jihffcr<& EARLE BIRNEY: A Tribute

EARLE BIRNEY: A Tribute EDITED BY Sioux Browning and Melanie J. Little

COMPILED BY Chad Norman

PRODUCTION AND DESIGN BY Sioux Browning

COVER AND INTERIOR ILLUSTRATIONS BY Heather Spears

PRINTED BY OK Graphics

Produced in cooperation with PRISM international.

Contents Copyright © 1998 PRISM international for the authors.

Net proceeds from the sale of this book will go towards the annual PRISM international Earle Birney Prize for Poetry.

PRISM international, a magazine of contemporary writing, is pub­ lished four times per year by the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z1.

ISSN 0032.8790 TABLE OF CONTENTS

bill bissett life is like a gypsy violin regardless 5

Al Purdy Birney: Dean of Canadian Poets 7

D. G. Jones For Earle Birney 15

Phil Thomas Authors Anonymous 16

Peter Trower Toronto the Moist 18

Janis Rapoport A Personal Memory 19

Louis Dudek from Notebook 1964-1978 22

I.B.Iskov When He Died, He Took One Last Poem With Him 24

Jacob Zilber A Little Shelter 25

Robert Sward The Generous and Humane Voice 27

Jan de Bruyn For My Former Friend and Colleague 30

Hilda Thomas To A Wild Beard 31

Earle Birney A Wild Beard Replies 33

Peter Trower Journeyman 34

Alison Acker Remembering Earle 35

Doug Lochhead An Acquaintance Remembers 38

Chad Norman The Blackened Spine 41

Glen Sorestad Suitcases of Poetry 44

Georgejohnston A Few Personal Notes 45

Fred Candelaria Amazing Labyrinth 47

Wayson Choy Nothing Would Be The Same Again 48

Linda Rogers The Perfect Consonant Rhyme 50

Wail an Low Once High On A Hill 52 Pirn wi**"* ik M m A A * i RISM international POETRY PRiZE

EARLE BIRNEY PRIZE FOR POETRY

RISM international will enter its fortieth year in 1999. Over the years it has had the opportunity to publish work by some Pof the world's best writers and to introduce many promising newcomers to the literary scene. Earle Birney was instrumental in making PRISM what it is today. Through his initiative, the magazine, which had been targeted largely at west coast readers, began to reach an international audience; likewise, it began to bring international writers to a Canadian audience, while still maintaining its strong west coast voice. Birney also affiliated PRISM with the newly formed Creative Writing department at the University of British Columbia, where it found a home. In 1997, to commemorate Birney's involvement with the magazine, PRISM international launched the Earle Birney Prize for Poetry. The prize, which is chosen by the editor or editors, is worth $500 and is awarded annually for the best poem or group of poems in the volume. The inaugural prize was given to Montreal poet Bruce Taylor. The second winner will be announced in July, 1998. PRISM intends the prize to reward those qualities which also distinguished Birney's poetry: strong voice, a sense of adventure and newness, and attention to craft. The prize is open to all poets published in PRISM, regardless of their nationality or chosen poetic form.

Sioux Browning and Melanie J. Little, Editors of PRISM international bill bissett • s 1 tup * »JP kJ ^o^ *»- l~ LIFE IS LIKE A GYPSEE VIOLIN REGARDLESS

earle birney as well as being a great poet a wundrful prson n a higlee esteemd n deeplee appresiatid fello traveller comet reelee star burst grappling demons cumming up with offrings 4 us all 2 mingul with muse upon n b veree grateful 4 in hi school we studied david great pome bankok boy his naytur pome abt vankouvr manee places his politikul poetree he knew sew much 2 detail 2 elusidate his Chaucerian contemp oraree premises his veree post modern langwages vizuals his love poetree his adventurs n teechings n finalee his inkredibul love poetree 2 wailan editid by al purdy inkredibul in that th marriage uv form n kon tent is totalee seemless n offrs 2 th reedr th heart beet uv all our great loves earle birney also veree kind beekon n veree encouraging 2 beginning poets a trust we all want 2 dew with each othr regardless uv anee age or whatevr its sew hard alredee we try 2 b ther 4 each othr he was great at that ovrcumming th perils uv iso laysun not eezee th time 2 write sew fragile n precar ious 2 find 2 b in 4 with n earle gave me a leg up whn othrwise I wud uv bin totalee on th street thru guiding me 2 purchasers arranging th sale uv mss n buying a painting from me wun uv th first i evr sold at a time whn i was living on th floor n was wun uv thos generous inkrediblee kind acts wch made all th diffrens in my life earle birney did a lot uv thos deeds 4 a great manee peopul thats not sung abt but its veree trew n its veree well known 2 me i lovd seeing earle in his last yeers in ths bardo as earle n it was also profound 4 me n profoundlee sad he was aftr timez uv uv kourz diffikulteez bcumming mor n mor sereen n b4 he reelee stoppd talking he sd manee in spiring things 2 me n 2 manee othrs he was a reel prson no pretens it was sew wundrful 2 b on th same bill with him eye remembr konvokaysyun hall me n thorn gunn n earle birney n earle evoked in a naytur sound pome th tundra n th candian shield th muskkeg n th sonorous sun eye askd earle with all th pain n loss heer whats ths life bizness all abt n he sd no wun knows i askd dew yu think theyul evr tell us not likely he sd eye miss earle n hope hes fine i know he is Al Purdv BIRNEY: DEAN OF CANADIAN POETS

I've had enough of this inert Ontario, this eunuch sea And pastured fenced nonentity I'm off to where a seafresh sun Slants golden warmth at dawn across Dwarfed Jurassic woods of moss

And there I'll get myself a shack With roof of shakes, and in I'll pack With beans and fishing hooks and whiskey, And when I'm getting close to famine I'll turn to dewberries and salmon And not until it rains ten weeks Will I slosh back through racing creeks And let a train bear back to Pluto, Campus tea and weekly blizzard, My pacific heart and gizzard. Though winter's sure, and war, or lectures To eastern young who've only books To tell them how a mountain looks. Or what is poverty and passion, I'll steal to Eagle Island first And slake my salt Columbian thirst.

- Beginning and ending of Birney's "Eagle Island'

he poem races ahead like a swift river; it's akin to doggerel; its rhyme-sounds bear down on your ears like flapping wings; Tit's kinda like Alexander Pope, except that it's good- humoured and drags the reader inside its drumming heartbeat. An early poem, Bin didn't include it in some of his collections, only in the large Collect. I suspect he didn't have a high opinion of it; but the poem is so closely related to Birney's own character that I find it irresistible. Earle Birney. Tall, thin and lanky, red-haired when young; bal­ ding and bushy-bearded when old; irascible and touchy as a tormented pit bull sometimes; generous and attractive and human as anyone I've ever met at other times. Some would say those traits are paradoxical, but they are not. Genus homo wraps up everything inside his two-pound (more or less) brain; and all of us share with Earle Birney the same things that make us human. They also make us fallible and infallible, vulnerable and invulnerable, both noble and ignoble. I have seen all of these things in Earle, these traits and qualities of self that I possess myself; that sometimes I deny irritably, but which I acknowledge here without a trace of reticence or shame. I've known Earle Birney since the early 1950s, more than forty years. I scraped acquaintance by sending a rather insulting letter to him in Vancouver, then met him (and was told by a kind friend that I "suckholed" to him). Over the years I've probably been as close to him as anyone of the male gender. He was a friend. Earle had a heart attack in March, 1987, suffered brain damage and lost all memory of the past. He was in and out of hospital until he died in September, 1995. Since the publication oiDavid in 1942, Birney has achieved very large stature in Canada. He won the Governor General's award for poetry twice, as well as other assorted medals and awards. In the eyes of the poetry-reading public, Birney and E.J. Pratt came to mind first when the word "poet" occurred to anyone during post-prandial brandy. (Irving Layton was a bit after those two.) And Earle wrote letters. His correspondence was enormous. Quite literally, he seemed to know everyone. And he had friends all across the world, both male and female; friendships that were never allowed to die. And Earle was a lover of women; he liked women for themselves, for their conversation and company; and he liked them in bed. One could say, entirely without irony, that he had "a genius for friendship." Earle Birney's character was restless and impatient: he wanted to be off without delay wherever he was going. An active man, he climbed mountains and scuba dived everywhere he went. In 1976 when I was standing atop the mountain at Machu Picchu in the Peruvian Andes (taken there by motorbus) looking at an even higher mountain a few miles away, I remembered Earle telling me he had

8 climbed that other mountain. I thought migawd! it'd give a goat heart failure. On the streets of Charlottetown, P.E.I., where Birney's Purvey made into a musical was billed at the local playhouse, my wife and I strove desperately to keep up with his seven-league-boots walking stride. We couldn't. At our Robin Lake house near Ameliasburg, he chopped down trees, mowed lawns, washed dishes and wanted to swim the mile-wide lake. And he was in his seventies. At his apartment in Toronto and earlier in Vancouver, he searched and searched among his belongings, wanting to make me a present of something, whatever it might be. Once he gave me a little carved wooden idol from the South Seas; when you pressed it somewhere, a large cock with red-painted foreskin sprang towards your face. Earle was never satisfied with either his reputation or his poems. The Intro, to his Selected Poems, 1966, describes relations with critics and reviewers and rehashes the long sad story of "David" (the poem) being turned down by everyone from the Ladies Home Journal to the United Church Observer. He was continually dis­ satisfied with his poems, and kept re-writing them, changing them in ways not always to their benefit. I know a little bit about this practice, since occasionally I indulge in it myself. You look at a poem perhaps months or even years after writing: you have changed and the poem hasn't. Something comes into your head, and WOW you think and say! Then work on the poem and change it, according to the great new line or word that just occurred to you. I'm trying to paint the whole man here, mean, curmudgeonly and irritable; also GENEROUS, FRIENDLY, and GOOD- HUMOURED. Of course I fail; but so what! There's a hint or two anyway.

