Victoria searches for successor to the 'people's poet'

The prolific Linda Rogers is concluding a three-year term as Victoria's poet laureate.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
September 26, 2011

VICTORIA

The patrician figure in tasteful black rose from a pew in the nave, bowing in the direction of the altar before taking her place at the lectern.

Without introduction, she began to read, picking up where a predecessor had left off. Linda Rogers spoke the familiar words of Chapter 5 of the gospel according to Matthew, the Sermon from the Mount. Blessed are the meek, etc.

Verily, I say unto you the reading exhibited her extensive experience in the elocutionary arts.

The audience in the cavernous and magnificent Christ Church Cathedral numbered just 11. She was reading during the dinner hour on Friday, the penultimate day of the cathedral’s week-long King James Biblethon. It was surely one of the smallest audiences the poet laureate of Victoria has faced in her tenure.

Ms. Rogers is nearing the end of a three-year term as a literary ambassador and “people’s poet.” The city is now canvassing for nominations for a successor. Applicants must be residents of greater Victoria, have published at least two volumes (self publishing does not count) and must have written work “that demonstrates poetry richness and flexibility (be more than one style).”

OK, first job for the next poet laureate — rewrite the eligibility criteria.

The winning candidate has to write at least three original works for each year of the term. In exchange, the laureate gets a $2,500 honorarium, guaranteed invites to swanky galas, and the future possibility of resting on one’s laurels.

The prolific Ms. Rogers has produced 27 poems for the city. She has visited classrooms, hospitals and seniors’ homes to encourage the creation of free verse and rhyming couplets, sonnets and haikus.

“More people who didn’t regard themselves as poets are now engaged,” she said.

Linda Rogers

A book of poems by schoolchildren celebrating the pending marriage of Prince William to Kate Middleton was sent to the royal couple before their wedding ceremony.
In April, local poets wrote poems about downtown businesses, which then showcased the works in window displays.

Ms. Rogers also continued a popular program called Love, Poetry and Chocolate during which the public is invited to contribute and read aloud romantic poetry. The event, held near Valentine’s Day, was launched by her predecessor, Carla Funk, who became Victoria’s inaugural poet laureate five years ago.

The city sponsors one of 18 poet laureate positions that exist in Canada, the most prestigious of which is the parliamentary poet laureate. Victoria is one of only three cities in British Columbia with an official poet laureate. New Westminster named its first in 1998 with Vancouver following suit four years ago.

Ms. Rogers, who says her antecedents include an abundance of lawyers, theologians and writers, including the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, is a ubiquitous presence on the local writing scene.

Alas, she has found the wedding of the spontaneous spirit of the poet with the demands of civic officials to not always be harmonious. She has found it difficult to accept some of the diktats issued by those who supervise the laureate. She said she was asked to read over any works to be read aloud by other writers at public events. What to City Hall seemed like a prudent vetting to the poet sounded like censorship.

She had hoped a legacy gift to conclude her term would be an anthology featuring the work of 30 local poets and visual artists, a volume the city could use as a protocol gift for visiting dignitaries. At the moment, the project has no publisher, though she vows to see it in print.

“I’ve failed Bureaucracy 101,” she said. “First course I’ve ever failed.”

Back at the cathedral, Ms. Rogers concluded her chapters by stating, “End of the reading.”

She stepped down from the lectern, retrieveing a purse left unattended in the pew before heading for the door, where I caught up with her to ask what she took from the reading.

“I’ve been having trouble with bureaucrats,” she said.

She contemplated the reading she had just completed.

“Judge not lest ye be judged,” she recited.

Good advice whether from Matthew or anyone else.


Glass Half Full

Linda Rogers completes a three-year term as Victoria’s poet laureate at the end of November. Her most recent poem for the city is described as a caption for Tyler Hodgin’s playful Glass Half Full sculpture along the Dallas Road waterfront.

This poem, which shares its title with the sculpture, is displayed on a round plaque set in the ground, the words rotating clockwise in a spiral like water going down a drain. The poet has a whimsical idea for the city — perhaps manhole covers could be replaced by similar poetic plaques.


The circle keeps turning. This
is where spinning children find out
we are one drop of water in
sky becoming ocean, or earth,
what ever catches the I, eye, first
as we go round in the half-full
glass that never empties or fills,
in the song that never ends.

