Remembering Ian Ferrier

In the old days, because of invitations from Ilona Martonfi, I did a lot of readings at the Yellow Door Coffee House, the Visual Arts Centre in Westmount, and the yearly "Lovers and Others" reading series, and so many times I read with Ian Ferrier. I think I read with Ian more often than with any other poet. Losing Ian (1954-2024) was a tragic loss for Canadian poetry, he was an immense talent. Often, at these readings, Ian would arrive on his motorcycle and bring his sound system. My test for poetry was always if what I read or heard made me want to write then it was good poetry, and Ian was one of the poets who inspired me to write. And I always took photographs of some of the poets at these readings, readings from 2011, 2012, 2015, and 2017; it all ended with the Covid lockdown. There were other readings, other events, but here are some photographs I took of Ian at these poetry readings. It's people like Ian Ferrier--original, idiosyncratic, highly talented, true to their inner being and vision--that inspire a poetry community.

At the Visual Arts Centre, Westmount, Quebec

At O'Reagan's Irish Pub

How to write a poem, and reading poems

 

29 May 2014

While my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed,

As to long panoramas of visions.

           --Walt Whitman,  "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d"

Some contemporary poetry is obscure, some of it has an intellectual affectation, it might say to the reader—the reader might intuit—that this poetry is meaningless and that perhaps it was written more for insiders than average people. Of course, there is nothing wrong with being difficult, I applaud being difficult; what is difficult today may be obvious to future readers. But, still, this poetry is more an extension of life's confusion, not an understanding of it, not clarity, not even clarity grounded in an aesthetic presentation, only more confusion. I like direct plain concise language which is an achievement in expression, it is also a very difficult achievement. Poetry deals with the human condition, it isn’t about language, it isn't word play, it isn’t being clever, it isn't jibber jabber, gibberish, abracadabra, or intellectual flim flam... The clue to understanding poetry is that it must be authentic to psyche—that’s all it has to do—otherwise it is meaningless to the reader, it is obscure, obfuscating, pretend intellectual, not real poetry, it doesn’t communicate or offer communion with the reader, it just adds to the overall confusion of life.

There is writing poetry and there is reading poetry, these are two different experiences. If you write poetry then the process is that writing poetry precedes having ideas about poetry and it may take you places—the unknown—in your writing that you never knew you would visit, but if you have preconceptions about what you want to write then you will never visit these new places and new themes in your poetry. It used to be popular to be a Marxist and write about Marxism in one's poems, that is now outdated and old fashioned; today, the popular thing is gender and gender dysphoria, but writing about gender dysphoria doesn't produce real poetry although real poetry may be about gender and gender dysphoria. Poetry isn't prose and some poets should turn to prose if they want to communicate a specific message on some topic of importance to them. 

Writing poetry is different than reading poetry; even though it might be one’s calling in life, writing poetry may only be temporary. Coleridge wrote poems for only two years, it was his calling but it was only for two or so years. Some poetry you read stays with you for a lifetime; poetry or some other art form, for instance visual art or music, changes and deepens as you get older, as you return to it at different times in your life and as you mature as a person, then it gives you a new perspective on what you used to believe. Poetry can also work at an intuitive level, or be an intellectual apprehension, or work at a deeper or different perspective of one's life, and whether one is reading poetry or writing poetry one must always be authentic to psyche. Poetry is visionary and an expression of the soul, it isn't a treatise, a dissertation, it isn't propaganda, it isn’t fiction or prose; for this reason poetry doesn't have a greater place in our contemporary world even though reams of poetry are written and published every year. 

Revised: 07, 08, 11 May 2025

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’ 2^nd 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. 

The politically correct CBC is destroying Canadian culture; it's time to Defund the CBC. 

Notes on Voice in Poetry

                      

The discovery of a poet’s voice brings an authenticity to the poet’s work, that the poet’s voice communicates the content of the poem as well as the poet’s inner being, his or her soul. Voice in poetry is the expression of the soul.

__________________________

It isn’t the sound of your voice or how well you read a poem out loud that is voice. It isn’t a poem for several voices. It isn’t slam poetry or performance poetry. It’s the essence of who you are as it is expressed in the way you write, your own original distinctive individual voice.

__________________________

Voice in poetry, to be authentic, must be true to the self of the poet, to the inner, subjective, self-perception of the poet. The voice has to be authentic and true to the poet’s inner perception. Voice has to be an expression of the authentic self, not the self covered over with falsehood and conceit.

__________________________

The point is to discover one’s voice, and then you continue writing and voice changes in what one writes, but the discovery of one’s authentic voice is a border one needs to cross in order to write the work that follows, work that one can stand behind, that gives one the self-assurance to expresses one’s vision. 

__________________________ 

Voice is a vehicle for the content of poetry, but it is also inseparable from poetry; content expands when an authentic voice is discovered. Voice is not style, style changes but voice is the expression of the inner, psychological dimension of the poet; voice is the expression of psyche. The expression of voice changes just as our actual voice changes with age, but once an authentic voice is discovered then voice will remain authentic to the poet, no matter what the poet is saying.

__________________________

There is no way to find one’s voice, it must be discovered by the poet, but not all poets find their voice in poetry; however, after voice is discovered the person writing poems is a real poet, not someone who also happens to write poems. If someone who writes poems never finds his voice, he is not a poet. How can he be when writing poetry is predicated on writing from an authentic voice? This does not diminish what a poet writes before the discovery of voice, in some way voice might exist as a precursor to the discovery of the poet’s authentic voice, or at least the reader can see the potential for the birth of voice in the early work.

__________________________

First, you have to be born a poet and realize you are a poet by writing poetry, then you have to put in your 10,000 hours of apprenticeship. There’s nothing romantic or fun about it. It’s a lot of hard work to be a poet and as you get older it gets harder and harder, not because of writing poems but because of all the pother work that comes with writing and building a body of work; for instance, organizing and placing your archives, working on your selected poems, writing criticism, keeping up correspondence, managing what you have created a lifetime building, and so on.

__________________________

Voice is the expression of the poet’s integrity as a poet. Voice is the expression of the poet’s character, sensibility, and integrity as a human being. This is why it has such importance to poets.

__________________________

Discovering one’s voice does not disqualify or negate what the poet wrote before this discovery, but it is a signifier of the poet’s maturity as a poet. 

__________________________ 

Voice is when we speak from the heart, from the soul, without pretention or affectation, but honestly without censoring ourselves, with only one conviction, to be true to our inner necessity, to what we have to say (not what we want to say or should say, or think we should say) but abandoning these things of the self, to speak from the real and authentic self, not the layers of self, but from the heart, with honesty, and from the soul.

__________________________ 

The genesis of both the content of the work and the voice expressing the work are simultaneous, they can’t be separated. They are the same process. The work is written in the voice as the voice is discovered and as the work is written.

__________________________ 

Voice in poetry is not one’s “style” of writing; style may be narrative, minimal, visual poetry, or what have you. Voice is access to psyche from which poems are written. If a poet hasn’t discovered his “voice” he hasn’t become a poet.

__________________________ 

A poet can’t “search for a voice”, but all poets need to find their voice. Voice comes to the poet, it isn’t something you can “find”. Voice is the expression of the poet’s psyche, the congruence of events that allow the poem to authentically express the inner, spiritual and psychological, being of the poet.

__________________________

Vision in Poetry

It is a constant struggle to write from one’s vision
when there are so many people who oppose what one has to say.
It is a constant struggle to be true to one’s vision,
to be true to one’s self over a lifetime of writing.

It is a constant struggle
to be strong, strong in one’s vision,
not give up, not surrender, not lose one’s vision.