In 1941 when Earle Birney wrote "Vancouver Lights," he was already in the Canadian Army, and went overseas as a captain in May, 1943. The poem describes the feelings of a man standing on Grouse Mountain overlooking Vancouver in wartime, meditating on the nature and accomplishments of man himself. "Beauty" is a word so misused that one hesitates to apply it to a night scene overlooking a great city, but there is no similar term to describe the panorama of sea and city and mountains. Birney stood on that high place, knowing the lights of Vancouver would soon be extinguished, with a strong possibility that barbarism would over­ whelm the world. Man is a small and weak creature; but the forces he has unloosed are colossal beyond imagination. Technology, the arts, the human spirit-these have accomplished marvellous things: but if our weapons are so powerful they wipe us off the face of the earth, or just back to the stone age, then we are responsible for our own extinction. Life and death are the subjects of "Vancouver Lights."

In the fathomless heat of our dwarfdom our dream's combustion we contrived the power the blast that snuffed us No one bound Prometheus Himself he chained and consumed his own bright liver 0 stranger Plutonian descendent or beast in the stretching night- there was light

Dramatic, even melodramatic if you prefer, exaggerated possibly: but also emotionally moving, straightforward and sincere in a way few poems are. Four years later the atomic bomb exploded over Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan. One would think that Birney was somehow privy to the Manhattan Project, and that at least one of the nuclear boys wrote him a letter about it. At that time there was no concern with environmental pollution, with sewage fouling the world's seas and chemicals despoiling vegetation. But again, it's as if Birney dreamed a future earth in 1941. The poem anticipates the possible, even probable, disaster; and standing on the world's edge the writer mourns-"if murk devour and none weave again in gossamer" we have no one to blame but ourselves. And there is little comfort in that, in fact none. But, "there was light." However much of a future the world may have, I think Earle Birney's "Vancouver Lights" will always be relevant. When David & other poems was published at Ryerson Press in 1942, it made a small splash. Critics and readers sat up and paid attention. Kind words were said and deserved. It received the Governor General's award. The title poem, "David," is nearly the opposite to "Vancouver Lights" in its quiet tone and understatement, which bring the theme into clear focus. Birney's own poetic mentors are visible in "David," although not intrusive. You can glimpse Joyce, a touch of E.J. Pratt, and far-distant Old English predecessors.

10 In its simplest terms, "David" is both tragedy and the "rites-of- passage" from youth to manhood. The young man, David, is a climber, for sport and recreation, in the BC mountains. He takes his younger friend, the first-person narrator, along on his climbing expeditions. A feeling of youthful joy and excitement is felt in the early part of the poem, which is almost a genealogy lesson for the reader. Then David falls and injures himself badly, to the extent that he does not want to continue living as a cripple and burden to other people. He asks the narrator, his friend, to push him off the ledge on which they are resting, since he is not capable of movement himself. And the additional fall would complete the job the mountain had begun. The intensity deepens at this point: the narrator was himself responsible for his friend's fall because he did not test his footholds on the mountain. It is a mark of Birney's expertise with prosody that "David," which could easily have degenerated into mere melo­ dramatic rhetoric, remains understated. It burns into the heart's memory:

That day, the last of my youth, on the last of our mountains.

Years later I dramatized "David," turned it into a half-hour radio play. I invented voices and personae for some of the bunkhouse people Birney referred to in the poem, and tried to bring the two lead characters into verbal as well as mental life. It felt weird listening to my invented people on CBC radio in Earle Birney's poem. I've forgotten what year the play was broadcast, but the ghosts who inhabit that poem still float through my head. Birney's most successful poem of the several written in Old English is "Mappemounde." The title thuds in my mind, and says things no mere translation to "map of the world" can say. It's like a spell; it's like a love letter from some old bearded seaman who dreamed out his death and life five hundred years ago, and now is speaking to a modern Arab halfseas-over in a waterfront pub:

No not this old whalehall can whelm us shiptamed gullgraced soft to our glidings [and ends] That sea is hight time it hems all heart's landtrace Men say the redeless reaching its bounds topple in the maelstrom tread back never Adread in that mere we drift to map's end II I used to get into arguments with Earle over a couple of lines in that poem. I claimed that the original version, "it hems heart's landtrace," was better than the revision; and so was the original, "we drift towards map's end." How did I get the nerve to criticize the "Dean of Can. Poets"? I half expected him to say, "Get ye back to your toys, mere stripling child that you are." But the grey beard wagged at me, and the Dean looked extraordinarily kind. When I first read "Bushed" many years ago, the poem's strange­ ness attracted me first, rather knocked me over:

He invented a rainbow but lightning struck it shattered it into the lake-lap of a mountain so big the mind slowed when he looked at it

Yet he built a shack on the shore learned to roast porcupine belly and wore the quills in his hatband

And I don't think the aforementioned strangeness ever really grows familiar. Something is happening to a man's mind, but we don't exactly know what it is despite the poem's title. Nature has turned into an enemy, changed from balmy warm days and pleasant walks in the woods to something we don't understand, something that is beyond reason. And yet the things described are not extraordinary in themselves: mountain goats chasing their tails in the high country, odd shadows the moon makes, owls hooting, cedars twisting in the wind...

But he found the mountain was clearly alive sent messages whizzing down every hot morning boomed proclamations at noon and spread out a white guard of goat- Then we remember the title, "Bushed," and realize all that's happening is entirely in the man's mind. Or is it, really? The word used is "bushed," but it could easily be "schizophrenia" if the setting was a Toronto rooming house. Bush madness. Many years ago, at age 17, I was lost in the Algoma bush of Northern Ontario for two days. I actually went through some of the things books and woodmen tell you happen in such situations. I circled around the same place three times, saw things that weren't there, and was completely terrified. It was only by an act of will that I

12 was able to start thinking rationally once again. I escaped the wood by remembering landmarks I had seen when entering the woods. And my sanity was, well-teetering, before I could gather the scat­ tered parts of my mind together again. That incident was some time before I read Birney's poem, and when I did read it my mind flew back immediately to the Algoma bush and the terror in your mind of not knowing where your body is. Something unknown and untraceable and deadly about to happen:

And now he could only bar himself in and wait for the great filing to come singing into his heart

There are other fine poems as well: "El Espolio," about two carpenters, a real one and a ghost carpenter. "The Bear on the Delhi Road," about a dancing bear and the connection with its captors and "the tranced dancing of men." And there are the love poems to Wailan that ache with tenderness; and a few others that murmur in the ears for weeks and months and decades as they did with me. These poems have entered a country's literature and mythology. And if this country ever falls apart and dies, their syllables will whisper among the ruins.

And so I come to Elspeth Cameron's biography, Earle Birney, a Life, 1994, Viking. A large book, nearly 700 pages, it details Birney's personality, career, and poems. It lists the love affairs with clinical exactitude. No argument. The love affairs did happen. Although I do think the emphasis on the old-goat-as-lover is slightly misplaced. Sure he was a lover, and aren't we all? Birney liked women as people to talk with, in bed, damn near anywhere. The biography, apart from a few factual errors, is pretty well written. The reviewers are something else. Frank Davey in the Toronto Globe and Mail, seemed rather coldly amused at the love affairs. (I can remember one of Davey's books describing his own erotic adventures in bed. It was hot stuff.) Jocelyn Laurence in the Toronto Star condemned Birney for bed-hopping and for his treatment of women, dismissing the poems as negligible. A nameless Someone in B.C. Bookworld played it sensationally, listing names of Birney's women, including photographs, and by implication condemning Earle. And I think, migawd, we human, we holier-than-thou sons- abitches! Slow to praise, quick to condemn and swift to execute.

