The representative poets in this section have worked, as Greg Cook aptly put it, “in various capacities to create environments that sustain the voices of Canadian writers.” They have been writing poetry since the late 1960s and early 70s; but have also been involved as teachers, mentors, editors, reviewers and anthologists of Canadian poetry. They have taken our leagues and our guilds to heart and served them well. They have helped make Canadian poetry visible and viable.
John Robert Colombo (b. 1936)
Poet, editor, broadcaster, anthologist
John Robert Colombo was born in Kitchener, Ontario, 1936. He was educated at the University of Toronto and began his career as an editor in Toronto.
It’s hard to know where to begin with “Canada’s Master Gatherer.” Colombo has published as author or editor over 150 books mostly about Canadian lore and literature. We know him best for his anthologies. The Canadian encyclopedia states:
He has a passion for searching out details about Canada. He has compiled…collections of Canadian facts, quotations, jokes, legends, mysteries, ghost stories, and so on… Colombo's career can be broken into 2 phases. The first involves him exclusively as a literary figure, particularly as an exponent and practitioner of "found poetry," with a vaguely European manner and a flair for causing literary activity to happen around him. This aspect became evident when he was at university in the 1950s and continued without challenge for 20 years, when it was joined by Colombo the bibliophile and creator of reference books.
We are grateful to Colombo for his eclectic tastes, his passion for gathering, especially his willingness to gather poetry. His anthologies of Native and Inuit poetry were among the first.
He has also gathered his own poetry into a massive three volume set entitled All the Poems of John Robert Colombo which consists of over 2500 poems. On the internet I found Colombo’s unpublished poem ‘Cozy’. This poem is reminiscent of Atwood’s ‘you fit into me’ or perhaps more comparable to Ammon’s ‘Small Song’—a two stanza poem constructed of reflecting and echoing couplets with a subtle (or, in Atwood’s case, not so subtle) shift in meaning.
Cozy Without is a zoo, Without you, too. Within is a common, Within you, too.
Colombo’s poems play with words and syllables, they parody and list and in the interstices often give us a glimpse of ourselves. We delight in his lighthearted descriptions of Canadians in poems such as ‘Why I am Not a Canadian”, “A Canadian is Somebody Who” “Oh Canada” and “Our Canada.” He is equally satirical about poetry readings:
Poetry Reading We are indeed lucky today to have with us today Our poet has written the following books So without further ado here is For my first poem I would like to read Now the poem I want to read is For my final poem I would like to read Now if there are any questions I am sure No questions? Well if there are any answers
In 1998, York University awarded Colombo an honorary Doctor of Literature degree.
Selected Titles: One Hundred Poems 1960-2000.
Barry Callaghan (b. 1937)
Poet, author, editor, publisher, journalist, translator
Barry Callaghan was born in Toronto, son of Loretta and Morley Callaghan, the novelist. He received a Bachelor of Arts Degree from the University of Toronto. He is married to the artist, Claire Weissman Wilks. To date, Callaghan has 14 publications including poetry, prose, edited works and a memoir of growing up in the Callaghan family. He is a journalist with wartime experience in Jordon and Syria. But we know him best as editor and publisher of the long standing journal—Exile: A Literary Quarterly and its Exile Editions. Exile is unique in its category as a literary journal for imaginative writing in Canada and abroad. The very first edition begins with a short editorial:
There are many excellent reviews in which the writer of imaginative prose and poetry seems to become mere fodder for the scholarly horse. The writer of the critique becomes more important than the writer of the poem, especially if the critic offers a new fund of useful scholarly information. But useful for what? It is the day of the information deluge. Who sorts it all out? The imaginative writer, who can rely on his own eyes, his own heart and sensibility for his information, is, in a sense, in exile now. There ought to be a small haven somewhere for such exiles. In these pages the imaginative writer will not be led in by a scholarly praetorian guard. He will be on his own.
