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.

 

Neil Flowers on Northern Comfort (Commoners’ Press, 1973)

this interview was conducted over email in April 2016 as part of a project to document Ottawa literary publishing. see my bibliography-in-progress of Ottawa literary publications, past and present here

Neil Flowers, Neil Flowers, aka Neil Whiteman, aka Monk Besserer, and likely several other aliases that he’s long forgotten, was born in Montreal and has lived in Italy, Mexico, the U.S., and on Saltspring Island, BC. In the late 60s and early 70s, he studied literature at Carleton University, including being a member of Robert Hogg’s seminar in modern and contemporary poetry. As well as being a poet, Neil has a long history as an actor, director, and writer for radio, theatre, and film. He currently lives in Los Angeles where he works as a screenwriter and script doctor, and teaches screenwriting. A distant ancestor, Robert Flowers, a British soldier stationed at Lake Champlain who fled America for Canada when the Yanks more or less won their revolution, helped found the town of New Carlisle in the Gaspé.

Neil transcribed and edited the public poetry reading that effectively became the anthology Northern Comfort (Ottawa, ON: Commoners’ Press, 1973).

Q: Northern Comfort was, by its own admission, an edited transcript of “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.” What was it about this event, beyond any other, that prompted transcribing it for the sake of print?

A: Interesting question. Your “beyond any other” seems to imply that there were more. I could be wrong, but to my knowledge, and to that time, the reading was a unique event in Ottawa’s cultural history. That seemed to make it important enough to leave a record. Except for Le Hibou, the city was pretty sleepy in the sense of street or popular art. Also, the mix and number of good poets who read was interesting to me, so I thought the variety of verse would help the book. It was an anthology, in a sense, of a specific place and time, rather than of a style or a school. Also, I respected the energies that had brought it together, such as Bill Stevenson, who at only 24, or something like that, was a top-dawg blues pianist. He’d recorded. I play blues piano to this day in large part due to his inspiration and he, in fact, gave me the only piano lesson I’ve ever had. Peter Lamb helped put the evening together, and recorded it, as you know. Peter and I had been friends from Carleton. We were in the same graduating year. Robert Hogg was reading at the event, and Bill Hawkins was the emcee. If they were a part of it, it had to be interesting. And so it turned out to be. 


Q: Given that literary events are prevalent in the city now, it’s almost difficult to think of a community of writers that weren’t regularly meeting and performing. How did the reading first come together? And which came first: the idea for the reading, or the idea for the book?

A: Well, there was not a community of writers meeting and reading regularly back in 1973 in Ottawa. None that I’m aware of at least, except for the readings Hawkins led at Le Hibou. Only when Bob Hogg came to town, to teach at Carleton, did there start to be readings there. He brought John Newlove, Basil Bunting, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, George Bowering, Warren Tallman, Alden Nowlan, and Ed Dorn, to name a few. An extraordinary lineup, when you think about it, several of the best poets in English of the era. Bob deserves major kudos for his work in getting these poets to come to Ottawa and getting the Dean of Arts at Carleton to pay for it. In the sense of nationally and international known writers, Bob is the person responsible for bringing contemporary poetry to Ottawa. He may have brought Margaret Atwood, too, not sure, you’ll have to ask him. She did turn up there. So did Michael Ondaatje, who read from The Collected Works of Billy The Kid. His reading was held in one of the major lecture theatres at Carleton—and it was packed. The Four Horsemen—with bp nicol—performed at Carleton, too. Not sure if Bob brought them either.

It’s worth saying that Bob was a poet, not someone with a doctorate who only wrote about poetry or literature. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Hugh Kenner was an academic, not a poet; still, The Pound Era is one of the best books about poetry ever written. But Bob knew poetry from the inside; he was young; he was friendly toward students. He’s Canadian, too, not British or American, and there were a lot of those in the Carleton English Department of the period. In fact, there was a public foofaraw about not enough Canadians in the department and enough Can Lit being taught. All these qualities counted very much in Bob’s favour from a student’s point of view. He was popular with those who knew him. One great thing we did in that class was we sent Ezra Pound a birthday telegram on his 85th. That was Bob’s idea. It was a cool thing to do. It wasn’t just academic stuff. It was a live connection.

