Arc walks, 2018 : byward market

[Brendan McNally's photo of us in the Tin House Courtyard, as part of the Northern Comfort entry] 

This is the text of the final of my four solicited “Arc Walks” [see links to the whole series—Centretown, Glebe, Hintonburg and the Byward Market—as it appears here, including post-walk texts and links to the poem handouts] I’d been commissioned to do this year, thanks very much to Arc Poetry Magazine (specifically Frances Boyle, Chris Johnson and James Moran) and The Community Foundation. The fourth walk was in the midst of some very cold weather—minus twelve or thirteen degrees—but managed to be a walk nonetheless, unlike our penultimate walk through Hintonburg. Thanks very much to my readers Colin Morton [see the link to his poem handout for the event here] and Danielle Gregoire (who recently returned to the Ottawa area after a four year haitus), and to both of them as well, among others (including Blaine Marchand, Stephanie Bolster, Rusty Priske, Susan McMaster, John Bart Gerald and Warren Dean Fulton), who provided essential details I might not otherwise have known, as well as to Brendan McNally for providing a couple of photos of the walk itself. Might there be more of these walks in the future? I’m not sure. My research has already half-built walks through Lowertown and Elgin Street/Golden Triangle, but let’s see how the next few months go, work-wise…

WALK FOUR:

FIRST STOP: National Gallery of Canada: There have been numerous poets working in and through the National Gallery of Canada over the years. Staff alone have included Susan McMaster, Nina Berkhout, Anita Lahey, John Barton, Robyn Jeffrey and Stephanie Bolster. Susan McMaster, for example, worked at the Gallery from 1988 to 2008, predominantly as Senior Book Editor, as well as founding editor of Vernissage, the bilingual art quarterly of the National Gallery of Canada. McMaster, mentioned briefly during my Glebe walk as a founding member of the intermedia group First Draft, was also the President of The League of Canadian Poets(2011-12), founding editor of the national feminist magazine Branching Out (1973-80), served on the editorial boards of Arc Poetry Magazine and Quarry magazine, and was head of the Feminist Caucus and the Freedom of Expression committees of The League of Canadian Poets. She is the author or editor of some two dozen poetry books, anthologies and periodicals, as well as recordings with First Draft, SugarBeat and Geode Music and Poetry, and her work has been presented at the Great Canadian Theatre Company, and workshopped at the National Arts Centre Atelier.

[Danielle Gregoire and Colin Morton]  

The benefit to a poet editing such a magazine as Vernissage was the possibility of original poetry appearing in each issue. Work was included by both English and French-language poets, thanks in part to an editorial assist by two published and well-respected Francophone poets, Claire Rochon and Myriam Afriat, both of whom were already working at the Gallery as editors. As McMaster says: “Rather than using translators, except I think two cases, we used different poems per issue, always matched to artworks.” At different points, Ottawa poets John Newlove, Anita Lahey, Colin Morton and Sylvia Adams also worked for the magazine as editors and/or feature writers, and there were contributions by multiple other poets, including Governor General’s Award-winner Denise Desautels, Hélène Dorion and Gabriel Lalonde. As McMaster responded via email: “Starting with that first issue, works by poets from across the country were made available in almost every issue of the magazine until I left, and were also mounted on the new audioguides.” She was good enough to provide an extensive list of writers from across Canada with poems published in the pages of Vernissage during her tenure, a list I include here in full: Stephanie Bolster, Ian Tamblyn, François Morel, Veda Hille, Jean-Noël Pontbriand, Douglas Burnet Smith, Michel Andrée Sincennes, Penn Kemp, Elizabeth Gourlay, Gabriel Lalonde, Christopher Patton, Sandy Shreve, George Whipple, Hélène Dorion, Denise Desautels, François Vigneault, Jocelyn Boisvert, Sylvia Adams, Colin Morton, Heather Pyrcz, Roy Campbell, Anita Lahey, Diana Brebner, John Barton, Inge Israel and Gabriel Lalonde.

