Poet Questionnaire #5 : Stuart Ross answering Stan Rogal

 

 

To be honest, I don't know that many writers these days, on a personal level. Times have changed, at least, for me. Let’s face it, COVID didn’t help, and it seems like many people are remaining more cocooned in their dwellings; in their computers. During the 1990’s there was a vibrant group I hung out with, partied with, put on events with, but this group has (sadly) long since dispersed. I thought it might be worthwhile to re-create some of that old-time camaraderie and "the interview" format seemed a nice, relaxed entry. I also wanted to interview writers who contributed to the literary community in broader ways, not only as writers, but as publishers, editors, event organizers, and such. I met Stuart several years ago, though, at a distance, through his readings and publishing efforts. It’s only more recently that we’ve gotten to know each other on a more personal level. I know he says he doesn’t set out to use humour in his work, but his piece about buying things while watching late-night TV ads always kills me. Oh, and as much as I love Kenneth Patchen, it was another Kenneth — Rexroth — who said: “I’ve had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book.” Or, as the French so waggishly put it: Plus ça change (plus c'est la même chose), n’est-ce pas?

 

     1. Will the real Stuart Ross please stand up! Meaning, give our readers an overview as to who you are, what you do, and why you do it.

Since my teenage years (I’m 64 now, maybe 65 by the time this gets posted), growing up in a then-Jewish suburb of Toronto, I have written poetry and fiction, and more recently I have written essays and memoir. My work tends to be quasi-surrealist and absurdist, often experimental. Whatever the hell “experimental” means. I was first published in book form, along with two good friends (Mark Laba and Steve Feldman), when we were all sixteen years old. When I hit twenty, I began self-publishing chapbooks and the occasional full-length book of my fiction and poetry. I stood out on Toronto’s Yonge Street during the 1980s and sold 7,000 chapbooks I issued through my Proper Tales Press (still going, 40whatever years later). I have since been immersed in small-press publishing, and often small-press organizing. With Nicholas Power, I started up a monthly small-press event in Toronto called Meet the Presses. This morphed into the Toronto Small Press Book Fair, which I was a coordinator of from 1987 to 1989, and when that event went all to hell about thirty years later, I started up a collective called Meet the Presses, which has put on the Indie Literary Market mostly annually (they booted me out a few years ago, though they might not see it that way).

I’ll add that sound poetry and poetry with music has been a big part of my life, collaborating with Gary Barwin, Mark Laba, jwcurry, and others, and also with bands and individual musicians. I’m one-third of Donkey Lopez, with Steve Lederman and Ray Dillard, but we’ve been on hiatus for nearly a decade after a fight over CD cover art that we are slowly recovering from. Most recently, I’ve been improvising and collaborating with a brilliant young guitarist named Domina Eliahou.

Over the years, I’ve done lots of editing too: I was literary editor at This Magazine for a record eight years; I had my own imprint (“a stuart ross book”) through Mansfield Press for nearly a decade and put out almost fifty books by new, mid-career, and senior authors. I now have a surrealist poetry imprint through Anvil Press called A Feed Dog Book and an experimental fiction imprint through Guernica Editions called 1366 Books.

Since my street-selling days, I’ve had over twenty full-length books published, and scores of chapbooks by a bunch of different micropress publishers. I love jumping around from publisher to publisher and have had books published in four Canadian provinces by about eight different publishers, as well as a collection of my poems in translation in Argentina. I also work as a freelance editor, primarily for literary presses, and I teach in various contexts: through the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies, as well as doing school visits across the country, from kindergarten to Grade 12 and beyond.

There’s a lot more, but this is getting tedious for the reader. As to why I do it, well, it’s the thing that I do, and I enjoy aspects of it. There’s a lot that’s rewarding, especially in bringing out books by other writers—books I wish I’d written—through my imprints.

Oh, and a further note on collaboration, which has always been a big thing for me. Over the past few years, I have collaborated on a sound-poetry film with Montreal video artist James Hawes; completed a poetry manuscript with Kingston poet Jason Heroux and another with Halifax poet Jaime Forsythe; almost completed another with Montreal poet Jason Camlot; and Montreal painter Nadine Faraj and I have created about 50 texty paintings. These collaborators are all amazing writers and artists, and it’s a privilege to work with them.

      2. Jack Kerouac came up with the term “Beat” to describe a particular movement and/or group of poets, and has been called a “Beat” poet himself, yet claimed he was not of that ilk. Do you see yourself fitting into an identifiable category? If no, how do you situate you/your work? If yes, what category suits you, and how does it manifest in your poetry?

I have seen myself at times as a surrealist, an avant-gardist, an absurdist, and just some goddamn poet. In my twenties I started a movement called Demento-Primitivo, but I was the only proponent. I don’t much care now about these kinds of labels: I just want to experiment with what is possible on the page.

      3. Understanding that humour is very subjective, can you comment on its importance and use in your poetry?

I wouldn’t say that I “use” humour in my poetry. I don’t ever set out to be “funny,” whatever that might mean to an individual reader. Though I guess, depending on one’s reading of a given poem of mine, one might find some stuff they consider funny.