These words were written in 1972 and they spoke, as they did to me, to a new generation of poets and readers. Exile was gutsy, edgy and avant guard. It brought us new voices, forms and images—and it fired our imaginations. It still does; the force of this publication has not abated. Exile is, more than any other Canadian journal, I think, the writer’s journal. This year (2007) is their 35th anniversary and they are celebrating of the 30th volume and 120th issue. For young writers I can’t think of a better starting point. Explore these volumes—go back to Volume 5 #3&4 and read TYPESCAPES A Mystery Story by Robert Zend, a piece that crosses all boundaries of poetry, concrete poetry, prose and image in a joyful romp.
In 1978 Callaghan’s first collection The Hogg Poems and Drawings created a national stir—poets and writers such as Timothy Finley and Marie Claire Blais praised the book as a splendid incantation, a major breakthrough, ‘the sounding of a new and authentic voice’. His poetry is aging well—Northrop Frye notes that Callaghan’s second collection “As Close as We Came” (1982) “deals symbolically with the power of love and imagination struggling to keep alive in a setting of cold repressiveness and terror.” And he claims that the poems “resonate with repeated readings and become a poignant drama of the precariousness of life in a world devoted to death.” They still do.
The Wound ‘Sometimes I think the hem of light under a door is an inch or two of respite someone breaking bread on the table keeping the room clean as a wound that will not heal.’
Barry Callaghan was the first recipient of the W.O Mitchell Literary Prize in 1998, which is presented to a writer in mid-career who has both produced an outstanding body of work and served as a mentor to other writers. His other awards include the CBC Literary Award (1985).
Selected Titles: A Kiss is Still a Kiss (1995); As Close as we Came (1982)
Douglas Barbour (b. 1940)
Poet, critic, editor, reviewer, professor
Douglas Barbour was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba. As well as a poet, critic, editor, and reviewer, he is a professor, teaching courses including Modern poetry, Creative Writing, Canadian Literature, Science fiction and Fantasy at the University of Alberta since the early 1970’s. As his body of work attests, he has contributed in many forms to Canadian poetry; he not only writes collections of innovative poetry and critical studies, but also edits anthologies, and collaborates with Stephen Scobie in the sound company: Resounding.
In the preface of his recent critical text, Lyric/Anti-lyric Essays on contemporary poetry, Barbour describes himself as a ‘formalist’ “because my first response to any art tends to be to aspects of what I choose to call form, in poetry the actual words, the rhythm, the placement of them on the page, the sound of them in the ear” (1). His interest in form has directed not only his critical response but also his own poetry.
His recent poetry collections Fragmenting body etc. (2000), Breath Takes (2001), and A Flame on the Spanish Stairs continue his lifelong work in formal innovation, and use linguistic techniques, such as homolinguistic translation (where the poet translates in a variety of methods from one language into the same language), to explore the limits of conventional lyric poetry. Barbour’s new book of essays helps to illuminate some of these developments; for example, the title essay is a stimulating discussion of lyric/anti-lyric forces in 20th century poetry, including the serial poem, the shifting “I”, the choral lyric, and the lyric poem which “deliberately calls attention to the lyric qualities it simultaneously denies and affirms (20). Breath Takes consists of two parts. The first part is a series of Ghazals in which, as the back jacket claims, Barbour responds to the traditional Persian form by opening up “the ghazal’s formal constraints so he can breathe more freely and deeply within it”, while keeping the traditional impetus, Love. Here we see the influence of the Black Mountain poets and in particular, Charles Olsen and his claim that the breath is connected to the heart. The ghazal is a Persian traditional form, brought to America by the translations of Aijaz Ahmud, and then to Canada by John Thompson in Stilt Jack. Used experimentally by poets such as Phyllis Webb, D.J. Jones and Barbour, it consists of five, traditionally rhyming, couplets. However, each couplet is written one at a time; that is, there is a break with logic between couplets. We can think of the form as associative, rather than linear. Each of these poets experiments with these aspects; Webb calls hers ‘ghazals and anti ghazals’. Barbour is less interested in the break between couplets and more interested in the element of breath and what Paul Dutton calls “inspired listening’:
Breath ghazal 5 tell me when you are going under he said . im going under im going uh that’s how fast it was . it is an aesthetic response almost distanced the breathing smooth calm controlled now its over the pain you might have felt gone youre tired yr eyes close listen to the quiet way you in hale exhale efff fff efff fff
The second part of Breath Takes, “& its Returns”, is a series of poems written to specific poets including Al Purdy, Daphne Marlatt, Fred Wah, Gwen MacEwan, plus homolinguistic translations of Leonard Cohen.
