CLASSIFICATION
Swallow ID:
1258
Partner Institution:
Concordia University
Source Collection Label:
SGWU Reading Series-Concordia University Department of English fonds
Series:
The Poetry Series
Sub Series:
SGWU Reading Series-Concordia University Department of English fonds
ITEM DESCRIPTION
Title:
Henry Beissel and Mike Gnarowski at Sir George Williams University, The Poetry Series, 13 January 1967
Title Source:
Cataloguer
Title Note:
"Henry Beissel Reading in The Poetry Series at Sir George Williams University, 1967-01-13" handwritten on the back of the tape's box. Spelling mistakes and Mike Gnarwoski's name scratched over with pen.
"I086-11-003" and "RT 516" also written.
"GNAROWSKI & BISSEL I006/SR122" written on sticker on the spine of the tape's box. Gnarowski refers to Michael Gnarowski. Bissel refers to Henry Beissel. Biessel is mispelled
Language:
English
Production Context:
Documentary recording
Genre:
Reading: Poetry
Identifiers:
[I086-11-003, I006-11-122]
Rights
CREATORS
Name:
Gnarowski, Michael
Dates:
1934-
Role:
"Performer",
"Author"
Notes:
Michael Gnarowski was born on September 27, 1934 in Shanghai, China. He attended several universities: McGill University, B.A. in 1956, Indiana University in 1959, University of Montreal, M.A. in 1960 and University of Ottawa, Ph.D. in 1967. While at McGill, he published his poetry in Yes, which he co-edited. Gnarowski was heavily involved in several presses and magazines throughout his career, which include Le Chien d’or/The Golden Dog, Delta, Golden Dog Press, the Tecumseh Press, Arc Poetry Magazine and McGraw-Hill Ryerson’s Critical Views on Canadian Writers Series (Ryerson Press, 1970), and Canadian Poetry. Along with Ron Everson, Raymond Souster and Louis Dudek, he founded the League of Canadian Poets in 1966. He taught English at the University of Sherbrooke from 1961-62; at Port Arthur (now Thunder Bay), Ontario from 1962-65; was an assistant professor of English at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia) from 1966-72; Carleton University from 1972 onwards. He published a book of his own poetry, Postscript for St. James Street in 1965 (Delta Press), and has since edited and compiled over fifteen other books.
Name:
Beissel, Henry
Dates:
1929-
Role:
"Author",
"Performer"
Notes:
Poet Henry Beissel was born in 1929 in Cologne, Germany. Beissel studied philosophy at universities in Cologne and in London before emigrating to Canada in 1951 where he graduated with an M.A. in English from the University of Toronto in 1960. He taught at the University of Edmonton, the University of Alberta as well as Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) in Montreal. Beissel served as editor for the controversial literary and political journal Edge from 1963 (in Edmonton) until 1969 (in Montreal). He translated the poetry of German-Canadian Walter Bauer, called The Price of Morning in 1968 (Prism International Press). His first book, New Wings for Icarus was published in 1966 (Coach House Press), followed by Face on the Dark in 1970. Beissel later published The Salt I Taste (D.C. Books, 1975), The Cantos North (Penumbra Press, 1982), Season of Blood (Mosaic Press,1984), Poems new and selected (Grove Press, 1987), Across the Sun’s Warp (BuschekBooks, 2003). He later wrote and published several plays; Inook and the Sun was performed at the Stratford Festival in 1973. In 1980-1, Henry Beissel acted as President of the League of Canadian Poets.
