To conclude my view of poetic life in pre-Internet Ottawa begun in the three chapters below:

Despite being based in the government town of Ottawa, all this creative work did not go entirely unnoticed in the rest of Canada. Both The Scream and The Merzbook made it onto the curriculum of a few university literature courses. Open Letter, the Toronto magazine, featured Andrew McClure’s essay on the notation system he had developed for spoken voice performance. Excerpts from The Merzbook won a CBC literary award and were read on the network on Robert Weaver’s Anthology  program. The network’s popular morning show host Peter Gzowski interviewed Susan McMaster about First Draft’s performance poetry and aired a few pieces from the WordMusic cassette the group recorded in 1985.

Thanks to the nation-wide reach of that CBC program, wordmusic was heard by a young animated filmmaker in Teeswater, Ontario, Ed Ackerman, who found the play of voices visually exciting. Ed wrote to Susan at the address she had given at the end of her CBC interview, and after an interval while the letter lay on the floor under her desk, she passed it on to me. Ed’s letter proposed a collaboration involving First Draft’s voices and his own “typewriter-animation” technique – in effect, another version of the kind of performing book we had attempted to create with The Scream. In my reply I admitted that I knew little or nothing about filmmaking, but that the notion of a film created entirely on a typewriter appealed to me. My concrete poems were, in fact, a kind of typewriter art, and it seemed a natural thing to set them in motion. I described the collaboration that followed in a brief article I later wrote for a special issue of Descant magazine.

The Making of the Making of a Primiti Too Taa

(This article first appeared in Descant 64/5, 1989..)

Watching Life Classes, I was one of those who thought the story was too corny: after twenty years of painting by numbers the young woman’s first student charcoal sketches become a one-woman show. Life isn’t like that, I said to myself; Art isn’t.

But life is more like that than I can sometimes believe. It happened to me. My first sketch of a film, conceived from start to finish in twenty-four hours, and realized in six weeks by animator Ed Ackerman, has been shown in festivals on four continents. Awards have come from across North America: Rimouski, New York City, Ann Arbor, San Francisco. When Ed and I brought Primiti Too Taa to the Rivoli on Queen Street in Toronto in 1988, the film already had a cult following: people who liked to play it forward, then backward, same speed, sound on, then forward again. Why only once?

A morning phone call from Ed Ackerman in October 1986 began the making of Primiti Too Taa. (We had never met, but had corresponded about making an animated film on a typewriter after Ed had heard some of First Draft’s poetry on CBC’s Morningside.) Ed was ready to do a test film, he told me on the long-distance line. He was in Toronto en route to Ottawa and wanted directions for driving to my house.

He was there in time for supper, and while it steamed he showed me on VHS some of the tests he had done so far. He also had a scrapbook crammed with typewriter drawings — grain elevators, meadowlark on the fence post, railway tracks to the horizon, all meticulously ‘coloured in’ and textured with lines of type.

He had never heard of concrete poetry, and it was with the shock of recognition that he leafed through the anthologies I showed him, along with my own chapbooks and postcards. Over a few hours of like discoveries, we settled on Primiti Too Taa as the film we were about to make.

I thought it a natural choice. It is a scherzo movement from the long sound poem Ursonate, sonata in primitive sounds, by German artist Kurt Schwitters, which I had been including in readings from my series of poems called The Merzbook: Kurt Schwitters Poems.

Primiti Too Taa is a highly charged bit of linguistic energy. Making a film of it was a tribute to Schwitters for the centennial of his birth in 1987, as Ackerman’s animation was a homage to Norman MacLaren, made a few months before MacLaren died.

In the hour of decision, though, we chose to make a film of that particular poem because it met certain real-world needs of independent filmmaking. First, Primiti Too Taa was the right length. The beautiful miniatures I had been performing with my collaborators in First Draft (Andrew McClure and Susan McMaster) each took under a minute to unfold; others of my pieces were five or six minutes in length and would likely demand elaborate animation. But the company in Toronto that developed film for Ed charged for a minimum of one hundred feet. That’s about two and a half minutes of film. Coincidentally, my improvisation based on the Ursonate lasted a little over two minutes.

What’s more, the sound poem was conceptually easy to ‘type.’ It demanded no shading of grain elevators with x’s and o’s. A single letter can become a character in this drama. When I say FFF, a file of F’s snakes across the screen. A few choruses of  rakete rinzekete rakete rinzekete rakete rinzekete fill the screen with off-kilter letters until BEEEEEEE spirals out from the centre, obscuring the rinzekete’s and BO! scatters all the letters at once, clearing the field for the next verse of the poem. There is rudeness and growling in Primiti Too Taa, but in greater measure there is laughter and dancing.

