Photos of poet friends

Several of these photographs were taken the day after 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. We met at the coffee shop (now a Second Cup) on the corner of Patricia Avenue and Sherbrooke Street West, across the street from the apartment building, The Westmore, where Artie Gold lived. Artie is seen here signing the anthology, The Vehicule Poets_Now (2004). Present were Artie Gold, Claudia Lapp, Tom Konyves, Stephen Morrissey, Endre Farkas, Ruth Taylor; absent is Ken Norris and John McAuley who later told me he hadn't been notified of this meeting. 

Other photos were taken the same week at the former St. Viateur Bagel Restaurant on Monkland Avenue.

Artie Gold

 

Artie Gold

                 

Endre Farkas, Stephen Morrissey, and Artie Gold

Tom Konyves 

Claudia Lapp at St. Viateur Bagel restaurant on Monkland Avenue, 2004

Tom Konyves and Carolyn Zonailo

From left: Tom Konyves, Endre Farkas, Claudia Lapp

Some other photos below:

Stephen Morrissey, Ken Norris, and Artie Gold,
at a Chinese restaurant in the 1990s

Stephen Morrissey and Tom Konyves
at a League of Canadian Poets’ AGM,
Edmonton, Alberta, in 2010

            

"Enemies" by Wendell Berry

 

If you are not to become a monster,

you must care what they think.

If you care what they think,

how will you not hate them,

and so become a monster

of the opposite kind? From where then

is love to come—love for your enemy

that is the way of liberty?

From forgiveness. Forgiven, they go

free of you, and you of them;

they are to you as sunlight

on a green branch. You must not

think of them again, except

as monsters like yourself,

pitiable because unforgiving.

Copyright © 1994 by Wendell Berry. 

Construction work outside The Neuro, April 2026

The Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital) is located at the top of University Street in downtown Montreal, across the street from the old Royal Victoria Hospital. The "Royal Vic" is now a part of the "super hospital" on the Glen in West-end Montreal, and the site of the old Royal Vic building is being repurposed and is under construction. (As seen here on 30 April 2026.)

Mural by Mary Harris Filer, at the Montreal Neurological Institute, 2

Here are some details of Mary Harris Filer's mural at The Neuro.

The co-founder of The Neuro, Wilder Penfield, in brown suit and arm extended;
note the extensive coverings worn by surgeons to avoid infections in patients

The patient is modelled after the artist, Mary Harris Filer

                                    Both patient and nurse are images by Filer of herself

In the operating room

                                                                                 
                              Anguish and suffering depicted in Filer’s mural

Visual depiction of mental illness as a kind of demonic possession
this might refer to epilepsy (a major concern of Drs. Penfield and Cone);
epilepsy was considered a mental, moral, or spiritual illness
until the Twentieth Century
 

Dr. William Vernon Cone (1897–1959) was a pioneering American-Canadian neurosurgeon
who co-founded the Montreal Neurological Institute (The Neuro) with Wilder Penfield in 1934

Politicians who helped provide funding for The Neuro,
in centre is Maurice Duplessis, premier of Quebec, 
and to the right is Mayor Camilien Houde of Montreal;
they are shown above the image of the Royal Victoria Hospital

Lines on Trout River in Public Reverie magazine

Some of the poems in Lines on Trout River have now been published in Public Reverie; thank you, Theresa Smalec! A chapbook containing the complete series of poems can be ordered from https://turrethousepress.ca/ Here is the first poem in the chapbook.

                    This is not yet the sea, it is the river.

             —Louis Dudek, Europe

  

It’s nice being alone
in old age, sitting
on the side of the bed
with the radio on,
classical music
on the CBC, and
a book I’m reading,
The Epic of Gilgamesh,
reading
by the light
of a lamp
bought at
an auction
thirty years ago,
and the lamp
even then was old,
made in the 1930s;
it was the MSO
playing Mahler’s
4th movement
of Symphony # 5,
and outside the insects
sing what my English
ancestors called “the
Canadian Symphony”
after they moved
to Ontario from Blackburn
in the north of England,
the least fashionable part of the UK,
they were builders, plasterers,
painters, carpenters,
workers in the mills,
carters, and landlords
renting flats they constructed, 
a distant cousin collecting rents,
and one was a publican
and farmer, at the Yew Tree
Inn—oh tree of death—and the sounds 
are Canadian sounds
on a fall night,
in the darkness,
before sleep.

Lines on Trout River by Stephen Morrissey

             

Lines on Trout River has just been published by Jame Hawes at Turret House Press; this chapbook (booklet) is made up of thirteen poems that refer to the Trout River and the archetype of rivers, time, old age, and the relentless changes in life that we all experience. I lived beside the Trout River from 1979 to 1997 and it was the river that I liked most about living in southwestern Quebec. I think this is the best work I've written in many years; it's different than previous poems I've written but I think it's my authentic voice at this time of my life.   

Copies can be purchased from www.turrethousepress.ca

In Lines on Trout River, Stephen Morrissey draws together influences as diverse as The Epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Mahler, Nelligan, and Wordsworth, yet the poem remains unmistakably rooted in the particular history and geography of rural Quebec. The landscape becomes a “thin place,” where the visible and invisible worlds meet, and where poetry itself becomes an act of spiritual witness. Meditative, unsentimental, and deeply humane, The Lines on Trout River is both elegy and testimony: a powerful reflection on the passage of time and the persistence of the soul through memory and art.

                the Lines separating
                youth from old age,
                and writing poems;
                fields bordered
                by drainage ditches
                and the Morrison Side Road  

Mural by Mary Harris Filer, at the Montreal Neurological Institute, 1

I know of two murals at McGill University, one is by Marian Dale Scott, a prominent artist and wife of poet and law professor Frank Scott, and the other is in a conference room on the first floor of the Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital (The "Neuro") on University Street, part of the McGill University Health Care hospitals. "The Advance of Neurology" is by Mary Harris Filer and was unveiled by Quebec premier, Maurice Duplessis, on 14 November 1954. 

Mary Harris Filer

                                                 

Artist's signature at bottom of the mural

Plaque beside the mural

Memorial to a Child that died, June 2011

 

Night, 6 June 2017

Looking south on de Maisonneuve driving west, just after Decarie

A jewelry store on Victoria Avenue below Sherbrooke

Corner Somerville and Victoria Avenue

At a reading at the Visual Arts Centre on Victoria

 

The garden on June 4, 2026