The people's poetry: a discussion

Milt Acorn, founder of People's Poetry

Reprinted with permission here is Chris Faier's post on an excellent discussion of People's Poetry, the only alternative there exists in Canada (imo) to the prevailing academic and mainstream poetries. I'm happy to have shared the discussion with Canada's foremost 'people's poets' Chris Faiers and James Deahl.
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Deahl/Faiers & DiDiodato discussions on People's Poetry

July 7, 2012

Dear Chris & Chase,

Below is a draft of my definition of People's poetry.

What do you think?

. . . James, Norma, & Rocky


People’s Poetry

by James Deahl


Although its roots lie deep in the Confederation Period (1880-1899), people’s literature as we know it today, both in poetry and in fiction, has been the central literary tradition in Canada since the mid-1920s when Frederick Philip Grove published his first Canadian novel, Settlers of the Marsh, in 1925. Grove’s poetic counterpart was Dorothy Livesay, who published her first collection, Green Pitcher, in 1928 and whose Day and Night (Governor General’s Award for Poetry, 1944) would set a standard for People’s Poetry that would be followed by Milton Acorn, George Bowering, and Ted Plantos, among others.

People’s Poetry is founded on two concepts: 1. That progress can be seen in the human universe — in terms of what might be called “social physics”, this means that society moves from disorder to order (thus, society improves, becomes more fair and less governed by social Darwinism); and 2. That humanity is perfectible within history. That is, humans play a (if not the) major role in their personal and collective salvation from the flaws of human nature.

 From these two principles it follows that: People’s Poetry promotes peace, equality, and human goodness; People’s Poetry opposes racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination; People’s Poetry opposes classism and class systems. It is, in short, art made for the people, not the elite. People’s Poetry works to preserve and enrich our natural and human environment.

In practice, People’s Poetry tends to: be committed to Modernist concepts while retaining key Romantic ideals; support Socialist / Social-Democratic political movements; oppose large-scale capitalism and its attendant “business culture”; encourage all people to participate in building their culture.

From the days when Grove and Livesay were writing and publishing their early books, realism joined with idealism has been the hallmark feature of people’s literature in Canada. This sets it apart from Post-modern, Imagist, and Confessional poetries, which also are present in our contemporary literature. Leading People’s Poets today include John B. Lee, Robert Priest, Ronnie R. Brown, and Chris Faiers.


            Note: People’s Poetry is a term generally used only in Canada. In the United States this type of writing is usually referred to as Populist Poetry, and in Britain as Public Poetry.



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late July 7- early July 8th, 2012

Dear James,
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to read & discuss your draft definition of (Canadian) People's Poetry. We were both fortunate to have the definitive Canadian People's Poet, Milt, as a comrade (in the Canadian Liberation Movement: CLM), as a friend (and roommate), and as a poetry mentor.

Knowing Milt so well, perhaps it's easier to define what a People's poet is, and that basically everything a People's Poet writes then becomes some aspect of People's Poetry. Some poets may write a People's poem from time to time, but not necessarily be considered representative People's Poets. Likewise, a true PP, like Milt, wrote lots of poems which, if read individually, wouldn't necessarily be obvious examples of People's Poetry, but which did form parts of his development, or explored aspects of his broadest world view.

I believe you pretty well nailed the development of People's Poetry and most of its primary features, but for the above reason I intuit that it's more practical to apply a definition to poets, rather than to the individual poems they create.

peace & poetry power!
Chris ... and Chase wrffffffffffffffffffffffff! (hi Rocky)

p.s. Another poet I consider a prime exemplar of PP is bill bissett. Like Milt, bill has encouraged progressive poetry through a broad range of activities, such as founding & operating blewointmentpress, doing countless tours across Canada (and Europe), mentoring and encouraging other poets, and constantly exploring and expanding our knowledge & practice of poetry, consciousness and social progress.

p.p.s. I'd like to post this discussion on my blog - I'm sure it would stimulate some feedback & perhaps even some controversy. OK with you?

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July 8, 2012

Dear Chris,

You are quite correct in the observation you made yesterday. There is People’s Poetry as a literary movement, then there are individual People’s Poems, and finally there are People’s Poets.

A true People’s Poet is one who writes People’s Poetry most of the time: Acorn, Livesay, Souster, bissett, etc. There are not many of those still around.

Then there are those who start writing People’s Poetry before moving on to another type of poetry, but who always acknowledge their roots in People’s Poetry. George Bowering comes to mind. (He has always acknowledged his great debt to the poetry of Acorn, Livesay, and Purdy.) And so does Irving Layton.

