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 rob more than several years ago, when he was helping to set up readings at Carleton University and I’d get invited on occasion, having been published in The Carleton Arts Review. Over the years, we’ve gotten to know each other on a more personal level, even given the distance between Ottawa and Toronto. He really is the hardest working promoter and writer of all things poetry (PLUS having an oar in fiction) in the country and I’d like to thank him for allowing me the opportunity to sometimes play in his sandbox.
1. Will the real rob mclennan please stand up! Meaning, give our readers an overview as to who you are, what you do, and why you do it.
I write full-time, and have since the early 1990s, having published some forty or so trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction over them years, as well as over a hundred and fifty chapbooks. I’ve been producing chapbooks through above/ground press since July 1993, and produce the quarterly Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], occasional G U E S T [a journal of guest editors] and monthly online journal periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics. Between Touch the Donkey, my ‘12 or 20 questions’ series and other venues, I’ve probably conducted and posted some two thousand interviews online since 2007, which seems akin to madness. I’ve been running events through The Factory Reading Series since January 1993, and co-founded and organize the semi-annual ottawa small press book fair, which celebrates thirty years this fall. I’m also an active reviewer, posting some one hundred and fifty book reviews online a year. I’m the current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, and President of the Board of VERSe Ottawa, which oversees both the festival and the poet laureate program, which recently announced David O’Meara (English) and Véronique Sylvain (French) as our latest two laureates for the City of Ottawa.
I’m currently working on a couple of non-fiction manuscripts/book-length essays, including “the green notebook” and “the genealogy book,” have completed a further manuscript of short stories, and am in-progress through a novel and at least two if not three poetry manuscripts. I’ve a few other schemes in the back of my head, but those aren’t quite ready to begin, as of yet.
Over the past decade, I’ve been home full-time with the two young ladies I share with Christine McNair, and both Christine and I have new books out this season—she, a hybrid memoir, Toxemia, with Book*hug Press, and I, a collection of short stories, On Beauty, with the University of Alberta Press—which is pretty exciting. We’re about to begin an array of readings in various corners of the country, whether together or separately, or at least as much as childcare might allow.
Why do I do it? Somewhere during my teen years, I found myself playing guitar and piano, and attempting drawing and painting, writing poems and short stories, floating across different genres and structures as what sparked my interest. It was only once my first daughter, Kate, was born in 1991 that I thought I should attend to writing properly, and not simply a poem every month or two or three. Why poems, over anything else? I really don’t know, but I knew I didn’t have to purchase supplies for writing in a way required for visual art. There was also a line I read around that time by Margaret Atwood, suggesting that if you want full time out of it, you have to put full time into it. So (even beyond the boundaries of running a home daycare until Kate was four or so) I did that. At this point, writing is how I best work out my thinking. And I think there are times I’m quite good at it.
2. Your poetic practice has sometimes been placed under the heading “Field Theory,” stemming from Williams’ notion of a poem as a “field of action” and, later, developed by Olson as “composition by field.” Is this an accurate account or totally off base? Perhaps you can expand on your writing style and influences.
Oh, curious. I hadn’t heard those first two terms prior, although I’m aware of the third. I first came to these structures not through Olson or Williams, but through George Bowering, which I suppose is an indirect kind of influence. There are lots of structural elements I learned in my twenties through my reading of the baffles of George Bowering, moving out from him into the concentric circles of Jack Spicer, bpNichol, Daphne Marlatt, Barry McKinnon, Leonard Cohen, Gwendolyn MacEwen, John Newlove, David Donnell, Sharon Thesen, Dennis Cooley, D.G. Jones, Robert Creeley, Andrew Suknaski and plenty of others, all of whom I absorbed different lessons from. I’ve still read very little in the way of Olson or Williams, but I suspect those writers exist as an underlay of where and what I’ve developed. I spent my twenties and into my thirties exploring the long poem and the book as my unit of composition. My compositions aimed for expansiveness, the fragment and the extended lyric.
