12 or 20 (second series) questions with E. Martin Nolan

E Martin Nolan is a poet, essayist and editor. He edits interviews at The Puritan, where he’s also published numerous essays, interviews and blog posts. His essays and poems have appeared in Arc, CNQ and CV2, among others. His long, illustrated poem about Donald Trump, “Great Again,” can be found here. His non-fiction writing focuses on literature, sports and music. His first book of poems, Still Point, was published with Invisible Publishing in Fall, 2017. Learn more at emartinnolan.com.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Still Point is my first book. I don’t have to write or edit it anymore. I’m still getting used to it being done. I do have some post-book poems already out there, though. They feel different because the story told in Still Point is told now, so I’m free of it. I want to do something fun now.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I began by imitating Bob Dylan and Van Morrison lyrics in high school. But I’ve always enjoyed writing prose, and non-fiction has always been there for me. I have no clue about plot, so fiction is out. I’ve always liked the music I can make out of poetry. I was counting syllables from the beginning (while I should have been counting beats—we get there).

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

Projects are always constantly emerging, morphing or fermenting, until I decide to, and have the time to, bring them up to the front of my attention and work on them. Poetry originally comes pretty quickly, and comes when it damn well pleases. A sequence can be a steady project, and the editing stages are, like prose, about just putting in the time and hopefully working it out. Poetry can occur in increments as short as one minute. I do like to research to mine for metaphors though. This is an impossible question to answer fully, so I’ll stop now.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I start with the single unit and that usually gets worked into a larger whole. A poem usually begins with an experience I want to capture, or with an image. Sometimes something I read about can attain an experience or image.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I enjoy readings, but generally if I’m reading a poem, then it’s done. I might drop a word or two, but it’s not a part of the process. Reading aloud to myself, of course, is.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I will assume that by “theoretical concerns” you mean poem-theory stuff like formalism, experimentalism, yada-yada. “Schools” is another word for it, right? It’s impossible to not have theoretical concerns behind your writing. I know poetry through poems and their attendant theories (professed by the writers or critics later) as they were taught to me and as I sought them out. But I don’t forefront those concerns. As grist for poetry, they are usually boring. You have to be Anne Carson or something to pull off a poem about theoretical concerns.

I want beyond literature. The state of the world, and of humanity. The question of how we sustain ourselves through the current and coming global crises overshadows all. Within that, I’m most concerned with our spiritual state. Do we have it in us to rise to the occasion? Do we have the collective wisdom and strength to reverse course? Maybe history will say I’m panicking, but still these concerns make it hard to care very much about theoretical concerns. I am, however, quite happy to be proven wrong.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

It’s not about “should be” but “can be” (to quote Matthew Tierney). A writer can be anything, and writers need the freedom to be what they become. “Should” is limiting. Most writers are far more important to the larger culture as people, as citizens, than they are as writers. That said, I think that given freedom and a decent platform, a lot of writers, enough writers, will (and should) take on a role of destabilizing received perceptions and truths, and (this is the crucial, more difficult part) of forming a moral consciousness and spiritual life that audiences can share in, and grow by. Maybe it’s romantic, and fine, but art should be a vessel for our shared humanity. What else is going allow us to share the our terribly gigantic current humanity? Consumerism?

On that, I do think to matter at all a writer has to engage the reader like any other artist. The work needs to be bright, needs to be compelling, or it’s nothing and it doesn’t exist “in the larger culture.”

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Essential, if the editor is engaged (not always the case in Canlit). I’m a collaborator by nature, and the editing process is one of the rare moments when that can happen in writing.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Clarity is more complicated than obscurity.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

Poetry and non-fiction are complimentary for me. They balance each other out. Non-fiction gives me certainty, direction, purpose. Poetry lets me roam more freely.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I don’t really have one. I write when I can, and my schedule and workload is ever-changing. Summers I write more, and can get into an everyday thing. But when teaching, it’s whenever you can snatch time.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I try to remember that the world is crushingly terrifying in its immensity and capacity. That the world is also ending before our eyes. But also that we have pictures of Jupiter. Like, actual pictures from our technology, close-ups of fucking Jupiter. Who could be bored or uninspired in this world? What a time to be alive and privileged.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Fresh-cut early-summer grass. Burned-out late-summer grass. Olive oil, butter, onions, garlic.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

