CLASSIFICATION
Swallow ID:
1292
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:
Dorothy Livesay at Sir George Williams University, The Poetry Series, 14 January 1972
Title Source:
Cataloguer
Title Note:
"DORTHY LIVESAY POETRY (1 OF 2) 3 3/4 IPS 1/2 TR. (COPY)" written on the back of the tape's box. DORTHY LIVESAY refers to Dorothy Livesay. DORTHY is mispelled. "D. LIVESAY I086-11-032.1" written on on the spine of the tape's box. "D. LIVESAY 1/2 1-72-012-5" and "reel 1 I086-11-032.1" written on stickers on the reel. "D. LIVESAY 1/2 I086-11-032.1" written on the front of the tape's box. "Reel 1: Contents.- Edmonton Street.-The operation-The women syndrome.-Other.-Bartok and the geranium.-Later day Eve." written on sticker on the front of the tape's box
"DORTHY LIVESAY POETRY (2 OF 2) 3 3/4 IPS 1/2 TR. (COPY)" written on the back of the tape's box. DORTHY LIVESAY refers to Dorothy Livesay. DORTHY is mispelled. "D. LIVESAY I086-11-032.2" written on on the spine of the tape's box. "I086-11-032.2" written on sticker on the reel. "2/2 D. LIVESAY 1/2 1-72-012-5" written on the front of the tape's box. "Reel 2: Contents.-Day and night.-Lorea.-Weapons.-Alienation.-Climax.-Blindness.-Song for Solomon.-Poem.-Four Songs.-The taming.-Give us our trespasses.-The notations of love.-Moving out.- At dawn." written on sticker on the front of the tape's box
Language:
English
Production Context:
Documentary recording
Genre:
Reading: Poetry
Identifiers:
[I086-11-032.1, I086-11-032.2]
Rights
CREATORS
Name:
Livesay, Dorothy
Dates:
1909-1996
Role:
"Author",
"Performer"
Notes:
Poet Dorothy Livesay was born in Winnipeg in 1909, and moved to Toronto in 1920, when her father managed the Canadian Press. In the fall of 1926 she started studying at Trinity College, University of Toronto, where she was influenced by ideas of socialism and women’s rights. She published her first collection of poetry, Green pitcher (Macmillan, 1928) when she was only eighteen. Livesay then went to the south of France to study for one year, and after her graduation in 1931 (B.A.) she studied at the Sorbonne in Paris where she received a Diplôme d'études supérieures, in 1932. Influenced and affected by the Depression, she began studies at University of Toronto’s School of Social Work, joining the Communist Party. The same year, 1932, she published her second book, Signpost (Macmillan). She then moved to Montreal from 1933-1934, and to Englewood, New Jersey from 1934-1935, working with the unemployed as a social worker. During this time she also wrote for the Marxist news magazine New Frontier, Canadian Poetry Magazine and The Canadian Forum. Dorothy Livesay’s political poetry includes Day and Night (Ryerson Press, 1944) and Poems for the People (Ryerson Press, 1947), both of which won the Governor General’s Award. Married in 1937 to Duncan Macnair, Livesay raised two children in Vancouver. In 1960, when her husband had died and her children began their own lives, Dorothy Livesay moved to Zambia, where she taught English for UNESCO for three years. Returning to Vancouver, she earned a M.E.D. (1966) from University of British Columbia. She became involved in the Vancouver poetry scene and she experienced a change of style and content in her writing. She published The Unquiet Bed, illustrated by Roy Kiyooka (Ryerson Press, 1967), and Plainsongs (Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1971), which both focused on aspects of femaleness. Livesay founded an important poetry magazine CV/II in 1975 and edited the anthology, Forty Women Poets of Canada in 1971 (Ingluvin Press). Dorothy Livesay also published several long poems, The Documentaries (Ryerson Press, 1968), Nine Poems of Farewell (Black Moss Press, 1973), The Raw Edges: Voices From Our Time (Turnstone Press, 1981), Phases of Love (Coach House Press, 1983), Feeling Worlds (Goose Lane/Fiddlehead,1984) and The Self-completing Tree (Porcepic Press, 1986). She also wrote several works of prose, including A Winnipeg Childhood (Peguis, 1973) and Beginnings (Newpress, 1988). She was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1987 and was the writer-in-residence and professor of English at many Canadian Universities. Livesay died in 1996.
CONTRIBUTORS
MATERIAL DESCRIPTION
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:
Half-track
Playback Mode:
Mono
Tape Brand:
Scotch
Sound Quality:
Good
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:
Half-track
Playback Mode:
Mono
Tape Brand:
Scotch
Sound Quality:
Good
DIGITAL FILE DESCRIPTION
File Path:
files.spokenweb.ca>concordia>sgw>audio>all_mp3
Duration:
00:25:51
Size:
62.1 MB
Content:
dorothy_livesay_i086-11-032-1.mp3 [File 1 of 2]
Introducer
00:00:02
I was going to talk on about Dorothy Livesay's
distinguished career, as a poet, and a critic and a teacher, but after what she told me tonight, I'm not sure if distinguished is exactly the right word, she says that at the age of nineteen, she snubbed the Prince of Wales
. Nevertheless, two books should be mentioned, her selected and uncollected poems to appear this September and a book which was called 39 Women Poets which has gained another poet and another title at the last moment and as 40 Women Poets of Canada
is now on sale outside, as you may have seen as you came in. Back in 1965, I guess it was, Wynne Francis managed to catch Dorothy Livesay as she was passing through Montreal
, and Dorothy gave a really private reading in Wynne's office. Ever since then, we have been trying to convince her to come back and read to us all in the series. I'm extremely happy this year that we have been successful and that I can present to you Dorothy Livesay.
