Well, I was asked to write a piece for our 'national paper' about him, &
shouldn't put that here till it appears I suspect. But here's a piece from
a Canadian e-list, CPA-London, which tells a lot. I'll only add that way
back in 1959 when I took a course on Europen modernism from him, I (& most
other people, let alone almost all the student) didnt know he was a poet.
Still he introduced me to Eliot & Pound, the cantos, & that gave me the go
ahead to start writing (& I began in open form).
> --------------- Forwarded Message ---------------
>
> From: "Todd Swift", INTERNET:[log in to unmask]
> To:
> Date: Fri, Mar 23, 2001, 1:39 PM
>
> RE: LOUIS DUDEK, MAJOR CANADIAN MODERNIST, DIES AT 93
>
>
> Louis Dudek, one of Canada's major modernist poets, poetry activists,
> polemicists , a member of the Order of Canada - and perhaps the greatest
> advocate of local emerging talent in anglophone Quebec - has died, age 93.
>
> 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
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
(h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
Springtime's wide
water-
yield
but the field
will return
Lorine Niedecker
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