T.L. Morrisey

Showing posts with label Girouard Avenue (2009). Show all posts
Showing posts with label Girouard Avenue (2009). Show all posts

Saturday, June 26, 2021

"I Years had been from Home" by Emily Dickinson

Childhood home, 4614 Oxford Avenue, Montreal



I Years had been from Home
And now before the Door
I dared not enter, lest a Face
I never saw before

Stare solid into mine
And ask my Business there —
“My Business but a Life I left
Was such remaining there?”

I leaned upon the Awe —
I lingered with Before —
The Second like an Ocean rolled
And broke against my ear —

I laughed a crumbling Laugh
That I could fear a Door
Who Consternation compassed
And never winced before.

I fitted to the Latch
My Hand, with trembling care
Lest back the awful Door should spring
And leave me in the Floor —

Then moved my Fingers off
As cautiously as Glass
And held my ears, and like a Thief
Fled gasping from the House —


Monday, December 14, 2015

Girouard Avenue (2009) now at the Internet Archive

2226 Girouard Avenue is the door on the right
leading to the upstairs flat


A few years ago I decided to digitize my out-of-print books and make them available as free downloads online. Only recently have I begun this project, it's long term and I'm slow at getting it off the ground...

I know doing this seems counter-intuitive to most people (especially poets), giving away the books, but I feel it is only common sense. Poetry has a very limited and ever-diminishing audience and "popularity". Copies of my books that I have left, hard copies, are doing nothing sitting in our basement in cardboard boxes.

Putting these books online (as is my plan) gives them a second life. It might even find a few readers for them.

So, here is a link to Girouard Avenue (2009), one of my favourite of my books. It got a lot of positive reaction from people who could relate to the content and I liked this very much. Someone living in Arizona told me it is a "holy" book, and that is how I feel about it. When I was preparing this book to put it online, digitizing it, I realized that it is some of my better work. It is the work I did during the late 1990s and 2000s, my first book since my Selected Poems in 1998. It is poetry inspired by my extensive family history work. There is also an essay that came out of writing this book, "Remembering Girouard Avenue" (also available at archive dot org) that explains something of the importance to me of Girouard Avenue.

In sum, the physical location called Girouard Avenue in Montreal became a spiritual place for me, it is my psychic center. As I wrote elsewhere, "This memoir ("Remembering Girouard Avenue") is an addendum to my book of poems, Girouard Avenue (2009). This is my psychic center, this is where I began in life and where I often return in dreams, poems, and memories." 




Sunday, May 1, 2011

Renovations at 2226 Girouard Avenue in October 2009








My heart went out of visiting Girouard Avenue when the renovations began. Whatever there was of the place as it used to be is now gone. The future has arrived and it has little to do with the past. I hope the new residents, in their brand new condo, will enjoy living there, but my interest was solely in family history.

Monday, September 27, 2010

Meeting Audrey Keyes in 2005




In the image below, my brother's initials ("JM") carved when we lived there, maybe the June 1962 date was also by him:









Photographs, not in any order, of meeting my first friend, Audrey Keyes, after not seeing her since 1963. We met at St. Viateur Restaurant on Monkland Avenue in the summer of 2005; we revisited our old homes, in the same fourplex, on Oxford Avenue (not far from Monkland Avenue and the buildings owned by John Hoolahan, and written about by me in the Hoolahan's Flats poems in Girouard Avenue...) we're sitting on the front steps of the building, we're in the lane on the back stairs, and there are a few places inside the back stairwell where we had carved our initials in the wood back in the late 50s, early 60s. There's Veeto with her dear mother, Mrs. Keyes. Veeto, who used to be Audrey Keyes... what a joy meeting her again after all of these years. Coincidentaly, Veeto was born on the same day as Artie Gold, and knew Artie's good friend Mary Brown, and possibly her daughter Candy, a few years before Artie knew them... how our lives intersect, meet, and meet again sometime off in the future.

Friday, July 23, 2010

"Holy Wells" in Ireland and Montreal



Recently, on Ireland's RTĒ television, there was a presentation on "holy wells" in that country. A "holy well" is not only a place where you can get water, it is also a sacred place. Many holy wells were originally sacred among pagans and then, when Ireland became Christian, the population assimilated the wells into their Christian faith; this is a fairly common occurrence, churches were built on the remains of pagan temples, and pagan or Celtic holidays were reconfigured into similar Christian holy days.

The history of holy wells reaches back to pagan time, perhaps 5,000 years, a time long before Christianity reached Ireland. There are approximately three thousand holy wells in Ireland where they are known as places of healing; one might visit a holy well to ask for help with a specific problem, or to give thanks that a problem, whether physical or spiritual, has already been resolved.

The holy well is a visible and physical manifestation of mythological, or archetypal and spiritual thinking; it a place where nature presents evidence of the existence of the divine in our lives.

I have been interested in holy wells for many years. The discussion that follows on holy wells also gives some background to the Prologue to Girouard Avenue as well present information on holy wells in our environment. Here is the Prologue in its entirety:

1. The Ancient Well of Ara

There is a well in Tipperary
visited by my ancestors
before they left for Canada.
They said, “This is a place
of sleep and dreams—
drink from the well
and know the mystery
of life.”

Looking down to the water
at the well’s bottom,
they saw the reflected sky
the size and roundness
of a coin with the emblem
of a bird.

On Main Street
where the well
is located, not long
after ships left harbour
and famine crossed the land
a wooden top was fitted
to the ancient well,
the water cold and still
beneath the earth’s surface.

