Honey Bees and Flowers in Mid-August

Mid-August and everything is lush and full of life. Honey bees are visiting hollyhocks, flowers are blooming, life is good. 

John Glassco, Ralph Gustafson, and F.R. Scott

Montreal by John Glassco, DC Books, 1973

Certain books, even certain groups of artists, seem to occur in clusters. Here are three long poems all published in 1972-1973 and all similar in expressing social criticism; they are poems of passion written in an open-ended form atypical of each of these poets' other work. First is one of my favourite poems, John Glassco's Montreal (DC Books, 1973); this is Glassco's history of Montreal and his criticism of the city for discarding the past in favour of urban development; many old mansions, all of importance to our heritage and all irreplaceable, were demolished in the 1960s. This has only gotten worse and the present city would be unrecognizable to Glassco as it is to me and many others. Despite what the crtitics say, this is one of Glassco's most interesting and certainly most idiosyncratic poems; it shows Glassco's love of language, it is Glassco having fun despite his lament for the lost city of his youth; Glassco's linguistic "fun" may not appeal to everyone... Louis Dudek, who published this chapbook, wrote "The Demolitions", a poem dedicated to Glassco, also lamenting the loss of Montreal that was charming, historical, and a place of artists, poets, and culture.

These and Variations for Sounding Brass
by Ralph Gustafson, self-published, 1972

Next is Ralph Gustafson's chapbook, Theme and Variations for Sounding Brass (self-published, 1972) in which Gustafson laments the loss of our collective innocence in several violent political events in the late 1960s and early seventies; these include the Prague Spring of 1968, Kent State in 1970, and the political terrorism of 1970 that lead to the War Measures Act in Quebec. I was never a big fan of Ralph Gustafson's poetry but this chapbook seems to me some of his best and most passionate work.

The Dance is One by F.R. Scott,
McCelland and Stewart, 1973

In my opinion F.R. Scott would have been a better poet had he written more long poems like his "Letters from the MacKenzie River", published in The Dance is One (M&S, 1973). This long poem has ten sections and is based on his 1956 trip to the North West Territories with his friend, our future prime minister, Pierre Eliot Trudeau. It is a truly magnificent poem that is also not typical of Scott's other work in poetry; it is my opinion that Scott would have been more significant as a poet had he written more poems like this and omitted some of the satire that he is known for; it is also better than Al Purdy's poems (published in 1966) about visiting the Baffin Islands, a place he didn't like.

According to some critics none of these chapbooks (or poems) are Glassco's, Gustafson's, or Scott's best work; however, these poems are among their most appealing and accessible work and can be read as a significant statement on the times in which they lived.

Revised: 17 January 2020

A Reappraisal of A.J.M. Smith

"And the classic shade/ Of cedar and pine..."

                                            

1.

Some people may think it presumptuous to call a book of only a hundred short,

mainly lyrical pieces of verse Collected Poems—but actually that is exactly what it is.

                                    —A.J.M Smith, Canadian Literature, (# 15, winter 1963)

                       

Fifty years ago A.J.M. Smith was one of our most prominent Canadian poets, since then Smith's prominence has declined into obscurity. Smith was a poet but he was also an anthologist, a critic, and someone who was important in the literary history of Canada, but he is primarily important as a poet. The reason for Smith's obscurity is his small body of poems, that he did not publish enough to be a significant poet. In E.K. Brown's review of Smith's first book of poems, News of the Phoenix (1944), Brown writes,

At last Mr. Smith has brought out a collection of his own. My first feeling, at the mere sight of the book, was one of disappointment. It is a little book; it holds but thirty-nine poems, spread over about as many pages; and among the thirty-nine are the twelve from New Provinces, and others well known to the readers of more recent anthologies of Canadian verse. One had hoped for evidence of greater fertility.

        One may be justifiably disappointed at the size of Smith's book but the book's real importance is its content, not the number of pages, and beginning with the title poem there are some truly exceptional poems in News of the Phoenix. Brown mentions twice that Smith is not a "fertile" poet, seemingly to reinforce his dislike for the book. But surely Brown knew that all poets are different; not all poets are prolific, some poets stop writing when young, some have ten or twenty years between books, and some write and publish more than they should. (Note: that both Brown and Smith published books on Canadian poetry in 1943 perhaps explains something of Brown's criticism of Smith's book; they were, in some sense, rivals with opposing views.) A few months after publishing this review, Brown made an effort to soften his first reaction to Smith's book by writing the following:

Finally, just a few months ago, appeared Mr. Smith's "News of the Phoenix," long awaited in Canada, and in perfection of technique undoubtedly the finest first volume since Archibald Lampman's "Among the Millet" came out in 1888. Mr, Smith has undergone the same influences that went to shape the difficult younger poets in this country. He is their analogue—and their peer. In his work is a distinctive note, the note of a temperament which is, as I have said elsewhere, "proud, hard, noble, and intense."            

