Ottawa writer and editor Colin Morton is the
author of numerous poetry books and chapbooks, including In Transit (Thistledown Press, 1981), This Won’t Last Forever (Longspoon Press, 1985), The Merzbook: Kurt Schwitters Poems (Quarry
Press, 1987), How to Be Born Again (Quarry
Press, 1991), Coastlines of the
Archipelago (BuschekBooks, 2000), Dance,
Misery (Seraphim Editions, 2003), The
Cabbage of Paradise (Seraphim Editions, 2007), The Local Cluster (Pecan Grove Press, 2008), The Hundred Cuts (BuschekBooks, 2009), and Winds and Strings (BuschekBooks, 2013)—as well as the novel Oceans Apart (Quarry Press, 1995).
Morton grew up in Alberta, and moved to Ottawa
soon after completing an MA in English at the University of Alberta in 1979. He
has performed and recorded his poetry with First Draft and other music poetry
groups, and his collaboration with Ed Ackerman, the animated film Primiti Too Taa (1988), based on Kurt
Schwitters’ Ursonate (Sonata in primitive
sounds), led to a Genie nomination, a Bronze Apple, and other international
film awards. He has been writer-in-residence at Concordia College (Moorhead,
MN, 1995-6) and Connecticut College (New London, CT, 1997).
From 1982 to 1989, he was editor and publisher
of Ouroboros, an Ottawa-based publishing house that produced books, chapbooks
and ephemera, producing works 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, and culminated in the anthology Capital Poets, which included work by Nadine McInnis, John Barton,
Christopher Levenson and John Newlove. He is currently one of the organizers of The TREE Reading Series.
Q: What was the original impulse for starting
the press?
A: In the summer of 1982, the Tree Reading
Series organized Word Fest, a 2-day poetry festival at SAW Gallery in ByWard
Market, Ottawa. I edited a chapbook of the featured readers’ poems and worked
with artist Carol English to produce the booklets. At the end of the two days
of readings I came home hyper-excited and wrote my “Poem Without Shame” in one
night-long beat-inspired cry. I thought a lot of the poem and wanted it out there.
The prospect of sending it away to magazine editors and waiting a year maybe
two before seeing my poem printed almost secretly in some little journal did
not appeal to me. I liked the fold-old broadsheets that the League of Canadian
Poets had produced for some of its members, and I thought that would be a way
to get my poem shamelessly out into public. I chose a rigid cover stock and
asked Carol English to adorn my poem with some cover art – something suitably
surrealist – and the broadsheet was ready to hand out at readings.
From the start, I liked the idea of being able
to control how the printed product looked. I naturally looked around for other
projects.
Q: Were you part of the Tree Reading Series at
that time? What other activity, whether readings or publishing, were around you
at that time in Ottawa?
A: I had some production experience out west
with NeWest ReView, Literary Storefront Newsletter and
others, so Tree recruited me to create the WordFest catalogues. Ouroboros
authors Susan McMaster and Margaret Dyment I met at Tree readings, and others,
like Marty Flomen’s Orion series and Juan O’Neill’s Sasquatch. Christopher
Levenson edited Arc magazine, then
only a few years old, and hosted Arc readings as well. Ouroboros published
several of the Arc poets – John Bell,
Robert Eady and, later in the Capital
Poets anthology (1989), Levenson, Nadine McInnis, Sandra Nicholls, John
Barton, Blaine Marchand ... all these poets later published in solo editions by
Quarry Press out of Kingston, Ontario. So it was a fairly busy time for poetry
in Ottawa.
In addition to all that, I had weekly meetings
over coffee and beer with First Draft, a collective of writers, musicians and
artists who closed out Theatre 2000 near Byward Market in 1983 with a
multimedia performance that including my recital of “Poem Without Shame,” “wordmusic”
collaborations and others. The following year, 1984, saw First Draft’s third
annual group show appear in the form of a book from Ouroboros – an artist’s
book designed by Claude Dupuis of Ottawa. Dupuis filled every corner of every
page with visual information, leaving the printer literally no margin for
error. The result is The Scream, by
far the most ambitious piece of book-making Ouroboros attempted. Smaller
projects did use the visual resources of Ottawa’s print shops, and my own
desktop publishing efforts. Visual poetry predominated in postcards, posters
and chapbooks.
Q: What do you feel your activity through Ouroboros
accomplished, and what prompted the press to finally fold?