By my thirties and into my forties I was paying more attention to the lyric sentence, leaning into prose poems, prompted through my reading of Rosmarie Waldrop, Etel Adnan, Julie Carr, Pattie McCarthy, Sarah Manguso, Cole Swensen, Lisa Robertson, Sarah Mangold, Sandra Ridley, Susan Howe, Robert Kroetsch and multiple others. The shifts have been interesting. I would think my ‘composition by field’ has evolved into something more compact, more pointed. I still work on books over individual poems, utilizing my current shapes determined in part through rhythm, sound and language. I still want to see where I’m going, where I might eventually land.
3. You live in Ottawa and participate in the larger literary scene as a publisher, editor, reviewer, and coordinator of book fairs and 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?
Had I not had a child when I was twenty, I might have made different choices, but there was a deliberate choice to remain here for her sake (and mine as well, through maintaining the connection). I might have easily ended up instead in Montreal, or Toronto. Because I had made such a choice for my writing-self to remain in Ottawa, I was determined to make the city “liveable” by working to assist with a literary infrastructure I considered lacking, including organizing readings, a small press fair, writing reviews, publishing chapbooks and journals, supporting other writers in their work and simply being out in the world as someone who was doing the thing other folk said they wanted to do. The 1990s saw numerous writers leave town, which was enormously frustrating, and led to some rather thin periods of literary activity across the city.
I think had I moved to a more active city (I was accepted into the Creative Writing Program at Concordia when I was nineteen, but was missing an OAC credit, so couldn’t get into the school), I might have been more influenced by the writing and the activity around me. I wouldn’t have necessarily worked so hard to do some of this organizing, wouldn’t have worked so hard to seek out writers and writing and activity and influence from different parts of the country. I might not have spent so much time seeing what else was out there. I think in the long run it was far better for my writing to seek out influence, and not be otherwise shaped due to proximity.
4. Have you noticed a change in the “live” literary scene, pre- and post-COVID?
It took a while for audiences to warm up to events again, certainly. Not that I’ve been to as many events as I could be, hampered by my own momentum. Given we’re home with small children, it is often less complicated to remain home after a long day. We also lost a couple of events during the Covid-era, including The TREE Reading Series, which had a history back to 1980 or so. In certain ways, I’ve had the feeling that there’s been a scattering of activity, and no central point at which we all meet. Perhaps there already is one, and I simply don’t understand where that is.
5. I was once asked by a poet in the US if I was a “career poet,” which had me scratching my head. What is your interpretation of the term career poet and how do you believe you might qualify?
That is a good question. What does that even mean? I write, I send poems to journals and do readings, I publish books. I worry less about terminology than simply getting the work done.
I’m aware that there are American poets that have booking agents for readings and reading fees. We might have a more consistent and stable array of tiered government funding for the arts in Canada, which the United States really doesn’t, but their private funding is all over the place, whether funded readings through universities, or organizations such as the Guggenheim or the MacArthur. I wonder if the difference of private funding determines that approach, that terminology?
6. 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?
How I
process and articulate the world shouldn’t be determined by anything as external
and as unstable as the market.
I’ve been doing this long enough to know that short-term gains or losses are as fickle as the winds (although a good navigator knows to attend to the movement of the wind). I’m in this for the long haul.
7. After years of publishing numerous poetry collections with several different publishers — not to mention poems appearing in many magazines and anthologies — do you find that your track record has made it easier to get your work in print, or are you still having to knock on doors?
Oh, I still have to knock on many doors. I’ve worked hard to seek out new doors because of it, and even create my own. I had a good run across the aughts, as I was getting multiple books published through Bev Daurio at The Mercury Press, Karl Siegler at Talonbooks and Joe Blades at Broken Jaw Press. I’d rather be producing everything through only a couple of repeated, ongoing relationships with fewer presses, but haven’t quite managed to get back to that, although losing Talonbooks as a publisher forced me to rethink a particular trajectory of my work. It is good to stop and take stock every so often, after all. Am I doing this because it is interesting or because this is simply what I’ve been doing? Each manuscript needs to prove itself on its own merit.
