10/14/2024

The Sponsoring Condition: An Interview with Matt Rader


An excerpt from this interview was first published in the Fall 2022 issue of Arc Poetry Magazine.


Lightwell – Matt Rader

The morning after you
left, the sun
was a dim white light

that didn’t make me 
think of anything,
not angels,

not death. I couldn’t
look directly
at it

but its effects
were everywhere:
the swarm of raindrops

alive in the lilac,
the metallic skyscape
floating

in my truck’s silver paint.
A brightness too bright
to look at

is the true definition
of a thing
beyond me, a white hole

I fall endlessly through
into my body.
Woe, to see the sun,

someone once wrote,
and not think 
of angels,

but I’d like to 
not think
at all, if possible. Just feel

something cosmic
reach through the altostratus
and touch me.

from Ghosthawk 
(Nightwood Editions, 2021).
Reprinted with permission.

 ---

Matt Rader is an award-winning author of five volumes of poetry, a book of non-fiction, Visual Inspection, and a collection of stories, What I Want to Tell Goes Like This. His work has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry, Geist, The Walrus, Wales Arts Review, The Fiddlehead and The Malahat Review. Rader is a core member of the Department of Creative Studies at UBC Okanagan where he lectures in creative writing. He lives on the traditional and unceded land of the syilx/Okanagan people in Kelowna, BC.


---

Rob Taylor: In reading Ghosthawk (Nightwood Editions, 2021), I was reminded of your second collection, 2008's Living Things, which opened with a poem whose form immediately grabs your attention, "The Great Leap Forward.” It’s still the only poem I've read modeled after the Fibonacci sequence! As Living Things' title suggests, in that book you focused your attention on the natural world. Here you are thirteen years later with another bold formal choice: almost all of Ghosthawk is composed of haiku-like tercets, with the majority of the poems being exactly eleven tercets long. And the plants and animals of the Okanagan anchor many of them. 

Formally and thematically, then, Ghosthawk feels like both a "leap forward" and a circling back to your enduring themes and concerns. Would you agree with that? How do you place this book in relation to those that came before it?
 
Ghosthawk (2021)
Matt Rader:
I’ve lived most of my life outside of large urban centers. I come from families of European settlers.  It’s challenging to write about where you are if you don’t have words for what’s around you. Mostly, what’s been around me have been plants, mountains, water, sky.
 
In 2014 I moved with my family to the Okanagan Valley, 400 kms from the sea. Semi-arid brush steppe. Grasslands and ponderosa pines. Prickly-pear cactus and sagebrush. I’d never lived that far away from the sea. I didn’t know where I was, not really.
 
Ghosthawk is a recapitulation of a method for poem-making and home-making that I first practiced most ardently in Living Things. In both books, the imposed structures of form, whether received or invented, helped focus my attention so my awareness might grow.
 
The naming of the natural world worked the same way: by learning names for plants I attended to them and became aware of the communities in which they lived. It’s important to know your neighbours and whose home you’ve come to live in.
 
RT: You attend to the natural world both by naming and seeing it. In Visual Inspection (Nightwood Editions, 2019), your book of experimental essays on chronic pain, you write, "sometimes searching for something guarantees you'll never find it. Sometimes what you are looking for obscures what it is you find in your search; you have to see not what you're looking for, but what is there." 

When I read that, my mind leapt to the poems in Ghosthawk, published two years later, which very much seem to be born from seeing "what is there." How did your thinking in Visual Inspection manifest in the poems of Ghosthawk
 
MR: I started writing Ghosthawk before Visual Inspection, so to some degree Ghosthawk informed Visual Inspection as much as the other way around, perhaps more.
 
RT: It makes a lot of sense that these two books were born out of the same time in your life. How do you think your chronic pain has influenced the way you "look" at the world in your poems?
 
MR: Pain is very difficult to speak about except in symbols, metaphors, and analogies. It reminds me of poetry: the best poems can’t be paraphrased because how they say what they say is, to be tautological, what they say.
 
Seeing “what is there” isn’t an objective action but an ethic of clarity based in humility. Sometimes you see the bitterroot making its star-shape laser-rays on the dry steppe. Sometimes you see, as Stevens has it, the “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” Or what I might call the fantasy and the mystery.
 
The vision of the bitterroot is a mystery not a fantasy. That’s the important part. Trust Louis MacNeice to say it plainly: “But dream was dream and love was love and what / Happened happened—even if the judge said / It should have been otherwise.”
 