 This idea that Smith's work can be dismissed based on his small body of published poems is repeated by Desmond Pacey in his Ten Canadian Poets (1958); Pacey writes that Smith "has produced a small body of poetry—only, in fact, two slim volumes, the second of which reprints a good deal of the contents of the first... " Pacey then writes,

 To call Smith a poet's poet seems to me to draw attention to his strengths and his   limitations.  He is a master craftsman, a poet from whom other poets can learn many of  the subtleties of technique; on the other hand he has neither the explosive force, the  musical charm, nor the clearly formulated set of ideas which either singly or in some  combination make a poet a great popular figure.

Many contemporary readers will agree with Pacey's assessment of Smith's poems; the poems emphasize craft over emotion and because of this they lack the capacity to hold our interest. To these readers Smith's poems must seem disembodied from time and place, as though self-contained and remote. This is the flaw in Smith's poetry: it is that technical skill without emotional depth is a formula for obsolete poems; however, conversely, emotion without technical skill is also a flaw in poetry. Having said this, there is more to Smith's work than craft; there is imagination, insight, intellectual depth, thematic cohesion, a restrained emotional content, and Smith's persistence to create a body of work that sustains its vision over many years. These are the qualities that we overlook when we complain that Smith's poems weigh too heavily on the side of craft. 

About twenty years after E.K. Brown's review was published, and five years after Pacey's book was published, Canadian Literature (# 15, winter 1963) dedicated an issue to A.J.M. Smith; in this issue, "Salute to A.J.M. Smith",  Earle Birney used the same word as Brown, "fertile", to criticize Smith; Birney writes, "As it turned out, Smith was to prove less fertile a poet than most, and, though he was to continue to set us all high standards when he did publish, his dominance was elsewhere." I could be totally wrong but until reading E.K. Brown's statement that Smith is not a "fertile" poet, and Birney's repetition of this, I had never heard of any poet, or any artist,  referred to as "fertile" except as having a fertile imagination. 

2.

Most of the members of the Montreal Group are distinguished poets (Leon Edel, a member of the group, was not a poet); all the poets but Leo Kennedy won the Governor General's award for poetry (F.R. Scott won the GG two times, once for non-fiction). Indeed, this is the preeminent group of poets—distinguished, creative, and innovative—in Canada. If Smith didn't publish a lot of poems Leo Kennedy published even fewer; John Glassco published only marginally more than Smith. Glassco and Smith published two books each followed by Kennedy with his one book. F.R. Scott published slightly more than A.M. Klein but only because Scott lived longer than Klein. In sum, none of these poets were prolific.

Critics who complain that Smith was not "fertile" as a poet don't understand the process of writing poetry which, simply put, is that the Muse visits the poet, it doesn't work in reverse. As well, much of Smith's published body of poems was written when he was young, the Muse often prefers young poets over older poets; as an example of this, Coleridge was most prolific as a poet for a two year period when he was twenty-five years old, from 1797 to 1799 (I am not conflating Coleridge with A.J.M. Smith). Smith's priority was the perfectly crafted poem, his ideal was a small collection of about one hundred poems; this results in a small book because perfectly crafted poems take more time to write than poems that need little editing. To explain this better, consider that Alex Colville, although not a poet but a man of great technical skill, imagination, and vision; Colville produced only three or four paintings a year, but no one ever said he wasn't "fertile". Smith encouraged an idea of the importance of technical ability in poetry but when applied to his own work this was interpreted as Smith not being "fertile" and then further interpreted and misconstrued as his work not being significant.  

 

All the members of the Montreal Group (again, leaving out Leon Edel) published poetry but also worked in other literary genres, for instance criticism, translation, and memoirs, or as anthologists (Smith and F.R. Scott; Smith and M.L. Rosenthal). Some group members were accomplished as poets but also in fields other than writing: F.R. Scott was a distinguished constitutional lawyer and law professor; A.M. Klein was a lawyer and publicist for the Bronfman family; Leo Kennedy made his living from advertising; A.J.M. Smith was a man of letters. Let's compare Smith's body of published books of poems with those of other members of the Montreal Group, excluding posthumously published books, and see where Smith stands among them; here is a list of the poetry books they published:

F.R. Scott's books of poetry:

Poetry books:

• Overture. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1945.
• Events and Signals. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1954.
• The Eye of the Needle: Satire, Sorties, Sundries. Montreal: Contact Press, 1957.
• Signature. Vancouver: Klanak Press, 1964.
• Trouvailles: Poems from Prose. Montreal: Delta Canada, 1967.
• The Dance is One. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973.

