the
book of smaller, rob mclennan
University of Calgary Press, 2022
Jérôme Melançon: Hi
Kim, hi Margo. So to get this started: I’m not sure what goes on with the
gestures accomplished in these poems. I wouldn’t call them imaginative, but I
wouldn’t call them descriptive, either. Maybe they’re a form of denotation?
Trying to name things? What would you call that – what is rob doing?
Kim Fahner:
I think he’s documenting each day. While it’s not as narrative as Bronwen
Wallace’s work, the book of smaller
has that sort of sensibility about it. Wallace used to talk about how we should
look for the extraordinary in the ordinary rhythms of life. These short
sentences that rob writes remind me, as a reader—and as a person—to take more
careful note of what’s happening around me. When I read this book of poems, I
feel like I’m a voyeur, seeing things that are private and that, as a result,
feel more endearing and weighted with meaning than they might otherwise. Does
that make sense?
Margo LaPierre:
Absolutely, Kim! There’s a sense of daily taking-stock that reminds me a bit of
a scientific or anthropological method, but of the self, of one’s family and
communities. “Endearing” is such a great word because I feel this is what rob’s
writing does—it’s precise but not calculated. It’s ground-level but expansive.
What exists between imaginative and descriptive? It’s like he’s putting pins in
experience, creating a map of life, like a shorthand. An emotional,
experiential shorthand. And yet there’s a repetition of blood to the point that
it’s like experience—time—is bleeding out, and the writing is a way to suture
it. In rob’s poem “Failed senryu,” (63) he writes: “I don’t mean to get all
parallel. How the day never varies. Like a hemorrhage.” There is a practice in
his work that seems to want to show snapshot over artifice. If this collection
were a photograph, it would be a candid one.
K:
Oh, Margo—I love the ‘putting pins in experience, creating a map of life’
analogy you’ve made. How often do we forget to note the tiniest experiences in
a day, but rob does that in all of the poems in the book of smaller.
J:
Yes, it’s a way of seeing—voyeurism, taking snapshots—without interrupting the
course of the day. There’s something dynamic, so incomplete. There’s no
delimitation between the writing, the written, the world, the words received
and passed on. He lets us into his perspective, not through his eyes, but from
his position.
There’s also the question of why rob is
doing that. He mentions “What needs not be written” (39), which brings focus to
what is written, and suggests that
there are other things, experiences, relations, that don’t need to be written,
that need not to be written. He seems
to give equal importance to both, and to see a difference in quality between
the two kinds of experience. And it’s a choice, it seems arbitrary: “The
sentence is always unfounded.”
Same: “We never look like the writing.”
(3) That last one goes back to the question I asked earlier; I don’t think he’s
trying to describe, but there’s definitely something he’s trying to grasp, to
hold onto. And just to finish this thought, I think the same idea is present
when he writes: “My pen runs low. What I have misjudged.” (49) Is it that
something didn’t need to be written? Or just that he didn’t use his time well?
K:
I think…maybe…it’s about trying to make meaning of life through observing it
really carefully. I want to try to do this with my writing, just to try to
write a poem in his style, just to see how my mind works if I give it a voice
without censoring it. I feel that I ‘clean up’ my writing before it even exits
my mind, and that’s before I begin to revise pieces after they’re down on
paper. I love how he’ll move from thing to thing, from experience to
experience. In “Incremental,” he writes: “I don’t know how to write. Other
templates emerge. My faith/is insurance. A pat on the shoulder. Again, our
skunk winters.” (30) It’s like leapfrogging through a person’s mind, in
poetics.
M:
Oh goodness, I feel you, Kim—I would like my writing to be more topographical
in the way his is. I would like my whole existence to be that way, and yet I
find myself nervous or reticent to be as open as rob is both in his poetry and
in his way as a friend and poet in the community. It’s true that in this book
rob questions the ability of writing to cover what needs to be covered. I know
that rob’s work as a writer extends far beyond the page. That for many years he
has bolstered community and created space for writers. His work ethic is
unparalleled! I could never agree to a statement that says rob didn’t use his
time well. He strikes me as stunningly on the ball, productive, and efficient.
And, in the same breath, authentic.
J:
That makes me think of the lines, “A sentence is what annihilates me.” And “A
cell that holds the body, whole.” (“Title poem,” 67) There’s that ceaseless
movement that you both describe so well, on the page and in life, that could really
define him—but from the inside, he seems to experience an opposite fear, a
concern with disappearance or immobility. Or maybe he craves it, I don’t know,
this might not be a negative eventuality at all.
