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THE
POETRY
OF THE
MONTREAL
SCENE
The poetry of the Montreal scene, at this time, seemed very
much informed by French surrealism, Cohen's lyric, and
Layton's socio/sexual politic. Louis Dudek, whose class at
McGill I visited once, was writing a kind of rhetoric
informed by his mentor, hero, and acquaintance, Ezra Pound.
Dudek seemed an ascetic loner, and was publically pummelled
regularly by Irving Layton who was on a rant about academic
university professor-poets who didn't know their "diddlers
from their assholes" or some such similar language. These
attacks were part of the tough-guy stance that gave literary
Montreal great energy: Polemics were in the air, and gave us
topics over beer and coffee. But Layton, behind these
passionate rants, also had a gentle, kind, and almost
sentimental side. I'm thankful I got to see these aspects
both in class and-over many coffees at the Tokay coffee shop
next to SGWU - a place where a few of us would gather around
him for another couple of hours of talk before heading thru
the dark side streets for home. I said very little at those
coffee sessions, but got enough courage one night to follow
him up the block. I wasn't handing in the required rhyming
exercises, and thought I'd fail this course too. I told him
I was writing free verse. Ok he said, next month we do free
verse - hand something in then. He kindly exempted me from
iambic tedium and the regularly assigned couplet
exercises.
THERE
WERE
MANY
NAMES
ON THE
SCENE
There were many names on the scene. Louis Dudek, with
co-editor Michael Gnarowski, was active with his magazine
Yes and continued to help and publish young writers in his
McGill Poetry Series, tho Leonard Cohen would remain his
most famous find. The other names I'd see and come to
recognize in the poetry mags were Pierre Coupey, Seymour
Mayne, K.V Hertz, Henry Moscovitch, Richard Sommer, Reynald
Schoofler, and others I've since forgotten. Roy Kiyooka,
however, a westerner teaching painting at SGWU, was
instrumental in organizing an ambitious reading series in
1965 - a poetry series that gave a huge lesson in North
American poetics that the purist Montreal writers put down
or ignored. This series featured Phyllis Webb Paul
Blackburn, John Weiners, Anthony Hecht, Robert Kelly,
Gwendolyn McEwan, and the writer I was most impressed by:
Robert Creeley.
I made this admission to Layton, who had known Creeley for a
long time thru correspondence and the business of preparing
a book for Creeley's Divers Press. Layton was well connected
and admired by the modern Americans. Charles Olson praised
him, William Carlos Williams "let out a yell of joy!" for
Layton's work, and Creeley published him. Yet an odd paradox
emerged. Layton graciously introduced Creeley's SGWU reading
by quoting a Creeley line asking the poem to "make a
pardonable wonder of one's blunders". Layton said: "the man
who wrote this knows all there is to know about poetry" and
went on to say that his wonderful Iyrics were powerful
little fire crackers. Yet in private, Layton seemed not to
like the general direction American poetry was taking, and
referred to some of Creeley's poetry as " paranoid mumbling"
When he asked me what I thought of Creeley's reading, I told
him I was reduced to silence. I suppose this was a kind of
breaking point, or at least a point of recognition that I
was more, in temperament and practice, attracted to
Creeley's intense revelations; his syntax projected an
emotional life I felt I understood. For Love remains one of
the great books.

MY
OTHER
HERO
AT THE
TIME
My other hero at the time, Leonard Cohen, was in Montreal
for a period in the fall of 1965. Joy phoned me one drizzly
Saturday afternoon from the famous Bistro on Mountain Street
(my favorite Montreal bar and long since boarded up as a
relic of some other age) to say that, although I wouldn't
believe it, she and her girlfriend Evelyn were sitting and
drinking with Leonard Cohen and the artist Graham Macintosh.
As she relates
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