Ken Belford: A Personal and Literary Reminiscence
I knew Ken through Barry McKinnon, my colleague in the English Department at the College of New Caledonia (CNC). Barry regularly included Ken in his series of Canada Council readers, a series that started in 1969 and ran into the mid 1980s. Starting in 1972, I worked as Barry’s factotum in this enterprise, printing posters, arranging rooms, picking up and dropping off readers. Once, when Barry went on leave in the mid-seventies, I took over, but I don’t remember if Ken came that year.
Barry met Ken in the fall of 1969, just as Barry was starting a job as an English and Creative Writing instructor. Ken was in the north only about a year. Why he left Vancouver seems to be anyone’s guess, but the hippy, back-to-the-land movement was in full swing then. You found some bush somewhere, and you built a log cabin or geodesic dome.
Barry describes his first meeting with Ken:
A big man in the shadows getting out of a cab by the side of our shack on Queensway street in Prince George. He had phoned earlier to say he’d read my poems in Talon, that he was on his way to Vancouver to read in Al Purdy’s class at Simon Fraser University, and wondered if he could crash for the night. Hell yes! I said.
Subsequently, Ken always stayed at Barry’s place when he was in town. If he was in for a reading, this saved him the money the Council gave him for accommodation. Often his stay was a stopover on his way to Vancouver, usually to visit his parents, so his travel allowance was also being used more efficiently. These would be necessary economies at the time; Ken made his living sporadically then, as a labourer on survey, highway, ranch and forestry crews. Sometime in the late seventies, he and his wife Alice started a fishing camp at Blackwater Lake up the Nass River, a business that had a difficult start financially.
Barry wrote about these years in a 2007 issue of the CNC magazine It’s Still Winter:
We always kept our friendship and connection via sporadic visits, letters, phone calls, and various publishing projects. I would occasionally go to Ken’s homestead outside of Smithers, or later to his camp in the Blackwater. He would come to Prince George to visit and read at the college. During those visits in the 70’s and 80’s, Ken would give a poetry reading and stay in town for a few days. We’d yak endlessly, smoke, drink, tell stories and laugh — but mostly talk and talk about poets, poetry and poetics, and the nature and wonder at our persistent occupation in its activity. Typical of these visits by Ken and other writers, I would ask for a poem, or short series and then get us to the college print shop or my basement letterpress to print. Ken’s chapbook, One Word, for instance, was “printed” one Saturday afternoon: a Gestetnered gray construction paper cover of a stretched wolf hide without a title, hand written poems on a textured paper stock that we Xeroxed and staple-bound into a French fold, and a humorous Belford “self portrait” sketch on the last page. These private publications often lacked any publication data: no press name, no date, no ISBN number etc., — and in the case of One Word, a run of maybe 26 copies. Although we had fun making them, these editions had a satiric intent: to register ourselves as marginal and willingly self-exiled and therefore suspicious of what some aspects of the Canadian literary world beyond had become. We took matters into our own hands and with a sense of self conscious and self-righteous integrity (also part of the sardonics) — worked hard and fast without ambition to go or be anywhere but where we were.
That’s Ken and Barry by themselves. The social life associated with Barry’s readings at the time involved a lot of pub-schmoozing — intense sessions dedicated to literary gossip and poetics, sessions in which students and interested members of the general public participated. Ken was a good drinker and could hold it admirably. He wasn’t manic at all in these sessions, as most of us were. He was polite, formal — the word might be “laconic.” He weighed his words carefully, speaking slowly and quietly. He commanded attention, and he knew a lot. I recall his remarks on a particular favorite of his: the U.S. poet Gary Snyder. I noticed this because I lived out of town, planning my own log cabin.
The high point of Barry’s reading series was an extended schmooze: the Words / Loves conference of February 7, 8, 9, 1980. Barry brought in Robert Creeley, probably the poet who most influenced most of the Vancouver poets, and he surrounded Creeley with old friends and fans — poets like George Bowering, David Phillips, Brett Enemark, David McFadden, Eleanor Crowe and George Stanley. One of the high points of Words / Loves: Creeley went up to Belford after Belford had read, and said: “I hear your music, man.”
