rob mclennan : Pause the Document, by Mónica de la Torre

Pause the Document, Mónica de la Torre
Nightboat Books, 2025

 

 

 

The latest from New York-based poet and editor Mónica de la Torre, and the first I’ve seen, is Pause the Document (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2025), a collection that follows a host of her other full-length and chapbook titles including Talk Shows (Denver CO: Switchback Books, 2007), Public Domain (Washington DC: Roof Books, 2008), The Happy End/All Welcome (Brooklyn NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017) and Repetition Nineteen (Nightboat Books, 2020). Set in a trio of untitled sections, Pause the Document offers a collection of lyrics that spark and sparkle, documenting an archive of tangibles and intangibles, from dreams to theorums to the void, all concrete, and clear; composed as gestures or monologues that might appear equally comfortable on the page, stage, or at the podium. “I was wrong in thinking just / malignancies could be extirpated.” she writes, mid-way through “AHİ VIENE EL LOBO,” Fatalism will only take us so far; / as it turns out, they’re still viable / in a territory larger than previously / calculated.” There is such an underlay of confidence and authority to these poems that would lean well into performance. “Funny, I wasn’t thinking of communicating in a language other than this one,” she writes, to open “RETURN TO PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY,” “but here I am. Feeling formally restless and leaving tracks.” The poems are exploratory, declarative, engaged and curious; shifting prose blocks to line breaks, a variation on rhythms, propulsion, offering exploratory statements on human language and being.

de la Torre both writes the clutter and through it, attempting clarification through the noise, and a habitat of habitation perpetually overrun by our own excesses. “What empty chatter must they overhear,” she writes, to begin the poem “LONDON PLANE TREE,” “in the polluted habitats for which they’re naturals.” If future alien civilizations might seek to understand how we lived, or at least tried to, one might hope they could find their way to these poems. There is such lovely ease in her lyrics, such as the poem “NOT AGAINST THE RULES,” that opens:

It hailed golf balls
back in June.

Notebook got nicked,
got soaked.

What month is it.

She speaks
of grief so gracefully
you hold on to her words
lest you miss
its gnawing at you too.

There’s a curious temporality to these poems, one that attempts to utilize the progress of time as a grounding element; her narrator attempting to locate or ground herself, perhaps, as the poem “DECEMBER,” for example, begins: “Who can say where we’re going. To be sure / I’d split my attention so now looking / back. I couldn’t tell.” Or the poem “FIT TO PRINT,” that begins: “Late in November appears a variant of concern. The news gets torn up.” Through all the searching for certainty, it might not yet be found. Through all the chaos, all the swirling movement, where does the centre hold, one might ask. As the poem “NOT AGAINST THE RULES” closes: “I am writing in the dark / and that is what the noise is about.”

 

 

 

 

 

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 nearly forty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, including On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023), his Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil) is out any day now and available for pre-order. As well, his poetry title, the book of sentences (University of Calgary), a follow-up to the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), appears this fall. The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.

rob mclennan : Interview with Laynie Browne

 

rob mclennan: You mentioned recently that your next collection, Apprentice to a Breathing Hand (Omnidawn, 2025), is a response text to the work of poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. I’m fascinated by your exploration of the book-length response text, whether your In Garments Worn By Lindens (Tender Buttons Press, 2018) composed as a response to Lawn of Excluded Middle by Rosmarie Waldrop, Intaglio Daughters (Ornithopter Press, 2023) as a response to the book The Unfollowing by Lyn Heijinian or Everyone and Her Resemblances (Pamenar Press, 2024) as a response to the epic structures and purposes of Alice Notley. How did you get on this path of composing book-length responses to particular poets and their works?

Laynie Browne: I think it began with a tremendous sense of gratitude, to be here in this time, with these particular poets. Unmistakably my life as a poet is possible, in large part, because of these female poets. The first homage text I wrote was for Bernadette Mayer. I was re-reading The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, as a young mother, and I was amazed. Thus began my book The Desires of Letters. I’m writing another book for Bernadette now, which I began on the day of her passing.

