Hostbox (1992-5): bibliography, and an interview

this interview was conducted occasionally over email, from November 2015 to March 2020, as part of a project to document Ottawa literary publishing. see my bibliography-in-progress of Ottawa literary publications, past and present here

Chris Pollard was 8 years old when Paul Henderson scored the goal that defeated the Soviet Union.  Twenty years later, he and a couple of Cold War operatives began Hostbox. Now he works in a grocery store owned by a capitalist.  And he has a wife and three daughters.

Q: How did Hostbox first start?

A: In 1990, I took a poetry workshop course at Ottawa U. that was being taught by Seymour Mayne. And it was here that I met Stu (ie Stuart Konyer) and Ray (ie Raymond Nicholls). A couple of months into the school year, the 3 of us and others from the class would sometimes go out for beers. One night, the discussion turned into one about publishing, and the idea of doing our own magazine floated to the surface.  I had wanted to publish a literary magazine for a few years, but it been mostly a vapour of an idea, as opposed to anything concrete. But talking with Stu and Ray, we thought this was actually a realistic prospect. After the course finished in spring 1991, we kept in contact and combining our own work and the few submissions we were able to solicit, we slapped together the first issue, which we published in early 1992.

Q: What was the process of seeking submissions to those first few issues? Did you make a public call, or simply solicit from those immediately around you?

A: I remember that it was usually a struggle to attract submissions back at the beginning, it was especially so. Part of the mandate of Hostbox was self serving in that we wanted a forum to publish ourselves. And we allowed ourselves 3 poems each per issue. And then there were the cartoons and bits of fiction. So the early issues were largely comprised of ourselves. As for non-editors, I know we tapped a few friends but beyond the word of mouth that the magazine itself mildly produced, generating a handful of submissions, I don’t recall actively putting out the word. I do have a memory of one of us contacting the Citizen books columnist, hoping for a plug, and being profanely bitter (or bitterly profane, I forget which) when we were refused. But first and foremost, Hostbox existed to get ourselves published, and everything and everyone else was largely gravy.

Q: Was Hostbox influenced by any other publications? Were you connected to or aware of much of the other literary activity in Ottawa at the time?

A: Our original influences were not very specific, other than wanting to produce a literary journal sort of like the ones that were regularly rejecting us, and to do it on the cheap. I don’t remember being very aware of zine culture even though in hindsight I think we subconsciously embraced that aesthetic. I guess in essence, for me anyway, Hostbox was an attempt to synthesize the whole punk diy philosophy with The New Yorker, which the idea to include cartoons in Hostbox was a direct lift from.

Q: I’ve always been a big fan of the cartoons, and, for me, they played such a large part of the tone of Hostbox, especially your “bookstore clerk” comics. Were they something that you were already doing, or did they emerge as the journal first came together?

A: I used to do one-frame cartoons for my school newspaper, which was an enterprise that I ran with one other person. It was largely a vehicle for me to try out some of my ideas at the time, and on occasion, actually address school matters. The cartoons were for the most part, dreadful Far Side rip-offs. After that, I would every once and a while, sketch out an idea for a cartoon, but until we started Hostbox, I did not do much with them. Once we got talking about starting Hostbox, I know I pushed the cartoon idea for two reasons. One because I loved (and love) The New Yorker, and in my own small way, wanted to pay homage, but more importantly, and I think this was the point that sold Stu on the idea, I wanted to puncture the grandiose self-important preciousness that poetry magazines often exude. So, I think I was already planning Bookstore Clerk at the time, and I worked with a very funny guy who came up with the Albert Camus strips. And then Peter Gould, whom my wife worked with, began to contribute, and I was very pleased with what the cartoons did for the tone of the magazine. Not sure if this answers the question but I’ve typed ever so much.

Q: Much of the tone of the journal is evidenced in those cartoons and sketches, included within each issue as well as on the front cover. You mention wanting to “punctuate the grandiose self-important preciousness that poetry magazines often exude.” It seems fairly obvious that the entire aesthetic of Hostbox worked very much to accomplish this, allowing some real humour and even ridiculousness throughout. Were you seeking submissions along those same lines, or was it more the idea of publishing interesting writing in a forum that refused to take itself too seriously?

A: In general, we were just happy that anyone was sending us submissions. Frankly, I found it amazing that complete strangers had heard of us and thought it worth their time and effort to organize putting anything in the mail for us. That said, we did receive a lot of terrible material. So the guiding winnowing principle came down to trying to find enough work we could live with putting in the magazine. So, to answer the question, I think our philosophy was definitely more of the latter (ie ‘publishing interesting writing in a forum that refused to take itself too seriously’). At the end of the day, most of what was absurd in Hostbox was what we ourselves deliberately put into it (or specifically recruited with the cartoons by Peter and Jake), and after that, we were hoping that the actual poetry and stories were good enough to stand up next to what the more “serious” magazines were publishing.