2. The Forgotten Spring

In the big city, at the beginning
of a new millennium, in a park,
the corner of Doherty and Fielding,
where water gathers on the path,
asphalt lifted, broken,
a place always wet
as though it rained last night
although it didn’t, with a seven story
apartment building on one corner
and low-cost apartments across the street,
where six young men stand and talk
on a Sunday morning in summer—
these are not the ancient fields
but a city park where water
rises on either side of a path
from an underground spring,
reminding us of what we used to know,
but have forgotten—the water
insistent, forceful, always desiring wholeness.

Before writing this poem I read very briefly about the ancient well Ara, located in Tipperary. That a wooden top had been placed on it, sealing the well, seemed a good metaphor for the ending of one age, the age of shamanic and visionary consciousness, the age of Bardic poetry and an apprehension of reality that includes that which might not be visible to the naked eye but still exists on some other level of awareness. That age, when the Other World could be more easily penetrated to, ended for most people and emblematic of this ending is placing a top on the well.

Having said all of this, it was interesting to hear on this RTĒ programme that some Irish who were leaving for North America visited, before they left, a holy well. I don’t know, in fact, if this is what my own family members did before coming to Canada in 1837, but I envisioned them doing just that. Creativity, imagination, this might explain my having written this about them, but there is also ancestral memory, whether it is in our physical makeup or in our personality, our genetic makeup, or what have you. I place this “coincidence,” this synchronicity, to ancestral memory.

The next section of the prologue moves us from 1837 to present times. It is over 150 years later, now we are in Montreal, and street names in this area of Nôtre Dame de Grace (NDG), a predominantly English-speaking neighbourhood in westend Montreal, reflect the Irish presence that once existed here. Nearby is Loyola College, founded by Irish Catholics, but since 1973 Loyola has been a part of Concordia University. Many Irish moved to this part of the city so their children could attend Loyola High School and then Loyola College. However, most of the Irish who lived here in the 1940and 1950s have moved away. This neighbourhood was their destination back then, from working class Pointe St. Charles, Verdun, and Griffintown, to Nôtre Dame de Grace, and now the children and grandchildren of these people are scattered across Montreal, Canada, the United States, and beyond.

I used to walk up Belmore to Chester and then continue to Fielding, and walk along the grassy meridian at this part of Fielding. Across the street is Ignatius Loyola Park that covers two city blocks, so it is a huge expanse. Then I would walk by the corner of Fielding and Doherty and one spring day I noticed water running from the park, it ran down an asphalt path from where the baseball diamond was located and into a sewer on Fielding. The asphalt was lifting as water would run along it, and I wondered about this water and where it came from. I remember seeing this water, and there was a lot of it, and noticing how the asphalt bulged and cracked due to the water running under it, freezing, then lifting up the asphalt as it thawed. Every spring there was water there, and it wasn’t from snow melting, it wasn’t run-off from snow melting in the park. Eventually I found the source of the water, it came from a spring locatged behind the baseball diamond on the Doherty side of the park. I intuitively understood what I had found and the significance of this water, this spring. As I walked passed it I knew I was in the presence of more than just water, I was in the presence of something holy.

(You can see this area: go to Google Maps, search “Doherty and Fielding, Montreal,” and then do a “street view” and you’ll see the repair work to the sidewalk due to the run-off from the well.)

There are many underground streams in NDG--they have all been paved over--and the foundations of many homes are being repaired due to damage caused by water from underground streams. NDG was once a place of farms, for instance Benny Farm which became a housing development in the late 1940s for soldiers returning from World War Two. Where we lived on Montclair Avenue had been apple orchards until the house where we lived was built in the late 1940s. Family members used to go for walks along the old Western Avenue (now Boulevard de Maisonneuve West) which was a dirt road, that was back in the early 1940s; they’d walk from Girouard to Hampton. Near where I grew up on Oxford Avenue, along Côte St. Luc Road, we used to play in the fields where apartment buildings were later constructed; until a few years ago there was an old farm house on the corner of Dufferin and Cote St. Luc Road. When I was growing up we were always looking for some nature, some fields, to play in; there were lanes to walk in, behind people's homes, and it seems there was still quite a bit of undeveloped property back then, but you had to work to find it.

I was aware of underground streams in this area of Montreal, all of them paved over or buildings constructed over them. This particular well in Loyola Park, what I have called a holy well, had managed to penetrate the earth covering it and for some years, at specific times of the year, water would run down the asphalt path. You could see the water coming from the earth and others knew of this well. Indeed, a few years ago, when walking through Loyola Park, and passing where the well was located, I noticed that the City of Montreal had made this specific area, where the well existed, into an ecological reserve, they had put a fence around it, planted flowers and some other plants that thrive in wet areas, and encouraged the return of nature. Not much came of this as water was abundant in spring but by the middle of summer it would dry up. It also upset local residents who were concerned that mosquitoes would lay eggs in standing water, they were concerned with West Nile disease. Apparently, some of these people went with buckets and removed the water that was present. I don’t know if there is much left of this well-meaning, but failed, experiment by the City.

What constitutes a "holy well"? We used to drive some distance to an artesian well by a roadside, there were usually several other cars parked there and people filling large containers of water from this well. At first glance, I don't think of that well as being "holy." I think two things can make a well "holy," either found together or separately. First, there is some agreement, some consensus among people, that a certain place is holy. Perhaps miracles can be attributed to the place, or some other supernatural occurences that help form an idea among people that the well has extraordinary powers. Second, a place, a well for example, may be located on a ley line, a place where earth energy may be more abundant than at other places; this example doesn't rely on any consensus of opinion. Perhaps you have walked in nature and suddently felt that you were in a place that was different, more serene or imbued with a quality of silence, or that created a quality of silence in your own mind, and that this space was somehow sacred. I have encountered these places, for instance St. Patrick's Basilica in Montreal is one such place; another, more remote, is an abandoned farm on a slight hill near where we used to live. When I would visit this place I knew that there was something different--spiritual, sacred, holy--that wasn't present elsewhere.

