My friend, Paul Leblond, retires from teaching

                      

                                                      Champlain College, St. Lambert Campus

Here is one of my last social engagements, my speech at the retirement party for my friend Paul Leblond hosted at the home of our colleague Susan Woodruff. I loved teaching and I loved socializing at our office, we had a great long run with both! But everything comes to an end. 

RETIREMENT SPEECH FOR PAUL LEBLOND

I taught at Champlain College from November 1976 to January 2012. 

For most of that time I shared an office with Susan, John, and Paul.

I can honestly say I never went to work unhappy that I had to be there. I always loved teaching, the students, and the three people with whom I shared an office.

I met Susan first because she was on the hiring committee when I was interviewed.

                                         View of the Jacques Cartier Bridge from our office window

A week after I was hired and sitting in my tiny first floor office, John (who I'd never met before), came and welcomed me to the college.

A few weeks later I met Paul at a department meeting at the home of Ricky Zurif, our department head. It was evening and Paul came running in when the meeting was almost over, he was breathless and animated,  he'd been to a political demonstration and he had lots to say about the demonstration still going on in the streets.

It was always lively in that office of ours, you could depend on it, we talked constantly, whether about Quebec and Canada, American politics, our students, the administration at the college, teaching, and schedules that had four hours of back-to-back classes! And when John wasn't there (he was "off to meet the kiddies" as he sang leaving the office, to a tune from the Wizard of Oz) Paul (or "Paulium" as John called him) and I continued to talk. And talk. And talk.

Few teachers have more students congregate around them than Paul, these were animated group meetings during which time young people could say anything they wanted, and some of them probably experiencing for the first time an adult taking them seriously and listening to what they had to say. It was a free-for-all for students visiting Paul. Students meeting with Susan all seemed responsible and charming young women who read Jane Austen and would no doubt go on to respectable and responsible careers. Students visiting me were more or less normal people, including one young man who brought along his five foot tall Italian grandmother who wanted to give me a hug. Paul's students were a motley crew who sometimes had outrageous opinions. And when they finally left it was back to work for Paul, he had to organize the half dozen tapes or media he was bringing to class, photocopy and staple elaborately made hand-outs on green, pink, or blue paper, and go over his class preps before he left for class. One semester when Paul's students arrived to talk, this time a particularly loud and large group, I was happy to go off to the library and work there.

                                                                             From a classroom window....

Paul gave so much of himself to his students. He is a genuinely kind and caring person. We often had the same students; I always recommended Paul's or John's or Susan's classes when students asked me for advice about the next semester. There was Patrick who had cerebral palsy and was in a wheel chair. Because of his illness it was difficult to understand what Patrick was saying but he visited Paul at least once a week for several years. We'd hear Patrick coming, his voice down the hall, and then he'd manoeuvre his wheel chair into the office. Patrick relied on Paul's help because no one would help him as Paul did. Paul was kind and caring to this young person, more than most people would have been.

Another memorable student was "Big Robert" who sweated profusely and filled the office with his presence. He was also intelligent and opinionated, but better to have students with passion and interest who actually read books and think for themselves than students sitting bored at the back of the class. Robert went on to earn several graduate degrees including his PhD and he returned to Champlain to teach for a few semesters. Again he visited our office and he was as opinionated as ever.

When students would apply to McGill University's medical school, Paul put in many hours helping each student individually with their applications. His father, Dr. Charles Leblond, was an eminent physician and medical cancer researcher at McGill and I always enjoyed hearing Paul's stories of growing up, including visiting, with his two brothers, the morgue at the McIntyre Medical Building (or some other building at McGill).

And then, every August, Paul would arrive at the office from travelling somewhere exotic in the world and we all listened to his adventures, looked at his photographs, and shared his enthusiasm for countries he'd visited, including over the years India, China, Japan, South America, South Africa, all across Europe, and numerous road trips by car across North America à la Jack Kerouac! There was always some curious bit of trivia he'd marvel over, for instance, do you know how many dozens of flavours of yogurt you'll find in a Paris grocery store? As someone who prefers to stay at home and read a book, or write a poem, it all sounded quite fascinating!

