Ben Robinson Interviews Zane Koss

(Invisible, 2025)

Zane Koss

​Ben Robinson: I guess, first, I’m interested in the development of this book. You write that it took a long time to come together and that parts of it date back to 2013. Can you tell us a bit about the history of Country Music?
 
Zane Koss: Yes! It’s been a project that was percolating for a long time, or that I was struggling for a long time to figure out how exactly it would work. The oldest pieces of writing in the book date back to the fall of 2012, when I’d moved into a basement apartment in Montreal with Mike Chaulk. I was starting my MA at McGill, and he was a couple years into his BA in Creative Writing at Concordia and editing the campus literary magazine. Being around him and all his literary friends, and also shifting from studying prose to poetry in my scholarship, I had a lot of new poetic input. I’d stopped writing poetry early in my undergrad, but I had an idea for a series of poems. So I gave the idea to Mike, and he said “Why don’t you do it?” The two short poems that come right after the opening cougar story, published as “dog” in CV2 and “coyotes” in Poetry Is Dead, were my first two publications, but also my first steps toward taking myself seriously as a writer, with validation from Mike, Emma Healey, and other people I was hanging around with at the time.
 
Around that time, I kept trying to write these poems about how on those first cool days of fall in the city people would get their leaf blowers out, and the scent of the two-stroke engine exhaust combined with the shift in weather always produced a sensorium that paralleled the sensorium of collecting firewood for the winter with my dad—the leaf blower and chainsaw using the same type of motor—and just these intense feelings of guilt that those sensations would produce. Why wasn’t I home helping my dad? It was a major responsibility that I felt I was failing to fulfill, but which only sort of existed while smelling and hearing two-stroke engines and feeling the autumnal air on my cheeks. I wrote poems about this sensation for most of the falls between, say, age 18 and 30, but they were all pretty terrible poems, too wrapped up in my own emotions and just thinking that trying to convey that emotion was enough to make a poem.
 
I also, from the first creative writing class I took in grade nine, knew that the stories I grew up hearing were worth writing down. But in every attempt to write them down, they fell flat. They weren’t as engaging on the page as they were in oral performance. So I’ve known I wanted to write these stories down for twenty years or so, but had never quite figured out how to do that in a way that both preserved the life of the stories as oral expression and could be interesting as poetry for someone invested in avant-garde and experimental poetics. And then one day I was digging through my old writing folders on my computer and found that I’d already written the core of the book—the section beginning “I think about performance”—a year or two earlier. What a gift to myself!
 
[Hilariously, in trying to find that file just now, I came across like seven different versions of false starts of projects called alternately “country song” or “country music.” These false starts include erasure poems of country songs, a really bad poem that starts with a joke about how I’m only a poet because I wasn’t talented enough to be a singer-songwriter (actually, holy hell, it’s longer than I remember and contains some writing that will be useful for my current project), couplets set to the tune of various country and blues songs, as well as a weird version of the cougar story that opens Country Music with just blank rectangles layered on top of the words so you can’t actually read the story. It appears I’ve really wanted to use that title since at least 2017.]
 
Anyhow, in finding that I’d already figured out what the form of the project would be—sort of framing these stories around questions about poetry and performance, in this more autotheorizing or autoethnographic voice, inquiring about myself as an object of study—it sped up the process of turning the project into something that was book-shaped. It was just a matter of following these lines of inquiry through to their conclusion, and including quotations and stories both as responses to these questions and as prompts to further questions, eventually reaching a sort of poetic if not argumentative conclusion.
 
The other useful thing about this form was that it allowed me to absorb those older, imperfect pieces of writing about my feelings for home, to read them as though I was a critic of myself, doing a sort of paranoid reading of my own unconscious. There are pieces of Country Music that are poems I thought were bad poems but that appear in that book through this frame of “Look at this bad poem I wrote about my feelings of guilt. Isn’t it interesting? Why was I doing this?” So it was easy to flesh it out into a longer project because it was a frame capacious enough to make space even for what I considered bad writing, because that bad writing allowed me to advance the terms of my investigation.
 
BR: Yes, that interplay of various modes and voices gives the book a real energy and productive instability. I’d like to hear a bit more about this process of finding a form that “preserved the life of the stories…and could be interesting as poetry.” What did that search for a form look like at the level of the individual page, the anecdote, and how did you know when you had it or were getting close? I’m interested to hear you speak about your use of enjambment, particularly early in the collection, and the lack of capitalization and spare punctuation throughout. What did you learn about that line between story and poem that Olson invokes in your fourth epigraph?
 