Selected Poems:

• Selected Poems. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1966.

A.M. Klein's books of poetry:

Poetry:

• Hath Not a Jew.... New York, Behrman Jewish Book House, 1940.
• Poems. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1944.
• The Hitleriad. Norfolk, CT.: New Directions, 1944.
• Seven Poems. Montreal: The Author, 1947.
• The Rocking Chair and Other Poems. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1948.

John Glassco's books of poetry:

 

Poetry Books:

• The Deficit Made Flesh: Poems. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1958.
• A Point of Sky. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1964.

Chapbook:

• Montreal. Montreal: DC Books, 1973.

Selected Poems:

• Selected Poems. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1971.

A.J.M. Smith's books of poetry:

 

Poetry Books:

• News of the Phoenix and Other Poems. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1943. New York: Coward-McCann, 1943.
• A Sort of Ecstasy. Michigan State College Press, 1954. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1954.

Selected Poems:

• Collected Poems. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1962.
• Poems New and Collected. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967
• The Classic Shade: Selected Poems. Toronto: McClelland Stewart, 1978                                                                                                                                                                                      

 Leo Kennedy's poetry book:

Poetry Books:

• The Shrouding.  1933

A.J.M. Smith's family home in the 1920s, 79 Chesterfield Avenue, Westmount, Quebec

                   

3. 

Here are some quotations from Canadian Literature's "Salute to A.J.M. Smith" issue (# 15, winter 1963). In 1963 Smith was still a prominent poet and referred to with admiration and esteem by his contemporaries; he was acknowledged as having made a substantial contribution to Canadian poetry.

• "This issue of Canadian Literature is in part a celebration occasioned by the publication of the Collected Poems of A. J. M. Smith, one of Canada's important writers and, since the 1930's, a poet of international repute. It is an act of homage..."  —George Woodcock

• "All help in the end to put this collection, despite its spareness, among the most distinguished, I believe, of the century."  —Roy Fuller

• "As I read the Collected Poems which Oxford has just given us, I realize, as I never did before, just how all of a piece, as well as how varied, Smith's work really is. "Metaphysical poetry and pure poetry are what I stand for," he has insisted. One may be justly dubious about his "metaphysical" qualities, but he is as pure a poet as he is a critic."  —Milton Wilson

                           

4. A.J.M. Smith and M.L. Rosenthal

M.L. Rosenthal was both a poet and a critic; in his introduction to A.J.M. Smith's The Classic Shade, Selected Poems (1978) Rosenthal writes with authority and insight into Smith's poetry. Perhaps because Rosenthal is not Canadian he can appreciate Smith's work in a way that Canadians can't; Rosenthal isn't encumbered with the preconceptions native Canadians bring with them. It was Rosenthal who invented the important descriptive phrase "confessional poetry" in his review of Robert Lowell's Life Studies, a whole school of poetry is categorized as such, so Rosenthal is both perceptive and influential. Rosenthal is also a poet and poets are often, if not usually, the best critics of poetry and the most understanding of what motivates poets to write. It is a failed critic who places ideology above the work being discussed. Smith met Rosenthal at Michigan State College (now Michigan State University) in the 1930s when they were both teaching there; Rosenthal moved on to teach at New York University but they remained friends and together edited the anthology Exploring Poetry (1955). Here are several quotations by Rosenthal from his 1977 essay on A.J.M. Smith, the essay is both the introduction to The Classic Shade and a separate essay that was published elsewhere:

• "Smith, an important force in modern Canadian poetry though still but little known in the United States, is an active esthetic intelligence whose life's work (like that of most other genuine poets of matured intelligence) refutes the very notion of an "anxiety of influence" that reduces the power of poetry to renew its energies because of its great past."  P. 10

• "If we viewed Smith's complete oeuvre as a unit, we would find in it analogous balancing of joy in the life-force and more depressive visions."  P. 12

• "In the Romantic-Classical debate, Smith tends to vote Classical on principle while his poems actually throw the balance of feeling and imagination a little the other way." P. 13

• "His (Smith's) ordinary humanity is evident in his obvious preoccupation with love and death and joy, and in his sense of language."  P. 15

• "The nobility of his (Smith's) finest work has many aspects. I believe it can partly be accounted for by his high degree of empathic sensitization to the rhetoric of the most truly accomplished lyrical poetry generally. But his unabashedly human hatred of death is somehow another, and of necessity a more passionate, source. One rarely finds the position held with such thrilling clarity in poetry. The language is the pure, sustained, and subtle speech of a poet who sees his own nature as a relationship between his art and his fate."  P. 19

                                           

                                  

5.