13 Davey, Laurence, and Nameless. How much fun they must have had putting down Earle Birney for something they must have indulged in themselves many times. Or don't tell me all three of those reviewers are virgins! And that they limited their lovers to only one? Or two? Or three? Well, how many then? Let's have a figure for that, and quickly please. How many? And don't tell me they never caused pain to a member of the opposite sex? Or damage of any kind. Or that they never liked women, or men, as the case may be? At times like this I feel like throwing up in sheer disgust and dislike for my own species. However, let's leave it at that, and proceed to something more pleasant. Earle Birney and Wailan came together for the first time in 1973. They remained together until Earle was hospitalized after his first heart attack in 1987. The feeling between those two people, for fourteen years of Birney's old age and Wailan's youth was-in lieu of a better word-love. Do any of us, writer and possible readers, know what that four-letter word means? I think not. Most definitions are pretty silly. But we do know the effects of love, and that such a feeling does truly and genuinely exist in the twentieth century. It did for Earle and Wailan, fourteen-years'-worth. The Wailan poems were one result.

Near the end of this piece I think back to the beginning at Eagle Island:

I've had enough of this inert Ontario, this eunuch sea And pastured fenced nonentity I'm off to where a seafresh sun Slants golden warmth at dawn across Dwarfed Jurassic woods of moss- There is the wanderer's track in time. There is the spoor and scent and trail of bubbles and the strength of feeling and what it was like to be Earle. He paid the poem little attention, and perhaps he was right (although I don't think so). And there are the other poems to speak for him as well, when he can no longer speak for himself. Who knows whether Birney will win or lose at Stendhal's Gamble (to be read after fifty years), but it matters little now-: for both he and I and likely most readers of this piece will not be here then to say I told you so. But I say it now: I told you so.

14 #*"** I « , I f 1:! 1I kJr FOR EARLE BIRNEY

out of a war: "The Road to Nijmegen," the better part children scavenging coal, a girl on a bicycle, skirting the wind pedals and shoes, the feet extending the line what he saw gazing out over the Baie de Chaleur I don't know, I saw the long-legged jeans, his running shoes what he saw in Cartagena des Indias: los zapatos the line from Lopez made concrete in the centre of town a peer in the Peripatetic School of Lampman, Lochhead, Purdy and Lane one of those never tired of walking up and down on the earth False Creek Mouth to Tokyo Banff to Borneo how many dactyls measure the globe the distance from crawling, the time between hospitals, first steps and the long caesura-not to die with your boots on-told to go barefoot-not in a phalanx, not in iambic-Indian file-through the silva oscura the foothills, the mountains of silence even weird birds fall, even stars in strange singularity-no trace but an absence indexing density

15 Pnii • l1 w-nThoma -""ill s AUTHORS ANONYMOUS

t UBC in the fall of 1946, writers were soon aware that a noted poet was on the campus. I'd been writing poems during Amy years overseas attached to the R.A.F. and was still writing a few. Getting critical evaluation of poems is not easy and as the year went on I wondered if Professor Birney would be willing to look at some of my efforts. I had not met him, and apprehensively asked my Literary Criticism professor, Thorleif Larson, if Birney was ap­ proachable. He assured me he was, and I arranged to show him my most recent work. Once in Birney's presence I knew here was an open, kind, yet serious writer in whom one could confide. He had read the poems, asked me what poets I'd been reading, and as editor of Canadian Poetry Magazine, took two of them for publication in the March and June, 1947 issues. In the fall of 1947, I was lucky enough to join Birney's creative writing course, English 401. Birney's criticism of both poetry and prose was both demanding and supportive, yet by the end of the year I knew that I was at best an "occasional poet." Birney's class was a serious proving ground for writers, and several members went on to literary careers. Birney, taking up a suggestion by members of his 1946/47 creative writing course, started what for a time was known as "Birney's Writers' Group," where writers of both prose and poetry would present their work for critical discussion. Eric Nicol playfully dubbed the gathering "Authors Anonymous" and that name stuck. The meetings were usually in evenings at Birney's residence, but we met elsewhere at times, including other members' houses, at

Birney's class was a serious

16 UBC's beach, and at least once at Birney's Dollarton shack. Although the gatherings were happy socially, they were very useful, the prose criticism being particularly sharp. There we met interesting visitors; a few I recall include A.J.M. Smith, Theodore Roethke, Lister Sinclair, Roderick Haig-Brown, and Malcolm Lowry. During one period, Earle read us, chapter by chapter as it was being created, his picaresque Turvey. All who shared in that group know that its success was owing to Earle's quiet leadership. Following graduation with a B A and a year of teacher training, I received an appointment to teach at the high school in Ladner to all classes from Grade 9 to 13.1 consulted with Earle over the design of my Senior Matric English. In my high school teaching I also used readings in both Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, which he spec­ ially tape-recorded for me. Looking back on those years, I value Earle's introducing me to Dylan Thomas, and making it possible to have some memorable conversations with Malcolm Lowry. My last literary connection with Earle was in 1951 when he included one of my poems in the issue of Poetry Commonwealth that he edited. My recollections of those few years compel me to express my gratitude to Earle for the many ways, both direct and indirect, that he affected my life. Those years, which I shared with Hilda (poet, poetry editor of the Thunderbird, member of the Letters Club, classmate in Eng. 401, and member of Birney's AA), were and are of continuing importance to both of us.

Proving ground for writers

17 TORONTO THE MOIST

Earle Birney, my love and I wandering Toronto in the rain after coffee in his twenty-second-floor aerie (entirely appropriate roost for an old mountain scrambler), good conversation of poetry falls from trees Holy Herb Wilson and the faraway westcoast where Dylan Thomas and Malcolm Lowry once collided like two floundering ships under Earle's aegis.

Bowls of thick goulash soup in a Hungarian restaurant (poor Earle wanting to treat but forgetting his wallet- later sending a record as recompense) and now scouring moist streets for our mislaid station wagon playing hide-and-seek with us in a maze of maple trees in that unknown neighbourhood.

My love and Earle talking familiarly of South America riots tear gas poverty Fascism me, travel-novice, mostly listening to exotic yarns of Uruguay and Peru our minds sliding over the edge of the world far from windy besquirrelled unromantic Toronto our elusive station wagon and the slow drenching rain.

18 anis Kapoport A PERSONAL MEMORY

Born in Calgary, Earle Other books include Straits of Birney graduated from the Anian; Down the Lons Table (a University of British Columbia novel); Ice Cod Bell or Stone Near with First Class Honours in False Creek Mouth (1964). English Language and Literature in 1926, subsequently taking his Forty-nine St. George St., M.A. and Ph.D. at the University one of the older buildings on the of Toronto. He has taught at the U of T campus, is unique in that Universities of California, it houses the office of the Toronto, and London (where he university's first writer in was a Royal Society Research residence, Earle Birney. Fellow). He is a former editor of Since no college at U of T the Canadian Forum and has ever known such a faculty Canadian Poetry Masazine and position, Dr. Birney as resident was for a year (1945-46) writer has no defined role. He supervisor of foreign language plans to give a series of monthly broadcasts at the CBC. Since lectures, beginning with 1946 he has been a Professor of readings from his own poetry. English at the University of Subsequently he will deal with British Columbia. For his sab­ such controversial topics as batical year, he is writer in "The Writer and the Canadian residence at Scarborough College, University." He plans to devote University of Toronto. one evening to a discussion of His experience as both an the life and works of Canadian officer and in the ranks during the author Malcolm Lowry, whose Second World War furnished him latest manuscripts he helped material for his novel Turvev compile. (1949), which won the Stephen Dr. Birney will hold no Leacock Medal for Humour that official classes but will be avail­ year. His reputation as a poet was able for tutorial assistance for established by David and Other those students (graduate or Poems (1942) and Now is the undergraduate) whom he feels Time (1945), both of which are talented in the art of writing. received the Governor General's He feels that Canada is not Award for Poetry. serving her writers. Across the

19 country there is a general aca- grooves into which he himself demic failure to teach creative has slipped. The professor must writing and there is insufficient be tolerant and humble towards emphasis on the study of his students with the realization Canadian literature. He notes that any or all the members of with regret that the only creative his class may be potentially writing course previously better writers than himself, offered to undergraduates at U of Having recently returned T will not be given in the 1965- from the Commonwealth Poetry 66 season. Conference, Dr. Birney seems According to Dr. Birney inspired by the intriguing poetic creative writing is a subject forms presented there. Visual worthy of the dignity of a univ- poetry read to a background of ersity course. He stresses the electronic music. Poetry created fact that a professor of creative as a complement to paintings and writing should be able to realize sculpture. Birney will devote one that he can only teach his craft of his lectures to these fas- and not force students into the cinating new media.

