Ian Ferrier, poet, at the Visual Arts Centre, 8 May 2012

 

These are photographs I took of Ian Ferrier reading
his work at the Visual Arts Centre in Westmount; 
in the background is the organizer of the reading
Ilona Martonfi

John McAuley, poet, some photos

 

John McAuley and Claudia Lapp, at Bleu Met Literary Festival, April 2018

John McAuley reading at Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University, 26 April 2018

Waiting to read at Rare Books and Special Collections, 26 April 2018
from left to right, Endre Farkas, Tom Konvyes, Claudia Lapp, Stephen Morrissey

John McAuley, sound check before reading at Rare Books and Special Collections, 26 April 2018

John McAuley and Tom Konyves, 26 April 2018

John McAuley reading at the Yellow Door, May 2013

Remembering John McAuley, 1947 - 2026

Note: This essay, "Remembering John McAuley, 1947 - 2026", was first published at Periodicities; thank you rob mclennan for publishing this. Here is the text below.

                      

                        Work for true poems true to you.

                        The rest are Styrofoam and glue.

                                    —John McAuley, "Four Tweets to a Young Poet"

 

 

John McAuley and I were the only members of the Vehicule Poets born in Montreal. John grew up on the West Island and lived most of his life in downtown Montreal, for many years in an apartment at 2151 Lincoln Avenue, just a few blocks from Concordia University where he had been a student and then a faculty member of the English Department from 1978-2018. One evening in the early 2000s my wife, Carolyn Zonailo, and I met John and his wife Ritva for dinner at the Alexis Nihon Plaza, a few blocks from where John and Ritva lived, it was the only time we met Ritva.

 

Before marrying Ritva, before the apartment on Lincoln, in the 1970s, John was married to Diana Brewer, Marie and Griffith Brewer's daughter. John and Diana (or "Lulu") lived at 1206 Seymour Avenue in the Shaughnessy Village, just south of Ste. Catherine Street West; it is a mostly residential downtown neighbourhood and they lived in a Victorian grey stone building (with lots of old books and needing some work) which I believe was the Brewer's family home going back several generations; it is a ten minute walk to Concordia University.

 

Artie Gold loved John's poetry, no Trump-like nickname for John that Artie had for one or two other members of the Vehicule Poets. There is John's poem, "Nine Lives for Artie Gold", written just after Artie died in 2007, and published in John's last book, All I can Say for Sure (2013). Ken Norris reminds me that "Artie once said that John might wind up being the best of all of us", of all of the Vehicule Poets. John writes of Artie,

 

                                    Those who know his books

                                    will delight at absurdities

                                    shadowed by the casual order of things.

All I can Say For Sure might be the best book John published but it received no prizes, few reviews, and little praise; however, here is what Bert Almon, a reviewer for the Montreal Review of Books (spring 2014), wrote about John's book:

 

            John McAuley, one of the Vehicule Poets who were so influential in Montreal circa            1975–80, published four books from 1977–79. His new collection, All I Can Say for             Sure, is so good that the long silence must be regretted.

 

A reviewer for the online Montreal Rampage, wrote the following:

 

            While McAuley’s writing is poetry by form, it seems like musical prose when read aloud. It is difficult to say why a piece of writing works. To use a cliché, but one entirely appropriate, you know good writing when you see it. Or, as McAuley states in “Poetry Reading”, “the gut always knows first”—but take it in a happier sense this time. Here, the writing just works. It comes off the page: it is the words in an order and a flow only a long time poet would be able to write. I could “hear” many of the works in my mind.

 

John and Artie had been in George Bowering's creative writing class together at Sir George Williams University (present-day Concordia University) in the early 1970s. Sometimes I hear Artie's voice in John's work, it isn't just a similarity to Artie's work, John had an equivalent ability to surprise the reader with insightful metaphors; what they shared, and GB acknowledged, is the rare gift for writing real poems. John writes, "The elderly learn the despair of outlasting everything in their closets", "Ancestral dreams in the one dark mole/ on your neck", and "Tranquil poetry arrives/ like unexpected snowflakes/ on your brother-in-law's roof next door."

