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| Back porch at 2226 Girouard Avenue, 1953 |
The following is from an interview that is forthcoming in www.poetry-quebec.com; this describes something of the content, the poems, in Girouard Avenue.
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Do you write with the intention of “growing a manuscript” or do you work on individual poems that are later collected into a book?
My ambition has always been to write a thematically cohesive book. I remember, in high school, running home at lunch time and listening to the Beatles’ “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” I believe this is one of the first concept or thematic albums. Then, there was also Frank Zappas’s parody of the Beatles’ album, and that was also fun. It was from the Beatles that I had the idea of a thematic book of poems, and I’ve followed this ever since. My new book, Girouard Avenue, is the most cohesive and thematic of all of the books I’ve written. It took many years to write Girouard Avenue, I must have started the writing in 1995, and then I’ve waited years to publish the book, my first since 1998.
Girouard Avenue begins with a prologue, “Holy Well,” an ancestral memory of Ireland where my family originated, but it is a mythical Ireland, a place of the unconscious mind, and then the poem also reflects on where we are today, in Montreal. The unconscious has always been important to my work, as it must be to any poet, for where do the poems come from but the unconscious, that place of dreams, mythology, and psychological and spiritual depth.
There are four long poems in Girouard Avenue, the first two are poems of place, of different homes where we lived in Montreal. The first of these is “Girouard Avenue Flat” which celebrates my grandmother and includes family history. She lived for over forty years at 2226 Girouard Avenue, renting a large flat below Sherbrooke Street West in Montreal. This home was busy with the daily life of a large family, which included seven children. Many played musical instruments. Other family members also lived there, due to illness or old age or financial straits. Even my parents and my brother and I lived on Girouard Avenue in the early 1950s, with my grandmother, my Aunt Mable, and my great aunt Essie, because of my father’s heart condition. Before that we had lived a few blocks away on Avonmore. This was my parents’ first home after they married in 1940, but a small 3 ½ room apartment wasn’t a good environment for a family of four people when one of them is seriously ill. After the war it was difficult to find a larger apartment to rent, so off we went to Girouard. By 1969, after my grandmother died, there was just my grandmother’s two very elderly sisters left living there and I talk about visiting them with my brother at Christmas.
The next poem is “Hoolahan’s Flat, Oxford Avenue,” where we moved in 1954, after living at my grandmother’s for the previous two years. “Hoolahan’s Flat, Oxford Avenue” is a poem of the 1950s, of television, and family. In this poem I purposely avoided being overly confessional or emotional in favour of a kind of reporting on the times in which I lived, what they were like, in a fairly matter-of-fact way. I mention my first friend, Audrey Keyes, the girl next door, and over forty years later Audrey saw the poem online and contacted me, and we’ve become friends again, as though no time has intervened.
These first two poems in the book are of places where I lived in Montreal, but they are also significant for other reasons. More happened in these two flats than just daily life. These homes were foundational to the development of who I am as a poet and as a person.
Even as a child I felt there was a bravery and heroism to everyday life as it is lived by everyday people. There is a courage in average people that has always interested me. I’ve loved stories of family, of who did what and when. These family stories are framed by history. These accounts have an aura of historical reality and authenticity; my poems about family are also poems of spirit, of courage, of dedication to family and everyone working hard. This is what I want remembered, so that these people aren’t forgotten, so that the ancestors are suitably remembered.
“November” is the third long poem in Girouard Avenue. The month of November is the time when I have always been closest to the unconscious mind, to dreams, to Spirit, to what the spirits say to me. The days are growing shorter, we are moving relentlessly into winter, and the fabric between our material world and the other world is at its thinnest. Now I return to my father departing for Boston in 1956, where he died a few weeks later; but I also reflect on the importance of the railroad in Canada. Many members of my family worked for the Canadian Pacific Railroad. The railway was an important form of transportation in the past. In this poem there is the juxtaposition of the personal with the impersonal, but always memory of the people I am descended from and who I honour. But a poet is more than this: a poet affirms life and writes from a vision that reminds the reader there is more to life than mundane activity, there is epiphany, spirituality, aesthetics, and dignity even in the most humble people.
The final poem in the book is “The Rock, Or a Short History of the Irish in Montreal” and uses my own family’s history in Montreal, from when they arrived here around 1844, to recall something of the history of the Irish in Montreal. The Irish were an enormous immigrant population here; people who mostly arrived with nothing, which is also the story of the Irish in other North American cities. Within several generations these Irish immigrants rose to become doctors and lawyers, politicians and leaders in government. The Irish have always believed in education and fighting to survive.
There is the Black Rock, a memorial to the Irish who arrived in Montreal in 1847 from famine-ridden Ireland, only to die in fever sheds located near present-day Victoria Bridge. Here you can see the heroism I am referring to. Families came all this way from Ireland, so hopeful, so desirous of a new life, and then five thousand of them perished soon after arriving. It’s a tragic story but at least they opted for survival and a new life, rather than give up and die in Ireland.
Having said this, perhaps there’s a balancing of tragedy and bravery that I find compelling. It is also my own Irish sensibility that causes me to perceive tragedy and melancholy in what I see around me, in the stories and lives of people. Even my father’s story is a combination of bravery and tragedy: he was a man of such intelligence that he rose from the working class to quite a prestigious executive position in the C.P.R., but he had rheumatic fever when he was a child and this eventually caused medical problems, scarring of his heart, that caused his early death. He didn’t give up, he lived as long as he could, he had a family, he did his best despite knowing that his life would not last as long as other people’s. Had my father lived for just another six months medical advances were achieved that could have extended his life for many more years. But that was not to be. His death when I was only six years old changed my life, and perhaps it made a poet out of me.
The last poem, the epilogue, is “The Colours of the Irish Flag,” which celebrates marriage, family, and love. But it is also a poem about being strong, not being defeated without a fight for one’s survival, or the survival of what one believes in. You don’t just roll over and give up, you fight, you struggle, you go the distance, you don’t be a coward, you be a man or a woman. We’ll have no cowards here. You can see that I feel very strongly about all of this.
Revised: 09 February 2022
