An interview with Ben Robinson

Ben Robinson's recent poems include the tale of a man who finds himself lodged in his condominium’s garbage chute, as well as an account of the Christian God’s foray into Spanish lessons. In 2019, The Blasted Tree, Above/ground Press and Simulacrum Press will each publish a chapbook of his computer-generated poetry. He has only ever lived in Hamilton, ON, on the traditional territories of the Mississauga and the Haudenosaunee.

How did you begin writing, and what keeps you going?

Both of my grandmothers were English teachers so books/writing/reading inevitably became a part of my life. My maternal grandmother, in particular, was a big part of my starting to write. Even before I was in school we would sit down and she would transcribe stories while I rambled on.

She was also somewhat responsible for getting me into poetry. I started messing around with writing songs when I was a teenager because I was playing in bands and she had the good sense to get me copies of Leonard Cohen’s Let Us Compare Mythologies and The Book of Longing for my sixteenth birthday to make sure I was on the right track.

I started writing more regularly when I was working at a garden centre where my boss chain-smoked Captain Black cigarillos and said things like “vegetables are for poor people.” Those kinds of mind-boggling moments still propel me to write – to try and make some sense of the experience or at least to get the stories down so I don’t forget them.

As far as what keeps me going, I don’t generally struggle to keep going. There are times when I’m less active or times when I lose interest in a particular project but I usually have enough things on the go that I can find something to work on. Also, because I’m not making my living from my writing, if I don’t feel like writing on a given day, I don’t.

In general, I keep doing it because I love the sense of play and exploration. I enjoy spending time reading and writing and thinking through a set of ideas and then seeing what comes out of that process. It’s that sense of discovery that keeps me coming back.

Have you noticed a difference in how you approach writing now that you’ve published a couple of chapbooks? Do you feel your process of putting together a manuscript has evolved?
            
Chapbooks have been a nice middle-ground for me in between an individual poem and a larger collection of work. The three chapbooks I’ve done so far are working in two very different modes - my first chapbook Mayami (bird, buried press) contained fairly traditional lyric poems whereas the other two chapbooks I did with Simulacrum Press and The Blasted Tree were more conceptual in nature, using material appropriated from YouTube. Having the opportunity to do these chapbooks allowed me to play with a couple of different approaches to writing poetry and explore those methods without the level of commitment that a full-length collection requires.

The small press has traditionally been a venue for experimentation and so I’m trying to embrace that freedom to experiment when it comes to chapbooks and not worry so much about continuity. Sina Queyras’s Lyric Conceptualism, A Manifesto was helpful about this. I’m also reading Frank Davey’s biography of bpNichol at the moment which is helping me to ignore artificial boundaries and feel okay about not being one kind of poet who writes one kind of poem. I hope I can continue finding points of connection between seemingly disparate modes of writing and combine them in my future work.

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

Being from Hamilton, David McFadden has certainly been an inspiration – his sense of humour, his ease with narrative, his empathy for the people in his poems, the way he captures the city. I keep coming back to The Great Canadian Sonnet because the writing is great and surprising and also because it’s such a strange little book object with all of Greg Curnoe’s illustrations.

Stuart Ross has also been an influence. There are no rules with Stuart. Everything is wide open and I love that sense of possibility. Reading his work, I feel free to let my imagination run wild and just watch where things end up.

Looking at my bookshelf, some names that stand out are:

Charles Simic / Michael Casteels / Karen Solie / Damian Rogers / Sue Goyette / Gary Barwin / Amanda Jernigan / Mikko Harvey / Natalie Shapero / Layli Long Soldier / Tongo Eisen-Martin / Suzanne Buffam / Dionne Brand / Souvankham Thammavongsa

How important has mentorship been to your work? Is there anyone who specifically assisted your development as a writer?

I’ve made extensive use of the Writer-in-Residence program at the Hamilton Public Library. Some amazing writers have come through that program in the past couple of years but I’ve been partial to Gary Barwin and Kate Cayley because they are poets. It’s been amazing to have such experienced writers give their time and attention to my work. All of the writers who have come through the program have also been very encouraging and great examples of how to be compassionate and generous presences in the writing world.

Also, Stuart Ross and I just finished up a chunk of mentorship/coaching sessions and they were truly mind-expanding, I would recommend them highly. He went through a manuscript of lyric/prose poems with me and having access to his level of insight was truly invaluable – the work is completely elevated because of it.

What are you currently working on?

I’m constantly at work on the manuscript that Stuart was helping me with which will hopefully be my first collection of lyric/prose poems. That manuscript is pretty much done in my mind and has been submitted to publishers so I’m in the waiting stage these days. The collection is full of animals and cars and garbage. I’ve been thinking about it as a merging of ecopoetics and surrealism – my attempt to find a kind of nature writing that can do justice to life in the city and hopefully escape an entirely anthropocentric perspective. A good chunk of the poems from that manuscript will be published in two chapbooks in the next year or so, one from above/ground press in late 2019/early 2020 and the other from The Alfred Gustav Press next summer.

At the moment I’m more actively working on a generically ambiguous manuscript which is investigating my full name. Back in January of this year, I set a Google Alert on my name to see what was out there and I’ve been having fun watching the results come in – generally, they are not about me because my name is quite generic. I started collecting the results from these Google Alerts in a word document with the thought that they might turn into a project of some kind. That process of spending so much time with material containing my name eventually got me thinking more about the history of my name and my associations with it, which prompted some further research.

Right now the concept for the manuscript is that the verso pages will contain the text pulled from the Google Alerts and the rectos will have short prose pieces with reflections on my name, explorations of the history of my first name going back to the book of Genesis, as well as some reflections on the Google Alert results and the stories that come up there. Ultimately, I’m looking at what happens when a name is so ubiquitous that it fails to do its job of identifying. This project has given me a good opportunity to blend conceptual and lyric elements within one work.

Can you name a poet you think should be receiving more attention?

Do people know about Emma Healey? I mean she did a book with Anansi so people probably know about her but, anyway, I thought Stereoblind was amazing. I just borrowed it from the library for the third time last month. Such attention to detail and subtlety and control throughout the whole book. Some of the poems in there are quite long and she’s pulling together so many different threads and tying them together into something that is quite beautiful and manages to hold its shape throughout. Stop reading this and go read Emma Healey.