Come celebrate 35 years of fine poetry with CV2’s Coast to Coast reading tour.

Toronto Readings by Jim Nason/Kate Cayley/Maureen Hynes/Steve McOrmond

Monday, August 23 / 8:00pm at Clinton’s, 693 Bloor Street

David Helwig, Sheree Fitch, Carolyn Smart at Victoria-by-the-Sea at the Victoria Literary Festival, July 16 to 18

Sunday morning Carolyn Smart decided to climb the great big tree and read to the crowd below.

Carolyn Smart, Hugh Macdonald, John Smith, Brent MacLaine

Antony Di Nardo appeared at the inaugural Knowlton Wordfest and read from his new book Alien, Correspondent in Knowlton, Quebec. Here are some pictures:

Antony will be launching his book in Toronto at Ben McNally Books at 366 Bay Street on Thursday, September 16; he will read at the Art Bar poetry series at Clinton’s on Tuesday, November 16; and the Pivot reading series on Wednesday, December 1st – all in Toronto.

Antony will travel to Calgary to read at the Flywheel reading series on Thursday, October 7 at Pages Books on Kensington; to Victoria for the Planet Earth reading series on Friday, October 8; and to Vancouver on Tuesday, October 13 for the Cross Border Pollination reading series at the Vancouver Public Library where he will read with Carolyn Smart.

Carolyn Smart, Lorri Neilsen Glenn  and Antony Di Nardo were all participating in literary festivals across the country this past weekend.

Carolyn was at the inaugural Victoria Literary Festival at Victoria-by-the-Sea in Prince Edward Island.  www.victorialiteraryfestival.com

Lorri was at the Festival of Words in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.  http://www.festivalofwords.com/

And Antony was at the inaugural Knowlton Wordfest in Knowlton, Quebec.  http://knowltonwordfest.blogspot.com/2010/06/summer-schedule-for-wordfest.html

Here’s a picture of Carolyn Smart reading “Rickety Rackety” from her book Hooked. The caption from the Victoria Literary Festival reads, “Oh yes, and she was seated most comfortably in Victoria’s great big tree!”

Poets laureate Agnes Walsh from St. John’s, Newfoundland, Brad Cran from Vancouver, Jill Battson from Cobourg, Ontario and Roland Pemberton from Edmonton are hosted by Shauntay Grant, poet laureate of Halifax this weekend in Halifax.

The Coast’s Sean Flinn writes about Agnes Walsh, “Her writing tends to flutter down, feather-light, but often land with an unexpected weight, a thud that wakes the listener up. (If one even got a sense of this from Thursday night, it’s worth checking out Walsh’s books, especially 2007’s Going Around with Bachelors.)”

For the full article, see http://www.thecoast.ca/SceneAndHeard/archives/2010/07/16/jazz-fest-poetry-gets-sweaty

To learn more about Going Around with Bachelors by Agnes Walsh, see http://www.brickbooks.ca/?page_id=3&bookid=47

Lorri Neilsen Glenn discusses how poetry can help us build a culture of peace and speaks about her participation in the Peace Celebration Dinner at Mount Saint Vincent University at 7 p.m. tonight – other performers are The Elastic Millennium Choir and Dream for Real.

The Peace Conference is being held from July 7 to 10 at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax.  “Being the Change:  Building a Culture of Peace” is its theme.

You can hear the interview with Lorri and a reading of her poem “Wild” from Lost Gospels, a new poetry collection published by Brick Books in February 2010 here  http://www.cbc.ca/informationmorningns/2010/07/poetry-for-peace.html

I would like to begin my talk this evening with a quote from John Barton, taken from rob mclennan’s very useful 12 or 20 questions, online.

“For me the best poems evince a way of being that it is their place to record and preserve.”

John Barton was born in Edmonton in 1957, raised in Calgary, and educated at the Universities of Alberta, Calgary, Quebec, and Victoria, where he studied with Robin Skelton.

Here’s what the poet and editor Harold Rhenisch says about John in those early days:

“John used to live in this funky Mediterranean apartment off of View Street. It’s now a car lot.  He always was a love poet. Then Sono Nis brought out his first book, with the worst book cover in the history of publishing.

