The Museum of Practical Things

, some notes from within the current work-in-progress,

Since July, I’ve been pushing pretty hard on a new poetry manuscript, attempting to compose and accumulate a handful of lyric sequences into a book-length shape. I like the idea of a full-length poetry collection with only a dozen or so poems within, each poem some six or eight pages in length. It isn’t anything I’d attempted prior, although every poetry title I’ve composed since the late 1990s one could claim an exploration of the long poem, or at least through the book as unit of composition.

By the time poems actually began in this project, during our time in Ireland, the title “The Museum of Practical Things” had already been sitting in a drawer, so to speak, for more than three years, sketched into a notebook for eventual use during an April 2022 cottage weekend. Back then, I had imagined the title as one for a collection of prose poems, each composed around a different object; in my mind, each poem was self-contained, and each half a page or more in single paragraph length. At the time, I couldn’t get any further than that spark of an idea, actively working on other projects, including completing a second manuscript of short stories, and subsequently, working two longer non-fiction projects: “the genealogy book” and “the green notebook.” I hadn’t the attention span.

Having published nearly three dozen poetry titles across the past three decades (some fifty titles, overall), I tend to think of my book projects as a series of ongoing threads that wrap around each other, akin to DNA strands, that form the shape of my larger writing practice. I don’t know how else to describe it. I’m usually working on a single “main” poetry project and a potential, simultaneous poetry “side-project” or two at any given time, although prose has been shifting (or expanding) my attentions over these past fifteen-plus years. While I’ve long worked on multiple projects simultaneously, there are manuscripts I’ve worked on that feel bigger, somehow, than others. I purposely provide dates of composition at the back of my published books, even if adding such notation matter to no-one beyond myself. In my mind, there’s a trajectory, if not necessarily an order.

The poems that emerged to form the compact prose poems of the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), composed from mid-December, 2016 to mid-October, 2017, came as a direct result of the lessons learned through the writing of World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), a collection itself composed from September 2013 through to the end of August 2016. Poetry manuscripts don’t usually take me as long as that, but with the birth of our Rose in November 2013, and Aoife, in April 2016, the household required more of my attention. I sketched out lines during naps, visits to the park, and preschool mornings. I set writing expectations aside, for a period.

In terms of structure and content, the book of smaller felt both the beginning of something new and the next logical step after writing full-time since the early 1990s—a lyric tightness and attention to reading, language and domestic—along with the subsequent two collections, the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025), composed from January 2019 to November 2021, and the as-yet-unpublished “Autobiography,” composed from the end of December 2021 to the first week of January 2023. These projects combine into a kind of trilogy, holding shared purpose, shape and tone. A trilogy, of course, in the Douglas Adams sense, as there were sidebar projects, secondary lyric threads composed simultaneously during those days, as I see Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024) resting between, as a side-car, to the first two volumes of this trilogy, and edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026), as between the second two. These two side-collections were composed as a handful of individual and self-contained clusters of sequences that cohered into manuscript-suites, set as a secondary thread alongside the main thread, each one wrapping intricately in and around each other.

I don’t wish to repeat myself, as well as the fact that I was working on short stories—the as-yet-unpublished follow up to On Beauty (University of Alberta Press, 2024), “Very suddenly, all at once” (I haven’t fully decided on whether or not that comma remains), composed from July 2017 to May 2024—so a pause on poems seemed the smartest move forward. I wanted to return to the form fresh. I wished for an alternate sense of shape, of tone; and one that simply didn’t replicate prior work, although one can’t entirely remove that, I don’t think, from composition. I didn’t want to begin an extension of “Autobiography,” but to see what other potential the lyric might hold. So, while completing that particular short story collection, I began to focus on non-fiction, working to explore different aspects of lyric shape and the sentence, and remained there for some two and a half years. I worked on those two separate non-fiction manuscripts, as well as occasional short essays on prose writers, slowly assembling what I am hoping might eventually be a collection, with fourteen completed essays-to-date (and another half-dozen in-progress) that make up a series of pieces underneath the title “reading in the margins.” Oh, I might have poked at other things here and there, other projects, thoughts and ideas, but my focus across those days was prose, which has been a rare thing across these past three-plus decades of full-time writing.

Since January 2025, I’ve been working on two separate project-based poetry manuscripts: “Fair bodies of unseen prose” (begun more than a year prior, but not seriously worked on until this year), responding in a book-length way to a particular book-length response work by Philadelphia poet Laynie Browne [see some here and here and here and here], and “dream logic : poems from a Sunday prompt,” a project directly composed from the weekly poetry prompts that Chicago poet Benjamin Niespodziany began offering back in January (apparently he’s only doing such every Sunday throughout 2025, which does set an end-point to that particular manuscript) [see some here and here and here]. Sidebar projects, to play with the lyric and potentially expand my repertoire, as it were. To see what might happen.

In July 2025, the Anglican Girls’ Choir of Ottawa’s Christ Church Cathedral toured Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, performing multiple times in Belfast, Galway and Dublin [I’m sure you caught my three travel reports: here, here and here]. As our daughter, Rose, was part of said group, Christine and I, along with our youngest, Aoife, played tag-along for the two week jaunt, accompanying and solo-touristing, and attending performances by the group at the Cathedral Church of St. Anne in Belfast, the ruins of the tenth century monastery Clonmacnoise (Cluain Mhic Nóis), Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas in Galway, the Cathedral Church of the Holy Trinity, Christ Church Dublin and the National Cathedral and Collegiate Church of St. Patrick, Dublin.

