Notes and Dispatches: Essays by rob mclennan, reviewed by Julian Day

Hey! Winnipeg poet Julian Day was good enough to review my second collection of essays over at Empty Mirror! I don't even know if copies are even available anymore (although I always have a couple of copies for sale, of course). Might they be? Either way, thanks!

See the original review here.

Notes and Dispatches: Essays by rob mclennan / Insomniac Press / 2014 / 978-1554831265 / 318 pages

rob mclennan has operated above/ground press from his home base of Ottawa for more than twenty-seven years, publishing over a thousand items since the press’ inception in 1993. He is himself a prolific writer, with more than twenty books of stories, poems, and essays to his name. In Notes and Dispatches: Essays, a collection of his writings from 2010 to 2014, he displays remarkable breadth and depth. mclennan’s interest is not just in writers and writing, but also circumstance and surroundings, and he is as much interested in how these external factors affect writing as in the output itself.

Throughout the book, he moves between person and place, subject and geography. In the introduction, he writes that each of his essays begins first with curiosity, as he tries to learn, through their writing, some aspect of an author or subject that can’t be understood otherwise. By starting with this pearl of curiosity, and enlarging his understanding through writing, mclennan provides a series of snapshots, each one focused on a figure or aspect from Canadian or American literature.

The essays in this collection are as diverse as they are personal. The first piece, “Reading and Writing Glengarry County: writing the Long Sault hydroelectric project”, describes the St. Lawrence Seaway project of the 1950s, tracing its indelible mark on the landscape of the region, and how entire communities were created, destroyed, or relocated by the project’s ambition. Weaving in recollections of his father’s life with Don McKay’s out-of-print long poem “Long Sault” and other sources, mclennan describes how the project’s scope changed Glengarry County forever. At the other end of the collection, in the penultimate essay, mclennan delves into his family history, tracing the McLennans from Scotland to Glengarry County, through to northern Alberta, British Columbia, and California. “Genealogy,” he writes, “really is akin to archaeology” (299), closing the piece with a note about his grandparents’ first child, named only as “Baby girl McLennan” in the newspaper obituary. Those who would have known her name, he writes, passed away years before he started his own inquiries. Despite our desire for understanding, for a full knowledge and accounting of ourselves and our histories, mclennan shows there are limits to how far we can ultimately dig.

Between these essays, the writings turn between geographies and the writers that inhabit them, often in the same piece: Douglas Barbour, an Edmonton poet mclennan feels was never given his full due; the poets and poetry of Vancouver and the west coast, including Roy Kiyooka, Meredith Quartermain, and Sachiko Murakami; essays on Lisa Robertson, Sylvia Legris, the American poet Sarah Manguso, and others; and “A note on Miss Canada”, on a piece by mclennan himself, describing how the sequence of voices in that work was partially informed by his trips between Toronto and Ottawa, where the dead played out in missing person posters taped to, then removed from, diner walls along the way.

mclennan is generous with the work of others, but the strongest work in the collection is autobiographical. In “The green-wood essay: a little autobiographical dictionary”, mclennan uses eight short sections to connect his family history to discussions of the pastoral, notes on the changing urban/rural landscape, poets whose lives began in farm country, and whether it is possible to be pastoral in a deeply urban landscape. The work shifts between sentences and fragments, in and out of poetry, working in mclennan’s distinct poetic style:

Instead of recess, played my scales. Another lesson. A further removal from bonding with my peers, already quiet, shy. Out on the farm, with barely a neighbour my age. Thirteen years of lessons, told to practice instead of wasting, wandering time. I wasted time. I put my head down. Played. I suppose, then, this was discipline. Certain notions set aside. (75)

“green wood”, a journey through mclennan’s foundations, allows the reader a view into his core tenets and beliefs – and foundations, mclennan writes, “rarely change, no matter subsequent constructions” (77). mclennan’s foundation is Glengarry County, and the red brick house where his father still lives; it is the move so many of us have made within the last few generations, leaving farms and villages for towns and cities; it is how he “absorbed books, consumed them” (75) – and how he still does. That was his life, and that is his life.