CONTRIBUTORS
Name:
Kiyooka, Roy
Dates:
1926-1994
Role:
"Series organizer",
"Speaker"
Name:
Dudek, Louis
Dates:
1918-2001
Role:
"Presenter"
MATERIAL DESCRIPTION
Recording Type:
Analogue
AV Type:
Audio
Material Designation:
Reel to Reel
Physical Composition:
Magnetic Tape
Playback Mode:
Mono
Tape Brand:
Scotch
Sound Quality:
Excellent
Recording Type:
Analogue
AV Type:
Audio
Material Designation:
Reel to Reel
Physical Composition:
Magnetic Tape
Extent:
1/4 inch
Playing Speed:
3 3/4 ips
Track Configuration:
2 track
Playback Mode:
Mono
Tape Brand:
Kodak
Sound Quality:
Excellent
Physical Condition:
Popped strands
DIGITAL FILE DESCRIPTION
File Path:
files.spokenweb.ca>concordia>sgw>audio>all_mp3
Duration:
00:19:00
Size:
45.6 MB
Content:
mike_gnarowski_i006-11-122.mp3 [File 2 of 2]
Louis Dudek
00:00:00
Strongly I was impressed and moved by that reading by Henry Beissel. Really several times after the poems I wanted to applaud, only we don't do that. They were magnificently organized forms with powerful language and very well read, I felt, I think I'm speaking for most people here when I say that. Mike Gnarowski who reads next is different perhaps in the extent to which his poetry is oriented towards reality. Not by implication because Beissel's also is very real and very down to earth and very much committed to the real world, but Gnarowski's poetry has a lot to do with Canadian poetry and the way it has turned towards the real world since about 1925 since A.J.M. Smith and Scott [F.R. Scott; https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3081656] and A.M. Klein
began writing. Gnarowski's been very active as a student of Canadian literature, a scholar and a bibliographer and so forth of our literature looking into the sources of this modern poetry and to letters and documents. In this he has done some very valuable work, indexing little magazines that would be otherwise, less well known, preparing bibliographies and he is now working on a larger anthology of criticism introducing the backgrounds of modern Canadian poetry. All this kind of study which is very valuable on the academic side is also important to his poetry I feel, that it places him within the line of modern Canadian poets who have tried to interpret the real, the visible, the actual, directly in poetry. Somewhat in the way I suppose that all modern poetry in English does, including T.S. Eliot's
"Waste Land"
and Ezra Pound's
"Cantos"
and e. e. cumming's
comedies and satires and Auden's
poetry also. That is the characteristic of twentieth-century poetry is that its extreme realism and the bringing of the romantic conceptions of the last century to bear upon the actual world and showing that the conflict, the intense conflict that exists in the poet between his conception of things and what he sees before him. That you find in Gnarowski very much. He as a writer he is a meticulous craftsman, I don't know if that's symbolic [audience laughter]... He's also a meticulous craftsman and his poems seem to grow by accretion, very gradually. He writes with a stubborn integrity and knows what he thinks and what he's trying to say in a poem, they aren't just momentary fusions. They're highly worked up pieces of writing. There's a strong element of rationality and reality in this poetry, less of the flight of the emotions and the fantasy that's in most other poets. There's a very strong formal organization in his poetry, a clean speech, straight as the Greeks as Ezra Pound used to say in the past. His first book is entitled Postscript for St. James Street which has to do with, in some part anyhow, with the business world in which we live and he has chosen that quite consciously as a subject that could be turned into poetry, to take the business man, the real in that sense, St. James Street
and see what can be made out of that imaginatively. Most poets when they treat a subject like that turn it into satire, because what else can you make out of St. James Street, but Gnarowski wants to keep his vision clear and straight for the fact to see what it really is without elevating too much or perhaps without caricaturing the reality, and it's a very interesting experiment. I'm sure you'll all enjoy listening to his poetry.
Mike Gnarowski
00:05:09
A couple of years ago I had the occasion to go up into North Western Ontario
, and I lived there for three or four years and more specifically on Port Arthur
which is on the very shores of Lake Superior
, and I kept looking at this magnificent and fantastic lake and it kept bothering me. It was too big and too vast and too meaningful and too ominous in many ways to be let off too easily. I also had a friend up there who was an anthropologist and archaeologist and a very good one, and he spent a lot of time going up into that country up around Lake Superior and he kept coming back with all sorts of wonderful thing, all sorts of relics of the past as it were. Gaffs and skulls and this and that which he kept finding and he told me that that part of the world had at one time had supported a pretty fantastic civilization of its own, a very peculiar civilization. And I looked at the lake, Lake Superior, and I decided I would try to write something about it, about the feelings that I think that this ominous body of water might have. A little poem I did for it is entitled "Great Sea".
Mike Gnarowski
00:06:30
Reads "Great Sea".
Mike Gnarowski
00:10:40
And following along the same themes, a little poem entitled "Amethyst Harbour" which was occasioned by a visit of A.Y. Jackson
and several friends who gathered in this quite magnificent place on the lake, just about this time of the year and you could look out across Thunder Bay
and you saw nothing but ice-locked island and of course snow and ice continuing forever and ever. I always felt the nature, of course, there had not been overcome by man and that nature always threatened man and that there was a struggle, a conflict, a tension going on. So here is "Amethyst Harbour".
Mike Gnarowski
00:11:31
Reads "Amethyst Harbour".
Mike Gnarowski
00:13:20
As Louis Dudek pointed out, I've always been fascinated by those men who wheel and deal and who are responsible for much of the life of the nation, I suppose, of North America
, the so-called businessman, much maligned most of the time. I normally try to deal as properly as I can and in this instance I think I'm probably being unkind. This is a poem entitled "Portrait of a Man Come to Say Farewell".
Mike Gnarowski
00:13:55
Reads "Portrait of a Man Come to Say Farewell".
Audience
00:15:26
Applause [one person].
