T.L. Morrisey

Showing posts with label Louis Dudek. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Louis Dudek. Show all posts

Sunday, January 14, 2024

"What is it that a Poet Knows" by Louis Dudek

 

Louis Dudek




What is it that a poet knows

                that tells him ­­ 'this is real?'
Some revelation, a gift of sight,
granted through an effort of the mind ­­
                                    of infinite delight.

All the time I have been writing on the very edge of knowledge,

heard the real world whispering
                    with an indistinct and liquid rustling­­
as if to free, at last, an inextricable meaning!
Sought for words simpler, smoother, more clean than any,
                            only to clear the air
of an unnecessary obstruction
Not because I wanted to meddle with the unknown
        (I do not believe for a moment that it can be done),
but because the visible world seemed to be waiting,
                            as it always is,
somehow, to be revealed

Saturday, April 15, 2023

Historical photos of the Alexis Nihon Plaza

Looking at these old photographs of the Alexis Nihon Plaza I am flooded with memories, all of them happy. The literally hundreds of times I passed through the Plaza, the stores that used to be here that I had forgotten about, the people, and what store replaced a different store in the Plaza. This shopping complex is always immaculate and well maintained. Canadian poet, Louis Dudek, lived on Ingleside Avenue which is within walking distance of the Plaza; he often visited the Plaza and invited many of us to have coffee with him in the food court here. 


1967

Aerial view of the Alexis Nihon Plaza, looking up Atwater Street







This photograph shows the site of the future Alexis Nihon Plaza when it was
a baseball park; you can see the Mother House in the background on the right



























Saturday, October 15, 2022

Louis Dudek in Paradise

I began writing this poem back in 2001 and completed it in 2012, and just found it in my archives. 

A winter afternoon at Mount Royal Cemetery



1)  Homage to Louis Dudek

A cold wind sweeps down
from Mount Royal
to the city below;
this bitter winter
ending with a death.
When a poet dies
a light goes out,
a bit of brilliance
is extinguished,
although poets know
no death is greater than another,
the homeless man surrounded
by plastic garbage bags,
or the former prime minister,
his body carried by a train
slowing at each station.

At the funeral, I listen to Louis' poems
being read, each reader celebrating Louis' life
with anecdotes and poems, a life
dedicated to poetry and teaching.
Louis has moved from temporal
to eternal, from flesh to word;
no more poems will be written by him,
no more meetings in restaurants
to discuss books and art and ideas.

A final grief, a final salute:
the old poet is dead,
the books are written,
the poems recited,
discussions into the evening
come to an end
and we prepare to go home.
We linger at the door
and say "Louis' life
was lived for love of others,
his poems were written out of love."
Outside the March day has turned to night,
we return to our usual lives
feeling diminished by his death
and the world seems
a lesser place.


2) that was then, this is now

The older poets
had a sense of their mission,
it was a lineage of poets,

not a competition
but a place in making
a national literature, the importance

of this in nation building;
now, the nation
is built, but we’ve

lost the propriety of things;
no one was concerned
with “award winning poets”

that was never why we wrote,
it was the obsession with writing poems,
the excitement of discovering a new poet,

and with being a community of poets;
the older poets welcomed the young;
that was when

in the whole country
we had ten or fifteen poets,
not fifteen poets times three hundred,  

not everyone writing their poems
and few reading what was written;
to be a poet was to be the exception,

not a commonplace, it was earned by writing,
not one or two poems, but a lifetime
of work, of building a body of work,

because the words came to you, not just
the mundane, but a vision in the work
an obsession for writing and love

for poetry; eccentricity (which is never
politically correct) was not despised,
it was expected; the tyranny of conformity 

had no place among poets,
it was the writing that mattered;
the courtesy of older poets to the young,

as that day, at McGill’s Arts Building,
I was a graduate student that year
in Dudek’s seminar, discussing Pound,

Yeats, Joyce and Ford Madox Ford,
that year in Louis’s office, when being
with an older poet was a privilege—



The Morrice family monument at 
Mount Royal Cemetery, including
a plaque for James Wilson Morrice



