Relatively small, and spoken.
Let the empty page
and box of envelopes. A
shutter, tarmac.
Hands had to move so fast, we
singled out. Disappearing
plastic valve.
If we navigated telling, could
this
measure. Jacket, wall pegs, scarf.
Nations, if they do some good.
Sharper,
as it glimmers. Still alive.
Current, rides these
frequencies. The wound
of meanings, bloodlet fingers.
Stay with me, reason. Tactile,
auditory clues. Divulged, but
rarely spoken.
A noble lie, compassionate.
Before this
moment, choices. Corner of an
eye.
Interview
TSTmpj: From the information you shared with me when
you submitted, it seems that you are a prime mover in the Ottawa writing field.
Could you share with readers something about one of your ventures?
rob
mclennan: For
international audiences, the most obvious ventures become the online ones,
including a blog I post to regularly (www.robmclennan.blogspot.com) with
book reviews, essays, notices, interviews with authors and other pieces. Since
2005, I’ve edited and published an Ottawa poetry pdf annual, ottawater (www.ottawater.com),
which appears every January. Recently, the fourth issue of seventeen
seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (www.ottawater.com/seventeenseconds)
appeared online, which I edit/publish, as a replacement to the original Poetics.ca
site that Stephen Brockwell and I co-edited for eight issues. I’ve been working
to explore various poetics, opinions and writers through soliciting materials
for the journal, including essays, interviews, new poems and manifestos. Fewer
and fewer venues, it would seem, provide critical consideration for what has
already appeared, making it more difficult to comprehend what has been made,
holding up the possibilities of what might happen next. The journal works to
further conversation, therefore furthering comprehension, discussion and
response. There is so much yet unexplored.
What else can I tell you? I do
this alongside the other work I do as a writer, editor, publisher and
everything else. To explore and follow the blog, for example, will provide many
more details of what else I’ve been up to, if anyone is interested.
TSTmpj: You use the compound word “faux-sonnet” in
the title of your poem. It’s not a traditional lyric; it’s what I would term an
objective lyric. Remembering T.S. Eliot’s resuscitation of the objective
correlative is now over ninety years old, where to from here? Be an Alvin
Toffler of twenty-first century poetics, and, on the basis of what you perceive
now, make a prediction or two for us.
rob
mclennan: Only
yesterday, I was at a talk at Ottawa’s AB Series by American poet and blogger
Ron Silliman, and he predicted that there are so many threads of
English-language poetry at the moment (he suggested 20,000 publishing English-language
poets currently publishing within the United States) that, in a few years’
time, various threads of what is self-called “poetry” might be completely
unrecognizable from each other. I think it’s already happened, with varieties
between what even Canadian poets Lisa Robertson, Karen Mac Cormack, Margaret
Christakos, Christian Bök and derek beaulieu have been producing, against the
work of writers such as Stephen Brockwell, Tim Lilburn, Ken Babstock, David
McGimpsey and Karen Solie.
Art is a living culture; it has
to move, and move it does, to remain alive, and vibrant. Who knows where it
might end up? Part of the appeal, as writer and reader both, is simply not
knowing where it might, it could or even should. We want to be surprised; we
want to be amazed.
TSTmpj: Your poem resonates, among other things, a
European sensibility to me. Ingeborg Bachmann comes to mind. Would you agree?
Have you spent much time in Europe, and if so, what do you see as contemporary
similarities between, say, a northern European country’s poetry and Canadian
poetry?
rob
mclennan: European? Interesting. I know so little of European
writing and writing traditions that I wouldn’t feel close to comfortable
commenting on such. I’ve read a number of French works of prose-poetry in
translation over the past few years—predominantly works produced by Burning
Deck, translated by such as Norma Cole, Keith Waldrop and Cole Swensen—that
have provided enormous inspiration, but not directly to the poem posted here.
For most of my twenties and into my thirties, my influences were predominantly
Canadian, with a shift over the past few years into more and more American
works, including the translated works mentioned above.
But I revel in Milan Kundera.
Why can’t he go back to writing novels?
About a decade ago, Stephen
Brockwell and I did some readings in Ireland, returning a couple of years later
to read in London, England and Cardiff, Wales. It’s as far as I’ve been east,
so far.
Bio Note
Ottawa writer/editor/publisher rob mclennan is the author of 26 trade collections of poetry, fiction and non-fiction.
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