A: Mostly, almost always, I construct books off material I have been assembling for years. Sometimes that means salvaging something that never got into earlier books. I’ve kept paused or undeveloped material that was part of earlier mss. So, I’ll have swatches of residual work from most of the titles, especially those from the last 20 years or so. They might involve pieces that are nearly “done” when I remove and take them into a new ms. More often, they will contain scatters of notes, strings of cognates, quotations, references, research data, rhymes, phrasings, research informationreminders, remainders, and even drafts of poems. I keep them in a few identified folders, and will move them between folders, knowing I might use them somewhere or other. The gathering helps me find something that I likely would forget, and that I might one day run with. It’s banking. A lot of it is goofy and outlandish, but mostley it amuses and impels me.
The two books you specifically ask about have drawn on what I’d been pecking away at for years. Some of it developed in extensions on earlier publications. body works continues a history that started at least in 1987 with the publication of soul searching. The title led some who had heard of the book but never read it mistakenly supposing I was a believer in angels. The book pretty much sympathized with the body and lamented the imperialism of angels and snobs. Years later I wrote departures (2016), based on a few weeks with a ruptured appendix—more appreciation of the body. body works became the latest incarnation of the concern. As I was assembling it I wrote a lot of new pieces, but what I had learned and what I had done in the earlier books didn’t disappear. I looked back through them, found a few pieces that would fit, and brought them, revised, into it. I’ve often reviewed related writing and revived it within a new field. Part of the impulse is to “save” the pieces. Some of them come from out-of-print books, and from books with limited exposure. A saving from being unknown; that's the hope, at least. If I am justified in my belief that I have improved any of them, or at least altered into new understandings, it can be a saving from being unrealized too—in the original piece and in the accommodating text too. The threads seldom consists of particular passages from earlier publications, but the spirit of earlier books continues.
In the case of body works I had already assembled a lot of material in notes and drafts. Once I had identified the focus of a collection I worked quickly and put together a manuscript within a year or two. The folder-keeping functions as a preparation, even when there is no discernible subject in mind.
I also gather in a more focused way. For years I have kept sites for particular projects that I’m keen on. The most dramatic version of the practice must border on lunacy. As you know, I have been labouring on a ms, love in a dry land, for a long time. I can’t say exactly when I conceived of it as an actual project. But it did begin as an attraction for the characters in Sinclair Ross’s As for Me and My House. I am speaking here of my interest as a poet, I had always found the novel powerful and moving—poetic, I'd say. I am unsure about when I started writing, but it would have been 1989 at the very latest. I have worked on it ever since and it grew and grew. I wrote and revised year after year. Two books, country music (2004) and the bentleys (2006), and a chapbook, the bentleys (2006) have come out of it. In addition to what mostly went into those mss., I have ended up with far more than 700 pages of other poems, and hundreds of pages of notes. I have just now, in the last week, finished two new manuscripts from that larger file and submitted them to publishers. One of them, I am proposing, will be called love in a dry land, the title that supervised the decades of work.
I have simply shed hundreds of pieces but many of the deletions I have already begun assembling as part of another, quite different ms.
And there's the Germany book that has had little if any
distribution. Almost
nobody in Canada has ever seen passwords.
Q: I’ve long been fascinated by the fact that you compose manuscripts that large, excerpting, as you suggest, into manuscript lengths more palatable in size for potential publishers. Is there a difficulty in conception between the singular project and the excerpted-manuscript? How do you pull such threads out of a tapestry to find self-contained book-length works out of such largess?
A: Funny you should ask.
I invariably build up an enormous pile of material. Some of it becomes well-developed and builds in pieces toward a book. A lot sits in another location as patches or drafts that may or may not go further. An awful lots gathers in notes that i constantly transpose from hand-written scribbles into a cache kept on the computer. Sometimes i simply addend stuff at the end of the digital file, or drop it into particular spots. The ms that I have identified as the project proceeds through addition and deletion and emendation and repositioning. The related cache develops along a crude parallel and includes stuff that has struck me as possible or promising. The files grow at the same time, never equally.
