Visiting Place Alexis Nihon, 3 march 2010

The shopping plaza at Alexis Nihon

Place Alexis Nihon, Tower One, the solarium accessed from the shopping plaza

 

Adam Shoalts on Hubert Darrell, explorer

I highly recommend Adam Shoalts’ new book, Vanished Beyond the Map, The Mystery of Lost Explorer Hubert Darrell (2025). What a great book; largely a mystery (discovering the life story and possible fate of Hubert Darrell, an explorer of Canada's far north), it is also a celebration of Canada's north, and it is fascinating to read of the people who were Hubert Darrell's contemporaries.

Hubert Darrell is the son of Charles Darrell after whom the Montreal-born Beaver Hall artist, Darrell Morrisey, was named. Darrell Morrisey's father, T.L. Morrisey, was a business colleague of Charles Darrell. Here is more information on Darrell Morrisey. Below is possibly the only existing photograph of Hubert Darrell;

Hubert Darrell

Hubert Darrell

Note: Image restored and colourized by Chat GPT.

Old Age

 

Don't assume that growing old is the same for everyone, or that it will be a pleasant time of love and family. Some old people end up nuts, some are bedridden; some die in their 60s; some have no family; some are alone and lonely; some get no respect, no love, no comfort; some live in poverty, some end up in homes sharing a room with someone with dementia; some sit all day in a wheelchair in front of a TV; not everyone is loved and cherished and have their health in old age; some repeat the same sentence all day and have no idea who you are; some have hip replacements and two days later have gone gaga and peeing from their eighth floor hospital window; some are sick for ten years before they die; some outlive everyone they know; some are surrounded by caring family; some are robbed by their sons and daughters and never visited again; some end up depressed; some die while having a nap on the living room couch watching TV, and all old people will agree that these people are the lucky ones. Some old people are well looked after by family and friends; some have sons, daughters, and other care-givers who are loving and care for them; some live with their sons and daughters; some keep their health; some live into their nineties in fairly good health; some old people stay living in their own home surrounded by what is familiar to them, but all old people fear they will be have to face the most difficult time of their life alone, afraid of being isolated and lonely. Whatever the case, for many old people, being old is not a happy time. Blessed are the elderly who have loving family and friends who care for them. 

The rabbit is happy

 

A few days ago I sprained my ankle and couldn’t feed the rabbit. He went two days without carrots from me and then I decided I had to feed him. Because my ankle was swollen and black and blue I couldn’t put on shoes so I walked, or hobbled, to the back yard in socks and left the carrots and then came indoors right away; I looked out of the dining room window and the rabbit was there, he must have been watching me leave the carrots for him. My wife said he was “starving” and that he’s dependent on me. I hope not. Well, there you go, I didn’t want to let him down and we're both happy. I mean, the rabbit and I are happy.

Urban wildlife

 

My cousin Bob suggested leaving some carrots near the pile of branches at the back of the garden, maybe the rabbit would show up and we'd see if this was his home. And that is what happened, the rabbit appeared and now he sits in front of his home. The days are getting longer, over an hour longer since early January, and spring seems to be on its way. This has been the coldest and snowiest winter that I can remember, everyday it seems to be -12 C but "feels like" (with the wind chill) -22 C. We'll all be glad when this winter is over. We wait and wait and then we have a single mild day and think we've turned the corner but we haven't, it's -9 C right now (on February 21st) and we had more snow last night. Oh well, I am enjoying seeing the rabbit and leaving him a few pieces of carrot everyday. It's a small reprieve from the relentless and unpleasant winter we're having. But the rabbit is thriving, it's like the country out there even though we live in the city, less than twenty minutes from the downtown; there is a considerable amount of green space in parts of the city, not just parks but people's backyards. When I was growing up here you'd never see any urban wildlife, now we share our environment with rabbits, racoons, skunks, groundhogs, the ubiquitous squirrels, many different types of birds but notably cardinals who I hear singing every morning, and chickadees. There are fewer insects, we are destroying monarch butterflies and other insects. Most of what used to be nature, abandoned farmers' fields, they have all been built on and so we're all in this together, urban wildlife has had to move into the urban sprawl that is city if they want to survive. As Joni Mitchell sang, “We’ve paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” That is exactly what we have done. Above are some photographs and a 13 second video of the rabbit. 