Dorothy Livesay
00:01:58
I think I might get hung up on this, I had quite a disastrous time getting here. I arrived with a new poem of seven, whose title is "Disasters of the Sun", and my first disaster was on the train, sitting on top of my glasses, which are now somewhat myopic, and second disaster going to Sherbrooke
, the bus rolled right into an oil tanker, which somehow or other didn't blow up, but gashed my thumb, and at Bishop's
I had only begun to read when a fire alarm started [laughter], and rang for ten minutes before they silenced it. So I have a feeling that somehow or other, there are more disasters ahead tonight. However, I'm supposed to read a while and then call an intermission I think. Mostly I like to sort of go back over the years and trace the different things, especially love poems from early times on, but I'm going to skip about a bit. Recently in Edmonton
I edited the fourth issue of a quarterly magazine, White Pelican. Which Sheila Watson
edits but she gave this particular issue to me, and I chose the theme of North. Feeling perhaps that we are still trying to find our identity, whether we're English Canadians or French Canadians, and that perhaps the north has some element of it in it which helps us to find that. I discovered though, in collecting material, stories, poems, plays about the north, that it was the Native Indian people who have a different view altogether of the north than we do. At the same time, you find many young Canadian poets identifying with Native culture, and almost feeling that they must become Native, and become Indian to be real, to know who they are. I wrote at the beginning of this issue this little note I'll just read. “North is from wherever you are looking.” It's starting...[laughter]. “For those living below the 49th parallel, Canada itself is North. In a sense, we're all here as explorers without a home. Our great guilt at having ousted the Native peoples from their land is now seeking expression in an attempt to re-create the Indian and Eskimo past, and every month brings forth books of poetry, fiction and history which seek to come to terms with pre-history, with myth, or with the way the Inuit live in harmony with nature. In ironic contrast, the Native artists and writers are expressing their concern, not with their past, but with possible ways of accommodation to the present, the white man's world. Thus, the three British Columbia
Indian poets here represented, Skyros Bruce, Gordy Williams and Eleanor Crow are bitter, ironic and contemporary. Not for them the nostalgic recreation of the Indian myth, or even not for them the vigorous folk humor of life in the north which you find in [unintelligible] and in later writers.” While I think it's worthwhile thinking about that because you do have a lot of young poets now seeping themselves in Indian or Eskimo culture, and feeling as if they must become that in order to be themselves. None of us can quite escape from this, and I have a poem or two that I'll begin with, which I suppose are my expression of coming to terms with the North, or the somewhat southernly north, Edmonton. I'll begin with a kind of collage poem where I put bits of history, bits of visual imagery and bits of surrealism together, called "Edmonton Sweet".
Dorothy Livesay
00:06:56
Reads "Edmonton Sweet" [from Plainsongs].
Dorothy Livesay
00:10:19
Quite a different poem about going North is called "The Operation", and that is the poem which is in this anthology, just out today, 40 Women Poets. I didn't intend to put myself in, but the other editors suggested it was the only 'done' thing to put one or two poems of my own in it. So here's the one called "The Operation". It's a kind of three-way poem where the woman is addressing the doctor and her lover, alternately, and then perhaps herself.
Dorothy Livesay
00:11:10
Reads "The Operation" [from Plainsongs and collected in 40 Women Poets] .
Dorothy Livesay
00:15:36
Since this anthology will probably be called a women's lib., even though it isn't, because none of the poets in it are consciously trying to be anything but their individual selves, nonetheless, I think there are poems by every woman which do express that individual point of view, that differentness, I have never been able, though perhaps I was a women's lib. creature in the thirties, I have never been able to feel that men and women are the same, and so I have poems, right through the years which illustrate that point of view. Here's a very recent one called "The Woman Syndrome".
Dorothy Livesay
00:16:26
Reads "The Woman Syndrome" [published later in Archive For Our Times].
Dorothy Livesay
00:17:05
And a much earlier poem, written when I had a family and young children and I suppose frustrated and not getting out into the world. It's called "Other", it's in The Selected Poems of 1957.
Dorothy Livesay
00:17:34
Reads "Other" from Selected Poems, 1926-1956.
Dorothy Livesay
00:19:11
And in a different vein altogether, the poem I suppose that's been the most anthologized of any of mine, which to me is a rather traditional way I suppose of seeing the male and female element. It's called "Bartok and the Geranium". The poem simply began because I was teaching an evening class of housewives the art of creative writing, and I gave them an assignment to write an imagistic or perhaps haiku-type poem, when they got home, to look at two objects, utterly different and disparate, and just see they could link these objects in a tension which would create a poem. Well the next day, I had sent the children to school after lunch and was sitting in the dining room listening to a CBC
concert, and heard music that I hadn't heard before at all, a violin concerto it seemed to be, and in the window as I was listening was this red geranium. So I thought to myself, well I've given my class an assignment, I wonder if I could do the same thing. And at the end of the concert they announced that it was Bela Bartok
, violin concerto. So suddenly, the two elements, the music and the geranium, did seem to link in my mind and immediately I wrote the poem which I think I've never revised. I'll tell you afterwards about what some of the professors have said about the meaning of the poem.
Dorothy Livesay
00:21:00
Reads "Bartok and Geranium" [from New Poems].