I seem unable to call it quits on either front. I will also be developing in other files stashes I may take up for other projects.
There are these heaps, and what to do with them? Where to take them? And when? So long as the impulse to write persists I keep writing. The winnowing is exhausting—because there is so much to process and because I persist in changing texts, inserting others, writing more. I plunge on, often with no end in sight. The poems evade me.
The extracting is exhausting because I always feel there is more to do, you can never be done. I always quote the line from Mallarmé (or Auden as I first encountered it): A poem is never finished, it is abandoned. But it’s hard to let it go. I find it painful to pull out what I find attractive, and I discard it, or set is aside, with reluctance. I keep a lot of the excisions for other possible use, and will sometimes open a new leaD using what I have withdrawn, though the impetus will spill out and mutate into its own direction. (seeing red derived from work I had been doing for goldfinger.)
I try to choose what I think are the most interesting pieces and the most accomplished ones. I want language that is alive and am quick to drop what seems to me ordinary and flat and uninspired. I am also looking for pieces that “fit,” whatever that might mean. I’ve a pretty liberal sense of coherence, and cogency, but I do remove what I feel does not belong, even if I like it. What I end up with undoubtedly will be marked by features that a reader would identify as mine, but I also look for variety and range in the selections. Though it is probably true that for at least chunks of writers’ lives they go on writing the poem that is their poem, I don’t want to write one in small variations on it.
Not much of an explanation, really. It’s a long and exhausting job. The two newest mss that I have sent out only a week ago came out of months and months of shaping what must have mounted to a thousand pages. As I focused on the new collections I assembled preliminary piles, then worked toward a difficult disposing and including that constantly moved.
Q: So then: when a published collection emerges out of a mound of such largess, how do you consider it? Do you see that as the finished work, or as a thread of a larger project that might never see the competed light of day? Or of multiple collections out of a single work? Do they exist as titles-in-sequence or pulled threads? I suppose my real question, here: is the project the process or the completed, published book or books?
A: I don’t know how to answer. What I am inclined to say would not be very satisfying. I don’t make a distinction among the options you raise. I guess I’m unsure what you might mean by “pulled threads.” For starters I’d say that the published collection is never a finished work. It exists in its own right, but what’s there is never settled in what I have done or might do. If I understand your terms, I’d say that the work is always product and always process, and I would think of it as as lurching back and forth. The work generally would might remain in process for any number of reasons, most of them predictable. There's a sense that the ms is unrealized or inadequately realized; a failure of energy or attention; a sense of nerve or failure; a redirection in priorities; simple distraction; the want of a magazine or publisher; a desire or need to continue on a project. I always revise and redirect, even with published stuff. I welcome the opportunity, as in, say, bringing into body works the residues you have found; or more dramatically in developing what is almost a second edition of Bloody Jack. Things could be made better, or different, or newly functional. The texts don’t close for me.
Again, my response may not answer the question.
Q: Well, I describe as “pulled threads” because I don’t know how else to describe a manuscript of one hundred or so pages that would emerge out of a larger manuscript nearing a thousand pages. How else would one describe the process of pulling out poems to shape something smaller in scale? And I’m curious as well about the process of you returning to and adding pages to Bloody Jack: were these pages that were originally composed during the period you were putting the first edition together, or were they newly-written pieces?
A: The work is getting a fair way off by now. I do remember that I wrote a new conclusion the second time around, “at the bridge, Penny.” I also added some “cinematic” pieces that I had already written but not in time to include in the first Bloody Jack. I removed at least one part from the original. I am attaching a graphic of the file listing “new poems, added.” I’m not sure how complete that is, but it would give you some idea. Also: “jail break,” some “cunning” bits, a score for “by the red.” There are probably others, and likely lots of little changes, but these I can’t remember. There probably are traces of them in the material that remains from working with U of Alberta.
Q: How easy or difficult was it for you to re-enter a published work after that much time?
A: Easy for me. Easy, and enjoyable.