He will go far, for he is genuine, and gifted.

—F.R. Scott, diary entry on A.J.M. Smith, 21 February 1927

Casual readers of poetry should not be overlooked, any audience for poetry is important. Casual readers don't care about the technical or historical background of poetry—they don't care if A.J.M. Smith was influenced by the Metaphysical Poets, they have probably never heard of the Metaphysical Poets—they like great poems when they read poetry. This was my experience when I was young, I was reading Palgrave's The Golden Treasury and read Shelley's "Ozymandias of Egypt" and immediately I knew I was in the presence of something great, something that existed by itself, as though it had always existed and always would exist. Great poems have a life of their own, they transcend the rest of a poet's body of work and, again, one doesn't need knowledge of the literary and historical era to enjoy reading them. These truly great poems are experienced as "pure poetry", existing beyond time and place; they are the kind of poem A.J.M. Smith wanted to write and, in fact, did write. One or two of Smith's poems—"pure poems"— more than make up for his small body of work; I refer to poems like "The Lonely Land" and "Like an Old Proud King in a Parable", but there are others.

Roy Daniells, in his review of Smith's The Classic Shade, Selected Poems (1978), published in Canadian Literature (# 79, winter 1978), positions Smith "as moving between two worlds, one dying, as the tradition of Carman, Lampman and Roberts subsides, one powerful to be born. ... How well has Smith provided a continuum, bridged the gap, or at least navigated between these diversities?"  Just over forty years later we have our answer, Smith has not fared well. The reason Daniells gives for Smith's failure to retain his prominence as a poet is demographic, he suggests that multiculturalism has displaced the concept of a homogenous culture of which Smith was a representative. Multiculturalism, as Daniells recognizes, is the society that was still "powerful to be born." For Daniells, Smith might be too old fashioned and even irrelevant to a contemporary multicultural audience; however, he also writes, "It is certain that a poet can become memorable on the strength of a handful of poems that show a fine excess of sensibility and achieve a genuine utterance."

Louis Dudek writes that it was Smith' s misfortune to publish his work in an era of low art, a time when poetry was popularized and made easy to understand and when high art was rejected by the public as uninteresting, inaccessible, and elitist. In a review, published in Delta (# 20, February 1963), of Smith's Collected Poems (1963), Dudek writes, "It may be that we find, in the end, that this was the most durable poetry published in Canada in the forty or so years since Smith began. He is our miglior fabbro, and in the last resort it is the fabbro that looks best to immortality." As most readers will remember, T.S. Eliot referred to Ezra Pound as "il miglior fabbro", the "better craftsman", in thanks to Pound who had edited Eliot's "The Waste Land". This is high praise from Dudek considering his adulation of Ezra Pound.

Most poets never know prominence, they only know obscurity; A.J.M. Smith is fortunate, he was once a prominent poet and deservedly so. Smith can be better appreciated and understood today than when he was alive, today we can consider his oeuvre in the context of the completion of both his life and his body of poems. The first thing in a reappraisal of Smith's literary career is to stop diminishing his accomplishment in poetry by saying he did not publish enough poems to be a significant poet; Smith's body of poems is sufficient in size and, more importantly, it is also significant as poetry. Some of Smith's poems transcend the time in which they were written, they are the "pure poems" that he wanted to write and they resonate in the reader's imagination. Smith's status is probably somewhere between being a "minor poet" (to which he resigned himself) and a "major poet"; in fact, he is neither minor nor major, but he is one of our better poets. Smith's poetry is a remarkable and incredible achievement but, as with any poet, he is not everyone's cup of tea and reading Smith takes some work, it is not light reading.

                                                            —Stephen Morrissey

                                                                April-July 2019

NOTE: Do a search of this blog for other comments on A.J.M. Smith .

Monument to the Protestant firemen in Montreal

Both my grandfather, John Parker, and his brother, Thomas Parker, were firemen in Montreal; they were born in Blackburn, Lancashire, England in the late 1800s and moved to Montreal with two other brothers and my grandfather's wife and his mother. Here are some photographs taken in April 2018 at Mount Royal Cemetery of the Protestant firemen's monument that is surrounded by the graves of some of these firemen, including my great uncle:

(Mostly) Anonymous in Inner Space

All of the ancestors have returned and are living quiet lives in Inner Space.  