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Thoughts of Girouard Avenue

Back porch at 2226 Girouard Avenue, my grandmother and my cousin Herb,
spring 1938



My parents worked hard and ensured their children had the opportunity to get ahead. Even so, due to my father's bad health, we lived with my grandmother and other relatives on Girouard Avenue for two years in the early 1950s. We were not the first to return there to live. I could make a list of the different family members who lived there over the years. When my grandmother was planning to move--maybe it was the move to Girouard from St. Henry back in the mid-1920s--my father told her to get a smaller place so she wouldn't be able to take in so many family members. As it turned out, the flat on Girouard was bigger than ever. The door was always open to family members who needed a home, who needed a safe harbour.

Some families are still willing to take in relatives fallen on hard times, bad health, unemployment, or family crisis, but the "open door" seemed to happen more often in the past before a social safety net took over this function. If you had family or friends, you would never find yourself on the street, you’d never be homeless. In our family, this help was given by my grandmother; other families did the same thing for their relatives when they were in need.

As I remember it, homeless people in the past were almost all men who had fallen on hard times, often due to alcohol; we called them “rubby-dubs,” and I wonder if this word exists outside of Montreal and if it is derived from a French word? If you saw any homeless people, or beggars, in Montreal just a few decades ago they were mostly men and many of them were hopeless alcoholics. Now, there are many homeless people in Montreal. Not all sleep in the streets, many sleep in shelters, others crash for a few days in the apartments of friends, and you see a few pushing grocery carts full of plastic garbage bags containing their possessions through the streets, or sleeping in the entrance ways to stores that have closed for the night. Being homeless is now a possibility in many people’s lives, just as time spent incarcerated is a possibility for some people, almost an expected event. If one served time in prison in the past it was a terrible disgrace and you had brought shame on your family; now, especially in the United States, for many poor people, it is just a part of life.

Are people really all that much worse now than they used to be? Must so many people end up in prison? Maybe these people really are terrible, lost souls, that you want to avoid, or put in prison. Maybe using illegal drugs has made them outcasts from traditional society. Maybe our society has turned into something that would be shocking and incomprehensible to people just fifty or sixty years ago. They might recoil with horror at some of the changes in our contemporary society.

Recalling my grandmother’s home as a place of welcome, I believe that this is how memories and family cohesiveness is created. When family memories are loving and happy ones, then these memories are sustaining for us when we are having difficult times in our own lives. We remember the good times when the hard times seem overwhelming. That is when an address, like 2226 Girouard Avenue, a place remembered, enters into the geography of the soul and into the important memories in a family’s collective history.

(Yes, they were called "rubbies," that is "rubby-dubs," because they drank rubbing alcohol. I had forgotten this.)

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Return to Girouard Avenue

Looking south on Girouard Avenue



(1) Return to Girouard Avenue 

When I returned to my grandmother’s flat at 2226 Girouard Avenue in May 2009, it felt as though no time at all had intervened since I was last there, that was also in May but forty years before. I had driven by the flat that day, as I often do, and noticed that the front door was open, there was an open house set up by a real estate agent. I rushed home and got my camera, and returned to a place that had meant so much to me my whole life. Entering the flat, it was as though only a few minutes had intervened since my last visit, so many years before. There was also a feeling of suspended animation as there had been no major renovations to the premises since it was built around 1900, and since 1966, when my grandmother died, there seemed to have been very little maintenance—the floors were now uneven, the door jambs crooked, the roof had leaked, and windows were threatening to fall out of the walls. Despite this, I felt “at home”; I was happy to have returned to this place that figures so much in my imaginal and psychic life. 


(2) It was in 1959... 

That day I took many photographs as I walked through the flat, I knew this would probably be my only visit there, and it was. The first room I entered had been my Aunt Mable’s bedroom where I can still remember sitting one afternoon on my father’s lap and learning how to spell, maybe I was three or four years old. Next was the living room where I often stood at the window and looked out at the street below—we were on the second floor — and one day in 1959 I counted eleven streetcars running along Girouard Avenue, for it was the last day there was streetcar service in Montreal. Here, too, was where my brother and I had visited our great aunts at Christmas just months after our grandmother had died; my Great Aunt Edna told us stories of the past, describing our grandparents’ wedding over seventy years before. I also entered what had been my grandmother’s bedroom; then the dining room; and as I walked down the long hallway to the rear of the flat I noticed the old claw foot bathtub in the bathroom; then my Great Aunt Essie’s bedroom; and finally I entered the kitchen and spare room off the kitchen where my great grandfather had lived his final years. All of these memories returned to me, including Bella, the cleaning lady my grandmother had come to the flat once a month in her old age; I remembered Bella on her hands and knees, with her nylons rolled down to her ankles, polishing the hardwood floors by hand and the smell of floor wax in the air. 


(3) Geography 

Girouard Avenue is on the eastern edge of NDG although it isn’t the true border where NDG begins and ends, but psychologically that border is Girouard. Driving south on Girouard, below Sherbrooke Street West, we pass my grandmother’s flat and then drive through an underpass at the bottom of the street; now we’re in Lower NDG and if you turn left from there onto St. Jacques you're headed in the direction of St. Henry, St. Cunegonde, Griffintown, Little Burgundy, or Point St. Charles. This journey is across the years but also across our collective emotions, a journey from the past that is frozen in a kind of suspended animation. 