After that, he found his true gift as a deconstructivist and reconstructivist of the body. Enough of exploring that territory as a romantic landscape. That cover, I think, would have cured anyone of that.
Still a love poet, though.

I remember workshops in which Robin Skelton gave John some very specific advice about depictions and embodiments of love in poetry, which sounded like part of an ongoing private conversation only conducted between the two of them. The public and the private, in conversation with each other.

That’s Robin, for sure.

And John.

John was always great at surrounding himself with people and building small communities of interest and support.

I remember workshops in his Santorinian Villa on View, with a coffee table, and mushroom and broccolli chunks, with ranch dip.

A totally new cuisine for one boy from the mountains. Not to mention the workshops. Whoa.

Sitting there inside the poem John made of Victoria. Or inside one intersection of its many lines.

John lived his poetry. Looking back on it, I’d say he likely had many rich and intimate private lives that intersected in moments of poetry, which he shared.

He kept pestering me to write reviews, starting with Gustafson. He knew something about me I didn’t know.

Took me years to catch up to his insight.

The world is his poem.

As an eminently literary act”

And the poet Patricia Young remembers John, too, from those days. She says:

“I didn’t know John well back then, it’s all a blur actually, life in general as well as the poetry workshop we shared though I do remember Robin Skelton assigning certain things to individuals, and one week he asked (told?) John to write a poem without any adjectives and adverbs (was John’s poetry rich in adjectives and adverbs? I wasn’t aware of it but perhaps Robin was), and the following week John brought to class a poem that quite blew me away. I can’t remember a single word of the poem but when I read it, I realized John was a ”real” poet. As for the rest of us we were still cruising, playing, trying to be “real” poets. Somehow, Robin had forced John to pare his language down to the essentials, and there it was, a genuine poem! Thrilling. John may not remember this or remember it differently. It was 30 years ago so I’m willing to believe anything is true or isn’t true, did or did not happen.”

And Neile Graham, a Canadian poet based in Seattle adds these thoughts:

“I have memories of being in workshops with him all those years ago and seeing his promise even then–Emily Carr poems in particular knocked me out. It was clear from the start (I met John in a third-year poetry workshop with Robin Skelton) that John would have an ongoing career. Our fourth-year workshop together in 1979-1980 especially was a watershed of amazing writers, among whom John shone. Robin Skelton recognized his talent right away and encouraged John’s thought, wit and style, and published A Poor Photographer very early in John’s career. We’ve been ongoing friends, sharing both the literary and personal details of our lives ever since. John has been a generous literary advisor and supporter of my work and an inspiration as well. We’ve taken wonderful short trips together (along with my husband, American poet James Gurley) for mini writing retreats on the coast where we write and share our work. Some of the most pleasant memories of my life are of being with Jim and John at La Push and Rialto Beach talking about poems. Perhaps the most frenetic are of visiting him in New York City, where he attended Columbia’s MFA program for a term (he dropped out to take a Canada Council grant to complete his Emily Carr book). We had a crazy time exploring the city’s bookstores and museums. I have a wonderful iconic photograph of John in a bellboy’s hat at the party at my parents’ house after Jim’s and my wedding. He’s standing on the balcony having just sent a celebratory champagne cork out in the darkness looking stylish, smart, fond, and amusing, all of which have been apparent throughout his writing career. His work is deeply crafted, intelligent, humane, and also quietly witty.”

John lived for many years in Ottawa, where he worked as an editor for Vernissage – the Magazine of the National Gallery of Canada, first as production manager and then as Editor in Chief. At the same time, he was assistant editor and then co-editor of Arc – Canada’s National Poetry Magazine. He currently lives in Victoria, where he edits what many consider one of the finest literary magazines in Canada, the Malahat Review.

Between 1981 and 2009, John has published nine collections of poetry, and this brings us to our true subject this evening, his most recent collection, Hymn.

Let us begin by judging this book by its cover. The mixed media “Three Boys” is by Attila Richard Lukacs, the artist also chosen for the cover art of Seminal – The Anthology of Canada’s Gay Male Poets, co-edited by John and Billeh Nickerson in 2007. Lukacs is widely known for his very strong representations of male sexuality, yet this picture has a tenderness and perhaps a sense of shared grief that gently draws the reader in. So let us enter.

