Michael Turner : Tomorrow Is a Holiday, by Hamish Ballantyne

Tomorrow Is a Holiday, Hamish Ballantyne
New Star Books, 2024

 

 

 

I’ve been looking forward to Vancouver writer Hamish Ballantyne’s’s Tomorrow Is a Holiday since Rolf Mauer announced he would be publishing it and Rob Manery would be working with Rolf and Hamish as the book’s editor. Nice that Rob should be attached, given that he introduced Hamish to so many of us when he published his poems in SOME’s fifth issue. After reading Hamish’s SOME poems, I learned of his chapbook, Imitation Crab (Knife Fork Book, 2020), and a more recent chapbook called Blue Knight (auric press, 2022), not to mention poems in journals like The Chicago Review and Blazing Stadium.

Tomorrow Is a Holiday begins with its title, with its beautiful, if not sudden, retro-temporal suspension (learning that tomorrow is a holiday and its immediate effect on the texture of today), then its bio. We are quick to look at bios -- to see if the writer looks like us, has published in places we recognize as maintaining a standard worth aspiring to, to learn what they do for a living. In Hamish’s case, he “works seasonally as a mushroom picker and works in the Downtown Eastside the rest of the year” (the latter presumably as a community care worker). Does this work have bearing on the “content” of his poems? Yes, but not in the way we think of when we think of what used to be called “work writing.” The same might be said of the book’s “style”. Is it “language-oriented writing” because it “lacks” narrative insoles? Because it prefers syntactic knots to rhetorical zip lines? Do these distinctions mean anything anymore? They do to some.

The book is comprised of four sections, the last of which -- “ROCK ROCK CORN ROCK” -- consists of the poet’s irreverent or otherwise translations of three longer poems by 16^th century Carmelite mystic San Juan de la Cruz (1542-91). The first section -- “Hansom” -- is also “about” a figure, a contemporary one, the kind endemic to any focused, if not improvised, gathering -- be it a mushroom-pickers’ forest collection centre or, as is increasingly common, an inner-city park, like Vancouver’s well-publicized Oppenheimer, Crab and Strathcona Park homeless encampments of the last decade.

Here’s the third page of “Hansom”:

learn from facebook that guy Hansom
threatened to stab
me with a triangle of porcelain
when shouting with my friend he woke
from a nightmare he is dead
a bbq for him

The structural similarities between “rural” and “urban” dynamics, exemplified as much through behaviour (swatting at mosquitoes) as through language (the mosquitoes themselves), not to mention the poet’s participation in these societies (simultaneously, binaries be damned), is to my mind the book’s great social achievement. Indeed, we find these similarities underscored in the title of the book’s third section -- “A&Ws” -- in reference to a fast-food franchise whose outlets look the same whether they are off the highway north of Campbell River or in the heart of downtown Vancouver.  

Here are first six lines of the poem’s third page:

a letter from jimmy buffet to
benjamin treating the form
of appearance of movement arrested
in the billboards advertising
billboard space: a whale encounters
an enormous incarcerated krill in a submarine

The image of a tightly wound, brainiac, “One-Way Street”-era Walter Benjamin receiving a letter from a ludic, don’t-sweat-the-small-stuff, parrot-toting Jimmy Buffet is cutely funny and there to show range. The poet demonstrates he can be both of these men, but is he a better man for it? Indeed, there are a lot of men involved in the production of this book and the turning of its lyric gyres (a she/her appears rambunctiously in the book’s second section, “Luthier,” but her energy is frowned upon and she disappears just as quickly), which has me wondering, Does Tomorrow Is a Holiday make a case as a course add for a Masculine Studies module?  

Here is “8” from “Luthier”:

and I DON’T even KNOW her I’m just pet-sitting
the rabbits of someone who did

she came up with sweatsuits she
boosted and none of us wanted
the sweatsuits she jubilantly cast out
the window they hung flapping from
the hotel sign for weeks

Early in my reading of Tomorrow Is a Holiday I was watchful for traces of more-northern B.C. landscape poets Ken Belford (1946-2020) and Barry McKinnon (1944-2023), but Hamish Ballantyne brings something different to the innovative Nature/Culture trails these two writers blazed. For Hamish is a more complicated man, of a generation that grew up when testosterone was spoken of as if it were a disease, resulting in a more self-regulated man, compared to Belford and McKinnon, who were born at a time of ferocious male privilege, when testosterone was closer to a working drug. I am, generally speaking, nervous about this new man, his reactionary potential, though I remain curious about where his poetry will take us.

