Elizabeth Smart’s Rockcliffe Park, from GEIST

my non-fiction dispatch, "Elizabeth Smart’s Rockcliffe Park," from GEIST magazine (print) is now online!

accompanying image: Jenny Bou, L'éveil de la bienveillance, 2020, handmade collage on cardboard

GEIST 82 (fall 2011)

In the 1960s and ‘70s, feminists, Marxists, anarchists, anti-establishmentarians, poets, writers and artists in Vancouver, who had found no place for their work in the publications of the mainstream, began to form their own book and magazine publishing enterprises. This was the era of the War Measures act, the Vietnam War and the Gastown Police Riot, of baby boomers coming of age. the CRTC introduced CanCon and the Federal Book Publishing Policy began to provide financial assistance to Canadian publishers. Small, niche presses began popping up all over Canada, which, until then, had been dominated by a few Canadian and foreign-owned companies with headquarters in Ontario.

Vancouver, at the time, had a population of about 426,000 (about a million in Greater Vancouver), two universities, many bookstores, a thriving counterculture scene and an NDP government (1972-75). Rent was still affordable, subsidized daycare was available, and people could support their artistic and cultural work for short periods with unemployment insurance claims, welfare benefits or temporary employment through government make-work programs. There were no publishing courses then; the editors and publishers of the 1970s learned everything from experienced people and/or just by doing.

What came out of this milieu in Vancouver was an efflorescence of publishing activity: feminist book and periodical publishers such as Press Gang, Makara and Room of One’s Own; counterculture presses such as Pulp Press and Vancouver Community Press/NewStar Books; avant-garde literary publishers such as Talonbooks, and periodicals such as blewointment, Periodics and TISH.

The following pages celebrate these publishers, on the occasion of Vancouver’s 125^th birthday, with materials found in archives, libraries, basements and attics by Geist interns and volunteers, some of whom were born a year after the ‘70s ended, others almost a decade after. The young writers, editors and publishers at Geist chose materials that seemed best to represent a decade that they can only imagine, from over here, on the other side of the ‘70s.

Over the years, Vancouver seems repeatedly able to do what most other Canadian cities haven’t been able to do, and that is, acknowledge and celebrate its own rich, literary history. I’m still annoyed (and a bit confused) that nothing was done to celebrate Ottawa’s 150^th anniversary a few years ago; when I premiered the first issue of the Ottawa pdf annual ottawater that January, I had presumed it would be only the beginning of a year’s worth of attention (apparently not). Still, every city has literary richness to celebrate, and fine contemporary work that could always use more attention than they currently get, and Geist has been anchoring a segment of British Columbia writing for decades. The new issue, #82, features “Signs of Literary Life,” showcasing “Literary Vancouver in the 1970s.” Anniversaries are worthy times to take stock, see just where it is you are, and where you’ve been, something that often gets lost during the course of any journey. For the sake of the issue, the feature on Vancouver’s literary history focuses on the 1960s and 70s, during which a wealth of activity began, and GEIST celebrates small fragments showcasing a whole array of activity, some of which, in different forms, of course, is still present. There are histories of many of these, from 3 cent pulp to blewointment to Talonbooks to Room of One’s Own that have yet to be written, but this will at least give a taste and context of what was happening during that period.

New Star Books got its start in 1969, when a group of writers and editors working for the Georgia Straight, an alternative Vancouver weekly paper, published the first of several literary supplements inserted in the paper. Within a year, this group had begun to publish books under the name Georgia Straight Writing Series. Early work by bill bissett, Judith Copithorne, Fred Wah, Brian Fawcett, George Bowering and Daphne Marlatt was featured in the series. In 1971, some members of the group (the York Street commune) started their own book-publishing project under a new imprint, Vancouver Community Press. Workers came and went, and by 1974, the press’s editorial focus had shifted to non-fiction titles about current affairs and politics. One of these books, Two Roads by Jack Scott, a largely positive account of the People’s Republic of China, inspired another name change, to New Star Books. In 2011, the press had about eighty books in print.

There has always been an element to GEIST of the literary scrapbook, picking worthy scraps and articles from other places, as well as original articles on just what is happening, remaining, in many ways, the news that stays news. Where else can you read of the infamous Gastown Riot of 1971 against an article by GEIST columnist Alberto Manguel on Australian outlaw Ned Kelly?