(4) Dreams 

While I have often dreamed of the Girouard Avenue flat, it bothered me that usually my grandmother was absent in these dreams. Maybe one or both of the old great aunts would be there or the flat was empty, but only seldom was my grandmother present. I now see that it isn't only the people, it's the actual place that is important to me, and this includes and encompasses my relatives and ancestors who lived there, it encompasses all we've done as a family living at this one location for so many years. Not only was the flat itself important to me, it was my psychic centre, a place of dreams and poetry, a place of creativity, family, memory, and emotion. The Girouard flat was a place of the soul and I have manifested the soul’s vision in the poems I have written. We contribute to the world with our poetry, our creativity, our love, our enthusiasm, our spirit, and this is what I have tried to do in my writing and in my life. 


(5) Notre Dame de Grace 

Many people have their own “Girouard Avenue,” as such it is an archetype for that first home, that first idealized place where we grew up and where we had our first memories of childhood. It is a place for us that recalls the world of innocence. For many of us, it is the place where we first lived as we moved upward in social class, from St. Henry to Notre Dame de Grace, to the familiar "NDG," our new neighbourhood. Many of our parents never finished high school: my father dropped out of St. Leo’s Academy to help support his family after his father died; my mother went to the Mother House and learned shorthand, typing, and secretarial work. 


(6) The quiet zone that is old age 

I was a quiet child and did not need constant entertainment, or any entertainment, when I stayed at my grandmother’s. I never thought of her as being someone to play with, I went to her house and stayed the day and just naturally played on my own. I respected that she was old. I looked out the window; I played with little cars on a tea wagon; I sat and listened to the radio with my grandmother; one day, I asked her to play the piano for me and we sat on the piano bench, just inside the living room, and she played a few notes, and then stopped, she could no longer play. I accepted my days of relative inactivity at her home as normal, as what one did at one’s grandmother’s home. I knew she was old and that she did not do much, she drank tea and ate toast, she sat, she listened to the radio. This created in me a sense of what it is to be old, of the quiet zone that is old age. I still enter a quiet zone of my own, as I have done my whole life, and which was a gift from my grandmother to me.

Sunday, February 28, 2010

Interview with Poetry Quebec, January 2010

View of Montreal from Pointe-à-Callière, museum, 2017




Here is the complete (unedited) text of my interview with Poetry Quebec from January 2010. 

 -------------------------- 

 Interview with Stephen Morrissey 


1. Are you a native Quebecer? If not, where are you originally from? Why did you come to Quebec? 

 I was born in Montreal in 1950. My family moved from Ireland to New Brunswick around 1837 and my great great grandfather, Lawrence Morrissey, moved to Montreal from New Brunswick a few years later. On my mother’s side, John Parker, my grandfather, moved here with his wife and young son around 1910 from Blackburn, England, and he worked as a fireman with the City of Montreal. I’ve researched and written my family’s history, and this can be found at www.morrisseyfamilyhistory.com. Some poems written out of this research are in Girouard Avenue (forthcoming fall 2009), my new book of poems. My paternal grandmother lived at 2226 Girouard Avenue in N.D.G. for about forty years and, for me, it represents a psychic center that I often visit in dreams. 

 2. When and how did you encounter your 1st Quebec poem? 

 When I was a student at Monklands High School in the mid-1960s, I studied North American Literature with Mr. Dewdney, who was a terrific teacher. This course was mostly, if not all, Canadian literature, and we read poets and some fiction writers (for instance, Stephen Leacock) from the 19th and 20th Centuries. I loved the writing we studied and the poems of Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, and Charles G.D. Roberts have stayed with me all this time. We read Earle Birney’s “David,” one of the greatest Canadian poems. There were also English Quebec poems in the course textbook, A Book of Canadian Poems, An Anthology for Secondary Schools (McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 1963), which was edited by Carlyle King, a professor at the University of Saskatchewan, and of which I still have a copy. I always took for granted the importance of Canadian literature since we studied it in school; and there were always poets and writers living in our community. The first Quebec or Montreal poem that really made an impression on me, that really touched me deeply, was A.M. Klein’s “Heirloom.” Later, I wrote a poem of my own, influenced by Klein’s poem. I used his title, and included it in my first book, The Trees of Unknowing (Vehicule Press, 1978). I was very impressed when I saw Endre Farkas’s play on Klein, Haunted House, at the Segal Centre for the Performing Arts, in the winter of 2009. Farkas’s play portrayed Klein’s life and showed how important Klein was to the development of Canadian poetry. 


3. When and how did you first become interested in poetry? 

Even when I was young I knew of Irving Layton and Louis Dudek. I remember they had a public falling-out that was in the newspapers, in letters to the editor, in the early 1960s. Max Layton, Irving’s son, was a student at West Hill High School with my older brother. I used to walk along Somerled Avenue to Willingdon School where I was a student. I would pass an apartment building I had heard was owned by Irving Layton. Montreal poets were famous nationally. F.R. Scott was a law professor at McGill University, a constitutional lawyer, and one of the founders of the CCF. He was widely known for his successful 1959 Supreme Court defense of Frank Roncarelli against the Quebec government. The premier of Quebec, Maurice Duplessis, intervened to deny Roncarelli, a Jehovah’s Witness, his legal rights. Scott’s intervention saw the eventual reinstitution of Roncarelli’s civil rights. However, I believe poetry was F.R. Scott’s passion and it is primarily for his poetry that he is remembered. Are poets born or are they created from the experiences of their lives? I think, in my case, it’s a combination of both. I always loved to write, especially poetry, but perhaps I was also driven to write by the circumstances of my life. Had I been more extroverted I may not have become a poet; perhaps introverts naturally gravitate to solitary activities, like writing poetry. I began writing poems when I was around fourteen years old and it took over my life. I’d sit in school and daydream, I’d stare out the window, or I’d write a poem. In the evenings, when I was avoiding doing school homework, I wrote poems. I was the editor of my high school’s literary magazine, and I published some of my own poems in it, but anonymously. Two excellent English literature teachers at Monklands were Mr. Boswell and Mrs. Montin, both encouraged my interest in English literature. I remember attending summer school at nearby Montreal West High School for a failed math course—I sat at the back of the class and wrote poems—of course, I failed the course and never took math again, but I’m still writing poems. 