 

John is similar in some ways to Leo Kennedy, one of the Montreal Group of poets who brought Modernism to Canadian poetry in the 1920s and 1930s; Kennedy came from an immigrant Irish family and he felt he was always an outsider. John may have identified with Kennedy but, unlike Kennedy, John never stopped being involved with poetry, and unlike Leo Kennedy John lived up to his early promise as a poet. In "To Leo Kennedy 1983" John writes,

 

                                    Half a century ago and one book published.

                                    . . . . .

                                    Tragic success in finding your music

                                    too easy too early,

                                    faultless memory for the cost of each line.

 

Leo Kennedy published one book of poems and while he was perhaps the most original of the Montreal Group of poets, or perhaps the most idiosyncratic, he was not the best of the Montreal Group. I like Kennedy's book, The Shrouding (1933), but it isn't a book I have returned to after my initial enthusiasm for it; it isn't a book that I have reread as I have with the other Montreal Group poets. John has a long gap in publishing, from around 1980 to 2013; but Claudia Lapp also published few books; I didn't publish any books from 1998 to 2009, an eleven year period. In 2013 I offered to publish a chapbook for John, with Coracle Press, but Ritva vetoed it, she said John didn`t have the work needed for a chapbook; John seemed to be always busy correcting student papers, preparing classes, but not writing new poem.

 

John and I, and Bob Galvin, organized the 1976-77 poetry series at Vehicule Art Gallery.  Several years before this, in 1973, I had organized a reading at Vehicule Art Gallery with Guy Birchard, and with Artie Gold's suggestions for readers; it was Guy who introduced me to Artie in early 1973 and I often visited Artie's Lorne Crescent flat. A few years later, organizing poetry readings at Vehicule Art, I brought in bpNichol and later The Four Horsemen, they read at the college where I was teaching, and then read at Vehicule Art; I had been corresponding with Clayton Eshleman and brought him in to read at the college and then at Vehicule Art. I remember Robert Kelly's reading and Kenneth Koch's reading. Claudia Lapp knew Anne Waldman from her years at Bennington College in Vermont and that's how Anne Waldman came to read at Vehicule.

 

In 2013 I suggested to John that he read at the Yellow Door Coffee House, the excellent reading series run by Ilona Martonfi who has done so much for Montreal poetry; the Yellow Door is located just around the corner from Artie Gold's old flat on Lorne Crescent. At the reading I made a short video of John reading his Leo Kennedy poem. The Montreal Review of Books published a poem by John as its Poem of the Month in May 2014. It is not as though John disappeared from the poetry scene, he was present but less than in the 1970s. While Leo Kennedy disappeared from poetry and moved from Montreal, John kept writing and teaching; and Ritva was an excellent editor of his work as can be seen in the poems in All I Can Say for Sure.

 

Tom Konyves posted videos on YouTube of the readings we did that evening in April 2018 at McGill's Rare Books and Special Collections, organized by Chris Lyon, the former director of that department; it was an evening celebrating the Vehicule Poets including readings by John McAuley, Claudia Lapp, Tom Konyves, Endre Farkas, and myself; Artie Gold's and Ken Norris's poems were read by other readers. An interactive screen displayed poems; exhibition cases contained books, letters, newsletters, and photographs of each poet; it was a great evening and well attended. It was great seeing John who was warmly welcomed, especially by Tom and Claudia, John was obviously emotionally distraught because Ritva was seriously ill.

 

The main collection of literary papers of the individual Vehicule Poets are housed at Rare Books and Special Collections on the fourth floor of McGill's McLennan Library; these include all of the literary archives of Artie Gold, Ken Norris, Endre Farkas, and myself. I agree with Ken Norris in the hope that someone who has access to John McAuley's literary papers donates them to the university, it would be a generous and important gift for present and future literary scholars; it would preserve something of John's literary and personal legacy. If you watch Tom`s video from that evening, you'll see that despite everything John was dealing with, Ritva's illness, John's reading at McGill University was a great reading, the poems he read were a showcase of his talent as a poet. Tom's video is the main visual document of John's public poetry readings. John was self-deprecating about public readings; in his poem "Poetry Reading"; he writes,

 

                        Years without a reading, no publishing, not much writing

                        as if the word really had gone out from Parnassus

 

And then he continues,

 

                        Some readers will even think he is dead or the next thing to it.

                        No one will want to talk to him nor he to them. . .

                        . . .

                        By the end of the reading, pale and shaken

                                    I can only murmur,

                        "What's wrong with being second or third rate?"

