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Andy Weaver’s fourth book of poetry, The Loom (University of Calgary), was published in 2024. He was a finalist for the 2024 Vallum Chapbook Award, and his chapbook So/I (above/ground) was longlisted for the 2022 Nelson Ball Prize. He teaches poetry and creative writing at York University.
Andy Weaver reads in Ottawa on Friday, March 28 as part of VERSeFest 2025.
rob mclennan: The back cover of The Loom offers that you “led a life of quiet contemplation before becoming a father at the age of 42. Within three years he had two sons; two small, relentless disruptions to an existence which had, for a very long time, been self-sustaining and tranquil.” How do you feel your work shifted as a result of having children?
Andy Weaver: Becoming a parent shifted a lot of things, including my writing. My writing had been pretty abstract at times, and what eventually became The Loom started off as very abstract—the idea was to contemplate parental love as a concept, without moving into the personal. That just didn’t work—everything was too cold and lifeless. Parenting my kids made me very interested in clarity of expression (it’s bizarre to actually teach tiny humans to speak, to explain to them what sentences are, what idiomatic meaning is, etc.) and the project slowly shifted towards being much more lyric than I expected. I think that shift is directly the consequence of having children.
rm: Do you feel it as straightforward a difference as that, shifting deeper into the personal? I suspect unless we’re asked to specifically read a poem at an event, we rarely go back into older poems or books, but have you looked back at your work before children to compare?
AW: Egads, man—read my own work? What fresh hell is that?
No, you’re right, I tend not to read earlier work unless I get a specific thought and decide to revise it for some reason, which happens every so often. Otherwise, I return to older things for the occasional reading, as you say. So I guess the shift was really mostly from where this latest book started and where I thought it wanted it to go vs where the project actually did go. The initial idea was for something quite general but the project kept pulling me towards the specific, and directly towards the personal as the primary example of the specific.
rm: When you say you occasionally go back to revise older work, are you referring to published work, or poems that haven’t landed there yet? What is that process like, and how difficult or easy is it to return to an older thought? Do you see poems as abandoned over, say, finished?
AW: I’d say I equally revise both published and unpublished old poems (poems more than a year or two old), though both somewhat rarely. It usually happens when I think of a line or image and happen to remember an old poem that I think it might fit with—then I tend to revise the poem as though it were a more recent piece. Sometimes that means substantial changes, though sometimes it’s only small tweaks. Sometimes I just happen on an old poem file on my computer and read through it, looking to see if I’m interested in them. That can trigger revisions. Basically, if the poem strikes me as something that I can improve on, I’ll try. I don’t know if I ever really abandon a poem, but I often do get to a point where I feel like I don’t have the ability to make it better. I guess that feeling is also what I use to know when the poem is “finished” and either ready to be shared or hidden away.
When I’m occasionally in a space where I’m not writing, I will go back to old poems (published or not) and try to revise them as a way to prompt something new.
rm: How much or how little might those changes be? Are you taking poems from earlier books and completely reworking them, or simply moving a line or stanza? And how do you see this process? Does it provide any insight into the distances of where you are now compared to where you might have been when a piece was first written, or even published?
AW: Sometimes it’s small tweaks, like adjusting a line or trimming some parts I don’t like. Occasionally, it’s a complete overhaul/reimagining, though that’s usually only for me, since I’m not interested in printing updated versions in a later book. I like to think it’s proof that I’m evolving and improving at my craft, but that could just be the trickery of ego. I do find it can sometimes point out bad habits that I’ve developed (“Yeesh, I’ve been doing this same move for years!”) or images/ideas I’ve returned to unproductively over the years.
rm: I’m intrigued at the level of Robert Duncan influence that emerges through this new collection of yours. Is this something more overt through The Loom compared to your prior collections, or am I simply catching something that has always been there?
AW: That’s an interesting question, but it’s hard for me to answer definitely. Duncan has been my favourite poet and one of my main guides ever since I took Mike O'Driscoll’s Black Mountain Poetry grad course back in 1998 or 1999. Reading Duncan in that class was a real Damascene conversion for me—I can’t stress just how much his work thrilled me, and challenged and expanded what I thought poetry was. So, his work has been a kind of North Star for me since well before my first book. But I think it’s fair to say that I worked hard to not let Duncan take over my own writing—I didn’t want to be a Duncan clone. There are references and techniques in earlier work, but I tried to limit those. Now, I think it’s fair to say that I don’t care if people think I’m aping Duncan. That would be a huge compliment. So, I don’t set out to write like Duncan, but—since I’m not actively guarding against writing like him—I think my work is unconsciously moving towards his style. His thoughts about rhyme and the tone leading of vowels, for example, are practices that often guide me through writing a draft.
And then there are moments when I do actively think about Duncan and what he might say about something—my recent above/ground chapbook (Robert Duncan at Disney World) actually started when I was with my wife and kids at Disney World last year (my first time anywhere like that) and I literally had a dream one night that I overheard someone in line for a ride quoting him (some lines from “Up Rising: Passages 25”) but the guy kept insisting he was quoting Robert Creeley. That made me think about what Duncan would think of Disney World.
rm: I will admit, Duncan is one of those poets I never quite “got,” much preferring the work of his co-horts, Robin Blaser and Jack Spicer. What is it about Duncan’s work that resonates with you? What are you focusing on when you are attempting to echo Duncan’s work or approach?