3) James Wilson Morrice

James Wilson Morrice
had to go to Paris
to be an artist

(as years later
John Glassco followed)

leaving the family mansion
(now torn down) on Redpath Street, 
a block from

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts,
where his paintings
are on permanent display— 

William Van Horn, president of the CPR,
who collected art as a hobby, told Morrice’s father
to let him study art abroad after seeing

some of the son’s paintings;
at Mount Royal Cemetery
on one side of the Morrice family’s monument,

James Wilson Morrice’s name and dates (1865-1924)
and place of burial, in Tunis; this is the man Louis Dudek said
“painted grey snow”: “he is a Canadian on his travels.

His destination is one he never reaches,
though others may reach it after him — it is Canada.”
That destination is paradise, to live with summer

year round, not in Montreal, the “Metropolis”, that Morrice rarely
visited after he left, where winter is six months of the year,
the other six divided between summer, fall and spring—

Meanwhile, the Beaver Hall artists, their studio space and gallery
located a block east of St. Patrick’s Church,
held two exhibitions, in 1921 and 1922.

And what about that forgotten Beaver Hall artist,
Darrell Morrisey? She was erased as an artist,
her work discarded by her family after her death, at age 33,

in 1930, it soon became as though she never existed;
and Morrice, the warm ocean breeze and sleeping
on a rooftop in Tunis under the stars—the choreography

of his life, and our life-long work as poets,
the vision of art, the act of creation,
the company of poets—


4) in the company of artists and poets

In the company of artists and poets:
John Cage chatting with Arnold Shöenberg

while Glenn Gould eats supper
with Bach; there’s Jackson Pollock listening

as Artie Gold reads his poem about Bucks County,
and later someone plays Charles Ives’ 2nd Piano Concerto;

Jack Shadbolt meets Emily Carr meeting Nellie McClung
(the granddaughter poet of the better known Nellie),

and HD talks with Virginia Woolf who celebrates
her birthday with James Joyce; Yeats and Jeffers

are in their towers; Jack Kerouac and John Lennon
discuss religion and listen to “Imagine” (which Kerouac hates);

Van Gogh argues with Gauguin; Strindberg and Arthur Miller,
watch Marilyn Monroe holding down her skirt around her knees;

Charlie Chaplin’s silhouette walking into the sunset;
we’re in the eternal, art and music, we’re in Paradise,

where artists and poets create our age,
hard cover books on shelves, abstract paintings on walls,

and just last week lying awake in bed at 5 a.m.,
some kid at a university radio station (in Edmonton) 

playing jazz, Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, 
and John Coltrane, with no idea where this music came from,

only knowing that he likes what he’s listening to,
this art, that it speaks to him—


5) all art is vision (or it's just a repetition of the past)

All art is vision—
in the great museums and concert halls,
what returns us to Spirit is art,

poems sustaining us
over a lifetime,
paintings by the Great Masters

drawings on Lascaux’s
cave walls, hieroglyphics
and Inuit art,

sculpture and pottery,
movies and dance—
all the great art of civilization

returns us to God—
all art is vision
all poetry requires vision
to express the poet’s psyche,
if the soul
is filled with lies 

how can the poetry
not also lie? if the poet
censors the poem,

what is created
but a censored poem?
We try to live  

true to our vision, our journey
of truth, our journey
in Paradise—

--------------------------

Note: "Homage to Louis Dudek", a section of this poem, was first published in Eternal Conversation, a tribute to Louis Dudek. 

The politically correct CBC is destroying Canadian culture; it's time to Defund the CBC. 

Sunday, June 12, 2022

Louis Dudek's white book


Here I am with Louis Dudek, not sure who took the photograph; it is 1993 
at the Loyola Campus of Concordia University, at the League of 
Canadian Poets' AGM, when Louis was made a life member of the
League (an organization he helped to found)

1.