Barry Dempster had this to say about editing the manuscript of Hymn with John:

“The editing process concentrated on small things in what ultimately was a very big picture.   Both John and I were willing to suffer the details for the good of the overall book.   John was a pleasure to work with, tackling each and every comment, often coming up with new ideas rather than simply moving text around.   I know the book was important to John not just as evidence of his ongoing maturity as a writer, but for both the personal and political ramifications of writing so honestly and richly from a gay male perspective.   If I remember correctly, the ordering remained pretty much the way John had planned it, although we did remove a few poems that weren’t working at the same caliber as the others.”

When asked in the 12 or 20 questions blog, “How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?” John answered: “It is technically more adventurous than anything I have written so far.”

The book is divided into five distinct sections, and I will approach each section and each poem in turn.

Part I, Aide-Memoire, is one poem which requires us to turn the book sideways, an interesting twist and play with its subject-matter, I think: a “catalogue of sexual encounters” as the review in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix describes it. How explicit and unswerving to start a poetry collection in this way! It’s certainly an attention grabber.

Part II, Ideograms, is made up of 21 lyric poems. An ideogram, according to the OED, is “a character symbolizing the idea of a thing without indicating the sequence of sounds in its name,” for example a numeral, or a Chinese character. There is a repetition of certain images here such as fingers, keys, the hands that manipulate the flying of kites, the playing of a piano  – and the introduction of the speaker’s father, a major figure in several of the poems, to whose memory the collection is dedicated.

“Ideogram, in the Half Light” introduces the notion of ‘the courage to love’ as well as the physical details of fingers to lips, attempts at communication through sleep, and silence.

“Free Associations”– dedicated to the great language poet Erîn Moure, who — like John – was raised in the West — continues the notion of a stuttering conversation, the way words and minds connect and then disconnect, raises the subject of self/editing, and personal history through geographical links – ‘this unnecessary / highway, its denuded story I am // destined to wear / all my life.”

“Geology of the Body” continues the personal history, the connection to geography, and in 12 or 20 John says: “I suspect that anyone who knows my poetry would feel that I evince a strong connection to geography, but I would prefer to say that I am shaped by geographies. I believe landscape imprints itself upon us from an early age—Highway 1A west from Calgary is my true primordial landscape—”

“Persona” sets the speaker in motion, clearly present as the driver here, moving through the landscape of his life. He identifies his companion at the start of the poem as “my friend/ my stranger” but by the end, the stranger becomes “a fellow //ventriloquist, illusive / member of the choir, you //hitched this  / ride with me”

Here I would like to pause and take note of John’s marvelous use of line breaks throughout this collection, as I will remark throughout this talk, and as evinced here in the weight and double entendre it brings to specific phrases.

“Shopping at Capers” brings the journey to the west coast, gloriously abundant and joyful:  “distillate lakes / of the heart laid bare, yes // and yes,” — the second half of this poem is distinctly sexual in tone and yet still a geographical exploration.

The climactic follow-up to that, “Hallelujah”, takes this fruit and travel experience to its apex.

“Inwards” is a slowing down, a still life, bringing into focus these lines:

“not because love incinerates the brain / with a radiance of flowers burning. No it opens inwards  / the path ahead sentinel as lit wisdom seen from far off.”

“Pathetic Fallacy” is filled with some of the finest examples of word play in the book, set in a poem where the garden itself is a sexual playground of metaphor. I note lines like “pathetic fallacy a trope for our phallocentrism” or “feyly manicured blooms in contrast to my hardy // weediness, desire’s other phylum”. The poem settles again into the question of the usefulness of language, and the notion of letting words do what they will, as in the final line, italicized, “leaving the language to be”.

“Le Tombeau de Sylvia Plath” is one of my favourite poems in the collection, and I would like to read it aloud now.

_________________________________________________________

LE TOMBEAU DE SYLVIA PLATH

How long have we stood here gazing blankly into the muddy yellow
Yorkshire clay where against your wishes you have lain, a citizen

of your own century even in death, with nothing much left beyond
a loosening paradigm of bones to claim you with, fugitive wisps
of blonde hair or an effaced piece of heirloom jewelry a cousin might
recollect, a watch stopped not long after no one could hear it stop.