Of course, two weeks away from my desk is no small thing, and it prompted me to work like a maniac for eight weeks prior to leaving home, to clear that thinking space for travel. I wasn’t suspending the blog while we travelled, after all, and I certainly wasn’t going to attempt writing and posting reviews, interviews or anything else on the road. I spent eight weeks pushing reviews, interviews and other posts nearly a month ahead on the blog, beyond our point of departure. I scheduled a half-dozen substack posts, chapbook posts and pushed a whole array of chapbook publication and mailing, so our adventuring in Ireland (plus at least a week or so after we returned) could be entirely free to focus on that particular experience. I wished to remain, even beyond the uncertainties of travel internet access, which was tricky at times, present.

On airplanes and bus rides, I read through longer works of prose, which seems another kind of rarity. With notebook in hand, I scribbled thoughts on what I was reading; scribbled notes on churches and monuments, Rose’s performances, scattered reading, architecture, and moments. I took a few hundred photos, and mailed more than two dozen postcards. I asked questions of tour guides, hostel and museum staff, bartenders, clergy. Why are there flags along the wall, clearly aged and falling to shreds? Why are the stones of that wall different colours? I looked up details and answers to things that prompted my curiosity. I asked questions of locals, and of the classics professor that was one of the tour organizers. How does Brexit affect the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland? Why was Belfast so young a city, and how does that reconcile with a graveyard going back to the 5^th century? If Richard de Clare, 2^nd Earl of Pembroke (c. 1130–1176), otherwise known as Strongbow, is buried in Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral, where was his wife, Aoife? Why is the Cathedral in Belfast where Rose and her choir sang named for St. Anne, a figure not mentioned in the actual Bible, but only in the apocrypha, as mother of Mary? Through the process of questions (and internet queries), I learned that, unlike her husband, our wee Aoife’s namesake, Aoife MacMurrough of Leinster (c. 1153–c. 1188), is actually buried with her father-in-law at Tintern Abbey, Monmouthshire, a ruin that sits along the Welsh bank of the River Wye.

Perhaps most minds might not go there, but a reference to Tintern immediately returned me to “Lines Written (or Composed) a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798” by English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850). It was this example that prompted my own series of title-attempts: “Lines composed in St. Anne’s Cathedral, Belfast,” “Lines composed a few kilometres past Clonmacnoise, County Offaly, on the banks of the River Shannon,” “Lines composed at Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas, Galway,” and “Lines composed at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Christ Church, Dublin.” For each piece, I held the title as a kind of umbrella, working to compose a sequence of small clusters of lyric underneath the protection and stretch of those titles; pulling apart sentences and fragments to stretch the narrative into a sequence of small cluster-points that constellate the physical space of each page.

I’ve now composed a handful of “Lines composed…” poems, set as foundation for the collection, with further pieces set around this particular core. So far, other poems in the manuscript-in-progress include “Epithalamium , a consortium,” a piece composed after the recent nuptuals of Ottawa poets Jennifer Baker and David Currie, and “Lines composed once landing at Al Purdy’s A-Frame, Ameliasburgh,” after a recent visit we made to Ameliasburg, driving by the late Canadian poet Al Purdy’s infamous house, a site that now hosts a sequence of writing residencies. Ameliasburg, a Loyalist territory, of course, named for Hanover Princess Amelia, the youngest daughter of English King George III. These are poems for occasions, it would seem, almost in the Robert Creeley sense, which, arguably, I have always done. Poems to mark or document moments of time, of activity; of thinking, across or within the broader spectrum of daily activity.

The first poem to prompt the collection, “Rereading Fanny Howe in Dublin, July,” was a piece sparked from the reports, while we were in Ireland, that the American poet had died. Once home, I returned to her sequences, specifically the collection GONE (University of California Press, 2003), a book I had originally explored when it appeared, attempting, with little success, to echo some of her extended, fragmented structures. It was a place to begin, to sketch out lines in elegy for a poet that was important for my thinking on and around a different kind of lyric sequence. It was a place to begin, and to see where the poems might take me. And did you know that Howe’s mother was from Dublin?

At the point of this writing, I’m working on a sequence titled “Light studies on the Ottawa River,” a poem that so far includes: “muscle’s melancholy, // Boreal, planting // cedar, chestnut, oak , striped and sugar maple, // older river channels, // a landscape that dates to the ice age, [.]” I pull at the lines, tearing sections and lines and setting phrases, ripping apart and attempting to rebuild sections one, three and four, as well as whatever else might come. So far, the only coherent section is the second, around which I hope to build, or even salvage, the rest:

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the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025): now available / order through your favourite bookstore or, in Canada, through the press directly; elsewhere, order through bookshop.org / if you are a current above/ground press subscriber, simply toss me $20 and I'll add a copy to your next delivery / Ottawa launch: October 18, 5pm at The Plan 99 Reading Series at The Manx Pub w/ Montreal poet Stephanie Bolster (new Palimpsest Press poetry title) + Guelph poet Zane Koss (recent Invisible Publishing poetry title) / myself, new poetry title and above/ground press will also be at: 2025 Toronto International Festival of Authors Small Press Market, November 1st + Meet the Presses Indie Literary Market, November 2nd (Toronto) / the ottawa small press book fair, November 22, 2025 /