On a VIA Train to Toronto, I am reading Lydia Davis’ Our Strangers (2023), a book purposefully unavailable through Amazon. It took some gymnastics for Westboro Bookshop to find copies, but now they’re the only store in Ottawa so far to carry it. Outside the train window, there are stretches through which all I can see is green. Until, of course, the lake.


Blue, blue. Lake Ontario blue.


Christine texts two words: Blue period. For a moment I have no idea what this refers to, until I realize she’s answering a question I’d asked her. What kind of Manga title does Rose want? Naturally, Rose wants to read what her friends are reading.


The gentlemen seated in the aisle seat beside mine is listening to a seminar on business accounting, loudly, via his cellphone. He mouths along with the audio, and gestures wildly, pointed. Kit Dobson, as part of his Field Notes on Listening (2022): “This book is about listening and land. It follows my belief that listening, or a lack thereof, has become a social and environmental problem. In this book, I argue that listening to landscapes, and doing so with dedication over a long period of time, is one path through the thicket.”


“Each had hoped to encounter an artist, a poetic and drunken prelate, perhaps,” Joy Williams writes, near the opening of Harrow (2021), “a botanist, even a professional athlete or doomsday commentator. This is what the great trains of literature were supposed to provide.”




“If I were Joseph Conrad,” writes Anne Carson, as part of Wrong Norma (2024), “I could not help thinking, I would be mastering this room in case I might one day write about it.” I am sitting in the Great Hall of Toronto’s Union Station, just by the clock, awaiting my friend Z. We are going to have lunch, before I catch my train home. Back in the days when my eldest daughter was small, I ran a home daycare, and Z was the waitress at the small coffeeshop at Elgin and Gladstone Streets where I wrote, three nights a week. Ten hours a day, five days a week I would attend to three preschoolers, with three nights working that muscle of literature. Thirty years ago. This, perhaps the first time we’ve sat down for anything in at least twenty.


Until then, I am sketching notes on Anne Carson, working up to an essay. Through this particular work, she writes through an array of subjects through the lens of such a deep interiority, offering both a personal distance and a core of intimacy.


Yesterday, my cellphone notified me of an Associated Press report of American Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr., of the fact of a worm that had crawled into his head and eaten a portion of his brain before it eventually died. Kennedy claims that none of this would affect his ability to be President. How have these notifications become so ridiculous? And now, I can’t get Pink Floyd’s “Hey You” from The Wall (1979) out of my head. An earworm. Into my brain.




Elisa Gabbert, discussing her work through the essay in an interview posted at Amsterdam Review, writes: “I often describe the form as a way of capturing thinking over time.” I tend to trust her thinking, whether through poetry or prose. There’s such an intriguing depth and lyric to everything she writes, whatever form or idea she’s exploring. For many years, I trusted the poem as my own best thinking form, but have since expanded that into prose. Writing itself as a way through thinking, and seeking the surprise of what might come.




I am sitting in Toronto’s Union Station reading Anne Carson’s latest, Wrong Norma (2024). Carson writes: “At first I wrote only for myself, nothing else existed.”




As part of Jesse Godine’s interview with American poet Peter Gizzi, reprinted from Yale Literary Magazine in Peter Gizzi’s A User’s Guide to the Invisible World: Selected Interviews (2022), Gizzi responds: “Though I’ve given you some of my personal backdrop of the periods in which I composed some of my work, it’s not that I narrate my biography in any of these poems. I don’t really write about my life, I write out of my life and where I am at a given moment of thinking and feeling. I mean to say, you don’t need to know my story to get the work, i.e., to fully engage with it.” I can very much appreciate the difference in what Gizzi suggests of his own work, offering biographical detail as a means through and to an end as opposed to an end unto itself. The blocks, which by themselves neither building nor final shape.


In Hammersmith, west London, we walk by a length of street-level wall littered with inconsistent brick, perhaps early 17th century, if we’re reading the fading marker properly; most likely constructed before the advent of uniform factory-made brick. It is a very strong wall.




I catch this excerpt from Matthew Holman’s interview with Peter Gizzi, reprinted from The White Review, as Christine, our young ladies and I traverse the two-plus hours south by train from London to Chichester, heading into West Sussex:


I could also say the same thing about coming to England. Once you’re there a month or two, you realize, “Oh, coming to England with American English is like going to France with a little French,” because it’s an entirely different language, an entirely different concern of cultural information. Vocabulary just doesn’t mean the same thing.