 

 

 

 

Michael Turner was raised in the garrison town of Vancouver on unceded Coast Salish land. His books include Hard Core Logo, Kingsway, The Pornographer’s Poem, 8x10, 9x11 and (this summer, with Anvil Press) Playlist: a Profligacy of Your Least-Expected Poems. This July he, Joi T. Arcan, Whess Harmon and August Klinburg will lead the Banff Centre’s Visual Arts Thematic Residency Get LIT! Language, Image, Text.

 

Jessi MacEachern : The View From Here: Re-Visioning Nation and Genre in Lisa Robertson’s Debbie: An Epic

 

          I began writing this essay mid-September on a train from Montreal–Toronto–Guelph. My intention had been, as my intentions so often are, to begin earlier. It was in early August that I reached out to rob mclennan to propose I write a short essay about Lisa Robertson’s Debbie: An Epic (1997) in response to periodicities’ recent call for work “on a particular older book by another poet.” I thought I would complete the proposed short text before the final summer-month’s end, and that I could use it as the springboard for an academic conference paper. September and the new academic semester were as of yet distant futures. Presently, I am finally back at the beginning and re-writing this essay mid-October on a bus from Lennoxville–Sherbrooke–Montreal.

          Truthfully, this essay actually has its beginning in 2009 or 2010 when, as a student in Sina Queyras’s feminist poetics workshop at Concordia University, I was first tasked with reading and responding to Robertson’s writing. That response became my first literary publication, appearing on Lemonhound in April 2011. Queyras’s workshop navigated the possibilities of making sense of the world (or non-sense, in the mode of Nicole Brossard) through poetry with the anthology Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics (2009), edited by Kate Eichhorn and Heather Milne. The feminist voices collected within that book have since accompanied me through my completion of a MA in Creative Writing (Concordia), a PhD in English studies (Université de Montréal), and these early years as a precariously employed college and university instructor.

          It was as part of a radically dissimilar collective that Robertson’s poetry was first introduced to me. In the pages of Prismatic Publics, I would not yet encounter the ferocious dog on the cover of Debbie, nor the significant visual “screens” (a word borrowed from Stephen Collis to explain the artful obstructions) within the book. Instead, I had just a few excerpts of the epic to contend with. Importantly, these excerpts were contextualized by selections from other texts throughout Robertson’s career, as well as an interview with the poet. In Queyras’s workshop, we speculated on the statement of poetics one could discern from the interviews with each of the anthology’s poets. My copy of the anthology still bears my early handwritten notes in response to these heady statements. I am not exaggerating when I say I had never encountered anything like this before. My poetry had already been resisting the accumulation of rivers and stones and birds of representational nature writing, a genre driven into me by my undergraduate creative writing classes in Fredericton, New Brunswick, but I had not yet clarified what new territories that resistance, in its pushing away, sought to push into. At one point in her interview with Eichhorn, Robertson says:

When I think of the variations of what gets termed innovative writing in Canada — if you think of the span from Rita Wong to Nathalie Stephens to Gail Scott to Dionne Brand — that’s very, very broad. What each of these people is doing is bringing their politics into writing directly. They’re investigating ways to innovate in language that reflects and analyzes their political experience. (368)

As a Master’s student, twenty-two or twenty-three years old and newly arrived in the exciting multilingual metropolis of Montréal, Québec, I underlined this passage with vigour. More than a decade separates that act (my first reading of Robertson, my act of underlining the passage) from this one (my continued reading of Robertson, my return to those early handwritten notes). A decade is not so long and I hope to return again many decades from now to accomplish this same feat: that is, to make a fool of my younger self.

          The reasons I would underline that passage today (i.e., as relevant to my own poetic and academic practice, as representative of my own desire to forge a connection between language and politics) are greatly divorced from my original reasons. Beside this passage, I wrote: “My investigation is not ‘political,’ but ‘personal.’” In my undergraduate education, I had encountered the lessons of second-wave feminism and knew better than to separate these two spheres (the personal is political after all) — but I nevertheless seemed to feel, at that moment in time, that what was personal to me was somehow above politics. The bitter irony is that what was “personal” to me was the experience of gendered violence, the very stuff of “politics.”