Against Change/2

 

Philips Square seen from The Bay on 17 October 2009

    

One of the most existentially bleak things I've seen are television commercials promoting online gambling. These commercials extol the great fun to be had by solitary gambling on one's IPhone. In the commercials the actors portraying happy gamblers are all laughing and having a great time by themselves; even when shown in a room full of people, each person is alone, isolated, gambling on their IPhones; whatever the gimmick is to get them to gamble it's working--advertising works--as soon as the gambling begins these people are transformed, suddenly they are all laughing and happy. This scenario is what the gambling companies want you to believe, this is the lie they are promoting. These gambling companies would promote solitary drinking if they could get away with it, maybe that’s the next big thing.

    There are moral values for a reason; life is good when there are moral values, life has a structure by which people can live. We can see the result of our Western society's abandonment of morality; the result of society’s liberalization of the last fifty years has made society, and our individual lives, worse; it's become a free-for-all of arguing and "do what you want as long as it doesn't hurt someone else" attitude. We have fewer relationships, our families are scattered, we are isolated and alienated from other people, mental illness is rampant, sexuality is confused, and our children have been sacrificed for liberal reforms. Liberalization proceeds to a dystopian world of amorality and the inevitable loss of free speech. The children are not doing well in this new world that has abandoned morality. Liberalization, open mindedness, was ostensibly intended to make society more equitable, to remove injustices, to improve society, and to decriminalize non-victim crimes, but it didn't work out that way.

    What did abandoning moral values achieve? In the past we never had homeless people sleeping in the streets, we never had widespread drug use, and the same applies to access to pornography, gambling, prostitution, and so on. Go back fifty years. People had moral values, rules to live by, that supported society and emphasized people living a moral life; they were the underpinnings of a good, decent society. Today everyone has an opinion, there is a cacophony of disagreeing voices; people are arguing, opinions matter but facts don't matter, it's all subjective and up to personal opinion. It's better to say nothing or the progressives will attack you, and there is no going back. We laugh at morality, we barely remember that people once had moral values, and we smirk when morality is mentioned—grin and smirk, grin and smirk—. And if you express anything in public that is  critical of the new morality, the thought police will fine you, disagreeing is a hate crime; it's a crime to disagree with the currently fashionable opinions of others. When our moral values were denied, abolished by government to buy our vote, then almost immediately society began to collapse. 

    Today, good people are silenced by fear of being attacked, and society is increasingly looking like some dystopian facsimile of what we once had. We're told good and bad don’t exist, it’s all relative. The new morality does not include free speech; it is a morality of censorship. No one wants to return to oppressive values, to misogyny, to prejudice or racism, but what we have now is not working. What we change is at a cost; no one has gained anything by discarding the moral foundations of society in favour of the possibility of a better society, it didn't work; gambling is one of the most addictive activities and I suspect the IPhone makes it even more addictive, like doom scrolling, YouTube, Facebook, X, Instagram, Tik Tok, Pornhub, and the rest of "social" media hell.

Edited: 04, 05 March 2026

St. Augustine Catholic Church, 01 March 2012

One day I drove by the old St. Augustine Catholic Church; it was the church of my Auntie Mabel and the church of my grandmother‘s funeral in April 1965. A few years after St. Augustine’s closed the building was reopened as River's Edge Church, a nondenominational Protestant church that is, I hear, highly successful. The congregation of the former St. Augustine Catholic Church now worship at "the church of Notre-Dame-de-Grace, home to an active French-speaking community" on NDG Avenue. Photos taken on 01 March 2012, my mother’s 96th birthday. 

The hidden trail in February

It's been a very cold winter and it looks like it will continue being very cold until the end of March. Here are photographs from a walk on February 17, on the hidden trail; this winter, beginning in early November, has not been a time for any really pleasant walks. But we're Canadians, we endure. And we wait for spring.

Against Change

A stained glass window at the United Church
of Canada, Huntingdon, Quebec, dedicated to
Robert Sellar, author and founder and editor
of the now defunct Huntingdon Gleaner newspaper.

