Astra Papachristodoulou : SQUARE IN SHAPE BUT NOT IN FORM

Derek Beaulieu, Surface Tension, Coach House Books, $23.95
ISBN 9781552454503
Sacha Archer, cellsea, Timglaset, €12.00
ISBN 9789198725766 

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There’s something very pleasing about small square books. Some of the most prized possessions in my bookshelves are Bob Cobbing’s collection of Selected Poems (Bill Jubobe, Kob Bok, Bob Jubile), with the first book in the bundle, Bill Jubobe, produced beautifully by Coach House Books in 1976. Before I even opened Derek Beaulieu’s Surface Tension (which was published by the same press, 50-ish years later) I knew from the shape and distinctive two-toned cover design that this book was either somehow linked to the Cobbing bundle or that it served as a homage to the distinctive poet of the British Poetry Revival.

Surface Tension is a collection of expansive, symmetrically perfect, and ‘palindromic’ poems, as Beaulieu calls them in the book, which vibrates both nostalgia and inventiveness. The book opens with a series of cursive Letraset concrete poems that subtly occupy the centre of each page. The balanced position of the mirrored letters is very enjoyable to the eye, especially to someone like me who finds pleasure in symmetrical arrangements (see extract from the ‘Kursiv’ section, for instance). As the book progresses, the Letraset poems become more and more unstable: the visual poems are ‘photocopy manipulated, chance-based’, as the poet writes, to appear stretched, fatigued and overwrung. An inkeous metamorphosis takes place: the neat concrete poems gradually erupt onto the page with the letters undergoing expansion – as you flick through the pages, the poems appear scanned and digitally stretched to remind us of the growing effects of technology upon us all. The poem is changed upon coming into contact with the photocopier, just like the poet (or humans, more widely) whose lives are continuously being transformed in technologically and Capitalist-driven Western societies. This approach seems to be very much influenced by Bob Cobbing, whose photocopier poems of the 80s-90s constituted a new poetics and exemplified avant-gardist practice as a breaking out of conventional forms.  

For those familiar with Beaulieu’s work already, Letraset, the dry-transfer lettering product that revolutionised graphic design in the 1960s, is a recurring material and approach in this poet’s work (see his Les Figues Press collection, Kern, for example). This intensely physical letter transferring technique which involves scratching off individual letters onto a surface to assemble messages, enhances the industrial dimension of the concrete poems; remnants of a tool once used in advertising—an essentially capitalist enabler—now adorns poetry assemblages. Due to the limitation in buying new packs of Letraset, poets working with this material must rely in old second-hand stock, which is often ‘less-than-perfect’, with some letters being more intact than others. This adds a charm to poems like the ones seen in Surface Tension that showcase typographic materials that were once customary and have now been replaced by more advanced tools. Beaulieu is a poet of our times – his work is not afraid to take risks and echoes what Cobbing called the “need for the awareness and action of taking it all that one step further”.

Like Surface Tension, Sacha Archer’s Cellsea also experiments with typography and the concrete form in interesting ways. Beautifully produced by Malmö-based publisher Timglaset, Cellsea is a square publication with two covers and can be read in two directions. This stylistic choice alone creates a flow that is replicated in the poems—each rubber stamp poem takes you out to sea, the letters pulsate in a way to awaken the imagination. The book opens with a quote from Jacques-Yves Cousteau which partly reads, “I held onto a rock and closed my eyes. This was the punishment of the sea,” which made me think of poems as waves – waves that, depending on the weather intensity, reveal a blanket of new rocks, cells and other wonders for us to discover upon searching; each poem carries meaning which awaits to be uncovered.

Each section (each half is divided in three sections) opens with the words ‘inhalation’, ‘exhalation’ and ‘return’, enhancing the idea of reading visual poetry as an act of meditation and discovery. For some, this sounds like a familiar experience when encountering good poetry, although others may not naturally agree with the meditative and healing effects of poetry reading and making. As a reader, I understood these words to be instructions from the poet, and enjoyed each suggested pause which, in my opinion, was well positioned in the book.

The first few concrete poems in Cellsea are small and contained, and are coloured in a mixture of blue, green and black inks (see poem ‘Phase 5’, for example). As the reader turns each page, the poems expand, with the letters stretching out and claiming the whiteness of the page – it should be noted that the poems eventually become monochrome – another technique indicative of movement and progression. In the poem ‘13^th Position’ for example, the letters ‘U’, ‘E’ and ‘R’ (amongst other letters) seem to have escaped their contained space, thus creating a visually satisfying buzz on the page. Repetition seems important for concrete poems such as these ones – in the same way that a coastal landscape is adorned with patterns and colours, these poems also have their own unique rhythm and standing.

