Snowy March Day at Vincelli's Garden Centre

I took these photos of Vincelli's Garden Centre from Westminster Avenue on 23 March 2020 around 4 p.m..

In the midst of the virus, mid-March

The COVID-19 virus preoccupies the news; everyday the number of infected people is rising, people are dying, people are recovering. The virus has become a part of everyday life, restaurants and gyms are closed, concerts and other gatherings are cancelled, some people are quarantined, others are self-isolating at home, our Canadian border is now closed except to Canadians returning home and some Americans. Only four airports are open to international flights, Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, and Vancouver. Truly, most of us have never lived through anything like this before.

Our deserted street...

Our IGA grocery store at the Cote St-Luc Shopping Centre,
located a half block from where we live

For a few days people were stock-piling food and a few of our grocery store
shelves at the local IGA were depleted, but this didn't last long 

This was the section for toilet paper and paper towels at our IGA

Our pharmacy at the same shopping centre as the IGA; the other day people were streaming out of this place clutching packages of toilet paper, 8, 12, 24 rolls . . .  I don't known why the mania for buying toilet paper began
but it swept North America, as though there would be a shortage of toilet paper . . .  

Trinity Memorial Church

I was in the area yesterday and took these photos of what used to be Trinity Memorial Church, closed a few years ago despite great protest by the parishioners. My parents were married here in 1940; about fifteen years ago I went to Christmas services at Trinity; and in the mid-1970s I lived just up the hill from Trinity on Northcliffe Avenue. 

This reminds me that Anglican churches in Montreal, in the 1950s, used to show movies and host dances in their church basements. Unfortunately, those days are long gone, the parishioners have moved away, the churches are closing, and we live in a secular society. A friend who grew up on Chesterfield Avenue, in Westmount, remembers going to dances at Trinity; he added that he and his Westmount friends were afraid to go beyond Decarie Blvd or Girouard Avenue because kids in Notre Dame de Grace were tough and would beat them up... 

My parents outside of Trinity Memorial Church on 30 March 1940, just after their wedding.

Northcliffe Avenue entrance to Trinity Memorial Church.

The "For Sale" sign is an unhappy conclusion to this place of worship.

Front door of Trinity Memorial Church, on Sherbrooke Street West near Decarie.

Windows on Northcliffe Avenue side of building.

Mid-February Cold

A mild January has given way to a very cold and snowy February, over 50 cm. of snow fell last week and it's -20 C this morning ...

Poetry, Place, and Psyche (with revisions and post scripts)

                                               

1.

I think of "place" in poetry as referring to two things: place as a specific geographical location, and place as location in a metaphysical sense. I am particularly interested in place as it is shown in the long, sometimes multi-book, poem; place can also be important in single poems that are neither long nor multi-book.

One of the best examples of place is William Carlos Williams' Paterson (1963). Williams' poem works on different levels of meaning, personal, historical, mythological, archetypal, and so on. One of the keys to Paterson is in Williams' preface in which he writes "that a man in himself is a city, beginning, seeking, achieving and concluding his life in ways which the various aspects of a city may embody..." The city Williams is writing about is an outer expression of the poet's inner being, it is Williams himself, no ordinary or average citizen.

Another aspect of place is in Williams' belief in writing the way Americans speak, in the American idiom. Allen Ginsberg, in his essay "Williams in a World of Objects" (1983), writes that Williams was a friend of Charles Reznikoff; he writes, "They composed their poems out of the elements of natural speech, their own speech, as heard on the porch or in talk over the kitchen table."  The way people speak—idiomatic English—also emphasizes place in poetry. Then Ginsberg continues, he writes,

He [Williams] deliberately stayed in Rutherford, New Jersey, and wrote poetry about the local landscape, using local language. He wanted to be a provincial from the point of view of really being there where he was; really knowing his ground. He wanted to know his roots, know who the iceman and fishman were; know the housewife; he wanted to know his town—his whole body in a sense. (340)

The loss of place in American life is also discussed in Wendell Berrry's The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford  (2011); Berry writes:

Without such rootedness in locality, considerably adapted to local conditions, we get what we now have got: a country half destroyed, toxic, eroded, and in every way abused; a deluded people tricked out in gauds without traditions of any kind to give them character; a politics of expediency dictated by the wealthy; a disintegrating economy founded upon fantasy, fraud, and ecological ruin. Williams saw all of this, grieved over    it, and accused rightly... (176)

  

2.