RT: There's a powerful moment in Visual Inspection where you talk about pain and belief: how others, and even ourselves, don't believe or sympathise with pain until it's diagnosed, named and measured in a medical context. But pain, at its core, is unnameable, unmeasurable. As you put it, "speaking about [pain] in medical terms often does more to undermine personal experience than to illuminate it." You then talk about the joy of having a friend, also living with chronic pain, who simply believes in your pain without needing you to prove it/name it.
 
Could you talk a little more about the connection between your challenges in communicating your physical pain to those around you, and your challenges in communicating your inner self in your poems? 
 
MR: To some degree, I don’t know that pain or poetry can be communicated much at all except through experience. Anyone who reads poetry for years will have the experience of a poem they read twenty years previous suddenly feeling like an entirely different poem even though the words are, obviously, exactly the same.
 
One can learn to communicate pain in limited ways within the contexts of particular relationships because within those relationships one can make use of shared symbols, shared signposts of language that indicate a familiar location within that relationship.
 
Mostly though, writing poems and communicating pain is like saying, “Look, a red thimbleberry.” Some folks will not be moved. Some folks will look at it with curiosity. Some will eat it.

RT: Ha! Yes, the releasing of control over how your work is interpreted is a valuable lesson for writers, applicable to many other aspects of life. A tension runs through Ghosthawk between the ephemeral (the aforementioned bitterroot, thimbleberry, etc.) and the eternal (the sun, the rain, the creek, etc.). You often show great affection for the living, but a distance from the never-ending: the sun "a brightness too bright / to look at," the rocks "pitiless solitude," the water with "nothing but the rush of itself to say," etc. Could you talk about this tension, and if you even see it as one? 
 
MR: This strikes me as a question of scale. None of the things you mention are actually eternal, as in “outside of time,” but appear—to me at least—to exist in time-scales that exceed humans in extravagant ways.
 
At a human scale, the table I’m writing on is solid, but physics tells us that at an atomic level it is mostly space and at a quantum level it isn’t even that. It’s easier for me to identify with the table as a table because the version of me that identifies at all is at the scale of tables. It might be the same with the rain and the mariposa lily.  
 
It’s an astute question though. The distance you note is interesting because I feel it most acutely when I “go inside” my own sensing mind-body. The brightness too bright to look at and the pitiless solitude and the aphasia of the self are all aspects of my attention-awareness when the part of me that can report back, the discreet user of language, is most dissolved or integrated with “what’s there.” In other words, the distance in the poem is an expression of the self as such.
 
RT: A favourite quote of mine is from Jim Harrison's poem, "Debtors": "Would I still love the creek if I lasted forever?" Does that question resonate with you? Or perhaps its opposite: Would you love the creek more if you shared its scale and lasted (almost) forever?
 
MR: Love exceeds humans in extravagant ways, thankfully. I love the creek and would love the creek under any condition because that is part of what it means to love. As Auden says, “You shall love your crooked neighbour / With your crooked heart,” and creeks, as the name suggests, are always crooked.

RT: A theme in Visual Inspection is adaptation to the crooked turns life throws at you. Looking back over your books, perhaps especially these six years between Desecrations and Ghosthawk, how have your expectations for the capacities of your own writing, or for writing in general, adjusted? 
 
MR: Yes, adjusting expectations until they aren’t expectations anymore at all but curiosities, possibilities, surprises, quiet revelations. A different orientation toward time, perhaps.
 
The insight for me, in the years writing Ghosthawk, was that the inner field of my imagination, my mind, was continuous with the field of wildflowers and the star fields. It’s an old insight; it’s nothing special, but it had a profound impact on me nonetheless. All the world in a grain of sand stuff.
 
There’s that old Buddhist wisdom that goes something like: Before I practiced the mountains were only mountains. After I started practicing the mountains were no longer mountains. Now, after long practice, the mountains are mountains again. 
 
I’m not a Buddhist though. I don’t have a particular spiritual framework guiding me, though I was raised in, and had my imagination shaped by, a very liberal Catholic theology that feels kinship with Eastern practices. 

I’ve always been so curious about what I’ll think if I’m lucky enough to grow old.
 
RT: A Buddhist sensibility is certainly present in Ghosthawk, as is the haiku form. The poems in the book, which pay deep attention to the natural world, are composed of haiku-like tercets. But these poems aren't haiku: they are longer and roam widely, drawing in more connections.

The opening words in Ghosthawk, from the book's epigraph, are "Reading Bashō..." Could you talk about what you took from reading haiku poets like Bashō, and how you applied it to your own work? Did you have any other sources of inspiration in settling on the book's form?
 