 

How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse).  

                                                    — John Cage 

It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.

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

 

Whatever we change, we change at the loss of something else, and not every change is for the better. We believe in change and celebrate what is new, but at great expense to ourselves. Some things that we changed for something new we may have considered reforms, but they ended up making life worse, or more complicated, or they destroyed institutions that have supported society for centuries. Not much thought is given to how change will affect us, what we are giving up, what we are replacing, or what we have lost. We are a society that believes in change for its own sake, that what is new is better than what is old, and people cheer for change as though all change is wonderful. What people are cheering for now may be what people will regret in the future.

    The reason we adopted the metric system is that it was presumed it would make us more economically competitive with other nations, for instance, with the European Union. Of course, the young accept the metric system, it's all they have ever known for measuring and weighing things, and it is taught in schools. Others among us have never wholeheartedly accepted metrification; fruit and vegetables in grocery stores are weighed in both metric and the imperial system, in ounces and pounds, and measurement for building construction material is still in the imperial system, we buy a sheet of plywood that is eight feet by four feet, a two by four is measured in inches, and so on. Measure twice, cut once, is the carpenter's rule; and it is still done in inches and feet.

    Metrification meant giving up an aspect of both our collective inheritance and the use of words that pertain to measurement. But we didn't care, we accepted something that displaced centuries of our history, our way of life, and our language. Metrification moved us further from what is specific and historical, the Avoirdupois system, and into what was conceived in conferences and has very little connection to the everyday life of everyday people. My concern here is not which is the better system of weights and measurement, it the loss of language, history, and our way of life; of course, we assume that we can't go back, that going back will never happen.

    The Imperial system is derived from the Avoirdupois system which originated eight hundred years ago, certain words are from Old English, the Romans, and earlier civilizations. An "inch" is 1/36th of a yard, from the Old English "ince" or "ynce"', and it is 1/12th of a foot. A "foot" is from the Old English, it is a linear measurement of a man's foot measured as twelve inches. A "yard" is the length of a man's belt but also calculated by King Henry I as the distance from his nose to the thumb of his outstretched hand, it is 36 inches in length. While a "furlong", a word still used in horse racing, is the length of the average plowed furor, it is 660 feet long. A "mile" is from the Romans and calculated as 5,280 feet; a "country mile" refers to travelling over difficult terrain over a long distance since it is not a straight line.

    Meanwhile, the metric system dates back to around the time of the French Revolution, from 1795 to 1799, replacing other systems of measurement. The metre was determined by dimensions of the Earth; the kilogram or unit of mass was based on the volume of the litre. It was not long before France and then the rest of Europe had adopted the metric system. This system of measurement is a child of conferences, both the Treaty of the Metre (1875) and the Conférence générale des poids et mesures continued to invent and increase divisions of the material world according to the metric system.

    If our previous system of measurement is ancestral and originated in a pre-industrial rural society, then the metric system is fairly recent, originating in cities, by intellectuals and academics, and based in measurement for science, business, and urban dwellers; it is not a system of measurement with a relationship with the natural world, with the earth, or with anything to do with forests, rivers, wild life, oceans, fish, no coast lines, farming, small towns, hunting, and so on. Perhaps most urban dwellers don't care about forests, rivers, wild life, oceans, fish, coast lines, farming, small towns, hunting, and so on. The metric system does not spring from the earth that we walk on or from our ancestors or a belief in the importance of place or where we live; its origin is an abstract invented system of measurement, it is an inbred system based on itself. 

    How do we define what it means to be a human being and does this definition include a soul? The soul does not resonate to the metric system, the soul demands specificity, place, tradition, and history; the soul includes forests, rivers, wild life, oceans, fish, coast lines, farming, small towns, hunting, and so on. The metric system was imposed on us as so much else has been imposed on us; what is being imposed on us moves us away from tradition, our ancestors, and the ground on which we walk. The metric system does not spring from place, or from our ancestral and historical place.