AW: A student recently asked me a similar question (basically, “Why do you love Duncan so much?”), and I answered that I think he has one of the best ears ever, and I love how he puts together his poems (serial form, obscure knowledge salvaged, spectacular word play, unexpected mental leaps), but I also respect that he was openly gay in a time when that was a crime in America, he was a radical pacifist when America was openly hawkish, and he was a vocal anarchist in a time when the Cold War consensus made that seemingly impossible. And all of those stances go directly into his poetry. He’s also open in his own loves and his own mentors (H.D., Gertrude Stein, etc.) and is careful to say in his own poems that he learned from others, he wasn’t interested in the “solitary genius.” I could go on and on, but I’ll leave it at that....
But I think Duncan is a love him or leave him poet—either it clicks or it doesn’t. But there are a lot of different Duncans—if “My Mother Would be a Falconress” or “The Torso: Passages 18” don’t work for you, then maybe his “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” or any of his Ground Work serial poems might.
rm: With Duncan as an example (and I’m sure others, obviously), what did those first experiments with your own writing look like? How were you looking at your own way through such a heft of influence?
AW: Early encounters with Duncan (which came along with encounters with Olson, Creeley, Levertov, Cage and other Black Mountain poets) were mishmashes of a lot of influences (Kroetsch, Mouré, but also lyric poets like Zwicky and McKay). I try to read widely and in various poetry styles, and I think I’m easily influenced by what I’m reading.
The first thing that I was influenced by Duncan and the Black Mountains was a focus on lines, line breaks, and spacing as ways of guiding readers through a poem. I worked with those tools in the front of my mind for a long time, but then they began to feel like cheats or crutches, and I worked to move away from them or at least limit them. My recent book (The Loom) moves back to them a bit more openly, and the pieces I've written since then are, I think, even more openly Duncan/Black Mountain in their form.
rm: I think you were the first person to introduce me to the work of Mina Loy, also, a poet I recollect you being big on at one point. Am I remembering that correctly?
AW: I certainly like Loy and went through a significant period reading her (around 1999/2000), so it's quite possible. I tend to share my likes pretty openly. But I don't know that I've thought of Loy as a specific influence or mentor. I magpie from everywhere, though, so I'm sure some of her is in there somewhere.
rm: Because you’ve published a number of chapbooks over the years, I’m wondering: how do you see the process of chapbook-making, as compared to preparing something full-length? Are your published chapbooks built as excerpts of in-progress longer manuscripts, or as self-contained projects that might evolve into something larger?
AW: I think it’s an even balance of both. Some (“Robert Duncan at Disney World”) are self-contained sequences or long poems that I don’t expect to extend. Others (“Haecceity” and “ligament/ligature”) are excerpts of longer works in progress. Some are longer sequences that I had to cut out of manuscripts (“So/I” was written to go into The Loom, but I couldn’t make it feel organic to that book).
I don’t think I’ve ever written anything specifically to be a chapbook, but I do love chapbooks. Way back in 2000(?) when some friends and I started The Olive Reading Series in Edmonton, I wanted to combine it with a chapbook press and so we developed the idea that we would put out a little chapbook with new work by the reader to pass around at their reading. The Olive is still going, and they still do the monthly chapbooks, which is terrific.
rm: You mention the poem “So/I,” which I know is part of a further manuscript you completed recently, following on the heels of The Loom. How does that particular manuscript differ from, or even further, the poems of The Loom?
AW: I have a pile (several hundred pages) of uncollected poems from the last 10 years. Some were pieces that didn’t fit in or relate to The Loom, but most are from after I finished a full draft of that project (late 2020). They are individual pieces, without any larger, intentional connections. I try to keep things interesting (for me, at least) so there is a fairly wide range of styles. I think most would fall into some version of slightly experimental lyric. My plan is to shape that into a collection when I have the time.
The other manuscript I’ve been working on (and I’ve just finished a complete first draft) is another book-length project—writing erasure poems of different translations of the nineteenth canto of Dante’s Pugatorio. It’s my “pandemic book,” for lack of a better description. Those are very short poems (19 words per page) in 5-6 page sequences.
rm: What brought you to that particular approach, that particular project?
AW: I wanted to try to document an experience of the pandemic without relying on my personal experiences and thoughts, so a cut-up/writing-through seemed like the way to temper that. Plus, I have always liked writing and reading poetry that tries to focus on language by downplaying the writer’s voice. Coming up with a strict structure (treating each page of the translation as a contained archive, taking exactly 19 words from that archive, using them in the order and line they appear in the translation) felt more like a sculptural project (cutting away to see what remains) of a purgatory that mimicked my experience of the slow feeling of being trapped but also somewhat free in the 2021-2023 years when the world was so conscious of restrictions and the tentative, staggered return to normal routines.
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. This fall, University of Calgary Press will be publishing his poetry collection the book of sentences, a follow-up to the book of smaller (2022). 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.