MR: At times, haiku feel to me like astute snippets of reportage, ones that note not only the physical environment but the psycho-social state that accompanies each moment of observation. There’s a kind of selfless objectivity in Bashō’s poems characterized by good humour, clarity, and care. This feels to me like one of the highest ethics not just in poetry, but as a human. 
 
Western poets have been taking cues from this technique for a few generations now: the image as a device for simultaneously collapsing and expanding space-time. However, Westerners, generally speaking, are more interested in the effects than the ethics of a technique. Not just in poetry but in everything. There’s a cost to the magic of collapsing space-time that must be paid. Bashō’s selflessness is part of that payment.
 
But Bashō wasn’t really the model for these poems, more like a fellow traveler I’ve met at points along the way. My guide was Seamus Heaney’s long poem “Squarings” where he asks “could you reconcile / what was diaphanous there with what was massive?”
 
RT: Can you tell me more about “Squarings” and how it came to guide you in writing Ghosthawk?

MR: “Squarings” is a long poem in four sections with multiple parts that concludes (with the exception of an epilogue translation from The Inferno) Heaney’s 1991 collection Seeing Things. It’s a book and a poem that has continued to unfold for me over more than two decades of repeated reading. “Squarings” is arguably the apotheosis of Heaney’s poetic vision.

The poems of Seeing Things were composed in Heaney’s middle life after the loss of both parents. The 1993 ceasefire in Northern Ireland was on the historical horizon. The fall of the Communist block had just taken place. Mythological times both world-historically and personally. 

“Squarings” is formally iterative. Each part is four tercets of roughly five beats a line. In other words, they’re squares. The lines make a kind of grid through which Heaney looks at his world and what’s beyond his world, what’s beyond the Earthly world. 

The poem gathers up themes, ideas, references, and foreshadowings from the first part of the book but also from his earlier work. It’s self-consciously literary. Heaney puts himself in a lineage that rocks between the clear-eyed atheism of Thomas Hardy and the spiritual curiosity of W. B. Yeats. The poem is very much about “seeing” in both a literal and a metaphysical sense. It has an airy, ethereal quality even when regarding the “stony up-againstness.” 

I’d had my own mythological encounters with death before and during the composition of Ghosthawk. When I found my own auger-like tercet shape, I determined to keep working it until I found water. And then work it over and over. 

RT: I love that idea of finding your auger: how these shapes hold power, allowing us to move more deeply into subjects that are difficult to approach.  In Visual Inspection, you write, "When we see a printed haiku by Bashō we immediately, before reading a word, apprehend something different than when we see the first page of a blank-verse epic like Paradise Lost." You then follow this with blacked-out versions of each, proving your point. 

This reminded me of something Ken Babstock once said about the sonnet:
 
I am attracted to its no-holds challenge to composition. It says, “Here’s a squarish block of text on a white field in which something or, more likely, nothing will occur. Are you up to it?” It gets strange here as, obviously, there is no real “block of text” anywhere present before one writes a sonnet–except perhaps there is; a blast shadow from history, a kind of dimly perceived ‘dark matter’-sonnet that can serve as a vessel or threat or foil.
 
Could you talk a bit more about what you apprehend from the "blast shadow" of the haiku, which you turn into your “auger” in Ghosthawk
 
MR: For me, the shape of the haiku is an invitation, a doorway, a portal. It invites me to attend to relationship, between something and nothing, speech and silence, matter and dark matter (to borrow Ken’s metaphor), to remember that the smallest gestures radiate, and are defined by what they radiate into. Which itself is a common image in haiku.
  
Visual Inspection (2019)
RT: In Visual Inspection, you wonder about "how to create versions of our poems, or even compose poems, that render [the] extra-semantic dimensions available to the non-visual learner?" It's obvious that you think a great deal about how to visually present your poems on the page, but it seems equally important to you to expand non-visual accessibility to poems. Are these two desires unavoidably in conflict? Are there ways we can reach readers/listeners beyond the page while still maintaining a poem's "physical" presence?
 
MR: The appearance on the page is only one manifestation of the energy of a poem. Poems also exist as physical and mental speech. In these forms poems occupy different but equally true physical presences (Where in your head, for example, do you hear the poems you remember?). Poems can also exist as a kind of touch under the right conditions. Or as three-dimensional printouts. Or trees and grasses. Anything, really.
 
