The synchronicity of dates

It's mid-January 2020 and winter has set in, it's -18 C today. So far, the winter hasn't been all that bad, meaning that while we've had some snow the temperature has hovered around -5 C to + 2 or 3 C. That has now ended... 

In my experience important events happen in clusters of dates, these are meaningful for specific people; there is a synchronicity of dates. For instance, two friends were born on January 15; they are Audrey Keyes (Veeto) who died last October, she was my first friend in life, someone I knew from age four or five. The second friend was Artie Gold who I met in the early 1970s, Artie was my first poet friend. Artie died in February 2007. A third friend, Paul Leblond, was born on January 16; he died suddenly in 2015. My friend Pat McCarty, with whom I traveled the length of California and down into Baha California in April 1976, died eleven years ago, on January 18, 2007. Pat was a truly lovely person and I still miss him. Note added on 31 August, 2022: I've just learned that Pat McCarty's birthday is January 21 (not sure of the year, possibly 1947); this is the same date as my wife's birthday, she was born on 21 January. A final date, January 14, 1965 is when I began keeping a diary, something I have done on a daily basis since then, it has changed my life, it has helped to fulfill my life. All of these significant occurrences are clustered around the mid-January dates. 

And now we turn to winter! Mid-January winter photographs. 

Here are photos taken yesterday, on Greene Avenue in Westmount and then on the drive home along Cote St. Antoine Road.

Pinocchio outside the old Nicholas Hoare Bookstore on Greene Avenue

Walking along Greene Avenue

The Bistro on the Avenue is gone; we had many happy times there over the years, dinners with friends and family and with fellow members of the C.G. Jung Society of Montreal

Years ago the old Westmount post office, on the corner of Greene Avenue and Blvd. de Maisonneuve  was closed and then made into boutiques, stores

This is Congregation Shaar Hashomayim, Leonard Cohen's family synagogue; it is where
his song "You Want it Darker" was recorded

Murray Hill Park; I suppose the green snow fencing is intended to keep people
from tobogganing down the hill

Fire Station/Caserne 34 between Decarie and Girouard

That's St. Augustine Catholic Church on the right, just after Girouard Avenue;
the church closed and it is now River Side Church 

That's the Loyola Campus of Concordia University, almost at the end of
Sherbrooke Street West, almost home

After Reading Guy Birchard's Valedictions

Home of Mary Brown and Artie Gold at 3667 Lorne Crescent

 

Before George Bowering was GB there was Guy Birchard, maybe the first GB, both named as such by AG, Artie Gold. Valedictions (2019), published by rob mclennan's above/ground press, is Guy's farewell to three deceased artists, poet William Hawkins, musician and visual artist Ray 'Condo' Tremblay, and our mutual friend, poet Artie Gold. I met Guy in the spring of 1973, I met Artie through Guy. I never met Ray Tremblay but one day my brother took a taxi in Ottawa that was driven by William Hawkins; somehow the subject of poets came up and Hawkins said that he had heard of me. It's a small world; we were all a lot younger in those days, we knew a lot of people. And now Guy's memoir has caused me to think about Artie once again, he was an imposing and domineering figure for many of us in the early 1970s.

Life seems to be a series of coincidences and cumulatively they can add up to something meaningful, or nothing at all. For instance, Guy says that he first encountered Artie at a reading by Michael Benedikt, but I was also at that reading, it was on 16 March 1973 in the Hall Building, the ninth floor I believe, and it may have been at this reading that I also met Guy, sitting a few rows behind me. Around that time, winter-spring 1973, Hopeton Anderson invited Guy to read at Karma Coffee House and that was the occasion on which Guy met Artie Gold; to get this sequence of events accurate, it was also at Guy's reading at Karma that Richie Carson, another poet of that era, invited Guy to read again at Karma. By then I knew Guy and he extended to me an invitation to read after he read (the reading was on the third week of April 1973), just as Hopeton Anderson had extended a similar invitation to Guy, all of these readings taking place at Karma. Karma Coffee House was located in the basement of the Sir Williams University Student Union Building. 

Artie was an extraordinary person, there was an aura of excitement surrounding him, he was a genuinely creative person; I doubt most of us meet someone like Artie Gold more than once in a lifetime. One winter day he and I and my first wife took a train to Ottawa and visited the National Gallery of Canada. For years I had a copy of The Far Point, bought on that occasion, an article in that issue was my introduction to what was happening in poetry in Vancouver where many of the most innovative poets were living at that time. There are other, happy memories of Artie; it was a seminal time when we were apprentices as poets. But now, after reading Guy's memoir of Artie, what is for me an unpleasant and pivotal memory has surfaced. It is a memory that explains what happened to my relationship with Artie. I remember talking with Artie and him telling me that he had published more than I had and that he was more important as a poet than I was. It may have been true but do we say that to a friend?  I have never said that to another poet and no other poet has said it to me, except Artie.