There were always parties for the poets after the readings; you could meet and talk with them. I remember Robert Creeley’s reading well: The fineness of his poems, and his total presence without being showy in the least, was galvanizing. When you heard him read, you at once understood his line breaks—attached to his hesitant breath—which could seem confusing or even precious on the page. He was as unique with the short line as Ginsberg had been with the Whitmanesque long. Bob made sure that Creeley and I met afterwards at the party—another kindness I owe Bob, among many. I was somewhat shy. I was meeting a legend! Creeley was soft-spoken and encouraging. That’s a memory for a lifetime. Ginsberg cruised the young men at his party, which is funny-hah-hah when I think of it now. I’m pretty sure I’d never even heard the word “gay” back then.

One night Bob and his wife, Leslie, and I and a couple of others had dinner and drinks with Basil Bunting at The Matador, which was on lower Bank Street, after Basil’s reading. He told us a story about Pound and Yeats and Yeats’s cottage. This was during the time Yeats was writing “Sailing to Byzantium” and the poem was in Yeats’s typewriter. So Basil alleged, adding that Yeats said he had been working on the poem for six weeks. Basil, who at the time was considerably younger than the other two, was there because Pound dragged him along to meet Yeats. Unforgettable story, of course. That same night at the Matador, Basil said if you think you’ve written a good poem, put it in a drawer, wait a year, then come back and read it and if you still think it works, then publish it. Eternally good advice.

That kind of personal contact with such poets made a difference in one’s appreciation of how the art was a living thing, and so you might dare to write verse, too. Leonard Cohen came to Carleton, by the way, and sang in the gymnasium. He had a small, low-key band, was superb, at his best, self-effacing in that way he had, and the crowd was adulatory. And he gave the concert for free, and I mean free-free, as I don’t think Carleton paid for it. He just offered. There was no publicity, word got around in a hurry one day and that was that. Maybe he was breaking in his band and needed a venue? I have no idea, and perhaps I’m being sentimental, but that always struck me as a Canadian-to-Canadian gesture. 

Trevor Tolley, a professor at Carleton, also taught an upper-level survey course in Modern Poetry that was very, very good, gave you the big sweep that included major figures like Wallace Stevens, as well as many lesser lights such as Edith Sitwell or Theodore Roethke. Bob taught for a whole semester, and therefore in depth, those poets—Pound, Williams, Olson—who I would characterize as more important because of their willingness to be so adventurous in terms of form and content. We also read Creeley, Duncan, and some Canadians like Newlove. Bob talked about Gary Snyder, too, a poet, IMO, who gets overlooked. In terms of subject—First Nations ways—Gary’s a prophet. Anyway, I was a student in that class, and it was the first year Bob taught at Carleton. He really let you see what you were missing, perhaps the idea of “open verse” or projective verse (as Olson says) and the sequence or serial poem most of all in terms of theory and possibility. Plus Creeley’s notion—which comes out of Williams—that form and content could be the same, rather than form being separate or imposed externally on the content, iambic pentameter or rhyme, say. There’s the Duncan poem from The Opening of the Field that says, “we let the long line pace even awkward to its period.” Mostly I’m leery of poems about poetry but that one made a big impression. The “all moose” one from the same book, too. That’s the challenge, isn’t it? To let a poem find its own form. Of course there are great poems of the closed variety, the old style, you might say, without judgement, what has been around since poetry began, of which Olson himself wrote some very fine examples, such as “Only the Red Fox, Only the Crow”. But thinking “open” gave new possibilities. That’s probably the big discovery of modern/postmodern verse.

Bob’s seminar made a difference in a positive way in my life and many others. If he hadn’t held that seminar, I and those who studied with him would probably still think that Eliot was the summum bonum of twentieth-century verse, which was pretty much the mainstream academic opinion of the time still, even though Williams had been railing against Eliot’s influence for years. And he was right. Eliot, skillful as he was, was mostly a dead end in terms of subject, but, I would argue, not altogether in style, though Pound sure helped make that style—il miglior fabbro and all that. The Waste Land is a knockout of a poem yet, at nearly a hundred years old, but what Williams said about Eliot’s blast of genius wrecking American verse for a while still rings true. Eliot was no lightweight, but where Williams was heading turned out to be endlessly usable, genitive, influential, crucial to the origin of much poetry that followed; Eliot not so much.