All of these writers that came to PG on reading tours, along with many of the major young Vancouver poets of the time, were published by Talonbooks — a publishing house founded by the poet David Robinson. Talonbooks had started as Talon, a small magazine (last issue 1968). Both Barry and Ken appeared there. Talonbooks operated as a sort of editorial collective. The first poetry book they chose to publish was Ken’s Fireweed (1967). Ken, at this time, was up at UBC — not as a registered student, but just hanging around the creative writers. He met the professors, Robert Harlow (fiction, and Department head) and J. Michael Yates (poetry). Yates, Barry told me, reworked the Fireweed manuscript into 3-line stanzas, and told Belford to take it to Talonbooks.
They published it in connection with Pat Lane’s Very Stone House. The same thing happened, three years later, with Ken’s second book, The Post Electric Cave Man (1970). The cover photo on that book shows Belford and Lane in an alpine area, hunting. Both are staring intently into the distance, no doubt looking for something worth shooting. Both are holding rifles. Both look rugged. Ken is wearing a cowboy hat and has a mustache and thick beard.
A year after The Post Electric Cave Man, Barry’s The Carcasses of Spring appeared. Talonbooks remained committed to both Ken and Barry right into the new millennium, with a big “selected poems” by Barry in 2004, The Centre, and Ken’s Decompositions in 2010.
Ken wrote the way he talked, formally and assertively. Barry applied the term “ontological certainty” to this tone. Donna Kane (a younger, Ft. St. John poet) called it “declarative.” His style was accessible in the sense of familiar, short mostly anecdotal poems featuring short lines tight to the left margin, short stanzas (three – five lines in the early poems) and minimal indentation (though he got into that later, for a while). Other writers were exploring modes and genres like the long poem (Bowering), composition by field (Barry) and Williams’ early use of line splits and indents as “measure” (big with everyone then, especially creative writing students). Belford, over time, wrote in all these modes except the long poem, unless you include the later books of interconnected short poems like land(d)guage (Caitlin 2008) and Decompositions. Mostly, Ken’s poems look like Creeley’s and Pat Lane’s.
Ken didn’t, in those days, publish much in magazines, probably because the poems accumulated slowly, and because Talonbooks liked his writing. He concentrated on putting books together. He was in Talon, of course, and Brian Fawcett’s NMFG (No Money from the Government), but once only, I think. There are doubtless a few other examples. Ken did self publish, but except for his first actual book by Talon (which I’ve never seen) and the One Word chapbook (scrawled on Gestetner stencils) that he did with Barry, no self-published chapbooks appeared until after he retired. Then, he started “off-set house,” and produced chapbooks that he gave to friends and to college / university students at readings. Later, like Barry, he compiled these into “real” books.
I suppose if you wanted to criticize the Vancouver scene, you’d say it was incestuous. But that would be a stupid comment. Poets all through history have worked, and have to work, in localized groups. Only novelists can afford to be loners. And when poets are working well, the circle widens. In 1969, Talonbooks published West Coast Seen, a selection of 28 poets. It was edited by Jim Brown and David Phillips, and included Robinson, Belford, McKinnon, Lane (Red and Pat), and Phillips. It included the Creeley-influenced poets (like the above) and the university and creative writing poets like John Hulcoop (a UBC professor), Stephen Scobie (a graduate student in the UBC English department, and Seymour Mayne (a UBC student in Creative Writing).
The circle widened considerably when, in 1971 McKinnon, Belford, Phillips and Lane appeared in Storm Warning, Al Purdy’s anthology of the new, Canada-wide generation of poets (most under 30 years of age). They, as Purdy put it in his usual arch manner of speaking, would “supplant (though not necessarily eclipse)” Purdy’s generation. Each of the poets got space for three or four poems, a photo, a statement, and (less welcomed, maybe) a serving of Purdy’s version of “Coles Notes” topics for discussion.
Ken’s photo shows him sitting on the porch of a cabin. He’s wearing moccasins, what looks like buckskin trousers and jacket, and the sort of hat that Grey Owl favoured. He looks like Jeremiah Johnson. In the background is a chopping block with an axe sticking out of it, and beyond that is the bush. Ken’s statement is:
Poetry for me is like a keyhole, something I can drain myself through, really another world on the other side of the door.