Remembering that comment by Artie I also realized that it is may have been around this time that my relationship with him began to diminish.  Artie was getting ahead in poetry, considering his talent and his intelligence the only thing that could hold him back was himself, the baggage of his life; the baggage eventually won: he was now being published by Talon Press in Vancouver; he was giving readings in BC, Ontario, and Quebec; other better known poets had heard of him and made him a celebrity of sorts; he was one of three poetry editors at Vehicule Press, the other two editors were Ken Norris and Endre Farkas. Artie had now become a "somebody". I benefited by Artie's ambition, Artie, Ken, and Endre published my first book, The Trees of Unknowing (Vehicule Press,1978) and I am grateful to them and to the press for that.

So, Artie moved on and was an important poet with a future. Then, Si Dardick, the owner of Vehicule Press, fired his three poetry editors and installed someone else in the job; I don't know the details of this firing but I do know that the books the new editor published never interested me; the emphasis was now on formalistic poetry.

I still knew Artie after he was no longer an editor at Vehicule Press; I gave him readings for several years, beginning in 1976, at the college where I was now teaching, I knew he needed the money. From these readings he would go home with a little money and office supplies from the college. But there were other changes happening in Artie's life; his decline into poverty, worsening health, and increasing drug dependency is usually dated from when Mary Brown, who supported Artie, ended their relationship by moving a few doors away but still on Lorne Crescent; later she moved to a house she helped build in the country. Mary Brown died in 1999. But now I wonder if  Artie's decline might also be dated from when he was no longer an editor at the press.

My long forgotten memory of Artie's comment to me had other repercussions on our relationship; it explains to me my distance from Artie in the years that followed. For instance, I continued knowing Artie but on a more formal basis, the old familiarity we once had was gone. Nothing lasts forever, everything changes. When he stored his boxes of archives in our basement, around 2005, I offered to give him a receipt (of all things!) and this surprised Artie as much as it surprised me at the time; however, I didn't want any problems with Artie and I didn't want Artie coming back at me saying I had polluted his papers with cat dander, an alleged trigger for his COPD (not asthma).  When I bought groceries for Artie, or clothes, or what have you—this was when he had friends supporting him so he could remain living autonomously—if I said I didn't have the time to go to several shops that day to buy him croissants or cans of chick peas he wouldn't push me to do it, he just agreed and let it go, in fact, I noticed he was uncharacteristically meek in accepting what I said. No good deed goes unpublished is one of my mottoes and it included Artie Gold.

Artie died in February 2007 and later that year a small group of us scattered Artie's ashes at places we thought significant to Artie. One of the people at this gathering told me that when she separated from her husband Artie phoned to offer his sympathy, at first this was an incredible thing for Artie to have done, she must have felt supported by Artie's phone call; but, more importantly, it must have at first felt doubly compassionate as it was from someone who was rarely compassionate about anybody. The point of this anecdote is that literally thirty seconds after Artie expressed his sympathy he returned to his favourite subject, himself. We both laughed at this, it was "good old Artie" being himself.

When I first saw Artie's cover drawing on his last chapbook, The Hotel Victoria Poems (above/ground press), I thought it was prescient, that this was the same bed in which the police discovered his body on Valentine's Day in February 2007. But I was wrong, Guy tells me this image appeared on a postcard he received when Artie was still living on Lorne Crescent, it is not the same room and bed where he died in 2007. Artie was a friend of our youth, he was one of the first real poets some of us met on this journey in life.

                                                                 October 2019, revised version

Guy Birchard's "Aggregate :Retrospective"

Cover, Aggregate :Retrospective by Guy Birchard

Congratulations to my old friend Guy Birchard on his new book, Aggregate :Retrospective, published by Shearsman Books, Bristol, UK. This book brings together four of Guy's chapbooks published over the last thirty years. I think this is one of Guy's best books and a great introduction to his work. I bought my copy from the "Book Depository", they pay the shipping and they're efficient and dedicated to small press publishing. Guy and Artie Gold were friends and Guy introduced me to Artie back in the spring of 1973, happy days 45 years ago!
trospective=, published by Shearsman Books, Bristol, UK. This book brings together four of Guy's chapbooks published over the last thirty years. I think this is one of Guy's best books and a great introduction to his work. I bought my copy from the "Book Depository", they pay the shipping and they're efficient and dedicated to small press publishing. Guy and Artie Gold were friends and Guy introduced me to Artie back in the spring of 1973, happy days 45 years ago!

