The Happy Hooker

            On the night of Tuesday, October 18^th, George Elliot Clarke arrived on time, in his usual upbeat fashion, “Good evening! Yes indeed!”

            For those that would like to consult with him about their essays, George recommended an email dialogue.

            He told us that we would be free to look at other poems than those in the anthology, but if we do we need to staple copies of the poems to the essay.

            He reminded us that when we are comparing more than two of something, use “among” rather than “between”, which is only for two.

            We should look at more than three poems from each poet unless the poems are very long.

            He added that “quote” is both a verb and a noun, but “quotation” is a noun.

            For essays on the Decadence movement we can refer to non-Canadian poets.

            George sounds like a game show announcer or like he’s reading one of his own poems when he does roll call.

            George mentioned someone who he said was a typical Newfoundland poet, who does calligraphy and sells these presentations of his poems in exchange for beer and whisky.

            George talked about Bob Dylan’s winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature and reminded us that he had been nominated for the prize back in 2004. He said that some writers don’t consider song writing to be literature. George says it is so the prize is by extension an acknowledgment of others, like Leonard Cohen and Bruce Springsteen, as well as many blues and rap composers who write in polysyllabic rhymes.

            I thanked George for saying that, telling him that I have had problems being accepted as a poet when I bring my guitar to readings. He declared that they are just jealous and that it’s an apartheid of elitists.

            As usual, George passed around a couple of books of poetry from his own personal collection. One was by R. Kyooka, who had been a victim of the Japanese internment by Canada, and another was by Milton Acorn.

            We picked up with Milton Acorn, where we’d left off last week.

            Acorn was a non-academic like Nowlan and Souster, but Acorn was a communist and Nowlan was a Progressive Conservative. He shared a place for a while with Al Purdy. Nowlan called his home “Windsor Castle” and gave the people he knew titles. The high point of his life was meeting Prince Charles.

            To Milton Acorn, soap and water was for rich people. People were shocked when he started a romance with Gwendolyn MacEwen. It could possibly be unfair to call him a regional poet because he lived all over the country.

            We looked at his poem, “Offshore Breeze”. Of the first line: “The wind, heavy from the land, irons the surf”, the word “iron” is the right verb because it is also a noun. Of the second line: “to a slosh on silver-damp sand”, “slosh” is an onomatopoeic word because it sounds like what it is. Of the third line: “The sea’s grey and crocheted with ripples”, “crocheted” is another fine use of a verb.

            Of his poem, “Charlottetown Harbour”, compare it to Pratt’s “The Shark”. It is a portrait poem with a sense of place. Imagist principals are put to the service of a region. With Nowlan and Pratt, Acorn carried on the tradition of the Group of Seven, of elevating the local to the universal.

            George told us that as he was driving through St John, New Brunswick he saw two gigantic cruise ships in the harbour and it’s passengers were sucking up the local crafts in town.             This reminded George of the iconic St John tea brand, Red Rose. He quoted the famous phrase from their old commercials, in which upper class Brits are impressed by the quality of the tea, but when they hear that it is only sold in Canada they remark, “Only in Canada, you say? Pity!”

            Of Acorn’s “The Island” there is a verisimilitude to local speech patterns. There is another great use of a verb in, “the stones of a river rattle”. He is looking back here on a long settled space, but leaves out the Mi’kmaw. In the early 20^th century the population of Prince Edward Island got their island back from the British landlords.

            Of the poem, “Knowing I Live In A Dark Age”, George asked us what Acorn means by “before history”. I guessed correctly that he meant, “before the revolution”. The first year of the revolution is always year zero. In Cambodia, for instance, in 1975 the Khmer Rouge burnt up all the money. The poem has a similar style to Souster’s poem, “Downtown Corner Newstand”. There is violence in describing “bayonets of grass”.

            Acorn’s “Jack Pine Sonnets” are longer than fourteen lines. He approved of the Iranian revolution.

            George said, “Tequila with champagne: Chaquila!”

            George said they are fighting right now over Mosul and Aleppo. There is terrorism, the threat of nuclear holocaust and a hot burning end. He recommended Jeff Nuttall’s book, “Bomb Culture” and then declared; “We should overthrow the governments with bombs, non-violently of course.”

            Of the poem, “I’ve Tasted My Own Blood”, George explained that Prince Edward Island and the rest of the Maritimes survive from the extraction primary resources. The Atlantic Provinces are not an oasis of industry, though they once made Volvos in Halifax. George declared, “I got to ride in a Nova Scotia Volvo, for cryin out loud!” The Maritimes has a boom and bust economy. It’s agars and oysters.