Mike Gnarowski
00:15:30
Uhh--Thank you. A little while ago, or a few years ago I should say, I had the occasion to go to a town south-east of here called Victoriaville
, I was there on business and I went through an old-age or an old-people's home and some of you may know what those places are like, I was profoundly affected by this experience and I tried to write something about it and I've called this little thing "Provincia Nostra".
Mike Gnarowski
00:15:56
Reads "Provincia Nostra”.
Mike Gnarowski
00:16:50
This is for a friend who was lost in an automobile accident.
Mike Gnarowski
00:16:54
Reads unnamed poem.
Mike Gnarowski
00:17:31
A very short thing, which I think fills the purpose of keeping me from becoming too serious.
Mike Gnarowski
00:17:46
Reads unnamed poem.
Mike Gnarowski
00:17:59
Thank you.
Audience
00:18:00
Laughter and applause [cut off].
Introducer
00:18:03
We'd like to express our thanks to Mike Gnarowski, Henry Beissel, and our special appreciation to Louis Dudek who made the supreme sacrifice of tearing himself away from McGill to come here and introduce them. [Audience applause]. Our next reading will be in two weeks, on Friday, January 27 Margaret Avison
will be coming from Toronto
to read her poetry and the following reading on Sat. Feb. 11, Paul Blackburn
who is the Poet in Residence at the City College in New York
and the author of, among other things, Brooklyn, Manhattan Transit will be coming here to read his poetry. Thank you.
END
00:19:00
Notes:
Mike Gnarowski reads from Postscript for St. James Street (Delta, 1965) and from other unknown sources.
00:00 - Introduction by Louis Dudek [INDEX: Henry Beissel’s reading, realism in poetry, Canadian poetry since 1925, A.J.M. Smith, F.R. Scott, A.M. Klein, bibliographer, indexing smaller magazines, T.S. Eliot’s “Wastel Land”, Ezra Pound’s “Cantos”, e e cumming’s satires and comedies, W.H. Auden, romantic conceptions of 19th century vs. extreme realism of 20th century, Postscript for St. James Street by Gnarowski]
05:09 - Mike Gnarowski introduces “Great Sea” [INDEX: North Western Ontario, Port Arthur, Lake Superior, archaeological artifacts]
06:30 - Reads “Great Sea”
10:40 - Introduces “Amethyst Harbour” [INDEX: A.Y. Jackson, Thunder Bay, man vs. nature]
11:31 - Reads “Amethyst Harbour”
13:20 - Introduces “Portrait of a Man Come to Say Farewell”
13:55 - Reads “Portrait of a Man Come to Say Farewell”
15:30 - Introduces “Provincia Nostra” [INDEX: Victoriaville]
15:56 - Reads “Provincia Nostra”
16:50 - Introduces first line “For some inimitable action...”
16:54 - Reads first line “For some inimitable action...”
17:31 - Introduces first line “If I had legs like yours...”
17:46 - Reads first line “If I had legs like yours...”
18:03 - Introducer (unknown) says thank-you’s. [INDEX: Mike Gnarowski, Henry Beissel, Louis Dudek, McGill, Margaret Avison, Paul Blackburn]
19:00 - END OF EVENT.
Content Type:
Sound Recording
File Path:
files.spokenweb.ca>concordia>sgw>audio>all_mp3
Duration:
00:49:40
Size:
119.2 MB
Content:
Henry_beissel_i086-11-003.mp3 [File 1 of 2]
Roy Kiyooka
00:00:00
Ladies and Gentleman, um, let's see, what am I going to say? [Audience laughter and applause]...Well, glad to see y’all here. So, Professor Louis Dudek []https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3261787] from McGill University
will introduce the two poets who’re reading this evening.
Audience
00:00:31
Applause.
