Ken Norris : THE WEATHER & THE WORDS: THE SELECTED LETTERS OF JOHN NEWLOVE, 1963-2003, Edited by J.A. Weingarten

THE WEATHER & THE WORDS
THE SELECTED LETTERS OF JOHN NEWLOVE, 1963-2003
Edited by J.A. Weingarten
Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2025

 

 

It probably isn’t just happenstance that the first letter in John Newlove’s Selected Letters is a letter to Eli Mandel, asking Eli if he would be willing to support Newlove’s application for a Canada Council grant with a letter of reference. Mandel is willing. Then it is something of a surprise to see that Newlove doesn’t get the grant. The CC won’t support him and the little magazines won’t accept him.

This is in 1963. He is twenty-five years old.

Happily, Newlove receives the next grant. And the next one. Little magazines get friendly. Then Raymond Souster and Louis Dudek accept his first full-length manuscript, Moving In Alone, for Contact Press. A.J.M. Smith comes calling, and now he is being anthologized. Newlove enters the still-evolving Canadian canon before he is thirty years old.

Things happened quickly in the 1960s, and as we see in the letters, Canadian poetry was still a small village. The Governor General’s Award is won by either this poet or that poet. Nevertheless, there is still acrimony. Newlove gets upset because Leonard Cohen wins it in 1968, not him (Don’t worry—he wins it in 1972). Back then awards were like small town politics. There were only 25-30 Anglo poets in the country.

I was in the next generation. We started publishing in the mid-70s and corralled a small piece of the spotlight in the early to mid-80s. There were maybe 50-60 of us.

Besides being a poet, I was also on an academic path. I completed my PhD in Canadian Literature at McGill University in 1979. I finally took up a university teaching job in 1985. For five years or so I decided to see what being a full-time writer was like.

I was lucky. There were grants and there was a writer-in-residence job. Nevertheless, at the end of five years I was done with the experiment. Most of the time I was thinking about money, not poetry.

So I have a lot of respect for writers who try to earn a living from the written word.

In Newlove’s early letters (1963—1970) there’s a lot of looking for bucks. He’s trying to raise a family on small Canada Council grants and whatever drops into his lap. He’s done menial jobs in his early twenties and has no desire or interest in returning to that. He doesn’t have a university education, so the universities are closed to him.

As with all young poets, life is tumultuous, and interesting. His correspondence then constitutes a small circle of poet friends. Letters are regularly sent to Jamie Reid, George Bowering, Al Purdy, Margaret Atwood, Alden Nowlan, Dennis Lee. There are a couple of letters to Michael Ondaatje and A.J.M Smith.

Before personal computers came along, Canadian writers conducted their professional lives via Canada Post. Grant letters came in the mail. Letters from publishers came in the mail. Letters from little magazines offering acceptance or rejection came in the mail. The little magazines themselves came in the mail. Letters from friends, poets and otherwise, came in the mail. Notification of reviews came in the mail. Long distance love affairs took place in the mail (long distance calls were expensive back then). Sometimes money came in the mail. As we see in Newlove’s correspondence, money didn’t come often enough.

Does anybody younger than sixty know what carbon paper is? Newlove’s letters are mostly written on the typewriter. On the typewriter you could make carbon copies. Happily, for editor J.A Weingarten, Newlove kept carbon copies of most of his correspondence.

It’s hard to talk about John Newlove without talking about his alcoholism. He was in that generation of hard drinking writers. Drinking was still heroic then. It seemed part of the job. Canadian poets Milton Acorn, Al Purdy and John Newlove were all anti-academic and pro-alcohol. There are a lot of litanies to beer and whiskey in Newlove’s correspondence. More than ten times he writes his letters drunk. They aren’t the fun ones to read.

As mentioned by Lorna Crozier in her perceptive Foreword, Newlove wrote about his alcoholism in the essay “Not Swimming, But Drowning.” It is the saddest and most honest account I have ever read about alcoholism. He says everything that needs to be said. Everything that he needs to say. It was written when he was older.

