rob mclennan : 2024 VERSeFest interviews: Armand Garnet Ruffo

 

Armand Garnet Ruffo is from remote northern Ontario and is a band member of the Chapleau Fox Lake Cree First Nation with familial and historical roots to the Sagamok Anishnawbek First Nation. He is recognized as a major contributor to both contemporary Indigenous literature and Indigenous literary scholarship in Canada. His books include Norval Morrisseau: Man Changing Into Thunderbird, and Treaty #, both finalists for Governor General’s Literary Awards. His latest work includes Reclamation and Resurgence: the Selected Poems of Marilyn Dumont (2024), which he edited, and his own book, The Dialogues: the Song of Francis Pegahmagabow, 2024 winner of “The VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres” Award. He currently lives in Kingston and teaches at Queen’s University.

Armand Garnet Ruffo reads in Ottawa on Saturday, November 30, 2024 as part of Fall into VERSeFest.

rm: When did you first start writing?

AGR: High School. I guess it was poetry, although if anyone asked me what I was doing I said I was writing songs, which I’m happy no longer exist. It wasn’t something that I advertised.

rm: What did those first attempts look like? Were they modelled on anything?

AGR: They were muddled. I spent a lot of time, like most younger writers I suppose, just trying to figure it out. Later when I got to York (and then Ottawa U) and was reading widely, and I was basically sounding like whomever I read. Then one day while I was visiting my grandmother who was living with my aunt in Toronto, we got to talking about my studies and for some reason I mentioned poetry. Then out of the blue she recited me a poem that she had written called “Lost In My Native Land.” ( I later published it in a magazine I was working for in Ottawa called The Native Perspective. She was thrilled.) The form was rather archaic, in the style of Pauline Johnson, but the content blew me away. That’s when I realized I needed to write about my heritage and my own experiences. The writing developed from there. You have to remember that back in the 70s there were very few Indigenous people getting published, very few role models. Not like today.

rm: How did you get from there to the publication of your first book? What was the process of putting an eventual manuscript together?

AGR: Getting published was not straightforward. Most of the work I sent out came back to me with the standard responses, too political, too polemical, etc. (I later learned that other Indigenous poets had experienced the same thing.) As for readings I hardly did any. You have to realize it was a period when Canadian nationalism was still in full throttle. The scene was basically unwelcoming, and I even stopped writing for a period in the early 80s. Then in 89 I sent my work to the Banff Centre and to my utter surprise I got in. Adele Wiseman was the Head of writing. I also met Alistair MacLeod there who invited me to study with him at Windsor U. My first book, consisting of mostly earlier poems, was published by Theytus Books in 1994. It should come as no surprise that it took an Indigenous publisher to get the first book out. At the Banff Centre I had met the editors of Coteau Books, and they published my second book Grey Owl: the Mystery of Archie Belaney, which came out in 1996 and is still in print. The 90s saw a huge shift in the general response to Indigenous writing, and it was a green light from there.

rm: Were there other Indigenous writers you were encountering during this period?

AGR: I guess it was the 80s when started going to hear readings. There was a pretty good poetry scene in Ottawa in those days, as there is today, but I really wasn’t a part of it and, as far as I can recall, there were no other Indigenous writers giving readings either.  I do remember giving a reading at a cafe called The Stone Angel with the great songwriter Willy Dunn. That was an honour.  Songs such as “The Ballad of Crowfoot,” “Son of the Sun,” and “I Pity The Country” were certainly an inspiration.  

At that time I was also writing plays and going to see productions in Toronto by Native Earth Performing Arts. I met Drew Hayden Taylor, Daniel David Moses and Tomson Highway there, but, again, I really wasn’t part of the scene, and I got to know them better in later years at festivals, conferences, etc.  As for Indigenous poets in Ottawa, in the early 90s  I met Anne Acco, Kateri Damm, Greg YoungIng and Joseph Dandurand. We hung out and even formed a poetry group we called W.I.N.O. (I hope you can see the humour.) Ann Acco provided funding for an anthology we put together, which was published in 1994. I also met the novelist Richard Wagamese, who was living in Ottawa and working on his first book Keeper’ n Me. We would meet for coffee and talk about writing. He was incredibly well read.