 

One day in the mid-1970s, Louis Dudek came to our graduate seminar with copies of his Collected Poems, (1971); "Does anyone want to buy a copy?" he asked; it was $5.00. I never had any money and passed on buying his Collected Poems, but a few months later I bought a second hand copy of Dudek's Atlantis at The Word Bookstore and I forgot about the Collected Poems of Louis Dudek. Over the intervening years I bought most of Louis' other books as they were published and around 1997, when the League of Canadian Poets AGM was held in Montreal, and I had nominated Louis for a life membership, I brought at least ten of his books with me to the AGM for him to sign. That was a bit much but Louis went along with it, we sat together, he signed his books, he gave his speech, and he left. He mentioned that one of the books of his that I had brought with me that evening had not been distributed, hang onto it, he said, it will be worth something one day, but I forget which book he was referring to. Like all good teachers, Louis was good with fatherly advice. He told me that my M.A. degree would get me a teaching job, and it did and that set me up financially and employment-wise for thirty-five years of my life. Then it was 2020, twenty years later, and I was at Stephanie Dudek's estate sale;  Stephanie was Louis' first wife and, although he died in 2001, many of his books were still stored at the Vendome Avenue home where he used to live. There were copies of Atlantis, in pristine condition, still unwrapped from when they were printed in the UK and shipped over to Montreal. I bought a few copies just for old time's sake and as I left I asked if they had any copies of Louis' Collected Poems; someone, I was told, had just bought all the copies they had, I was out of luck. And then, finally, I found a copy on Amazon; you don't often see Dudek's Collected Poems, 3,000 copies were printed but it didn't sell many copies when it was published and it wasn't widely reviewed. I finally found a used copy for sale by a book seller in Vancouver, for $10.00; I placed my order and a few days later received a phone call, the book was missing a page, did I still want to buy it? Of course I did. The price was reduced to the original $5.00 it had been in 1975 and my copy, a former library copy, was sent to me.

Monday, January 10, 2022

The organ grinder outside of Morgan's Department Store

Here is the final memory of going downtown with my Auntie Mable. It is the organ grinder in front of Morgan's Department Store who I remember from one of those Saturday afternoon trips. I am still trying to find the passage in which the organ grinder is mentioned in a poem by Louis Dudek. 

This Morgan's Department Store was also called Colonial House, that would be the original building as shown below, not the newer wing attached to the rear of the store. Morgan's was founded in 1845 and sold to the Hudson's Bay Company in 1960, this flagship location became La Baie in 1972. Morgan's was the first large department store in Canada; it was also the first large Montreal department store to move to Ste. Catherine Street in 1891 and our commercial downtown area grew from that time on. 

The store is bound by Ste. Catherine Street, where the organ grinder stood outside of the store, Aylmer Street on the east, and Union Street on the west. What also interests me is Phillip's Square, across Ste. Catherine Street from the store, and the location of the original Arts Association of Montreal, later the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. 

There used to be a plaque commemorating Jefferson Davis's visit to Montreal, he stayed at the home of John Lovell, and the plaque was on Morgan's exterior wall on Union Street where Lovell's home had been located; Davis stayed at Lovell's home in 1867; the plaque was removed in 2017.

It seems that a twenty story condo and office building will be built on top of the old Morgan's building.


Morgan's Department Store, 1960s; Union Street and Ste. Catherine Street


Pushing his organ outside of Morgan's on Ste. Catherine Street West


The organ grinder in front of Morgan's


I am told he lived in a shed in Chinatown




Cartoon by John Collins


The organ grinder in the background






Saturday, June 13, 2020

Four Poems by Montreal Poets







The Improved Binoculars
by Irving Layton

Below me the city was in flames:
the firemen were the first to save
themselves. I saw steeples fall on their knees.
I saw an agent kick the charred bodies
from an orphanage to one side, marking
the site carefully for a future speculation.
Lovers stopped short of the final spasm
and went off angrily in opposite directions,
their elbows held by giant escorts of fire.
Then the dignitaries rode across the bridges
under an auricle of light which delighted them,
noting for later punishment those that went before.
And the rest of the population, their mouths
distorted by an unusual gladness, bawled thanks
to this comely and ravaging ally, asking
Only for more light with which to see
their neighbour's destruction.
All this I saw through my improved binoculars.
[1955]