Many critics don't rank John Glassco's chapbook length poem Montreal (1973) very highly; I think they are mistaken. Glassco's poem is a short history of Montreal, from pre-historic days to around 1967, it also represents Glassco as a man who rejects what his city has become. Urban development is destroying the city in which he grew up, not much is left of the Victorian architecture and ambiance of daily life which Glassco once experienced. This is seen in the demolition of historic family homes in the Golden Square Mile area of the city and it continues to this day with the gentrification of once poor neighbourhoods. Glassco writes, "Last night I heard again all your chanting voices / Fetched from my own dead childhood..." This is no conventional history or critique of modernity, this is history seen through the eyes, memory, and aesthetic sensibility of one of our prominent writers. This is a history grounded in Glassco's emotional response to modern-day Montreal, it is not a positive one. This is the city where Glassco lived and grew up, it is a subjective history that is based on objective historical fact filtered through his aesthetic sensibility.

Glassco refers to living in a rented room in the Crescent Street area of downtown Montreal. I remember meeting Marian Dale Scott in the fall of 1970 at a reception at McGill's Thomson House on McTavish Avenue, she recounted how her husband, the poet Frank Scott, and Scott's friend John Glassco, both elderly, would talk about the past as they walked along Crescent Street; I would like to think that at least part of the genesis of Glassco's poem was on these mid- to late-1960s walks with Frank Scott. If the poem was completed in 1968 then, reasonably speaking, this is possible. I remember thinking at the time that Marian Scott was a lovely grey-haired lady (I was about twenty years old); later that evening I spoke with Frank Scott about poets he used to know and life in Montreal as it used to be. I had recently been at Patrick Anderson's reading; Anderson was an old friend of Scott's from the 1940s, and Scott mentioned that Anderson wished to make the acquaintance of young Montreal poets, he wanted to hear about contemporary Montreal poetry.

Glassco's treatment of the Indigenous population in his poem is also interesting; to him they represent an age of innocence, of sexual freedom before the arrival of Europeans. But he also recalls the French colony that became Montreal as a time of innocence; he associates it with the past, with when he was a boy collecting stamps. This, then, is Glassco's place: it is nostalgia for the past, disgust with what the city has become under Mayor Jean Drapeau's regime, and an enduring sense of loss that he has become estranged from his home city. He is contemptuous of Expo 67, the highly successful Montreal World's Fair of 1967, promoted and brought to completion by Mayor Drapeau. In effect, Montreal is the place of Glassco's lost innocence and his nostalgia for the past. In his other writing Glassco is cosmopolitan but as a poet he is a nativist. 

3.

Poetry, I believe, is the voice of the human soul, it is the voice of psyche; psyche is manifested in things, places, objects. This is how soul is recognized in someone's life, it is recognized by how it appears in things, not only by how they change and grow in their consciousness or awareness.

I agree with Williams that "poetry feeds the imagination and prose the emotions" but it is important to emphasize that place evokes both emotion and imagination; we have an emotional attachment to place and the emotions that are evoked there are important to us; place also moves us more deeply into imagination. Emotions connect to place, no matter how significant that place may be to other people. We have an emotional attachment to place.

Poetry returns us to place; poetry explores place, it extols the humanity of place over the anonymity of the contemporary and soulless built environment. Without place there is a levelling off and diminishment of what makes us human; there is the emergence, as we see in the world today, of a dehumanized society. 

4. 

I also believe that "the soul revels in specificity"; that is, the soul is not an abstract entity, the soul loves the material world and is manifested in specific things. The soul loves "things", not just "ideas". Soul is not disembodied; it is embodied, or manifested, in our time and place, by a specific person living in a specific place at a specific time.  

Place, a geographical location, is one of the ways we discover psyche.  Place is the source of tangible things, as well as images, metaphors, and archetypes. So, personally speaking, I believe that psyche is essential to poetry, and by extension place is essential because it is where we find our psychic center, that place we identify with and resonate to.

A few examples of poets and place:

Charles Olson’s Glouester; William Carlos William’s Paterson; Whitman's Manhattan; Yeats' Sligo; the Lake District for Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. In Canadian poetry we might think of Ameliasburg, Ontario, for Al Purdy; Montreal for John Glassco, F.R. Scott, Louis Dudek, A.M. Klein, and Irving Layton; the Tantramar Marshes and Sackville, New Brunswick, for Douglas Lochhead; PEI for Milton Acorn. All are places that are identified with these poets, they are places that have been transformed by poetry into an archetypal geography that contains the human condition; they are psychic centers, places of numinosity and soul. 