    Metric displaced pounds, ounces, inches, and feet, it displaced what our ancestors knew and lived with, and it displaced words that were used every day by average people going about their lives. We can't go back to the old system but we should remember that change is not always for the best, that what changes displaces what we already have, and in retrospect what we already have may not be all that bad. Today's society is beginning to look very different from what we had, and were happy with, even just five years ago. I am not saying that change is not needed in society, but change and the direction in which our society is now headed is not a place some of us want to go, it looks to be dominated by the State, by globalism, by the deterioration of the family unit, by a laissez-faire morality, by the end of our way of life, by everybody talking at odds with everybody else, and by replacing our vocabulary with new words that, in effect, replace and destroy the past. Anyone opposed to metrification was depicted as a crackpot, reactionary, terrible people, and trying to hold back "progress" (all of the usual reactions by the vocal liberal minority). One day you won't even be able to recognize society because of the changes imposed on us by progressives. 

Note: this was originally published here on 22 November 2020 under the title "The Metric System"; it has been edited, expanded upon, and republished here.

Edited: February 25, 27, 2026; 06 March 2026.

Rabbit on video

 One more video of the rabbit. . . 

 

Home of the rabbit

I assumed the rabbit lived in one of the backyards adjacent to ours. If you look at our street, or most other streets around here, you'll see people's homes and in front of the homes there is a sidewalk on both sides of the street and an asphalt road running between the sidewalks (I am being simplistic but I want to make a point). It seems to be relentless city but there are backyards behind each of the houses, there are two backyards adjacent to each other; on some blocks this land is taken up with a lane (the lanes of NDG are a great place to take a walk) and some backyards have flower or vegetable gardens, some are just grass, some have a swimming pool, and most aren't used much. So, the rabbit and other urban wildlife have a lot of land to enjoy and a lot of places to live and places where food can be found. And then, looking at our backyard, my Canadian Cottage Garden, I saw the rabbits' footprints, his trail, and it led from where I leave carrots for him to a pile of branches and weeds, I left these in a pile at the rear of the garden not wanting to bag and discard this stuff, but also wanting to add to the diversity of what grows and what is present in the garden. There are flowers and bushes and there is a growing wild space, planned by me last summer, and part of this is a pile of green vegetation. Now I see the rabbit probably lives in this pile of vegetation, people say rabbits live underground, perhaps under the vegetation. Anyhow, I'm happy with his presence and I don't plan on growing vegetables, just flowers and hostas, hydrangeas, and so on, nothing he'll want to eat. 

Here are photographs, taken from the second floor bedroom window of our home, of the backyard in winter with the rabbit's path from where I leave carrots for him to where he possibly lives.

                    

Where the rabbit lives.

Where carrots are left for the rabbit.

The rabbits' home?

The rabbit's ears are burning, he knows someone is talking about him... 

Someone phoned yesterday, the first thing they asked was "how's the rabbit?"

I am now eating carrots and they're pretty good, not much taste but good.

Yesterday, around 6 p.m., I looked outside and there was the rabbit eating his carrots; he's really just a little guy. When he finished he ran off to a neighbour's backyard.

Note: Top photos were taken on 13 February 2026; other, bottom photos, taken in January 2026.

"World's Gone Wrong" by Lucinda Williams

 

Lucinda Williams

They get up every morning and they go to work
He sells cars and she's a nurse
Workin' long hours is the devil's curse
Things are gettin' tight, but it could be worse

She tries hard to ignore the news
Nothing makes sense and she gets confused
Between what is false and what is true
And she worries they won't get through

Come on, baby, we gotta be strong
Dark days are getting long
Looking for comfort in a song
Everybody knows the world's gone wrong
Everybody knows the world's gone wrong

They can see what's going down
Empty houses all over town
So many lost are never found
And bad, bad signs are all around

A lot of people being put on the street
It's gettin' harder to make ends meet
He comes home every night feelin' beat
And wonders how long he can take the heat

Come on, baby, we gotta be strong
Dark days are getting long
Looking for comfort in a song
Everybody knows the world's gone wrong
Everybody knows the world's gone wrong

She stares out the window and shakes her head
She can't believe the things she's read
She can't believe what's being said
Some days she can't get outta bed

She hopes this won't last forever
She needs to believe it's gonna get better
It's getting hard to keep it together
They need each other now more than ever