Choirs will fall silent, money will be thrown into the streets, and everywhere people will wonder what this dream was all about.

I was not cut out for childhood, I was already living part-time in Inner Space.

How can poets write anything without going down the spiral staircase to the darkness below?

I needed so many years to accomplish so little.

I'm back living at the Yew Tree Inn; nothing has changed, there is a Yew tree outside my window and children playing by the old wishing well.

There were some people dressed in colourful outfits, meditating and praying in Inner Space; we threw them out.

I no longer care what poets have to say, not if it's just more of the same old avoidance of Inner Space.

None of this was invented by me. It is what I found in Inner Space.

I was absorbed into the universe by cosmic energy; there's no playing around in Inner Space.

And now I'm a broken wheel going nowhere.

It's not bleak here in Inner Space, it's just a habit of mind to say that life is meaningless.

I liked poets but when I arrived in Inner Space I found few had joined me there, they were too busy trying to make names for themselves.

Most poets have nothing I want or need, they are not crowbars prying open the unconscious mind. Poets need to be crowbars.

  

If a poet can't be a crowbar he can at least be a hammer. 

                                                                       

A.M. Klein's "Heirloom"

 

Map of Montreal from 1910

1.

Looking through an old notebook from 2010 I found a poem I had written about the poet A.M. Klein. Then I remembered that in my first book of poems, The Trees of Unknowing (1978), I had a poem entitled "Heirloom"; when I was young I had been very impressed with Klein's poem of the same title. I wondered when it was that I wrote "Heirloom", probably sometime in the early 1970s but I thought it was much earlier. Then I also remembered that Sandra Goodwin, Bill Goodwin's widow, had told me that she grew up near where Klein lived; that was before Klein became a recluse due to mental illness and she and the other children in the street would greet Klein by saying "Good morning, Maitre Klein" ("Maitre" being the formal way to address a lawyer or notary in Quebec). Sandra was married to Bill Goodwin who was Irving Layton's nephew and best friend for eighty years; I knew Bill because I taught in the same English Department as him and when he retired he said he had retired so I could hold on to my job. Anyhow, I wondered where Klein had lived, I found two addresses in Lovell's Montreal City Directory, one on Clarke (in the Mile End neighbourhood) and one on Querbes in Outremont. The address on Querbes says his employment was as "Public relations counsellor Seagram's"; the Bronfmans certainly supported Klein, they were wonderful patrons of the arts. I taught Klein's "Heirloom" poem for many years; one day I reread my own "Heirloom" poem, it is almost an embarrassment when compared to Klein's.

2.

That generation of poets, Layton, Dudek, Smith, Scott, Klein, welcomed young poets, after all,  who would want to be a poet? Bill Goodwin was Irving Layton's nephew but they were more like brothers. My mother lived on Montclair Avenue and, on occasion, I used to see Bill walking along Monkland Avenue on his way to Irving Layton's home on Monkland; that was in the 1990s when Irving wasn't well and Bill and several others looked after him, it was before Irving entered Maimonides long term care residence. Bill was very kind to me in so many ways; one day, soon after my son was born in January 1979, he phoned to say that it was too cold to take a baby outside, as my wife and I had planned, and he was right. Whatever Bill taught it included poems by Irving Layton and every year he would have Irving in to the college to give a reading. Some times after the reading I would get a lift downtown with them. Poets, like Irving Layton and Louis Dudek, focused on the young, especially if they were poets, so while Irving was talking in the front seat of the car he'd turn around and include me in the conversation. He was always polite and considerate. He'd ask what I was writing and show some interest, despite his famous enormous ego he was also concerned with mentoring young poets; Layton was a natural teacher. But that's what the older poets were like, it wasn't all prizes and ego, they mentored younger poets; it was a small community and anyone wanting to be a poet was treated with some respect. I mention this as it is an heirloom from those days when poets were few but they were dedicated to the Muse and to the life of being a poet.

 

Leo Kennedy's "A Priest in the Family"

I've mentioned Leo Kennedy before, he was a member of the Montreal Group of poets back in the 1920s and '30s. Now we can add this short story to Kennedy's body of work; Kennedy's "A Priest in the Family" was first published in The Canadian Forum in 1933 but you can find it at archive dot org. The story was republished in 1972 by the Readers' Digest, in Great Stories of the World. Kennedy's story reminds me of short stories written by Morley Callaghan, but that's where the comparison ends.