5.

The world is a place for creating one's identity, a place of intentionality and meaning. John Keats, in a famous letter to his brother and sister, George and Georgiana Keats, dated 28 April 1819, identified the purpose of the world, not as a "vale of tears" but a "vale of soul making"; soul-making refers to inner transformation, discovering one's purpose and meaning in life. Soul-making includes meeting one's Shadow, the rejected and dark aspect of our inner being, it is the journey to selfhood when entering the darkness that resides within each person. Keats emphasizes the importance of soul-making, that it is done in the "world", and that the world has this essential role in one's life.  The "world" refers to place, refers to living in the world and being engaged in the transformative quality of place.

To continue this line of thinking, Frank Bidart has referred to Robert Lowell's "confessional" poetry as "soul-making"; Bidart writes that the commonly used "confessional" label, first used in a review of Lowell's work by M.L. Rosenthal, is inaccurate and derogatory. It has become derogatory partly because of the academic prejudice against the personal and emotional. Place in poetry is one of the access points, one of the portals, to the inner or spiritual dimension of life and the poet's effort at soul-making. 

6. 

My own "place" in poetry, in life, is Montreal where my family have lived since the early 1840s; but more specifically, place for me is my grandmother's home at 2226 Girouard Avenue in Montreal where she lived from the mid-1920s to the mid-1960s. This was my first home (my brother remembers our mother going to the hospital for my birth at the Western Hospital that was located on Atwater Street near Ste. Catherine Street).

I first realized the psychic importance of Girouard Avenue in my dreams, it was a place of significance for me long before I began writing about it; this place was the home of my grandmother, and it was the place and home of other family members who lived with my grandmother or had once lived with her on Girouard.

For many years I thought it was individual family members, especially my grandmother, that were the reason I returned so often to this place, in dreams, poems, memory, even driving by her flat everyday on my way to work long after she died and always looking up at the living room windows that faced the street, always hoping I would see her looking out into the street. All of this is important to me, and perhaps fanciful, but one day I realized that it was the place itself that I was returning to, not only the people, for the place was the container for the people and our life there. This place, my grandmother's flat at 2226 Girouard Avenue, is my psychic center.

My history at my grandmother`s Girouard Avenue flat is what I wrote about in my book Girouard Avenue (2009) but also in other essays and poems that are about or refer to living on Girouard Avenue, for instance in my memoir Remembering Girouard Avenue (2015). About ten years ago I returned and visited the inside of the flat on Girouard when the building was for sale; incredibly, not much had changed during the intervening 45 years since my grandmother had lived there, except that the building was more run down than ever. The rooms were empty or contained boxes of the current renter's possessions; after the place was sold it was totally renovated and it now holds no interest for me, it now exists only in the imagination. 

7.

What is left that is distinct in today's big cities? One thinks of historical sites, art galleries and museums, literary gatherings, restaurants and theatre, gay villages, China Town, botanical gardens, university districts, natural beauty, large parks, all are places that make cities worth visiting. But mostly, in every city, we find the usual sixty story office buildings, condos everywhere, malls with the same stores in them as in every other city, people dressed in the current fashions, some people are homeless, some people are having the same conversations about sports or entertainment as people in other cities, people are watching the same television shows and movies, they are listening to the same inconsequential popular music, they have the same opinions as people everywhere. No wonder we call these cities soulless places.

More and more people live a transient existence, they are not homeless but they move from one city to another, one state or province to another, one country to another. It doesn't really matter to these people where they live, it can be in any of the soulless places they find themselves. These people no longer identify with a specific city or place, they are people with no substantial connection to anywhere in the world. They are, lamentably, citizens of the global world, identifying with nowhere, engaged with nothing, and loyal to no one.

8.

E.K. Brown, although largely forgotten, is one of the foremost scholars and critics of Canadian literature; indeed, he supported and helped define our national literature when many critics were ambivalent about the value of Canadian literature, some of these critics thought that Canadians were colonials and what was written here was a poor second cousin to literature written in the United Kingdom. Place is important to Brown, it creates who we are, our identity; we have an emotional and intellectual connection to place. Brown is a "nativist", not a "cosmopolitan", as these terms were defined by A.J.M. Smith in his Introduction to The Book of Canadian Poetry (1943). The nativists are concerned with what makes Canada a distinct place, we have moved out of a colonial age and into nationhood, and place is a natural concern for them. The cosmopolitan poets, usually formalists and therefore adhering to a poetic tradition found in the UK or Europe, are more conservative than the nativists, they have a traditional approach to poetry that does not necessarily adhere to the importance of place.

