Kaie Kellough, Interposition

 

beuz i can’t think

in this star-powered new conclusion

this streaming autobiographical noise

in which the protagonist

dissociates & enters

forever as a brand

 

                        & the universe rewards

w/ subscriptions & emojis

 

            i can’t think

until a re-

shaped jawline

emancipates my can-do

& i transform into the wolf

of self-motivation (“to be”)

The latest poetry title from Montreal-based “poet, fiction writer, and sound performer” Kaie Kellough is Interposition (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2026), a book that follows his Griffin Poetry Prize-winning Magnetic Equator (McClelland and Stewart, 2019) [see my review of such here]. Composed as a book-length suite in three extended, expansive, accumulative sections—“to be,” “between” and “betweens”—Kellough blends performance swirls and punctuated language to immediately establish the book’s intentions. “these words declare // who i is,” he writes, near the opening of the first section, “across all platforms [.]” There is a way Kellough’s lyric opens into critical explorations across conversational and visual space, comparable to such as the ongoing works of American poets Jessica Smith and Melissa Eleftherion, M. NourbeSe Philip’s classic Zong (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2008; Invisible Publishing, 2023) [a book I reviewed for The Antigonish Review when it was first appeared, see such reprinted here] or even New York poet Christian Schlegel’s more recent The Blackbird (Brooklyn NY: Beautiful Days Press, 2025) [see my review of such here]. There is something big and stretched in the way Kellough pulls at the lyric, a clear performance element articulating the self amid the climate crisis, data mining and culture wars, and where any individual sense of being, purpose and even reason might sit amid the chaos of all that noise, far too often presented with equal or disproportional weight.

x          never wanted but it happened in spite

of a void of am-                       bition x was raised

by arrivants to over-

come                imperium of doubt                   & do not

 

fixed caste                                heredity alterity &

non-consensual

collective consciousness           & others’ expectations

invaded x & the (“to be”)

 

Working an enormous amount of loose threads, Kellough’s book-length expanse examines and critques anxiety, achievement, culture and chaos, attempting to navigate through the bombardment and into clarity, utilizing the space of the lyric not as an end unto itself—whether witness or document—but a means through and to it.

 

(now i understand that in my poems, this                diegetic contrivance

 

                                                        when the speaker of the poem

 

                        oscillates btwn music               & matter

 

this freedom suite

 

                                    africa brass

 

this contrivance returns like a chorus –

 

 

Kaie Kellough, Magnetic Equator

From Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough comes the powerful collection Magnetic Equator (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2019), another title in the quartet of first titles from McClelland and Stewart poetry editor Dionne Brand [see my review of Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Cluster here]. Set in ten poem/sections—“kaieteur falls,” “mantra of no return,” “high school fever,” “exploding radio,” “bow,” “zero degrees,” “ghost notes,” “alterity,” “essequibo” and “the unity of worlds”—Magnetic Equator writes out a very personal journey across time, geography and culture. This is a poem, very much a singular, book-length work, that is populated, in a generative sense, by all who had come before; Kellough delves deep into sound and cadence to propel his text through a coherence of location, dislocation, immigration, longing and belonging, from South America shores to his Canadian teenaged prairie. As he writes to open the second untitled poem in the poem/section “mantra of no return”:

people arrived from portugal. people arrived from africa. people arrived from india. people arrived from england. people arrived from china. people predated arrival. people fled predation. people were arrayed. people populated. whips patterned rays into people. people arose. people rayed outward to toronto, london, boo york. people raided people. people penned the past. people roved over on planes. people talked over people. people rented places. people planted people in people. people aided plantations. people prayed.

In the poem/section “high school fever,” subtitled “nowhere, prairie,” he writes: “these were the worst years of my life. i wasn’t supposed to admit that.” Throughout the collection, Kellough excavates and investigates the materials of his own past, and the pasts that made his possible, moving through a deeply personal and intimate series of investigations, memories, joys and frustrations, many of which come with the shifts of geography and culture. He writes of between-ness, being of one place in another, and then of being of both, but somehow neither, concurrently evolving into and away from. His is a seismic lyric built on sound and memory, song, salvage, seekers of asylum and those dislocations that continue to hold. Through Magnetic Equator, Kaie Kellough lays the foundation for what it means for him to be where and who he is, exactly, now, and it is an incredible sight to behold. As a fragment of “ghost notes” reads:

i’d like to erase this poem. i’d like to erase the syntax i grew up in: the unlettered suburbs. the strip malls, the pickup trucks        the spilled asphalt, the ranchers and bungalows, the clustered skyscrapers exclaiming downtown, the futurist signifying of the calgary tower     i would leave the natural grammar: the bow river, the supple foothills that accelerate as they buckle into sawtooth peaks that scrape the big sky     i can’t erase everything, so i choose to erase myself, remove myself from the prairie come the 1980s, gulping white exhaust in the garage, or on a blurred silver greyhound     fleeing the province to vanish into anonymous eastern multitudes, a slow smudging that only a poem’s time-lapse lettering can

