The following interview is part three of an eight part series of conversations with BC poets. All interviews were conducted by Rob Taylor.
waking up at my cousin’s was something new
waking up at my cousin’s was something new cereal poured in a blue plastic bowl sitting in the kitchen nook overlooking the backyard with their very large trampoline his older brother bouncing all afternoon in his muscle t-shirt doing flips and other tricks when we got new dishes white with a tiny green trim the box said unbreakable so my brother took a plate with both hands and flung it onto the floor my mother’s shriek shattering the air
Reprinted with permission from
Sprocket
(Caitlin Press, 2025)
Rob Taylor: Sprocket is a book length sequence of 55 prose poems. One question that hangs over a prose poem is: without line breaks, what makes it a poem? The Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms took a crack at a definition by highlighting a prose poem’s “high patterning, rhythmic and figural repetition, sustained intensity and compactness.” Your poems display all of these characteristics, their rhythm in particular torqued by your choice to exclude punctuation from the poems, which gallop along as a result (in a blurb for the book, Kevin Spenst describes them as “run-on tumbles of full-blast exuberance”). Though rhythm has always been important in your poetry, this style feels like a bit of a departure from your previous books. Did you feel some extra motivation to stylize these poems in order to make their prose feel “poetic”? Did any other poets inspire you in taking on this style?
Al Rempel: When I started writing these poems, I felt a need to change up my usual style. I think I intuitively realized that a run-on format would nicely match a child’s perspective, though I didn’t recognize then, as Harold Rhenisch did so wonderfully in his review of my book, that it also mirrored what’s necessary when pedalling a bicycle: if you don’t keep moving, you fall! I’ve dabbled with the prose poem form in the past, but never with any seriousness, and after reading a variety of prose poems from different poets over the years, including Eve Joseph’s amazing work, Quarrels, I thought I could make that style my own. I realized that without line breaks, what’s going on inside the line becomes more important that what happens at the edges of the poems—I tried to put the torque and rhythm there, inside, using internal rhyme and changes in voice to help signal to the reader how it could be read, something I learned from rereading Al Purdy’s work. Once I settled on a style that worked for me, each poem inspired several others, so they came tumbling out one after another until one day it was all done.
RT: The line between “prose poem” and “prose” is also thin in this book as it is autobiographical: a memoir-in-verse of your early years growing up in Arnold, BC. Why did you choose to write this memoir in poems instead of as a more traditional prose memoir? What did poetry allow you to get after that might have been more difficult in prose?
AR: I was telling my physics class about some of my adventures growing up, and one girl exclaimed: “Your childhood must’ve been lit!” which I took to mean a good thing. So I thought maybe my stories did have some interest outside of my immediate circle of family and friends. But I wanted my telling to be “artful,” to go beyond the prosaic and be worthwhile on its own. About every ten years I think that maybe I could write a novel and usually I get halfway into the first paragraph when I remember that I’m not really any good at it, or rather, prose doesn’t grab me the same way poetry does. I’ve become so accustomed to poetry’s economy and power (think: espresso vs. coffee) that I have trouble writing prose, and sometimes reading it too! What I love about poetry is that it invites language to open up to possibility, to multiple readings, whereas when I teach, I use language to do the opposite, to decidedly state and explain one meaning of a particular physics concept, for instance. Both uses of language require a level of precision that appeals to me—finding the exact right word or image or metaphor.
I’ve become so accustomed to poetry’s economy and power (think: espresso vs. coffee) that I have trouble writing prose, and sometimes reading it too!
RT: In reading Sprocket, I was envious of your memory! You seem to have so many details so clear in your mind. Have they always been locked away in there, or did writing this book draw them out of you?
AR: Thanks! Some memories I’ve held with me since they first happened, and I have used them in past work, but more like dabs of colour on the canvas (a memory here, a made-up image there, something I saw at a coffeeshop last year). Sprocket was my attempt to be more “truthful” in retelling the events. I also tried to write them as prose, once as a collection of short stories and another time as a humorous explanation of the physics of bicycling, but those attempts didn’t work. Other memories popped up out of nowhere in the middle of writing a poem, so much so that I exclaimed to myself in one of the poems: “what was it with those sticky green leaves in spring…”
RT: Would you give any credit for those memories popping up to the free-roaming, associative style in which they are composed?
AR: I think my run-on style definitely helped unlock even more memories, so similar as it is to the practice of free-writing.
RT: You write in your acknowledgments that you partly wrote Sprocket so your daughter could learn where you came from. Would you say you wrote this book with her as your audience? Your childhood friends? Did who you were writing for shift over the writing of the book, and did that precipitate changes in how, or what, you wrote?