The Varsity, University of Toronto, October 29, 1965

t's because of Earle Birney I became a writer. Thirty years ago Earle was the first Writer in Residence at the University of IToronto and I was a fledgling teenage reporter of the Varsity (as well as being a New College student in Philosophy). I had attended a lecture/poetry reading of Earle's and submitted a report on the evening "Birney reads Birney" but was anxious to speak to him further on a one-to-one basis. So I asked my Varsity editor if I could be switched from the architecture beat (one of my recent assignments had been to write up the "to cover or not to cover" controversy concerning the exterior pipes on the engineering building) to literature; i.e. I wanted to do a feature article on Earle Birney. Thankfully, Earle was easy to talk to. After I'd run out of questions and was getting ready to leave, he said he had a question for me...did I by any chance happen to write poetry? Did I write poetry?! Of course. I had been writing poetry since the age of twelve, and recently had some acceptances for publication. But I didn't know whether to make that confession in the presence of a real, much- admired and accomplished poet.

20 He offered to read a selection of the poetry I hadn't yet admitted to writing and said if he found merit in the work he would ask me to come in so that he could give his comments. (Back then, as I recall, a Writer in Residence gave lectures and a reading or two but did not have many individual manuscripts on which to comment.) If he didn't think the work had any potential he wouldn't call but would return the material by mail. I did not expect the phone to ring. When I next saw Earle it was about a week later back in his office and he had my poems spread all over the top of his desk. I remember staring at his very bright, very blue eyes. I remember him talking about the concept of emotion in relation to the concept of the poem. I'd written something about a dead kitten at the side of an urban street and I'd been trying too hard to make the reader feel a great deal of sorrow and pity. He said that these emotions must be evoked, not laid on with such a heavy hand. I've done my best to follow that advice and have passed on Earle's "message" to my own students. Earle asked if I would be staying at the University of Toronto for another year and if so would I be interested in joining the first official creative writing class that was to be run by a professor at Trinity College, Dave Godfrey. Earle said he would get in touch with Dave to recommend me as a participant. Then he offered to drive me home. His red MGB electrified the middle-class part of Toronto where I still lived with my parents. I don't think the neighbours had ever seen a man with longish white hair let alone such a man driving a flashy convertible sports car; accompanied, moreover, by a young woman from their own modern but conservative community. We said good-bye and I thanked him, not sufficiently, not then knowing that at the end of the creative writing course I was about to take on his recommendation I would co-found a publishing house- Anansi~and that my own book of poetry-Within the Whirling Moment-would be among its first titles.

21 oms Duclek from NOTEBOOK 1964-1978

EARLE BIRNEY

Earle Birney in Montreal Fri. and Sat. gave a reading at the McGill Union (which I had arranged). Attendance about 100. Slides of experimental poems which I had prepared for this, including some of Pierre Coupey's. Lunch with Earle and Ron at Beaver Lake Sat. E.B. told us that he started on poetry very late in life because in the 30s he was committed to Marxism, and literature he then considered a betrayal in the face of political reality. As a result, he said, he has always been classed with poets of the 30s - "Livesay, etc." whereas actually he had not been on the scene at all at that time. "David" was his first serious poem. He had been married and divorced early in the 1930s. He can see the Nietzschean idea, which I have suggested, in "David." But it is clear that this implication was not in his mind at the time of writing. Leonard Cohen, he thinks, is playing around with drugs, and that's dangerous, but he is not yet hooked. (I had heard various stories.) Leonard is a prize kibitzer, the sort who never contradicted his mother directly but drove her up the wall by his non-sequiturs and little perversities. He had transferred these attitudes to the world, and to his poetry, as a kind of wobbly insouciance without point or axis. I find it merely irritating. (March 18/64)

22 AFTERNOON TEA

Had tea with Ron Everson at Les Pres (he had beer, actually, and I had coffee). He is very beautiful and frail, and sad. Says his eyesight is not improving after his last operation for cataracts. Wants to go see another specialist "for a second opinion." Very touching to hear Ron tell me how he went to hear me lec­ ture before he ever knew me, when I first came to McGill. Wanted to know "what I would be like" and "what I would say." Told me about a letter he'd just received from Earle Birney who's finding the writing "very slow" on his second book of memoirs. Birney still planning to give a reading. All very sad. We are all fading fast, the old boys. And the young are lost to poetry; the criticism today, I said, "mere flummery." We discussed the word flummery. Flattery, humbug-it fits the case. And Ralph Gustafson, fast disappearing too. Travelling some­ where to hear music, or to get away. But not the same. Not the same as we were. As I wrote on a piece of paper this afternoon: "The approach of death brings no special wisdom./ One mumbles and dies." One mumbles and dies. (October 30/86)

23 LB. Iskov WHEN HE DIED, HE TOOK ONE LAST POEM WITH HIM

He lived his life like a leaf dancing and singing from a hazel bough In winter, he'd simply move the tree indoors

His words etched a million faces on paper burned a memory in metaphor cities of parchment exploded like firecrackers

His hands moulded pictures like a sculptor he'd fashion shadows in holes and everyone would gasp at their exactness The ritual was a myth

He sleeps with one last poem as a blanket to cover the decay of genius now and forever

24 acob Zilber A LITTLE SHELTER

He not only gave us valuable technical advice, but what every young writer needs: hope. — Eugene O'Neill, regarding Professor George Pierce Baker, in whose Yale play writing workshop O'Neill had been a member.

will leave it to others to talk about Earle Birney as an author and teacher and will confine my remarks to his struggle on behalf of Iaspiring young writers. That struggle originated when he became a student at the University of British Columbia almost 80 years ago. In those days it was unusual for anyone to attend university, and Earle Birney was thought to be even more so because he harboured the passionate hope that some day he might become a writer. Per­ haps a poet. But his professors looked on this notion as a young man's fancy that the realities of life would cure, and that, in any case, a university should not encourage. (As Karl Shapiro would say many years later, universities regarded creative writing as a Trojan horse- once it was brought into the groves of academe, barbarians would leap out and overrun the campus.) Young Birney, however, was a tenacious type. Not only did he determine to become a writer, he vowed that he would try to change the University's attitude toward future aspiring writers-if he ever had the chance. By 1946, he had become a professor of English at the University of Toronto, and since he was not yet cured, he had also become one of Canada's best and best-known poets. Now came the chance that he was looking for: UBC's president invited him to teach at his alma mater. And he accepted on condition, as he put it, that "I can have one course I can believe in, the first stone in a little shelter for the creative student naked in academia." The condition was granted. UBC became the first Canadian university to give a credit course in creative writing. Three years later, he commented: "That stipulation was the wisest I, a foolish man in general, ever made. The

25 feeling of companioning and actually helping talented young writers to survive and mature still sustains me..." After 11 years of trying, he managed to add two more stones to the shelter. But these concessions were not made happily. And when he tried to get the department to hire a controversial writer to teach one of the new courses, he was stymied by the opposition. In protest, Birney sent a fiery letter to the Dean of Arts, resigning from the English Department and saying, "I urge you to make Jake Zilber and myself the nucleus of an independent department of creative writing, with the freedom to develop a program according to the best interests of the students." A new Dean of Arts appointed a committee to advise him on what to do about this matter, while creative writing remained in limbo. The committee, whose ranks included several English Department members, recommended that creative writing be granted departmental status. The Dean agreed, and it was not long before there came into being Canada's first, officially designated Department of Creative Writing. Earle Birney called this his proudest achievement at UBC. Second came his saving of PRISM magazine when it was about to expire by making its publication (as PRISM international) part of the creative writing program. Now, 35 years later, the program and the magazine are alive and well. Because of Earle, there are ex-students who, as creative writing teachers, have been building shelters in high schools, colleges, and universities. Because of him, there are ex-students who have won national and international recognition for their writing or for their work in film, television, radio, and publishing. All of this is proof and justification of his labours. If Earle were here today, I would say, "You gave hope to young writers. You pioneered the building of shelters where talent would be nurtured and challenged. Workman, you built well. We owe you a debt of gratitude."