Q: How did the magazine get distributed and what were your print runs? I remember you at the first few ottawa small press book fair events, for example, but how else were you getting copies out into the world?

A: I forget what our print run for the first couple of issues was but we eventually settled into a pattern of 200. For a period, we would have them printed and collated at printers but then Stu got a really good printer so we printed them ourselves and would then have collating gatherings with spouses and friends. We must have still had to get them stapled at a printer as we did not own a sufficiently long enough stapler but my memory is fuzzy on that one.

As for distribution, we did all our own. We hit up any store that seemed like they might be possibly game to carry Hostbox. The obvious candidates were magazine stores that already had zine shelves like Mags & Fags and Brittons. There were others but most are gone now and again, I am forgetting their names. We also got into stores like Shake Records (where I spent much money over the years they were open) as well as a couple of bookstores. In Ottawa, I think at our peak we were in a dozen or so stores. We also were briefly in a store in Montreal (I completely forget their name or even where they were located) we happened upon once and asked if they would carry us and for a while we mailed new issues to them. We also were in Gotham Books in New York. That was pretty cool. In 1994, Stu and I (and spouses) went to NYC and made a point of going by and we were pretty jazzed to see Hostbox sitting on their shelves.

Usually we dropped off quantities of 5 and then when we had a new issue, we would pick up what did not sell and the ‘profits.’ I think we were paid 1.20 for each issue sold (the cover price was two bucks). We never covered our expenses and we never sold even half of our print run. But we never expected to get rich off of this which was probably for the best.

Q: How was Hostbox received?

A: Honestly, Hostbox was barely even noticed. We were just another zine (and not even free like Bywords). Stores would grudgingly agree to take five copies each and drumming up submissions outside the group of people we knew was always a challenge. But then again the people we knew was a group that did grow because of Hostbox. People like yourself of course and a number of others involved in the local scene seemed to like what we were attempting to do. I didn’t expect us to change the world and we didn’t so all told I guess we got exactly the reception we expected and probably deserved.

Q: After all this time, what do you feel Hoxtbox achieved as a small literary journal? What are you most pleased about? What are you disappointed about?

A: When we first started Hostbox, Seymour Mayne (who was the professor in the class where Stu and I [and Ray] met) declared that literary magazines rarely make it to 3 issues and so when we stubbornly produced 16 issues, I think we were to a degree still responding to that. This was our primary achievement. Otherwise I don’t believe we had any lasting impact. And to be honest I don’t think I am especially disappointed about anything regarding Hostbox. Obviously it would have been great if it had really taken off and we’d been able to rent that office space in the Empire State Building I have my eye on but it was a zine and makers of zines must be realistic about their ambitions. As for what I am pleased about, recently my oldest daughter informed me that when she is describing her parents to new friends, she usually mentions that I co-created a poetry magazine for people who hate poets (no offense). I can live with that legacy.

Q: What was behind the decision to finally end the journal?

A: A combination of time and money. Time in the sense that my first born was on the way and apparently kids can eat up large swathes of energy and attention. And by money I mean that we lost money on each issue. Sales never came close to covering production costs (not that our costs were huge) and I think Stu and I both felt like we’d accomplished as much as we were going to accomplish and given that our circulation and sales never really increased, I think we also both felt like we were spinning our wheels. So yeah, time and money were the primary nails in the Hostbox coffin.

Hostbox bibliography:

Volume I, Number One. Winter 1992. Editors Stuart Konyer and Chris Pollard. Poems by

Volume I, Number Two. Spring 1992. Editors Stuart Konyer and Chris Pollard. Poems by Raymond Nichols, Seymour Mayne, Christopher Pollard, Stuart Konyer, George Simeon, S.D. Willcock, Leslie Smith Dow, and Michael McGlade. Fiction by Christopher Pollard, Stuart Koyner and Jerry Aesop. Cartoons by Rosary Swooner and Valley Swooner. Miscellaneous by Gallon Swooner.

Volume I, Number Three. Summer 1992. Editors Stuart Konyer and Chris Pollard. Poems by Christopher Pollard, Nathalie Moisan, Stuart Konyer, Richmond Nichols, Lissa Beauchamp, Matt Rogers, Leslie Smith Dow and Rob McLennan.  Fiction by Raymond Nichols and Jerry Aesop. Cartoons by Rosary Swooner and Valley Swooner.