Come on, baby, we gotta be strong
Dark days are getting long
Looking for comfort in a song
Everybody knows the world's gone wrong
Everybody knows the world's gone wrong

She holds him tight and softly smiles
Says, "Baby, let's put on some Miles"
And dance barefoot across the tiles
And forget our troubles for a little while

Everybody knows the world's gone wrong
Everybody knows the world's gone wrong
Everybody knows the world's gone wrong
Baby, the world's gone wrong
Baby, the world's gone wrong
Everybody knows the world's gone wrong
Everybody knows the world's gone wrong
Everybody knows the world's gone wrong

Note: Above is Lucinda Williams performing her song.

Below: Lucinda Williams was interviewed on PBS's evening news, 7 p.m., February 19, 2026. It is worth watching and hearing what she says has to say; Lucinda Williams is a highly talented and intelligent person.

Rabbit time, u can't touch this

Today’s carrot purchase.

Our resident rabbit with carrots.

At the IGA today, two pound bags of carrots were selling for 87 cents a bag, of course I bought three bags for our resident rabbit; that’s $3.00 for six pounds of carrots while five pounds of carrots is usually $5.00. This should last me over a month or so of daily feeding the rabbit. Yesterday, I saw the rabbit running across the backyard, the days are getting longer and the crepuscular light he favours is later in the day. This morning, after I finished shovelling last night’s snow, I saw what looked like a small dog running along the sidewalk on the other side of the street; then I realized it was the rabbit. He’s a busy little fellow! He's also avoiding the crows who would love to swoop down and fly away with a rabbit; however, I suspect he's too heavy for that.

"The Great Year"

Walking to Meadowbrook Golf Course, 27 March 2020

I wrote "The Great Year" in the mid- to late- 1990s. Here is the complete, edited, version available on the internet archive.

The Great Year is a collection of poems that celebrate a period of time that lasts 25,868 years during which Earth passes through the twelve zodiacal signs, and the Great Months, each lasting approximately 2,500 solar years. Poetry is the voice of the human soul, and like astrology and mythology, it is also the language of the unconscious mind, of dreams, symbolism, irrationality, and intuition. 

Commentary on Continuation III, Introduction (Edited)

 

Downtown Montreal, 1960s

This third book, the parts were written but never collected to make a book out of them, let's call it "a proposed book", by Louis Dudek, and continuing his Continuation project, was meant to be his final Continuation statement; the incomplete and unassembled nature of this text coincides with the incomplete nature of the whole project. There isn’t a completed book titled Continuation III; there are bits and pieces, an assemblage of fragments that are significant. Continuation III is the deconstruction of Continuation I and II. It is the intervention of life over art, the separation of artifice and authenticity. The triumph of truth over poetry’s facsimile of authenticity. It is where poetry ends and the last words and absolution begin.

Final lines in Continuation III:

Stand there and remember

the paltriness of worldly claims

and the immensity

that is always now.

--The Surface of Time (2000), p. 84

-o-

The content of Continuation III was published in two installments by Sonja Skarstedt’s Empyreal Press. “Continuation III [Fragment]” and “Bits & Pieces [A Recitation]” both appear in The Caged Tiger (Empyreal Press, Montreal, 1997). “Bits & Pieces [A Recitation]” is the only section of all three "Continuation" that deviates from the style, use of epigrams, and line breaks found in the previous two books. The final poems are in Dudek’s last book, The Surface of Time (2000).

There is no single volume or completed series of poems called Continuation III but there are fragments, and completed sections, of what might have been the text of this non-existent third book. In Dudek's The Caged Tiger (1997) there is "Continuation III (Fragment)"; it has four sections and the fourth section emphasizes the importance of poetry; this is followed by "Notes for Ken" (Norris), these are page numbers and notes explaining some of the references and meaning of this section. Then, Dudek published Surface of Time (2000) and the final Continuation III poems are included here, "Sequence from "Continuation III". This is the conclusion to the Continuation project; it emphasizes the importance, value, and journey of Dudek’s poetry, both writing poetry and reading poetry; in addition to poetry the other topic in the Continuation texts is God, the divine presence, and there are references to both God and poetry throughout all three Continuation books. Suddenly, the poem ends, not in mid-sentence but it ends (as life ends), the various fragments have ended but it still has the feeling of continuation; it might serve as Dudek's literary “last will and testament": it's the gift of the importance of poetry. But it is also a failed completion of the Continuation project and proves my belief that most long, multi-volume poems end in failure, not in completion, and, as Pound said of his Cantos, it does not cohere. 