During this period, I ended up teaching at The En’owkin Centre in Penticton, B.C.  It was a real hub with all kinds of Indigenous writers and artists, either teaching or passing through. Jeannette Armstrong was the Director; Lee Maracle was there; Greg YoungIng was both teaching and editing Theytus Books; Gerry William (a sci-fi writer) was there, as was the Native American poet Maurice Kenny; the poet Annharte visited, etc.  So it was an exciting place to be.  Once Grey Owl came out things changed for me, and I was invited to do readings both nationally and internationally.  I met Marilyn Dumont, Louise Halfe, Garry Gottfriedson, Joanne Arnott, Greg Scofield and Duncan Mercredi, etc. It was an exciting time because Indigenous literature as we know it today was really just getting on its feet.

rm: Grey Owl felt a huge leap in your creative work. What brought you to working that narrative in that particular form?

AGR: I wrote Grey Owl: the Mystery of Archie Belaney because the infamous Archie Belaney lived with my grandmother’s parents in the village of Biscotasing in northern Ontario.  I had grown up with stories about him, and I knew I could complicate the telling.  As for the writing, I thought initially it was going to be a suite of connected poems at best.  However, once I started writing it bloomed into a full  book. I did struggle initially with the book’s POV.  I tried initially to tell it from Grey Owl’s POV and that didn’t work for various reasons. Then I tried write it using an omniscient narrator, ostensibly the poet’s POV, but it didn’t work either. It felt distant and detached.  Then I started to think about how other poets have handled long, narrative poems.  I went back and read Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie, along with a few Native American poets who were on my bookcase, like N. Scott Momaday, Carter Revard, and Ray Young Bear.  As soon as I had a block of uninterrupted time, I just started writing, and once I got into it it actually kind of wrote itself. The multitude of voices seemed to jump onto the page. It’s a gift when that happens.

A few years later after the book was published, I ran into the Metis poet Gregory Scofield, and he told me he had been on a literary jury and Grey Owl came up in their discussion.  He said that others on the jury dismissed it because they said it wasn’t, quote, “pure poetry.” I have to laugh when you think about that today. The takeaway is just do your own thing and don’t worry about what others think. The book is still in print nearly 30 years later. 

rm: It does seem interesting that Grey Owl is simultaneously a work that holds direct influence from now-canonical works while being well ahead of its time, certainly in terms of structure and content alike. Given you recently won the Betsy Warland Between Genres award, I’d say you’ve been playing with genre for some time now. How aware are you of genre when you are working? How are decisions around structure made?

AGR: We talked briefly about this the other evening. I try not to repeat myself, and in that regard I’m very conscious of genre. That said, I never set out to explore a particular kind of form. Each project takes its own shape. To use a well worn metaphor each project is like a newborn who arrives with its own personality. And to extend that, I don’t create the baby and then give it a personality. I’m really unaware until it cries to be fed.  It’s at that moment that I have that “Ahah moment.”  Take The Dialogues, I wrote the libretto, essentially a long narrative poem, after about a year of doing research on the life of Francis Pegahmagabow, the famous WWI sniper.  And in hindsight I would say it developed rather organically alongside the music.  After a few performances I was asked by audience members if I were going to publish it.  I thought about it, but the libretto was not written for the page and that presented a problem. 

When I imagined it without the music, I saw it full of holes, spaces, absences. I had to fill it up, but how?  I came up with the idea to create a dialogue with the libretto that would ‘open it up’ much like the music does on stage. With that in mind, I started to take chunks of the libretto and explore what it was saying, and what I could say about it – and I extrapolated from there.  That’s when the whole left side, right side page thing developed. At first I was just trying to get my ideas down, but later it got to a point where I was carefully fitting bits and pieces of multifarious text together.  And I soon realized that even the various literary forms of the textual inclusions were in a kind of dialogue with each other.  So, yes, as the project developed I became very aware of what I was doing, but only as it developed.  E.L. Doctorow famously said that "writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the trip that way.” I agree with him, and I think it’s a hopeful sentiment for any writer, certainly for me, because I really only see glimpses when I’m writing.

rm: You mention working a libretto, but how aware are you, more generally, of sound or visual components as you write? How do you see sound exist upon the page?