And there are individual People’s Poems such as my “On The Line”, “The Great Lakes Shipping Strike”, and “Hiorra”.

What we see today are a great many Canadian poets (actually the majority) who have come out of the People’s Poetry Movement, but who seldom write a true People’s Poem today. Souster and bissett are among our few living poets who have devoted their lives to writing for The People. But Souster is 91 years old. bissett is 72.

Actually, Norma can be viewed as a People’s Poet in that she was inspired to write poetry at all (and she had already turned 40 at the time) by first reading Souster and a bit later by reading Layton’s A Red Carpet for the Sun (he was still writing P.P. at that time). She still writes for The People. But my sweetheart will turn 84 in less than two months.

It is perhaps not good that our People’s Poets are all Senior Citizens, but I simply do not see younger poets who devote themselves to the Canadian people and to the struggles of their people like Livesay and Acorn did.

Nonetheless, all the time I meet younger poets (by that I mean poets in their 40s) who admire Purdy or Livesay or Acorn or bissett.

A bit odd. What do you think, old Buddy?


Poetry Power!

. . . James

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July 8

Hi James,
Yes, I like your clarification of three distinct aspects of People's Poetry: as a literary movement, individual poems, and then People's Poets. I find the distinctions very helpful and astute.

And something else you relate which I hadn't thought of is that some are People's Poets for the earlier part of their literary life (career is so inaccurate in Canada!), and then they go on to other things, while some poets develop into People's Poets later in life (like Norma, and perhaps Robert Priest).

Another issue is the quality of the poetry. There are many political activists who write People's Poetry, but most of them are more committed to their activism than to their poetry. And so the poetry suffers. On last night's walk along the river with Chase, I mused that if Milt had been a 'better' progressive activist, if he had been capable of organizing Canadian unions, say, then his attention might have been focused there and we would have lost our best national poet.

I'm also biased towards considering non-academic and blue collar poets as more likely candidates for being People's Poets. I'm thinking of Martin Durkin, the young prole who closes the Purdy tribute anthology, AND LEFT A PLACE TO STAND ON. Of course Purdy, and MIlt, and even Ray Souster all worked at prosaic day jobs - they had to earn their bread and butter among the people, not sheltered in ivory towers, and their poetry reflects this.

And there is an 'outsider' element to People's Poetry. All the best PP have been outsiders - thinking esp. of bill bissett here - there is an almost shamanistic pattern in the lives of our best People's Poets - a separation from the tribe, and then a rejoining, with the means of communicating the new experiences gained during the separations necessary for tribal growth being the poetry.

And yes, it's sad, but completely understandable that there are so few younger dedicated People's Poets. It isn't any sort of career by the standards of our capitalist and materialistic society. So the young poets become profs, or journalists, or give up on poetry and literature completely as a primary lifelong activity. As I've said in a few emails, I've recently been hanging out with poet/novelist/raconteur/hipster Jim Christy. He's now 67, and still hard scrabbling for paying literary and artistic gigs. I've joked that he should receive some sort of lifetime guaranteed income - Canada Council? Ontario Arts Council? some private foundation?

Maybe that's part of the test of the mettle of Canada's People's Poets - surviving in a culture which needs your work so desperately, but which will consciously neglect you to the point of leaving you bedridden in your own excrement in a flophouse (Milt at the Waverley Hotel). With examples like this, no wonder so few are genuinely following the path Milt trail blazed.

peace & poetry power!
Chris and Chase ... wrffffffffffffffffffffff! (glad my dog ESP was working last night!)

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Conrad DiDiodato has left a new comment on your post "Deahl/Faiers discussions on People's Poetry":

Great discussion, guys

I'd just like to add that (imo) the real American exponent of the People's Poetry movement ideal in Canada was probably Cid Corman. He worked tirelessly all his life (mostly from Kyoto Japan) to publish, support and encourage mostly non-mainstream, non-academic poets. There was once a Corman-Souster relationship that resulted in Souster's inclusion in some issues of Corman's "Origin" literary mag.

But certainly Milt Acorn is the quintessential people's poet: and particularly for the reasons that made him also(from what people who knew him have told me) instantly likeable as a person: I guess it's true to the say the people's poet emphasizes the person of the poet over any fake ('illustrated')personas or methodologies. The poem is the person, the poem being always the indelible imprint of the person.

