Vehicule Days at McGill University

Here is my group photo of the Vehicule Poets from our reading on the evening of April 26, 2018 at McGill University's Rare Books and Special Collections. From left: Endre Farkas, Tom Konyves, John McAuley, Claudia Lapp, and Stephen Morrissey. Missing: Ken Norris.

Claudia Lapp at Blue Met Literary Festival

Claudia Lapp, one of the Vehicule Poets, reads her poem "Shivasana", at Hotel 10 in downtown Montreal, as part of the Blue Met Literary Festival, on April 28, 2018.

A Lost Poem by Artie Gold

(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.

Artie Gold in 2004

SM behind Artie...

Ken Norris, Artie Gold, and Stephen Morrissey

Here are the rest of the photos from our evening out at a Chinese restaurant on St. Laurent. Here's Ken Norris on the phone before they had cell phones...

Here's Ken at the Gazette's book fair back in 1993.

Here I am (ever the conservative) with Ken Norris.

There's SM, Ken Norris, and Artie back in 1993.

Artie Gold in 1993

All previously unpublished photographs of Artie Gold from 1993. A group of us went out for supper, including CZ, Ken Norris, Artie Gold, and myself, to a Chinese restaurant on St. Laurent. Ken's book, Vehicule Days: an unorthodox history of Montreal's Vehicule Poets (1993)  had just been published. A fun time was had by all...

Dwight Druick on Artie Gold

Artie Gold in 2004 at the restaurant across the street from where he lived on Sherbrooke Street
West, near Patricia Avenue; this restaurant closed and there is a Second Cup there now

Here's a letter I received from Dwight Druick on November 6, 2011, regarding my essay "Remembering Artie Gold"; the complete essay can be read at
http://www.coraclepress.com/chapbooks/morrissey/remembering-artie-gold.html
------------------

Dear Stephen,


It has been 16 years since I moved from Montreal to make a home in Kingston, Ontario. I had come here to work at Hotel Dieu Hospital in adult psychiatry after having transformed from a musician-songwrtiter (a calling which has gratefully returned without the onus of having to make a living from it) to a psychiatric social worker. During a long period of transition from the stage to McGill - a seemingly endless 7 years - I was a bartender - first at the Rainbow and, then, at Charlie's.

I met Artie in the late 70's at the Rainbow. He would wait for the end of my shift and we would go to Ben's for a 4 AM breakfast of eggs, rye toast, and fried salami. I will never forget watching Artie eat - lingering over each bite with the delight of a child.

Artie and I spent many nights together. We would talk and eat - and we shared some drugs. He would invite me to his tiny apartment on MacKay to see his stash of treasures, the latest of which he would find in the alley ways in the Guy Street area where he lived. I dubbed him 'the urban beachcomber'.

I still have many treasures that Artie gave or sold to me. Scrooge McDuck comics wrapped in plastic and an array of lost and found objects that we both valued. We shared a kind of childlike wonder, marvelling at the great stuff other people would throw away.

This afternoon, I decided to change the place where I have hung one of Artie's drawings that he gave to me. I wanted it to get more light and attention. I turned to Nancy, my wife of 22 years - and a friend of Artie's as well - and said that I was going 'Google' him. That's how I found your tribute to him and learned the very sad news of his passing.

I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for your words and photos. Artie was a truly gentle and brilliant soul. It was a privilege to have been his friend.

I have often thought of him as the years have gone by - and wondered how he was doing. I missed his company. His humour. His smile.

So in memory of a great friend, I will share my favorite Artie story that I tell at least 5 times a year:

I see Artie for the first time in a few days and say 'hi'.

He says "How come you don't ask how I'm doing"?

Chastened, I ask, 'So how are ya doin'?

Artie pauses, shrugs,

"Don't ask".

Thanks Stephen.

Dwight Druick

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.

A Visitor From the Future

Poster for poetry readings at Vehicule Art Gallery, and
showing interior of the gallery

One fall evening, back in the mid-1970s, at the old Véhicule Art Gallery on Ste. Catherine Street West, I was scheduled to give a reading of my poems. It was dark and rainy outside as I waited for an audience so I could begin. I remember the arrival of a bearded man as he came up the stairs from the street outside. He asked if “Stephen Morrissey” was giving a poetry reading and I remember speaking with him. He had just arrived in Montreal, he said, on a train from New York City and he had seen my name advertising the reading in the newspaper, and he had a few hours between the arrival of the train and his departure from Dorval Airport that same evening on a flight to Ireland. He wanted to know if I had any poems about being Irish and when I answered that I didn’t, he turned and left. I remember being annoyed by him, and thinking, as well, that whatever was implied by writing “Irish poems” didn’t interest me. I remember that his brief appearance at the reading, before it even began, caused a stir, as others also gathered around him when he entered.

The memory of this stranger has stayed with me all of these years; indeed, I see his visit in a different light now that I have spent the last ten or more years researching my Irish family history and writing what might be called “Irish Poems,” such as “The Colours of the Irish Flag” and “The Rock, A Short History of the Irish in Montreal.” I now think of this stranger as a visitor from my future, someone who came to remind me of what I would one day be writing. In retrospect I see that what I was writing back in the mid-1960s, and on through the years to what I am writing now, is a single continuum, although I was not conscious of this back then. I think of this visitor from the future not as someone who came to change what I was writing, but as someone reminding me of my themes in poetry: poems of family, memory, the ancestors, grief, and the knowledge that underlying everything we do is this journey we are on—this journey between being born and dying—that it is in every instance holy and divine.