 

I want to show John's extensive involvement with poetry in those early days, and his lesser but still significant involvement that followed; I want to show that John participated in creating an open and inclusive poetry scene at a time when English language poetry was in decline in Montreal. John was never solely a traditional poet, he also has a substantial body of concrete and visual poetry. Looking back on things, John participated in the writing and performance of “Drummer Boy Raga”, on 16 April 1977 at Powerhouse Gallery; it was a group reading promoted by Tom Konyves. John's work was included in the anthology, published by Vehicule Press, Montreal English Poetry of the Seventies (1978). John's Maker Press published books and he edited and published a literary magazine, "Maker"; he edited and published our first anthology, The Vehicule Poets (1979). John participated in our collective interview with Louis Dudek and published the interview with his Maker Press, A Real Good Goosin', Talking Poetics, Louis Dudek and The Vehicule Poets (1980). Of course, John's work is included in Vehicule Days, An Unorthodox History of Montreal's Vehicule Poets (1993). John also read at our 2004 reading, C=a=b=a=r=e=t ==V=e=h=i=c=u=le, presented at La Cinquieme Salle of Place des Arts on 8 April 2004, and he was in the anthology of The Vehicule Poets_Now (2004). And John's work was included in Language Acts: Anglo-Québec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century (2007), edited by Jason Camlot and Todd Swift and published by Vehicule Press. In addition to the Yellow Door reading in 2013, John also read at Argo Book Shop when DC Books launched his 2013 title, All I Can Say for Sure. He read at both the Bleu Met literary festival reading in April 2018 and the Vehicule Poets' reading at Archives and Special Collections at McGill University, also in April 2018.

 

John and I used to correspond, beginning in 1974 and ending in 2018, up to 2014 our correspondence is archived in my literary papers at McGill University: there are five letters to John McAuley, in 1976 and 1979-1980; seven letters from John, 1974 to 1976; one letter in 1980; and then years of silence until two letters in 2003, a few letters between 2004 and 2006, and silence until 2010; writing this I reread his emails to me from 2013 to 2018. When John didn't respond to emails from Ken Norris or Endre Farkas I was asked to contact John, which I tried to do. Reading these more recent letters, 2013 to 2018, I even discovered an unpublished review John had written of my book Girouard Avenue (2009); he had been at the book launch for Girouard Avenue, at The Word Bookstore, and after the book launch we had walked along Milton Street, talking about the old days at Vehicule Art Gallery.

 

I tried to keep in touch with John but, after the Bleu Met reading, in late April 2018, it was with little success; after 2018 John's life was filled with care giving for Ritva. After the event at Bleu Met John and I sat in my car and he told me of Ritva's health situation and that he was her primary care giver; I commiserated with John, I know that care giving is constant solitary work, exhaustion, and worry. I never expected this would be the last time John and I would meet or speak together; I sent him letters and books but they were either returned by the post office or never acknowledged by him, if they were ever received. Ritva died in 2021 and then John's health began to decline.

 

Memories fade, some are authentic but many memories are forgotten or unreliable, and some things that we remember, in fact, never happened, they are invented by time. Writing this memorial has been a return to the past, a time to remember those years of publishing books and poetry magazines, of public readings, of knowing John McAuley, but it is also about the excitement of being young poets and committed and passionate about poetry. Other than being a highly talented poet, a dedicated teacher, a faithful and loving husband to Ritva, a loyal friend, my memory of John is that he was a good decent human being and that means everything.

 

                                                                        Stephen Morrissey

                                                                        Montreal • 20 April 2026

                s.e.morrissey@gmail.com

 

 

The Grief Room

 

                        Grief with a glass that ran

                                     —Swinburne 

Grief is a room that was built on to the side of consciousness, an attached dwelling, a room that may seem abandoned but it stays as part of one's psychic construction; unless you have experienced grief you don’t have this room. If you know grief you will never "get over" grief; once the room is constructed it is there permanently. Grief is the child of time, as sand falls through an hourglass grief is present, it accompanies each grain of sand on its journey. What will you do with your Grief Room? Will you inhabit it? Will you renovate it? Will you try to demolish the Grief Room? Or board up the entrance to this room? Or try to forget it exists? It may fall into disrepair, cobwebs on the walls, dust dust dust of the dead on the floors and under the single bed of dead desire. The abandoned Grief Room will not be ignored, it is inhabited by ghosts who play loud music, weep and wail, laugh uncontrollably, and talk their insane talk throughout the night and into the morning. 

