"Language, without the monkey of historical reality clinging to its back, is poetry!!"
--Artie Gold
(Artie's handwriting and design on a piece of plastic)
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It was on this day two years ago, February 14, 2007, that Artie Gold died. I often go for walks and pass the apartment building on Sherbrooke Street West where he lived. At night, from the street, I can look up at his windows and see that new people have painted and decorated his old place. Not long ago I entered the building, the inside door unlocked when one of the tenants was entering. I went up to the second floor where Artie’s apartment was located; there was no aura of Artie left, it had long departed; the books of poetry Artie wrote and our memories of him are all that we have left.
What memories do we have? Artie was someone who talked, rather than listened. He was an intelligent man, one of those people who seem to have been born knowing something about many things. He had charisma and a terrific sense of humour. He could be kind but he also managed to alienate many of his friends. A few old friends looked after him in his final years as he was not well and left his home only infrequently; I think of Endre Farkas, Luci King-Edwards, and Jill Torres in particular as friends who did much for Artie. I apologize for omitting the names of any others who helped him. I also visited, bought groceries, T-shirts, sole inserts, and other things he needed; and CZ and I had coffee with him at different restaurants. He often phoned. He saw few people and he allowed even fewer to enter his apartment. Artie was not someone to whom one could be indifferent. Some of us who knew him for many years thought he was fated to die young, but he managed to live sixty years and exactly one month.
Once Artie showed me a book by the American poet Larry Eigner with the author’s name, where it had been written in pencil inside the book, erased but still visible. The printing was a scrawl as a result of Eigner’s cerebral palsy. Looking at Eigner’s photograph at the back of his The World And Its Streets, Places (Santa Barbara, Black Sparrow, 1977), I noticed the similarity of how Artie looked with Eigner’s appearance. Both men, at age fifty—Eigner in 1977 and Artie in 1997—are balding but still attractive men, both were dedicated to poetry despite their physical health.
Artie Gold was one of our most talented poets. His bad health was partly self-inflicted, and partly the result of childhood health problems. He came from a fairly well off family in Outremont, a neighbourhood in Montreal which is mixed socially but is also very upper middle-class. His father was a businessman who made trips to China as far back as the early 1970s. Artie suffered greatly in his life, due both to his emotional and physical condition. We will not see his like again, for no one would want to live his life and few would put up with what he endured, not even Artie Gold by the end.