For me, the lesson of working on Visual Inspection was that no particular rendition of the poem needs to be definitive or given priority. That access isn’t a question of equal availability to all things for all people all the time, but rather a form of love characterized, as I said of Bashō, by good humour, clarity, and care. In this formulation there is no conflict created by difference.
 
The question for me as an artist isn’t how to expand non-visual access to poems, but rather how to expand my own aesthetic preferences, how to make art that imagines difference from the beginning. Rather than thinking about what non-visual folks don’t have access to and how I might deliver that access to them, I find it generative to think of how I might be in better relationship with my non-visual friends and families and how I might care for them.
 
I hope I’m getting better at imagining difference in general. I hope I’m getting better at bringing my own values in line with my actions both in and outside of writing. As Wallace Stevens says, “poetry is a violence within protecting us from a violence without.” I’ve not always lived up to “poetry.”
 
RT: What do you mean when you say you haven’t lived up to “poetry”? Do you mean outside of the writing, or within it?

MR: Both. Poetry for me has been a process of trying to find a way to be ever more honest—though a writer I admire told me that in an earlier draft of Ghosthawk I was still ducking saying what needed to be said. I don’t know if I agree with him but it was instructive for me about how even honesty and clarity look different from different positions. 

Within writing, I’ve at times not lived up to poetry by becoming too enamoured with my powers of description or my wielding of craft. I’ve not lived up to it when I’ve cared more for the performance than the audience, more for the praise than the simple truth. 

Outside of writing, my failure is more difficult to talk about because its ramifications are to particular people and relationships that didn’t agree to be put into print. I didn’t always understand that to my shame.

I’ve been thinking a lot in the past years about redress, restitution, and reconciliation. 

RT: The vices you laid out there in poetry (becoming too enamoured with one’s own powers, caring for the performance not the audience, seeking praise instead of truth) are too often the vices that lay us low outside of poetry, too. Perhaps that’s why both are lifelong pursuits, rarely mastered. Perhaps—and forgive me if I’m reaching wildly here—they’re the same pursuit.

MR: No, I don’t think that’s a wild reach. Often enough the obvious thing is the most important thing to say yet the thing left unsaid. So thank you for saying it. 

There are other grand vices with familiar names (racism, misogyny, colonialism, etc.) that amount to the same things: ego, will to power, fear. For me, “poetry” is one of the words for what stands against those vices, for what invites a human transcendence of our hurt and our hurting. It’s aspirational, an animating vision, even when the poem itself is about hurt and hurting. 

Great poems are to be lived with. They are inexhaustible. They are ongoing invitations to becoming. Which is why a Japanese maple is a poem, why a friendship is a poem, why birdsong is a poem. 

RT: Yes, let’s stick with this idea. Earlier you mentioned that a poem can be “trees and grasses. Anything, really.” In the acknowledgments to his new book of essays, The Tree Whisperer: Writing Poetry by Living in the World, Harold Rhenisch thanks you as the person who "saw the trees in my poetry and urged me to write this book." In what ways were Rhenisch’s poems trees? 
 
MR: What I recognized was the rhyme between Harold’s approach to fruit trees and his approach to composing poems. Harold taught me to care for fruit trees and poems by watching where the light falls. It is an invaluable lesson with ongoing ramifications for both my poems and my fruit trees. 
 
RT: Rhenisch writes so well about just that – making space for light in the orchard, and on the page. At one point in The Tree Whisperer he writes, "To use an intellectual tradition and the conceit of individual consciousness to speak of an Earth that is the body of all people who have touched the Earth is to lose the Earth." 

It feels to me that in your books there is an ongoing dance between intellectual traditions and “the Earth,” but which partner is leading the dance shifts from book to book (Ghosthawk, perhaps, being the book in which “The Earth” is most firmly in control). Would you say there's truth to that? How do you see your own work in relation to that quote from Harold?
 
MR: I think Harold’s correct and in this global historical moment that polemic is necessary. In a more philosophical mood I’d make one adjustment: "To use only an intellectual tradition and the conceit of individual consciousness to speak of an Earth that is the body of all people who have touched the Earth is to lose the Earth." The mind and the body are one and any tradition that denies this explicitly or implicitly summons trouble.
 
I think you’re also correct about my books. There’s a function of attention that feeds awareness and a function of awareness that directs attention. I don’t know if “The Earth” is most firmly in control of Ghosthawk, but it does seem to me that this book has a new sense of harmonics to it than in previous works. Harmonic being a word used, naturally, by music, physics and astrology.