Dorothy Livesay
00:22:10
Well, a few years later, Dr. Roy Daniels was giving a course in Canadian Literature, which I was a member, and one day he asked me if I would not come to class, so I divined he was going to deal with my poems, and I asked a fellow student to please take notes. So this was one of the poems he dealt with, and he informed the class that this poem represented the conflict between nature and art. While at first I was a bit dumbfounded, you know now about how the whole thing began and then what I felt about the he and she of it. But perhaps upon meditation, that this could be another meaning in the poem which I as poet, wasn't aware of but which was still perhaps there. But still another example of the different interpretations which people take to themselves and perhaps get great pleasure from, was, happened in U.N.B.
when Fred Cogswell
put this poem on a sight examination for a first year Canadian lit. class, and one of the students who I'm afraid failed his year, wrote on the paper, and on seeing this poem decided that it was written by a man, and he said it was about this guy Bartok who walked along the street and saw a whore leaning out of the window. Well on the same, and finally, this last one on the same kind of he and she of it, a poem written about a year ago, right out of a dream, I mean I dreamed this poem. It's called "Latter Day Eve".
Dorothy Livesay
00:24:18
Reads "Latter Day Eve" [from Plainsongs].
Dorothy Livesay
00:25:34
Well I'd like to jump back a bit, quite a long way back now, not to lyrical poems, which were the ones I really started out doing, but two poems from the thirties...
END
00:25:51
[Unknown amount of time elapsed between tapes].
Notes:
Dorothy Livesay reads poems from numerous sources, including Signpost (Macmillan, 1932), Day and Night (Ryerson Press, 1944), New Poems (Emblem Press, 1955), The Selected Poems 1926-1956 (Ryerson Press, 1957), The Unquiet Bed (Ryerson, 1967), Forty Women Poets of Canada (Ingluvin Publications, 1971), and Plainsongs (Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1971).
00:02- Unknown male introduces Dorothy Livesay [INDEX: Prince of Wales, Forty Women Poets, Wynne Francis, Montreal]
01:58- Dorothy Livesay introduces reading and “Edmonton Sweet” [INDEX: new poem: “Disasters of the Sun”, love poems, Edmonton, White Pelican Magazine edited by Sheila Watson, Dorothy Guest edited “North” edition: contains three B.C. Native poets: Skyros Bruce, Gordy Williams, Eleanor Crow, Canadian Identity and Native American Identity, young poets searching for it]
06:56- Reads “Edmonton Sweet”
10:19- Introduces “The Operation” [INDEX: 40 Women Poets: Anthology edited by Dorothy Livesay]
11:10- Reads “The Operation”
15:36- Introduces “The Woman Syndrome” [INDEX: Women’s Liberation Movement]
16:26- Reads “The Woman Syndrome”
17:05- Introduces “Other” [INDEX: from The Selected Poems of 1957]
17:34- Reads “Other”
19:110 Introduces “Bartok and Geranium” [INDEX: teaching creative writing to housewives, CBC radio- Violin concerto by Bela Bartok, most anthologized poem: “Bartok and Geranium”]
21:00- Reads “Bartok and Geranium”
22:10- Continues to explain “Bartok and Geranium”, also introduces “Latter Day Eve” [INDEX: Dr. Roy Daniels, teaching Canadian Literature, Interpretations of her poetry, University of New Brunswick, Professor Fred Cogswell]
24:18- Reads “Latter Day Eve”
25:34- Introduces “Day and Night” [INDEX: Day and Night, 1934/5 Montreal: shooting of a Polish man in his own home, Englewood, New Jersey, Discrimination against African Americans, E.J. Pratt’s first issue of Canadian Poetry Magazine in 1936, Cole Porter’s song “Night and Day”, John Lennon quote: “In order to make two steps forward, you may have to go one step back”, Negro spiritual songs]
28:07- Reads “Day and Night”
33:48- Introduces “Lorca” [INDEX: Spanish Civil War: Lorca and Franco, and the poets that were soldiers for Lorca, Jack Spicer, MacKenzie-Papineau Batallion]
35:06- Reads “Lorca”
37:20- Introduces “Weapons” [INDEX: Love poetry, 1932 Songpost by Dorothy Livesay]
38:16- Reads “Weapons”
38:45- Reads “An Alienation”
39:17- Reads “Climax”
39:38- Reads “Blindness”
40:02- Reads “Song for Solomon”
40:27- Introduces “The Unquiet Bed” [INDEX: 1967 The Unquiet Bed by Dorothy Livesay]
40:47- Reads “The Unquiet Bed”
41:16- Reads “Four Songs”
42:32- Introduces “The Taming”
42:43- Reads “The Taming”
43:25- Reads “The Touching”
44:40- Introduces “Give Us Our Trespasses” [INDEX: Jack Spicer]
45:43- Reads “Give Us Our Trespasses”
46:59- Introduces “The Notations of Love”
47:13- Reads “The Notations of Love”
49:18- Reads “Moving Out”
49:58- Introduces “At Dawn” [INDEX: 1968 Plainsongs by Dorothy Livesay]
50:21- Reads “At Dawn”
50:49- Reads “Dream”
51:21- Introduces “The Uninvited” [INDEX: St John River, New Brunswick]
52:00- Reads "The Uninvited".