Ed Ackerman’s first film, Sarah’s Dream, a Plasticine-animated story of Ukrainian immigration to Manitoba, has a sound-track recorded live, in real time, by a sound-effects crew of seven. At a presentation in the lecture theatre of the National Gallery, Ed showed two films side-by-side: Sarah’s Dream, the animation, and the voice and sound-effects crew recording the Sarah’s Dream soundtrack while watching the silent film on screen.

        Primiti Too Taa was made in the opposite way. The sound-track was recorded first, the typewriter drawing laboriously synchronized to it later. The day after Ed drove to Ottawa to meet me, I was in Studio A of my friendly neighbourhood broadcaster, CKCU-FM at Carleton, recording the soundtrack for the film that was still barely a notion in our two heads. Then, with the soundtrack in the can ($18), Ed and I sat down to ‘do the storyboard’ — to outline the action of the film.

There must be some kind of story, after all. Not that anything needs to happen, but there’s a beginning, a middle and an end. I have always tried to use my visual imagination to the max in poetry, and never with as much freedom as in this collaboration, where Ed volunteered to do all the tedious typing. Together, we plotted the film verse by verse, word by ‘word,’ letter by letter.

Six weeks later we would meet in Toronto to line up the soundtrack with the finished film and catch any flaws. But Primiti Too Taa was effectively created during the hour or two after taping the soundtrack and before Ed climbed into his car, borrowing money for the oil and gas, to drive home to Teeswater, Ontario, where he typed the film. By the first week in December, Primiti Too Taa would be showing at the San Francisco Poetry Film Festival under a poster that said, You’ve seen the book, now read the movie!

Each foot of 16mm film has forty frames; a hundred feet has 4000 frames; 4000 sheets of paper for Ed to align and realign (how many times?) to make the giant flip-book that is a two and a half minute film. Ed Ackerman, who dreams in 70 mm, went on to remake the film in 35mm — the version that was shortlisted for a Gemini award — and finally built his own IMAX camera in order to see Primiti Too Taa full-scale.

Although I can call myself an award-winning filmmaker, I still know very little of the mystery that changes a concept, even a notion, into a big-screen daydream. But I’m sure this is not the way it’s done in Hollywood.

*

In the summer of 1986, Andrew McClure, the creative spark of First Draft, moved from Ottawa to Toronto. Although the group’s collaborations continued and even grew in scale over the next three years, the creative intensity of the mid-eighties gave way to a consolidation, a summing up of the work of the previous five years. Determined to take our performances from the concert setting that had been very successful to larger-scale theatrical productions, we welcomed as a new member Jennifer Boyes, a young theatrical director. Jennifer had recently arrived from British Columbia, and had an interest in experimental, lyrical theatre. The first major production she undertook was a workshop production of my Kurt Schwitters poems from The Merzbook. Acting as dramaturge, Jennifer helped me craft my collection of monologues into a stage play called The Cabbage of Paradise. She proposed to dispense with the biography of Schwitters, dividing the portrait of an artist into a drama involving three artists with diverse qualities – Hannah, a dada theorist; Max, a wild, instinctive creator; Kurt, the homme d’affaires that Schwitters himself sometimes seemed to his contemporaries. We put out a casting call, chose our cast of three from Ottawa’s acting community, booked the new theatre space in ArtsCourt, the converted courthouse on Nicholas Street, and began rehearsals. A distinctive feature of the production was a word-music “choir” of a dozen voices – actors, musicians and students – trained by Andrew McClure to provide vocal sound effects and performance-poetry interludes. Roberta Huebener provided a graffiti-like backdrop on poster paper. Although billed as a staged reading, the actors soon learned their parts, and the workshop production, which ran for two nights in the summer of 1988, looked and felt to me like a fully developed stage play.

The following year, Jennifer teamed with Susan McMaster and Andrew McClure to stage a workshop production of Susan’s poem sequence Dark Galaxies, in an elaborate setting that required at least a dozen actors to recite performance poetry while marching in choreographed patterns around the stage. After these two, for us, massive productions, First Draft had just about fulfilled its mission. Andrew and now David Parson had moved to Toronto, then Jennifer moved back to the west coast. First Draft continued for a year or two to give occasional performances, featuring Susan and myself, with Alrick Huebener and Peter Thomas. But, at least until the mid-90s when Susan and I again began collaborating with musicians, our creative collaborations took a breather.