Volume I, Number Four. Autumn 1992. Editors Stuart Konyer and Chris Pollard. Poems by Stuart Konyer, Cindy Upton, Christopher Pollard, Sean Johnston, Natasha Kyssa, Nathalie Moisan, Rob McLennan, Lissa Beauchamp and jimmy s.g. ioannidis. Fiction by Christopher Pollard and Jerry Aesop. Cartoons by Jake Selwood and Valley Swooner. Miscellaneous by Gallon Swooner.

Volume II, Number One. Winter 1993. Editors Stuart Konyer and Chris Pollard. Poems by Sean Johnston, Christopher Pollard, Lissa Beauchamp, Leslie Smith Dow, Stuart Konyer, S.D. Edgar, Rob McLennan, Seymour Mayne and Warren Layberry.  Fiction by George Godson, Stuart Konyer and Lissa Beauchamp. Cartoons by Valley Swooner and Jake Selwood.

Volume II, Number Two. Spring 1993. Editors Stuart Konyer and Chris Pollard. Poems by Stuart Konyer, Stephen Le, Christopher Pollard, Lissa Beauchamp, Sean Johnston and Rob McLennan. Fiction by Za Arian, Andrew Haynes and George Godson. Cartoons by Jake Selwood and Valley Swooner.

Volume II, Number Three. Summer 1993. Editors Stuart Konyer and Chris Pollard. Poems by Roma Quapp, Sean Johnston, Lissa Beauchamp, Rob McLennan, Cindy Upton, Christopher Pollard, James Spyker, Gregory F. McGillis, Joy Hewitt Mann and Natasha Kyssa. Fiction by George Godson and Stuart Konyer. Cartoons by Rosary Swooner, Peter Gould and Valley Swooner.

Volume II, Number Four. Autumn 1993. Editors Stuart Konyer and Chris Pollard. Poems by Christopher Pollard, Stuart Konyer, Lissa Beauchamp, Rob McLennan, Jimmy S.G. Ioannidis, Joy Hewitt Mann, Roma Quapp, Sean Johnston and Cindy Upton. Fiction by Andrew Haynes and George Godson. Cartoons by Peter Gould, Valley Swooner and Rosary Swooner.

Volume III, Number One. Winter 1994. Editors Stuart Konyer and Chris Pollard. Poems by Joy Hewitt Mann, Sylvie M.S. Hill, Lissa Beauchamp, Stuart Konyer, Christopher Pollard, Cindy Upton, Karen Moffat and Sean Johnston. Fiction by George Godson, Roma Quapp and Jerry Aesop. Cartoons by Peter Gould, Rosary Swooner and Valley Swooner.

Volume III, Number Two. Spring 1994. Editors Stuart Konyer and Chris Pollard. Poems by Joy Hewitt Mann, Richard King, Sylvie M.S. Hill, Warren D. Layberry, Jimmy S.G. Ioannidis, Gregory F. McGillis, Paul Politis, Roma Quapp, Patrick Seguin, Christopher Pollard, Lissa Beauchamp, Stuart Konyer and Cindy Upton. Fiction by Joy Hewitt Mann, George Godson and Jerry Aesop. Cartoons by Peter Gould, Rosary Swooner and Valley Swooner.

Volume III, Number Three. Summer 1994. Editors Stuart Konyer and Chris Pollard. Poems by Cindy Upton, Lissa Beauchamp, Paul Politis, Rob McLennan, Stuart Konyer and Christopher Pollard. Fiction by Seymour Mayne, Danielle Richteel and James Spyker. Cartoons by Rosary Swooner and Valley Swooner.

Volume III, Number Four. Fall 1994. Editors Stuart Konyer and Chris Pollard. Poems by Lissa Beauchamp, Alex Mortimer, Christopher Pollard, Sean Johnston, Cindy Upton, John Rupert, Patrick Seguin, Catherine Jenkins, Stephanie Abbis, Joy Hewitt Mann and Joanne Epp. Fiction by Stuart Konyer and Jerry Aesop. Cartoons by Valley Swooner, Rosary Swooner and Peter Gould.

Volume IV, Number One. Winter 1995. Editors Stuart Konyer and Chris Pollard. Poems by Richard Carter, Tamara Fairchild, Jamie Russell, rob mclennan, Sean Johnston, Cindy Upton, Chris Pollard, Rose Oskaboose, James Spyker, Warren D. Fulton, Joy Hewitt Mann, Dave Hallihan, Lissa Beauchamp, Stuart Konyer and Catherine Jenkins. Fiction by Richard Clare and Jerry Aesop. Cartoons by Valley Swooner and Rosary Swooner.

Volume IV, Number Two. Spring 1995. Editors Stuart Konyer and Chris Pollard. Poems by James Spyker, Richard Carter, tanya evanson, Dave Hallihan, Chris Pollard, Stephen Edgar, John Rupert, rob mclennan, Grant Shipway, Tamara Fairchild, Veronica Tarlos, Malcolm Todd, Leo Brent Robillard, P.C. Chynn, Scott Broderson, Warren D. Fulton and Lissa Beauchamp. Cartoons by Rosary Swooner and Valley Swooner.