Here is Paul in our office, early May 2011

Paul was always kind and compassionate to his students and I know they responded to this quality in him. They knew he was a good person and they trusted him, they could rely on him, he brought out the best in them. Paul's classes and meetings during his office hours provided students with an environment that gave them the freedom to be themselves, to feel empowered to express themselves freely. No wonder he was considered one of the best teachers at Champlain.

And now, on behalf of Paul's colleague's in the English Department, and especially on behalf of Susan and John and myself, I would like to congratulate Paul for his many years of dedicated service to the students at Champlain College and thank him for being our wonderful office mate, a true friend, and for being himself.

Stephen Morrissey

August 19, 2013

Updated on 22.09.2019, 06.11.2019

"Sorrow Acre" by Isak Dinesen

Sorrow Acre

By Stephen Morrissey

Many things influence a poet's development, for instance what we read can enlarge our concept of ourselves as poets as well as our idea of what we can do in poetry. One of these influences for me occurred around 1970 when I read a short story entitled “Sorrow Acre" by the Danish author Isak Dinesen. Dinesen's story was important to me for two reasons: first, it showed me the importance of mythology and archetypes as a way to critique literature; second, it introduced me to the "Garden Myth" and this was significant for me at a personal level as well as influencing  the poetry I was writing. This myth expresses a psychological truth, it is about how we lose the unself-conscious innocence of childhood. As we get older we "fall from innocence" into the world of self-consciousness. My father's death when I was six years old introduced me to the world of grief, loss, and regret. I knew at an early age that life is finite, that death takes away from us people we love. Indeed, we all suffer loss in some form and eventually leave the idyllic world of innocence.  

The Garden Myth is a major theme found in the work of many poets and writers, it is found in the work of a poet I was reading at the same time I read Isak Dinensen's short story; this is William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Blake perceived that our life's journey includes both the fall from innocence and later the effort to find a higher innocence, a meaningful existence

Years ago, Isak Dinesen's “Sorrow Acre" was important to me. In the 1990s I wrote "The Shadow Trilogy" (The Compass, 1993; The Yoni Rocks, 1995; The Mystic Beast, 1997) which was influenced by C.G. Jung's concept of the human "shadow", that dark fallen side of our inner being that we either keep hidden or we project onto other people. However, preceding my interest in Jungian psychology was Isak Dinesen's short story.

This is where Élizabeth Robert enters this essay with her wonderful translation of The Mystic Beast as La bête mystique (Editions Tryptique, Montreal, 2004). Now Élizabeth knows something more of what was "going on in my mind" that influenced the text that she translated in the early 2000s.

23 04 2014

Note: I wrote this for a panel discussion on "Dans la Tête de L'auteur/ In the Mind of the Writer", a panel discussion presented by the ATTLC-LTAC, held on April 23, 2014 here in Montreal. I was invited by Élizabeth Robert, my friend and translator: "Three authors pen short texts, and their translators “translate” the imagined text, sight unseen. Trois auteurs écrivent un court texte. Leur traducteur respectif produisent simultanément la traduction de ce qu'ils pensent être les textes en question." This (above) was my text; unfortunately, I was ill that evening and, with regrets, missed the event. 

Review of In the Writers' Words, Conversations with Eight Poets

Laurence Hutchman on Grand Blvd near Somerled, Montreal, March 2016

                                 

Laurence Hutchman 

In the Writers' Words, Conversations with Eight Poets

Guernica Editions, Toronto, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-5507-309-1

Conversations with Eight Poets

by

Stephen Morrissey

             Laurence Hutchman's In the Writers' Words, Conversations with Eight Poets is a valuable addition to our knowledge of modernist Canadian poetry. The poets interviewed in these conversations are Ralph Gustafson, George Johnston, P.K. Page, Fred Cogswell, Louis Dudek, Al Purdy, Anne Szumigalski, and James Reaney. All eight of these poets have made important contributions to Canadian literature—they are all distinguished members of the Canadian poetry canon—and several have also contributed as translators and publishers.

