Kevin Spenst : Whatever Heals You

part three in a series of three personal essays mixing travelogue and review
see part one here : see part two here

 

 

 

Day 3: Discovery Park

     From Vancouver, at Prospect Point, anyone can see Mount Baker, a glacier-coated mountain my family could see from a small living room side window in Surrey; here in Seattle, Cheryl and I are admiring it from Alki Beach. In Canada, it stands for the south. In Seattle, it stands for the north. It’s the fifth biggest mountain in the Cascades where it plays countless roles for other directions, people and creatures. It’s one of the many distant mountains that surrounds Seattle.

     Later in the afternoon, Cheryl and I explore Discovery Park, a large space equivalent to Vancouver’s Stanley Park. Colonialism’s history (aka military history or white settler history) is on display in both parks: in Vancouver the military presence is still active in Coal Harbour, a holdout from the time when the military wanted Stanley Park in the 1800s as a base to protect Canada from American invaders. Discovery Park has a decommissioned military reserve of large older buildings standing far apart from each other over large swaths of mown grass. It’s got a creepy vibe and feels a little like the Stepford Wives. The American military established Fort Lawton in Seattle in 1900. This most tranquil of places holds at its centre obvious markers of colonialism. It feels like a good place to reflect upon the poetry of Jess H̓áust̓i, not that the writer engages in military history, but their collection Crushed Wild Mint intimately conveys a spirituality rooted in the viscera of the body to the mountains that hold living ancestors in a grounded resistance to those who would delineate the world in borders, binaries and the 24-hour clock.

     From their website: “Jess is a Haíɫzaqv parent, poet, and land-based educator living in their homelands in the community of Bella Bella, BC.” Crushed Wild Mint honours those homelands in ritualistic poems.

     “Praying is dreaming out loud / with my ancestors,” the speaker tells us in the opening poem, “The Future.” The past and future are brought together in the ceremonial timelessness of a prayer, but the poem also reminds us of how laughter can partake in this sacredness. The poem defines prayer as that which gives “anatomy / to futurity,” the preserve of the past into the future. This idea of anatomy is brought to visceral light in a few poems later, where the speaker suggests “If I were to gut you like a deer, / the smell of good earth and the clarity of green things, the musk and the humus, that scent would rise up / like a prayer.” These lines hold no hint of morbidity, and within the context of gentleness and reverence that runs throughout the collection, they are offered as a vision. Not only are other creatures acknowledged as a part of the speaker’s world, but their existence parallels our own. The poem begins with deer chewing and ends with the speaker’s loved one chewing. More specifically, the speaker’s loved one is mourning some loss and this imagined ceremony of gutting is something offered to help “lift out from the birdsong sorrow / you hold in your mouth.” Familial love guides us through the ceremony of “Ruminant/Remnant.”

     The overlapping lives of other beings we share the planet with is a central part of the poem/prayers in H̓áust̓i’s book (and certainly some cultures centre that sharing in ways that others can only imagine.) What I adore about Crushed Wild Mint is the echoes of wisdom literature from other corners of the world. I grew up on the Old Testament so it’s hard not to hear the Song of Solomon in the poem “You Are Inseparable,” but instead of romantic, it’s familial and/or self-love:

There are flocks of songbirds

sleeping in your hair,

deer’s wisdom compacted in your heels,

salmon in the creeks of your veins.

 

Your body and the land

have collaborated for your safety and joy

The imagery of the land blends into the body and vice versa. This acknowledgement of the inseparable relationship between a West Coast people and the land is something I can admire from a distance, while trying not to be a white settler tourist (though I’m clearly all three.)

     The fifth and last section of Crushed Wild Mint takes us into the mountains. As if enacting the long journey of climbing a mountain, many of these poems are longer than others in the collection. In the last section of one of these long poems, we read

These are living

Geographies.

 

This is especially true

when the crown of the mountain

was a gift from the weary body

of that mountain’s brother.

 

 “iv. You have arrived”

Here the process of mountain formation is personified at a familial level. H̓áust̓i’s ancestors saw these mountains generations ago and the thousands of years are compressed within poetry.