Volume IV, Number Three. Summer 1995. Editors Stuart Konyer and Chris Pollard. Poems by Sean Johnston, Scott Brodersen, P.C. Chynn, Malcolm Todd, Clare Latremouille, John Rupert, Stuart Konyer, C.M. Upton, rob mclennan, R.B. Fairchild, Richard Carter, Jason Gennaro, Lissa Beauchamp, Patrick Seguin, Grant Shipway, Dave Hallihan, Chris Pollard, Jim Larwill, James Spyker, Joy Hewitt Mann and Tamara Fairchild. Fiction by Jerry Aesop. Cartoons by various.

Volume IV, Number Four. Autumn 1995. Editors Stuart Konyer and Chris Pollard. Poems by John Rupert, Catherine Jenkins, Grant Shipway, Rob McLennan, Sylvie M.S Hill, Tamara Fairchild, Chris Pollard, Stuart Konyer, R.B. Fairchild, Lisa Beauchamp, Joy Hewitt Mann and Leanne Patterson. Fiction by Sean Johnston and James Spyker. Cartoons by Peter Gould, Suzie Snipe, Gallon Swooner and Rosary Swooner.

Arc Walk Ottawa #6 : Byward Market : curator/guide: rob mclennan

Arc Walks Ottawa is a series of guided walks based on poetry themes and capitalizing on the rich poetry history of Canada’s capital. Residents and visitors alike are welcome to join in on the walks to learn and revel in Ottawa’s poetry.

http://robmclennansindex.blogspot.com/2018/05/arc-poetry-walks-ottawa-2018.html

The sixth and final walk of this series will take place in the Byward Market on Saturday, December 8th. This walk, led by rob mclennan, will showcase the poetry of this historic neighbourhood, including sites significant to Susan McMaster, Diana Brebner, Stephanie Bolster, William Hawkins, Neil Flowers, The Vanilla Reading Series and The Vogon Reading Series, WORDFEST 1983, John Bart Gerald and Capital Slam, among others.

The walk will begin at 3:30PM outside of the National Gallery of Canada on Sussex Avenue. During the hour-long walk, participants will visit locations where they will hear about some of Ottawa’s contemporary poetry history, and hear from a special guest poet or two. Come prepared for rain or shine!

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent titles include the poetry collection How the alphabet was made (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018) and the forthcoming Household items (Salmon Poetry, 2019) and A halt, which is empty (Mansfield Press, 2019). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds), Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com). He is “Interviews Editor” at Queen Mob’s Teahouse, editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

For any questions or concerns, contact James Moran: imigan@rogers.com

Arc Walk Ottawa #5 : Hintonburg : curator/guide: rob mclennan

Arc Walks Ottawa is a series of guided walks based on poetry themes and capitalizing on the rich poetry history of Canada’s capital. Residents and visitors alike are welcome to join in on the walks to learn and revel in Ottawa’s poetry.

http://robmclennansindex.blogspot.com/2018/05/arc-poetry-walks-ottawa-2018.html

The fifth, and penultimate, walk of this series will take place in Hintonburg on Friday, November 9th. This walk, led by rob mclennan, will showcase the poetry of this historic neighbourhood, including sites significant to Diana Brebner, Collected Works Bookstore and Coffeebar, The Dusty Owl Reading Series, Dennis Tourbin and Anita Lahey.

The walk will begin at 5:30PM at the corner of Wellington Street West and Holland Avenue. During the hour-long walk, participants will visit five locations where they will hear about some of Ottawa’s contemporary poetry history, and hear from a special guest poet or two. Come prepared for rain or shine!

A sixth walk, also led by rob mclennan, will occur on Saturday, December 8th, and focus on Ottawa's Byward Market. Info tba.

For any questions or concerns, contact James Moran: imigan@rogers.com

Arc walks, 2018 : glebe

This is the second in a series of four “Arc Walks” [see links to the whole series as it appears here, including post-walk texts, notifications on upcoming walks and information on poemhandouts] I’ve been commissioned to do this year, thanks very much to Arc Poetry Magazine and the Community Foundation. The second walk, through the Glebe, included a great deal of rain, so unfortunately, we were forced to bail half-way through, and head straight to the pub, for grand conversation, commiseration and othersuch. Thanks very much to Blaine Marchand, John Barton, Scott Lemoine, Clyde Sanger, Michael Dennis, Rachel Zolf and others who provided some details I might not have otherwise known, and to Jean Van Loon and Emily Baird who were good enough to read (a poem of theirs, alongside a poem by, respectively, Jane Jordan and George Johnston). And to the small, rain-soaked crowd! Keep an eye on Bywords.ca or Arc Poetry Magazine for information on further of this year’s further four walks; two more by myself, and two further, including a French walk and an Aboriginal walk. Let’s hope the next one isn’t rained out.

