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.

Ken Norris : OF CHAPBOOKS AND BROKEN RIVERS

 

 

 

1.

It’s almost fifty years that I have been writing and publishing books of poetry. My first three published works, in essence, were chapbooks.

The first book, Vegetables (Vehicule Press,1975), was a glorified chapbook. It had nineteen poems in it. The book was fleshed out with illustrations by visual artist Jill Smith. So it managed to be perfect bound, with a package of vegetable seeds affixed to the front cover. It was a chapbook of poetry hiding inside of a book format.

The second publication was the chapbook Under The Skin (CrossCountry Press,1976), which was a brief experiment in neo-Surrealism.

My third publication was Report On The Second Half Of The Twentieth Century (CrossCountry Press, 1977), which wound up being the first book in a twenty-two book long poem. That first installment was something like thirty-two pages long.

My first full collection of poems was The Perfect Accident, which was published by Vehicule Press in 1978. It had fifty poems in it, and served as an early greatest hits.

In the early days, the time between writing and publication just wasn’t that long. The poems in Vegetables had been written in the two years prior to publication. Under The Skin was written maybe two to four months before publication. The first book of Report was written and published in a similar time frame.

In those early days, what chapbooks had was immediacy. You didn’t have to build a book. You didn’t have to wait around for publishers to find the money and/or a publication slot. Chapbooks could capture the eagerness of young poets. Chapbooks were fast, and they were fun.

 

2.

When do writers enter mid-career? It’s probably four proper books in or age forty, whichever comes first. In my case, it was five books in and thirty-five years of age. Many Canadian poets like to publish a new full-length book every four or five years. In the early days, I was more productive than that.

We all learn with the first few books. Then the switch gets flipped, and we become ourselves, writing the poems or novels that only we can write.

The middle can take up a lot of space. It is often disproportionate to the beginning and the end. In a fifty year career the middle can be thirty years.

In mid-career I was writing a lot of big books. My books then had lots and lots of pages. There was so much that I had to say.

 

3.

For me, the middle started evaporating around the time I was turning sixty-five. The year would have been 2016. By then I had been teaching university for thirty-one years. I had two years to go before retirement.

When I entered retirement in 2018, I finally got a good chance to look back over my writing of the previous decade. In brief, I found that I had had two extra manuscripts. Where there should have been three potential books there were five. Publishing those extra two as full-length books was going to swallow up five years, and put a delay on my  other/future work that was going to be equal to a decade. I had no desire to send my recent work into suspended animation or to be running so far behind. And so I put those two somewhat more eccentric manuscripts to the side.

The first of those manuscripts was called Dedicated. It had eight sections, each one dedicated to a close friend. Six of those friends were living, and two of those friends were gone.

The manuscript was pretty unrelenting in its focus on time and mortality. Some readers were guaranteed to find it as being way too dark.

What to do. I thought about it for a while, then came to the conclusion that the work would be better served by dividing it up into four chapbooks. Each chapbook would have two of the dedicated sections. There would be lots of breathing room between the chapbooks, and many readers would probably read only one or two of them anyway. Sending the work out into a random order universe really appealed to me. Only the dedicated would take the time to track down all four chapbooks.

They were published as Midnight Hour Blues (Poets & Painters Press, 2022), False Narratives (above/ground press, 2022), History & Secrecy (Poets & Painters Press, 2023) and Echoes (above/ground press, 2023).

I was a bit surprised. Going back to publishing poetry in chapbooks afforded me a lovely freedom. I was no longer tied to that haunting epigram from Callimachus: A big book is big trouble.

Also, chapbooks often travel a different route than full-length books and collections. It is more of a situation of being passed from hand to hand. I started getting emails from far-flung corners written by people I hadn’t heard from in thirty years. As in my youth, publishing poetry was fun again.

 

4.

The second manuscript had a series of working titles that never stuck around for very long. Maybe the work was telling me something: that it didn’t want to all be shovelled into the same book.

I took a long, hard look at it. It was another long book of poetry—140 pages—and maybe there was too much of a repetition of themes. Maybe I could make it shorter and punchier.