There is a part of me that believes that poets should not be the ones to edit their own selected poems, but only because the process seems one that requires an outside eye. In the introduction for Toronto poet Paul Vermeersch’s Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems 1995–2020 (2020), Daniel Scott Tysdal writes that it was the author himself who assembled the selection, and I’m sure one can point to plenty of other poets over the years who have done similar. Alternately, Vancouver poet and troublemaker Goerge Bowering has at least half a dozen volumes of selected poems over the years, the first of which, Selected Poems: Particular Accidents (1980), was edited by Robin Blaser, with a further, George Bowering Selected Poems 1961–92 (1993), edited by Roy Miki. Each volume by an entirely different editor, akin to different sides of a dodecahedron. Each volume with its own purpose, framing and perspective.


I think it has to do with how it is I approach writing: that what the reader takes out of it should be led by the author, but not in any sense of absolute, and I’m sure my pal, Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell, would put together a far different shape of a rob mclennan selected poems than would, say, ryan fitzpatrick or Derek Beaulieu. There is something of photography to putting together a selected poems: what kind of perspective might be hidden, brought out or developed by each outside eye? It reminds me of a competition some years back, an array of photographers, each provided the space of an hour with the same model in the same large room, the variation of response showcasing and highlighting the differences and strengths of each artist. Over the past few months, American poet Lea Graham has been in conversation with MadHat Press, who say they would be interested in seeing a selected poems by me, as put together by her. I am curious to see how she shapes her portrait.




“Because influence is indelible you should choose your company carefully.” I am working through Birmingham poet Luke Kennard’s Notes on the Sonnets (2021), picked up yesterday from a West Sussex bookstore mere doors south of where the young ladies and I linger. This is the fifth visit to the same Chichester pub the children and I have made in two days, during the time Christine attends her course at West Dean College. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Breakfast, lunch. Rose is reading Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (1807), Aoife is writing stories, I am sketching out notes, including these. The Dolphin and Anchor, across from the Cathedral. Despite the early hour for breakfast, regular patrons set at the bar with their pints. Are we keeping good company?




An Associated Press notification on my phone informs that Canadian short story writer and Nobel Laureate Alice Munro has died, at ninety-two. I don’t think I’ve read Munro since I was a teenager, although I did attempt a few months back to poke around our library to suggest some of her stories for our ten year old to begin reading. It was the eventual mother of my firstborn that introduced me to the work of Alice Munro, small paperbacks handed over during our teenaged years. Ann-Marie was, in her own words, in the midst of a “Canadian literature kick” during those days, as we moved further into novels by Michael Ondaatje, Elizabeth Smart, Robertson Davies, Leonard Cohen, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence and Sheila Watson, et al. Those Canadian standards, at least back in those late 1980s. By the time I reached Carleton University in September of 1989, I was deep into Timothy Finley’s two collections of short stories, and Matt Cohen’s The Expatriate (1982). Some books stay with you, after all, especially if read so young. Coming Through Slaughter. The Double Hook. The Stone Angel.


In an article on Munro years back, I recall the way one of her daughters described her mother’s work: how each failure simply led to another attempt. That thick-headed push to continue, despite rejection. There’s something of the small town Ontario Protestant Scottish attitude there that I recognize, certainly. That push and that push and that push. That absolute faith.




Over the past few days, since landing home from our week in England, I’ve managed to complete and send out three short stories, including one that I’d been working on since last summer. Eight months to carve and craft less than a thousand words, responding to a building I saw in Mississauga last summer during a week-plus of driving across swaths of western and southwestern Ontario with the kids. Out of the corner of my eye, a large building the same colour as the sky. At the stoplight, I asked Christine to snap a photo as evidence, which became an eventual prompt.


It was curious to realize that all three stories I’d been working on simultaneously include structures that echo each other, offering movements of narrative that were less about setting or even character but about points across a particular narrative through-line. My natural inclination would be to keep a distance in the manuscript between each of these, so the structures seem less repetition than echoes that drift through the larger collection. Once I’ve the attention span to begin another story or two, I should probably return to something character-based, or at least character-threaded. Once you learn how to do something, Madoc, Ontario painter Diane Woodward told me, back in the late 1990s, move on.


I recently answered interview questions for my upcoming short story collection, asked if I had any specific advice for those interested in working the form of the short story. Here’s what I said:

Like any other writerly advice: read as much as possible, don’t be afraid of revision or failure, find your people, and just keep writing. You only achieve the things you spend the time doing.

Los Angeles poet Adrian Ernesto Cepeda posts a line by the late Ukrainian-born Brazilian novelist and short story writer Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) to the site formerly known as Twitter: “Sometimes writing a single line is enough to save your own heart.” According to Cepeda’s citation, the sentence emerges from her book A Breath of Life (1978), as translated by Johnny Lorenz.


