“Committing to writing meant committing to a place - and then leaving it
Joel Robert Ferguson’s winding road to writing involved accepting imperfection
Joel Robert Ferguson took a somewhat circuitous route to publishing his debut poetry collection, The Lost Cafeteria.
Ferguson was raised in a conservative Christian home in rural Nova Scotia but spent his 20s enmeshed in what he calls the “anarcho-punk/traveller milieu.”
That meant roaming from Whitehorse to Guelph, from Halifax to the southern Okanagan, hitchhiking and train-hopping, and living in shared housing and punk houses.
“Travelling definitely was a type of home for much of my 20s,” Ferguson says. “It felt fantastic to have my life and belongings condensed down to the rucksack on my back and a sturdy pair of shoes; it felt as though I was existing in the world with much fewer illusions about my place within it and the precarity and preciousness of being alive and healthy.”
After nearly a decade of this life, Ferguson found himself committing to living in Winnipeg, to writing poetry.
“I spent my 20s reading non-stop, but also there was this feeling that it was something that I myself could never write,” Ferguson says. “I worked a lot of seasonal or dead-end jobs around the country, which was alright for a while, but by the time I was staring down 30 had become stultifying.
“Writing poetry became a sort of escape hatch, both in an immediate, day-to-day sense, but also in terms of finding a sense of self-worth, proving to myself I wasn’t just this schlubby guy pushing a mop (after all, nobody who works in a socially belittled or maligned job is just that job or role).”
Committing to poetry meant a committing to a daily writing practice, trying new forms and subjects, and becoming a part of the writing and publishing community.
“For me, getting serious about poetry meant editing, editing, and more editing, and working to get over the feeling that, though I loved reading poetry, it was something that I couldn’t do, or rather that I didn’t have anything worth saying,” Ferguson says. “It was a matter of accepting that maybe I would never write the perfect poem (whatever that may be), but to always be trying to improve.”
What emerged was what Ferguson describes as “millennial coming-of-age” poetry, influenced by the work of Seamus Heaney, George Oppen, and Roberto Bolaño.
“I think that for many millennials there’s a real struggle in how we perceive ourselves…, with the post-war markers of adulthood (career, home ownership, etc.) no longer being hegemonic, of being stuck in limbo between childhood and adulthood, expectation and reality,” says Ferguson.
Ironically, his commitment to a place and a vocation led to Ferguson leaving Winnipeg, for a creative writing master’s degree at Concordia University. His thesis ended up being the collection of lyric poetry that is now The Lost Cafeteria.
“I’m hoping that this book will be enjoyed by people who are already big readers of poetry, but also those who might have some biases against the genre on the basis of it being seen as inaccessible,” says Ferguson.
“My hope is that the work here can be sometimes challenging but never antagonistic to that sort of reader; though, don’t get me wrong, I love me some dense, theoretical poetry as well!””

— Ariel Gordon Prairie Books NOW

Read the full review at Prairie Books NOW

“Joel Robert Ferguson’s The Lost Cafeteria has a compelling habit of telling us what it is and isn’t. “No volta here,” ends one poem, “no tears / for a lost generation, just petty crime brazening” (“The Kitchen Debates, Early-to-Mid 2008”). It’s a fitting aside from an author whose bio begins, “At the age of 21, Joel Robert Ferguson had the words ‘BOOK PUNK’ tattooed on his knuckles, a decision he still stands by.” Wait—reading this, I knew I’d heard about that tattoo, or a similar one, although I’d never met Ferguson. Is it that common a tat? Or had Ferguson’s lore really spread so far as he racked up the experiences found in these poems?

Further research proved that I had, despite being based in Ontario, known a few of Ferguson’s friends and heard about the BOOK PUNK decision (along with some of the exploits mentioned in the poems). This says less about Canada’s size than it does about the blend of hyper-specific and not-really-specific-at-all details found in both the media release’s identity claims (the author hails from “evangelical Baptists in the Maritimes”; his work confronts “the ways in which working-class masculinity is used by capitalism and white supremacism”) and the poems’ sometimes tongue-in-cheek engagements with punk culture and a young lifetime of voracious reading.

Ferguson’s perspective is unique for fixating on processes of growing into and out of things—how “Uprooting for a crush was simple at nineteen” and “Beginnings were still as easy at twenty,” as “Twenties” puts it. The Lost Cafeteria also documents various Canadian places, including the Maritimes, swaths of Ontario, and a Yukon Ferguson locates as “just off / dead-centre of the coyote’s universe.” Dumpster diving and drinking appear again and again, as part of images of exchange (a “sharehouse fridge still full of vegetable salvage,” “another winter / spent stacking empties”) but, through repetition, also as a lifestyle brand. The poems seem equally eager to show their cred and to ridicule, or at least question, notions of authenticity.

Some of the book’s most compelling passages reflect on strenuous undertakings that come to seem unthinkable only a short time later: hitchhiking, hours-long walks, or “chopping wood, clearing deadfall / for friendly strangers one province east of it all / for two days and five twenty-dollar bills” (“Twenties”). There’s something poignant, and timely, about a millennial lamenting his younger days in the form of a poetry debut. Ferguson documents a strange state of unraveling: a place from which one asks, “will I be as surprised / to be alive in a year as I was at thirty? / at fifty? 100?” These poems admit they don’t quite know what’s happening until it’s happened, but they also worry about what could be coming apart undetected.

Still, one might wonder how much new territory a dude working his way through books, jobs, booze, and bummed rides can really cover. Ferguson’s origins and peregrinations position him as something like a crust-punk Al Purdy, drifting from coast to coast to coast. Like Purdy’s body of work, The Lost Cafeteria explores the dynamic between local origins and someplace larger. As it does so, it may also be asking whether that place is big enough for more than one book punk.”

— Carl Watts Arc Poetry Magazine