Archer’s choice to handstamp the letters in Cellsea reveal another layer that makes this visual poetry book so fascinating; stamping is an act that predisposes physical force, and in a way points to the violence of the wave-like poems. In the same way an inked stamp leaves a footprint when it comes in contact with the page, a sea wave alters the coastal landscape one cell at a time. Archer’s letters are swept away by ocean storm – this, to me, alludes to the power of language to change the world.

Unique in its use of movement, typography and approach to book design, Cellsea offers a meditative yet unpredictable energy, capturing the turmoil and, simultaneously, the beauty of temporal spaces. Archer’s concrete poems are visual masterpieces and Timglaset did a brilliant job in presenting them in the best possible way.

 

 

 

 

Astra Papachristodoulou is a poet and artist from Greece with a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Surrey. She was recently awarded a Fleck Fellowship from Banff Centre for Creativity, and her poems have appeared in numerous UK and international magazines including Buzdokuz, Resurgence & Ecologist and BeeCraft. Her poetry publications include Selected Variations for Bees, Stargazing and Constellations (all from Guillemot Press).

GENRE-HOPPERS: A Conversation with Nick Thran and David O'Meara

David O'Meara, the newly appointed English-language poet laureate for the City of Ottawa and author of the debut novel Chandelier, speaks with Nick Thran, whose works include If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display and the upcoming poetry collection Existing Music. Together, they explore the inspirations behind their latest works and the influences that shape their writing.

 

 

 

First off, congratulations on publishing your first novel, Chandelier. You’re both a poet and a playwright, so genre-hopping is not new for you. You’ve talked a little bit with rob mclennan on this site about the novel offering you “a different way [than in poems] of talking through the paradoxes” and about getting to moving through a prosaic trajectory of causal relations. But I’m wondering if there was some kind of hinge moment when the lark of the novel became the work of writing the thing, and a three-hundred-page family drama felt possible? Can you talk about this moment? Or was it an idea borne more gradually, in increments?

Frankly, I learned many things from abandoning an earlier novel I wrote before Chandelier. I wanted to apply that knowledge and experience; I just needed a story. And when I was in the editing stages of my last book of poems, the image of Hugo, the father / ex-husband character in the novel, waiting impatiently for a connecting flight and receiving a phone call from the police, imbedded itself in my head, and I thought what the F, let’s see where this goes. So, it started as an image that interested me. But it needed to be a character that interested me. And as I worked on that, essentially making him an architect on his way to a conference to confront a professional rival, the other characters developed into a compelling drama. The things I learned from the previous failed novel came into play. Essentially: plan almost nothing, create interesting people and let them get into trouble.

I want to ask a similar question regarding your book of essays, If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display. How did it form? I can see that maybe it grew incrementally, except that there seems to be a very coherent exploration of enquiry through art and aspiration (and I’ll get to that later). What was the process like for gathering the material together?

I admire this capacity to move a particular character through a single evening, to have them make decisions, situation to situation, on the fly.

If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display grew from two manuscripts. For a few years I’d been working on both a manuscript of essays and a manuscript of poems. In the essays I’d established a difficult but exciting (until it wasn’t) set of formal and thematic constraints. The poetry manuscript was open-ended and going nowhere. I was also working a Sunday shift at my local bookstore where my sole task, apart from slow Sunday retail, was to group different books together on the tables for display. After I hit a creative block with both manuscripts, I’d say the display work felt more satisfying than any of the writing I was doing. Next thought, can I write a book that feels like this, whose parts mimic the kind of associative leaps I sense going on here at the shop? This opened the door for fiction enter the conversation, which quickly established a leading role, as the stories drove through many of the roadblocks I was encountering in the essays. A role for the poems suddenly appeared. The three genres thrived side by side.

Returning to your work, the three members of the broken family who are the subjects of Chandelier, daughter Georgia and her parents Hugo and Sarah, have a few things in common. They’re prone to wild or risky excursions. They struggle with substances. But I’m interested in ways the three are bound by the largesse with which certain individuals outside the family unit – Georgia’s friend Natalie, Hugo’s career-rival Alan Norcock, and, for Sarah, the double-first-named scammer Trevor Brent – loom in each of their present realities. I wonder if you can tell me about the decision to have each of these characters reckoning with the actions or absences of individuals outside of that family? 