WALK TWO:

[photo as we collected at Bank and First, by Chris Johnson]

For my second walk, the Glebe presented itself with far more information than I could ever present in a single walk. The lyric poet and critic Jay MacPherson (1931-2012), for example, may have been known as a Toronto poet, but attended both Glebe Collegiate and Carleton College (the precursor to Carleton University). Poet and former Ottawa City Councellor Clive Doucet and poet and writer Roy MacSkimming were long-time neighbours on Muriel Street, a short street stretching from Fifth Avenue to Holmwood, hidden just east of Bronson Avenue. One could mention poet, editor and Arc Poetry Magazine co-founder Christopher Levenson, a name I’ve seen attached to both 585 O’Connor and 30 First Avenue, either or both of which could have been sites of conversation around the creation of Canada’s National Poetry Magazine. As some of you most likely know, the journal was founded in 1978 by Levenson, Tom Henighan and Michael Gnarowski, all of whom were professors in the English Department at Carleton University. I could mention Pulitzer Prize and Giller Award-winning novelist Carol Shields, who lived with her family on the Driveway from 1968 to 1978, where she wrote poetry and fiction, was editorial assistant to the journal Canadian Slavonic Papers, taught a year at the University of Ottawa, and raised her five children, including her youngest, the poet, fiction writer and YA novelist Sara Cassidy, who was born in Ottawa in 1968. During Shields’ time in Ottawa, she published the first two of her three poetry collections—Others (1972) and Intersect (1974)—as well as her first novel. Along those same lines, there was activist Patricia Zolf, known as Patsy, who, as a member of the Glebe Community Association, was instrumental in preventing Carling Avenue from extending east beyond Bronson Avenue (the original plan would have extended Carling through the Glebe and over the Rideau Canal into Old Ottawa East), as well as one of the original contributors to the Glebe Report. Mother to poet Rachel Zolf, Pat and her daughter lived on Monkland Avenue for a couple of years around 1970, before they relocated to Toronto, where after being involved in halting the Spadina Expressway, Pat began her lengthy career as a Toronto City Planner.

There is a whole list of writers that have worked for Octopus Books over the years, including Ottawa poet Cameron Anstee, Toronto fiction writer Jennifer Whiteford, Ottawa writer Marwan Hassan, Vancouver poet Kim Minkus and even myself, during the mid-1990s. One could mention the former RR restaurant at Bank and Holmwood, where the Pizza Pizza currently exists, where First Draft, the collaborative sound and poetry group of writers, artists and musicians that included Colin Morton, Susan McMaster, David Parsons and Andrew McClure, among some half-dozen more members, regularly met. As Morton writes in an email, the RR restaurant was where the group “met every Wednesday night over coffee and beer as documented in The Scream (Ouroboros, 1984); also scene of the after-party following First Draft’s Theatre 2000 show Pass This Way Again.” Further north, the Clocktower Pub has been hosting the In/Words Reading Series since 2010, when Justin Million relocated the series, after time spent in a couple of locations around Centretown.

I even lived a year in the Glebe, in a terrible apartment with roommates around 1995-1996, on Fifth Avenue, just at the end of Lyon. This was during the two-year period I was co-coordinating editor of The Carleton Arts Review, a journal originally founded at Carleton Univeristy as The Carleton Literary Review in 1981 (the journal folded in 1997), and not long after I took over The TREE Reading Series. I don’t specifically remember what I wrote there, but I suspect it was terrible.

FIRST STOP: 299 First Avenue: This is where Toronto poet, playwrite and translator Richard Sanger grew up, and his father, “proud parent” Clyde Sanger still lives. Clyde wrote an article for the Glebe Report in 2005, in which he detailed a bicycle tour of poetry sites around the Glebe (a couple of the addresses gathered here are thanks to him), that includes his own home address, “where a proud parent reads from Richard Sanger’s works, either Paper Boy or, if the bikers seemed broadminded, The LowDown, about poor Mr. Pullen giving a sex-education talk to Glebe students with ‘know-it-all smirks.’” Richard Sanger, according to his online bio, “was born in Manchester, England, to a Canadian mother and an English father, both journalists. After living in Kenya, Connecticut and Toronto, the family settled in Ottawa where his parents still live and he grew up, played hockey and soccer, ran and skied cross-country, wrote poems and attended bilingual high school.” Richard Sanger has published numerous plays, translation and poems, and is the author of three collections: Shadow Cabinet (1996), Calling Home (2002) and Dark Woods, new this spring with Biblioasis.