Here is Brown writing in 1947 about his own early life:

The central and northern parts of Toronto are where I am most at home. The narrowness of lower Yonge Street, the rows of its shabby and sometimes seedy shops between College and Bloor, the huddling curves of South Rosedale, the vista from Casa Loma, the shadeless streets of that suburb so oddly named Forest Hill, they are all beautiful in my eyes. ("Now, Take Ontario", 1947)

And then we turn to Laura Smyth Groening's excellent biography of Brown, E.K. Brown, A Study in Conflict (1993), and we read of Brown's "ever-growing fascination with Canadian Literature"; Groening writes,

The theory of national literatures that he was developing, as we saw from his work in On Canadian Poetry [1943] and the articles leading up to that book, was strongly rooted in ideas about the essential relationship between writers and their grounding in a specific place... in the 1930s he believed that universal quality was most securely present in the work attached to a definite time and place. (132-133)  

9.

Soul-making requires place, being uprooted from place is to dig up the roots of one's inner being from the psychic ground, from the material ground of place; if a tree is uprooted then the tree dies, people who have lost place in their lives are uprooted, they are deracinated. The soul flourishes in specific things, in small and large things, in a specific place and in all of the details that make a specific place unique and soulful; this includes historical places, buildings, neighbourhoods, architecture, and people one sees on the street.

We are increasingly living in a deracinated world, in a global community, but a global community is an abstraction, an invention of committees and legislation and driven by people's personal ambition; it is an intellectual construct, it is not born organically, a process that may take several millennia of human migration, political and military strategies, transformation of the arts, and spiritual insight. If we are not careful we will soon be living in Orwell's world of geographical regions, not places of vibrant specificity that are containers of soul. Place is specific and local, it is not abstract but concrete; globalism is an abstract concept that has little or no connection to community or place. Abstraction denies the specificity of place; place emphasizes the diverse world of things. Poetry requires community; it requires the diversity of a specific place.

                                                                                                January 2020

Essay revised: 06 February 2020, 22 March 2020


Post Script, 1 of 2: Here is a quotation from C.G. Jung that seems appropriate (my italics),

“The question of overriding importance in the end is not the origin of evolution but its goal. Nevertheless, when a living organism is cut off from its roots, it loses the connections with the foundations of its existence and must necessarily perish. When that happens, anamnesis of the origins is a matter of life and death.”
                        --C.G. Jung, Aion




PS, 2 of 2: Of interest regarding the relevance of A.J.M. Smith's statement about Canadian poetry, and the larger discussion of politics, being divided between "cosmopolitan" and "nativist" is this quotation from a recent communication from Conrad Black; Black writes (not about poetry but about the Davos economic summit): "He [not Black] credits capitalism with the triumph of globalization, and with it of freer and more prosperous societies, after what he bills as a close battle against communists, socialists and nativists." Since my subject is poetry and not politics I conclude from this that nativist poets rightly condemn globalization as lacking a human element and creating the soulless environment found in many major cities. Black should have omitted the word "nativist" from his essay, it might have been more convincing. 

Post Script 3, 24 November 2022: I can see that I've been a lot more concerned about the meaning and value, and the importance, of poetry than most contemporary poets. Perhaps I've been wrong about this, I always thought it was a part of the work of being a poet. Most poets write their poems but they don't write anything on poetics and some of them are critical of me for being as concerned about poetics as I am. But poets have always been concerned about poetics, about the meaning and value of poetry, why poets write, and the significance of poetry. Poetics has always been a concern since it deals with, personally speaking, my understanding of why I write poetry and my place as a poet in the world. 

BTW, regarding Conrad Black, above, in another article Black quotes from a poem by Irving Layton; I was impressed by this because it showed to me that Layton is a living presence in our cultural life, this is as it should be for any nation but in Canada to quote from or acknowledge the existence of our poets is the absolute exception and rarely the rule. 

Poets All Types

                     

              

                                                            Hark, hark! the dogs do bark,
                                                            The poets are coming to town.
                                                            Some in rags, some in jags,
                                                            And some in velvet gowns.

Poetry and art is our refuge from darkness.

It is not up to poets to affirm anything. What we need is negative thinking; don't accept what people say; don't believe anything; give up trying to be a somebody.

My life was so small as to almost not exist; I avoided people, lived quietly, and never felt at home anywhere: I had become a permanent resident of Inner Space.

