news | Monday April 14, 2014

rob mclennan Interviews Jordan Abel

Today, poet rob mclennan published an interview he conducted with Jordan Abel, author of The Place of Scraps – which has recently been shortlisted for the 2014 Dorothy Livesay Prize for Poetry in British Columbia – about his writing process and influences. Here is a little taste of the interview:

rm: the place of scraps is your first trade collection of poetry. What was your process of originally putting the manuscript together, and how long did it take? How do you feel your concerns as a writer have developed over the space of starting the collection to finally seeing a finished copy at your front door? How do you feel the work, and even the process of writing, evolved?

JA: When I originally began putting the manuscript together, my process leaned towards mechanical. To construct a poem, I would scan through Marius Barbeau’s book Totem Poles until I came across a section that spoke to me. Usually, I was looking for a paragraph or two that I could type out in InDesign and subsequently erase. When I found a section that I liked, I would begin by erasing a word, a sentence, or a group of sentences. Sometimes I erased punctuation, letters and parts of letters.

Read the full interview on rob mclennan’s blog.