A Canadian is Someone Who Knows How to Make Love in a Canoe

            On Tuesday the guy who’s been renovating the apartment at the top of the stairs knocked on my door to tell me that his “brother” had called the exterminator to come on October 25. I didn’t know he was Raja’s brother. He doesn’t look anything like him.

            Jonquil came down the hallway from outside, crying, as I was getting ready to leave for Canadian Poetry class. She wouldn’t come into the apartment though, but rather ran back out onto the deck. I went outside to pat and reassure her She liked it, but still wouldn’t come back inside. Under my hand I could feel that she’d lost a lot of weight.

            I saw David in the hall and he asked me if I needed the money back today that I’d leant him the day before. Since I wouldn’t have time to stop at the supermarket after class, I told him that I didn’t need the money. He gently punched my shoulder and went upstairs.

            It was a pleasant evening. I wore an open long sleeved shirt over my tank top, but I could have ridden to campus without it. I expected it to be colder on the way home, so I had my hoody stuffed into my backpack.

            As I was going up Brock Avenue, I had to wait for the light at Dundas. A woman in black came quickly around the corner with her hand to her mouth. She looked like she was upset and about to cry.

            I rode along College, listening to the angry language of car beeps and then up the cobblestones of King’s College Circle to University College. I locked my machine to the wrought iron fence beside a pastel blue bike with a wide white seat that had blue floral patterns around its edge. The bulb of its horn was pastel pink, while the reed and mouth were a transparent pink. I expected Barbie to come out of her class, unlock it and ride away.

            The air conditioner was off in room 161, so I removed my long sleeved shirt. There were only two other people in the lecture hall and the only noise was of a woman behind me munching loudly on something from a loudly crinkling bag.

            George arrived right on time, once again full of energy. “Yes! We may begin, for cryin out loud! Let’s see if we can get to page 90! Holy smokes! I gotta stop sayin that!”

            He handed out sheets of paper containing the choices of topics for our first essay.

            He passed around two books to show us from his collection. One was an antique Gustafson book of poems and the other was a 1989 edition of a book by Irving Layton, illustrated with sketches of nude women.

            We began with A. M. Klein’s “Portrait of the Poet as Landscape” in which he argues for the importance of the poet in the era of World War II. As Shelly said, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

            The poet is a dissenting figure, invisible as phosphorous at the bottom of the sea, radiating into mythologies that may influence.

            He mentioned Gustafson’s book, “Rivers Among Rocks”.

            “To find a new function for the déclassé craft/ archaic like the fletcher’s …”

             A fletcher is an arrow maker. George added, that there was a crossbow murder in Ottawa twenty years ago.

            What is déclassé? Fallen in status.

            What is the craft? Poetry. George exclaimed, “Shout POETRY!”

            A neologism is a newly coined word. I guess George should know about that, since he coined the word “Africadian”.

            The poet becomes an invisible, anonymous background figure.

            Klein’s view revisits Pound’s declaration that artists are the antennae of the race.

            The task of the poet is to keep language vivid, clear, palpable and concrete so that the masses will not be deluded by the perverting tendencies of the political and commercial speech of demagogues and marketeers.

            In last night’s debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump there was vigour of language use.

            Klein says, “Somehow pay back the daily larcenies of the lung”. “Larcenies of the lung” are theft of the lung, as in white lies and propaganda that use language to hoodwink. It is the poet’s vital task to resist this. Shout the outrageousness of vivid speech, of poetry beyond entertainment. This poem was written at the birth of rock and roll. He was competing with Audrey Hepburn and Rock Hudson. How dare he!

            “Halo” of “anonymity”; “phosphorus” in the darkest depths.

George said, “Sock hop!” I added, “Roller derby!” though I meant “roller rink”.

            Pristine source of radiance of thought.

            Not just Ezra Pound but also as in W. H. Auden’s line from “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”: “Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives”. Yeats’s own political interventions were farcical.

            Klein’s poetry is quiet but radiant and transcendent. It keeps language true but it won’t raise any armies.

            “The world – he, solitary man – is breath to him” presents a vision of the poet as Adam: An individual given the task of naming.

            All poets radiate and create the world as an extension of their own being. “Poet” comes from a Greek word that means “maker”. The poet is a divine being, writing, speaking, and singing. Poets are all Adams, atoms, cannons of phosphorous pieces radiating to U of T students only.

            George took roll call, and he still said, “Thank you!” and “Welcome!” to each student that responded. For every name of a student that had enrolled in the course but had not showed up he said, “Not yet!” after calling their name.

            The next poet we looked at was Earle Birney. George noted that the editor of the anthology referred to Birney as having been controversial, but he didn’t say why. George said that it was perhaps because Birney was a Trotskyite. Trotsky had a cool look, and he had been the lover of Frida Kahlo, but he was assassinated with an ice pick.