AGR: Like many people I grew up listening to music, which I’ve written about it in my poetry collection At Geronimo’s Grave (winner of the 2001 Archibald Lampman Award), and when I’m working I tend to have something playing in the background. Because I can’t listen to anything with lyrics – it messes with the writing – it’s usually instrumental jazz, and in fact I’ve become a huge jazz fan because of it.  One of the things that I stress to my students is that when they are writing poetry they should read it aloud to hear and feel the rhythm.  So, yes, I’m very conscious of sound value.  As I say in the “Afterword” to The Dialogues, when I was writing the libretto I had to feel the words just as one feels music.

rm: You mention The Dialogues emerging out of doing research on Francis Pegahmagabow. How do such projects begin? Do you dig into researching a subject and see what writing might emerge, or have you a particular goal or shape in mind? Are you researching simply through your own interest and curiosity, and writing becomes a kind of secondary process?

AGR: That’s a good question. The libretto was originally commissioned by The Festival of Sound in Parry Sound for the 35th anniversary of the festival. They paired me with Tim Corlis, a classical composer out of B.C., and it was literally our job to come up with a musical about Frances Pegahmagabow. I talked about the process we went through in the book’s Afterword. Suffice to say here that we drove together from Toronto to  Francis’ home community of Wasauksing (Parry Island) to meet Francis’ family, and we talked, maybe strategized is a better word, about the project on the trip. Eventually Tim would send me snippets of music, and I would listen to them and write, and sometimes I would send him something.  Back to Doctorow’s quote about driving with one headlight; I had a very basic idea of where I wanted to go with libretto in terms of dividing it into three parts, Francis’ early life, the war, and then his political life after the war, but that’s really all I had.  After that it was all about feeling the music and letting the poetry come.  So, yes, I guess it was about letting the writing “emerge” as you put it.  As for the research itself, whether it’s about Grey Owl, or Norval Morrisseau, or Francis Pegahmagabow, it has always been connected to a writing project. There’s always been something in mind.

Miigwech, thanks, for the questions. 

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent title is On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024). He is very excited that 2025 will see the publication of the poetry title Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil), the lyric essay a river runs through it: a writing diary (Spuyten Duyvil) and his follow-up to the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.

rob mclennan : 2024 VERSeFest interviews: Manahil Bandukwala

Manahil Bandukwala is a writer and visual artist based in Mississauga and Ottawa, Ontario. She is the author of Heliotropia (Brick Books, 2024) and MONUMENT (Brick Books, 2022), which was shortlisted for the 2023 Gerald Lampert Award, and was selected as a Writer’s Trust of Canada Rising Star in 2023. She is the co-creator of Reth aur Reghistan, a multidisciplinary project exploring folklore from Pakistan through poetry, sculpture, and community arts. See her work at manahilbandukwala.com.

Manahil Bandukwala reads in Ottawa on Thursday, November 28, 2024 as part of Fall into VERSeFest.

rob mclennan: When did you first start writing?

Manahil Bandukwala: In some ways, ever since I can remember. But more seriously, around my first/second year as an undergraduate student at Carleton University in Ottawa. I formed strong writing connections, both within the English department and in Ottawa’s poetry community. This helped me improve my craft, publish my work in journals and magazines and such—leading to now, with my second poetry collection, Heliotropia, out with Brick Books. 

rm: What did those first attempts look like? Were they modelled on anything?

MB: My early work was modelled on what I was reading and hearing at open mics. I think, like many people, my impressions of poetry revolved around Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and generally this very white, British, masculine space. I’m fortunate that I arrived to poetry at a time when the big Canadian poets include ones like Dionne Brand, and on a local level, the wealth of poetry we have here in Ottawa. Writing involved trial and error, figuring out what my poetic “voice” was, and understanding what I wanted my work to look like as a recent immigrant teen (at the time) threading an in-between space of Pakistan and Canada. 

rm: How did that, as you call it, “in-between space” begin to make itself known in your work? What were you attempting to articulate from or even through that particular space?