I believe I have eaten winter at Takla Landing . . . a dog in that country is a buck . . . pumping his heart . . . I had to shoot three horses . . . something that I had to face . . .everything seemed to go wrong . . . the lantern fell apart . . . all I had left was a flashlight — that’s when I started to write the good poetry.
What we have here, in the first part, is cryptic on the precious side. In the second part, we see a personal image being sketched out, one that obviously attracted Purdy, who himself cultivated the much different but equally recognizable image of the country bumpkin, when he wasn’t cultivating the image of the working-man bumpkin.
As time went on, the Vancouver writers were included in other anthologies — anthologies being a measure of a poet’s popularity and, in that they are sold mainly to students, teachability — centrality to what critics and teachers considered at the time the big issues. Ken, with Barry and Phillips, made it all the way, in 1982, into Margaret Atwood’s New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English. Atwood said of Ken: “Belford is a delight; he has his language under control, and such poems as ‘Carrier Indians,’ ‘Stove,’ and ‘Omega’ read with the kind of inevitability of image and rhythm that makes other poets grit their teeth in envy.”
All-in-all, I was conscious through the seventies and into the eighties that I was hanging out with a crowd of (mainly) guys — more on that later — who were enthusiastically involved in writing, publishing, and self-publishing, and getting somewhere. I was writing poems and stories at the time, and running a small magazine and even smaller publishing operation, my equipment supplementing Barry’s in the creative-writing print room at the college. Barry wrote a detailed account of this that was published in Simon Fraser University’s Line magazine, number 2. This publication encouraged me in my plan to ride to whatever fame awaited me on Barry’s coattails (which I sort of did).
No poetry for my magazine from Belford, though. However, in 1979, a small book that I co-published with Barry, Sign Language, dedicated to a friend of Ken’s from Smithers, Rudi Bisenburger. Barry did all the work on this book; I earned the status of co-publisher by providing the paper. And it was a lot of work, Ken’s isolation being the major factor. Barry describes it as follows:
Editing Sign Language and Holding Land (1988), however, was not easy. The poems for my eye and ear didn’t require alteration or copy editing to any great degree. My approach was to print what I got, as I did with Norm Sibum‘s chap book Banjo. When Banjo was completed, Norm wrote to say that my ordering of the poems in the book was brilliant. I thanked him for the compliment then informed him that I printed them in the same order that he had sent them. With Ken’s work, I’d notice obvious inconsistencies — upper case “I” in some of the later poems, lower case ”i” in others. Ken would say “leave it inconsistent — as is.” But without face to face contact, phone or email connections — ken was way off in the mountains — and because his light pencilled script had peculiarities, I’d have to guess at certain words while setting type, and being slightly drugged by nicotine, ink, and blanket-wash fumes — hope to hell I was right. I do remember one or two calls from his radio- phone but the medium was useless for any conversation about editing. At the end of each spoken line, the speaker must say “over” — then after a few minutes in mid-sentence the phone would crackle and break up, followed by faint and lost voices. “Can you hear me? Are you still there?”
Rudi Bisenburger became a friend of mine, and was a source of stories about young Ken’s exploits in the bars, back-alleys and logging camps of the Wild West. Rudi held a sort of key to that image of Ken’s. It had to do not just with the backwoods, to which Ken unlike Rudy was a fairly recent arrival. It also had to do with Ken’s being a large, very buff guy who liked to drink and who was also and not so incidentally a wrestler of some status — my wife’s ex-brother-in-law, Ray Lougheed (8th, Olympics, Rome 1960) was one of his teachers.
Rudi said that Ken was very aware when he walked into a bar that he was a challenge to anyone who was looking for a fight. There’s status, I guess, in taking on the big guy. Rudi, who was barely over five feet, felt safe being in the bar with Ken, until one night he asked Ken, “would you back me up if I got into a fight?” Ken said, “Only if it was really obvious that they were close to killing you.” One time Rudi and Ken were hauled in by the RCMP: the bar had closed, they were still thirsty, so they broke into the liquor store. Or, in another version, they got into a fight, got thrown out of the bar, etc.