52:59- Reads “Another Journey”
53:08- Introduces “The Artifacts, West Coast” [INDEX: West Coast, Victoria]
54:42- Reads “The Artifacts, West Coast”
58:05.94- END OF RECORDING
Content Type:
Sound Recording
File Path:
files.spokenweb.ca>concordia>sgw>audio>all_mp3
Duration:
00:32:14
Size:
77.4 MB
Content:
dorothy_livesay_i086-11-032-2.mp3 [File 2 of 2]
Dorothy Livesay
00:00:00
...Polish immigrant who came back to the same house to pick up his belongings, and not knowing what was happening, entered the house, and police shot him in the back and killed him. This happened in Montreal in 1934 or 5. So out of all those experiences, through the thirties, and out of another year I had in New Jersey
, living amongst the Negro, very, very discriminated against people in Englewood
, New Jersey. I, my whole poetry changed from being lyrical and personal to being social and yet I always, never felt it was something outside myself because I felt very powerfully the identification to what was happening to people. I returned from New Jersey about '36 and I wrote this poem which E.J. Pratt
published in the first issue of the Canadian Poetry Magazine in ‘36. I guess I wrote it in about 1935. In it, there are various themes, the whole poem seemed to start from Cole Porter's
lines, the song we were all singing then, "Night and Day"
. “Night and day, you are the one…” And then also there's a theme from Lennon
, who said "In order to make two steps forward you may have to go one step back". And this poem reverses that idea, in looking at industrial capitalist society. The other theme is that of the Negro and that of his exploitation and also of his release in song, and in Negro spiritual, because I did know them very well that year.
Dorothy Livesay
00:02:16
Reads "Day and Night" from Day and Night.
Dorothy Livesay
00:07:57
I might read one more poem from that period, "Lorca", and then perhaps you'd like a break. This is a little later, of course, this is about 1937-8, when the Spanish Civil War
was raging and haunted us very much in this country, many friends we knew joined the MacKenzie-Papineau Battalion
, and went to fight for Spain
. At that time, we believed that the Spanish Court, Garcia Lorca
, had been killed by Franco's
men. I believe that, well in fact, Jack Spicer
taught me that there's another version of his killing, that of a love triangle, but it didn't matter, the point was that many poets were fighting for Spain, and many were killed. So I'll just read "Lorca" if I can find it. Yes.
Dorothy Livesay
00:09:15
Reads "Lorca" [from Day and Night].
Dorothy Livesay
00:11:29
I'll pause now for a break.
Unknown
00:11:32
[Cut or edit made in tape. Unknown amount of time elapsed].
Dorothy Livesay
00:11:33
And though I don't want to appear to suit every taste, quite a lot of my poetry has been personal love poetry, beginning with the earliest days, my teenage, and I thought I would read a few very early love poems and then you could, you might be interested to compare them with those written within the last five or six years. These were from a book published in 1932, Signpost. And you'll notice that they're pretty well structured, and in a sense quite conventional, but perhaps they have a kind of feeling in them. "Weapons".
Dorothy Livesay
00:12:25
Reads "Weapons" from Signpost.
Dorothy Livesay
00:12:54
Reads "Alienation" [from Signpost].
Dorothy Livesay
00:13:26
Reads "Climax" [from Signpost].
Dorothy Livesay
00:13:47
Reads "Blindness" [from Signpost].
Dorothy Livesay
00:14:11
And a very short lyric, "Song for Solomon".
Dorothy Livesay
00:14:17
Reads "Song for Solomon" [from Signpost].
Dorothy Livesay
00:14:36
And now, recent poems from the 1967 book, The Unquiet Bed. I'll read a little ballad that is the title poem, which one of my students set to music at one point. "The Unquiet Bed".
Dorothy Livesay
00:14:56
Reads "The Unquiet Bed" from The Unquiet Bed.
Dorothy Livesay
00:15:25
And "Four Songs".
Dorothy Livesay
00:15:32
Reads "Four Songs" [from The Unquiet Bed].
Dorothy Livesay
00:16:41
And a poem which certainly wouldn't be acceptable to women's lib., yet it's an experience probably all women have had. It's called "The Taming".
Dorothy Livesay
00:16:52
Reads "The Taming" [from The Unquiet Bed].
Dorothy Livesay
00:17:34
And "The Touching".
Dorothy Livesay
00:17:39
Reads "The Touching" [from The Unquiet Bed].
Dorothy Livesay
00:18:49
And a little poem called "Give Us Our Trespasses", which was an attempt to do what Jack Spicer had advised us at some of his sessions, to completely wipe out all sensation, all the senses and see what happened when the words came out of this void, out of this [unintelligible] and I did one poem about dreams dedicated to him, and then a little later, this other one came. One would listen in the dark for the words, but not expecting or unexpecting, you understand, but they would certainly arrive and I would turn on the light and write them down. And then turn off the light, turn to sleep again, but again, more words came, and so this series has about seven of these little interludes in it.
Dorothy Livesay
00:19:52
Reads "And Give Us Our Trespasses" [from The Unquiet Bed].
Dorothy Livesay
00:21:08
And two more from that book, one has five sections--six sections in it, it's called "The Notations of Love".
Dorothy Livesay
00:21:22
Reads "The Notations of Love" [from The Unquiet Bed].
Dorothy Livesay
00:23:27
And a last one from there, "Moving Out".
Dorothy Livesay
00:23:33
Reads "Moving Out" [from The Unquiet Bed].
Dorothy Livesay
00:24:07
Well, I have a few more recent poems, dealing a little differently perhaps with love. This is in the little book Plainsongs, which is still in print. "At Dawn".
Dorothy Livesay
00:24:30
Reads "At Dawn" from Plainsongs.
Dorothy Livesay
00:24:58
And "Dream".
Dorothy Livesay
00:25:03
Reads "Dream" [from Plainsongs].
Dorothy Livesay
00:25:30
And this one "The Uninvited", the river in this is the St. John
in New Brunswick
and it's a theme that reoccurs a lot, whether one is a man or a woman, the feeling that even though one is walking with one's loved one, there is another lover who one also remembers, or who perhaps is coming, one fears.
Dorothy Livesay
00:26:09
Reads "The Uninvited" [from Plainsongs].
Dorothy Livesay
00:27:08
And perhaps just this last one, "Another Journey".