26 Robert Sward THE GENEROUS AND HUMANE VOICE

f^X arie Birney's prose, like his varied and vigorous poetry is remarkable for its sheer open-heartedness, the generous rand humane voice that shines through everywhere. Spreading Time is a collection of literary memoirs and rem­ iniscences infused with passion and humour. The book, Birney's thirtieth, includes reviews, editorials and articles-some previously unpublished-on such figures as Charles G.D. Roberts, Ralph Gustafson, P.K. Page, Robert Finch, and Louis Dudek. Interspersed with the reviews and articles are brief, personal recollections that give appropriate background information and help set the mood for the pieces that follow. For example, in the section entitled "Spring Plowing, 1904-26," Birney writes of his own origins (on a remote ranch in the Alberta bush) and traces his development from elementary school days in Banff to his time as a bank teller in Vernon, BC, to the University of British Columbia (in 1922) and the start of his own writing career. The section ends with Birney's entertaining description of his encounters at UBC with "the then still un-knighted Charles G.D. Roberts" and Roberts' cousin, Bliss Carman. Carman, "...billed by the Canadian Authors' Association as 'one of Canada's laureate poets,'" came to read at UBC in 1926. Birney relates how he had already formed the opinion, "from Carman's anthologized poems, that he was nobody's laureate." Birney goes on to describe how he was called into professor Garnett Sedgewick's office an hour before Carman's reading "and told by the great Doc that the Poet of the Open Road wanted someone to guide him into 'one of our woodland trails,' for a walk before his performance." However, Carman stubbornly set off on his own into the BC undergrowth and got lost. One of the delights of Spreading Time is hearing Birney speaking informally about his early years in the west and, at one point, recalling his own excitement at "seeing my first window

27 display just for a book, a book by a real live Canadian about real places somewhere, at least, in our Rocky Mountains." Teasingly, he adds, "I had become a regionalist." Birney's career gives a perspective on the Depression few other writers have managed. As literary editor of the Canadian Forum in the 1930s, he was in a unique position to observe and to influence, in some degree, the direction of Canadian poetry and social comment as it appeared in the pages of that important publication. Moreover, as a noted poet, medieval scholar, editor, award-winning novelist and CBC broadcaster, Birney numbered among his colleagues and contributing editors poet Leo Kennedy; Frank Underhill, professor of Canadian history; Frank Scott, professor of lawatMcGill; painter Peggy Nichol; sociologist Leonard Marsh; and others. Elsewhere, in "As I Remember 1941," Birney writes of Alan Crawley, whose west coast magazine, Contemporary Verse, "did more perhaps to advance the reputation of Canadian poetry than any other magazine before or since...Alan, although totally blind, read (by the voice of Jean, his devoted wife) every word of the constantly growing volume of mail that came to them from both Canadian and American poets, and sent replies discussing the submission, whether or not he accepted them. His judgement was acute, his taste sensitive, his energy constant."

Earle Birney, perhaps the first

28 One recurring theme in Spreading Time is Birney's concern with raising Canada's cultural standards. In 1948, he gave a radio broadcast entitled "How Can We Raise Canada's Cultural Stan­ dards?" in which he noted, "...until we who work in the arts find the way to persuade our representatives to greatly increase the outlays for cultural development, our arts will continue to be starved and our cultural standards will not rise but sink." In "Poetry Is An Oral Art: Poets Should Hire A Hall" (originally printed in 1948 in the Globe and Mail), Birney writes, "We have only two journals of verse of any standing; one is a mimeographed quarterly limited to about 1000 lines a year; the other appears fitfully in Toronto and is consequently hostile to any verse which looks to be heterodox in either form or content." He goes on to say, "The trouble with Canadian poetry then, as I see it, is this gulf between the poet and his audience..." These words are as true today as they were 30 years ago. Yet Earle Birney, perhaps the first authentic voice in Canadian poetry, has done as much as any other author to narrow that gulf. Birney's comments on the poetry of Robert Finch apply equally well to himself: "He is, in fact, very un-Canadian in his hatred of the cheap, and his devotion to the world of taste and art. [In his] assertion of the virtues of hope and endurance, he is part of the best ofus." authentic voice in Cdn. poetry

29 ja• n de Bruyn FOR MY FORMER FRIEND AND COLLEAGUE

n the late '30s my sister Ida and I, along with my school buddies Emil Bjarnason and Vic Hopwood, attended a monthly meeting Iof a group of people who read and wrote poetry. Among our number were Dorothy Livesay and her husband. We were all enthusiasts, though not (except for Dorothy) particularly talented. Earle Birney arose frequently in our discussions as one who represented the beginning of a new and zestful surge in Canadian writing. In 1940, when my sister and I were living in Ottawa, we sent our poetry to the Canadian Forum, of which Earle was the editor. To our surprise, he accepted poems by both of us, though clearly he especially favoured my sister's. Characteristically, he recorded her name among others who he considered showed promise. This interest in budding poets (even those who never produced blos­ soms) and his encouragement of them were major features of all his active literary life. Without meaning to disparage those who laid the groundwork of our literature, I think it is fair to say that before the Second Great War, Canadian literature was derivative, staid, and passionless. After the war, it became a vibrant, fast-growing, and rich aspect of our culture, thanks in very large part to the pioneering boldness of Earle Birney. Not only in his assistance to other writers, but in the quality, novelty, and feeling of his own work, Earle made his magnificent contribution to the burgeoning Canadian literature in the formative years from the 1940s to the 1980s. Much of what he wrote will be long read and respected; in my opinion some of it, including "David," achieved greatness.

30 Hilda Thomas TO A WILD BEARD

hil Thomas and I were both enrolled in Earle Birney's second creative writing workshop-English 401~in 1947-48. At the Ptime, Earle was two years out of the army, but still wearing his uniform on occasion, probably motivated more by thrift than by any regard for things military. With his uniform, his cane, which hinted at some romantic war wound (he was actually injured in a training camp accident), and his red beard, Major Birney was a glamorous and somewhat intimidating figure. Although some of the glamour remained-he was, after all, that rara avis, a published Canadian poet and winner of the Gee Gee award-in the classroom he was anything but intimidating. He took our work seriously, and wrote helpful criticisms. He introduced us to Under the Volcano, and later to its author, the fabulous Malcolm Lowry. He was the motive force behind Authors Anonymous (so named by Eric Nicol), where we read and criticized each others' work, and he read us chapters of his work in progress, Turvey, including the expletives he later deleted from the first edition, to much hilarity. He invited us to his home, where we met writers like A.J.M. Smith and Ethel Wilson, among others, and to his waterfront shack next door to the Lowrys' at Dollarton. In short, he was an exceptional teacher and a friend. In the spring of 1948, when I was about to graduate from UBC with an Honours degree in English and Philosophy, I went to Earle with a proposal that I go on to do an MA in English (there was no Creative Writing Department at that time) with a book of lyric poems for a thesis. Earle was very enthusiastic about the idea. He and Roy Daniells, the then-Head of the English Department, had adjoining offices in the old Arts Building, and Earle went through the con­ necting door to get Daniells' approval. While I sat in the next room, Earle and Roy had a very audible shouting match, with Daniells claiming that it would be impossible to evaluate a creative writing thesis, and Earle demanding "What the Hell do you think I have been doing for the past two years in English 401?" Daniells subsequently suggested that I do an MA on Matthew Arnold, and "the best that has been known and thought in the world." Instead of an MA, I went on to have a child, and did not return to

31 UBC until the early sixties. I still saw Earle at the Authors Anony­ mous meetings, but in 1949 Phil and I moved to Pender Harbour for two years, and after our return to Vancouver we gradually lost touch with the writing community. When I returned to UBC in the early 60s, I decided to write my MA thesis on Under the Volcano. I went to see Earle, who was by that time Head of his own Creative Writing Department, to ask him to be my outside adjudicator. He refused absolutely, and was curt to the point of rudeness in his response. I was quite hurt at the time, but looking back I think he was still extremely bitter over his quarrel with Roy Daniells. Perhaps also he resented my choosing to do my MA in English, where Daniells was still Head, and to take Lowry's novel as a subject (his view of Lowry having soured somewhat after too many disastrous experiences with Malcolm in his self-dram­ atizing, inebriated state) when I might have chosen Earle's own work as a subject. Earle played an important part in our lives. He made us aware of the discipline that goes into writing, especially the writing of poetry, and he certainly sharpened our critical faculties. I would also like to add a tribute to Esther, who was unfailingly warm and generous, despite her acerbic tongue, and who always welcomed students into her home in those early years. I enclose a copy of a rather damp squib which I wrote in Earle's class, and his reply in lieu of a criticism, which demonstrates both his superior wit and his skill in versification.

TO A WILD BEARD

Birney, Birney, bearded bright Does that forest on your chin Fright your pen to writing right, Or keep the cold from getting in? Tell me, does your wife admire it, Or would she rather like to fire it? And confidentially, Earle, How do you get the thing to curl?

English 401 assignment, Oct. 31, 1947

32 tarle Birney A WILD BEARD REPLIES

When the brain threw down the shears, And the razor and its tears, An immortal hand and eye Framed my fearful symmetry.

God alone supplies the art, Twists each hair, defines the part. My wife smiles His work to see For He who made the Lamb, made me.

s^-ft-

33 etcr I rower JOURNEYMAN

The old master maker from the faraway hills that are always there in his heart in this high concrete and steel crag-top he calls his roost in the bellies of jets that hurl him a poetic emissary along the worldwinds to Sri Lanka Madrid Machu Picchu sits at his desk in the reckoning room where dreams coalesce words rustle like mice images spring from the folds of his mind like pigeons from a magician's cloak

It is a familiar alchemy he turns his conjuror's touch to It is also a war a scrabbling a wresting of essences from a sprawling horde of impressions.

