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

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.

On Leo Kennedy

On the right is the Kennedy family home on Rushbrooke Avenue in Verdun where they lived in the 1920s.
They had a private tennis court adjacent to their property. 

On Leo Kennedy

Ken Norris told me that in the 1970s he and a Montreal publisher invited Leo Kennedy to publish a book of poems, it would have been Kennedy's first book since The Shrouding (1933). Kennedy arrived at the meeting with a garbage bag full of poems (not an auspicious beginning!) and the meeting failed to produce a book; it would have been only his second book in forty years. One wonders about this meeting. Did Kennedy sabotage an opportunity to publish a second book so late in life? Was it a way to get out of publishing what may have been inferior work? Did he dislike my friend or the publisher and not want to work with them, then why go to the meeting? Or was there some psychological complex that had held him back from writing new poems or publishing them? Still, despite the dearth of new poems by Kennedy he always insisted that he was a poet, he was not shy about his place in Canadian literature, nor should he have been.

When I heard this story about Kennedy I thought that he was a fool to have passed up on a publishing opportunity; however, I've known other poets like him who had lots of talent but who never fulfilled themselves as poets, they stopped publishing for several decades or never published again after some early success. Am I the only one to think of this as a failing on Kennedy's part? Perhaps I am. During the years after The Shrouding Kennedy didn't publish much original poetry but he did publish book reviews and even some poems in Poetry (Chicago). Patricia Morley in As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy's Story (1994), her biography of Kennedy, mentions that these reviews were perceptive and incisive. As well, Kennedy was also interested in socialist ideas that were at odds with his work in an ad agency as a copywriter for consumer goods. Kennedy was one of the early "Mad Men" as depicted in the television show by that name. It seems that his creative energy went into copy writing.

Perhaps the circumstances of Kennedy's personal life need to be considered. After 1935 Kennedy had to make a living to support his family; he had a second marriage and years later he took care of an invalid wife. Indeed, he had a successful career in copy writing and the family moved several times because of his work. He had three sons—one with his first wife and two with his second wife—and he helped raise two grandchildren which is what brought him back to Montreal in the 1970s. Kennedy was no puer aeternus, the Jungian term that describes a man who does not take on full adult responsibilities like gainful employment, maintaining long term and meaningful relationships, supporting his family, and being a fully functioning adult in society. He lived a responsible life of stability and middle class respectability and was well-liked and respected by his colleagues; however, perhaps (solely as conjecture) this middle class life conspired to end his career as a poet even though others have lived middle class lives such as his and they continued being poets. So what gives?

What gives is that after hearing of the "poems in the garbage bag" episode I saw Kennedy in a new light, as a kind of archetypal trickster, a coyote figure in mythology, someone who punctures the appearance of respectability in others. The anecdotes that Morley recounts of Kennedy shooting squirrels and storing them in his freezer, and other stories, suggests to me that Kennedy had a bit of the joker in him; perhaps even his copy writing career is a job suited to the jester, to someone aiming to sell stuff to people who don't want or don't need the stuff up for sale. This is just to suggest an explanation for some of Kennedy's behaviour and perhaps his work as a poet.

Kennedy is someone who had lots of talent as a poet, he is a formalist in his work, in some poems he is counting syllables, he has an incredible vocabulary in his work, and his images, metaphors and similes can be stunning. There is also something "old fashioned" in his work, I am not sure that he is a truly modern poet except that he was active as a poet in the Modern period; he's some kind of an aberration, a solitary voice that is self-invented. Kennedy has a depth of perception that is sometimes greater than the other Montreal Group of poets from McGill University. But I don't think he felt included among the Westmount poets who dominated English language poetry back in the 1930s. F.R. Scott made some cracks about Kennedy coming from working-class Verdun even though Kennedy had as much talent as FRS as a poet; Kennedy was not truly a working class person, his father owned a successful business located in Old Montreal and their home in Verdun was substantial. It is ironic that Scott is the defender of the working class, one of the founders of the CCF, a precursor of the NDP, and yet he is snobbish with Kennedy. Could Kennedy not have been offended by this, or contemptuous of Scott because of this? A response to Scott and his patrician lifestyle and social class might be to become even more eccentric. This, of course, speaks to the considerable class divisions that English-speaking Montreal experienced in the past; the wealthy lived in Westmount and had little or nothing to do with the English in Verdun, NDG, Griffintown, or elsewhere in the city of Montreal.

It's also curious that in 1926 AJM Smith published a poem entitled "The Shrouding", seven years before Kennedy published his book with this same title. Was there some conflict between them because of this? Small things divide poets! A friend published a poem with the same title as one of my poems and I always wondered what that was all about. BTW, his poem was inferior to mine... But I also published a poem entitled "Heirloom" after reading AM Klein's poem "Heirloom"; with its allusion to Klein my poem was to honour the older poet and it was published years (in the mid-1970s) after Klein's death. Was Kennedy making some kind of a comment, positive or negative, about Smith or the poems that Smith was writing by using Smith's poem title for his book?

I also question some aspects of Patricia Morley's biography of Kennedy; she treats Kennedy in a benign way, but you also get the feeling that she thought of him as her personal pet project, she was writing his biography and she was proud to have him captive. She insinuates herself into his life story and becomes a part of Kennedy's biography. She comments that there is no biography of AJM Smith; Anne Compton's A.J.M. Smith, Canadian Metaphysical  (1994) is not a biography but a discussion of his work. Kennedy has a biography and the biography was a big deal for Leo Kennedy as it would be for any poet. It must have made him more impressive with his family and with other poets, it also returned him to public attention. I doubt we would pay him as much attention as we are (for instance this essay) if the biography hadn't been published, it raised interest in Leo Kennedy, poet. Kennedy was serious about the biography but he must have realised how little he had achieved in poetry; indeed, later he has difficulty collecting any archival material when requested to do so. There are no extensive Leo Kennedy Fonds; he came up with very little archival material.

Now, I'm just thinking about Leo Kennedy and trying to figure him out and maybe he's not a trickster at all. One of the things critic do, one of the things some readers do, is try to figure out some explanation of the writer or the writer's work that he or she is currently reading. Another thing is to build on what we read, to develop some of the ideas we read and make them a part of out own insights into life. We find something curious, or something that appeals to us, or something that deepens our feelings and understanding about life, or we find something that speaks to us as human beings and we need to explore that writer or his or her work for ourselves, to apply it to our own understanding of life. That's what I've tried to do here.

Note: Kennedy may have published a second book in 1972 or 1992, Sunset in the States published by Diane Press; this seems to be a summary of some kind of legislation in Michigan, it is not mentioned in Morley's book on Kennedy. Perhaps it is not Kennedy's work but wrongly attributed to him.

18 January 2018

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.