rob mclennan at the Pivot Reading Series

By Patrick Connors

On Wednesday, May 4, rob mclennan was featured at the series Pivot Readings at The Press Club. “Toronto as a city is almost too big to wrap my head around,” he said.

I spent a year in the vicinity of Toronto, exploring some of the neighbourhoods through a creative non-fiction manuscript, 'Sleeping in Toronto,' but otherwise, it’s simply too big. I had considered moving there at one point, but that plan seems to have been set aside.

Chaudiere has a number of forthcoming titles, including some of the best work I’ve seen out of Fredericton poet Joe Blades, the collection (Collected) Casemate Poems, and then there’s that selected poems by Andrew Suknaski I’ve only been a decade working on. The fall includes a major anthology of Calgary writing that will be essential reading. Through above/ground press, I’ve got forthcoming chapbooks by Ken Norris, Paige Ackerson-Kiely, Robert Kroetsch, Lary Bremner, derek beaulieu and Dennis Cooley, all of which I’m looking forward to. My own projects include two poetry collections this year — Glengarry (Talon, April) and Poems for Lainna (BuschekBooks, September) — and hopefully over this coming year I can place the third novel, finish the fourth, complete that collection of short stories and the creative non-fiction post-mother project. So much to do!

The evening opened with a greeting from Sachiko Murakami, the host of Pivot:

rob’s the hardest working man in Canadian letters — I wonder if he sleeps at all, sometimes…. He’s had four poetry collections in the past two years, as well as a novel in 2009 (missing persons). He’s also a publisher, and produces broadside and chapbooks through above/ground press; he blogs, tweets and responds to nearly every Facebook status update I make. Where does he find the time?! I can barely respond to my emails. I get to see rob once or twice a year as he’s hopping around the country. Very stoked to have him at Pivot — he brings fantastic energy to a reading.

Composed in three sections, Glengarry is a return in writing to the landscape of rob mclennan’s youth and a headlong rush into the fractures, slippages and buried surfaces of what the text leaves undisclosed to him.
"Glengarry is a long poem composed out of two long poems and a less-long poem,” mclennan said.

In this collection, I’m extending the work I’ve done previously using line breaks and breath, and accumulated sections that evolve into larger structures. Glengarry also extends a conversation about my home-place that I started in bury me deep in the green wood (ECW Press, 1999). In Glengarry, I’m less interested in writing about than writing through. I am working to understand, and pushing to further the potentials of where the language can go. I am pushing to come out the other side.

bpNichol talked once about one of the connecting theories behind his multiple-book-length long poem The Martyrology, that it connected in part through being written by the same hand. Glengarry is similar to previous of my works in that I wrote them. I lived on the farm until I was 19, a home space on a road the McLennans have lived on since our original land grant in 1845. My recently-widowed father still lives there, and my younger sister is across the road with her husband and their three children. I return regularly, and have done much reading and research on the area over the past 25 years. I think I come to the space from both directions equally: the historic (not necessarily “nostalgic”) and the contemporary.

He gave a calm and almost flawless reading, despite having to deal with numerous distractions and good-natured heckling from the likes of Nathaniel G. Moore, a formidable man of letters himself. mclennan fluently changes cadence and meter, even within individual pieces, or sections of his long work. Even when he is breathing, it is a part of the poem. “I read my line-breaks and page-breaks, otherwise, why did I put them in there?”

His last two poems in the set were written very recently and as yet unpublished. One would have to always be writing to already have more than 20 trade books published.

I wrote three poems today. They are not finished, but all have strong starting points.… I would argue that all writing asks for the reader’s attention, that the goal of writing, and poetry specifically, is to require such close attention.

I never claimed to be a poet, although I do write poems. Is there loneliness in my Glengarry? I certainly wasn’t conscious of writing loneliness up against any idea of wilderness, and there are parts of the county that one can’t ascribe any pure wild. My father has Internet and satellite television, and the wild deer and coyotes still have highways to contend with, strafing through the fields of domesticated Holsteins.

I did spend a great deal of my growing up by myself. Perhaps it’s part of what I associate with home, that home place, Glengarry, those echoes of singular movement. I wouldn’t describe it all as lonely. My relationship with home is a multi-layered, complex thing, rife with textures and contradictions. Or perhaps it’s far simpler than I keep making it out to be. How does long distance compare to the notion of home? How far is away, and how does one return? No matter what magical lands were discovered along the way in stories from The Odyssey to Alice in Wonderland to The Wizard of Oz, each story if fueled predominantly by the desire to return home, even if that home is seen as ordinary, routine and black-and-white. Or is it like Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, where the return home only results in the desire to return to what had just been, finally, escaped?

mclennan will be back on may 17th for AvantGarden at the Ossington and then 18th for his INFLUENCY workshop with margaret christakos.

Also appearing on Wednesday evening at Pivot Readings at The Press Club with mclennan were Linda Besner and Jacob McArthur Mooney. “I’ve read both of Mooney’s poetry collections, but am pretty sure I haven’t heard him read. I’ve only met him twice, I think, and both times quickly,” said mclennan. “I don’t know anything about Besner. It’s always interesting to hear new people read, so I’m certainly looking forward to hearing them.”

Besner’s first collection, The Id Kid, was released last month by Signal Editions. She introduced her first poem by saying it was her most inaccessible piece, going back and forth between French and English, even in the middle of lines. I appreciated it as a slice of authentic Montreal life, where the two solitudes of English and French mix into a brilliant mélange of all that is truly Canadiana, even to the point of thinking in one language and having it come out verbally in the other, official language of Canada. Also, it managed to have all kinds of rhyme throughout the work. In general, her poetry features a lot of clever and entertaining word play.

“I do pun as a huge building block in my poetry,” she said. “I love exploiting the little felicities in language…. I’ve had some of the pieces from the book in The Malahat Review, Grain, Maisonneuve, the Fiddlehead, the Walrus and Canadian Notes and Queries. I guess I’ve been working on this book for years! But, it’s very happy and satisfying for me to get this book out.”

Jacob McArthur Mooney, the first ever winner of Poetry NOW, began his set by buying cotton candy on Dundas Street West from a passing vendor, then distributing it to the audience. Then, he read “Spectacles,” an homage to Gorilla Monsoon, in honour of wrestling aficionado Moore, in reference to when Monsoon was hosting Wrestlemania 3, and represented the sellout crowd at the event as “literally hanging from the rafters.” Mooney’s next three pieces were from Folk, the new release from McClelland and Stewart, focusing on the catastrophic plane crash near Nova Scotia in 1998, while he was living there.

As for The Press Club, it is a lovely little establishment, surprisingly sanitary as poetry venues go. My neck is sore from having to keep my head in a constant “duck” from the third last stair before the bottom (I am a shade under 6′) until I returned from performing my ablutions. However, they have dozens of beers for sale, served by a friendly bartender, who was very involved in the stage production of the event, and reliably gave me updates on the scores of NHL Playoff games without me having to ask. Count on me being there again, not only as a journalist, but as a patron of fine service and fine poetry.

On Wednesday, May 18 at 8 p.m., Maureen Hynes will be reading at the The Press Club along with Stan Rogal and Matthew Trafford.