A Flame on the Spanish Stairs, a small but innovative chapbook, is described by greenboathouse books as “quasi-sonnets, word-line acrostics, based on fourteen word-phrases found in the letters of John Keats…Formally innovative, this short series of poems follows the last thoughts of a sickening Keats through the streets of Rome. Barbour's use of Keats' letters as pre-text calls the structure of narrative lyric into question. Once associated with an internalized speaker, the lyric poem is turned upside down. Far from being cold and formal explorations, these poems are affected by a great sense of learning, a longing or melancholy, and the final thoughts of Keats are rendered with a delicate human closeness.”
Perhaps one of the most interesting sides to Barbour is his foray into the world of collaboration. In A Note on Collaboration, Barbour states that collaboration is “a chance to get outside the self in linguistically tuned and turned ways. The process brings forth a different creator, representing the combination of energies often vastly different from those of the original participants.” He has had a long standing collaboration with Stephen Scobie, and more recently with the American, Sheila E. Murphy, in Continuations. Describing the process, the poets explain, “we agreed on a more or less fixed format of six lines, and have bounced the ongoing process of poem-construction back and forth over the (now) years, since November 2000. It seems that in that time, a “third individual” has emerged, who writes differently from the way that either writer would be creating independently.”
In his critical studies, Douglas Barbour has brought to the forefront poets such as Daphne Marlatt, John Newlove, bp nichol, and Michael Ondaatje, helping to make these innovative poets more assessable. His essays range even wider including Canadian poets such as Phyllis Webb, E.D Blodgett, Anne Wilkinson, Roy Kiyooka, John Thompson and Sharon Thesen. In his long career, Barbour has been a sustaining voice for experimental poetry in Canada.
In 1984, he received the Stephan Stephasson Award for Poetry.
Selected Titles: Visible Visions Selected Poems (1984); Breath Takes (2001)
Len Gasparini (b. 1941)
Poet, editor, reviewer
Len Gasparini, born in Windsor, Ontario, currently resides in Toronto. He is a reviewer, editor, fiction writer and poet with ten books of poetry, including Halo of Flies (1998), The Broken World: Collected Poems (1967-1998), and a collection for children, I Once Had a Pet Praying Mantis.
The Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada (2002) edited by WH New describes his poetry as “open verse merging into narrative prose.” Thus, autobiography, observation and documentation exist side by side. Marino Tuzi argues that a confessional voice “is present in his poems…divulging his short comings and alluding to his ethnicity…and a kind of inchoate sense of displacement and yearning for place…Gasparini does not seek redemption through his act of confession, but affirms the idea that only by confronting oneself can one find meaning in the world” (416).
Gasparini’s most unusual collections are two collaborative works with the photographer and visual artist, Leslie Thompson: Chthonic Light and Erase Me. Both texts include black and white photographs by Thompson and text by Gasparini. Chthonic Light is a work of praise to the forest primeval and the art of loving, a celebration of the fecundity of life. The effect of the literal and symbolic juxtaposition of erotic love poems/text and lush photographs of the rain forest is that the reader not only witnesses the act of making loving, but also sees that the lovers are taught by the most intimate, secret places of the earth. The collection is small enough to slip into your pocket, a daily reminder that the world is not all steel, concrete, cell phones, computers or disaster. Although, disaster is not far away:
Driven by demonic chthonic powers, I delve into my unconscious. In the light you celebrate, I see darkness that surrounds a rotting nurselog whose hollows of tangled hemlock roots are graves aswarm with moss. When you focus your camera lens to form an image, tendrils of fog appear, light is reflected in a blur of rainforest ferns… the Earth spirit wakens, groping in roots, tapering in tree trunks, with the energy of a serpent.