*

Although in this telling it may seem that First Draft was a singular oddity on the Ottawa scene, the group’s work was only a part of a movement toward performance in literary and artistic practice. Around the time First Draft was performing with flute, cello, and glass harmonica, Ronnie R. Brown staged a dramatized version of her sequence of poems about circus freak-show characters, first with Michael Dennis and later, at the NAC Atelier theatre on King Edward Avenue, featuring the performance artist Richard Schacter. Performance art was a parallel movement, becoming active in artist-run spaces, notably SAW Gallery and Gallery 101, where I attended shows by Schacter, Paul Couillard, and Dennis Tourbin, who had recently  moved from Peterborough. Tourbin had already published visual poetry and begun creating his word-based paintings, and memorably performed his October 1970/FLQ piece at Gallery 101 from behind a plywood frame shaped like a television screen.

Before the advent of the public Internet, radio played a large role in keeping the local community informed about writers and writing in Ottawa. In the 80s, Ronnie R. Brown hosted an early-morning Sunday radio program on CHEZ, called Sparks 2, after the short-lived 1970s little magazine Sparks, edited by Blaine Marchand. Sparks 2 was a fifteen-minute interview with a local or visiting writer, listened to by a small, dedicated group who probably drifted off to sleep soon afterward. Within a few years CHEZ withdrew even this time-slot, but replaced it with a more ambitious Sunday evening arts talk show hosted by Ken Rockburn. Across town, the Carleton University radio station CKUA offered a half-hour literary show on Tuesday evenings, hosted in the mid-80s by Louis Fagan, who sometimes conducted interviews and on-air readings while drunk.  It was in the studio of CKUA that I recorded the soundtrack of Primiti Too Taa, during my lunch-break from work at Labour Canada, the day that Ed Ackerman visited me to make the animated film. And in the same studio, a year or two later, the First Draft trio recorded half-hour versions of our stage shows The Cabbage of Paradise and Dark Galaxies.

The National Library of Canada became an important reading venue for local writers from the late 80s under the direction of Randall Ware.  The Ottawa Valley Book Festival held most of its events there, including the annual awards ceremonies, where I received the first Archibald Lampman Award, a prize for a new book by a Capital Region poet initiated through the efforts of one person, Blaine Marchand. I recall one morning when, walking from my car to my office at Place du Portage, I happened to meet Blaine on the way to his office, and he excitedly told me that my book This Won’t Last Forever  had been chosen the winner. At the award presentation later, at the National Library, I met one of the judges, Jacques Flamand, poet and publisher of Editions Vermillion, with whom I would later work on the board of the Ottawa Valley Book Festival.

August 1989. A group of Ottawa writers gathered at the home of Blaine Marchand for a potluck dinner to celebrate the anthology Capital Poets, published by Ouroboros, the upstart little press my wife Mary Lee Bragg and I had started a few year earlier. As we worked our way towards the cake Blaine had prepared, the conversation turned to that evening’s lunar eclipse, and so the party moved from his second-floor apartment into his backyard, where we had an unimpeded view as earth’s shadow slowly darkened the full moon. Here we are in the picture, looking happy and fresh-faced: Blaine on the blanket beside the cake; Sandra Nicholls, Margaret (Slavin) Dyment, and Susan McMaster kneeling beside him; and in the chairs behind them myself, Nadine McInnis, John Barton, Mary Lee Bragg, and Holly Kritsch. Since that night, everyone in the picture has published books of poetry, many of us several times; five have won the Archibald Lampman Award; all except Holly, Susan and John have published books of fiction as well; and, although John and Margaret have left the city, the potluck dinner and the cake have had many successors. Yet in retrospect, that night of the eclipse seems to have closed a chapter in Ottawa’s literary history. The eighties were coming to an end. Having turned seriously to writing fiction, I would close down the little press called Ouroboros and retire from the editorial board of Arc magazine. Soon, John and Nadine too would end their terms as editors of Arc, which they had dubbed “Canada’s national poetry magazine.” First Draft, the inter-media performance poetry group Susan and I had been heavily involved with, was also winding down. And, foremost in our minds that evening, we were awaiting the inevitable news, which came a week or two later, that our friend the Kingston poet Bronwen Wallace had lost her struggle with cancer. Earlier on the evening of the eclipse, Susan had read us a draft of the poem she had been working on, linking the eclipse, and the passage of the Voyager spacecraft out of the solar system, with Bronwen’s tragic death. Blaine, too, would eventually write an elegaic poem for Bronwen.

Seven years earlier, shortly after Mary Lee and I moved to Ottawa from Vancouver, we had spent another summer night viewing a lunar eclipse, a night I wrote a poem about, a night that, in some ways, marked the beginning of my eighties decade in Ottawa. Our party and memorial beneath the eclipse in Blaine’s backyard seems now like the end of a chapter.