My own experience of the world. I think that is the most important form: the self’s original relationship to the universe. But music, especially in a rhythmic sense, is also incredibly important to my writing. For a while I’ve been steadily getting more into the natural world to gather figures to witness my feelings and theories.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I just quoted Emerson in the answer above, so he’s in there. Dionne Brand was the one who told me the thing about clarity above. The ghost of James Wright works in me. But the rappers, for all their flaws, are also super important, especially, again, for their rhythms. But it’s always gotta be mostly drawn from life outside of the work.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Write a big fat novel that gets me into Oprah’s Book Club when she’s president.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I guess my day job? Teaching. Writing isn’t an occupation for me. Though I’d probably pursue some career more seriously if writing wasn’t taking up so much time. I’d dig being a religious scholar.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

It was the thing I could do well and was intriguing to do.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

The World of Yesterday. The Shape of Water.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Not totally sure. Maybe essays on sports or music. A book of poems about the bright lights at the end of the world. What I want to do is talk some shit in poems. I want to explore poetry as venting. I also await wonderment, terror and the grotesque. Maybe.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Ryan Eckes, General Motors

we’re in a greyhound station in baltimore w/ an hour to kill, staring at the tv. cnn is in love w/ the bombing of the boston marathon, and cnn is in love w/ 165,000 new jobs, 165,000 new jobs, 165,000 new jobs. they zoom in to their analyst who’s been staring at the mayor’s face. i can see the mayor’s tears, he says, the mayor means it. he’ll make a wonderful ronald reagan some day, just as the last four presidents, just as the president today who picks up your phone—anybody there? anybody says “my dumb life” but in the station and on the bus nothing rings and nobody means a thing, so we’re a tribe. it’s communism, calm as a yawn til the next city, where we’ll be sucked out and dispersed by vacuums of identity. finally we board. the man next to me asks if i can watch his bag. sure i can. (“chase scenes”)

Philadelphia poet Ryan Eckes’ latest poetry title is General Motors (Split Lip Press, 2018), a book, according to one author bio, that is “about labor and the influence of public and private transportation on city life.” As he wrote as part of an interview forthcoming at Touch the Donkey:

I was writing poems that blur easy distinctions between “public” and “private” realms and trying to undermine the U.S. myth of rugged individualism.

Mythmaking is powerful, and the machinery that continues, relentlessly, to enforce the American mythology is quite a thing to take on. Constructed in three sections of extended prose sequences—“chase scenes,” “spurs” and “strikes”—the poems are composed through a working-class lens, writing prose poems engaged with both formal experiment and social engagement, blending research and personal knowledge of the hardscrabble industry of Philadelphia. While reminiscent of works by contemporary Vancouver poets such as Stephen Collis, Christine Leclerc and Jeff Derksen, it’s as though Eckes is actually channeling the late Nanaimo, British Columbia poet Peter Culley [see my obituary for him here], writing his Philadelphia in a similar way to how Culley wrote out his “Hammertown”: writing industry, personal history and social commentary, much of it critical. As he writes as part of the longer prose-poem “Northeast spur”:

To reduce the number of accidents, the Philadelphia Parking Authority started a “Red Light Camera Program” that issues $100-tickets for blowing a red light. The program has resulted in huge profits for a private camera company in Arizona. It has not made the city safer.

The American solution to a public problem, created by private industry, is usually to find a new way to steal from the public. Robbing your neighbor, in other words, is an American tradition, and it thrives in Northeast Philly, where people live as if their neighbors do not really exist. Believing in the American dream is a way to deny your own existence.

While General Motors might be a logical extension of considerations present in his first two poetry collections—Old News (Furniture Press, 2011) and Valu-Plus (Furniture Press, 2014) [see my review of such here]—there is something that coheres in this collection that wasn’t present before, marking a critical seriousness and lyric expansiveness that is far stronger than simply the sum of its parts. It is as though everything he’d been working on previously has come into an incredibly sharp focus. Further in his Touch the Donkey interview, Eckes writes:

I’ve always liked the idea of a book as a book—as all one piece—rather than a “collection” of standalone poems. I think of poems in relation to other poems, and in relation to non-poetic material. This is because of Philly, too. Advanced Elvis Course by CAConrad, for example, will change how you think. And becoming a poet in Philly in the 2000s, in the post-9/11 era, changed how I think. It radicalized me for sure. I learned far more about history and politics from hanging out with poets in bars than I ever did in school. That is not an exaggeration. And I think it’s because of knowing poets like CAConrad and Frank Sherlock that I so often go back to influences from the 60s-70s-80s—Amiri Baraka, Diane di Prima, Allen Ginsberg, Audre Lorde, Ammiel Alcalay, and so on.