These two books in which the Continuation III poems appear contain other short poems, and this might suggest that the energy for completing Continuation had run out, I suspect that this is the case; perhaps poetry is a young person’s activity, it requires energy the old don’t have; but Dudek might have asked himself why write short poems when the larger and more consequential Continuation project needs to be completed? The obvious answer is that he no longer had the energy or strength, or vision, to sustain a longer poem.

-o-

Continuation III is preoccupied with and describes what it’s like to be old. It has a quality of increasing fragmentation, the body is collapsing, it's closing down,, it is beginning to reach its end.

It is possible some parts of Continuation III were written much earlier and then recycled into the final book. I have tried to indicate both the movement of time and the various insights in these three books; dates for composition remain approximate, for instance, the embryo of Continuation III was in 1990.

-o-

"Continuation III" (this section is found at the end of The Caged Tiger) is divided into four sections with an additional section, “Bits & Pieces [A Recitation]” at the very end of the book. Between these two sections is “Notes for Ken [Norris]”, that briefly elaborate Dudek’s vision in personal terms, not abstract ideas but poetry. This writing is Dudek in his old age, in which the theme of youth vs. (old) age is further developed. This is a poem of summation of the important points in Continuation I and II. The fragmentary nature, writing in fragments, is important here. It seems that in old age all there is are fragments; indeed, one doesn’t have the strength to write a long poem without relying on the fragmentary nature of the poem. In old age this is all that’s left of the individual; it’s fragments, not much else but fragments and inevitable death. And death, meditations on death, run throughout this poem. While this is the weakest of the three books—because it is incomplete and published in two separate volumes— it might also be the most moving, written directly from Dudek’s profound experience when he wrote this section.

-o-

The most difficult time in a person’s life is when they are at their weakest, it is when we are old. If one is a sensitive or intelligent person old age is a time of physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual decline to inevitable death. As one grows old the body wears out, just as the body of an old car rusts, parts wear out and have to be replaced, and nothing works as well as it used to. After a lifetime of stress one’s ability to handle emotional conflict is at its lowest; we’ve survived death, divorce, betrayal, but there isn’t much left to us, our nerves are shot... The brain is also wearing out, thought processes are not as fast as they used to be, there is the possibility of dementia and senility. As well, one wonders if the spirituality that was once a support is now viable, facing the end one might wonder if religion was never more than a fairy tale; or, one’s spirituality is strengthened by the circumstances of one’s life. Around you, all of your old friends and family members are dying, you are more and more alone, and you must face your own inevitable death. There is the chance that one’s family, one’s own children, have turned on you and invented a rift, the very people you loved the most have become the biggest disappointment of your life. Do they care? Perhaps not at all. This is a dismal picture of old age. This is what Dudek is writing about when he says that old people are either always smiling or always scowling; that the older one gets the more one looks like a corpse. Some old people are strong and resilient, they have the support of loving families and have a positive outlook on life; however, many others become bitter as they grow old, and some become insane, gags, with their inability to handle the terrible final demands of their existence.

-o-

Note the fragmentary nature of Continuation III, note that it is a fragment in a fragment. Life has dissolved into its separate parts, there isn’t the energy to work on a larger manuscript.

-o-

There is still poetry and “shining”, what is brilliant, mysterious, against the world of appearance, is a counterpoint to the world of appearance and possible illusion. The infinite, one of Dudek’s favourite words, seems to be a part of life, for those able to perceive it, as well as the experience of poetry. Some excerpts:

We are tied to a chariot called time

and dragged along the road

(58)

Well, you’re old only once

Something to be said for that



And thanks to the collection of manuscripts

we now know, before we die

what our friends really thought of us

(59)



Against this, he writes:



There are days when

whatever is is bright



(63)



An Appearance Erscheinung

not “mere appearance”

but a shining

EPIPHANEIA

(64)



Why should I bow to authority?