There are strangers who come here who cannot shake the apparition
of you faintly smiling, perfection betrayed if satisfied, a smile they try on

in the mirror before leaving for the graveyard with narcissus, perhaps tulips
or poppies—your studied  moods symbolized—to stand and conjecture
over that other grave, the words, tease your last breaths from them only
as they can be surmised, head poised in the oven on an ironed napkin

at 23 Fitzroy Road, Yeats’ subdivided house the perfect dark address
you had hoped to fortify with wine and laughter to give you strength

poetry a gas jet you woke up to one morning in February, as always
but finally could not light, lungs filling with an inspiration so terrible
you would not write it out, the only accolade you could welcome
was its odorless embrace hello, goodbye. How we keep reviving

the body of your work to enjoy an unstable place in our book-lined lives
keep taking it down from the shelf, trained by our literate scruples only.

You have fallen a long way, you were right, and not into the rocky earth
of your beloved Devon among the anchoring roots of a familiar yew tree
as you had hoped, to be sheltered from a weather you need no longer feel.
Instead you lie far from home, far from Massachusetts and the woman

you have become, no less hallowed than stone men exhumed from bogs
in Europe, their agonies tested, the facts suggested by the unspeakable

mouths and strangely passionate eyes hollowed by silt. Be glad of your final
loss of consciousness, a nightmare without ears the living are loathe to ride.
I wait by your grave in the rain, firmly in the footsteps of all the others who want
to commune with the dead for no reason, yellow clay encumbering my shoes.

I have even brought you roses, the adulterous buds affecting to be full-blown.
I wanted to believe in tenderness, but our age is not tender; there is no tender age.

_________________________________________________________

I am particularly moved by the final lines which had the affect of raising the hair on my arms when I first read them. This always has seemed to me to be the mark of highest art.  I have brought with me today several pictures of the gravestone in Heptonstall Churchyard in Yorkshire. These pictures were sent to me coincidentally two weeks ago by a former student who lives in London.

“Installation in Homage to Gathie Falk” is a marvelous combination of a homage and a didactic poem – here we manage to literally walk in the shoes of the oppressed, as well as in this case those on strike at the National Gallery. Gathie Falk (whose installation pieces might well have been on display inside the gallery at the time) is a visual and performance artist known for making of the banal something extraordinary, and John has echoed that skill in this poem.

“Foul Bay at 2 a.m.” again does what Gathie Falk might: it makes the commonplace beautiful in a snapshot of sight and sound, a visual image capturing work and beauty.

“Anxiety” seems to incorporate confessional elements both transformed and not, (I especially noted the lines “Every window / THAT window” here) – this double reality becomes a state which feeds anxiety, accentuated by the coming of winter. The possibility of war enters the collection for the first time in this poem – War is a theme and a subject explored in Hymn in various and affecting ways.

In the poem “Frieze” the form is markedly shattered and I wondered if this was a consequence of conflict. Here the body “loses / grasp of its vocabulary” – language fails.

“Aquarium” suggests the human state of loneliness and distance from the natural world, the earth itself (see lines such as ‘in the high rises where we sleep’), so far removed from the watery world of our beginnings and the communal nature of our longings.

“Saumon Fumée” made me laugh aloud in recognition of my habit to correct misspellings and poor punctuation on public signage. How many of us here are born editors, I wonder? Here the poet reflects those moments, and turns the ’smocked salmon’ into something far more angular and even fearful. Again, the image of wounded lovers appears.

“On Evia” is an exploration of a landscape very different than the other poems in this section. Evia is the second largest Greek island after Crete, separated from the mainland by a narrow channel, and the site of several historical battles throughout history.  The speaker’s distance and perhaps isolation moves into different areas with this geographic shift.

“This Land is Our Land” humorously moves back to the ‘known’ landscape, home and desire. Feeding the pleasure of the flesh on several levels, the speaker here appears to feel comfortable in their skin.

“Runoff” is the final poem in this Ideograms section. It returns us to the Alberta landscape of the speaker’s childhood and picks up several images from earlier poems, ending with a mixture of language, indigenous plantings and finally a sense of safety in which “we land downstream from the syllabic overflow”.

The third section of Hymn is entitled Narrations, and consists of five prose poems written without the use of periods, broken by commas and dashes.

