The Library of Lost Interests 1/3

Here are two boxes of Krishnamurti books, destroyed when our basement flooded.

When our basement flooded two years ago I lost books, literary papers, archives, old family photographs, manuscripts, and old diaries. Losing these things was strangely liberating, I didn't really care as much as I thought I would. I had already begun discarding books; years before the flood I began downsizing my library; I kept poetry and books on poetics, biographies of poets, books on poets’ work, books of interviews with poets, and some other books that still meant something to me. But fiction was easy to discard, except for a few novels--Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, novels by Margaret Laurence, and other Canadian novelists--most of the rest were discarded.

Years ago I read all of Henry Miller's books, some were purchased second hand, some new, some remaindered, and some from antiquarian book stores. I read books that Miller recommended, for instance, the diaries and novels of Anais Nin and I heard her speak at Sir George Williams University; I read Blaise Cendrar and other writers that Miller knew. Read Henry Miller's The Books in My Life (1952); I am pretty sure that I discovered J. Krishnamurti because of Miller's essay on him in this book. I remember late one day, taking a city bus home, and meeting Louis Dudek on the same bus; he had planned to publish something by Henry Miller but decided against it; he writes, somewhere, that the big influence on his writing was Matthew Arnold and Henry Miller. He liked Miller’s conversational style of writing and that Miller was intelligent but not academic.

Also, I must have read all of the novels of Jack Kerouac, and then I moved on to other Beat writers, Corso, Burroughs, Michael McClure, Ferlinghetti, and Diane di Prima. It used to be that when I would read someone whose books I liked I read all of their work, their novels, poems, essays, letters, books on their writing, and biographies. And I’ll read the books they recommend or books that influenced them. 

I began reading Jack Kerouac in the fall of 1969, around the time I heard Allen Ginsberg read his poems at Sir George Williams University where I was a student; by then, Kerouac had fallen into obscurity, he drank his way into oblivion, and then he died; by then the public had moved on from the Beatniks to the Hippies and left Kerouac behind. Back then, in 1969, I found it difficult to find Kerouac's books; today, they're in the remaining bookstores that we have. But now I have no real interest in Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg. As bpNichol said to me, when he read his work at the college where I was teaching, Kerouac is for when you are young, when you get older you want something more substantial. I'm no longer interested in reading Kerouac's novels but I kept his poetry, I still like Kerouac's poetry.                                 

I remember the evening of 21 October 1969, a dark and rainy evening, I was downtown on McKay Street when I heard that Kerouac had died. But death was good for his reputation as a writer, over the following years and decades his popularity has grown and his unpublished manuscripts have been published; books on Kerouac, biographies and memoirs, have also been published. 

Back in the late 1960s there were still people around who had known Kerouac from his visits to Montreal. A professor and friend, it was Scotty Gardiner at SGWU, told me that he expected Kerouac to come for supper at a friend's home but Kerouac never arrived. It was the usual story of a drunk Jack Kerouac disappointing people and not caring, he could be belligerent and argumentative when drunk. Ginsberg also read in Montreal, in November 1969, and from where I was sitting I could see George Bowering in the first row with Peter Orlovsky. The years passed and Ginsberg returned to read in Montreal (I can't find documentation for this visit) but Ginsberg's readings were no longer important cultural events, it was golden oldies, and people demonstrated against Ginsberg's advocacy for adult men having sex with young boys. Ginsberg discredited himself advocating for this issue, he was not ahead of his time, he was out of touch with society, its norms, and values. Here is something ironic: a few days ago I read that when Ginsberg was young, he lived for a while with William Burroughs, and when he moved out he complained to Burroughs that he didn't want to have sex with some old man... Actually, Ginsberg said a lot worse about Burroughs' private anatomy than I will repeat. Ken Norris writes in a poem that, when he was young, poets were our heroes, and they were. A friend, Trevor Carolan, wrote on Ginsberg in Giving Up Poetry: With Allen Ginsberg At Hollyhock (Banff Centre Press, 2001). Ginsberg, like Kerouac, is a writer of one's youth, not one’s older years. 

Our flooded basement:

Flooded basement, July 2023

Vehicule in Vancouver

A few weeks ago I was doing some research at UBC's Rare Books & Special Collections and University Archives. Part of this research was reading Brian Fawcett's "NMFG," an acronym for "no money from the government." NMFG, a magazine of poetry and poetics, ran from 1976 to 1979.

Vancouver was especially important back in the 1970s, that's where contemporary poetry was happening in Canada. This is no longer the case and I suspect there is no single place in Canada that is the center for new and important poetry in this country. I remember visiting with Richard Sommer, who was a poet and had been one of my professors at Sir George Williams University, after he and his family had visited Vancouver and been influenced by the poetry scene there; Vancouver, truly, seemed like a Mecca as compared with Montreal at that time. Richard was a little bit of Vancouver in Montreal, someone who made a significant impression on me back then.

I need to qualify these comments on NMFG and the Vancouver poetry scene by saying that NMFG represents only one aspect of the Vancouver poetry scene back in the second half of the 1970s; there were other groups, other poets, other poetry scenes in Vancouver. My impression has always been that Vancouver was a pretty open and welcoming place for poets. It has always seemed to me to support and welcome poets, support a literary community, and not try to drive poets away. I can't say the same for Montreal, where a literary community exists but it is fragmented and divisive. I remember receiving a letter from bpNichol commenting on this. This is also one reason why the Vehicule Poets were so important in Montreal, we had no single aesthetic commonality but we were inclusive and supportive to each other.





I noticed two items of interest in NMFG's back issues that I want to mention here: first is a short message from Artie Gold, suggesting that the gay content in the journal was detracting from commentary on poetry. Good old Artie, you wouldn't make this comment in today's politically correct world. But you also wouldn't get away with the "boy's club" of poetry found in NMFG; check out how many women poets are published in its pages, in many issues it's none. These intellectual men running NMFG come across as embarrassingly mysognynistic. As well, another comment, while American poets found a welcome home in Vancouver back then some of them don't seem to have thought Canadian poetry worth their time. I wonder if some of these same people will one day be seen as little more than long-term visitors to Vancouver, as footnotes, and not really part of the poetry tradition in Canadian Literature? Maybe someone will address this issue in Anvil Press's forthcoming Making Waves: Reading BC and Pacific Northwest Literature, edited by Trevor Carolan at the University of the Fraser Valley.

The second item is Brian Fawcett's review of the first anthology of English poetry in Montreal (English Montreal Poetry of the 1970s) published by Vehicule Press back in the mid-1970s. I know the anthology very well, I taught it for several years to my college-level Canadian Literature students, and I know personally many of the poets in the anthology. The review misses the point of the anthology which was a gathering of what was happening in English poetry in Montreal back then; we'd had years of the poetry community growing smaller and smaller, and finally there was a kind of Renaissance going on mainly due to our efforts at Vehicule Art Gallery. The anthology's editors (Norris and Farkas) were fairly democratic in choosing who would be in it, and it was the first evidence in print that Montreal poetry was coming back to life. You might trace the more open and inclusive aspects of the present-day poetry scene in Montreal back to this anthology, it was one of the signs that things had begun to change for the better. We'd had Dudek and Layton's public quarrel before Layton left for Ontario and Louis seemed to stop making public statements until he wrote the introduction to my first book, The Trees of Unknowing (Vehicule Press, 1978). As well, the separatist movement was growing in Quebec and the English-speaking community was being increasingly marginalized. The Vehicule Poets, beginning around 1974, were the first poets in Montreal at that time who were awake to contemporary poetry whether in the States or in the rest of Canada; however, NMFG couldn't have known any of this.