today is my fifty-sixth birthday,

and I’ve been wearing my ‘birthday boy’ pin since Monday, given I take the whole week.

Here, this annual check-in, to see where I’m at. Where was I last year? Ten years back? Where culture suggests New Year’s as the moment to collect, recollect, I’ve always done on my birthday, these fifty-six years since I first appeared at the former Grace Hospital on Wellington Street West, two blocks or so from the Carleton Tavern.

As some might know, I’ve been in the basement since the last day of August, having spent eighteen months relocating my home office from our main floor (where I’d been since we landed in our Alta Vista house, the same season our Rose was born), so our young ladies didn’t have to share a bedroom anymore. For the first three months, at least, we barely saw either of them, set behind their closed doors, in their spaces. Once made, the move felt immediately more comfortable than I might have imagined, mid-point through an essay on the trauma of the relocation, but then there simply wasn’t, and I went immediately to work (although winter and the spring thaw does make it a bit cool down in the back corner of the basement, but mother-in-law did gift a space heater, which I use when required). A much smaller space, so the bulk of the work of the move was two-fold: carving and curating a particular corner with what I would need, and attempting to not just physically move everything else, but figure out where the hell to put it (that last part is still working itself through).

We also have two new kittens over the past couple of weeks, but you already know that. This, also, a prompt for the young ladies to keep their bedroom doors open. With kittens, we actually see the young ladies more often.

I’ve been working, lately, short essays: focusing on a particular poet, a particular title, as a way through thinking on a particular form. I worked a piece on Kingston poet Joanne Page (and Sadiqa de Meijer and Bronwen Wallace etc), but evolved into a subsequent piece on the prose poem/Anne Carson’s Short Talks (1992); currently working a piece on (a particular version of) the Canadian long poem/Don McKay’s Long Sault (1975). To revisit classic works, specifically across my own reading, to see if there might be something new to learn. Not sure where I might go next (I do have some thoughts—Monty Reid, John Thompson, etc), but think I may better serve the work by focusing purely on one piece at a time. Otherwise, I recently put the project-based poetry manuscript “Fair bodies of unseen prose” to bed [I wrote on such here], having sent it out into the world to a potential publisher. I’ve also been shopping around “the genealogy book” and “the green notebook” for some months now, as well as my Covid-era essay-book, “Lecture for an Empty Room” (I’ve returned to such recently, for the purposes of revisiting/cleaning up that particular manuscript). I keep thinking non-fiction might be where I think best, especially when publishers keep saying how great the writing is in these manuscripts, but then add how they aren’t able to publish them. It makes for a frustrating process.

I’m close to also completing my further project-based poetry manuscript, “dream logic: poems from a Sunday prompt,” working weekly across the length and breadth of 2025, thanks to Benjamin Niespodziany’s “Sunday poem and prompt” substack. I’m announcing a chapbook from the same project via above/ground press a bit later this morning (the press turns thirty-three this summer; can you imagine?), in case such intrigues. I’ve been slowly working on my “Museum of Practical Things” since July [a project I wrote about over here], as well as a collaboration with Jessica Smith—“Lake Ontario.” I had a dream not long ago that she and I each wrote 20-30 page long poems on “Lake Ontario,” prompted in part via Lorine Niedecker’s “Lake Superior,” but this as a counterpoint across an international border with increased tension, thanks to that most ridiculous orange monster over there (when I first met Jessica, circa 2004, she was living in Buffalo, so the argument of us being across the same pond from each other, say). When I offered the prompt, I was very pleased Jessica agreed to work on this, as I’m always wishing to see further work by her. I am slowly inching and centimetreing along my “Lake Ontario.” It moves slower than I would prefer, but it is moving. Naturally, the pull these days is to return to fiction—whether my in-progress novel that sits between my two short story collections—On Beauty (2024) and the as-yet-unpublished “Very suddenly all at once” (or that other novel we don’t really discuss anymore, “Don Quixote”), as well as the potential for further short stories, some two years after that prior collection completed—is strong. But not yet, not yet. Finish one thought before starting another.

Mostly, the past three months (honestly, back to July, but the past few months have really ramped up) have been working on next week’s festival, our sixteenth annual VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival. I’m also working new above/ground press titles by Jennifer Baker and Misha Solomon for such, as well as a very cool reissue by Stephanie Bolster.

Otherwise, I’m reading (twice, it would seem) in Victoria, British Columbia on April 24^th via Planet Earth Poetry, and, while there, even hosting a podcast! Three weeks later, I’ll be a week at Banff Writing Studios as part of the fiftieth anniversary of the writer-in-residence program at the University of Alberta! (I was there as such in 2007-8, don’t forget). A week in the mountains, alongside ryan fitzpatrick, Fred Wah, Margaret Christakos, Daphne Marlatt, J.R. Carpenter, Thomas Wharton, Joshua Whitehead and multiple others (we’re doing at least one online reading as part of same, also; I’m sure closer to the time there will be further information/a link on that sort of thing). Naturally, I’ve already been working to produce new above/ground press chapbooks by fitzpatrick, Carpenter, Marlatt and myself for such, with possible others as well, and even an anthology through above/ground of as many participants as are willing to submit (the process is still very much in-progress). It is very exciting. What else might fifty-six bring?