It was McMaster who invited Bolster to a meeting at the gallery which led to her being hired as Assistant Editor on October 1, 1998, where Bolster remained until she moved to Montreal to join the Creative Writing faculty of the English Department at Concordia University in the fall of 2000. In 2002, McMaster returned to her previous position of Senior Book Editor, with John Barton taking over the position of Editor in Chief of Vernissage, a position he held until he left for Victoria, British Columbia to take over The Malahat Review in 2004.

Diana Brebner, whom I spoke of as part of my Hintonburg walk, was one of numerous poets who also came through the National Gallery to sketch out poems on visual art, and her sequence “Eleven Paintings by Mary Pratt” won the 1992 CBC Poetry Prize. This poem subsequently appeared in her second collection, The Golden Lotus (Netherlandic Press, 1993), and further, in her posthumous title, The Ishtar Gate: Last and Selected Poems. If one wished a quick Coles Notes on the late Diana Brebner, the important facts would include her mentorship of younger writers, her appreciation of the sonnet, and her fascination with composing poems on visual art. Her long poem “Head of a Girl,” also included in The Golden Lotus, composed on the painting of the same name by Vermeer, won first prize in the 10^th anniversary Literary Competition of Netherlandic Press in 1991. The third section, “Silver Fish On Crimson Foil,” of her “Eleven Paintings by Mary Pratt” reads:

This is the river of blood, the salmon run;

so ruthless, in their dark bed, the dusk years

bring to bear, upon anything, or all things

that we care to call dreams. You want to

believe it will be easy, clear & fluid; life

looks you straight in the eye, and you flourish.

you want to believe; if You swim like crazy

everything turns out right at the end. Now,

I ask myself: What bloody river is this? I set

my mouth (that wants to gape) stubbornly shut.

I carry on, one silver creature on the heraldic

field, companion to lions and unicorns, worthy

of shields. I carry on. Up the river I go

to my crimson foil, the river, and bed,

that I am carried on; and the blue heavens

will move, reflected in all, and the silver

fishflash of my joy will shout, and then

every good thing will be words in my mouth.

Stephanie Bolster says that when she first moved to Ottawa in the spring of 1996, she met Diana Brebner at the League of Canadian Poets Annual General Meeting, held that year at the National Library and Archives on Wellington Street. As Bolster says: “She’d learned of my work through the editors at The New Quarterly, and shortly after, when the League proposed a mentorship program, she asked if I’d be interested in working with her. I think the mentorship lasted around three months (maybe six?) and we met regularly at the Gallery, often just to talk in the cafeteria by those huge windows, and sometimes to visit the galleries themselves. One of my ‘assignments’ was to write a prizewinning poem (I was inspired by her having won the CBC competition for her Mary Pratt poems, and the League contest for “Snow Angels”). My favourite was to choose three works in the collection – she specified that they be ones I resisted, not ones I immediately responded to as a writer, or ones I liked – to inspire three poems. She chose three works herself, but didn’t complete her poems.” Bolster adds that hers became the “Three Goddesses” poems at the end of her second full-length collection, Two Bowls of Milk (McClelland & Stewart, 1999). Her first collection composed in Ottawa, two of the four sections of Two Bowls of Milk were directly composed on visual art, from the third section, “DEUX PERSONNAGES DANS LA NUIT: poems from paintings by Jean Paul Lemieux,” and “INSIDE A TENT OF SKIN: poems in the National Gallery of Canada,” a section originally produced as a chapbook through Vancouver Island publisher Mother Tongue. The first of her “Three Goddesses,” composed on the painting “Venus” by Lucas Cranach the Elder, reads:

Love, the Romans said they made you –

and how small you have become.

Barefoot on stones, you have no need

of fig leaves, for you’ve learned

to keep the body in itself and not to let

the breasts go loose. What child

could your hips span other than yourself?

In fear you’ve put on heavy necklaces

as though you were not enough. Your

painter must have thought you wanton,

his neck aflush with shame at posing a girl

unclothed for Art. Your shame at having

flesh is greater. Would you rather lack

a body and so be safe from probing

fingertips and gazes, be safe from what

that body wants? I have wanted

to turn away from the sudden ivory

of your skin, too rare a thing,

endangered, endangering its self

and mine by such exposure.