            Birney was born one year before British Columbia became a Canadian province. He went to U of T; he spoke foreign languages; he was cosmopolitan; his poems reflect travel; he studied and was influenced by old English with its many compound nouns; his novel, “Turvey”, reflects on the Canadian army’s liberation of Holland.

George said that’s why Canadians get special treatment in Holland. I guess that since I’m not the type that puts maple leaf flags on my backpack, I got treated like I was from the US when I was there.

The first of Birney’s poems we looked at was his narrative poem, “David”. It’s written in quatrains or four line verses like a folk song and it’s very straightforward.
            I offered the view that it would make a great movie, and George agreed, comparing it to Deliverance. Margaret Atwood mentions the poem in her book, “Survival”.

The word “inimical” shares roots with “enemy”.

Trump said, “Hunky dory”.

George said that “David” has an anapestic rhythm, but when I looked that up I couldn’t see how that’s true. The lines are consistent, but I can’t see how a line like “David and I that summer cut trails on the Survey” has a “da da dum da da dum da da dum da da dum” rhythm. It seems more to me like iambic pentameter, as in “da dum da dum da dum da dum da dum da dum”.

The poem is ballet on the mountains with a full flask at first and lots of compound adjective nouns. Real Canadians are dancing over the mountains. Now they want to run pipelines through that range. It’s terrible! At this very moment, William and Kate are out there. The duke and duchess of … the woman behind me said, “Cambridge”. George continued, “With their children, George and …” The woman behind me said, “Charlotte”.

Boy scouts camping. “We reached to the slopes above timber and won”. “Won!” George exclaimed. “To snow like fire in the sunlight”.

When David dies, he’s a type of martyr. I said, “His life of going over is over.”

George said, “Make sure you test your handhold!” and then added that it sound like a Canadian Tire ad. Then he told us, “You can’t trust all-season! Get the real thing!”

He suggested there is a homoerotic element to the poem. I pointed out that it does say, “ … The two of us rolled in the blanket”. George seemed sure that Bob had pushed David over the cliff after he was injured, because he’d asked him to. It doesn’t actually say that, but maybe it subtly implies it.

The romance of mountain climbing.

“My feet squelched a slug and horror rose again in my nostrils”. George sees a symbolism here because he said, “Slugs eat dead things”, but it seems to me that would only work symbolically if slugs didn’t also eat everything else.

The imagery of horror films: buzzing flies, the scent of death, and the smell of decay. That’s what we’ll experience, George said, “if Donald Trump wins!”

“I saw the glimmer of tents”. All that’s left is the glimmer of civilization. “The last day of my youth.”

The poem has a babbling rhythm that is classically structured like a folk song.

Someone observed that it has no periods.

I offered that “David” is a reversal of the Biblical story of David and Goliath, in which Goliath slays David. George said, “Why not?” and then added that it could be seen as an anti-psalm; an anti psalm 23 poem: “The lord is my shepherd … I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …”

We then looked at Birney’s poem, “Bushed”, which presents a vision of insanity in the form of cabin fever. George said that his own mind slows down when he’s in Banff and he feels claustrophobic. He added that it is spooky at night because one can’t see the mountains.

Our next poet was A. J. M. Smith. George commented that his photo in the anthology looks like he’d taken “absinthe with sugar! Holy smokes!”

Smith was part of the McGill Movement that included A. M. Klein and F. R. Scott. There is some debate about his importance to Canadian poetry. He was a Modernist, combining Imagism with Classicism, using both free verse and rhyme.

We looked at his poem, “The Lonely Land”. I read it for the class.
            George said the poem aligns with the Group of Seven, Emily Carr and Tom Thompson’s “Jack Pine” painting. The spirit of the lumber oriented towns. It’s a simple and spare poem that looks like a scraggly pine on the page. The verbs are clear, sharp and lean. The sky is curdled from the north.

            George said that the last four lines: “This is the beauty/of strength/broken by strength/and yet still strong” could advertise an athletic team.

            The Group of Seven and these poets saw themselves as nationalists.

            Canadian troops were feisty, took no prisoners and did not back down. The war gave Canada pride and “unity”.

            The poem may refer back to Pratt’s “Shark” in its simplicity. Smith was characteristically a poet of the 1920s and 30s.

            We looked at his poem, “The Wisdom of Old Jelly Roll”. “Jelly Roll” is mostly argued to have been a euphemism for a woman’s vagina, though some argue that it’s symbolic of heroin. Smith, in this case probably leans towards the sexual reference. I suggested that he was specifically referring to Jelly Roll Morton. George agreed that could be the case. He said that it’s very Canadian to join African American culture with classical references. It’s a Canadian idea that a poet should be proficient in many forms.

            “How all men wrongly death to dignify.” George exclaimed, “How dare they conspire to dignify death!”

            Smith edited an anthology of Canadian verse, for which his introduction is important.

            At half time we took a break.

