It is self-indulgent to remark on my own difficulty in completing the introduction to the following interview with rob mclennan, author of over thirty books, most recently the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025) and Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025), but the deep contrast between my paralysis and rob’s work ethic is too large not to note. A poet of remarkable tenacity, rob mclennan can somehow reply to emails just hours after receipt with thoughtful, poignant observations that highlight how much of a writer he is. Writing, like any art form, is one in which the writer needs to be engaged consistently to remember the mechanisms of their craft. Writing builds on itself, and in order to write fluently and well, one must stay involved in the practice of putting pen to paper.
For what have been months, going on a year, my own connection to writing has become more philosophical than physical. My distance from the routine of writing makes anything I attempt seem even more precious and, in that preciousness, impossible. To give myself some direction, I have been reading the letters of Rainer Maria Rilke who, within his relatively short lifespan, remained desperate to discover how to stay fully devoted to writing and not let the abyss that opened between days of production consume him. In a letter to a friend, Rilke shares the advice that Auguste Rodin gave him after he lamented this problem: “I must learn to work, to work, Lou, I am so lacking in that!”
In speaking with rob, I find some of the instruction Rilke was looking for in Rodin. rob, who grew up on a farm and who has known labor his entire existence, says it plainly on his blog in regard to his own creative practice: “Sometimes one needs to simply repair the fence, milk the cows, put up a new building. One doesn’t have to get all abstract about it.”
Perhaps I am taking psychoanalytical liberties, but rob reads as contented and joyful within his craft—a happiness I assume stems from his years of honing the muscle it takes to write fluidly, continuously, robustly. He is not a writer who locks himself away, but rather takes the moments between living and caregiving to create. Similar to Bernadette Mayer, Gertrude Stein, or Fanny Howe, here is a poet who uses his daily activity to direct his thinking. rob is actively involved with his two daughters (his “young ladies” as he calls them, with whom he shares a home with poet Christine McNair) and their care, maintains fruitful correspondence with writers across the globe, and runs the imprint above/ground press which is more cornucopia of bountiful poetic delight than typical publishing house. The expansiveness of this everyday life is what makes rob’s writing so gratifying to read, in texts that show how writing and living happen simultaneously.
the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025) is rob’s second installment in a three part trilogy, following the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), a collection of concentrated prose poems about life with two small children, both under the age of five during its writing. the book of sentences is similar in its explorations of the rhythm of daily life and thinking as a poet. The first section (“The Book of Magazine Verse,” taking cues from Jack Spicer’s chapbook of the same title) focuses on poems written for various publications, a type of writing device where rob is thinking about editorial preference and using his own voice to heed the call. The second section, from which the book derives its name, falls into the texture of days spent dedicated to the domestic, the literary, and the death of friends and family. Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025) follows a similar meditative path.
All that adds up to a certain kind of portrait, but it’s still missing the most important detail, which is this: rob is a uniquely and exceedingly generous poet. That great generosity is expressed in his steadfast championing of other poets via prolific reviews of small press titles and interviews with other writers and publishers, and is readily evident in the sheer staggering output of above/ground press. Throughout the book of sentences and Snow day, abundant references and connections make clear just how much other writers are an essential part of rob’s thinking, writing, and publishing processes.
In that spirit, I wanted to use our conversation as a bit of an instruction manual for myself, since rob is such a reliable model of good writerly practice. It’s a common, albeit obnoxious tendency in the poetry community whenever somebody presents as a “lifer” that others will inevitably want some proof of just how committed that poet is to the craft. rob mclennan is the definition of a poetry “lifer” and a writer whose work is all the proof needed.
Katie Ebbitt: I have an anecdote I want to share. I was in a cafe preparing for our conversation, and two little children came up to me and asked what I was doing. I was perusing your blog at the time, so I explained that I was reading about someone writing about his own writing. I think this summary applies not just to your blog, but also to the book of sentencesand Snow day. Can you talk about this meta element within your writing—how you reference your practice and craft as it relates to daily existence?
rob mclennan: It’s a good question. The children are present, so they can’t help but fall into the work, as might the rest of my daily everything. It centres around that word, “domestic,” a term that gets tossed about every so often, what Rachel Zucker does so well, or Margaret Christakos, or poets such as JoAnna Novak, Gillian Sze, Pattie McCarthy, Robert Creeley. I was always so aware, during my time running a home daycare when my first daughter was small (during the early 1990s), that such was still dismissed as “women’s writing,” despite the fact that it not only had produced some of the finest writing, but hadn’t been the exclusive experience of women for quite some time. Why weren’t men writing about fatherhood, or any other element of the domestic, in the same way? Over the years, I’ve been able to point to individual poems from the 1970s, say, by Barry McKinnon or George Bowering or Brian Fawcett, but none of them engaged with the subject in any ongoing way, the way their female compatriots might have. It’s always swagger, exterior. Perhaps it has to do with the actual roles still falling in one direction over the other, with the weight of expectation always on women, while men still presume the luxury of not having to think about such unless they decide to.
