The Ben Robinson Interview Part the Second

The second of two parts, this conversation took place online between Hamilton and Montréal on November 6th, 2023 on the occasion of the publication of The Book of Benjamin (Palimpsest Press, 2023). It has been edited for clarity.

FORM | MORE THAN INFLUENCES | POSITIONALITY | ETHICS OF ENGAGEMENT | FORM

FORM

Kevin Andrew Heslop: I’m thinking about your having discussed the line and the way that the length of the line is determined by the width of a screen when one is reading captions.

Ben Robinson: Mhm.

Kevin Andrew Heslop: How you had mentioned having read — I think in conversation — a Deaf poet talking about how his conception of the line was informed by his having often seen captions at the bottom of the screen —

Ben Robinson: Adam Pottle.

— Right, Adam Pottle — and the sort of arbitrary parameters that technology can impose on one’s experience in the arts. Also, one could easily enough come to a feeling of horror thinking about the actual utility of AI, which produces text often so far removed from what is being said as to produce bizarre and surreal and wonderful but nevertheless not-in-any-way-resemblant-of-what-had-been-spoken poetry. So: technology, constraints, accessibility, why this was interesting to you.

That Pottle quote was relevant to a project where I was using autocaptioning technology on these gibberish prank videos that I found online. Before I applied that feature to the prank videos though, I also tried it, maybe more fittingly, on videos of people speaking in tongues. But it’s surprisingly hard to find videos of that on YouTube.

As far as constraints, increasingly I’m just really into form. I love found forms — forms that feel chanced-upon but that have an insistence of their own. I hope that’s true of Benjamin. The structure of that book didn’t necessarily feel like constraint — I guess form is always a kind of constraint — but I just found it energizing.

Mm.

I was listening to an interview before we started speaking this evening and just happened to hear Robert Hass’s description of his first encounter with a teacher, Yvor Winters — Winters, on their first day of class, saying: Here’s a definition of poetry. It’s a statement, in words, about a human experience, in which the rhythm exactly conveys the feeling and the thought.

Mm.

He goes on — and I don’t know that this bears on our conversation, but I just thought it was so wonderful a succession of sentences that I just want to read it to you — he says: Most of you can’t even hear the rhythm of poetry — again, he’s speaking to these undergrads — and then he recited a poem to demonstrate to us that none of us would understand the rhythm of poetry. And then he said, My friend Hart Crane committed suicide. My friend Ezra Pound was committed to an insane asylum. The history of poetry since the Romantics is full of the wreckage of poets that waded into their feelings. You’re not going to do it. You’re going to be sentimental old college professors dabbling your toes in the destruction of your betters. And then he walks out of the class after this three-minute lecture *laughs*.

Wow.

Um.

And yet we get Hass. So he was wrong.

He was wrong. Indeed. Okay: form. This inevitably has to bring up Without Form, although your interest in form doesn’t begin there. But it’s an extremely bold undertaking, that book. I have deep respect for how strong an undertaking that was, how clear-eyed and decisive and intentional a statement that is.

Mhm.

With words of yours limited to something like no more than 70 in the preface.

Yeah *chuckles*.

And this amazing quote from Erín Moure: “Is a gap nothing? Or is it eloquent?”

Yeah. It’s from a review of Phyllis Webb. That was amazing. She’s amazing.

Well, I mean, you put her in very good company in a book with so very few words in it and so many hundreds of pages. The only other quotation is from Genesis, “And the earth was without form, and void.

That’s where I rank her.

*chuckles* And if she preceded Genesis you would have had her words appear in the first place but because Genesis was first it had to be first.

She would have had the first word, yeah.

So this book wasn’t your first thinking through form but it was definitely a step on that path.

Mhm.

I feel like, in some ways, Without Form was — I’m sure that there is a great Latin word for this, but — the shadow that precedes something.

Mhm.

It in some ways significantly precedes Book of Benjamin.

Well, the project came about as a failed contest entry. We were talking about poetry and faith and that is the territory of the Mitchell Prize, which is this big prize. It’s a kind of an unbelievable amount of money, I think, for one poem. I can’t say what it is.

20k.

Yeah, pretty significant. Everyone in my life was emailing me the call for submissions because it’s the one poetry thing that overlaps with the church. Each year it’s like, Oh, he’s the poet! Send him the poetry thing. It’s sweet, but also funny how many emails I get about it.