SECOND STOP: 206 Saint Patrick Street: From 1995 to 2015, poet, fiction writer, publisher and activist John Bart Gerald and his wife, the artist Julie Maas, lived at 206 Saint Patrick Street where they ran an Atelier/showroom for their publications and artwork. Born in New York City in 1940, Gerald worked with Dr. Albert Schweitzer in 1960, lectured at City College of New York and ran workshops at Saint Mark’s Poetry Project in the 1960s, marched with Dr. Martin Luther King in 1965 from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, and published novels in 1964 (Viking) and 1972 (Farrar Straus & Giroux). A former lecturer at Harvard, he quit the university for their refusal to comment on the Vietnam War. The couple co-founded gerald and mass in 1978 to produce small publications of their combined writing and artwork, as well as the Convention against Genocide when it fell out of print. After years of living in Maine, he moved his family to Ottawa in 1995, where he spent twenty years very active in writing, publishing and activism, before moving to Montreal in 2015.

THIRD STOP: 18 Murray Street: In June, 1972, Ottawa poet William Hawkins, discussed as part of the Centretown walk, and others were responsible for a poetry reading outside in the Byward Market to memorialize the old Victoria Hotel, a building that had been torn down earlier that year. The reading was held in the hotel’s back yard at 18 Murray Street, an event we are only aware of due to the entire transcript of the event published as a book by Commoner’s Press in 1973 as Northern Comfort, a book self-described as “being a reading of poetry by various people, given in the back yard of the Victoria Hotel 18 Murray Street, the Byward Market, Ottawa, on the evening of June 29th, 1972.” An article from the Ottawa Citizen from October 25, 1972 writes that “The three story building at 18 Murray St has erroneously come to be known as the Victoria Hotel. NCC spokesmen said its historical value is vague and ‘marginal’ at best. […] It is assumed to have been built in 1862.” The blog Urbsite posted an article on February 8, 2014 [http://urbsite.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-victoria-hotel.html] that provides further information on the history of the site, including on the confusion of where exactly the Victoria Hotel may have sat, and a plethora of information on fires, National Capital Commission missed opportunities, and what lives here now.

The anthology Northern Comfort was transcribed was transcribed, edited, and sent to the printer by Ottawa poet Neil Flowers [see my interview with Flowers on the project here] (via the moniker Monk Besserer aka Neil Whiteman, brother of poet, critic and archivist Bruce Whiteman) from recordings provided by Peter Lamb of Coon Hollow Films and Maria Sparks of Ottawa Living Radio. The book returned from the printer after Flowers had moved to British Columbia, where he lived for seven years on Saltspring Island and in Vancouver before relocating to Los Angeles where he works in the film business as a writer, script doctor, and teacher of screenwriting. The book includes transcripts of the evening’s readings by William Hawkins, Alyx Jones, Robert Hogg, Marius Kociejowski, Christopher Levenson, Neil Whiteman, Jack Nathanson, George Johnston [discussed at length during my Glebe walk], Ronnie Judge, “Unknown Reader,” David Andrews, The 47 Argyle Street Band, Christophe James and Bill Stevenson. Incidentally, George Johnston couldn’t actually attend the event, but read his poems over the phone (which was directly put to the microphone) and poems by the American poet Charles Olson (as read by Hawkins). As Cameron Anstee wrote of the book at the ottawa poetry newsletter in 2011: “The charm of the book lies in its apparent faith to the recording. The transcription includes the speakers, the banter, the introductions, comments from the audience, as well as a generous selection of photos of the event.” He continues:

Northern Comfort occupies a unique position in these respects (at least so far as my own reading has turned up). While the text initially appears to offer an unadulterated transcription of the reading in question, numerous editorial comments, as well as an introductory note, make clear that this is a fragment rather than a whole. However, what is most interesting about Northern Comfort is that it was produced in the immediate wake of the reading, rather than at a later date and further distance. It was transcribed and published within one year of the reading. The effect of this, in my opinion, is to create an object that shares the spirit and intent of the initial reading. It is not total narrative, but rather a strange, bizarre, wonderful book-object that mirrors the described strange, bizarre, wonderful reading-event. The fidelity of Northern Comfort is not to the reading, but rather to the spirit of the reading.