The first poem, “In the House of the Present”, is to my view a dream sequence, and seems to refer to a childhood friendship, family memories, the past, things lost and let go, yet neither a sense of grief nor anxiety exist here.

The second poem, “Strata” is a particularly complex, fascinating poem, both in its stratified form and content. Simplistically described, the speaker is watching the film “Journey to the Center of the Earth”, made in 1959 and starring James Mason and, rather absurdly, Pat Boone in a supporting role.  While watching the film, the speaker is eating fresh peaches. His father is revealed to be suffering from a war wound  – war enters the collection here very directly, overshadowing much of the poem.

In the second section, fruit and love are paralleled, and the marvelous line “Too many of us afraid to crack open our closed hearts” appears – very much a theme in the book to my view.

“The man with the blank face is the man I love” signals the hidden secrets between generations, between loved ones — after all, the result of cracking open the heart is often heartbreak.

“Sombrio Beach”, the third poem in this section, made me ask this question: what is the grief here directed at? Looking back through these three poems it would appear to reflect the dying of the older generation, and perhaps also of a lover: on p. 67, I noted the lines “the blank man I still love would far too soon cull and halve his life”.

“The Troubles” takes us to Ireland, and to the Falls Road where the troubles hit hard. It also reveals the speaker’s family history, the immigration to Upper Canada, the house on Amherst Island near Kingston, and finally the haven of the Republic of Ireland mixed with the terror/ism of love.

The fifth and final prose poem in this section is entitled “Asymmetries.” It is set in Barcelona, and although the poem masquerades as a simple travel narrative it becomes a poem about indifference and deformity, uncaring, male beauty, the sense of history held in the body through time and travel which is perhaps the over-arching theme of the whole section.

Part V of the collection is entitled “Hymns” and the poems here are in two-line stanzas throughout.

“Excerpt from a Travel Journal” contains the lines that sum the section up for me:

‘So here we are, men who travel / in disguises we trade amongst ourselves, comedians in the same desire’.  Desire is central to this section which contains by far the most erotic poems of this collection.

“Eros” (with apologies to John Le Carré) presents the alter-ego, the hidden self, the erotic side of the speaker’s nature, hidden, only glimpsed, and coming in from the cold.

“Him” is the only poem from this collection chosen for the important anthology Seminal. Although based on a painting it would appear to me to depict the death of the speaker’s father, without sentimentality, in the clear and detailed light of day.

“10 lines for X” is the only poem in this collection that plays so broadly with language and form, using numbers in a very light-hearted manner. If only texting were this clever.

“Way Finding” is set in a house under renovation with the background noise from CNN news. The poem itself has the result of leaving the reader discomfited – ill at ease and restless, the state of the speaker’s world made real and tangible.

In sharp contrast to the intimacy and quiet of the previous poem, “Fucking the Minotaur” takes us into the glare of the bathhouse, a reality described in details reminiscent of a labyrinthine hunger journey, and brings to mind a friend telling me once that taking leave of the bathhouse he often felt more lonely than when he had entered.

“Man of your Dreams” subverts the fantasy, takes an imaginative leap into possibility, both satisfying and not – again, the sense of failure, of a character unrevealed, a life unlived is present in lines such as “a man without qualities” which seems to describe the speaker here rather than one who is observed.

“Our Embrace – Random Etudes, 1 through 4″ begins with a quote from the iconic Quentin Crisp: “sex is the last refuge of the miserable”, which could in large part be applied to this section as a whole.

Part 1, Pastorale, describes “a ravine mulched with waste and tangled fallen / branches falling towards an unseen river”, not one’s average pastoral setting for an attempted kiss, and the one being kissed states “if I were to believe in love”; in other words, the romance not yet begun is doomed.

Part 2, Divertissement, presents sex without affection, sentiment or caring, a pure diversion, a form of refuge.

Part 3, Pastiche, turns the oft-quoted Atwood poem into not so different areas of disturbing realities, nothing to do with cracking open the heart.

Part 4, Caprice, contains the missing kiss of earlier sections, yet causes the reader to see stars because of it, with the gorgeous wordplay of gilt / stale/mated by guile and artifice.