Chaudiere Books blog : National Poetry Month begins next week!

Over at the Chaudiere Books blog, we begin our fifth annual National Poetry Month array of new poems! With new work appearing almost daily by Chaudiere authors and friends of the press alike, including Natalee Caple, K.I. Press, Amanda Earl and and and... who else? You'll just have to tune in to see!

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Alina Pleskova

Alina Pleskova is a poet, editor, Russian immigrant turned proud Philadelphian, & consummate Aquarius. Her first chapbook, What Urge Will Save Us, was published in April 2017 by Spooky Girlfriend Press. She co-edits bedfellows – a biannual print & online magazine that catalogs discussion of sex, desire, & intimacy – with Jackee Sadicario. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Elderly, Cosmonauts Avenue,  & elsewhere. You can find her on the internet at alinapleskova.com & @nahhhlina.

​1 - How did your first chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
​Okay so I know  poems as a (/in a) physical object are no more or less real than poems in any other format, but t​he chapbook​ ​was validating ​ in a way. Maybe because  I've never had big ambitions for my poetry.​ Getting my shit together at least a little, &  ​a  small press I liked a lot want ​ing​  to publish a selection of my poems, & strangers out there picking them up & reading the ​​ m made me believe in my own work more. ​ It made me want to do more & write more, too.​  I totally believe people when they say that they write for themselves first, but having readers beyond yr friends & people you know is a something-else feeling.

​O​ne thing that has shifted ​ in my work now vs. before​  is how I used to write more explicitly ​,​  & I guess diaristically about​ sex & desire (or its lack). I was cataloging ​various ​ experience ​s, letting them cascade, trying to write my way into a voice. And now the voice is a speaker who feels, to me anyway, more warm-blooded than before. I'm letting more of the world in. The poems are less insular than before.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
My answer to this changes all the time (depending on  planetary positions ​ & ​ my internal weather & interlocutor, hunger level, etc. in that moment), but it always has something to do w/ the following: early & immediate attractions to compression, musicality, wandering, Frank O'Hara.​

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I write s ​-​ o ​-o-o​  slowly ​. I'm not big on rigor or routine, but also, the poems come when they come.  Most of the time, I'm like a weird little animal scuttling around collecting bits & bobs of poem-stuff. I try to notice things, but I think things just make themselves known to me, again, in their own time.

Then I have to go back into my gmail drafts, gchat (it's google hangouts now, whatever, still gchat to me) transcript histories, phone notes, purse notebook, who knows where else, & compile it all, & connect the parts, & shape the actual poem(s). I weave other people's words (things my friends & partners & family members say, song lyrics, lines from other poems, etc.) into my poems all the time, but sometimes those things sit around for a while before I figure out where to put them.
​
My poems are pretty conversational, & they have a pretty apparent logic/flow, so maybe it doesn't seem like they take as much time to complete as they do, but maybe I could stand to be a little more disciplined & then it wouldn't be that way.  Or I'm  ​doing the  self-abnegation  ​thing here , which was on my list of shit to quit doing in 2018. But it's still early in the year- ​-​

Anyway, occasionally, an entire poem arrives in my head almost fully-formed. It feels like being momentarily possessed, or like summoning an incantation from the back of yr skull. Those moments are awesome, but rare.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
​Poems usually start w/ a line looping in my head, or something someone else says or does or writes. I don't know, it's all sort of mystical. Like, writing a poem requires me to see a certain way, but that sort of seeing is not my default mode.

Some days, I feel more tuned in than others. If poets are radios, as Jack Spicer claimed, then my antenna must be kinda busted. It isn't always picking up the poem frequencies, or they're coming in staticky.