 4. What is your working definition of a poem? 

 Poetry is largely metaphor, but it is also concise language, language imbued with some quality of music, and language that communicates an emotion. Poetry usually builds on the work of earlier poets, so there is a tradition or a lineage to the kind of poetry one is writing. Poetry is much more open-ended today than ever before: we have concrete and visual poems, sound and performance poetry, poetry that is computer generated, and so on. The study of ethnopoetics has embraced poetry by indigenous people from around the world, this literature was formerly of interest mainly to anthropologists. Diversity has increased the definition of poetry and the varied field of poetic expression open to poets today. In general, what I perceive as a “real” poem makes me want to write poetry. It inspires me to write. However, no single definition of poetry will suit everybody. 


 5. Do you have a writing ritual? If so, provide details. 

 By ‘ritual’ I guess you mean some repetitive, perhaps obsessive and compulsive, task that has to be done before one can write. The tennis great, Rafael Nadal, has his obsessive rituals, for instance listening to a certain piece of music and having several showers before entering the court, lining up bottles of water beside where he’s sitting during a tennis match, and so on. I don’t have any ‘rituals’ like this, I just do the writing. 


6. What is your approach to writing of poems: inspiration driven, structural, social, thematic, other? 

 CZ, who is a poet and editor as well as my wife, often gives me titles for poems and I can usually direct my inspiration into whatever the title suggests to me; at other times, I’ll sit and write and later, with a lot of editing, I’ll find the poem hiding in what I’ve written. When I’m writing, I don’t know in advance where the writing will take me. I think of this writing as improvisation, on a title or a theme, on what these suggest to me, or on an emotion. Of course, the process of writing poetry is a lot more complicated than this but it gives a general idea of my approach to writing. 


7. Do you think that being a minority in Quebec (i.e. English-speaking) affects your writing? If so, how? 

 This question raises a lot of contentious issues. I feel that over the last thirty or forty years Quebec politics—the question of Quebec’s separation from Canada and the language issue in Quebec—has soured and made unpleasant the experience of living here for many people, including myself, in the English-speaking community. This situation is complicated and affects one’s daily life although I doubt it is a subject for much poetry written here. 


 8. Do you think that writing in English in Quebec is a political act? Why or why not? 

 English is one of the most used, most spoken, languages in the world, so when English is your mother tongue you don’t really think too much about writing in any other language or that writing in English is a political act. Politics—government and how best to govern the country—have always been of vital interest to me, as a social democrat and as someone who believes in the western liberal tradition. Politics are defined by where one lives and when; poetry is not defined by time and place. My calling in life has been to poetry and not to politics. 


9. Why do you write? 

 Writing, being creative, is a celebration and an act of affirmation. For me, this is an important aspect of writing poetry. We need to embrace life and not accept an attitude of denial that is so easy to fall into. The very act of writing affirms life, even if the content of the writing is negative or questions ultimate values. Some of my work deals with death, regret, and grief, all negative subjects; but for me, writing the poems I have written has also been to rise above personal experiences. To write poetry is to affirm being alive. 


10 Who is your audience? 

While a poet’s first reader is himself, there are also many others who read poetry. I give numerous readings in Montreal, and there are always people who speak to me after the reading. They thank me for a particular poem, they have questions or express interest in something mentioned in the poetry. I’ve read my work to audiences across Canada and in different parts of the United States. There are many people who are readers of poetry, although maybe not as many as those who read detective novels! When CZ and I were in New York City last year we read at Haven Art Gallery in the South Bronx. We spent a delightful hot summer evening meeting both audience members and other poets who read at that event. It was really quite exhilarating to meet so many people who value both poetry and poets. Later, we visited the New York Public Library where we found copies of all our books, available to readers there. Our books are also in major libraries across Canada. So, you see, the audience is there and it is a large one. I was one of the eighteen poets who gave readings for the Montreal Gazette’s online poetry reading series this summer, 2009; each poet read only one poem. What a varied group of poets! This type of experience was impossible before the Internet; now, anywhere in the world, people can see Montreal poets read their work. With the Internet we have an international audience that is beyond anything possible in the past. My website, www.stephenmorrissey.ca, also includes some of my poems, and it has at least sixty new visitors at the site every day from all parts of the world; again, this kind of exposure for poetry was unheard of just a few years ago. CZ and I co-founded www.coraclepress.com and publish online poetry chapbooks and, more recently, print medium books. The online chapbooks reach an enormous audience in all parts of the world. The opportunities for publishing have increased with the many literary sites and magazines. In terms of audience, I don’t think there’s a better time to be a poet than now. In the future readers will be able to purchase books, printed on demand; we are increasingly moving away from print medium to digital. I welcome these changes. 


11. Do you think there is an audience, outside of friends or other poets, for poetry? 

 Audience is there, at readings, online, or listening to literary programmes on the radio. I’ve read my work before audiences at conferences, universities, high schools and grade schools, coffee houses, church basements, and other places. There is also the more personal experience we have of audience, one day you meet someone reading a book of poetry, and they’re the last person you would expect to read poetry but there they are, carrying a book of poetry and reading it on the bus, or where they work. One of the best public reading experiences I’ve had was at the N.D.G. Food Depot over the course of several years. Here was a group of people who needed to visit the food bank to make ends meet. These audiences applauded after each poem, and were genuinely enthusiastic and appreciative of my reading. Many came up and talked to me after the readings. I was deeply touched by their welcoming and positive response. 