In the next poem, “Warhol”, gorgeous wordplay continues in this multi-layered semi-narrative. Lines like “I project myself across the ready-made screen of your fame, ejaculator // in home slow-mo, a low-fidelity money shot so orchidaceous you organza — a deadly improvisation you exteriorize stroke-free over my cropped-out face.” Who else writes about sex like this? Fantastic stuff!

Following this rococo over-the-top poem, the choice of “Portal” to follow is a marked leap. There is such openness and warmth here, such a clear-eyed view of humanity. It feels somehow deeply personal and invested with history and memory. I will read it now.

_______________________________________________________

PORTAL

Drop the bombs, I say, drop the bombs, stand inside the portal
with your mother and hold your breath, your left hand in hers

while the house begins to shake, Ghats of the Indian Air Force
cutting low across the border, an escort to the French-built

Mystères about to strafe the airfield outside Multan, ancient city
of your distant childhood in Pakistan, but you are too young

to know the Sabres stationed nearby take flight too late to block
the raid, holding your mother=s hand while dishes in the cabinets

clatter, the door jamb fixed above your head square and tense
as your shoulders, my hands smoothing, loosening the restrained

muscles of your back as you start to talk, drop the bombs, I say
drop the bombs, your heart opening, ten years in Canada, amazed

no one before me had ever asked, the first of your wars decades past
eyes askance, right hand grabbing mine in vestigial panic, no answer

when you call Karachi, Ramadan over, your parents at the mosque
the moon’s crescent scything a quick, bright swath through the stars

as it arcs inexorably towards us across the unseeming turbulence
of the Earth, meteors raining down timeless windfall, an ice storm

we watch approach from the east, standing on your balcony, the last
Boeing 767 to lift away from the airport banking overhead, the Arctic

air close about us while, breathless, you long to take flight, not from me
or the knowledge of who you are, but from the peaceable coldness

of the north—no one way to pilot this shifting jet stream even your mother
might, fast or feast, hope is love—drop the bombs, I say, drop the bombs

hold my hand or let it go, neither of us either stateless or desperados
these words a portal without imprimatur to grant you safe passage.

_______________________________________________________

The title of “A Boys’ Own, with Queen” would lead one to imagine the poem’s content as very different than what’s here: perhaps touched by rock and roll and early death, but instead, the Queen is the long-lived Victoria, and the poem is set in a converted one room schoolhouse. Surprise, surprise.

“Sandy Hill Gothic” is another poem about settling down, calming, becoming a householder, perhaps housebound, the poet and the healer, in harmony. It is a calmer poem than most others in this section, centered in domesticity and peace.

“Hymn”, the title poem of the collection (though it could also be seen as “Him”) projects a story of a break-up that somehow becomes celebratory by the close of the poem. It is an uplifting hymn of praise to possibility.

In “Amnesia” we return to Greece, and specifically to a barber’s chair in Athens where a barber from Delphi plies his trade. The speaker observes a boy who reminds the speaker of his own youth, “the boy not yet shattered / by love”. The realities of aging projected at the end of this poem by the loss of hair in the barber’s chair is in a sense both a reminiscence and a case of amnesia in combination, the way memory and time make a tumble of our emotions as the world and life fly by.

“Days of 2004, Days of Cavafy” allows us to again turn the book sideways, as we did at the start. Honouring and recalling two famous gay writers (Forster more closeted than Cavafy, though they shared a friendship, deep admiration and long correspondence – Forster’s memoir of Cavafy is contained in his 1922 travel journal, “Alexandria – a History and Guide”).  Cavafy’s sensual poetry, much like some of the poems in this collection, are filled with lyricism and emotion, and inspired by recollection and remembrance.

The poem is voiced by a man no longer young, in a society not entirely welcoming of sexual freedoms, in a city not as cosmopolitan as one might wish. It speaks again of loneliness, of a life apart, hesitations and wishes, with a clear-eyed view of reality, of where we are now, poor humans, reaching out to strangers for aid and comfort.

“The Afterlife” is, fittingly, the final poem of the section. It is perhaps a fantasy written after prolonged illness or pain, in which the speaker imagines his afterlife and those who read his obituary, those whose ‘tongue’ is foreign in the capital city of this land.