I have a contemporary who claims that most of their many, many books were solicited by publishers, and I’ve only had that a single time, from Marty Gervais at Black Moss; ironically (and very fortunate for me), he offered this mere days after I’d already mailed a manuscript to him (which hadn’t landed yet on his end). My new short story collection went through about twenty rejections before it found a home at University of Alberta Press, and I’m very pleased to return to the fold, especially one that works to keep Robert Kroetsch in print. I’ve a handful of other manuscripts that have been rejected repeatedly, and still can’t find ground. Although, with forty or so published books, I’m certainly in no position to complain. If I never published again, I’d still consider myself incredibly fortunate, having produced work I’m still rather proud of, and opportunities to interact with writers and writing and the world that I might never have had. I think the difficulty provides another measure of checks and balance; the regular reminder to reconsider.
There are a couple of editors that I can at least send something to and I know the work will eventually get read, and get read well, although that doesn’t necessarily lead to publication either. I just have to keep working at it, I suppose.
8. Highly regarded as the uncrowned Kingpin of the Canadian poetry scene, and having several fingers in several pies, I’m sure our readers would like to know what the profitability margin is in such a venture — including the lucrative merch market, ie: T-shirts, fridge magnets, beer mugs, pens, ball caps, dead poet notepads, etc — perhaps, say, to the nearest million?
I will divulge nothing about my secret, illegal bank accounts in the Cayman Islands.
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?
When my eldest was a preschooler, she declared “unction” was the name of the meal between lunch and dinner. We’ve no idea where she picked up the word. Recently, I was impressed that my youngest, our eight-year old, not only used the word “persnickety,” but used it correctly.
10. When do you have time to sleep?
When I am tired, if I must. There is much still to do.
11. Do
you feel that poetry has the power to end war, hunger, discrimination, and
environmental destruction in the world?
Not directly, but one always hopes a poem might move any reader enough to attempt to work on those things. Literature is part of the larger human conversation of how we live in the world, document and articulate ourselves and our surroundings. Poetry is part of the world, and has value; it shouldn’t be so regularly forced to justify itself. Is painting ever asked if it has the power to end war? Have TikTok videos ever been asked if they have the power to end environmental destruction? Poetry books don’t sell, nor do they end wars, therefore, where is the value?
Reading allows for both empathy and comprehension, the ability to imagine beyond ourselves; one would think that these are the qualities that would prompt any civilization to push to end war, hunger, discrimination and environmental destruction. A poem has value beyond requiring it to attend to tasks beyond it, and yet, prompting the imagination is exactly what is required for those tasks to be levied.
12. What other
sources influence your poetry, i.e., music, movies, sports…?
I’m sports-neutral, but elements of all sorts of other things interweave through my lines regularly, including references to pop culture, what I might read in the newspaper or a particular action or activity by one of the children. Back in the days of Mad Men, each new episode prompted me to think deeper about prose narrative; I always got further work done on fiction after watching that.
13. Do you have any advice for anyone who’d like to be(come) a poet?
Read everything. Writing is both muscle and study: the more time you spend doing it, the better your work will be. Pay attention to your contemporaries. Go out and interact with others attempting the same things. When working early drafts, don’t worry about being wrong or the poem not working. Worry more about the work than about naming.
14. Add any additional comments of your own choosing. Manifestos included.
Manifesto? I haven’t any of those. Although, in a recent issue of The Believer (Vol. 21, No. 2; Summer 2024), I was struck by an interview with Devon Price, an American social psychologist, blogger and author focusing on autism, on how community is so often approached in the wrong direction, as a colonial force. “Your approach is often colonialist, if that’s all you’ve ever known.” The mistake, as Price articulates, of asking yourself what you can take instead of what you can bring. I like the clarity of this, and the reminder. I have rarely heard such an idea articulated so clearly, and so well.
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.