SECOND STOP: 314 First Avenue, between Percy and Lyon: Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa on November 18, 1939, the second of three children born to forest entomologist Carl Atwood and his wife Margaret, during a period the family lived at 314 First Avenue. I don’t know if I have to say much about Margaret Atwood, celebrated novelist, critic, poet, editor and short story writer who has also authored works in multiple further genres, including screenplays, graphic novels, radio plays and stories for children.

By 1941, the family had relocated to 2-1 Patterson Avenue, by the canal, and by 1945, had left the city entirely, as Carl Atwood relocated them north for the purpose of studying forest insects. According to Wikipedia, young Peggy didn’t attend school regularly until she was eight years old, spending much of her childhood in the backwoods of Northern Quebec.

THIRD STOP: 22 Third Avenue, between O’Connor and Queen Elizabeth: Poet and translator George Johnston joined the English Department at Carleton College in 1950, seven years before the College officially became known as Carleton University. His author biography in The Essential George Johnston (The Porcupine’s Quill, Inc., 2007), writes that “he was a charismatic and much-loved professor of Old and Middle English and Old Norse.” His first poetry collection, The Cruising Auk, written during the war, was published in 1959, during his time in Ottawa, followed by Home Free (1966), Happy Enough (1972) and Taking a Grip (1979). After retiring that same year, he relocated to Quebec, where, according to Wikipedia, he raised bees and continued to write, until his death in 2004. In the introduction to The Essential George Johnston, editor Robyn Sarah refers to him as a “master poet.” In his Glebe Report article, Clyde Sanger refers to “Raymond Souster’s charming poem that starts, ‘Ottawa to me, George Johnson, lies at the bottom of your street.’”

Farewell to Teaching

Knowing what I now know

would I have consented

to be born? Next question.

When it comes time to go

will I go forlorn or

contented? Ask again.

Anything in between

should be easier. O

K, what made up my mind

to come to Carleton? Work.

my kind of work was not

easy to come by, I

came by it at Carleton;

it was as simple as that

and lucky, plain lucky.

I cannot account for luck

but I can be grateful.

What was my kind of work?

Presumably teaching,

whatever that may be.

Teaching is a kind of

learning, much like loving,

mutual goings-on,

both doing each to each;

mutual forbearance;

life itself, you might say.

Whatever teaching is

did I enjoy it? Yes.

Am I glad to leave it?

Even of life itself

enough is enough. Good-

bye Dow’s Lake, goodbye Tower,

 

essays, papers, exams,

you I can bear to leave.

But how shall I improve

the swiftly-dimming hour?

I shall deteriorate

amid bucolic dreams

and gather in my fate;

there’s lots worse ways than that.

Goodbye good friends. Alas,

some goodbyes are like death;

they bring the heart to earth

and teach it how to die.

Earth, here we come again,

we’re going out to grass.

Think of us now and then,

we’ll think of you. Goodbye. 

In 1992, the English Department at Carleton instituted the George Johnston Poetry Prize, awarded annually to the best student poem, and has been won over the years by numerous poets, many of whom have continued to publish, including Aaron Kozak, Jenna Jarvis, Natalie Hanna, Kathryn Hunt, Amal El-Mohtar, Laurie Anne Fuhr, JM Francheteau, Mark Foley, Leo Brent Robillard, Jeremy Hanson-Finger and Bardia Sinaee (I have yet to see a comprehensive list of such, and was forced to cobble together a list with the assist of others on social media). This year’s winner was Emily Baird, for her poem “Lifeboat.” [produced as an above/ground press "poem" handout for the event; read the poem here]

[Frances Boyle holding an umbrella for Emily Baird, who read a poem by George Johnston across the street from Johnston’s former Ottawa home]

FOURTH STOP: 191 Fourth Avenue, between Percy and Lyon: For a period in the early 1960s, Ottawa poet Harry Howith, one of William Hawkins’ circle of friends and contemporaries (and co-founder, along with Hawkins, of poetry readings at Le Hibou [discussed as part of my first walk]), lived here, where he ran his own short-lived small press, Bytown Books. In 1963, he produced his own debut as the press’ first title, Burglar Tools, and, as Cameron Anstee wrote about the press on his blog, a second title was announced the same year, in an issue of Louis Dudek’s Montreal journal Delta (the precursor to the publishing house DC Books), but was never published. That lost book was That Monocyle, The Moon, by Seymour Mayne, a Montreal poet most likely still out in Vancouver during that time, a full decade before he arrived in Ottawa to teach in the English Department at the University of Ottawa.

