What is YOUR fragment? Poets explain this technique as it appears in their books (see original conversation post HERE for the questions and a response by Lisa Pasold HERE the second response by Marthe Reed HERE and the third by George Vance HERE. Today, rob mclennan responds:
rob mclennan: Born in Ottawa where he resides to this day, Canadian rob mclennan is the author of more
than twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John
Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in
2012. His most recent titles include Grief Notes (BlazeVox, 2012), notes
and dispatches: essays (Insomniac press, 2014) and The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014), as
well as the forthcoming poetry collection If suppose we are a fragment (BuschekBooks,
2014). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books, The
Garneau Review (ottawater.com/garneaureview), seventeen seconds:
a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds) and
the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com), as well
as curating the weekly “Tuesday poem” on the dusie blog http://dusie.blogspot.fr/. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as
writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews,
essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com
BlazeVox, 2012 by Rob Mclennan |
THE FRAGMENT--rob mclennan
My
compositional interest in the poetic fragment most likely emerged during my
twenties, my initial decade of serious writing, from my initial interested in a
particular form of the Canadian long poem. I was quickly and deeply influenced
by the procedural open-form, promoted and furthered by Black Mountain poetics,
Canadian west coast/TISH poetics, Toronto’s avant-garde/Coach House
poetics and all that followed. Taking stock, and marking each particular step;
pulling back to see less of the larger picture and focus on smaller, more
immediate concerns, and my poetry manuscripts over the past two decades have
engaged with the temporal and geographic immediate, as well as an attention to
the flow and the shape of the language itself. Days emerge, and the poems
happen, as do the individual days, the individual events. One ties almost
directly into the other.
I spent
years caught up in works by contemporary Canadian poets who worked in longer
forms, themselves influenced by poets including the Berkeley Renaissance poets
Robin Blaser, Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, and I devoured works by Canadian
poets such as George Bowering, Robert Kroetsch, bpNichol, Barry McKinnon,
Daphne Marlatt and so many, many others. Having become very aware of the book
as my unit of composition (and even moving occasionally to the multiple-book
project), I’ve now published more than two dozen trade poetry books composed as
single units, each working a variety of structures to make up an entire whole,
whether a collision of shorter poem-sections, a collection of accumulated
shorter self-contained poems, or a work made up of one or two longer pieces.
Over the years, I’ve been intrigued at the different approaches a single
self-contained work of poetry can manifest, from the collage to the
accumulation to the seemingly-random assortment.
The
idea of the fragment, whatever that might mean to any individual writer, allows
the space for the reader to fill in the blanks and perhaps piece together their
own particular narrative or through-line. Any poem has to allow space for the
reader to make their own connections, but the writer must be capable enough to
provide the direction (or directions). Since my initial reading, I’ve been
increasingly influenced by other poets working their own variations on the
fragment, whether Fanny Howe’s poetic of the ever-expanding single project (a
variant on what I saw in the work of Robert Kroetsch), the ongoing
accumulations of Rachael Blau DuPlessis (a variant on what I saw in bpNichol’s The Martyrology), the structure of the
tightly-crafted “collection” of shorter poems by Sarah Manguso, Lisa Robertson,
Sarah Mangold and Kathleen Fraser, or the self-contained essay-style projects
of fragment-poems by Cole Swensen and Anne Carson.
The
fragment allows for the distractions of easy narrative and straightforward
patterns to be abandoned for the sake of the collage or even collision of
lines, phrases, stanzas and even poems to shape into something that couldn’t
easily be explained, but somehow manages to exist and make perfect sense. The
fragment allows for impossible patterns and mixtures that shouldn’t work, and
shouldn’t even be, something the “poem” should always be striving for. One
should ask exactly what a poem shouldn’t be doing, and then do exactly that.
Although
my current poetry project, “World’s End,” is still very much in its beginning
stages, it slowly engages through the same series of transitions and
distractions that hinders its progress, from our house-purchase and move to the
Alta Vista area, to the birth of my second child, Rose. One of the sections,
“The Rose Concordance,” perhaps the only work I’ve really done since Rose was
born in November, 2013, is constructed out of a series of stand-alone seemingly
random phrases. The inattention to work and the impossibility of any longer
attention span that Rose presents is something I’m attempting to capture in
this fragment-collage work. Art must progress, or die on the page, and if the
way in which a work is created becomes different, then one hopes that the work
itself can’t help but also be different. And, given I’m remaining home with her
once Christine goes back to work after her year of maternity leave, I can
expect the next few years to be a series of work-related upheavals, after more
than twenty years of full-time writing. If all I can compose at the moment is
the occasional stand-alone line, then I will work from that perspective. I
mean, if William Carlos Williams wrote short poems due to quick moments amid
his work as a doctor, sketched out on prescription pads, perhaps the fragment
might just become the only structure that makes any sense. Scraps of paper fill
my desk in a way my pre-Rose life never did, and perhaps she might just force
my attention to pinpoint, and allow me to create something far more striking
than I ever could before.
Wednesday’s
child is full of whoa—
Sleep,
a bitter fiction
Babe
agape, snores slightly
One
writes like a storm, intermittent—
u((n)in)t(e)rr((u)pte)d
)s(l))ee)p
1 comment:
A very exciting reflection on the fragment, responding to this project and including the image of one of rob mclennan's pages, can be found on Pearl Pririe's PESBO Poetry Journal blog at: http://pagehalffull.com/pesbo/2014/03/22/on-fragments/
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