So I started working on something for the prize and got interested in GIFs. I was animating selections from Genesis 1 and investigating this word dominion that rings out in that chapter. And then one of the pieces that I animated consisted of just the verse and chapter numbers with all the words erased. There was something about that image that really sparked me.

Ben Robinson’s Without Form, from Blasted Tree.

I guess I didn’t read the guidelines for the contest though because you had to submit your entry in PDF. I emailed the organizers and explained my situation but they wouldn’t do it. So I sent the pieces to Kyle Flemmer at The Blasted Tree instead who I knew was not going to be bothered by the format. Initially, Kyle and I looked at doing something with the animations, but at a certain point I got more interested in the numbers, in letting the words go, and bringing those animations back to the static page.

Mm.

I’m glad that the book seems like a clear-eyed statement, but really, like most things, it came on slow. I had said to Kyle, “well, maybe we just do Genesis because of course it would be ridiculous to do the whole Bible. Wouldn’t it be cool? But we can’t do that. Can we?” The editorial process with Kyle is always the beginning of something as opposed to the end of something. I appreciate that so much about him.

Mm, mm.

So Kyle said, “well, what if we did one copy of each book?” And so the first run of Without Form was 66 unique chapbooks. That was the way the project lived for about a year. And then Kyle emailed me out of the blue and said, You know, I’ve been thinking about this. This is bugging me.

Ha, ha, ha.

He was about to publish his own collection of poems as well. And he was like, “what if we do it? I think we can do it. I’ve priced it out.” I was stunned by this. He wanted to do the book in hardcover. It was going to have a dust jacket. He was going to print the whole thing. And then suddenly Kirby was on board as well. The two of them were preparing for the first Fertile Festival and — I don’t know — they had a conversation and then the book became a co-publication between The Blasted Tree and Knife | Fork | Book. It was a dream to work with the two of them. They did it right. They really … yeah. They treated me really well. And those books are beautiful. There’s a copy sitting behind me on the shelf and I still look at it and —

*chuckling*

— I’m kind of in disbelief that it happened.

I mean, it’s not 20k, but it’s not not 20k, you know what I mean?

Yeah. Oh, it’s —

*laughing*

— It’s very worth it. And these are the things that you look at and say, What was I thinking? Of course this was the way that it was supposed to go. Or I’m glad that it went this way.

Mm, mm.

Without Form by Ben Robinson. Order from Blasted Tree here.

You were talking about the shadow, too, the leading shadow of this book. I think you’re right. Gary Barwin has talked about making a working cover while he’s drafting a book to help the manuscript feel a little more real. I did that with Benjamin and it was the first page of Without Form, the numbers, laid out around the title.

Mm.

And so you’re right to sense the connection there, I think; and it’s part of this broader process, trying to understand this tradition that I’ve found myself a part of, for better or for worse.

Mm. Star-Charts for a New Cosmology.

Yeah. Pretty explicit, I guess.

But tell me about that. I mean, you could read that at one level, maybe the shallowest level of looking at the remainder numbers indicating Bible chapters and verses as looking constellatory —

Mm.

— But I think that there’s more — a lot more — going on there.

Mhm. Yeah, I think you’re right. Erasure is a very political form, right? It’s been used on political documents in really compelling ways. I mean, Zong! is an example of this.

Mm.

I think there could have been a version of this project that was more antagonistic.

Mm.

That took on the Bible as this faulty foundation of Western thought —

Mhm.

— And people have done this and it’s compelling. Amanda Earl’s ongoing visual poetry project, The Vispo Bible, is doing some of this, taking a more critical approach. It’s not that mine’s not critical but it wasn’t firstly critical.

Mhm.

I guess I’m interested in work that might be called heretical by certain people and looking at how there’s actually a basis for that kind of work in the Christian tradition, how we can widen our understanding of the tradition. I’m not even really widening it though. It’s always been this wide and I’m trying to point back to those earlier examples and say, “this is a legitimate gesture. And it can be a gesture of someone who is still invested in the tradition. It doesn’t have to be from-without; it can be from within.”

We needn’t ostracize and become too sectarian.

