IRVING LAYTON USED to talk about Leonard Cohen with the pride of a father in the achievements of his own son. They wrote poems about and to each other. Several of Leonard’s poems make reference to Irving or to one of Irving’s poems. He regarded Irving as his “poetic master.”
“I taught him how to dress, he taught me how to live forever,” Leonard said. Irving’s The Swinging Flesh and Leonard’s The Spice Box of Earth had been launched at the same time in 1961. Both were sensations.
I read a lot of Cohen in the 1970s when Jack and I were engaged in a battle with Malcolm Ross, the editor of the New Canadian Library series, about including Cohen’s novel Beautiful Losers in the New Canadian Library. In order to persuade Malcolm of the worthiness of the novel, I quoted what I assumed were persuasive literary passages over the phone to the progressively less and less polite Malcolm. The book had first been published in 1966, and Jack thought it was a literary bombshell. He wrote to Leonard: “It’s wild and incredible and marvellously well written, and at the same time appalling, shocking, revolting, disgusting . . .”
I had found it difficult to read, its language overly florid, its characters hard to believe, but it does have some extraordinary writing, its lack of structure is mesmerizing once you decide not to care about structure, and it has what Malcolm found so distressing: very graphic sex.I
I didn’t hear Leonard sing until about 1972. He was performing in Toronto and Jack had two seats close to the stage. Though he took up only a small portion of it, Leonard seemed to occupy the whole space, blue shirt, guitar, mic, and a spotlight. I don’t remember all the songs, but I know he sang “Suzanne” and “Bird on a Wire.” I was humming them for several weeks. Some days, I still do.
Jack seemed restless and harrumphed from time to time. When the show was over, he announced we were going backstage. In the small dressing room, he had barely introduced me before he launched into a speech about why Leonard was wasting his talent singing. His voice was shit but he was a great poet. His Selected had been a bestseller and had even won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry.II
Leonard mainly nodded and smiled. Having first seen him on stage, I was surprised at how fragile he seemed. In the end he talked a bit about his new book, The Energy of Slaves, but I no longer recall what he said. The book was published the following year, but I didn’t meet Leonard again till 1978.
* * *
JACK WAS CONVINCED that Canada was a land of poets. He believed that more poetry was written and read in Canada, per capita, than in any other country (and Edmonton, he thought, was our poetry capital). We certainly sold enough poetry books to support his theory.
The seventies saw Layton, Cohen, Atwood, Purdy, Birney, Ralph Gustafson, Raymond Souster, Doug Jones, Milton Acorn, George Bowering, and John Newlove attesting to that theory, and M&S was attracting some younger poets, Joe Rosenblatt and Susan Musgrave. Storm Warnings, Al Purdy’s two volumes featuring the work of young poets, were successful and well reviewed. Musgrave’s The Impstone and A Man to Marry, A Man to Bury got her the attention she deserved.
A plethora of new literary journals showcased Canadian poetry. Alongside the Writers’ Union, there was the League of Canadian Poets (founded in 1966), where Purdy, A. J. M. Smith, and Earle Birney could support newer arrivals such as Dennis Lee,III Sid Marty, David McFadden, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Patrick Lane, Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, and Michael Ondaatje. I went to one of their meetings in Calgary, and tried to hawk poetry books from a hastily set-up table outside the hall. The poets bought one another’s books and had them autographed. Purdy added to his large collection of other poets’ signed books.
I didn’t meet Michael Ondaatje till late 1978 or early 1979, when I was ready to leave the company. He had brought the manuscript of There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do: Poems 1963–1978. He was lovely to look at, his strange blue eyes, the curly dark hair. Everyone wanted to see him. The editors ducked out of their warren and the salespeople walked down the corridor to the “reception” for a better view. What I remember about the poetry is the immediate, tactile, often abrupt, and wildly colourful imagery. And these lines from “Letters and Other Worlds”:
My father’s body was a town of fear
He was the only witness to its fear dance . . .
After reading Ondaatje’s 1982 fictional memoir Running in the Family, I understood what the poem had already told me.
* * *
I STILL LOVE poetry but not with the questing urgency of my early years. Yet each year I listen to the Griffin Prize’s short-listed poets read. Dionne Brand’s Ossuaries has taken up residence next to my bed, along with Al Purdy’s Naked with Summer in Your Mouth, George Jonas’s Selected Poems, Irving Layton’s Selected, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and a rich assortment of books I am reading or plan to read one day.
Scott Griffin created the prize in 2000 along with trustees Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje. Scott seems to believe, as I do, that words can change the world. He is a most unusual businessman because, in addition to his founding and supporting an internationally lauded poetry prize, he pursues personal goals of derring-do, such as circumnavigating the globe in a sailboat, flying his aging Cessna 180 solo across the Atlantic and volunteering for the Flying Doctors Service of East Africa. My Heart Is Africa: A Flying Adventure is his account of the two years he spent working for the NGO.IV He is a romantic, an adventurer, a storyteller, and a publisher: his Griffin Trust bought the House of Anansi in 2002.
I. Beautiful Losers, the book Malcolm Ross objected to (“The book turns my stomach. Quite literally, Jack!”), did finally find its way into the New Canadian Library in 1991 after Ross had retired and the stewardship of the series was taken over by David Staines.
II. Leonard rejected the award.
III. I used to look for early versions of some of Dennis’s poems, trying to understand why he changed them.
IV. Every time I see Scott’s rather regal wife, Krystine, I am reminded that this very accomplished woman accompanied her husband on his African adventure, crash-landed with him on an isolated island in Kenya, was arrested with him in Tanzania, slept on the ground, endured malaria, but stayed.