          Queyras’s workshop was quintessential in disabusing me of the notion that the political was ever simply impersonal static messaging. Robertson’s poetry opened me up to new aesthetic and political possibilities, even as those first poems from Debbie: An Epic grappled with a genre from the ancient past — that of the epic. In the academic conference I attended in Guelph, Ontario this past September (Where From Here), I proposed to explore the contemporary feminist anti- or ante-epic, in the mode of the antenarrative. Fred Moten uses the term “antenarrative” to define the experimental work of M. NourbeSe Philip, another poet I first encountered in Queyras’s workshop. The “ante” prefix signals what precedes the starting position, what might start in media res, and what is non-linear. Recently, as a limited term professor at Concordia University, in two sessions of an advanced studies class on “The Contemporary Feminist Epic in Canadian Poetry,” students and I explored the subversion of the epic by reading texts from Robertson, as well as Philip, Anne Carson, Daphne Marlatt, Dionne Brand, Rachel Zolf, and Canisia Lubrin. (The first class was interrupted by the pandemic, but the student responses to the poetry still proved essential to my further understanding of their poetic possibility. The second class was one of the final classes I taught at Concordia, and it is an experience I will forever cherish. Both groups of those fiercely intelligent students have my immense thanks.)

          What the reader discovers when they encounter the poems of Debbie: An Epic as a book, rather than as excerpts in an anthology, is that the whole is more than a poetry collection: it is part art book, part parody, and part manifesto. In the years since my first reading, I have come to think of Robertson’s work as demonstrative of what Lauren Berlant terms “genre flailing”: a gesture in writing to what is hybrid, incomplete, ongoing. In Debbie: An Epic, the flail is the act whereby our protagonist, the giantess — or the bitch, as illustrated in the female rage of the dog’s mid-bark or -bite on the cover— re-appropriates the masculinist genre (i.e., the epic) of the title. The book’s many visual irruptions or impasses are the material evidence of the destruction that has been wrought on the original text — or the original map of the nation — by the enormous body of Debbie: “her hearty hands bear / the bruised sea” (Debbie: An Epic). Debbie is not woman: “Yes I am a man.” Debbie is not entirely human: “her sense of her body includes both dog and owning state’s daft glamour.” What we see jostling on the surface of the epic or anti-epic poem is the interplay of past and present in the postmodernist text. Collis reads these gestures as poetic architecture: “imagining, and thinking, poetry’s impossible, its enunciation of public space, its verbal creation, of polis.” The question we must pose of the revisionary text, in the words of the classics scholar Ann Bergren, is this: “What form of city will a woman build, if left to her own devices?”

          For Robertson, genre (flailing) is a “classically styled folly” used to “decorate” (Debbie: An Epic) — and therefore re-vision — the poet and reader’s concept of the epic and its relationship to history, knowledge, and selfhood. It is through this ornamentation, the accumulation of visual excess, that our ideas of who or what constitutes the epic changes. Rather than on the global stage of warfare, it is within the domestic interior of the private home, and upon its intimate piles of heaped textiles, that Robertson’s feminist re-visioning takes place. In a recent essay on Robertson appearing in the London Review of Books (4 August 2022), Andrea Brady remarks that an obsession with textiles is characteristic of Robertson’s oeuvre: “[C]lothes are experiments in subjectivity. The thrift shop is a gallery of obsolescence. Inhabiting used garments, which carry the smells, oils and gestures of other bodies, we experiment with occupying other selves.” In Debbie: An Epic, the textiles provide a mutable screen on which one version of a feminist city (not in the model of the utopia, but the jargoning agora) is projected.