MB: Back then, a sense of loneliness, confusion, and rupture. Almost a decade on from that time, I’m more grounded in where I write from, although my work certainly is still interested in liminal spaces. The geographies, locations, and imagery that appears across my poetry tends to fall back towards this theme, whether through the presence of ghosts/spirits, spacetime, or a feeling of uncertainty. 

rm: Had you any models for that kind of work? Between then and now, what writers or works have provided examples of those kinds of explorations?

MB: My MA at UWaterloo really modelled that, especially through courses I did with Professors Veronica Austen and Mariam Pirbhai. I studied ghostliness and haunting in the South Asian Canadian literary imagination. So the work of Farzana Doctor, Soraya Peerbaye, and Shani Mootoo has always been influential. From a poetry side, lots of South Asian and Arab writers like Sheniz Janmohamed, Sanna Wani, Natasha Ramoutar, and natalie hanna, to name a few. I especially appreciate work that isn’t like my own, as that’s where I learn about poetic forms, styles, and voice. I love that poetry is always changing, always in a state of growth.

rm: Do you think you have influences that anyone familiar with your writing might be surprised by?

MB: This is a really good question...and has stumped me. I’m certain there are surprising influences. I asked my partner, Liam Burke, for help with this question, and he said what appears in my writing feels like a natural extension of the influences of my life—but he’s also familiar with the plethora of writing influences. I do remember with MONUMENT, including a poem about the video game Animal Crossing was surprising. I’m sure there’s similar in Heliotropia, and I have to say, I’m keen to find out what that surprise is!

rm: You mention moving to Ottawa for your undergrad: what was the experience of first encountering writers in the city? Were there any particular writers or exchanges that shifted your thinking around writing?

MB: It was intimidating, partly because I was eighteen and meeting published writers for the first time. Probably every conversation has shifted my thinking about writing in some way. Recently, I spoke with Dave Currie about how, almost a decade ago, he came to my first-year English class to talk about writing, and careers you can have with an English degree. And now, recently, we’ve been speaking about poetry submissions, compiling manuscripts, and more. Lots of music/sound-focused writers, like Liam Burke, nina jane drystek, and Conyer Clayton have helped me think about the sonic qualities of poetry. Poets like Sandra Ridley, natalie hanna, and Christine McNair helped me think about manuscripts more conceptually, and how to thoughtfully think through the overarching flow of a collection.

rm: I know you published a handful of chapbooks prior to the release of your full-length debut. How did you get from individual poems to chapbook-length manuscripts? Did your approach shift through attempting to cohere poems together within the boundaries of a chapbook? What did you see as the result of publishing chapbooks?

MB: All sort of by accident. My very first chapbook was just me realizing I had enough poems to fit a chapbook-length manuscript. More recent chapbooks have been more intentional in making, but that is also in part because these have been collaborative projects—you have to define the parameters when you’re working with another person. Publishing chapbooks really helped me with poem sequences—I have two 20ish page poems in Heliotropia. It was an understanding of long poems, a surprising realization that I could write them, and an insight into how to edit a poem that spans multiple pages.

rm: Your first full-length collection, MONUMENT, is very much constructed as a single unit. What were the origins of this particular work? How did it begin?

MB: When I started MONUMENT, it was meant to be a single poem that sought to highlight obscured Mughal women in history. As I researched, I found out more, and the poem became longer and longer. I had just started publishing chapbooks then, and thought the poem could be a chapbook. But then it outgrew that length too. Really what solidified the poem into a collection was submitting Ontario Arts Council Recommender Grants, and receiving a very kind note from Alayna Munce at Brick Books, saying the press was interested in seeing the full-length collection.

In my second year of university, I took a poetry workshop with Amal El-Mohtar, where she talked to us about long poems. I was amazed to learn that poems could go on for pages and pages—and then that’s exactly what I did.

rm: I’m curious about how MONUMENT developed, being so specifically project-based. Had you a shape in mind for the collection, or did it shape itself more organically.