Remembering Ginsberg and the summer of poetry

Poets gather outside the Vancouver home of Ellen and Warren Tallman in 1963. Allan Ginsberg is in the back row, third from left, standing beside a young, far-haired Dan McLeod in glasses. Warren Tallman is seated in the second row, far right. BELOW: The American poet Charles Olson in Vancouver, as photographed by Ginsberg.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
January 5, 2011

VICTORIA

Allen Ginsberg, fresh from an Asian sojourn, arrived in Vancouver with his hair and beard untrimmed, ringlets cascading from his face. The poet looked like an Old Testament prophet in an age of Brylcreem conformity.

He was a mad (holy) man amidst the Mad Men.

It was the summer of 1963. A three-week university course brought to the grungy port city with its neon-lit streetscapes an all-star lineup of hotshot writers known as the New American Poets.

George Bowering, at the time a student at the University of British Columbia who would go on to become Canada’s first poet laureate, had been reading these works for years. He intended to follow his favourite, Charles Olson. Instead, he found himself shadowing Mr. Ginsberg.

“Maybe it’s embarrassing to say it,” Mr. Bowering said Tuesday, “but he seemed to have some kind of spiritual aura. The air shone around him.”

He remembers the poet in Stanley Park so taken by its natural beauty to deliver an impromptu recitation of “Adonais,” a pastoral elegy to John Keats. “Pages and pages and pages of Shelley!” Mr. Bowering recalled. “I was astonished.”

The movie Howl, which takes as its title the famous poem written by the late Mr. Ginsberg, is being released on DVD this week after a limited theatrical run. The movie intersperses an interview with the poet, a reading of the poem, and a notorious obscenity trial in docudrama fashion.

For some who see the movie, it is unnerving, though not unsatisfying, to see Hollywood portray characters they knew in the flesh.

Stan Persky, a 69-year-old philosophy professor at Capilano University, knew many of the people portrayed in the film — Jack Kerouac (from whom he received a postcard at age 16 encouraging him in his writing), Neal Cassady, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Peter Orlovsky (Ginsberg’s lover), and the poet himself, whom he met in 1959 while stationed with the U.S. Navy in San Francisco.

“Ginsberg was an advocate of gay liberation 10 years before it was invented,” Mr. Persky said. “Ginsberg was totally open about it. I’d be walking around Chinatown and see him on the other side of the street and he would call out, ‘Hey, have you got a boyfriend yet?’ ”

Mr. Persky worked with the poet in organizing an early anti-Vietnam War protest at Berkeley, Calif. When the local Hells Angels chapter made it known they were prepared to beat the peace marchers for not being patriotic, the poet went to visit them in their compound. He returned to announce the Angels had changed their mind, offering to provide security for the protestors, an entente negotiated after the long-haired, gay poet shared with the leather-wearing bikers a supply of LSD.

The 1963 visit to Vancouver coincided with several parties held at the Kerrisdale home of Ellen Tallman, a writer, and Warren Tallman, an English professor, at 2527 W. 37th Ave. The atmosphere was redolent of cigarette smoke and spilled Black Label.

At one point, Mr. Ginsberg posed outside the home with the host and several poets. Among those in the photograph is Dan McLeod, who would go on to co-found the Georgia Straight underground newspaper. Some years later, the Straight faced a substantial fine for criminal libel by having awarded a “Pontius Pilate Certificate” to a judge who convicted Mr. Persky on a loitering charge. The newspaper held a benefit to raise legal funds, attracting the support of folk singer Phil Ochs and Mr. Ginsberg. In a radio interview with Jack Webster, a hard-hitting interrogator from Scotland known as the Oatmeal Savage, the gentle poet used wit and humour to disarm the host. In the end, Mr. Persky remembers Mr. Ginsberg cajoling a $50 cheque from the Scotsman.

Looking back, the 1963 poetry conference is the day what we think of as the 1960s began in Vancouver.

Mr. Bowering likes to tell an anecdote about the conference.

At one point, the visiting poets were playing a friendly game of Monopoly at the Tallman residence. Savvy purchases and some luck with the die soon had Mr. Ginsberg demanding rent payments and calling mortgages on his fellow poets, as he ignored their entreaties for loans or leniency. The writer who decried the excesses of American capitalism was a whiz at tabletop real estate.


Fred Wah recorded a reading by Allen Ginsberg during the Vancouver conference. You can hear it http://slought.org/toc/Vancouver1963/ ">here.