In the context of Bob’s seminar and the readings he put together, you might be interested in knowing that I designed the poster for the Ed Dorn reading and several years ago donated my copy to the Carleton Special Collections Library, which didn’t have one. You can see the poster there, if you’ve a mind to do so. It was somewhat of a struggle to get Carleton to print it, but they finally agreed and on very nice paper, but they would only print a small number, no more than 40, as I recall, so it’s a rare item. I also sold my 1st edition copy of WCW’s first Selected Poems (New Directions, 1949) to Spec Coll a couple of years back, a book I’d bought in LA. So it’s there, too, dust jacket in perfect shape, in case you or your readers would like to have a look.

That’s a long way around and with detours. To answer the question directly: The idea for the reading at the Victoria came first. After the fact, I decided it would make a good book.

I’m not sure who first proposed the reading, and how the logistics brought it about. I wasn’t privy to that stage of the organizing. I had nothing to do with it. You need to speak with Peter Lamb. He would likely know, as I believe he helped put the reading together as well as recording it and shooting some film of it (alas, likely lost, Peter told me recently). 

Q: How was the idea pitched to Commoner’s, and how were they to work with?

A: Sorry, can’t recall the details of how I pitched the idea to Commoners or how we were connected. They were a breeze to work with. I edited the MS exactly how I wanted it to be and that’s how it went to press. No tinkering. Peter Lamb either took or provided nearly all the photos. Brenda Cook, Peter’s girlfriend at the time, took the beautiful picture of Hawkins, as you know because it’s credited. As I recall, once the MS got rolling, I connected Commoners with Peter and that’s how the pictures happened, i.e., Peter gave them a bunch of images to work with and they chose.

Although I was involved in the preliminary layout of the book, Cam Christie at Commoners deserves the lion’s share of the credit for the way Northern Comfort finally looks. He also shepherded the book through the printing process while I was out in BC. As soon as I had submitted the MS, I took off for BC, where I lived for the next several years. After being out there only a few months, I came back east for personal reasons, and that’s when I first saw Northern Comfort. I was astounded that the book had actually been done because these projects often run aground when money and enthusiasm decline. And I was doubly astounded that it had come out so well. As I say, Cam Christie did the heavy lifting in terms of getting the book out. He was the sine qua non. Minus him, it wouldn’t have made it.

Q: How were the poets selected? Were there some you wanted to include in the event but weren’t able?

A: In the sense of being selected, it seems you mean who was selected to read, not who was selected to ultimately be in Northern Comfort. Yes? This is a logistics question, to which I don’t think I know the answer. Does that sound odd? What I mean is that I had zero pull with the organizers. Before the event Bob Hogg and I had some sort of conversation about the line-up, but how definitive that became I don’t know. Maybe Hawkins had some input? I do recall the question of how we were going to allow George Johnston to read, as he was out of town, up at his cottage. It was imperative that he read because he was a legend, published by a major publisher, and he lived and taught in Ottawa. Who suggested the idea of the telephone hook-up I can’t remember, possibly Peter Lamb—he was really good at that end of things—but there was definitely an effort to get that bit of technology to work just because it was George and we wanted him as part of the event. To be frank, I doubt we would have gone to the trouble for a lesser figure.

Q: I was going to ask you about that; even when I first encountered the book years ago, I thought it absolutely delightful that you had readers unable to participate in person phoning in their readings. William Hawkins has also given me the impression over the years that George Johnston was pretty important for younger poets in town, as a mentor and influence. How do you recall Johnston?

A: Bill is absolutely right about that. i.e., George being a mentor and a light. George taught Old English at Carleton and, at least once, Old Norse. He was, as I said, a legend, tall, imposing, with his white beard, gaunt look, and beret. You knew he was into the skalds. Pretty amazing! You respected him and his obvious integrity. He was somebody who seemed like a poet first and then a university professor, rather than the other way around. I started his class in Old English, but it was too much for me at the time and I dropped out. Nonetheless, he and I not long afterwards had a good discussion about Robert Lowell’s poem, “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” from Lord Weary's Castle. This gives you an example of the mentor thing.