          Debbie: An Epic is just one in a trilogy of texts that re-vision Virgil. Robertson begins in 1993 with XEclogue, which Brady describes as “a book of pastoral featuring the ‘roaring boys,’ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Nancy the shepherdess, and ‘a pink prosthesis hidden in the forest,’” and ends in 2001 with The Weather “in which,” Brady writes “‘everything is lifted’ from 18^th and 19^th-century works of natural history such as Luke Howard’s 1803 typology of clouds.” Robertson herself attributes this re-visionary tactic to an interest in complicity: “I needed a genre to gloss my ancestress’ complicity with a socially expedient code; to invade my own illusions of historical innocence” (“How Pastoral”). This is the basis of a recurring question in Debbie: An Epic: with which here and now are we complicit? Robertson’s epic places this self-accusatory question in the mouths of the heiresses of the epic tradition. In “Virgil’s Bastard Daughters Sing,” Robertson writes: “Good companions: maybe even this dress shall some day / be a joy to repair. But now our memories are / complicit with the walls of father’s doubt.” This is, in part, a gesture forward to the textile to come: the screen on which the mending is re-produced and in which paternal memory becomes a second-hand dress. “Maybe even this dress shall some day be a joy to repair” becomes a screen in the text: an instance of visual poetry in which font size and colour signal the importance of the material of the book (page, line, and syllable). Collis explains: “This screen’s masked quotation is of Virgil’s Aeneid: ‘Some day, perhaps, remembering even this / Will be a pleasure.’ It is the heroic speech of Aeneas ‘feminized’ by the insertion of ‘dress’ mending.” Insistently, however, Robertson’s re-visioning does not happen on the level of creative citation alone. The short phrase occupies a single page, each word blown up to such a size that it occupies a single line. The vertical text is overlapping and alternate words are weighted differently in black, gray, and light gray.  These overlaid textures make visible and make felt the necessary border-crossing of flailing hero: pricking a finger on the sewing needle and decorating the page with the blood of a bastard daughter.

          In “Virgil’s Bastard Daughters Sing,” wherein this line first appears, the chorus wears doubt and enters the historical record. What did their father, Daddy Virgil, doubt? As a representative of filial lineage, we may assume he doubted the power of his (bastard) daughters to sing. To be complicit in this doubt as the daughters is to make the flail manifest as the speaking voice (or voices) of the poem; yet, it is this excessive gesture (i.e., flailing in Daddy Virgil’s flunking filial line) that makes the voice(s) possible. The uncomfortable entanglements of the bastard daughters in the empire begin with the book’s variant opening, appearing as a footnote to the first poem “Party Scene”:

When this was
nature, language felt moveable, per
sonal. Now complicity
resists trusting something

The present condition of complicity is outside nature, in an artificial surrounding where language feels fixed; the personal has been overtaken by a flailing collective, for individual matters appear suddenly meaningless. What — if any — is the “historical catastrophe” with which Virgil’s bastard daughters are complicit? The daughters themselves, figured as a chorus, are the entanglement from which Debbie emerges as an individual. Debbie, as a lone and giant figure, is inseparable from this excessive female body. In her inhuman and “half-made” form, Debbie is also the embodiment of human entanglement, steeped as she is in “desire and /stupidity.”

          Why re-vision the epic, or construct a poetry collection around “the frayed trope / of rome”? Perhaps because it is fun — an affect and effect that seldom enters serious literary study — for fun was a key component of Roman life, as documented by Virgil in his epic, and asserted by Frank O’Hara, in an epigraph appearing at the beginning of Robertson’s “episode: majorettes.” In the poem “For Girls, Grapes and Snow,” Debbie’s body is “both dog and owning state’s daft / glamour.” The majorettes and their heroine are marching across the “Adanac” (Canada spelt backwards) and cataloguing their war spoils. In a moment akin to the epic poet invoking the muse, Debbie invokes Frank and asks for “opulence and / majesty.” Frank appears not to be in a giving mood, for what is acquired in the following lines are only a series of negations: “No Bees no Honey. No Ambition no / Money. No Master no Metre. No Soul / no Rigour. NO Adage no Axis.” What such a stripping away further reveals is the complicity of Debbie with the filial faults — to gesture to the miniscule lines “filius / flunks,” printed in small text and surrounded by white space, of a following page — of her Roman father: “I’ll bite into complicity’s / proper structural pinkness.” As Debbie participates in the orgy of empire, the march is coming to its end. Are we still having fun?