Sunday, 12 April 2026

Walking on Mount Royal, 30 April 2011

This was the day Cassidy and I walked on Mount Royal and spread Jack's ashes, he was a wonderful and intelligent Whippet, we all loved that dog and remember him with fondness. 

Mr. Crow is Eating Lunch

 

I made this video yesterday and put it online last night; Mr. Crow is looking for a good time! 

"In Memoriam", ["Ring out, wild bells"], Alfred, Lord Tennyson

 

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
   The flying cloud, the frosty light:
   The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
   Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
   The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
   For those that here we see no more;
   Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
   And ancient forms of party strife;
   Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
   The faithless coldness of the times;
   Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
   The civic slander and the spite;
   Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
   Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
   Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
   The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
   Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

"Madame George" by Van Morrison

Down on Cyprus Avenue
With a childlike vision slipping into view
The click and clacking of the high-heeled shoe
Ford and Fitzroy, and Madame George

Marching with the soldier boy behind
He's much older now with hat on, drinking wine
And that smell of sweet perfume comes drifting through
Oh, the cool night air like Shalimar

And outside they're making all the stops
The kids out in the street collecting bottle tops
Gone for cigarettes and matches in the shops
Happy taking Madame George

Whoa, that's when you fall
Whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa, that's when you fall
Yeah, that's when you fall

When you fall into a trance
A-sitting on a sofa playing games of chance
With your folded arms and history books you glance
Into the eyes of Madame George

And you think you found the bag
You're getting weaker and your knees begin to sag
In a corner, playing dominoes in drag
The one and only Madame George

Then from outside the frosty window raps
She jumps up and says, "Lord, have mercy, I think that it's the cops"
And immediately drops everything she gots
Down into the street below

And you know you gotta go
On that train from Dublin up to Sandy Row
Throwing pennies at the bridges down below
And the rain, hail, sleet, and snow

Say goodbye to Madame George
Dry your eye for Madame George
Wonder why for Madame George
Wo-oh-oh

And as you leave, the room is filled with music
Laughing, music, dancing, music all around the room
And all the little boys come around, walking away from it all
So cold

And as you're about to leave
She jumps up and says, "Hey love, you forgot your glove"
And the love that loves, the love that loves, the love that loves
The love that loves to love, the love that loves to love, to love the gloves

To say goodbye to Madame George
Dry your eye for Madame George
Wonder why for Madame George
Dry your eyes for Madame George

Say goodbye
In the wind and the rain on the backstreet
In the backstreet, in the backstreet
Say goodbye to Madame George

In the backstreet, in the backstreet, in the backstreet
Well, well, down home, down home in the backstreet

Gotta go

Say goodbye, goodbye, goodbye
Dry your eye, your eye, your eye, your eye, your eye
Your eye, your eye, your eye, your eye, your eye
Your eye, your eye, your eye, your eye, your eye
Your eye, your eye, your eye, your eye, your eye
Say goodbye to Madame George
And the love that loves to love, that loves to love, that loves to love
The love that loves the love to love, the love that loves to love
Say goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye

Say goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, hey, to Madame George
Dry your eye for Madame George
Wonder why for Madame George
Ah, the love that loves, the love that loves to love
The love that loves to love, the love that loves to love
Say goodbye, goodbye
Get on the train
Get on the train, the train, the train, the train, the train, oh, darlin'
This is the train, this is the train, darlin'
This is the train

Whoa, say goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye
Get on the train, get on the train

“Before The Beginning Of Years" by Algernon Charles Swinburne

 

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Before the beginning of years
There came to the making of man
Time, with a gift of tears;
Grief, with a glass that ran;
Pleasure, with pain for leaven;
Summer, with flowers that fell;
Remembrance, fallen from heaven,
And madness risen from hell;
Strength without hands to smite;
Love that endures for a breath;
Night, the shadow of light,
And life, the shadow of death.