We talked about my English degree, but I also ended up in Religious Studies. Doing a Religious Studies degree at a secular university was really interesting because you’re bringing these research-oriented, historical faculties to the Bible as a new way to understand the stories. Without Form used some of those skills. Even reading the Wikipedia article about the Bible, which I did while working on the book. Talk about defamiliarization.

Mm.

It was one of the first times where I realized, the Bible is an anthology. If we’re thinking about it using my literary frame, it’s an anthology, it’s hybrid. These modes that seem very contemporary and in some ways avant-garde, are all in there.

Mm.

The other thing that I realized was that the Greek is plural.

Mm.

I don’t know Greek, but it’s ta biblia, The Books. That plurality is explicitly named in the Greek. That felt really generative — to say, we can think about this in more than one way.

I mean, this is how you get Anne Carson’s Orpheus at the grocery store.

Mhm.

And also, I feel like you’re quite intentionally writing Book of Benjamin in — I don’t know, is this King James? — this language so pared down and distilled as to feel revealed, say.

Mm.

But it’s relating details about your life —

Mm.

— And your relationship with family members and moving through space in Hamilton. It’s very autobiographical.

Yeah. I think you’re right, and some of that flatness or tone-matching is necessary for the book to hold together. But I’m also interested in that kind of writing outside of this project as well.

To flatten and to humanize a monolith.

Mm.

I think it’s a really important insight that the Bible is not one thing; it’s many.

Which is the same with other entities that we’d think of as religious texts.

Mhm.

And also the sense that they’re cohesive as opposed to relentlessly self-contradicting —

Mhm.

— And erratically combustible.

Mhm. I think that was one of the things that I learned from Midrash, which is not a tradition that I know a whole lot about, but the concept that you can inhabit the text, that you can speak back to the text, that you can sort of reformulate the text, was really important. I read The Nakedness of the Fathers by the poet Alicia Ostriker. It was amazing and important for me in terms of this sort of revision of the tradition, which there is not as much patience for on the Christian side of things, so I had to find examples elsewhere.

Nice.

Mm. One of the sentences that I’d jotted down while reading your work was something like, I think you are an artist who appreciates the work of an artist who doesn’t do the same thing twice.

Mm.

I think it was probably more mythology than etymology, my trying to trace strength through sinew and the strands constituting the cord or rope of Book of Benjamin, but you’re synthesizing things that you’ve done in the past and there’s this prenumbral relationship between Without Form and Book of Benjamin; and you’re inevitably bringing all of that into your current writing now. But maybe a question is — and I don’t want this to anticipate the end of our conversation, but — how far can you see down the tracks? Do you see what’s on the horizon? And what’s the importance for you of — I don’t want to project the term “to invigorate one’s practice” but —

Mm.

—To do things differently every time.

Mm.

I mean, they’re quite significantly different books. In many ways there are similarities, but I feel like you’re doing quite different things each time out.

Mm. *chuckling* I can’t see very far. Until very recently, when I started to figure out these fatherhood poems, I had no clue what was next. I was in this very strange place where I had finished both Benjamin and my first book of poems — two projects that I’d been working on for about five years — and, at a time where my writing was more visible than it had ever been, I wasn’t working on anything. People were encountering the book — Oh, you write. You’ve written a book — and I just felt utterly lost.

It’s all part of the process. Gertrude Stein says, “to be a genius you must do nothing. Really do nothing.

*laughs*

And Aaron Sorkin says that if someone was to ask him what his writing process looked like he’d say, “less than two percent of the process is actually me sitting at a keyboard.

Mm.

Most of it would look like just a guy lying on the couch watching sports updates —

*chuckling*

— Or driving around listening to music.

Yeah.

So the book is being written; it’s just it hasn’t started to reveal its text. But speaking of revelation, does it feel like revelation when you’re writing? Does it feel like the text is coming from you or that you’re discovering it as if it pre-existed you and that it’s arriving through you or something like that? We’re talking, too, about different projects that have different processes. Without Form —

Mm.

— Is maybe a succession of ideas and then their meticulous enactment. But … yeah, is there generally speaking a way that you feel — Do you feel like you’re channeling it? Does it feel like you have to show up and put the time in? Is this Sisyphus —

Mm.

— Or revelation?

I think it’s all of it. Not that I’ve been at it for very long, but long enough to know that it comes in different ways. The fun ones are where you feel like you’re taking dictation or it just comes and it lights you up and it’s gone.