MB: It’s difficult to find a shape for a project you’re so closely entangled with—this is where outside eyes come into play. A lot of the shaping happened in my editorial process, with Cecily Nicholson, who advised me on how the manuscript could come together more cohesively. I also swapped manuscripts with my friend Sanna Wani, who suggested a lot of the order of the book as it exists now. So the ideas were there, but the flow of the poems from one to the other took many hands. 

rm: With the amount of writing and publishing you’d done prior to the appearance of your full-length debut, were there poems you had to set aside in the process of putting together manuscripts? If so, might these pieces fall into another project down the road, or are they, at this point, too far behind you?

MB: When putting together Heliotropia’s manuscript, I took out a number of poems that weren’t quite the right fit. I thought they might go in another manuscript, but truthfully during editing realized that the deleted poems were simply repeats of themes that had already been explored in much stronger ways in the actual book. So no, these pieces likely won’t appear in another project down the road.

There was one poem, written as a point-and-click adventure game, that I took out of Heliotropia, that will probably appear in a collaborative manuscript I’m (theoretically) working on with Liam Burke, but that will appear more as form rather than the same content.

rm: You’ve been exploring collaboration for some time. What do you feel collaboration allows in your work that might not otherwise be possible? And do you approach collaboration differently with each different collaborator?

MB: Collaboration gets me out of my head and into a process that is both more intuitive and more methodological. I have existing relationships with the people I collaborate with, whether that’s a sibling or friend or partner. Having a prior connection is what really allows for the collaboration to flourish, as we have knowledge of each other’s artistic practices, and trust in the creation. Sometimes we know what the end product will look like, other times it’s a matter of playing and finding out together. But I learn so much about my own practice, and in turn my solo work changes and becomes stronger. 

rm: You’ve published two chapbooks so far as part of the collaborative group vii. How did the group come together, and how does a collaboration between so many individuals manage and maintain such a coherence? Has the group anything currently in the works, or plans for further publications ahead?

MB: In 2020, during the first lockdown, Helen Robertson messaged a few of us asking if we’d be interested in collaborating on an exquisite corpse poem. We all knew each other prior, but this was the first time really working together to create something. We edited a lot after writing to bring a coherent voice to our poems, but embracing the chaos was also part of the final poems. Truthfully, our last chapbook, Holy Disorder of Being, was the last time we really did collaborative writing. As lockdowns lifted and we got back to our “normal lives,” we didn’t have time in the same way to write together, even asynchronously. But our group chat is always buzzing. We meet up, show up for each other’s events, and provide feedback on work. And we haven’t put aside the idea of working on more poems together—if only to find the time!

rm: Tell me about Reth aur Reghistan. How did that begin?

MB: From a place of play, and of realizing that stories from Pakistani folklore weren’t easily accessible in English in North America. The title means “sand and desert,” and speaks to the geographical landscape of the province of Sindh, where Karachi is located. It’s a project started in collaboration with my sister, Nimra, when both of us were coming up as artists in our respective fields. Going back to the question on collaboration, I think that sense of playing together has always been a part of my life, and so naturally extends to being a part of my practice.

Actually seeing the project through has been something else entirely. We took it slow, applying for grants to make it happen piece by piece. And really, there were a lot of people who believed in us, in the importance of sharing cultural stories, and the fun of interdisciplinary arts practices.

rm: Beyond obvious elements of subject matter, how do you feel this new collection, Heliotropia, is different from MONUMENT? Do you see your work moving towards a particular as-yet-distant point, or are you working purely from poem to poem, manuscript to manuscript?

MB: The quality of the poetry is better, more lyrical. Although there are quite a few long poems in Heliotropia, the individual pieces, for the most part, stand on their own. Although in editing with Sonnet, we did discuss an overall “arc,” so there is a sense of almost science fiction and futurism as you get into the last section of the book.

In terms of the movement of my work, I can never tell where it’s going until I’m past it. I realize my published works are often in the form of projects, but I don’t really set out to undertake a project until I’m well into it. Oftentimes a project takes shape because I’m writing a grant application, for example.

