Smoking the City, Bryan McCarthy
McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1965
Yea Yea
the city burns!
I drag it into subterranean
lungs
like holy
marijuana
— Smoking the
City
Who was Bryan McCarthy and why should anyone care? A fair question. After all, he had only one book of poems published in his lifetime, Smoking the City, which I’d obtained from a used bookstore several years ago for the ridiculously low price of two bucks, hardcover. I dragged the copy from my bookshelf recently to give it a re-read, just to see if it stood up to my earlier admiration, considering that my own approach to writing poetry — as well as my personal taste in the genre — has altered over time. The good news is that while I have some trifling complaints, I still enjoy much of McCarthy’s book. Encouraged, I decided to dig a bit deeper into his life to discover more of who he was and what he was about, my curiosity driven by a couple of nagging questions: how did this seemingly unknown person manage to get published by McClelland and Stewart, and why only one book, given its initial praised reception?
I sought out the oracle, Google, for more information, and found next to nothing about McCarthy, which shouldn’t have been too surprising knowing that Google is often sparse in content when it comes to Canadian personages, especially poets. Referring to the preface in the book itself I learned that McCarthy was born in England in 1930 and emigrated to Canada in 1956, where he took a job on the Mid-Canada radar line, fifteen hundred miles NNE of Montreal. After that he moved to Toronto where he became an editor with a chemical processing magazine. Then, for some unknown reason that I could discover, he moved to Montreal where he decided to try his hand at poetry. Crazy idea, or what? During his time there, he managed to meet up with, and be influenced by, such literary notables as Irving Layton, Al Purdy, and Milton Acorn. How’s that for fortuitous company? In McCarthy’s words, these poets had “forged a poetic idiom that was viable and modern. They’d ruthlessly purged all traces of Nineteenth Century romanticism from their work; in the grain and imagery of their verse, was an awareness of modern life, and the language they used related to contemporary speech.” This keen observation of his, was (for me, at any rate) worth the price of admission and made McCarthy’s own poetry worth more than a casual glance, and deserving more than a mere footnote in the short history of Canadian verse.
Via the influence of these poets, he began to read voraciously the works of Miller, Orwell, Celine, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Sartre, Mailer, Baudelaire, Mayakovsky, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso and Ferlinghetti, which might account somewhat for the existential bent with traces of surrealism in his own compositions: “batwingy tenement-passage / where the air / creeps up behind & / jumps you with its urinated blanket.” As well, he and an unknown business partner (plus Milton Acorn and a few others) opened a hangout called The Place on Stanley Street in Montreal, a coffee house-cum-jazz joint (McCarthy himself was a saxophone player and jazz enthusiast: “heads spinning like pineapples / on slow turntables / Coltrane’s sax shimmering / snarling in your sex / everyone hugging jigging jabbering / down / in that hot-lit / yellow cellar —") that apparently attracted every outsider east of San Francisco. The establishment folded in about six months with the partner absconding with the meager proceeds. So much for the artistic camaraderie of like-minded souls. McCarthy states that he had made the scene for a short period, then opted for the middle way, lived quietly, taught at a high school, then married in 1964.
Which brings me back to my original question: how the heck did Smoking the City come about getting written and subsequently published by a major press in 1965 accompanied by blurbs such as: “Bryan McCarthy’s poetry is written in that no-man’s land between passion and paranoia, at the extreme edges of the human personality. Viciously contemporary, he aims his poems at the reader’s inhibitions and then fires. In his concerns to save man from sex, violence, and inhuman society, he writes desperately, as if he were that last poet alive.” (John Robert Colombo). And: “He has walked down the bright corridors and looked into the deepest abysses, and he has written authentically of those experiences. His is an exciting new voice in Canadian poetry. He will go places and take us along with him.” (Irving Layton).
