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.

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]