Ben Robinson

My desk in the vestry of St. Luke’s where I have been hiding out since 2021.

Readings

A book of poetry from the past year(ish)

Ben Lerner, The Lights (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023)

I know Lerner is perhaps the poster child for a certain kind of overachieving white boy (and I think he might know it too) but I’m writing about my sons lately and I was really struck by his poem “The Readers” where he tries to explain to his job to his kids:

They are too trivial

my offices, too intimate, it isn’t labor

I cannot bring my daughters to work

or not bring them

here.

(Also, that Robert Hayden echo! The father of all father poems.) My older son, in particular, has been trying to understand what poetry is and what happens on the days when my going to work means writing, on the nights when I go “read to strangers.” One Saturday morning at breakfast, he was walking a wooden cat across the dining room table and muttering, “He’s going to a reading . . . in New York. He’s a reader . . . a poet.”

I also appreciate how Lerner changes thoughts/time across the line break in this collection, like a kind of parataxis that retains a faint relationship, like some thoughts aren't worth finishing or at least don't need to be finished for communication to occur, which, as someone with a tendency to trail off, I so appreciate. Other times, the threads are picked up in later poems. He's made me feel much better about the continuities between poems which seemed like mistakes at one point—maybe more echoes than repetitions.

A book of poetry that feels like it is contemporary to your own work

Robyn Schiff, Information Desk (Penguin Poets, 2023)

Information Desk is less a contemporary to my writing work than my day job. I’ve spent much of the last nine years working on various information desks in the local public library, which is longer than I’ve done most anything else, so when I saw Schiff’s book, I knew I needed to pick it up, if only for the title.

But then the poetry was also impressive, the breadth of history that Schiff handles is incredible. She and I seem to suffer from the same lingering sense that, with enough research and facts at our disposal, the world can be neatly made sense of.

And I saw a lot of my life in public service in these pages:

of those years

organizing

the money drawer in a black plastic tray, zipping

the cashier’s gray money pouch

back up, signing my name

and so the day begins.

A guard unlocks a row of doors, crowds

enter, and I am information,

not so much behind as within the Desk,

a property of the fact

of the collection, and catechism

commences: Where’s the bathroom?

Where’s

the bathroom? Can you direct me to a

men’s room?

That sense of facelessness, depersonalization, that becoming a provider of capital I Information can instill, merging with the Desk/role. That familiar look from library users as they see me out from behind the Desk, perhaps only five minutes later, on my break, and can’t quite place my face. The internal rhyme of the morning routine (tray/ gray/ name/ day). And Schiff’s brilliant line breaks (Where’s // the bathroom), a clerk knows the catechism remains unchanged from day to day, but the possibility of a more interesting, or at least a new, question looms with each interaction.

A book of poetry that was important to you when you were starting out as a poet and how that has shifted or remained constant for you over time

Michael Ondaatje, The Cinnamon Peeler (McClelland & Stewart, 1989)

Ondaatje (along with Commander Cohen) was my entry into poetry. I read In the Skin of a Lion (novel alert) in Grade 12 and was totally captivated. I think I chose the book because doing so required a note home to your parents about the adult content—seemed intriguing. And when I opened it, there were different voices interrupting one another, no titles and weird page breaks. You don’t learn the main narrator’s name until well into the book. Strange allegorical puppet shows in the bowels of the waterworks, running around a memorized apartment in the dark, a prisoner painting his entire body the colour of the prison roof, semen caught in a handkerchief and called a lightning bug. A whole world, or many worlds, that felt fresh and exciting—not your typical book report fare.

And once I’d read all the novels, the poetry was the same for me. Ondaatje’s books are still transportative, bringing me back to that Romantic teenager, vacant and floaty. Some of the poems are likewise a bit mythic and removed for me now, as though they were written in calligraphy (a writer-in-residence I met with called Ondaatje “Baroque”) but he has a way with image that has stuck with me: walking confidently through a door in the hopes of escaping a poetry reading only to end up in a broom closet, a seagull carrying a dog’s still-seeing eyeball up through the clouds, rolling a retired outhouse across a front lawn so it can be repurposed as a chicken coop.