Nick, I have a very messy proto-essay in my files regarding the idea and use of advice by characters in the history of novels. Advice is a very fraught concept. We give and get it every day. Our fate, for good and bad, often hinges on whether and how we apply it. Secondary characters operate somewhere in this sphere, I think. Very broadly, main characters battle their past and present, its great mistakes and regrets, predictably inside their embattled psyche. But the secondary characters, even minor characters, apply the unpredictable left hook. They have access to protagonists’ information without perhaps suffering the immediate consequences. The tension of a narrative can be barrelling along like a tractor trailer and then suddenly the minor character can step out and push it into the traffic. Or pull it out of the way. They can be a playful irritant to the narrative trajectory. They are less developed so can be shadowy.

You make great use of these minor characters, and the shadows they cast are so clearly partly from them, partly fabrications of the “embattled psyche[s]” of your main characters.

There was likely a well of personal experience you were drawing from while writing Chandelier. You previously taught in Korea, which had to inform writing about Georgia and her time overseas. In your work as a bartender, you must have been regaled with horrific tales from a thousand Hugos (well done in pulling no punches with his physical and mental breakdown in Barcelona, by the way).

I’m wondering how you found the process of negotiating boundaries between the self and your characters. Was this something different for you than establishing a speaker in a poem? In some sense, maybe you were already doing some of these character sketches or vocal exercises in Masses on Radar. Gestural drawings towards the bigger canvas of the novel. 

I really have no way of explaining where these characters came from. There is no direct line from my own experience and theirs. Yes, I have lived in South Korea, and spent time in Barcelona, and Gatineau, for that matter. I have drawn on some familiar situations but also made many up. I have felt many of the things Georgia, Hugo and Sarah feel, but disagree with them on other things. The book is a thousand lies tied together with its emotional truth.

Back to yours. I mentioned an enquiry into art. What I loved about your book is its integration of thought through many experiences and places—New York, Toronto, Fredericton, book store work, your extended discussion of the Old Trout Puppet Workshop, Patrick Lane’s writing, etc. The whole is a coherent sum of its parts. In this, it attested to the noble goal of reflection as lifestyle. I’m wondering two things: did you have a particular thesis that you wanted to gather evidence toward, and I’m intrigued by the claims in your NOTES that several of what seem to be personal stories are “works of fiction.”

Looking back, I was starting to (wrongly) conflate my making of a poem with the shorthand of a temporary gig or stay, with abrupt upheavals or shifts I was experiencing both geographically and in my own consciousness. During a protracted feeling of rootlessness, I had the good fortune of taking a fascinating journalism course at NYU with writer Lawrence Weschler. He convinced me longform essays could be (and were often) as intricately constructed as poems. I was also slowly learning how to write prose through years of writing reviews of other peoples’ poetry collections, as well as trying to respond sensitively and productively to poets’ manuscripts in my work as an editor. I was also consciously looking to what other people like the Trouts or my friend Kalpna were doing in their working lives for similarities with the private act of composing poems.

When I arrived in Fredericton in 2016, I began working in a bookshop again and started to read a lot of fiction, especially autofiction. Then about 2021, after five or so years of reading and writing a lot of prose, I started to see ways that a few of the poems I was working on could thrive within an ecosystem that included both stories and essays. I saw that I could write something part memoir, part short story collection, part poetry collection, and this unclassifiable nature might keep it, on a macro level, in the realm of the poem (which satisfied my stubbornly non-linear brain). If the bookshop or workshop could house a variety of tools and still impart a particular aesthetic, character, or overall experience, so, perhaps, could my book.

To the last part of your question, as soon as I knowingly took some kind of creative liberty with a personal experience, that experience had entered the realm of fiction, and I would be correct to categorize it thusly. I’d read enough of either genre to understand where the lines for me were. But the structure of the book, winding an autobiographical essay around the stories and other essays, blurs those lines a second time in what I think is a compelling way. I have my editor Emma Skagen to thank for suggesting we walk the title essay through the book.

Back to Chandelier, there were many points in the novel where I sensed a poet enjoying the freedom to keep going, to keep describing, to keep encountering.  A fellow flaneur in full stride.  Were you as energized as I was by having the space for more episodic variety or descriptive sprawl than we might have in our poems?

