(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.
