A shaman on the back of a grizzly

The bear is a symbol of rebirth, for the bear hibernates during the winter which is a kind of death, and then in spring he emerges from his cave, as though brought back to life, as though reborn. The shaman is a representative of the world's oldest spirituality.

Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are?
                                                 —Herman Melville, Moby Dick

That inescapable animal walks with me,
Has followed me since the black womb held
                                                 —Delmore Schwartz, “The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me”

The moon was high now, sailing in icy splendour of solitude
over the immensity of the ancient wood.
                                               —Charles G.D. Roberts, The Heart of the Ancient Wood

                                          Cave paintings from the Cueva de la Vieja, Alpero, Spain. 

Years ago my brother gave me a wood cut print entitled "Shaman on the back of a bear"; I kept this wood cut for many years but when we moved to this house I was hasty and discarded it. I regret that I no longer have this piece of art, but I did write a poem that was inspired by it. Here is the poem:

a shaman on the back of a grizzly
the black fur a black streak
moving between the trees
then across an open grassy field
a shaman eyes blackened
hair hanging limply down over ears
& arms holding to handfuls of bearskin
he leans slightly forward
knees pressing to flanks
the grizzly face down & mouth open
a bewildered look on his face
we see the white of his teeth
we see the shaman mouth open
we see him see us
we see them disappear back into the forest
they see us disappear back into the forest
we see them disappear back into the forest
we see him see us

(1972)

Perfecting the Art of Living

Who has perfected the art of living? Who lives a life worth noting? My wife's parents come to mind, they were married to each other for over sixty years; several times a week they had relatives or friends drop in on them, everyone was made welcome. They were good people and we miss them. I think also of my friends George and Jean Johnston, they had a large family and many friends, they were generous and kind people, and it was a blessing to have known them. And now I include Bill and Dora who live up the street from us. They go out for breakfast everyday and then sit outside their home reading the paper; many people walking by will stop and chat, some people on the street sit and talk with them. They're good people and Bill gave me the single clue to living a healthy life (he said it was given to him by their family doctor): it is to socialize; but socializing isn't just for health, it`s also how to live a good life and how to perfect the art of living.

Heading for Samhain

Heading for Samhain, the season of the soul; the unconscious opens to the conscious mind, in dreams, something caught fleeting in peripheral vision, and the long days to winter solstice.

Indigenous Poems and Stories from Quebec

Here is my review, published in The Malahat Review, issue 197, winter 2016:

Indigenous Poems and Stories from Quebec

Languages of Our Land, Indigenous Poems and Stories from Quebec,

Langues de Notre Terre, Poèmes et Récits Autochtones du Québec 

Susan Ouriou, ed., and Christelle Morelli, trans., 

Banff Centre

Banff, 2014

I

f you read Languages of Our Land / Langues de Notre Terre with any preconceptions about Indigenous writing, then you will be surprised by these twelve writers from Quebec; they are all unique and talented voices. All of these authors write in French and for the most part they live either north of or in the Quebec City region.

            I suspect that many readers of this book will be English-speaking. What might be interesting for them is to read the English translation and the French text together. Don’t just ignore the original text; even with thirty-year-old high-school French you can benefit from this reading. With no offense to Christelle Morelli, who translated this book into English, you will see the limitation of translation. There is an almost ineffable quality to a text in its original language that can elude even the best translator. For instance, here is the beginning of Mélina Vassiliou’s wonderful poem “Birthing/Writing.” In English the text is flat: “birthing / writing // writing / my future.” But in the original French you have the wonderful sound of the words, as Mélina Vassiliou wrote them; they have a vigour not found in the English translation. Here is the same passage in French: “progéniture / écriture // écriture / mon futur.” These are powerful words in French, and you can get the full force of the words by reading them out loud several times, “écriture / mon futur”—“écriture / mon futur.” It becomes mantra-like, an inspiring motto reminding poets that the profundity of our existence lies in communicating our vision, it is our present and our future.