          Of course, neither O’Hara nor Robertson are quite satisfied with fun; for O’Hara, the justifications for artistic creation “must be found elsewhere.” One has fun as an isolated individual in thrall of one’s own “acquisitive spirit.” The artist, however, must not be isolated — or, in Theordor Adorno’s terms, whose words on complicity provide the epigraph to the book’s “interlude,” the artist must recognize “there is no way out of entanglement.” “So,” O’Hara writes, “out of this populated cavern of self comes brilliant, uncomfortable works, works that don’t reflect you or your life, though you can know them. Art is not your life, it is someone else’s. Something very difficult for the acquisitive spirit to understand […]. But it’s there.” Like the female flâneur (or flâneuse) — an impossible female subject, according to the history of modernity — Debbie must step out of the bounds of mere acquisition. No longer is the female subject heading out into the street in search of an object (like Virginia Woolf’s street walker and her pencil in “Street Haunting”); no, she is caught adrift. The Debbie that speaks in this poem sets out on a dérive. This is not a limitless drift, however, for she recognizes the “necessary contradiction,” according to Guy Debord, of dropping one’s relations and “letting go.” When one attempts to drift freely one only becomes more entangled in “the absolute or relative character of fissures in the urban network […] and above all of the dominating action of centers of attraction.” Even while marching backwards, “the moody ranks” (500) of “Adanac” reveal themselves to be — where else? — in Canada here and now.

 

 

 

 

 

Jessi MacEachern (she/her) lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Her writing on the contemporary feminist poetics of Lisa Robertson, Erín Moure, and Rachel Zolf has appeared or is forthcoming in Canadian Literature, Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature Canadienne, and CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event. Her poetry has recently appeared in Vallum, Touch the Donkey, and CAROUSEL. Her debut poetry collection is A Number of Stunning Attacks (Invisible Publishing, 2021). Her chapbook, Television Poems, was published with above/ground press in 2021. She is currently working as an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Bishop’s University.

 

rob mclennan : An interview with George Stanley

Note: Given above/ground press recently published a chapbook of new poems by Vancouver poet George Stanley, I thought it might be worth re-posting this interview I did with him back in 2014 for The Conversant, an American interviews website that appears to have completely disappeared. And, if you want to catch a list of his current books-in-print (including another published since this interview was conducted), check out his author page at New Star Books. Enjoy!

Now retired from teaching in the English department at Capilano University, George Stanley is the author of At Andy’s (New Star, 2000), Gentle Northern Summer (New Star, 1995), Opening Day (Oolichan Books, 1983), The Stick: Poems, 1969-73 (Talonbooks, 1974), You (Poems 1957 - 67) (New Star Books, 1974), A Tall, Serious Girl: Selected Poems 1957-2000 (Qua, 2003), Vancouver: A Poem (New Star, 2008) and After Desire (New Star, 2013). Vancouver: A Poem was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Prize. In 2006, Stanley received the Shelley Memorial Award from the American Poetry Society, and in 2011, The Capilano Review produced their “George Stanley Issue.” His newest collection is North of California St. (New Star Books, 2014).

California St. is one of the major thoroughfares in downtown San Francisco, the city where George Stanley was born in 1934, and left at age 37 to move to Vancouver. Associated with the “San Francisco Renaissance” in poetry, moving in circles that included Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser, Stanley had won a reputation as an exciting young poet. But it was his move to Canada, and particularly his fifteen years teaching literature at Northwest Community College in Terrace, BC that marked a profound turn in his poetic practice.

North of California St. collects 53 poems, all written between 1975 and 1999, that mark Stanley’s maturity as a poet. Originally published in four collections, all now out of print — Opening Day, Temporarily (a chapbook; Gorse Press, 1986), Gentle Northern Summer and At Andy’s — the collection includes the Stanley classics “Mountains & Air,” “Raft,” “The Set,” “The Berlin Wall,” “For Prince George,” “Terrace Landscapes,” and the 16–part poem “San Francisco’s Gone,” including “Veracruz.”

this interview was conducted by rob mclennan over email in August-September 2014

Q: I’m very much enjoying North of California St., your new “Selected Poems 1975-1999,” constructed from Opening Day (1983), Temporarily (1985), Gentle Northern Summer (1995) and At Andy’s (2000). How did this project first come about, and who made the selection?