Somehow we crossed paths and he asked me whom I liked and I said that I was reading the Lowell poem. I still remember chunks of it. I was so taken by the poem that I drove to Nantucket one summer after teaching at Carleton in order to visit the island. I almost missed the graveyard. I had to ask a local who pointed it out because it’s just like the poem says. It looks like an empty field, but it’s “field of Quakers in their unstoned graves,” Quakers didn’t believe in tombstones. Lowell later sort-of dismissed these poems—the ones in Lord Weary’s Castle, I mean—calling them “armoured,” and compared to “Skunk Hour,” for example, they are rhetorical, but I admired that poem then and do now.  It’s magnificent, complex rhymes and all. George was surprised at my enthusiasm for the poem. A little impressed, I suppose, because I was a kid, really, and into this thorny work—with its allusions to Moby Dick plus the very Catholic section about Our Lady of Walsingham—and which is, incidentally, a sequence poem, speaking of. Anyway, George told me he liked the poem, too, and nodded in that sage way of his. I was incredibly flattered that he’d taken the time to talk with me and to approve. That conversation made me realize that he wasn’t forbidding or unapproachable at all, which you might have thought from the way he looked and his reputation as a poet. He was like a fifth columnist is how I began to think of him. His earlier poems were somewhat contradictory, crafted in tight quatrains mostly, hard-rhymed, a style completely out of fashion then, the currency of the time being “free” verse, yet his content was very 60s in a way, inasmuch as it pointedly questioned the bourgeois way of life. His later poems became freer in the handling, the form, though he once said that he had to “unlearn” the idea of a poem finding its own form. There are many paths up the mountain.

He was a great soul and an incredible poet. It was unthinkable back then to have a reading in Ottawa and George not be a part of it, which is why we went out of our way to make sure that he was.

Q: You mention that readings were a rarity at the time in Ottawa, but for what Hawkins was curating at Le Hibou, but I’m curious about what was happening in town as far as small poetry publishing, whether journals or books. In 1972 there was Commoners’ Press, obviously, as well as Golden Dog Press and Northern Journey. What were the local poets paying attention to? How were Ottawa poets getting their work out?

A: Sorry can’t be of much real help here either. Northern Journey I read, and of course Roy MacSkimming ran New Press and published Bill’s The Gift of Space, but the history of poetry publishing and performance in Ottawa I really know little about beyond what I told you regarding Bob, though that part is important. My life at the time was centred around my studies at Carleton and being a new father while being very young. I didn’t have a book in the works at the time, so I wasn’t really thinking about publishing. If I were you, I’d ask Roy about this. He’d likely know.

Q: You’ve said you left town before the book appeared in print, returning later to see a finished product. Do you remember any response to the collection, either from contributors or the public?

A: Tough question. Long time ago. Bob approved highly and congratulated me when we saw each other during my brief return to Ottawa from BC. So did my brother, Bruce. There was a review somewhere that lauded the book.

Although Northern Comfort does, as Cameron Anstee notes in his piece on it on your blog, capture the spirit of the event, I think it’s worth insisting on how exuberant that evening was. It felt magnetic, important, and it felt homegrown in the best way, too, like the difference between a home-grown tomato and a store-bought one. It felt authentic to the spirit of the place, not an import, not from somewhere else. It was ours. It showed us who we were, that we mattered to ourselves and, in a sense, generally. When you study poetry at university or at any school, it’s easy to be intimidated or to think that only the great ones count: Donne or Keats or Dickinson or Williams, etc. Not that they don’t. Of course they do. You have to learn from somewhere, so learn from the best.

