Introduction to THE VEHICULE POETS_NOW
by George Bowering
I have always liked the idea of a group of poets. I disagree with that
critic who called poetry the "sullen art." Sullen means all alone, and that
may be an okay way to write a novel, but for most of our history good poetry
has been produced by poets working with each other, or against each other.
Wordsworth and Coleridge made their great odes as arguments with one
another. Keats and Shelley fed each other's imagination. The English
Romantics holed up during storms and concocted nineteenth century classics.
A hundred years later the Imagists slapped poems like poker cards on the
table around which they sat.
Right after the Second World War, there were two lively poetry groups
working the streets and salons in Montreal. They turned their city for a few
years into the poetry centre of English-writing Canada. The small presses
with which Louis Dudek was involved, for example, would print the books that
collectors and critics go to now when they want to understand how modern
Canadian poetry got going.
I am not about to tell you that the seven youngsters in Montreal in the
Seventies were Byrons or even John Gould Fletchers. I don't think they got
tyro poets in Regina saying that they wanted to band together and become
western Vehiculars. But in the history of recent English-language poetry in
Montreal, the Vehicule group, Ken Norris, Stephen Morrissey, Tom Konyves,
Claudia Lapp, Artie Gold, John McAuley and Endre Farkas, provided a very
welcome radical chapter.
I lived in Montreal from 1967 till 1971. For me, Montreal was of course a
storied site. In the Forties Irving Layton and Louis Dudek had joined
Torontonian Raymond Souster to create the fabled Contact Press and rescue
Canadian poetry from the genteel tradition that Montrealer F.R. Scott had
made fun of in his poem "The Canadian Authors Meet." Leonard Cohen had
emerged, published by Dudek, befriended by Layton, to act out the role of
blessed poete damné. Milton Acorn met Al Purdy in Montreal, and got
published by Contact Press. Soon there were dozens of whippersnapper poets,
guys like Seymour Mayne and K.V. Hertz and Avi Boxer, who would start their
own little poetry mags in the early Sixties.
But by the time I arrived there in Canada's centenary year, English
Canadian Montreal was a poetry ghost town. The old guys were still around,
at least part of the time, but they were not causing any trouble. Cohen and
Mayne had moved out. Roy Kiyooka was there, but his best poetry was in the
future. There were some English-language poets in their thirties, but they
were staid. They resembled the academic poets in Iowa and the versemakers
trying to get something together in the postwar desert that was the English
tradition. They fashioned metaphors and crafted stanzas and considered the
spirituality of nature as opposed to the disappointments of contemporary
city life.
They may have thought of poetry as the sullen art.
I felt a little lonely myself. Thank God I was involved with the paradox
that was the Sir George Williams University reading series. Into this
time-trapped world we brought the news—Victor Coleman, Michael Ondaatje,
Michael McClure, John Wieners. I also taught creative writing, if you can
imagine, and what a strange contradictory world we lived in. It was the late
Sixties, the time of great radicals and obstreperous youth. My "students"
knew about Malcolm X and Franz Fanon and the Velvet Underground. But they
had not read Charles Olson.
There I was, in the middle of Montreal, holding up a poem by Charles
Olson. There were the English Canadian poets, wondering whether Robert Frost
might be a little too daring. These were the people who thought it was okay
to use the word "whereupon" in a poem. They were conservative, I thought,
largely because they were insular. They must have been aware, minimally,
that there was a post-Imagist poetry out there, but they were quick to
protect against it, calling it names. They favoured the conservative British
arts scene, where the ability to be clever with name-calling was apparently
an asset.
I left for the west coast in the spring of 1971, having enjoyed Montreal,
having talked with a few youngsters who seemed happy to hear from the
outside world. Artie Gold, for example, could quote from Frank O'Hara, while
downing a couple dozen latkes at Ben's.
A year and a half later a hip new arts gallery named Véhicule opened just
about where Ste. Catherine Street started being west, and before anyone knew
it there were Sunday afternoon poetry readings in the gallery. Those seven
youngsters I mentioned began to cohere as a group, and you could be pretty
certain to hear them doing their stuff on Sunday. Before too long, the
gallery took its place among alternative arts spaces across Canada, and
became the hip Montreal site for poetry readings by people from out of town.
Then, as these things went in those days, a poetry publisher named
Vehicule was born, and three of those seven poets formed the editorial board
from 1975 till 1981. Vehicule Press took its place among the little poetry
presses of the country, learning its direction from, say, Talonbooks and
Coach House Press, where the concerns for contemporary modes in poetry were
accompanied by a desire to make interesting art of their books. Printer
Simon Dardick and poets Farkas and Gold bent their heads together the way
printer Stan Bevington and poets Victor Coleman and bpNichol used to do. The
first book was Ken Norris's Vegetables. Affixed to the cover was a
seed package with seeds in it. My copy featured, if I remember rightly,
eggplant.
For five or six years the Vehicule collective produced nice little poetry
books that quickly became bookdealers' collector items. A quarter-century
later, one still likes to sit and reread John McAuley's Nothing Ever
Happens in Pointe Claire or The Trees of Unknowing by Stephen
Morrissey. When one was in town, as one was in those days of the
mid-seventies, it was nice to drop in at Véhicule and check out the art on
the walls or wherever it was, scan the page proofs of Artie's new book,
sprawl on the floor and listen to Claudia Lapp chant her new poems. It was
nice to know that it was there, and that Montreal was here,
with us.
