A Tribute to Louis Dudek

Note: This is the text of my speech prepared for the Louis Dudek Tribute held in the Writers' Chapel at St. Jax Church, 1439 Sainte-Catherine Street West, Montreal, Quebec H3G 1S6, on 12 October 2018.

Louis Dudek was one of the most generous people I have known; his generosity touched many people in significant ways. For me, he wrote an introduction to my first book of poems; because of his letters of reference I was awarded several Canada Council writing grants and I was hired to teach English literature at Champlain Regional College where I taught for 35 years; but the most important gift was his generous spirit, that he gave freely of himself. He was a wonderful person, a friend, a teacher, and a mentor, and we all miss him. I enrolled as a graduate student at McGill University in 1974 because I wanted to study with Louis Dudek and it was one of the best decisions I've made in my life. This evening we honour Louis, one of our greatest poets, he enriched many people's lives, my own included.

          I must tell you of a meeting I had with Dudek on March 10, 1975 because it is still important to me. At this meeting in his office he read some of my poems which he liked very much. There is no time to go in to the details of the meeting but Louis gave me something that afternoon that only an older poet can give to a younger poet; I was 24 years old at the time, and what he gave me was confirmation that I was a poet. I left that meeting feeling that I had nothing to worry about, just keep writing and life as a poet would unfold. And that's what I did. The day on which that meeting took place becomes more poignant for me, my father died in 1956 and March 10th was his birthday.

          Another event—it was the afternoon of January 9, 1979—I was with Louis Dudek and Lionel Kearns, who named his son "Louis" after Louis Dudek. We had something to eat at a food court after Lionel’s reading. My then wife was pregnant but was not expecting to give birth for another four weeks. This was the one time I went off by myself, other than going to work, while my wife was pregnant. I arrived home around 5 p.m., the flat on Northcliffe Avenue was in darkness, and I found an almost illegible note scribbled by my mother-in-law telling me to go to the hospital, my son had been born prematurely. This is where I was when my son was born, not in the birthing room at a major hospital, but with Louis Dudek and Lionel Kearns talking about poetry in a food court in downtown Montreal. Life can be very strange.

          Think of Louis' contribution to Canadian poetry. On my book shelf I have almost forty books either written by Louis or about his writing. His books have been an inspiration to many people, they communicate an infectious love for poetry. There are several selected poems; books of his criticism and book reviews; his thoughts on poetry; his epigrams; his 1941 diary; a book on philosophy and another on the mass media; also, several anthologies of poetry that he edited, one that was widely used as a college text book and another one co-edited with Irving Layton; and a collection of texts and essays that he edited with Michael Gnarowski; a book on  "CIV/n", a literary magazine edited by his future wife, Aileen Collins, in the 1950s; also his 1967 "First Person in Literature" talks that were broadcast on CBC radio's "Ideas" programme; and don't forget his book of letters from his friend Ezra Pound. There is also Frank Davey's book on the poetry of Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster; special issues of at least two periodicals dedicated to his work; Robin Blaser's excellent selection of Dudek's poetry; a book remembering and honouring Louis, Eternal Conversation; and Susan Stromberg-Steins' biography of Louis Dudek. Susan and I were in Dudek's graduate seminar in the fall-winter semester, 1974-75. He was certainly the best and most influential teacher I ever had; I learned so much from being Dudek's student and friend, things he said to me decades ago are still remembered today.  

          Dudek is a poet whose major work, Continuation, a long poem that he worked on for over forty years, will one day be better recognized for its importance. Dudek began writing Continuation when he was 49 years old, a month later he turned fifty; however, the concept for how to write the poem was discovered by Dudek in 1956, when he was only thirty-eight years old. Dudek tells us that he could only write Continuation after he discovered his authentic voice, one that was a memory of his thought processes when he was a child. With this in mind, Continuation is Dudek’s life-long work. The theme of Continuation is poetry, what it means, its importance, and the poet's dedication to his work; indeed, poetry is Dudek's religion. When he championed Ezra Pound, and he told me he never convinced anyone to like Pound's Cantos, what he really championed was great poetry.

          I remember Louis showing me the manuscript of his Epigrams before it was published, typed on onion skin paper, in his office at McGill. The key to Continuation, and the foundation on which the poem is written, are Dudek's epigrams. Dudek writes, “Epigrams are one-line poems. A lot of them together are like a long poem” (Dudek, 1975, p. 38). That “long poem” is Continuation. Another key to Continuation is Dudek's admiration for Henry Miller; Louis' ideal for his own poetry is to write in the conversational style of Henry Miller but always maintaining the critical faculty of Matthew Arnold. In Continuation Dudek is able to combine what he learned from Miller and Arnold in order to communicate his poetic vision.

