Toronto-in-True-North: An Approach to the Work of Ted Plantos
by Terry Barker
Nine months have gone by since the death of Ted Plantos (1943 - 2001), so
it is perhaps appropriate to attempt some preliminary reflections on Ted's
place in the canon of People's Poetry. Some may, indeed, think it is none
too soon, as in his lifetime the Poet of Parliament Street certainly
qualified as the almost completely unacknowledged legislator of
Toronto-in-True-North, an entity which, by the late 1980s, had almost
completely morphed into Tim Hortonia.
Ted survived its doughy demise, however, and retained its image, probably
because his 'Ragtown' (South Cabbagetown) roots grew in the detritus of John
Graves Simcoe's original vision of an alternative America, destroyed or
stolen by U.S. forces in 1813, and almost obliterated by Canadian Whigs and
Yuppies in the twentieth century.
Born in 1943 in the later slum-cleared and renamed real Cabbagetown, a
scion of St. Paul's Roman Catholic parish, Ted grew up an East-Ender in the
era of the rumbles involving the Beanery Boys and the West-End Junction
Gang. I was born the same year in a city where the Luftwaffe was also
engaged in slum clearance, but I grew up on the periphery of the Junction,
and I can recall, aged about twelve, advancing past Maple Leaf Gardens along
Carlton Street with great trepidation, as if in an alien city, half
expecting to be jumped as an obvious West-Ender, or propositioned by one of
the 'hooers' I had been assured covered the streets in the East as thick as
flies.
My mother was asked once in those days by an East-Ender, 'How can you live
in the West End with all those foreigners?' For the West End was understood
as immigrant, and the East as English or Anglo-Canadian, with a sprinkling
of French Canadians and long-resident Greeks and Macedonians. Thus, when I
eventually met Ted, I viewed him as perhaps an archetype of the Easterner:
Cabbagetown with Newfoundland and Quebec ancestry and an apparently Greek
surname (or, as he told me, Romanian).
As a Roman Catholic, Ted brought to the rather Whitmanesque sex-and-nature
mysticism of his early self-published poetry a sacramentalism that fitted in
well with the culture of 'Zen, drugs and mysticism' (as R.C. Zaehner has
called it) of the sixties. His early Catholic Left Liberal Party sympathies
also chimed well with the radical politics of the period: the libertarian
interpretation of Marx of the Trotskyists and New Left, and of the civil
rights, free speech, and anti-war movements they helped inspire, represented
in Toronto by the people around the Bohemian Embassy and the Allan Gardens
Free Speech Movement, of which Ted was on the fringe.
Ted actually met the poet who was to become his main mentor somewhat later.
This was Milton Acorn, whom Ted encountered in the mid-1970s when he took
some of his poems to show Tom Arnett at a warehouse/office in the Bathurst
and Queen area. Ted was a bit nervous, and he assumed that the
red-check-shirted, craggy-featured man he found when he arrived was the
shipper. This initiated a weird, convoluted conversation with Milton leading
him on, before the People's Poet finally decided to set Ted straight (to Ted's not inconsiderable embarrassment).
Milton and Ted got on well personally, politically, and poetically because
both understood themselves as modern Canadian post-Romantics: patriotic,
proletarian, and protagonists of the life of the spirit. The High Anglican
Acorn and the Low Roman Catholic Plantos had both taken the proper
pilgrimage to the secular shrine before the age of thirty: the former to
Montreal to imbibe the spirit of the Canadian Georgians, and the latter to
the English Lake District, where he engaged in dialogue with the shades of
Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Ted started to produce his mature work, as represented by the collections
The Universe Ends at Sherbourne & Queen and This Tavern Has No Symmetry,
under the direct tutelage of Milton. Ted also, in the late 1970s, became a
partner with Acorn, Robin Mathews, and several of Acorn's and Mathews' Left
Nationalist colleagues in Steel Rail Educational Publishing, which grew out
of the Maoist Canadian Liberation Movement. The disintegration of this
organization after 1980 led Ted to strike out on his own, and his interest
in history came to the fore, culminating in probably his best work (in a
conventional literary sense), Passchendaele, a family and national
remembrance of the real sacrificial role of Canada in the First World War.