Dorothy Livesay
00:27:17
Reads "Another Journey" [from Plainsongs].
Dorothy Livesay
00:28:08
I'd like to read a poem about the West Coast. It was written summer before last, in Victoria
, where one was, I suppose, feeling one's age, and yet observing the eternal pattern of the young. And perhaps relating it to our own history in this country. It's a more, I suppose, didactic poem. "The Artefacts, West Coast".
Dorothy Livesay
00:28:51
Reads "The Artefacts, West Coast" [from Plainsongs; cut off].
END
00:32:14
Notes:
Dorothy Livesay reads poems from numerous sources, including Signpost (Macmillan, 1932), Day and Night (Ryerson Press, 1944), New Poems (Emblem Press, 1955), The Selected Poems 1926-1956 (Ryerson Press, 1957), The Unquiet Bed (Ryerson, 1967), Forty Women Poets of Canada (Ingluvin Publications, 1971), and Plainsongs (Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1971).
00:02- Unknown male introduces Dorothy Livesay [INDEX: Prince of Wales, Forty Women Poets, Wynne Francis, Montreal]
01:58- Dorothy Livesay introduces reading and “Edmonton Sweet” [INDEX: new poem: “Disasters of the Sun”, love poems, Edmonton, White Pelican Magazine edited by Sheila Watson, Dorothy Guest edited “North” edition: contains three B.C. Native poets: Skyros Bruce, Gordy Williams, Eleanor Crow, Canadian Identity and Native American Identity, young poets searching for it]
06:56- Reads “Edmonton Sweet”
10:19- Introduces “The Operation” [INDEX: 40 Women Poets: Anthology edited by Dorothy Livesay]
11:10- Reads “The Operation”
15:36- Introduces “The Woman Syndrome” [INDEX: Women’s Liberation Movement]
16:26- Reads “The Woman Syndrome”
17:05- Introduces “Other” [INDEX: from The Selected Poems of 1957]
17:34- Reads “Other”
19:110 Introduces “Bartok and Geranium” [INDEX: teaching creative writing to housewives, CBC radio- Violin concerto by Bela Bartok, most anthologized poem: “Bartok and Geranium”]
21:00- Reads “Bartok and Geranium”
22:10- Continues to explain “Bartok and Geranium”, also introduces “Latter Day Eve” [INDEX: Dr. Roy Daniels, teaching Canadian Literature, Interpretations of her poetry, University of New Brunswick, Professor Fred Cogswell]
24:18- Reads “Latter Day Eve”
25:34- Introduces “Day and Night” [INDEX: Day and Night, 1934/5 Montreal: shooting of a Polish man in his own home, Englewood, New Jersey, Discrimination against African Americans, E.J. Pratt’s first issue of Canadian Poetry Magazine in 1936, Cole Porter’s song “Night and Day”, John Lennon quote: “In order to make two steps forward, you may have to go one step back”, Negro spiritual songs]
28:07- Reads “Day and Night”
33:48- Introduces “Lorca” [INDEX: Spanish Civil War: Lorca and Franco, and the poets that were soldiers for Lorca, Jack Spicer, MacKenzie-Papineau Batallion]
35:06- Reads “Lorca”
37:20- Introduces “Weapons” [INDEX: Love poetry, 1932 Songpost by Dorothy Livesay]
38:16- Reads “Weapons”
38:45- Reads “An Alienation”
39:17- Reads “Climax”
39:38- Reads “Blindness”
40:02- Reads “Song for Solomon”
40:27- Introduces “The Unquiet Bed” [INDEX: 1967 The Unquiet Bed by Dorothy Livesay]
40:47- Reads “The Unquiet Bed”
41:16- Reads “Four Songs”
42:32- Introduces “The Taming”
42:43- Reads “The Taming”
43:25- Reads “The Touching”
44:40- Introduces “Give Us Our Trespasses” [INDEX: Jack Spicer]
45:43- Reads “Give Us Our Trespasses”
46:59- Introduces “The Notations of Love”
47:13- Reads “The Notations of Love”
49:18- Reads “Moving Out”
49:58- Introduces “At Dawn” [INDEX: 1968 Plainsongs by Dorothy Livesay]
50:21- Reads “At Dawn”
50:49- Reads “Dream”
51:21- Introduces “The Uninvited” [INDEX: St John River, New Brunswick]
52:00- Reads "The Uninvited".
52:59- Reads “Another Journey”
53:08- Introduces “The Artifacts, West Coast” [INDEX: West Coast, Victoria]
54:42- Reads “The Artifacts, West Coast”
58:05.94- END OF RECORDING
Content Type:
Sound Recording
Title:
Dorothy Livesay Tape Box 1 - Back
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
Title:
Dorothy Livesay Tape Box 1 - Front
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
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Title:
Dorothy Livesay Tape Box 1 - Spine
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
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Title:
Dorothy Livesay Tape Box 1 - Reel
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
Title:
Dorothy Livesay Tape Box 2 - Back
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
Title:
Dorothy Livesay Tape Box 2 - Front
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
Title:
Dorothy Livesay Tape Box 2 - Spine
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
Title:
Dorothy Livesay Tape Box 2 - Reel
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
Dates
Date:
1972 1 14
Type:
Performance Date
Source:
Supplemental Material
Notes:
Date specified in written announcement "Georgian Happenings"
LOCATION
Address:
1455, Boul de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Venue:
Hall Building Room H-651
Latitude:
45.4972758
Longitude:
-73.57893043
CONTENT
Contents:
dorothy_livesay_i086-11-032-1.mp3 [File 1 of 2]
Introducer
00:00:02
I was going to talk on about Dorothy Livesay's
distinguished career, as a poet, and a critic and a teacher, but after what she told me tonight, I'm not sure if distinguished is exactly the right word, she says that at the age of nineteen, she snubbed the Prince of Wales
. Nevertheless, two books should be mentioned, her selected and uncollected poems to appear this September and a book which was called 39 Women Poets which has gained another poet and another title at the last moment and as 40 Women Poets of Canada
is now on sale outside, as you may have seen as you came in. Back in 1965, I guess it was, Wynne Francis managed to catch Dorothy Livesay as she was passing through Montreal
, and Dorothy gave a really private reading in Wynne's office. Ever since then, we have been trying to convince her to come back and read to us all in the series. I'm extremely happy this year that we have been successful and that I can present to you Dorothy Livesay.