Gasparini was the founder of the University of Windsor-based little magazine Mainline. Gryphon Press evolved from Mainline and, during its six-year existence, was the primary publisher for Windsor poets. But we know him better, perhaps, as the thoughtful, critical reviewer of poetry for Books in Canada, Poetry Canada Review, Paragraph and the Toronto Star. In this capacity, Gasparini bought to the attention of readers an untold number of Canadian poets, known and unknown, established and emerging. His reviews were another significant window onto what Phyllis Webb once described as our “delicate monster”; that is, Canadian poetry. In 1990 he was awarded the F.G. Bressani Literary Prize for poetry.
Selected Titles: Selected Poems (1993); The Broken World Poems 1967-1998
Gregory M. Cook (b. 1942)
Poet, editor, lecturer, biographer, anthologist, Chair extraordinaire
Greg Cook was born in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, in 1942. His father, a Canadian soldier, was killed in Holland in 1944. Cook worked as a student clergyman in the Annapolis Valley N.S. during his undergraduate arts and theology studies and as a news reporter in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. After the literary pages of the student newspaper were dropped in 1939, he co-founded Acadia University’s literary journal. He has worked as a lecturer, freelance writer, dramatist, and writer-in-residence at the University of Waterloo.
There are many ways that Cook has served Canadian poetry: as chair of the Nova Scotia Writers' Council of the Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia; as chair of the Writers' Union of Canada; as Treasurer of the League of Canadian Poets; as a Board Member of the Writers' Development Trust; and as the first Secretary of the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (ACCESS). At Acadia University, he wrote the first Masters Thesis on the novelist Ernest Buckler. In 2003, he published a biography of Alden Nowlan, entitled One Heart One Way / Alden Nowlan: a writer’s life. And more recently edited Alden Nowlan: Essays on his Work (2006). He is currently working on Breaking Silence, a collection of memoirs by Canadian Children of the War Dead, and an anthology of Canadian poems about war. Cook has given readings across Canada, as well as in the USA, England, Netherlands, and Germany.
George Elliot Clark describes Cook’s voice in Untying the tongue (2002) as “gentle, reverent, astonished by love's fragility and enraptured by its persistence,” and the book’s themes as “genealogy, family relationships, and the strange power of words to rupture and repair both.” The collection’s title poem begins:
One of the brothers I might have had was born with cleft palate, tongue-tied. In surgery on his fourth day a brother I might have known bled to death. Whose loss was the greater is not a question neither does the equation include a when. The problem is how to untie the tongue.
The poem tells of his grandfather burning his father’s last letters to his mother, and his mother burning her own to him. And ends suggesting that why one continues to ‘untie the tongue’, or attempts to see ‘the irresistible radiance of what is’ when there is no evidence left to observe, is the role and fate of the poet.
Cook was awarded the Booksellers Choice Award and the Dartmouth Book Award for Non-fiction.
Selected Titles: Untying the Tongue (2002), Songs of the Wounded (2004)
Stephen Scobie (b. 1943)
Poet, critic, translator, anthologist, editor
Stephen Scobie was born in Scotland in 1943; he received a M.A. from the University of St. Andrews and came to Canada in 1965. He completed a PhD from University of British Columbia, taught for twelve years at the University of Alberta, and currently teaches at the University of Victoria. Over twenty books of his poetry have been published.