            In “Roadblock 138–Innu Resistance,” the Innu poet Réal Junior Leblanc asks, “How can we / defend our heritage / and our children’s future / against the moneyed giants?” I used to live near the New York state border on Route 138, the highway that Leblanc refers to. It is mostly a secondary highway that runs its 1400-kilometre length slightly diagonally east and west through country and city across the province of Quebec. In some ways, this road is an asphalt soul of the province connecting, linking, joining people from north to south. I am reminded of the Mohawk blockade of the Mercier Bridge, on Route 138 as it enters Montreal, back in 1990, and the reaction of the majority of the population against this manifestation. Any answer for Leblanc’s question, “how can we defend our heritage?” is both difficult and complicated; however, Leblanc writes, “I weep / for all the rivers / they will divert / for all the forests / they will plunder / for all the lands / they will flood / for all the mountains / they will raze // To them, I will say always / from the depths of my soul / No.”

            It might be difficult to maintain a “No” when the force of modernity and so-called progress surround one. So much is political in Quebec: French, English, First Nations. We who live here know that our identity is in the language, or languages, one speaks; it is our endless conversation, our endless dance. Even though writing in French, Manon Nolin, in her poem “The Land of My Language,” is referring to her Innu-aimun—her Innu language:

           

                                    Roots of our ancestral lands
                                    a word, a language
                                    that of my ancestors
                                    bear my promised land

                                    The language of my cradle
                                    becomes my land
                                    and so the territory of my tongue
                                    remains my life’s Innu-aimun.

            If poetry is the voice of the human soul, as I believe it is, then these Indigenous writers are the voice of the soul of their community. As editor Susan Ouriou writes in her Introduction, they bring to us a “reinterpretation of history and a rediscovery of spirit.” There is so much of interest in Languages of Our Land / Langues de Notre Terre that I regret not being able to discuss each author in some detail. However, perhaps the poet Johanne Laframboise speaks for all of the writers in this book when she writes, “One cannot kill / poetry // it withstands all / for us // we owe it to ourselves / to be poets / in this century” (“Emergence”). “One cannot kill / poetry” is a statement of survival and transformation and a wonderful affirmation of the creative spirit. These writers bear witness to their vision and their community in this excellent anthology.

Poetry as place, history, soul

I wrote these notes before a reading at the Visual Arts Center in Westmount, QC, on 17 October 2017:

Poets aren't nomads, we all come from somewhere; and this "somewhere" is our psychic center, our home, the place we identify with, the place where we have a history. Personally, place is very important to me—I think it is essential in poetry—and I identify with Montreal, the home of my family since we moved here 180 years ago. Everywhere I go in this city I find something that expresses my soul, my inner being, the place of my ancestors and my family. That is why I say I am a Montreal poet, for nowhere else I have been is home as much as Montreal is home. So, not only is poetry an expression of location but it is also a place of history, of what happened in the past, of names, places, dates, events; that is to say it is a place of psyche, of the soul.

Lane behind Girouard Avenue.

Lane behind Girouard Avenue.

Lane behind Girouard Avenue.

Looking towards Girouard Park, one street west of Girouard.

A few years ago when they renovated 2226 Girouard, my grandmother's home from 1925 to 1965, they didn't put in a new door (as seen above) that leads to the basement. 

Looking up at the back porch of my grandmother's flat on Girouard. 