Louis Dudek
00:00:40
I expected a longer introduction than that, it will be very fine. There are two kinds of readings that I like to attend very much, one kind is the sort that they're having tonight at McGill University, where a well-established poet who has been on the scene for forty or fifty years comes to read. Over there, it's A.J.M. Smith
from Michigan State
, Canadian anthologist and well-known poet. With a poet like that, really makes no difference what he reads or how he reads it's just important to see him and even the tottering saint can perform miracles on occasions. The other kinds of poets I do like to hear very much are the sort that we'll hear tonight, Gnarowski and Beissel
. The McGill publicity department sent out a notice about A.J.M. Smith and described him as well-known Anthropologist of Canadian poetry. Actually, they corrected it in ink, they made the mistake twice though, probably a typist error. But they didn't know how correct they were, with the current scene in Canadian writing, there are primitive types around that are hard to classify and we need anthropologists...Well, Beissel and Gnarowski are not of this breed of poets who seem to have lost all sense of poetic organization or form, where you think that conventions, poetic conventions have been abolished and what is left are chaotic bits of internal monologue on the page. Of course, that kind of school may be very interesting to watch to see what comes out of it but at present, having watched it now for a few years I'm a little impatient often and tired of the magazines where this material occurs because it seems so easy to turn out and anyone has these bits of chaotic monologue going on. On the other hand, there are many poets still writing who are not following the conventional forms of English metrics and rhyme and so forth, who are turning out poems or at least watching what happens what happens with the words on the page and both the poets we're listening to tonight are of this kind. They are very careful craftsmen. Henry Beissel has the long list of achievements to his credits already, but two on that list strike me very much. One is, amongst many of the posts where he's taught, one is the University of Alberta
is the kind of political stir that was created on the campus when his magazine Edge was brought into the classroom by one of the professors. That is, his poetry contains, content that can make one think, that is morally committed to certain issues in today's world. He's very strongly a moral poet on one side, and the other item in his biography is his new book which has just appeared New Wings for Icarus, which is extremely aesthetic at the same time that it is meaningful in this way. His poetry seems to combine two things, one is a moral urgency and on the other hand, at the same time, a romantic sense of language and of imagery and of emotion that goes with that, which are all very, very promising characteristics for a beginning poet, but I think that this New Wings for Icarus book is his first considerable book. So, without more ado, I introduce to you Henry Beissel.
Henry Beissel
00:05:30
When I considered the kind of poems that I might read this evening and the order in which to read them, I was thinking of the condition of this hall, as it was the last time I was here and I therefore chose two poems which I wrote in the West Indies
. [Audience laughter]. They celebrate the sun in an ambiguous sort of way, I'm going to read them all the same, despite the fact that the conditions have changed. I don't know how much you need to know about the West Indies, I'm hoping—oh.
Audience Member 1
00:06:15
Addresses Beissel [unintelligible].
Henry Beissel
00:06:17
Is this any better? Is there someone in the hall who can attend please to all this?
Audience Member 2
00:06:28
Addresses Beissel [unintelligible].
Audience
00:06:30
Laughter.
Henry Beissel
00:06:39
Well I'll try to speak a little louder on my own, in spite of the microphone. I was saying that I don't know how much one needs to know of the West Indies to respond to this sort of poem, I'm hoping something of the West Indies might be in the poems, the first is called "Pans at Carnival". Pan
is the expression for a steel drum. The imagery in the poem is taken entirely from the steel drum and its use at Carnival
, a feast that is about to be celebrated in Trinidad
in about a month. Rhythmically, the poem tries to catch something of the rhythm of the steel pan.
Henry Beissel
00:07:28
Reads "Pans at Carnival".
Henry Beissel
00:10:18
The second poem celebrates something of the violence that the sun, with which the sun blesses those parts of the world from which it never really disappears.
Henry Beissel
00:10:34
Reads "Where the Sun Only".
Henry Beissel
00:12:49
Next I want to read two parts from New Wings for Icarus. Time does not allow me to read the whole poem, because then I could read you nothing else. “Icarus” is a poem that is written in four parts, it is with some regret that I read only two, because to me it is like playing the second and fourth part of a symphony, but there is no alternative.
Henry Beissel
00:13:19
Reads "New Wings for Icarus", part 2 from New Wings for Icarus.
Henry Beissel
00:13:51
Sorry, I'll start again. This is a hard one to read and this print is very small. I better hold it closer.
Henry Beissel
00:13:59
Reads "New Wings for Icarus", part 2 from New Wings for Icarus.
Henry Beissel
00:19:41
Reads "New Wings for Icarus", part 4 from New Wings for Icarus.
Henry Beissel
00:26:39
Now for a little sort of relaxation in-between, I find unrelieved serious poetry hard to bear myself, I'll read—unfortunately I do not write occasional poems terribly often, they always seem to grow into something much bigger than I can handle, but the next two poems I want to read you are occasional poems, poetry can come out of anything of course, and this one came out of an encounter in a house of Inquisition in Cartagena
, in Colombia
, it is really self-explanatory. It's called "En la Casa de Inquisición".
Henry Beissel
00:27:40
Reads "En la Casa de Inquisición".
Henry Beissel
00:29:23
The next poem leads me on to the last set of poems, but you won't discover that until you hear the last two poems. This poem is dedicated to my daughter, when she was 1 and a half, the first stanza deals with the circumstances of her birth, which were somewhat elaborate, there were firemen. The second stanza deals with her present—this would be the past from the time of the poem, the second deals with her present, and the third with her future.
Henry Beissel
00:30:07
Reads "To My Daughter at Age 1 1/2".