RT: Could you speak a little more about this “new sense of harmonics” in Ghosthawk

MR: I’m thinking of Don McKay’s use of the term “rhyme” to describe the relationship of his poems about birdsong to actual birdsong. My good friend, the Tahltan artist Peter Morin, told me once that he liked the idea of me going out into the hills to eavesdrop on the flowers. I don’t mean to say that I can actually hear the flowers like I can hear birdsong, but I mean to say that I can actually hear flowers like I can hear birdsong. 

The process of making poems—at least the poems in Ghosthawk—isn’t burdened by questions of metaphysics, by what is and isn’t. The question of whether one can “truly” hear flowers is immaterial. What matters is that going out to listen to the flowers is different than going out to look at the flowers or pick the flowers or smell the flowers or pass them by. Intention matters. Openness matters. Attentiveness matters. This is what I mean by “harmonics.” 
 
RT: Though almost all of Ghosthawk is in tercets, the book's middle section features two ghazals, spread out one-stanza-per-page, with a longer poem between them (also spread out, in 10-line sections): three relatively short poems over 24 pages! I'm struck by how they speak to one another: the radif (refrain) of the first ghazal is "one" and the second is "gone," and between them you write "I'll never be able to say everything I want / to say, is what I want, finally, to say." 

There seems to be a disappearing here—someone sweeping their footprints behind them as they walk out of a room—as evidenced in part by the preponderance of white space on these pages (usually containing only a single couplet). Could you talk about that middle section: how you devised it and how you see it functioning as part of the larger book?
 
MR: I’m sensitive to some degree about claiming genre-forms like haiku and the ghazal for my poems. There’s a strong cultural argument against such claims. On the other hand, I certainly want to show the respect of acknowledging the influence these poetries have had on me. The ghazal appears to me to suggest something important about coherence and the primacy of the body, of form. The middle section is an experiment with that insight.
 
Conceptually, the middle part of Ghosthawk happens in the slackwater between in-breath and out-breath. Breathing is an important trope for me because I have had difficulties breathing my whole life. But breathing is also involuntary. In this sense it is pure form and each breath repeats the breath before. There’s a rhyme I think between that idea and the formal insights of the ghazal.
 
RT: Yes, absolutely. Moving forward while also circling back. And the quiet of that “slackwater.” The closing poems in Ghosthawk speak with increasing frequency of silence: "I'd like to / not think / at all, if possible," "The more I breathe,/ the less I have / to say // about the mariposa,”, "I was nothing once / I was happy." Do you see this book, with its white space and quietude, as a motion towards silence? Towards a return to happy nothingness? Do you see a time when you may stop writing books entirely?
 
MR: Writing poems is fun. As Mary Ruefle says, if you haven’t tasted the sweetness of writing poetry then you’re not writing poetry. It can be clarifying and ramifying and transformative. It can mystify and delight and console.
 
I see myself continuing to write poems in one form or another, but making books is another matter. At the very least, reflecting on my reasons for making books is important. Silence is not only one of the enduring themes of poetry but the sponsoring condition.
 
RT: If not books, then what? How would you find your way to readers? Or are readers (at least a wide audience of readers) of less importance to you now than in the past?
 
MR: What is a wide audience of readers for a Canadian poet in 2022? My relationship with readers is important to me, but that importance isn’t predicated on the size of my audience—it never has been for me. 

Books have acted like a psychological clearing house for my obsessions: publishing books has let me move on to the next set of problems and puzzles. But I’ve always felt that if I didn’t publish another book it was only because I was doing something more important to me. 

Living Things (2008)
RT: As naming and honouring sit so near the heart of Ghosthawk, I’d like to end our interview with a remembrance. A poem in the book, "Spring Azure," is dedicated to Elise Partridge and Patrick Lane, and I was struck in reading the back of Living Things to see blurbs by both Elise and Steven Heighton. Three meticulous poets and generous human beings, all lost to us too soon. My sense is that these three played distinct roles in your life - as friends, as teachers, as fellow poets on the page. Could you talk a little about these three, and the different ways poets have influenced your life and writing? 
 
MR: Patrick Lane was my first poetry teacher. Meeting him showed me that poets are living people, and that they could look and sound like the blue collar working class men I grew up with on northern Vancouver Island. Patrick was one model of what a poet might be and a very important one. There was wilderness inside Patrick that I recognized from my own life. Great love and great suffering, as the Franciscans say. He changed my life.
 
Elise was one of the most humble and private people I’ve ever known. In a sense that I think she’d object to out of modesty and embarrassment, she most resembles the ethic I ascribed to Bashō. She deserves a wider and ongoing readership. Elise once apologized to me because she felt that endorsement on Living Things wasn’t effusive enough. Anyone who knew Elise would recognize this as typical of her character. She passed on a wisdom about care as a poet and a person that I count among the greatest treasures I’ve received. 
 