(I am now interrogating myself to determine if I’m being totally honest. Please give me a moment.)

Okay, I’m not being totally honest. Very occasionally I put something into a poem that I think is funny. Like, recently, in a very long ongoing poem I’ve been working on for several months, I wrote, “rat’s eyes / are / rat size.” That kills me. Not sure what others will think of it, but it was an actual intended bad joke.

In my prose poem “The Food Court,” from Motel of the Opposable Thumbs, I write, about an episode on a shopping-mall escalator: “But I guess the problem was I was a bit impatient, eager to catch up to Murray and Ken, and I took a few steps down and stumbled a bit, and I dropped everything. I watched it all bounce down the moving stairs of the escalator: my book bag, my records, and my dad’s wooden coffin. … When I caught up, Murray and Ken each had one end of my dad’s coffin. They flipped it; it had landed upside down. ‘I always drop that,’ I told them.” Isn’t that hilarious? Apparently this guy walks around with his dad’s coffin, and he just keeps dropping it. I read this at readings quite a bit, and only once has one person laughed at that last line. I was so grateful.

But mostly I don’t set out to be funny. My poems are just reflections of how I think, at least when I’m thinking creatively. And people often find absurdism and surreality funny, so they might see some of my poems as humorous. In my poetry, I tend toward what the late American poet Dean Young calls “recklessness,” and that might also produce what some find funny. And sometimes things that people find funny in my poetry I find heart-breaking.

But let’s stick with your premise that humour may hold some importance in my poetry. Humour is one of the things about us humans, so it’s only natural that it spill into poetry. It’s important that it be there.

4. You live in Cobourg and participate in the larger literary scene as a publisher, editor, teacher, and sometimes coordinator of reading events. What does this mean to you in terms of creating a community? What impact do these involvements have on you and your writing?

Community is extremely important to me. Working with others and making things happen and exchanging ideas—these are essential to the creation of my own work. Since I moved to Cobourg fifteen years ago, this has been a real struggle. In my half-century in Toronto, I made a lot of things happen. It’s not so easy in a small town, some of the reasons for which I had better shut my trap about. But I have just begun to get a bit involved here, and in April I put on my first reading where I wasn’t a reader: for National Poetry Month, I partnered with our local indie, Let’s Talk Books, and invited poets Allison Chisholm (Kingston), Graham Colton (Alderville First Nation), Stephen Brockwell (Ottawa), Carol Anne Judd (Cobourg), and Ayesha Chatterjee (Toronto) to read. It was a dream. The place was packed and the readings were great. It was also an experiment: a rare Cobourg poetry reading without an interminable open mic.

5. Have you noticed a change in the “live” literary scene, pre- and post-COVID?

A little tough for me to answer because in Cobourg there is very little literary scene, and I don’t really know what’s happening in Toronto anymore, or in other places. But my sense is that there are smaller audiences, fewer events, and, crucially, way fewer free or cheap venues to hold in-person events than there were pre-Covid. (There’s good and bad about the fact that there are more live online events now than pre-Covid.) Here in Cobourg, as I said, I deeply miss being part of a community where there are regular, collegial, exciting literary happenings, but various little birdies are telling me that community has really crumbled in the bigger centres now.

6. What is your interpretation of the term “career poet”?

That has a bad ring to it, doesn’t it? The word careerist gets bad press. On the positive side, it’s a term that can be applied to someone who has made poetry a lifelong practice. On the negative, it sounds kinda like someone who is writing crap they think they can sell (and maybe they can). I tend to think in terms of practice rather than career.

7. What keeps you writing poetry given there are fewer poetry publishers and even fewer poetry books being sold? Or am I wrong in this evaluation?

I think there are fewer chapbook publishers now than a decade or two ago, but I think the number of book publishers has stayed pretty steady. Some are busy croaking, some busy being born. Are fewer poetry books being sold? I’m skeptical. There are more MFA programs in creative writing here in Canada these days, more people writing, I think. Do they buy books? I hope so. If they don’t, they should be ashamed.

8. After years of publishing numerous books and chapbooks of poetry, you recently won the Trillium Book Award for a memoir. How was this experience for you? Did it produce a mix of thoughts and/or emotions or did you accept it with your usual grace and humility?

It was a shock. My jaw dropped. But, Stan, it was an amazing experience. I got a lot of money and I got bragging rights, and it kind of sunk my usual self-deprecation shtick. Oddly, I didn’t get a single festival invitation out of it, and no one asked to interview me. But I won the Trillium, with a very strange hybrid book, The Book of Grief and Hamburgers. I thought of it as an essay, it was published as a memoir, and I keep seeing it in poetry sections at bookstores. It was written to honour people in my life who have died, and it feels good to know that this book has had the biggest audience of any of my previous books, and I even get letters from friends, acquaintances, and strangers who have found the book helpful in dealing with grief (even though the book is about my inability to understand what grief is). Plus I just got a royalty cheque from ECW Press of close to $1,000 for the book—nearly unheard of for me to get anything beyond the initial advance!

