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.

On Glen Sorestad's Poetry

Glen Sorestad, League of Canadian Poets AGM in Edmonton, 2007

Ten years ago, I invited Glen Sorestad to give a reading of his poems at the college where I teach. It was a large audience, well over a hundred students, and I remember that the students loved the poems that Glen read that afternoon. Later that day, Glen and I drove into Montreal and had lunch at an Irish bar-resto on McKay or Crescent below Ste. Catherine Street. I remember introducing Glen to our waiter and saying that Glen was a well-known poet, that he was also the Poet Laureate of the Province of Saskatchewan. A few minutes later the waiter returned with a guest book for Glen to sign, I had no idea restaurants had guest books.

Once, someone wrote in a review of a reading I gave that I came across as “everyone’s favourite uncle,” not necessarily what I would like to have heard but perhaps accurate. The only other poet I’ve met who could also be described in a similar way is Glen Sorestad. I remember Margaret Laurence being described by the critic Robert Fulford as nondescript, perhaps looking like a housewife. Appearances are deceiving!

Over the years I’ve read many of Glen’s books as they’ve been published; two of his newer books are Road Apples, an autumn journey into America (Rubicon Press, 2009) and What We Miss (Thistledown Press, 2010). Unless I am mistaken, What We Miss is Glen’s first major publication since Blood & bone, ice & stone (Thistledown Press, 2005). In fact, as online-chapbook editor at Coracle Press, I published Glen’s Language of Horse in 2007 and some of the poems in this chapbook are republished in What We Miss.

Road Apples, an autumn journey into America is an impressive chapbook. It is part of a body of literature—the iconic and archetypal journey or road trip across a part of America—that moves from particular observations to general comments about American society. The archetype of the journey is present in many American writers, from Walt Whitman to John Steinbeck to Jack Kerouac. Sorestad’s American journey is across a landscape of ranches, highways, RV parks, and tourist attractions. Sorestad is the outsider, the observer, the bystander. This is America seen through Canadian eyes, that is, it is the perception of someone who is easily assumed to be a fellow American but whose perceptions are always informed by a consciousness that is uniquely Canadian. You could call us “Americanadians”! Americans, unlike Canadians, seem to know very little about the outside world. When telling a waitress in Sioux City, Iowa that he and his wife have just driven from southern Nebraska, she comments that this is lovely and where are they from? They reply they are from Saskatchewan… “And what part of southern Nebrasaka/ would that be in?” she asks. There’s no guest book to sign in this American restaurant, and I doubt the waitress would know what a Poet Laureate is…

………

        Glen Sorestad’s What We Miss is a truly inspired book of poems. These poems are deceptively simple, they return us to the basic experience of being a poet and writing poetry. This experience lies in the ability to see in the quotidian, the everyday, that which is marvelous and meaningful. In the first section, “Moving Towards the Light,” we read poems of everyday experiences, of going for daily walks and recording what is significant on these walks: it is seeing the first robin in spring; the presence of a red-winged blackbird; the warmth of the sun on one’s face; rain; geese; an old man and his dog; the sun coming through some clouds; a woman walking two dogs; a decapitated field mouse… All poets have had this experience: we place importance on observations that other people either ignore or aren’t aware of or think are too trivial to comment on. The poet gives these experiences significance and importance, he gives people a different way to perceive reality. As well, informing Sorestad’s poems is the recognition of our mortality. We know that when he writes of “walking towards the light” it is not only a kind of awakening, but it is also the light that lies beyond death. “Towards the Long Night,” the last poem in this section of What We Miss, finds us in November, the decline to winter has begun, and we note “The sharp sting of wind in our faces, /we bear reluctant light through the park.”

Sorestad’s love of language began when he was a child; he writes of this experience in “The Language of Horse”:

It was words like halter and hames,
bits and bridle, collar and reins,
words his uncle threw at him
as if they were self-evident—
this language so foreign to him.
It was a childhood epiphany:
each new landscape he encountered
from that point on would come with
its own language, its own lexicon
to be snapped or buckled into place,
for him to become a part of and in turn
for it to become a part of him.

Glen Sorestad is a poet who celebrates his early life, his family, moving between the city and the country, but it is in the country where he seems happiest, a happiness of being in a loving family and in close contact with nature. For instance, “Snow Tunnels” and “Christmas Oranges” are both poems of a happy childhood and of innocence. His poem, “Map of Canada,” returns us to an earlier time in Canadian history, he writes of a large map of the country on the classroom wall, but this map had a different quality to it, it also advertised the products of a chocolate company, and now, many years later, the names of different chocolate bars are forever associated to places in Canada, at least in Glen Sorestad’s consciousness! The final poem in the book, “Winter Walk,” has at least two layers of meaning; it is winter, but this is also a walk in the cemetery, and Sorestad is one of several pall bearers of a child’s coffin. This is a very moving poem, it reminds us of life’s transience and the fragility of human life. He writes movingly,

At last they set their box down at the site,
consigned the child to cold and dimming light.

The beauty of Glen Sorestad’s poetry lies, in part, in finely crafted epiphanous perceptions of nature, a love for family, and memories of the past; in these two books we see things through his eyes and know something of the way poets perceive reality.

I consider Glen Sorestad one of our finest Canadian poets. 

(The Language of Horse by Glen Sorestad can be found at http://www.coraclepress.com/the-chapbooks/language-of-horse-glen-sorestad/.)

Floor tiles at St. John the Divine

A day at the Montreal Botanical Gardens (4)

A day at the Montreal Botanical Gardens (3)

On the 142nd anniversary of Thomas D'Arcy McGee's assasination

McGee was assasinated on April 7, 1868. This is the 142nd anniversary of the death of Thomas D'Arcy McGee, a Father of Canadian Confederation, always remembered as a poet and for his contribution to founding the Dominion of Canada.

A day at the Montreal Botanical Gardens (2)

A day at the Montreal Botanical Gardens (1)