Like Elise, Steve was a tremendous citizen of and for poetry. He was another kind of model: warm, serious, sincere, disarming, generous, not afraid to be goofy. He had a way of making everyone who knew him feel like they had a special connection with him because, I believe, they did. Steve seemed to have a heart the size of Lake Ontario. I feel his loss deeply. The possibility of seeing him again was something I cherished.
 
Maybe I can take this opportunity to send my love and regard to the families and loved ones of Patrick, Elise, and Steve. Thank you for loving our friends as you did so that they could be in our world as they were.

10/09/2024

"Weather" updates

I had a wonderful time launching my new book, Weather, across BC in May, culminating in a hometown launch in Port Moody, hosted by Raoul Fernandes and featuring a reading by Kayla Czaga from her new book, Midway.

Raoul Fernandes' hosting was so entertaining that
hardly anyone was playing Monopoly when he spoke.
Thank you to everyone who came out to any of my events or picked up a copy of the book. It really means the world to me.

A highlight of the summer was being interviewed by Margaret Gallagher for CBC's North by Northwest in August. You can listen to the interview here.

Another highlight has been the reception to my essay "Some Notes on Writing Haiku," which was published at TheWoodlot.ca (Chris Banks' new poetry review site!) in May. I've received really positive responses from both folks who were new to haiku and haiku devotees (I worried a bit about the latter). The essay was even picked up by the New Zealand Poetry Society, who reposted it on their blog in September. What a thrill!

If you haven't read the essay, and are curious about haiku (either in general, or my take on the form), I encourage you to give the essay a read. And, of course, if it piques your interest at all, I encourage you to pick up a copy of the book from Gaspereau Press or your local bookstore!

10/07/2024

neither trap nor puzzle

In her essay “What Does Poetry Do?” from her collection Experiments in Distant Influence, Nova Scotia author Anne Simpson writes about what’s possible when we give ourselves up to the mechanisms of poetry. She uses the experience of reading one’s way through the brutal wars of the Iliad to illustrate poetry’s effects: “It is not just that after reading Homer’s Iliad we feel as though we’ve been hauled through the burning lands, the ash lands. We haven’t just witnessed war; we’ve participated in it. It’s not simply a case that poetry, that all literature, allows us to be attentive to otherness, to imagine otherness, it is that we enter a world of otherness.”

In that otherness, we see ourselves. That, writes Simpson, is the alternative offered by poetry: “the ability to see oneself,” which is “the beginning of knowing and mastering oneself—the beginning of wisdom.” This leads to the chance, by no means guaranteed, that we might “awaken from the dream of ourselves.” 

Poetry is neither a trap nor a puzzle, and not every poem is all-consuming and urgent. But there’s no mistaking that, when you dare to step into the world of a poem—a successfully executed poem, I mean—from the first line, you are hit full-force by the poem’s sensory cues. You have entered an environment of the poet’s own making, and in that place, you become fully awake. Or differently awake. Awake to the unfamiliar airiness or stuffiness of the poem’s “rooms,” and the light therein. When I enter the strange and only partly knowable place of a poem, I grow tense and alert... I watch myself take the poem in. I let it do its work on me. Who am I, in this space? Is this, finally, the real me, coming to the fore?

Within any given poem lies no clear mystery a reader can solve. They’re engaged, after all, with a poem, not a riddle. (Poem riddles do exist, but they’re a rarity these days.) For those who give themselves over to the poem’s rhythms and sounds, its sights and textures and smells—and to the feelings those cues evoke—there are sure to be moments of recognition that land like soft explosions within, the aftermath of which is often an aura of relief, a potent sense of not being alone in this world... But no triumphant “oh, I get it!” awaits at the end, no code that will, at last, open, with a satisfying click, the heavy padlock on the magic shop’s door latch—nothing that will render the poem, and the effect it had, explainable in simple terms. That’s because poems aren’t for solving; they’re for getting lost inside.


- Anita Lahey, from her introduction to Best Canadian Poetry 2024. 

10/03/2024

desk blog count: seven years for seventeen

I know you've spent many a day wondering why a man named Rob would continue to maintain his clunky old blogger site well over a decade after it fell out of fashion. And while that Rob would be rob mclennan, I take your point. I, too, have at times wondered why I keep the lights on around here.