The fifth and final section of the book is made up of one poem, entitled “Polygonics.” The definition of a polygon is a plane figure with many sides and angles, a geometric description, perhaps, of a human. This poem again displays John’s marked use of line breaks, for instance “guessing afterwards at wrecks we are // sure must lie deeper still”. But beyond the word play and light humour there is a final sense of hope and possibility present in this poem, the “you & I” incorporating all the past, and all the “possible trajectories of the limitless”.

It is an uplifting ending, set in a different unnamed town, on the breakwater, where the speaker asks a companion to overcome their fear and “walk with me.”

Here is a letter I received from poet and civil servant Blaine Marchand in which he speaks of John, his long-time close friend.

“The one thing that struck me about John when I first met him in 1987 – at an Ottawa Poetry Group meeting organized by Christopher Levenson, was his determination which was somewhat at variance with his thin and waif like appearance. Back then, he was fresh out of library school at the UofWO. But he was clear that this new job in Ottawa was simply to pay off his student loan. His real dream, at some point in the near future he stressed over and over again, was to be a full-time writer. From that first day in Ottawa he worked toward his dream. He began to lay the groundwork as a poet – working on the editorial board of Arc Poetry Magazine and eventually becoming its editor. He had such insight in how to improve this little literary magazine so it would become the professional national magazine it is today. He found inventive ways to make it more appealing. He added work by visual artists. He devoted issues to themes. He set up a poetry contest.  Sometimes he chose to do things that were provocative, such as an issue called “We All Begin in Little Magazines.” But with each new step, the circulation of the magazine grew.

He also pursued this dream by changing his professional career. He left working in the library of the National Aviation Museum to work on the periodicals at the National Gallery of Canada so he could continue to gain first-hand deeper insight and fuller experience in the full range of production values of government publications – from their concept, through their layout, to their final printing. Here too, he was inventive.

It was interesting to watch his creative and artistic vision for magazines take shape both professionally and creatively. It was as if he was a train heading toward his longed-for destination.

Leaving a well-paid (or reasonably paid) government job with its benefits and its pension is a daring move. It is not for the faint of heart. But then John’s heart was never faint. He pulled up stakes, moving to the West Coast (something else he dreamed of since he had graduated from the University of Victoria’s Creative Writing Program) and became the editor of The Malahat, the creation of one of his mentor’s – Robin Skelton.

Once when John and I were attending the League of Canadian Poets annual general meeting in Victoria, we went to visit his father and stepmother. His father pleaded with John that he should finally go through the numerous boxes in the garage. These cartons stored decades of John’s things from his childhood and his university years. I helped John with this task. In one box, I came across a notebook he had written in 1967 when his family had gone across Canada to Montreal to visit Expo 67.

As I read through this childhood stories, I was amazed to see how many of the ideas and themes John continues to explore today, were found there in those pages – the struggle to understand what constitutes a family, a long list of food items consumed on the cross-country trek, and the struggle to find his place, to be loved.

Over the years, John has grown in maturity as a poet. With this has come a voice willing to speak out about his family. His poems struggle with questioning and with the acceptance of weaknesses and new insights into previously unnoticed strengths. These are poems about innate, flawed humanness that all families share. But as the poetic voice grew surer and he grew more daring in his poetic vision, he discovered family is not restricted just to parents and siblings. It reaches beyond them, drawing in those we love along the way, friends, strangers and mere acquaintances, who share something beyond blood, a sexual orientation, a distinctive commonality.

But as with our parents and siblings, this community is also human and exhibits its own neuroses and issues. One thing that has consistently struck me about John’s poems is that many of them are post-coital. After the initial rush of love, of lust, of sensual pleasure, the real difficulties begin and so the creative impulse – the struggle to articulate what is felt deep in our bodies, how it rarely matches what is in our hearts, and that in the end, we all must come to accept, that human love can be fleeting, can be intense but it is never as romantic as we are led to believe it is or that we want it to be.

John’s years in the Creative Writing Program were years in which John and his fellow students, many of them nationally known poets today, were formative ones for him. He always spoke with high esteem of the professors who taught him. Today, he is playing the same way, not only by nurturing beginning poets in The Malahat, but working as an editor on many poetry books (and, as he is with himself as a poet, he can be very demanding in that role) and by being writer-in-residence where he is helping writers to learn to hear their own voices and to write them out. I have no doubt that there is a good deal of cross-fertilization going on too. John has always been open to learning from new trends, new ideas and incorporating them into his own work, but making them distinctly his own.”