There are some great metaphysical images
here, depictions of being, beings, ways of being… What are your favourites?
I’ll share mine after.
K:
A lot of this book made me sit up and think about how time works, and how it
passes, and how we age without thinking we are aging. I’m not sure what I want
to ask about this, and I need to think a bit more about it, but I also know I
need to write this down or I’ll forget!
M:
Oh boy, 100%, Kim. In relation to aging, what do you think may be hidden in the
line “Words as long as facts” in “My 1975” (31)?
K: I
think I’m drawn to how rob positions himself in terms of his age, and the aging
process. He and I are very close in age, so I’m drawn in to the way he notices
things that are both timeless and constant, almost, and then left thinking
about how it feels to be ‘between’ two ends of time in a life. His tiny
daughters show one end of the spectrum, but his poems about his father’s
decline show the other. He’s in the middle somewhere, trying to find meaning in
the syntax of sentences and often realizing that it’s rooted in the tiniest
moments of caring for his girls or checking in on his dad. I love “Daylight
savings” for that sense of location and setting. He writes: “But first, coffee.
What have we saved? Preschooler up with the dawn. Morning routine, chaos: oatmeal,
newspaper, diapers. So much yelling. A mile or more in her red shoes, princess
apparel. Such empathy. Exaggerated twirls.” (54) Reading this poem makes me
feel as if I am sitting in that same kitchen, watching a morning full of chaos
and love unfurl itself over a mug of coffee. The tenderness of this poem gets
at my heart, especially when rob ends it with “We have no need for icons.” Gah!
My heart! No, of course not. There is no need for icons because he is
describing this beautiful scene of familial chaos and love. It’s raw and
gorgeous and tender. In his description, he knows the value of the moment, one
that will pass…as all of time does.
M:
I love his Forty-seventh birthday series, and from the first one, there’s the
image of a petrified forest for language. I remember visiting the petrified
forest in Arizona as a child, and it’s a bunch of trees turned into rocks! I’m
sure that once I had one of those tree-rocks for my pocket. But he applies this
to grammar, dead metaphors. These smooth-brained rocks we carry. In another
serial poem, “It’s still winter,” electrical outlets are held in the mouth. And
occasions equal restlessness. Something occurring only once drawing our
attention. What is not daily, not holy, maybe. I love the dailiness in rob’s
poems.
J:
That image of metamorphosis you bring up Margo, I love it. Reaching for
something that’s outside of the possibilities of daily life, within daily life.
rob writes in “Wing, an ideal place”: “A shadow won’t translate; you have to
speak its language.” (26) So much in here, and definitely in my own writing as
well, emerges from this concern to catch what objects, times, situations,
events are telling us. Conveying that, passing it on, requires such care, like
bringing something into the world, from a different world, a different
dimension, in all its fragility, because it doesn’t entirely belong here. And
yet, it’s here.
K:
Jerome, that notion—of passing it on—is embedded in the poems about his mother
and father, but also in rob’s fascination on where things begin in a person’s
life. We know factual things—like our place and time of birth—but memory starts
a bit later, so he explores and spelunks around that question, as well. What do
we first remember? How are we tied to those who came before us? Those who come
afterwards? The idea of passing things on (or down) is reflected, too, as Margo
says, in the birth and birthday poems.
I love “Birth story” for its simplicity:
“I was born. At some far away point. Two blocks from this tavern. I’m not
joking” (15). It’s a place to situate oneself, the moment you were born—when
you began and how you begin to move forward from birth to adulthood, and then,
to caring for aging parents and being part of the Sandwich Generation. It’s
echoed again, in “I live somewhere imaginary” (47), when rob writes “The poem
begins: when you are born” and “I repeat myself.” As humans, as poets, we
‘worry through’ some of the same big questions and ideas through our bodies of
work. That notion is present in the book
of smaller, too.