I once did a week-long reading tour of Northern BC and the Yukon with John. It was November, and already freezing. In the afternoons we talked and played cribbage. In the evenings we read. His poems enchanted me completely. Poems like “Driving,” “Insect Hopes,” “The Weather.” Right before we left for parts south, he wrote a complete poem (“Poem With Ravens”) on a tavern placemat in Whitehorse in fifteen minutes. He’d been composing it in his head the whole tour. Despite his reputation for abrasiveness, in a week he never said one unkind word to me. He was one of the gentlest souls I have ever encountered.

The 1970s were Newlove’s most active decade. For a time he worked at McClelland and Stewart as a Senior Editor, followed by a government job in Ottawa. There were awards, residencies and frequent readings.

His poetry world widens with more correspondents (Barry McKinnon, Susan Musgrave, Glen Sorestad, Andrew Suknaski, Sid Marty). There’s an interesting assessment of fellow Canadian poets on pages 245-246. In certain ways the letters from this decade are less interesting. They are more business and less reflection. He’s a man on the move.

The eighties are almost perfectly divided between poetry and bureaucracy. In the early 80s Newlove is mostly in British Columbia doing teaching stints and residencies and trying to find money in the spaces in between. It takes him six years to deliver his last amazing full-length book of poetry—The Night The Dog Smiled—which gets published by ECW Press in 1986.

In July of 1986, he begins working “an Ottawa job” (305) with the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages. It is a job he will hold down until the later 1990s. Money is no longer an issue. But poetry? When asked by George Bowering about how his writing is going, Newlove replies “Am I writing anything? Memos” (316).

Post-1990 the letters get fewer. They are about poetry business, health, small skirmishes with the Canada Council. The Newloves buy a house. A few years later they have to think about selling it. In the meantime, Newlove enters a poet’s silence. For thirteen years. Until rob mclennan convinces him to do a chapbook for above/ground press in 1999. Via email.

There are two wonderful Newlove Selected Poems: Apology For Absence and A Long Continual Argument. If you don’t know his work you should read one of them. If you already love his poetry you’ll be moved by hearing John’s voice again here in his letters.

 

 

 

 

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 PhD in Canadian Literature at McGill University. Norris became a Canadian citizen in 1985. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Maine, Where he taught Canadian Literature and Creative Writing for thirty-three years. He currently resides in Toronto.

J.A. Weingarten : John Newlove’s Life in Letters: Notes on the Publication of The Weather and the Words: The Selected Letters of John Newlove, 1963-2003

 

 

 

  

Back in 2004, I was an undergraduate student reading Sam Solecki’s Yours, Al: The Collected Letters of Al Purdy. I found it thrilling to read the past as a fly on the wall, reading words that were never meant to be read. In graduate school, I began visiting archives around the country in order to write my dissertation, but always in the back of my head was a thought: “whose letters will I find and then edit?”

And then, in 2010, I came across a vicious letter in the Canadian poet John Newlove’s archives. Newlove (1938-2003) sent the letter to the literary critic and writer Frank Davey in the early 1960s shortly after Newlove reviewed Davey’s City of the Gulls and Sea (1964) on CBC Radio. Newlove’s review upset Davey so much that he contacted a local CBC producer and suggested that Newlove wasn’t qualified to review books. The producer, Allan Campbell, then shared Davey’s comments with Newlove. Newlove confronted Davey in a long, angry letter: “Now, this business of untrained reviewers or ones with vested interests. You’re the boy with the vested interests, and you’ve shown it in your letter; a second-rater crying because someone has drawn attention to his incompetence. And what do you mean by untrained? Do you think your fat little M.A. means you know anything? Or that no university means no knowledge? Don’t give me that horseshit routine” (98). After reading that explosive exchange, I decided to look further into Newlove’s archives to see what else was there.

His archives contained a treasure trove of correspondence that demonstrates the cultural function that letters served for twentieth-century writers. The American poet John Taggart reminded me of this function when I interviewed him while editing Newlove’s letters: “I’m struck by it now,” he told me. “[Letters were] how writers made contacts. That’s how they fought poetic battles. Letters were a medium that the current generation has no clue about.” Literary correspondence, Taggart said, “is filled with hopes and aspirations … These are life documents. They’re life vessels” (1). Newlove’s correspondence exemplifies those aspects of letter writing: they give insight into the financial conditions, social and political networks, and the struggles (emotional, psychological, and physical) of artists (especially those contemporary with Newlove). Newlove’s letters reveal much, generally, about what an artist may face: alternating moments of self-doubt and self-confidence, depression and addiction, oscillation between literary vigour and paralysis, and general existentialism.