And the last words go to the poet Neile Graham, who goes on to says this about Hymn:

“I think Hymn is the crowning achievement of [John's] career so far and I confess I have been somewhat surprised that it has as yet received so little recognition. It’s powerful, mature work of a level rarely seen and I’m starting to think that people are intimidated by it. At least, that’s the only explanation I can think of that more people aren’t talking about it, thinking about it, and writing about it. John, his writing, and his long service to Canadian writing as readings coordinator and editor, deserve far more accolades than they have received thus far.”

I can only enthusiastically agree.

Carolyn Smart

Mayor David Miller launches new plaques program

On March 4th at City Hall, Heritage Toronto and the Toronto Legacy Project launched a new program of commemorative plaques. Each blue plaque will mark a site where a notable artist, scientist, or thinker lived or worked.

Joining Mayor David Miller were Grace Westcott and poet and author Dennis Lee of the Toronto Legacy Project, in addition to Heritage Toronto Board Chair Peter Ortved. The first six plaques recognized writers Milton Acorn, Margaret Avison, Morley Callaghan, Robertson Davies, Gwendolyn MacEwen and E.J. Pratt.

A separate ceremony in the afternoon at the University of Toronto’s Massey College presented the plaque honouring Robertson Davies, the former Master.

The program will continue steadily, with six to eight new plaques annually. The first plaques will be installed in the Spring.

For more information on the new plaques, http://www.heritagetoronto.org/news/story/2010/03/03/heritage-toronto-launches-legacy-plaque-project

Come out and meet Randall Maggs – Winner of the Kobzar Literary Award 2010, Winterset Award 2008, E.J. Pratt Poetry Prize 2009 and Globe 100 book for his book Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems.

Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems recounts the personal and public life of Terry Sawchuk, famous goalie of the NHL Original Six.

Upcoming readings

EDMONTON – TUESDAY, MARCH 23 – AUDREYS BOOKSTORE -  7:30 P.M.

YELLOWKNIFE – THURSDAY, MARCH 25 – 7 P.M. – YELLOWKNIFE LIBRARY

YELLOWKNIFE – SATURDAY, MARCH 27 – 1:30 P.M. – 2:30 P.M. – POETRY READING AT THE ICE CASTLE

WHITEHORSE – MONDAY, MARCH 29 – READING WITH LOCAL POET CLEA ROBERTS – “BRAVE NEW WORKS” – 7 P.M. – LOCATION BAKED CAFÉ.

WHITEHORSE – TUESDAY, MARCH 30 – 7 P.M. – CRAFT TALK AT WHITEHORSE PUBLIC LIBRARY.

VANCOUVER – THURSDAY, APRIL 1 – READING WITH ELIZABETH BACHINSKY AT UBC BOOKSTORE ON ROBSON SQUARE – 7 P.M.

LONDON – SATURDAY, APRIL 17 – WOLF AUDITORIUM, CENTRAL LIBRARY 2 P.M.

OAKVILLE – SUNDAY, APRIL 18 -OAKVILLE POETRY CAFÉ, 12 NOON

TORONTO – TUESDAY, APRIL 20 – UKRAINIAN NATIONAL FEDERATION COMMUNITY CENTRE, 145 EVANS AVE. 7:30 P.M.

WATERLOO – SATURDAY APRIL 24 – WORDSWORTH BOOKS, WATERLOO – 2 p.m.

For more, details see www.brickbooks.ca – author tours

CBC radio Corner Brook interviews Randall Maggs, the recipient of the $25,000 Kobzar Literary Award for 2010, for his acclaimed hockey saga Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems.  March 8, 2010

For the full podcast, see

http://castroller.com/podcasts/TheWestCoast/1507452-March%208/10Randall%20Maggs/Literary%20Award

CBC radio Gander interviews Randall Maggs – Leigh Anne Power is the host of the Central Morning Show – Randall’s interview is at the end of this 25 minute podcast – March 9, 2010

http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/pastpodcasts.html?23#ref23