A: Rolf Maurer and i realized that all these books were out of print. Two of them (Gentle Northern Summer and At Andy’s) had gone OP because the back stock had been destroyed by water damage after the firebombing of New Star Books’ warehouse a few years back. Rolf and i each made our initial selections and then compared them and found there was very little disagreement between us. Sharon Thesen, who wrote the introduction, also gave us some input on the final contents.

Q: What was it about these four titles that made them feel like a coherent unit?

A. The poem ‘Opening Day’ was a breakthrough for me; it was the first poem where i began to deal with my life in San Francisco. The book Opening Day, including that poem and the ones where i began to write poems about Vancouver, and then the North, was my first book in ten years, so it is a kind of beginning of a central (chronological) period in my writing. The books after At Andy’s relate more to my post-North years in Vancouver, and they are all still in print.

Q: You famously emerged from, in part, a workshop led by Jack Spicer. What do you think you learned from him, and how much of it still carries through in your writing?

A.  Spicer is a great poet, in the same league with Dickinson or Rimbaud. I think i knew that then. The main things i learned from Jack were a) dictation – his version of the muse – listen to the poem coming through to you (like a distant radio station), get all the stuff that you want to be in the poem out of your mind, and (2) the serial poem – which Jack always credited Robin Blaser as being the co-inventor of: ‘a narrative which refuses to adopt an imposed story line, and completes itself only in the sequence of poems’ – Blaser. In the new book, examples of the serial poem are ‘San Francisco’s Gone’ and ‘Mountains & Air,’ and one poem that is completely dictated is part 16 of ‘SF’s Gone’ – ‘Veracruz’.

Q: I’ve heard that “Mountains & Air” also had a great deal of influence from the Canadian iteration of Spicer’s long/serial poem, ie. as practiced at the time by poets such as Fred Wah, George Bowering, bpNichol and Barry McKinnon. What changed with the way you saw a poem once you finally crossed the border north?

A. Well there are several threads in this question. Let me pick them out.

First, i don’t think i’ve really changed the way i see a poem since i began writing poetry under the tutelage of Spicer. Being open to dictation is important to me, but i also do a lot of revision. Spicer once told me there is no conflict between dictation and revision: you may have to revise in order to get the irrelevant stuff of your own that’s in the poem out of the way, so the poem can come through.

Second, i don’t think my poetry has been influenced in any way by Bowering, Wah, or Nichol (although i admire and respect all three). With McKinnon, on the other hand, we have had a close poetic friendship since the 80s – we have seen each other as fellow northerners (this is true as well of my friendship with Sharon Thesen). The relation between Northern BC and Vancouver in poetry is something like that between Scotland and England in literature generally.

Finally, crossing the US/Canada border was no big thing. Vancouver is a city very much like San Francisco or Seattle. I adapted easily. The big change for me was when i went north, and encountered a wholly new world – Canada – that i had to deal with in my poetry. Aboriginal people, bears, fundamentalist Christians, small planes, angry, militant trade unionists, none of which i had ever encountered before. And snow.

Q: What I find interesting is that North of California St. isn’t the first work of yours put together, as Sharon Thesen suggests in her introduction, out of a frustration over a lack of attention to your work. How did your American selected poems, A Tall, Serious Girl: Selected Poems 1957-2000 (2003) that Kevin Davies and Larry Fagin edited, originally come about? And how do you feel now about the collection, more than a decade later?

A: As of June 2011, Craig Watson, publisher of now-defunct Qua Books, reported that 781 copies of A Tall, Serious Girl had been sold. I was surprised at this high figure. ATSG was a true selected, beginning with my juvenilia of the late 1950s (some of which are fine poems, however). The book as i recall was originally an idea of the late Michael Gizzi (who was Watson’s partner in Qua) and i think Fagin and Davies were involved in the early discussions. I was very pleased with it at the time, but i don’t think it has any particular relevance at present. The title came out of a stoned conversation between me and the late Goh Poh Seng – later there was the question of the comma.

Q: That’s a healthy amount of sales, I’d say. And that, paired with the new collection, make for an intriguing overview of your work. What were the arguments for and against the comma? And who won?

A. I think one of the publishers or editors asked me if the comma was necessary. i said yes, since tall and serious are distinct, unrelated concepts – but i don’t know what rule this follows (or breaks).