Once I got going, half of the manuscript fell away. I was now down to 70 pages. And then those 70 pages split in half, and I had two 35 page chapbooks.

It is very true that sometimes the work has a mind of its own. I have learned to always respect that. Now, in the place of a sprawling tome of poetry, there were two chapbooks—their names were Afar and Broken River.

I tend to always follow chronology, and then to cheat when necessary. Nobody ever knows the difference anyway. Though Afar was written before Broken River, my intention was to publish it second. A few poems bounced between them until they finally settled down.

I added a couple of poems written especially for Broken River (above/ground press, 2024). Something required rounding, amplification. I dug back into the past, and found what I was looking for.

In New Zealand, on South Island, there’s a Broken River.

 

Toronto
June 2-4, 2024

 

 

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. He currently resides in Toronto.

 

Ken Norris : A LONG SMALL PRESS TALE: IRVING LAYTON’S IN THE MIDST OF MY FEVER

 

 

 

 

 

A lot of correspondence went back and forth between Robert Creeley and Irving Layton about In The Midst Of My Fever. Creeley was living in Mallorca and Layton was living in Montreal. And Creeley was publishing the book under the imprint of his Divers Press.

The book project began in 1953, but printed copies of the book didn’t make it to Montreal (and to the rest of Canada) until early in 1955. The pub date on the title page says “The Divers Press 1954.”

The book was printed in Mallorca, where printing costs were a lot less than in Canada. Layton knew all about Canadian printing costs, being a partner (with Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster) in Contact Press (1952-1967). Layton had paid a third of the costs for Cerberus (1952), a three-headed dog book he shared with Dudek and Souster. And he had paid the bill for his early Contact Press books: Love The Conqueror Worm (1953), The Long Pea-Shooter (1954), and The Cold Green Element (1955). Creeley was footing the bill for In The Midst Of My Fever.

In the period 1953-1955 there was no greater Irving Layton fan than Robert Creeley. In The Black Mountain Review, Creeley had written:

          Irving Layton may well be for the historian of literature, at any rate, the First
          Great Canadian Poet—he has his bid in certainly. Canadian, English, American,
          or whatever, his poetry can be very good.

Creeley was backing up his praise of Layton by publishing In The Midst Of My Fever.

Although Layton was only two years younger than Charles Olson and fourteen years older than Robert Creeley, reading the correspondence between them reveals that Creeley and Layton were very much thinking of one another as contemporaries.

The publication of In The Midst Of My Fever is a long small press tale. It takes two years for the book to make it into print. In Creeley’s case, life intervenes again and again. On Layton’s end, he keeps writing new poems and sending them to Creeley, suggesting adding the new ones to the book and deleting some of the older and weaker ones. There are problems with the printer. There are problems with Spanish Customs and Canadian Customs. There are quite a number of typos in the book, which necessitates a printed errata sheet. Every change or glitch eats up time.

Finally, in early 1955, there is the book In The Midst Of My Fever, one of Layton’s most accomplished early books hailing from his first decade as a published poet.

Later in life, through chance or fate or luck, Creeley and I wound up being in the same university English department for three Fall semesters. After a short amount of time, we got to talking. One topic area that we visited and revisited was Irving Layton’s poetry. Creeley’s repeated question to me was this: “Ken, why did Irving’s poetry become so terrible after A Red Carpet For The Sun?” I tried out several theories on him, but he wasn’t accepting of any of them. I also didn’t see Layton’s later poetry as being uniformly terrible. I argued that there were two or three good poems in the later books. Bob wasn’t accepting of that theory either. All he knew was that, in the fifties, Irving’s poetry had been so wonderful. And then. . .

*

In the 1950s, Irving Layton was writing the most exciting and most innovative poetry in Canada. At that time, he was a small press author and a poet’s poet. In the Canadian cultural milieu, A.J.M. Smith, Frank Scott, Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster were all admirers of his work. In the U.S. he had an even bigger fan club: Charles Olson, Cid Corman, Robert Creeley, Jonathan Williams, and even Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams were all Layton fans. (He wouldn’t have a presence in the general Canadian culture until Jack McClelland published A Red Carpet for the Sun in 1959.)