ZK: Certainly, Charles Olson and his approach to understanding the relationship between oral and visual text helped to spark the direction I went, but I also think it still wasn’t quite enough to use the page to try to render the oral rhythms. Like, I’m really interested in the work of Harry Robinson, who was an Okanagan storyteller from the Lower Similkameen Band of the Interior Salish people. Settler anthropologist Wendy Wickwire recorded a bunch of his stories in the 1980s, and edited them into three books that render them in verse, using line breaks and the space of the page in ways that echo William Carlos Williams or Charles Olson. But nonetheless, I think, as poetry, it can be a bit underwhelming—because it’s not poetry. It’s storytelling. In the same way that reading rap lyrics if you’ve never heard the song can be very tedious. You’re not experiencing the full thing. You’re missing so much, and it’s not just the rhythm. It’s tone, it’s texture, it’s pacing, it’s bodily motion, eye contact. It’s the whole social context, too.
 
Which is to say that learning about Olson’s techniques was a vital step forward, but it still left my own family’s stories feeling flat as poems. Reading, recently, Nathaniel Mackey (“Sight Specific, Sound Specific”) on the relationship between the aural and visual poem, he pushes back on and denaturalizes the 1:1 equivalency that Olson is seeking. That a line equates to a breath and a line break to a pause. Reading out loud from Country Music as often as I have this year, I’ve noticed that I’m more likely to take a pause in the middle of a line, and push right over a line break without one. The visual grammar of thought and the auditory grammar of speech are different. For me, the “look” of the page feels like it captures the shape of my thinking, but as it turns out, that doesn’t match the shape of my speaking. Which is to say, I think Mackey is right, though I might not have thought so a year or ten years ago. These two modes of language have two different syntaxes that are specific to the materiality of each.
 
In any case, there’s something about the stories that relies on the sudden, sharp twist. The punchline, sometimes literally. I think it was understanding those moments of rupture, trying to capture that through fragmentation, decontextualized pieces of stories that are never told or only told much later, say, or by unexpectedly cutting back and forth between the two (or three) modes of this book. I don’t think I knew I was “close” until I started reading it to people. I was terrified the first time I read from this project, which I’m pretty sure was at NYU. But people were really excited by it, they said I was really onto something. You don’t always get that kind of feedback at a poetry reading. Or I don’t, anyway.
 
As far as enjambment and such, this book is, in many ways, about reckoning with the complex legacy of Olson and Williams as much as my family’s storytelling. Mike had introduced me to Charles Olson that year I lived with him, so that’s all part of that circa 2012 context there. The way Olson uses enjambment, punctuation, capitalization, etc. really gripped me in those years (and since), which comes back to his outsized influence on the early poems that make it into the book, especially the first section. Breaking “more” into “m / ore,” feels like a characteristically “I just learned about the New American Poetry” type of move. I almost got rid of that in the book for being too gimmicky, but the whole first section is about negotiating my entry into “poetics” as such, so it felt right to preserve it. I was known among my friends in those years for being quite picky about the vertical alignment of words on the page, how different stanzas lined up, and for being a bit idiosyncratic about line breaks.
 
That quote from Olson, it’s this moment in the 1965 Berkeley lecture, where he’s clearly quite inebriated, and he’s slurring his way through this pointless story about him and his wife going out to dinner with someone or other, and he keeps getting sidetracked, and the audience is calling out to him to shut up and get on with the poetry reading, and that’s his retort. As an often-inebriated teller of too-long stories, it struck home. But I think really, the biggest imprint of Olson on Country Music comes from the film clip of him reading “Maximus to Gloucester, Letter #27 [withheld]” at home in Gloucester with his voice coarse and raw. I was pretty deep into working on the manuscript when I showed it to a student and had this moment of vertigo where it was like “Oh, fuck, everything I’m doing is just re-writing this poem over and over again.” All my weird rhetorical flourishes in this book can pretty much be traced directly to that. Like the way he leaves “wore” off the line “under one of those frame hats women then”—I make that gesture over and over again in the book. Or my continuous use of whatever verb tense it is that is represented by “had," past perfect or whatever. All my uses of “that” or “this.” The very rhetorical repetitions. Luckily, ryan fitzpatrick and Norm Nehmetallah smoothed out some of the worst of it, but I retained as much as I could.
 
BR: In that uninhibited spirit, I’m curious to what extent the looser, more verbose structure of this book is a reaction to the slighter, gridded poems of your last book? I see a continuity in your invocation in the final section of Harbour Grids that “the self / is a location / in a system / of relations // not a skin / to be shed.” Did you learn anything about writing place in Harbour Grids that you brought to Country Music?
 