The Shrouding by Leo Kennedy

I just finished reading Leo Kennedy's The Shrouding, originally published in 1933, this edition was re-published by Michael Gnarowski's Golden Dog Press in 1975. I am so impressed by Kennedy's work, I think he's brilliant and he's the real thing, a real poet. He always presented himself as a poet and I thought this rather specious when reading Patricia Morley's biography of Kennedy, but I can see the validity of it now. This one book is Kennedy's (almost entire) body of work, as Leon Edel writes in his Introduction, "...all writers in reality have only one book within them." This may be true, or not true, but we would still have liked a few more books by the same person. Kennedy is a formalist in his writing, there is rhythm and music in his poems, many of the poems are unfashionable as they rhyme, and the first poem in the book is a sonnet. Kennedy writes in his Introduction, "These poems were written when the world was more formal and poets thought a lot about scansion and almost as much about rhyme." I bought my copy of The Shrouding from Dundurn Press, delivered it cost $13.80, cheap! https://www.dundurn.com/books/Shrouding

McGill Fortnightly Review

Mark McCawley, the editor of Urban Grafitti, was in favour of online/digital magazines, I was in favour (and still am) of both, but I prefer a hard copy, on paper. This was one of the few things about which Mark and I disagreed. Online periodicals can disappear when the editor discontinues the site/periodical, and what is digital can be revised or altered in the Orwellian future. Hard copies of periodicals, kept in archives, can be researched years from now and I have done this type of research. So, for instance, two of the Montreal Group of poets (Scott and Smith) founded The McGill Fortnightly Review and it was published from 1925 to 1927; a few years later they published The McGilliad. Even today these periodicals are fascinating reading. The full run of both periodicals is available at Special Collections at McGill University or online at https://blogs.library.mcgill.ca/…/mcgill-fortnightly-review/

Leo Kennedy, Montreal Poet

I've just read Patricia Morley's As Though Life Mattered, Leo Kennedy's Story (1994); Kennedy was one of the four poets that comprised the Montreal Group in the 1920s. The others were F.R. Scott, A.J.M. Smith, and A.M. Klein. Kennedy had one book in him, The Shrouding (1933); I've read some of the poems in this book and they are truly exceptional, had he written more and produced a larger body of work he might have been the best of the four poets. Instead, he wrote advertising copy (like Ron Everson), many book reviews, and some poems for children; however, the second or third book was never written. We can only judge a poet on what he or she produces, the marriages, poverty, fishing trips, drinking, this is all of interest but it isn't poetry.

F.R. Scott, "The Dance is One"

I've just reread F.R. Scott's, The Dance is One (1973). Scott is not a great poet but he's also not a minor poet; as I wrote about Scott's colleague and friend, A.J.M. Smith, he is one of our better poets. Scott's importance lies not only in his body of creative work but also in what he did (he helped bring modernism in poetry to Canada in the 1920s), who he knew (Leon Edel, A.J.M. Smith, John Glassco, Leo Kennedy, Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, Louis Dudek, and many others, for instance Pierre Eliot Trudeau), what he believed (for instance, an inclusive vision of Canada) and his career as a distinguished law professor at McGill University. 

Louis Dudek told me that Scott controlled every aspect of Sandra Djwa's biography, The Politics of the Imagination: A Life of F.R. Scott, that always intrigued me but I also feel ambivalent about it because Scott basically censored the book. If you read Professor Djwa's biography of P.K. Page you'll get the other half of the story about Scott's extramarital affairs that he didn't want in his official biography. I was also very impressed with Scott's book of translations St-Denys Garneau & Anne Hebert: Translations/Traductions (1962); additional translations by Scott are in The Dance is One.  

The title of The Dance is One is from his poem "Dancing" and is also the inscription on his and his wife's headstone in Mount Royal Cemetery. By the way, Allan Hustak's biography of Scott's father Canon Frederick G Scott, Faith Under Fire, shows the kind of extraordinary family F.R. came from; Canon Scott was an exceptional person as was his son Frank Scott.