As editor, critic, translator, and professor, Scobie has helped foster interest in poetry, and in particular, Canadian poetry. With Shirley Neuman and Doug Barbour, he established Longspoon Press in the early 1980s. He has translated an anthology, Paris Quebec, with the French scholar Marie Vautier. The anthology, edited by Claudine Bertrand and illustrated with atmospheric black-and-white photography, introduces contemporary Québécois poetry by way of one of the world’s favourite cities. Scobie and Barbour are the sound poets of the experimental sound group Re:Sounding (see Experimental poetry). They have also co-edited unusual anthologies such as The Maple Laugh Forever: An Anthology of comic Canadian Poetry (1981) and an anthology of recent sound poets entitled: A Celebration of Sound Poetry. Scobie’s long standing interest in sound and concrete poetry is also revealed in his critical work: Earthquakes and Explorations: Language and Painting from Cubism to Concrete Poetry.
Scobie’s literary criticism includes texts on bp Nichols, Sheila Watson, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan. For bp Nichol fans Scobie has written bp Nichol: What History Teaches. (see Experimental poets); for Leonard Cohen fans, an excellent criticism: Leonard Cohen (1978) and, more recently edited an anthology, an eclectic collection of analyses and meditations from fans and critics: Intricate Preparations. See Ten Reasons to Toast Him on His Birthday at http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/scobie02.html.
For Bob Dylan fans, Scobie has written not only an excellent criticism, Alias Bob Dylan, Revisited, but also a poem sequence, a collection of forty poems entitled And Forget My Name: A Speculative Biography of Bob Dylan which Chris Rollason describes as “an attempt to see behind the masks, to grasp something resembling the historical Dylan - even if, as the book's author would be the first to admit, the very act of constructing a history of this man may itself be the creation of yet another - necessary and inevitable - fiction…We may read 'And Forget My Name' as a poet's construction, out of the raw materials of fact and text, of another alias for Bob Dylan - an alias which is as provisional as any other, but is also offered as bearing at least a tangential relationship to that ever-elusive 'real identity'.” Scobie describes the birth of the ‘Legend’ in Dylan’s hometown, in his adolescence:
The legend of rust: hard freeze of a January morning, Jee- zuz Christ, in northern Minnesota, in a tent! How he crawls out of whatever warmth he may have found and stretches into the cracked and crystal air of 40 degrees below zero: looks around him (aware perhaps of supernumerary witness, notebook at the ready to record?) and declares: I believe there is iron in me. My bones feel rusty and chilly. Rust: the metamorphosis of iron to richly coloured death; iron making love to water and spending itself in air –
Through the text we follow Dylan’s early origins and formative development. We come to know his home town of Hibbing, his genealogy, his friends and lovers, what it is to live with the threat of the bomb, his restlessness, his longing. There are echoes of Dylan songs, but not too many:
Restless Hungry Feeling In Hibbing every morning was one too many The sun came up over one end of Howard Street worked the day shift and sank at the other You could see it coming for a thousand miles
The thread that holds the text together is the shifting nature of Dylan’s identity as the poet/songwriter emerges and constructs his own mythology. When he ‘Stepped to the Stage’:
There was never any question of playing alone: always he wanted the sound, the surround, he wanted to be in the middle of the music: to lose his heartbeat in the drums, to hear the steady bass line of his breathing pulse: he wanted a lead guitar to say for him everything he knew about the wind. He wanted to hide in the names
Scobie’s experimental poetry collections include formalist elegies, verse biographies, performance, sound and deconstructionist poems. But he is perhaps best known for his book length long poem McAlmon’s Chinese Opera (1979), a documentary long poem, an ‘autobiography’ in which Scobie assumes the voice of Robert McAlmon, an American modernist writer living in the literary shadows of Earnest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. In a voice Betsy Struthers (in Canadian Book Review Annual 1980) calls “bitter memory” Scobie/McAlmon chronicles his childhood in America, the 1920s in Paris where he was part of the flowering of Modernism and his later decline as a truss salesman in Arizona. “In the end” Struthers states “it is this pity for a wasted life and talent that we are led to experience acutely.” His most recent collection, The Space in Between, is a retrospective collection of lyric poems from 1965-2001 illuminating Scobie’s poetic life. Robert Kroetsch describes Scobie as “the restless connoisseur of travel, a carefully elegant voice exploring places of sorrow and desire, an urgent intellect locating a home or homes in music and unlikely landscapes and the ever-shifting possibilities of language. The Spaces in Between is, as the title suggests, a transfixing portrait of a contemporary condition.”