They were a restless bunch, this collective, and the backlist from the
Vehicule Press does not cover their activity in the small-press inky
business. McAuley ran Maker Press (which published an anthology of the
collective's poetry), Morrissey started Montreal Journal of Poetics,
Konyves ran the peculiar item called Hh (he was always the one most
involved in the history and course of the central European avant garde)
and Norris had an international mag/press called CrossCountry. There
were other scraps of publications, too, the charming ragged edge of the
paperback scene.
Here is what happens with any young arts collective worth paying
attention to: the individuals that make up the group are restless and
creative, and begin to pursue their varying interests while cherishing their
early collaborative work in their memory, a place into which any artist will
reach all his/her life. Tom Konyves, for example, became fascinated with the
possibilities of videotape when that medium was new. He made something he
called "videopoetry," and is now a west coast video-arts doyen. Endre Farkas
started a press and organization called the Muses' Company, and gave his
attention to collaborations between poetry and dance. Claudia Lapp moved
back to the USA, eventually to Oregon, where she and her poetry are involved
with visual artists and spiritual healers.
While the gang members were getting to be thirty, and some of them taking
up teaching jobs, and most of them exploring multi-media and performance
arts, the urgency of their poetry press declined. In 1982 Vehicule Press
published an interesting compromise anthology called Cross/Cut:
Contemporary English Quebec Poetry, edited by Ken Norris and Peter Van
Toorn, the most interesting of the young conservatives. That anthology was a
turning point: from then on the press would do a severe turnaround to
publish the neo-con poets who had been the antithesis of the movement, and
the Vehicule poets (they had first been called that by Wynne Francis, a
professor at Concordia University) would be a name for a former collective.
So goes the history of poetry, including the local history.
So this new anthology. It is an opportunity to see the widely diverse
recent poetry of seven former Vees. Tom Konyves tells me that they are
ordered according to their astrological signs or some such fortunate
nonsense. The present-day Vehicule Press is not interested. They recently
had a 25-year anniversary party, at which there was apparently no mention of
these middle-aged folks. On the Internet you can find a picture book of
Montreal writers as seen by Vehicule Press. None of these seven is anywhere
to be seen.
The life of English language poetry in Montreal is now in the hands of
two remarkable women—Erin Mouré and Anne Carson. They made it into the
picture book, despite the radical contemporaneity of their work. One senses
that there is some animosity being exercised to handle history.
Ken Norris's first poem in our collection is a good introduction to that
history as seen from within. It ends:
We always
had the freedom to create
something out of nothing, to fill the air
with music when there was nothing
going on at all.
I have a notebook full of clever insights into the verse in this volume.
But I am less interested in those than in the recent directions taken by
these kids I have known so many decades.
I like the new, more venturesome Norris. He used to be very strictly
realistic and plain-spoken, the ideal student of Louis Dudek. Now his syntax
is straight, but his images tilt: "you don't love the real; you love your
mind playing across it." Morrissey has, in a way, gone in the other
direction. He used to turn every poetry reading into an experiment in
delivery; these poems delve into autobiography and family history. His work
resembles that of Marty Gervais, insisting without any easy moments, on
recovering the events that lie under a carpet of years. Konyves is witty,
terse and cynical. He chose his surrealist roots, and they, along with his
years as a video artist, have led him away from exposition. Like Norris, he
addresses the function of this update:
There are poems and there are poems,
we used to say, for we were defenders
of the poems, the guardians of the poems,
and our habits changed and our families grew
until we forgot what we were defending
and we secretly relinquished the poem
Lapp now writes hearty poems denouncing the enemies of the earth. She has
become what one would hope and expect from an artist in the US northwest, an
environmentalist, one who lends her strength to the anti-war movement and
favours the wisdom of pre-propaganda children. Gold still offers us
outrageous poems that flip like intellectual fish just out of the water, not
quite graspable in the bottom of the boat. You can hear his voice even if
you don't know it—his lines compel companionship. McAuley has grown
pleasantly weird. He translates the Roman poets with iambs and anapests,
setting us up for his other poems, in which he presents such things as
Virginia Woolf brushing her hair on her last day of life, imagining eating
the little bits of fat under her scalp. Farkas has always been the most
French of these English-language poets. Here he offers us a brave long
Quebec love poem.
Any anthology that has anything to do with a moment from so many years in
the past is going to make you a little sad, the kind of sad that mortality
has so much to do with. In this case, of course, that sadness is bound up
with the fact that the neo-cons have infiltrated the magazines and
universities in the little community of English Montreal.
But here it is anyway, a reminder of those wonderful days in the early
seventies, when the collective wrote and sang and danced and painted and sat
on the Véhicule floor, and the world came to Ste Catherine Street. It is a
book, seven living poets and the spirit that makes people grasp the means of
production, still here.
Ken Norris was the last to reach the age of fifty. In his 2003 book
titled Fifty, he offered this simple dedication: "for the Vehicules,/
all fifty now". Seven times fifty makes up a year of days. Let's spend it
reading what we have so far.
GB, Feb/04
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