Throughout the 1960s and 70s I knew there was remarkable artist at the University of Alberta named Norman Yates – who had created the cover image of Sheila Watson’s litttle magazine White Pelican and the drawings that made up roughly half of Henry Beissel’s very early Coach House Press poetry book New Wings for Icarus. I also knew that somewhere on the prairies I had a cousin named Norman Yates, a member of what my grandmother called “a military family” whose brother Bill had died over Germany during the war; his father, Albert Yates, a decorated WWI British officer, had visited my B.C. home in 1944 in the uniform of a Canadian army recruiting officer. It was only in the late 1980s while attending a series of conferences at the University of Alberta that I began to realize that these were probably the same Norman Yates.

Norman had served overseas during the war in the Royal Canadian Air Force as a radar operator. He had graduated from the Ontario College of Art in 1950 and begun teaching at the University of Alberta a few years later. He and I were the grandchildren of sisters, born in Sunderland, County Durham. The younger, born 1882, had immigrated to Vancouver in 1913 and the older, born 1870, to Calgary in 1926, but they had never attempted to visit one other. Postal contact between them and their families ended when the older sister died in 1953, predeceased by her daughter, Norman’s mother, in 1948.

Norman died last week, most unexpectedly, at the age of 90. He had been still painting large canvases; his art had been still evolving. Openness to such change was one of the two major things I had discovered that we shared – we both believed that our new work should be a significant step from our previous work. The other was that we both believed that composing involved collaborating with one’s materials. In his case this had come to mean – by the time I

The Metaphor of Celebrity: Canadian Poetry and the Public, 1955-1980, by Joel Deshaye. Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 2013. 264 pp. $50.00.


In “The Era of Celebrity in Canadian Poetry,” the second chapter of his The Metaphor of Celebrity: Canadian Poetry and the Public, 1955-1980, Joel Deshaye declares that 1955-1980 was Canadian poetry’s  “era of celebrity.” He doesn’t find many celebrity poets, however.  He proposes only four possibles: Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, Michael Ondaatje and Gwendolyn MacEwen, the latter whom he qualifies as “a celebrity of low degree compared to some of her contemporaries” (200). Ondaatje also seems a questionable celebrity in this period by the criteria that Deshaye uses, although he’s undoubtedly had later moments as an international novelist-celebrity. Deshaye’s readers could well wonder how many celebrities it should take to make an “era.” Even Deshaye at times in this chapter seems unimpressed by the degree of celebrity he can establish for any of his poets, at one point writing that he hopes only to recognize “the real, though limited, success of this group of poets beyond and in the literary field ordinarily assumed to be incapable of supporting stardom” (44).

Certainly Deshaye appears to have no interest in glamourizing his 1955-80 era. He is, in fact, often usefully cynical  about the ambitions of the four writers and the means they used to achieve them, calling their claims to spiritual insight “religious pretence” (11) and the textual enactments of masculinity by the male poets unconscious “parody” and “grandstanding” (7). He implies that their themes of personal freedom – frequent in Layton – may have been a grasping at an illusion, and that their self-portrayals as sacrificing themselves for their art were mere posturing in hope of attracting empathetic fans.

          Most of the poets in this study wrote about themselves as if they were more widely recognized
          than they were in reality, or wrote as if they were other celebrities of higher degree. I call this
          self-aggrandizement "grandstanding" to suggest that their self-promotion and identity formation
          depend on metaphor .... (15)

Sacrificing “themselves” is a rather problematic concept for Deshaye because in his various comments on identity formation (which he evidently understands through Diana Fuss’s theories of metaphoric substitution) he shows little

all the elements that one is familiar with in Curnoe’s mature work – the fluorescent areas of plain colour, the extraordinary rendering of spatial proportions, the combinations of text, collage, carpentry and paint, the use of text to comment on the process of creating the work, and the use of templated fonts. It’s thus a major piece in the history both of Curnoe’s development and of world art. Curnoe may have abandoned it because of the difficulty of combining and erecting its three parts – the legs he had made for it were insufficient and have been replaced for this exhibition. He had attached metals eyes to the top, possibly in hopes of suspending the pieces from a ceiling.  He also appears to have had misgivings about some of the visual elements. The text on the left panel appears to be on its way to being erased. On the centre panel there is an uncharacteristically blurred area beside the chin of the blue-and-

The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley. Ed. Rod Smith, Peter Baker and Kaplan Harris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. 512 pp. $65.00 Hardback.

It will be difficult for a biographer to do a better job of revealing Creeley and his life than the editors – and of course Creeley himself – have done in this selection. Whether in letters to other writers, his wives or his children, Creeley wrote openly about his often changing views, responses, feelings, hopes and plans. He is often so ingenuously open and self-focused that he discloses even more than he may be aware of – i.e. reading a Creeley letter can be a lot like reading Browning monologue.

The context and tenor of the early letters during which Creeley farmed in New Hampshire, lived in Aix-en-Provence,  Mallorca and Black Mountain, NC, will be familiar to those who have read volumes of George Butterick’s ambitious but uncompleted Charles Olson & Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence. It’s a period in which Creeley is aggressively seeking his place in postwar American poetry, searching for mentors and exploring possible connections with his younger contemporaries. Before he has any significant publications he is confidently introducing himself to Williams and Pound, asking for their help, and exchanging views on poetics. He soon discovers more fruitful connections with Cid Corman, Denise Levertov and Olson. These letters mostly concerned with questions of how to write, literary politics and publishing possibilities but are also punctuated with reflections on his poverty, his unhappiness with the places in which he is living, and his embarrassment at not being able to support his young family in a ‘manly’ fashion. What is especially interesting is how he wrestles with himself in these letters, posing various possibilities against one another in both his writing and domestic lives. There’s an obsessive sense of irresolution similar to the one which gives the first decade of his poetry such power.

Throughout he tends to be excited about new poems he has written. But often within a few months he re-reads them and thinks they are weak, facile, slight, too “easy” because they are so similar to ones he has written before. He finds them again a year later – if he hasn’t destroyed them – and is impressed with them. Later when they are published and well received by some of his writer friends his estimation of them rises again. The excitements, self-doubts, conflicted feelings, moments of despair – often caused by the same things that have excited him – tumble one after