My Lost Youth
by A.J.M. Smith

I remember it was April that year, and afternoon.
There was a modish odour of hyacinths, and you
Beside me in the drawing room, and twilight falling
A trifle impressively, and a bit out of tune.
You spoke of poetry in a voice of poetry,
And your voice wavered a little, like the smoke of your
Benson & Hedges
And grew soft as you spoke of love (as you always did!),
Though the lines of your smile, I observed, were a little
sententious.
I thought of my birthplace in Westmount and what that
involved
-- An ear quick to recoil from the faintest 'false note'.
I spoke therefore hurriedly of the distressing commonness
of American letters,
Not daring to look at your living and beautiful throat.
'She seems to be one who enthuses,' I noted, excusing
myself,
Who strove that year to be only a minor personage out of
James
Or a sensitive indecisive guy from Eliot's elegant shelf.
'What happens,' I pondered fleeing, 'to one whom Reality
claims . . . ?'
• • •
I teach English in the Middle West; my voice is quite good;
My manners are charming; and the mothers of some of my
female students
Are never tired of praising my two slim volumes of verse.
A.J.M. Smith, Poems, New & Collected, Oxford University Press, 1967

The Break-Up
By A.M. Klein

They suck and whisper it in mercury,
the thermometers. It is shouted red
from all the Aprils hanging on the walls.
In the dockyard stalls
the stevedores, their hooks rusty, wonder; the
wintering sailors in the taverns bet.
A week, and it will crack! Here's money that
a fortnight sees the floes, the smokestacks red!
Outside The Anchor's glass, St. Lawrence lies
rigid and white and wise,
nor ripple and dip, but fathom-frozen flat.
There are no hammers will break that granite lid.
But it will come! Some dead of night with boom
to wake the wagering city, it will break,
will crack, will melt its muscle-bound tides
and raise from their iced tomb
the pyramided fish, the unlockered ships,
and last year's blue and bloated suicides.
[1945-46] [1948]

Lyrics of Air
by Louis Dudek

This April air has texture
of soft scented ocean on my face --
no ripple against the skin
but open waves, parabolas from some April place
in the sky, like silk between the fingers
from old Cathay, blown about, or like gigantic roses
whose petals, waving, fall on my face
with a faultless petaline smoothness.
Delicate as a pear, this milk-white air,
to pour over the crust of windy March.
Give me a mouthful of such air, digestible as water,
to rarify in the bones and flow
upward, until
from the bud of my cold lips poetic leaves may grow.
Small Perfect Things (DC Books, Montreal, 1991)



Wednesday, April 1, 2020

"Lyrics of Air" by Louis Dudek



Lyrics of Air
by Louis Dudek
This April air has texture
of soft scented ocean on my face --
no ripple against the skin
but open waves, parabolas from some April place
in the sky, like silk between the fingers
from old Cathay, blown about, or like gigantic roses
whose petals, waving, fall on my face
with a faultless petaline smoothness.
Delicate as a pear, this milk-white air,
to pour over the crust of windy March.
Give me a mouthful of such air, digestible as water,
to rarify in the bones and flow
                                    upward, until
from the bud of my cold lips poetic leaves may grow.
Small Perfect Things (DC Books, Montreal, 1991)

Thursday, May 16, 2019

A.M. Klein's "Heirloom"

 

Map of Montreal from 1910

1.

Looking through an old notebook from 2010 I found a poem I had written about the poet A.M. Klein. Then I remembered that in my first book of poems, The Trees of Unknowing (1978), I had a poem entitled "Heirloom"; when I was young I had been very impressed with Klein's poem of the same title. I wondered when it was that I wrote "Heirloom", probably sometime in the early 1970s but I thought it was much earlier. Then I also remembered that Sandra Goodwin, Bill Goodwin's widow, had told me that she grew up near where Klein lived; that was before Klein became a recluse due to mental illness and she and the other children in the street would greet Klein by saying "Good morning, Maitre Klein" ("Maitre" being the formal way to address a lawyer or notary in Quebec). Sandra was married to Bill Goodwin who was Irving Layton's nephew and best friend for eighty years; I knew Bill because I taught in the same English Department as him and when he retired he said he had retired so I could hold on to my job. Anyhow, I wondered where Klein had lived, I found two addresses in Lovell's Montreal City Directory, one on Clarke (in the Mile End neighbourhood) and one on Querbes in Outremont. The address on Querbes says his employment was as "Public relations counsellor Seagram's"; the Bronfmans certainly supported Klein, they were wonderful patrons of the arts. I taught Klein's "Heirloom" poem for many years; one day I reread my own "Heirloom" poem, it is almost an embarrassment when compared to Klein's.