            Now the boom and bust is in Fort McMurray. You drive to work in a limo but later you’re a bum. In Canada our standard of living is not based on the sales of industrial products. George exclaimed, “Hydro electric! Wow! It’s the one-hundredth year of Ontario Hydro!” When we are being annihilated by nuclear bombs we can be proud of the fact that the uranium those bombs are made of were sold to China and the United States by Canada. If your income depends on prices paid for ground and water, you are a captive. There are real estate bubbles until they burst.

            “She dragged her days like a sled over gravel.” George says that “We Shall Overcome” is playing in the background of this poem.

            George mentioned oppression by the police and so I told the story about how I was stopped by the cops while riding my bike and that because I sighed heavily on handing the officer my identification she threatened to handcuff me and throw me in the back seat. A woman behind me gasped during my recounting of the event.

            Our next poet was Margaret Avison, who saw poetry as a vehicle of discovery. What do we discover? George says that Avison was a “Sound of Music” poet and philosophical, so overly difficult and maybe too serious for her own good.

            T. S. Eliot poems are not whimsical. He stuck his wife in an insane asylum. Why so bleak? George says, “It’s your failure to be proper Christians that gave us “The Wasteland”.

            Avison is a Christian and looks at the world in that bleak way. She is connected to Gerard Manley Hopkins. Eliot and Hopkins were mystical Christians. They were nature oriented with a distrust of the modern. Media distracts us from thinking about the important topic of eternity. They wanted to step away from the diurnal or the quotidian.

            George said that he heard a woman getting out of a Volvo say, “Poetry is your doorway into infinity.”

            It’s interesting though that Avison contributed to a Beat magazine. She remained on the edges of Canadian poetry. That means she didn’t go to parties. A lot of her work was published by a small Christian press.

            Of her poem, “Snow”: “The optic heart must endure: a jailbreak.” The unseen things of the world need a jailbreak from the obvious and the real. “Snow’s legend: colour of mourning.” White is the colour of mourning in Chinese culture.

            At this point we had the halftime break. A student told George that she’d tried to call him last Tuesday. He told her that he only has a landline and no cell-phone.

            During the break I was still wondering about the meaning of snow. It seemed as if Avison was talking about some tragic event that occurred in China. George decided that when she refers to snow, she might be talking about the kind of snow we used to see on televisions with bad reception. She may be reacting to a story on the news. “Sad listener” may indicate that the picture is snowy but the sound is on. “Rivery pewter” may suggest the waves one sees on a colour TV when the picture isn’t working.

            Of the poem, “Black-White Under Green: May 18, 1965”, I wondered if she was talking about a plane crash. George and the class spent a lot of time trying to figure this one out. Loss of innocence. “Still a boy, a pianist, dying.” On the date in the title there was a plane crash and someone named Eli Cohen died. Was he a pianist?

            Patrick offered the opinion that poems that are hard to understand are bad poetry.

            When did you first become aware of your mortality?

            Our next poet was Gwendolyn MacEwen, who George says is one of his favourite poets. He likes the fact that as a woman she had decided to make a living as a poet. She was down to earth and mythopoeic. She was fascinated by the letters of the alphabet and interested in the magic she saw in codes of language. She learned Yiddish, Arabic, Greek and even Egyptian hieroglyphics. She saw them as doorways to other forms of knowledge.

            She and a boyfriend opened a Greek restaurant on the Danforth, but the business went bankrupt.

            She is the only Canadian poet to receive the Governor general’s award posthumously. There is a bust of her near the Metro supermarket in the Annex.

She was an alcoholic. George said he had a beer with her at the Free Times café. Dorothy Livesay was there as well.

George wanted a woman to read, “Poem Improvised Around A First Line”.

Of her poem, “Nitroglycerine Tulips”, MacEwen was attracted to Mediterranean codes.

Her T. E. Lawrence poems were dramatic monologues, narrative lyric sequences and a narrative lyric suite.

George told us that one of her poems tells the story of how Xaviera Hollander visited her restaurant but mistook MacEwen for the coat check person. George enlisted me to explain to everyone who Xaviera Hollander was and that she had written a famous book called “The Happy Hooker”.

MacEwen makes myths out of everyday events. Mario Manzini is a real person, but she makes a myth of him. Six line stanzas make a poem ballad-like. Pound says a poet should find luminous details to illuminate the text.

Of her poem, “Water”, George said it is not in the anthology, but he advised us to look for it.

Lawrence of Arabia was an influence on Ondaatje’s “The English Patient”.

Our next poet was John Newlove, who was from the Projective Verse school of poetry. He was also an alcoholic.

Of his poem, “Ride off any horizon”, it is projective, so the meter is decided by the breathing. The poem contains very few Latin based words. I observed that each segment deals with a different historical horizon of the prairies. History unfurls in a light, almost gentle manner. The prairies’ endless cyclic oppressions.