Mm.

The pieces that I’ve written recently have required getting to a certain flatness, stripping away the extraneous details to locate the significance. Whether through journaling, or just thinking, or retelling a given anecdote, I’m trying to find the core where the poem is and then building back up from there. Sometimes it takes a while, but it’s a great feeling when it clicks into place. There are also things you can do to be ready though.

Mm. You can sit in the basement of the dilapidated — you didn’t say dilapidated, but —

It’s pretty dilapidated. I think part of it is music too. I’m not a great improviser but the improvisers that I know, they practice so they’re ready when it’s time.

Mm.

That’s very well and succinctly put, that.

I have an uncle who once phrased his sense of musicians as, “it seems as if they have clean hands.

Mm.

Clean hands.

Mhmm.

MORE THAN INFLUENCES

So, I’m thinking about Anne Carson. I’m thinking about Kate Cayley and Stuart Ross and Gary Barwin and I’ve got a long list now of poets. I’ll just read their names to get them into the transcript. Charles Simic, Michael Casteels, Karen Solie, Damian Rogers, Sue Goyette, Gary Barwin, Luke Hathaway, Mikko Harvey, Natalie Shapero, Layli Long Soldier, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Suzanne Buffam, Dionne Brand, Souvankham Thammavongsa. More than influences, mentors whom you sought out intentionally? I’d seen in an interview that you said you didn’t do the MFA thing so you had to kind of find those opportunities for mentorship another way and one of those way through — was it McMaster’s Writers-in-Residence and maybe Hamilton library writers in residence?

Mm. Joint program.

Okay. So, talk to me about that. And Stuart Ross, this sense of maybe freeing you.

Mhm. Yeah, I mean I’ve been knocking on the door of those Writers-in-Residence for a long time. Some of the relationships have been more fruitful than others. You find the right connections. That’s where I met Gary Barwin; and that’s been a … I guess probably the closest thing that I’ve had to a real mentorship. He was very generous with me when he was Writer-in-Residence and let me come see him a lot more than he probably had to. To get to take fifty, sixty poems to someone over the course of a year. That was huge for my development as a writer. We were talking earlier about not recognizing artificial boundaries and Gary is someone who embodies that. We talked about the forking of the path of music and poetry, but he’s someone who brings that path back together. Gary embodies possibility.

Mm.

His openness has been huge for me, as someone who is very careful.

Stuart Ross, as well, in a different way. That wasn’t through the Writer-in-Residence program but we connected; and his freedom of imagination — I think that goes back to writing with my grandmother and those wild, associative children’s tales. Surrealism, which I was very much into for a while. I’m more interested in the surreality or absurdity of the real now, but I’ve kept a lot of the lessons that I learned from that kind of writing close to me.

Kate Cayley was incredible for this book. She saw the seed of Benjamin and didn’t really need to say very much. She didn’t really give me critique or editorial advice — just sort of met me as a peer. It was just enough to say, “yeah, you’re onto something. Keep going with this.”

Mm.

It was heartening to work with her, to work with each of the writers there. It’s been a really important program for me, like I said, as someone who hasn’t done an MFA, to find these relationships.

Um. Would it be some kind of obscene talk-show speed-round if I put through the chat the names of those poets that I listed off and then asked you to free associate on two or three of them?

Sure.

I feel like we need some kind of theme music.

*chuckles*

I’m thinking of Tick-Tock McGlaughlin from the film Sea Biscuit, William H. Macy playing the role of this *throws voice* And now, for this —

*chuckling*

If your eyes catch any of those names—

Yeah.

— I wonder: a word or two.

Well, Simic, I mean, with his passing … The darkness, the darkness of the Real. Someone who sees the shadow side of life, the violence, and doesn’t shy away from it. He was really big for me. It’s interesting to see these because it’s like the whole International Griffin Prize shortlist from 2019 at the end there. Everyone except the winner, Susan Howe, who I’ve finally come around to; and I’m on a big Susan Howe kick right now. Karen Solie is an influence that has stayed with me for sure. Karen and I have gotten to work together since then and her clarity, both technically and morally — I have learned so much about the sentence, about the line, about grammar, from Karen. I never knew you could go so deep into the technique of writing.

Mm.