But especially, I think, speaking as a Canadian, and from the perspective of more than forty years, it could be easy to be intimidated by the British and the Americans if English was your first language and you wanted to write verse (the question of Québec is different). TISH was trailblazing on the West Coast with Bowering and Davey and Bob Hogg. And there was Daphne Marlett: Steveston is a masterpiece, if you ask me. Newlove came riding out of Saskatchewan. In the East, Ray Souster in Toronto and, say, Irving Layton in Montreal, were important as guides. So was Leonard Cohen, by the way, in terms of spirit, whatever one may think now of his limitations as a poet (his songs are a different matter, there he is a master). He did write some first-rate single poems, “I Have Not Lingered in European Monasteries,” or “You Have the Lovers,” for example, and he was breaking through in his poetry, as well as his music, to a large audience. That was important as a possibility. And of course there are the two superior novels. They weren’t Frederick Philip Grove. They were from an altogether different register, which Desmond Pacey saw and immediately lauded, calling Beautiful Losers the best Canadian novel written to that point.

Now poetry is a river in Canada, and it’s the Fraser or the St. Lawrence, not Etobicoke Creek. When it comes to the genre, we take a back seat to no other culture in the English-speaking world, which is pretty remarkable considering how small a country we are, smaller in population than California.

Sometimes you hear that being sandwiched between England and America works against us but I think this has worked in our favour in terms of poetry and prose in English. We’re neither of them, but we’ve drawn from them, which, mixed with our own poetic spirit—and I’m pretty much talking from W.W. E. Ross and Ray Knister on—has made something quite unique. And let’s get a word in here edgewise for the national and provincial arts councils for doing so much to foster the admirable state of affairs here in the arts. But, to continue the metaphor, poetry in Canada was starting to overrun its banks back then. Northern Comfort demonstrated, I think—I hope—that Ottawa, that government town which could be easy to dismiss, was a part of the gathering flood, that the town had poets who were active, who were writing, and who were just as relevant as the stuff we read in the anthologies. We were waving our shirts above our heads. We were alive.

Northern Comfort

Published by Commoners’ Press, 1973

Subtitled “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 29^th, 1972.”

Transcribed and Edited by Monk Besserer

Cover by Alyx Jones

Design and Layout by Cam Christie and Monk Besserer

Typeset and Printed in an edition of 500 copies at Commoners’ Press, 425 Rideau St., 2B, Ottawa.

INTRODUCTION

            The text of this book is a slightly edited transcription of a reading that began at approximately 8:30 p.m. on June 29^th, 1972 in the backyard of the Victoria Hotel. The reading was arranged by Peter Geldart, Alyx Jones, and Bill Stevenson, the three principle co-ordinators of Market Projections, a now-defunct OFY sponsored group of artists who got together to try and bring some life into Ottawa’s artistic scene. Most of their work was of the “happening” variety and is now long gone but this book, if nothing else, stands as witness to their inspired collective energy. Without them none of it would have happened.

            I have tried to offer in the text a layout that will facilitate a re-creation of the experience through reading. There is a long section by Alyx Jones that has been omitted for quantitative reasons but with that sole exception whatever editing I have done was only to this end. There are countless “um”s and “ah”s omitted (I am always astonished at how inarticulate a poet can be), though some may think there are still too many. Occasionally I have substituted a word that was obviously intended though whoever spoke actually said something else (slips-of-the-tongue). Whenever a poet read two or three poems straight through without comment I have separated them with a row of asterisks to indicate as much – in effect, a time break. There is, also, a small amount of material missing – the machine was shut off for the telephone calls from George Johnston and Ronnie Judge, and I’m still piqued over those omissions for there seems to have been no reason to do so. The opening remarks of Alyx Jones and George Johnston, for example, are perfectly audible. There are also lacunae as a result of the necessity to change tapes. Even twentieth century technology has its limits.

            Someone has said that the real function of Northern Comfort should be as textbook for Ottawa schools. It’s not likely that the OBE will ever make NC required reading or that it will ever find its way onto English 100 courses anywhere, but for those whom school is out something may be learned.

            Neil Whiteman                        November 1973

Dramatis Personae (In order of appearance.)

William Hawkins

Alyx Jones

Robert Hogg

Marius Kociejowski

Christopher Levenson

Neil Whiteman

Jack Nathanson

George Johnston

Ronnie Judge

Unknown Reader

David Andrews

The 47 Argyle Street Band

Christophe James

Bill Stevenson

[note: incredible thanks to Cameron Anstee who provided book scans]