The poem is my authority

if I want truth.



(65)



-o-

Tragi-comedy, comic-tragedy

Let’s see how you will laugh

when your time comes.

(69)



And accept everything that is given—

pain, darkness, death.

So I am living it

for the last time

like the young

who are living it

for the first time

Ah!

The lilacs falling over themselves

on the garage roof,

and the trellis of trees, making their leaves

for a new summer.



(70-71)

-o-

the one you lie to is the one you love.

“Santuzza, criedi mi!”

cries out Turridu

and died with the lie on his lips.



“Santuizza, credi me! Santuzza, credi me!”



If it’s the truth it fits like a glove,

but the one you lie to is the one you love.

. . . .

Where are the kind friends that used to pass,

and the lovers, with laughing loves—

where are they gone from this world of glass?

(71)

-o-

I am a hole in space,

empty as matter, hungry as death—

can eat up the universe in my maw.

I push into unknown infinite world...



(Came to the sun, came to the earth

and wedged into matter)



I am an interloper,

even now as I push my pencil in the dark

and write this poem.

(76-77)

-o-

His advice:

Keep pushing ahead

with all the language arts,

developing new brain cells

And the reader rubbing his bald pate

in irritation—

Canadian (or American)

“entreprenoors”

sipping their “kreem the menthe”

to their “déjà voo”—





Some of this is beautiful, simply exquisite writing. 

(I don’t remember what the event was all about but in the mid-1990s I was driving Louis and a few others to a Greek restaurant (on the corner of Northcliffe Avenue and Sherbrooke Street West), I remember Dudek correcting me on my pronunciation of “déjà vu”... it was the same restaurant where the poet Keitha MacIntosh used to spend hours correcting student papers and drinking tea. She lived across the street in the large apartment building on the northwest corner, on the corner next across the street from the restaurant. Alas, she, too, has departed (in August 2012) this veil of tears... this vale of soul-making.). Actually, I think Keitha may have been there when we entered the restaurant, but not sure about that.

-o-

Ah, the tears, the tears of forgetfulness

for all our sorrows

For all the good we leave behind

(Even you, my dear,

whom I love more than myself

—the self that I despise)

(82)

-o-

Back, for a minute, to epigrams:

The New Yorker has set a very high standard

for perfume advertising

So has “the Booker Prize”

for best-sellers.

(86)

-o-

Underlying the whole poem is the importance of poetry, but also of languages, of knowing several languages possibly in order to be a literate and educated individual. In his old age Dudek was translating Greek poetry using a bilingual dictionary; he told me, “it’s simple”, just follows the order of the words and look them up in a dictionary.

-o-

The second section in Continution III is “Bits & Pieces [A Recitation]”. This section is made up of “Bits & Pieces”, but it’s an interesting poem. It posits two voices of the same person speaking with some directions or instructions as to how it should be read (for instance, “cut here”, “pause”, “break”, “long pause”, and so on). The voice that is italicized could be Dudek’s thinking while the voice in plain type could be Dudek addressing an audience; there are other variations of this. Italics could indicate answers or responses the one speaking, the unconscious mind, the fragmentation of the speaker’s voice, and so on.


The world is always full

of the young.

(99)

The body breaks down. If one medicine fails

you try another.

In the end they all fail.

But you keep on trying.

Only youth

never fails.

(106)

-o-

“Sequence from Continuation III” appears in The Surface of Time (Empyreal Press, Montreal, 2000). This is the final “sequence” and conclusion of the poem. It is fragmentary, as thinking is fragmentary, moving from one thought to the next but always overshadowed with Dudek’s concerns: poetry, infinity, youth vs. age, and so on. Poetry seems to be one approach to an awareness of eternity:


Time and space are a construct,

we know it.

But before time and space, what was there?


Eternity is the surface of time.

(80)


What started things, what

was there before the creation

in unknowable to us.

But it shines

from a leaf, from a letter

on the perfect page.


Poetry is a wandering search

an escape from gravity—

a space-walk in the open.

