April has come in with a blast of warmth from the south. New motorcycle is out (new meaning 1987, but otherwise nice fast 1000cc sport touring bike), and poetry is everywhere this month:

BLUE METROPOLIS
Montreal just wound up one of the largest literary festivals in the country, Blue Metropolis. The festival takes place in three (and sometimes more) languages, and is broadcast by Canada’s national radio network, the CBC. On hand to receive the first Blue Metropolis Literary Award was Norman Mailer, while fine writers and poets participated in over 100 separate events. Players included Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Drabble, Michael Holroyd, and from the Montreal performance community, Jake Brown, Corey Frost, André Lemelin and Catherine Kidd, to name a few.

I did one show with Geneviève Letarte which was a toast to the long relationship between literature and alcohol, and we all ended the weekend at the Casa for the Anarchist Book Fair Benefit. This was a wild and crazy show which we may release in snippets in the coming months. The Anarchist Book Fair itself is coming to Montreal on the 19th of May, so make your plans now. It's in a large community hall at 1710 Beaudry Street, and you can get more info at:

télephone: 514.526.8946
email: lombrenoire@tao.ca
Web: www.tao.ca/~lombrenoire

GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE
This year’s big poetry news was the creation of the Griffin Prize, and at the Blue Met opening the first finalists for the huge ($40,000) poetry prizes were announced. The prizes were created by Scott Griffin, a Canadian industrialist who — at least according to his sister Ann McCall — grew up in a family where the children had to memorize and recite poems for their transgressions. Ann says the practice hit each kid a different way — some never wanting to see a poem again, and Scott keeping a love for them all his life. This from the prize committee:

Montreal, April 11th – The seven shortlisted winners of the 2001 Griffin Poetry Prize were announced today by Scott Griffin, Michael Ondaatje and Robin Robertson, Trustees for The Griffin Trust. Selected by judges Carolyn Forché, Dennis Lee and Paul Muldoon, the books are divided into two categories, International and Canadian, with each prize worth $40,000.

On the International shortlist are Yehuda Amichai’s Open Closed Open; Paul Celan’s Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan; Fanny Howe’s Selected Poems; and Les Murray’s Learning Human. On the Canadian shortlist are Anne Carson’s Men in the Off Hours; Robert Bringhurst’s translation of Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas’ Nine Visits to the Mythworld; and Don McKay’s Another Gravity.

The shortlisted poets will be invited to give a reading in Toronto at a Harbourfront Reading Series Special Event on June 6th and the winners will be announced at the inaugural Griffin Poetry Prize awards ceremony on June 7th.

SHERI-D WILSON IN MONTREAL MAY 20TH
Meanwhile, on the performance front, Calgary poet and top Canadian performer Sheri-D Wilson is off on her launch tour for her new CD Sweet Taste of Lightning. Based on Sheri-D's previous writings and two new works, the recording is masterfully arranged by hip-guitarist Russell Broom. This collection matches word with music in a seamless performance of sexy and humorous social commentary. Sheri-D will be here in Montreal on the 20th of May for a show at the Casa’s Words & Music series, 4873 St. Laurent, Montreal. Other stops have included the National Poetry Month Party on April 16, a show a the Victory Café in Toronto featuring Sheri-D herself, Clifton Joseph, Andrea Thompson and Seth-Adrian Harris: Sir Surreal. That show was hosted by Daniel Richler for the new BookTelevision network—a channel devoted to the written and spoken word which is scheduled to debut this fall. Last week Sheri-D Wilson's “Airplane Paula” from the Sweet Taste of Lightning CD was Bravo Canada's #1 video & you could see it online at www.bravo.ca/bravovideos. It's still on the Net in RealAudio at the Edgewise Cafe & Electrolit Centre.

POETIC PROTEST IN QUEBEC CITY
Meanwhile, in Montreal and beyond, the poets are massing for this weekend’s giant anti-FTAA protest in Quebec City. FTAA stand for “Free Trade Agreement of the Americas,” and just about everyone who’s anyone from around here is going to protest it. A giant poetry reading is scheduled for the night of the 20th of April. Here are the details:

Free Verse Area of the Americas
In times of crisis, when communities are stressed, citizens are called on to contribute beyond the routine of the everyday. Poets, working on the workshop floor in the foundry of language, have a civic responsibility to make their voices heard. At the upcoming Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, poets from throughout the Americas are converging join in the giant protests of the FTAA as well as to establish The Free Verse Area of the Americas as a creative response to the silencing of dissenting voices through censorship or mainstream media indifference.

This event encourages open participation from all different voices and hopes to unit poets in the mass struggle against corporate globalization. The reading/listening will take place Friday, April 20th in the cafe at a community college called CEGEP Limoulou, 1300 8th Avenue, Quebec City, Canada at 8:30 pm. Can't make it to Quebec City? Create your own Free Verse Area just by standing up and reciting a poem. Then offer everyone within earshot citizenship.

“The role of poetry is to utter the un-utterable; to open up spaces of consciousness and resistance; to language oppressions; to re-language histories and spaces of resistance; to shift contexts; to create community; to rethink grammars of action. And of course to inspire.” --Ramez Qureshi

YOUTH POETRY WEEK IN CANADA
This in from the League of Canadian Poets:

Youth poetry week was the second week in April. During that time we launched www.youngpoets.ca, a Web site designed to foster an appreciation of poetry and encourage and teach budding young poets. The opening of the site features the online publication of Spokes, an anthology of the winners of our youth poetry contest, Poetic License. The League's Webstore is also launching 70 new titles, including books by the winners and shortlisted contenders for the awards mentioned above.

TODD SWIFT EULOGY FOR LOUIS DUDEK
On a more sombre note, we have this in from Canadian poet Todd Swift, now living in Hungary:

Louis Dudek, one of Canada's major modernist poets, poetry activists, polemicists, a founding member of the League of Canadian Poets, a member of the Order of Canada -- and perhaps the greatest advocate of local emerging talent in anglophone Quebec -- has died, age 83.

While his own poetry was often overshadowed by the immense influence his various little magazines, publishing houses and other literary ventures had, especially in the 50s and 60s and 70s, he left a distinguished body of work which may be Canada's most rigorously Modernist in outlook and practice, being directly influenced by major figures of the period such as Ezra Pound (with whom he had an important epistolary relationship) and Cid Corman. Louis Dudek was the mentor of many, like his own mentor Pound, and was responsible for the early publication and recognition of poets Leonard Cohen and Daryl Hine.

Dudek was born in the East End of Montreal, of a family recently migrated from Poland, February 6, 1918. He was raised in that primarily working-class and francophone neighbourhood of Montreal, graduating from McGill University with a BA in 1940. From 1943-1951, he lived in New York City, where he eventually graduated with a Ph.D. from Columbia, and then taught English at (the) City College of New York. His friends at this period included Paul Blackburn and Corman. It was at this time he began exchanging letters with Pound.

Dudek was committed to the idea of controlling the means of production and dissemination of poetry, and promoting the local, as well as the international; thus, he encouraged many emerging poets from his original community, Montreal, as well as from across Canada. Dudek pioneered the role and significance of small press publishing in Canada, particularly in the 60s and 70s, through his work as contributing editor to First Statement (with Irving Layton and John Sutherland), his little magazine Delta (founded in 1957), and the founding of Contact Press in 1952. He was later the editor and publisher of Delta Canada Press, which published the work of R.G. Everson and F.R. Scott, among others. Dudek was also instrumental, through the McGill Poetry Series, in publishing Leonard Cohen at an early stage of his career.

Louis Dudek's own poetry was published over a span of six decades, making him, surely, the grand old man of Canadian letters, in so many ways. His major books include East of the City (1946), the long poem masterpiece replying to Pound, Europe (1955), Atlantis (1967), Continuation (1981) and most recently The Caged Tiger (1997). Dudek's work was marked by a spare, prosaic, dry, probing intellectual manner, which was in some ways reliant on the “local” diction of William Carlos Williams, but the political, cultural and philosophical epigrams and statements his poems were made to contain, owed much more to The Cantos of Pound.

The uncompromising seriousness of his vision alienated him from a wider reading public, and, unlike, say, his near-contemporary Irving Layton, he did not find himself a household name, or god, in quite the same way; more's the pity, as his work will sustain the inevitable posthumous appreciation it all-too-desperately demanded while the poet himself was alive. Dudek's legacy lives on, in the numerous small presses in Canada, the lively 'zine culture, the Quebec Literary Renaissance which inspired The New McGill (Reading) Series, founded by Bill Furey and Todd Swift in the late 80s, and in the newly-reborn DC Books, edited by Robert Allen, which is based on the classic Delta imprint.

Most importantly, his attention to the local -- to the possibility of poetry in his place, in his time, in Montreal -- has led to a never-fading community of excellent Montreal poets; and indeed, in the 1950s and 60s, to the nearly unquestioned poetic dominance of his native city in his nation's poetry.

Louis Dudek will be sorely missed.

March 23rd, 2001
written by Todd Swift
with biographical information from the Internet

POETRY AND JAZZ AT THE CASA
To end it all off, if you're in for the Montreal Jazz Festival in June and July, come and visit us June 17th for a night of poetry and jazz at the Casa, 4873 St. Laurent. Other events are scheduled but not confirmed, so if you want info, look in the Speakeasy section of wiredonwords.com.

Ian Ferrier