Vehicule Days at McGill University

Here is my group photo of the Vehicule Poets from our reading on the evening of April 26, 2018 at McGill University's Rare Books and Special Collections. From left: Endre Farkas, Tom Konyves, John McAuley, Claudia Lapp, and Stephen Morrissey. Missing: Ken Norris.

A Lost Poem by Artie Gold

(Click on the image to enlarge)

"The Doomsday Mice-Trap" was published in Anthol 4, winter 1975; edited by Bob Morrison

I am writing this in the Second Cup on Sherbrooke Street West, directly across the street from Artie Gold's old apartment. This is where CZ and I last met Artie, for coffee, one evening in January 2007 just a few weeks before his passing. I can look up and see Artie's apartment in The Westmore, at 7338 Sherbrooke Street West. Before this place was a Second Cup it was a restaurant where we all met, the Vehicule Poets, in April 2004, that was Artie, Claudia, Tom, Endre, and myself; why was John McA not there? I don't know. He tells me he wasn`t told of the meeting...

"The Doomsday Mice-Trap" is vintage Artie Gold, written in the early 1970s, the decade when Artie was most productive as a poet. It has his humour, his insight into life, the essence of Artie comes across in this poem. From what I've heard speaking with Patrick Hutchinson, just last week, we won't have any posthumous books by Artie, there is no cache of poems waiting to be published. Patrick organized Artie's papers that are now at Special Collections at McGill University. However, I know that Artie was still writing poetry in the 2000s, there is a beautiful poem for Luci King-Edwards, and possibly a few other poems somewhere. But Artie's poetry career basically ended in the late 1970s/early 1980s when he and Mary Brown went their separate ways. Then it's a spiral of welfare, drugs, and progressive illness (COPD not asthma!) until 2007 when the Montreal Chest Institute wanted Artie to take up full-time residence in the hospital, they felt he was no longer capable of taking care of himself. His long-term doctor there pleaded with him to stop using drugs and Artie's reply was that his life was such a hell the only happiness he had was using.

In the summer of 2010 I was living on the UBC campus, in Vancouver, and doing research at their Special Collections. A few years before I found a Charles Olson poem in a little mag, maybe it was the poem by Raymond Souster that was published (by mistake) under Olson`s name. Anyhow, I gave the magazine to our friend Ralph Maud, the main critic of Olson`s work. I also found a comment by Artie in NMFG and published it on this blog. Recently, with the passing of my friend Keitha MacIntosh, I`ve been going over old poetry magazines from Montreal and found Artie`s poem. I suggest literary critics check out old poetry magazines, you'll find a gold mine of lost and forgotten work. For instance, this poem by Artie that didn't make it into his Collected.

Recently, I've been reading a lot of Artie's work. In just a few short years he wrote some of the best poetry to come out of Canada (those years he said poetry wrecked his life...). I read much of this in the 1970s, at his place on Lorne Crescent, before it was published, and that Artie kept in those black spring bound binders that poets used. He was a genius and, I believe, one of our best Canadian poets. He was tormented by certain aspects of his life, and his response was humour, always humour. He has at least ten poems out of his body of work that are classics, they should be anthologized. Artie is one of those people who was born the person he would always be, he didn't work at becoming "Artie Gold", he was born Artie Gold, intelligent, gifted, talented, creative. He was born a poet, lived as a poet, and died a poet.

Artie Gold in 2004

SM behind Artie...

Ken Norris, Artie Gold, and Stephen Morrissey

Here are the rest of the photos from our evening out at a Chinese restaurant on St. Laurent. Here's Ken Norris on the phone before they had cell phones...

Here's Ken at the Gazette's book fair back in 1993.

Here I am (ever the conservative) with Ken Norris.

There's SM, Ken Norris, and Artie back in 1993.

Artie Gold in 1993

All previously unpublished photographs of Artie Gold from 1993. A group of us went out for supper, including CZ, Ken Norris, Artie Gold, and myself, to a Chinese restaurant on St. Laurent. Ken's book, Vehicule Days: an unorthodox history of Montreal's Vehicule Poets (1993)  had just been published. A fun time was had by all...