At one point, I probably thought that poetry freed you from having to know how language works. There were no rules and so one didn’t need to know the rules of grammar. But Karen brings a concern for technical accuracy that feels freeing and heightening. Who else is on here? Natalie Shapero. I love Natalie Shapero’s books. Sadiqa [de Meijer] said Benjamin was funny in her blurb and I’m glad that she found part of it funny. Natalie Shapero is the funniest poet I know, running the closest line to writing stand-up. The poetics of stand-up, that’s what I see in her. So she’s freed me up to think about, alongside her flatness, where humour comes in.

Mm, mm.

Layli Long Soldier, I mean, these are all the greatest hits for me. Her poem “38” is in my — I don’t know the number, but it’s in the top poems for me. I think about that poem often. With Tongo Eisen-Martin it’s less about a single poem and more about his delivery. Watching him do twenty minutes from memory, the way his voice moves. He brings a sense of possibility as well as just virtuosity, how to lead with voice. And I mean, Dionne Brand, the brick of Nomenclature sits behind me right now and weighs heavily on us all. Unavoidable.

POSITIONALITY

Speaking of Stuart and Gary particularly, giving permission to dissolve artificial boundaries, I’m thinking about — this is an atrocious thing to do to a poet, but I wonder how you would characterize your poetics. There’s a line in one of your interviews where you say, I’m also reading Frank Davey’s biography of bpNichol at the moment which is helping me to ignore artificial boundaries and feel okay about not being one kind of poet who writes one kind of poem. And it seems like you’re relaxing comfortably into that kind of self-conception as being anthologic, not unlike the Bible, say.

Mm.

Of many books. I’m not sure if this is irreparable injury to do to another poet to ask —

*laughing*

—Them to characterize their own poetics.

Yeah.

Depending on one’s interpretation, I’ll get you back in the next life for it — I promise — if I may. May I?

Yeah. *laughs* It’s hard to say what’s consistent, you know? This has been an ongoing question for me. There are certainly shared concerns between the poems and Benjamin. Well, I think the Real is there.

Mm. Mhm.

The factual. The written. The written record. Documenting. I’ve just finished working on a documentary poem basically for the last year, this long poem that just ate up all of my resources, creative and otherwise. But I’m interested in how to write the Real, how to represent the Real.

I feel you thinking through your positionality as you’re engaging that question, too, right?

Mhm.

What does the representation of the Real in the context of the local look like for me at this time?

Mhm.

Yeah.

That’s there for sure too; and I’m thinking that’s the connection between Benjamin and this Hamilton book, one is thinking through place, right? And Benjamin is more about time or tradition. They’re both trying to get to pre-existence, in a way, too, right? What was this place like before I was here? And what/who came before me?

“As my car crawls up the Niagara Escarpment / my ears pop reminding me / I am accelerating out / of an ancient lakebed.”

Mhm. Yeah, maintaining that tension of how, obviously, we exist in the now, but we exist in the context of everything that’s come before us as well. And trying to live in that awareness and write out of that awareness, that reality, perception, consciousness is necessarily layered. And how do these other less visible layers inform the surface?

Mm.

ETHICS OF ENGAGEMENT

I mean, a word that kept coming up in the notes that I was taking as I was reading your work was ethical. And aspiring towards an ethical — not even just disposition in the work but — way of being in the world. And it’s not a word that’s come up so far in our conversation, but I think it’s a worthwhile one to invoke; and I wonder how you think about that or what your relationship is with your sense of ethics. I don’t think you’d ever want to create an ethics that you’d presume to impose on anybody else; I think it’s a very personal ethics, a personal commitment to a way of being, but yeah: what are your thoughts on this question of ethics as it relates to your work and to your life more broadly, if that’s not too overloaded a table of a question?

*chuckles* I think some of that is — I won’t say post-Christian after all this but — what Flannery O’Connor calls being Christ-haunted. The ethical question is always there. The moral question is always there. As much as I might try to hide it, I’m a pretty earnest person and I think that you’re right to see that in the work. I’m stealing from your notes now, but you talked about an anarchist hiding as a librarian or something like that.

Yeah, yeah *chuckles*. As a law-abiding librarian *laughing*.