But you see, some things are worth waiting for. Today that thing is lightbulb-shaped desk enthusiast Greg Mania, and his "Show Us Your Desk" series over at The Rumpus. That's right, Deskblogmaniacs, seven years after the last entry, we have found Desk Blog #17.

Desk Blog #17 is really an online interview series, run out of The Rumpus' Instagram page, but I'm going to count it, because, well, it's really just me and the other Rob actually blogging at this point. Instead, it seems, authors now let Johnny Bravo poke around their offices, live on the internet. 

Here are the sacrosanct seventeen:

On My Desk [Defunct: Archived Here]

Desk Space

Sitting Pretty Magazine

Writers' rooms (Guardian Newspaper)

What Is Your Ideal Space to Create? (Ploughshares Lit Journal)

"Workspace" Section (Branch Magazine)

At The Desk (Open Book Toronto)

Writers' Rooms (VIWF)

Good Places to Write

On The Writer's Desk (Open Book Toronto)

Where Do You Write to My Lovely?

10 Stunning Writing Studios (Flavorwire)

Writing Spaces (The New Quarterly)

3 Room Editors Share Their Writing Rooms With Us (Room Magazine)

Tiny Rooms of One's Own (Open Book Toronto)

From the Desk of (Real Pants Magazine)

Show Us Your Desk (The Rumpus) 


I'm sure I missed a desk blog or two over the past seven years, just as I'm sure more will come, in whatever form the latest technology permits. Desk podcasts hosted by Caillou and streamed into your LG SmartFridge or whatever. Whatever it is, the next desk blog will be, like all that came before it, gloriously redundant. And I will list it here, on this blog that will never die, because the desk blogs won't let it.

10/01/2024

the 2024 Fraser Valley Writers Festival is almost here!

 


I'm in my second year coordinating the Fraser Valley Writers Festival, and we're very excited about this year's lineup! The festival will take place on November 1st and 2nd at the University of the Fraser Valley's Abbotsford campus.

To open the festival, we'll have keynote addresses by Billy-Ray Belcourt and Angela Sterritt. The next day we'll have an array of panels, workshops and a Page Fright podcast live recording!

You can learn more, and register for (free!) tickets, at the festival website: https://fvwritersfestival.com/

5/03/2024

"Weather" Book Launch and Tour


My new book, Weather, is almost here! If you're in the Lower Mainland, I will be launching the book in Port Moody on May 24th. The event will take place at the Old Mill Boathouse, next to Rocky Point Park, where I wrote much of the book!

I will be joined by dear friends and brilliant poets, Kayla Czaga (whose new book, Midway, was just published) and Raoul Fernandes. The event is free and open to all, and will be kid-friendly (read: snacks!).

The details:

Weather - Book Launch and Reading
Featuring: Rob Taylor, with special guest Kayla Czaga
Hosted by Raoul Fernandes

Friday, May 24, 2024, 7 PM
Old Mill Boathouse
2715 Esplanade Ave.
Port Moody, BC

Poster time:


In advance of the launch, I will be embarking on a quick four-city tour of the Southern Interior of BC with fellow new-release poet, and friend of the blog, Kevin Spenst. We'll be in Enderby on May 11th, Nelson on May 14th, Rossland on May 15th and Kelowna (with Dallas Hunt, Matt Rader and Cole Mash) on May 16th

You can learn more at those individual links, or in these news articles, or by reading this poster:


If you're in the neighbourhood for any of these events, know that I'd love to see you there!

4/21/2024

on the way to knowing

Kate Dwyer: I worry that—in America at least—the act of critical thinking is being devalued from a cultural perspective. Do you notice that as a thinker or teacher?

Anne Carson: That’s part of the thing that made me start thinking about hesitation. The last few years I was teaching, I was teaching ancient Greek part of the time and writing part of the time. And the ancient Greek method when I was in school was to look at the ancient Greek text and locate the words that are unknown and look them up in a lexicon. And then find out what it means and write it down. Looking up things in a lexicon is a process that takes time. And it has an interval in it of something like reverie, something like suspended thought because it’s not no thought because you have a question about a word and you attain that as you go through the pages looking for the right definition, but you’re not arrived yet at the thought. It’s a different kind of time, and a different kind of mentality than you have anywhere else in the day. It’s very valuable, because things happen in your thinking and in your feeling about the words in that interval. I call that a hesitation.

Nowadays people have the whole text on their computer, they come to a word they don’t know, they hit a button and instantly the word is supplied to them by whatever lexicon has been loaded into the computer. Usually the computer chooses the meaning of the word relevant to the passage and gives that, so you don’t even get the history of the word and a chance to float around among its possible other senses.