I'm really not prolific enough to speak to the larger project questions, but I'm grateful for whatever I can get done. Sometimes it's a little less passive than that - sometimes I  actively feel around for what else to add, how to expand a piece. I like what Eileen Myles wrote about the feeling of "going out to get a poem, like hunting."
​
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
​Philly & New York both have awesome literary communities, & I attend/host/perform at readings often.  I hate the word 'networking', but readings do connect editors to writers (I coedit a mostly solicitation-based magazine, bedfellows, so I can't emphasize that enough)  ​&​ writers to each other  ​&​ to other readers, a ​&​ ​ to hosts of other events, etc. etc.

As an attendee, readings (I mean, of course there are ones that don't do anything for me, but the ones that do) are generative & inspiring & so often expose me to great work I didn't know about before.  As a reader, it helps w/ my drafting process ​.​ I get a sense of what works well ​,​ what doesn't. Sometimes a line sounds fine in my head, even when I read it out loud to myself, but that changes when it enters a room.

I've gotten used to getting up in ​front of a crowd, but I don't love it. I'm very shy by nature, but I believe in my work more than I used to & that helps. A poet friend who I respect & admire recently said that the way I read/perform my poems has changed for the better over the last few years. I'm still beaming over that.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
​I' d like to offer three (out of context, but effective) excerpts here.

Alice Notley (as quoted by Chris Kraus): "Because we​ rejected a certain kind of theoretical language, people just assumed that we were dumb."

​Eve Sedgwick: " Obsessions are the most durable form of intellectual capital ​"​

​Chris Kraus: "​ Because emotion’s just so terrifying the world refuses to believe that it can be pursued as a discipline, as form. ​"​

​Meghan Daum (on Joni Mitchell): "... if there's anything I've learned from listening to her over the years, it's that if you don't write from a place of excruciating candor, you've written nothing.​ ​"​

​Those are my concerns, or maybe all that is something like an ethos. Most of my poems have something to do w/ the speaker (well, it's me) feeling their way around the world, & reporting bac ​k, or trying to make sense of things . I write about power dynamics & what I call 'fraught intimacies' often.  T he question of how any of us figure out what we want from each other is the thing I return to over & over & over.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
​Hope this doesn't come off glib or flippant, but I don't know if "the writer" should have a particular role. Every writer has different capacities, energies, resources,  etc. It would be strange, possibly boring, maybe even dangerous if we all endeavored to occupy the same role in larger culture, which (again) means different things to different people anyway. Whose culture & which writer, I guess is what I mean.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
An editor who gets what yr trying to do & nudges further towards it is a total gift. I've worked w/ great ones in various contexts, but in terms of messing around w/ my poems before they end up anywhere, I've had the same editor for years. My friend Andrew Clark is so wonderful & has great instincts ​. He's invaluable & has​ , so far, let me get away w/ making use of his time & effort for free. (What a pal.)

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
​Frank O'Hara: "You just go on your nerve."​

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to reviews)? What do you see as the appeal?
​Everything I try to write eventually ends up as, or in, a poem. Even my TinyLetter.
​
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
In part because I have an office job (at an academic publishing company) & have very regular hours​​, & in part because I'm an air sign, I don't want more routines in my life. It would be deeply upsetting for me to have something I love & enjoy linked to a routine, which is different from a ritual.

My daily rituals include lighting a stick of palo santo or sage or lavender or incense or cedar or mugwort & ​usually ​ crying to "Silver Springs" & taking a scalding shower (sometimes the crying continues there.) This can take place in the morning or evening time.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
​Can I mention Alice Notley again? She never fails to remind me of what poetry can do, does to me, etc.​

Relatedly, it helps to just put myself in the path of other people's brilliance-- whether it's through soliciting/reading work for bedfellows, or my new project, Sitting Room Series, a video reading series.​ Or going through the bookstore, or seeing what people are reading/sharing on my Twitter feed, etc. etc.

It also helps to get away from words entirely & listen to music, or look at visual art, or go for a long ass walk. Being a stoned flaneuse occasionally results in me spacing out & like, buying 4 different types of hummus at Aldi, but other times it leads to something, even if I'm not writing in that moment.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
​Childhood: boiled cabbage, must, cedar.

Now/my current apartment: palo santo, lavender, weed, garlic (I put it ​i​ n everything I cook.)