12. Does your day job impact on your writing? How? 

Writing requires time to write. A day job that gives you time to be by yourself is what poets need. If your day job takes up too much time, writing will be impossible. Poets also need time to revise their work, read what other poets or writers have written, and time to daydream. It is very difficult to write poetry if your day job demands too much of your time, your thinking, your being. I have been blessed by having a college teaching position that has allowed me to enjoy the work I have done to make money, but also the time that is needed to do my writing. 


13. How many drafts (beer too) do you usually go through before you are satisfied/finished with a poem? 

 As many drafts as it takes, but seemingly more drafts as I get older. A poem might take fifty drafts, or be publishable with the first or second draft, although, for me, this seldom happens. The editing process is laborious and takes up a lot of time. When CZ edits a poem for me it goes a lot faster, she is not only a brilliant poet but has many years of experience editing poetry, and this is a gift that is not found in many editors. 


14. Do you write with the intention of “growing a manuscript” or do you work on individual poems that are later collected into a book? 

My ambition has always been to write a thematically cohesive book. I remember, in high school, running home at lunch time and listening to the Beatles’ “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” I believe this is one of the first concept or thematic albums. Then, there was also Frank Zappas’s parody of the Beatles’ album, and that was also fun. It was from the Beatles that I had the idea of a thematic book of poems, and I’ve followed this ever since. My new book, Girouard Avenue, is the most cohesive and thematic of all of the books I’ve written. It took many years to write Girouard Avenue, I must have started the writing in 1995, and then I’ve waited years to publish the book, my first since 1998. Girouard Avenue begins with a prologue, “Holy Well,” a memory of Ireland from where my family originated, but it is a mythical Ireland, a place of the unconscious mind, and then the poem also reflects on where we are today, in Montreal. The unconscious has always been important to my work, as it must be to any poet, for where do the poems come from but the unconscious, that place of dreams, mythology, and psychological and spiritual depth. There are four long poems in Girouard Avenue, the first two are poems of place, of different homes where we lived in Montreal. The first of these is “Girouard Avenue Flat” which celebrates my grandmother and includes family history. She lived for over forty years at 2226 Girouard Avenue, renting a large flat below Sherbrooke Street West in Montreal. This home was busy with the daily life of a large family, which included seven children. Many played musical instruments. Other family members also lived there, due to illness or old age. Even my parents and my brother and I lived on Girouard Avenue in the early 1950s, with my grandmother, my Aunt Mable, and my great aunt Essie, because of my father’s heart condition. Before that we had lived a few blocks away on Avonmore. This was my parents’ first home after they married in 1940, but a small 3 ½ room apartment wasn’t a good environment for a family of four people when one of them is seriously ill. After the war it was difficult to find a larger apartment to rent, so off we went to Girouard. By 1969, after my grandmother died, there was just my grandmother’s two very elderly sisters left living there and I talk about visiting them with my brother at Christmas. The next poem is “Hoolahan’s Flat, Oxford Avenue,” where we moved in 1954, after living at my grandmother’s for the previous two years. “Hoolahan’s Flat, Oxford Avenue” is a poem of the 1950s, of television, and family. In this poem I purposely avoided being overly confessional or emotional in favour of a kind of reporting on the times in which I lived, what they were like, in a fairly matter-of-fact way. I mention my first friend, Audrey Keyes, the girl next door, and over forty years later Audrey saw the poem online and contacted me, and we’ve become friends again, as though no time has intervened. These first two poems in the book are of places where I lived in Montreal, but they are also significant for other reasons. More happened in these two flats than just daily life. These homes were foundational to the development of who I am as a poet and as a person. Even as a child I felt there was a bravery and heroism to everyday life as it is lived by everyday people. There is a courage in average people that has always interested me. I’ve loved stories of family, of who did what and when. These family stories are framed by history. These accounts have an aura of historical reality; my poems about family are also poems of spirit, of courage, of dedication to family and everyone working hard. This is what I want remembered, so that these people aren’t forgotten, so that the ancestors are suitably remembered. “November” is the third long poem in Girouard Avenue. The month of November is the time when I have always been closest to the unconscious mind, to dreams, to Spirit, to what the spirits say to me. The days are growing shorter, we are moving relentlessly into winter, and the fabric between our material world and the other world is at its thinnest. Now I return to my father departing for Boston in 1956, where he died a few weeks later; but I also reflect on the importance of the railroad in Canada. Many members of my family worked for the Canadian Pacific Railroad. The railway was an important form of transportation in the past. In this poem there is the juxtaposition of the personal with the impersonal, but always memory of the people I am descended from and who I honour. But a poet is more than this: a poet affirms life and writes from a vision that reminds the reader there is more to life than mundane activity, there is epiphany, spirituality, aesthetics, and dignity even in the most humble people. The final poem in the book is “The Rock, Or a Short History of the Irish in Montreal” and uses my own family’s history in Montreal, from when they arrived here around 1844, to recall something of the history of the Irish in Montreal. The Irish were an enormous immigrant population here; people who mostly arrived with nothing, which is also the story of the Irish in other North American cities. Within several generations these Irish immigrants rose to become doctors and lawyers, politicians and leaders in government. The Irish have always believed in education and fighting to survive. There is the Black Rock, a memorial to the Irish who arrived in Montreal in 1847 from famine-ridden Ireland, only to die in fever sheds located near present-day Victoria Bridge. Here you can see the heroism I am referring to. Families came all this way from Ireland, so hopeful, so desirous of a new life, and then five thousand of them perished soon after arriving. It’s a tragic story but at least they opted for survival and a new life, rather than give up and die in Ireland. Having said this, perhaps there’s a balancing of tragedy and bravery that I find compelling. It is also my own Irish sensibility that causes me to perceive tragedy and melancholy in what I see around me, in the stories and lives of people. Even my father’s story is a combination of bravery and tragedy: he was a man of such intelligence that he rose from the working class to quite a prestigious executive position in the C.P.R., but he had rheumatic fever when he was a child and this eventually caused medical problems, scarring of his heart, that caused his early death. He didn’t give up, he lived as long as he could, he had a family, he did his best despite knowing that his life would not last as long as other people’s. Had my father lived for just another six months medical advances were achieved that could have extended his life for many more years. But that was not to be. His death when I was only six years old changed my life, and perhaps it made a poet out of me. The last poem, the epilogue, is “The Colours of the Irish Flag,” which celebrates marriage, family, and love. But it is also a poem about being strong, not being defeated without a fight for one’s survival, or the survival of what one believes in. You don’t just roll over and give up, you fight, you struggle, you go the distance, you don’t be a coward, you be a man or a woman. We’ll have no cowards here. You can see that I feel very strongly about all of this. 