He does what he has always done down the many years in the many places He is the journeyman the man of journeys at evening at his craft.

for Earle Birney

34 REMEMBERING EARLE

orry, but this is not going to be a titillating tidbit about Birney's love life. As one of Earle's Girls, I would like to forget the Smoralizing tone of his recent biography and its reviews, with their tabloid portrayals of him as a lecher, womanizer, old goat. There is something so old-fashionedly Canadian about our Puritanism. There is also a nasty sense of adolescent age-ism, more apparent to me now that thirty years have passed since we were together, and I am roughly the same age he was when we met. Okay for Leonard Cohen to celebrate sex, but not for the aging and respected Dean of Canadian poetry! Equally disturbing to me is the note of anti-feminism which suggests that Birney seduced and trapped his lovers, who were, according to Elspeth Cameron, "usually gleaned from his creative writing classes and often vulnerable because of marital or financial difficulties" (Earle Birney, a Life: Viking, 1994). So where did I fit in? I can, of course, speak only for myself, but I suspect my experiences with Earle mirrored those of many others, that most of us got more than we gave and that we share good memories and a few regrets. We met in 1965 at the Beaches Library, Toronto, where he was doing a reading. I knew a little about Canadian poetry, was a regular at the viciously critical readings held in the Bohemian Embassy, and intended to take an MA in English at the University of Toronto once I had saved enough money from teaching high school. Recently widowed and with one young son, I'd been a tough journalist, was intent on a new career, and was not looking for love or protection. I don't remember anything at all about Earle except that he read "El Greco: Espolio" and "The Bear on the Delhi Road" and the endings of both poems kept chiming in my head. When he invited me out, I went to meet the poet. How an acquaintance deepened into romance, I can no longer remember, but it was romance. I enjoyed Earle because he enjoyed life so much, was greedy for it, conscious he would only have so many years more. There was something of the country boy in his loping stride, his relish of any physical activity, his lust for knowledge about insects and plants,

35 his delight in naming things. One birthday I bought him speed skates and watched him swoop under the coloured lights on a frozen lake in Scarborough. In the Australian outback, we rode horseback into the desert. Off the Barrier Reef, we went skin diving. We made love a lot and we did it with style and a lot of laughter. Cantankerous, paranoiac, petty, self-absorbed-yes, Earle could be all of those at times. I could never understand why he had to spend so much energy on letters to friends and enemies, publishers and academics, though I probably did not appreciate how hard it was to make money as a poet or how important contacts were in shoring up a yet-fragile Canadian writing community. So much of his time was spent encouraging younger writers in Canada and all over the globe. Sometimes I'd hide his mail, wanting to shut out the world for him so that he could write, though I knew poetry doesn't work that way, and nor could he. There was a lot of his life that I did not share and did not want to. I wanted no part of the business of Canadian poetry. Earle once asked me if I would be his literary executor; I can't remember how I got out of that one. We were lucky to be together in the Sixties, sharing the exhilaration of the times. And if love-ins and a daffodil in your lapel seem laughable emblems today, that is our loss. Earle was as passionate about political change as he was about food and wine and the natural world. (When I did two weeks' jail time for trying to protect the Clayoquot rainforest in 1993, I'm sure the author of "What's So Big About GREEN?" would have approved. Approved? He'd have probably been there, blocking the road.) I suppose I was much less of a romantic than Earle. I was always conscious I was only the latest, not the last of Earle's Girls; we parted because I wanted to get married and find a father for my son. Earle never suggested marriage and neither did I. It took an aborted pregnancy to bring about an expected conclusion, and I would like to think that, like the couple in "From the Hazel Bough," we "...never took time to be broken hearted." Earle dedicated three poems to me, poems I shall always cherish not just because they were for me but because they heralded a new simplicity of style that flowered in his poems to his last, and best, love, Wailan Low, who gave him the serenity and devotion I never could have matched. I last saw Earle in 1979, at the launching party for my first book Children of the Volcano, about the results of war in Central America. He brought me flowers. He was always immensely generous of his

36 time and encouragement and his love. He did indeed, as he wrote to Esther, "spill over with very genuine feelings of tenderness and affection for more than one woman," and, "brought genuine love to those women which is still with them and which they draw some strength from to this day." Earle, I'm still proud that I knew you, in every sense of the word.

A

37 oug Lochhead AN ACQUAINTANCE REMEMBERS

did not know Earle Birney well. I wish I had. However, I feel that in a tribute to a great poet and novelist it is important to hear Ifrom the majority, from those who were his acquaintances. From those who knew him as Dr. Birney, as Mr. Birney, even as Earle. He was most approachable and many poets, students, and others would have known him by his first name. Such tributes from the fringe throw minor lights on their subject. Unfortunately, inevitably they say probably a little too much about the tribute-maker. But here goes. In the late 1940s I submitted a number of poems to Canadian Poetry Magazine. The editor was Earle Birney. I could not have done better. Earle was trying to bring new voices into the magazine and to move it into the forties, even the fifties. I had heard this. At any rate he accepted several of my poems and with the ones he turned down he sent me a kind letter. I have failed to find that letter for this note, but no matter, I remember what he said. It was about as follows: "I like your poems. We will take such and such and such (three acceptances). The remainder I return with this advice. Do not file them away but send them out immediately to other editors of other magazines. Keep them in the mails. Don't worry about rejection slips. I don't. They come in all colours and I paper my study walls with them." This from a poet of Birney's stature! I felt great. At about the same time at the University of Toronto in the Department of English I had heard about Birney and his doctoral thesis. It was about Chaucer and irony. A poet could be a scholar too. Good news. In 1951-52 I was in Victoria College as it was then. Word came across the waters that Dylan Thomas was to read at the Vancouver Art Gallery. I had to be there. Armed with the authority to offer Thomas the sum of $120 ($60 from Victoria College and $60 from Royal Roads courtesy of Professor Ruper Scheider) if he would come to Victoria to give a reading, I set out for Vancouver. On the ferry I remember thinking that this occasion might well be a wonderful opportunity to meet my editor, Earle Birney of UBC.

38 Surely he would be at the Art Gallery. He might even be able to help me meet Dylan Thomas. The Vancouver Art Gallery Theatre was packed. The poet from Wales was introduced and then took his place behind a lectern. "Good evening, and I'll have none of your damned questions," said Thomas in his rich Welsh voice and then proceeded to read sixty minutes of his poetry. It was electric. But what happened was that he made a quick exit from the stage and disappeared. Where had he gone? Was Earle Birney in the audience? I was in a quandary. Must I return to Victoria on the night ferry without my mission accomplished? Where was D. Thomas? Where the hell was E. Birney? After some desultory searching around the Gallery I gave up hope of ever meeting Dylan Thomas and conceded that my meeting with Earle Birney was delayed for the time being. George McDonagh, a friend from Toronto, and I decided to seek solace in the pub of the Hotel Vancouver until the ferry for Victoria departed. We searched for a table and there was himself, Thomas, the poet, in company with a member of the English Department of UBC. But it was not Earle Birney. We were invited to join them. Thomas was drinking what looked like mile. In the end, I had the poet sign my book of his selected poems, invited him to come to Victoria to give a reading, and generally listened to what he had to say. What he did tell me was that he could not come to Victoria because he was being driven to the University of Washington, Seattle, the very next day by Mrs. Earle Birney. But he would come to Victoria the next year, 1953. It was a double disappointment-no reading by D. Thomas and no face-to-face meeting with E. Birney. Two fine war novels came out of Vancouver in those days: Ed Mead's Remember Me and Earle Birney's Turvey: a picaresque novel. Having spent some time in the army I warmed to the misadventures of Private Turvey. It is one of this country's finest novels and it is filled with humour, something that is rare in our fiction. I resolved to talk to the author if I could ever manage to meet him. This came about in the 1960s and '70s at early meetings of the League of Canadian Poets and during Birney's year as writer in residence at the University of Toronto. His office was at Massey College where I was located. We saw each other from time to time, but all too briefly. I am sure that I am like many who wish that they had known Earle Birney better. His energy was what I envied and admired. Not only his long-legged ability to go up four steps at a time to the Great

39 Hall for meals at Massey College, but for his prolific writing. What I particularly admired was his commitment to keep his poems alive, his revising, for example, of his manuscripts and printed books housed in the Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Tor­ onto. He lived with them and wouldn't let them go. Thank you, Earle. (Some time ago I contributed by invitation some recollections for a book in honour of the poet Irving Layton. My words were described as "apocryphal" by a west coast critic who wasn't around at the time about which I was writing. These brief moments are put down as I recall them. God help me if they are anything but as accurate and true as I can make them.)