The 1950s were, by no means, an uninteresting decade in Canadian poetry. Accomplished books by P.K Page, Louis Dudek, Anne Wilkinson and F.R. Scott all appeared at that time. So did early work by Al Purdy,  Eli Mandel, Phyllis Webb , D.G. Jones and Leonard Cohen. However, to a number of observers, Layton’s poetry stood head and shoulders above the rest.

Why might this be so?

Layton wrote nothing like his two Canadian partners in Contact Press, Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster. And he REALLY didn’t write anything like Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Cid Corman, Ezra Pound or William Carlos Williams. Layton was something of an outsider in the North American poetic tradition, and it was his outlaw status that was one of the factors in other poets latching on to his work. He was a steady contributor to magazines like The Black Mountain Review, Civ/n, Contact and Origin.

In the late 1980s, in conversation, Layton said to me, “Ken, if you write six great poems you’re a great poet.” And I knew that that was something in which he totally believed.

Looking to write masterpieces, Layton found an interesting way to scale his major poems. And it was totally different than the way the other poets in his  milieu were putting poems together. Dudek and Souster’s lyric poems orbited what I would call “the sonnet tradition.” Most of their poems were between ten and twenty lines, and their modes of connection worked quite similarly to the way that sonnets work. Creeley was almost epigrammatic in his work; Olson was epic; Cid Corman was flirting with the haiku tradition; Pound was epic and tragic; and William Carlos Williams was pioneering his own convincing brand of Modern free verse.

None of this was what Layton was doing at all.

In his attempt to write “great poems”/anthology poems, Layton had stumbled upon a way to write lyric poems that was solely his own. The poems were larger than the poems in what I am calling “the sonnet tradition,” and they were shorter than the poem-essays that we would see in the sixties from poets like Al Purdy, Dennis Lee and, occasionally, John Newlove.

They were poems that were usually between twenty and forty lines. They took on grand themes. They dramatized and they apostrophized. They dabbled in Surrealism. They struck a blow for eroticism and sexuality in what was (still) a Victorian Anglo Canada. And they placed the poet, in all of his glorious egotism, at the absolute centre of things. The poems were brash and bold and a revelation to his fellow poets on both sides of the border.

*

In The Midst Of My Fever is bracketed by two other Layton collections—The Long Pea-shooter (Laocoon Press/Contact Press, 1954) and The Cold Green Element (Contact Press, 1955)—that deserve more than a glance. In the 1950s, Layton was cranking out a book or two of poetry just about every year. The Long Pea-shooter precedes In The Midst Of My Fever and The Cold Green Element follows it.

The Long Pea-shooter is dedicated to Robert Creeley and mostly contains Layton’s satiric and inside baseball/Can Lit poems. Many of these poems have not survived their moment. In terms of scale, they are either longer than the usual Layton poem (“Prologue” is five pages of rhymey satiric stuff) or are short “punchline poems.” His poem about T.S. Eliot is ten lines long and reads as follows:

       T.S. ELIOT

       Harvard and English mist;
       the sick Christian;
       the American tourist
       with an interest in monasteries
       rather than castles:
       in shrines for aging knees;
       a zeal for poetry without zest,
       without marrow juices;
       at best, a single hair
       from the beard of Dostoievsky.

In terms of what is to come, The Long Pea-Shooter can be seen to be the last of Layton’s apprentice work. The short satiric poems don’t do much or say much that is interesting, and the larger lyric poems—like “Look, The Lamps Are All Around Us’ and “Rain At La Minerve-- are still second tier. That is all about to change with In The Midst Of My Fever.

The Cold Green Element is the book that  immediately follows In The Midst Of My Fever, and it continues with the breakthroughs that Layton has made. The poems in this collection are far more accomplished than those in The Long Pea-Shooter, and the book  has a formidable title poem—“The Cold Green Element”— that can be put forward fairly convincingly as one of Layton’s major poems:

       At the end of the garden walk
       the wind and its satellite wait for me;
       their meaning I will not know
                   until I go there,
       but the black-hatted undertaker

       who, passing, saw my heart beating in the grass,
       is also going there. Hi, I tell him,
       a great squall in the Pacific blew a dead poet
                    out of the water,
       who now hangs from the city’s gates.