Already the space was shifting. At home, our teenage son was online, operating his own BBS bulletin board on the family computer. Within a few years, in 1992, the National Capital Freenet would bring the public Internet to Ottawa. Usenet, listserves, the World Wide Web followed, and the way we form literary communities (and communities of all kinds) changed radically. That story, I guess, is more familiar.

Continuing the chronicle of pre-Internet times in the literary community of Canada’s capital:

In 1982, when the Tree collective began organizing a two-day poetry festival called Wordfest, they asked me to edit an anthology of work by the featured poets. I had some experience in editing and pasting up books and magazines, from the student magazine Gaillardia at the University of Calgary in the late-60s and early-70s, to the Harbinger  anthology in 1973 and my volunteer work at Edmonton’s NeWest Review in the late-70s and Vancouver’s Literary Storefront Newsletter in the early-80s. With the design help of Carol English, I put out a very respectable souvenir volume including the work of Cyril Dabydeen, Mark Frutkin, Alice Groves, Blaine Marchand, George Miller, Riley Tench, Lorna Uher (Crozier), and Patrick White.

Wordfest, two solid days of readings by these and other writers held at SAW Gallery, then upstairs in the Byward Market building, was an inspiring event, for me. On my return home after the Saturday readings, I sat up most of the night writing “Poem without Shame,” a cascade of images that I decided ought to be published without the frustrating delays of submission, rejection, acceptance and eventual inclusion in a little magazine.

Damn it, I thought, I can publish this myself, as a broadsheet, and within a couple of months I had done it. The design – 8 ½ by 14 in cardstock with two folds – left room for fanciful line-drawn cover art by Carol English. To give the project a bit of respectability, I decided that I would start my own press and call it Ouroboros. Soon to follow were similar broadsheets by Susan McMaster, John Bell and Chris Wind, chapbooks by Margaret Dyment and Nancy Corson Carter, a series of postcards with visual poems by myself, Penn Kemp, LeRoy Gorman and Noah Zacharin, as well as perfect bound books by Robert Eady, Susan McMaster, and the performance group First Draft.

“Poem Without Shame” took its name from a poem read at Wordfest by Lorna Crozier and drew most of its details from images in poems I had heard or from things I had seen or heard about happening in the Byward Market area during the festival. It was later published between the glossy covers in my second book, This Won’t Last Forever, from Edmonton’s Longspoon Press:

Poem without shame

This poem has no shame.

It has a punk bagpiper on the Saturday morning sidewalk

who has set out a basket to collect quarters or dollar bills,

it has one silver er dollar (American) and one sand dollar (Atlantic),

the Pacific and Arctic oceans fit neatly into its corners

leaving room for the Great Lakes, a gravestone, a stamp album, a teddy bears’ picnic and more,

this poem is large enough to encompass the orbit of Jupiter without straining,

it has black holes into which readers have been known to disappear and never return,

this poem has a melodious doorbell and five spacious rooms,

it has picture windows, broadloom and air-conditioning,

but it has no shame, it has no soul.

This poem has sole fried in butter with lemon and a sprig of parsley,

it has phallic symbols, womb symbols, symbols of death and resurrection which never correspond because they don’t affix proper postage,

this poem has bold headlines behind which burn real bodies which don’t symbolize anything,

it has cities reduced to rubble and cities restored in plaster, it has cabinet ministers preserved in alcohol,

but it has no shame.

It has no shame because the stars are rusty,

because the phallic symbols look like wombs and vice versa,

because the dead think this is living and the living, postage paid, have never returned,

because its readers have short attention spans and are already getting annoyed at this,

because some have already given it up, and for the rest of us every second counts,

although not one in a hundred knows CPR and heart disease is one of our biggest killers,

through no fault of its own yet irreversibly, this poem has no heart.

This poem is not alone,

although in nights so silent even the streets are mute and every light has gone out in the facing apartment tower it tells itself there is no other poem like it in the world,

and it aches with an inarticulate loneliness because it knows that is not so,

that every poem is like it but it can phone up none of them, not even long distance.

It has no heart because if another poem did phone it up in the night it would curse and hang up,

because it is empty, yet doesn’t hold water, nor serve as a sieve by separating coarse from fine,

because it is finest when it is coarsest and vice versa,

because it sings the blues without being blue and celebrates without joy, and when it is blue does not sing at all,

because it is wise without wisdom and foolish without folly,

because it salts its words without savour,

because it never speaks on the elevator,

because it has walked in space but never in cowshit,

because it has acted out its sex fantasies but not its death wish,

because it prefers fantasy and so will be taken unawares by death,

because it drives fast through the city late at night in search of other poems and ramming them,

because it is a poem with dented fenders rusting out,

a fatty poem carrying in it traces of pesticides food additives battery acids,

a poem with nine cups of coffee two ashtrays and a heap of sweaty clothing,

a poem with bagpipes, kilt of purple leather and a one-stringed electric hockey stick,

but no soul.