Henry Beissel
00:33:25
And now I come to the final two poems. They belong together and are part of a— we agreed not to torture you and not to read for more than 30 minutes this evening and I am trying to stick to that. This is rather the beginning of something that I may never live to finish, the entire thing is supposed to have some 26 poems, of which you will hear the first two, one is a prologue and the other one is called "Adam Enter Eve". In the prologue, a character introduces himself who is to play his part in the rest of the poem. It's not really a dramatic poem, although it's, well I don't think of it as a drama, although it has dramatic qualities. Anyway, I don't like to be my own critic. I prefer just to read you the poem. The whole cycle will be called "The Dancer from the Dance" that is as you no doubt know, a quotation from Yeats
.
Henry Beissel
00:34:45
Reads "Prologue" from "The Dancer from the Dance".
Henry Beissel
00:37:04
Reads "Adam Enter Eve".
END
00:49:40
[Recording continues on mike_gnarowski_i006-11-122.mp3].
Notes:
Henry Beissel reads largely from New Wings for Icarus (Coach House Press, 1966).
00:00 - Unknown speaker introduces Louis Dudek [INDEX: McGill University, Louis Dudek]
00:40 - Louis Dudek introduces Henry Beissel [INDEX: A.J.M. Smith from Michigan State as Canadian Anthropologist of poetry, Mike Gnarowski, poetic organization and conventions, new schools of poetry, ‘chaotic monologue’, English metrics and rhyme, University of Alberta, Edge Magazine, New Wings for Icarus]
05:30 - Henry Beissel speaks [INDEX: West Indies]
06:39 - Henry Beissel introduces “Pans at Carnival” [INDEX: imagery of a steel drum, Trinidad]
07:28 - Reads “Pans at Carnival”
10:18 - Introduces “Where the Sun Only” [INDEX: imagery of the sun]
10:34 - Reads “Where the Sun Only”
12:49 - Introduces “New Wings for Icarus”, part 2 [INDEX: Icarus]
13:51 - Re-starts poem
19:41 - Reads “New Wings for Icarus”, part 4
26:39 - Introduces “En la Casa de Inquisition” [INDEX: occasional poetry, Cartagena, Columbia]
27:40 - Reads “En la Casa de Inquisition”
29:23 - Introduces “To my Daughter at Age 1 1/2” [INDEX: poem for his daughter]
30:07 - Reads “To my Daughter at Age 1 1/2”
33:25 - Introduces “Prologue” and “Adam Enter Eve” from “The Dancer from the Dance” [INDEX: Yeats]
34:45 - Reads “Prologue”
37:04 - Reads “Adam Enter Eve”
49:40 - END OF RECORDING.
Howard Fink List of Poems:
“Henry Beissel”
January 13, 1967
with reel information
Content Type:
Sound Recording
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Title:
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Credit:
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Content Type:
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Dates
Date:
1967 1 13
Type:
Performance Date
Source:
Supplemental Material
Notes:
Date specified in The Georgian's "Op-Ed"
LOCATION
Address:
1455, Boul de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Venue:
Hall Building Basement Theatre
Latitude:
45.4972758
Longitude:
-73.57893043
Notes:
Location specified in The Georgian's "Op-Ed"
CONTENT
Contents:
Henry_beissel_i086-11-003.mp3 [File 1 of 2]
Roy Kiyooka
00:00:00
Ladies and Gentleman, um, let's see, what am I going to say? [Audience laughter and applause]...Well, glad to see y’all here. So, Professor Louis Dudek []https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3261787] from McGill University
will introduce the two poets who’re reading this evening.
Audience
00:00:31
Applause.
Louis Dudek
00:00:40
I expected a longer introduction than that, it will be very fine. There are two kinds of readings that I like to attend very much, one kind is the sort that they're having tonight at McGill University, where a well-established poet who has been on the scene for forty or fifty years comes to read. Over there, it's A.J.M. Smith
from Michigan State
, Canadian anthologist and well-known poet. With a poet like that, really makes no difference what he reads or how he reads it's just important to see him and even the tottering saint can perform miracles on occasions. The other kinds of poets I do like to hear very much are the sort that we'll hear tonight, Gnarowski and Beissel
. The McGill publicity department sent out a notice about A.J.M. Smith and described him as well-known Anthropologist of Canadian poetry. Actually, they corrected it in ink, they made the mistake twice though, probably a typist error. But they didn't know how correct they were, with the current scene in Canadian writing, there are primitive types around that are hard to classify and we need anthropologists...Well, Beissel and Gnarowski are not of this breed of poets who seem to have lost all sense of poetic organization or form, where you think that conventions, poetic conventions have been abolished and what is left are chaotic bits of internal monologue on the page. Of course, that kind of school may be very interesting to watch to see what comes out of it but at present, having watched it now for a few years I'm a little impatient often and tired of the magazines where this material occurs because it seems so easy to turn out and anyone has these bits of chaotic monologue going on. On the other hand, there are many poets still writing who are not following the conventional forms of English metrics and rhyme and so forth, who are turning out poems or at least watching what happens what happens with the words on the page and both the poets we're listening to tonight are of this kind. They are very careful craftsmen. Henry Beissel has the long list of achievements to his credits already, but two on that list strike me very much. One is, amongst many of the posts where he's taught, one is the University of Alberta
is the kind of political stir that was created on the campus when his magazine Edge was brought into the classroom by one of the professors. That is, his poetry contains, content that can make one think, that is morally committed to certain issues in today's world. He's very strongly a moral poet on one side, and the other item in his biography is his new book which has just appeared New Wings for Icarus, which is extremely aesthetic at the same time that it is meaningful in this way. His poetry seems to combine two things, one is a moral urgency and on the other hand, at the same time, a romantic sense of language and of imagery and of emotion that goes with that, which are all very, very promising characteristics for a beginning poet, but I think that this New Wings for Icarus book is his first considerable book. So, without more ado, I introduce to you Henry Beissel.