AR: The danger, at least for me, of imagining an audience, is that it can shut down or unnaturally contort my writing. I just say what I want to say, as cleanly as I can, and worry about audiences when it comes time for the book launch and subsequent readings.
RT: Now that you’re a father yourself, have you come to see these stories in a new light? Do you see your friends, your parents, or Arnold differently?
AR: The first thing I realized when I wrote Sprocket is that I would never let my daughter do what we did back then—disappear for hours on end, roam through fields, play in ditches, and climb mountainsides—so it was strange to look back at these memories and think: “my parents let me do that?!” Times have changed for sure! I also learned some of the history of the place. I knew that the Mennonites initially purchased the land from a farmer, but I didn’t fully realize that it was on the traditional territory of the Semá:th First Nation and Máthxwi First Nation, where the names Sumas and Matsqui come from.
The first thing I realized when I wrote Sprocket is that I would never let my daughter do what we did back then—disappear for hours on end, roam through fields, play in ditches, and climb mountainsides—so it was strange to look back at these memories and think: “my parents let me do that?!”
RT: As a rolling long poem exploring your childhood, Sprocket reminded me in many ways of David Zieroth’s 2006 long poem, The Village of Sliding Time. How fitting it was, then, to see a blurb from Zieroth on Sprocket‘s cover, and a note in your acknowledgements thanking him for “ongoing encouragement in my writing practice,” which includes his publishing three of your chapbooks via his Alfred Gustav Press. Could you speak a little about Zieroth’s influence on your writing and life?
AR: I started corresponding with David just after his book, the bridge from day to night, was published in 2018. What I love about reading other poets’ work closely is that it gives me permission to try out new things. Zieroth’s work inspired me to try out a new type of torque, what John Lent calls “springboard lines,” where the energy of the line starts at the beginning and shoots out as far as it can from there. Up until this discovery, I had been working my torque at the end of the line: the twist, the turn (verse comes from the Latin for plough; the line is a furrow), ratchetting up or down the torsion there as the poem needed. So now in my current work—my poems after Sprocket—I’m experimenting with David’s springboard lines.
RT: Sprocket has an unusual design element. At the edges of the poems, there are faint watermarked words, sometimes as a single word and at other times a phrase. Can you talk a little bit about what’s going on here?
AR: When I worked on the book’s structure, I started off by placing the poems roughly chronologically from my earliest memories to about the end of grade seven. But how could I create an arc, or make them flow from one to the other? I realized that I sometimes repeated a word that I’d just used in the previous poem, and that these repeated words could form links like in a bike chain with just a little bit of adjustment and rearrangement. So the watermarked words propel the poems forward through the book and carry their energy right back around to the beginning. I then realized that some readers would try to read the words as part of the poem, so I spent more time adjusting where they would land at the edge of the poem, as best as possible. I further realized that some might want to read the two words or phrases on their own, as a sort of “micro-poem,” so I added some connecting words in parentheses, but the parentheses were ultimately dropped during the design stage since they were too busy and too hard to identify as such beneath the poem’s text. I’m grateful to Vici Johnstone of Caitlin Press who took the time to get each watermarked word in exactly the right place.
RT: Sprocket ends on a wistful note: “until I looked up one day and everyone was gone.” Do you think of this as one last message for your daughter, and other young readers, to cherish what they have while they have it? Is there any advice you’ve gleaned, from life or the writing of this book, to help someone hold on to everyone a little longer?
AR: High school was an abrupt end to my childhood and created a sharp transition to new friends and new activities, so I think that was the impulse that informed my last line, along with what you have suggested. It was interesting to curate these memories, to decide what to tell and what to keep secret. How we choose to remember our past influences who we are now, what we think of ourselves; the story we tell ourselves informs our current narrative. I find myself looking for balance between remembering and holding on to the past and living in the present. As my friend Lonny calls out in one of the poems: “don’t trip looking back over your shoulder.”
Sprocket is Al Rempel’s fourth book of poetry, composed entirely of breathless prose poems about his growing up years in Arnold, where you could ride your bike pretty much anywhere as long as you were home by supper. His previous books are Undiscovered Country, This Isn’t the Apocalypse We Hoped For, and Understories, along with a handful of chapbooks. He’s been published in a variety of journals and anthologies, some of his poetry has been translated into Spanish and Italian, and he has collaborated with other artists on a few video poems. Al teaches physics and science in Prince George, on the beautiful, unceded territory of the Lheidli T’enneh.
Rob Taylor’s fifth poetry collection is Weather (Gaspereau Press, 2024).He lives with his family in Port Moody, BC. You can read more of his interviews on his website.