In 1980, Scobie was awarded the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for his book McAlmon’s Chinese Opera, and the Prix Gabrielle Roy for Canadian Criticism in 1986. In 1995, he was elected to the Royal Society of Canada.
Selected Titles: The Spaces in Between Selected Poems, 1965-2001; McAlmon’s Chinese Opera
Richard Lemm (b. 1946)
Poet, professor, writer-in-residence, active league and guild member
Born in Seattle, Washington in 1946, Lemm immigrated to Canada in 1967. He received an M.A. in English from Queen's University and a Ph.D. in English and Canadian Literature from Dalhousie University. He has been a writer-in-residence and poetry instructor for various community colleges, regional libraries, public schools, and summer writing programs. He has lived on Prince Edward Island since 1983, where he teaches at the University of Prince Edward Island.
In a review of Lemm’s most recent poetry collection, Four Ways of Dealing with Bullies, Lemm’s fourth collection, Jeanette Lynes in The Antigonish Review describes Lemm’s poetic voice as “fresh, conversational, colloquial”, his poems “spontaneous, uninhibited, loose” constructed by “savvy poetic maneuvers.” In a book whose prevailing theme is power, Lynes argues that Lemm’s poems are neither too abstract nor preachy, but rather ground in personal experience which includes his own collusion, his complicity in ‘bullyism’. The opening poem is an astonishing comparison of “the bridal white feathers of the egret’” that “glide down to this Cuban beach” and “then lurch along the sand like Judy/ McElroy in her elementary ballet/ of polio braces across the minefield/of school” and describes the narrator’s collusion in Judy’s humiliation. Lynes suggests that this early poem is meant to reveal how deeply embedded bullyism is in our social institutions. Although there are no unambiguous answers, his four ways of dealing with bullies is reflected in the four sections of the collection: Gillette Time, Jesus Honey, Bandages and Tongue Piercing. In the title poem, his grandfather offers words of advice: “You’ve got good running shoes,/ stay in shape, you’ll outrun them” and if they have a weapon, “It takes real courage/ to show them your back,/ walk away. All they can do/ shown up like this, is/ hurl gutless insults/you won’t give one shit about.” But his grandfather draws a line and stands up for himself when necessary, even when it gets him shot, leaving the reader like the narrator in uncertainty.
Some of the most haunting poems in the collection are observations of a witness in small human actions and interactions such as ‘Lifeguard’ and ‘Gauntlet’, a subtle image that stays with you, having shifted your perspective:
Gauntlet Conrad goes hunting for geese once a year, two birds hanging limp from his farmer’s hand in the other, a gun used sparingly, just this. I stand with him, looking up at the sky. The silence that was not there one hour ago. I’d always thought of all the geese flying on closing ranks on the empty spaces, the save passage beyond this field, this marsh, and the long warm winter. Now I see a man drop geese on his kitchen table lean his gun in a corner every few miles.
Lemm has helped sustain Canadian poetry not only as a teacher, but also through criticism such as his biography Milton Acorn: In Love and Anger (1999); and acts of public service such as poet laureate for the 2000 PGI Golf Tournament for Literacy. (See his funny seven- part poem “On the Seventh Day” at http://www.pei.literacy.ca/pgigolf/pgi00/poem.htm.) He was a member of the writing faculty at the Banff School of Fine Arts (1977-1987), president of the League of Canadian Poets (1986 to 1988), and active in the Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia and the Prince Edward Island Writers' Guild. He was awarded the CBC Radio Literary Competition for poetry third prize, in 1983 and 1992, the Canadian Authors Association Literary Award for poetry in 1991, and The National Poetry Contest, third prize, 1998.
Selected Titles: Four Ways of Dealing with Bullies