Henry Beissel
00:05:30
When I considered the kind of poems that I might read this evening and the order in which to read them, I was thinking of the condition of this hall, as it was the last time I was here and I therefore chose two poems which I wrote in the West Indies
. [Audience laughter]. They celebrate the sun in an ambiguous sort of way, I'm going to read them all the same, despite the fact that the conditions have changed. I don't know how much you need to know about the West Indies, I'm hoping—oh.
Audience Member 1
00:06:15
Addresses Beissel [unintelligible].
Henry Beissel
00:06:17
Is this any better? Is there someone in the hall who can attend please to all this?
Audience Member 2
00:06:28
Addresses Beissel [unintelligible].
Audience
00:06:30
Laughter.
Henry Beissel
00:06:39
Well I'll try to speak a little louder on my own, in spite of the microphone. I was saying that I don't know how much one needs to know of the West Indies to respond to this sort of poem, I'm hoping something of the West Indies might be in the poems, the first is called "Pans at Carnival". Pan
is the expression for a steel drum. The imagery in the poem is taken entirely from the steel drum and its use at Carnival
, a feast that is about to be celebrated in Trinidad
in about a month. Rhythmically, the poem tries to catch something of the rhythm of the steel pan.
Henry Beissel
00:07:28
Reads "Pans at Carnival".
Henry Beissel
00:10:18
The second poem celebrates something of the violence that the sun, with which the sun blesses those parts of the world from which it never really disappears.
Henry Beissel
00:10:34
Reads "Where the Sun Only".
Henry Beissel
00:12:49
Next I want to read two parts from New Wings for Icarus. Time does not allow me to read the whole poem, because then I could read you nothing else. “Icarus” is a poem that is written in four parts, it is with some regret that I read only two, because to me it is like playing the second and fourth part of a symphony, but there is no alternative.
Henry Beissel
00:13:19
Reads "New Wings for Icarus", part 2 from New Wings for Icarus.
Henry Beissel
00:13:51
Sorry, I'll start again. This is a hard one to read and this print is very small. I better hold it closer.
Henry Beissel
00:13:59
Reads "New Wings for Icarus", part 2 from New Wings for Icarus.
Henry Beissel
00:19:41
Reads "New Wings for Icarus", part 4 from New Wings for Icarus.
Henry Beissel
00:26:39
Now for a little sort of relaxation in-between, I find unrelieved serious poetry hard to bear myself, I'll read—unfortunately I do not write occasional poems terribly often, they always seem to grow into something much bigger than I can handle, but the next two poems I want to read you are occasional poems, poetry can come out of anything of course, and this one came out of an encounter in a house of Inquisition in Cartagena
, in Colombia
, it is really self-explanatory. It's called "En la Casa de Inquisición".
Henry Beissel
00:27:40
Reads "En la Casa de Inquisición".
Henry Beissel
00:29:23
The next poem leads me on to the last set of poems, but you won't discover that until you hear the last two poems. This poem is dedicated to my daughter, when she was 1 and a half, the first stanza deals with the circumstances of her birth, which were somewhat elaborate, there were firemen. The second stanza deals with her present—this would be the past from the time of the poem, the second deals with her present, and the third with her future.
Henry Beissel
00:30:07
Reads "To My Daughter at Age 1 1/2".
Henry Beissel
00:33:25
And now I come to the final two poems. They belong together and are part of a— we agreed not to torture you and not to read for more than 30 minutes this evening and I am trying to stick to that. This is rather the beginning of something that I may never live to finish, the entire thing is supposed to have some 26 poems, of which you will hear the first two, one is a prologue and the other one is called "Adam Enter Eve". In the prologue, a character introduces himself who is to play his part in the rest of the poem. It's not really a dramatic poem, although it's, well I don't think of it as a drama, although it has dramatic qualities. Anyway, I don't like to be my own critic. I prefer just to read you the poem. The whole cycle will be called "The Dancer from the Dance" that is as you no doubt know, a quotation from Yeats
.