My dear friend, the extraordinary poet Stacy Doris, who left us much too soon, told me when her first book came out, that one poet she greatly admired appreciated the book, and that was more than enough for her. I just love this way of thinking of poetry as intimate and written not only to any reader, but also to a particular reader.  Many years later the poet Sawako Nakayasu, also a friend whose work I admire greatly, echoed this idea of an audience of one. When I wrote the book for Bernadette I didn’t know that I would continue in this vein, and it was many years before I wrote another homage text. Sometimes there is a very specific formal relationship between my book and a book by the writer I am writing for, and other times the relation is more conceptual or oblique. 

rm: I completely understand the poem-as-prompt, as well as the beauty of being able to respond to the work of a particular writer while utilizing an echo of their forms. As you’ve been working through these projects, what do you think is possible through these responses that might not be possible through, say, working an essay, even one that might be considered more lyric? Have there been elements that have surprised you as you’ve worked your way through?

LB: I’m always surprised by what happens when I write. Maybe that’s one reason I continue.  I like writing into the unknown, or maybe I should say, that seems to be the way I can write. What happens with these homage texts is that my attention in reading becomes heightened. It’s an amazing gift to spend time with poets whose work I love. I do think of this writing project as a dedicated intentional reading practice. As to comparing what I’m doing here to writing essays, that’s an entirely different mode. I’m not writing on, or about, or in an expository sense at all.  What is miraculous to me is the way the reading makes my writing possible.

rm: What prompted you to respond in such a way to a specific book-length work through your own book-length work? And how do you think these projects have shifted the writing you do outside of these particular projects?

LB: I really don’t know, except to say that I tend to write book length manuscripts without planning to do so. I seem to need plenty of space to write through a concept or question. I’ve never really written individual short poems, except for sonnets, and these also seem to be in communication with each other, not necessarily stand alone pieces. The greatest shift I note at this time is that I’ve continued to think and write in this way for several years now, and not really written much outside the context of homage texts. Even now, when I think ahead, I’m thinking about books I want to write for particular poets. The only exception is when I write prose works of fiction or non-fiction. I’ve found it extremely rewarding to write through the work of particular writers who are incredibly important to me, and in doing so I have a sense of always being in relation. 

rm: How do these processes begin? Do you dig deep into research through your subject’s work, or a particular work, or simply start riffing off individual pieces? Once you’ve decided on a particular subject or target, how do these projects begin?

LB: For each book the process has been completely different and seems to arrive organically. For instance with The Desires of Letters, I wanted to try the epistolary form that Bernadette had created, along with exploring many of the questions her book evokes, regarding being an artist and a mother. In the book I wrote for Cecila Vicuña (which is not yet published) I began with just one word, indivisible. That word inspired from Ceclia’s work, a concept of the invisible transcribed is inviolable, impossible to separate from what is most hidden and essential, became the title and focus for the book. In Apprentice to a Breathing Hand, the book I wrote for Mei-mei Berssenbrugge I worked closely with the title poem in her book Hello, The Roses, and wove lines from that poem into a series called “Euphoric Rose.” The book for Alice Notely arrived in a way that is utterly unique to my experience. I began with a question: what if one were to have a person or divine entity or being one could consult at any time, and always receive an answer. Once I started writing this book, I felt as if I had entered a dark hallway. Someone grabbed my hand and pulled. I was receiving the work, as a form of dictation.

rm: Now that you’ve worked a handful of these projects, how do they see themselves finished? Once a manuscript is completed, or even published, are there ever new questions that occur? Once a project is completed, is it ever complete?

LB: These are important questions because there are always more questions that arise. However, my method of operating is onward. I assume that with each new act of reading and writing I am continuing arcs of investigation. No single book represents more than the duration in which I spent writing it—at least for me. Otherwise, the pressure is immense, and how to “finish” anything?

rm: You mention that your first response work was for and through Bernadette Mayer, a poet you returned to again, for your current project. To return to Mayer’s work, are you responding to a particular and different text, or moving through different questions? With the amount of time passing between that prior project and this current one, have you, as a more experienced reader, simply a different set of questions across her work as a whole?