One of the key themes, I think, is about
how writing ‘works’ and how much we think about how it works, as the poets and
writers we are. The prologue of the collection, by Anna Gurton-Wachter, speaks
to how writing is about suffering losses. Sometimes, it feels to me, life is
also about that, so it’s an archetypal human ‘thing.’ But, then I also think
that—as writers and deep thinkers—we are maybe more aware of how tiny things
are both gifts and losses. How do you think loss works into this collection of
rob’s? I’m noticing his poems for his parents, and for his children as they
grow up…
J:
My children being a few years older than his younger two, I was brought back to
those moments, holding them after they had fallen asleep in the oddest places
or sitting down in the middle of an intense session of pretend-play, when I
noticed small changes that made me feel that something was slipping away. He weaves
that feeling into a few poems—a shared joy, but a consciousness of time as
carrying away what’s already in the process of escaping. His eldest daughter is
also present, deepening that gap in time, that slipperiness: “My daughter is in
New York City, celebrating. The baby is asleep. The poem is the distance
between early morning rustlings. The toddler, cat. This is the last day of the
year.” (2) But there’s also something in there that’s not entirely lost, and
the same goes for his mother. In “Sentences my mother used” (37) the brevity
and ordinariness of the sentences seem to carry his mother into his own, or
anyone else’s, daily utterances, making her present still.
M:
The poems in the book of smaller
strike me as those of a self-archivist. Or not quite the self but the circle
around self: family, community. I feel like I hear the word “presence” as a
verb a lot these days, of presencing, being present, making present. And I
wonder if rob is “pasting” by treating the familial/familar minutiae as historical
and worthy of preservation even in the moment of its unfolding. Preservation in
a way that anticipates loss, so that loss must be coded into a thing in order
to enter it into this archival document. His poem “Letter” (65) is only two
sentences: “As sacred as any artifact. The disembodied hand.” I am not sure
whether “letter” is meant as the typographical character or the epistolary
document, maybe both (probably both), but I wonder if these treats writing as
an extension of ourselves that we then have to chop off in order to pass it
around to others to read.
K:
I’m fond of the tiny, domestic details that he weaves into his poems. I love
the mentions of slow cookers and children waking from naps. Were there images
or lines that resonated with you, that made you rethink your life inside your
house, even?
J:
The book resonated with my pandemic life, even though it was written before the
pandemic. This tying together of moments, the multiplication of my gestures
inside the home that were simply multiplied once we needed to isolate (and in
the case of my family, given a compromised immune system in the house, this is
for the foreseeable future). Living by train tracks (repeatedly, across
different cities), I’m drawn to “Thunder rolls, or a heavy truck.” (49) That
uncertainty about what the world brings to us, whether there’s danger, whether
I need to stop what I’m doing on carry on, as I carry on. And then there are
those aspects of daily, home life that disappear. “Sustenance” (72) is the
clearest series of images that brought me back to gestures we repeated every
day when the children were young, completely unrelated thoughts interspaced
between them: “Rose, a wish to water seedlings. Sprout. All we’ve managed to
garden. Where’s her schoolbag? Put your socks on. Chew. Beyond the frame:
Christine’s work-prep.”
M:
Daily gestures, certainly. I don’t have children and am lucky enough to have
both parents and both in-laws in my life, so the greatest concrete gains and
losses of the book are ones I haven’t experienced. And yet I find the poems to
be ground-level and relatable for me, especially in the inquiry of writing as a
practice. What are the stakes of writing? The goal? Those sorts of questions.
An observation like “We never look like the writing (3)” seems to propose that
writing might be a turning inside out of self. Oh, I am this person with this
colour of hair and this particular smile and this wool scarf and these projects
and these chores? Well ha, I am also the red slime of viscera, the half-digested
food, the electric glint of chattering neurons. I am also these memories and
questions.
A few lines that draw my attention for
their attention to leaky abundance:
“Thirty pages of
liquid (26).”
“The unbound
capacity of sentences (33).”
“The talk of ‘one
more thing.’ Adaptability. Waterlogged (38).”
“Word count. A
spread (39).”
“How the day never
varies. Like a hemorrhage (63).”
“How these
fragments link together (73).”
“How high is the
water? Runoff, drift (74).”
“The Chaudiere
rages. It holds down the house. May have washed away. How high’s the water,
mama (75)?”
“Rituals are not
my thing. A multilingual, bleed and shift (81).”
“The sun flows in
every direction. Do not worry about your own authority over anything (87).”
“The surface
overtakes the borders (92).”
Even the final
line of the collection: “This June rain, relentless. I’ve nothing to add
(108).”
It’s all an overflow. I picture rob like
one of those old animated cartoons in a leaky house of experience, putting
buckets everywhere that simply can’t contain. I remember Mickey Mouse in the
movie Fantasia, The Sorceror’s
Apprentice number, gleefully playing with magic that results in an alarming,
rushing flood that displaces all sorts of domestic items. There’s a desire to
contain and a recognition of how impossible a task that is.