40 Chad Norman THE BLACKENED SPINE

In this time, if ever, there is a book to burn, where a life is left in the words of a lie: the compilation by a woman known for wile. Earle, hear me, a copy of this thick execution pulls my hand to a fire many hands have made. In the flames we see you back on Bloor Street, carrying David, yourfirst, far from the Finger you snap to rubble, crush into the country now so numb the provinces convene with clowns in the first ring of a circus they call Literature. In the burning words of each turning page the uniform of a soldier fills with your youth; those Rocky-rapt fingers ripping out chapters, adding to this fire all the fame of Turvey. In the heat we hear the clink of medals, you in Kyoto on a walk with the G.G. & the Leacock; as you watch the metal meld on your chest, we hear the pursuing scrape of a shoe, those years, all ten, when no poems were published,

41 what you turn to embrace, choose to enter as if a refuge. In the changing colours of each plummeting spark the tenure of an academic merges with your yen; those grant-grown sideburns denoting a new dep't, those world-swept eyes blinking out graduates, adding to this blaze all the semesters at UBC. In the crackle we find you back with Capt. Poetree, raising pnomes, your gifted, far from the Mobile you hang on a critic, purge among the public now so neutral the communities panhandle from poseurs by the last forgery of a sketch they stamp Innovation. In the ember we watch the trial of a city, you in Toronto on a stroll with Wailan & the rigmarole; as you revise the patent past, on your shoulder, we follow the bending finger of a future, those books, all unfinished, where last poems are promised, when you forget to worry, shred the works as if a henchman. In the ensuing smoke of each stiffening ash the tuxedo of a statesman appears with your yield;

those whim-whitened hairs charming a new heart,

42 those age-wrought attacks blacking out memories, adding to this debris all the teeth of Birney. This in time, as ever, a book is there to burn, where a stature is sold as the romps of a seducer; the advertisement by a woman known to winnow. Earle, leave me, the spine of this blackened tome seals my deed in the smoulder few deeds can douse.

43 ilen Sorestad SUITCASES OF POETRY

Here today in Calgary, under a spring blue I am waiting to arc up and descend into America into the dry warmth of the New Mexico desert with a heavy bookbag laden with my poetry... and suddenly it's easy to remember you and marvel at all those departures you made with a satchel full of poetry books, off on another series of readings: easy to recall a time you landed in Saskatoon weighed down with a suitcase of poems and left town a few days later with it empty, well into your eighth decade then.

Now, in your ninth, crumpled on a white bed in a Toronto hospital, do unwritten poems still flit and dance behind your eyelids as nubile nurses hover over your thoughts? And is the sky as blue as a poem in the space you lie in, somewhere above that hospital bed?

I will arc up and out of Calgary and my poems will fly with me through the rarefied air into New Mexico; and I will have time to ponder all the reasons we do this, poets like us, who make our small gifts and bear them through the sky again and again; why we do this through one decade to another; time to think of you, several thousand miles away, locked in unaccustomed stillness, where perhaps a thousand poems you never wrote are dancing even now, dancing on the brilliant blue that lies over the eighty years behind your eyes.

44 George Johns A FEW PERSONAL NOTES

he first time I saw Earle he was coming through a window. That was in the spring of '36: the window was in an office Toccupied by Roy Daniells on the ground floor of Victoria College Library, University of Toronto. Roy was then a lecturer and I was a fourth-year undergraduate having a friendly chat with him. Earle was also a lecturer at a college in the mid-western United States. He was a skinny redhead, and long-legged; it was no trouble for him simply to step in from the green sward outside over the wide, low window-sill. The next I knew was not himself but of him. He had ridden Roy Darnell's bicycle in the Rhineland in the summer of 1935 and been knocked down in Bonn for jeering at a Brown Shirt parade. I was in Bonn on the same bicycle next summer, hence my knowledge of Earle's misadventure. He was a Trotskyist then and had served for a few months as one of Trotsky's bodyguards while he was in Norway. Then came the war years. Earle was in uniform and out of that experience came Turvey. He next swam into my ken personally at a poets' conference held at Queen's University in the '50s. There were readings of poetry by the poets and Earle had been left out of these though he had been editor of Canadian Poetry Magazine and had published three volumes of poetry. "David," title poem of the first of these, was a much discussed and admired poem. Earle felt that leaving him out of the readings had been an affront not simply to himself but to Canadian poetry in general. He voiced his complaint to me, though I had had no part in the organizing of the conference. In any case, we began a correspondence not long afterwards that lasted till the fate­ ful successive heart attacks that did such damage to his mind. Jeanne and I had many a good visit with Earle and Wailan. The

45 first was in East Leach in Gloucestershire in the spring of '74, when Jeanne and I were on sabbatical leave there. We all four made an expedition to Bisley and had lunch with two young English poets, Michael and Frances Horowitz. Michael was an energetic enthusiast who had just edited a Penguin anthology of his contemporaries' poems. Frances was a beautiful, tall, slim young woman and a fine poet, very different in style from Michael, though they did very successful readings together. She died, tragically, a few years later of a brain cancer. There were more meetings with Earle and Wailan, one in Ottawa when Earle stayed with us and gave a successful reading at Carleton University. On one of our Toronto visits he was limping. He had been cutting a branch from high up in a friend's tree when his footing gave way and he fell to the ground. For a wonder he was not killed, but he did damage one leg severely. "I think the pain away," he told us. "I start at my hip and think it slowly down my leg and out through the end of my foot." He was stoic and whole-hearted about it, as he was about everything else he thought or did. In March of '87 came the three successive heart attacks and resuscitations that destroyed his memory and mental powers. We visited him a few times, first off, and then later in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, where he seemed content enough. It was clear that he recognized us not at all. When he died nine years later, it seemed a sad departure for such a vigorous, various, and important Canadian poet.

46 n n * andelana AMAZING LABYRINTH

a dazzle an intricate maze of gears inside the watch like the endless array of russian or Chinese dolls one inside the other into infinity knight errant wit-armed to battle sometimes windmills but quixote both & sancho in one flesh the earl took on life looking its monsters & delights straight in the eye from explosive or quiet dawn until night's apocolypse erupts in silence recording mortality through good & bad times the watch you gave us is still running

"a Canadian rhapsody in e-major" for Esther Birney

47 Wayson Choy NOTHING WOULD BE THE SAME AGAIN

nen I first met Earle Birney as my short story writing teacher, 1958-59, I had already been influenced by Earle Birney the ;joet. His "David" had inspired me to write a story about two teen-aged boys in Belleville, Ontario who chal­ lenged a white-water river called the Moira. It was awkwardly written (to say the least), but it won first prize in a contest sponsored by the Gladstone High School Yearbook. "I'm a writer," I thought. In the first of my four writing classes at UBC, I was buoyed in this belief when I was the only one in the early going whom Earle chose to meet him in his office. No sooner had I entered than he boomed, "Has anyone ever pointed out to you that you have subject- verb agreement problems?" I reeled back, but when he said, "If you want to write," and paused, I perked up as I waited for the words that held the key to great writing. Earle leaned on his desk, eyes blazing, voice vibrating: "—learn how to punctuate!" He handed me the manuscript and watched me leave. Three hours later, I looked down at what I had laboured over so enthusiastically. Every page was covered with ruthless criss-cross hatchings of penciled, no-holds-barred remarks and corrections. I felt like ripping the whole thing up and calling my writing career quits. But I didn't. For it was his slap to my expectations that urged me on to the tougher realities of learning how to write. Earle had no time for coddling students who assumed there must be an easy way to acquire the writer's craft or who lacked a compelling passion to write: you wrote because you wanted to and had to. You wrote because you had a story you had to tell. Now learn the craft and earn the art. Write. Rewrite. Write. Rewrite. And learn the damn rules of grammar! The story about the two boys was rewritten half a dozen times- under Earle's guidance, under Jake Zilber's guidance, under the

48 guidance of Jan de Bruyn. Finally, "The Sound of Waves" was pub­ lished in PRISM international. A year later it was included in Best American Short Stories, 1962, along with work by John Updike, Flannery O'Connor, Arthur Miller, Irwin Shaw. I was listed as "...And Others." At the end of that term with Earle Birney, he called me into his office after looking over my last two submissions. "You're getting better, " the Master said. "Don't give up." Thirty-six years later, I published my first novel, The Jade Peony. In it, I acknowledged my debt to him. And I checked twice to be sure the punctuation was right and that each verb agreed with its subject.

