Towards the Unsaid of the Blank Page: An Interview with Rob Taylor
August 29, 2024
“Poems are often a way for me to process my life or unpack why I am drawn to a particular image or scene. The language takes over and a poem can move away from that starting point, of course, becoming less autobiographical along the way. But I’m not someone who writes in response to prompts, or assembles poems from assorted lines in a notebook, or prints the internet in an art gallery in Mexico City. I live a thing and I write it down.” – Rob Taylor
Ben Robinson interviews rob taylor about his recent collection of poetry.
Rob Taylor is the author of five poetry collections, including Strangers and The News, which was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. His new collection, Weather, was published in May from Gaspereau Press. Rob is also the editor of What the Poets Are Doing: Canadian Poets in Conversation and Best Canadian Poetry 2019. He teaches creative writing at the University of the Fraser Valley, and lives with his family in Port Moody, BC, on the unceded territories of the kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.
Ben Robinson: I’m curious about the origins of this book in relation to your earlier work. You have a haiku in your first collection that begins:
I can’t help but hate
haiku. They end abruptly
just as they’re getting
How did you go from publishing that poem in 2011 to 2024’s Weather, comprised almost entirely of haiku?
Rob Taylor: Ha! Yes, it’s been a journey. A long one in some ways, and a short one in others. Back in my first book, I was reacting against the syllable counting that dominates how haiku is taught in North America. Poems that follow that one rule alone are often treated as haiku — any old set of words could count. A favourite recent “haiku” discovery of mine, for instance, is the beauty pageant “Community Chest” card in Monopoly:
“you have won second / prize in a beauty contest / collect ten dollars.” It can get silly quickly, eh?
When I wrote my poem I didn’t really have issues with actual Japanese or English-language haiku — I was largely ignorant of them. But my favourite poem at the time was William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow,” which I’ve come to see as a haiku prefaced by an invocation to readers to pay haiku-like attention to what follows: “so much depends / upon.” So in some ways I was already on my way to the form.
I’ve kept an interest in minimalist writing and, increasingly, haiku over the intervening years: I quote two haiku, one by Matsuo Bashō and the other by Kobayashi Issa, in The News, and I included haiku about my father’s books as section breaks in Strangers.
I was already researching haiku prior to the COVID outbreak (Robert Hass’s translations in The Essential Haiku were a revelation, and opened many doors for me, as did Hiroaki Sato’s essay collections 100 Frogs and On Haiku), but our time in quarantine, in which I worked mostly in the park near our apartment, was a period of intensive study and experimentation for me. That was where the haiku in Weather came into being.
BR: In thinking about your use of time constraints across your last three books — the 40 weeks of pregnancy in The News, your life from age three until your son’s third year in Strangers, and the first three years of your daughter’s life here in Weather — to what extent are the different characters and forms of these books a result of the time spans they encompass in your and your family’s lives?
RT: A great question! In both The News and Weather, I set their poem-a-week time constraint in order to capture a fleeting moment in my family’s life. I don’t think I would have written time-constrained books otherwise. The constraint proved vital to the creation of the forms and “voice” of each. I normally write quite slowly (Strangers took me a decade), so to produce poems at that rate required me to devise a structure I could more consistently place my observations in.
For The News, the form I struck on was more of a formula, the mixing together of three types of “news”: political, poetic/philosophical, and personal. The poems became these sort of condensed glosas, with quotes from poems and philosophical texts snaking through the other content. For Weather, obviously, I adopted/adapted an existing form, but I also used the pressure a haiku poet puts on language (“If even one syllable is stale in your mouth, give it all your attention.” - Bashō) to write minimalist free verse poems. So the formula this time around was to communicate small, discrete subject matter while using no unnecessary syllables.
Strangers was quite different, written slowly over a longer time span, each poem its own “formula.” The work I did on the other two books is visible in some of the poems in Strangers, but I also do things in there that bear little resemblance to either. Strangers is more the type of book I thought I would write when I started out as a poet, believing I was a writer of individual poems, not books. The other two coming along has been a welcome surprise.
BR: You mentioned above that the haiku form allowed you to communicate small, discrete subject matter. In keeping with thinking about constraint, to what extent does haiku, along with form, constrain or suggest content? To what extent were you writing haiku because you were “venturing outside to work in peace” versus writing about nature because you had decided to write haiku?