Yes, I think so. Unless you’re writing an epic, a poem starts and ends in a pretty finite space. Every time you finish one, you’re faced with starting all over again. It’s a bumpy psychological roller coaster through the forty or fifty poems it requires to finish a book of verse. The longer forms have their challenges but at least you don’t have to create a new character every few pages. But the nuances of a book-length story have their own challenges. How can a character successfully develop while staying consistent? What happens, how and why? What should be said indirectly? What should be left out or delayed? The space is energizing, isn’t it? 

Is it too early to ask what’s next for David O’Meara? Will you revisit the proto-essay about secondary characters and dispense some advice for the rest of us genre-curious poets out there?

I’d love to do a book of essays. I’ve got a list of things and many notes. I do aspire, as I characterised your last book, toward “reflection as lifestyle.” But whether those notes can be effectively articulated and collected is the dilemma. It’s always a question of what time is left after paying the bills.

What’s exciting is you have a new book of poems, Existing Music, coming out this spring. It’s been a few years since your last. Has your approach to poetry composition changed, and how? What can we expect with the new poems?

I look forward to these essays! The reality of bills aside, it seems that you’ve proven yourself more than capable of seeing a project through.

Existing Music, yes! It’s very close to being out there: April 15^th of this year. Three parts: the first includes a lot of character studies and first-person poems dealing broadly with ideas of why people might make music (or write), might stop making music (or writing), and suggests that what happens between recordings – grave or mundane or exciting or entirely speculation – is also a kind of music. The second section is a kind of extended riff, borrowing heavily from an antiquated dictionary of musical terms and inspired by some of my amateurish mid-life hobbies, and tries to capture the kind of joy and unexpected tones and juxtapositions that happen when you just let go. The third section brings in a kind of band. These are poems situated among others at places like the bookshop, or they’re specific gestures to another person. A lot of the poems in this final section work with parts of translations I’ve been doing over the years from the Spanish poems of José Hierro. Nothing that appears in this section of Existing Music is a direct translation from Hierro, or even an approximation, but I try to work in the way a folk musician might build off a chord progression or a lyric in another song.

I could talk at a nauseating length about the way my approach to composition has changed in the ten years between this volume and my last. Basically, getting my hands dirty in other genres has helped to re-establish for myself the value of writing poems. I probably do a bit more background work outside of the poems to establish the tones and energies I want my poems to have. And yes, I reflect a lot, perhaps pre-maturely in my mid-forties, on how the poems of others haven’t just helped me to stay alive but have shaped the way that I live and the decisions I’ve made, be it in the minutiae of certain formal aspects or in their overall effects. I write my own poems from the things I have learned there.

 

 

 

 

 

David O’Meara is the award-winning author of five collections of poetry, most recently Masses On Radar (Coach House Books). His books have been shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, the ReLit Award, the Trillium Book Award and the K.M. Hunter Award, and have won the Archibald Lampman Award four times. His poetry has been nominated for a National Magazine Award, quoted in a Tragically Hip song and used as libretto for a pastoral cantata for unaccompanied chorus, written by composer Scott Tresham. He is the director of the Plan 99 Reading Series and he was the founding Artistic Director for the VERSeFest Poetry Festival. He lives in Ottawa.

 

 

 

 

Nick Thran’s books include the mixed-genre collection If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display (2023) and three previous collections of poems. Earworm (2011) won the 2012 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. His poems have been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry and The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry. Thran lives on unceded Wolastoqey territory (Fredericton, NB), where he works as an editor and bookseller.

rob mclennan : an interview with David O’Meara

 

 

 

 

 

David O’Meara is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Masses on Radar (Coach House Books, 2022), the winner of the Ottawa Book Award and the Archibald Lampman Prize. His 2013 collection, A Pretty Sight, also received both honours. His first novel, Chandelier, appears this month with Nightwood Editions. He is the Director of the Plan 99 Reading Series and was the founding Artistic Director for VERSeFest (Canada’s International Poetry Festival). David has served as Poet-in-Residence for Arc Poetry Magazine, as a faculty member at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and as a jury member for the Griffin Poetry Prize. He was recently announced as one of two poets laureate for the City of Ottawa for 2024-2026. He lives in Ottawa, Canada where he tends bar.