A soleless shoe of a poem written on folds and folds of print-out paper wadded to keep the rain out,

a poem with only a horseshoe for good luck

a poem that says it is prepared for the worst but imagines decay is mere bad luck and forgetting but an interval in memory (not vice versa),

a poem that regardless has walked in space,

that still has room for another bagpipe, for a chair wrapped in magnetic tape, for all the planets plus the entire metric system;

into its black hole fall the half-moon of a fingernail, the moon itself which is full tonight, and all the moons of Jupiter;

a poem with room for more still,

because it is a horseshoe

with ends pointed up

to catch the falling angels.

The Wordfest event at SAW Gallery also marked the beginning of my friendship with Blaine Marchand, then working on a government contract for CIDA, developing video and film projects in the international development field. When I told him that I had written TV scripts for ACCESS Alberta, he said that we should meet to discuss what I might be able to do for CIDA. Nothing came of that idea, but very soon I would find myself working as an editor for the Department of Labour, whose offices were in the same massive federal complex as CIDA, Place du Portage in Hull, across the river from Parliament Hill.

I phoned Blaine from my new desk at Labour Canada, and we met in the food court for lunch, a break from the workday that we would repeat every week or so for the next decade. While we paced the alphavillean corridors of Place du Portage, the streets of la ville d’Hull, and the adjoining paths along the Ottawa River, our conversation was almost always about books, writing, our own poetry.

Also at Wordfest I met Sheila Chapman, a young writer who had been impressed with some poems of mine published in Descant magazine, who was writing short stories full of poetry and promise. Since I was then still trying to write a historical novel, which I called “Cage of Bone,” Sheila and I began meeting to discuss our fiction. By that fall we had found an informal fiction-writing workshop that included Mark Hopkins, who later became Sheila’s husband, and Armand Garnet Ruffo, then a student at Carleton University, now Governor-General’s award-winning writer and professor at Queen’s.

At a Tree open set before the reading by Christopher Levenson. I observed that Levenson’s first collection had the same title as my book, In Transit and I supposed that this was not the only thing we had in common. Soon after, Chris invited me to join the monthly poetry workshop that he organized, mainly for former students from his creative writing class. This group included several of poets who would become friends whose work I would later publish in Ouroboros editions – John Bell, Robert Eady, Darien Watson, Holly Kritsch, Susan McMaster, Blaine Marchand and, of course, Chris Levenson. Over the next few years, the group would expand with the addition of other poets newly arrived in Ottawa – John Barton, Nadine McInnis, Sandra Nicholls and others who have since published many books. Our monthly workshops were held in members’ homes and involved, along with close reading and technical critiques of new poems, a table of food and drinks and friendly conversation.

When all this was still fresh in memory, I wrote a brief essay about poetry readings and literary activity in Ottawa. It sounds slightly dated now, not only because Ottawa’s population has grown but also because there has since been a “rush to the margins” in literature – with both spoken word and language-based poetry gaining market-share. In the hope that what I wrote back then captures some of the energy and engagement that brought heat and light to the literary life, I quote it in full below.

POETRY IN ACTION: OTTAWA 1982-3

(from Arc 10, Fall 1983)

In the first half of this century it was a rare occasion for a poet to read his or her work in public. In that self-consciously “modern” age, when close-study-of-the-text-alone was building into a major industry in the universities, most poets espoused the dictum of T.S. Eliot that a poem must be “difficult”. Consequently, reading poetry was the work of a cultivated elite, and demanded an intensely private experience of discovery between the reader and the printed page. A poem may have musical rhythms, but it was generally agreed that the ear is an inadequate instrument to take in at a single hearing all the nuances of symbol and allusion that make up poetic meaning. In fact (some would have said), reading aloud can actually diminish a poem by fixing a particular interpretation on it. Yeats insisted, “If a poet interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility.”

Coincidentally, it was while ambiguity and difficulty were considered prime poetic virtues that poetry lost its popular audience to less demanding media such as film, radio, TV, and paperback novels. Everyone agreed that poetry was difficult; the mass audience went further, and declared it stuffy and boring as well.