15. What is the toughest part of writing for you? 

Because every poet is different, what is difficult for one poet may be simple, or come easily, to another. I’m sorry I can’t be more specific. Writing is a lot of work and requires dedicating your life to this art. What is tough changes with time. Consider poetry all hard work; it’s all tough. 


16. What is your idea of a muse? 

 A muse is what Sharon Stone portrays in the film The Muse. A muse brings a man to life, and my life since meeting CZ has been transformed by her. The feminine animates the empty or damaged shell that is the condition of some men or women. A muse inspires creativity. There is always a price to be paid for having a muse; it’s not something to be trivialized, the muse needs to receive presents for her work, and not cheap baubles, as Sharon Stone‘s character made clear in this film. There is no free ride in this life. Creativity is a lot of work with a few moments of rest, but worth every minute of the journey. You can always rest when you’re dead, because living is to embrace life and accept the challenges of inspiration more fully, more consciously. The idea of a muse is no simple topic, and you don’t have to be a poet to be moved by a muse. 


17. Do you have a favourite time and place to write? 

I’ll write just about anywhere and at any time. I’ve written poems during classes when I was a student and I’ve written while classes of my students are writing a test when I was the teacher. I’ve written during other people’s readings and while lying in bed with the only light being from a flashlight. I’ve written sitting on a lawn chair balanced on a rock in the middle of a river. I’ve written sitting on a beach in both Vancouver and Mexico. I’ve written during snowstorms and heat waves. I’ve written in hospital cafeterias and waiting rooms. I’ve gotten up in the middle of the night and written down a poem that came to me in my sleep, or that I was writing in my mind while still awake in the dark. I’ve spent innumerable hours sitting at desks writing poems. This isn’t just my experience but probably the experience of many poets. 


18. Do you like to travel? Is travel important to your writing? Explain. 

I can’t say that I like to travel, although I’ve done my fair share of traveling. I enjoy travel on business, for a conference, or to visit relatives or friends, but being a tourist for its own sake doesn’t interest me. I agree with Thoreau’s sentiment when he said, “I am well traveled in Concord.” 


19. Do you have a favourite Quebec poet? If yes who and why? My favourite Quebec poet is Louis Dudek. I don’t think his work is dated at all, it’s contemporary and significant. One day more people will hopefully realize how accomplished and important a poet Dudek really was. Doug Jones is a gifted poet and John Glassco, who is mostly known for his memoir, is also a very good poet. Artie Gold is a terrific poet who was very talented and creative. Of course, I always enjoy reading what friends are writing, such as Carolyn Zonailo, Sharon H. Nelson, Carolyn-Marie Souaid, and others who are my contemporaries. For many years I’ve liked Deborah Eibel’s original voice in poetry. Ian Ferrier is a wonderful spoken-word poet. I meet and hear interesting new Montreal poets, talented younger voices, at readings that I give or attend. It is with great sadness that Montreal’s poetry community lost the poet and painter Sonja Skarstedt who died this summer, 2009. Emile Nelligan, St-Denys Garneau, and Anne Hébert are three poets I teach in translation, and I continue to enjoy their work very much. All of these poets stand out for me as exceptional. 


20. Do you write about Quebec? If so, how and why? If not, why not? 

Some poets write from a specific place that they are identified with, but they always transform the specific into the universal. So, Charles Olson’s Glouester and William Carlos William’s Paterson are places that are identified with these poets but are also places that have been transformed into an archetypal geography that represents the human condition in general. That’s why I named my selected poems Mapping the Soul: Selected Poems 1978-1998 (Muses Company, Winnipeg, 1998). In my writing I am not only interested in a geographical location—for instance, Montreal—but in the manifestation of the soul in this place, in the expression of the landscape of the unconscious mind, this is what interests me. I won’t always write about Montreal, but in the writing I have done that refers to this city, and the work I am doing now, I am attempting to transform the city into something more than a specific place, but always retaining the specificity of the place.

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Reading at Paragraphe Bookstore

Reading and Book Signing

Stephen Morrissey, author of Girouard Avenue and Ilona Martonfi, author of Blue Poppy will read from their new books.

When: Thursday, February 18, 2010, at 6:30 p.m.

Where: Paragraphe Bookstore, 2220 McGill College Avenue, Montreal, QC H3A 3P9

Phone: Paragraphe at 514-845-5811

Light refreshments will be served

Thursday, November 19, 2009

News of the Book Launch








Monday evening's book launch for Girouard Avenue and Blue Poppy, at The Word book store on Milton in McGill Univrsity's student ghetto, was a big success. An excellent turn out, 40 to 50 people, readings from the books, excellent food, and a good time for all of us.