Snow day, really, was initially prompted by a particular work by Brooklyn poet Anna Gurton-Wachter, who herself is influenced by the work of Bernadette Mayer, offering variations on the daily, on the immediate, on the domestic.
KE: I was drawn to a line in the poem “Composition” from the book of sentences: “I do not struggle with the poem, but with/ my own attentions.” You have written about routine being the way you get work done—but, obviously, carework and the domestic space make creative regimen… uneven.
rm: I’ve always been good at multi-tasking, which has become clearer as an element of undiagnosed ADHD (something diagnosed across two of my three daughters, and various biological half-siblings and their kids). I spent much of my growing up as the eldest of two, thus attending a household with a mother fallow due to multiple ongoing health issues, even beyond holding similar expectations of labour as part of the family farm (I was the sole male child, thus), needing to learn how to attend to my own interests beyond those boundaries. By my early twenties, I was writing three nights a week at a coffee shop from 7 PM to midnight while parenting toddler Kate and running that home daycare, ten hours a day, five days a week. I spent much of that decade working the muscle of writerly attention, sitting daily to attend to the work. I pushed to start three poems a week, for example, and was writing a book review column for the weekly entertainment paper. By the time I was twenty-four, I was five hours a day, six days a week in a coffee shop, taking Saturdays off to hang out with my daughter. I knew I had to find my own reasons to want to get work done. I’ve now been writing full-time for more than three decades, which seems madness, somehow. I don’t think about that muscle in the same way, although there are days harder than others to sit down and actually attempt to get anything done.
We battle laziness and lies in our search for the truth, I read somewhere. But sometimes the battle is with our own distractions, or lack of momentum. Pushing oneself to the desk.
These days, I know if I don’t take that half hour of thinking time during a ukulele lesson or that hour during a ringette practice, that time is gone.
KE: There is such a range of experience and sentiment within the book of sentences.I wonder how you balance that scope within a single book without getting overwhelmed. Perhaps some of these questions can be answered in its poem “Quarantine, in perpetua”: An astonishing kind of importance. To think, upon the page./ Any line that is composed can be reworked. Each word/ in its proper place.
rm: It is true. Those first eighteen months of the Covid era also had a weight attached due to multiple losses, from poet-friends Joe Blades and Brian Fawcett, to the death of my father (after sixteen months of an unrelated ALS), all with very little possibility of proper acknowledgment. I mean, we couldn’t hold in-person funerals or memorials, and had no idea when that might change. I found the weight accumulated after a while, although I’ve always held the possibility of the poem-as-memorial. I’ve long worked to attend to obituaries, as well, through the daily blog, which does allow me a certain kind of immediate processing. I can often spend a whole day or two doing nothing else but working on an obituary, which allows me to get a lot worked through my system. If we aren’t acknowledging other writers even once they’ve died, then we have no business calling ourselves a community.
And: sometimes the possibility of being overwhelmed is countered by pulling back, and focusing on one task, and then another. And then a further task. Write one thing. Write the next thing.
Once I get a sense of the loose boundaries of what a “book-length manuscript” might be, I think I am rather good at figuring out how to flesh it out, and when it might be nearing the end. the book of sentences was a process of nearly two years before it neared its final shape, final poems. I could tell the conclusion was coming. I could feel the itch of that next project at the back of my head.
KE: I think those who are concentrated on carework often are very tied to the importance of community. Can you speak more to poetic community building—when you first began to build a poetic community?
rm: I think my activity with and approach, for my writing and larger writing practice, emerges directly from my farming background: doing what I can do to assist others. One can’t get anything done in isolation, and it so often takes so little to encourage in a meaningful way. Hey, that poem in that journal was really cool. Not everyone comes to any of this with the same set of skills or same interests or the same agency. Only one in our rural area, for example, had a combine, and everyone hired that guy to combine their fields. We used to help an elderly neighbour take off his hay, or my father would assist another neighbour in repairing his fence. The six laneways he’d snowplow throughout winters. This is just normal activity, as I saw it, within a community, and it didn’t occur to me to approach literary activity any differently. I was well into my twenties before I heard how unusual my approach might have been, which, honestly, made me dig in even deeper, knowing that I had found the thing I could do to help.
