T.L. Morrisey

Saturday, October 19, 2019

After Reading Guy Birchard's Valedictions

Home of Mary Brown and Artie Gold at 3667 Lorne Crescent

 
Before George Bowering was GB there was Guy Birchard, maybe the first GB, both named as such by AG, Artie Gold. Valedictions (2019), published by rob mclennan's above/ground press, is Guy's farewell to three deceased artists, poet William Hawkins, musician and visual artist Ray 'Condo' Tremblay, and our mutual friend, poet Artie Gold. I met Guy in the spring of 1973, I met Artie through Guy. I never met Ray Tremblay but one day my brother took a taxi in Ottawa that was driven by William Hawkins; somehow the subject of poets came up and Hawkins said that he had heard of me. It's a small world; we were all a lot younger in those days, we knew a lot of people. And now Guy's memoir has caused me to think about Artie once again, he was an imposing and domineering figure for many of us in the early 1970s.

Life seems to be a series of coincidences and cumulatively they can add up to something meaningful, or nothing at all. For instance, Guy says that he first encountered Artie at a reading by Michael Benedikt, but I was also at that reading, it was on 16 March 1973 in the Hall Building, the ninth floor I believe, and it may have been at this reading that I also met Guy, sitting a few rows behind me. Around that time, winter-spring 1973, Hopeton Anderson invited Guy to read at Karma Coffee House and that was the occasion on which Guy met Artie Gold; to get this sequence of events accurate, it was also at Guy's reading at Karma that Richie Carson, another poet of that era, invited Guy to read again at Karma. By then I knew Guy and he extended to me an invitation to read after he read (the reading was on the third week of April 1973), just as Hopeton Anderson had extended a similar invitation to Guy, all of these readings taking place at Karma. Karma Coffee House was located in the basement of the Sir Williams University Student Union Building. 

Artie was an extraordinary person, there was an aura of excitement surrounding him, he was a genuinely creative person; I doubt most of us meet someone like Artie Gold more than once in a lifetime. One winter day he and I and my first wife took a train to Ottawa and visited the National Gallery of Canada. For years I had a copy of The Far Point, bought on that occasion, an article in that issue was my introduction to what was happening in poetry in Vancouver where many of the most innovative poets were living at that time. There are other, happy memories of Artie; it was a seminal time when we were apprentices as poets. But now, after reading Guy's memoir of Artie, what is for me an unpleasant and pivotal memory has surfaced. It is a memory that explains what happened to my relationship with Artie. I remember talking with Artie and him telling me that he had published more than I had and that he was more important as a poet than I was. It may have been true but do we say that to a friend?  I have never said that to another poet and no other poet has said it to me, except Artie.

Remembering that comment by Artie I also realized that it is may have been around this time that my relationship with him began to diminish.  Artie was getting ahead in poetry, considering his talent and his intelligence the only thing that could hold him back was himself, the baggage of his life; the baggage eventually won: he was now being published by Talon Press in Vancouver; he was giving readings in BC, Ontario, and Quebec; other better known poets had heard of him and made him a celebrity of sorts; he was one of three poetry editors at Vehicule Press, the other two editors were Ken Norris and Endre Farkas. Artie had now become a "somebody". I benefited by Artie's ambition, Artie, Ken, and Endre published my first book, The Trees of Unknowing (Vehicule Press,1978) and I am grateful to them and to the press for that.

So, Artie moved on and was an important poet with a future. Then, Si Dardick, the owner of Vehicule Press, fired his three poetry editors and installed someone else in the job; I don't know the details of this firing but I do know that the books the new editor published never interested me; the emphasis was now on formalistic poetry.

I still knew Artie after he was no longer an editor at Vehicule Press; I gave him readings for several years, beginning in 1976, at the college where I was now teaching, I knew he needed the money. From these readings he would go home with a little money and office supplies from the college. But there were other changes happening in Artie's life; his decline into poverty, worsening health, and increasing drug dependency is usually dated from when Mary Brown, who supported Artie, ended their relationship by moving a few doors away but still on Lorne Crescent; later she moved to a house she helped build in the country. Mary Brown died in 1999. But now I wonder if  Artie's decline might also be dated from when he was no longer an editor at the press.