            There is an easy intimacy between Laurence Hutchman and the poets he is interviewing. It feels as though we are listening in on good friends having a friendly but serious conversation on a subject about which both of them are passionate. Each interview is prefaced with a vivid and detailed description of the poet's home or place of work where the interview took place. When Hutchman is invited into Ralph Gustafson's Eastern Township's home he sits by a warm fire in late December; he describes the "chilly November morning in Saskatoon" when he rode a borrowed bicycle to interview Anne Szunigalski and entered her home where he admired paintings "everywhere on the walls, mostly done by her own family."
            Just before the interview which takes place in James Reaney's university office, Hutchman notes, "We sit on a green couch for the interview. On the wall facing us there is a painting of Reaney's, of The Nihilist Spasm Band. Above us is a picture, 'A Well Organized Athletic Meet on Centre Island, 1907 two women carrying eggs on a spoon.' Above those are topographical maps representing Grand Bend, St. Mary's and Stratford." Hutchman's awareness of the minutiae and detail of the place where the interview takes place enhances each interview that follows. In these interviews we are invited to know the human side of the eight different poets. Indeed, these conversations are an invitation for new readers to explore each poets' work.
            Scholars will find In The Writers' Words, Conversations with Eight Poets a valuable source of insight into these poets' work; recent criticism I've written on Louis Dudek's major long poem "Continuation" has been deepened by reading the interview with him. I can hear Dudek's voice—engaging and inquiring—in his discussion with Hutchman; Dudek states,

                        In Continuation 1 and Continuation 2, I at last found a voice where

                        I could say exactly what I want to say, and everything I want to say,

                        in the most amazing fragmentary way... you have to take risks in poetry.

                        What is poetry trying to do on the page? It's trying to represent the

                        poet's thought.

                        Many of us have fond memories of having met these eight poets. I remember meeting James Reaney at a League of Canadian Poets AGM in Toronto; he was wearing a tie decorated with books that I liked so much it took me a year before finding a similar tie for myself. In Edmonton, a few years ago, Mark Abley's excellent keynote address at the League's AGM was on Anne Szumigalski and it brought her life and work to a new audience. Elsewhere, I heard Fred Cogswell and Ralph Gustafson read their poems and from time to time corresponded with them. I sat and talked with Al Purdy after one of the times I heard him read. Louis Dudek, besides being my professor, was a friend until the end of his life. I remember being a first year graduate student at McGill University and walking into the English Department's staff lounge and seeing Laurence sitting discussing his own poetry with Louis Dudek. Dudek's DC Books published Hutchman's first book, Explorations (1975). George Johnston was a good friend, we both lived in rural south-western Quebec after he retired from teaching at Carleton University. In addition to many discussions on poetry George taught me the basics of the art of bee keeping which I did for many years. George and his wife Jean were both good friends and warm-hearted people, over the years of knowing them I also got to know some members of their family. During their careers all of these poets that Hutchman interviews readily made themselves available to newer poets. Reading Hutchman's conversations with them reminds me of the generosity and welcoming spirit of this modernist generation of poets, many of whom made an indelible impression on me.
                  All eight of these poets began writing and publishing during the 1930s to the1950s. Individually and collectively they made a significant contribution to Canadian poetry. P.K. Page, reminiscing about when she lived in Montreal, reminds us of poets we may have forgotten but who are still important for their role in Canadian literature, they include Patrick Anderson and John Sutherland. She also remembers with fondness Montreal poet A.M. Klein; Page says,

            ... he was only nine years older than I but he seemed to belong to a different generation. This had to do with a series of things, I think, with the fact that he was married, had children, and a law practise. He was already established as a poet... I find him a  wonderful poet and can't think why people today don't see it. But they will again.

            In his interview George Johnston discusses the literary scene back in the 1930s when he was a student and had just begun writing; Johnston states, "To tell the truth, I was hardly aware of a literary life in Toronto, except at the university. There was one intellectual sort of magazine which came out once a month..." This comment by Johnston reveals to us how far Canadian literature has progressed over the last sixty or seventy years.

            The eight poets Hutchman interviewed spent a lifetime writing poetry and thinking about poetry; theirs was a life centered on literature and poetry. The New Brunswick-based poet Fred Cogswell, who did a tremendous service for poets across Canada during his many years of running the literary small press, Fiddlehead, makes this statement on "the philosophical nature of ... poetry":

           

The particular philosophical nature of poetry is that its function is to illustrate the  qualities of the human mind that are the basis for the attitudes we have as human beings. Keep going farther than you've already gone, or you become a victim of what you've written up until that moment.