Here is Poetry Quebec's review of the book launch.

Thank you to Adrian King-Edwards who hosted the evening. Thank you to everyone who came!

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Book Launch on Monday, November 16





Coracle Press is pleased to announce new poetry books Girouard Avenue by Stephen Morrissey Blue Poppy by Ilona Martonfi Please join us for the book launch Monday, November 16, 2009 at 7:30 p.m. The Word 469, rue Milton 514-845-5640 Refreshments will be served Coracle Press: www.coraclepress.com

Farewell as you leave this place



Stained glass window above the front door at 2226 Girouard Avenue.

Our tour of 2226 Girouard Avenue has come to an end. I have other photographs from that visit last April, and I could add a few more photographs to this, but you've seen enough for now. To most people this visit will mean very little--or nothing--and why should it be any other way? For me, this was an exciting journey into the past.

When I returned to the old flat, it really felt as though no time at all had intervened since I was last there, back in 1969. It was as though I had left the place for just a few minutes and then returned, and in that intervening time the place had mysteriously fallen into the state it is now in, all in the blink of an eye. I suppose at some level, emotional or psychological, or spiritual, time doesn't exist except as chronological time. We grow older, the body wears out just like my old white 1994 Honda Civic that CZ named "Pete" after the abbreviated letters on the license plate. "Good old Pete" we say, personifying the car, making it a familar thing, not just a rusting metal vehicle that gets me back and forth to work. Pete is older and more rusted and I, too, am older and seem tired much of the time. That's the effect of chronological time. I think, also, of my old friend Audrey Keyes who I met again in 2005, after not seeing each other for over forty years. There she sat waiting for me that summer day outside of St. Viateur Bagel Restaurant on Monkland Avenue, near Oxford and only a few blocks west of Girouard, and we immediately recognized each other and began chatting away. Time did not seem to exist, not at the emotional and psychological level, but chronologically we were both forty years older.

There is an archetypal value to Girouard Avenue. Maybe it was the first street many of our families lived on as we moved upward in social class, from St. Henry to Notre Dame de Grace, to "NDG," our new neighbourhood. And people living in NDG love the neighbourhood. Girouard is on the eastern edge of NDG as we drive through the underpass at the bottom of the street and then you're in Lower NDG, turn left on St. Jacques and you're headed for St. Henry, St. Cunegonde, Griffintown, Little Burgundy, or Point St. Charles. That's where we came from, my mother born on Irene Street and my father on Marin, both in St. Henry.

We came up in the world, we were educated, we went to university while our parents never finished high school but our parents worked hard and made sure we would also get ahead, and we did. We valued education and we got good jobs and we became "somebodies" (relatively speaking). You begin on Girouard and you move up, to Hoolahan's flats on Oxford Avenue and Audrey and Bobby Keyes, and Mr. and Mrs. Keyes, are your neighbours, more Irish, Irish everywhere, Irish descendants, Irish names. It was either Irish, English, or Jewish; another friend, Ica Shainblum lived across the street and we all played together. A few doors south was Uncle Herbie and Auntie Dorothy's flat, and a few blocks east is Girouard where my grandmother, great Aunt Essie, and Auntie Mable lived, and later (in the early 1960s) my great Aunt Edna moved to Girouard. As I've said before, my parents and my brother and I also lived there in the early 1950s; and over the years, in the 1930s and 1940s, many other family members lived in the flat on Girouard. Even if you move up to the big house on Montclair Avenue, where I lived for thirteen years, you still have one foot in the old street, in the old neighbourhood, and you're proud of it.

So, Girouard Avenue is more than just a street, it is also a border between one neighbourhood and another, one social class and another, one period in our lives and another. It's a psychological border that we've crossed. If you drive north from St. Jacques (few call it St. James anymore) where Girouard begins, then along Girouard to Cote St. Luc Road, to where Girouard ends--it's not a long street--you've run the full extent of it. It's a journey of years and emotions and a journey from the past, frozen in a kind of suspended animation, like my grandmother's old flat.

How many times I have revisited the Girouard flat in dreams, usually my grandmother is absent, maybe one or both of the old great aunts are there. Or it's empty, no one home. So, this makes me think it isn't only the people, it's the place and the place includes and encompasses the people, the beloved relatives and ancestors, and it encompasses all we've done with our lives. I know I could sit down with any of the ancestors, if it were possible, even with great great and great great great grandparents and beyond the greats, as far into the past as one can journey, and it would still be family, flesh and blood, people I love. So, the place, 2226 Girouard Avenue, means all of this to me. And I say "God bless them all," no matter their social status or what they acomplished or didn't accomplish in life. God bless them. God bless them all.

P.S. Driving by the old flat this morning I see extensive work being done on the place. What I have presented here is the last of 2226 Girouard as it used to exist. I caught it just before the end. It will soon be gone.



Thursday, October 22, 2009

View from back porch






Top photo: my Auntie Ivy, then below is my Uncle Alex, holding their son Herb. Then my grandmother, Edith Sweeney Morrissey, on the same day, holding her new grandson, Herb Morrissey, winter or spring 1939. Then, below, here's the cover of my 1989 book, Family Album (Caitlin Press, Vancouver), taken back in 1953 on the same back porch on Girouard. That's me with my grandmother.

Below are other shots of this same porch, taken in April 2009.





Now we're back inside the flat and it's April 2009 again; this is a view of the lane and the back porch looking out the porch door from the kitchen.









Cover of Girouard Avenue (2009).

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Lane behind Girouard in winter





















I took these photographs a few months before the other interior photographs--it's January or February 2009--photos taken from the lane looking up at the flat.