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.
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