The poets were magnanimous, no cause was too small if it included getting published or a reading; they were garrulous and self-conscious, they were almost imposing.

She was published in dozens of online zines; when the zines went offline it was as though she never existed.

They wanted to be poets but what they wrote lacked meaning and authenticity. They refused to enter Inner Space.

Hard days at the poetry factory when production exceeds demand.

We used to laugh at creative writing courses, now no one gets the joke.


When a great poet dies the world is a darker place, we grieve their loss, they are not forgotten by us.

A prick without talent is just a prick.


He won many awards for his poetry, but no one remembers the poems, no one even remembers what the awards were all about.

This poet said she was a star; she hung out at bars, she had affairs with other poets, she was a poet until she joined AA, then she quit poetry.

It's the Great Decline, the end of history, the end of time, the river polluted, the old abandoned.

The first people we threw out of Inner Space were the poets. Plato made us do it.


Among poets I am looking for good people, loving people, who put the other person first; that means as much to me as what they write.

It is a sad day when a friend dies and you realize you were writing with him in mind, he was your audience and now you've lost both a friend and your audience.

These poets were all bigger than life, I was smaller than life.

Years of life elegiac; years of life spent remembering.

They were aggressively ambitious, but ambition without talent and hard work isn't worth anything.

If they don't have the talent to be eccentric poets, they should just be nice people.

           

The synchronicity of dates

It's mid-January 2020 and winter has set in, it's -18 C today. So far, the winter hasn't been all that bad, meaning that while we've had some snow the temperature has hovered around -5 C to + 2 or 3 C. That has now ended... 

In my experience important events happen in clusters of dates, these are meaningful for specific people; there is a synchronicity of dates. For instance, two friends were born on January 15; they are Audrey Keyes (Veeto) who died last October, she was my first friend in life, someone I knew from age four or five. The second friend was Artie Gold who I met in the early 1970s, Artie was my first poet friend. Artie died in February 2007. A third friend, Paul Leblond, was born on January 16; he died suddenly in 2015. My friend Pat McCarty, with whom I traveled the length of California and down into Baha California in April 1976, died eleven years ago, on January 18, 2007. Pat was a truly lovely person and I still miss him. Note added on 31 August, 2022: I've just learned that Pat McCarty's birthday is January 21 (not sure of the year, possibly 1947); this is the same date as my wife's birthday, she was born on 21 January. A final date, January 14, 1965 is when I began keeping a diary, something I have done on a daily basis since then, it has changed my life, it has helped to fulfill my life. All of these significant occurrences are clustered around the mid-January dates. 

And now we turn to winter! Mid-January winter photographs. 

Here are photos taken yesterday, on Greene Avenue in Westmount and then on the drive home along Cote St. Antoine Road.

Pinocchio outside the old Nicholas Hoare Bookstore on Greene Avenue

Walking along Greene Avenue

The Bistro on the Avenue is gone; we had many happy times there over the years, dinners with friends and family and with fellow members of the C.G. Jung Society of Montreal

Years ago the old Westmount post office, on the corner of Greene Avenue and Blvd. de Maisonneuve  was closed and then made into boutiques, stores

This is Congregation Shaar Hashomayim, Leonard Cohen's family synagogue; it is where
his song "You Want it Darker" was recorded

Murray Hill Park; I suppose the green snow fencing is intended to keep people
from tobogganing down the hill

Fire Station/Caserne 34 between Decarie and Girouard

That's St. Augustine Catholic Church on the right, just after Girouard Avenue;
the church closed and it is now River Side Church 

That's the Loyola Campus of Concordia University, almost at the end of
Sherbrooke Street West, almost home

Reading at Rare Books and Special Collections at McGill University, April 2018

Not sure I'll ever watch this, like some others I don't like seeing myself in videos... This was a reading I gave with some old friends at Rare Books and Special Collections at McGill University, on 26 April 2018.

First there was snow and then, in mid-December, there was no snow

First it was green and lovely and we were all happy, and then there was snow and we weren't as happy, but then there was no snow and it was green and we were happy until there was snow again and we weren't as happy as before and then, today, there is no snow and some of us are happy and don't miss the snow and we're hoping for a green Christmas... well, in fact, we're hoping for either a green winter which won't happen or an early spring, like in January...

December 14 (today)

December 14

December 12



December 12

                                                                                December 10

December 10

December 6

                                   

December 6


And back to snow on December 18th followed by -22 C cold, wind chill feels like -33 C.

Farewell Fall of 2019, today is the Winter Solstice, December 21, and winter it will be...