I was writing poems during high school, and had a social group attempting creative work as well, whether poems, stories, artwork or music. Chris Page is still releasing albums, which is pretty cool. Clare Latremouille had a novel out in 2006. I was writing and surrounded by a handful of others who also considered that to be of value. I’d met two local and well-established poets by that point—Henry Beissel and Gary Geddes, both of whom taught an hour’s drive east, at Concordia University in Montreal—who also declared what I was attempting had value, which did help as well. Once I landed in Ottawa at nineteen, it took me a little bit of time to find other like-minded people, but I figured it out. I was eager and attempting to read everything, however quiet and shy my demeanour (relative to now). I asked questions of older writers, and editors, and publishers. I wanted to know who made things, and how things were made. I wanted to know the histories of presses, journals, and other activities. By the time I was twenty-three, I’d started producing chapbooks through above/ground press and was writing the occasional review. I was organizing occasional readings by my peers. Within a year, I was working at the weekly paper and had co-founded a small press fair. I mean, I was off and running.
KE: And running you still are! above/ground has been going since 1993. You publish sixty to eighty chapbooks per year. I am curious what it’s been like to run a press, especially one with such a prodigious output, for 32 years.
rm: More than anything, my enthusiasm drives the press. I get very excited about seeing new work by writers I’ve been following for a while, and even solicit work from new writers I discover through a variety of journals. FENCE magazine, for example, or The Capilano Review. And I’m fully aware that to solicit can occasionally mean helping a work come into being that might not have, otherwise. We’re all attempting to improve, to engage, to learn just how far one can push it. Writing as muscle, as study. There’s still so much to discover.
KE: Given that so many writers struggle to even write, can you speak more about your capacity for output? The volume of chaps you publish with above/ground press as well as your own work is mindboggling. Conventional literary wisdom says less is more. What do you say?
rm: It is true, I do tend to produce an enormous amount of material, and have for many years. Honestly, there’s just so much out in the world still to do as far as editorial, and I can barely keep up with the number of writers I know are producing incredible works. I want to see what Julia Drescher might do next, or Monty Reid, or Jason Christie or Chris Turnbull or Buck Downs or Jessica Smith or dozens upon dozens upon dozens of others. I search folk out, and prod at various authors if I haven’t seen any new work in a while. I’ve heard say that bpNichol was a great editor, during his Coach House Press days, in part for taking someone’s first full-length, which allowed that writer the attention to move onto what might be next. Between simply wishing to prod a particular author to move forward, and simply cheerleading through production and distribution, the press is quite literally fueled by my own enthusiasms. Recently, for example, I was in Toronto for two back-to-back small press fairs, and it was very exciting to be able to not only provide copies of new titles to Toronto poets MLA Chernoff, Lillian Nećakov, Cary Fagan and Kate Siklosi, as well as Guelph, Ontario poet Jeremy Luke Hill, but to Toronto-ish audiences, many of whom I knew would be receptive to new titles by some of their own.
My sales through the press are pretty scattershot, and there are certain books that do better than others, but all in a slow, ongoing way. Really, the foundation of the press is through subscriptions: I don’t expect anyone to like everything the press produces, given how varied my own interests run, but I am gratified that there are nearly two hundred folk currently who trust my judgement enough that they’re willing to see through the process. I like that.
KE: In both Snow dayand the book of sentences,you write about ongoing and almost daily correspondence with other poets.
rm: I’m in constant contact with a variety of writers for numerous of my schemes, well beyond my circle of immediate friends. I mean, I’m working three or four issues ahead for the quarterly issues of Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], some six months ahead in my “Tuesday poem” series and “12 or 20 questions” series, the Spotlight series, and Canadian Poets Series for Peripety and/or Tronies. I’m also working on multiple and simultaneous book reviews and a flurry of chapbooks through above/ground press, so one would imagine that I would easily be in regular contact with a dozen or more writers daily on various fronts. I’m also working to curate our spring 2026 VERSeFest Poetry Festival (as I’m Artistic Director), and working on multiple interviews for Touch the Donkey and the above/ground press substack, also, one question at a time. There’s a lot going on. I’m also regularly soliciting work for a number of things, including my “How does a poem begin?” series over at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, a monthly online journal I also edit/publish. For that particular thread, I’ve been focusing on Canadian poets with three books or fewer, soliciting short essays on poetics. Most of these writers haven’t been asked much of anything as of yet, so I think it is always good to hear how the emerging writers might articulate what they’re doing and seeing.