The poem builds density and speed in the third, fourth and fifth stanzas, and attempts to stick the landing in its last three image-soaked stanzas. Layton speaks of old women:

       in whose old pupils the sun became
       a bloodsmear on broad catalpa leaves
       and hanging from ancient twigs
                 my murdered selves
       sparked the air like the muted collision

       of fruit. A black dog howls down my blood,
       a black dog with yellow eyes;
       he too by someone’s inadvertence
                  saw the bloodsmear
       on the broad catalpa leaves.

       But the furies clear a path for me to the worm
       who sang for an hour in the throat of a robin,
       and misled by the cries of young boys
                   I am again
       a breathless swimmer in that cold green element.

*

The poetic difference between The Long Pea-Shooter and In The Midst Of My Fever is considerable. It is as if all of the lights have suddenly been turned on. Layton’s poetic ambitions have finally resulted in poetic fruition. For the next five years—from 1954 until 1959—Layton will write better poetry than anyone else in Canada.

The poems in In The Midst Of My Fever are all quite accomplished and do not suffer from Layton’s more satiric urges or his  earlier and later propensity to get overly didactic. He is a lot less prescriptive and proscriptive in these poems. These poems are very much in the moment, and the quality of language and turns of phrase are suddenly finely focused and poetically accurate. Perhaps that is due to Creeley’s influence or Creeley’s editing—it is hard to say. These poems set a higher bar than anything that Layton has written up until this point. In this collection Layton is far less the aspiring prophet and much more a poet in possession of all of the right tools and tone.

Lines move with ease, images sparkle and compel, and a poetic vision of human life and art suddenly blossoms. Of the many fine poems that the collection includes, there are three poems that really stand apart from the rest. They are “Seven O’Clock Lecture,” “The Birth of Tragedy,” and “Composition in Late Spring.”

All three poems can be considered to be some of the best poems that Layton ever wrote. Here are a few stanzas taken from these poems:

       Filling their ears
           with the immortal claptrap of poetry
       These singular lies with the power
                        to get themselves believed,
       The permanent bloom on all time-infected things;
       Indicating the will to falsehood in the hearts of men,
       The music in a pismire’s walk, the necessary glory of dung,
                          immortal coal of the universe. . .

                                                (“Seven O’Clock Lecture”)

 

       And I observe how the sensual moths
                  big with odour and sunshine
                  dart into the perilous shrubbery;
       or drop their visiting shadows
                  upon the garden I one year made
       of flowering stone to be a footstool
                    for the perfect gods
                    who, friends to the ascending orders,
       will sustain this passionate meditation
       and call down pardons
       for the insurgent blood.

                                                    (“The Birth Of Tragedy”)

 

       When Love ensnares my mind unbidden
                  I am lost in the usual way
        On a crowded street or avenue
        Where I am lord of all the marquees,
        And the traffic cop moving his lips
                    Like a poet composing
        Whistles a discovery of sparrows
         About my head.

                                                        (“Composition In Late Spring”)

 

The reader is ensnared by the seeming ease of composition, the aptness of chosen adjectives, and by the elevation of some commonplaces into the realm of poetry. It isn’t so much “a will to falsehood” or a will to power—“A word after a word after a word is power “(Margaret Atwood)—as it is a will to poetry.

*

In 1956, Jonathan Williams would publish Layton’s first selected poems, The Improved Binoculars, with a praising introduction by William Carlos Williams. It would be followed in 1959 by a larger selection in A Red Carpet For The Sun, published by Jack McClelland at McClelland and Stewart. Layton won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for A Red Carpet For The Sun, and his reputation in Canada was established.

After that he was no longer a small press author or a literary press author. Nor was he any longer involved in Contact Press (he had been replaced by Peter Miller). And shortly thereafter the intense correspondence that he had with Robert Creeley  throughout the 1950s ceased to be. From conversations with Creeley, I came away with the impression that, at that time, he ceased to find much merit in Layton’s later poetry, so there now was nothing much to talk about. In the mid-fifties, In The Midst Of My Fever was an intriguing event in North American poetry.

         

      

 

 

 

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. He currently resides in Toronto.