RT: I sometimes think of myself as an uncreative writer (not in the Kenneth Goldsmith way, though). Other than a few poems in my first book, everything I write is autobiographical and, more often than not, born out of an event or observation I experienced that day. Poems are often a way for me to process my life or unpack why I am drawn to a particular image or scene. The language takes over and a poem can move away from that starting point, of course, becoming less autobiographical along the way. But I’m not someone who writes in response to prompts, or assembles poems from assorted lines in a notebook, or prints the internet in an art gallery in Mexico City. I live a thing and I write it down.
In an essay in her tremendous collection, alfabet/alphabet, Sadiqa de Meijer talks about the Punjabi concept of jugaad, or “mak[ing] do with what is at hand.” That struck me as speaking directly to my poetics. Yes, sure, a poem can be about anything, but I’d rather work with what’s at hand, hopeful that I might discover something surprising in the process. And if I’m surprised in writing the poem, it increases the chances that you might be, too, in reading it.
Which is all a long way to say that my first instinct in answering your question is: no, the form doesn’t dictate the content. I wrote about birds and trees and a crying baby because that was what I was surrounded by at the time. But really that’s too simplistic. The “formula” I talked about earlier in writing my haiku wasn’t just “no unnecessary syllables,” it was also “look up and attend to this world before it passes you by, you fool.” And some of that — that “so much depends upon” level of haiku attention — is definitely connected to the form, and a major element of my attraction to it.
BR: I can certainly see that attention to what is at hand in your work, and in Weather in particular. While we have many excellent mother-poets in this country and increasingly collections from gender-diverse parents, there aren’t many other Canadian poets I can think of who have engaged with fatherhood the way you have across your last three books. What does a poetics of fatherhood mean to you? And do you have any models?
RT: You’re right that there aren’t too many role models out there for me, which is bleak. Male writers have inherited a long legacy of men who shunted parenting responsibilities off to their wives and partners, and whose children hardly made appearances in their lives, let alone their poems. There’s no question that being an attentive parent reduces the time available to you to write, but I also reject the idea that a writer is here exclusively to write. We’re here to live full lives, and as a result we can hopefully write fully-lived poems. Fewer poems in total, perhaps, but that seems like a fine tradeoff. I wrote about this in a poem in Strangers called “Cemetery”:
My son pulls my pen to his mouth
and chews it awhile.
I watch, contented, as some magnificentstretch of my poem disappears.
That said, I don’t think I write about fatherhood as some great statement, some middle finger to the canon. I just write what I live, and becoming a parent has been the single most transformative event of my life — how could I avoid it, and why would I want to? I’m aware, though, that my interest in writing about fatherhood is tied in some way to my loss of my own father at age eleven. A “presentiment of loss” — a term Stephanie Bolster used to describe Don Coles’s poetry — infuses many of my parenting poems, as it did in Don’s, such as “Flying,” a poem from his final collection which I was lucky enough to publish while poetry editor at PRISM international. You can read that issue here, which also includes a wonderful fatherhood poem by Russell Thornton (“Picking Blackberries with My Daughter”). I suppose I had some role models after all! Other contemporary writers whose fatherhood poems have shaped my own include Todd Boss, Raoul Fernandes and Matsuki Masutani.
As I suggest, my twinned interest with fatherhood poems is dead-dad poems. My role models for these are far more plentiful — Kayla Czaga writes such damn fine ones in her new book, Midway, for instance. My biggest dead-dad poem influence is Larry Levis, whose collection Winter Stars, especially its title poem, gets me every time.
And motherhood-poets! Mothers writing about pregnancy and raising young kids have had a great impact on me as well: Adrienne Gruber, Elizabeth Ross, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Sadiqa de Meijer, Jennica Harper...that one, too, is a very long list.
BR: Yes, many of my own favourites in that list as well. Staying with fathers for another moment, both in your own experience as well as your experience as a son, I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on this question from another rob — that of rob mclennan from an Open Book Ontario editorial he wrote a while back on Writing Fatherhood:
What are the perspectives that fatherhood can bring that aren’t already inherently there from the perspective of motherhood? Perhaps little, perhaps nothing at all; perhaps something that I can’t quite articulate or shape. Perhaps something that requires far more study than I have space and time for here.
RT: Lower-case rob! What a force. There’s no one I’d rather be constantly confused with in the writing world. (I also once had the strangest conversation with a poet over dinner. Only at the end did we figure out she’d thought I was Rob Winger the whole time. But I digress...)
