Talking poetry with Chris Clemens

Chris Clemens lives and teaches in Toronto, surrounded by raccoons. Nominated for Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net, his stories and poems appear in Night Shades Magazine, Dreams & Nightmares, Strange Horizons, Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction, and elsewhere.

Chris is the author of “The Rat King’s Rising Star” from Issue 11.

Q: Readers might interpret the Rat King as a metaphor for community, consumption, or even digital collectivism. Do you prefer readers to approach it allegorically, or as something more literal and mythic?

It can work in a number of ways, which is maybe why Rat King ended up as a poem instead of a story. For me, this piece was initially about loneliness, and trying to fit in with a crowd you’ll never truly belong to.

Lately in my creative writing I’ve fetishized loneliness in some weird ways. With two young children, I can never really get enough of it myself. I have trouble writing without solitude, but to be alone feels impossible sometimes.

Of course, paradoxically, my family gives me the motivation to keep writing.

Q: The idea of being useful recurs throughout the poem — the speaker’s worth is tied to productivity and service. Do you see this as a critique of capitalist or social hierarchies, or is it more existential?

At some base level I was wondering what an outcast might possibly be able to contribute to a rat collective. What do people have that they don’t? Prodigious size, nimble fingers, and potential access to huge quantities of cheese.

I think people are always looking to be valued by others, to find meaning in our relationships with others. It’s unfortunate that commodification has shaped that desire so strongly.

Q: What are you teaching these days?

This semester is Digital Culture, a course increasingly dominated by LLM-related issues. Students tracked their phone/computer use for a week and were supposed to reflect on their habits in some sort of human way. Don’t get me wrong — many people are still really bright and enthusiastic about critical thinking — but I’m kind of worried about the folks who don’t see anything wrong with using ChatGPT to summarize their 76 hours of ChatGPT screentime. Something’s breaking down here.

In class I often ask, “So why would anyone hire you for this?” and point at my brain. Last year a guy said, “What, grey hair?”

Q: What changes are you seeing in post-secondary education at the moment?

Habitual underfunding! Compared to other provinces, Ontario colleges and universities don’t get much, and a lot of cash is siphoned to a “Skills Development Fund” for alternative corporate grifting.

Relatedly, I feel bad for students who should be getting the benefits of that money, but are instead caught in the middle of strikes and various labor actions. A lot of them are fresh out of high school, just looking for a “real” job, and BAM! Here they are smack in the middle of messy adult political life, whether they like it or not. It’s not like college in the movies! It’s actually college as Brechtian theatre.

Q: What first drew you to the image of the Rat King, and what does it symbolize for you personally or artistically?

For a while I was trying microfiction twists on familiar cryptids, inspired by Stephen Graham Jones, and by Nathan Ballingrud’s North American Lake Monsters. I was also playing The Last of Us: Part 2, and there’s a “rat king” fight in that game that’s scary as hell, but not at all what I imagined an encounter with a Rat King to be like.

But I have trouble taking things seriously sometimes, which is why cheese is the ultimate prize here. I’ve played way too many games of Mousetrap (building the machine, at least).

Q: Who are your touchstone writers or artists when it comes to blending the mythic and the mundane?

I’m never reading enough. Lately I’ve been writing horror stuff, so I’m trying to read horror. But I’ve also been publishing poetry, so I need to read poems, right? And then I’m ALSO trying to read to my mousetrapped kids. It’s a struggle to touch any kind of stone at all.

For the most part, I try to keep up via David Steffen’s Long List Anthology series, but I’ve also read some wonderful pieces from writers I met online this year. I love the magnitude and variety of human creativity out there right now!

Stories by Kelly Link often bother me, in the best ways. Scary plus funny is hard to do well.

Q: How do you want readers to feel at the end of “The Rat King’s Rising Star”? Disgusted, moved, implicated, or something else?

I guess that depends on how much you like rats, and how excited you are for radical political change involving a rat monarchy.

There IS a sense in the last line of the poem that some kind of real synthesis might be possible. I grapple with hopelessness, personally, and from time to time find it helpful to revisit Ann Lamott in Bird by Bird: “In general, though, there’s no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we’re going to die; what’s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.”

I’m hopeful for the rats.

Q: What was your journey in becoming a poet?

If someone points over here and says, “Hey, check out that strange poet,” I’m turning around to look behind me, except there’s nobody there. I still don’t identify as a poet. As an English major twenty-five years ago, I was more interested in novels and theatre and video games.

Last year I was submitting microfiction to poetry calls, because why not? And sometimes it worked (thanks, prose poetry!). Radon Journal was the only one to call me out, incidentally, which got me thinking I needed to start reading and learning and catching up, and FAST.

That didn’t happen, but at least I’m using enjambment now.

Q: How does the world around you shape you as a poet, and how does it influence your work?

I wanted to write books but couldn’t find the time; poetry seems a perfect fit, with its bite-sized moments of focus.

I wanted to care more about the world, to pay more attention to the people around me. And poetry is making that happen.