In the past generation all that has changed. First, Allen Ginsberg and the rest of the Beats threatened to blow the academy’s house in with their “barbaric” poems that depend on reading aloud to achieve their cumulative, incantatory effects. Then in the 1960s the universities were invaded by millions of young people demanding “relevance” (and creating teaching jobs for more poets than ever before). About the same time, the Canada Council, perhaps more for political reasons than for aesthetic ones, began what has become a tradition of sponsoring a perpetually moveable feast of poetry readings that reaches into nearly every city and town in the land. Now, in response to popular demand (from the writers, not their audience), public readings are staged, with or without official funding, nearly every day of the year. Locations vary from church basements to classrooms to taverns to theatres to community centres. Styles of writing, and of reading, are equally diverse. No one has gone so far as seriously to suggest that a public reading can take the place of that private experience with the printed page; but at present in Ottawa, a city of half a million which has only one English language poetry magazine, there are frequently two or three readings a week.

Over the past winter, for instance, Jack Hodgins of the University of Ottawa brought in, among others, Michael Ondaatje, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Josef Skvorecky, W.P. Kinsella and Elizabeth Smart. Each of these writers probably drew a larger audience than any theatre in Ottawa that night, outside the National Arts Centre; and boxes of books were sold. Carleton University, for its part, sponsored the appearance of such institutions as Irving Layton and Earle Birney.

Meanwhile, for the second year, the poetry magazine affiliated with Carleton—Arc—organized its own twice-monthly reading series. In doing so, Arc departed from the universities’ model in two important ways. First, series organizer Christopher Levenson moved the readings off campus into the heart of the city, a tavern in the basement of the Lord Elgin Hotel. Audiences there tend to be smaller—stripped of the captive audience of uncommitted students—and less predictable. Even Ottawa, although more homogeneous than other large Canadian cities, is a cultural grab-bag of avid readers and aspiring writers—displaced Westerners and Maritimers, astrologers, immigrants, poets of punk, retired civil servants, mental hospital graduates and others. Inevitably, there are risks and surprises involved in exposing visiting writers to the questions and requests for aid that often come from such an unregimented group. But the move off campus is an expression of faith, on Arc’s part, that there is a literary audience to be found, and that the opportunity to see writers in person will stimulate an interest in their books, even when degrees and university credit are not offered as bait.

The Arc reading series distinguished itself in a second way last winter by reaching beyond the Toronto-centric orbit to bring in a welcome succession of western, especially prairie, poets, and a major figure of Quebecois literature, Michel Tremblay. Toronto writers were not wholly neglected, of course, but those sponsored by Arc tended to be writers near the beginning of promising careers, or who have not been the benefactors of the media-star system that operates even in the small world of CanLit.

By stepping out into the community and seeking quality work rather than big reputations, Arc has helped to fill the huge gap between the universities and the community-based reading series such as Tree and Orion. These non-academic groups also bring to Ottawa established writers and talented newcomers from across the country, but the mainstay of their repertoire, and their support, comes from Ottawa writers and aspirants, from the city’s “cultural grab-bag.”

Tree, which has met on the second and fourth Tuesday of every month for the past three-and-a-half years at the Friends’ Meeting House in the Glebe, has been the most consistent in promoting the view that local and beginning writers, too, need and deserve an opportunity to read for an audience. The result is often appalling, sometimes surprising and even exciting, as when one discovers “unknown” local writers of the calibre of Clive Doucet and Margaret Dyment. Visiting writers like Patrick Lane and Joe Rosenblatt may resent having to wait through the offerings of a dozen open-readers and a local musician; but it is not many years since they themselves bulled their way into public notice in the same kind of setting, whatever romantic aura may cling to them now. There is plenty of room for improvement in these programs. For example, a separate evening might be set as an open reading at which constructive comment and discussion are encouraged. Tree’s organizers stick religiously to their original format, however, reasoning (and who can say they are wrong?) that exposure to the example of accomplished visiting writers will do more to improve the craftmanship of novices than any amount of comment from their peers.

Implicit in this reasoning, of course, is the recognition that without the opportunity to stand up and read their own work, many members of the audience simply would not be there. (This the organizers of Arc, which tolerates no open readings, can sadly confirm.) The depressing fact is that, after decades of open hostility between “difficult” poets and “common” readers, the effort of building an audience for serious writing in Canada (and not only in Canada) is frustrating, unrewarding and possibly hopeless. Yet without an audience, the work of today’s literary “stars” is as doomed as the therapeutic verse that receives polite or embarassed applause at open readings.

Good writing comes not out of a cultural vacuum, but out of a community of avid and discerning readers who are awake to the literary achievements of the past, to the best contemporary writing wherever in the world it originates, and to the literary culture of their own country.

