Larry Sawyer Tribute /
Reception / Memorial – Toronto edition
1970 (9 June) – 2025 (28
February)|
April 25, 2025, 6-8 pm
Gagné Contemporary
Gallery
One of Larry Sawyer's writers (for Milk magazine), Ronnie Burk, the peripatetic activist/Beat/Surrealist poet, wrote “Childhood Memory” (2002) with an epigraph from Sawyer that reads:
we're only birds ...in a children's story
which hints at the state
of existential contingency by which we each meet our days, one after another,
until an end comes, however random and inexplicable that may be.
For close to 30 years Larry Sawyer made a name for himself in the republic of letters as a poet, an editor, a connector, a person who supported and uplifted others as a hub around which exciting things were happening in print and performance.
Larry was fortunate early in his career to build a lasting bond with Lina ramona Vitkauskas, with whom they activated a cultural frisson in the communities in which they lived, from Fairborn, Ohio to Chicago, the Windy City, to Toronto where they moved in 2020.
I met Larry only twice on my visits from California to my hometown Toronto.
From reading him online, to meeting in person, I was quickly drawn to collect his works for the library in which I have been employed for donkey's years. The Bancroft Library, founded in 1860, has since 1906 been part of the flagship campus of the University of California in Berkeley, or as we sometimes refer to it, UC Berzerkeley.
A number of Larry's works, including books, chapbooks, broadsides, serials and other media are now part of The Bancroft Poetry Archive alongside those of his peers — Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Hirschman, Philip Lamantia, Jack Micheline and others.
As we celebrate Larry today, and what he and Lina built both together and as separate and distinct poets, it seems apropos share from his collection Unable to Fully California (2010):
Of René Char
Trace for us that stony path that leads to a cobblestone brilliance. We demand that our love bleed like yours, and yet the street was an immediate eclipse of anguish, befitting genius like a neon Pepsi sign.
Here in the present day, your assiduous answer.
Leaves as they fell to the ground made
a snarling sound, almost like dead watches.
One after another your critics fell
they wished only to find a happy future
for your books.
Quiet snow, gossip over the hero's grave.
And with that, I savor the sense of Larry Sawyer in a manner that poetry demands: an exquisite and continuing presence we honor and celebrate, who speaks to us from his many pages and from the very spirit of poetry which is everywhere for the making.
D S. Black is an archives whisperer by day, and somnobiographer of night.
Red Shift Blues, his first book-length collection of poems, awaits a publisher.
Born in Toronto, raised there and in Manitoba (The Pas and Winnipeg), he has lived his adult life in Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area.
His memoir of a most eccentric Canadian literature bookseller will appear in Stigma: William Hoffer and the Final Judgment Construction Company edited by John Metcalf slated for publication by Biblioasis later in 2025 or early 2026.
