In memory of Louis Dudek, on his 104th birthday
I went out of my way to study with Louis Dudek. It wasn’t just happenstance.
I first heard of and became aware of Dudek as the teacher of Leonard Cohen. At the age of sixteen I was a Leonard Cohen fanboy. And I knew that Cohen had attended McGill University and studied with this professor named Louis Dudek. Dudek had also published Cohen’s first book, Let Us Compare Mythologies, in the McGill Poetry Series.
Originally, I wasn’t supposed to attend McGill University for my Ph.D. I was supposed to be going to York University and taking Frank Davey’s graduate Canadian Poetry seminar.
So, in the summer of 1975, I was doing advanced reading for that course while still living in Montreal with my new girlfriend Barbara. We were living in an apartment up on Cote des Neiges.
Reading ahead for Davey’s course is how I first encountered Dudek’s poetry. I was reading “the white book”: The Collected Poems of Louis Dudek. And I was really impressed by what I was reading.
The early lyrics were magnificent. And then there was a long poem called Europe. And then there was another long poem called En Mexico. By the time I got to Atlantis I was at least a fan, possibly a disciple. And Atlantis just wiped me out. Several years later, I was deeply gratified when bpNichol told me that the Epilogue to Atlantis was one of the greatest achievements in Canadian poetry. I agreed and agree with that completely.
My life got rewritten on a morning in late August. I was alone in the apartment when the phone rang (Barbara was down in Toronto, looking for an apartment for us). On the phone was Archie Malloch, who was the graduate director of the English department at McGill.
After exchanging greetings, he said to me, “I’m afraid I spoke too soon when I said we didn’t have a teaching assistantship for you. Someone has dropped out of the program, and I can offer you one now. You’re still coming, right?”
I paused for a moment, then decided to tell the truth. “Well, actually, I sent a letter declining admission back in May, because there wasn’t a teaching assistantship,” I admitted.
“We never received it,” Professor Malloch said.
Pause. Think. “Okay, then I never sent it,” I said.
And so it was resolved. I would be a candidate in
the Ph.D. program at McGill. The teaching assistantship at York was $2,400, at
McGill $7,000. It really was a no-brainer. I called Barbara and told her to
come home, we were staying in Montreal.
*
After Labour Day, it was time for me to check in with McGill.
There were three fateful meetings to have.
The first was with Professor Archie Malloch, who supervised teaching assistants. He welcomed me to the program, then asked me if I had any preferences for courses I’d like to be an assistant to. On a whim, I said Canadian Literature.
“That’s great,” he said, “no one ever asks for that.”
I was then on to meet Professor David Williams, who was the Chair of the English Department. He welcomed me to the program, then gave me a fifteen minute lecture on how, to be successful at literary studies at the Ph.D. level, you had to have a methodology. It wasn’t enough to just love reading books. I assured him that I would develop an adequate methodology (I did: it was literary history).
I’d timed things right. I appeared at the door of Professor Dudek’s office just as he was beginning office hours. I knocked, and was told to enter.
It was a big office, on the second floor of the Arts Building, that members of the English department are probably still fighting over. There were big bookshelves, and behind the desk there were large windows, with an amazing view of the campus and of downtown Montreal.
And behind the desk was Professor Dudek.
I introduced myself, and quickly handed over a copy of my first poetry book, Vegetables.
Before I could even get comfortable in the situation, he said, “Give me some time to read this. Come back next week.”
Our
first meeting had lasted all of two minutes. Not promising.
*
Nevertheless, I returned the following week.
This time he motioned me to the student chair. He allowed me to get settled before he started speaking.
“Your book reminds me of Joe Rosenblatt,” he said.
I hadn’t yet read any Joe Rosenblatt, so I had no idea what this meant.
“Pop Art gestures. You aren’t going to get very far writing poems about vegetables.”
Did I ask Why not? I don’t think so. I was intimidated. I was still a kid. What did I know about poetry?
Dudek rose from his chair. It was my first glimpse of how tall he was. He walked to the window and gestured towards the outside. “There’s the world. Why don’t you write about it?”
It seemed like a reasonable suggestion.
The conversation moved on. I told him I was a Ph.D student in the program and proposed to write a Ph.D. dissertation on D.H. Lawrence.
“The fiction or the poetry?” he asked.
“Probably the poetry,” I replied.
“As you probably know, there are no formal classes for Ph.D. students. You can audit my graduate class in Modernist Poetry if you like.”
I told him that I would like to do that.
I also told him that I’d been reading his Collected Poems and that I thought he was a fine poet.
He
told me when the graduate seminar met, in his office (his office was big enough
for a small class to meet there), and wished me good day.
*
As I got to know Louis, he began to school me in Can Lit. I was like a sponge, soaking up everything. In fairly short order, he knew that I was a both a poet and a cultural activist. He started to educate me in the work that needed doing.
He began to school me in what I have always called The Five Missions. They are the tasks I would have to undertake as a Canadian writer. They were the tasks that Dudek, himself, had already fulfilled.
The first mission was simply being the writer, being the poet. Canada wasn’t exactly an hospitable environment. He taught me that I would have to be self-motivating while also developing a very thick skin and a will to survive.
The second mission was to be a literary magazine editor. There were very few outlets at the time for Canadian writing, and writers needed to run magazines.
They also needed to run publishing houses. Dudek and Layton and Souster (and later Peter Miller) had set the finest example for literary publishing with Contact Press. They started Contact Press because Dudek and Souster could only get chapbooks published by Ryerson Press, and Layton could not get anyone to publish him in Canada at all. In later years, Robert Creeley would regale me with stories of how he came to publish Irving in the 1950s.
The fourth mission was to be a reviewer. If writers did not review Canadian books, no one reviewed Canadian books. I was happy to have found a place at The Montreal Gazette under the tutelage of Doris Giller. The good news was that I could write the necessary reviews, and also get paid for doing so.
The fifth mission was to teach Can Lit. It was now my specialty.
At the time, I acknowledged that Dudek had to perform all five missions. I wasn’t so sure that I wanted to, or that I needed to. Maybe a few things were beginning to change. Maybe, by 1980, we had some book reviewers and some Can Lit specialists.
Looking back, I see that I fulfilled all five missions. Not necessarily all the time for a lifetime, but at points in time. I’ve been a practicing and publishing poet for forty-eight years now. With my American friend Jim Mele, I ran the magazine CrossCountry for close to a decade. I participated in the running of other poetry magazines like Mouse Eggs and Somewhere Across The Border. Jim and I ran CrossCountry Press for a decade, producing twenty-three titles. Along with Endre Farkas and Artie Gold, I was a poetry editor at Vehicule Press from 1975 to 1981. I “assisted” Endre Farkas in running his publishing house, The Muses’ Company, from 1980 to 1995. I wrote an abundant amount of newspaper reviews for The Montreal Gazette under the tutelage of Book Review Editor Doris Giller. And I taught Canadian Literature (and Creative Writing) at the University of Maine for thirty-three years.
Louis Dudek taught at McGill for thirty-three years, and I taught at U. Maine for thirty-three years. Teaching thirty-four years just wasn’t possible. I didn’t want to attempt to go past him, even in that small regard.