 

Howith attended Carleton University, and later became an instructor at Centennial College in Toronto, where he also designed books, including Toronto poet Gwendolyn MacEwen’s first major collection of poetry, The Rising Fire (1963), a book published by Contact Press, a publishing house run by Louis Dudek, Irving Layton and Raymond Souster, that quickly became known as being the most important and influential poetry publishing house of its time. Even in Toronto, Howith maintained his connections to Montreal and Ottawa, including publishing his second book, Two Longer Poems (Toronto ON: Patrician Press, 1965), which consisted of Howith’s poem “The Seasons of Miss Nicky” alongside William Hawkins’ poem “Louis Riel,” and The Stately Homes of Westmount, published by Dudek’s DC Books in 1973. His sixth and final poetry collection, Multiple Choices: New and Selected Poems, 1961-1976, was published by Mosaic Press in 1976 and edited by Seymour Mayne, who spent many years editing books for the press. Howith eventually returned to Ottawa, as Blaine Marchand mentions that Howith lived in the Ambleside Apartments, off Richmond Road, during the late 1970s and into the 80s, but at some point, Howith relocated east, ending up in Kentville, Nova Scotia, where he died in June, 2014. His extremely short obituary in the Globe and Mail includes the final line: “As directed by Mr Howith, there shall be no funeral, flowers, donations, eulogy or memorial service.” It was around that time that William Hawkins suggested there was another, unpublished manuscript of Howith’s that existed, and one that he had a copy of, but Bill soon discovered that it had somehow been thrown out by one of his roommates in their shared rooming house, during one of Hawkins’ hospital stays.

 

FIFTH STOP: 91a Fourth Avenue: In May 1980, Juan O’Neill, Marty Flomen, Joe Lacroix, Jim McAuley, Nelson Oliver and Paul Ryan hosted a reading by Ottawa poet Jane Jordan (1926-2007) [see my Open Book column on dismantling her library here] as the first event under the name The TREE Reading Series, at what O’Neill later referred to as a “disused fire hall in the Glebe.” Research indicates that this would have been the No. 10 Graham Station at 260 Sunnyside Avenue, a building that has since been rebuilt and repurposed into the current Old Ottawa South Community Centre. By 1981, TREE had moved to 91a Fourth Avenue to what is now known as the Religious Society of Friends, or the Quaker Meeting House, where it ran throughout most of the 1980s, before relocating to the Glebe Community Centre. Held the second and fourth Tuesday of each month, TREE remained there until 1994, when it moved to SAW Gallery. During part of my own tenure as co-running the series in the late 1990s, the series reappeared in the Glebe, where it briefly lived at Irene’s Pub, before returning to SAW.

 

TREE is a series that has not only hosted readings by hundreds of poets and fiction writers from across Canada (only evolving into a poetry-only series around 2006), but, through its regular open set, provided the space for first public readings for generations of Ottawa poets and fiction writers. To list those that have read at TREE would most likely be one of the most comprehensive list of Ottawa-area writers available, and even a list of organizers past and present would be impressive, including John Barton, Colin Morton, Sylvia Adams, Rod Pederson, James Moran, Rhonda Douglas, Deanna Young, b stephen harding and Pearl Pirie. The series is currently being run by Claire Farley, Scott Lemoine, Dorian Bell, Jean Van Loon, Elanor Boyle-Stanley, Chris Johnson and Natalie Leduc, and is held at The Happy Goat Coffee Co., 55 Laurel Street near Preston and Gladstone.

 

Here is a poem from Jane Jordan’s A Signature of Leaves (Penumbra Press, 2005), a loosely-collected selected poems gathered from more than three decades of her writing:

Notes for the Dreamspeaker

 

I do not serve you platitudes

I need to speak & live

function & rebel

in my own language

 

I want to drop a line

watch the current flow

before I reel concepts

document my particular vision

 

bafflegab will never substitute

 

I take my stubborn route

with clarity

a hardhat just in case

a cliff should fall on me

 

I watch the sky lengthening its mystic & surreal

dreamspeaker nets

 

     focus ten years ahead

 

NOW IT IS YOUR TURN

SIXTH STOP: 82 Fourth Avenue: Poet, playwrite and nationalist Robin Mathews, who taught at Carleton University for many years, lived here with his wife Esther. Some might recall that Mathews was one of the more prominent voices who declared the works of George Bowering and his contemporaries in and around TISH magazine in the early 1960s to not be producing Canadian writing, due to their, as he declared, overwhelmingly American influences. This type of complaint culminated in the establishment of a one-off prize, the People’s Poetry Award, for Prince Edward Island poet Milton Acorn. In 1969, Acorn’s collection, I’ve Tasted My Blood, had been, some believed, unfairly passed over for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, instead awarded to George Bowering for two collections: Rocky Mountain Foot and The Gangs of Kosmos. The People’s Poetry Award was subsequently established as an annual book prize in 1987 by Ted Plantos, and continues to this day. In the Glebe Report in 2005, Clyde Sanger wrote that this was where Mathews “wrote Language of Fire: Poems of Love and Struggle. When they sold the house to a lawyer, he asked for the keys and they handed him a shoebox full of them they had inherited and said: ‘Try them to fit. We never locked anything.’”

