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