The Father of Canadian Nationalism

            Early on the Tuesday morning of November 15th, while I was doing song practice, a woman that I’d seen walking around at that hour before, positioned herself on the street so she could make eye contact with me through my half open window and began to gesture to me. As far as I could tell, her graceful hand movements were indicating that she wanted me to come down to open the front door and let her in. I assumed she knows someone in my building but not well enough to have their phone number. I just looked back at her and kept on singing. I sure wasn’t going to stop in the middle of a song to let a stranger into my building.

            George arrived for class about four minutes late, “Evening! Yes indeed! Holy smokes! After the decision made!”

            He asked who among us had expected Hillary was going to win the US election. He was surprised to see that a few students indicated that they’d expected Trump to win and asked if they were being honest. Patrick responded, “Did you really expect something good would happen?” We discussed the Electoral College. I said it would be like voting for a mayor of Toronto and only each building, including apartment buildings and houses would get one vote each. George said that Trump would be in now for at least two years. I suggested that maybe he’ll get impeached after his fraud trial.

            George’s new book just came out, so he showed us a copy. It’s called “Canticles: Imperialism, Enslavement and Insurrection”. He said it’s about people fighting back and it’s all based on fact. He told us that he’d be launching it that weekend at the Supermarket Restaurant in Kensington Market and that there’d be a second launch on December 4^th. He pointed out that this is only part one of the book, that there’d be another one out next year and that they are 460 pages each. Patrick asked him to read a poem from the book. It took George a while to find one that wasn’t too long, but he settled on “Queen Ana Nzinga Addresses Her Troops” – “Smack down the Portuguese until death gets tired … I prefer having an army to having to having charisma … Bear to me the Portuguese bellies … Mere thunder makes no injury …” Queen Nzinga resisted the Portuguese in 1647 with an army that included women warriors.

            George talked about the death of Leonard Cohen, saying he was in St Catherines when he heard about it. He mentioned the talk he’d given, marking the fiftieth anniversary of Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, on the night before he died.

            Our first poet of the night was Patrick Lane, and I read his poem, “Albino Pheasants”.

            Every poem offers an argument.

            The narrator of this poem lives in and is connected to a wild place, surrounded by farmers that would shoot the white pheasants. It reminds George of the movie, “Deliverance”. What is wild is lost behind closed eyes. Succubae.

            Connect this poem to some of Margaret Atwood’s poems and Robert Kroetsch’s “Seed Catalogue”

            Our next poet was Dennis Lee, a Toronto poet who resented Canada selling Canada to the United States. He was influenced by George Grant, whose book, “Lament for a Nation” had a huge impact on Canadian nationalism. Only in Canada could a book of philosophy become a best seller.

            Successive waves of four Liberal governments sold Canada out, culminating in that of Lester Bowles (George pronounced it “Bowels” with disdainful yet delicious emphasis) Pearson. In 1962 the world came close to thermonuclear war between the United States and Russia. Who was in the middle? Canada. In October, Kennedy asked Canada to go on alert. Diefenbaker said no. Our anti-death penalty prime minister said, “We don’t think it’s a threat to world peace.” But behind is back the Canadian army went on alert anyway. There was a defense crisis in Canada. Pearson, who had earlier thought up UN peacekeeping force, accepted US nuclear weapons on Canadian soil. George Grant left the NDP because they backed the Liberals on this issue. He thought that Canada was by nature a Progressive Conservative country and that it was important for government to help with public utilities. His was kind of a communist conservatism. But the Liberals wanted greater economic integration with the United States. Grant’s book created Canadian nationalism. Courses like “Canadian Poetry” did not exist before 1965.

            George told us that when he started teaching at Queens University, in Kingston, Ontario, he was lecturing about Michael Ondaatje’s “Coming Through Slaughter”, and another professor commented to him that it wasn’t real literature because it was Canadian.

            Because of George Grant, Canada did not go to Vietnam and his influence can also be seen in our Canadian Content Regulations as applied to broadcasting in Canada. Can Con states that, for instance, music played on Canadian radio must be 40% Canadian, though there are four ways that it can meet that criteria: either the writer of the song, the singer, the producer of the record or the recording studio where the record was made must be Canadian for the song to fit with the guidelines. Grant would have hated the music that resulted from the ruling, because he was a classical man. He thought that Canadians should use their own tax dollars to support themselves.

            George said that Loyalism was not just sticking with the king of England. It was a Canadian political choice.

            Dennis Lee is a philosophical poet. He helped found the House of Anansi Press. He wrote the book of poetry for children, “Alligator Pie” and the lyrics for the theme song of the show “Fraggle Rock.