I think the distinction between motherhood and fatherhood (or child-bearing and non-child-bearing parent) is most obvious during pregnancy — the perspective of the happening-to and the happening-beside. I would have loved to have been a mother, but I also quite like the “happening-beside” perspective. I often encourage my short fiction students to rewrite their stories from the perspective of a peripheral character, or an animal or inanimate object, that is involved in the action only peripherally. What do they see that the central characters cannot? It can transform a writer’s sense of a story. Writing on pregnancy as a father feels like that — you are unable to access so much of what’s happening, but that’s what makes it interesting. It’s a creative restraint, not unlike many of the others I’ve mentioned already.
Some amount of that “happening-beside” continues after the baby is born — breastfeeding, for instance — but it diminishes with time. Or, really, all parenting becomes a happening-beside as the child gains independence. So maybe the non-child-bearing parents just get an earlier taste of what’s to come. That shapes the whole relationship for some fathers — they remain buffered from the intimate lives of their children, nearby but never a part of — but thankfully not all. One of the joys of fatherhood, I think, is your ability to draw closer to your children over time. Lacking an umbilical bond spurs the need to forge some sort of emotional equivalent. And it can be physical too: my son was a restless baby, and would only fall still in his mother’s arms, usually when breastfeeding. When he was nine months old we moved into the Al Purdy A-frame. Shortly after, he caught a cold — a mild fever, nothing too serious, but it calmed him. I lay on Al’s old couch for a whole afternoon, Harvest revolving on the record player and dust drifting slowly through the spring light, my son resting in the crook of my arm. It was a euphoric feeling (I’m welling up even now, as I type this), one I’d waited for for months, years, in some ways my whole life. It wasn’t superior to a mother’s experiences, just adjacent. Alive in its own light.
BR: Lovely. I’m reminded of your lines in The News, “Our journeys / are not the same.” Many different ways of parenting and connecting with children, each with its own character.
I’d like to ask about your thinking around the layout and pacing of the book. There are times when a single haiku appears on the recto between two blank versos; at other times there are three haiku on both page and page-facing. Weather largely forgoes individual titles, at least for the haiku, and so sections of it also read something like a long poem or a sequence, as almost one poem. When did you begin to think about how the poems would appear in book form and what were your considerations around how to lay it out? How were you thinking about the tension between a collection of individual poems and something more like a sequence where those haiku start to blur into tercets?
RT: Robyn Sarah, who edited my first book, once told me in an interview that “sequencing a collection is like writing one last poem,” but I’ve always thought that was an understatement, especially with a book like this — 156 poems! When I was nearing the end of the three years of writing, I went away for a weekend to a friend’s family cabin to try to figure out how to bring everything together. I had maybe 300 haiku and 30 short poems. I knew I wanted to hew as close to the chronology of their composition as possible, one-per-week as in The News. I also wanted to emphasise seasons and seasonal change, which play such an important role in haiku. So I culled what I had down to 156 poems and divided them into twelve thirteen-poem groupings. That part was largely just math, but it brought with it another math problem: how do you arrange thirteen poems evenly? I drove myself a bit crazy trying to figure it all out. (Did I mention I developed shingles that weekend?) I like the quietude of a single haiku on a page, but a book that exceeded 200 pages felt ridiculous and potentially monotonous. I eventually struck upon a balance: in each section two haiku get their own page, one to start the season and one to close it, while the others are gathered in groups of three and paired with a couple longer poems. I fully expected Andrew Steeves at Gaspereau to suggest compressing the book further (even this more condensed version reached 120 pages), but he liked it as it was and was willing to give it that space. Yet another way in which Gaspereau is generous to its authors and our words.
Beyond maintaining the chronology, I wasn’t overly concerned with how the poems would come together as a book. I trusted they would, as I had with The News, the narrative in each being the narrative of my life, the arc of my witnessing a child’s slow becoming. You’re right to say that in many ways it’s a long poem (we chose to emphasise this by not including a table of contents). But the micro-sequencing — gathering together the best possible groups of three haiku, picking the poems to open and close each section, etc. — took me forever. I’m obsessed with the way one image, or thought, or colour, or sound, might carry forward and flow into the next poem — the generative space between two poems, in which the reader creates a ghostly third poem. Robyn gets a lot of the credit (blame?) for this obsession, having gotten me to think deeply about it with my first book. I couldn’t move the poems too widely in the manuscript — poems written in the fall of my daughter’s first year, for instance, always stayed in that cluster — but within a given group I would rearrange the sequence endlessly. The process wasn’t wildly different from the process of writing some of the individual poems, swapping out poem for poem (word for word) until something clicked. I love that search, that kind of being lost, perhaps as much as the eventual finding.
