McGill Fortnightly Review

Mark McCawley, the editor of Urban Grafitti, was in favour of online/digital magazines, I was in favour (and still am) of both, but I prefer a hard copy, on paper. This was one of the few things about which Mark and I disagreed. Online periodicals can disappear when the editor discontinues the site/periodical, and what is digital can be revised or altered in the Orwellian future. Hard copies of periodicals, kept in archives, can be researched years from now and I have done this type of research. So, for instance, two of the Montreal Group of poets (Scott and Smith) founded The McGill Fortnightly Review and it was published from 1925 to 1927; a few years later they published The McGilliad. Even today these periodicals are fascinating reading. The full run of both periodicals is available at Special Collections at McGill University or online at https://blogs.library.mcgill.ca/…/mcgill-fortnightly-review/

Leo Kennedy, Montreal Poet

I've just read Patricia Morley's As Though Life Mattered, Leo Kennedy's Story (1994); Kennedy was one of the four poets that comprised the Montreal Group in the 1920s. The others were F.R. Scott, A.J.M. Smith, and A.M. Klein. Kennedy had one book in him, The Shrouding (1933); I've read some of the poems in this book and they are truly exceptional, had he written more and produced a larger body of work he might have been the best of the four poets. Instead, he wrote advertising copy (like Ron Everson), many book reviews, and some poems for children; however, the second or third book was never written. We can only judge a poet on what he or she produces, the marriages, poverty, fishing trips, drinking, this is all of interest but it isn't poetry.

F.R. Scott, "The Dance is One"

I've just reread F.R. Scott's, The Dance is One (1973). Scott is not a great poet but he's also not a minor poet; as I wrote about Scott's colleague and friend, A.J.M. Smith, he is one of our better poets. Scott's importance lies not only in his body of creative work but also in what he did (he helped bring modernism in poetry to Canada in the 1920s), who he knew (Leon Edel, A.J.M. Smith, John Glassco, Leo Kennedy, Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, Louis Dudek, and many others, for instance Pierre Eliot Trudeau), what he believed (for instance, an inclusive vision of Canada) and his career as a distinguished law professor at McGill University. 

Louis Dudek told me that Scott controlled every aspect of Sandra Djwa's biography, The Politics of the Imagination: A Life of F.R. Scott, that always intrigued me but I also feel ambivalent about it because Scott basically censored the book. If you read Professor Djwa's biography of P.K. Page you'll get the other half of the story about Scott's extramarital affairs that he didn't want in his official biography. I was also very impressed with Scott's book of translations St-Denys Garneau & Anne Hebert: Translations/Traductions (1962); additional translations by Scott are in The Dance is One.  

The title of The Dance is One is from his poem "Dancing" and is also the inscription on his and his wife's headstone in Mount Royal Cemetery. By the way, Allan Hustak's biography of Scott's father Canon Frederick G Scott, Faith Under Fire, shows the kind of extraordinary family F.R. came from; Canon Scott was an exceptional person as was his son Frank Scott.

Here is my main reservation regarding Frank Scott as a poet: writing poetry is not a sideline, maybe people can do two things well in life but not in poetry, poetry demands full-time commitment and Scott never gave it full-time commitment, he was also a human rights activist, a lawyer, a law professor, one of the founders of the CCF, and while some of the poetry he wrote is exceptional he also wrote satirical poetry, and other poems, that have a limited interest for readers. I know that Scott was charismatic and people liked him, some loved him, they all thought highly of him. But poets don't have to be nice people, was Robert Frost a nice person? No, but he was a great poet. Here is my main complaint about Frank Scott, he was attached to his social class while promoting social causes, he was making a name for himself as a lawyer and law professor, and while he was doing this he wasn't writing poetry, he was dividing his time and while poetry was important to him it didn't come absolutely first despite what he claimed. None of the Montreal Group of poets wrote large bodies of work except for A.M. Klein.  

Cover of Frank Scott's The Dance is One

Headstone for F.R. Scott and his wife Marian Dale Scott at Mount Royal Cemetery

Cover of Scott's translation of poems by Anne Hebert and St-Denys Garneau

Carolyn Zonailo at the Scotts' family grave site,
Mount Royal Cemetery, Montreal, mid-1990s

NOTE: This was up-dated and expanded on 28 July 2019; 02 August 2022.                          

"Laurentian Shield" by F.R. Scott

F.R. Scott was born in Quebec City on August 1st in 1899 but lived most of his life in Montreal. A member of the Montreal Group of poets, Scott, A.J.M. Smith, Leo Kennedy, A.M. Klein, Leon Edel, and John Glassco helped bring Modernism to Canada. Desmond Pacey's Ten Canadian Poets (1958) is still a good place for some insight into Scott's importance as a poet.

Here is one of Scott's most famous poems:

LAURENTIAN SHIELD

F. R. Scott
From:   Events and Signals. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1954.

Hidden in wonder and snow, or sudden with summer,
This land stares at the sun in a huge silence
Endlessly repeating something we cannot hear.
Inarticulate, arctic,
Not written on by history, empty as paper,
It leans away from the world with songs in its lakes
Older than love, and lost in the miles.

This waiting is wanting.
It will choose its language
When it has chosen its technic,
A tongue to shape the vowels of its productivity.

A language of flesh and of roses.

Now there are pre-words,
Cabin syllables,
Nouns of settlement
Slowly forming, with steel syntax,
The long sentence of its exploitation.

The first cry was the hunter, hungry for fur,
And the digger for gold, nomad, no-man, a particle;
Then the bold commands of monopolies, big with machines,
Carving their kingdoms out of the public wealth;
And now the drone of the plane, scouting the ice,
Fills all the emptiness with neighbourhood
And links our future over the vanished pole.

But a deeper note is sounding, heard in the mines,
The scattered camps and the mills, a language of life,
And what will be written in the full culture of occupation
Will come, presently, tomorrow,
From millions whose hands can turn this rock into children.

Retrieved, 14 August 2017: https://canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/scott_fr/poem2.htm

                                                                                                "The Dance is One"

Video of Painted Lady Butterfly

Here is a Painted Lady butterfly on an echinacea bloom in our backyard. Lots of fun growing the flowers and then seeing many butterflies on them...

"For a garden, as Bacon observes, is the purest of human pleasures and the greatest refreshment of the spirit of man; and even idle and ignorant people who cannot distinguish Leptosiphon hybridus from Kaulfussia amelloides and would rather languish away in a wilderness than break their backs with dibbling and weeding may get a good deal of pleasant conversation out of it, especially if they know the old-fashioned names of the commoner sorts of flowers and are both tolerably well acquainted with the minor Elizabethan lyrists." Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night, p. 454