Ben Robinson is a poet, musician and librarian. His first book, The Book of Benjamin, an essay on naming, birth, and grief was published by Palimpsest Press in 2023. His poetry collection, As Is, was published by ARP Books in September 2024. He has only ever lived in Hamilton, Ontario on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Mississaugas. You can find him online at benrobinson.work.
1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first chapbook helped me meet poets. It took this thing—poetry—that I was spending an increasing amount of time thinking about, and gave me a way to connect with like-minded folks through reading and mailing and editing and exchanging.
My first book was maybe an extension of this, but also its opposite. For all of the grief about the decline of the book, I think there’s still a certain amount of cultural capital attached to the idea of having published a book, such that my first one brought me back into contact, even briefly, with old neighbours, former classmates, friends from out of the country, etc.
As for how my most recent book, As Is, compares to the earlier work, I think there are common concerns around closely investigating inherited pieces of my identity, like my name, my relationship to Christianity, or my hometown, and trying to come to both a deeper understanding of the way these forces have shaped me, and also how I might want to relate to them in the future. That sounds somewhat individualistic, but I hope these reflections also scale up, that they might contribute to broader conversations.
I think As Is differs from my past work in that it’s perhaps the most explicitly political. Perhaps that’s because it’s about place and, while I share other aspects of my identity, the communal aspect is undeniable when thinking about a city.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I’m not sure that I did come to poetry first. I used to write short fiction but it never felt quite right. I took a lot of my early work in many genres to the various writers-in-residence at the Hamilton Public Library. One WiR that I took stories to helped me, in maybe an inadvertent way, to see that I didn’t really care about the rules of fiction, or at least conventional fiction. I would bring in a story and she would ask these questions about plot and character development that I had no clue about and ultimately wasn’t interested in. I’d say that I came to poetry because of its comparative openness. I’m not always sure that what I write are 100% poems, but there seems to be a higher tolerance for divergence in the poetry world.
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’m a real notebook writer. The poems often come when I find the connection between a couple of images or lines in my notes, when it feels like there’s a charge, like there’s something that merits exploring. Sometimes it takes a while to find exactly why I’m drawn to a line or how it might be used, but once I find that connection, the poem tends to emerge quickly as I find it difficult to think about much else in the meantime.
Lately, I’ve been trying to keep my drafts unsettled for as long as possible. I often find it hard to get back to the generative space with a piece once I’ve gone into editing mode, so I’ve been letting my poems stay unfinished for as long as possible, giving them time to morph and stretch.
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?
A bit of both, I think. I wrapped up writing As Is at the start of 2023 and I wasn’t sure what would be next. I didn’t write any new poems for almost a year, and when the new ones did come, I didn’t immediately see what the connections were, but it’s exciting to watch the themes slowly emerge and start to coalesce; there's something akin to the way a poem reveals itself in the writing that can also happen with a collection, I think.
The first new poems I wrote were about my experience of fatherhood and then, seemingly out of nowhere, I wrote a couple of poems about bad advice I’d received in my life, almost exclusively from men. While the connection might seem obvious now, at the time I wasn’t convinced these two sets of poems were part of the same project. I’m trying to increase my tolerance for that divergence, trusting that the variety will ultimately make for a more interesting and less predictable collection as opposed to working backward from a theme and intentionally writing poems on particular subjects.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I think it depends when you ask me. On the day of a reading, I might say that they’re counter to my process because I find the anticipation kind of immobilizing, whereas once I’m about two minutes into a reading or after, I’d probably say they’re part of the process. It’s great to meet other poets and readers of poetry, to share the poems I’ve been tinkering with in solitude, but it takes a lot out of me. Maybe the nerves will go away one day, but they haven’t yet. Now I just know to expect them and keep going.
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 find this kind of question hard to answer. I did an interview with Kevin Heslop for my last book and it felt like a kind of creative therapy—he had such great language for the connections between my projects that I’m not all that conscious of. Each project has its particular theoretical concerns, but the broader ones are more elusive. I guess I’m interested in the big questions: How should we live? What to do with life’s many coincidences and contradictions?
I think I’m more concerned with the effect of my writing. The books that I love feel essential, both as pieces of writing, and also to my life in general; they keep me attuned to the many nuances of experience that tend to get flattened out in daily living. I read a blurb once that talked about “obliterating cliche” [Anne Boyer, The Undying] which I like—to take the old standards (life, death, love, home, family, etc.) and find some small particularity that might make them feel urgent again.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I’m not sure that I operate in the larger culture, but I’m okay with small. The writers I respect, even in their limited and local ways, are doing the difficult work of thinking deeply, of escaping the rut of what has already been thought, or written down, or is Googleable and are revealing how much more complex life is out beyond the bounds of the feasible, the realistic or the expedient.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Yes, certainly both. I’ve tried to get better at emotionally preparing myself for editing, to resist defensiveness. My default position tends to be either wholesale acceptance or rejection of suggestions, but I’ve been getting better at slowing down and evaluating edits individually.