I'd like one day soon to continue this vital discussion at my site.

A good day to you both!



Posted by Conrad DiDiodato to Riffs & Ripples from ZenRiver Gardens at 8 July 2012 09:57

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July 8, 2012 - part 2


Dear Chris,


I have long noted that the poets who enjoy what I call “comfortable money” are almost all professors with their Ph.Ds. Then there are a great many poets who have a much lower income than the average Canadian. (I worked at wage-slavery from the age or 21 until I was 61 — four decades. In only one of those years did I have an annual much income above the official “poverty line”, otherwise known as the “low income cut-off” to government folk. Some years I earned only half of a poverty line income!)


While it must be acknowledged that some People’s Poets did teach university, by far the majority of our People’s Poets did not. Some I know worked as dishwashers, taxi drivers, loggers, bookshop clerks, and hospital orderlies. (I was a “professional” dishwasher myself on three occasions.) Very few People’s Poets ever earned $100,000 per year.


A comfortable income is more likely to be found among the writers of other types of poetry.


What do these facts mean? Hell if I know. All I do know is that when I was a student at West Virginia Wesleyan I had to decide on an academic career or poetry. I was certain I could not pursue both. (Here I speak only for myself since I cannot speak for any other person.) Thus, at age 66 I am poor but happy, and I have written a few books that are, at least in my opinion, pretty good.


I must add here that some professor/poets I have known (once upon a time I was a member of the inner circle of the League of Canadian Poets) turned out to be decent people. And I must also add that a few People’s Poets turned out to be complete jerks. In short: bad people can write good poetry and good people can write bad poetry.

Again, these are simply facts. Make of them what you will.


Fraternally,

. . . James

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Conrad DiDiodato has left a new comment on your post "Deahl/Faiers & DiDiodato discussions on People's P...":

James,

the academic is generally unfavourable to the people's poet (as I've discovered) for two reasons: 1. academics don't write or don't encourage anyone to write til they've been vetted and approved by the right'committees' or 'review boards' and then university presses who round out the process (I ask you, Who would ever have published Silliman's monstrosity of book of poems titled "the Alphabet" if not the Alabama Press to which, of course, Silliman is attached via his 'review board' friends Bernstein and Lazer?)I've always maintained that the academics and, in Canada, the arts funding regime, have virtually monopolized publication in the arts.

2. academics who happen to teach writing, working in cahoots with the academic publishing industry, create instant ready-made audiences (in the form of their own classes)for their own published goods. Academics can't publish under any other more normal conditions--let's face it, who's going to read an academic's dull droning prose if they don't have to?-- It's for this reason I detest Kootenay-style writing regimes since academics posing as litterateurs create a need for the services only they can provide (It's sort of like the iPhone user's addiction to Apps: without them the addiction to instant texting and networking can't be fed).

I also maintain that the academics are directly responsible for the terrible state of poetry in Canada. This conclusion follows directly from the above-mentioned two observations re: academic presses. If the public isn't the final arbiter of taste, and the academic has free rein to do whatever they wish in their classes,the type of poetry that 'sells' and will be published in mainstream mags will always tend to be wildly experimental, elitist and anti-communal.



Posted by Conrad DiDiodato to Riffs & Ripples from ZenRiver Gardens at 8 July 2012 16:57

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July 11, 2012


Dear Chris and Chase,


Thank you for sending the Umbrella. Nice piece on AcornFest.


Have you seen the Jeff Seffinga definition of People’s Poetry? If not, here it is:


"Milton Acorn's poetry defines the People's Poetry Tradition. Subtle in his emotions, his power and directness come from the images drawn from everyday island life. Dedicated to the class struggle, Acorn peopled his poems with working men and women of the visage of Canada, and paid unceasing tribute to their suffering, their humble crafts and their utter reliability. With an authentic working-class voice, Acorn's poetry reflects the uncanny ability to replicate the nuance and cadence of everyday speech so that the delicacy of his imagery is also fraught with the wrath of hardship."


Fraternally,

. . . James

"reading Conrad's poetry on the shaman shack deck (Bridget bird review)" by Chris Faiers (reprinted with permission)

 Thank you, Chris!

__________________________

I received Conrad DiDiodato's book a few days ago, and took it with me for a couple of afternoon readings on the shaman shack deck at my ZenRiver Gardens retreat. This is a test of sorts - the poetry had to compete for attention with the Moira River's spring run-off, newly arriving songbirds, Chase begging biscuits, cold Zywiec beer, and a nagging kidney stone.

