T.L. Morrisey

Showing posts with label Morrice family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Morrice family. Show all posts

Saturday, October 15, 2022

Louis Dudek in Paradise

I began writing this poem back in 2001 and completed it in 2012, and just found it in my archives. 

A winter afternoon at Mount Royal Cemetery



1)  Homage to Louis Dudek

A cold wind sweeps down
from Mount Royal
to the city below;
this bitter winter
ending with a death.
When a poet dies
a light goes out,
a bit of brilliance
is extinguished,
although poets know
no death is greater than another,
the homeless man surrounded
by plastic garbage bags,
or the former prime minister,
his body carried by a train
slowing at each station.

At the funeral, I listen to Louis' poems
being read, each reader celebrating Louis' life
with anecdotes and poems, a life
dedicated to poetry and teaching.
Louis has moved from temporal
to eternal, from flesh to word;
no more poems will be written by him,
no more meetings in restaurants
to discuss books and art and ideas.

A final grief, a final salute:
the old poet is dead,
the books are written,
the poems recited,
discussions into the evening
come to an end
and we prepare to go home.
We linger at the door
and say "Louis' life
was lived for love of others,
his poems were written out of love."
Outside the March day has turned to night,
we return to our usual lives
feeling diminished by his death
and the world seems
a lesser place.


2) that was then, this is now

The older poets
had a sense of their mission,
it was a lineage of poets,

not a competition
but a place in making
a national literature, the importance

of this in nation building;
now, the nation
is built, but we’ve

lost the propriety of things;
no one was concerned
with “award winning poets”

that was never why we wrote,
it was the obsession with writing poems,
the excitement of discovering a new poet,

and with being a community of poets;
the older poets welcomed the young;
that was when

in the whole country
we had ten or fifteen poets,
not fifteen poets times three hundred,  

not everyone writing their poems
and few reading what was written;
to be a poet was to be the exception,

not a commonplace, it was earned by writing,
not one or two poems, but a lifetime
of work, of building a body of work,

because the words came to you, not just
the mundane, but a vision in the work
an obsession for writing and love

for poetry; eccentricity (which is never
politically correct) was not despised,
it was expected; the tyranny of conformity 

had no place among poets,
it was the writing that mattered;
the courtesy of older poets to the young,

as that day, at McGill’s Arts Building,
I was a graduate student that year
in Dudek’s seminar, discussing Pound,

Yeats, Joyce and Ford Madox Ford,
that year in Louis’s office, when being
with an older poet was a privilege—



The Morrice family monument at 
Mount Royal Cemetery, including
a plaque for James Wilson Morrice



3) James Wilson Morrice

James Wilson Morrice
had to go to Paris
to be an artist

(as years later
John Glassco followed)

leaving the family mansion
(now torn down) on Redpath Street, 
a block from

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts,
where his paintings
are on permanent display— 

William Van Horn, president of the CPR,
who collected art as a hobby, told Morrice’s father
to let him study art abroad after seeing

some of the son’s paintings;
at Mount Royal Cemetery
on one side of the Morrice family’s monument,

James Wilson Morrice’s name and dates (1865-1924)
and place of burial, in Tunis; this is the man Louis Dudek said
“painted grey snow”: “he is a Canadian on his travels.

His destination is one he never reaches,
though others may reach it after him — it is Canada.”
That destination is paradise, to live with summer

year round, not in Montreal, the “Metropolis”, that Morrice rarely
visited after he left, where winter is six months of the year,
the other six divided between summer, fall and spring—

Meanwhile, the Beaver Hall artists, their studio space and gallery
located a block east of St. Patrick’s Church,
held two exhibitions, in 1921 and 1922.

And what about that forgotten Beaver Hall artist,
Darrell Morrisey? She was erased as an artist,
her work discarded by her family after her death, at age 33,

in 1930, it soon became as though she never existed;
and Morrice, the warm ocean breeze and sleeping
on a rooftop in Tunis under the stars—the choreography

of his life, and our life-long work as poets,
the vision of art, the act of creation,
the company of poets—


4) in the company of artists and poets

In the company of artists and poets:
John Cage chatting with Arnold Shöenberg

while Glenn Gould eats supper
with Bach; there’s Jackson Pollock listening

as Artie Gold reads his poem about Bucks County,
and later someone plays Charles Ives’ 2nd Piano Concerto;

Jack Shadbolt meets Emily Carr meeting Nellie McClung
(the granddaughter poet of the better known Nellie),

and HD talks with Virginia Woolf who celebrates
her birthday with James Joyce; Yeats and Jeffers

are in their towers; Jack Kerouac and John Lennon
discuss religion and listen to “Imagine” (which Kerouac hates);

Van Gogh argues with Gauguin; Strindberg and Arthur Miller,
watch Marilyn Monroe holding down her skirt around her knees;

Charlie Chaplin’s silhouette walking into the sunset;
we’re in the eternal, art and music, we’re in Paradise,

where artists and poets create our age,
hard cover books on shelves, abstract paintings on walls,

and just last week lying awake in bed at 5 a.m.,
some kid at a university radio station (in Edmonton) 

playing jazz, Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, 
and John Coltrane, with no idea where this music came from,

only knowing that he likes what he’s listening to,
this art, that it speaks to him—


5) all art is vision (or it's just a repetition of the past)

All art is vision—
in the great museums and concert halls,
what returns us to Spirit is art,

poems sustaining us
over a lifetime,
paintings by the Great Masters

drawings on Lascaux’s
cave walls, hieroglyphics
and Inuit art,

sculpture and pottery,
movies and dance—
all the great art of civilization

returns us to God—
all art is vision
all poetry requires vision
to express the poet’s psyche,
if the soul
is filled with lies 

how can the poetry
not also lie? if the poet
censors the poem,

what is created
but a censored poem?
We try to live  

true to our vision, our journey
of truth, our journey
in Paradise—

--------------------------

Note: "Homage to Louis Dudek", a section of this poem, was first published in Eternal Conversation, a tribute to Louis Dudek. 

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