Dorothy Livesay
00:01:58
I think I might get hung up on this, I had quite a disastrous time getting here. I arrived with a new poem of seven, whose title is "Disasters of the Sun", and my first disaster was on the train, sitting on top of my glasses, which are now somewhat myopic, and second disaster going to Sherbrooke
, the bus rolled right into an oil tanker, which somehow or other didn't blow up, but gashed my thumb, and at Bishop's
I had only begun to read when a fire alarm started [laughter], and rang for ten minutes before they silenced it. So I have a feeling that somehow or other, there are more disasters ahead tonight. However, I'm supposed to read a while and then call an intermission I think. Mostly I like to sort of go back over the years and trace the different things, especially love poems from early times on, but I'm going to skip about a bit. Recently in Edmonton
I edited the fourth issue of a quarterly magazine, White Pelican. Which Sheila Watson
edits but she gave this particular issue to me, and I chose the theme of North. Feeling perhaps that we are still trying to find our identity, whether we're English Canadians or French Canadians, and that perhaps the north has some element of it in it which helps us to find that. I discovered though, in collecting material, stories, poems, plays about the north, that it was the Native Indian people who have a different view altogether of the north than we do. At the same time, you find many young Canadian poets identifying with Native culture, and almost feeling that they must become Native, and become Indian to be real, to know who they are. I wrote at the beginning of this issue this little note I'll just read. “North is from wherever you are looking.” It's starting...[laughter]. “For those living below the 49th parallel, Canada itself is North. In a sense, we're all here as explorers without a home. Our great guilt at having ousted the Native peoples from their land is now seeking expression in an attempt to re-create the Indian and Eskimo past, and every month brings forth books of poetry, fiction and history which seek to come to terms with pre-history, with myth, or with the way the Inuit live in harmony with nature. In ironic contrast, the Native artists and writers are expressing their concern, not with their past, but with possible ways of accommodation to the present, the white man's world. Thus, the three British Columbia
Indian poets here represented, Skyros Bruce, Gordy Williams and Eleanor Crow are bitter, ironic and contemporary. Not for them the nostalgic recreation of the Indian myth, or even not for them the vigorous folk humor of life in the north which you find in [unintelligible] and in later writers.” While I think it's worthwhile thinking about that because you do have a lot of young poets now seeping themselves in Indian or Eskimo culture, and feeling as if they must become that in order to be themselves. None of us can quite escape from this, and I have a poem or two that I'll begin with, which I suppose are my expression of coming to terms with the North, or the somewhat southernly north, Edmonton. I'll begin with a kind of collage poem where I put bits of history, bits of visual imagery and bits of surrealism together, called "Edmonton Sweet".
Dorothy Livesay
00:06:56
Reads "Edmonton Sweet" [from Plainsongs].
Dorothy Livesay
00:10:19
Quite a different poem about going North is called "The Operation", and that is the poem which is in this anthology, just out today, 40 Women Poets. I didn't intend to put myself in, but the other editors suggested it was the only 'done' thing to put one or two poems of my own in it. So here's the one called "The Operation". It's a kind of three-way poem where the woman is addressing the doctor and her lover, alternately, and then perhaps herself.
Dorothy Livesay
00:11:10
Reads "The Operation" [from Plainsongs and collected in 40 Women Poets] .
Dorothy Livesay
00:15:36
Since this anthology will probably be called a women's lib., even though it isn't, because none of the poets in it are consciously trying to be anything but their individual selves, nonetheless, I think there are poems by every woman which do express that individual point of view, that differentness, I have never been able, though perhaps I was a women's lib. creature in the thirties, I have never been able to feel that men and women are the same, and so I have poems, right through the years which illustrate that point of view. Here's a very recent one called "The Woman Syndrome".
Dorothy Livesay
00:16:26
Reads "The Woman Syndrome" [published later in Archive For Our Times].
Dorothy Livesay
00:17:05
And a much earlier poem, written when I had a family and young children and I suppose frustrated and not getting out into the world. It's called "Other", it's in The Selected Poems of 1957.
Dorothy Livesay
00:17:34
Reads "Other" from Selected Poems, 1926-1956.
Dorothy Livesay
00:19:11
And in a different vein altogether, the poem I suppose that's been the most anthologized of any of mine, which to me is a rather traditional way I suppose of seeing the male and female element. It's called "Bartok and the Geranium". The poem simply began because I was teaching an evening class of housewives the art of creative writing, and I gave them an assignment to write an imagistic or perhaps haiku-type poem, when they got home, to look at two objects, utterly different and disparate, and just see they could link these objects in a tension which would create a poem. Well the next day, I had sent the children to school after lunch and was sitting in the dining room listening to a CBC
concert, and heard music that I hadn't heard before at all, a violin concerto it seemed to be, and in the window as I was listening was this red geranium. So I thought to myself, well I've given my class an assignment, I wonder if I could do the same thing. And at the end of the concert they announced that it was Bela Bartok
, violin concerto. So suddenly, the two elements, the music and the geranium, did seem to link in my mind and immediately I wrote the poem which I think I've never revised. I'll tell you afterwards about what some of the professors have said about the meaning of the poem.
Dorothy Livesay
00:21:00
Reads "Bartok and Geranium" [from New Poems].
Dorothy Livesay
00:22:10
Well, a few years later, Dr. Roy Daniels was giving a course in Canadian Literature, which I was a member, and one day he asked me if I would not come to class, so I divined he was going to deal with my poems, and I asked a fellow student to please take notes. So this was one of the poems he dealt with, and he informed the class that this poem represented the conflict between nature and art. While at first I was a bit dumbfounded, you know now about how the whole thing began and then what I felt about the he and she of it. But perhaps upon meditation, that this could be another meaning in the poem which I as poet, wasn't aware of but which was still perhaps there. But still another example of the different interpretations which people take to themselves and perhaps get great pleasure from, was, happened in U.N.B.
when Fred Cogswell
put this poem on a sight examination for a first year Canadian lit. class, and one of the students who I'm afraid failed his year, wrote on the paper, and on seeing this poem decided that it was written by a man, and he said it was about this guy Bartok who walked along the street and saw a whore leaning out of the window. Well on the same, and finally, this last one on the same kind of he and she of it, a poem written about a year ago, right out of a dream, I mean I dreamed this poem. It's called "Latter Day Eve".
Dorothy Livesay
00:24:18
Reads "Latter Day Eve" [from Plainsongs].
Dorothy Livesay
00:25:34
Well I'd like to jump back a bit, quite a long way back now, not to lyrical poems, which were the ones I really started out doing, but two poems from the thirties...
END
00:25:51
[Unknown amount of time elapsed between tapes].
dorothy_livesay_i086-11-032-2.mp3 [File 2 of 2]
Dorothy Livesay
00:00:00
...Polish immigrant who came back to the same house to pick up his belongings, and not knowing what was happening, entered the house, and police shot him in the back and killed him. This happened in Montreal in 1934 or 5. So out of all those experiences, through the thirties, and out of another year I had in New Jersey
, living amongst the Negro, very, very discriminated against people in Englewood
, New Jersey. I, my whole poetry changed from being lyrical and personal to being social and yet I always, never felt it was something outside myself because I felt very powerfully the identification to what was happening to people. I returned from New Jersey about '36 and I wrote this poem which E.J. Pratt
published in the first issue of the Canadian Poetry Magazine in ‘36. I guess I wrote it in about 1935. In it, there are various themes, the whole poem seemed to start from Cole Porter's
lines, the song we were all singing then, "Night and Day"
. “Night and day, you are the one…” And then also there's a theme from Lennon
, who said "In order to make two steps forward you may have to go one step back". And this poem reverses that idea, in looking at industrial capitalist society. The other theme is that of the Negro and that of his exploitation and also of his release in song, and in Negro spiritual, because I did know them very well that year.
Dorothy Livesay
00:02:16
Reads "Day and Night" from Day and Night.
Dorothy Livesay
00:07:57
I might read one more poem from that period, "Lorca", and then perhaps you'd like a break. This is a little later, of course, this is about 1937-8, when the Spanish Civil War
was raging and haunted us very much in this country, many friends we knew joined the MacKenzie-Papineau Battalion
, and went to fight for Spain
. At that time, we believed that the Spanish Court, Garcia Lorca
, had been killed by Franco's
men. I believe that, well in fact, Jack Spicer
taught me that there's another version of his killing, that of a love triangle, but it didn't matter, the point was that many poets were fighting for Spain, and many were killed. So I'll just read "Lorca" if I can find it. Yes.
Dorothy Livesay
00:09:15
Reads "Lorca" [from Day and Night].
Dorothy Livesay
00:11:29
I'll pause now for a break.
Unknown
00:11:32
[Cut or edit made in tape. Unknown amount of time elapsed].
Dorothy Livesay
00:11:33
And though I don't want to appear to suit every taste, quite a lot of my poetry has been personal love poetry, beginning with the earliest days, my teenage, and I thought I would read a few very early love poems and then you could, you might be interested to compare them with those written within the last five or six years. These were from a book published in 1932, Signpost. And you'll notice that they're pretty well structured, and in a sense quite conventional, but perhaps they have a kind of feeling in them. "Weapons".
Dorothy Livesay
00:12:25
Reads "Weapons" from Signpost.
Dorothy Livesay
00:12:54
Reads "Alienation" [from Signpost].
Dorothy Livesay
00:13:26
Reads "Climax" [from Signpost].
Dorothy Livesay
00:13:47
Reads "Blindness" [from Signpost].
Dorothy Livesay
00:14:11
And a very short lyric, "Song for Solomon".
Dorothy Livesay
00:14:17
Reads "Song for Solomon" [from Signpost].
Dorothy Livesay
00:14:36
And now, recent poems from the 1967 book, The Unquiet Bed. I'll read a little ballad that is the title poem, which one of my students set to music at one point. "The Unquiet Bed".
Dorothy Livesay
00:14:56
Reads "The Unquiet Bed" from The Unquiet Bed.
Dorothy Livesay
00:15:25
And "Four Songs".
Dorothy Livesay
00:15:32
Reads "Four Songs" [from The Unquiet Bed].
Dorothy Livesay
00:16:41
And a poem which certainly wouldn't be acceptable to women's lib., yet it's an experience probably all women have had. It's called "The Taming".
Dorothy Livesay
00:16:52
Reads "The Taming" [from The Unquiet Bed].
Dorothy Livesay
00:17:34
And "The Touching".
Dorothy Livesay
00:17:39
Reads "The Touching" [from The Unquiet Bed].
Dorothy Livesay
00:18:49
And a little poem called "Give Us Our Trespasses", which was an attempt to do what Jack Spicer had advised us at some of his sessions, to completely wipe out all sensation, all the senses and see what happened when the words came out of this void, out of this [unintelligible] and I did one poem about dreams dedicated to him, and then a little later, this other one came. One would listen in the dark for the words, but not expecting or unexpecting, you understand, but they would certainly arrive and I would turn on the light and write them down. And then turn off the light, turn to sleep again, but again, more words came, and so this series has about seven of these little interludes in it.
Dorothy Livesay
00:19:52
Reads "And Give Us Our Trespasses" [from The Unquiet Bed].
Dorothy Livesay
00:21:08
And two more from that book, one has five sections--six sections in it, it's called "The Notations of Love".
Dorothy Livesay
00:21:22
Reads "The Notations of Love" [from The Unquiet Bed].
Dorothy Livesay
00:23:27
And a last one from there, "Moving Out".
Dorothy Livesay
00:23:33
Reads "Moving Out" [from The Unquiet Bed].
Dorothy Livesay
00:24:07
Well, I have a few more recent poems, dealing a little differently perhaps with love. This is in the little book Plainsongs, which is still in print. "At Dawn".
Dorothy Livesay
00:24:30
Reads "At Dawn" from Plainsongs.
Dorothy Livesay
00:24:58
And "Dream".
Dorothy Livesay
00:25:03
Reads "Dream" [from Plainsongs].
Dorothy Livesay
00:25:30
And this one "The Uninvited", the river in this is the St. John
in New Brunswick
and it's a theme that reoccurs a lot, whether one is a man or a woman, the feeling that even though one is walking with one's loved one, there is another lover who one also remembers, or who perhaps is coming, one fears.
Dorothy Livesay
00:26:09
Reads "The Uninvited" [from Plainsongs].
Dorothy Livesay
00:27:08
And perhaps just this last one, "Another Journey".
Dorothy Livesay
00:27:17
Reads "Another Journey" [from Plainsongs].
Dorothy Livesay
00:28:08
I'd like to read a poem about the West Coast. It was written summer before last, in Victoria
, where one was, I suppose, feeling one's age, and yet observing the eternal pattern of the young. And perhaps relating it to our own history in this country. It's a more, I suppose, didactic poem. "The Artefacts, West Coast".
Dorothy Livesay
00:28:51
Reads "The Artefacts, West Coast" [from Plainsongs; cut off].
END
00:32:14
Notes:
Dorothy Livesay reads poems from numerous sources, including Signpost (Macmillan, 1932), Day and Night (Ryerson Press, 1944), New Poems (Emblem Press, 1955), The Selected Poems 1926-1956 (Ryerson Press, 1957), The Unquiet Bed (Ryerson, 1967), Forty Women Poets of Canada (Ingluvin Publications, 1971), and Plainsongs (Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1971).
NOTES
Type:
Cataloguer
Note:
Original transcript, research, introduction and edits by Celyn Harding-Jones
Additional research and edits by Ali Barillaro
Type:
General
Note:
Year-Specific Information:
Forty Women Poets of Canada was published the same year, 1971, as was an extended and revised edition of Plainsongs.
Type:
General
Note:
Local Connections:
Dorothy Livesay has contributed considerably to the cannon of Canadian poetry, writing about national issues and extending the Canadian long poem. Her anthology, Forty Women Poets of Canada (1971) promoted other Canadian women and their work. Livesay’s writing was published by Canadian publishing houses, and she contributed to and edited Canadian journals and magazines of poetry and criticism. Wynne Francis, who was a professor at Sir George Williams University, met Livesay in 1965.
Type:
Preservation
Note:
2 reel-to-reel tapes>CD>2 digital files
RELATED WORKS
Citation:
Davey, Frank. “Livesay, Dorothy”. The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. Benson, Eugene and William Toye (eds). Oxford University Press, 2001.
Citation:
Geddes, Gary. Fifteen Canadian Poets Times Two. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Citation:
“Georgian Happenings”. The Georgian. Montreal: Sir George Williams University, 11 January 1972.
Citation:
Gnarowski, Michael. “Livesay, Dorothy”. The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English. Hamilton, Ian (ed). Oxford University Press, 1996.
Citation:
Livesay, Dorothy and Dean J. Irvine. Archive for our Times: Previously Uncollected and Unpublished Poems of Dorothy Livesay. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1998.
Citation:
Livesay, Dorothy. The Selected Poems, 1926-1956. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1957.
Citation:
Livesay, Dorothy and Seymour Mayne. Forty Women Poets of Canada. Montreal : Ingluvin Publications, 1971.
Citation:
Livesay, Dorothy. Day and Night. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1944.
Citation:
Livesay, Dorothy. New Poems. Toronto: Emblem Books, 1955.
Citation:
Livesay, Dorothy. Signpost. Toronto: Macmillan, 1932.
Citation:
Livesay, Dorothy. The Unquiet Bed. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1967.
Citation:
Livesay, Dorothy. Plainsongs. Fredericton: Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1971.
Citation:
Stromberg, Paula. “The Gentle Poetry of Dorothy Livesay”. The Georgian. Montreal: Sir George Williams University, 25 January 1972.
Citation:
Strong-Boag, Veronica. “Livesay, Dorothy”. The Oxford Companion to Canadian History. Hallowell, Gerald (ed). Oxford University Press, 2004.