LB: This new book for Bernadette is more concerned with writing in the immediate aftermath of loss. I don’t recall consciously deciding to do so, but upon her crossing, I immediately began writing sonnets. I notice that I’m also concerning myself with the common problem of facing occasion days differently, writing through the first and second midwinter days, without her present, for instance. My grieving for my father also figures into this book, as they passed only a couple of months apart. I guess one way to tie this new book to Bernadette’s work in general, is that I always think of her as a love poet. And I also identify as a love poet—and elegy is perhaps the most challenging form of love poem that one wishes one never has need of, and yet . . .

rm: Where do you see yourself moving forward, beyond this particular project? Are there poets or structures you’ve already been considering at the back of your head? A project such as this is potentially endless: where and what might next occur?

LB: Thus far I’ve published books for Bernadette Mayer, C.D. Wright, Rosmarie Waldrop, Leslie Scalapino, Alice Notley, Lyn Hejinian and forthcoming is the book for Mei-mei Berssenbugge. I’d like to find publishers for the books I’ve written for Cecilia Vicuña and Hannah Weiner. The next book I have in mind is for Harryette Mullen.

 

 

 

 

Laynie Browne is a poet, prose writer, artist, editor and teacher. Her recent books of poetry include: Everyone & Her Resemblances (Pamenar, 2024), Intaglio Daughters (Ornithopter 2023), Practice Has No Sequel (Pamenar 2023), Letters Inscribed in Snow (Tinderbox 2023), and Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists (Wave Books, 2022). In 2024 a solo show of her collage titled “On the Way to the Filmic Woods” was exhibited at the Brodsky Gallery at Kelly Writer’s House. She co-edited the anthology I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Les Figues Press) and edited the anthology A Forest on Many Stems: Essays on The Poet’s Novel (Nightboat). Honors include a Pew Fellowship, the National Poetry Series Award for her collection The Scented Fox, and the Contemporary Poetry Series Award for her collection Drawing of a Swan Before Memory. She teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

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 nearly forty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). His poetry title, the book of sentences (University of Calgary), a follow-up to the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), appears in 2025, as do two titles with Spuyten Duyvil. The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.

rob mclennan : 2024 VERSeFest interviews: Armand Garnet Ruffo

 

Armand Garnet Ruffo is from remote northern Ontario and is a band member of the Chapleau Fox Lake Cree First Nation with familial and historical roots to the Sagamok Anishnawbek First Nation. He is recognized as a major contributor to both contemporary Indigenous literature and Indigenous literary scholarship in Canada. His books include Norval Morrisseau: Man Changing Into Thunderbird, and Treaty #, both finalists for Governor General’s Literary Awards. His latest work includes Reclamation and Resurgence: the Selected Poems of Marilyn Dumont (2024), which he edited, and his own book, The Dialogues: the Song of Francis Pegahmagabow, 2024 winner of “The VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres” Award. He currently lives in Kingston and teaches at Queen’s University.

Armand Garnet Ruffo reads in Ottawa on Saturday, November 30, 2024 as part of Fall into VERSeFest.

rm: When did you first start writing?

AGR: High School. I guess it was poetry, although if anyone asked me what I was doing I said I was writing songs, which I’m happy no longer exist. It wasn’t something that I advertised.

rm: What did those first attempts look like? Were they modelled on anything?

AGR: They were muddled. I spent a lot of time, like most younger writers I suppose, just trying to figure it out. Later when I got to York (and then Ottawa U) and was reading widely, and I was basically sounding like whomever I read. Then one day while I was visiting my grandmother who was living with my aunt in Toronto, we got to talking about my studies and for some reason I mentioned poetry. Then out of the blue she recited me a poem that she had written called “Lost In My Native Land.” ( I later published it in a magazine I was working for in Ottawa called The Native Perspective. She was thrilled.) The form was rather archaic, in the style of Pauline Johnson, but the content blew me away. That’s when I realized I needed to write about my heritage and my own experiences. The writing developed from there. You have to remember that back in the 70s there were very few Indigenous people getting published, very few role models. Not like today.

rm: How did you get from there to the publication of your first book? What was the process of putting an eventual manuscript together?