Lately, I’ve had the opportunity to work with some great editors (as well as poets in their own rights) like Karen Solie and Annick MacAskill. My work is much stronger for their engagements with it, but, despite the fact that they are both unfailingly lovely people, it’s a vulnerable process for me. Ultimately, I try to remind myself that there are plenty of people in my life (thankfully) that I could go to for simple praise, to tell me that the poems are “good,” and while praise is certainly nice and, to an extent, necessary, constructive and insightful feedback is so much harder to come by and is a real gift that ought to be treated as such.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Put the problem into the poem - Robert Hass. This one works for both writing and life, I think.
Sometimes I’ll make lists of my worries about a given piece, about what might be missing, about how it might be misread. Some of these worries just need to be written down and then moved on from, others help reveal what might be missing in the project. When I was writing “Between the Lakes” which is a long poem that threads throughout As Is, I was concerned that the poem, which is trying to engage with the land, was doing so largely from within the confines of a car which was of course actively degrading that same land. After reading Gabriel Guddings' Rhode Island Notebook where he obsessively lists his mileage and direction of travel, I realized that I needed to address this tension in the poem and so, in the final version, I included moments where the smeared windshield, or the gas station—the material conditions of the poem’s construction—are visible and I think the piece is stronger for it.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to reviews to music)? What do you see as the appeal?
I don’t think of the transitions in terms of ease or difficulty. As much as I love poetry, there are only so many hours I can spend with it in a given day, and when I reach that saturation point, it’s not easy or difficult to transition, just necessary. They are all pursuits that I enjoy and they certainly feed one another, but I move between them in the same way that I might leave off writing a poem to ride my bike, or make dinner: because I think it’s important and valuable to fill a life with many different endeavours.
The reviews or interviews are a bit more related, but I think they started as, and continue to be, a natural outflow of my reading practice, of trying to think deeply about poetry and then wanting to offer some of that time and effort to others. They are another way to participate in a literary community, to escape the limits of introversion and ask brilliant people about their practice in a structured environment that also hopefully serves to bring more readers to work that I think is useful or excellent or interesting.
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?
My routine has shifted a lot lately. Right now, with it being summer and having both my sons home all the time, my routine is no routine—writing a bit on the bus to work, in the back room of the library on my lunch hour, at the kitchen counter while the little one naps and the big one watches his shows, in the rare moments where the boys play quietly together and I try to stay as still as possible, so as not to disrupt them.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Like many, I turn back to reading. I go back to the books that have resonated with me or go looking for something new that will show me fresh possibilities. I ride my bike, which seems to open up a less conscious part of my brain that is capable of quickly solving problems I’ve been fussing with for hours.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I have a poor sense of smell, to be honest. We have a lilac bush in the yard and my wife loves lilacs so maybe that? My kids love bananas, or at least the first two bites of a banana, so perhaps the remaining 80% of the banana that is then abandoned beneath the couch or somewhere similarly out of the way. Flowers and decaying fruit, like a Caravaggio. There are many things I like about our house, but its “fragrance” isn’t always top of the list.
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?
Well for As Is, the book came from historical plaques, local newspapers, neighbourhood watch Facebook groups, archives, old maps, Google Maps, the land itself, by-laws, lawn signs, murals, government forms, realtor fliers, and road signs.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
The aforementioned Gabriel Gudding’s Rhode Island Notebook, C.D. Wright, Juliana Spahr’s Well Then There Now, Solmaz Sharif’s Look, Ari Banias’s A Symmetry, Layli Long Soldier’s “38,” Doug Williams’s Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg, Catherine Venable Moore’s introduction to Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, Susan Howe, bpNichol’s The Martyrology Book 5, Greg Curnoe’s Deeds/Abstracts, Emma Healey’s “N12”, and Zane Koss’s Harbour Grids.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Escape monolingualism.
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?
My first thoughts were all writer-adjacent: journalist, podcaster, documentarian.
There was a time when I wanted to be a recording engineer. I find cutting audio meditative.
Increasingly, I’m fascinated by photography, but I don’t imagine the career prospects are much better than poetry.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Probably some mix of the low barrier to entry, a preference toward working alone, being content to sit in one place for long periods of time, and an inability to move on from the structure of school.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I loved Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles. The music in her poems is blaring and raucous. And she went so far into the underworld for this one, at once viscerally engaging with the unimaginable heartbreak of losing a newborn but also venturing off into all the other realms where poets dwell. It’s both mythic and materialist in the best way.
As for movies, those seem to be the one art form that I haven’t figured out how to fit into life as a parent without splitting a 2-hour film across four sittings. I have a Google spreadsheet of Movies to Watch, like a 2005 version of Letterboxd, which I have not made much progress on lately. The odd time when my family goes away without me, I watch as many movies as I can to make up for it. Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up was a highlight of my last binge—a moving but unassuming look at how art comes from, and is also thwarted by, daily life. Some great weirdos in it, dysfunctional family, but gentle and nearly plotless like many of my favourites.
20 - What are you currently working on?
As I mentioned above, I’m working on a collection of poems that seems to be focused on fatherhood. I have two young boys who (often delightfully) take up much of my time and energy, so like Hass says, I am putting the problem into the poem, trying to engage with an experience that is often either absent from literature or overly sentimentalized, to document some of the amazing thinking that children do.
