Carl Watts reviews my Mansfield Press poetry title, A halt, which is empty (2019) for Canadian Literature

I am incredibly grateful for Carl Watts’ attention recently, after he reviewed my Mansfield Press poetry title, A halt, which is empty (2019) alongside Mark Laba’s The Inflatable Life (Anvil Press, 2019) over at Canadian Literature. Thanks so much!

This is actually the fifth review of the book (which makes me feel even luckier, honestly), after Kim Fahner discussed same for Arc Poetry Magazine, Jessica Drake-Thomas reviewed it over at her site, Jonathan Ball reviewed it in the Winnipeg Free Press, and Mary Kasimor reviewed the same at Otoliths. You can see the original review here.

There are certainly options for you to order directly from the publisher, or through whichever of your local bookstores are doing delivery, I'm sure, although I can mail you a signed one, if ever such appeals ($19 Canadian / add $2 for US orders; add $5 for international orders; send me an email: rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com).

As Watts' review of the collection reads:

Fixtures in a poetry community, even those who are notably prolific, can sometimes be accounted for without much trouble. But figures whose writings span multiple genres, which may come from the smallest of small presses or in otherwise ephemeral formats, can be harder to get a handle on. Any attempt to make sense of such writers, especially in a brief review, seems preposterous.

And yet, a reviewer taking on a new book by rob mclennan may note that his sprawling body of work has been shifting toward producing a somewhat less conventional form of lyric. A halt, which is empty bears out this development; its title comes from a passage by Claude Royet-Journoud that associates writing with the perception of movement. The opening poem’s first section is caught up in this crudely physical act of stopping and noticing; it relies on short “sentences,” frequently of two words (“Uninterrupted, swallow. Machines, recirculate. Relieve. We watch for symptoms, shallow”), distilling into particles everyday processes that clunk with their materiality.

But passages like “[a] mass of modern bus and antiquated streetcar. The power of an average. Slanting, ruin” are also typical mclennan in their alternately clattering and airy impressions of Ottawa. Much of the book strikes this balance between experimental conceit and familiar authorial voice. The epigraph to “Corporation of snow” disputes the colonial “Eskimo words for snow” myth; it asks whether any writing can be truly novel—“[p]articles, we designate. A show of hands. More sentiment / than sediment”—while again simplifying and physicalizing its conceit.

“Birthday poem for Gwendolyn Guth” combines the above techniques with apostrophe: “You turn, you turn, // remark, refrain.” Such moments depict a group of creative people working in loose association with one another, creating a picture of mclennan as publisher of broadsides and of work by possible up-and-comers—a writer’s writer’s writer whose network defines his past and pervades his present as he brings others into the fold, his poetics embodied as they dilate within recognizable limits.

poem + corresponding q+a at Canadian Literature,

I have a relatively new poem and corresponding short interview now posted online at Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review. Much thanks!

Peter Culley, Parkway

I abandon my self

to a blushing

of precise boundaries,

like where a squirrel would

step up to snap the branch

back fast enough

to ride the torque all the way back,

a walnut under each arm –

getaway with intent to spring

rather than English leave.

It’s why I wear my

shirts backwards

& my jacket is the color

of the sky.

I’d abandon everything

for a plush spring

with a fat calendar,

every day ringing a bell

every day floating

in a penumbra of sound

echolocalic lenses unfurling

coiled batwings flap

as I velociraptor

among rainy streets & thread

on a knotted length of fishing line

pinpricks of orange brick

mixed with holiday sweat.

You abandon yourself

to the runnels & channels

of a new boundary,

ankle-deep sliding

thick transparency mirroring

even when disrupted

the thick marine light

located by inference

the waggle of a last leaf &

two minutes of leaping edit

is a spray of divided attention,

your lupine shoulder dropping

hot science on cold water. (“A Letter to Hammertown”)

The concluding volume in Nanaimo, British Columbia poet Peter Culley’s “Hammertown” trilogy is Parkway (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2013), following the volumes Hammertown (New Star Books, 2003) and The Age of Briggs and Stratton (New Star Books, 2008). As the back cover of Parkway tells us, “‘Hammertown’ is French Oulipo writer George Perec’s invention, an imaginary finishing port on Vancouver Island that Peter Culley recognized as his own home town of Nanaimo.” In this alone, it would seem as though Culley’s “Hammertown” works to be a blending of what he might know of Nanaimo (where the author has lived for most of his life), and what he recognizes in Perec’s articulation of the fictional fishing port. In his review of the original Hammertown in Canadian Literature (#184; spring2005), critic Ian Rae writes:

This industry is responsible for the “pulpy sulphur rain” falling on the hometown of Nanaimo poet and art critic Peter Culley. Inspired by a reference to a village on Vancouver Island in George Perec’s Life A User’s Manual, Culley imagines in Hammertown how Nanaimo might have appeared to the Oulipo poet. Culley does not paint a realist portrait, but rather seeks to capture “the syntax of place” as Perec might have perceived it. I doubt that the syntax of either Paris or Hammertown compels a farmer to remark that “cattle from untasted fields do / bitterly return,” but overall the collection provides some interesting interpretative challenges. Given the Perec epigram, one hunts for acrostic-telestics, hidden algorithms, omitted letters of the alphabet, or some guiding principle for the shifting subject matter. For example, a third of the collection consists of sequences of seven-line stanzas, each containing roughly seven beats per line. This form conveys a sense of rhythm and looks very nice on the page, but in what else the poems cohere I have no idea. Culley, like Laba, hopes that the tactility of words and the delirious struggle of the mind to cope with incessant change are pleasure enough. One may wish to worship with Culley on the “prayer-rug of faded beach,” but he no sooner introduces this rug than he pulls it out from under the reader. Dizzy and confused, the reader lands in a world where “speech or its opposite / flutters the blinds / at the moment of sleep.” In short bursts this dizziness is quiet pleasing, but longer episodes induce sleep after all.

Parkway contains a curious range of poetic responses, including poems after Wallace Stevens (“Cruel Summer”), for Kevin Davies (“Pause Button”), for Bernadette Mayer (“November Day”), for Bernd Heinrich (“North by Northwest”), for Theo Parrish (“Ugly Edit”), for Lary Bremner (“Five North Vancouver Trees”), for Maxine Gadd (“MAX POWER for Maxine Gadd”), for George Stanley (“Inland Empire”), and in memoriam Jonathan Williams and Gerry Gilbert (“Sampler”), all of which play off phrases, lines, titles or structures of those he has dedicated the individual poems to. Throughout the collection, Culley acknowledges industry, personal history, social commentary and the eco-poetic, as he opens the poem “Sampler” with a mention of “The Rural Parkway – Wooded / is characterized as / the ‘cut through the forest’ / quality created by / the regularity of the forest edge / and by the relative closeness / of the forest to the roadway.” The third of the eleven-section poem reads:

A newly formatted

raven’s tongue

pops digitally out & in

of trombone beak

Texas jug band style

but overhead no newscrawl

no basslines from inland terraces

or hoots from hominid heights,

offroad daytrippers drop

off arbutus cloudtops

badger into a crevasse

midwestern cushion full stop tree

bent under a towhee

the tread of a groundwater smeller

rumbles through the cellar.

Nearly in point-form, Culley articulates his hybrid, “Hammertown,” writing out a space created fiction, imagination, history and memory, and one that incorporates numerous threads and articulations from other writing. The book includes a cover photo by the author, the piece “Angelus Novus (for EF),” of what appears to be fragments of discarded/found materials. In Parkway, Culley blends and weaves his poems from similar materials, and manages to create something part memoir, part city-biography and part myth. Whether taken as a single work, or trilogy as a whole, the project is fascinating, and the work shimmers in and out of focus like a shifting photograph. Peter Culley has long held an intriguing position in Canadian writing, and the press release describes him as a “Kootenay School of Writing hang-around in the 1980s,” allowing him a lengthy period of being known for his obscurity, and possibly better known by name than his actual writing. For example: I’ve known of his name for years, but haven’t a clue what kind of work he doing before this particular trilogy, and can only hope that the publication of the third book in his “Hammertown” allows his work to gain a wider audience. I’m curious to see where his writing will go next.

my second novel, missing persons (2009), reviewed in Canadian Literature

Reviewer Gordon Bölling was good enough to discuss my second novel, missing persons (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2009) in a kind and generous review over at Canadian Literature (even though I think he gives too much away; and why does he insist on upper-casing my name?). Given that this is only the second review I'm aware of (after Cassie Leigh was good enough to discuss it) I appreciate the attention.

He reviews the book alongside Steven Heighton's The Dead Are More Visible: Stories (Knopf Canada) and Dan Vyleta's The Quiet Twin (HarperCollins). See the original review here, and the post I wrote on the novel he mentions, here.