From his adolescence onwards, Ned Kelly led a violent life, involved in punch-ups, assaults, cattle rustling and bank robbing. For the latter purpose, he formed a gang of four: himself as leader, his younger brother Dan, the opium-addicted Joe Byrne and the melancholy adolescent Steve Hart. Ned was finally captured in June 1880, tried for his crimes and condemned to death by hanging. When the judge pronounced the fatal words “May God have mercy on your soul,” Ned replied: “I will go a little further than that, and say I will see you there when I go.” His mother’s parting words to him were: “Mind that you die like a Kelly.” A petition to spare Ned’s life was signed by over thirty thousand admirers.

Vancouver writer Michael Turner, “one of six writers invited by the Association of Book Publishers of BC and the City of Vancouver to select ten classic Vancouver books to be brought back into print, in honour of the city’s 125^th birthday” writes a small piece on D.M. Fraser’s Class Warfare, recently reissued by Arsenal Pulp Press:

The context of the conversation, when we speak of simpler things, a break from our usual attempts at making difficulty meaningful, an explanation of what is and isn’t missing, the logic we employ to make everything as obvious as possible, as if guided by something other than ourselves, yet forgetting ourselves in the process, coasting on our logic until someone calls us on it, and we argue about that too. Which is fine, until this writing, why it looks the way it does, how I don’t feel better for it, how it takes me away from the stuff we started years ago, when we made this stuff up.

I can’t for the life of me even recall the last time the City of Ottawa worked to celebrate anything literary; my front window still holds the “MY OTTAWA INCLUDES CULTURE” sign from the 2004 debacle when our then-mayor threatened to cut numerous city services, including hospitals, public transit and all cultural funding. Shameful, that. And far more shameful that our counter-arguments weren’t a louder, more sustained noise. Given the amount of literary activity Vancouver is able to celebrate, both officially and unofficially, including the recent Vancouver Poetry Conference, doesn’t it put all other Canadian cities to shame? Where are your celebrations, Winnipeg, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary?

fwd; geist magazine's plunder/erasure contest,

Win the *Geist Erasure Poetry Contest <http://www.geist.com/erasure-contest>*!
All you have to do to win Canadian-style fame and glory is to read our excerpt of Susanna Moodie's Roughing It In the Bush and have at it with your eraser.

*First Prize: *Geist Erasure Trophy and $500
*Second Prize: *$150
*Third Prize:* $100
*Honourable Mentions:

* Swell Geist gifts 
All winning entries will be published in Geist and at geist.com.
More than one prize per category may be awarded. 
*Deadline:
* July 1, 2011

*How to Submit:
* Send your poem, with a cover letter and $20 entry fee (includes a one-year subscription to Geist), to:
Geist Erasure Contest
#210-111 West Hastings St.
Vancouver BC V6B 1H4

To find out more and to enter online, visit http://www.geist.com/erasure-contest.

A more recent note about Leonard Cohen

Everyone writes about Leonard Cohen, it seems, eventually. Every poet, every novelist, every journalist, at least a bare reference hidden, between lines. Those who arrived at Cohen in our teens or twenties and have never left. Of all the positions to take, he has various. You’ve done it, I’ve done it, everybody has done it [see my Cohen note from last fall, coincidentally also written in Myrna Kostash’s house]. You weren’t the only one pining for a run-in, Nancy White, but I never needed help with groceries. A word or two, perhaps. I keep the two letters he wrote for me by the bed, close to access if I ever need to see them, show them off, attempting charm through Cohen’s own, in my late twenties and early thirties not yet confident enough to know that if a woman was already in my room, I no longer needed the same hard-sell. For years, Saturday Night magazine seemed to be profiling Cohen a few times a decade, as though any of us would forget. As though any of us wouldn’t be hoarding our back issues featuring our favourite Montreal poet alongside that issue that featured those tastefully-nude photographs of Susan Musgrave. Just admit it. You know you’ll feel better.
Sifting through books and magazines on Kostash’s shelf, I find an issue of Border Crossings on her coffee table (no. 104, 2007) that features an interview and profile by Robert Enright, published to coincide with an exhibition of Cohen’s drawings, “Drawn in Words: Visual works from 40 years,” which premiered at the Drabinsky Gallery in Toronto on June 3, 2007.

