rob mclennan talks to Sharon Berg about his latest poetry collection
SB: One gets the feeling from a review in the September 22, 2022 issue of The Miramichi Reader by Jami Macarty that they see the book of smaller almost like – and I mean no disrespect – a father’s game of peek-a-boo at the same time as it’s a writer’s shell game with references to important historical moments in the evolution of literary language. How do you relate to the critical audience’s perception of the book of smaller to date? Have the people offering reviews read it as you intended it be received?
rm: I appreciated the response that Kim Fahner, Margo LaPierre and Jérôme Melançon had in their collaborative review of the book at periodicities, and their conversation made me feel as though they understood something of what I was doing in that particular book, a feeling I rarely get when reading reviews of my own work: a way through observation that isn’t prescriptive but propelled by and through language.
SB: I’m sure as a stay-at-home Dad you’ve made many simple sandwiches for your daughters. If I equate poetry to sandwiches it seems there are layers upon layers in the poems in this book, presenting a Club sandwich, or a Reuben, or a Cuban in the flavours and textures of the language you present. Indeed, an interview you did in December 2021 for etcetera.com has a photograph of your office from November 2021. It has piles of books on the desk (layers), with piles of papers and manuscripts balanced on shelves behind. One imagines it difficult to find a clear space to work in there. Yet, it’s a common meme to suggest people with desks like this are creative, that there’s a system to what looks like disorganization. Would you say the book of smaller reflects the organization of your desk in the way the book’s organization draws on moments of domesticity followed by references to important literary moments and various other authors… or not?
rm: Actually, our young ladies tend not to go through that many sandwiches, preferring fruit and raw vegetables, soup or Kraft Dinner. I tend not to think of things in terms of order vs. disorder, but one relating more to a curated, crafted shape. My attentions are legion, and in multiple directions simultaneously, which leads to an overflow upon my desk (as well as numerous other surfaces). My poems less seek order than attempt to shape and respond to and through language in a particular way through sound, image and rhythm, playing on, around and through meaning.
SB: Your use of punctuation in the poems contained in this book seems both far more evident and more purposeful than the way many other modern poets are using – or dropping – punctuation. In fact, it seems that while punctuation was presented as a silent cueing system when we were taught the basics for writing in Grade School, your poems draw such heightened attention to the punctuation you use, it often seems to rise to the same level of importance as the phrases and line breaks you use. Can you comment on this?
rm: Given I work first and foremost on the page, I consider myself to be working through a medium that initially presents as visual (providing notation for performance, naturally). When including a comma at the beginning of a line, for example, instead of at the end of the prior line, I am suggesting something different about the pause, something that the eye doesn’t just run past or run over. The visual rhythms and sounds upon the page are an essential part of how I construct poems. Punctuation is simply one of those tools.
SB: What do you intend for the readers to be left with after the final page?
rm: The impulse to reread.
SB: How long did the first draft take for you to write? What was the core of the developmental process between drafts, were you working on the structure or the story world or aspects of style and language or something else? In terms of sheer length what did the book look like after the first draft? Did the length change?
rm: The manuscript was composed from December 16, 2016 (some three or so months prior to my wife Christine returning to work after her second maternity leave) to October 16, 2017. The bulk of the collection was composed during those first seven months I was solo full-time with two small children (having done a stretch of eighteen solo months with Rose, prior to Aoife’s birth). I began with a computer file of drafts of poems (begun during Aoife’s nap, or visits to the park, etcetera) that I would daily carve (as much as our young ladies’ preschool and nap schedules might allow), I then set finished pieces into a separate file once they were completed. Some poems took days to complete, while others took weeks, or even months. I was always working on at least a half-dozen poems at any given time. I wasn’t working on any “story” elements, I don’t think; this wasn’t an attempt to narratively work through a space of house, thinking and children, but one of accumulated moments.
The manuscript ended at one hundred and five poems. I attempted to push further, but the project simply ran its course at one hundred and five pieces, and I was unable to complete anything beyond that. My editor through University of Calgary Press, Helen Hajnoczky, through our multiple summer 2021 zoom-calls, suggested reordering the last fifth or so of the collection, to keep to a structure she saw that I had established throughout the rest of the manuscript. Otherwise, no poems were added or removed after October 2017.
SB: How did you arrive at the form/structure of the work? Did you have a form/structure in mind when you started? What other forms/structures or shapes did you consider? What was driving the choices of form/structure – efficiency or something else …style, urge for innovation, compulsions of the genre, compulsions of a literary movement it aspires to connect with?
rm: I’d been considering the prose poem for a number of years up to that point, having employed the structure within a variety of poetry manuscripts, and had long wanted to attempt a manuscript that was exclusively constructed out of prose poems. The idea of each poem being compact, comprised of one stanza per, was a deliberate structure from the offset. When attempting the beginnings of any project or manuscript, structure is one of the first considerations I ponder: content always finds its way through on its own. The opportunity of being newly home full-time solo with two children presented a shortened attention span, one of bursts over longer stretches, so the form became just as much dictated by circumstance. The project felt as a series of loose threads that came together at a particular time, in a particular way. I knew my writing day had shifted, so why wouldn’t the work shift as well?
SB: If this book was to be translated in another language, what would your advice to the translator be, what aspect of the original work would you most care to consciously preserve?
rm: I wouldn’t consider my unilingual self in any position to dictate terms to a translator. I would presume an engaged translator would attempt to articulate the rhythms, bounces and breaks of my prose poem structures, although I’m sure arguments might be made for the sake of alternate elements of focus.
SB: Are any aspects of the book that is autobiographical? How did you consciously deal with your intimate material (i.e., experiences – emotional and physical) in a way that avoids the dangers of straight autobiography?
rm: Everything that I describe in the book actually happened, although I’m always wary of those questions that suggest the binary of whether poetry falls into “fiction” or “non-fiction.” What is the poem doing? What do the choices of language allow or provide?
SB: Are there poems/ideas that were originally intended but ultimately not included in the collection? How did you determine what to keep and what not to keep in the collection?
rm: The only pieces that didn’t land in this collection were the unfinished poems attempted during that compositional period; the pieces that didn’t cohere and were eventually abandoned.
SB: How would you like this book to be taught – as a historical document, socio-political document or as a document about a certain kind of taste in writing or aesthetic, genre, literary style or something else?
rm: Any or all of the above. But first and foremost, as poetry. Best to look at these things on their own terms, after all.
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 titles include the poetry collection the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), and a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022). 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