When I began writing and editing The Weather and the Words: The Selected Letters of John Newlove, I thought it was a project entirely about Newlove and not much else. But gradually I came to appreciate that this book is a microcosm of an era, a glimpse into a time in which letters were not just the stirring fragments of a letter writer’s life, but also the sites in which life-changing introductions took place, mutual admiration societies formed, career-defining decisions were made, philosophies were developed and refined, personal struggles were faced, and fights were fought.

That’s what readers will find in The Weather and the Words: they’ll sneak, unseen, into the life and times of Newlove and live like that proverbial fly on private walls in the past. From this vantage point, readers will see far beyond Newlove’s individual experiences; they’ll also see the state of the world in which this remarkable author lived and wrote. Indeed, letters preserve a wide-reaching history to which the letter writer continually gestures, knowingly or unknowingly, simply by inhabiting their specific era. Read Newlove’s letters as more than the story of his remarkable writing and troubled life: they are vestiges of a particular moment in time when letters were essential to the existence and cultivation of a literary culture.

Of course, it is also a gift to (re)discover the poet John Newlove. Though his name may today be less familiar than others, he was, like those literary figures, widely read and hugely influential during this lively period in Canadian history.

If you were an aspiring writer in the 1960s and you wanted to write poetry about the Canadian prairies (its landscape, its people, its cities and towns, its culture), you would have had an extremely difficult time finding a single poet of note on which to model your writing or to whom you could look for inspiration. Newlove was arguably, if not the first, one of the first prairie-born poets to achieve nationwide popularity by publishing modern poems about the prairies.

Newlove was also immediately recognized by emerging poets and his contemporaries as a trailblazer for writing unapologetic, engaged poems about a region of the country largely unrepresented in modern poetry. It may be hard for readers today to imagine the profound loneliness many aspiring prairie poets felt before they discovered Newlove’s poems, but it was a very real sense of isolation and even shyness—it was a feeling that you couldn’t write about the place in which you lived, grew, and learned to be a poet. Newlove’s poetry alleviated some of those feelings for aspiring writers.

That is not, however, to reduce Newlove’s achievement to “first through the gate” or to say his reputation has rested strictly on his choice of content; his poetry is extraordinary. Contemporary reviewers singled him out frequently as one of the rising stars of the 1960s, and In Newlove’s literary archives (mostly at the University of Manitoba), one will find dozens of letters from younger writers such as Lorna Crozier, David Zieroth, Robert Bringhurst, Barry McKinnon, Michael Ondaatje, and Rob McLennan, each of whom praised Newlove’s talent and learned from his craft. The fan mail, student letters, and correspondence with poets in Newlove’s archive are compelling evidence of a wide-reaching reputation as a masterful poet, by any standard.

The Weather and the Words (which includes a preface by Lorna Crozier and an afterword by Dr. Laura Cameron) celebrates these achievements by giving readers a chance to read the world in which Newlove lived and to observe his life and career as they unfolded from 1963 until his death in 2003. The letters are vibrant, alive, funny, heartbreaking, witty, and profound. They trace the career of one of Canada’s best poets from his promising beginnings to his tragic end.

 

The Weather and the Words: The Selected Letters of John Newlove, 1963-2003 was published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press in 2025.

 

 

 

Dr. Jeffrey Aaron Weingarten is a professor and writer living in Guelph, Ontario. He is the author of Sharing the Past: The Reinvention of History in Canadian Poetry (2019, UTP), co-editor of Unpacking the Personal Library (2022, WLUP), the co-founder and co-editor of The Bull Calf: Reviews of Fiction, Poetry, and Literary Criticism (2011-2019), and the editor of The Weather and the Words: The Selected Letters of John Newlove, 1963-2003 (2025, WLUP).