     This last section ends with “Prayer (II)” which begins “Creator, / go before us in all things, / especially small things.” Under the majesty of the names of mountains in the previous poems, we return to the smallest of things around us and this poem ends with a prayer “for the blessedness / of perpetual memory.” Climbing a mountain might hold a story of memorable moments but when that mountain is understood as a sacred being, it is also preserving memory on a different scale in space and time. Someone whose family has lived in a place since time immemorial can define and connect with that perpetual memory. 

     Vancouver and Seattle preserve the memory of their “great fires” (both in the 1880s) old civic leaders (both Seattle and Vancouver had American mayors charged with bigamy) and the centuries of colonialism in street names and statues. There are exceptions and I believe they have been growing. In 1970, activists took over Fort Lawton as part of the growing American Indian Movement. The Indigenous activities armed with “cooking utensils” came to occupy the land. They were met with armed resistance and skirmishes took place over three months until an agreement was reached:

In July 1971 negotiations started [...] In November an agreement was reached with the United Indians for a 99-year lease to build an Indian cultural center in the Park. The groundbreaking ceremony took place on September 27, 1975, and the impressive Daybreak Star Cultural Center opened on May 13, 1977.

                                                             https://www.historylink.org/File/8772

     In 2022, participants in the Downtown Eastside Women’s Memorial March toppled Gassy Jack. The statue had been erected in 1970 as a bid to boost tourism in Gastown, but the fact that he’d married an indigenous woman and then, when she died, her 12-year-old niece rang too close to the violence towards murdered and missing indigenous women. Statues are coming down and new totems (at Hastings and Carol) are coming up.

    Cheryl and I do a loop at Discovery Park and pass tourists, locals and far off mountains in the distance. We try to take in as much as we can while acknowledging there’s only so much we can take in.

Days 4,5&6:

Bumbershoot and we dance ourselves loose. We shake the way little dogs shake after encountering a frighteningly big dog. As humans, we have this thing called music to help us shake off our stress. Over six weeks this past summer, I was in emergency four times and I was laid up for weeks on end. At times, it was excruciating. There was no clear diagnosis. I’m finally almost one hundred percent and I dance off the fears of the summer. After dancing to the Montreal psyche-rock band TEKE::TEKE, the first person I hand a line of poetry to hugs me with the biggest smile I’ve ever seen. I give out a few other lines of poetry and everyone at the festival gets it. On our drive home, we stop for dinner in Bellingham. When we tell our server we’ve been to Bumbershoot, she gets chatty. “When I was young, I went to Bumbershoot,” she tells us but she seems young so it’s hard for us to imagine her younger. I give her my last line of poetry, which is by Patrick Grace. She is thrilled.

Envoi:

     Isn’t it lovely to return to words you haven’t heard in decades. On our last afternoon, in reading about Seattle history, I come across this:

'Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.'

 

--Chief Si’ahl, Namesake of the City of Seattle

When I was a teenager, after I stopped going to church, I religiously watched the Power of Myth on PBS. At the end of the series, Joseph Campbell quotes the words of Chief Si’ahl. I wrote the words out and shared them during our school’s graduation ceremony held in the gymnasium at SFU on top of Burnaby Mountain. During the ceremony, one of my classmates, who’d failed at least once and bullied me in my first year at junior high, leaned in to me and whispered, “I gotta piss.” As I stood up to go to the podium to give my valedictorian address, he drunkenly pleaded, “Keep it short.”

    The sacred and profane are neighbours, living, at times, on reasonably friendly terms. So too poetry resides next to prose. Cities live next to each other with slightly different orientations but with the same giants in the distance. Giants some can know with an intimacy that others are oblivious to, but which demands respect if we care about justice, about living with the right words around us.

 

 

 

 

Kevin Spenst (he/him) is the author of sixteen chapbooks and three full-length books of poetry plus his newest collection A Bouquet Brought Back from Space (Anvil Press, 2024). He is one of the organizers of the Dead Poets Reading Series, has a chapbook review column for subTerrain magazine, occasionally co-hosts Wax Poetic on Vancouver Co-op Radio, and is the 2025 Poetry Mentor at The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territory where he cohabitates with the one and only Cheryl Rossi.