I’m always a bit surprised by those who take social media breaks, as I’ve always utilized social media as a way through which to information-gather. The site formerly known as Twitter just informed me of a poetry title by American poet Nikki Wallschlaeger, newly published through Copper Canyon Press. Facebook just informed me of a new essay Chris Banks is finishing up on the work of Rob Winger. This is why one utilizes social media, to see what is out there, and exchange information, ideas, events, etcetera. If I am at my laptop, I am working writing and reading and emails and social media simultaneously, as I have always done. This is how thoughts are formed, shaped. When I sit, laptop-free, at the coffee shop or pub, it is purely me with a stack of paper, notebook, books, although this is when I scroll through CBC articles or Bluesky on my phone, or send out a flurry of texts. Everything is simultaneous, perhaps.


Lispector is on a list of authors I have yet to get to, even as the books pile up on my desk, on the bookshelves, on the floor. Such sentences are important, and I appreciate them as a prompt into further thinking. Even just as that small moment of spark, of push. To keep moving forward.




“I can well imagine a perfectly healthy society in which nobody reads poetry. I cannot imagine a healthy society in which nobody writes poetry.” I found this small broadside on my desk recently, a three-folded pamphlet quoting remarks Stefan Themerson of Gaberbocchus Press uttered to open the Little Press Book Fair at the National Book League in London, June 4–19, 1971. There is no publisher colophon on the item, but I suspect it was produced by Brooklyn’s Ugly Duckling Presse, although I’m hoping someone corrects me if I’ve misattributed.


I’ve been using this small item as a bookmark while reading the Peter Gizzi interviews, and, while I agree with the sentiment, I’m still wrapping my head around it. He’s right, of course.




Another short story begun last summer is now complete, and submitted. Eight to ten months, carrying this particular two-page story around, scratching out lines and adding a few more each time. I’d been weeks circling the finer points, but spent half a day picking and poking to get those roughly thousand accumulated words into final shape. I had been prompted by and aiming towards a particular themed deadline by a local journal, one that I thought this story fit perfect. Well, fit perfectly but also slant. There are certain subjects better not to approach head-on, but around, from the side. There’s much more to be explored that way.




“The H.D. Book became the single most important influence on my understanding of a poetics,” writes Queens, New York poet Lisa Jarnot, in her Four Lectures (2024). “And not a single page of it disappointed.” She’s writing of the influence that the work of poet Robert Duncan (1919–1988) had on her own, an influence I know shared by numerous poets across North America, from Michael Boughn, Norma Cole, Ted Byrne, and Victor Coleman to Dale Martin Smith, Stephen Collis, Jennifer Moxley, and Andy Weaver. While I appreciate and admire the work of all of those writers, as well as Jarnot, I’ve never been able to get an angle on Duncan’s poetry. Duncan was considered one of a trio of poets that made up the San Francisco Renaissance, and I’ve long held a deep appreciation of the work of Jack Spicer (1925–1965), as well as for the work of Robin Blaser (1925–2009). During my late twenties and into my thirties, I moved across the work of George Bowering through to Robert Creeley and into Jack Spicer as an accumulating sequence of touchstones for my writing and thinking, but Duncan, despite multiple attempts on my part, has remained unfathomable, akin to a language I have yet to decipher.


In the mid-1990s, I was unable to fathom multiple titles by Toronto poet David W. McFadden (1940–2018), until discovering the Rosetta Stone of The Art of Darkness (1984), the collection of his that opened the rest of his writing for me. It might be as simple as that, still requiring that particular equivalent title by Robert Duncan, to provide me some insight on how to engage.


Perhaps there’s something healthy about not “getting” every single writer out there, despite whatever reading experience or depth one might have. I don’t think it is purely about one’s limitations or biases—not liking on direction because of the preference for another—but in actually leaning into one direction or preference far and deep enough that it becomes difficult to comprehend certain other directions. I don’t know why anyone appreciates the work of the late Canadian poet Don Coles (1927–2017), for example. I don’t know why or how anyone appreciates the work of the former Toronto poet laureate A.F. Moritz. Both of these poets, naturally, highly regarded and lauded. I remember, years ago, sitting in Ottawa poet David O’Meara’s Lowertown apartment, and a conversation between David, myself, and the since-late Kingston writer Steven Heighton (1961–2022), both of them proclaiming the magic of the poems of the late John Berryman (1914–1972), specifically the “Dream Songs,” which I’d already dismissed through my own reading. I tried going through those poems again after our conversation, and their insistences, but nothing sparked. Nothing. I don’t get it. I just don’t get it.