Henry Beissel
00:34:45
Reads "Prologue" from "The Dancer from the Dance".
Henry Beissel
00:37:04
Reads "Adam Enter Eve".
END
00:49:40
[Recording continues on mike_gnarowski_i006-11-122.mp3].
mike_gnarowski_i006-11-122.mp3 [File 2 of 2]
Louis Dudek
00:00:00
Strongly I was impressed and moved by that reading by Henry Beissel. Really several times after the poems I wanted to applaud, only we don't do that. They were magnificently organized forms with powerful language and very well read, I felt, I think I'm speaking for most people here when I say that. Mike Gnarowski who reads next is different perhaps in the extent to which his poetry is oriented towards reality. Not by implication because Beissel's also is very real and very down to earth and very much committed to the real world, but Gnarowski's poetry has a lot to do with Canadian poetry and the way it has turned towards the real world since about 1925 since A.J.M. Smith and Scott [F.R. Scott; https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3081656] and A.M. Klein
began writing. Gnarowski's been very active as a student of Canadian literature, a scholar and a bibliographer and so forth of our literature looking into the sources of this modern poetry and to letters and documents. In this he has done some very valuable work, indexing little magazines that would be otherwise, less well known, preparing bibliographies and he is now working on a larger anthology of criticism introducing the backgrounds of modern Canadian poetry. All this kind of study which is very valuable on the academic side is also important to his poetry I feel, that it places him within the line of modern Canadian poets who have tried to interpret the real, the visible, the actual, directly in poetry. Somewhat in the way I suppose that all modern poetry in English does, including T.S. Eliot's
"Waste Land"
and Ezra Pound's
"Cantos"
and e. e. cumming's
comedies and satires and Auden's
poetry also. That is the characteristic of twentieth-century poetry is that its extreme realism and the bringing of the romantic conceptions of the last century to bear upon the actual world and showing that the conflict, the intense conflict that exists in the poet between his conception of things and what he sees before him. That you find in Gnarowski very much. He as a writer he is a meticulous craftsman, I don't know if that's symbolic [audience laughter]... He's also a meticulous craftsman and his poems seem to grow by accretion, very gradually. He writes with a stubborn integrity and knows what he thinks and what he's trying to say in a poem, they aren't just momentary fusions. They're highly worked up pieces of writing. There's a strong element of rationality and reality in this poetry, less of the flight of the emotions and the fantasy that's in most other poets. There's a very strong formal organization in his poetry, a clean speech, straight as the Greeks as Ezra Pound used to say in the past. His first book is entitled Postscript for St. James Street which has to do with, in some part anyhow, with the business world in which we live and he has chosen that quite consciously as a subject that could be turned into poetry, to take the business man, the real in that sense, St. James Street
and see what can be made out of that imaginatively. Most poets when they treat a subject like that turn it into satire, because what else can you make out of St. James Street, but Gnarowski wants to keep his vision clear and straight for the fact to see what it really is without elevating too much or perhaps without caricaturing the reality, and it's a very interesting experiment. I'm sure you'll all enjoy listening to his poetry.
Mike Gnarowski
00:05:09
A couple of years ago I had the occasion to go up into North Western Ontario
, and I lived there for three or four years and more specifically on Port Arthur
which is on the very shores of Lake Superior
, and I kept looking at this magnificent and fantastic lake and it kept bothering me. It was too big and too vast and too meaningful and too ominous in many ways to be let off too easily. I also had a friend up there who was an anthropologist and archaeologist and a very good one, and he spent a lot of time going up into that country up around Lake Superior and he kept coming back with all sorts of wonderful thing, all sorts of relics of the past as it were. Gaffs and skulls and this and that which he kept finding and he told me that that part of the world had at one time had supported a pretty fantastic civilization of its own, a very peculiar civilization. And I looked at the lake, Lake Superior, and I decided I would try to write something about it, about the feelings that I think that this ominous body of water might have. A little poem I did for it is entitled "Great Sea".
Mike Gnarowski
00:06:30
Reads "Great Sea".
Mike Gnarowski
00:10:40
And following along the same themes, a little poem entitled "Amethyst Harbour" which was occasioned by a visit of A.Y. Jackson
and several friends who gathered in this quite magnificent place on the lake, just about this time of the year and you could look out across Thunder Bay
and you saw nothing but ice-locked island and of course snow and ice continuing forever and ever. I always felt the nature, of course, there had not been overcome by man and that nature always threatened man and that there was a struggle, a conflict, a tension going on. So here is "Amethyst Harbour".
Mike Gnarowski
00:11:31
Reads "Amethyst Harbour".