A: About the time I was rounding up operations
at Ouroboros, I had a phone call from John Buschek, who was thinking of
starting up his own literary press and asked if I had any advice. I told him it
would be a good idea to keep it small. Keep it small so that every project you
undertake receives your full attention and love. (By this time I had decided to
give my full creative attention to writing novels, one of which was eventually
published by Quarry in 1995.) The second piece of advice I gave Buschek was to
produce exactly what he wanted. We go into the arts, after all, to create
something of ourselves, we don’t write books, or print and distribute them, to
fulfill someone else’s dream. I’m glad to see BuschekBooks continuing to grow,
a little at a time and, reflecting on the Ouroboros years, I’m glad I could
bring those writers to wider public exposure, and to draw attention to Ottawa
as a place to make art and literature, to talk and argue about art and
literature, because these things matter.
Q: I’m curious about the activity you were
involved with out west, before you moved to Ottawa. What prompted the move, and
what differences did you see between the communities?
A: This is reaching back into the 70s, into the
real arts-and-crafts era of little magazine production. I was involved in
little magazines from high school, on though university and after. In 1973, I
co-edited Harbinger, an anthology of
southern Alberta writing that included Erin Mouré, Andy Suknaski and others. Later, at the NeWest ReView office, we received long strips of copy that we had
to glue into straight columns by eye. Layout really was a matter of cut and
paste. It could get messy. At Vancouver’s Literary Storefront there would be
collating parties, a collective effort to get the monthly publication out on
the streets before the events they announced. That was social media in those
days.
Like a lot of people, I moved to Ottawa for the
work – my wife Mary Lee’s work first and eventually my place in the publication
division of a federal department. After supply teaching in Vancouver, I’d have
gone anywhere at the first hint of an opportunity. After Vancouver, which had
an established literary culture with factions and rivalries, Ottawa was more
like Calgary and Edmonton – smaller, just getting active, open to newcomers and
new ideas.
Q: The press ended on a high note, with the
publication of the anthology Capital
Poets. In many ways, the anthology represents just as much the aesthetic of
the press as the poets active around you at the time. What was the selection
process for the anthology?
A: Here’s one of the difficulties in
reconstructing literary history. Capital
Poets has a finished look to it, and you might see it as a landmark – the eighties
generation in Ottawa. But it isn’t that and it didn’t set out to be. My
original idea was to put out a monthly leaflet featuring a single writer each
month – poetry or fiction or whatever – an author spotlight that could be
distributed at readings or given away in bookstores or through the mail. A
continuing series.
Two moments’ thought about the economics of the
enterprise, though, reveals the problem. We are deluged by a flood of paper; we
throw it away, often unread, whether it’s this week’s ads or poetry for the
ages. No, the practical way to highlight Ottawa’s writers was through an
anthology, up to ten pages from each of ten writers, printed and bound to be
kept and remembered a generation later.
Capital Poets
represents the poets I spent time with in the eighties, many of whom had connections
to Arc and Tree and other literary
groups. In a way, the collection was just as important for the writers who
weren’t included in the anthology. It mobilized some to create their own
anthologies, like Seymour Mayne’s Six
Ottawa Poets and Luciano Diaz’s broader Symbiosis
collections. In retrospect, I guess Capital
Poets is a kind of landmark; it’s from then that Ottawa writers really
start looking at ourselves as a community of interests. When I see Ottawa’s
varied literary communities cooperating in our annual VerseFest, WritersFest and
so on, I appreciate how much the city has matured, culturally, and how much it
continues to change.
Q: Well, and I know, too, of a whole slew of
Ottawa poets who didn’t respond to your anthology by putting out one of their
own, such as the loosely-grouped poets around Gallery 101: Dennis Tourbin,
Michael Dennis, Riley Tench, Ward Maxwell, etcetera. What was the response to
the anthology when it appeared?
A: Not to mention Diana Brebner and Marianne
Bluger, both emerging nationally about that time. The response to the anthology
was vigorous, back pre-Internet when the letters to the editor page gave one a
loud blowhorn. Again, the outsiders came across as more scandalized than the
insiders were pleased. They took their own inclusion for granted, I guess. I
could have gone ahead and published a second volume in the series. There were
obviously the poets to fill one out, but the anthology field seemed well
ploughed by that time, and I imagined writing would be a more satisfying use of
my time, which it was.
Q: Was it as simple as that, then, choosing
your writing over the publishing? You add Brebner and Bluger to my shortlist;
who or what else emerged during the period you were producing Ouroboros?
A: A number of things were wrapping up around
that time.
After theatrical productions of Susan McMaster’s
Dark Galaxies and my Kurt Schwitters
piece, The Cabbage of Paradise (with
3 actors and a 12-voice sound poetry choir), First Draft disbanded and members
Andrew McClure and David Parsons moved to Toronto.
My writing was going more and more into prose
and narrative, so the cross-media emphasis of Ouroboros was less top-of-mind.