            Our next poet was Al Purdy. Purdy was an autodidact, which is an important word in Canadian poetry because there are many self-taught poets like him in our country. For Purdy, writing was a craft rather than an art. He tried it out and decided to pick up the trade.

            George said that autodidacts have a tendency towards mysticism because they don’t know any better.

            Purdy’s poems are rambles with no fixed subject. The subject is the process.  There is an indeterminacy that also relates to the above-mentioned mysticism. His poem “The Country North of Belleville” is canonical.

            Purdy was a poet of the every man. Some say that he was the Canadian Walt Whitman, but George says the claim is exaggerated and implausible because the average Canadian does not recognize him as its national poet. He added that “the average Canadian” is an NDP phrase. The editor of the posthumous collection of Purdy’s poetry was obviously comparing Purdy to Whitman when he gave it the title, “Starting From Ameliasburgh”, drawing the similar title from Whitman’s poem, “Starting from Paumanok”.

            Purdy’s poem, “Home Made Beer” is a love poem that is sort of a Bukowskiesque Streetcar Named Desire.

“I had to distribute the meals she prepared among the neighbourhood dogs, because of the rat poison” This reminded George that sometimes rats fall on the heads of people riding in gondolas in Venice.

It’s the kind of poem you could overhear as a real story in the right kind of Tim Hortons. It could very well have been a real story overheard by Purdy that inspired the poem. It’s Popeye and comic books. If you keep your ears open you will hear the greatest stories. Then George said he’d heard somebody say once, “That bitch is wearing my underwear!”

Our next poem was Purdy’s “Arctic Rhododendrons”. George asked for a volunteer to read it and a young woman raised her hand, but she ended up reading the poem next to it, “Wilderness Gothic” instead. George went along with it like that had been the plan all along.

I pointed out that Purdy used the word “yodel” in two poems in a row. George said that he evokes a country and western feel in his poems; though there is a classical feel as well. It’s a Canadian literary version of the painting, “American Gothic”. The frontier of the United States closed long before that of Canada. The church behind the couple in the painting is not under construction. He refers to a church steeple as “god’s belly scratcher”. George said that the image of a man hammering in the sky is an inversion of Christ. It sounds more like Thor to me.

George mentioned seeing elk going at it on the streets of Banff.

Then he told the story of a couple that owned a resort in Northern Ontario. She found that her husband had been killed by a bear but she saved her own life by beating the bear back with an umbrella.

“Sky navigation and mythopoeia.” Mythopoeia is a reference to Northrop Frye.

Our next poet was F. R. Scott. He was an Anglo-Quebecois and a learned man. A poète. Then George said there could be a girl group called “The Poettes”.

            Scott was one of the founders of the CCF, which later became the NDP. George called them “the knee dippers”. He was a mentor of Pierre Elliot Trudeau and a father of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. George said that Scott’s parody of Victorian poets; “The Canadian Poets Meet” is unfortunately not included in this anthology. I looked it up and found that it’s called “The Canadian Authors Meet”.

            We looked at the poem “Saturday Sundae”. The drug store that is described in the poem reminded George of Reid’s Drug Store (maybe Reed’s or Read’s, though nothing with any of those names shows up in a search of drug stores in Moncton). He said it’s a “grrreat drug store, with a phenomenal soda fountain!” He mentioned also, a New Brunswick made vodka called Snowfox. I guess New Brunswick has changed since I ran away.

            George said there’s the spectre of Freud in the poem. Maybe he meant in the line, “Sit sipping succulence and sighing sex”. References to marketing and packaging are a critique of capitalism. Escapism. Got caught up in Enquirer gossip before someone intervened. “What did he do? P Diddy did it!”

            I commented that although this poem is supposed to be a critique, he kind of makes it all very attractive.

            We looked at the poem, “Bonne Entente”. It was written before the quiet revolution. It’s a secular critique of Catholicism in Quebec. Profound apple pie.

            Our next poet was Irving Layton. He was a superstar in the 1960s. He was charismatic. George says that he thought he was the messiah. Maybe that’s because he was born circumcised. He had chutzpah and cojones. He joined the Canadian army in 1941 but left by 1943. George thinks Layton had a sense of guilt about not taking part in the war and that made him become hard edged later on. The editor of the anthology says that Layton was not a sensualist, but George disagrees. He was a bare-chested poet who wanted to match his cojones with yours. William Carlos Williams praised Layton. He was a Nietzschian, an Appolonian and a Dionysian. George recommends his book, “Fornalutx”. He was a Decadent poet.

            The poem, “Look, the Lambs Are All Around Us!” is an attack on prudery. Then George quoted the saying, attributed to Pierre Berton: “A Canadian is someone that knows how to make love in a canoe”. It’s an anti-WASP poem. “You toss me in the air”. Layton knew his Latin and Greek and taught them. This is a free love propaganda poem.

            Canadian Prime Minister W. L. McKenzie King talked to his dead mother through his dog and went to hookers every night.

            A harbinger of the flowering of Canadian poetry.