Ken wrote only later, in any detail, about the events Rudi was turning into myth. Decomposition (2010) talks about “competing narratives” connected to “Ken.” Ken says he takes full responsibility for these narratives, though he paid a price for creating them because people (everyone from Rudi to Purdy) were able to “impose” them on him as the only narrative. Purdy’s selection, for example, is fairly focused, two out of four poems about the tough guy: a poem about shooting arctic grouse, and a poem about killing a dog:
The dog in the snowbank is dead
Because he trusted me as meat
And I fed him wine for a laugh. (Fireweed, Storm Warning)
In Decompositions, Ken adds to this image:
I used to drink myself stupid
And wander through the towns looking lost. (Lan(d)guage)
But he was correct in that book make it clear that this is not the only Ken. Really, the majority of the poems in the first two books, and indeed in most of Belford’s books, could be summed up as anthropomorphic nature poetry at its most sensitive, the mode in which Wordsworth blew the widest range of stops: “And ’tis my faith that every flower / Enjoys the air it breathes.” This Ken, the observant, sensitive and often nervous ruminant, not Ken the predator, is the dominant Ken.
I have my own, smaller mythology of Ken, a sort of version of wilderness Ken. Ken’s image also had to do with taking a route out of Vancouver that had nothing to do with academia. The big rush of poets into the universities started in the forties in North America, and created a split that meant and still means nothing important I think to the themes, images and quality of the poetry, but much in terms of the sorts of tensions involved in finding a community and an audience. Barry, the bridge between Ken and academia, talks about this:
Despite the visibility of occasional publication, other aspects of literary life and work did not open, especially in Ken’s case. In the 70’s, 80’s and most of the 90’s, Ken was not invited to give readings or attend conferences, unlike those writers solidly connected to academic institutions or eligible for Canada Council grants. I’ve been more visible as a poet because of my activities as a college teacher, small press publisher and literary organizer; I’ve read at various Canadian and U.S. colleges, universities, coffee houses, libraries etc., and have attended several festivals and conferences. Any invitations Ken did receive usually came without a realistic sense of the time and adequate funding it would take to get him south, east or anywhere. When I invited him to be a featured reader at the Words/ Loves Conference, I got him as much Canada Council and college money as I could, but even with that amount and because of bus scheduling, he had to hitch-hike to Prince George.
Of the poets I’ve mentioned, Creeley, Belford, Lane, Fawcett, Phillips and Purdy were outside the academic pale when it came to the way they made a living. Certainly, the non-academic poets gave readings, almost entirely to students and writer-profs because there’s no other audience (apart from other poets), and occasionally they took teaching positions as writers-in-residence and even as low-order professors, and sometimes (like Pat Lane) they became professors when they got famous enough. But they were never really part of the system. They worked at other jobs, and they acquired pensions (if any, apart from the Canada’s universal Old Age Pension) elsewhere. And most of them looked askance at the university. As Randall Jarrell, a prominent U.S. poet-critic-prof quipped: “the gods who took away the poet’s audience gave him students.” Yes, the professor-poets got security in a big way. They also got simplifying poetry. And marking.
Ken was emphatically exotic. Phillips was a carpenter, Pat Lane drove heavy equipment, Fawcett did something in Vancouver in the city planning office, and other BC poets worked in truck factories (Tom Wayman) and cafes (bill bissett). These poets could be connected to the myth of the proletariat, the worker. But Ken was a mountain guide — connected to that earlier, romantic, survivalist dream of living in nature.
This is not to say that Ken wasn’t comfortable in the classroom. He seemed, at least, to be. His image disappeared when he was teaching. That ontological certainty, that cryptic manner, combined with the anthropomorphical wisdom, made him into a guru with students. And not an intimidating one. He didn’t at all dress like Jeremiah Johnson, appearing more in what you would buy back then at Sears or Woolco. Later, as Greg Lainsbury described it in connection with a reading he staged for Ken and Barry in Fort Saint John, Ken dressed out of Mountain Equipment Co-op: “contemporary fabrics associated with the ability to wick away the physiological consequences of vigorous outdoor activity.” In the classroom, Lainsbury, Barry and I probably looked much more like outfitters or even loggers than Ken did, except that we obviously weren’t.
Barry has described Ken’s outfitting business in detail — the details based on a fly-in to Blackwater Lake. By then the business was about 25 years old. Barry saw a well-established, well-run operation, with which clients (including the ones Barry flew in with) were happy. After retirement, Ken told the local paper, “I didn’t hunt or guide hunters.” In Lan(d)guage he says:
The Blackwater is good to look at
And has been a good investment for my Daughter
I see good in what she is doing . . . .