Bridget Bird, Conrad's first collection, passed this literary gauntlet with flying colours. It's hard to believe this is his first book, at age 55. The poetry is masterful, engaging and relaxing. Instead of competing with the constant peaceful distractions, Conrad's poetry flowed as naturally through my afternoons as the river's gurglings and the birdsong serenades. A lesser book wouldn't have lasted 5 minutes, and a bad book risked being flung into the not-so-mighty Moira's flow to the Bay of Quinte.

The familiarity of the circumstances of the first poem grabbed me. Sixteen Mile Creek is the story of an autistic boy who drowns. Two locals died in similar tragic circumstances in the Marmora area last spring. One man took a shortcut home across a too-thawed beaver pond, and never returned alive. His widow and I chatted several night ago in the Mac's Milk parking lot. This introductory poem's synchronicity made me immediately receptive to the book.


Sixteen Mile Creek

At mid-stream, adrift in reedy sand, face down,
he likely caused rifts in this creek.

(for raw hands slap down last,
careless how they land)

Hard like spites in the ear
is the last splash (as only the leaden do, at dawn)
of faith, hearts & poor Ron

Same to god if autistic boys sleep or drown

Cleaving to leaves is futile
unless lights can tell hair from starfish, shoes from shorts
Suns scratch them out, like this,
and discount
clothing clotted & sent to port

Poor discounted Ron! I'd say I was the first to see him
and seer enough to shake a few lines loose
out of miles of leaves & sands : &

reedy waters slapped
hard in the autistic ear

This is humane evocative "people's poetry" in the tradition of Canada's greatest poets, Milton Acorn and Al Purdy.

I read on, and began dogearing favourite poems and passages for repeat reading and for writing this reflective review. I should have stopped this task after vandalizing the first few pages - in less than a week the book has that ratty, well-thumbed look of other favourites on my poetry bookshelf : )

from the poem Zebras & Things

But it's an old spidery autumn moon
deep in the night,
prickly, wild-eyed & bright

can poke the water
so full of holes that the stars fall through
& glisten in sandbar


Almost haiku, and maybe even more so!


More sandbars in the poem Lake (no pun intended):


Sandbars, not too far out, a shale-brown foot
below the water
(not a lot down there, in just
a foot of water)
But tides here ripple with the minnow & serve as
fish- or eel-comfort


Kell Verses is a beautiful homage to poet Katherine L. Gordon

it begins:

She sits on her stone seat,
beside two tractor wheels,
musing, the jug beneath her feet,
earth of clay round her heels -
dear Kate, prophetess of rivers,
who sends me lone breezes.
When day dies, giving pale slivers
of light, and night freezes.


In just 63 pages of Bridget bird Conrad manages to share his clear-eyed and yet mystic vision. Again, hard to comprehend this is his first collection. And I know he has already written new poems which prove his creative arc is growing. Conrad kindly let me blog post his poem on the recent 'honour killings' of three sisters and their aunt. His heartfelt, yet almost simplistically styled poem, For Zainab,Sahar, Geeti, and Rona, sits among the highest ranking pages of my 300+ postings. To my chagrin, it is the most-read poem on my blog, far ahead of any of my creations. Congratulations and thank you, Conrad, for sharing this fine collection. 55 years is far too long to wait for your next collection ; )

Bridget bird by Conrad DiDiodato
Serengeti Press, 2012
63 pages

Serengeti Press
Box 146, RR #3
Puslinch, ON
N0B 2J0

Edited by Jeff Seffinga (no wonder the poetry is so damn good!)


reflective review by Chris Faiers
For several years I was a regular poetry reviewer for Canadian Book Review Annual.
I've also reviewed for the haiku mag Inkstone as well as other poetry mags.
Recently I was a national judge for both the Acorn/Plantos People's Poetry Medal
and the annual Canadian Poetry Association contest.

CanPo: and why the Internet is just the place for it

Yes, that's right: CanPo, just like LangPo, VisPo and VidPo. What is it? Another poetry manifesto with all the usual idol-shattering & exhibitionism? Well, not exactly a declaration & not so much a new poetry as one that's been pushed underground by mainstream CanLit establishment (the people who get the dollars & top poetry gigs!) & that other funky university-bred stuff that calls itself one of many things: post-avant, mash up, conceptual, slam, flarf, fluxus, codework, L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E, text, appropriation, cleave, ecopoetics, restraint-based, cancellation, concrete, moving, jump-cut, etc etc. We're certainly not going to add ourselves to that growing crowd of third-rate writing class experimenters.