An important function all readings serve is to bring together the writers who share this time and place, giving them the opportunity to build a community that will foster, recognize and encourage writers of genuine talent when they most need it—before they have given in to

despair and taken up one of the multitude of more rewarding professions. The Tree series made the most direct gestures toward the building of such a community in the past year, by introducing to English-speaking readers several francophone poets from the Outaouais region,

and on another evening, four of the Chilean exile writers associated with Ottawa’s Spanish-language publisher, Editions Cordillera. The cultural base, which is inevitably small in a city of only half a million, is further threatened in Ottawa by linguistic division. Communication between the cultural groups is especially important here, therefore; and it was encouraging this spring to see Ottawa writers in English, French and Spanish discussing their art at a reception for one of Arc’s readers from the prairies, Anne Szumigalski.

Public readings, then, have created a good deal of activity in literary circles. But apart from the devastatingly gloomy picture with which John Metcalf concludes his book Kicking Against the Pricks, there have been few attempts to assess the contribution made by all this activity to Canadian literary culture. What is the function of a poetry (or prose) reading? How does it advance the cause of serious writing? Does it exert an influence on what is written and published in Canada?

The anecdotal account above suggests a number of answers. A poetry reading may be an aesthetic experience in itself, a means of building the poetry audience and community, or a promotional event for the writer. It may, of course, be all three.

As promotional events, the University of Ottawa’s readings were by far the most successful, for the most part being well-coordinated with publishers as part of nation-wide bookselling tours. But any poetry reading at which a single book is sold must be counted a success by comparison with bookstores, where poetry books, if they are given shelf space at all, tend to linger untouched until marked down to fifty-nine cents.

One lesson to be learned from going to readings is that culture does not consist merely of books and pictures and buildings; it is the people who write and read the books, who create and look at the pictures, who design and live in the buildings. A reading is often a social event as much as an aesthetic one, and should be. There is not a one-way communication line between writer and audience. Writers and readers share a body of collective myths and images, which creates a context within which they can interpret both literature and experience. When a poet reads to an audience, he or she gains a new perspective on the work. Laughter, whether nervous or amused, restless shuffling or rapt silence—every response is part of a subtle dialogue that lets the writer know whether the work has achieved the intended impact. This dialogue, along with the informal exchange before and after the reading, helps the writer discover what she or he must write; and it gives the audience new entrances to the work—human, “non-literary” entrances, perhaps, but important ones nonetheless.

The formal question-and-answer period that follows many readings is rarely the best forum for such exchanges. Some writers, knowing very well the pitfalls of attempting off-the-cuff replies to the off-the-wall questions they are liable to be asked, politely and firmly refuse this part of the ritual. Others would be well-advised to do the same. Michael Ondaatje — a writer accustomed to media attention and questions—takes no risks in this situation, answering in two or three words that give nothing away, and don’t involve him in trying to defend half-baked arguments. Other writers—Chris Wiseman, for example—are more daring and provocative. But the teacher-student situation is rarely conducive to a serious argument or exchange. The audience is likely to find that even stimulating writers with challenging ideas can be as muddled and incoherent as anyone else when forced to think on their feet. There are exceptions, of course, for which we can be thankful. Michel Tremblay, for one, appearing in the Arc series, gave succinct and brilliant responses that provided valuable insights into his work and creative methods.

I have left the hardest questions for last, not altogether out of cowardice, but rather, to leave readers—many of whom must be writers themselves—with a challenge.

How, then, do readings measure up as aesthetic experiences? Usually about as well as a Friday afternoon traffic jam—both tend to be hot, uncomfortable, frustrating, seemingly endless, inescapable, and free. It seems that many writers still believe the modernist doctrine that poetry can be understood only with the book open and The Golden Bough and OED close at hand; and so disdain to pamper the audience by providing a performance. Doubtless some writers cynically regard a reading as merely a quick two hundred dollars. Others, I am convinced, simply have too much faith in the printed word, and neglect to give their voices those nuances of pitch and tone and timing that convey such a large part of the meaning of spoken language. Precisely these performance skills are required to make even a superb short story writer into a good story teller. It is true that any good poem (or story) has complexities that cannot be taken in by a listener or reader the first time through. The same is true, though, of plays, although people continue to go to the theatre. A public reading is a variety of theatre, with the writer playing the role of him/herself as well as any other parts the writing demands. The trouble is, readings are usually bad theatre; often very, very bad theatre. Moviegoers who, excited by seeing the film Poetry in Motion, seek out the next live poetry reading in their town are likely never to repeat their folly.