My Ex is well behaved and obedient on the river . . . .
I took the good with the bad
Some of the assholes were always good for a laugh . . . .
In the winter months I helped the bourgeois
Organize their thoughts and make decisions
On the river I gave good advice . . . .
The fact is I never had it so good.
Once, after the outfitting business was well established, on a mid-winter day with the temperature at about minus 30C, Barry and I visited Ken. He and Alice were back, living as close to civilization as they ever got, in a mobile home on some acres of bush right on Highway 16, somewhere between Smithers and New Hazleton. They had a pig in the place who (Ken explained) was an adorable pet and future bacon that had to be kept from freezing to death. I was purchasing a platen printing press from Ken. I don’t know where he’d acquired it or when, but he had in mind doing McKinnon’s thing, some publishing or self-publishing. The press had been there a long time, outside on a platform covered with a tarp, its bushings seized up. I got a shop instructor at CNC to fix it for me, got bored with setting type, and sold the press to John Pass.
This was the only time I ever saw Ken in his natural habitat.
The agreement that resulted when Ken and Alice sorted out their separation and divorce (she and Hannah bought the fishing camp), involved a small income for Ken. Or it was supposed to — there were tax troubles connected to the sale that Ken described to us later. Ken came out to Prince George. I’m not sure exactly why; his parents and his publisher were in Vancouver. Barry, of course, would be one big reason; after Sign Language, Barry had done Holding Land, another beautiful chapbook, and after that arranged for Ken’s first trade publication in almost two decades, Pathways into the Mountains (2000). Barry had a connection to Caitlin, at that time a northern branch of Harbour that specialized in publishing “local colour” histories and biographies by ranchers, hunters and foresters. Caitlin had published Pulp Log, which was as the cover blurb said, Barry’s first trade publication since The the (Coach House) in 1991 — a book that had been nominated for the Governor General’s Award. Ken had had to wait longer, maybe for the reasons Barry provided about the advantages of poets who worked in academe.
Unfortunately, the same comedy of errors took place as with Sign Language, but one infinitely more complicated because Caitlin had hired a new poetry editor out of the Writing and Media Technologies program at CNC, and she was enthusiastic but completely inexperienced. Barry (and George Stanley) are acknowledged in the book as mere “editorial assistants” — probably an attempt to distance themselves. Very little of their advice was taken. Parts of the poems had, really, been re-written, and Barry’s design for the cover was rejected and replaced with something ugly (a sort of parody of the image of “wilderness Ken”). Ken was upset, but he did gamely go on the mandatory book tour — to McBride and (more on this later) he was very much the gentleman in his subsequent relationship with the publisher, Cynthia Wilson.
Soon after he settled in Prince George, Ken did a reading at the town’s new university, the University of Northern BC — a reading staged by Rob Budde, a published poet who had been hired in 2001 to teach creative writing. Legend has it that, at the reading, Ken met and fell in love with a professor of women’s studies and social work, Si Transken. Transken has said (in print) that for her part, “It was love at first sight,” and Barry told me that it did seem to be just that on Ken’s part.
Si is both a poet and a visual artist, and as outgoing as Ken was reticent. Together, they proceed to add a lot of color to the literary and social life of Prince George. Si gets a lot of attention because of her job teaching in UNBC’s social work program, and also because of her activist attitude as a feminist. She volunteers at the Northern Woman’s Centre, where she founded the Woman’s Circle of Creativity that gives art therapy workshops there and (more recently) in a studio at UNBC. She often displays locally at the Gallery, the UNBC concourse or Artspace (above the local book store). She volunteers at AWAC, a homeless shelter for sex-trade workers and drug-addicted women. She participates, sometimes as an organizer, at events like Take Back the Night and International Woman’s Day. In all these roles she appears regularly in the papers and on TV and radio as a spokesperson for women.