 

SEVENTH STOP: Bank and Fourth: Avenue Bookshop: From January 7 to February 7, 1986, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis [also discussed as part of my first walk] composed his poetry collection poems for jessica-flynn, a small title produced later that year by proprietor Rhys Knott under “not one cent of subsidy press,” an imprint seemingly created for the sole purpose of this single title. While the store is long gone, Knott later ran another bookstore, for used and antiquarian titles, on Hawthorne Street. Knott also employed Dennis occasionally, which Michael often used as an opportunity to trade work hours for store credit, thus adding to his large personal library of contemporary poetry.

 

Michael Dennis’ month in the window was part of a much larger project that allowed artists to install whatever they wished for a month-long display, curated by Dennis himself, and the series also included Ottawa artists Richard Negro, Daniel Sharp, Bruce Deachman, Dennis Tourbin and Dana Wardrop. Dennis’ month writing poems was the final of the twelve month series.

 

            1st in a series of poems from a bookstore window

            so, i'm finally here

            sitting in a bookstore window

            and trying to write

            of all things, poetry

 

            you have to get everything right

            you have to be sitting in the perfect position

            with the typer at just such an angle

            you have to be feeling a certain way

            and then you can do it

 

            you can let go

            of whatever it is that controls you

            whatever it is that sets the rules

            and you simply go the other way

 

            that's exactly what i'm doing

            here in this bookstore window

            in the middle of winter

 

Influenced by Michael Dennis’ work and bookstore window project, I even did my own version of same, sitting a month in the window of Octopus Books when it still lived at 798 Bank Street, writing banker’s hours throughout the month of June 1996. My own project was far less successful than Michael’s, although it did attract the mockery of Frank magazine, a political tabloid that prided itself on going after the “rich and important” (keeping in mind, of course, that I have never been rich).

 

EIGHTH STOP: 2 Howick Place, at Fifth Avenue: From 1976 to 1982, Ottawa poet and fiction writer Blaine Marchand lived in apartment 1, during which he ran the short lived SPARKS magazine [see my interview with Marchand on SPARKS here, with full SPARKS bibliography] with an editorial board that included, variously, Robert Craig (who went on to co-found Lowertown’s infamous BARD Reading Series of the 1990s), Timothy Dunn, Kathryn Oakley and Juan O’Neill, back when Juan was still known as John O’Neill. Some might remember Juan as the founder and organizer of the long-running Sasquatch Reading Series, hosted in various locations around Lowertown, a series that was actually founded, originally, by Jane Jordan at Pestolozzi College on Rideau Street in 1971. The series, once Jordan handed it over to O’Neill in 1982, was redubbed Sasquatch. After O’Neill’s death in 2006, the series continued under poet Lynne Alsford, and finally folded in 2012 under Alistair Larwill.

SPARKS magazine was a chapbook-sized poetry newsletter consisting of new poems alongside an interview or possibly a review, and listings of literary events throughout Ottawa over the following weeks. SPARKS ran montly from March 1977 to September 1978. After the demise of the journal, it continued as a weekly poetry show at CHEZ-106, hosted originally by Marchand and Oakley, and later, by poet Ronnie R.Brown, running until the mid-1980s. The format of SPARKS magazine was based on PoetryToronto, a monthly publication founded by Maria Jacobs and Heather Cadsby that ran from January 1976 to December 1988, providing information on readings, workshops and other literary notices, as well as publishing new poems by Toronto writers. Jacobs and Cadsby also went on to found the literary publishing house Wolsak and Wynn in 1983, a press since sold to Noelle Allen, who currently runs it out of Hamilton, Ontario. After SPARKS ceased publication, Bywords, another publication clearly influenced by Poetry Toronto, was founded in 1990 as a monthly poetry publication and newsletter by Heather Ferguson, Gwendolyn Guth and Seymour Mayne out of the University of Ottawa, and Bywords ran continuously until 2001. Bywords was revived by Charles and Amanda Earl as an online journal in 2003, and continues to provide complete listings of Ottawa-area literary events, publications and calls for submissions, as well as hosting the annual John Newlove Poetry Award.

 

On his part, Blaine Marchand went on to publish numerous books of poetry and fiction, co-founded the Ottawa Independent Writers and the Ottawa Valley Book Festival in 1996, and was President of the League of Canadian Poets from 1992-94.