            In the interview with P.K. Page, living at the west coast edge of the continent, in Victoria, BC, a clap of thunder is heard as the interview comes to an end. PK says to Hutchman, "You're conjuring up gods that we don't normally have." This is what Hutchman does in all of these interviews. He conjures the gods of poetry. Hutchman's interviews with each of these eight poets is an intimate conversation with each individual. We hear their voice, their commitment to poetry, and their example of a life lived for poetry. Hutchman's book stays vivid and lively and brings the reader directly into the personality and writing of each of the eight poets. For anyone of any age, either scholar or reader, who is interested in the modernist poets of Canada, this book is an indispensable companion to the poets' collected works. That is part of the magic of this book.

                                                                        Stephen Morrissey

                                                                        Montreal, September 3, 2013

A long hard winter is coming to an end...

Review of James Hollis's "Hauntings, Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives"

James Hollis and Stephen Morrissey, April 2013, in Montreal

James Hollis

Hauntings, Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives
Chiron Publications, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-888602-62-3

By

Stephen Morrissey

             When I was six years old my father died. Several months after his death I saw my father's ghost, luminous and bright, at the top of the basement stairs. No one spoke of my father for many years after his death so that his absence became an even greater haunting than seeing his ghost. This new book by James Hollis, Hauntings, Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives, spoke to me personally as I have been haunted by the loss and grief I felt over my father's passing. For Hollis, there are several ways in which we may be haunted and none of them are supernatural. These include dysfunctional parental relationships, complexes, guilt, betrayal, the shadow, and even a calling to an authentic life becomes a haunting when it is ignored. These ghosts that haunt us are the conflicted parts of our own inner being and they are able to destroy relationships and happiness and make life feel that it is not worth living.

            To be called to an activity is not something only for great artists or thinkers. Each of us has a calling to some activity, but this calling is also to psychological wholeness, what C.G. Jung called individuation. We reject this calling at our own peril because it leads to an inauthentic life. Hollis admits that it was with reluctance that he began writing this book. He was called,  however, by a dream about the American Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant and by synchronistic experiences that he describes in the Introduction. Hollis also states this writing was a "summons and an obligation," for a calling is sometimes not to an activity that we may desire, but one that we are compelled to carry out.

            We can also be haunted by a complex. Hollis quotes Jung in describing a complex as "the state of being seized or possessed" by the past.  A complex is driven by the fear, sometimes by the terror, of not behaving in accordance with the unresolved demands of an experience in our life. A mother complex is one that some people are possessed by, but many other complexes also exist. Those people haunted by complexes readily find excuses to perpetuate them. There is a lot at risk in understanding the psychology behind a complex, the foremost might be to lose a connection to the past to which one is attached.  Hollis writes, "wheresoever ready rationalizations exist, thereunto a complex is being protected." (42)

            One of the most fascinating discoveries of C.G. Jung is the shadow aspect of the psyche.  The keeping of secrets is an important way the psyche maintains the existence of the shadow. When we project what we don't like about ourselves onto other people we are being haunted by the shadow but we are also in thrall to the secret that is protected by the shadow. What we are afraid of or reject in ourselves is what we project onto other people. The history of the world is full of examples of such shadow hauntings. Evidence of the shadow can be seen when people make generalizations, usually condemnatory, about other people, often people who can't defend themselves from these unfair projections. These secrets haunt us and corrupt our present-day life. At its worst the haunting by the shadow can lead to genocide and racial hatred, or the failed relationships of people who are unaware of their own shadow. In either case, this haunting results in the diminution and denial of life, not the expansion and affirmation of life.

            Hollis's book is accessible and is a continuation of his previous books. It is Hollis's mission to help the reader understand his or her life more fully, often by taking an original approach to difficult psychological problems, or different stages of life. Being haunted undermines our ability to live fully the life that we have. Hollis returns again, in this book, to the topic of living the unlived life of the parent. He feels an urgency to communicate and explain this idea. Can we ever exorcize our parents who both blessed us with life and cursed us with their unlived lives? It seems to me that this can be taken two ways: the first is the obvious working at a career that is not appropriate for us or otherwise living according to the unfulfilled experiences that our parents wanted for themselves. It seems to me that there is another, less literal, example of "living the unlived life of the parent" that is to attempt the individuation, or self-understanding, the parent never considered important or was afraid to attempt. If our parents have not lived in a way that is authentic to their inner being, then this work becomes the inheritance of their children. The alternative is a multi-generational continuation of dysfunctional relationships, this is the haunting of families that can last for many years.  Hollis writes,