She also organizes and presents at conferences. March, 2002 saw the Little Rebellion conference in honour of Bridget Moran, organized by Si, Suzanne LeBlanc, Vivien Lougheed (my wife), and a group of Si’s students, and staged at CNC and UNBC. She presented at the 2005 Writing Way Up North Conference (focusing on Fawcett), a paper entitled “Creating Community Differently.” In the paper, she uses the Prince George poetry community as an example of “different” — i.e., welcoming and supportive. Belford, McKinnon, Fawcett and Budde, along with local female writers Jackie Baldwin, Jorge Kelly and Dee Horne, are examples of supportive community. Even Viv and I (a critic and a journalist, respectively) get mentioned.
As a poet, Si has appeared in Canadian Women’s Studies, Azure, and Unfurled: Northern BC Women Writers. Her poems appear alongside Ken’s in Capilano Review 2004, and she has done readings and workshops with him at the Women’s Centre and UNBC. She writes protest poetry — for example, most of the poems in Capilano Review including “How Senior Academics May Gang-Rape Your Mind,” deal with feminist, environmental and social-justice issues.
Si, in her public relationship with Ken, was delightfully innovative. For example, on his July 10, 2004 birthday, she purchased an ad in the Free Press, a big picture of Ken with the announcement, “If you see this man do NOT wish him a happy birthday . . . or buy him an organic blueberry bar at Starbucks.” Ken at that time liked to hang out at the local coffee franchises, especially Starbucks and Second Cup, but also Tim Horton’s when it came to meeting Barry, who still has a lot of the Alberta wheat farmer in him. Si’s list is a deft specification of what you should definitely buy for Ken on his birthday.
Barry and I seldom saw Ken with Si, but the poetry / poetics schmoozing continued, now in those coffee shops. Beer was too hard on us; when we did it, we had to be safe at home, close to our beds. A couple of times, Viv and I hiked with Ken on the trails east of town — Ken and I always bringing up the rear, speculating on the limits of even our massive doses of testosterone. Not long after, Ken got a membership at Gold’s gym and we never saw him on the trail again. He had a formal quirk. Whenever we had him over to the house he would send a message thanking us. Or, in the mail, a chapbook with a nice message.
One of Ken’s notes (May 3, 2003) seemed to apologize for his not being that convivial in groups, or for not being that intimate with me in the past, or for something I wasn’t entirely sure of: “John, I also wanted to thank you for your previous support. When I was up on the Blackwater, I lived a reticent and far-away life. My shift in the bush is over.”
The first big occasion after we’d gotten to know the Ken of the coffee shops and back deck (at our place and Barry and Joy’s), and before we’d gotten to know Si at the conferences, was a sad one, the death of Cynthia Wilson in 2005. Cynthia owned Caitlin, and publishing a book with her was (as Barry and George Stanley found out) an adventure. So was doing the promotional follow-up — trips, with her, often through snowstorms, to McBride and Ft. St. John.
Viv and Ken put together an obituary and organized a reading for which Ken did the poster (he was getting good at computer design). He chose a great caption for it, a saying by Wentworth Dillon, “Choose an author as you would a friend,” indicating that Cynthia did treat her writers as friends. Ken talked on local CBC about Cynthia, and he and Viv worked, with the public library, on a memorial event that would include the White family.
Ken arranged for the flowers. He wrote to Viv on June 8: “Maybe the garden center at Pine Center has something. Hmmmm. There was a lovely put of mixed flowers there a couple of days ago, but my hands were full of groceries and . . . Damn! I should have bought the thing and gone back later. . . .I’m heading to bed for a nap right now, but I’ll check in for mail later. Yes, I think we have done a good thing. You are a good neighbour. Here’s to you!” He also designed the brochures and insisted on paying some of the cost to have them printed.
Ken and Viv agreed that the Whites and some of the other visitors would meet at our place, I would serve lasagna, and then everyone would proceed to the memorial. Since Ken and Si moved around the downtown on bikes, and since the Whites had flown up and would have to be driven around in our car, they would skip my lasagna and turn up at the library.
In a Christmas letter, 2006, Ken told us he’d been diagnosed with diabetes, type 2. He said he wasn’t surprised; there was a lot of it on his mother’s side of the family. He was determined to bring down his blood sugar levels and lose weight: “John. I want to get skinny like you.” He was on some herbs and supplements to ease his circulation problems (he quickly became expert in neuropathic medicine). He affirmed that his condition wasn’t taking all his attention: “I’m not far away from finishing off an ms for Nomados Editions” [When the Snakes Awaken, 2007], a 30-page chapbook, and I’ve finished a book of 100 pages [likely lan(d)guage] a new kind of poetics, but it’s still Belford by Belford.” Also at the time, he and Si were moving into their new house. The old one they’d rented had been up by our place; the new one they bought was closer to Barry’s.
