the book of smaller

rob mclennan

• Publisher: University of Calgary Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781773852638
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

Written while at home full-time with two small children under five, the book of smaller is a collection of short, sharp, incredibly dense prose poems. Created in moments snatched from chaos, these poems challenge the possibilities of language in very small spaces.

Each poem is a still moment, a memory, a burst of observation, suspended outside time and held up to the light as the world whirls around it. Some are intimate, some are public, all are grounded personal, domestic space. With trademark intelligence and daring, rob mclennan uses radical structures to express the concision and disorientation, jumps in sense and mood, the collapse of time and duration, the shattering joy and powerful fears, of full-person, full-time parenthood.

With an unparalleled knowledge of modern poetry and poetic evolution, mclennan breaks the sentence into its most vital pieces, then breaks it further, smashes punctuation out of the expected into spaces of risk and uncertainty, pushing conventions to the edge and then beyond to challenge what writing is, and what a reader can be.

Notes

“Happy Holidays” is for and after Sawako Nakayasu. “Wing, an ideal place” is for and after Deborah Poe. “Sentences my mother used” is a title adapted from the title of a poem by Charles Bernstein. “It’s still winter” is borrowed from the Prince George, British Columbia online journal It’s Still Winter: A WEB JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY CANADIAN POETRY AND POETICS (1997-2002), edited by Don Precosky, Barry McKinnon, John Harris and Karin Beeler. “My 1980” is a title originally lifted from a poem with the same by Stephen Burt, posted at Prac Crit. “The President’s House Is Empty” was the title of an article by Bonnie Honig posted online at Boston Review on January 19, 2017. “I live somewhere imaginary” is a line borrowed from Morgan Parker’s There are more beautiful things than Beyoncé (Tin House, 2017). “Japanese poetic diaries” is for Lea Graham, and begun in her house near Kingston, New York, utilizing altered lines lifted from her copy of Japanese Poetic Diaries, selected and translated by Earl Miner (University of California Press, 1969). “Great Barrington MA” is for Geoffrey Young; and in the same poem, the word “kills” is a Dutch word meaning “little waterways.” The first draft of “Plenary, Robert Kroetsch” was sketched out during plenary talks by Aritha van Herk and Dennis Cooley on April 28, 2017 at the Robert Kroetsch conference at the University of Ottawa, and is dedicated to the three of them. “Seven inches from the midday sun” adapts a May, 17, 2017 tweet by American writer Sasha Fletcher. “Title poem” is for our Aoife, for her first birthday. “The 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize” lifts and adapts interview responses by Jordan Abel, Sandra Ridley, and Hoa Nguyen from a June 5, 2017 article posted at Open Book, and is dedicated to them. “Potsdamer Strasse” is cobbled together from the remains of a (failed) longer sequence composed in October, 2015 during a trip to Berlin, as Rose and I tagged along with Christine, who was in the city for a conference. “Some pastorals” is for and after Lea Graham. “It’s just a city, darling,” is a line by Leonard Cohen (1934–2016), and is dedicated to him. “Emily Dickinson’s hair” emerged from a 2014 blog post by Spencer Lenfield, titled “Cool thing #2: Emily Dickinson’s hair” (http://loosesignatures.blogspot.ca/2014/02/cool-thing-2-emily-dickinsons-hair.html). “My family’s all in bed” is a title adapted from a title by George Bowering.

Thanks much to Amelia Martens, Rosmarie Waldrop, Paisley Rekdal and Anna Gurton-Wachter for permissions to use their words at the opening of the collection, as well as to Sarabande Books, who wished to remind that Martens’ quote is from her full-length debut, The Spoons in the Grass are There to Dig a Moat (Brooklyn NY: Sarabande Books, 2016). Wh...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Beware the failure of imagination
• My daughter is in New York City
• Happy Holidays
• Brockwell madrigal
• Reading Ed Dorn in Vancouver
• Three lines, overheard:
• Forty-seventh birthday
• It’s still winter
• History of the fissure
• Remembering John Newlove
• My 1980
• Forty-seventh birthday
• Ars poetica
• The book of smaller
• Birth story
• Fifty words for Gwendolyn
• February
• On minimalism
• Snow Moon, 2017
• Poem, with errors
• The President’s House is empty
• Darwin’s finches
• Augustine of Hippo
• Origin story
• The Prime Minister’s House is empty
• Wing, an ideal place
• Lament
• Journal entry
• The book of smaller
• Incremental
• My 1975
• Anne Carson, Short Talks
• Forty-seventh birthday
• Journal entry
• The Sainte-Adèle variations
• It’s still winter
• Sentences my mother used
• The untranslatable
• Journal entry
• Château Montebello
• Postcard for Gil McElroy
• Homestead
• A child speaks to St. Augustine
• It’s still winter
• Forty-seventh birthday
• Words borrowed from Nelson Ball
• I live somewhere imaginary
• It’s still winter
• Journal entry
• Forty-seventh birthday
• Alta Vista story
• Self-portrait, extant
• It’s still winter
• Daylight savings
• On the value of making
• Map of the Niagara Frontier
• Forty-seventh birthday
• Great Barrington MA
• Japanese poetic diaries
• It’s still winter
• The ends of language
• Spring journal
• Failed senryū
• Jennifer Kronovet, translated
• Letter
• Study of a fox
• Title poem
• Study of an April rain
• Breaking news
• Portrait of a deer
• Plenary, Robert Kroetsch
• Sustenance
• The ends of maternity leave
• Mother tongue
• Christine, in the Halifax airport
• The ends of maternity leave
• Study of a fragment
• The ends of the earth
• Theory of Composition
• Lorine Niedecker
• The 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize
• The Sainte-Adèle variations
• Correspondence
• Anne Carson, Short Talks
• The books you need in five years
• C.D. Wright, ShallCross
• Before description
• Potsdamer Strasse
• Once up a time, in Picton
• A sketch of a sketch of the Ottawa River
• Anne Carson, Short Talks
• Grasshopper Hill
• Elegy for OC Transpo route #2
• Christine, coastal
• Elegy for Dave Russell
• The Glengarry Highland Games
• Policy.
• C.D. Wright, ShallCross
• 423 Alta Vista Drive
• Where landscapes are preserved on canvas
• A Confederate General in Charlottesville, Virginia
• Solar Eclipse 2017
• My father, at seventy-six
• Emily Dickinson’s hair
• Deportations
• My family’s all in bed
• Twenty-first century literature
• Anne Carson, Short Talks
• Acknowledgments
• Notes