ZK: I’m so happy you mentioned that thread of continuity between these books. In my mind, Country Music is sort of the logical next step from where Harbour Grids leaves off, that turns toward seeing my own subject formation as a useful area of investigation. I think it was Norm, when we first sat down to talk about Country Music after he’d read the draft manuscript, who said “It’s very different from the last one,” which caught me off guard for a second. Like, he’s right, formally it’s a very different approach, but I hadn’t really thought of it as anything other than the logical extension of Harbour Grids, which was sort of about realizing how a certain version of circa 2010s avant-garde poetics was a deadend, if I wanted to be attentive to the things—politically and poetically—that I was invested in being attentive to. This takes right off from there.
 
Framing this continuity through place, though, is super interesting to me because I haven’t really thought of it that way. You’re right, that definitely my first instinct here would be to pull on that same quote that you do—the realization of the intertwining of self and place, self and social context being one thing that I brought from Harbour Grids into Country Music, and maybe the necessity of generosity that comes with it—seeing all of us as enmeshed in the same imperfect world, doing what we can with what we’ve got. It’s also that both books borrow language and life from people who are not me, and what responsibility I bear to the other—whose stories are these to share, how much am I allowed to tell, where’s the boundary between appropriation and ethically transmitting stories—whether I’m reading Spanish off roommate ads on telephone poles or re-telling my dad’s friends’ now-comical near-death mishaps in the bush.
 
But maybe I haven’t thought about these two books as both books of place because in a fundamental way their relation to place is different. Harbour Grids is about how to translate scraps of perceptual experience into language, like real live experience of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, directly into words almost as I experience it. Grounded, right there in the flesh. Whereas I was still in Brooklyn when I assembled most of Country Music—or in Guelph, for that matter—and even most of the earlier writing it draws on is from Montreal, or Guelph, or Brooklyn. So it’s as a much a poem of those places too, even if that’s less apparent for the reader. I wasn’t in the place it’s about, so those sensorial details enter the book through memory, or the memorial function of language, in the case of oft-repeated stories. An East Kootenays of the Mind. But both places are places, perhaps, where I feel as though I’m on the outside, and where that sense of alienation drives a lot of what happens. Or like, answering the question of “why don’t I (feel as though I) belong” becomes the point. (Which, terrifying to realize it, is also the question driving the next two projects. I think we’ve found my original trauma, doc. Yikes!)
 
BR: Who says experimental poetry can’t be therapeutic?!
 
I take your point about “the boundary between appropriation and ethically transmitting stories.” I get the sense that many contemporary poets are reluctant to inhabit anything resembling a specialized social role, and I feel you examining that in Country Music. Poetry is everything and nothing; we write books that get published in very small quantities, and yet, you have access to publication and you have now published these stories. How do you balance this hesitancy around extraction with “finding that [you are]/ a writer” and the desire to preserve?
 
ZK: I’m curious what you mean by “specialized social role.” (Don’t worry, I will answer the question, and already have thoughts, but I am curious!)
 
BR: Yes, I could have been clearer, certainly. Something like a social function, the poet as a/the story collector/(re)teller within a given community?
 
ZK: Oh, interesting! For that phrase, my brain immediately went to how poets are treated in some parts of Latin America, where they’re expected to be public figures who might be called on as panelists for current affairs talk shows, and give their election analysis or whatever. Where’s my invite to Power & Politics? Maybe the type of social function you’re pointing to feels more in line with Ezra Pound’s conception of his Cantos as “the tale of tribe,” but that's not quite right either. I think one important distinction your definition creates is that it’s someone within a community. That reluctance on behalf of poets that you’re pointing to above has something, I assume, to do with the idea of representation as a speaking on behalf of (I’m thinking of the riff on “Vertretung” and “Darstellung” in Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”), but I think you’re right to suggest that it’s not about speaking for nor speaking to but speaking with, in dialogue with, if that’s what you’re saying.
 
That tension between the poetry-reading public as one context for my (or anyone’s) poetry and the people I’m writing about as another possible audience is something that’s been on my mind since at least my first chapbook, Warehouse Zone, in 2015, and that I’ve been trying to understand and work through more conscientiously with each project. Like, for Warehouse Zone, I assumed none of the people who are in that book would ever read it. It’s a long poem with a quasi-conceptual, processual, constraint-based poetics about working as an order picker in a warehouse. But then I became friends with my co-workers at that warehouse, and they added me on social media, so they saw when it came out. And they loved it. They appreciated being seen, being recorded in print, seeing their other friends preserved. It’s easy, in academic/literary circles, to forget that being published at all is sort of an outlier, an anomaly, especially when you’re from a background where access to cultural capital seems impossible.
 