They got married on 21 April 2007. Guests got a personal email from Ken:
I hope you have nothing planned for this coming Saturday the 21st at 1:00 because that’s when me and Si are getting hitched. I’d like to invite the two of you to the Bentley Room . . . for our two-hour marriage event. There will be some yummy finger food, some music, and an open mike . . . . We are not dressing up in formal wear but I will be wearing a jacket and dress pants and Si will be wearing a red dress and shoes. I’m nervous but I’m not sure why. Think it has to do with my previous marriage being so difficult for so many years. But I’m not going to run. My daughter Hannah will be there as well. Anyway, I hope the two of you can be there. I realize it’s not traditional to send an email as invitation and not do the Hallmark thing, but . . .
It seems now that it wasn’t long after the wedding that things started to change between Ken and us, or (more importantly) Ken and Barry. I’m not anxious to talk about that change, but if I don’t people will wonder since I was involved. The change made literary news because it was written about by locals in outlets that went well beyond Prince George. Someone identified (simplified and dramatized?) this change as a “poetry war.” My anxiety in talking about this arises from a concern that I could be seen in this account as trying to cast a shadow on Ken’s accomplishment, which would be like Salieri complaining about how the dead Mozart had treated him at social events, Hazlitt accusing Coleridge of betraying the radical cause, Robert McAlmon bitching about the writing habits and styles of Hemingway and Joyce (“the office-boy’s revenge,” as Joyce put it), or Chinua Achebe pointing out Conrad’s racism. It’s not a good idea, especially in terms of your relationship to posterity, to do things like this when the supposed guilty party isn’t alive to defend himself and is so superior an artist to you.
Nobody’s interested in the details of who fired the first shot in the poetry war. I’ll go straight for the analysis, the retrospective view. There are two versions, both I think objective and smart, and each choosing to support a different side. The first analysis to appear was by Brian Fawcett who, born and bred in Prince George and, having since acquired a fame at least equal to that of Barry and Ken, retains more than just a forensic interest in the lives of those in his birthplace. On 12 April, 1012, Fawcett published “A Poetry War in Prince George” on his Toronto-based emag, dooneyscafe.
Recognizing that the idea of a Prince George poetry war as a matter of serious consideration would seem ludicrous even to most locals never mind the cross-country audience commanded by dooneyscafe, Fawcett asserts: “The poets are fighting over what people are allowed to imagine and speak about, and why. And because that is the central cultural battle going on across Western civilization right now, it matters, and not in a small way.”
That war, Fawcett goes on to explain, has been going on for about three decades in the English and liberal arts faculties of universities. It’s between two views of western art, culture, science and politics. The two views are, first the liberal-humanist, that argues for commitment to the values of a common humanity and therefore of secularism, capitalism, democracy, canonical art and science. The second view is the poststructuralist (postmodern, postcolonial) that argues that there is no common humanity and that democracy, canonical art and science are fundamentally transparent plots against women, non-whites, the trans-gendered, the indigenous, the poor and the environment, and overall against the individual conscience. One side argues that democracy, science etc are the only chance that a fundamentally flawed but infinitely improvable human nature have, the other that these things have to be utterly destroyed if human nature is to survive.
Fawcett admits that there are arguments on both sides, but fears mainly the platforms, the battle plans, of the poststructuralists. He refers to other ideological wars fought as real wars entirely in the west: fascism, communism and assorted manifestations of Christian religion, against secular, capitalistic democracy. Like fascists, communists and evangelical Christians, poststructuralists see plenty of legitimate problems in the enemy ideology and platform and believe that the first job is to destroy the system at any cost.
Fawcett’s examples of warriors on the liberal-humanist side are me and Barry. On the postcolonialist side, Budde and Transken. The two sides are neatly fortressed in two institutions, UNBC and CNC, where my and Barry’s successors are carrying on our work. Fawcett analyzes the tactics on both sides, citing Transken’s work for social justice and Buddy’s work for political correctness in publications like his bowderlized edition of Al Purdy’s poems.