FOURTH STOP: 27 York Street: From November 1994 through the end of 1995, poet and chapbook publisher Warren Dean Fulton ran The Vogon Reading Series at Zaphod Beeblebrox. The series was named after the third worst poetry in the universe, taken, as the name of the club itself, from Douglas Adams’ infamous The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, a quintet of novels originally begun as a radio play. Ottawa’s Zaphod Beeblebrox self-described as “the original nightclub at the edge of the universe, an intimate live music venue and dance club featuring Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters and other such exotic cocktails,” and existed here as the club’s second location from 1992 through to May 4, 2017.

The Vogon Reading Series was a continuation of Fulton’s Vanilla Reading Series, a series held at Lois N’ Frima’s Ice Cream locations in both the Byward Market and on Elgin Street from October 1993 to October 1994, during Fulton’s time working there, providing poetry and ice cream to a bevy of confused customers and passers-by. Readers during these series included writers from Ottawa and beyond, such as Stan Rogal, Erin Manning, Nadia Halim, Gwendolyn Guth, James Spyker, Kathryn Payne, Death Waits (now known as Jacob Wren), Joe Blades, Catherine Jenkins and Patrick White, as well as a variety of slam poets, and launches for the quarterly poetry, fiction and comics journal Hostbox magazine. It was also around this time that Fulton founded Pooka Press, a small press focused on single-author poetry chapbooks, which still occasionally produces titles from time to time.

It was through Vogon that Ottawa held the first Poetry Slam on April 23, 1995, as part of the Ottawa Valley Book Festival. As Fulton writes, a “Poetry Slam” was a “competitive, judged, and scored poetry event, called Slam, a novelty, a poetry gimmick, with prize money, introduced to me by Boston poet Marcel Kopp [….].” He recalls an earlier competitive poetry event at Carleton University through the English Literature Society, held during his tenure as President of the ESL, but the first “Slam” event, following many of Slam founder Marc Smith’s original rules (formed in Chicago in 1984 through the GET ME HIGH LOUNGE), was held in Ottawa through the Vogon series. The slams drew immediate attention; the “summer slam” event, held August 6, 1995, had a crowd of more than one hundred people. There were concurrent Slam competitions emerging in Vancouver and Toronto during the same time, and Jill Battson, who organized the Toronto events, often came through Ottawa to participate in the Vogon events. The series also hosted the Ottawa launch of the Michael Holmes’ The Last Word anthology (Toronto ON: Insomniac Press, 1995), one of a handful of anthologies produced through the mid-1990s of the “next generation” of Canadian poets. The Vogon Reading Series finally shuttered when Fulton relocated to British Columbia, where he started working in the film and television industry, working on such projects as X-Men 3: The Last Stand, Arrow and Legion.

Over the years, Fulton has occasionally returned to Ottawa to visit, as well as participate in the ottawa small press book fair, during which he would also instigate a series of literary pub crawls, later producing small chapbook anthologies of the resulting poems.

FIFTH STOP: 55 ByWard Market Square: ByWard Market Building: When Ottawa’s VERSeFest Poetry Festival was founded in 2011, there were those who spoke of it as the city’s first poetry festival, unaware that there were at least two prior poetry festivals held within the city limits, both of which were first held in the ByWard Market. In 1996, for example, Rob Manery and I organized the first of what became three annual WHIPlash poetry festivals. Founded as a two-day event, the first annual WHIPlash festival was held in the basement of Café Deluxe on Dalhousie Street (the subsequent year’s festivals were organized solo by myself, with the second held at The Upstairs Club on Rideau Street, and the third at Club Saw in Arts Court). Prior to that, the collective organizers of The TREE Reading Series put together a two-day poetry festival on August 6 and 7, 1982 as the Ottawa Poetry Festival. The readings were held at S.A.W. Gallery, which at that point was housed in the north end of the second floor of the Byward Market Square, a building originally constructed from 1927 to 1928 as the fifth building to house Ottawa’s public market. The public market, itself, was established in the 1830s by Colonel John By, an English military engineer, known for supervising the construction of the Rideau Canal, and founder of the original Bytown, the village that would eventually become both Ottawa and Capital. 