But anyhow, to get back to your initial question, for me, from that first chapbook onwards, I’d begun to recognize that, as an artist, you’re doing your best work when you’re being vulnerable, or as I framed it then (and still kind of do) when the act of creation has the potential to also be an act of betrayal. You’re giving something away. Doing so invites risk, of course, but also vulnerability, openness. And conversely, if you're not giving anything away, why should anyone care? It can be terrifying but that’s usually what makes art meaningful. On the one hand, there needs to be stakes. On the other, openness offers the possibility of connection.
 
Still, at readings for Country Music, I’ve been asked a few times about what my relation to these stories is, and I always answer: “theft.” I’ve been re-telling these stories since I was a teenager, and they’ve never been mine. Even now, when the principal figures have all given their blessing to this book, I still feel like it’s theft. I think you just have to be okay with that, maybe. It’s not a theft in service of myself. I want to share. The stories deserve to be shared because they only exist as a social material, only exist in circulation, in the telling. There is no story without the sharing.
 
BR: I’m interested in your invocation of risk here and the way you embrace complexity throughout the collection. Someone like your father comes through in a very rich and nuanced way—apathetic about electoral politics, enraged at statues being torn down, wanting a Black Lives Matter sign for the end of the driveway. Likewise, I think the book is attempting to preserve a place, and perhaps, even more so, a culture, with all its simultaneous beauty and flaws. We don’t often see (anymore) poetry books in this country that contain so much violence, so much gore, so many guns, so many fuck right offs.
 
Can you talk a bit about the task of depicting these complicated men with both understanding and a healthy amount of scepticism? Your being someone who “never shot anything except/ popcans and paper targets,” resisting the temptation of the hot coffee spoon, while remaining in awe of someone who would take on a cougar in the nude or push his friend’s intestine back in with a stick. This question is getting unruly, but talk about preserving your relations even as you acknowledge that you are “never in relation to the land except / in opposition”?
 
ZK: My unruliness is rubbing off on you!
 
Two points of clarification: I did not resist the hot coffee spoon. It happened once, and it was like an out-of-body experience, watching myself do it, until Kate yelped and told me off. It happened so unconsciously that it hadn’t even crossed my mind that it would be a cruel thing to do. It hadn’t even crossed my mind that I was doing it. Kate will say that it’s the worst thing I’ve ever done to her, but just a window into the strange way we echo what we’ve learned even if it’s been totally forgotten, consciously anyway. A real lesson in how trauma works, even at this more mild end of the spectrum. The second point, and I’m glad to put this in the public record: my dad would like the world to know that he put his sweatpants on before going out on the deck. That wasn’t how my mom told it to me, it’s not how I received this story, but he wants everyone to know he wasn’t nude. In any case, it’s a much better story if he’s nude, and the book is more about my relationship with the stories than it is about the truth of them.
 
In thinking about how to respond to this, my mind sort of loops back to the type of conflict that drives this whole project, from the presence of Williams and Olson through to the presence of my dad and his friends. I love them, but I see the political or ethical consequences of their approach to the world. It’s about this question of both love and skepticism, yes. The book initially started out not quite delving into the politics of it as much, but the deeper I got, the more I was thinking about the project, the more it became clear that I couldn’t just leave some of these questions unasked. Maybe that’s one difference, starting from love and adding critique.
 
Distance has probably also been key. I grew up hating country music and hunting and big trucks all the tropes that we’d put in that conceptual sphere. The violence of it all. As a kid, I was bullied by the rednecks, so it took some time away from that to see how those relations are informed by larger structures and histories. And not just settler-colonialism and white supremacy, but the types of class violence that I began to see in academia and major urban cultural scenes. How these people talked about the people I grew up with. Seeing that happen sort of drove me to identify more with where I grew up. I always seem to define my identity oppositionally. I used to say, as I moved from Invermere to Guelph to Montreal to New York, every few years I move to a larger city further east, and my rural western accent gets stronger each time I do. But being able to see that both of those things are true, that the possible forms of relation are determined by both violence and exclusion operating in both directions.
 