That interval being lost makes a whole difference to how you regard languages. It rests your brain on the way to thinking because you’re not quite thinking yet. It’s an absent presence in a way, but it’s not the cloud of unknowing that mystics talk about when they say that God is nothing and you have to say nothing about God because saying something about God makes God particular and limited. It’s not that—it’s on the way to knowing, so it’s suspended in a sort of trust. I regret the loss of that.


- Anne Carson, in interview with Kate Dwyer over at The Paris Review. You can read the whole interview here

3/16/2024

to balance an algebra not meant to be solved

When we absorb images, dance or music from a culture outside our own, we may project substantial misinterpretations, but it is also possible to receive the sense of what was intended: a face, a fright, an ode. A written poem in a foreign language is inscrutable. Someone has to ferry it across the difference... To translate a poem faithfully is to balance an algebra not made to be solved; a task for which it does not hurt to invoke the primordial spirits.

- Sadiqa de Meijer, from the essay "stilte/silence" in her essay collection alfabet/alphabet. 

1/29/2024

poems do more than soothe or teach

We take poetry too seriously. This occurred to me as I reviewed the magazines my publisher, Biblioasis, sent to me in hefty boxes. When I first took up the form in the mid to late aughts, surrealism and irony were in. The hot new poets rarely said what they meant or meant what they said. They mixed Latinate and vernacular diction and wore the skinniest jeans I’d ever seen. For all their ingenious descriptions of the globalized, technological moment, these poets’ perspective seemed removed from the world, not transcendent but aloof. At worst, their poems were trifling, with little feeling or gravity. Where was the beating heart?

Then history took a turn: asylum seekers’ bodies strewn along European shores, Trump’s chintzy demagoguery, pandemic lockdowns and mass graves, neo-Nazi marches, police violence, historic wildfires, the air thick with ash. As daily life grew more surreal, the dominant voice in poetry became more direct and serious, more rooted in real individual experience. A new generation of literary gatekeepers emerged to facilitate this shift. A number of the magazines I read for this anthology opened with an editor’s note that solemnly reflected on the need to heal, both from the terrors of the recent past and from the legacy of genocide and slavery upon which the so‑called New World was built.

When this trend first emerged, I was excited to see so many poets write candidly and with real political rage about our denial of the past and the untenability of the status quo, often with the same technical adventurousness that drew me to poetry in the first place. At some point over the last decade, however, the content superseded the form. Canadian poets and magazine editors have confused good poetry with good politics. Many poems in journals today consist primarily of solipsistic observations, social justice tropes, and moralizing narratives delivered in a uniform first-person voice. They are wooden and boring. What’s worse, poets cheapen political subject matter when they treat it with formal laziness or as a platform to signal their virtue.

I don’t believe poetry has gotten worse. Great poems continue to be written and published, as I hope the anthology demonstrates. However, the editorial curation now skews heavily in favour of poetry with a social justice message, regardless of how (or how well) it’s written. This orthodoxy is stifling. I read hundreds of magazines in the course of a year, and sometimes it seemed like every other poem was about trauma or the politics of personal identity. Some of these were excellent, but many were indistinguishable fluff.

Poetry may be therapeutic, but it is not therapy. Poetry may be enlightening, but it is not pedagogy. The best poems do more than soothe or teach. They enter and alter our consciousness such that our perception of everything else is filtered through them.


- Bardia Sinaee, from his essay on editing Best Canadian Poetry 2024, "Line by Line." You can read the whole thing here.

1/22/2024

we took the desert's role for granted

 

Those downtown institutions - the Sam the Record Man and HMV - are gone now, of course. Vintage Video was uprooted by developers. It doesn't seem to have taken in its new location, which Google Earth reveals is now a Wine Rack. 
Perhaps Netflix and other streaming services are sending young twenty-first-century minds rafting down tributaries of their own... But speed of scrolling, algorithmic assistance, and instant access weren't what my friends and I needed, even if we might've welcomed them as conveniences. We needed that long subway trip downtown. (We were the farthest stop west.) We needed the sobering disappointments and sporadic victories. We needed the longueurs that new technology seeks to close, as if abolishing boredom ever does anyone a favour. Mostly, we needed wind resistance. It took effort to cultivate our enthusiasms in a desert, but it's clear now that we took the desert's role for granted. Knowledge tends to stick when you've toiled for it. 

- Jason Guriel on acquiring physical media in the pre-internet age, from his book On Browsing.