“How do books begin?”, mclennan asks (209). In Notes and Dispatches: Essays, the beginning and the end are geography: physical and human, intertwined and inseparable. We can never remove ourselves from the physical world; we are a product of our childhoods and upbringings, and the lives we choose for ourselves. The personal is the physical. Each of us are necessarily a part of where we live, and as mclennan deftly demonstrates, where we live, where we’re from, form an inseparable part of ourselves as well. “We already live in the world,” mclennan writes. “Why pretend to be apart?” (78)

rob mclennan round-up: some poems, two interviews, etcetera

I feel as though I keep forgetting to mention things such as these, but I do have some poems from "the book of smaller" up in the twelfth issue of where is the river, as well as new poems up at Selcouth Station and Empty Mirror. I was even interviewed over at Train : a poetry journal! And by Paul Brookes for his Wombwell Rainbow Interviews series! [you can see a full list of interviews with me online here] Thanks so much to the editors of all! Further links to further poems, short stories, essays etcetera of mine online also appear (as best as my ability provides) over at my clever author page. Oh, and did I mention that I'm posting poems over at my Patreon page? I'm totally posting poems over at my Patreon page.

Ali Znaidi reviews A perimeter (2016) in Empty Mirror

Poet and translator Ali Znaidi was good enough to provide a lengthy review of my poetry title, A perimeter (New Star Books, 2016), via Empty Mirror. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here. This is actually the second review of my New Star title, after Jonathan Ball wrote a brief review of such via the Winnipeg Free Press. And of course, you can still order copies of the book through the publisher (or me, even).

A perimeter by rob mclennan / New Star Books / 978-1-55420-128-0 / paperback / 80 pages / 2016

In A perimeter rob mclennan has ordered the poems which were written between 2010 and 2014 in a way that the cumulative force makes us savour those new things that have happened to him: A new daughter; Rose, a new lodging experience, and a new surrounding. This is shown from the very outset in the dedication page:

for Rose Irene Valentina McLennan,
who arrived just then,

A perimeter - poetry by rob mclennanThis collection spins keen observations and strong stories of a new father and the oppression that fills his days as he is caught between writing and fatherhood or precisely “[c]aught, between ambition and exhaustion” (page 5). mclennan’s poems are set in Alta Vista Drive in Canada where he becomes an owner of his home. Speaking to his neighbourhood newspaper, VISTAS [PDF], in its October 2016 issue, rob mclennan says in page 17, “I’m also now in an area familiar to family history: my maternal grandparents original owners of a house on Kirk Drive, a street later renamed Ridgemont. My parents married in the church across the street from our front door, and relocated nearly an hour’s drive east, near Maxville, to his home property. How do I rewrite myself into this familial space?”

A perimeter is a work of exploration and self-discovery in which the poet tries to show those changes that have appeared in his entirely new situation and their effects on his daily life and writing habits. mclennan depicts many details of his daily life through tactile references. Nevertheless, the raw problems he touches upon are universal; issues of conjugal relationships after the birth of a new child, spouse roles, struggles to do house chores, and how to find time to write, and the exhaustion and frustration that accompany all that. This elegiac fragment is but an illustrative example of his nostalgia for sufficient and satisfactory sleep: “u((n)in)t(e)rr((u)pte)d) s(l))ee)p” (page 8).

Grappling with living in the world as poet and as a new father, and despite lack and interruption of sleep, mclennan finds solace and comfort in the beauty of his new daughter. In these beautiful lines, for instance, his daughter Rose and the rose become interchangeable terms. He draws from the haiku traditions of simplicity and conciseness to tell a story of beauty. mclennan intertwines the free-verse form, which is rich with a strong narration, with the delicate short Japanese form, drawing stunning images to emphasize the beauty he is generating. At the end, Rose’s interruption of his muse engenders a newer poem that is more beautiful; something akin to the opening of a petal:

Such wonderful scraps. Rose sleeps,
she stirs, she interrupts the poem. I am crafting
a why, when. Rose unfolds, a petal opens.

You are beautiful. You are like we.
(page 9)

In this collection, the personal intersects with his civilian life. Moving on, the poet takes a light political stance through raw imagery. While readers are immersed in the “newness” of the poet’s life, mclennan surprises them with bitterness. He says:

I see nothing new
in the whole of this country; bitter threads
(page 26)

These two lines would jolt most of us into self-critique. This time, the poet creates bitterness out of newness through effective and poignant language.

Exploration, rediscovery, and self-critique are shown from the outset of the abecedarian poem “A perimeter” in which he ponders on the new space of 1950s suburb, and focuses attention upon the issues of boundaries, location, and ownership through a well-crafted combination of poetic technique. His ruminations upon these issues are coupled with the problems of authorship and naming through language which is “impermanent.” He says in the first section, “A” :

The property boundary is handmade (shared). Fluid,
and only fluid. Unless
you know precisely where. The skin

and space of white noise (hearth). One hundred foot of fence.

