Sonja Skarstedt on a poem by F.R. Scott

 

In an old booklet of poems by the McGill Group of Poets, at the bottom of F.R. Scott's poem "trees in ice", Montreal poet Sonja Skarstedt writes, "I spoke to FRS at McGill in 1981 & he explained to me that he wrote this poem in memory of a time during his boyhood in Quebec City--he recalled the winters when he glanced out of his window & saw the black, bare branches encased in clear ice." So, now, anyone doing research on Scott's poems has this to include. 

This untitled booklet has poems by the McGill Group of Poets--Frank Scott, AJM Smith, AM Klein, and Leo Kennedy. Maybe the booklet was used in a class on Canadian poetry, it doesn't have a publisher, a title, an ISBN, a date, and it is unpaged, but it is a good short introduction to the poems of these important Canadian poets. 

"Laurentian Shield" by F. R. Scott

Events and Signals, F.R. Scott,
Ryerson Press, 1954

 

Hidden in wonder and snow, or sudden with summer,
This land stares at the sun in a huge silence
Endlessly repeating something we cannot hear.
Inarticulate, arctic,
Not written on by history, empty as paper,
It leans away from the world with songs in its lakes
Older than love, and lost in the miles.

This waiting is wanting.
It will choose its language
When it has chosen its technic,
A tongue to shape the vowels of its productivity.

A language of flesh and of roses.

Now there are pre-words,
Cabin syllables,
Nouns of settlement
Slowly forming, with steel syntax,
The long sentence of its exploitation.

The first cry was the hunter, hungry for fur,
And the digger for gold, nomad, no-man, a particle;
Then the bold commands of monopolies, big with machines,
Carving their kingdoms out of the public wealth;
And now the drone of the plane, scouting the ice,
Fills all the emptiness with neighbourhood
And links our future over the vanished pole.

But a deeper note is sounding, heard in the mines,
The scattered camps and the mills, a language of life,
And what will be written in the full culture of occupation
Will come, presently, tomorrow,
From millions whose hands can turn this rock into children.

Date of Death for Leo Kennedy

If you remember (John) Leo Kennedy, one of the McGill Group of poets from the 1920s, and if you check out his bio in Wikipedia you'll see that they don't have a date of death for him. It was fairly easy to find out when he died, just look it up on the Social Security Death Index. Leo Kennedy had three children, two sons from a second marriage, and both sons seem to have disappeared. He also had a son from his first marriage, Peter Kennedy, who as of a year ago was still alive. After Peter Kennedy's parents' marriage ended in divorce Peter distinguished himself by attending Harvard University, becoming a medical doctor, and (as of this writing) lives  in San Marino, CA, one of the most affluent communities in the California. Dr. Kennedy suffered a car accident a few years ago that seems to have ended his medical practise; after the accident Dr. Kennedy wrote a book, Medicine Man: Memoir of a Cancer Physician, and in the Introduction he notes that both of his parents were alcoholics or substance abusers; he's a lot tougher on his father than Patricia Morley was in her bio of Leo Kennedy. Maybe this explains why Leo Kennedy accomplished so little as a poet. Leo Kennedy spent his final years living in a hotel near his son's home in San Marino until his death at age 93 on 14 December 2000. BTW, Leo Kennedy was born in Liverpool, England, not in Michigan, where he lived for a number of years. 

(When I did this research in February 2018 Wikipedia did not have a date of death for Leo Kennedy; I now see that as of May 2018 someone has corrected this by giving the year but not the day and month of Kennedy's passing.)