Poet Questionnaire #6 : rob mclennan 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 rob more than several years ago, when he was helping to set up readings at Carleton University and I’d get invited on occasion, having been published in The Carleton Arts Review. Over the years, we’ve gotten to know each other on a more personal level, even given the distance between Ottawa and Toronto. He really is the hardest working promoter and writer of all things poetry (PLUS having an oar in fiction) in the country and I’d like to thank him for allowing me the opportunity to sometimes play in his sandbox.

1. Will the real rob mclennan please stand up! Meaning, give our readers an overview as to who you are, what you do, and why you do it.

I write full-time, and have since the early 1990s, having published some forty or so trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction over them years, as well as over a hundred and fifty chapbooks. I’ve been producing chapbooks through above/ground press since July 1993, and produce the quarterly Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], occasional G U E S T [a journal of guest editors] and monthly online journal periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics. Between Touch the Donkey, my ‘12 or 20 questions’ series and other venues, I’ve probably conducted and posted some two thousand interviews online since 2007, which seems akin to madness. I’ve been running events through The Factory Reading Series since January 1993, and co-founded and organize the semi-annual ottawa small press book fair, which celebrates thirty years this fall. I’m also an active reviewer, posting some one hundred and fifty book reviews online a year. I’m the current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, and President of the Board of VERSe Ottawa, which oversees both the festival and the poet laureate program, which recently announced David O’Meara (English) and Véronique Sylvain (French) as our latest two laureates for the City of Ottawa.

I’m currently working on a couple of non-fiction manuscripts/book-length essays, including “the green notebook” and “the genealogy book,” have completed a further manuscript of short stories, and am in-progress through a novel and at least two if not three poetry manuscripts. I’ve a few other schemes in the back of my head, but those aren’t quite ready to begin, as of yet.

Over the past decade, I’ve been home full-time with the two young ladies I share with Christine McNair, and both Christine and I have new books out this season—she, a hybrid memoir, Toxemia, with Book*hug Press, and I, a collection of short stories, On Beauty, with the University of Alberta Press—which is pretty exciting. We’re about to begin an array of readings in various corners of the country, whether together or separately, or at least as much as childcare might allow.

Why do I do it? Somewhere during my teen years, I found myself playing guitar and piano, and attempting drawing and painting, writing poems and short stories, floating across different genres and structures as what sparked my interest. It was only once my first daughter, Kate, was born in 1991 that I thought I should attend to writing properly, and not simply a poem every month or two or three. Why poems, over anything else? I really don’t know, but I knew I didn’t have to purchase supplies for writing in a way required for visual art. There was also a line I read around that time by Margaret Atwood, suggesting that if you want full time out of it, you have to put full time into it. So (even beyond the boundaries of running a home daycare until Kate was four or so) I did that. At this point, writing is how I best work out my thinking. And I think there are times I’m quite good at it.

2. Your poetic practice has sometimes been placed under the heading “Field Theory,” stemming from Williams’ notion of a poem as a “field of action” and, later, developed by Olson as “composition by field.” Is this an accurate account or totally off base? Perhaps you can expand on your writing style and influences.

Oh, curious. I hadn’t heard those first two terms prior, although I’m aware of the third. I first came to these structures not through Olson or Williams, but through George Bowering, which I suppose is an indirect kind of influence. There are lots of structural elements I learned in my twenties through my reading of the baffles of George Bowering, moving out from him into the concentric circles of Jack Spicer, bpNichol, Daphne Marlatt, Barry McKinnon, Leonard Cohen, Gwendolyn MacEwen, John Newlove, David Donnell, Sharon Thesen, Dennis Cooley, D.G. Jones, Robert Creeley, Andrew Suknaski and plenty of others, all of whom I absorbed different lessons from. I’ve still read very little in the way of Olson or Williams, but I suspect those writers exist as an underlay of where and what I’ve developed. I spent my twenties and into my thirties exploring the long poem and the book as my unit of composition. My compositions aimed for expansiveness, the fragment and the extended lyric.