Canadian prairie literature is alive and well. Recent years have seen the publication of a number of such well-received novels as Dianne Warren’s Cool Water and Guy Vanderhaeghe’s A Good Man. Warren’s first novel won the 2010 Governor General’s Award for fiction, while Vanderhaeghe’s most recent novel rounds off his highly acclaimed frontier trilogy. Rob McLennan’s Missing Persons has yet to receive the same degree of attention as the above-mentioned books. Nonetheless the poetic novel is a welcome addition to the body of Canadian prairie fiction. In comparison to both, Cool Water and A Good Man, Missing Persons is a rather slim, fragmentary, and open-ended novel. This may be due to the fact that Missing Persons did not start out as a novel in its own right. In a blog post, McLennan states that he began Missing Persons as a kind of character’s background story for another novel that he intended to write but never finished. Still, Missing Persons is far more than a mere by-product. McLennan’s novel is anything but a linear and straightforward narrative. It comprises a three-page preface and a total of 55 chapters, some of which consist of a single paragraph, and some of which are merely half a page long: "The entire book is a novel in the form of variations. The individual parts follow each other like individual stretches of a journey leading toward a theme, a thought, a single situation, the sense of which fades into the distance." This quotation from Milan Kundera’s 1979 novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting serves McLennan as a first epigraph and alerts readers to what lies in store on the pages ahead. In one instance, an entire chapter consists of a single sentence: "Alberta was drowning in her own skin." Alberta is Alberta Jonas, the novel’s teenage protagonist. Newly arrived immigrants from Eastern Europe, Alberta’s parents name their first child after the Canadian province in which they intend to live: "Her parents were very old, born and married to that place before. The old country. A fiction to her, but a story told with every breath. . . . Tales of Baba Yaga. Alberta, named for their destination, born en route. Her parents arriving on New World soil and giving her breath on a Montreal shore. Two weeks before they moved again." Ironically enough, the Jonas family never makes it as far west as Alberta and settles on the Saskatchewan prairies instead. Missing Persons chronicles Alberta’s life from the age of fourteen to the age of sixteen. In the novel’s first chapter, we encounter Alberta on the day of her father’s funeral. A car accident leaves Alberta, her younger brother Paul, and her mother Emma without a father and husband. At the end of the novel a second death occurs which leads Alberta to abandon the Canadian prairie and seek her fortune elsewhere. The decision to leave ultimately provides Alberta with a larger perspective and a new sense of possibility: "Her map was larger, her geography patently new. She was no longer lost, the rest of the country flat ahead of her in all directions. She took a first step. She could begin." Missing Persons is a nuanced portrait of a vulnerable yet courageous teenage girl. It is also a study of life on the Canadian prairie: "Wind swirling dusty snow. A horizon without end." Images such as these are, of course, reminiscent of the writings of Sinclair Ross and other classic prairie authors. "This isn’t much of a story," Mary, Alberta’s best friend, at one point remarks. Readers of Rob McLennan’s Missing Persons will not interpret this observation as a self-reflexive comment.

Matthew Hall reviews A (short) history of l. (BuschekBooks) in Canadian Literature

Matthew Hall was good enough to review A (short) history of l. (BuschekBooks, 2011) in Canadian Literature, alongside recent titles by Stan Rogal and Erin Moure (see the full review here). Thanks, Matthew Hall! Thanks, Canadian Literature!

"I burn at both ends" seems a telling understatement from mclennan’s latest book, A (short) history of l, a series of love poems based on the ghazal. mclennan’s investigation into the history of love and the capacity of the individual to sustain and grow through love’s negotiations and trials is uniquely tied to the lyric. Early on, he underscores the enquiry of the book:

    I am interested in how lyricism
    bonds itself to our molecules.
    the insistence of light against
    insistence of dark.

mclennan’s poems work to explore the particularity of the moments in which the other becomes a part of oneself. "dictionary of touch" is one of the most profoundly lyrical and cadenced works in the collection, with an estranged sense of the capacity of love to open expansively to the meaning of small gestures. Through this poem, the idea of reciprocity and mutual understanding is incited:

    … we are shades
    of meaning, shadowing
    the other. the dictionary
    useless, for what
    we have figured out. what
    we already know.

The disparity between what we have learned and what we have to learn is part of the processional core of mclennan’s new book, an avid exploration of the materials, the moments, the changes we undergo through love. mclennan’s style courses through the collection; the thematic energy which he devotes to his poetic is exceedingly renewing. The poems are referential, meditative spaces in which the history of love is imagined through literary antecedents, subjective presences, and technological complexes, and pits mclennan’s love as testament to his development, as personal and poetic.

a review of my poetry collection Glengarry (Talonbooks) in Canadian Literature,

Sean Braune was good enough to review my poetry collection Glengarry (Talonbooks, 2011) alongside Toronto poet Andy Weaver's second poetry collection, Gangson (NeWest Press, 2011) in the piece "Field poetics, sky blue" now online at Canadian Literature.

Call for Papers: Letters for Robert Kroetsch: A Special Issue on His Work and Influence

I wanted to become a postman
to deliver real words
to real people.

There was no one to receive
My application.
—Seed Catalogue, section 5

Robert Kroetsch (1927-2011) [photo from CKUA, "Robert Kroetsch Remembered"] had a resounding impact—wild and crazy and thoroughly Canadian prairie—as Armin Wiebe describes it. As co-founder of boundary 2 in the early 1970s he was influential in disseminating postmodern theory in North America and internationally. A prolific and funny theorist and critic, he became a major influence in Canada as he taught Creative Writing at the University of Manitoba at the same time as his own work was taught across the country. He combines a clear connection to his roots in Heisler, Alberta, with a life-affirming and intellectually challenging take on writing. Author of 9 novels, 14 volumes of poetry, and 7 books of non-fiction, Mr Canadian Postmodern has given us many lovely and treacherous words. We invite you to continue the play with word and place that he introduced to Canadian literature by submitting an essay on his work to Canadian Literature.

All submissions to Canadian Literature must be original, unpublished work. Essays should follow current MLA bibliographic format (MLA Handbook, 7th ed). Maximum word length for articles is 6500 words, which includes notes and works cited.

Submissions should be uploaded to Canadian Literature’s online submission system at http://canlitsubmit.ca by the deadline of September 1st, 2012.

Questions in advance of the deadline may be addressed to: can.lit@ubc.ca

Submission Deadline: September 1, 2012

http://canlit.ca/submissions/cfp/18