SAW Gallery was originally named as an acronym for Sussex Annex Works, and founded in 1973 by a group of local artists in a space on the second floor of Café Le Hibou [an establishment discussed at length during my Centretown walk], which at that time was at its third and final location at 521 Sussex Avenue, before recloating to the Market Building. In 1989, SAW finally moved to its current home in Ottawa’s historic Arts Court Building.

As part of the first year of the Ottawa Poetry Festival, Colin Morton edited and produced, with design assistance by Carol English, the chapbook volume WORDFEST, an anthology that included work by featured performers from the two-day event, including Cyril Dabydeen, Mark Frutkin, Alice Groves, Blaine Marchand, George Miller, Riley Tench, Lorna Uher (Crozier), and Patrick White. Part of the offshoot of such an event, and such a publication, was Morton’s decision to found Ouroboros [see my interview with Morton on Ouroboros here], an Ottawa-based publishing house that produced books, chapbooks and ephemera by himself as well as a number of poets around him at the time, including Susan McMaster, Chris Wind, Robert Eady, Margaret Dyment and John Bell, culminating in the 1989 anthology Capital Poets. In the introduction to the first year’s WORDFEST volume, David J. Freedman writes enthusiastically, offering:

            This is an historic occasion. It is Wordfest, and it marks the coming of age of poetry in Ottawa. We, calling ourselves the Ottawa Poetry Festival, had not so much an idea when we started as an opportunity which we took, and here, as in the SAW Gallery, we present the issue of our efforts.

            In this souvenir volume we present the work of all participants. With only two exceptions the poets are local, young and just beginning to come to notice in the city, the country, the continent and beyond. This is our theme, and inevitable once one begins to look at the talen in the city. And yet many of the poets represented here came to Ottawa from somewhere else. And all of them draw influences from elsewhere as well as here.

[Colin Morton, reading from a poem composed during the first Ottawa Poetry Festival, subsequently produced as the first Ouroboros publication (which he handed out copies of); Chris Johnson, holding a sign; Grant Wilkins and Marilyn Irwin, etcetera, listening/following] 

A second Ottawa Poetry Festival was held a year later, again with accompanying chapbook anthology, and was expanded into a three-day event. Held from August 12 to 14, 1983 at the Friend’s Meeting House on Fourth Avenue (where The TREE Reading Series was being held at the time; see my Glebe Walk for further information on The TREE Reading Series), the second annual WORDFEST anthology was again produced by Colin Morton and Carole English, and included work by Richard Truhlar, Steven Smith, Colin Morton, Steve McCaffery, Robert Hogg, Michael Dean and Ottawa poet Catherine Ahearn, who was still in the midst of her tenure as Ottawa’s first official city poet laureate.

Not everyone might know that in the 1980s, the City of Ottawa (or, the government body then known as the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton) hosted three city poet laureates. Conceived by Ottawa poet, Dr. Catherine Ahearn in 1981 to “help promote the City of Ottawa as well as enrich the lives of its citizens,” she suggested the idea to then-Ottawa Mayor Marion Dewar, who made the position official in 1982, and insisted Ahearn herself be the first to hold the position. Created as a three year post, paying but a dollar a year, Ottawa poet laureates were to write six poems a year, and attend various civic and community group functions across the city. The position was later held by poet, fiction writer and University of Ottawa professor Cyril Dabydeen (1984-1987), and later, poet and former Anthos magazine and Anthos Books editor/publisher Patrick White (1987-1990). As Dabydeen wrote in a piece in The Ottawa Citizen on November 15, 1986:

While no one has expected me to pen verses in the manner of a D.C. Scott or an Archibald Lampman (the two best poets who ever lived here), I've been tempted to justify the honour of being Ottawa’s poet laureate by churning out heroic couplets on some epochal or historical event. Why not, for instance, trace the history of Ottawa as a burgeoning small lumber town, ringing with the cries of the Glengarry men on the Ottawa River on its way to becoming a bureaucracy-crazed nation’s capital?

