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| Here I am with Louis Dudek, not sure who took the photograph; it is 1993 at the Loyola Campus of Concordia University, at the League of Canadian Poets' AGM, when Louis was made a life member of the League (an organization he helped to found) |
1.
One
day in the mid-1970s, Louis Dudek came to our graduate seminar with copies of
his Collected Poems, (1971); "Does
anyone want to buy a copy?" he asked; it was $5.00. I never had any money and
passed on buying his Collected Poems,
but a few months later I bought a second hand copy of Dudek's Atlantis at The Word Bookstore and I forgot
about the Collected Poems of Louis Dudek.
Over the intervening years I bought most of Louis' other books as they were published
and around 1997, when the League of Canadian Poets AGM was held in Montreal,
and I had nominated Louis for a life membership, I brought at least ten of his
books with me to the AGM for him to sign. That was a bit much but Louis went
along with it, we sat together, he signed his books, he gave his speech, and he
left. He mentioned that one of the books of his that I had brought with me that
evening had not been distributed, hang onto it, he said, it will be worth
something one day, but I forget which book he was referring to. Like all good
teachers, Louis was good with fatherly advice. He told me that my M.A. degree
would get me a teaching job, and it did and that set me up financially and
employment-wise for thirty-five years of my life. Then it was 2020, twenty
years later, and I was at Stephanie Dudek's estate sale; Stephanie was Louis' first wife and, although
he died in 2001, many of his books were still stored at the Vendome Avenue home
where he used to live. There were copies of Atlantis,
in pristine condition, still unwrapped from when they were printed in the UK
and shipped over to Montreal. I bought a few copies just for old time's sake
and as I left I asked if they had any
copies of Louis' Collected Poems;
someone, I was told, had just bought all the copies they had, I was out of luck.
And then, finally, I found a copy on Amazon; you don't often see Dudek's Collected Poems, 3,000 copies were
printed but it didn't sell many copies when it was published and it wasn't
widely reviewed. I finally found a used copy for sale by a book seller in
Vancouver, for $10.00; I placed my order and a few days later received a phone
call, the book was missing a page, did I still want to buy it? Of course I did.
The price was reduced to the original $5.00 it had been in 1975 and my copy, a
former library copy, was sent to me.
