Dark and Stormy

In an autobiographical poem called “Being Caught,” John Newlove writes, “I want to be at home in the weather.” For him, the weather is a condition, an environment, some version of reality, but not a home. In The Weather & the Words, a highly readable selection of letters, expertly edited by J. A. Weingarten, Newlove drops occasional comments about the elements. While living in British Columbia in the 1960s, he complained about the drenching rain: “Goddam May here, and it rains like mad; druther be back on prairies, where there’d be sunshine.” A few years later in Toronto, he fought cold spells with Aspirins and whisky.

Canadian poets have a lot to say about the weather, both as meteorology and as metaphor. Archibald Lampman’s outstanding “Heat” exults in the shimmery temperatures of high summer. P. K. Page’s “Stories of Snow” summons up snowdrifts and frozen lakes as counterpoints to tropical vegetation. Whatever else is happening, there is always the weather. Patrick James Errington’s “Not an Elegy” starts with a contrarian observation: “Thank fuck there’s still a little weather left. Snow, / Which means you don’t have to talk about it, means / Despite itself, no poems needed.”

By far the most famous and possibly the best Canadian poem on the subject is Newlove’s “The Weather.” It is a miracle of craftsmanship, with weather referring to incremental changes that happen while no one is paying attention, events that etch lines on a face or in a poem. Publication of “The Weather” in 1981 triggered seismic reactions in poetry circles across Canada. The following year, Michael Ondaatje wrote to Newlove to say that he had been reading the poem over and over. In 1983, Lorna Crozier published a collection called The Weather as a homage to Newlove and sent him a copy. (He commented on her tetrameters.) Lisa Robertson’s experimental The Weather registered another aftershock, twenty years after the initial publication of Newlove’s poem.

At first glance, the opening of “The Weather” might seem like a sequence of non sequiturs: “I’d like to live a slower life. / The weather gets in my words / and I want them dry.” If words could be aired out, would that lead to a slower life? In Newlove’s lexicon, “dry” is a loaded term: he had a decades-long addiction to alcohol. You sometimes hear the slosh of too many drinks in his syntax. “I’m drunk & can’t think straight. Can’t think words straight,” he wrote to a friend in 1966, while mixing himself one screwdriver after another. Alcohol led Newlove to multiple injuries. On one occasion, he broke an ankle in Al Purdy’s kitchen. On another, after overindulging at a restaurant, he fell and broke his hip.

When drunk, Newlove had the surprising habit of biting people. At a party, he failed to bite one person so bit another instead. Although it sounds unlikely, he threatened to bite Angela Bowering’s instep. At another party, Elspeth Cameron, then teaching at Loyola College, bit back, which caught Newlove off guard. Biting may be one way to communicate, but letters and poems are perhaps more reliable in conveying a point. Biting, however, should not be underestimated as an attribute of good poetry: Anglo-Saxon literature had a strong influence on his poems, Newlove told one correspondent, because it had words “powerful enough to bite bone.”

For a while in his twenties, Newlove worked at the University of British Columbia bookstore, where he shifted boxes around in the warehouse and stole paper on which to write his poems. When that work came to an end, he reminded various correspondents about his precarious situation. “GOT TO GET A JOB SOMEHOW,” he told Margaret Atwood in shouty capital letters. He claimed that he could do nothing of value except unload trucks. “I am very serious about working as a warehouseman. I must have a job; I can’t go on this way,” he lamented to John Robert Colombo, who boosted Newlove’s career by publishing some of his earliest poems in Poésie/Poetry 64 and The Tamarack Review.

Whenever he settled into steady employment, Newlove kvetched that it interfered with his writing. “Shiver convulsively at the thought of going back to work tomorrow,” he confided to a friend. Throughout the 1960s, Newlove counted on Canada Council grants and readings to eke out a living. From 1970 until 1974, he was an editor at McClelland & Stewart in Toronto. Two of his projects were Rudy Wiebe’s The Temptations of Big Bear and F. R. Scott’s Collected Poems, both of which won Governor General’s Awards. Newlove, too, won a GG, in 1972 for a book called Lies. After his stint at M&S, he scrounged together an income as a “writher-in-residence,” as he liked to joke, at various universities. He and his wife, Susan, ended up in Ottawa, where they bought a house and Newlove worked as an editor for the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages.

Off and on, Newlove thought he might be suited to a full-time teaching position. But, having dropped out of the University of Saskatchewan after a year, he did not meet the minimum requirements, despite his skill as a poet and editor. He often railed against professors whose academic appointments freed up time for writing poetry, not always of a quality that he approved. In a fit of pique, he wrote to Frank Davey, founder of Tish magazine and subsequently a professor, accusing him of being “a second-rater crying because someone has drawn attention to his incompetence.”

Newlove’s letters do not outline a theory of poetry in any systematic way, but they do offer insights into his ambitions and how he set about the task of writing. Poetry for him was an organization of sounds: “Phrases come into my mind, usually more interesting for their rhythm than for what they say, and sometimes they can ignite an entire set of rhythms, poetic, dramatic, horizontal (the line), perpendicular (the stanza and the whole piece), and at the same time it becomes important that I find the meaning of what is being said as well and make it as plain as I can.” Typically, he jotted down lines that consolidated into poems. Sometimes these lines disappeared into boxes or piles for long stretches of time.

As patterns of sound, Newlove’s poems modulate unexpectedly, as on the ambiguous word “dry” in “The Weather,” where you think you are hearing one meaning, but several other meanings are activated at the same time. Not surprisingly, he had a weakness for puns and wordplay. With a few keystrokes of his “tripewriter,” as he dubbed it, George Bowering turned into “Georgeous” and Peggy Atwood became “Pegasus.” Saturday Night magazine was demoted to Slatternly Night. He despised “glitterature” and “gliterary gossip” because they cheapened the ends of art. Two objects of particular scorn were the CBC and the Canada Council, which he refashioned as “the Sleepy C” and “the Canada Cow.”

The letters in this volume provide insights into Newlove’s life and writerly networks. They also offer a snapshot of a literary culture during the boom years of CanLit. Most letters were written to individuals, but a few had public purposes. In 1985, Newlove wrote to Ed Broadbent to question the New Democrats’ arts policy and to explain that writing poetry is actually a form of work. In a letter addressed to the editors at The New Yorker in 1991, he lent his support to Mordecai Richler, who had ruffled feathers with a scathing article about Quebec nationalism in that magazine.

In his informative introduction, Weingarten notes that he selected approximately 300 letters from several thousand archived at the University of Manitoba and the University of Toronto. As many people did, Newlove saved carbon copies of his typed correspondence; doing so was a way of keeping track of who said what, at a time when the lag between sending a note and receiving a response was measured by weeks or even months.

Weingarten also provides a chronology of Newlove’s life and short biographies of his correspondents. Letters are annotated with insight and a pleasingly personal touch. Weingarten interviewed via email or telephone numerous people who knew Newlove, who died in 2003 at the age of sixty-five. The poet and editor Allan Safarik summarized Newlove’s distinctive qualities: “He was [a] serious student of history and he developed a style of his own that was so distinctive. He was a brilliant editor of other people in several different genres. He was largely a self-taught academic man who exploited himself for poetry. He was a bloody genius but he paid the price.” These letters demonstrate how high that price was. With luck, they will bring new readers to Newlove’s finely crafted poems.