Ken Norris : THE ROMANTIC WORDS/RUBY WOUNDS PROJECT

 

 

 

 

When he was pushing thirty, Artie Gold began writing Romantic Words. He thought so highly of the manuscript that he called the book that came before it before Romantic Words.

For a number of odd reasons, Romantic Words never made it into print during Artie’s lifetime. Publishing became difficult and drugs became easy. That’s one way to tell it. There are a multitude of other ways. Long story short, when Artie died at the age of sixty in 2007, Romantic Words remained unpublished.

Endre Farkas and I discussed cobbling together a version of it and including it in The Collected Books of Artie Gold (2010). But we really didn’t have very much to go on. The manuscript was “lost.” In 2012 or 2013, Patrick Hutchinson, who was going through Artie’s papers to organize them for McGill University, found two version of Romantic Words in the literary papers. By 2015 or 2016, Endre, as Artie’s literary executor, had decided to ask George Bowering to edit Romantic Words. And so begins our tale.

By 2018, George had declined the job. He still had too much of his own writing left to do. I toyed with the idea of editing the book myself, and then declined the job too. It was going to be a tough, problematic edit, and I still had too much of my own writing left to do as well.

The pandemic arrives in 2020 and all of life changes. Late in the year, Endre and I hear from George—he’s working on Romantic Words. But he is not editing it—he is collaborating with it. In the life confusion that was plaguing us all, he had put on his writer’s hat, not his editor’s hat.

In this version of Romantic Words/Ruby Wounds, Artie gets the first page and George gets the second. And what George has going on his page is many things. Sometimes it is commentary. Sometimes it is revision. Sometimes it is translation. Sometimes it is a wholesale rewrite. Sometimes it is a moment in awe.

George’s openness as a reader/writer/editor/friend/fanboy allows many things to transpire. It’s a curious book, and there is a genuine dialogue happening between the Artie poems and the George poems. What the reader sees happening is certainly some version of admiration, affection and love.

I think the big question isn’t: why does this project exist? I think the big question is: why don’t we have more books like this? As it stands, it is unique in our literature, in our realm of writing.

Fencing, tennis—the metaphors are there for the back and forth the book produces. Artie, George, Artie, George—it’s an atmosphere of engagement and, occasionally, friendly competition. Sometimes George seeks to explain Artie. Other times he simply says, This is the way I’d do it, and here it is—done.

*

When Artie was working on Romantic Words, Joe Rosenblatt asked him for poems for Jewish Dialog. Artie sent him a batch of poems (as he was prone to do) and Joe selected the poems he wanted. When the issue came out there were all of these R.W. poems with numbers. I am guessing that was Artie's idea, but it might have been Joe's.

Artie gave me a copy of Jewish Dialog (he had spares) and I started flipping through it, saw all of the numbered R.W.s. "Ah, I get it," I said, "R.W.--Romantic Words." 

"It's also Ruby Wounds," Artie said.

"Ruby Wounds?" I asked.

Artie then started telling me about Frank O'Hara's poem "Ode To Willem De Kooning." I looked puzzled, as I often was when Artie was philosophizing about poetry. "Just read it when you get home," he said, and moved along to another life topic, probably involving food. 

When I got home I opened up my copy of The Collected Poems Of Frank O'Hara and found the poem. It's one of those wandering odes of O'Hara's where he is trying to show that he can do Abstract Expressionism in words. The payoff for "ruby wounds" comes at the end of the poem:

A bus crashes into a milk truck
                                                  and the girl goes skating up the avenue
with streaming hair
                               roaring through fluttering newspapers
and their Athenian contradictions
                                                     for democracy is joined
with stunning collapsible savages, all natural and relaxed and free

as the day zooms into space and only darkness lights our lives,
with few flags flaming, imperishable courage and the gentle will
which is the individual dawn of genius rising from its bed

"maybe they're wounds, but maybe they are rubies"
                                                                                   each painful as a sun

                                                                                                              1957

*

To be interested in poetry means, I think, to be willingly engaged in a certain kind of verbal difficulty. I say this as a poet who started out trying to be extremely accessible. But there is something in the abstruseness of a Margaret Avison or an Artie Gold that calls one to a different kind of mission. George loves engaging with that, when poetry threatens to start speaking in tongues. And when, at the age of twenty-four, I met Artie and started reading his poetry, it was something I really had to get used to.

Artie Gold is, by no means, an easy-to-read poet. He deploys vast elements of Surrealism—often. And his syntax is often programmed to confound the most astute grammarian. There are verbal tangles throughout his work. And there are numerous places to get lost in the hopes of being found, in the hope of poetry giving the reader that state of grace that only poetry can deliver.

