map of life’ analogy you’ve made. How often do we forget to note the tiniest experiences in a day, but rob does that in all of the poems in the book of smaller.
J: Yes, it’s a way of seeing—voyeurism, taking snapshots—without interrupting the course of the day. There’s something dynamic, so incomplete. There’s no delimitation between the writing, the written, the world, the words received and passed on. He lets us into his perspective, not through his eyes, but from his position.
There’s also the question of why rob is
doing that. He mentions “What needs not be written” (39), which brings focus to
what is written, and suggests that
there are other things, experiences, relations, that don’t need to be written,
that need not to be written. He seems
to give equal importance to both, and to see a difference in quality between
the two kinds of experience. And it’s a choice, it seems arbitrary: “The
sentence is always unfounded.”
Same: “We never look like the writing.” (3) That last one goes back to the question I asked earlier; I don’t think he’s trying to describe, but there’s definitely something he’s trying to grasp, to hold onto. And just to finish this thought, I think the same idea is present when he writes: “My pen runs low. What I have misjudged.” (49) Is it that something didn’t need to be written? Or just that he didn’t use his time well?
K: I think…maybe…it’s about trying to make meaning of life through observing it really carefully. I want to try to do this with my writing, just to try to write a poem in his style, just to see how my mind works if I give it a voice without censoring it. I feel that I ‘clean up’ my writing before it even exits my mind, and that’s before I begin to revise pieces after they’re down on paper. I love how he’ll move from thing to thing, from experience to experience. In “Incremental,” he writes: “I don’t know how to write. Other templates emerge. My faith/is insurance. A pat on the shoulder. Again, our skunk winters.” (30) It’s like leapfrogging through a person’s mind, in poetics.
M: Oh goodness, I feel you, Kim—I would like my writing to be more topographical in the way his is. I would like my whole existence to be that way, and yet I find myself nervous or reticent to be as open as rob is both in his poetry and in his way as a friend and poet in the community. It’s true that in this book rob questions the ability of writing to cover what needs to be covered. I know that rob’s work as a writer extends far beyond the page. That for many years he has bolstered community and created space for writers. His work ethic is unparalleled! I could never agree to a statement that says rob didn’t use his time well. He strikes me as stunningly on the ball, productive, and efficient. And, in the same breath, authentic.
J: That makes me think of the lines, “A sentence is what annihilates me.” And “A cell that holds the body, whole.” (“Title poem,” 67) There’s that ceaseless movement that you both describe so well, on the page and in life, that could really define him—but from the inside, he seems to experience an opposite fear, a concern with disappearance or immobility. Or maybe he craves it, I don’t know, this might not be a negative eventuality at all.
There are some great metaphysical images here, depictions of being, beings, ways of being… What are your favourites? I’ll share mine after.
K: A lot of this book made me sit up and think about how time works, and how it passes, and how we age without thinking we are aging. I’m not sure what I want to ask about this, and I need to think a bit more about it, but I also know I need to write this down or I’ll forget!
M: Oh boy, 100%, Kim. In relation to aging, what do you think may be hidden in the line “Words as long as facts” in “My 1975” (31)?
K: I think I’m drawn to how rob positions himself in terms of his age, and the aging process. He and I are very close in age, so I’m drawn in to the way he notices things that are both timeless and constant, almost, and then left thinking about how it feels to be ‘between’ two ends of time in a life. His tiny daughters show one end of the spectrum, but his poems about his father’s decline show the other. He’s in the middle somewhere, trying to find meaning in the syntax of sentences and often realizing that it’s rooted in the tiniest moments of caring for his girls or checking in on his dad. I love “Daylight savings” for that sense of location and setting. He writes: “But first, coffee. What have we saved? Preschooler up with the dawn. Morning routine, chaos: oatmeal, newspaper, diapers. So much yelling. A mile or more in her red shoes, princess apparel. Such empathy. Exaggerated twirls.” (54) Reading this poem makes me feel as if I am sitting in that same kitchen, watching a morning full of chaos and love unfurl itself over a mug of coffee. The tenderness of this poem gets at my heart, especially when rob ends it with “We have no need for icons.” Gah! My heart! No, of course not. There is no need for icons because he is describing this beautiful scene of familial chaos and love. It’s raw and gorgeous and tender. In his description, he knows the value of the moment, one that will pass…as all of time does.
M: I love his Forty-seventh birthday series, and from the first one, there’s the image of a petrified forest for language. I remember visiting the petrified forest in Arizona as a child, and it’s a bunch of trees turned into rocks! I’m sure that once I had one of those tree-rocks for my pocket. But he applies this to grammar, dead metaphors. These smooth-brained rocks we carry. In another serial poem, “It’s still winter,” electrical outlets are held in the mouth. And occasions equal restlessness. Something occurring only once drawing our attention. What is not daily, not holy, maybe. I love the dailiness in rob’s poems.
J: That image of metamorphosis you bring up Margo, I love it. Reaching for something that’s outside of the possibilities of daily life, within daily life. rob writes in “Wing, an ideal place”: “A shadow won’t translate; you have to speak its language.” (26) So much in here, and definitely in my own writing as well, emerges from this concern to catch what objects, times, situations, events are telling us. Conveying that, passing it on, requires such care, like bringing something into the world, from a different world, a different dimension, in all its fragility, because it doesn’t entirely belong here. And yet, it’s here.
