above/ground press author spotlight #6 : Monty Reid

, reading as part of the above/ground press 32nd anniversary event on August 7 in Ottawa,

Monty Reid was born in Saskatchewan, and currently lives in Ottawa. He is the author of the full-length collection Karst Means Stone (NeWest Press, 1979), The Life of Ryley (Thistledown Press, 1981), The Dream of Snowy Owls (Longspoon Press, 1983), The Alternate Guide (Red Deer College Press, 1985), These Lawns (Red Deer College Press, 1990), Dog Sleeps: Irritated Texts (NeWest Press, 1993), Crawlspace: New and Selected Poems (House of Anansi Press, 1993), Flat Side (Red Deer College Press, 1998), Disappointment Island (Chaudiere Books, 2006), Luskville Reductions (Brick Books, 2008), Garden (Chaudiere Books, 2014) and Meditatio Placentae (Brick Books, 2016), as well as a mound of chapbooks. The former Managing Editor of Arc Poetry Magazine, he was the Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival for more than a decade.

Reid is the author of seven titles through above/ground press: Six Songs for the Mammoth Steppe (2000), cuba A book (2005), In the Garden (sept series) (2011), Moan Coach (2013), seam (2018), Where there’s smoke (2023) and cuba A book: twentieth anniversary edition (2025), which he will be launching as part of the above/ground press 32^nd anniversary reading/launch/party in Ottawa on August 7. Tickets are available now. above/ground press produced Report from the Reid Society Vol. 1 No. 1 (2022).

You’ve published some thirty chapbooks, by my count, including seven with above/ground press. How do you see your work progressing between titles? How many of these titles were deliberately composed as chapbook-sized units, or part of larger, book-length manuscripts? How do you see your chapbooks in terms of your larger work?

Thirty’s probably a bit generous, but I guess it’s getting close – it’s been a while since I counted. And progression’s probably a bit generous too. I’ve been publishing short sequences since the 1980’s – “The Pictures of Williams” (in The Dream of Snowy Owls, Longspoon, 1983) still appeals to me. As with most long poems, a sequence comes from the desire not to find an end, but to find a way to continue. For me, the sequence accommodates interruptions more readily, it stops and starts, tries to hold it together, begins again, and is probably as much a result of my easily interrupted working habits over the years. These days, my easily interrupted memory may have a role. Or maybe it’s just an understanding that time in a poem is often not linear, or at least not experienced as linear. What has become clear to me is that I’m not drawn to write the single-page poem any more. I admire very short poems – haiku, couplets, whiptails, etc – and I like longer forms. I read and enjoy many 20-line poems too but that’s rarely what I’m drawn to in my own work. Perhaps that recognition is a kind of progress.

I’d say about half of the chapbooks (certainly all of the Garden ones) were part of a larger project, the rest were gathered more haphazardly into full-length collections. Those conceived as part of a larger project have external linkages that the stand-alone sequences do not.

The chapbooks are crucial to my work. They keep me going when the larger work seems remote. They can be fun, without the expectations that can hang on a full collection. And as they accumulate, they often become the larger work. And sometimes, they can be better than the larger work.

I’m only aware of a single chapbook by you before you landed out this way back in 1999, your long-ago debut. What brought about such a wealth of your chapbook publication over the time since?

I love chapbooks, but back in the previous century, they just weren’t a big thing on the prairies. They showed up occasionally, but I don't remember anyone producing them on a regular basis. The ones I was most familiar with at that time came from the west coast. My only chapbook from that period was, in fact, self-published. So having the opportunity to publish chapbooks, because there were a number of engaged publishers, when I moved east, was a new thing for me and I appreciated the quick turnaround, the tremendous variety of material, and the various production standards. As you know, I had something of a dry period when I first located to Quebec, and having the opportunity to publish in chapbook form helped to get me working again. So part was just opportunity. And the short sequences I often produce lend themselves nicely to chapbooks, so I usually have suitable material available. It occurs to me that this is starting to sound like a crime novel: means, opportunity, motive. Ok then, I’m ready to confess.

I would wonder if the availability of chapbook publishers over this way might have prompted any shifts in your work, but your work in the sequence already lends itself quite well to the format. I can’t imagine too many journals engaging with longer works, which suggest many of your longer sequences would either have been excerpted, or seen first light through book publication. Have you felt any shifts in the ways you approach work since publishing chapbooks more regularly?

Yes, the sequences are chapbook-friendly, but not of great interest to the majority of magazines, and I am grateful to those like +doc and The Typescript and a few others that are prepared to print longish works. Sometimes I make an effort to produce shorter magazine-shaped pieces but mostly I just follow where I think the poem wants to go. I’m more relaxed about this now than I used to be. One way or another, the poems seek the larger cultural commons and it's best to encourage them on their way.

In your short piece at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics on cuba A book: twentieth anniversary edition, you mention how that project led you to working a mistranslation of El gran Zoo (1969) by Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen (1902-1989). How did this one project lead into that one, and why did you approach as a “mistranslation”? Given a more recent and straighter translation of the collection was shortlisted for this year’s Griffin Poetry Prize, translated by Aaron Coleman and published in 2024 by University of Chicago Press/Phoenix Poets Series, what do you see as the differences between your text and Coleman’s?

Ha! That’s a complicated question, and answered in more detail in the hybrid ms of El Big Zoo (it includes both the mistranslations and a memoir), which I’m hoping will be published soon. I used to travel to Cuba for winter holidays. One time, my luggage was misdirected and I had to wait in Havana for a few days until it arrived. I found this little poetry book, Guillen’s El Gran Zoo, in a market stall and tried to translate it with my limited Spanish. I brought it home with me (you may remember my sweet little house on Chestnut Street) and kept working at it. I translated it once a year for a decade and each year it became further from the original. One version got eaten by squirrels, another was illustrated by artist Suzanne Hill.

Guillen, who was both an important Cuban poet and not-always beloved cultural bureaucrat, had created an idiosyncratic zoo, in which he included a variety of things (atom bomb, sputnik) plants and animals and people both friendly and not so. The poems were often funny, always short, and occasionally nasty. I tried to keep that range but update the zoo’s intake, so the Caribbean (one of the zoo’s denizens) is no longer full of coral, but of microplastics, the usurers become hedge fund traders, etc. Here’s an example of the difference:

Ursa Major (Roberto Marquez translation)

This is the Great Bear.
Captured June 4, 1964,
by a hunting sputnik.
(please do not touch
the stars on its skin.)

Wanted: a trainer.

and my version

Great Bear

Remember sputnik?
It went out and caught a bear.

The stars on its skin are the bones
of light.

And out there
the light doesn’t always find you.

I can’t legitimately call them translations anymore, altho there’s clearly a debt of origin, so I’m just calling them mistranslations, as others have done before.

I was happy to see Aaron Coleman’s new translation of El Gran Zoo. It’s a more fluid, American-sounding version whereas I always thought the previous govt-approved versions were a little stiff. But it does remain pretty faithful to the original. I just hope it draws more attention to Guillen’s work.