2.

That generation of poets, Layton, Dudek, Smith, Scott, Klein, welcomed young poets, after all,  who would want to be a poet? Bill Goodwin was Irving Layton's nephew but they were more like brothers. My mother lived on Montclair Avenue and, on occasion, I used to see Bill walking along Monkland Avenue on his way to Irving Layton's home on Monkland; that was in the 1990s when Irving wasn't well and Bill and several others looked after him, it was before Irving entered Maimonides long term care residence. Bill was very kind to me in so many ways; one day, soon after my son was born in January 1979, he phoned to say that it was too cold to take a baby outside, as my wife and I had planned, and he was right. Whatever Bill taught it included poems by Irving Layton and every year he would have Irving in to the college to give a reading. Some times after the reading I would get a lift downtown with them. Poets, like Irving Layton and Louis Dudek, focused on the young, especially if they were poets, so while Irving was talking in the front seat of the car he'd turn around and include me in the conversation. He was always polite and considerate. He'd ask what I was writing and show some interest, despite his famous enormous ego he was also concerned with mentoring young poets; Layton was a natural teacher. But that's what the older poets were like, it wasn't all prizes and ego, they mentored younger poets; it was a small community and anyone wanting to be a poet was treated with some respect. I mention this as it is an heirloom from those days when poets were few but they were dedicated to the Muse and to the life of being a poet.


 

Thursday, January 24, 2019

A.J.M. Smith of Chesterfield Avenue, Westmount







Poems, which are the spiritual blood of a poet,
Renew themselves in an eternal April,
And renew us also who take them into ourselves.
Thus the poet becomes as one of the gods
And in the church of the poem we communicate.

                            —A.J.M Smith, "In Memoriam: E.J.P. 26 April 1964"

                            Poems, New & Collected, p. 142

1.

I've been thinking about A.J.M. Smith's poetry lately, longer than "lately", maybe a few years and I'm still divided re. if I like it or not. Smith grew up on Chesterfield Avenue in Westmount and my friend Paul Leblond also grew up on Chesterfield, across the street from Smith, but that was thirty years later (long after Smith had moved down to the States). This reminds me that Paul's father, Dr. C.P. Leblond, who was head of the anatomy department at McGill, was famous for his discovery of stem cells. Up to a few years ago if you had a doctor educated at McGill they would have been at one time a student of Dr. C.P. Leblond. He didn't retire from McGill until the early 2000s and I remember Paul telling me of his visits, as a child, to his father's office in the Strathcona Anatomy and Dentistry Building. His office was two stories and had previously been the office of Dr. Hans Selye, famous for his studies of stress and distress. In 1943 Dr. Selye had commissioned Marian Dale Scott to paint a mural in his office and a few years after that this became Dr. Leblond's office. The mural is entitled "Endocrinology" and is 12' by 16', enormous. At any rate, as we all know, Marian Dale Scott's husband, F.R. Scott was good friends with A.J.M. Smith from the mid-1920s and they formed the Montreal Group of poets who brought modern poetry to Canada.




2.