And the high gods took in hand
Fire, and the falling of tears,
And a measure of sliding sand
From under the feet of the years;
And froth and the drift of the sea;
And dust of the laboring earth;
And bodies of things to be
In the houses of death and of birth;
And wrought with weeping and laughter,
And fashioned with loathing and love,
With life before and after
And death beneath and above,
For a day and a night and a morrow,
That his strength might endure for a span
With travail and heavy sorrow,
The holy spirit of man.

From the winds of the north and the south,
They gathered as unto strife;
They breathed upon his mouth,
They filled his body with life;
Eyesight and speech they wrought
For the veils of the soul therein,
A time for labor and thought,
A time to serve and to sin;
They gave him light in his ways,
And love, and space for delight,
And beauty, and length of days,
And night, and sleep in the night.
His speech is a burning fire;
With his lips he travaileth;
In his heart is a blind desire,
In his eyes foreknowledge of death;
He weaves, and is clothed with derision;
Sows, and he shall not reap;
His life is a watch or a vision
Between a sleep and a sleep.”

―Algernon Charles Swinburne

Henry David Thoreau on Walking

 

We walked in so pure and bright a light... I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of elysium,and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman, driving us home at evening.

                --From "Walking" by Henry Thoreau; 1862

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!

                --"What Shall It Profit?", Henry David Thoreau, 1854

I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.

        --Walden (1854), "Solitude", Henry David Thoreau 

Aldous Huxley's letter to George Orwell after reading 1984

George Grant discusses what have become the two main expressions of a future dystopian western society, you can find this in Grant's Lament for a Nation (1965); these two concepts of our collective western future are found in George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Orwell's vision in 1984 is frightening, it is the division of the world into conflicting sectors that maintain power by oppressing and controlling their citizens. It is Huxley's idea of the future, equally dystopian, that Grant thought we were moving toward; it is control of the population by psychotropic drugs, compulsive free sex, and instant gratification and constant pleasure. We already have constantly changing technology and inexpensive consumer good that keep the public satisfied, complacent, and docile. The entertainment industry is a main component in keeping people complacent and ignorant; entertainment isn't art, it is mind control; not many people are interested in contemporary "art" which promotes contemporary liberal values. While many commentators agree with Huxley's idea of a hedonistic future, and not with Orwell's future of government micro-managing everyone's thinking and behaviour, it seems most likely that our future will be a combination of the two dystopias; this is our future.

Here is Aldous Huxley's letter to George Orwell written after reading 1984.

Note: I have just been flipping through my copy of George Grant's Lament for a Nation and I can't find this reference to either Huxley or Orwell. I must have read it elsewhere but I still believe it was Grant's opinion. 30 March 2026

Wrightwood. Cal.

21 October, 1949

Dear Mr. Orwell,

It was very kind of you to tell your publishers to send me a copy of your book. It arrived as I was in the midst of a piece of work that required much reading and consulting of references; and since poor sight makes it necessary for me to ration my reading, I had to wait a long time before being able to embark on Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Agreeing with all that the critics have written of it, I need not tell you, yet once more, how fine and how profoundly important the book is. May I speak instead of the thing with which the book deals — the ultimate revolution? The first hints of a philosophy of the ultimate revolution — the revolution which lies beyond politics and economics, and which aims at total subversion of the individual’s psychology and physiology — are to be found in the Marquis de Sade, who regarded himself as the continuator, the consummator, of Robespierre and Babeuf. The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it. Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World. I have had occasion recently to look into the history of animal magnetism and hypnotism, and have been greatly struck by the way in which, for a hundred and fifty years, the world has refused to take serious cognizance of the discoveries of Mesmer, Braid, Esdaile, and the rest.

Partly because of the prevailing materialism and partly because of prevailing respectability, nineteenth-century philosophers and men of science were not willing to investigate the odder facts of psychology for practical men, such as politicians, soldiers and policemen, to apply in the field of government. Thanks to the voluntary ignorance of our fathers, the advent of the ultimate revolution was delayed for five or six generations. Another lucky accident was Freud’s inability to hypnotize successfully and his consequent disparagement of hypnotism. This delayed the general application of hypnotism to psychiatry for at least forty years. But now psycho-analysis is being combined with hypnosis; and hypnosis has been made easy and indefinitely extensible through the use of barbiturates, which induce a hypnoid and suggestible state in even the most recalcitrant subjects.

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency. Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large scale biological and atomic war — in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.

Thank you once again for the book.

Yours sincerely,

Aldous Huxley