A poet or book of poetry from the late-twentieth century

bpNichol, The Martyrology Book 5 (Couch House Press, 1994)

This is a book that I found a bit too late, even though it came out two years after I was born. I had read books 1 & 2 of the Martyrology a while back and thought saint and. was clever/funny/charming but didn’t really make much more of Nichol. As I continued writing and reading though, Nichol kept cropping up; everywhere I went, he seemed to have been there long before. I was making computer-generated poems using .gifs and my friend Gavin showed me Nichol’s First Screening (1984!). I wrote a book about names and naming, and found the perfect epigraph in his poem “Two Words: A Wedding”: “because we are words and our meanings change.”

Likewise, with my book As Is, which was concerned with mapping and driving through small town Ontario, Nichol had also been here. It wasn’t until after my book was already in print that I made it to Book 5, but as soon as I saw the Toronto street maps on the endpapers (Are they endpapers? I’ve only read this in e-book.), I knew this was going to be an important one. His sense that place names are more than just “rimes of // coincidence” is strong here (like when I learned that one of the first settlers in Hamilton was named R. Land). Likewise, the way he reads the landscape, the “old line's / ghost geography,” to understand his place more intimately, that aspects of the forgotten/disappeared past can be recovered through careful attention and contemplation. As ever, bp was there first, and we are richer for it

Writings

A New Thing

Pushing the stroller

alone on the third day

I remember how the first

woman’s eyes shone,

fear gone from her gaze. Another

called down from a wooden

fire escape, Aren’t you beautiful!

before getting flushed and shouting

I meant the baby, not you.

My own fieldwork says it’s

the dad who forgoes the Family

Change Room in favour

of the Men’s who’s most likely

to scream Stop and spook

the newborns when his

three-year-old won’t get

in the deep end, to tell

his son he’s embarrassing

himself in front of the lifeguard,

while me, I’m in a stall between

two grandmothers, answering

a question about foreskin

as quietly as possible—

not that I’m never tempted

to shout their tears away

and I do wonder what all this

affection is doing to my brain,

whether I’m becoming something

else. Returning from parental leave,

coworkers I had barely spoken to

covered my desk in

gifts each morning: a seized

safety gate, atonal exersaucer,

a single disposable swim diaper.

After the Endoscopy

I woke up in

my mom’s station wagon

searching for a mechanic who

would do a same-day

safety inspection

on our Elantra

which one month earlier

was on the lift

just three minutes before

the technician alerted me

its lines were corroded

nearly leaking

which tomorrow a friend

would put new plates on

and drive to Georgian Bay.

I placed my calls

adamant in a Fentanyl haze

and as we crawled through

the gridlocked underpass

I saw my esophagus again

enlarged and live

on the doctor’s monitor,

realized sedation

had erased neither

the taste of the bite block

nor the sight of my own insides,

only my mother

somehow ferrying me from

the elevators

to her passenger seat.

Honk If You Can Read This

All these poets

penning odes to their

illiterate offspring—

I’ll admit I’ve

misused apostrophe

disguised as direct address

feigned correspondence with

if not the unborn

then the newly birthed.

These days if I

encourage Jim to sound

it out, he inevitably

reminds me I CAN’T READ

and yet still insists

on a lunchbox note which

he carries to his classroom

each morning and

home again to ask me

what it was I said.

My First Animals

Driving home from the First Aid course

where the instructor brought

the heel of her hand down on the blue baby’s back

I try to photograph the fox creeping across

the adjacent lawns, but catch only a glowing orb

a ball of white light against the black.

I tuck Jim in and just before the snoring,

on that brink where he can finally speak

freely, he tells me, Dad, I am scared

of three things: people getting hurt,

the dark, and ghosts. Back in my own bed,

blue and red whirl on the ceiling; out the window,

I can’t quite see which house the stretcher

emerges from. In the morning, I ball up

the damp sheets, carry them to the laundry sink

where I find a motionless bat lying next to a chunk

of plaster. I scoop it into a margarine container

with a stack of old sheet music, tip it out onto

the lawn where it lays, one wing pinned, one

spread wide. I run inside to check the boys for bites;

when I return, no bat.

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 2024. Recent poems have appeared in Poetry Pause and The Temz Review. 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.