Here is my main reservation regarding Frank Scott as a poet: writing poetry is not a sideline, maybe people can do two things well in life but not in poetry, poetry demands full-time commitment and Scott never gave it full-time commitment, he was also a human rights activist, a lawyer, a law professor, one of the founders of the CCF, and while some of the poetry he wrote is exceptional he also wrote satirical poetry, and other poems, that have a limited interest for readers. I know that Scott was charismatic and people liked him, some loved him, they all thought highly of him. But poets don't have to be nice people, was Robert Frost a nice person? No, but he was a great poet. Here is my main complaint about Frank Scott, he was attached to his social class while promoting social causes, he was making a name for himself as a lawyer and law professor, and while he was doing this he wasn't writing poetry, he was dividing his time and while poetry was important to him it didn't come absolutely first despite what he claimed. None of the Montreal Group of poets wrote large bodies of work except for A.M. Klein.  

Cover of Frank Scott's The Dance is One

Headstone for F.R. Scott and his wife Marian Dale Scott at Mount Royal Cemetery

Cover of Scott's translation of poems by Anne Hebert and St-Denys Garneau

Carolyn Zonailo at the Scotts' family grave site,
Mount Royal Cemetery, Montreal, mid-1990s

NOTE: This was up-dated and expanded on 28 July 2019; 02 August 2022.                          

"Laurentian Shield" by F.R. Scott

F.R. Scott was born in Quebec City on August 1st in 1899 but lived most of his life in Montreal. A member of the Montreal Group of poets, Scott, A.J.M. Smith, Leo Kennedy, A.M. Klein, Leon Edel, and John Glassco helped bring Modernism to Canada. Desmond Pacey's Ten Canadian Poets (1958) is still a good place for some insight into Scott's importance as a poet.

Here is one of Scott's most famous poems:

LAURENTIAN SHIELD

F. R. Scott
From:   Events and Signals. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1954.

Hidden in wonder and snow, or sudden with summer,
This land stares at the sun in a huge silence
Endlessly repeating something we cannot hear.
Inarticulate, arctic,
Not written on by history, empty as paper,
It leans away from the world with songs in its lakes
Older than love, and lost in the miles.

This waiting is wanting.
It will choose its language
When it has chosen its technic,
A tongue to shape the vowels of its productivity.

A language of flesh and of roses.

Now there are pre-words,
Cabin syllables,
Nouns of settlement
Slowly forming, with steel syntax,
The long sentence of its exploitation.

The first cry was the hunter, hungry for fur,
And the digger for gold, nomad, no-man, a particle;
Then the bold commands of monopolies, big with machines,
Carving their kingdoms out of the public wealth;
And now the drone of the plane, scouting the ice,
Fills all the emptiness with neighbourhood
And links our future over the vanished pole.

But a deeper note is sounding, heard in the mines,
The scattered camps and the mills, a language of life,
And what will be written in the full culture of occupation
Will come, presently, tomorrow,
From millions whose hands can turn this rock into children.

Retrieved, 14 August 2017: https://canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/scott_fr/poem2.htm

                                                                                                "The Dance is One"

Video of Painted Lady Butterfly

Here is a Painted Lady butterfly on an echinacea bloom in our backyard. Lots of fun growing the flowers and then seeing many butterflies on them...

"For a garden, as Bacon observes, is the purest of human pleasures and the greatest refreshment of the spirit of man; and even idle and ignorant people who cannot distinguish Leptosiphon hybridus from Kaulfussia amelloides and would rather languish away in a wilderness than break their backs with dibbling and weeding may get a good deal of pleasant conversation out of it, especially if they know the old-fashioned names of the commoner sorts of flowers and are both tolerably well acquainted with the minor Elizabethan lyrists." Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night, p. 454

Review of The Archetypal Imagination by James Hollis

This review was originally published in The Newsletter of the C.G. Jung Society of Montreal, February 2017.

The Archetypal Imagination

James Hollis

Texas A&M University Press, 2000

By Stephen Morrissey

             If you have time to read only one of James Hollis's books, The Archetypal Imagination is the book to read. Published in 2000 by Texas A&M University as part of the Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series in Analytical Psychology, the book is a part of Hollis's mission to explain Jungian psychology to a contemporary audience, often referring to literature and the arts in this endeavour. Hollis's erudite discussion of the archetypal imagination is brilliant; he writes, "It is the archetypal imagination which, through the agencies of symbol and metaphor and in its constitutive power of imaging, not only creates the world and renders it meaningful but may also be a paradigm of the work of divinity." (p. 7) Each chapter of Hollis's book begins with the same statement: What we wish most to know, most desire, remains unknowable and lies beyond our grasp. But what is it that we wish to know, what is it that we most desire, and why is it out of our grasp? There is a possible answer, it is found in the archetypal imagination.