(81)

-o-

And then we have a memory, an anecdote, regarding the “many funerals” Dudek attended as a child. It is the beginning of his sense of mortality, of the utter transience of life. It is the positioning of youth and age beside each other, of an awareness of temporality, an awareness of death. But with this awareness is also a more difficult awareness, it is of the magnificence of life, the multiplicity of existence, the “shining” features of life, the transcendence of temporality found on poetry and life.

Then, he gives us another memory from childhood, “How you fumbled in class,/ how you failed in arithmetic” (83), and then the final, compelling and deeply moving words of this monument of poetry. For, as I remember thinking as we left Dudek’s funeral (on the side of Mount Royal, within walking distance of St. Joseph’s Oratory) that cold March day in 2001, we had greatness among us, we had a Colossus (as Henry Miller referred to a writer friend of his) among us, and now we are alone to face the demands of “savage modernity”:

Go out in the sun

some Sunday morning

when the clouds are melting

over St. Joseph’s,

look down from Mount Royal

to that other world.


It is far off and glorious—

at the heart of creation—

no tin-can world

of savage modernity,

but the everlasting

world of a present

where you stand

in the pale light of allness.


Stand there and remember

the paltriness of worldly claims,

and the immensity

that is always now.

(83-84)

-o-

Postscript: Just last night I was reading some comments on Dudek's poetry, written by another poet who was a fan of Dudek's poetry. This poet praised Atlantis and sections of his other long poems, but nobody (not even my poet contemporaries) will stand up for Continuation; one critic, who knew Dudek, didn't even have the correct title of the poem, throughout his discussion of the poem he refers to it as Continuations. My God, can't we even get the title right? Most critics disparage or ignore Continuation and yet, if you read interviews with Dudek, read what he said about the poem, the whole project took over forty years to write, it is meticulously written, and it is Dudek's longest piece of writing. Continuation should have been three books, and it should be republished as such but in one volume. It is Dudek's most experimental writing. And yet, it is ignored, it is treated as something critics wish had never been written, it's an embarrassment. My contention has always been that Continuation is a significant poem in Dudek's body of work. Well, times have changed and we've entered a very dark time in western civilization, not just in Canada but in the west; in Canadian poetry the (golden) days of Modernism, of Irving Layton, Al Purdy, include F.R. Scott in this short list, and others has ended and what we have today is the irrelevancy of poetry and poets; not one poet today has the public status of earlier poets, not one poet is a public personality or presence in the media, not one poet is listened to. It could be that one day people will read Continuation and understand exactly what Louis Dudek is saying, that's what happens with difficult literature, with time the educated public find what was formerly difficult fairly obvious in its meaning.  13/02/2026


Note: Written in 2012; revised October - November 2024, 2025. Thought: the best final statement is to put in writing what one is thinking, don't leave it up to chance or the possibility that someone might understand what you are saying. Suggestion for poets: be your own critic because the critics may never write about your work and you need to explain what you are doing.

Edited: 13 February 2026.

"Radio Ethiopia" by Patti Smith

 

Oh I'll send you a telegram
Oh I have some information for you
Oh I'll send you a telegram
Send it deep in the heart of you
Deep in the heart of your brain is a lever
Oh deep in the heart of your brain is a switch
Oh deep in the heart of your flesh you are clever
Oh honey you met your match in a b_tch

Deep in the heart of
Deep in the heart of

There will be no famine in my existence
I merge with the people of the hills
Oh people of Ethiopia
Your opiate is the air that you breathe
All those mint bushes around you
Are the perfect thing for your system
Aww clean clean it out
You must rid yourself from these, these animal fixations
You must release yourself
From the thickening blackmail of elephantiasis
You must divide the wheat from the rats
You must turn around [and look oh God]

When I see Brancusi
His eyes searching out the infinite abstract spaces
In the [radio] rude hands of sculptor
Now gripped around the neck of a [duosonic]

[I swear on your eyes no pretty words will sway me]

Oh look at me aah
cannot move ahh so much aahh everything I am
possible
Aah
Feel so f_cked up

much too
I know I know

tell him to get out of here
go down to the sea
if he would just tell me
he appreciates Brancusi's space
the sculptor's mallet has been taken in place

every time I see