A friend of a friend published a book of short stories about the area where I grew up—with a big five publisher, no less—and I couldn't finish reading it because I could see that he hadn't fully absorbed that. It felt like he was still very angry about the people who had bullied him growing up, framing those characters in ways that didn’t acknowledge their motivation and complexity, other than just a cartoonish desire to perpetuate violence, and I was sort of shocked. Like, I kind of thought he’d have known better, especially given that he was a few years older than me, or that someone along the line, whether a creative writing professor or an editor, would have pushed him to explore that more. That was my first experience with literary representation of my home, too, and it was perpetuating this classism with a sort of smugness about escaping it.
 
But maybe most important is just needing to be accountable to the real people. They’re not abstractions. And I knew, given what this book is about, that they'd for sure read it, especially after people had read Warehouse Zone. Again, it’s about the tension between those two audiences: needing to critique and be generous.
 
BR: Incredible. I’m glad we could get those details straightened out, though I agree that the nudity puts it in a delightfully more Neolithic mode.
 
I’m curious about Kate’s role as one of the two acknowledged editors of this book. We see her powerful presence on at least one occasion in the text as that critical (in two senses) voice that you mention above, with her provocative suggestion that “you will probably never work with/ your body ever again in your life” and she is also a skilled publishing professional in her own right, but what did she bring to this project and perhaps your writing at large? (Feel free to have her chime in herself if she is so inclined.)
 
ZK: Kate is touched by the question but only wanted to give me notes to make sure I mention everything important. Ever the editor. She’s also given this answer a top edit.
 
Because this book is so interwoven with my family and because Kate has been subjected to my retellings of these stories more than anyone—fifteen years of listening to them—we naturally had a lot of conversations about this book in ways that we hadn’t for much of my previous writing. For Harbour Grids, for example, I’d had the first section written, and was reading it out loud just as a means of editing, and Kate overheard and said, “That’s the most beautiful poem you’ve ever written.” That was the first time I started thinking about that book as doing something aurally and not just visually, but that was about all she really had to say about that one until it came out, really.
 
But for Country Music, we had long conversations about which stories to tell, how much of the stories to tell—different ethical considerations about how and why to tell which stories. The one story that involves someone’s death, which is not my story to tell in a way unlike the others, I’d wavered about whether to include it. The idea of having it redacted emerged from our conversation, as well as, later, after I’d learned I’d unknowingly gotten enough of the details wrong to anonymize the story a little, we arrived together at the idea that maybe it was valuable to include. It was no longer the story about that person, but the space that story occupies in my brain. Which then informed my approach to the stories elsewhere, too. I’d initially planned to fact-check the whole book with my dad and Jerry Kohorst, my dad’s best friend, who is the third of the three big storytellers in this book, along with my mom, but as I kept working on it and we talked about it, Kate and I decided that the book wasn't about the veracity of the stories so much as their life in and through me. I did gently nudge my dad and Jerry into retelling a bunch of these stories when I went home the summer before the book came out, so I was able to correct a few errors, but I left other errors that I knew about uncorrected.
 
But equally importantly, the end of the book had initially come at the beginning. The section where my dad interrupts my brother to invite me to tell the story instead had initially been adjacent to the part about my baba, which has that echo of “started like this.” And Kate had said I should use that section as the end so that it sort of opened back out again, as if I was just beginning to tell the story, rather than acting as though that passage introduces the book, and also to end with that punchy self-revelation there.
 
It was actually Norm’s idea to list Kate as an editor, which I’m grateful for, especially because I had written one of my dissertation chapters looking at a specific example from the 1960s of how Margaret Randall—like many women in that era and since—often did not receive the full credit she was due for her work on the magazine El corno emplumado, which she co-edited with her husband Sergio Mondragón. So sort of a theory into praxis moment for sure. Kate’s not really someone who typically engages with poetry, so I think she’s quite pleased with herself for having had such a crucial editorial intervention. Which, as a poetry outsider, I love, after readings, getting her frank assessments of who she did and didn’t like. Very decisive and sharp for someone who sees herself as above all that. I’m more inclined to look for some aspect to appreciate, if not always enjoy per se, in each reader. Kate has that sharper editorial instinct.

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Zane Koss is a poet and translator living in Guelph, ON. He is the author of Harbour Grids (Invisible Publishing, 2022) and several chapbooks of poetry. He is the co-translator of Hugo García Manríquez’s Commonplace (Cardboard House, 2022) and Karen Villeda’s String Theory (Cardboard House, 2024), with the North American Free Translation Agreement (NAFTA). He was born and raised in the East Kootenays, BC, and earned a doctorate at New York University.

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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.