BR: I love that idea, that the sequencing is its own kind of creative act. I think you achieved that here, the variety keeps monotony at bay.
Staying with the idea of searching and lostness, throughout the collection there’s this sense that many of these poems are just barely wrested from the void, from the blank page — “no notebook—/ running home past the dog park/ a poem in my mouth” or “the explainable poem/ evaporates” or “too cold to write down/ the poem about clouds.” I’m thinking of David McFadden’s late haiku as he contended with Alzheimer’s — is the haiku the closest poetic form to silence?
RT: I didn’t know of McFadden’s haiku. I’ve ordered the book! I love his poems–his “Country Hotel in the Niagara Peninsula” is an all-time favourite of mine.
I’m pulled in conflicting directions when thinking about haiku and silence. On the one hand, yes, for sure, for me haiku has felt part of a long winnowing of my poems, shifting the balance away from the said of the ink towards the unsaid of the blank page. A form of sweeping up as I back out of the room. (I wrote an essay on this for EVENT and The Tyee.) But at the same time, there is something quite loud, even boisterous, about a haiku. There are fewer words, but the ink is thicker, you know? Concentrated with thought and image. The gulf between even a handful of words and silence is so much greater than that between a haiku and an epic poem.
This divide plays out in debates within the haiku community: is haiku connected to Zen? Can all that talking in haiku really be a path to enlightenment? (13th-century Zen Master Yueh-lin: “Ninety percent accuracy is not as good as silence.”) I know little about Zen, but my own attitude on haiku’s potential role on the path to inner peace is: yes and no. It is close to silence, it is miles from silence. If I wish to achieve true silence I will have to one day leave it behind.
BR: After “almost whispering” for more than a hundred pages, is there something of this tension between silence and speech in your decision to turn to prose in the afterword?
RT: Ha — yes, I’m lousy at this silence stuff! In the original manuscript the four page afterword was accompanied by six pages of notes on the haiku form. Collectively, those two paratexts contained half of the words in the book! Every early reader who looked at the manuscript said that I should take out the notes, but I clung to them until my editor very gently suggested the same. I’m a stubborn man, but even I will come to my senses eventually. I pulled out the notes, expanded on them a bit, and published them as an essay on The Woodlot in May.
The two essays were byproducts of all the new learning I was doing around the haiku form. They were also inquiries into my restlessness: Why take on this new form and write it so feverishly? Why, still, was I choosing poetry instead of silence? (The EVENT/Tyee essay is really the third in this little navel-gazing triptych.) The notes were a form of self-defence, my “showing my work” as I ventured into a new form, one originating in a different language and culture. “I’m not just messing around! I did my homework!” That was the anxious element that needed to go.
The afterword you see in the book earned its place, I think, because it wasn’t really trying to do that. It frames the book a bit, but mostly it’s a love note to my late father, and to poetry. And to how poetry might (might!) bring me closer to mental peace and reconciliation with my past. In many ways I think of the afterword as approaching the same big questions the haiku tackle, but from the other side of language, letting words flow freely after having concentrated them down for so long. Hopefully it creates a pleasing balance for readers.
BR: Yes, I think there’s a kind of balance there — both in form and also the way it brings in the past so explicitly.
Lastly, I’d like to ask you, what is Rob Taylor’s radish?
RT: Ha! I’ve wondered about that myself. I open the book with a Kobayashi Issa haiku, translated by Robert Hass: “The man pulling radishes / pointed my way / with a radish.” I tell myself I included it as a nod to that jugaad-ian sense of making do — we make the world legible with the tools we have at hand. For me that meant my family and the natural (and occasionally man-made) world around me. But also, hell, I don't know. Why does anyone do anything? I loved it and it felt right, even if certain elements of the poem will always exist beyond my reach. The radish could be anything. The man could be pointing it anywhere. Where is Issa even trying to go? But I like the thought of a man with more knowledge than Issa showing him the way, then Issa unknowingly doing the same for me, and now me here, 200 years later, attempting my own version in guiding my kids. Radishes in all our hands, whatever radishes are. Maybe even the same damn radish this whole time.
Ben Robinson is a poet, musician and librarian. His first book, The Book of Benjamin, an essay on naming, birth, and grief was published by Palimpsest Press in 2023. His poetry collection, As Is, was published by ARP Books in September 2024. He has only ever lived in Hamilton, Ontario on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Mississaugas. You can find him online at benrobinson.work.