If I read someone I like, or someone who interests me, then I'll read everything they've written including whatever has been written about them. A.J.M. Smith's Poems, New & Collected (1967) is probably the first book of poems that I ever bought; I still have reservations about his work but (as we say) such is life. It's difficult to find much on Smith's life, for instance did he have any siblings? Maybe this shouldn't matter but I am a nosy Parker, literally since my mother was a Parker, and I have a lot of the old Irish police detective in me that likes to figure things out. Years ago I found a copy of Smith's anthology (he is an excellent anthologist) Seven Centuries of Verse, English and American, From the Early Lyrics to the Present Day (1947). The book's inscription suggests that Smith had at least one possible sister, Dorothy Brown, and that she lived in or near Huntingdon, QC. Maybe this is common knowledge but it was new to me. Smith is pretty closed mouth about his personal life. The Huntingdon High School is now a grade school and where my grandsons are students. Another anthology edited by Smith, this time with M.L Rosenthal of NYU, is Exploring Poetry (1955). If every home should have several good poetry anthologies (which I believe) then these two would fit the bill. Smith and Rosenthal are from a time when poetry really mattered, they aren't writing out of an ideology or an attempt to exploit something that is timeless, they are writing out of love for poetry. For this reason alone I'll continue reading Smith's poems and when I find something by Rosenthal I'll buy it and discuss it here.



3.

I had forgotten about English Poetry in Quebec (McGill University Press, 1965) which I read in high school. The idea for the Foster (Quebec) Poetry Conference originated with A.J.M, Smith and Frank Scott and was organized by John Glassco (who also edited the proceedings, as pictured). It's interesting that the idea for this conference came from three members of the Montreal Group of Poets, they helped bring Modern poetry to Canada back in the 1920s; this ongoing involvement in poetry also emphasizes their literary importance. It's interesting that the Foster Poetry Conference was held in October 1963, just two months after the Vancouver Poetry Conference held at UBC; for different reasons both poetry conferences are important in Canadian literary history and it might be worthwhile to discuss these events together. These older Quebec poets were not stodgy old men, they believed in the importance of poetry; this is especially true in the essays by Smith and Layton, both of whom have a passion, urgency, and intelligence in their discussion of poetry. For background information on the conference read Brian Busby's excellent biography of John Glassco, A Gentleman of Pleasure: One Life of John Glassco, Poet, Memoirist, Translator, and Pornographer (2011), it's one of the best literary biographies that I've read. 





4. 

I write the date inside the book that I am reading and I see that I read A.J.M. Smith's On Poetry and Poets (NCL, 1977) in July 1980. The whole book is a fascinating discussion of Canadian poetry. In some ways it reminds me of John Sutherland's Essays, Controversies and Poems (NCL, 1972) but also of Louis Dudek's book reviews, criticism, and commentaries on poetry. In Smith's book there are two essays that need to be mentioned; the first is "The Confessions of a Compulsive Anthologist" written in 1976; this is about as autobiographical as you'll get from A.J.M. Smith and you can see his passion for poetry was present even when he was a high school student reading a poetry anthology under his desk. The second essay was given at the Foster Poetry Conference, it is "The Poet and the Nuclear Crisis" (1965). He concludes this essay by writing "it is the arts and the humanities, and particularly poetry, the most humane of all the arts, that can offer that education in sensibility and virtue that we must submit to if we are to live." That's the kind of passionate statement that leads me to read more of Smith's writing. In fact, passion is something we don't talk about these days, maybe passion sounds naïve and if so, then we need more passion among our poets. So, let's talk about something that people don't talk about anymore and that is passion, and passion includes enthusiasm and a sense of urgency regarding the importance of poetry. It is passion in a poet's work that changes people, it makes the reader realize he or she is in the presence of something greater than what is normally experienced. When I was seventeen years old and an apprentice poet I read Allen Ginsberg's statement that poets should "Scribble down your nakedness. Be prepared to stand naked because most often it is this nakedness of the soul that the reader finds most interesting."  With this one statement Ginsberg changed my life. Where are the poets of passion today? There are no Earle Birneys, no Al Purdys or Dorothy Livesays, no Alden Nowlans or Gwendolyn McEwens. Where are the poets who change the reader's life because that is what real poetry does, it changes one's life. Our most passionate poet, Irving Layton, has become a solitary historical figure, a voice that is no longer listened to.  Smith's passion makes his poetry and criticism worth returning to and reading.

NOTE: The conclusion of this was published on this blog in July 2019 under the title "A Reappraisal of A.J.M. Smith".