Ken Norris : POEM FOR CLAUDIA

Claudia Lapp (1946-2026)

 

 

Honey, and horses,
and bright days
rich in sunflowers. 

The ecstatic
joys of youth. 

Where do we go now,
no longer earthbound? 

Out into the universe?

All of my realizations
always come slow. 

But I’ll see you now:

in the twinkling of stars,
in undefinable moments,
in the half-mad river of crazy dreams.

 

 

 

 

 

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 : 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.