K: Jerome, that notion—of passing it on—is embedded in the poems about his mother and father, but also in rob’s fascination on where things begin in a person’s life. We know factual things—like our place and time of birth—but memory starts a bit later, so he explores and spelunks around that question, as well. What do we first remember? How are we tied to those who came before us? Those who come afterwards? The idea of passing things on (or down) is reflected, too, as Margo says, in the birth and birthday poems.
I love “Birth story” for its simplicity: “I was born. At some far away point. Two blocks from this tavern. I’m not joking” (15). It’s a place to situate oneself, the moment you were born—when you began and how you begin to move forward from birth to adulthood, and then, to caring for aging parents and being part of the Sandwich Generation. It’s echoed again, in “I live somewhere imaginary” (47), when rob writes “The poem begins: when you are born” and “I repeat myself.” As humans, as poets, we ‘worry through’ some of the same big questions and ideas through our bodies of work. That notion is present in the book of smaller, too.
One of the key themes, I think, is about how writing ‘works’ and how much we think about how it works, as the poets and writers we are. The prologue of the collection, by Anna Gurton-Wachter, speaks to how writing is about suffering losses. Sometimes, it feels to me, life is also about that, so it’s an archetypal human ‘thing.’ But, then I also think that—as writers and deep thinkers—we are maybe more aware of how tiny things are both gifts and losses. How do you think loss works into this collection of rob’s? I’m noticing his poems for his parents, and for his children as they grow up…
J: My children being a few years older than his younger two, I was brought back to those moments, holding them after they had fallen asleep in the oddest places or sitting down in the middle of an intense session of pretend-play, when I noticed small changes that made me feel that something was slipping away. He weaves that feeling into a few poems—a shared joy, but a consciousness of time as carrying away what’s already in the process of escaping. His eldest daughter is also present, deepening that gap in time, that slipperiness: “My daughter is in New York City, celebrating. The baby is asleep. The poem is the distance between early morning rustlings. The toddler, cat. This is the last day of the year.” (2) But there’s also something in there that’s not entirely lost, and the same goes for his mother. In “Sentences my mother used” (37) the brevity and ordinariness of the sentences seem to carry his mother into his own, or anyone else’s, daily utterances, making her present still.
M: The poems in the book of smaller strike me as those of a self-archivist. Or not quite the self but the circle around self: family, community. I feel like I hear the word “presence” as a verb a lot these days, of presencing, being present, making present. And I wonder if rob is “pasting” by treating the familial/familar minutiae as historical and worthy of preservation even in the moment of its unfolding. Preservation in a way that anticipates loss, so that loss must be coded into a thing in order to enter it into this archival document. His poem “Letter” (65) is only two sentences: “As sacred as any artifact. The disembodied hand.” I am not sure whether “letter” is meant as the typographical character or the epistolary document, maybe both (probably both), but I wonder if these treats writing as an extension of ourselves that we then have to chop off in order to pass it around to others to read.
K: I’m fond of the tiny, domestic details that he weaves into his poems. I love the mentions of slow cookers and children waking from naps. Were there images or lines that resonated with you, that made you rethink your life inside your house, even?
J: The book resonated with my pandemic life, even though it was written before the pandemic. This tying together of moments, the multiplication of my gestures inside the home that were simply multiplied once we needed to isolate (and in the case of my family, given a compromised immune system in the house, this is for the foreseeable future). Living by train tracks (repeatedly, across different cities), I’m drawn to “Thunder rolls, or a heavy truck.” (49) That uncertainty about what the world brings to us, whether there’s danger, whether I need to stop what I’m doing on carry on, as I carry on. And then there are those aspects of daily, home life that disappear. “Sustenance” (72) is the clearest series of images that brought me back to gestures we repeated every day when the children were young, completely unrelated thoughts interspaced between them: “Rose, a wish to water seedlings. Sprout. All we’ve managed to garden. Where’s her schoolbag? Put your socks on. Chew. Beyond the frame: Christine’s work-prep.”
M: Daily gestures, certainly. I don’t have children and am lucky enough to have both parents and both in-laws in my life, so the greatest concrete gains and losses of the book are ones I haven’t experienced. And yet I find the poems to be ground-level and relatable for me, especially in the inquiry of writing as a practice. What are the stakes of writing? The goal? Those sorts of questions. An observation like “We never look like the writing (3)” seems to propose that writing might be a turning inside out of self. Oh, I am this person with this colour of hair and this particular smile and this wool scarf and these projects and these chores? Well ha, I am also the red slime of viscera, the half-digested food, the electric glint of chattering neurons. I am also these memories and questions.
A few lines that draw my attention for their attention to leaky abundance:
“Thirty pages of liquid (26).”
“The unbound capacity of sentences (33).”
“The talk of ‘one more thing.’ Adaptability. Waterlogged (38).”
“Word count. A spread (39).”
“How the day never varies. Like a hemorrhage (63).”