Q: In the introduction for A Tall, Serious Girl, the editors describe their frustration at your lack of attention in American poetry over the past few decades, citing not only your move north, but your “inexplicable omission” from Donald M. Allen’s The New American Poetry (1960). Given that “The George Stanley Issue” of The Capilano Review in 2011 featured contributions from American poets such as Joanne Kyger, Beverly Dahlen, Lisa Jarnot, Kevin Killian and Michael McClure, you and your work have certainly maintained a series of relationships with at least a certain amount of American readers. What do you feel your current relationship is to American poetry? Do you still consider yourself an American poet, a hybrid American-Canadian or purely a Canadian poet? Does it matter?

A: i’m certainly an American poet (or, as Bowering says, USAmerican). i’ve recently given readings in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Seattle, and just received an invitation to read in New York (which i probably won’t take up, since there’s no travel funding). i’m a BC poet – i was made welcome from the first day i arrived here by the Vancouver poets. i guess i’m now a senior BC poet. But a Canadian poet? i don’t know – what would it take? i had one reading in Toronto in 1973 and i don’t think i’ve been to Toronto since the 70s. iI read in Montreal in the mid-90s. And i received a Canada Council grant in 2011.

Here’s an anecdote, amusing and maybe revealing. Just after arriving in Vancouver in 1971 i applied for a Canada Council grant. That may seem odd, but lots of Americans were arriving in Canada at the time (mostly to escape the Vietnam war and the draft), and applying for grants. The Trudeau government was quite freehanded with grant money at the time. i was short of funds, and my new Vancouver friends said i should apply. i was turned down. Then, a few years later, i met a Toronto writer who told me he had been on the jury that had rejected me. The vote was 2 to 1, and his was the one yes vote. He told me that one of the other jurors, in explanation of his no vote, said the following: ‘It’s OK to be an American, and it’s OK to be from BC – but not both.’

Q: Your Vancouver: A Poem (New Star, 2008) is one of a long line of poetry books on the City of Vancouver, adding to an impressive array of titles from George Bowering’s George, Vancouver (Weed/Flower Press, 1970) and Kerrisdale Elegies (Coach House Press, 1986; Talonbooks, 2008), Michael Turner’s Kingsway (Arsenal Pulp, 1995), Daphne Marlatt’s Vancouver Poems, and Meredith Quartermain’s Vancouver Walking (NeWest Press, 2005) and Nightmarker (NeWest Press, 2008), among so many others. What is it about Vancouver, in your mind, that lends itself to such an array of physical exploration by poets? Were you aware of any of these works when you began your own?

A. i’ve read all these books, as individual works of course, not as examples of a wave or tendency. i don’t think my Vancouver book is indebted to any of them – well, it’s possible Turner’s book and Quartermain’s first book (her second was published the same year as my book) may have given or awakened in me the idea of a poem that takes place on streets. Why is Vancouver thematized in so many poets’ books? i have no ready answer; it’s a question for literary historians.

The main influences on Vancouver: A Poem (apart from its following my own ‘San Francisco’s Gone’), as a poem where lyrical and prose passages are interspersed, are William Carlos Williams’ book-length poem Paterson, and also Baudelaire’s Petits Poemes en Prose, which depicts Parisian scenes in prose poetry.

Q: If, as New Star Books tell us in the press release, North of California St. marks “Stanley’s maturity as a poet,” how would you describe the work you’ve been doing since?

A. Well maturation must be a slow process indeed if it takes till age 80 to get there!

                                And maturity

                       is getting used

                       to this scattered country.

                                                                        (‘My New Past,’ c. 1986)

Right now i’m working on a new long poem, ‘West Broadway,’ which is a sequel, or continuation of Vancouver: A Poem. i’m also working on a long poem i wrote in 1971, ‘Against the Moony Night,’ which i thought i’d lost the ms. of, but which turned up a year or so. it’s a pretty good poem. And i’m continuing to do translations (or in Robert Lowell’s sense, imitations), most recently from the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova and from Baudelaire (some of these appeared recently in TCR 3.23). All of this will come together somehow to make a new book, god willing.

rob mclennan is currently working on numerous projects. This is one of them. His most recent titles include A halt, which is empty (Mansfield Press, 2019) and Life sentence, (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), as well as chapbooks with above/ground press and Anstruther Press.