Mike Gnarowski
00:13:20
As Louis Dudek pointed out, I've always been fascinated by those men who wheel and deal and who are responsible for much of the life of the nation, I suppose, of North America
, the so-called businessman, much maligned most of the time. I normally try to deal as properly as I can and in this instance I think I'm probably being unkind. This is a poem entitled "Portrait of a Man Come to Say Farewell".
Mike Gnarowski
00:13:55
Reads "Portrait of a Man Come to Say Farewell".
Audience
00:15:26
Applause [one person].
Mike Gnarowski
00:15:30
Uhh--Thank you. A little while ago, or a few years ago I should say, I had the occasion to go to a town south-east of here called Victoriaville
, I was there on business and I went through an old-age or an old-people's home and some of you may know what those places are like, I was profoundly affected by this experience and I tried to write something about it and I've called this little thing "Provincia Nostra".
Mike Gnarowski
00:15:56
Reads "Provincia Nostra”.
Mike Gnarowski
00:16:50
This is for a friend who was lost in an automobile accident.
Mike Gnarowski
00:16:54
Reads unnamed poem.
Mike Gnarowski
00:17:31
A very short thing, which I think fills the purpose of keeping me from becoming too serious.
Mike Gnarowski
00:17:46
Reads unnamed poem.
Mike Gnarowski
00:17:59
Thank you.
Audience
00:18:00
Laughter and applause [cut off].
Introducer
00:18:03
We'd like to express our thanks to Mike Gnarowski, Henry Beissel, and our special appreciation to Louis Dudek who made the supreme sacrifice of tearing himself away from McGill to come here and introduce them. [Audience applause]. Our next reading will be in two weeks, on Friday, January 27 Margaret Avison
will be coming from Toronto
to read her poetry and the following reading on Sat. Feb. 11, Paul Blackburn
who is the Poet in Residence at the City College in New York
and the author of, among other things, Brooklyn, Manhattan Transit will be coming here to read his poetry. Thank you.
END
00:19:00
Notes:
Henry Beissel reads largely from New Wings for Icarus (Coach House Press, 1966). Mike Gnarowski reads from Postscript for St. James Street (Delta, 1965) and from other unknown sources.
NOTES
Type:
General
Note:
Year-specific Information:
Henry Beissel was teaching at Sir George Williams University in 1966. He also edited Edge: An Independent Periodical, no. 6, Spring 1967.
Mike Gnarowski received his Ph.D. from University of Ottawa in 1967, and was working as an associate professor at Sir George Williams University. He co-edited The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada with Louis Dudek, which was published by Ryerson Press in 1967. He was the editor of Yes magazine from 1956-69.
Type:
General
Note:
Local connections:
Beissel retired as Distinguished Emeritus Professor of English from Concordia University in 1996. Henry Beissel, Mike Gnarowski and Louis Dudek (also in this reading) organized the Montreal Committee, and organized The Emergency Symposium on the Americanization of Canadian Universities in May of 1969.
Mike Gnarowski is very involved in the effort to promote Canadian authors and writers, editing and publishing criticism and anthologies of Canadian poetry, specifically those of Leonard Cohen, Archibald Lampman and Raymond Knister as well as little known writers.
Type:
Cataloguer
Note:
Original transcript, research, introduction and edits by Celyn Harding-Jones
Additional research and edits by Faith Paré (2020) and Ali Barillaro (2021)
Type:
Preservation
Note:
2 reel-to-reel tapes>2 CDs>2 digital files
RELATED WORKS
Citation:
Beissel, Henry. New Wings for Icarus. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1966.
Citation:
Cormier, Jeffrey. The Canadianization movement: emergence, survival and success. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.
Citation:
“Gnarowski, Michael 1934-”. Michael Gnarowski fonds 1956-1985. Library and Archives
Canada
Citation:
Gnarowski, Michael. Postscript for St. James Street. Montreal: Delta, 1965.
Citation:
“Poetry Readings Resume Tonight with Beissel and Gnarowski”. OP-ED. Montreal: Sir George Williams University, 13 January 1967.
Citation:
“Poetry Series Coming Up At University”. Montreal: The Gazette. 31 December 1966, page 39.
Citation:
Simco, Bob. “Georgiantics”. The Georgian. Montreal: Sir George Williams University, 9 January 1967.
Citation:
Stevens, Peter. "Beissel, Henry". The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, 2nd edition.
Eugene Benson and William Toye (eds). Oxford University Press, 2006.
Citation:
Thoms, Kathleen. “Professor Poets With Urgency and Imagery”. The Georgian. Montreal: Sir George Williams University, January 1967.
Citation:
Toye, William. "League of Canadian Poets, The". The Oxford Companion to Canadian
Literature, 2nd edition. Eugene Benson and William Toye (eds). Oxford University Press,
2006.
Citation:
"Michael Gnarowski." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2009.