“How these fragments link together (73).”
“How high is the water? Runoff, drift (74).”
“The Chaudiere rages. It holds down the house. May have washed away. How high’s the water, mama (75)?”
“Rituals are not my thing. A multilingual, bleed and shift (81).”
“The sun flows in every direction. Do not worry about your own authority over anything (87).”
“The surface overtakes the borders (92).”
Even the final line of the collection: “This June rain, relentless. I’ve nothing to add (108).”It’s all an overflow. I picture rob like one of those old animated cartoons in a leaky house of experience, putting buckets everywhere that simply can’t contain. I remember Mickey Mouse in the movie Fantasia, The Sorceror’s Apprentice number, gleefully playing with magic that results in an alarming, rushing flood that displaces all sorts of domestic items. There’s a desire to contain and a recognition of how impossible a task that is.
To tie this back to Jerome’s question, I think in this collection, being is a bursting that can’t be dammed. But we can still try to document, imperfectly. What do you guys think? Does life overflow or exceed writing? Are we talking about writing as a container for lived experience?
K: I hope that life can’t exceed writing because then I’d worry that some of it wouldn’t be captured in literature, and I love how literature—all genres, but poetry in particular—serves to sort of remind us of our humanness. I guess I hope, too, that writing can serve life, somehow…that writing can record and document and then later serve as a form of recollection and witnessing (for others who may come later and possibly read the work) so that fragments of time and life experience are preserved for later. I like that idea of writing as a container for lived experience, but I don’t want the lived experiences to ever feel like dead butterflies pinned in a display box in the ROM or something. I want writing to keep the essence of life experience alive, in a vibrant way. I think that’s why rob’s work in this collection is all about “Compassionate engagement” (55) and how a letter, something he says that only poets write anymore, is “sacred as any artifact.” (65)
J: If we're taking the time to write, even this right now, and if rob's making time to write in between everything else he's doing in 2017, sometimes a simple marvelous line that holds everything within itself, for a moment, then writing has to exceed life, augment it, heighten it, be its own experience, its own moment. Like when writing a letter, making time for someone else. I just got a letter from rob, along with a box of my chapbooks, and I need to reply, but already there's this gratefulness for having written—and I do mean to be ambiguous about the subject of this sentence. I get that sense of gratefulness for the moments that are carried into writing, taken care of, held, and for the moment of writing, in every page of this book. The moments don't flee in the book or between not writing and writing, they flow into one another, and rob develops an awareness of continuity. Not always, of course, and he knows it: “I don’t mean to get all parallel.” (63)
I feel a deliberate writing, a polishing, every sentence smooth, a pebbling. We feel a desire to carry & let oneself be carried. I think you're right, Kim. These short sentences without subjects or verbs or predicate—they're the work of the invisible. They have—rob gives them no beginning nor end, no temporal direction; they're a delivery of fullness.
M: An awareness of continuity is such a great word for what he’s doing, Jerome. And Kim, yes to compassionate engagement! He certainly lives this. One thing I appreciate is how he doesn’t disengage when encountering resistance. A few years ago he’d prompted me to send him some poetry a few times and I had to admit to him that I was just simply too depressed to send any work out, there was nothing I’d feel good about seeing published. Several months later, he checked back in, and whether it was that time or another later on, eventually I was in a place where I was able to submit. I think a lot of writers are in tough spots right now and rob’s attitude is one to keep in mind, whether we’re prompting or querying or submitting or simply reaching out as a friend—to keep trying in cycles despite resistance.
J: That makes me think of a line I love, that I keep going back to: “Wings: if we’ve each but one, should we hold hands.” (26) Not a complete interrogation, and not a statement. More than a hypothesis, less than a norm. A suggestion perhaps, or the expression of an attitude. He doesn't speak to the reader often, and he doesn't address the people in his life in the second person, so it might be a generic we—or a way to describe a poetics, an ethics, a politics, simply his way of relating.
Kim Fahner first met rob in Ottawa, while she was a grad student at Carleton, back in 1994-95. There, in the window of an independent bookstore on Bank Street, was a long-haired poet who looked a bit like Jesus writing poems on an Underwood typewriter. She bought a chapbook of poems and liked it a whole lot. Such a long time later, and she’s glad to be writing reviews for periodicities with cool poets like Jerome and Margo. She especially likes how rob gathers poets together from across the country in his poetic undertakings, and she loves getting occasional notes from him in the mail!
Margo LaPierre met rob through the Ottawa poetry scene while she was still just a visitor to the city from Toronto, in thrall of how cool, kind, and welcoming all these Ottawa poets were. Margo and rob *almost* share a birthday and very occasionally run into each other on Bank St., where rob can sometimes be found running writerly errands with happy little Aoife as his sidekick.
Jérôme Melançon met rob mclennan on Twitter and sent him a chapbook. The response, and invitation to send work for periodicities (well, not a personal invitation) all came on the cusp of the pandemic. Then he's met so many great people through above/ground, periodicities, and social media conversations that he can't untangle his life and his writing from all these threads rob lets all these great writers leave lying around.
All three publish often enough on periodicities and kind of like it here.