By my thirties and into my forties I was paying more attention to the lyric sentence, leaning into prose poems, prompted through my reading of Rosmarie Waldrop, Etel Adnan, Julie Carr, Pattie McCarthy, Sarah Manguso, Cole Swensen, Lisa Robertson, Sarah Mangold, Sandra Ridley, Susan Howe, Robert Kroetsch and multiple others. The shifts have been interesting. I would think my ‘composition by field’ has evolved into something more compact, more pointed. I still work on books over individual poems, utilizing my current shapes determined in part through rhythm, sound and language. I still want to see where I’m going, where I might eventually land.

3. You live in Ottawa and participate in the larger literary scene as a publisher, editor, reviewer, and coordinator of book fairs and 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?

Had I not had a child when I was twenty, I might have made different choices, but there was a deliberate choice to remain here for her sake (and mine as well, through maintaining the connection). I might have easily ended up instead in Montreal, or Toronto. Because I had made such a choice for my writing-self to remain in Ottawa, I was determined to make the city “liveable” by working to assist with a literary infrastructure I considered lacking, including organizing readings, a small press fair, writing reviews, publishing chapbooks and journals, supporting other writers in their work and simply being out in the world as someone who was doing the thing other folk said they wanted to do. The 1990s saw numerous writers leave town, which was enormously frustrating, and led to some rather thin periods of literary activity across the city.

I think had I moved to a more active city (I was accepted into the Creative Writing Program at Concordia when I was nineteen, but was missing an OAC credit, so couldn’t get into the school), I might have been more influenced by the writing and the activity around me. I wouldn’t have necessarily worked so hard to do some of this organizing, wouldn’t have worked so hard to seek out writers and writing and activity and influence from different parts of the country. I might not have spent so much time seeing what else was out there. I think in the long run it was far better for my writing to seek out influence, and not be otherwise shaped due to proximity.

4. Have you noticed a change in the “live” literary scene, pre- and post-COVID?

It took a while for audiences to warm up to events again, certainly. Not that I’ve been to as many events as I could be, hampered by my own momentum. Given we’re home with small children, it is often less complicated to remain home after a long day. We also lost a couple of events during the Covid-era, including The TREE Reading Series, which had a history back to 1980 or so. In certain ways, I’ve had the feeling that there’s been a scattering of activity, and no central point at which we all meet. Perhaps there already is one, and I simply don’t understand where that is.

5. I was once asked by a poet in the US if I was a “career poet,” which had me scratching my head. What is your interpretation of the term career poet and how do you believe you might qualify?

That is a good question. What does that even mean? I write, I send poems to journals and do readings, I publish books. I worry less about terminology than simply getting the work done.

I’m aware that there are American poets that have booking agents for readings and reading fees. We might have a more consistent and stable array of tiered government funding for the arts in Canada, which the United States really doesn’t, but their private funding is all over the place, whether funded readings through universities, or organizations such as the Guggenheim or the MacArthur. I wonder if the difference of private funding determines that approach, that terminology?

6. 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?

How I process and articulate the world shouldn’t be determined by anything as external and as unstable as the market.

I’ve been doing this long enough to know that short-term gains or losses are as fickle as the winds (although a good navigator knows to attend to the movement of the wind). I’m in this for the long haul.

7. After years of publishing numerous poetry collections with several different publishers — not to mention poems appearing in many magazines and anthologies — do you find that your track record has made it easier to get your work in print, or are you still having to knock on doors?

Oh, I still have to knock on many doors. I’ve worked hard to seek out new doors because of it, and even create my own. I had a good run across the aughts, as I was getting multiple books published through Bev Daurio at The Mercury Press, Karl Siegler at Talonbooks and Joe Blades at Broken Jaw Press. I’d rather be producing everything through only a couple of repeated, ongoing relationships with fewer presses, but haven’t quite managed to get back to that, although losing Talonbooks as a publisher forced me to rethink a particular trajectory of my work. It is good to stop and take stock every so often, after all. Am I doing this because it is interesting or because this is simply what I’ve been doing? Each manuscript needs to prove itself on its own merit.