Dwight Druick on Artie Gold

Artie Gold in 2004 at the restaurant across the street from where he lived on Sherbrooke Street
West, near Patricia Avenue; this restaurant closed and there is a Second Cup there now

Here's a letter I received from Dwight Druick on November 6, 2011, regarding my essay "Remembering Artie Gold"; the complete essay can be read at
http://www.coraclepress.com/chapbooks/morrissey/remembering-artie-gold.html
------------------

Dear Stephen,


It has been 16 years since I moved from Montreal to make a home in Kingston, Ontario. I had come here to work at Hotel Dieu Hospital in adult psychiatry after having transformed from a musician-songwrtiter (a calling which has gratefully returned without the onus of having to make a living from it) to a psychiatric social worker. During a long period of transition from the stage to McGill - a seemingly endless 7 years - I was a bartender - first at the Rainbow and, then, at Charlie's.

I met Artie in the late 70's at the Rainbow. He would wait for the end of my shift and we would go to Ben's for a 4 AM breakfast of eggs, rye toast, and fried salami. I will never forget watching Artie eat - lingering over each bite with the delight of a child.

Artie and I spent many nights together. We would talk and eat - and we shared some drugs. He would invite me to his tiny apartment on MacKay to see his stash of treasures, the latest of which he would find in the alley ways in the Guy Street area where he lived. I dubbed him 'the urban beachcomber'.

I still have many treasures that Artie gave or sold to me. Scrooge McDuck comics wrapped in plastic and an array of lost and found objects that we both valued. We shared a kind of childlike wonder, marvelling at the great stuff other people would throw away.

This afternoon, I decided to change the place where I have hung one of Artie's drawings that he gave to me. I wanted it to get more light and attention. I turned to Nancy, my wife of 22 years - and a friend of Artie's as well - and said that I was going 'Google' him. That's how I found your tribute to him and learned the very sad news of his passing.

I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for your words and photos. Artie was a truly gentle and brilliant soul. It was a privilege to have been his friend.

I have often thought of him as the years have gone by - and wondered how he was doing. I missed his company. His humour. His smile.

So in memory of a great friend, I will share my favorite Artie story that I tell at least 5 times a year:

I see Artie for the first time in a few days and say 'hi'.

He says "How come you don't ask how I'm doing"?

Chastened, I ask, 'So how are ya doin'?

Artie pauses, shrugs,

"Don't ask".

Thanks Stephen.

Dwight Druick

All's Good

Painted on the side of a former IGA grocery store next to the Montreal West train station and just a block from where Artie Gold used to live; this building was demolished last summer and condos are being built at this location. 

January 15th, 2011: This is the birthday of two dear old friends: Veeto, my friend from Oxford Avenue days and Hoolahan's flats, from the early 1950s, who lives in Australia, and my old friend Artie Gold who I met in the early 1970s. God bless both of them. How dull and boring life would be without people like Veeto and Artie, they bring life and enthusiasm and spirit to everyone they meet. It was Veeto who told me that "LG" means "Life is good," so when I saw this painted sign I thought of her. Artie would have been 64 years old today; he is still missed by all of us who knew him. Coincidentally, Veeto (who never met Artie) knew Mary Brown, Artie's companion on Lorne Crescent, when Mary worked at a summer camp years before Mary and Artie met. Veeto and Artie are the kind of people I love, people who embrace life and who are bigger than life, people who take chances and sing, loudly, as they walk along the street, or who just have to stop at every second store to buy something to eat. These are people who remind us that life is meant for living, for creating, for loving, that life is not to be lived in fear, or for money, or for what we can get. These are people who changed my life for the better!

Meeting Audrey Keyes in 2005

In the image below, my brother's initials ("JM") carved when we lived there, maybe the June 1962 date was also by him:

Photographs, not in any order, of meeting my first friend, Audrey Keyes, after not seeing her since 1963. We met at St. Viateur Restaurant on Monkland Avenue in the summer of 2005; we revisited our old homes, in the same fourplex, on Oxford Avenue (not far from Monkland Avenue and the buildings owned by John Hoolahan, and written about by me in the Hoolahan's Flats poems in Girouard Avenue...) we're sitting on the front steps of the building, we're in the lane on the back stairs, and there are a few places inside the back stairwell where we had carved our initials in the wood back in the late 50s, early 60s. There's Veeto with her dear mother, Mrs. Keyes. Veeto, who used to be Audrey Keyes... what a joy meeting her again after all of these years. Coincidentaly, Veeto was born on the same day as Artie Gold, and knew Artie's good friend Mary Brown, and possibly her daughter Candy, a few years before Artie knew them... how our lives intersect, meet, and meet again sometime off in the future.