Of all of these hauntings, the greatest is the one we alone produce: the unlived  life. None of us will find the courage, or the will, or the capacity to completely fulfill the  possibility invested in us by the gods. But we are accountable for what we do not attempt.  To what degree does our pusillanimity beget replicative haunting in our children, our families, our communities, our nations? (144)

            As we get older, or face old age and death, we know that this life is a journey from birth to death. We have happiness and regret, success and failure, but the worst thing is the discovery that one's life has not been authentic to oneself. This journey demands of us inner work that is psychological but it is also spiritual and this spiritual aspect is ignored in our increasingly secular society. For many of us, part of the beauty of Jung's approach to psychology lies in its assertion that individuation is "synonymous with, or analogous to, what our ancestors called a divine vocation: answering the summons of God." (141)

            Hauntings, Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives is the culmination of James Hollis's years of communicating to his readers the urgency of knowing ourselves and resolving our inner conflicts. Most of us will be able to resonate to the thesis of this book, that what haunts us is the residue of our own unexamined life. This beautifully written book, a book of wisdom and intelligence, can help the reader exorcize the spectral presences that prevent us from living a more meaningful and authentic existence.  

This review was published in the winter 2014 issue of the "Newsletter of the CG Jung Society of Montreal".     

                                         

Note: Read other reviews of books by James Hollis reviewed here, do a search on this blog.

Waiting for a bus

Sunset at Gilbert Layton Park

Moon over Gilbert Layton Park

A happy occasion in NDG, May 10, 2013

John McAuley reading at the Yellow Door, Montreal

Cardinal in back yard at Belmore

Mushrooms...

A bleak lawn

Andre Corbeil

 

Here I am with CTV television sports broadcaster Andre Corbeil. It was a morning in April 2011 at Nickel`s Restaurant  on Cote des Neiges Road. CZ (especially) is a big fan of Andre`s;  ("AN-drey, AN-Drey" she says when he comes on to read the sports at 11:50 p.m.). So there I was at Nickel's and Andre walks by where I am sitting, "You're Andre Corbeil!" I said, and here we are, the old guy (me) and Andre. Really exciting! Now if only CZ could meet him to say "hello", she's a real fan. AN-drey, AN-Drey!!

Pole in the middle of a highway...



It's not all that unusual that someone leaves a pole in the middle of a highway. 

Noni Howard at Casa Bella

This must have been 1997 when Noni Howard stayed with us at Casa Bella. Here we are at the side door with Noni. Maybe it was just after this we walked up the street to visit Irving Layton at his home on Monkland Avenue. See Noni's last collection of poems at www.coraclepress.com.

This was back when poets were characters, personnages, not politically correct award winning creative writing graduates... Now, "characters" are not wanted, just bland career building "poets"... Even Layton was a character back then...

Kids at Gilbert Layton Park in March

Scarey doll...

Back in the day, when we were children, I remember visiting Audrey Keyes (Veeto) who lived next door to us on Oxford Avenue. She had this huge doll she received for Christmas and I remember swinging around this doll, pretending to be a fake wrestler, and then finding the head had come off... Anyhow, years later, around 2005, Audrey and I met again; I also met her mother, Mrs. Keyes, a really lovely person. Mrs. Keyes laughed at some of the things in my poem "Hoolahan's Flat", it was not the reaction I expected!  And the doll's head? I wonder what happened about that episode...

Construction at Cavendish Mall

Since the demographics changed in Cote St. Luc (the young moved away; the old remained), Cavendish Mall has had to adapt. Half of the mall was closed and torn down; on the old parking lot, and where half of the mall used to be, there is now  housing construction. In the winter the construction site is fairly bleak, but I suppose when it's completed and trees are planted and growing, then it will be an attactive community...

Dunn's Famous next to Dominion Square

Montreal smoked meat is famous, and Dunn's is always great to visit for smoked meat... this location is across the street from Dominion Square in downtown Montreal.