[David O'Meara launches Chandelier in Ottawa at 6:30pm on Wednesday, September 18 at The Rainbow; he and French-language poet laureate Véronique Sylvain give their first official readings as Poets Laureate for the City of Ottawa as part of an event through the Ottawa International Writers Festival, Tuesday, October 1, 2024 at 6:30pm]

rob mclennan: What first started you writing poems?

David O’Meara: Old poems. Film dialogue. Song lyrics. Famous quotations. Rhetoric, but the classical Aristotelian sense of it. What Cicero refined as the manipulation of words and phrases to create an effect. Composition as persuasion. The addiction of a well-wrought phrase. Art springs from an initial emotional response, and since I can’t dance, I think I felt that words seemed the best tool for response. At a certain juncture, I needed to organize my thoughts in the hope to transmit and transform them. Early on, it was probably just clumsy attempts to understand myself and show off a little.

rm: Who might you have been showing off to?

DO: Only to myself since I kept very quiet about my writing ambitions for many years. At an early stage, it’s a game of trying to impress yourself while generating a form of patient objectivity and self-apprenticeship. Bluster with dedication.

rm: Where and when did you first encounter other writing, or other writers? At least my high school library had a copy of an Irving Layton collection, For My Brother Jesus (1976), and certain of my peer group were attempting to write as well, which prompted my own early attempts.

DO: Early access is so incredibly important. Before the internet, those high school libraries, if they were stocked with a few (and usually it was only a few) contemporary voices, could be instrumental in accessing poetry beyond the Romantics, Yeats and Robert Frost. Like your experience, there were a few Atwood, Birney and Al Purdy books available at Fellowes High School in Pembroke. In the early eighties, finding them was electrifying. Though the collection lacked in diversity, it was life-changing to see a poem called “The Beavers of Renfrew” in a book. It gave agency to the regional and the vernacular. Suddenly and astonishingly, poetry didn’t have to be about English abbeys and Grecian urns. And you could write the way people around you talked.

rm: I know you originally know Ken Babstock from those Pembroke days. At what point did you each realize the other was attempting poems?

DO: We knew each other and had lots of literature and music chats in dingy Pembroke cafes. If memory serves me correctly, we skated around admitting we were attempting our own writing until Ken published a couple of his poems in the high school yearbook. I was viridescent with envy. It was the year I graduated (Ken is two years younger than me) but from there we started a letter correspondence (pre-internet) and included poems. Our initial bluster evolved into valuable and candid critique, which we continued for years.

rm: The first time I met either of you was in 1994, I think it was, when you and Ken read together at The Manx Pub. How did that reading come about? Where were you in your writing by then?

DO: Have we known each other for thirty years? Wow. Yes, I still remember that reading. The Manx had just opened a year earlier and Chris Swail, a co-owner with a lit background, wanted to ramp up the cultural presence in the bar, so he started a series named after a brainwave (?) with Rob Manery. I was friends with Chris, and he knew I was writing (I’d had a couple of poems published in The Antigonish Review and Fiddlehead), so he asked me to bring Ken along (also with some early publishing credits: he beat me to The Fiddlehead by six months) to open for a Scottish guy who had a couple of actual novels at the time. I was nerve-wracked beyond belief since I didn’t have much experience doing readings. The sense of exposure is still hard to swallow. They were, beyond a doubt, very terrible poems. The solution to nerves then was alcohol and bravado. I feel like we all went to the Sportif and played pool afterward.

rm: Yeah, that sounds right. That was The N400 Series, which Manery ran until he left for Vancouver, two years later. I tagged along for the pool, which you might not recall. Most of what I remember from that event was John Metcalf attempting to talk to Ken afterwards about a manuscript, and Ken (possibly through nervousness) seeming to brush him off. What was the process for you between that reading and what became your first collection, Storm still? How did you get from there to there?

DO: I kept writing, reading, reading, exploring approaches to style and technique, getting more self-critical. I’d write ten poems, let them sit, change them, and then throw out eight. The manuscript grew and shrank. I sent stuff off to the magazines and journals. It’s hard to imagine the not-so-long-ago days before Submittable. Those pre-stamped self-addressed envelopes in envelopes. I worked in Montreal. I hitched to Vancouver, worked maintenance in a hotel, flew to Japan, eventually back to Ottawa, all the while checking in with friends who I was using as my return address. A version of the manuscript got turned down by 4 or 5 publishers. I cut stuff. I wrote more. Just before moving to teach in South Korea, I sent it off again. Rejected. I wrote some poems in Korea, mornings and evenings after work. When I arrived home a year later, the manuscript went in the mail again and was accepted.

rm: When thinking back to those early days, do you see a difference to the way you approach a poem now? Who were you even reading to influence the poems of that first collection? Do you begin with rough notes that cohere into shape through revision? Do you begin with an idea, or even a line?