Other interests in the by-ways of history followed, with much material
collected about the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the UFO
phenomenon, and obscure U.S. political leaders. But Ted, like cockney poet
Charles Williams of my birth city, London, was an urban post-Romantic whose
fundamental metaphor was what Charles Williams called 'the image of the city'. In Western Europe and its fragments, this is always double
- the
Augustinian/Neoplatonist City of God and the City of Man, inextricably
interwoven in the actual life of humans.
This reality of broken unity is most easily configured poetically in the
ambiguous symbolism of the Hermetic and Gnostic currents that have
accompanied Christianity since its birth. Williams expressed it in the
magical machinery of Rosicrucian speculation, and in 1987, Ted found a
similar vehicle for his vision through his friend and fellow Toronto poet
Cliff Kennedy - the speculation on the nephilim, or fallen angels of the
pre-Flood Old Testament world, developed by eccentric U.S. Hebrew scholar,
Zecharia Sitchin.
Sitchin's Earth Chronicles series, along with its sequels, outlines a
supposedly actual history of the coming of a race from beyond the solar
system, and of the creation of human life and culture in the cities of
ancient Babylonia and Egypt - Ur of the Chaldees, etc. This provided Ted
with a cosmology for his self-described Christian mysticism, something
needed in view of the evident failure of the ideologies put in place during
the Enlightenment to provide order in the soul, and to preserve
spirituality.
In Ted's last-published book, The Shanghai Noodle Killing, a collection of
short stories, Ted revisioned his image of the city, although he did not
quite coin the fully Tennyson-derived Toronto-in-True-North, as Williams did
with his London-in Logres. But Ted did clearly articulate its principle
through the mouth of the chief character of his story 'Ragtown', the retired
boxer Scotty Dugan, who returns to his old mostly-obliterated neighbourhood:
Our spirituality is all we really have. There is a poverty in society
worse than any slum; the poverty of the spirit. Well, I just want
to say people have to fight for their spirituality because society won't do it for them.
Local Toronto archaeologists have recently chronicled the finding of the
first parliament and church (they were combined) between the street named
after the former and the street named after bishop and philosopher George
Berkeley in the book Government on Fire. Under the layers of asphalt,
rubbish, and industrial use and misuse the archaeologists found something
like Toronto-in-True-North, perhaps prefigured in Berkeley's 1730 'Verses on
the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America':
Westward the course of empire takes its way;
The first four acts already past,
A fifth shall close the drama with the day;
Time's noblest offspring is the last.
Books and chapbooks by Ted Plantos:
- The Seasons Are My Sacraments (Old Nun Books, 1972)
- She Wore a Streetcar to the Wedding (Missing Link, 1973)
- All the Easy Oils of Energy (Missing Link, 1974)
- Vigil (Pikadilly Press, 1976)
- The Light Is On My Shoulder (Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1977)
- The Universe Ends at Sherbourne & Queen (Steel Rail, 1977)
- This Tavern Has No Symmetry (Steel Rail, 1979)
- Passchendaele (Black Moss Press, 1983)
- Heather Hits Her First Home Run (Black Moss Press, 1986)
- At Home on Earth (Black Moss Press, 1992)
- Mosquito Nirvana (Wolsak and Wynn, 1993)
- Dogs Know About Parades (Black Moss Press, 1993)
- Daybreak's Long Waking: Poems Selected and New (Black Moss Press,
1997)
- The Shanghai Noodle Killing (Seraphim Editions, 2000)
Ted also edited three People's Poetry anthologies:
- The House Poets
- Poems for Sale in the Streets
- Not to Rest in Silence
Of Ted's books, Mosquito Nirvana, Dogs Know About
Parades, Daybreak's Long
Waking: Poems Selected and New, The Shanghai Noodle Killing, and Not to Rest
in Silence remain in print.
Terry Barker teaches Canadian Studies at Humber College. His
collection of essays After Acorn: Meditations on the Message of
Canada's People's Poet is published by Mekler & Deahl.
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