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
​Hell yes. Currently, these include: Louise Burgeois' art, tunneling very deep into a Joni Mitchell hole (especially Court and Spark​ ), the poet Gala Mukomolova's super sharp & lovely horoscopes​ at NYLON, the 34 trolley.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
​Alice Notley, Diane di Prima, Ariana Reines, June Jordan,​ Adrienne Rich, ​Anne Boyer, ​ Clarice Lispector, Roberto Bolaño, ​ CAConrad,​  Hoa Nguy​en.  ​Each of them ​is  a master class on like, a craft level, but that's not even what I mean. I'd follow their words anywhere.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
​Go to Portugal, try ayahuasca​, embarrass myself for love. It's possible all three could happen at the same time??​ ​

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I love the thought of, but wholly can't relate to, writing poetry as a full-time job. Is that a thing for people w/o inherited $$$?

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Ballet & figure skating gave me tendinitis & fucked up my ankles, but poetry has proven less physically onerous.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
​Alli Warren's I ​Love It Though. I won't shut up about how good it is. The last great film I saw was Get Out.

I wanted to like Lady Bird more, but will refrain from getting started on that here.

20 - What are you currently working on? ​​
Writing my way back into writing, which right now actually mostly means reading a bunch & working on other projects until I feel like writing again. I want to expand my chapbook, What Urge Will Save Us, into a full-length (& while I'm at it maybe come up w/ a title of my own instead of stealing from Jenny Holzer--)

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Queen Mob's Teahouse: Heather Sweeney interviews J’Lyn Chapman

As my tenure as interviews editor at Queen Mob's Teahouse continues, the thirty-seventh interview is now online: Heather Sweeney's interview with J’Lyn Chapman. Other interviews from my tenure include: an interview with poet, curator and art critic Gil McElroy, conducted by Ottawa poet Roland Prevost, an interview with Toronto poet Jacqueline Valencia, conducted by Lyndsay Kirkham, an interview with Drew Shannon and Nathan Page, also conducted by Lyndsay Kirkham, an interview with Ann Tweedy conducted by Mary Kasimor, an interview with Katherine Osborne, conducted by Niina Pollari, an interview with Catch Business, conducted by Jon-Michael Frank, a conversation between Vanesa Pacheco and T.A. Noonan, "On Translation and Erasure," existing as an extension of Jessica Smith's The Women in Visual Poetry: The Bechdel Test, produced via Essay Press, Five questions for Sara Uribe and John Pluecker about Antígona González by David Buuck (translated by John Pluecker),"overflow: poetry, performance, technology, ancestry": kaie kellough in correspondence with Eric Schmaltz, Mary Kasimor's interview with George Farrah, Brad Casey interviewed byEmilie Lafleur, David Buuck interviews John Chávez about Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing, Ben Fama interviews Abraham Adams, Tender and Tough: Letters as Questions as Letters: Cheena Marie Lo, Tessa Micaela and Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Kristjana Gunnars’ interview with Thistledown Press author Anne Campbell, Timothy Dyke’s interview with Hawai’i poet Jaimie Gusman, Hailey Higdon's interview with Joanne Kyger, Stephanie Kaylor's interview with Kenyatta JP Garcia, Jaimie Gusman’s interview with Timothy Dyke,Sarah Rockx interviews Gary Barwin, Megan Arden Gallant's interview with Diane Schoemperlen, Andrew Power interviews Lauren B. Davis, Chris Lawrence interviews Jonathan Ball, Adam Novak interviews Tom Stern, Eli Willms interviews Gregory Betts and Jeremy Luke Hill interviews Kasia Jaronczyk, Karen Smythe and Greg Rhyno, Chris Muravez interviews Ithica, NY poet Marty Cain, and Róise Nic an Bheatha interviews Kathryn MacLeod.

Further interviews I've conducted myself over at Queen Mob's Teahouse include: City of Ottawa Poet Laureate JustJamaal The Poet, Geoffrey Young, Claire Freeman-Fawcett on Spread Letter, Stephanie Bolster on Three Bloody Words, Claire Farley on Canthius, Dale Smith on Slow Poetry in America, Allison Green, Meredith Quartermain, Andy Weaver, N.W Lea and Rachel Loden.