My long forgotten memory of Artie's comment to me had other repercussions on our relationship; it explains to me my distance from Artie in the years that followed. For instance, I continued knowing Artie but on a more formal basis, the old familiarity we once had was gone. Nothing lasts forever, everything changes. When he stored his boxes of archives in our basement, around 2005, I offered to give him a receipt (of all things!) and this surprised Artie as much as it surprised me at the time; however, I didn't want any problems with Artie and I didn't want Artie coming back at me saying I had polluted his papers with cat dander, an alleged trigger for his COPD (not asthma).  When I bought groceries for Artie, or clothes, or what have you—this was when he had friends supporting him so he could remain living autonomously—if I said I didn't have the time to go to several shops that day to buy him croissants or cans of chick peas he wouldn't push me to do it, he just agreed and let it go, in fact, I noticed he was uncharacteristically meek in accepting what I said. No good deed goes unpublished is one of my mottoes and it included Artie Gold.

Artie died in February 2007 and later that year a small group of us scattered Artie's ashes at places we thought significant to Artie. One of the people at this gathering told me that when she separated from her husband Artie phoned to offer his sympathy, at first this was an incredible thing for Artie to have done, she must have felt supported by Artie's phone call; but, more importantly, it must have at first felt doubly compassionate as it was from someone who was rarely compassionate about anybody. The point of this anecdote is that literally thirty seconds after Artie expressed his sympathy he returned to his favourite subject, himself. We both laughed at this, it was "good old Artie" being himself.

When I first saw Artie's cover drawing on his last chapbook, The Hotel Victoria Poems (above/ground press), I thought it was prescient, that this was the same bed in which the police discovered his body on Valentine's Day in February 2007. But I was wrong, Guy tells me this image appeared on a postcard he received when Artie was still living on Lorne Crescent, it is not the same room and bed where he died in 2007. Artie was a friend of our youth, he was one of the first real poets some of us met on this journey in life.

                                                                 October 2019, revised version




Monday, October 14, 2019

Mid-October and out for a walk

It's the Canadian Thanksgiving and we're headed into a federal election, the choices are minimal and not too exciting. So far it's been a lot of promises paid for with taxpayer money, endless speeches, scandals that blew over, and the whole thing descended into a comedy that is not funny or even entertaining.




Winter is not far off, this is the last chance for honey bees to stock up on pollen

Concordia University has made this mini-park just outside the rear gates of Loyola Campus 

Also at the mini-park

The baseball diamond is in the rear, at Loyola Park between Fielding and Somerled

Home sweet home... 

Wednesday, October 2, 2019

Poetry Is A Calling

 Calliope, the muse of epic poetry; detail from a Pompeii fresco


No one makes a conscious decision to be a poet—poetry is a calling, a metaphysical event— poetry calls you. To deny a calling is to step out of the current of life, it is to deny life and the direction in which life is sending you. To deny a calling is to betray your life, it's that fundamental. There are only a few times when you will have a calling in life, perhaps only once, and there aren't many people who have a calling, so to turn down what life has given you is to deny the basic integrity of one's life. Being a poet has always been the biggest event in my life; if you follow a calling you are affirming life at a very basic level; to be a poet is not a conscious decision, poetry calls you to be a poet.

Sunday, September 22, 2019

Gardening, Mid-September in 2019


I've added a new section to the garden, as seen above

And now planted, cone flowers, bee balm, irises, day lilies, mint, and by the path raspberries. I planned this last summer, that's what gardening is, other than work in the garden, it's thinking and planning what you're going to do next year...





Final three photos, honey bees in the garden. It wasn't always this way, only for the last three years or so, but now honey bees are common in the city.

Tuesday, September 17, 2019

A poets' body of work: how much is too much, how much is too little?




One of complaints made by critics about A.J.M. Smith is that his body of published work is too small for him to be considered an important poet; if a poet hasn't done the writing, they reasoned, then how can that poet be considered significant? At first this view seemed valid to me; however, I also felt that Smith had written some individual poems that are the work of genius, he was too good a poet to be dismissed on this one point. Indeed, except for A.M. Klein none of the members of the Montreal Group of poets have large bodies of published work; Smith was not a prolific poet but he published more poems than Leo Kennedy and about as many as John Glassco, both members of the Group. Consider the following citation:

      After a life of persistent devotion to literature, he has left enough poems to make a single small volume (less, certainly, than a hundred poems in all), a single volume of prose, a few pamphlets, and a prose translation of the poems of Poe.

This could be a description of A.J.M. Smith's literary writing (omitting the reference to Poe) and yet the citation is taken from Arthur Symons' ground breaking book on the French symbolists, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1919), and it is Stéphane Mallarmé who is being referred to. Symons affirms Mallarmé's work; E.K. Brown is critical of Smith's work.