Really, I thought the book would just bum people out. But in my sixties now, I am really trying to not be so anti–Stuart Ross and to embrace the good things that happen to me, rare as they might be. I think the Trillium win and the invitation to read at a festival in Slovenia in 2018 were two of my greatest personal accomplishments as a writer. Charles North, a poet whose work I admire immensively, inviting me to read at the Pace University series in New York City last year is a real contender too. Oh, and one more thing: a very young and very talented French/Spanish poet, Claudia Souto Cuello, is translating my short novel Pockets into French, in Switzerland. This is like a dream for me.

9. Poets deal in words. What is your favourite word? What about another word that maybe strikes your funny bone or makes you feel uneasy/awkward for no particular reason when you say/use it? Why?

I’m a big fan of the word spelunking, because it doesn’t sound at all like what it is. It sounds pretty dirty. In Spanish, I love the phrase sin embargo, which means however. “I was going to go spelunking, but I was put under a sin embargo!” In Nynorsk, I’m fond of the phrase snart sneglar, which I found in a poem by my dear friend the Norwegian poet Dag T. Straumsvåg. I don’t remember what it means, but I love the sound of it. I intend to write a mystery novel whose protagonist is Detective Snart Sneglar.

For my 2015 poetry book A Hamburger in a Gallery, I wrote a bunch of one-word poems. My favourite is: glod. I’m very proud of that poem. I like to present it during school visits and ask the students what they think it might mean (I made it up). One Grade 5er said it was a declaration of my atheism, because I put a sword through “god.” I laboured over that poem for about four seconds, so I’m glad it’s paid off in hours of classroom discussion and the occasional pissing off of teachers.

10. Do you feel that poetry has the power to end war, hunger, discrimination and environmental destruction in the world?

No. But even if it did, it wouldn’t be my goal. I don’t write to move people to action. I write to see what I can do with words and sentences and sounds and the page and stories and non-stories. I’m a lazy, unambitious fucker.

11. As a teacher and organizer of poetry workshops, what do you find most daunting? Most agreeable?

I find the chemistry that can develop in a workshop or class very agreeable, even inspiring. I love watching students make the kinds of discoveries I made when I was a young poet: it brings me back to the excitement of that time. (Not to say I don’t still make discoveries! My recent reading of the poems of Joyce Mansour and Lisa Fishman, for example, have opened up so many things for me.) I don’t much find the experience of teaching daunting, except that I get a bit neurotic and try to fit too much in, because I don’t want to leave out something I think the students deserve/need to know.

I guess I’ll also admit there is an element of impostor syndrome. I don’t do lectures. I’m not an academic. But I try to embrace the advantages of that.

12. Do you have any advice for anyone who’d like to be(come) a poet?

Only the usual: read like crazy, experiment, and don’t lock yourself into what you think a poet “should” sound like. I’d also say: write to please/befuddle/trick yourself first, and don’t worry about audience. Dean Young says to attend to your words, not intend with them. Alice Notley (pretty sure it’s Alice Notley) says that once you start making assumptions, change things up. I interpret that as: “Don’t fall into a shtick and don’t get comfortable.”

13. Add any additional comments of your own choosing. Manifestos included.

Who was that poet who said that people who say they like poetry but don’t buy it are cheap bastards? Was it Kenneth Patchen? I agree, except I’d expand it to: people who say they like poetry but don’t buy it are cheap bastards, unless they can’t afford it, but then if they don’t borrow tons of poetry books from the library, they’re not serious writers. Unserious bastards? Finding poems online is valuable, but the experience of holding a poetry book in your paws is irreplaceable.
 

 

 

 

 

Stuart Ross has published 20+ books of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction, most recently the memoir The Book of Grief and Hamburgers, winner of the 2023 Trillium Book Award; the poetry collection The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky; and the short story collection I Am Claude François and You Are a Bathtub. A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry; Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew won the Mona Elaine Adilman Award for Jewish Fiction; and Buying Cigarettes for the Dog won the Relit Award for Short Fiction. In 2018, Stuart received the Harbourfront Festival Prize for his contributions to Canadian literature. Stuart teaches at the U of T School of Continuing Studies and has visited classrooms across Canada to read and lead workshops. His poetry has been translated into Nynorsk, French, Spanish, Russian, Slovene, and Estonian, and he runs the Feed Dog Book imprint for surrealist poetry at Anvil Press and the 1366 Books imprint for experimental fiction at Guernica Editions. He has performed sound poetry, solo and with musicians, for decades. Active in Canadian micropress since the mid-1970s, Stuart lives in Cobourg, on the north shore of Lake Ontario, and blogs infrequently at bloggamooga.blogspot.ca.

Stan Rogal lives and writes in Toronto along with his artist partner Jacquie Jacobs and their pet jackabee. His work has appeared almost magically in numerous magazines and anthologies. The author of several books, plus a handful of chapbooks. Currently seeking a new publisher: anyone??? Co-founder of Bald Ego Theatre and former coordinator of the popular Idler Pub Reading Series.