I have a contemporary who claims that most of their many, many books were solicited by publishers, and I’ve only had that a single time, from Marty Gervais at Black Moss; ironically (and very fortunate for me), he offered this mere days after I’d already mailed a manuscript to him (which hadn’t landed yet on his end). My new short story collection went through about twenty rejections before it found a home at University of Alberta Press, and I’m very pleased to return to the fold, especially one that works to keep Robert Kroetsch in print. I’ve a handful of other manuscripts that have been rejected repeatedly, and still can’t find ground. Although, with forty or so published books, I’m certainly in no position to complain. If I never published again, I’d still consider myself incredibly fortunate, having produced work I’m still rather proud of, and opportunities to interact with writers and writing and the world that I might never have had. I think the difficulty provides another measure of checks and balance; the regular reminder to reconsider.

There are a couple of editors that I can at least send something to and I know the work will eventually get read, and get read well, although that doesn’t necessarily lead to publication either. I just have to keep working at it, I suppose.

8. Highly regarded as the uncrowned Kingpin of the Canadian poetry scene, and having several fingers in several pies, I’m sure our readers would like to know what the profitability margin is in such a venture — including the lucrative merch market, ie: T-shirts, fridge magnets, beer mugs, pens, ball caps, dead poet notepads, etc — perhaps, say, to the nearest million?

I will divulge nothing about my secret, illegal bank accounts in the Cayman Islands.

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?

When my eldest was a preschooler, she declared “unction” was the name of the meal between lunch and dinner. We’ve no idea where she picked up the word. Recently, I was impressed that my youngest, our eight-year old, not only used the word “persnickety,” but used it correctly.

10. When do you have time to sleep?

When I am tired, if I must. There is much still to do.

11. Do you feel that poetry has the power to end war, hunger, discrimination, and environmental destruction in the world?

Not directly, but one always hopes a poem might move any reader enough to attempt to work on those things. Literature is part of the larger human conversation of how we live in the world, document and articulate ourselves and our surroundings. Poetry is part of the world, and has value; it shouldn’t be so regularly forced to justify itself. Is painting ever asked if it has the power to end war? Have TikTok videos ever been asked if they have the power to end environmental destruction? Poetry books don’t sell, nor do they end wars, therefore, where is the value?

Reading allows for both empathy and comprehension, the ability to imagine beyond ourselves; one would think that these are the qualities that would prompt any civilization to push to end war, hunger, discrimination and environmental destruction. A poem has value beyond requiring it to attend to tasks beyond it, and yet, prompting the imagination is exactly what is required for those tasks to be levied.

12. What other sources influence your poetry, i.e., music, movies, sports…?

I’m sports-neutral, but elements of all sorts of other things interweave through my lines regularly, including references to pop culture, what I might read in the newspaper or a particular action or activity by one of the children. Back in the days of Mad Men, each new episode prompted me to think deeper about prose narrative; I always got further work done on fiction after watching that.

13. Do you have any advice for anyone who’d like to be(come) a poet?

Read everything. Writing is both muscle and study: the more time you spend doing it, the better your work will be. Pay attention to your contemporaries. Go out and interact with others attempting the same things. When working early drafts, don’t worry about being wrong or the poem not working. Worry more about the work than about naming.

14. Add any additional comments of your own choosing. Manifestos included.

Manifesto? I haven’t any of those. Although, in a recent issue of The Believer (Vol. 21, No. 2; Summer 2024), I was struck by an interview with Devon Price, an American social psychologist, blogger and author focusing on autism, on how community is so often approached in the wrong direction, as a colonial force. “Your approach is often colonialist, if that’s all you’ve ever known.” The mistake, as Price articulates, of asking yourself what you can take instead of what you can bring. I like the clarity of this, and the reminder. I have rarely heard such an idea articulated so clearly, and so well.

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan [image credit: Aoife 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

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.