Except he didn’t go, but abruptly stopped. It was almost as if a group of enthusiastic beaux amis had snuck into his room while he slept, stole a selection of his poems, put together a manuscript, then hit up a pal at M&S to publish the book while McCarthy remained oblivious, or aloof, even as the tributes poured in. Al Purdy wrote: “Bryan McCarthy distills nightmares from his own nightmares, and nearly-genuine lakes of blood from a puddle of vomit on St. Lawrence-Main. His contacts with the city and other people seen to me surrealistic, and perhaps the more real because this is so. No other poet in Canada looks at urban life this way, sees so much one-sided horror, is so alienated by his environment.”
While deriding such literary icons as John Newlove, Raymond Souster, Frank Davey, and Louella Booth, critic Edward Lacey said: “Mr. McCarthy’s language and imagery are of course the common idiom of a certain kind of modern poetry, borrowing from science fiction, cinema, technology, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Fearing, etc., etc., and perhaps I dwell unduly on them. But I find these poems very powerful stuff, strongly conceived and sharply executed, especially after the incoherencies of Newlove and the insipidities of Davey. The imagery is fresh and accurate, the language both spare and brilliant and there is a masterly use of repetition, cumulative effect, and symbolism. The poet, the rebel against the system, is pursued and destroyed by the police of society. The theme of catatonia is explicit here: “Nobody moves / we are mad / catatonic — / welded into our madness.””
Further praise ensued, so what happened? Richard Lemm surmised: “Bryan McCarthy palavered his way to local celebrity for Smoking the City and the central table at the CafT Bistro on Mountain Street, then simply faded out like a plume of marijuana smoke, or, for that matter, like most Montreal poets in the anarchic sixties.”
Further rumour had it that McCarthy at some point moved back to England where he slowly lost his mind, a one-hit wonder, or, a freakish accident that existed for a brief moment to be observed (experienced) by a reader, an audience, then gone up in flames, nothing left but ashes. Consider his poem, “Poem for Reading”: “This is not a poem I read / very often / It’s not a poem at all but a kind of visual / accident / At the same time it’s a very / mysterious poem — / I want you to observe / very carefully / exactly what happens / and to observe / your own / interpretation of this.”
The poet’s words spill across the page as a visual accident that serves to create the further phoney device that is the “mysterious” (what?) poem. Next, the poet introduces an object that is supposedly “real” and “recognizable”: “Look: a ten-dollar bill — / it’s genuine — no deception. / And here’s / a box of matches” (one can’t help but think of Magritte’s famous painting titled The Treachery of Images that depicts a pipe and a statement below that reads “This is not a pipe” and how it might apply here). This is followed by: “Now observe / your feelings / carefully.”
Rather than attempt to elicit a particular feeling or spoon-feed a message — as is often the case for much of today’s poetry — the poem (the poet) invites the reader to step inside the poem, to examine it closely, see how it works, figure out what’s actual, what’s artifice, and judge for themselves how it affects them, intellectually and emotionally.
And what’s going to happen when those matches are lit (as they must, dear reader, be lit, yes?). I mean, how differently do you react to a poem being produced on a page as opposed to a ten-dollar bill going up in smoke?
Lacey ends his review with this: “There is a certain limitedness in the range and even the style and language of the poems in Smoking the City; they really are all facets of one another, and Mr. McCarthy cannot go on writing this way indefinitely. It will be interesting to see what a poet of his verve and talent will produce next, provided, of course, that he doesn’t lock away his wings and elect for a very Canadian silence.”
A very prescient consideration, not unlike the more sensationalist sentiment from one of Neil Young’s songs: “It’s better to burn out than to fade away,” though Bryan McCarthy has (perhaps) managed to accomplish both with his small book.
My, my, hey, hey.
Stan Rogal lives and writes in Toronto along with his artist partner Jacquie Jacobs. His work has appeared almost magically in numerous magazines and anthologies. The author of several books, plus a handful of chapbooks, a 13th poetry collection was published in March 2025 with ecw press. Co-founder of Bald Ego Theatre and former coordinator of the popular Idler Pub Reading Series.