Queen Mob's Teahouse : kaie kellough in correspondence with Eric Schmaltz

As my tenure as interviews editor at Queen Mob's Teahouse continues, the twelfth interview is now online: "overflow: poetry, performance, technology, ancestry": kaie kellough [pictured] in correspondence with Eric Schmaltz. 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, and Five questions for Sara Uribe and John Pluecker about Antígona González by David Buuck (translated by John Pluecker).

Further interviews I've conducted myself over at Queen Mob's Teahouse include: 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

Drunken Boat blog "spotlight" series #3: Kaie Kellough

The third in my monthly "spotlight" series over at the Drunken Boat blog, featuring a new poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online: Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough. The first two in the series feature Canadian poet Amanda Earl, and American poet Elizabeth Robinson. A new post is scheduled for the first Monday of every month.

Language Matters: Interviews with 22 Quebec Poets, eds. Carolyn Marie Souaid and Endre Farkas

God knows the creative process is a mystery. To make something out of nothing, to see a world in a blank page, to hear imagined people speak, to touch things that aren’t there, to taste what is not yet baked, to speak volumes or write an image is something to wonder at, something awesome to behold. Yet these are the things that artists do every day. These are the tasks, pleasures and pains that artists, including poets, undertake. Transmitters of acts of the imagination, poets use language to make their unique works of art. But how do they do this?

            This is one of the many questions we asked Quebec’s English-language poets over the four-year lifespan of the online literary magazine that we, along with Elias Letelier, founded on June 24, 2009, Quebec’s Fête Nationale. We were curious about their process but we also wondered whether living in Quebec and writing in the language of “les autres” meant anything aesthetically, socially, culturally and politically. We had a poetic and political agenda. Poetry Quebec, or PQ, was a conscious and deliberate nod (and wink) to Quebec’s separatist party, the Parti Québécois. We wanted through our tongue-in-cheek name and motto, “Je me sousviens,” to signal that Quebec’s English-language poets are Quebec poets who were, are and will be here to remember and be remembered. The name and motto were also a manifesto of our engagement.

There is something very familiar in the framing of the new collection Language Matters: Interviews with 22 QuebecPoets, eds. Carolyn Marie Souaid and Endre Farkas (Winnipeg MB: Signature Editions, 2013). The press release begins:

Is writing in English in Quebec a political act? An act of survival? An act of defiance? An act of futility? An act of celebration? For answers to these questions, look no further than Language Matters, a series of candid interviews with some of Quebec’s – Canada’s – most interesting and innovative poets, which launched on Tuesday, September 10, 2013. These are poets who write in the dominant language of North America, but are the linguistic minority in a francophone culture – a minority within a minority. Living in the birthplace of Canadian poetry that gave rise to A.M. Klein, F.R. Scott, Louis Dudek, Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen, how do these poets view themselves and their already marginalized art?

