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Tributaries: Ben Robinson + As Is
In As Is (ARP Books) Ben Robinson considers his hometown of Hamilton, Ontario, and what it means to be connected to a place as a settler.
In this interview, Ben speaks to us about his poem “Establish a Perimeter,” the quiet drama of neighbourly encounters, and how sound and visual art have informed his poetry.
Read “Establish a Perimeter”
from As Is (ARP Books)
Establish a Perimeter
The man the landlords
pay to cut our lawn insists
on mulching Allison’s dahlias
with the mower.
As part of his contract, he will not
move anything that’s on the grass —
cuts right around the kiddie pool,
my son’s bike.
Now each night before he comes,
Allison goes out to the yard and constructs
barricades of lawn chairs
along the edges of the beds.
An interview with Ben Robinson
All Lit Up: Can you tell us a bit about your book and how it came to be? How did you
come to write “Establish a Perimeter” and how is it representative of your collection?
Ben Robinson: This book is the slow accumulation of my thinking about my hometown of Hamilton, ON over the course of five years (2019-2023). It spans the birth of my first child, the pandemic and an eviction.
“Establish a Perimeter” in particular was born out of a pandemic moment where I wasn’t encountering many people in my day-to-day and so those few people that I did interact with began to take on an outsized presence in my life. This is one of a pair of poems in the collection about “the man the landlords pay to cut the grass,” this dour guy who would pull up unannounced most weeks in the warm weather and just get to work. He was not particularly careful in his cutting and my wife, who is an avid gardener, got into a kind of cold war with him.
As for how this poem might be representative of the collection, I think it’s interested in these happenstance relationships that exist only due to proximity, this sense that living in the city involves a certain amount of conflict and tension.
ALU: Has your idea of poetry changed since you began writing?
BR: Yes, I hope it is something that is always expanding as opposed to contracting. There is so much diverse and wide-ranging work out there.
ALU: If your collection had a theme song, what would it be?
BR: I listened to a lot of Gia Margaret’s Romantic Piano while writing this book, and given the book’s attention to the urban, I think “City Song” would work well. Increasingly, I find music to be really healing, which might sound new agey, but this album makes me feel so calm from the opening chords. It’s been a critical work of art for me since it came out in 2023.
ALU: What’s a non-written piece of art (e.g. a song / album, painting, sculpture, or film) that you feel is a “sister city” or companion to your collection?
BR: I got really interested in Ingrid Mayrhofer’s Steel Town collagraphs. They show the city both from above and at street level which resonated with my attempts to capture the city from multiple simultaneous perspectives.
A collagraph from Ingrid Mayrhofer’s Steel Town series.
Ben recommends…
“Sons” from Dale Martin Smith’s
Flying Red Horse (Talonbooks)
ALU: Why did you choose Dale Martin Smith’s poem “Sons” from his collection Flying Red Horse? What do you love most about this particular poem?
BR: Dale Martin Smith’s “Sons” (knife fork book, 2017; Talonbooks, 2021) has been a really important poem for me as I’ve been trying to find a way to write about fatherhood. His exploration here is so tender and loving, while also capturing the fluid time of parenthood.
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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.
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Thanks to Ben for answering our questions, and to ARP Books for the text of “Establish a Perimeter” from As Is, which is available to order now (and get 15% off with the code TRIBUTARIES until April 30!). Thanks also to Talonbooks for the text of “Sons” from Dale Martin Smith’s Flying Red Horse.
Follow our NPM series all month long to discover new poetry or connect with old favourites, and visit our poetry shop here.