And I can't lay claim to having named it either: it's Chris Faiers who, either intentionally or not, spoke of People's Poetry in those post-avant terms. I mean it seems we're already in a bit of a conceptual quandary from the outset: how to, namely, establish an allegiance to a distinctive Canadian tradition that's been sadly subverted & which a communitarian poetry ideal such as CanPo envisages will restore to something like its former glory. But a name like CanPo? Shouldn't we avoid the cutesy terminology of Ron Silliman and his L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E cohorts? Is adopting the title not a forced concession to changed literary tastes which no amount of ranting will alter? We ought to be in the game, after all, if we want to win.Those of us who want a true poetics back have to learn to navigate a middle course between subjection to the CanLit & post-avant tyrannies & reintroduction of the notion of the artist as a free, independent producer & consumer of cultural goods.

Even Marx cautioned wild-eyed revolutionaries everywhere not to storm the company gates at first but rather to be patient, working slowly & methodically to undermine oppressive regimes from within.Canada-Council and the university are regimes (make no mistake about it!) at the top of every radical agenda for critique & eventual overthrow. It's to them we turn our anger and not competing poetries out there. But we're not really communists nor are we prepared to go to the extreme of Black Bloc activism: we don't have to. I think of CA Conrad's "guerilla readings" at the Philadelphia Museum, an event marked by a friendly storming of a public space in order to read from the works of Gertrude Stein. Maybe we ought to storm Queen's Park and hold a similar sort of Al Purdy rally, once a year to commemorate the Purdy statue unveiling. As Faiers certainly will attest, poetry activism comes always as matter of safeguarding a national patrimony and its key symbols (such as Purdy's A-frame), things always bound to come under threat in a predominantly state-run cultural milieu.

Al Purdy statue at Queen's Park

CanPo is more than just a name & network comprised of symbols or sites consecrated to a ground-up literary expression (in decided opposition to the statist command structures in place today, with their regulations & protectionist policies). It's certainly all those things in one way or another. I'm particularly fond myself of poetry 'sites': I think of the Erland Lee barn where my own readings have been held or James Deahl's former downtown Hamilton "Artbar" reading series or Faiers's own annual Purdyfest celebrations in Marmora. Ours shouldn't be, however, just another cozy enclave of poets & poetries; it'd be likely to develop into another "official verse culture". And nor will I envisage for it any role in preserving a kind of pure Canadian poetics, whatever that means: such talk is mythico-political and will result in another closed system. And we oughtn't be too overly critical & resentful, prepared to give just unrelenting commentary on the inadequacy of competing literary expressions, since that would make the whole thing look elitist & exclusionary, which it isn't. Milt Acorn, founder of the people's poetry movement, would have found the idea revolting.

CanPo does operate internally to both the mainstream & fashionable post-avant. I'd like to think it does, in a strong sense, override both culturally through its vision of a literary commons characterized by openness & fairness and a real Canadian literary continuity. A good example of poetry community is to be seen in the The Grand Piano project , a "collective autobiography" of the early days of Language poetry in San Francisco. And speaking of Americans, I'd always thought the Olson-Duncan- led invasion at Simon Fraser in the 60s had prevented a Canadian modernism from fully developing. The radical Tish poetries of its day hadn't been good to people with a more traditionalist bent & all but killed the lyrical voice. A trend that would have continued were it not for the Internet. There's a very strong affinity, in fact, between people's poetry and a system of Internet linking & networking that by design works strongly towards developing a poetry community. Recently Faiers said he thinks Acorn, consummate conversationalist, would have loved the blog. Faiers:

Uncle Milty (Acorn) would have loved blogging. Milt always had several rants on the go - it was impossible to hang out with him without listening to at least two or three ... they did get a bit repetitious - if Milt had been able to blog his heart out, maybe he would have gotten the rants out of his system sooner & moved on to new areas ...

Software interface is not the same as a live interactive Purdyfest; wikis and blogs, Yahoo! groups and listserves, of course, are not an exact substitute. An Acorn rant wouldn't go as far on his blog. But Web 2.0 & social media are good for poetry, celebration and  research. It's just the place to critique the unholy alliance of Canada-Council, academia & their mainstream publishing outlets & the way they feed on the creative multitude: just the place to refuse to collaborate with any state-sponsored managers of the Arts, exposing them for the freeloaders they essentially are. Make no mistake about it: it's a distinctive type of "surplus value" they've extracted from artists, writers & independent researchers, one comprising of productive practices that they've both encouraged via state "multiculturalist"-style propaganda and then taken as their own so that today literary expression ("cultural capital") is practically indistinguishable from government policy. Here's the unusual paradox of the social welfare state acting like capitalists: and the even more unusual one of the radicals themselves today resorting to corporate tactics to cash in! And where do they go to do it: Internet.