If you are interested in sending a pitch for an interview my way, check out my "about submissions" write-up at Queen Mob's; you can contact me via rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com

above/ground press gets some love in the globe and mail!

In case you didn't catch, Toronto writer, artist and filmmaker R.M. Vaughan was good enough to pitch and write a short piece for The Globe and Mail on above/ground press' twenty-fifth anniversary! Thanks so much! You can see the original article (that appeared online on Tuesday, and in print in Saturday's paper) online here.


And, fyi, while above/ground press might be nearing 900 publications, that number might not be achieved until Christmas, or even the new year (we're in the 860 range right now; check the sidebar for a list of names and links to new titles from Steve McCaffery, Sara Renee Marshall, Alice Notley, Gary Barwin and tons of others, including a long list of forthcoming). But that's okay. (and you know I'm still willing to backdate 2018 subscriptions to January first, right?)

Vaughan is also the author of two publications through above/ground press, including half of issue #8 (with Judith Fitzgerald) of the long poem magazine STANZAS, with his poem “HOW TO SPEND MOST OF YOUR TIME ALONE AND STILL WRITE CONVINCINGLY ABOUT SEX” (May 28, 1996) and the small chapbook 14 Reasons Not To Eat Potato Chips On Church Street (April, 1999).

Ottawa’s Above/Ground Press marks 25th anniversary and 900th publication

R.M. VAUGHAN
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL

A lot can happen in 25 years. Ours are busy times. And then, there’s publisher rob mclennan.

The Ottawa writer, himself the author of 30 plus books of poetry and fiction, runs Above/Ground Press, a micropress specializing in chapbooks, broadsheets, quarterlies and zines. This year marks Above/Ground’s 25th anniversary – and it’s close to prepping its 900th publication.

900th. The 1000th is due in the fall. We may need a new definition of the word busy.

When asked about recent Above/Ground publications, mclennan responds by sending a box crammed with 20 new titles, including works by Natalee Caple, Gary Barwin, Joe Blades and Stephanie Bolster, as well as several issues of Touch the Donkey, a poetry magazine similarly stuffed with new works.

How does he do it? Perhaps the larger question is why does he do it?

mclennan seems surprised by the numbers himself.

“Odd to think that my ‘forthcoming’ list is larger than most chapbook presses’ entire publishing catalogues. I’ve been doing it for so long that it is simply a part of my practice. And it’s bloody good fun. I told myself years ago, that if I stop having fun doing something, I should no longer do it, and now both Above/Ground press and my reading series, The Factory Reading Series, are 25 years old. The Ottawa Small Press Book Fair turns 25 in fall, 2019.”

“I get to spend my days writing and thinking and reading (in between the requirements of a household and two small children); how could that not be seen as the most glorious fun possible?”

Above/Ground is funded by a devoted subscription base, people who “want everything the press makes in a calendar year,” mclennan tells me, plus online sales and book-fair sales. Above/Ground also swaps works with micropresses around the world.

“I didn’t get into small publishing because I like math,” mclennan says.

But the actual labour? It must be exhausting.

mclennan shrugs off the question. “I fold and staple in front of the television during evenings, and have for the whole run of the press. Folding and stapling I can do as part of my evening not-writing downtime. I’m currently on my third long-arm stapler over the 25 years of the press! I’ve most likely worn off my fingerprints by now.”

Being a publisher and a writer is tricky in Canada. Being a self-publisher and writer even more so (mclennan contributes to various Above/Ground titles occasionally and is of course the main editor). Canadian publishing, and arts in general, prefers clear divisions between creators and managers, makers and gate-minders. Again, mclennan is not fussed by such distinctions.

“I grew up on a farm, so I was raised with the idea that one exists in a community in which we all have different things we can do for the group. This is what I can do, so I try to do it for as many writers that appeal to me as possible.”

But mclennan is far from naive about the business – and anxieties – of publishing while writing.

“I’ve realized that those who are seriously interested in being ‘career’ poets might initially be interested in what I’m doing, but very quickly move on. I’ve had multiple young poets over the years realize that there isn’t really anything I can do for their career, so I tend to get ignored, which I’m quite okay with.”

“Those that do love the [micropress chapbook] format, and see the format as simply a means to an end (i.e. getting the work distributed) are the ones that tend to stick around. They’re my people.”