The response to Capital Poets was disappointingly parochial (the opposite of what
I’d hoped the anthology would show).
At the day job, the big public service strike
started me thinking of going freelance instead. My son was going off to
university, and soon I would be offered writer-in-residence gigs in the U.S.
Things end for lots of reasons; more mysterious
is why some continue on despite the changes.
Memories tend to be short, and some exciting
developments can be forgotten until someone like you, rob, comes along to
preserve the memory somehow.
Ottawa in the 80s saw the emergence of valuable
venues like Gallery 101, where Dennis Tourbin animated literary events. There,
and at SAW Gallery, performance artists like Paul Couillard and Louis Cabri
were exploring language in the visual arts context.
The National Library was a regular venue for
national, international and local writers, thanks to Randall Ware’s direction.
Ottawa was a centre for the Chilean diaspora writers
like Jorge Etcheverry and others though Split Quotation Press.
Patrick White’s Anthos magazine ran as a quarterly tabloid. There were regular
reading series like Tree, Orion and Sasquatch.
Young writers were maturing and first books
were coming out. Blaine Marchand, though Ottawa Independent Writers (another
new organization then), introduced the Archibald Lampman Award.
Bywords
emerged from Ottawa U. as a monthly newsletter preceded, I believe, by another
monthly newsletter edited by James Cassidy.
Then as now, poets migrated to Ottawa from
across the country – John Barton and Stephen Brockwell, for instance – and international
poets were attached to embassies – like Shaheen who wrote ghazals in Urdu.
The trouble with such lists, like anthologies,
is that something will be left out. But maybe this is enough to suggest that
the Ottawa literary scene wasn’t a blank slate before the present generation
arrived.
Q: In hindsight, what do you consider the
biggest accomplishment of the press?
A: I'm inclined to let others decide what
Ouroboros achieved. It might be the publication of the first book by Susan
McMaster, Dark Galaxies; or the last
long-poem by John Newlove, “In Progress” in Capital
Poets; or a performing book like no other, The Scream.
But there’s something else, more personal.
I’m reminded of the Kafka parable about the man
who waits his whole life at the door of the castle to be admitted. No one ever
comes to invite him inside, and when it’s too late he realizes all he needed to
do was to walk through that door. By publishing Ouroboros, I learned that
Literature is not some great edifice or institution that we writers have to
approach with our begging bowls. It is the sum of everything writers,
publishers, critics do. As you know, rob, we just have to be bold enough to
walk on past the gate-keepers.
Ouroboros Bibliography
Broadsides
1982 – Colin Morton, “Poem Without Shame” (8.5 x 14,
3-fold); art by Carol English
1983 – Susan McMaster, “Seven Poems” (8.5 x 14, 3-fold);
art by Claude Dupuis
1983 – John Bell, “The Third Side” (11 x 17, 4-fold); art
by Suanne Rogers
1986 – Chris Wind, “The House that Jack Built” (11 x 17
poster)
1989 – Richard Kostelanetz, “Openings” (8.5 x 11, 3-fold)
Chapbooks
1983 – Margaret (Slavin) Dyment, “I Didn’t Get Used To It”
(24 pp.); art by Claude Dupuis
1987 – Colin Morton, “Two Decades: from A Century of Inventions” (28 pp.)
1989 – Nancy Corson Carter, “Patchword Quilt” (16 pp.)
Books
1984 – The Scream:
First Draft; the third annual group show (96 pp.); writing by Colin Morton,
Susan McMaster, Nan Cormier; music by Andrew McClure, Andrew Parsons; art by
Claude Dupuis, Carol English; design by Claude Dupuis
1985 – Robert Eady, The
Blame Business (50 pp.); cover art by Darien Watson
1986 – Susan McMaster, Dark
Galaxies (50 pp.); cover art by Roberta Huebener
1989 – Capital Poets (96
pp.); poetry by John Barton, Margaret Dyment, Holly Kritsch, Christopher
Levenson, Blaine Marchand, Nadine McInnis, Susan McMaster, Colin Morton, John
Newlove, Sandra Nicholls
Postcards
1983 – Colin Morton, “Dialogue 1” “Dialogue 2” “Dialogue 3”
“Dialogue 4”
1984 – Penn Kemp, “Incremental”
1984 – Colin Morton, “Twins”
1984 – LeRoy Gorman, “moon”
1985 – Noah Zacharin, “Blues”
1985 – Colin Morton, “I read a shadow on the stream”
1985 – Robert Eady, “Amnesty” “The Lie” “Concise History of
a Room” “How to Lube a Car”
1987 – Maureen Korp, “Melting Ice” (with art by Mitsu
Ikemura)
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