To tie this back to Jerome’s question, I
think in this collection, being is a bursting that can’t be dammed. But we can
still try to document, imperfectly. What do you guys think? Does life overflow
or exceed writing? Are we talking about writing as a container for lived
experience?
K:
I hope that life can’t exceed writing because then I’d worry that some of it
wouldn’t be captured in literature, and I love how literature—all genres, but
poetry in particular—serves to sort of remind us of our humanness. I guess I
hope, too, that writing can serve life, somehow…that writing can record and
document and then later serve as a form of recollection and witnessing (for
others who may come later and possibly read the work) so that fragments of time
and life experience are preserved for later. I like that idea of writing as a
container for lived experience, but I don’t want the lived experiences to ever
feel like dead butterflies pinned in a display box in the ROM or something. I
want writing to keep the essence of life experience alive, in a vibrant way. I
think that’s why rob’s work in this collection is all about “Compassionate
engagement” (55) and how a letter, something he says that only poets write
anymore, is “sacred as any artifact.” (65)
J:
If we're taking the time to write, even this right now, and if rob's making
time to write in between everything else he's doing in 2017, sometimes a simple
marvelous line that holds everything within itself, for a moment, then writing
has to exceed life, augment it, heighten it, be its own experience, its own
moment. Like when writing a letter, making time for someone else. I just got a
letter from rob, along with a box of my chapbooks, and I need to reply, but
already there's this gratefulness for having written—and I do mean to be
ambiguous about the subject of this sentence. I get that sense of gratefulness
for the moments that are carried into writing, taken care of, held, and for the
moment of writing, in every page of this book. The moments don't flee in the
book or between not writing and writing, they flow into one another, and rob
develops an awareness of continuity. Not always, of course, and he knows it: “I
don’t mean to get all parallel.” (63)
I feel a deliberate writing, a polishing,
every sentence smooth, a pebbling. We feel a desire to carry & let oneself
be carried. I think you're right, Kim. These short sentences without subjects
or verbs or predicate—they're the work of the invisible. They have—rob gives
them no beginning nor end, no temporal direction; they're a delivery of fullness.
M:
An awareness of continuity is such a great word for what he’s doing, Jerome.
And Kim, yes to compassionate engagement! He certainly lives this. One thing I
appreciate is how he doesn’t disengage when encountering resistance. A few
years ago he’d prompted me to send him some poetry a few times and I had to
admit to him that I was just simply too depressed to send any work out, there
was nothing I’d feel good about seeing published. Several months later, he
checked back in, and whether it was that time or another later on, eventually I
was in a place where I was able to submit. I think a lot of writers are in
tough spots right now and rob’s attitude is one to keep in mind, whether we’re
prompting or querying or submitting or simply reaching out as a friend—to keep
trying in cycles despite resistance.
J:
That makes me think of a line I love, that I keep going back to: “Wings: if
we’ve each but one, should we hold hands.” (26) Not a complete interrogation,
and not a statement. More than a hypothesis, less than a norm. A suggestion
perhaps, or the expression of an attitude. He doesn't speak to the reader
often, and he doesn't address the people in his life in the second person, so
it might be a generic we—or a way to describe a poetics, an ethics, a politics,
simply his way of relating.
Kim Fahner first met rob in Ottawa, while she was a grad student at Carleton, back in
1994-95. There, in the window of an independent bookstore on Bank Street, was a
long-haired poet who looked a bit like Jesus writing poems on an Underwood
typewriter. She bought a chapbook of poems and liked it a whole lot. Such a
long time later, and she’s glad to be writing reviews for periodicities with
cool poets like Jerome and Margo. She especially likes how rob gathers poets
together from across the country in his poetic undertakings, and she loves
getting occasional notes from him in the mail!
Margo LaPierre met rob through the Ottawa poetry scene while she was
still just a visitor to the city from Toronto, in thrall of how cool, kind, and
welcoming all these Ottawa poets were. Margo and rob *almost* share a birthday
and very occasionally run into each other on Bank St., where rob can sometimes
be found running writerly errands with happy little Aoife as his sidekick.
Jérôme Melançon
met rob mclennan on Twitter and sent him a chapbook. The response, and
invitation to send work for periodicities (well, not a personal
invitation) all came on the cusp of the pandemic. Then he's met so many great
people through above/ground, periodicities, and social media
conversations that he can't untangle his life and his writing from all these
threads rob lets all these great writers leave lying around.
All three publish often enough on periodicities
and kind of like it here.
