, a writing vigil,
rob mclennan
$6
I’m rereading notes sketched out last November, responding to the death of Prince George, British Columbia poet Barry McKinnon. Christine and I, along with our young ladies and mother-in-law, headed to Florida for the sake of finally taking the children to Disney, a trip delayed due to the onset of the Covid era. Apparently the goal was to catch the trip before Rose turned ten, which would then have her charged as an adult. I carried my Red Deer College Press reissue of McKinnon’s I wanted to say something (1990) across Universal Studios, suburban Orlando and Walt Disney World, capturing photos of his book from our hotel deck, in the Cantina, by the Millennial Falcon, a Tie-Fighter, by a fire-breathing dragon in Harry Potter’s Hogsmeade. I amused myself by carrying a book by my late friend across a ridiculous series of outings, mere days after he’d died.
Working through my many pages of rough drafts, I’m realizing my poem-sketches are closer in tone and structure to the late John Newlove’s 1964 poem “Ride Off Any Horizon,” a poem that first appeared in book-form in his Black Night Window (1968); how I utilize variations of the phrase “I wanted to say something” as a repetition, from which poem-fragments might return to leap from. As Newlove once said of his own poem, originally using his phrase as a compositional tool that he’d remove from later drafts, which he ended up being unable to strike out. “Ride off any horizon / and let the measure fall / where it may— [.]”
In his Paris Review interview (1968), Robert Creeley responds: “I’m really speaking of my own sense of place.” This is the sensibility that Barry McKinnon brought to Prince George when they moved there, what I also absorbed across my twenties and into my thirties from those British Columbia poets. The very notion of Robert Creeley invited up north to read, into McKinnon’s local. What might that have sounded like.
*
The earth moves, through parts of New England. A rare New York earthquake. Come Monday, the solar eclipse. Some say we’re in end-times. Kim Trainor’s A blueprint for survival (2024) speaks to wildfires, the British Columbia interior, the coast. Matt Rader’s FINE (2024). The poetry, that makes nothing happen.
I spend half an hour tweaking three short stories at RedBird, a music venue in Old Ottawa South, as Aoife attends her weekly ukulele lessons. She couldn’t find her pink ukulele, so she has borrowed my lime green model, the one Sharon Harris gifted me during their move from apartment to house, back in 2010. I am working on stories.
There is a certain point of the editing/copy editing process that is less improving upon and is simply changing. This story isn’t any better, but it sure is shorter, or longer. Or different. The idea of spending thirty years working a self-portrait in oil to keep up with the changes. It might never be finished.
There were tales of the late Steven Heighton (1961-2022), attending revisions and reworks of his prose to the point of checking in with the printers of his books, which his publishers and editors were not necessarily happy about. At some point, one has to let go. Or pull it back.
I had hoped also to look at poems this morning, but naturally, they remain in my office, freshly printed. And I am here, instead.
published in Ottawa by above/ground press
May 2026
as the thirty-fourth title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
produced in part for activity at Banff Centre, May 11-18,
2026, as part of the 50th anniversary of the University of
Alberta Writer-in-Residence program
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024), the poetry collections the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025) and edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026), and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.
This is mclennan’s seventieth above/ground press chapbook, following recent titles including Origin stories (2026), the collaborative river / estuaries (with Julie Carr; 2023), edgeless : letters, (2023), The Alta Vista Improvements (2023), Autobiography (2022), the collaborative SOME LEAVES (with Gary Barwin; 2020), Twenty-one stories, (2020), Poems for Lunch Poems for SFU (2020), Somewhere in-between / cloud (2019), Study of a fox (2018), snow day (2018) and It’s still winter (2017).
To order, send cheques (add $2 for postage; in US, add $3; outside North America, add $7) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com
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