NATIONAL POETRY MONTH 2024

, the view from here, (and there,

April is National Poetry Month, thirty days out of the year when poetry gets a nod from librarians, publishers, and other cogs in the literary machine that usually give it short shrift. If you are on Knopf’s email list, you will have received a poem per day during April, a pleasant arrangement that they might consider making permanent. The University of California Press and New Directions celebrated the event more frugally, by offering discounts on their poetry list. The Academy of American Poets, who inaugurated NPM in the United States in 1996, sponsored various poetry-related events that included tweeting opportunities for poets, among other up-to-the-minute cutting-edge attempts to keep poetry at the forefront of the North American psyche. It was hopeless, of course. The average Canadian or American doesn’t give a pinch of prairie dog scat for poetry. The American psyche is more interested in Civil War reenactments than in poetry. An American is a thousand times more likely to know who Jed Clapett was than Amy Clampitt. Canadian readers are no different.

Bruce Whiteman, “What’s Poetry?,” Work To Be Done: Selected Essays and Reviews (Windsor ON: Biblioasis, 2024)

While it might seem I’ve been suspiciously silent on the issue of National Poetry Month, that hasn’t been the intention. I’ve been busy in other places, of course. Poem-ing.

If you are seeking more regular poetry information, you could always sign up here for the weekly ‘Tuesday poem’ series I curate via the dusie blog. Can you believe the series is more than eleven years (nearly six hundred weeks) old? A new poem every week, with the goal of not repeating any authors (at least, not yet). The weekly email notices also provide updates on above/ground press publications, Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics (some further poet-videos were recently posted there, by the by) and other things going on in my immediate. Oh, and I’ve been curating a months’ worth of daily poems via the Chaudiere Books blog, the eleventh year I’ve been doing such a thing. See the links to the whole series here.

I managed a few readings this past month, including a very cool zoom-event celebrating Perth, Ontario poet Phil Hall, who not only has a new book out, but a festschrift that Mark Goldstein put together, ANYWORD: A Festschrift for Phil Hall, both published through his Beautiful Outlaw Press [see my review of the collection here]. Phil read from some new work, and myself, Erín Moure, Sandra Ridley and Ali Blythe read from our contributions to the collection [the media page on the Beautiful Outlaw Press page holds the video recording for that reading]. Mark does make lovely books. Look through their catalogue: you really should be ordering copies of the books he is producing. Beautiful Outlaw is also hosting an in-person event in Ottawa on May 4^th, also [check out bywords.ca for the listing].

I was invited to host a zoom-reading this past Wednesday to help launch the spring poetry titles published by University of Alberta Press out there in Edmonton, solicited, in part, due to my short story collection out with them this fall [and I did have a poetry title with them moons ago, also]. Poetry debuts by Dawn Macdonald and Patrick Grace, and a new poetry title by Margaret Christakos, all of which are very much worth paying attention to. The next night, I read with dear spouse Christine up in Fort Coulonge, Quebec, organized in part through filmmaker and Chaudiere Books co-founder Jennifer Mulligan [I wrote about her golf relative a while back here, in case you lost track]. It was a pretty good reading (although rush hour Ottawa traffic en route added an hour to what should have been a ninety minute drive). Good to catch an open set that included poets in English and French, a particular mix that doesn’t happen often enough in this area (everyone falling into their individual corners, it would seem). We both read from our published work, given our appearance would have been introductory to the crowd. I’m doing a couple of upcoming readings as well, including: through the milk reading series in Toronto, Type Books, Queen West, on May 8; at the PEP Reading Series in Picton, Ontario on June 20; and again in Toronto, as part of the Shab-e She’r series at the Tranzac Club on July 30. I do try to keep a running tally of my upcoming events on the sidebar of the blog, in case anyone is so inclined to check for updates (plans are afoot for Calgary and Edmonton, fyi, among other locales, once the new collection of short stories appears, including a couple that Christine and I are doing together).