            Hollis states that the archetypal imagination is similar to the Romantic poets' concept of the imagination. For the Romantic poets the "imagination is our highest faculty, not our reason, which is delimited by its own structure." (p. 7) There is a place for the intellect and rational thought in understanding the unconscious mind, it is to lay a foundation of learning and knowledge about the way our psychology works. The archetypal imagination has a different place in understanding the complexity of the unconscious mind; Hollis writes, "What Coleridge called the secondary imagination was what Jung means by the archetypal power; the capacity to echo, perhaps to replicate, the original creation through the regenerative power of an image... " (p. 6) Coleridge posited and differentiated between a primary and secondary imagination; both concepts elaborated by Coleridge are more complex than Wordsworth's idea of the imagination but the essential idea of the Romantic imagination remains similar in both poets. The English Romantic poets found ultimate meaning not in reason—consider William Blake's criticism of those proponents of rationalism, Newton, Voltaire and Rousseau—but in the imagination; for the Romantics "the imagination was the door to divinity." (p. 7)

            The feeling that life is meaningless is one of the existential dilemmas that many people experience at some point in their life; meaninglessness carries with it despair, hopelessness, alienation from the community, and anxiety. We question the purpose and value of our existence when our traditional supports, whether religious, social, or economic, are no longer present. Hollis writes, "The recovery of meaning not only relocates a person in a larger order of things but also supports a sense of personal identity and directs energies in life-serving ways." (p. 16) How do we discover a meaningful existence, how do we reconcile the conflict between the inner and outer world? Indeed, how is the wounded psyche or soul healed (for "neurosis is suffering without meaning and the flight from authentic being." (p. 16)? Jung maintains that there is no individuation without meaning or intentionality and meaning can be discovered in the archetypal imagination. Hollis writes,

            ... perhaps life is meaningless, but we are meaning-seeking creatures who are driven to understand it. Failing that, we attempt to form some meaningful relationship to life. We learn from archetypal psychology, from the core of primal religious experiences, from quantum physics, and from the artist's eye that all is energy. Matter is a dynamic, temporary arrangement of energy. Apparently, a religious symbol or a prayer, a work of art, or an expressive practice can so act on our psyche as to move that energy when it has been blocked, deadened, or split off. (p. 10)

            The answer to how meaning is discovered is the crux of Hollis's book; he quotes Jung, writing in his memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections: "'Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable—perhaps everything... For it is not that "God" is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man.'" (p.15) The archetypal imagination is a part of the transcendent function; in the imagination we discover aspects of the soul, of our psychology, and thus one sees the importance of active imagination, sand play, drawing mandalas, or other creative activities like writing poetry or painting pictures. Hollis quotes Jung again, "'Meaning only comes when people feel that they are living the symbolic life, that they are actors in the divine drama. That gives the only meaning to human life; everything else is banal and you can dismiss it. A career, the producing of children, all are maya [illusion] compared to that one thing, that your life is meaningful.'" (p.18)

            Of course, the purpose of all of C.G. Jung's life work is individuation, it is to help people live an authentic and meaningful life and to discover a greater consciousness and understanding of who and what we are. Hollis writes, "Consciousness is transformed by the encounter with mystery as invested in images theretofore foreign to it." (11) Individuation is the visionary transformation of consciousness, it is the discovery of a meaningful existence; whether in the paintings of Rene Magritte or the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, all art is vision in its transformation of the complexity and depth of the unconscious mind into art.