Right now I’m working short story to short story, a project that blossomed into a manuscript as I realized my pieces circled a similar set of themes. And these stories do continue from the themes explored in Heliotropia in a way. They’re speculative, introducing elements of magic into the real world. I approach writing fiction the same way I do poetry, with just writing and letting the story elements figure themselves out along the way.

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan [knitted hat by Dawn Macdonald] currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024), the poetry collection World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.

rob mclennan : 2024 VERSeFest interviews: Alice Burdick

 

Alice Burdick writes poetry, essays, and cookbooks in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. She is the author most recently of Ox Lost, Snow Deep (a feed dog book/Anvil Press), and of Deportment, 2018, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Book of Short Sentences, 2016, Mansfield Press, Holler, 2012, Mansfield Press, Flutter, 2008, Mansfield Press, and Simple Master, 2002, Pedlar Press. Her practice often includes collaboration, and recently her poetry has been used in Woodlight, a series of three films created by Hear Here and Erin Donovan. Her poems have appeared in Aubade: Poetry and Prose from Nova Scotian Writers (Boularderie Island Press, 2018), GUSH: Menstrual Manifestos for Our Time (Frontenac House, 2018), Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian Poets Under the Influence, An Anthology of Surrealist Canadian Poetry (The Mercury Press, Fall 2004), as well as other anthologies. She is the author of many chapbooks, folios, and broadsides since 1991. Her essays have appeared in Locations of Grief: an emotional geography (Wolsak & Wynn, 2020) and My Nova Scotia Home: Nova Scotia’s best writers riff on the place they call home (MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc., 2019). She has authored three cookbooks for local publisher Formac Publishing. From 1992-1995, Alice was assistant coordinator of the Toronto Small Press Fair, and has been a judge for various awards, including the bpNichol Chapbook Award.  She is also a freelance editor, manuscript assessor, and workshop leader.

Alice Burdick reads in Ottawa on Thursday, November 28, 2024 as part of Fall into VERSeFest, and will be conducting a poetry workshop as part of same on Saturday, November 30 (pre-registration required).

rob mclennan: When did you first start writing?

Alice Burdick: I first started writing as a little kid, and did a lot of writing and drawing. The writing was sometimes plays, sometimes stories, and sometimes poems. As an older teenager I really got into it, though, mainly poems.

rm: What did those first attempts look like? Were they modelled on anything?

AB: When I drew, I would usually be telling a story out loud at the same time, and often it would be with friends, as well as by myself. There was a lot of art and music in my home, and fairy tales and folk tales of all sorts were inspirational. I remember we had a copy of Archy and Mehitabel in the home and that was a rich source; nonsense verse by Edith Sitwell and Edward Lear. It was an easy leap from description to far-out narratives that happened. As with any new poet, a lot of my earlier pieces were a bit overwrought. But once I accepted sound into the process, it opened up.

rm: What did that foray into sound look like? And how did you first start connecting to other writers?

AB: It was the moment when I understood the role of rhythm, internal rhyme, disjunction, the out loud quality of the words on the silent page. That the writing starts with joy and play in sound, and they can transmit a mood or meaning with more velocity. Once I got that, the writing started to come more easily, in general.

I was lucky enough to be in The Dream Class as a teenager, where I was exposed to many different contemporary poets in Toronto, as well as the Small Press Book Fair. After high school ended, it was mainly through my partner at the time, Victor Coleman, as well as the Small Press Book Fair, that I found out about and became friends with a lot of writers, especially poets, who were also usually active in small and micro press.

rm: What was The Dream Class?

AB: The Dream Class was an extra-curricular writing class through the Toronto School Board. As far as I know, only Victor Coleman was the primary instructor. It was held at Christie Pits High School on Bloor Street, so I would travel there one night a week via subway with a couple of friends who also took the class. It is where I first heard Stuart Ross and Paul Dutton read, and found out about Ron Padgett, Joe Brainard, et al. It was a great class and really showed me that the world of poetry is as wide as the world of song.

rm: It sounds as though you were engaged with some of this stuff rather early. Were you submitting to journals once high school ended? Were you publishing, self-publishing or quietly working? Who else was around, and what did your activity look like?