AGR: Getting published was not straightforward. Most of the work I sent out came back to me with the standard responses, too political, too polemical, etc. (I later learned that other Indigenous poets had experienced the same thing.) As for readings I hardly did any. You have to realize it was a period when Canadian nationalism was still in full throttle. The scene was basically unwelcoming, and I even stopped writing for a period in the early 80s. Then in 89 I sent my work to the Banff Centre and to my utter surprise I got in. Adele Wiseman was the Head of writing. I also met Alistair MacLeod there who invited me to study with him at Windsor U. My first book, consisting of mostly earlier poems, was published by Theytus Books in 1994. It should come as no surprise that it took an Indigenous publisher to get the first book out. At the Banff Centre I had met the editors of Coteau Books, and they published my second book Grey Owl: the Mystery of Archie Belaney, which came out in 1996 and is still in print. The 90s saw a huge shift in the general response to Indigenous writing, and it was a green light from there.

rm: Were there other Indigenous writers you were encountering during this period?

AGR: I guess it was the 80s when started going to hear readings. There was a pretty good poetry scene in Ottawa in those days, as there is today, but I really wasn’t a part of it and, as far as I can recall, there were no other Indigenous writers giving readings either.  I do remember giving a reading at a cafe called The Stone Angel with the great songwriter Willy Dunn. That was an honour.  Songs such as “The Ballad of Crowfoot,” “Son of the Sun,” and “I Pity The Country” were certainly an inspiration.  

At that time I was also writing plays and going to see productions in Toronto by Native Earth Performing Arts. I met Drew Hayden Taylor, Daniel David Moses and Tomson Highway there, but, again, I really wasn’t part of the scene, and I got to know them better in later years at festivals, conferences, etc.  As for Indigenous poets in Ottawa, in the early 90s  I met Anne Acco, Kateri Damm, Greg YoungIng and Joseph Dandurand. We hung out and even formed a poetry group we called W.I.N.O. (I hope you can see the humour.) Ann Acco provided funding for an anthology we put together, which was published in 1994. I also met the novelist Richard Wagamese, who was living in Ottawa and working on his first book Keeper’ n Me. We would meet for coffee and talk about writing. He was incredibly well read.

During this period, I ended up teaching at The En’owkin Centre in Penticton, B.C.  It was a real hub with all kinds of Indigenous writers and artists, either teaching or passing through. Jeannette Armstrong was the Director; Lee Maracle was there; Greg YoungIng was both teaching and editing Theytus Books; Gerry William (a sci-fi writer) was there, as was the Native American poet Maurice Kenny; the poet Annharte visited, etc.  So it was an exciting place to be.  Once Grey Owl came out things changed for me, and I was invited to do readings both nationally and internationally.  I met Marilyn Dumont, Louise Halfe, Garry Gottfriedson, Joanne Arnott, Greg Scofield and Duncan Mercredi, etc. It was an exciting time because Indigenous literature as we know it today was really just getting on its feet.

rm: Grey Owl felt a huge leap in your creative work. What brought you to working that narrative in that particular form?

AGR: I wrote Grey Owl: the Mystery of Archie Belaney because the infamous Archie Belaney lived with my grandmother’s parents in the village of Biscotasing in northern Ontario.  I had grown up with stories about him, and I knew I could complicate the telling.  As for the writing, I thought initially it was going to be a suite of connected poems at best.  However, once I started writing it bloomed into a full  book. I did struggle initially with the book’s POV.  I tried initially to tell it from Grey Owl’s POV and that didn’t work for various reasons. Then I tried write it using an omniscient narrator, ostensibly the poet’s POV, but it didn’t work either. It felt distant and detached.  Then I started to think about how other poets have handled long, narrative poems.  I went back and read Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie, along with a few Native American poets who were on my bookcase, like N. Scott Momaday, Carter Revard, and Ray Young Bear.  As soon as I had a block of uninterrupted time, I just started writing, and once I got into it it actually kind of wrote itself. The multitude of voices seemed to jump onto the page. It’s a gift when that happens.

A few years later after the book was published, I ran into the Metis poet Gregory Scofield, and he told me he had been on a literary jury and Grey Owl came up in their discussion.  He said that others on the jury dismissed it because they said it wasn’t, quote, “pure poetry.” I have to laugh when you think about that today. The takeaway is just do your own thing and don’t worry about what others think. The book is still in print nearly 30 years later. 

rm: It does seem interesting that Grey Owl is simultaneously a work that holds direct influence from now-canonical works while being well ahead of its time, certainly in terms of structure and content alike. Given you recently won the Betsy Warland Between Genres award, I’d say you’ve been playing with genre for some time now. How aware are you of genre when you are working? How are decisions around structure made?