          Louis Dudek devoted his life to writing poems, to the literary community, to teaching, and to his family and friends. I am grateful for having known him, he changed my life for the better and what greater praise can be given to a fellow human than that they changed your life, they made it better, they helped you fulfill your promise and destiny? It is an honour to have known Louis Dudek and to have contributed this evening to this Dudek Tribute.

-- Stephen Morrissey

Re. Dk/ : Read the work

At the estate sale of the late Stephanie Dudek,
Vendome Avenue, 20 July 2020

The first issue of the new online periodical http://poetry-quebec.com/ is dedicated to the work of Louis Dudek. My article, "The First Person in Literature", on Louis, is available on the site. I add the following as a suggestion, a postscript, that we read a poet's writing, his body of work, and avoid those whose aim seems purely negative.

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Louis Dudek made an enormous contribution to literature in Canada as a poet, publisher, and critic. He helped many poets realize something of their creative potential by mentoring, publishing their work, and reviewing their books.

Robin Blaser describes Louis as being a “walking loneliness.” Even Louis’ friendship with Ezra Pound, for which he has been criticized for being overly naïve in his support of Pound’s work, is the friendship of a someone who would find approaching Pound difficult. It is this criticism of Dudek’s relationship with Pound, who Pound referred to as Dk/, that I would like to discuss here.

People will dig up whatever they can to criticize someone else, or invent something, or reveal their personal grudges in their comments. When he met Pound, Dudek was young and in awe of the older poet, as many of us would be if we were in his situation. Another visitor of Pound’s at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, where Pound was incarcerated after the war, was Charles Olson. It took Olson several years of dealing with Pound before he finally made his break with him. Olson and Pound had personalities that were larger than life; alternately, Louis was introverted and introspective.

Assuming that Pound needed to be “disowned”, then perhaps Dudek, like Olson, should have disowned Pound much earlier in his career than he did. Dudek rightly identified Pound’s Cantos as one of the greatest works of 20^th Century literature; however, he never supported Pound’s political views.

Dudek went to Pound to offer his support as a younger poet to the older poet that he admired for his poetry, just as Olson approached Pound for the same reason. To find one’s own voice, as a poet, it is necessary to assimilate something of the work and vision of the poets who come before us and that we admire in our youth. Both Louis and Olson assimilated in their work what they learned from Pound, and both poets eventually found their own distinctive poetic voices. Pound’s poetry helps inform something of Dudek’s work, just as Pound’s poetry helps inform something of Olson’s work, but the majority of both Dudek’s and Olson’s body of work is original and beautiful, for instance Dudek’s Atlantis and Olson’s masterpiece The Maximus Poems.

Dudek’s respect for Pound is that of an introverted person for the elder poet who had accomplished more in his writing career than just about any other poet in the 20^th Century. However, Dudek was not without serious critical reflection on Pound: Louis confided to me that despite having taught Pound’s work for over thirty years he never convinced anyone to share his enthusiasm for Pound; as well, he accepted that Pound was "mentally ill", as others have diagnosed, but which in no way disqualifies Pound’s creative work. Louis would always direct his students to read Pound’s work, The Cantos, for themselves, to go to the source, and not get hung up on what others are saying.
Although I saw Louis only infrequently in the 1990s--at poetry readings at McGill and a group of us went to dinner at Ben's Restaurant after the readings with Louis--I was kept informed of how he was doing by Sonja Skarstedt, who did so much for Louis during that time. Sonja, who is a tireless worker for poetry, both writing her own work and publishing poets with Empyreal Press, also published Louis’ work in his final years.

I remember when Louis died in 2001, leaving the reception after the funeral, walking into the cold dark March evening, and feeling an incredible emptiness, knowing that an important person in Montreal, a city of poets, was Louis Dudek and that he was now no longer among us. I felt that a great man of letters had died.

What is the meaning of the poet’s life? Poetry demands everything from a person. It demands one’s time and one’s soul and being. The meaning of the poet’s life is his writing, and this means his body of work. The message, then, is this: pay your respect to an elder poet, like Louis Dudek, by reading their body of work. Avoid the writings of those who would destroy a poet's reputation and memory. These people don’t know what motivated the man, who he really was, or his future place in literature.