KE: There is a deep warmth to your writing that often can be devoid in poetry. the book of sentencesis an honest, open work; playful, yet deep. And it’s a hard time in the world. As a poet, I sometimes feel I have nothing more to articulate—I get choked on language, on the sentence. But I feel that the book of sentencesis a work that illustrates how writing is about giving yourself permission to not get mired in melancholy.
rm: I’ve had conversations with our young ladies about the importance of feeling one’s feelings, certainly, and I attempt to do the same as well. I lived my whole upbringing within the shadow of my perpetually ill mother’s potentially imminent demise, but after a certain amount of time, one has to get on with one’s business. She was diagnosed with having three months to two years to live in 1967, three years before my adopted self landed, and she managed forty-three years more, including twenty-two of them on kidney dialysis, with three transplants before one worked, so one doesn’t know anything, really.
Death is singular. People are plural. It is all the same event, even if the details are different. You might love folk differently or whatnot, but it is all the same loss. Only the feeling, the depth of it, changes. Unlike, of course, Peter Greenaway’s classic film Drowning by Numbers (1991), as one of the characters offers: “once you’ve counted to a hundred, all the other hundreds are the same.”
There are times I’ve had to remind myself, when I’m feeling low, that I’m eventually going to pick myself up and get back to things, so why not start now? It just saves so much time.
Always helps to think of the Go-Gos. One can never feel sad while listening to (or thinking of) the Go-Gos.
KE: I love the Go-Gos.
Your poems’ structures are like breathing at times—forms expanding and contracting. I love the mix of style and voice throughout your work.
rm: I’ve always been attracted to the music and rhythm of how lines flow, whether through poetry or prose. I need to hear the music in it, and work to place the language visually on the page as a kind of notation for reading. I am aware of writers who need to read aloud work during the compositional process to understand how such sounds, but I’ve never needed to. Anything read aloud is done first, always in public. I can hear it through the page; I don’t need to be in my house talking to myself.
Over the past fifteen-plus years, I’ve been working to be more attentive to the lyric sentence, working through poets including Susan Howe, Margaret Christakos, Julie Carr, Monty Reid, Lisa Robertson, Rosmarie Waldrop, Caroline Knox, Pattie McCarthy, Valzhyna Mort, Etel Adnan, et cetera. Prior to that, I was very attuned to a particular rhythm that came through the line-break, and the Canadian long poem, working elements of George Bowering, John Newlove, Barry McKinnon, bpNichol, and even Robert Creeley and Richard Brautigan. Whatever the content or subject matter, poems often begin through considerations of phrase, of shape. the book of smaller, for example, was a collection of self-contained single-stanza prose poems and was always going to be that, working an exploration of what was possible without using line breaks or stanza breaks at all, worried I’d begun to use such a crutch. I wanted to see where I could go. When I began what became the book of sentences, the follow-up, I wanted to see what was possible once I began to pull those phrases, those structures, apart once again. Pushing out again after a particular kind of compression, I suppose.
KE: the book of smallerand the book of sentencesare part of a trilogy. Are you writing the last book now?
rm: The third in the trilogy, “Autobiography,” was completed a couple of years ago. It has been submitted, but the process through university presses takes time. When the book of smaller landed, I submitted the book of sentences, which took three years from submission to publication. I did the same with the press in August, when that second title landed. I have yet to hear (which is, again, their normal process). Peer review!
Although I have been saying that these three are a trilogy in the Douglas Adams sense (“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”) in that there are actually five titles, I consider Snow day a sidecar to the first two in the trilogy, and edgeless (out in spring 2026 with Caitlin Press) as a sidecar to the second two in the trilogy. The connections are structural, as much as anything else. And between “Autobiography” and the current project sat two-plus years where I focused on two different non-fiction projects, not wishing my “next” work of poetry to be any kind of replicant of what I’d already accomplished. One wishes to move forward, after all.
KE: I want to ask a sillier question. In Snow day you quote Muriel Spark, who wrote, “we all have a fatal flaw.” What’s yours?
rm: Hm. If I tell you that, wouldn’t that give you power over me?
KE: No! Because I am nice! But you don’t have to say. I was guessing you would say “optimism.”
rm: I think optimism through the last bunch of years has been the only thing getting some of us through, don’t you think? Why Star Trek resonated so deeply through the 1960s, perhaps.
KE: I think so. Maybe optimism is a universal fatal flaw. But if we are all experiencing it, maybe it’s not a flaw at all.
rm: From Batman Begins: Why do we fall, sir? So we can learn to get up again.
KE: Wise words from Alfred. Michael Caine is a gem.
rm: He was a pretty good Alfred.