DO: I was reading everything I could get my hands on. Poetry was a drug. I was hooked, jonesing for the next hit. The pre-internet days, what you could find in bookstores, or what you borrowed hungrily from friends. The contemporary Canadians, the American voices. The Brits and Irish through Faber volumes. Translations from Asia and South America. Always the question, what effect are these poets creating and how do they do it? Differences of approach? I learned, over time, to not decide what the poem was about before I started it. So, it usually begins with an image, or a phrase, and the poem becomes an investigation into why it feels important. From there, it’s all blowtorches, sledgehammers, spokeshaves, and sandpaper: a free-for-all to get through the poem’s self-indulgent tendencies to form an evocative, arresting shape. I need to surprise myself—a line, a metaphor, an emotional admission—in order to feel the poem is successful. A poem is a thoughtful conversation with itself to learn why it exists. I don’t understand how poems work, which is probably why I keep writing them. The most important goal is re-readability. What makes anyone want to re-read a poem? Shocks of comprehension, complex arrangements of thought, the pleasure of language.

rm: You’ve had numerous poems over the years that have emerged from travel. How does one write about a place or an experience without sounding like a tourist? Is this something you worry about?

DO: I think the danger in writing about travel is forcing profundity out of exoticness, and consequently a tendency to write “poetry.” The poem’s effectiveness is primarily in the words, regardless of where it takes place. Whether you are single-handedly bringing a train to a halt in the Tunisian desert or going to Loblaws to buy a bag of carrots (I’ve done both without writing about them), you can’t know if it’s significant until you experience and process it. Likewise, whether it’s a subject for good art. The carrot sometimes makes for a better poem than the train. The travelling I’ve done has led to some poems. Much hasn’t. I haven’t worried too much about sounding like a tourist. Most of the time I am. There’s a strength in acknowledging we're encountering things for the first time, with all its awe, ignorance, and humility.

rm: In an interview with Open Book in 2021, you mention that a poem “shouldn’t try to be a poem. It should just talk to you.” It sounds as though this consideration is still in play, so I’m curious as to how you began to compose a novel. Was there something in the shape or idea that compelled you into a different direction, or were you deliberately trying something new?

DO: I guess a story suggested itself and I shifted gears. Writing a novel is a different way of talking through the paradoxes. As an engaged reader, I want an interplay of confusion and clarity. I like being confronted by contradiction, then surprised by revelation. Narrative and lyric trajectories operate differently, but complementarily. One is essentially causal (this event led to this event) while the lyric embraces illogical shifts based on association and comparisons (this event makes me weirdly think of this other thing) which is basically metaphor. I think of them as occupying horizontal versus vertical planes. Kipling versus Imagism. The art floats inside the two extremes. A novel leans more heavily on the narrative, though has shift. It’s another version of those horizontal and vertical planes. Like a good poem, I wanted my characters to dwell in uncertainty, reveal and surprise themselves as recklessly as possible. Their anecdotal evidence constitutes a world, the way images do.

rm: An interesting consequence of attempting a new form is in how one’s relationship to prior forms might shift in tandem. Do you see a difference in how you approach writing a poem since composing a novel?

DO: Yes and no. One thing informs another, doesn’t it? The prose nudges the poetry; the poetry tugs at the prose. The work widens or compresses. It’s those horizontal and vertical lines in action. There’s always a part of me that doesn’t understand how art works. One needs to continually ask “what is the essential information and where does it go?” And “how will language achieve both communication and pleasure?”

rm: You were recently announced as one of two new Poets Laureate for the City of Ottawa. What are your plans for your two-year post? What do you think you can bring to the position?

DO: I’m keen to keep organizing literary readings with local poets and I’m also eager to partner with other arts and cultural organizations in order to bring audiences from different disciplines into the same space. And, in the spirit of throwing stuff at the wall, I’ve got a wild bunch of stupid ideas to generate a bit of spontaneity, fun, profundity, and potential failure. Stay tuned.

 

 

 

 

 

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, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. 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). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics and Touch the Donkey. He is editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. 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, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

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.