The Book of Longing, a collection of poetry and prose Leonard Cohen published in 2006, is about wisdom. Composed by a man who has lived much in the world, and who has come to understand what all that living has been about, it also knows enough to take its wisdom with a grain of salt. While his ability to write remains undiminished, what he writes about has undergone some adjustments. As the poet himself laments, he now aches in the places where he used to play, and his candor in addressing those moments of pain is no less compelling than it was when he articulated his moments of passion. Cohen, in his 73rd year to heaven, remains our most satisfying poet on the complications of love and the loving body.

What is it about Cohen that keeps us so fascinated? Anyone with a guitar has attempted to play his songs, and the list of covers grows and grows. He is the poet our teenagers swoon over, girls and boys both, for various reasons, and with a depth that one grows to further appreciate as his audience ages, causing many to remain. CBC recently showed the hour-long “Live in London” concert, displaying the expected charm and intimate appeal special of Cohen covering his own long list of memorable songs, his own long list of memory. But still, at least one newspaper columnist asked the apprpriate question, wasn’t there a Canadian concert as worthy to show? But they have always loved him better over there, in Europe. Far more than here, even. And certainly far more and far longer than in the United States.

In the new issue of Geist (no. 72, spring 2009), Montreal writer Ann Diamond writes her own peice about Cohen, “Stranger Song: How I (finally) met Leonard Cohen,” writing out her teenage and twentysomething dreams and accidental run-ins around Montreal streets. Her piece moves gracefully between the adolescent swoon and self-questioning love, which perhaps, might also come originally from adolescence, in a memoir that wraps herself around him as a thread through her own history and coming-of-age, writing time after time they didn’t actually meet, or almost, or should have and didn’t, before arriving to tea.

Seven years later, at his kitchen table, I would ask him if he remembered our first encounter. He would not. Right now, though, I’d had enough for one night’s glimpse of the future. And I’d learned an important lesson: one poet leads to another. The universe provides for the pure in heart. On a street corner I’d had a flickering encounter with a mythical figure whose novel Beautiful Losers was one of the sacred texts of the day.

Part of a larger work-in-progress, I’m intrigued at this work; where is Diamond leading? As she writes near the end:

There are times—mainly in youth—when we believe ourselves deserving of exceptional blessings. Times when fate reaches a hand down into the aquarium where we’ve been circling, and offers us a glimpse of a world beyond. Are we really meant to breathe air? Or to end up gasping on the floor?

The title essay in the late Vancouver writer Bruce Serafin’s posthumous Stardust (New Star Books, 2007) also moves through an experience of Cohen, but without the immediacy of Cohen himself, through his own experiences growing up in West Vancouver from 1965 to 1970. Writing about a time just before Diamond’s own begins, Serafin's is a more general generational piece about the 1960s, threading his own reading of Cohen through the growing up that he needed to leave behind him. Writing about the “glamour” of a particular generation that, for him, Leonard Cohen’s work embodied.

Cohen’s poems ‘The Music Crept By Us’, ‘What I’m Doing Here’ (from Flowers for Hitler), ‘The Genius’ and ‘Angels’ (from The Spice-Box of Earth) show this trick at work. The heroic pose, the lyrics using the language of love to evoke grotesque subject matter, the narcissism, the coy glamorization of failure and terror – all this hit home to me and my teenage friends. Of course we didn’t have any real understanding of the severity and pain of failure. But in Cohen’s poems, just as in songs like “Desolation Row,” we found a romantic mode of writing that provided an access to a realm of experience that might otherwise have proved overpowering and beyond our ability to assimilate. [...]

So why did I stop reading him? Well, as with e.e. cummings, another poet I admired, the very intoxication I felt marks the point at which Cohen’s weaknesses can be observed: the playing to an audience, the easy stylization of experience. Vanity was Cohen’s element, just as a black leather sportscoat was his favoured dress, and the consequent staging of the personality that I now sense everywhere in his work meant that an infatuated intelligence instead of an alert one was the order of the day so far as his readers were concerned.

Later on, he writes that “[t]he truth is, experiencing Cohen was uncannily like experiencing infatuated love.” Is this the difference? Is this what Diamond gets, able to work through her love and engage with it, whereas Serafin falls out of his altogether? Or did Serafin fall too hard too far to do anything else than leave it all behind?