Donato Mancini interviews rob mclennan

donato: First of all, you’ve published five books within a 3 year period, something few have done, how did you achieve this?

rob: I achieved it simply; through writing. I mean, I've been at this full-time for nearly ten years, which is hard to tell when everything seems to come out in such quick succession, seemingly at once. I've still got folk who presume I knock some of these off in a weekend, without edits. Really, when a book does come out, it's usually long behind me, by a few.

donato: Well, one of the pleasures of your work is the sensation that the poems are coming into existence at that very moment you read them. An unsympathetic reader might misconstrue that effect, which can only be achieved through revision or, rarely, that kind of Rilkean Angelic inspiration that's not often real.

rob: One can arrogantly claim that such ease is one of the signs of the true mastery over the form. I mean, how easily & smoothly a Newlove poem, or George Bowering, but knowing the work, the carve carve carve of getting to that point. Days, months, weeks. It's not easy, but it should look easy, at least sometimes (depending on certain forms, I know, I know). Even these responses are crafted. It's a matter of knowing, too, when to stop editing, which I see some people not (no names, please). It's frustrating, seeing the good stuff, ie the life, squeezed out of a piece.

donato: Have you been formally schooled in writing?

Rob: Formally schooled in writing? Yes & no. When I was nearing the end of high school, I took part in two annual day-long poetry workshops with then-local Gary Geddes (& lived to tell the tale...), another day-long fiction workshop, & a week-long poetry mini-course for high schoolers at Carleton University with Bob Hogg. After that, there was a fiction course at Algonquin College with screenwriter Tom Shoebridge, & a creative writing class at the University of Ottawa with Mark Frutkin. Through most of them, we were pretty much left to our own fledgling critical devices. I got the impression, too, that the instructors really didn't know what to do with me, in terms of what I was so badly trying to do, badly. I mean, Gary Geddes disagreed with the poetics of those initial influences, Bowering, et al, & I'm so bloody belligerant, that we ended up butting heads. On the other hand, Bob Hogg was exactly into that stuff. I don't know how I didn't know that at the time. If I had, perhaps I might have progressed at a different rate, or direction. I was pretty much aimless for a long time, self-teaching through reading everything I could of Canadian poetry in Carleton U., Ottawa U., Ottawa Public Libraries. I'm disappointed at the opportunity I missed, there.
Really, I was writing & reading voraciously by the time I started any of them. My grade 13/OAC Writers Craft course only required thirty pages of poetry to complete; I handed in one hundred & twenty. Most of what any of them accomplished was the opportunity to start considering my work, & other people's, critically, & at least have a somewhat receptive audience for newer poems; a bit more of a push to