There’s something to that. Because of my personality, I’m a rule-follower, or at least that anxiety is there. I think you can feel that in some of these formal experiments, this sense of pushing but being a bit anxious about it. Intellectually entertaining these ideas through the work that I might be hesitant to really enact. But the work is a place to be open to all possibilities and to consider even the most daunting.

The image that’s coming to mind is of — a mountain has to have a sufficiently wide base in order to have its head properly in the clouds.

Mm.

Something like this. That that stability of one’s life allows for experimental thinking.

Mhm.

Um. I feel like we’re approaching a close and I have two more questions. So, I haven’t read everything that you’ve — I think I’ve read pretty much all of the poetry, but I haven’t read all of the reviews and all of the interviews. I’ve read some of them. All of the interviews with you as the interviewee, but not all as the interviewer. And maybe it partakes of the question of aspiring to an ethical way of being in a world or something, to be engaged and to engage. I’m thinking about reviewing and interviewing as practices of engagement with others. And I wonder how you think about those practices — whether you think of them as in tandem, as part of the same thing as writing? Are they quite different? What’s the value of reviewing? How do you approach an interview? What guides you in this way of engaging with other artists, with writers?

I really struggle with reviewing. I do it very reticently, hesitantly. And I think part of that is just that I don’t identify as a critic. For me, my gauge when I’m reading a book is, “how is this useful for my own practice?” Which is maybe a selfish and self-involved way to read. Hopefully that’s not the only thing I’m reading for. But assessing quality isn’t what I’m primarily interested in. Most of the reviews I’ve done have been attempts to salvage an interview that hasn’t come together, for one reason or another.

Mm.

Or with reviewing, I find that if I just move fast enough and keep writing the thing, I can send it off to rob mclennan and he publishes it in 24 hours before I have a chance to overthink it.

Mm.

Part of my hesitancy is about not wanting to close off or assert my own aesthetics to the detriment of others, or to the exclusion of others.

Mm.

The interview feels safer in that way, to keep it in a conversational mode as opposed to having to be definitive. I think the interviews — talking about not having done an MFA — have been an education of their own, you know? At some point I realized that the pretense of an interview allows me access to these brilliant people and — right?

*nodding*

If it gets published, that’s great; it can support their work as well. But it really started as a way to reverse engineer books that I admired. At the same time, they’ve also felt like a way to participate in a community that I’ve been trying to find my place in. I was hosting a reading series for a while and the live, at-the-front-of-the-room thing is not my favourite place.

I feel you.

The email interview is, right now, where it’s at.

Mm.

The time to think and to process the work through text. To draw attention to work that has been useful for me and I think deserves further attention.

So, email interviews. Presumably none of these have been as protracted as the badminton that brought us to this moment, but how many back-and-forths are there and what does that look like?

Depends on the person, I think. You get a vibe for how quickly people are replying or how long the responses are. I’ve been doing them with Dana Hansen at the Hamilton Review of Books, who has been great. There’s no word count and she leaves it very open to me, which I’m grateful for. I think the process really depends on the interviewee and where we’re headed and how soon I run out of questions.

Mm, mm. Well, I suppose you could always default to the four-year-old’s line and just say, Why?

*laughs*

— If you need to.

Less charming from me, I think.

*laughs*

To read Ben’s recent interview with James Lindsay, visit here

Ben Robinson is a poet, musician and librarian. His most recent publication is Without Form from The Blasted Tree and knife | fork | book. 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.

Publisher: Palimpsest Press (October 16, 2023)
Paperback 6″ x 4″ | 200 pages
ISBN: 9781990293603

Kevin Andrew Heslop (b. 1992) is a hyphenate whose debuts as a poet, curator, playwright, filmmaker, and screenwriter respectively appeared with Gordon Hill Press (2021), McIntosh Gallery (2022), TAP: Centre for Creativity (2022), Astoria Pictures (2023), and Rose Garden Press (2024), with a non-fiction debut forthcoming from Gordon Hill Press in 2025, a multi-media vibrotactile installation alongside Roxanna Bennett and Leslie Putnam forthcoming in 2026, and a two-volume collection of dialogues first published with AmphoraCentred MagazineThe Miramichi ReaderParrot ArtThe Devil's Artisan, and The /temz/ Review forthcoming from Guernica Editions in 2027 and 2028. An agnostic pantheist of Nichiren Buddhist practice born Canadian to Danish and Celtic ancestry, he lives abroad.