By Judith Fitzgerald
TODAY'S POET:
rob mclennan (April 20)
The author of a dozen-plus accomplished volumes across a swath of genres, Ottawa's rob mclennan snagged the 1999 Canadian Authors Association Air Canada Award for most promising writer under the age of 30. The poet, critic, anthologist, visual artist, publisher of above/ground press and editor of Stanzas magazine's work regularly features prominently in respected journals and periodicals throughout North America, India, Australia, the UK and the Czech Republic, to ID but a representative few. He's currently on the road in support of his just-published 14th full-length volume of verse, Gifts (Talonbooks); however, he took 12 or 20 minutes yesterday to provide "In Other Words" readers with a unique pair of 'graphs concerning the way in which his poetic inscape's permutations have evolved in terms of connecting with "the woman of [his] dreams":
Over the past few years, my poetry has become less concerned with the all-encompassing gesture -- working out the rhythms and flow of the sweep of the line's arm -- than in the minutiae of what is possible with the individual line. Perhaps it came out of my interest in the Canadian ghazal (from American ex-pat John Thompson circa 2001) or finally writing a collection of same myself a year or two later (soon to be published by Ireland's Salmon Poetry as a compact of words). Much of my recent work has involved, as poet and critic Gwendolyn Guth notes, "the logic of the fragment," the discovery of what's possible in tandem with an investigation into what can be sensibly placed side-by-side and still somehow make sense despite that disconnect implicit in sequences of fragments.
Still, exploring individual lines in and of themselves has come to dominate my poetry (through reading the works of poets such as Lisa Jarnot, Fanny Howe, Juliana Spahr and Sarah Manguso). Whether long, shorter or fragmentary, just what can a series or sequence of words hold on a single straight line? Last year, I wrote a 140-page poetry mansucript for the woman of my dreams, the beginning of a relationship that came together as "Poems for Lainna," much of which works that disconnect as well as working what the lines can accomplish individually, titling a number of the pieces inside "another (short) history of 1." for the beautiful woman who holds sway over my thoughts. This entry, a small part of a further manuscript working up to our time together in Toronto, extends some of those considerations and includes a number of longer poems working longer lines. But, still . . . One word after another word . . . That's where, in the end, it always goes; yet, where will it take us?
1. is for ______
texts or pastures further hope
of one through step
a life of lonely, safety net
we caught
distangled lines
& awkward
what could we regard; you sweetly,
laugh
pouring out what was left
of our hearts
set into; twin suns
the fire escape; a city
we went nowhere
between intolerable
intermissions
mid-afternoon
the rain that marked
the length of jasper ave
blue in your tights
-- Unpublished (© 2009 rob mclennan. Reprinted by permission of the poet. Exclusive to The Globe and Mail. Photograph © 2002-2009 Stephen Brockwell. All Rights Reserved.)