Keep on Killing

(Note: This stencilled message was seen on the day a group of us scattered Artie Gold's ashes; this was at the end of the walk, in Montreal's Chinatown. Was that September 2007?)

Vehicule in Vancouver

A few weeks ago I was doing some research at UBC's Rare Books & Special Collections and University Archives. Part of this research was reading Brian Fawcett's "NMFG," an acronym for "no money from the government." NMFG, a magazine of poetry and poetics, ran from 1976 to 1979.

Vancouver was especially important back in the 1970s, that's where contemporary poetry was happening in Canada. This is no longer the case and I suspect there is no single place in Canada that is the center for new and important poetry in this country. I remember visiting with Richard Sommer, who was a poet and had been one of my professors at Sir George Williams University, after he and his family had visited Vancouver and been influenced by the poetry scene there; Vancouver, truly, seemed like a Mecca as compared with Montreal at that time. Richard was a little bit of Vancouver in Montreal, someone who made a significant impression on me back then.

I need to qualify these comments on NMFG and the Vancouver poetry scene by saying that NMFG represents only one aspect of the Vancouver poetry scene back in the second half of the 1970s; there were other groups, other poets, other poetry scenes in Vancouver. My impression has always been that Vancouver was a pretty open and welcoming place for poets. It has always seemed to me to support and welcome poets, support a literary community, and not try to drive poets away. I can't say the same for Montreal, where a literary community exists but it is fragmented and divisive. I remember receiving a letter from bpNichol commenting on this. This is also one reason why the Vehicule Poets were so important in Montreal, we had no single aesthetic commonality but we were inclusive and supportive to each other.





I noticed two items of interest in NMFG's back issues that I want to mention here: first is a short message from Artie Gold, suggesting that the gay content in the journal was detracting from commentary on poetry. Good old Artie, you wouldn't make this comment in today's politically correct world. But you also wouldn't get away with the "boy's club" of poetry found in NMFG; check out how many women poets are published in its pages, in many issues it's none. These intellectual men running NMFG come across as embarrassingly mysognynistic. As well, another comment, while American poets found a welcome home in Vancouver back then some of them don't seem to have thought Canadian poetry worth their time. I wonder if some of these same people will one day be seen as little more than long-term visitors to Vancouver, as footnotes, and not really part of the poetry tradition in Canadian Literature? Maybe someone will address this issue in Anvil Press's forthcoming Making Waves: Reading BC and Pacific Northwest Literature, edited by Trevor Carolan at the University of the Fraser Valley.

The second item is Brian Fawcett's review of the first anthology of English poetry in Montreal (English Montreal Poetry of the 1970s) published by Vehicule Press back in the mid-1970s. I know the anthology very well, I taught it for several years to my college-level Canadian Literature students, and I know personally many of the poets in the anthology. The review misses the point of the anthology which was a gathering of what was happening in English poetry in Montreal back then; we'd had years of the poetry community growing smaller and smaller, and finally there was a kind of Renaissance going on mainly due to our efforts at Vehicule Art Gallery. The anthology's editors (Norris and Farkas) were fairly democratic in choosing who would be in it, and it was the first evidence in print that Montreal poetry was coming back to life. You might trace the more open and inclusive aspects of the present-day poetry scene in Montreal back to this anthology, it was one of the signs that things had begun to change for the better. We'd had Dudek and Layton's public quarrel before Layton left for Ontario and Louis seemed to stop making public statements until he wrote the introduction to my first book, The Trees of Unknowing (Vehicule Press, 1978). As well, the separatist movement was growing in Quebec and the English-speaking community was being increasingly marginalized. The Vehicule Poets, beginning around 1974, were the first poets in Montreal at that time who were awake to contemporary poetry whether in the States or in the rest of Canada; however, NMFG couldn't have known any of this.

I dreamed Artie Gold...

Window display at The Word Book Store remembering Artie Gold

I dreamed Artie Gold sat half-conscious in a hospital chair slumped forward surrounded by women wiping away saliva running down his chin. It was in this state he decided to end his life. The Chinese pottery Artie collected, the T’ang Dynasty, the Golden Age of Chinese culture and poetry; now the American Empire collapses, the look of the country changes because of the men we admire. Of Canada what can be said? A country of winter, a geography of wind in a northern land— the convergence of spirit and vision, what we’ve become, the poem completed.

Revised: 02 March 2021; 31 December 2021.

Artie Gold's chair

Remembering Artie Gold on the third anniversary of his death, February 14, 2007. The chair now belongs to Adrian King-Edwards, owner of The Word Bookstore.