At times, in this collaborative Romantic Words, Bowering seems quite content and happy to play second violin. He isn’t contesting the poetic space with Artie as much as he is commenting upon Gold’s negotiation of it. At times there is an opportunity to redirect the energy flow, or offer an older and wiser perspective on things (Bowering is eighty-five years old as he is working on the manuscript). George reconfigures some poems on his page as an act of generosity. Occasionally he illustrates a flaw. But he also bows to the flawless when it occurs, which is often. Sometimes only for a sequence of lines, sometimes for an entire startling poem (see R.W. 6)

There are times when I do, in fact, prefer “George’s version”—he has a lifetime of craft and crafting behind him. Sometimes Artie’s poems sputter—like Elmer Fudd trying to talk when he’s excited about something. At these times, George, as an astute reader, a gifted writer, can show a bewildered reader where the poem was trying to go.

There’s something almost arcane about poetry if you are doing it right. It’s shot through with mystery, and its moments of bright clarity are often totally mysterious. This is a great project for me as a reader. It takes me right down into the commas.

In the late 1970s, I knew Romantic Words/Ruby Wounds as a unified working manuscript. I knew it as something that was up for revision. And then, years later, I knew it as a mythic manuscript that had been lost and then was found in Artie’s papers. What it’s now become both mystifies and pleases me.

Under George’s hand, Romantic Words has been divided in two and multiplied by two and has quite possibly entered the realm of works such as After Lorca and Heads of the Town Up to the Aether. It used to be a friend of mine’s poetry manuscript. Now it’s become something else and something totally unique.

Toronto
June 16, 2023

 

 

 

 

Ken Norris was born in New York City in 1951. He came to Canada in the early 1970s, to escape Nixon-era America and to pursue his graduate education. He completed an M.A. at Concordia University and a Ph.D. in Canadian Literature at McGill University. He became a Canadian citizen in 1985. Norris is Professor Emeritus at the University of Maine, where he taught Canadian Literature and Creative Writing for thirty-three years. His latest chapbook, Echoes, recently appeared from above/ground press. He currently resides in Toronto.

 

 

 

 

George Bowering : Dressing Ruby Wounds

 

In an issue of his poetry magazine Mouse Eggs, Endre Farkas published a few of the Ruby Wounds poems and introduced them this way:

I was looking through Artie Gold’s archives at the McGill University library and came across his long lost ms. Romantic Words. Ken Norris and I contemplated getting it published. We agreed on asking George Bowering to write an introduction. George had written introductions to a number of Artie’s books, so we expected that he would agree. What we didn’t expect was what George did with the ms. He engaged in a poetic exchange with Artie’s poems. He wrote his version of Artie’s poems. It was an ekphrastic monologue dialogue. I know there have been poets who have done this as a one or two off. Jack Spicer comes to mind with his engagement with Garcia Lorca. But George did this with (118 +) poems. This is something unique in Canadian (perhaps in all of) poetry. Some of them are “rewrites” of Artie’s poems and some are George’s poems on the topic/theme.

Thank you, Endre.

The more I worked at this peculiar task, the more aware I became of Artie's suspicion that some of the poems were not really part of Romantic Words. So I gathered the typescripts that did not have the handwritten letters RW on them, and named them with a phrase that had come from their author.

Thank you, Artie. It was worth the craziness and death fear and deeply painful beauty.

–––GB

 

 

 

In Spring of 2023 NeWest Press will publish George Bowering’s anthology of English language poets from Wyatt to Avison, with one-page essays on each of the poets, Good Morning Poems.

 

George Bowering : Artie’s Hotel & Mine

 

 

 

For this calendar year I have been working on a notoriously unpublished book of poetry (well, it has been published in a few pieces by Talon and others) by Artie Gold, Romantic Words. It is a sequential (and numbered) poem he worked on from 1969 till 1993. You could say that he was in a sense taken over by this sequence, even naming his previous work Before Romantic Words. Artie was a prominent member of a Montreal group called the Vehicule Poets, and was much loved by his cohort, including Endre Farkas, who published one of Artie's major works The Beautiful Chemical Waltz, through his press, The Muses' Company. That book was introduced by another friend, Ken Norris, who is writing the intro to Romantic Words. Endre wrote the afterword to Talonbooks' marvelous The Collected Books of Artie Gold, the title of which is a nod to Jack Spicer, one of Artie's two favourite contemporary poets.