Some poets have small bodies of work, these include Elizabeth Bishop who published 101 poems, Stéphane Mallarmé who published less than 100 poems, Jay MacPherson, John Thompson (who published two books), Patrick Kavanaugh, and of course A.J.M. Smith who published 100 poems. Is the poet who publishes a small highly crafted body of work, each poem the result of many drafts, the product of considered editing, better or worse than the poet who publishes a lot including a few brilliant poems? I suspect that some poets need to write a lot in order to arrive at a few good poems; others need to write very little but do endless edits and revisions to arrive at a few good poems of their own. Ezra Pound said, regarding Walt Whitman, that when he was young he found a small number of Whitman's poems worth reading but now that he is older he can't find those few poems. Many would say the same thing about Pound's poetry but few would say it about Elizabeth Bishop's work.

Some poets are proud of not writing much and I suspect that this is sometimes a pretention on their part, a kind of snobbery found among both individuals and little in-groups of poets. I have known people like this. Perhaps these poets have higher standards than the poet who cranks it out, they would have us believe this. What are some of the reasons these poets don't write more than they do? Perhaps they are not very good poets; perhaps writing poetry was just a lot of talk and socializing; talent without hard work isn't worth much. Poetry is an art of inspiration and work, not what could or might have been.  

Poets who write "too much" are also open to criticism; it is difficult to say how much is "too much" but the number of books published by established Canadian poets may be more than most of us think. Here is a list of several important Canadian poets and the number of poetry books they published, but with a proviso, I am not saying that they all published too much, only that  the number of books poets publish varies widely. Irving Layton published 51 books; Al Purdy published 33 books; Dorothy Livesay published 25 books; Louis Dudek published 23 books; Phyllis Webb published 23 books; Earle Birney published 21 books; Margaret Avison published 11 books; P.K. Page published 14 books; and George Johnston published eight books. All of these poets have made a substantial contribution to Canadian literature.

When I was a university student in the early 1970s, I would visit the poetry section at Classic's Little Book Store on Ste. Catherine Street West here in Montreal. The store had expanded from one floor to two, and then to a third floor where the poetry books were displayed at the top of the stairs. I remember seeing Clayton Eshleman's books, one title in particular stood out, Indiana (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1969), a hefty book of almost 200 pages. And I remember my first reaction to this book: wasn't it a bit presumptuous to publish such a lengthy tome? Who had that much to say? My ideal for poets at that time, but not my personal reality, was a small body of meticulously crafted work. Over time I changed my opinion about Eshleman, in fact I became a fan of Eshleman's work and, in May 1978, I invited him to Montreal to read at the college where I worked as well as at Vehicule Art Gallery where I organized readings with John McAuley. Unfortunately, this gesture on my part, of friendship and respect for Eshleman, backfired on me. I found him to be a difficult person, not very friendly, and I don't remember hearing from him again after he left Montreal. I think there was a misunderstanding as to whether he would be paid in Canadian or American money, a difference of a few dollars that I regret not having made up at my own expense. Let me just say that Eshleman is a highly talented and gifted poet and translator, his work is original and visionary.

Many poets are critical of self-publishing but it has a long history and is a valid option for many poets; Louis Dudek recommended a number of approaches to publishing that included self-publishing (Whitman's first book was self-published), setting up a literary press, and being published by a small literary press. I have been published by established presses, I have been published by presses just getting off the ground, and I have self-published one of my books. My work has always been guided by the central myth of my life, discovered when I was young, and that is the Garden Myth, the fall from innocence into experience. My nine published books follow the progression of my life as it fits the template of the Garden Myth. I am working on two manuscripts, by the end of my literary career I will have written a medium sized body of work of eleven or so books of poetry, maybe these two final books will be self-published online but at least I will have done the work and completed my life mission.

In itself publishing too much or too little is not a valid basis on which to critique someone's life work; at best, it may be a way to qualify one's statements about the work, perhaps as an addendum to other more serious criticism; at worst it is lazy criticism and does little to evaluate a poet's work. I agree with Louis Dudek and T.S. Eliot (whose body of published poems is fairly small), both said that the final critic or judge of a poet's work is time. It isn't how much or how little you publish, it's how good the work is that you publish; it's not possible to know what poetry will last and what poetry will be forgotten, that's determined by unknown variables in a future that is also unknown.

                                                            Stephen Morrissey
                                                            September 2019


Thursday, August 15, 2019

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. 












Tuesday, July 30, 2019

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

Monday, July 15, 2019

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 Universityin 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

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