It was White who moved out to Perth, Ontario in February, 1988, not five months after Mayor Jim Durrell had named him Laureate, causing some consternation around White retaining the title of city laureate. Around the same time, some of the French-speaking poets in town were wondering why all three Ottawa Poet Laureates had been English. Whatever the prompting, after White’s tenure as Laureate, the position was quietly eliminated. Despite the likelihood that Ottawa had the first poet laureate position in the country, it was years before it would exist here again, even as laureates soon popped up all across Canada, from city laureates to provincial laureates to the ongoing federal version: after a focused campaign by the National Council of The League of Canadian Poets, the Parliamentary Poet Laureate position was created in 2002, a two-year post first held by Vancouver poet George Bowering. Through her own tenure, Ahearn wrote poems that seem exactly the kind Bowering would steer clear of, penning small pieces on the Ottawa River, or on Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, some of which were collected in her self-published Poet Laureate poems, 1982-1984 (1984).

After years of a variety of local writers petitioning the city to reintroduce the position, including Steve Artelle and Rod Pederson, it wasn’t until a committee as part of Ottawa’s VERSe Ottawa, the group that runs the annual VERSeFest Poetry Festival, that the city finally agreed. The new two-year position, one with a proper amount of compensation, is now held in both official languages, and the first two poets laureate were announced as part of the festival in March, 2017: Andrée Lacelle and Jamaal Jackson Rogers. The second pair of laureates will be announced at VERSeFest in March, 2019.

SIXTH STOP: 56 Byward Market Square: The Mercury Lounge was the original home of Capital Slam, the biggest regular Spoken Word Poetry Showcase in Ottawa history. Organizers of the series have been legion, including Danielle K.L. Gregoire, Elissa Molino, Nathanael Larochette, Brad Morden, Sarah Ruszala, Blue, Janica Shivkumar and Rusty Priske. Capital Slam was founded in 2004 as a response to the first National Slam Championship, which had been held in Ottawa that same year. Moving around to a couple of venues after its original inception, Capital Slam returned to the Mercury for its seasons finals in 2007, where it remained until October 2015, thus cementing Mercury’s moniker as “The Home of Slam in Ottawa.” By the time of the subsequent event, in November 2015, Capital Slam had relocated to the University of Ottawa’s Café Alternatif, an event which also included the Capital Slam slam debut of Apollo the Child (who won that night’s slam). Slams were still held monthly, but, according to online reports written up by Rusty Priske, only up to March 2016 [Gregoire suggests events did occur for a few months beyond this].

[Danielle Gregoire, performing; Frances Boyle, listening] 

Organized by the Capital Poetry Collective, Capital Slam self-described as “one of the longest running slam series in the country,” and won the National Slam Championships twice: in 2009 and 2010. As Rusty Priske offers:

During CapSlam’s run at the Mercury, they fielded two National Slam Champion teams, in 2009 and 2010, as well as launching the careers of two World Slam Champions, Ian Keteku and OpenSecret (Ikenna Onyegbula).

For a time Ottawa was considered one of the main centres for Spoken Word in Canada, culminating in the largest single event crowd that the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word has ever seen, as nearly 800 people packed into the Dominion Chalmers to see Capital Slam win their second straight National Title. (Another Ottawa team, Urban Legends, came second that year.)

Some names included in those last few years of Capital Slam would include names familiar to those who attend local readings, from John Akpata, Blue and Sarah Ruszala to Lazy Hero, Omar Saghir and Avonlea Fotheringham, but would also include appearances by Amal El-Mohtar, an award-winning writer of fiction, poetry and criticism who subsequently held the position of Writer in Residence at the University of Ottawa before becoming Otherworldly columnist at the New York Times earlier this year, and Sarah Kabamba, who longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2017.

The Mercury Lounge also briefly hosted The Factory Reading Series, circa 2005, before the series permanently relocated to The Carleton Tavern, as well as some of the above/ground press anniversary events (beginning with the 13th anniversary event, and culminating with the 20th anniversary event in 2013), early launches for the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater, and a variety of events over the years organized as part of Ottawa’s annual VERSeFest Poetry Festival.

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.