            Lee’s poem “from Civil Elegies / 1” is about Toronto’s New City Hall. George commented that the building was like something out of Star Trek. I pointed out that it was actually featured on Star Trek as representing the architecture of an alien civilization. I was certain that I’d seen it on the original series, but research suggests that it only appeared in the Next Generation, perhaps just representing itself as something seen through a portal. I’m still sure I saw it though, even though everybody says it wasn’t there. George said that it was designed by a Finnish architect who wanted a big public space in front of it to create a sense of community.

            George read the poem. He said the speaker is awaiting the arrival of the muses in the form of dead Torontonians. The ghosts of the original settlers that never felt at home here because they were yearning for Europe. Contemporary English Canadians were no different failures. But English Canadians finally decided to be a country. George said the word, “Nationalist!” and added, “Ohh, it sends chills down my spine! Isn’t Canada unique and prideworthy? The opening of the poem is reminiscent of Dante.

            George said that thousands of Canadians went to fight in the Vietnam War for the United States. Canada manufactured the napalm that was used there.

            Patrick interrupted to say declare that the poem is obviously talking about pigeons rather than ghosts. George said that it’s not about pigeons. It’s about mourning. It’s about the tension between what is native and what is not. The settlers didn’t settle but rather pretended they were still in England. George said they still fly the Union Jack in Kingston, “For cryin out loud! Get over it!”

            Patrick insisted that pigeons are in the poem at least symbolically because the furies are described the way one would talk about birds.

            George said that Toronto is unceded territory. When William Lyon Mackenzie was the first mayor of Toronto we had the Upper Canada rebellion, but in Toronto it consisted of a couple of shots being fired, the rebels retreating to the pub and the soldiers retreating to the fort.

            Both Lee and Atwood were influenced by George Grant.

            George asked, “Will Canada get its groove?”

            In 1966 a French Canadian suicide bomber blew himself up in the parliamentary washroom. History of defeat. George mentioned Jane Jacobs and the craft of neighbourhood. The Spadina extension was blocked. Development is a dangerous verb. From the poem, “But in the city that I long for, the people complete their origins.” And “Men and women live that they may make that life worth dying.” George was trying to remember the Bob Dylan line from “It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding” that has a similar line. I told him it was, “He who is not busy being born is busy dying.”

            The poem is anthemic.

            George misquoted an old soft drink slogan, “Come alive with Coke!” and then he called a break.

I asked him about the essay topic of Confessionalism because I could find much in terms of confessionalism in the three poets he’d mentioned in association with it. He said he wants people to dig for it or alternatively to argue that it isn’t there.

            I told George that the correct quote was, “Come alive, you’re in the Pepsi Generation!” He suddenly remembered. We talked about the Coke commercial, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” that became a hit song by the New Christie Minstrels. But on research I see that it was actually the “New Seekers” that did it.

            He said they featured the song in the last episode of “Mad Men”. I said that I had to stop watching the series after the second season when I stopped having cable. He told me he doesn’t have cable either. I asked if he downloads the show. He answered that he watches it on DVD but he gets his news from the internet. Then he complained about the cost of both the internet and his phone bill. I told him that I don’t pay for the internet and that I have a pretty good deal for my phone with Wind Mobile and I quoted the monthly pre-paid fee. He admitted that’s pretty good but told me he only has a landline. I wondered why and he explained that the area where he lives, which is the east end, near Scarborough, has power outages and so he doesn’t trust having a mobile phone because of its dependence on electricity. I asked why he doesn’t use a generator. He said they are a great thing to have but that they cause pollution.

            This conversation made me curious, because I know that there are very few landlines in developing countries and so anyone that has a phone uses a cell phone. It seemed to me that they must face greater challenges towards recharging their phones than George would if he had one. I found several solutions. First of all, George drives a car, so in an emergency he could easily charge his phone in the car with a charger for that purpose, and they only cost between $8.00 and $50.00, depending on what kind. He could also get a solar powered phone charger for between $25 and $150. There are also bike-powered chargers that give your phone 25 minutes of talk time for every 10 minutes of riding, but I don’t think George rides a bike. I suspect though that even with this information George won’t get a cell phone because his years of being held hostage by Bell has given him Stockholm syndrome.

            Patrick mentioned that he is from Ottawa and he was still living there when the big ice storm hit in 1998 and the power was out for a long time.

            George related that he was in North Carolina in 1996 when Hurricane Fran hit and even though he was a two hours drive from the coast, the storm knocked out the power for five days. But the Canadian embassy provided them with a store of beverages and there were lots of great potluck suppers.