Like good venture capitalists some of the erstwhile 60s Tish poets have paid a kind of forced obeisance to the Web: Frank Davey, Fred Wah and bpNichol, for example, are figures associated with the Simon Fraser revolution who've been digitized, a once thriving live campus and lecture hall activism reduced to links and online submissions. (I can't help feeling, however, that bpNichol would have chafed at the idea of his lifework being converted into digital archive: his spirit was too pure, & his work too mindful of the materiality of art). What happened? Whether as public archive, not-for-profit community venture or forum for academic discussion, the end-game is the same: the capitalist mantra of converting institutions into markets is being sounded everywhere. Let's face it: in Canada the Arts have been institutionalized. Readers, contributors and the odd troll are generously contributing to what Hardt and Negri in their celebrated book Empire refer to as "immaterial labor", "that is, labor that produces an immaterial good such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication" (290). "Immaterial" is also synonymous with "abstract", as in abstract bureaucratic decrees that are always very far removed from the real live conditions of artistic creation Ministry directors seek to control.

bpNichol

But there we go again talking like Marxists, & even borrowing current communist denunciations of internet technologies as the most advanced form of capitalist exploitation &how, in particular, it infiltrates the very productive processes (such as blogging, file sharing, free software use) that keep it going. Bloggers like me are, according to this, the unsuspecting dupes of software designers and the Zuckerbergs of the social media world who've amassed fortunes because we've been helping ourselves to all their free stuff. Managing to entangle users in sticky webs of circuits & drives, only a few profit from the potential of "informatization of production" (again, Hardt & Negri). Jodi Dean's argued very passionately for just such a position in her book Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive.  I happen to think the communist critiques (to which Dean is uncritically tied) are ridiculously misdirected and I've tried pointing that out to her at her blog: capitalists these days are pretty hard to tell from the socialists & radicals of old.

As I've already said, the "commons" is an idea that can be put to good uses where CanPo is concerned. I won't hesitate for a second to suggest it's rather bureaucratic arts-funding regimes in partnership with academics and mainstream publishing that are the "culture capitalists" who've turned the free labor of artists & writers into an "immaterial" type of property. The multiculturalist credo of inclusivity, fairness & equity in the Arts may even be compared to the "free software" and "open access" lure of informational technologies. Time was in Canada when culture and government were suspcious of each other, and a bpNichol could cause a furor in the House of Commons over his poetry. Perhaps that's something we need to think seriously about.

The 'people's poetry' online: a special welcome to Chris Faiers

I'm delighted to hear that one of Canada's foremost 'people's poetry' activists, co-founder of the Canadian Poetry Association (CPA) and perhaps the nation's greatest Al Purdy champion, Chris Faiers, has started a "Riffs & Ripples from ZenRiver Gardens" blog. Activist with the heart of Eastern poet, unstinting supporter and practitioner of a poetry close to where the heart lives, Chris is someone I seem to have known for a very long time (primarily through email, his Al Purdy A-frame campaign and numerous other notices of special interest to local poetry communities) though never meeting him in person yet.

If I'm asked what I'd like to replace the abysmal 'mainstream' Canadian poetry with, it's this: a people's poetry in the tradition of Katherine L. Gordon, Andreas Gripp, Al Purdy, Wayne Ray, Jeff Seffinga, Milt Acorn, James Deahl and Ted Plantos. A community rather than a bureaucracy; a network of friends, supporters & artists with loyalties to a national literature (though many hail from different parts of the world). In the time Chris has been active in Canada several significant literary events (like Purdyfest) have appeared, poetry publications & associations like the CPA continue to flourish, & anthologies (such as the recent Crossing Lines -Poets Who Came to Canada in the Vietnam War Era, Seraphim Editions, 2008) occasionally appear on the literary landscape.

And with a growing number of people's poets going online perhaps it's also time to think of creating our own true Canadian poetics & form a real alternative to the elitist CanLit establishment that's had a free ride for too long, & usually at taxpayers' expense. Let the poetry & discussions begin!