           I should say a few words about the history of all this. When I was the writer in residence at Sir George Williams University in Montreal while the sixties were becoming the seventies, I met a lot of young (going to be) poets. I have mentioned elsewhere being encouraged about the futures of two of them, Artie Gold and Dwight Gardiner. These two youngsters were the only people at the university (including faculty) who had heard of Frank O'Hara and Jack Spicer. You know, the kind of students who make you think it might be all right to be a professor.

          So I kept track of the Vehicule poets, and came to town to read in their series at their Vehicule Gallery. I read their books and magazines. I corresponded with them. When Artie Gold died I bought an air ticket to Montreal to attend his celebration at his beloved book store, The Word. I ate half of the chicken livers. Endre was the person who found Artie's body and then faced the spectacular task of making some order in his literary remains. The lads knew about Romantic Words. They had heard Artie read from the book and sometimes talk about it. It was obvious that something had to be done with the manuscript. But where had it gone? Parts of it were to be found in his books and elsewhere, but as for the whole pile of paper? It was apparently lost, the newest member of that club.

          For various reasons, one might think of Artie's life and output as being a mess. But like Jack Kerouac, he kept his papers in order, treating them as he treated his famous collections of glass, stones, poetry books, illustrators, etc. , and sure enough, eventually his typescripts of  unpublished work showed up in the McGill University library. (That in itself is a miracle I might tell you about some time.) The question arose: could Endre Farkas turn these pieces of a book into a book? Could Ken Norris? Could GB? By the way, Artie was the first person to address me that way. Let me look at the typescript as held by McGill, I said. No promises. And so those poems sat in my hard dive for a few years.

          Well, certain events in which I took place or vice versa suggested that while I was working on other books I might have a look at Artie's sequence I wrapped up three other books and stopped half way through a fourth (my memoir of La Manzanilla), and poked at a computer file called RW. Well, you know, a couple critics of Canadian Lit have noticed that a lot of my books are collaborations. They are right, I noticed, I have cowritten books with living writers, dead writers, older writers, younger writers, single writers, groups, even imaginary writers. I won't mention them all, but they include George Stanley, David Bromige, Michael Matthews, Angela Bowering, Charles Demers, Ryan Knighton, David McFadden, Fred Wah (unpublished), Jean Baird; enough of those. I also do a lot of writing in which I make use of other people's work without their knowledge. So with Romantic Words. In his intro Ken mentions some of the approaches I take to my co-author's poems. I think that perhaps the best point he makes is that there hasn't been a book (in Canada at least) constructed this way. I sort of knew that when I dived in, but I never felt confused about what I was doing.

          A word about the structure. Artie was never sure about whether a poem he had written was part of RW. The typescripts show us this. Some of his friends think that all his later poems might be included in the sequence. Before I had been doing the work for long I felt that there were two books here: RW and what are usually called "Unpublished Poems." A look at the back end of The Collected Books will show you what I mean. Well, I listened to Ken and I listened to Endre and I listened elsewhere, and I understood their views. Then with their help, I came upon this idea: Artie's late period was spent on one big life work, and I can produce one big poem with Book 1 and Book 2. Thinking of what I said about my life's work being part of an ongoing task that the poets attend to as a shared activity, I can say that in a smaller world, all of Gold's poems are parts of his life work. I am pretty sure that Artie felt that way, and that most good readers will have picked up on that feeling.

          In Artie's typescript there are a few shorter sequences. One of them bears the title The Hotel Victoria Poems, and was published by above/ground press in 2003 as a chapbook. My reply is called Hotels, and is published as a chappie by above/ground eighteen years later. These sequences may be related section by section. What fun.

          Here's what Norris writes at the end of the first draft of his intro:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

George’s openness as a reader/writer/editor/friend/fanboy allows many things to transpire.

It’s a curious book, and there is a genuine dialogue happening between the Artie poems on the left hand page and the George writing happening on the right hand page. What the reader sees happening is certainly some version of admiration, affection and love.

I think the big question isn’t: why does this book exist? I think the big question is: why don’t we have more books like this? As it stands, it is unique in our literature, in our realm of writing.

Fencing, tennis—the metaphors are there for the back and forth the book produces. Left page, right page, left page, right page—it’s an atmosphere of engagement and, occasionally, friendly competition. Sometimes George seeks to explain Artie. Other times he simply says, This is the way I’d do it, and here it is—done.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

          I have to say thanks, Ken, for collaborating with me on this little essay, or note or preface, whatever it is.

 

 

 

George Bowering is one of Canada’s oldest living poets. Last year he published a couple books, Could Be, five years worth of poetry, and Soft Zipper, a response to Gertrude Stein’s book with a similar title. He is working on a number of books as we speak.