Language is impermanent. We retain nothing, have no
specific form. The latent grass, explode; infect
the yard and underneath the stone-work.
(page 43)

In his book, Content’s Dream: Essays, 1975-1984 Charles Bernstein states that “poetry and philosophy share the project of investigating the possibilities (nature) and structures of phenomena” (page 220). In this regard, mclennan assumes the role of a philosopher. He attempts through plumbing psychological and interpersonal depths to show to what extent a new space or a new map can affect his world view and to what extent a new locale and shift in perspective and vision can affect his poetic craft. With mclennan and his enviable craftsmanship with language, one cannot help but relish in philosophy, while savouring the poetic language of a poet-choreographer, who knows how to make words dance on the paper. The movements are natural, measured and astonishingly sophisticated, all at the same time. In this quoted passage (page 38), for instance, one cannot help but delight in mclennan’s dancing words:

                reworking, legends: archive, scraps
I was moving very quickly;

Thus, the reading that mclennan’s poetry suggests or requires is a reading that keeps on “viewing” or “seeing” the text on the paper, otherwise the reader would find the language of the poem inarticulate, obscure and meaningless. mclennan is a master when it comes to sprinkling words on the page like a masterful baker who sprinkles cumin on bread to make it delicious and mouth-watering. Hence the reader would be captivated by the layout of the poem and its visual aspects. mclennan, thus, uses the means of experimental art but for different ends: not to create a meaningless world but in order to engage readers, and especially the inattentive ones, with his poems and make them aware of what the poem can afford. mclennan’s A perimeter can be looked at as a philosophical inquiry or a treatise that draws attention to one’s adumbrated knowledge of oneself and the world by making it accessible through poetry. Through his uncanny ability to create fragmentary poetic narratives he is able to show a way of seeing/reading the world and the self in a hostile world that neither explains nor gives justifications. Another aspect of philosophy which falls squarely into the realm of this collection is the persistent quest for truth that is coupled with skepticism. Look at this philosophical inquiry which is buried beneath these two lines in page 7:

Not the event but language; laundry cycles, sediment.
Nothing settles.

In this way, and because “nothing settles,” poetry acquires a therapeutic function and serves as a constant injection against metaphysical confusions and the sedimentation and fossilization of the mind. This is achieved through mclennan’s deep awareness of line breaks and the power of the poem layout and form.

rob mclennan’s use of orthography, layout and punctuation is always innovative and especially in this collection. Part of the point, no doubt, is to create the right kind of a free zone in which the poetry can develop; besides, to let readers experience the poem as a thrilling adventure or journey. The poem becomes a narrative interlaced into the larger space of the paper with words trying to transgress borders and boundaries like “a stretch of cedar boughs” as he says in page 48. The poet’s innovative use of punctuation ramps up the tension even more and harkens back again and again to the process and craft of poetry composition. Punctuation becomes an act of transgression and a means to go beyond the fence.

A boundary creates another kind of boundary. A perimeter likewise creates its own recurring perimeters. The book, in fact, rather than offering new boundaries, is cathartic, simultaneously conjuring and exorcising the ghost of boundaries of readers with words, precisely with the kinetic energy of language. The politics of mclennan’s poetry reflects an overwhelming sense that a great perimeter was inflicted upon land and people. The poet demonstrates awareness and creates a startling experience of transgressing perimeters through the extraordinary cumulative effects of a poetics that is permeated with patterned departures and returns because, at the end, as he says on page 44:

[t]he lawn requires trim,
and so it does.

The collection reads as a series of short connected sequences, and focuses on how the perimeter, the boundary, and the fence are controlling our lives, and morphing into metaphors of the capitalistic constraints of society. The poems are both fragmentary and visual, and the dialogue between these two aspects enhances the tension and overall experience of the book. mclennan’s poetry displays a propensity towards transgression and crossing: Each Rose’s step is a poem and each poem is a step deeper into sequencing, into freedom, and into ourselves through, as he says in page 68; the last words of the book, “a task of outlines.”

mclennan’s moving collection is an exercise in reinventing one’s own body, psyche and world. The abundant metaphors are the bits or tools that mclennan gives to readers to reinvent themselves. The poems themselves become dense fragments allowing readers to assume the role of experimental collage artists whose vocation is to reshape and remould the semantic space and the world view. Rather than destroying meaning, mclennan tries to explore the meaninglessness of language not in order to annihilate it but to bestow on it an inner cohesion—something this postmodern era lacks—and to restore confidence as he says in page 14: “what shines is confidence, reduced to letter,”.

mclennan’s poetry is clearly an example for a work of art that looks for new possibilities of meaning beyond “the postmodern condition.” Containing seeds of revolutionary acts and political positions (in a non-radical way) mclennan masterfully explores the fissures in the psyche and the cracks in the walls in this hostile world of now.

"City of words" : a new poem,

My poem "City of words" is now online at Empty Mirror.