AGR: We talked briefly about this the other evening. I try not to repeat myself, and in that regard I’m very conscious of genre. That said, I never set out to explore a particular kind of form. Each project takes its own shape. To use a well worn metaphor each project is like a newborn who arrives with its own personality. And to extend that, I don’t create the baby and then give it a personality. I’m really unaware until it cries to be fed.  It’s at that moment that I have that “Ahah moment.”  Take The Dialogues, I wrote the libretto, essentially a long narrative poem, after about a year of doing research on the life of Francis Pegahmagabow, the famous WWI sniper.  And in hindsight I would say it developed rather organically alongside the music.  After a few performances I was asked by audience members if I were going to publish it.  I thought about it, but the libretto was not written for the page and that presented a problem. 

When I imagined it without the music, I saw it full of holes, spaces, absences. I had to fill it up, but how?  I came up with the idea to create a dialogue with the libretto that would ‘open it up’ much like the music does on stage. With that in mind, I started to take chunks of the libretto and explore what it was saying, and what I could say about it – and I extrapolated from there.  That’s when the whole left side, right side page thing developed. At first I was just trying to get my ideas down, but later it got to a point where I was carefully fitting bits and pieces of multifarious text together.  And I soon realized that even the various literary forms of the textual inclusions were in a kind of dialogue with each other.  So, yes, as the project developed I became very aware of what I was doing, but only as it developed.  E.L. Doctorow famously said that "writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the trip that way.” I agree with him, and I think it’s a hopeful sentiment for any writer, certainly for me, because I really only see glimpses when I’m writing.

rm: You mention working a libretto, but how aware are you, more generally, of sound or visual components as you write? How do you see sound exist upon the page?

AGR: Like many people I grew up listening to music, which I’ve written about it in my poetry collection At Geronimo’s Grave (winner of the 2001 Archibald Lampman Award), and when I’m working I tend to have something playing in the background. Because I can’t listen to anything with lyrics – it messes with the writing – it’s usually instrumental jazz, and in fact I’ve become a huge jazz fan because of it.  One of the things that I stress to my students is that when they are writing poetry they should read it aloud to hear and feel the rhythm.  So, yes, I’m very conscious of sound value.  As I say in the “Afterword” to The Dialogues, when I was writing the libretto I had to feel the words just as one feels music.

rm: You mention The Dialogues emerging out of doing research on Francis Pegahmagabow. How do such projects begin? Do you dig into researching a subject and see what writing might emerge, or have you a particular goal or shape in mind? Are you researching simply through your own interest and curiosity, and writing becomes a kind of secondary process?

AGR: That’s a good question. The libretto was originally commissioned by The Festival of Sound in Parry Sound for the 35th anniversary of the festival. They paired me with Tim Corlis, a classical composer out of B.C., and it was literally our job to come up with a musical about Frances Pegahmagabow. I talked about the process we went through in the book’s Afterword. Suffice to say here that we drove together from Toronto to  Francis’ home community of Wasauksing (Parry Island) to meet Francis’ family, and we talked, maybe strategized is a better word, about the project on the trip. Eventually Tim would send me snippets of music, and I would listen to them and write, and sometimes I would send him something.  Back to Doctorow’s quote about driving with one headlight; I had a very basic idea of where I wanted to go with libretto in terms of dividing it into three parts, Francis’ early life, the war, and then his political life after the war, but that’s really all I had.  After that it was all about feeling the music and letting the poetry come.  So, yes, I guess it was about letting the writing “emerge” as you put it.  As for the research itself, whether it’s about Grey Owl, or Norval Morrisseau, or Francis Pegahmagabow, it has always been connected to a writing project. There’s always been something in mind.

Miigwech, thanks, for the questions. 

 

 

 

 

 

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, his most recent title is On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024). He is very excited that 2025 will see the publication of the poetry title Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil), the lyric essay a river runs through it: a writing diary (Spuyten Duyvil) and his follow-up to the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press). 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.