It is unreasonable to expect writers to turn themselves into actors for the sake of an occasional reading fee, but it bears asking what purpose is served, in terms of building an audience and selling books, by giving a lacklustre performance of even the best work. There is a temptation, of course, to dilute one’s material in order to hold an audience—to read only comic poems, or narrative poems that are easy to follow. No harm comes of this until the writer lets awareness of the audience inhibit her or his adventurous spirit, and begins to write with the limited attention span of the listening audience in mind. On the contrary, the writer should be trying to stretch the audience’s capacity for appreciation. Some—like the Toronto group Owen Sound who appeared at Tree this year, and the Ottawa group First Draft, who place poetry at the heart of their multimedia shows—combine the written word with elements of theatre, music and visual art, stressing above all other values the impact of the work as performance. Attempts to wed poetry with music and other arts take us beyond the realm of the public reading as such; but perhaps there has been an undue emphasis on the word “reading”, which has allowed ill-prepared, undramatic performances to frustrate the quest for a larger audience.

Readings don’t have to be dull, any more than poetry has to be stuffy or difficult. The most memorable reading of the year, for me, was in the Arc series, when well over a hundred people crowded into the basement of the Lord Elgin Hotel to hear Michel Tremblay read in English from one of his novels.

Tremblay is best known for his plays, of course; but on that night, with neither actors nor costumes nor lighting nor sets, he made his audience see his characters, and feel their humour and their rage. Fielding questions from the floor afterward he increased, rather than diminished, his audience’s esteem for him and understanding of is work. He even offered, for a second encore, to sing and dance. That would have been too much. The performance he gave had already convinced many that there is no need to make such compromises to popular taste in order to reach a wider audience through public readings.

Personal Epilogue

A year and a half ago, when I was new to Ottawa and knew no one in the writing community, I stood up at one of Tree’s open readings and read from my recently published first book, In Transit. The featured reader that evening was Ottawa poet Christopher Levenson, and I made a point of mentioning that his first published collection, too, was called In Transit. On the basis of this affinity—surely not entirely coincidental—I became a member of the Arc poetry group, first by attending its writers’ workshop, then as a contributor and finally a distribution editor of the magazine.

Meanwhile, poetry readings had been serving their culture-building function. I had helped organize the first Ottawa Poetry Festival—a day and a half of readings—and edited the festival’s commemorative anthology, producing it with designer Carol English who would soon be designing the first publication under my own Ouroboros imprint. At further Tree and Arc readings, I got to know Ottawa poet Susan McMaster, and at her invitation attended some of the weekly meetings of First Draft—a discussion group of poets, new music composers and visual artists. At that time, First Draft was preparing its second annual collaborative group show. I was invited to read some of my poems in the show, and to be part of a “performance poetry” trio. The performance poetry—poems by Susan McMaster scored for human voice as a musical instrument by Andrew McClure—excited me as a genuine union of music and poetry, which treated as primary the aural qualities of  words and rhythms, and the public performance of the work. In rehearsing these pieces with the group, I realized that my own poetry presented dramatic possibilities for a solo speaker which I had barely begun to explore in my conventional readings.

I memorized the poems I was to recite in the show, and endeavoured to bring the meanings of the words off the page, using tone, pitch and action as an actor might. As my voice coach, the show’s artistic director Sharon Burke, said, the audience would have only one opportunity to hear my words, to “get” my poem, so I must use all the resources at my command to bring it to life for them. She was right. No matter whether the audience is large or small, the removal of the text—too often a barrier—establishes an intimacy between poet and audience. Without the necessity (or luxury) of reading, I was able to make eye contact with my listeners, to speak directly to them, and to seize upon their positive responses, concentrating the “flow of energy” of which actors often speak. Poetry performed this way can be far more effective, in public, than if the poet’s eyes are leashed to the page. Far from betraying or watering down the poetry, such a performance enhances the work for both reader and audience. It requires the poet both to know his or her material very well, and to know the capacity of his/her voice and body to express that material.

When I go to a poetry reading, now, and see a talking head behind a podium “reading” rather than communicating, I am reminded that the fault is not in the stars if poetry readings fail to instill in the literate public the excitement and conviction, even the enlightenment, that has gone into the poet’s writing. Not all writers want to, or should, expend the creative energy required to transform their works from written into spoken art. Their time might well be better spent in a silent room, perfecting the craft and art in which they are uniquely gifted. But there are writers for whom the poem is its performance, the story is its telling, who can spellbind a small crowded room in the way Homer and the first poets long before Homer did their small audiences. For these rare artistic experiences (as well as to meet friends and sell books) I continue to go, hopefully, prepared for disappointment, sometimes with manuscript in hand, to poetry readings in Ottawa.

For the third part of “Between the Eclipses” go here.