            After the break, we began with bp Nichol, who George told us pronounced the initials before his surname as “beep”. He was inspired by Earle Birney, Bill Bissett and TISH, and connected with Ondaatje. He also wrote several episodes and two songs for the children’s show Fraggle Rock. John Diefenbaker attacked his book, “The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid” as being pornographic.

            Nichol expanded the audience for poetry by making it also visual. He worked in the mediums of concrete poetry and sound poetry. He was also a member of the poetry group, “The Four Horsemen”, that was featured in Ron Mann’s documentary, “Poetry in Motion”. I mentioned that I saw the Four Horsemen perform in Vancouver back in 1979 or 1980. Nichol would have been knowledgeable of John Cage’s experiments with the sounds of words; Kurt Schwitters’s voice compositions and Jerome Rothenberg’s ethnopoetics, such as his transcriptions of so called primitive Native poems; Derek Beaulieu’s “Kern”, which consists of poems that look like mosaics. .

            Nichol tried to make poetry accessible. His book, “Captain Poetry” had that TISH accessibility, with the fun of superheroes. It was clear and colloquial, with simplified spellings and Blakean rhymes.
            Patrick wondered how Nichol could be compared to Blake.

            They were both visual.

            We looked at the poem, “Blues”, which is a visual poem composed only of the letters that make up the word “love”. All of the “e”s are at an angle in a line through the center of the piece. At each end of that run there are two extra “e”s that do not connect with other letters. There are four “o”s running parallel to the line of “e”s on each side of it and each o is between an “l” and a “v”, though sometimes “love” is spelled backwards. There are three “l”s on each side of the poem, on the outside of the “o”s. There are two “v”s on either side of the middle stream of “e”s. George agreed with me that the middle stream of “e”s could be pronounced as a scream. The woman to the far left of my row commented that it looks like there is “love”, but if you read around the corner you get “evolove”, which she read as “evolve”. She interpreted it as “Love evolves into Evol”.

            I said that I find that kind of poetry extremely annoying. I get what it’s saying but I think turning it into a visual moves it away from what the mind really wants to see when it’s reading.

Our next poet was Michael Ondaatje and George said he’s lost track of all the Governor General’s Awards the guy has won. The title of his book, “The Dainty Monsters” riffs on Leonard Cohen’s “Beautiful Losers”, which was a big influence for Ondaatje. He uses a negation of form in which anything goes and so his is a Beat aesthetic, for crying out loud! He finds mythopoeic potential and has a cinematic style. George says that reading Ondaatje is like looking at a Diane Arbus photograph or a Robert Crumb comic. The freaks coming out of the crackerjack box. He compared it to the way that, as a kid, he would bite animal crackers in half and then make new animals by putting halves of one animal together with that of another.

Of the poem, “Elizabeth”, George asked who Elizabeth is. I figured out a few weeks ago that it’s Queen Elizabeth I. The poem renders her both ordinary and unusual. It is reminiscent of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”. Of lines 12-16, that read, “they put a snake around my neck and it crawled down the front of my dress. I felt its flicking tongue dripping into me like a shower. Daddy laughed and said Smart Snake.” Zack commented that it was disturbing to think of a father saying that to his daughter. George said maybe it is a blasphemous treatment of Elizabeth, for the “virgin queen” to be sexualized, but try to keep in mind that her father was Henry VIII.

Narrative is one of Ondaatje’s great strengths. P. K. Page gives us photos but Ondaatje puts them into motion. Aestheticization is a distancing. Thomas Seymour is a Beautiful Loser. Of Ondaatje’s 1968 book, “Pictures from the War”, incidents in Vietnam are aestheticized while horror is made beautiful.

Of his poem, “Letters & Other Worlds” we can’t tell if it’s true, but it does take place in Sri Lanka, where he was born and raised. Ondaatje is part Dutch. His family was rich but not part of the British ruling class because of its ethnic mixture, but not entirely divorced from it either.

Exoticism in Ondaatje: the tropes are overseas, comedic and not menacing. It takes the form of an exotic confessional memoir. The father in the poem dies of a stroke, but before that, his deteriorating personality is accompanied by a widening empathy. Ondaatje’s heroes are always creative, destructive and decadent. You cannot produce art unless you have p-p-p-p-p-pain! Making art is about breaking your aching heart. For Miles Davis to make “Blue and Green”, he had to have all kinds of heroin. Even with “On the Corner” and “Birth of the Cool” (George meant “The Birth of Cool”) he was always riding the horse! Miles Davis was middle class. As a kid he rode horses and as an adult he rode horse. George commented that there haven’t been many Canadians that have ended that way. Someone declared, “We can take OUR heroin!”