The tenth anniversary issue of my poetry quarterly, Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], landed mid-month. I’ve even been running a subscription sale, which runs out at the end of April. I’m both amazed and not that I’ve managed to keep it going this long. Naturally, I’m already working on issues for 2025. This is how the work goes, after all. And I’ve even had two new above/ground press subscribers over the past couple of weeks, which was nice (there’s still time for you to do same, if such appeals). I simply backdated their subscriptions to January 1, naturally, and sent them each off a box of 2024-so-far. Recent titles through above/ground press include poetry chapbooks by Julia Polyck-O’Neill, Kyla Houbolt, Dale Tracy, Phil Hall and Steven Ross Smith, Melissa Eleftherion, Amanda Deutch, Kyle Flemmer, Pete Smith and Katie Ebbitt, among others. Oh, and check out this upcoming zoom-reading by recent above/ground press authors, all of whom are spread out across North America [send me an email if you wish to register: rob_mclennan (at) hotmail (dot) com].

As for my own writing, this particular poetry month has been caught up more with prose than with anything else (this is the first year in more than twenty-five that I didn’t manage an annual birthday poem, simply caught up with other projects), although I did have a chapbook out recently through Montreal poet James Hawes’ Turret Press. I haven’t worked on “the genealogy book” in a few weeks, due to the second round of my copy edits for my forthcoming short story collection. I did manage to complete and submit a handful of new stories, some of which were started well back into last fall or even last summer (there’s still another two I’m working on that I began in July). I spent the first week of April working on a poem-sequence elegy for the late Prince George, British Columbia poet Barry McKinnon [see my obituary for him here], scraping through notes I sketched out during our week in Florida last November, hearing he’d died just before we left town. I know there’s a memorial publication being crafted out west, possibly to coincide with the in-person memorial on June 22^nd, but I might also just produce the poem as a chapbook. Michael Turner and Stephen Cain were also generous enough to read the poem over once I was finished, to provide bits of feedback.

This past week I did manage to return to a book-length poem I’ve been poking at since November, another project begun during our Florida jaunt [my trip report, naturally]. The project moves, slowly; but moves, nonetheless. The first few pieces from such do appear in this tenth anniversary issue of Touch the Donkey. Here’s a short write-up I recently wrote on the manuscript-in-progress, which now sits at some fifteen poems in varying degrees of incompletion:

Fair bodies of unseen prose is an homage text for, around and after American poets Laynie Browne and Rosmarie Waldrop, furthering my exploration around and through the lyric sentence and prose poem. All poem titles (which appear in italics above each brief prose poem) are taken in order from the poems in Browne’s In Garments Worn By Lindens (Tender Buttons Press, 2019), itself an homage text to Rosmarie Waldrop, with all of Browne’s titles taken from Waldrop’s Lawn of Excluded Middle (Tender Buttons Press, 1994). As my own sequence progresses, echoes of texts by both poets resound throughout, especially from Browne’s In Garments Worn By Lindens and Practice Has No Sequel (Pamenar Press, 2023), Rosmarie Waldrop’s Blindsight (New Directions, 2003) and Gap Gardening: selected poems (New Directions, 2016), and the collection Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France, edited/translated by Norma Cole (Burning Deck, 2000).

In early 2023, I reviewed three recent titles by Laynie Browne, and quickly realized just how much affinity there was between her work and my own, an element of which is certainly due to our shared love of, and influence from, the work of Rosmarie Waldrop. Browne and I soon exchanged books, and In Garments Worn By Lindens immediately prompted this response.

I did, also, begin a new prose project (foolishly enough) a couple of weeks ago, “the green notebook,” which I’ll start posting here soon. Happy National Poetry Month! I think I’ve managed to complete some two dozen poetry book reviews over the past few weeks, if that helps (most of which are posting here, or at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics). Are you thinking about poems? You should always be thinking about poems.