Well, actually not my first. My first would have been Michael Ondaatje, around 1972, reading in North Bay at something I seem to remember being called “Writers Day” (but don’t completely trust that memory). Local high school students, including 16 year-old me, were bussed to the former Teachers College downtown for this one day event, and I watched Ondaatje reading his work while using the base of a table lamp as an ashtray. When, of course, we could all smoke indoors… but I digress
My more meaningful “first poet” encounter took place six years later. I’d just finished with Queen’s University and was in dire straits. University had quite killed my passion for fiction, and damn near finished off poetry for me as well. But not quite; enough of it remained that I knew I needed sustenance. I was back in North Bay, and a friend from high school told me of a teacher up at Nipissing University in the city, a poet as it turned out, one who even edited a literary magazine. I got a phone number, and summoned up the courage to call.
It was Ken Stange, with whom I made my first mistake of calling “Mr.” But we moved past that, and I met up with him in his office at the university. We talked, he took me to task for overlapping “academic” and “intellectual” in the kind of Venn Diagram that would have looked like a circle, and then invited me to join the small group of poets involved in putting together his literary magazine, Nebula. We walked the walk around tables, collating the magazine, read every submission and commented on them all, and gathered more socially at the Stange household, where I met his remarkable spouse Ursula, and their equally remarkable library. The Stanges were generous in loaning books (a trait I did not acquire), and I engaged in a wide reading of the work of contemporary poets, primarily (though not exclusively, for it was there I discovered William Carlos Williams) Canadian. And because of the catholic (note the lower-case “c” there) nature of their wonderful library, I developed a strong and abiding taste for science writing. There were sounds, too. Music. I first heard Rachmaninoff at the Stange’s, dug into Bach via Glenn Gould, and encountered the amazing Nina Simone. Ken was asked to host a reading series at an artist-run centre in the city, and I watched over his shoulder to see how he did it. It led to running the short-lived Upstairs at Rosenberg’s series, and several years later to my founding of the Conspiracy of Three series that is still active.
In a nutshell, I learned stuff.
And I wrote. And wrote. The bulk of it was, of course, crap, apprentice-level stuff. But I showed it all to Ken for his commentary. My poetry began to teeter dangerously off-kilter, the end product of me attempting to suppress my feelings as I sought to shelter myself from a barrage of emotional and psychological storms. The writing became arid and sterile and austere and cold, and even though some of it was being published, I knew that it was dead-ending. But it took the proverbial kick in the pants from Ken to jolt me from my personal and artistic numbness, reconnect with my humanness.
Ken and I didn’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of things, disagreed about much. I left North Bay in 1990 to live in Halifax, and in those pre-internet days our contact became more sporadic and sometimes not at all. Ken died several years ago, but Ursula still lives in the city. I will hopefully be seeing more of her when I relocate back there in a few months. Both of them profoundly changed the course of my life. So very much of who I am now is because of them then.
Gil
McElroy
August
14, 2022
Gil McElroy is a poet currently living in Colborne, Ontario.
Ken Stange photo credit (circa 1980): Lizzie Bolton