Maybe because the book in the first place was an exercise. I had early on conceived of it as a loose drama, an assembling of many different styles and voices (somebody else’s in a way), a compendium of widely varied forms. It was a rough drama and a half-assed encyclopedia, I thought. When Kroetsch showed up in the middle of the writing, he gave me a copy of something by Bahktin, and I realized, that’s it, I’m writing a Menippea.
The book was not particularly personal, so I hadn’t a lot of emotion invested in it. I was able to come back to it not having much of that attachment, and so felt free to change it as a lucky second chance. The whole thing was a gift—all that wild material around the Krafchenko story, and all of the formal possibilities.
Q: You mention that almost no-one saw passwords, a collection of journal entries from your time teaching in Germany in 1980. Wasn’t there another journal entry you published, I think part of Sunfall: New and Selected Poems, that was composed from your hospital bed after your appendix burst?
A: This stuff became a basis for departures, the book that ambled around the ruptured appendix. As I remember, you found that book strange and hard to centre. I thought that the material in sunfall was a mix of prose and poetry. Maybe not. I say this without reviewing it, but that’s what I had supposed. I always work with a loose sense of what counts as poetry, and what I’m willing to call poetry. Often, I work with intergeneric stuff. The journals exceed any ordinary definition of the form; they’re bulging with crazy rhymes and the words of people I encountered and jokes and fantasies and parodies and rapid shifts in voicing and ironies and eruptions of sounds and rhythms, lyrical outbursts and elegiac moments, patches of nonsense —the sorts of stuff that would violate the truth-telling function of the journal. I think of the journal as a place where I can let go, and let in. I think I mentioned something about wanting language that is demonstrably alive. I think of what I do in journals in much the same way. I often play and invent and reach for something more than sober recordings. Quite often they include passages marked with ragged right margins and a lineation that in almost any other context would announce they are poems; or think they are; or would like to be considered as poems.
Q: I’m wondering at your use of the prose journal over
the years. Given your suggestion that you publish far less than you produce, is
the journal form one you utilize often? What prompts you to compose a journal
over, say, working on a poem?
A: Almost entirely circumstantial, that and the excitement of trips. Many of them included family and friends and colleagues. I kept only one journal before the summer of 1990. And I have kept journals when I was travelling for a long stretch and then usually under literary or academic circumstances. They took a lot of time and energy, all the way into keyboarding and editing. The first journal, which I have taken to calling “Travels with Dave,” came from May, 1978, when he, Daniel Lenoski, and I were in Lahr, Germany, were ending up our teaching for a first-year English course for the Canadian armed forces and their spouses. And then a series of others in 1994, 1995, 1997, 1999, 2001, 2002—all from visits to Europe. I kept notes by hand, and increasingly by keyboarding over the years. After I got back to Winnipeg I keyboarded everything, sometimes within months, sometimes over several years. I always edited them, trying to make the writing more vivid and fresh, and more detailed too (no way could I have entered many of the passages right there on the spot amidst workshops and visits and talks and classes and presentations and travel and you know what this is like). I invariably arrived home with dozens of notes on scraps of paper and napkins and coasters, including names and addresses that sometime bewildered me: who was this? Why did I write this down? The keeping was a nuisance sometimes, and often inconvenient, but i enjoyed it at every stage. There was always the old writer’s pleasure in fitting a word.
The journals enabled me to remember. And to construct a record of cultural events. They also helped me to pay attention. Without the alertness that a journal requires, I would not have noticed all kinds of things. And I would have lost a lot of memories that I have turned, and hope to have turned, into poetry. When reading the 2001 journal, for example, as I am doing now in response to your email, I feel a pleasure in what it has kept for me.
Q: Have you considered attempting any further journals into print?
A: I have, yes, but I’ve made no attempts so far.
Love to find a place for something.
- see rob mclennan's reviews of Dennis Cooley's three 2021 poetry titles here.
Photo credit: Jan Horner
rob mclennan will probably be in Winnipeg on October 21, launching World’s End, (ARP Books).