There is something familiar here, and even curious: but for the date mentioned within, this blurb could easily be included on the back cover of a similar collection of essays twenty, or even forty years earlier. Have the questions really not changed during that period (or for that matter, the poets one might cite as precursors?)? As someone who grew up just on the other side of the Quebec border, I’ve a curiosity about such questions of landscape and geography, and wonder if there should be further questions in other regions that should also be repeated to the writers within, to allow a different perspective on other types of geographies, their politics, language and considerations of local space. Over the years, co-editor Endre Farkas has worked tirelessly to promote, encourage and explore English-language poetry in Montreal specifically and Quebec and the rest of Canada generally, through his work as one of the original Vehicule Poets in the 1970s (the group that helped give rise to Vehicule Press, where he was one of the founding editors) to later founding The Muses’ Company in 1980, to editing, co-editing and/or contributing to anthologies such as 10 Montreal Poets at the Cegeps (Montreal QC: Delta, 1975), Montreal English Poetry of the Seventies (Montreal QC: Vehicule press, 1977), Vehicule Poets (Montreal QC: Maker Press, 1979), CrossCut: Contemporary English Quebec Poetry (Vehicule Press, 1982), Canadian Poetry Now (Toronto ON: Anansi, 1984), Voix Off (Toronto ON: Guernica, 1985), The Other Language: English Poetry of Montreal (The Muses’ Co., 1989) and Quebec Suite: Poems for and about Quebec (Winnipeg MB: The Muses’ Co., 1998). Farkas has spent decades working as an English-language poet in a geography and political landscape where he has been very much part of the minority, and through such, his efforts have allowed certain writers to become known and even flourish where they might not have otherwise had the same opportunities. But the question of the book becomes: have the questions one poses to writers in such a landscape really not changed over the years? It’s as though the framing of the collection doesn’t give nearly enough credit to the scope of the book’s content, and the engagement each author has with questions goes far beyond those suggested on the cover. When asked “Would you say that writing in English in Quebec [is] a political act?” in her interview, Erin Moure answers:

Not necessarily. Writing is always a political act, of course. Writing in English is not devoid of politics, for sure, in terms of the conditions of production and reception for that hegemonic language in the world. Writing in English in Quebec is also subject to conditions of writing in a society that speaks French. So there are political consequences, and social consequences, to writing in English in Quebec. Yet the act of writing in English, picking up a pen and writing, is not necessarily a “political act” for me, who grew up in English in Alberta. The act of writing in English and including French directly in the poem is a political act, though. The act of writing and speaking in Galician is a political act.

Originally conducted to be posted on their online Poetry Quebec (a website that arrived with much enthusiasm, but seems to have disappeared), the collection includes a selection of a series of interviews conducted over four years with poets Stephanie Bolster, Mark Abley, Erin Moure, David McGimpsey, Mary di Michele, Gabe Foreman, Catherine Kidd, Richard Sommer, Maxianne Berger, Steve Luxton, Robyn Sarah, Mahamud Siad Togane, Susan Gillis, Brian Campbell, Charlotte Hussey, kaie kellough, Moe Clark, Jason Camlot, Gillian Sze and Angela Leuck as well as interviews with the editors, Farkas and Souaid, themselves. The interviews (each including a poem or two by the interviewed poet) connect through a common concern with the intricacies of language (including multiple languages), and each speak of their engagements with Quebec writing, writers and the immediate landscapes in which they live. As Susan Gillis says in the space of her interview, “Living in English in Quebec is a political act.” She continues:

History and culture are living continuities. Writing and working and living in a minority language create an active engagement with those living continuities, a kind of claim-staking: Look, here’s my little corner of history and culture, alive and well and kicking. Not threatening, just being. I suppose for some Quebec nationalists, any other culture’s activity is threatening? Or the very notion of “just being” is false? I don’t see my work or myself that way, but that doesn’t mean others might not.

Originally from Calgary, Montreal-based “word-sound systemizer” kaie kellough provides an interesting perspective:

for an english writer, provincial boundaries dissolve. the nice thing abt writing & performing is that it can travel. if english writers were restricted to publishing & presenting their works in québec alone, then i might feel that working in english is a political act. but english writers can publish throughout north america: the markets for our work are much larger than the markets for french work. when my first book was published, it was launched in vancouver, ottawa, toronto, and montréal. further, i was eventually invited to read across the country - in halifax, calgary, gabriola (bc), saskatooooon, etc. [...] a french-language poet might get to launch a first volume in montréal, ottawa, and québec city, if lucky.

What does it mean to be an English-language Montreal writer, or more broadly, an English-language writer in Quebec? For some the question is essential, and for others, the question is a curiosity, nearly in passing. For some writers, these questions might be entirely irrelevant to the ways in which they write. Thanks to editors Farkas and Souaid, the question allows the answers to showcase the ways in which the landscape has shifted over the years, and just how much has remained the same. I’d be curious to hear others respond to these questions, such as Montreal-based writers Sina Queyras, Jon Paul Fiorentino and SusanElmslie, as well as some of the younger writers slowly emerging in the city, such as Helen Hajnoczky and Kirya Marchand. This is very much a collection built originally not as a book, but as a series of online one-offs which, when collected, might show the occasional gap or two. One hopes that further work, and/or a second volume might be down the road?