Oh, and a new poetry title in June! edgeless, appearing with Caitlin Press (which includes both my elegy/sequence for Barry McKinnon, and my half of the call-and-response collaboration with Julie Carr, etc). The cover isn’t up yet (an image by our wee Aoife [above]; I’m curious to see how it comes out in the design), but the pre-order link is there. Just as the book of sequences, Snow day (2025), sits as sidecar between the book of smaller (2022) [see my write-up on such here] and the book of sentences (2025) [see my note on such here], so, too, does the book of sequences, edgeless, sit as sidecar between the book of smaller and the as-yet-unpublished third in this particular trilogy, “Autobiography.” A trilogy of five titles? Oh, how very Douglas Adams of you, sir.

new from above/ground press: Paty, Christakos, Kasimor, Robinson, Earl, Smith, Campos + Smith,

F I V E   O ’ C L O C K   O N   T H E   S H O R E
Allyson Paty
$5
See link here for more information

Retreat  Diary  2019
Margaret Christakos
$5
See link here for more information

disrobing iris
Mary Kasimor
$5
See link here for more information

TALKING GIBBERISH TO STRANGERS
Ben Robinson
$5
See link here for more information

Aftermath or Scenes of a Woman Convalescing
Amanda Earl
$5
See link here for more information

Lion’s Den, a chiasmus
Jessica Smith
$5
See link here for more information

Autobiographical Ecology
Isabel Sobral Campos
$5
See link here for more information

S i n g ... d e s p i t e
Pete Smith
$5
See link here for more information

keep an eye on the above/ground press blog for author interviews, new writing, reviews, upcoming readings and tons of other material;

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
October-December 2019
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button (above). Scroll down here to see various backlist titles (many, many things are still in print) or click on any of the extensive list of names on the sidebar.

Review copies of any title (while supplies last) also available, upon request. AND 2020 SUBSCRIPTIONS ARE TOTALLY STILL AVAILABLE!

Forthcoming 2020 chapbooks by Trish Salah, Franco Cortese, Andrew Cantrell, Ashley Yang-Thompson + Mikko Harvey, J.R. Carpenter, George Stanley, Anthony Etherin, Guy Birchard, Amanda Deutch, Melissa Eleftherion, Stan Rogal, Razielle Aigen, Rachel Kearney, Leesa Dean, Eric Baus, Zane Koss, Barry McKinnon, Ian McCulloch and Dale Tracy, as well as issues of G U E S T [a journal of guest editors] edited by Dani Spinosa and Kate Siklosi (#8) and Jenny Penberthy (#9), further issues of Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal] and maybe even a new issue of The Peter F. Yacht Club!

Just what other gloriousness might above/ground press' 27th year bring?

Jessica Smith, How to Know the Flowers

Alabama-based poet and editor Jessica Smith’s third full-length collection is How to Know the Flowers (El Paso TX: Veliz Books, 2019), a book, as the author writes in her “FOREWORD,”

[…] about trauma, sexual harassment, female friendship, grief, place, and techniques of natural dyeing. Organized in three sections, it develops from a question of “what happened?” through memory, processing, and resolution.

Because the act of recollecting occurs in time, it moves linearly, successively, as it marks time (simultaneity). But our memories do not conform to linear narratives. When I recall a birthday party from my youth, I can recall fragmentary colors, patterns, and little snippets of linear moments (she brought out the cake, he paid for the ice cream), but to pull together a story from those elements distorts the reality of my memory. To narrate the memory is to fill in the gaps. In writing fragmented narratives that do not necessarily move linearly across and down the page, I hope to preserve some of the sense that memories are shimmery, unreliable, scattered things.

How to Know the Flowers is structured as a sequence of page-length individual poems that scatter and staccato across the page. With poems dated from “9 March 2017” to “8 July 2017,” How to Know the Flowers extends her ongoing project, The Daybooks; a project that so far includes numerous chapbooks as well as her two previous full-length poetry titles: Organic Furniture Cellar (Outside Voices, 2006) [see my review of such here] and Life-List (Chax Press, 2015) [see my review of such here]. “like a storm brewing,” she writes, to open “16 March 2017,” “but with no clouds gathering [.]”

Smith’s structures of erasure and excision explore and respond to violence as a way to cut away the dross and focus, properly, on her subject matter, writing the gaps through the gaps; writing the buried strains and threads, continuing those structures throughout the collection as a way to finally rebuild out of and beyond that violence into something constructive and positive. The poems pull apart as a way to articulate, comprehend and, finally, reset. “days of reckoning,” she writes, to open “3 July 2017,” “with acceptance                                       what has been lost / my grip loosens                                      what remains       what grew / the emotional memories                 become pure fact / lose their impact [.]”

above/ground press 25th anniversary essays

I’ve started posting a series of short essays/reminiscences by a variety of authors and friends of the press to help mark the quarter century mark of above/ground press, aiming to appear on the above/ground press blog throughout 2018. 