            So, what do we now make of Hollis's statement that What we wish most to know, most desire, remains unknowable and lies beyond our grasp? Money won't buy happiness and you can't live forever. We ask: what is meaningful in life, can we find individuation? We err if we think that an individuated existence is an intellectual construct or a theoretical destination at which one might arrive in the future. Individuation is not that distant place on the horizon that is impossible to reach; in the archetypal imagination we find a greater consciousness of the conflict between our inner and outer life and the discovery and realization of this can lead to a meaningful individuated existence, one that is authentic to psyche. This also helps us to discover that which we wish most to know, most desire.  

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

How to write a poem

Part of a poet's education is reading poetry and hearing poets read their work. Other people's poems inspire us, not to write like them but to write our own poems, in our own voice, to be a witness of what we have seen and experienced—the geography of your soul—not to copy anyone's poems but an expression of one's own vision. One might say, when hearing a poem being read, that the poem inspires the soul to express itself.

            My test of poetry has always been that if the poems I am reading make me want to write then the work of that poet has enlarged my vision of poetry and life. The poets I continue to read, who for over the last twenty or more years still inspire me, are Charles Olson, Robert Lowell, and Louis Dudek. They are poets of the soul and enlarge one's concept of poetry.

            We also learn about poetry by hearing poets read their own work. Between October 1969 and April 1973 I heard many poets read at Sir George Williams University; I also attended readings at McGill University and Loyola College. Sometimes after a reading there would be a party, for instance at Professor Richard Sommers' home, or at the home of another professor; after the party I'd go home and write about the reading in my diary. It wasn't until 2012 that these diary entries had any importance when I was interviewed about the Sir George Williams University reading series by Professor Jason Camlot at Concordia University (formerly SGWU). Attending so many readings was a wonderful apprenticeship for a young poet. Here are the names of some of the poets that I heard read their work during my undergraduate years.

             Jerome Rothenberg, bill bissett, Allen Ginsberg, Frank Davey, Diane Wakowski, Ron Loewinsohn, Tom Raworth, David Ball, Robert Creeley, Roy Kiyooka, Al Purdy, Joel Oppenheimer, Ted Berrigan, David McFadden, Gerry Gilbert, Jack Winter, Kenneth Koch, Dennis Schmitz, Jackson Mac Low, Michael Horowitz, Gary Synder, Dorothy Livesay, L.E. Sissman, Mac Hammond, Tom Marshall, Irving Layton, W.H. Auden, Frank Scott, Earle Birney, Fred Cogswell, Louis Dudek, Alden Nowlan, Margaret  Atwood, Patrick Anderson, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael Benedikt, William Empson, Anaïs Nin, and others.

Church Bells at St. Thomas on a Sunday Morning

Hear the church bells ringing at St. Thomas Anglican Church in Montreal, October 2016.

English and French Canadian Poetry

On Mount Royal

If English-Canadian poetry is largely narrative and French-Canadian poetry is largely lyrical, then the most interesting French Canadian poets are Émile Nelligan (1879-1941), St-Denys Garneau (1912-1943), and Anne Hébert (1916-2000). There is a dreamlike quality to the work of both Garneau and Hébert and I think the best way to understand their work is to think of their poems as one thinks of dreams, as visits to the unconscious archetypal mind, to be understood as one interprets one's own dreams. They are direct expressions of the poet's psyche and the collective unconscious of the French-Canadian people. I am always interested in what a poet's work says about the soul of the poet, the soul of the nation, the poet's private mythology. These are dark poets that I have listed, they write of the human , they write of the dark side of the Quebec soul, this means the French soul but also in a symbiotic-two solitudes kind of way the English-speaking soul; that is, my soul. We have a spiritual darkness in Quebec that people in the rest of Canada will find difficult to understand; few people want to look at the soul, they are afraid of what they might see.

Honey bees at hydrangea flowers, July 2016

A favourite activity, watching honey bees foraging for nectar and pollen in flowers... here is the latest video on that.