I dreamed Artie Gold...

Window display at The Word Book Store remembering Artie Gold

I dreamed Artie Gold sat half-conscious in a hospital chair slumped forward surrounded by women wiping away saliva running down his chin. It was in this state he decided to end his life. The Chinese pottery Artie collected, the T’ang Dynasty, the Golden Age of Chinese culture and poetry; now the American Empire collapses, the look of the country changes because of the men we admire. Of Canada what can be said? A country of winter, a geography of wind in a northern land— the convergence of spirit and vision, what we’ve become, the poem completed.

Revised: 02 March 2021; 31 December 2021.

Artie Gold's chair

Remembering Artie Gold on the third anniversary of his death, February 14, 2007. The chair now belongs to Adrian King-Edwards, owner of The Word Bookstore.

Artie Gold, two years later

"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)

____________________________________________

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.

Poetry in Motion, poetry on the buses

It was April 2004 when Poetry in Motion was launched at Paragraphe Books, located on McGill College Avenue. Organized by several local poets, poems by Montreal poets were displayed on buses.

This is the launch of Poetry in Motion at Paragraphe Books.

Here is Linda Leith, founder of Blue Metropolis, at the Poetry in Motion launch.

Here is Mohammed Togane in one of the buses displaying his poem. I reviewed one of Togane's books years ago, the review can be found at the Reviews section of www.stephenmorrissey.ca.

Visiting one of the buses...

My poem, "because reality is too much", in the display bus.

CFCF channel 12 filming the poems for that evening's news.

A bus, parked outside of Paragraphe Books, in which the poems were displayed, with the Poetry in Motion advertisement displayed on the bus.

"Drummer Boy Raga" and Cut-ups

Vehicule Poets at Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University
giving a group reading on 26 April 2018

Like a collagist, selecting and snipping, Stephen immersed himself in the text, emerged with bits and phrases words, even syllables. Sometimes, his selection was to introduce fragments of what was to come, sometimes a reflection (refraction) of what had just passed. His breaking up the text in this fashion turned the piece in on itself, its meditative aspect. The work was now reaching inward as well as outward. He did not add one original phrase, not one external element, yet his contribution was instructive. In visual terms, he zoomed in on the fabric, the material, offering the work as “object”, built with breaths, words, thoughts. 

                                                    —Tom Konyves on “Drummer Boy Raga: Red Light, Green                                                         Light” (Poetry in Performance, The Muses’ Company, 1982) 

By chance, I just reread Tom’s commentary on my participation in “Drummer Boy Raga: Red Light, Green Light”, a poetry performance we gave at Vehicule Art Gallery, on April 16, 1977. I believe the project was originated and coordinated by Tom Konyves; the performance included John McAuley, Ken Norris, Tom Konyves, Endre Farkas, Opal L. Nations, and Stephen Morrissey. My participation in writing the text amounted to cutting-up what others were writing. Then the cut-ups were assembled and returned to Tom who distributed the new work to the next person. These were my first published cut-ups. Finally, as a group, we performed the completed “Drummer Boy Raga: Red Light, Green Light”. Thinking back, this must also have been our first written group project as the Vehicule Poets; the next group collaboration would be A Real Good Goosin', Talking Poetics, Louis Dudek and The Vehicule Poets (Maker Press, Montreal, 1981). This was an interview or dialogue between Louis Dudek and the seven of us young poets. We were known as the Vehicule Poets because we all hung out and organized poetry readings at Vehicule Art Gallery. Our first group anthology, The Vehicule Poets (Maker Press, Montreal, 1979) wasn’t a collaborative work as such; it was an anthology of our work as individual poets, not work written in collaboration with each other. And now, here is Tom’s text, from above, cut-up: 

Like a collagist, selecting and snipping turned the piece in on itself, its meditative emerged with bits and phrases words, inward as well as outward. he did not add was to introduce fragments of what was element, yet his contribution was instructive (refraction) of what had just passed. His fabric, the material, offering the work as Stephen immersed himself in the text thoughts. even syllables. Sometimes, his selection aspect. The work was now reaching to come, sometimes a reflection. In visual terms, he zoomed in on the breaking up the text in this fashion “object”, built with breaths, words,

The Vehicule Poets' last meeting, 2004

From left: Artie Gold, Claudia Lapp's husband Gary, Ken Norris, Ruth Taylor sitting beside Ken, Claudia Lapp (standing), Tom Konyves, and the back of Endre Farkas's head... This was the morning after the Vehicule Poet's performance at Place des Arts in April 2004, at La Brise Restaurant (now Starbucks) across the street from Artie's apartment. Copies of the anthology, The Vehicule Poets_Now (edited by Tom Konyves and Stephen Morrissey; published by The Muses' Company, Winnipeg, 2004) were distributed. I am not too sure why John McAuley wasn't present.

Ken Norris and Ruth Taylor.

Artie, going home...

A few days earlier, at St. Viateur Restaurant on Monkland, from left, Tom Konyves, Endre Farkas, Claudia Lapp, Stephen Morrissey.

The Vehicule Poets in 2002

Artie Gold (SM in background).

Endre Farkas.

Tom and Marlene Konyves.

From left: CZ, Stephen Morrissey, Artie Gold, Endre Farkas, Tom Konyves.

Photographs taken at a Chinese restaurant on the corner of St. Denis and Sherbrooke Street West in Montreal.