So far, short essays have appeared by above/ground press authors

Erín Moure, Stan Rogal, Eleni Zisimatos, Derek Beaulieu and Jessica Smith, with forthcoming pieces by Gary Barwin, Amanda Earl and Jason Christie, among others. You can see links to the whole series as it develops, here. 

And of course, 2018 subscriptions (backdated to January 1^st) are still completely possible. New and forthcoming 2018 titles include chapbooks by (in reverse order): Allison Cardon, Melissa Eleftherion, Uxío Novoneyra (trans. Erín Moure), Travis Sharp, Dani Spinosa, Andrew Wessels, Stuart Kinmond / Phil Hall, Natalee Caple, Jon Boisvert, Lise Downe, Dennis Cooley, Edward Smallfield, Sean Braune, Kate Siklosi, Michael Martin Shea, Jennifer Stella, Miguel E. Ortiz Rodríguez, Sara Renee Marshall, Gary Barwin and Tom Prime, Stephanie Gray, Amish Trivedi, Stan Rogal, Eleni Zisimatos, Gary Barwin and Alice Burdick, Rachel Mindell, Adrienne Gruber, Andrew Cantrell, kevin martins mcpherson eckhoff and Anna Gurton-Wachter (as well as four issues of the quarterly Touch the Donkey, and at least one issue of The Peter F. Yacht Club).

I mean, the press produced forty chapbooks last year (roughly half by Canadian writers and the rest by American writers). Isn’t that work a mere sixty-five dollars?

Queen Mob's Teahouse: Vanesa Pacheco and T.A. Noonan : On Translation and Erasure

As my tenure as interviews editor at Queen Mob's Teahouse continues, the ninth interview is now online: a conversation between Vanesa Pacheco [picutred] 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. 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, and an interview with Catch Business, conducted by Jon-Michael Frank.

Further interviews I've conducted myself over at Queen Mob's Teahouse include conversations with Claire Farley on Canthius, Dale Smith on Slow Poetry in America, Allison Green, 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

rob mclennan : Queen Mob’s Review of 2015

I was asked to participate in “Queen Mob’s Review of 2015” over at Queen Mob’s Teahouse, in which I recommend books, chapbooks and other somesuch by Sarah Manguso, Jessica Smith, Marilyn Irwin, Rosmarie Waldrop, Phil Hall, Etgar Keret and plenty of others.

My list of 'best of' sits in a rather lengthy post alongside equivalent lists by Rauan Klassnik, Evan Tognotti, Greg Bem, S Cearley, Gideon Morrow, Eve Johnson, Reb Livingston, Nicholas Rombes, Natalia Panzer, Masha Tupitsyn, Jeremy Fernando, Allison Grimaldi-Donahue, Vladimir Savich, Legacy Russell, Scherezade Siobhan, Erik Kennedy, Menachem Feuer, Russell Bennetts and Amanda Earl.

I also have my fifth annual “‘best of’ list of Canadian poetry books” list up on the dusie blog on January 1st. Watch for it!

Jessica Smith, life-list

American poet Jessica Smith’s long-awaited second trade collection, life-list (Victoria TX: chax press, 2015), is a remarkable collection of expansive and exploded lyrics stretched and pulled apart to form staccato breaches into memory, multilinearity, meaning and language. As she explains in a recent interview posted over at Touch the Donkey: “I want to use the whole space of the page and approach it like a kind of blend between painting and poem, in that the words are usually arranged roughly left-right, top-bottom, but not entirely. I see the space of the page as already having a certain “weight,” like it’s not a blank/silent space, and that concept was molded for me by John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock and Steve McCaffery. I was also inspired, early on, by installation art, which along with sculpture is still what excites me the most: I want the audience to physically participate in the making of the object.” Structured into two sections—“observation” and “memory” (a selection of the second section published as a chapbook, here)—the poems in life-list, published a full nine years after the appearance of her Organic Furniture Cellar (Outside Voices, 2006), suggest far more might be possible, with further titles in what could simply be the opening work of something far larger. If this is Smith writing out a “life list,” how many entries might there be?

Part of what is remarkable about Smith’s work is her use of fragment and space, allowing the poems such a breadth of multiple readings and meanings, even while allowing a strong intuitive narrative grounding. There is something lovely and deceptively light in the way her poems accumulate so subtly into such hefty, serious weight, pinging across the margins of the book in ways that deserve as much to be heard aloud as experienced upon the page. Further in her Touch the Donkey interview, she responds:

I choose the page as a constraint: Often when I asked for poems for periodicals, I ask the editor about the margins, page size, and font, and then I write a poem specifically for the magazine within those constraints. When I write a larger project on my own, I choose my own visual constraints. I enjoy writing by hand on square pages, but when I transfer drafts to the computer I try to choose standard printer sizes for paper and margins and standard, readable typefaces. I am constrained by the current standards of publishing, but I choose the constraint for myself with an eye to publishing because I want a larger audience than the kind of micropublishing that non-standard pages/typefaces would require. So, yes, I sometimes feel limited by page space, but the limitation is positive. I need boundaries! It helps me concentrate on other things.

Given her use of space, it becomes nearly impossible to replicate the poems in a forum such as this, but one should attempt to read as many as possible online in other places, such as here and here and here.