49 w * 1 TH

THE PERFECT CONSONANT RHYME

Long in the tooth, they say, because the old poet, omnipotent, is valued for ivory, pounding the slippery keys as if they were frozen ponds made for the long strides of a man rushing to Armageddon, where he needs to rehearse the first and final moment, again and again, bawling, orgasmic, falling through holes in the ice, plunging himself into women and poems who lie down for as long as it takes,

as long as the words march over breasts and mountain peaks, anything that will have them the way people in pain will allow medicine women to walk on their backs, and others will listen to music,

even the sound of his piss freezing in snow, his white heart breaking on the thighs of a cold morning while the planet spins in silence as white as the sheets in his hospital bed,

nis wniits nnsiwB • prciiRiiiii %PMI

50 as the boy on the icy precipice, waiting for someone to push him off, because the view from the top- the cold alpine flowers, the rigid parts of prehistoric men aching forever, never touching the ivory brides sleeping in avalanches, the fish spawning in white water, and the perfect consonant rhyme of their eggs dropping- all the way down is beautiful.

for Earle, who taught me to write the truth when I was a child who had been taught not to

the thighs of a cola morning

51 ailan Lo ONCE HIGH ON A HILL

n the summer of 1974 Earle decided that I was overschooled and undereducated and took me east from Toronto. We kept going Ieast and by February of 1975 landed in Mexico. We were weary of moving, waking in the night and not quite remembering where we were. We had seen great beauty and great suffering, had been moved again and again by the kindness of strangers and discouraged by the relentless stupidity of the human race, and we needed to take root somewhere and make a place of stillness. Earle had spent many months, in the 1950s, in San Miguel del Allende with Leonard and Reva Brooks.* He had bought a building lot with the plan of building a house, but the construction had got only as far as the outer wall, and circumstances had led to abandonment of the plan and the sale of the lot. Now Earle was 70 and his ambitions no longer ran to ownership of land and houses. We found a little house to rent at the top of the hill where the main street turns into the Salida a Queretaro. It was San Miguel's most dangerous corner, a blind turn, and very steep. Many a truck had met disaster there, and it seemed fitting that the corner was occupied by a little church. Our house, however, was a few doors up the hill in the stony lane, and we felt confidently safe. We presented to the world a crumbling stuccoed wall and a small unpainted and battered wooden door, but inside was a tumble of bougainvillea, dark blue lobelia spilling from clay pots, and an arching jacaranda tree. The house was built on the vertical, all tile and wrought iron, and severe in the fashion of 17th century colonial Mexico though the house was quite new. The sleeping quarters were on the mezzanine, reachable from an outside door leading to the roof and patio or by an iron winding stair from the dining room, an arrangement that encouraged sobriety as the toilet was downstairs. Though the rent was $125 a month, more than we wanted to pay, we had taken it immediately.

*Leonard Brooks, painter, and Reva Brooks, photographer, are Canadian expatriates who have lived in San Miguel de Allende since 1947. Their friendship with Earle began in the 1930s in Toronto. San Miguel is a colonial town in Mexico's high central plateau. It has drawn many writers and artists.

52 Our first household purchase was a three-gallon cauldron and every morning began with the boiling of the water. I can't remember how we settled on 30 minutes of boiling but we theorized that that should kill off whatever was in the water that was likely to hurt us. February was still cold in San Miguel and the vapour warmed the kitchen. Once a week a campesino came down the lane bellowing donkey sounds. He had two burros, loaded with mesquite wood, and Earle struck up a friendly camaraderie with the man. We bought and burned a great deal of firewood. Earle had no interest in material things for himself and after 70 years of frugality, it had become a habit, but he did not like me to be cold and he enjoyed the ritual of building and tending the fire at the end of the day. Most mornings I went to the market alone while Earle went up to the roof to write. He had a tiny blue portable typewriter purchased on a whim in Fiji and had started a memoir about his political years. He had a title, "Conversations with Trotsky," and a collection of political writing he had done earlier, but it lacked connective tissue and he wanted to set straight-perhaps for himself-his reasons for getting into and out of the Marxist movement. He set up on the roof in the morning and worked till I came back with the day's treasures from the market. Some days he produced pages of script, some days nothing, but usually the day began with a letter to a friend. The letters were a warm-up exercise, getting the prose and fingers limbered. Earle typed quickly with three fingers only, but with little accuracy. He found it difficult to get started, though, and had to get himself and the scene set for writing. He had a favourite writing costume, a white hat and a blue-and-white-flowered "lava lava," an ankle-length Samoan wrap-around skirt that stayed up mainly by the willpower of its wearer. He wore huaraches with rubber tire soles. On days when he was expecting a visitor he wore shorts, very baggy and threadbare and defiantly unfashionable. Some days Earle went to the market with me, steering me away from the most notoriously rowdy cantinas where cowboys from the outlying cattle ranches might break out into the street drunk and aggressive at any hour. The market in San Miguel today is large and bright and clean and not very different from what one would find in a small town in Canada. Then, it was cluttered, dark and ripe with the smells of fruit and flowers and spilling out into the adjoining square where the Indian women sat on the ground in the midst of their displays of oranges arranged in perfect pyramids, baskets of tortillas wrapped in cloths, and mounds of pumice stones. Usually there was a baby wrapped in the rebozo and two or three dusty children milling

53 about nearby. Earle had few opinions about the quality of the produce or the soundness of the chickens, and he liked almost everything I bought and cooked, but he had stories and memories about every­ thing. I think he made a lot of it up. He did not like to ruin a good story with the truth; his stories grew better and more elaborate with each telling and I never knew how the story would end as the endings frequently changed. And so, on these walks about San Miguel to and from the market, he told me of old scandals, robberies, murders, and of adventures and scrapes he had had with his friend Leonard years before. Earle never said, though, that he missed those days and times. He liked being there in that moment and alive. Earle enrolled us both in Spanish classes at the Academia and siesta was followed by hard labour at school. I was in the beginners' class and Earle was in the advanced. He could read quite fluently and was digesting Octavio Paz and Lorca and Neruda in the original. I could not read at all but picked up market and restaurant Spanish quickly and was soon able to make my way about the town trans­ acting whatever was necessary. Earle felt, I think, a mixed pleasure in my growing independence from him, but he continued to enjoy reading poems in Spanish to me and translating as he went along. In March, San Miguel began to have power black-outs every afternoon at around five or six and we learned to cook by candlelight. While I washed and chopped, Earle and I played a game that went on for fourteen years without keeping score—he read lines of poems to me until I could name the poem and the author. It was a game that revealed, to my continuing chagrin, the deficiencies of my degree in English literature, but I knew even then that those hours in the still darkness, broken only by the light of a pair of greasy Mexican candles, were precious and that we were happy.

54 irnev Tribute AT THE HAVANA RESTAURANT AND GALLERY

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 1998

PANEL DISCUSSION: 4 PM TO 6 PM

MaryaFiamengo Lionel Kearns Heather Spears Al Purdy Miriam Waddington Joe Rosenblatt Phyllis Webb Jacob Zilber

READINGS: 7:30 PM TO 9 PM

MaryaFiamengo George Bowering Rona Murray Fred Candelaria Heather Spears Lionel Kearns Phyllis Webb Al Purdy

Havana Restaurant and Gallery 1212 Commercial Drive, Vancouver, BC

55 Thankil s AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Birney Tribute Committee would like to thank

Chad Norman and Catherine Owen Sioux Browning and Melanie J. Little Royal City Poetry Centre PRISM international and George McWhirter The Canada Council for the Arts Simon Sherwood at the Havana Otto and Chontel Koppe at OK Graphics People's Co-op Bookstore The University of British Columbia

We are especially grateful to the contributors, panel members and readers whose involvement made this project possible.

"When He Died, He Took One Last Poem With Him" was previously published in Museletter, December, 1995, by the League of Canadian Poets, Toronto, Ontario (Ted Plantos, Editor).

"The Blackened Spine" is taken from And These Are My Elders: Poems of Tribute & Thanks by Chad Norman, which features thirty poems celebrating thirty Canadian poets.

"Birney: Dean of Canadian Poets" by Al Purdy was first published as "Earle Birney" in Quarry, Volume 44: Issue 4, 1996, Kingston, Ontario (Mary Cameron, Editor).

"The Generous and Humane Voice" originally appeared in Quill & Quire, February, 1981, as "Earle Birney's recollections of post­ partum CanLit." It is a review of Birney's book Spreading Time: Remarks on Canadian Writingand Writers, Book I(1909-1949).

Exerpts from Notebook: 1964-1978 by Louis Dudek are reprinted with permission of the author.

"Toronto the Moist" and "Journeyman" by Peter Trower are reprinted with permission of the author.

56

EARLE BIRNEY: A Tribute

Alison Acker Earle Birney bill bissett Jan de Bruyn Fred Candelaria Wayson Choy Louis Dudek I. B. Iskov George Johnston D. G. Jones Doug Lochhead Wailan Low Chad Norman Al Purdy Janis Rapoport Linda Rogers Glen Sorestad Heather Spears Robert Sward Hilda Thomas Phil Thomas Peter Trower Jacob Zilber

Net proceeds from the sale of this book will go towards the annual PRISM international Earle Birney Prize for Poetry

ISSN 0032.8790