AB: In the last year of high school in Toronto, a group of friends and I who also participated in the Dream Class put together a journal called 21 Down (referring to our ages) and it included poems, silly articles, stories, photography etc. It lasted a few publications. Then I moved with my mom and my younger brother to Espanola, as she'd gotten a job as a high school art teacher there. I'd failed my last year of high school as I mainly didn't show up at all and so I graduated in Espanola. I wrote a lot there, on my own. After that point, I moved to Toronto, and then joined in on The Eternal Network, a chapbook publisher with Victor Coleman, and it was through this press I published my first chapbook. I met so many stalwarts of the scene then: Stuart Ross, jwcurry, John Barlow, Jennifer Lovegrove, Nicky Drumbolis, Maggie Helwig, Beth and Joy Learn, Daniel F. Bradley, Clint Burnham, Katy Chan, etc etc. It really was a lively scene in Toronto then. I worked in a cheese store, wrote and drew, then hung out with folks and attended readings. I did a lot of reading of various texts as well, new and old.

rm: I know you had a few chapbooks published through that period. How did you get from (and through) there to the publication of your first full-length collection?

AB: yeah, quite a few were published, both via my press and others. That mainly happened in the earlier to mid 1990s, and then there was a lull. My mother and then my boyfriend passed way within 5 years of each other and I just spent time living, working, and grieving. I was writing too, but not publishing. Every now and then I’d send my manuscript (which was called Anthropomorphic Pride) out to publishers but finally it landed with Pedlar Press. Stuart Ross became the editor for it, and that has continued for other books since. He’s always been an advocate.

rm: Do you see a difference in the way you currently approach a poem, or a manuscript, compared to those early days?

AB: Not really. To me, writing poems seems like one long project. So it is always the same and always different. I have taken different approaches over the years, and have found different incentives/prompts, such as listening to music or watching films at the same time. Maybe the biggest difference is that I accept that poems and manuscripts don't always need to be published, and it just comes down to the writing. 

rm: How does a poem begin? Even if you think in terms of your work being a kind of single, ongoing project, when you are writing, do you think in terms of one poem at a time, clusters of poems or manuscripts?

ab: Usually I just think – I am going to write! And then I write, and it is usually just a focus on the writing, not knowing if it will be a single long poem, or if it will become a longer series of poems, linked or not linked. If I am writing in response to a specific thing initially, then sometimes there's an initial containment because of that constraint, but then it usually widens a bit. I don't usually think of something becoming a book when I'm writing the poem(s) but that seems to be something granting bodies like.

rm: Did having a selected poems, Deportment (WLU Press, 2018), that Alessandro Porco put together, shift your perspective or provide any unexpected insight into your ongoing work? What was the process of putting that collection together? Were you involved at all?

AB: yes, Alessandro communicated with me a fair amount – he checked in with me when he had the list of poems under consideration, and we talked about the process together. I also wrote an afterword for the selected, where I talked about how my writing life developed. I have to say that it was illuminating (and surprising) to read what Alex wrote about my writing. I am a reader but I also didn’t go to university, so my understanding of terminology and theory is a bit limited. It was interesting to see what he sees in my writing, as generally I feel like I’m receiving transmissions and then transcribing them as poetry, and mainly don’t plan on a particular effect. It was fascinating to read his take on my poetry.

rm: Has your approach or consideration of your own work shifted since that process?

AB: yes, I think I accept my weirdness more. In the past I sometimes was concerned about “wrapping” up the endings of poems, and now I accept an energetic continuity!

rm: You suggest that your work is a kind of single, ongoing project. How do you see your new collection as part of that trajectory?

AB: I think as I get older, the continuum becomes more apparent. Like, poems are a living practice. Ox Lost, Snow Deep is essentially a chapter in the big book of life. I’m more comfortable with longer poems, and these are occasionally multi-page poems. Also there is more interplay (I think) between the surreal and personal aspects of the poems. 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024), the poetry collection World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.