Saying "Goodbye" to our friend Robert as he sets off in his Saab for home in Baltimore...

Edmund at Loyola Park

It's July 2, 2016 but feels like an early fall day, windy, grey sky, rain blowing in; cool until the sun comes out. Here is my grandson, Edmund, playing at Loyola Park. "That's fun" he says after coming down the slide...

Chanting at the Buddhist temple

Out walking in Montreal West when I made a detour back to my own neighbourhood, the borough of Notre Dame de Grace. Passing the old Rosedale United Church on Terrebonne, seeing the labyrinth outside of Dewey Hall, and that the Hall is now a Buddhist Temple. Standing outside the temple and listening to the chanting coming from inside...

No Looking Back Now

INTRODUCTION: NO LOOKING BACK NOW

M

ark McCawley, who died suddenly in April 2016, was an Edmonton-based writer, publisher, and critic. Mark published and edited Urban Graffiti, a litzine that has an international reputation for publishing transgressive texts, including short stories, poetry, criticism, in-depth interviews with artists, and reviews of books, visual art, and music.

            Writers, as Margaret Laurence said long ago, are a tribe; we know our own people, we have friends, and friends of friends, around the world—we have a lineage and a history—and as members of this tribe many of us came to be friends with Mark. He was, as Richard Rathwell said, of "the social poet class...", that social class is our tribe.  He was one of us.

            I first became acquainted with Mark McCawley in the early 1990s. He published, with his Greensleeve Editions, chapbooks for both my wife and I; it was Carolyn Zonailo's The Letters of the Alphabet (1992) and my The Divining Rod (1993). In 2008 I published Mark's collection of short stories, Collateral Damage, on Coracle Press's online site. I also taught his short stories in my college-level English literature course; the response to his stories was always positive, the students appreciated his honesty and depiction of "real life". Mark wrote to me, "I think of all my literary experiences, I am most proud of the suite of stories you published, Collateral Damage. Even more so that you used those stories to teach your students." With time, there were other honours that Mark was also proud of, for instance being published in the Evergreen Review.

            It was in the early 1990s that Mark and I began to correspond, first by Canada Post, then E-mail, and for the last few years we also kept in touch on Facebook. Mark asked me to write a column for Urban Graffiti but personal events in my own life prevented me from doing this. Mark also published on Urban Graffiti several essays and fiction I wrote.

            Like many writers Mark was an introvert; my image of Mark is him working in solitude, listening to the music he loved, going out for a coffee, editing and publishing Urban Graffiti, and doing his own writing. Mark also had serious health issues and this is what finally ended his life at age fifty-two; it is much too young to leave this world.

            Mark was a highly intelligent and articulate advocate for literature and the arts. His passion was for transgressive literature but he was also interested in and affirmed the importance of literature in general. Mark and I agreed on many things about Canadian literature; for instance, that creative writing courses and the numerous awards for poetry that now exist have ended up promoting mediocre conservative writing. He was critical of everything fake, false, and hypocritical; Mark's integrity is part of why we valued him so much. One time I wrote to Mark that he was one of the most honest people on Facebook. I wrote, " ... Stay being honest, although I doubt you can do otherwise..."

            If Mark had a message for writers it is to be true to one's vision, don't sell out, tell the truth of what you have witnessed. Whenever we think of softening our line, of selling out what we believe, we need only remember Mark McCawley and we will quickly return to our authentic vision, one that is at the core of our inner being.

            The title of this essay, "No looking back now", are Mark's final words taken from his last communication with me. This morning I was thinking of Mark, I wondered: What will we do without him? And then, after some reflection, I remembered what Mark said, that there is "no looking back now." I realized that this is what we must do, move on to the future, get on with life; that is what he would have said and what he would have wanted us to do.  

                                                                        Stephen Morrissey

                                                                        Montreal, June 2016

Revised: 19/06/2016

Here is the full text at Internet Archive: