Poet Gwendolyn MacEwen, perhaps best known for winning the 1969 Governor General’s Award for her collection The Shadow Maker and the 1987 GG, posthumously, for Afterworlds, is one of the most significant Canadian poets whose work is entirely out of print. In this episode, SpokenWeb podcast host Hannah McGregor reflects on why MacEwen’s voice continues to haunt so many of us, alongside authors Jen Sookfong Lee and andrea bennett, and SpokenWeb researcher Katherine McLeod.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Guest Bios:
Hannah McGregor is an Assistant Professor of Publishing at Simon Fraser University, where her research focuses on podcasting as scholarly communication, systemic barriers to access in the Canadian publishing industry, and the history of middlebrow periodicals. Her work can be found in various journals including Participations, Modernism/modernity Print+, the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, and Studies in Canadian Literature; she is also the co-editor of the book Refuse: CanLit in Ruins (Book*hug 2018). Hannah is the co-creator of Witch, Please, a feminist podcast on the Harry Potter world, and the creator of the weekly podcast Secret Feminist Agenda, which is currently undergoing an experimental peer review process with Wilfrid Laurier University Press. She is also the host of the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast, an experimental collaborative research podcast created through the SSHRC-funded SpokenWeb partnership.
andrea bennett is a National Magazine Award–winning writer and editor. Their writing has been published by The Atlantic, the Globe and Mail, The Walrus, Maisonneuve, Hazlitt, Vice, Reader’s Digest, Vogue Italia, Quill & Quire, and many other outlets. andrea’s first book of poetry, Canoodlers, came out with Nightwood Editions in 2014. Their Moon Travel travel guide to Montréal is now available, as is their guide to Québec City. Their first book of essays, Like a Boy but Not a Boy, is forthcoming with Arsenal Pulp Press in Fall 2020.
Katherine McLeod researches and teaches Canadian literature through sound, performance, and archives. Her recent publications include a chapters in the books Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Canadian Poetry and Poetics, Moving Archives (Wilfrid Laurier UP), and CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (MQUP), which she also co-edited with Jason Camlot. Currently, she is an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Concordia University, where she researches CBC Radio recordings and where she is organizing SpokenWeb’s Ghost Reading Series. Follow the site she curates for Montreal readings at WherePoetsRead.ca and @poetsread.
Jen Sookfong Lee's books include The Conjoined, nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award and a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize; The Better Mother, a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award; The End of East, and Gentlemen of the Shade. Jen teaches writing at The Writers’ Studio with Simon Fraser University and co-hosts the podcast, Can’t Lit.
Episode Resources:
bennett, andrea. Excerpt from “The People's Poetry.” The essay appears in the book Like a Boy But Not A Boy: Navigating Life, Mental Health, and Parenthood outside the Gender Binary to be published by Arsenal Pulp Press, fall 2019.
Camlot, Jason and Katherine McLeod. "SGW Poetry Remix" MP3 file, 12 Dec 2018.
MacEwen, Gwendolyn. “Dark Pines Under Water.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaHTMxvxNGc
MacEwen (a performance)." Resurfacing: Women Writing across Canada in the 1970s. Mount Allison University & Université de Moncton, 26-28 April 2018.
--- "Performing the Archive: A Remix." Performed with Jason Camlot. Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival, Montreal, 5 May 2019.
MacEwen, Gwendolyn. “Dark Pines Under Water.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaHTMxvxNGc
--- Reading with Phyllis Webb at Sir George Williams University, Nov 18 1966. https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/gwendolyn-macewen-at-sgwu-1966/
--- "Past and Future Ghosts." Afterworlds. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987.
McLeod, Katherine. "(Un)Covering the Mirror: Performative Reflections in Linda Griffiths’s Alien Creature: A Visitation from Gwendolyn MacEwen and Wendy Lill’s The Occupation of Heather Rose." Theatre and Autobiography: Writing and Performing Lives in Theory and Practice. Eds. Sherrill Grace and Jerry Wasserman (Talon, 2006). 89-104.
--- "An Archival Remix" Performance by Katherine McLeod and Emily Murphy. Toronto: Modernist Studies Association, 18 Oct 2019.
Music:
“Flamenco Rhythm” by Sunsearcher: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Sunsearcher
"Soothe", “At Our Best Alone,” “A Certain Lightness,” “The Bus At Dawn,” “Slow Slow Sky” all from https://www.sessions.blue/
00:00
Stacey Copeland:
Oh hi, SpokenWeb Podcast project manager Stacey Copeland here. How are you? [Begin Music: Instrumental Piano] I wanted to take a moment to let you know we are looking for contributors from across the SpokenWeb network to pitch and produce episodes with us for the 2020 season. All SpokenWeb team and network affiliates can submit episodes, no podcasting or audio experience necessary. Do you have a great archival find or current project you'd like to showcase? Ever wanted to interview a fellow colleague or Canadian poet? Our team is here to support you every step of the way from episode idea to editing to final production. So send us your pitch and get in touch at spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com. That's spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com. I'd love to hear from you. And now back to our regularly scheduled programming. [End Music: Instrumental Piano]
01:02
Theme Music:
[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don't know how much projection to do.
01:13
Hannah McGregor:
What does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor and each month I'll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. You might know poet Gwendolyn MacEwen as the winner of the 1969 Governor General's Award for her collection The Shadow-Maker or the 1987 Governor General, posthumously, for Afterworlds. She's also maybe one of the most significant Canadian poets whose work is entirely out of print. MacEwen was only 46 when she died and her tragic life combined with the mysticism of her poetic voice has made her a figure of enduring fascination for other poets and scholars. At the same time, her works' deviation from popular narratives of Canadian literature has often led to her being dropped from our literary histories. In this episode, I'm inviting you to join me as well as authors Jen Sookfong Lee and andrea bennett and SpokenWeb researcher Katherine McLeod as we reflect on why MacEwen's voice continues to haunt us. Here is, again, me, Hannah McGregor, with "The Voice Is Intact." [Theme Music]
02:47
Hannah McGregor:
Have you ever heard her read?
02:48
Jen Sookfong Lee:
No, I've never heard her voice.
02:49
Hannah McGregor:
Oh my God, do you want to?
02:49
Jen Sookfong Lee:
Yeah!
02:50
Audio Recording:
[Audio, Gwendolyn MacEwen recording, overlapping with Hannah McGregor and Jen Sookfong Lee's commentary] A fugitive from all those truths, which are too true, the great clawing ones and the fire-breathers,--
03:00
Jen Sookfong Lee:
[Gasps]
03:00
Audio Recording:
--the ones that rake the flesh--
03:01
Jen Sookfong Lee:
So much nicer with her voice!
03:01
Audio Recording:
--like Pyramus,and those that crush the bones to chalk and those that bear their red teeth in the nights.
03:09
Jen Sookfong Lee:
So melodious, her voice.
03:10
Audio Recording:
My mind emulates,--
03:12
Jen Sookfong Lee:
I've never used the word melodious.
03:14
Audio Recording:
--dragon, fish, and snake and shoots fire to melt the Arctic night--
03:18
Jen Sookfong Lee:
So ASMR, though.
03:20
Audio Recording:
--or chews off the edges of continents or wraps itself around the ribs of the world,--
03:23
Jen Sookfong Lee:
I knew it, I knew it, she had to have a voice like that. She couldn't write these poems without that voice.
03:26
Audio Recording:
--squeezes...
03:27
Katherine McLeod:
Something that will come up often when presenting about MacEwen, and certainly in conference sorts of settings, where people really wanna hear her voice. And if you talk about MacEwen and don't play her voice, then people are really aware, like, "Wait, we want to hear her voice." But then to also think about the layers of mediation and copyright and all the things that also are distancing us from her voice and being aware of that, too.
03:54
Hannah McGregor:
The voices you're hearing belong to academic Katherine McLeod--
03:58
Katherine McLeod:
I am Katherine McLeod and I'm an affiliate researcher with SpokenWeb at Concordia University.
04:04
Hannah McGregor:
--and author Jen Sookfong Lee.
04:06
Jen Sookfong Lee:
I have been trolling Margaret Atwood since 1997, big props to me.
04:11
Hannah McGregor:
You might recognize Katherine from earlier episodes of the SpokenWeb Podcast. She's a Montreal-based scholar of Canadian literature with a focus on sound, performance, and archives and the co-editor of the new book CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event. She's also the curator of SpokenWeb's Audio of the Week series. Jen Sookfong Lee is a Vancouver-based writer, radio broadcaster, and podcaster. She's the author of The Conjoined, the co-editor of Whatever Gets You Through: Twelve Survivors on Life after Sexual Assault and the co-host of the podcast Can't Lit.
04:44
Audio Recording:
[Audio, continuation of Gwendolyn MacEwen recording, overlapping with Hannah McGregor's commentary] ...once the monster's jaws unfolded fire--
04:48
Hannah McGregor:
And that third voice you're hearing is Gwendolyn MacEwen reading on November 18th, 1966 as part of the Sir George Williams poetry series held between 1965 and 1974 at what was then the Sir George Williams University and is now Concordia University. The audio recordings of this reading series are at the heart of the SpokenWeb partnership and form a rich and exciting digital archive that has already inspired significant scholarship on the history of the poetry reading. But I'm not interested in this reading series. I'm interested in MacEwen.
05:22
Jen Sookfong Lee:
The first time I discovered Gwendolyn MacEwen, it was probably reading "Dark Pines Under Water" in an anthology. And I think it was, it was a green, it was Oxford University Press, edited by Margaret Atwood, of course. Because back then everything was edited by Margaret Atwood. Yeah, and it was "Dark Pines Under Water" and I think it was only one poem that was anthologized in there. And I read it, I must've been 17 or 18--
05:46
Audio Recording:
[Audio, Gwendolyn MacEwan reading the first lines of "Dark Pines Under Water"] This land like a mirror turns you inward / And you become a forest in a furtive lake.
05:52
Jen Sookfong Lee:
And that poem, which people say is about Canada, right? Like I think you and I were just discussing this before we turned these mikes on, but the... They say it's about Canada, but I read it as being this like fear of the internal and sort of the fear of the Gothic-ness that lives inside us that we only see in reflection. Upon reflection, in reflection.
06:10
Audio Recording:
[Audio, continuation of Gwendolyn MacEwan reading "Dark Pines Under Water"] The dark pines of your mind reach downward, / You dream in the green of your time, / Your memory is a row of sinking pines.
06:20
Jen Sookfong Lee:
And there was enough in that poem for me to want to read more of her work.
06:26
Audio Recording:
[Audio, continuation of Gwendolyn MacEwan reading "Dark Pines Under Water"] Explorer, you tell yourself, this is not what you came for / Although it is good here, and green.
06:33
Katherine McLeod:
Actually when you mentioned your master's, that was the first time I learned of MacEwen, was during my master's degree out at UBC, out west in Vancouver. And I was in a course with Sherrill Grace and it was a CanLit graduate course and we were thinking about autobiography. And we read the play by Linda Griffiths Alien Creature: A Visitation by [sic: should read "from"] Gwendolyn MacEwen. And in the play, Linda Griffiths uses MacEwen's words to conjure the presence of MacEwen as this magical poet and really to think about kind of really the reflection of the self through a poet's words and a poet's presence. And so I actually ended up writing about that play and that was my first academic publication, was about Linda Griffiths's play about Gwendolyn MacEwen, sort of the presence of the voice in the play and as a remediation of MacEwen in that way. But it was, it was back in my master's, too. So it's sort of this long... MacEwen has always been.
07:36
Jen Sookfong Lee:
You know, and I took these books off my bookshelf. There's, you know, pictures of her on it and she had these huge, like, sad eyes, big, sad... You know, like that movie Big Eyes, it's like that kind of thing. And I realized that like every poem I've ever read of hers, her eyes are there. Like they're there somewhere. There's a lot of looking, a lot of vision, a lot of dark vision, you know?
07:56
Katherine McLeod:
It really was the voice of her poetry, the sound of her poetry, the way she's able to conjure up a presence through the words themselves. And I think a lot of her poetry actually has to do with, it has to do with haunting. There's this sort of this continuation that's really evoked in her poetry and a real, a strengthened voice that you can hear from the words on the page, I would argue. Even though it's fascinating then to think that what often captures people is hearing MacEwen herself read the poems and then whenever someone's able to listen to MacEwen, reading her poetry--
08:30
Audio Recording:
[Audio, continuation of the first Gwendolyn MacEwen recording] ...but mark now how harmless are the claws...
08:32
Katherine McLeod:
--is something that just captures one's attention and she's able to create a real strong sense of voice in her poetry and then, when it's read out loud, it's even more powerful.
08:42
Music:
[Instrumental Guitar And Drums]
08:42
Hannah McGregor:
I can't remember the first time I heard Gwendolyn MacEwen's voice, but I remember that I first heard her work read out loud by a friend. And I know that I was excited enough about her 1982 poetry collection, The T.E. Lawrence Poems, that I initially planned on writing about it in my dissertation before the practicalities of putting together a research project led me elsewhere. Actually, despite the fact that MacEwen was one of the authors who led me to the study of Canadian literature, I've never written about her formally. This podcast episode is the closest I've come. MacEwen was born in Toronto in 1941 and rose to fame quickly and young. She published her first collection of poetry in 1961 and won the Governor General's Award for her fourth, The Shadow-Maker, in 1969 when she was not yet 30 years old. She died young, too, at 46, and the combination of her fascination with mysticism and the almost mythically tragic shape of her own life have turned her into a somewhat mythic figure in her own right.
09:46
Jen Sookfong Lee:
No, she was deeply social and she was as famous as poets get, really, in Canada, ever. Like, she was a bit of a rock star, like she started doing things like having like a signature black eyeliner situation and like signature clothing, like loose silky things. I mean, come on, man, I wish I had like a signature look,
10:05
Hannah McGregor:
But this iconic status was no accident. MacEwen came into her own as a poet in a historical moment when it was possible to be both a poet and a celebrity. And her poetic persona was very much tied to the culture of poetry readings in the 1960s, perhaps most notably at the Bohemian Embassy, an alternative club in Toronto where she would meet poets like Jay MacPherson, Margaret Avison, Phyllis Webb, Al Purdy, Leonard Cohen, Irving Layton, and Milton Acorn.
10:32
Katherine McLeod:
Well, I'll start again. Like thinking about MacEwen also allows you to think about spaces for performances of poetry. Thinking about, say, the Bohemian Embassy in Toronto, you know, it's talked about how MacEwen would show up to the Bohemian Embassy and there would be the sounds of like the coffee maker in the background and all these poets maybe reading with these like loud, bombastic voices or however, however poetry, you know, the poet's voice was thought of. And then this woman's coming up to the microphone and she's often talked about as appearing very quiet and suddenly just absolutely captivating the audience. And I was so drawn to the fact that somebody very sort of unassuming could have such an impact and just call everyone's attention. And it also, then it allows you to think about what it meant to be performing as a poet, a particularly very young female poet, at the time that MacEwen started doing her readings and being up there with a young Margaret Atwood and all the rest of the 1960s poets. Just how, how she held her own on that stage, too.
11:32
Hannah McGregor:
In fact, it's impossible for me to think about the historical context that shaped MacEwen's work without thinking about that poetry scene of the 1960s and how central it was to the invention of that thing we now think of as CanLit. And when I think of MacEwen and the poet she would become, the poet who would write The T.E. Lawrence Poems and Afterworlds, collections that have haunted me as long as I can remember, I keep coming back to those years in the early '60s to what happened to her then. And I'm not the only one.
12:03
Music:
[Instrumental Piano]
12:06
Katherine McLeod:
I also think about the way that she was so determined to be a poet and there's something about that, again, thinking of, you know, what models did she have to look to, to be a female poet in Canada at the time? Really she had to sort of forge her path of what that looked like and what that sounded like and trying to sort of find her place and her voice, the space for her voice, in that world. She was in the circles with so many of the very loudest male poets at the time and still managed, you know, she managed to be known for the strength of her voice, but it sounded incredibly difficult, too. And I was very interested in how she managed that and what she had to fight against in order for her voice to be heard. You know, who was this person Gwendolyn MacEwen? What kind of work could she have produced if she was in a more sustainable environment for her writing? You know, can we learn something from that now or are we still struggling against the very same things?
13:04
Jen Sookfong Lee:
I often wonder sometimes when... 'Cause she wrote a lot of her work after this was done, like most, the the bulk of her work after that marriage was over. And like there's a part of me that sometimes thinks those things that she's trying to access is maybe that marriage. Like I wonder sometimes, right? 'Cause like when you get married or you're in a relationship when you're really young. Like, I got married really young, I got married, I met my ex-husband at 21, I was married at 24. By no means was that like an imbalanced marriage, I would never say that. But it defines you, I think. Like in your twenties, you're exploring things, you don't know who you are, your identity is so malleable. So what did Milton Acorn, what did he try to shape her into and what did she end up taking on and what did she end up rejecting would be my question. And I don't think any of us will ever know this answer. But then looking at her poetry, I sometimes wonder if that darkness is there and that, and the way she would sort of like, as we were saying, she was not ever writing in the voices of men who were like loud, big, you know, masculine men. Always the opposite. And to me that's kind of a gentle pushback against that Milton Acorn angry bear.
14:07
Hannah McGregor:
As I was working on this episode, I reached out online for someone who could help me better understand MacEwen's relationship with the poet Milton Acorn and how it might've shaped her work. My answer came serendipitously in the form of an essay by writer andrea bennett from their new book Like a Boy but Not a Boy: Navigating Life, Mental Health, and Parenthood Outside the Gender Binary, which is available for pre-order now from Arsenal Pulp Press. With their permission, here's an excerpt from the essay "The People's Poetry."
14:36
Music:
[Instrumental Low String Instruments]
14:43
Hannah McGregor:
In the early 1960s, a part-bar, part-coffee shop, part-venue space opened on St. Nicholas Street, a few blocks up from Yonge and Wellesley in Toronto. Soon after it opened, poet Milton Acorn, then in his late thirties, began to hold court there. The Embassy held poetry readings on Thursday nights, when Acorn would read, generally overstaying his welcome on the stage. Afterwards, Acorn would find himself surrounded by younger poets, many of them students from the University of Toronto. Margaret Atwood, then a student at the University of Toronto, read at the Embassy; a little later, a teenage Gwendolyn MacEwen found the spot, the community—Acorn.
15:23
Hannah McGregor:
Acorn was bombastic, drank a lot, often had a fat cigar sticking out from the side of his mouth. MacEwen was slight and half his age but had a compelling voice of her own. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she wasn’t at university. She was self-taught, had had a tumultuous—occasionally violent, marked by alcoholism and mental illness—home life. Many of the books that chronicle Acorn and MacEwen’s relationship come close to saying that Acorn was something of a father figure for the younger poets gathered at the Embassy—dispensing poetic advice, maybe acting more like a big brother. Acorn started off as MacEwen’s “poetic mentor,” but their relationship soon morphed and they began to date. Eventually, they married. This was something Acorn wanted and MacEwen initially did not; he’d proposed in December 1960 when she was nineteen and he was thirty-seven, and she’d said no, writing, “Milt, my love is not the same as yours… I feel no need to find myself physically, sensually, emotionally in another person... I’m still getting acquainted with life, with myself.” However, she agreed to his proposal a little later; he was in Prince Edward Island for the winter, and she was missing him while he was away.
16:39
Hannah McGregor:
Acorn and MacEwen’s friends speculated about why they had gotten together at all. Chris Gudgeon’s biography of Milton Acorn, Out of this World, says people referred to them as Beauty and the Beast. It was easy to see why Acorn was drawn to MacEwen—she was young, beautiful, talented, and insecure. MacEwen, Gudgeon writes, quote, “fed Milt’s lopsided vision of himself as a heroic poet-knight, battling the dragons of injustice, and leaving the fair maidens swooning.” End quote. (Another Acorn biographer, Richard Lemm, is more explicit, quote: “He had a constant companion who would listen to his political discourses. A sexually experienced man, he could teach and savour his less experienced lover.”) End quote. Although it was less clear what had drawn MacEwen, one friend from the Embassy pointed out that when they met, in contrast to later on, Acorn seemed confident, strong, clean-shaven, eccentric but put-together. Acorn and MacEwen had friends who guessed that part of the reason she’d been attracted to him was career-related—she was “ambitious” and saw him as “established,” a way to further her writing and publishing goals; Al Purdy thought, quote, “Gwen was with Milton because Milton was ‘getting attention.’” End quote.
17:53
Hannah McGregor:
Rosemary Sullivan, MacEwen’s biographer, writes that it’s important to be careful about the way we think about MacEwen and Acorn’s relationship in retrospect. There was a power imbalance, and the relationship seemed doomed from the start, and Acorn was persistent, but there’s no evidence that he was abusive, either physically or emotionally. At least, not until the relationship crumbled. MacEwen took a solo trip to Israel a few months after her wedding; when she returned, the distance and solitude had given her a new perspective on Toronto, and her relationship. As Sullivan puts it in Shadow Maker, quote, “Almost as soon as she had married, Gwendolyn recognized that she had made a terrible mistake.” End quote. MacEwen wanted a marriage of equals, and Acorn wanted a wife. Acorn was “deeply conservative” at heart, homophobic, anti-abortion (he wrote at least one terrible poem about it), and he wanted to see “supper on the table every night.”
18:50
Hannah McGregor:
MacEwen and Acorn had an open marriage; he’d taken advantage of this when she was away, and she began a side relationship with a painter when she returned from Israel. Acorn gave her an ultimatum—him or the painter—and, not even a year into their marriage, she chose to leave. It was a choice that Acorn could not brook. He fell apart. He drank; he showed up on friends’ doorsteps in the middle of the night, distraught and drunk; he wrote MacEwen angry, bitter letters. Quote, (“One letter from that time begins with ‘You Dirty Bitch’ and ends up asking ‘WHERE IN THE WORLD DID YOU LEARN TO BE SUCH A LOUSE?’” End quote. Writes Gudgeon; another, quoted in Shadow Maker, sent after MacEwen told Acorn of her intentions to divorce him, quote, “accus[es] her of being ‘the Great North American Castrator.’”) End quote. MacEwen wrote back, at least at the beginning, explaining herself, trying to make him understand. Reading their biographies, the snippets of his letters that make it through, it appears as though Acorn’s life had fallen apart, and he’d set the blame squarely on the shoulders of his much younger ex, who simply wanted space, freedom, and an amicable divorce. When Acorn refused to give her a divorce—in the era before no-fault divorces—MacEwen was forced to travel across the country, to Vancouver, to gather evidence of his marital infidelity in order to petition the courts. Purdy, who’d been Acorn’s best man at the wedding, reluctantly acted as a witness to Acorn’s adultery so that MacEwen could finally break free of the marriage.
20:21
Hannah McGregor:
In 1969, years later, MacEwen and Acorn were both announced finalists, alongside George Bowering, for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry or Drama. Acorn was still a mess—outstaying his welcome at friends’ houses, drinking, not bathing, suicidal, hospitalized for depression, still half hoping MacEwen might come back and blaming her for everything that was wrong in his life. When MacEwen found out her book The Shadow-Maker was shortlisted alongside Acorn’s I’ve Tasted My Blood, Nick Mount writes in his book Arrival: The Story of CanLit, quote, “She was afraid enough of him to write to the judges that if there was any change of her having to share the award with Acorn, she would rather withdraw her book from consideration.” End quote. But she and Bowering won, and Acorn didn’t.
21:10
Hannah McGregor:
CanLit did not graciously accept MacEwen and Bowering’s wins. Instead, poets Irving Layton and Eli Mandel co-authored an open letter protesting Acorn’s loss. The letter was in part a call for money, to be raised and, quote, “presented to Milton Acorn as the Canadian Poets Award.” End quote. Another public plea for Acorn, this time an editorial by poets Seymour Mayne and Ken Hertz in a now-defunct Montreal literary magazine, reads, quote, “Either because of literary politics or a gross ignorance of Canadian poetry on the part of the Canada Council jury, Milton Acorn has been denied the Governor General’s Award that he truly has earned.” End quote. Acorn’s supporters generally focused their ire at Bowering. One of the three jurors who’d chosen MacEwen’s and Bowering’s books over Acorn’s was Warren Tallman, an American who’d been hired to teach English at the University of British Columbia; the thinking went that Bowering’s style, which was influenced by US poets, was emblematic of a type of cultural imperialism that needed to be studiously avoided if CanLit was to be its own proper national cultural project.
22:17
Hannah McGregor:
Five days after MacEwen and Bowering were fêted at their awards ceremony in Ottawa, a broad swathe of CanLit, including Layton, Purdy, and Atwood, showed up at Grossman’s Tavern, on Spadina Avenue in Toronto, to witness Acorn receive a cheque for $1,000 and a medallion naming him the People’s Poet. When I think of this night—Acorn got so drunk he lost the medallion twice; his friends let him read for forty minutes; he was roundly celebrated—I immediately picture MacEwen and wonder how she felt, if she was at home in her small apartment that night, if there was anyone with her. And I wonder if anyone at Grossman’s thought about MacEwen. Did they wonder, celebrating Acorn, if they were enacting a deeper injustice by attempting to address a perceived one?
23:06
Music:
[Instrumental Low String Instruments And Whistling]
23:12
Hannah McGregor:
If MacEwen wasn't quite part of that new CanLit scene represented at the People's Poetry party at Grossman's Tavern, maybe it was because she also wasn't part of the project of building a thing that looked recognizably like CanLit,
23:25
Jen Sookfong Lee:
But that white male sort of masculine sort of like, yeah, like the, it's the Milton Acorn narrative. She just didn't care. She just was like, "I don't care. You guys go fight it out in your huts with your potatoes and axes. I'm going to go, I gotta to go to Egypt, get some bomb black eyeliner, see you later."
23:43
Hannah McGregor:
And perhaps it's something about her poetic rejection of accepted nationalist narratives, those "potatoes and axes" that Jen alludes to, that make her appeal to those who are a little skeptical about essentialist stories about what it means to be a Canadian or for literature to be Canadian.
23:59
Jen Sookfong Lee:
I think there's a lot of pressure for authenticity and I think it's a marketing thing in many ways. I think that in my experiences writing for both big publishers and small presses, that the big publishers understand that a certain amount of authenticity sells, it doesn't even really matter if you're writing fiction. Like if you're somebody, like, who looks like me and you're writing a family story about a Chinese Canadian family, then the authenticity is easy to sell. It's easy to sell. It's like, "Well, Jen's real grandfather was also a barber" or whatever. You know? It's very much a merging of self, brand, and book.
24:32
Hannah McGregor:
And her lack of investment in those narratives can help to pry open the spaces to think about alternative ways of organizing our literary history.
24:40
Jen Sookfong Lee:
In the history of Canada, for me anyway, like, I'm not a historian by any stretch. The only history of Canada that I'm familiar with, like, in any deep way is the history of Chinese Canadians. And for most of that time that there were white settlers on this, on this land, there were also Chinese Canadian, usually indentured, labourers. And I don't think the garrison mentality, how many times can I say that on this recording?
25:04
Hannah McGregor:
Oh, garrison mentality, for those who don't know, is a term that was coined by literary critic Northrop Frye and kind of popularized by Margaret Atwood's literary critical writing, which essentially argues that one of the major themes in Canadian literature is anxiety about the dangers and emptiness and threats of the Canadian landscape.
25:25
Jen Sookfong Lee:
I don't, it doesn't suit their experiences of let's just say being chased off a gold claim, doing laundry for the railway workers, being a railway worker, being abandoned by the railway and not having passage home, scouring the woods for the remains of your friends so you can send them back home for a proper burial. Where's garrison mentality in that? It's not the land that has destroyed them, it's the white people. So like there's an alternative there and I think that any sort of marginalized group who has, you know, been alongside the white settlers all this time could very well choose their own anthology that would support that narrative. And wouldn't that be interesting?
26:06
Hannah McGregor:
This isn't to say there's nothing CanLit-esque about MacEwen's poetry career. In fact, MacEwen had a strong, if often largely functional, tie to the CBC. As Katherine McLeod explains, it began with a prize.
26:18
Music:
[Instrumental Low Strings]
26:23
Katherine McLeod:
Gwendolyn MacEwen won the CBC Poetry Prize in 1965 and at that point she was very young, very young poet. And through winning the prize, she got the attention of Robert Weaver who was then the producer and editor of the program Anthology, which was a CBC literary program that, you know, ran from the mid '50s up until 1985, so very long standing literary program. And Robert Weaver became a really strong supporter of Gwendolyn's work. So he had her on to read on Anthology shortly after winning the CBC Prize. And she then read on Anthology numerous times, but also started to write radio plays. So the one that she's most well-known for is the play Terror and Erebus that is all about the Franklin expedition and the Northwest Passage. And she also, she wrote two more but, which aren't as well-known, but that, the play Terror and Erebus, was broadcast in the mid '60s and re-broadcast. And both by writing the plays and also reading for CBC, she was able to make a bit of money, which the reading on CBC and writing for CBC ended up being a way that she was able to support herself. Again, continuing that sense of wanting to really be a poet and be self-sustaining in that way.
27:51
Katherine McLeod:
So one of the programs that I uncovered that I thought was one of the most fascinating when I was listening to MacEwen's readings on CBC in the '60s was a program that she produced and created for Anthology that was broadcast in 1969 and it was called Gwendolyn MacEwen Introduces, and I've been thinking a lot about how this program, Gwendolyn MacEwen Introduces from 1969, is an opportunity for her to talk about other poets and other works that she's interested in. So it was this moment of listening in the archives and expecting that, okay, maybe this is going to be another reading by MacEwen, which are fantastic and captivating, but in this case she was talking about other poets. It was actually a four-part series and that's where, the last episode of that four-part series, I was most surprised by because that's where she started to talk about flamenco.
28:46
Music:
[Instrumental Flamenco: Guitar And Clapping]
28:53
Katherine McLeod:
And that is where I nearly fell out of my seat because I was so thrilled and amazed that here I was in the CBC archives, listening to MacEwen, who I was fascinated by and working on, and at the same time I have been cultivating my own dance practice and flamenco throughout my academic work for the past 15 years. And here I was listening to MacEwen talk about flamenco and in this past year with Dr. Emily Murphy, who's an assistant professor at UBC Okanagan, we've started a research creation project that lets me perform some of these recordings back from this 1969 piece and bring in the flamenco side, too.
29:42
Katherine McLeod:
So Gwendolyn MacEwen's interest in flamenco, there's all kinds of connections between MacEwen and music and especially the sort of the Toronto world music in the '60s and artists that were passing through, this continues into the '70s and is a whole other story of MacEwen and her partner in the '70s opening the Trojan Horse cafe and connections to musicians passing through and performing there. But back to the '60s, I'm trying to figure out where she would have heard it or how she would have first been drawn to flamenco, but it makes a lot of sense because there's something undescribable about the sound of her voice and this feeling almost like the duende of flamenco, which is a word that refers to this undescribable sense that when you're just really moved by something. And MacEwen's program, part four of Gwendolyn MacEwen Introduces, is all focused on the duende. And she's interested in thinking about the duende as it's theorized in Spanish poetry and then in flamenco as this undescribable feeling of the depths of your soul and true feeling and emotion. She's interested in how we can understand that in poetry. And she's thinking about poetry outside of Canada, but then she starts to sort of reflect a little bit more on Canadian poetry and she asks the question, where is the duende in Canadian poetry? Which I just find fascinating because where she turns, I think, goes back to her trying to figure out where her voice sits in Canadian poetry because the person she turns to as an example is Irving Layton. And it's so, when we're thinking about what kind of models or what is she thinking about when she's thinking about Canadian poetry that is moving, on the one hand, yes, I see why she talks about Layton's poetry, but I found it fascinating that she didn't give her own poetry as the example because I would argue that her poetry has the duende. Her poetry is the poetry that moves you and the poetry that has that undescribable feeling. So in listening to the piece, it was really interesting to hear her theorize all of this, but also not see herself in that. And then I, that's when I started to think, okay, as a critic, how can I argue that MacEwen has the duende? And one of the ways that I feel like is most successful in arguing this is, in fact, to dance her poetry.
32:11
Audio Recording:
[Audio, Gwendolyn MacEwen Reading, Overlapped With Soft Flamenco] I should have predicted the death of this city. I could have predicted it if only there had been no such pretty flowers. No such squares filled with horses and their golden riders.
32:26
Hannah McGregor:
Katherine's work on Canadian poetry and flamenco and Jen's imaginative alternative anthologies that reject the garrison mentality's settler-colonial meta-narratives of Canadian writing both point in different ways to how MacEwen's poetics can lead us away from perceived notions of what Canadian poetry is or can be. And as I think about ways that those of us who care for her work can keep MacEwen's contributions alive, I come back to her voice, so powerful that it feels fully present as I listen to it.
32:59
Jen Sookfong Lee:
This, this one really affected me when I was like 19: "I don't trust you for a single second, but / My bones turned gold in your hands' warm holding / in the dark or in the bright heart of the morning. / And suddenly the days are longer than anything, / Longer than Tolstoy, longer than Proust, longer / Than anything. / But the days are also diving into nights, and / I told you our end lay in our beginning / So we drink to our end, always remembering / that at the bottom of the goblets of Pompeii / Was the skull; we crawl / Out of the night utterly broken, bruises / All over our souls, / But this pain returns me to the world. / Even in the end your perfidy serves me, so / The cry we made when we came, love, / Will sound the same and is the same / As the cry we will make when we go." She knew she was gonna die young, I think. I think I'll love her forever. And I think she never, she never disappoints. Every time you go back you're still like, "Wow." There's always something else there because whatever is happening in our world or the things that we're most consumed with, there will always be an element of that in her poem. So it's the kind of poems that she wrote.
33:58
Katherine McLeod:
They were everything and everywhere. Playing a recording of her reading, it sounds so live and sounds so present. She's still in motion. She's still, she's still alive. She's not in the archive. She's not in a box. She's, she's still here in very present. Thinking of the lines from "Past and Future Ghosts": "Look out, you who inhabit those rooms of my future. I'm coming after you. I'm starting to haunt you. I'm starting right now."
34:25
Audio Recording:
[Audio, Gwendolyn MacEwen Speaking] So listen, I had a great idea that if our voices gave out, we were just going to open up the record and bring a recorder up on stage and place the needle in the proper groove and then just let the record speak for itself. However, I guess the voice is intact.
34:43
Music:
[Intense Echoing Instrumental]
34:53
Hannah McGregor:
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. I was the producer this month. Thanks so much to Stacey Copeland, SpokenWeb Podcast _project manager and producer extraordinaire, for all her help. A special thank you to Jen Sookfong Lee, Katherine McLeod, and andrea bennett for their generous contributions to this episode. [Theme Music] To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the _SpokenWeb Podcast_on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We'll see you back here next month for another episode of the _SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.