Ken, in other words, went over to the enemy.
The other study of the poetry war was presented by Greg Lainsbury in the literary magazine Thimbleweed (Fall, 2918), edited by (among others) Budde and funded by (among others) UNBC. Lainsbury agrees with Fawcett’s description of the two sides in the war. He sees it, though, not as having any ideological implications, but as a turf war: the new guy, Budde, embedded in the new institution, a threat to the old guy (Barry) in the old institution. Barry works to eliminate that threat, by various means including one that I, in a short story, show Barry as particularly skilled at: insinuation. Lainsbury also points to another story to show how hard the two of us had fought to prevent UNBC being built:
By the time I arrived north in the mid 90s Barry was pretty much boss, while Ken was a more obscure figure who still lived deep upstream the Nass where it becomes Blackwater Lake in northwest BC. Ken was starting look to make his way back into the literary world, and Barry was his best friend/biggest fan. At the same time UNBC was occupying its new digs atop the mountain, and there was from the beginning a lot of paranoia amongst university transfer instructors at all the northern colleges that they were going to have their work hijacked by these non-union elitists from the universities of Toronto [Si] and Alberta [Budde]. But Barry’s paranoia was next level, as the kids say — that he was convinced that the university was a 200 million dollar plot hatched by an evil Scots ex-principle of CNC is the central thesis of John Harris’s short story, “The Bjorne-Again University.”
Ken, caught in a stupid turf war generated by his old friend and facilitator Barry, opts for the innocent party, Budde and UNBC.(Lainsbury doesn’t mention Transken).
Both takes on the Prince George poetry war make sense, and I’m not going to answer Lainsbury by pointing out that McKinnon loved Belford and his poetry and went to incredible lengths to help and promote both. History can always be reinterpreted (did McKinnon insidiously use Belford to further his own career?), and I’m clearly, as Lainsbury says, and as Budde, Transken and Belford himself have said publicly, in the camp of the capital E Enemy.
Belford should have known that no one really cares what a great poet thinks about issues that ultimately boil down to local politics, that poets rarely get famous for incisive social analysis, deep philosophical thinking, and convincing political platforms. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were all too often found on the dark side of fascism. Yeats believed in fairies and some proto-religious sort of historical cycle. Belford must have known that people care about poets’ politics only if they screw up the poets’ poetry, as they did Wordsworth’s. Belford was never, before the poetry war, a moralizer, and one of the tenets of the whole “scene” of which he was a part was “the thing itself” — no drifting off from the flowers into commandments. But this is what Belford got into.
Lainsbury didn’t talk about this. Presumably he thinks that there weren’t more bad poems coming towards the end, or that what bad poems there were came for the same reasons as earlier bad poems. Certainly a case could be made for that view. But Fawcett and I have both written in detail about a decline in the quality of Belford’s poetry, in reviews of, respectively, his Slick Reckoning (2016), and Decompositions, both on the dooneyscafe.com website. Both of us found good new poems in those late books, but both of us also found a lot of maundering, dull, self-righteous, moralistic and blatantly self-serving poems. We found an attempt to kill off and bury Wilderness Ken, who was a Ken who was sensitive not just to nature but to his first wife Alice and his daughter Hannah, and to replace Wilderness Ken with “Social Justice Ken.”
Of course, as in the case of any serious poet, posterity will weigh in with its own interpretation, and that will override anything being said in the heat of the poetry war. Will Budde and his postcolonialist successors, in the name of political correctness, produce bowdlerized anthologies of Belford — bowdlerized not in the sense of poems modified, but in the sense of poems shunned. The dead dog may have to go (too traumatizing, like Purdy’s use of the word “squaw”) in order to salve the delicate consciences of readers, especially of students who might have to flee to a safe space and work the playdough. Or will future liberal humanists, like Atwood, continue to be entranced and convinced by Belford’s style, and so continue to present Wilderness Ken to the public as a sensitive nature poet?
I have another observation about Belford that is connected to Decompositions. I found that Belford, while he was trying to re-write his image in silly and even dishonest ways, was also and more prominently developing a new and promising mode of seeing, using references to scientific and technological concepts, to write what I called “metaphysical” nature poetry. I quoted, as an example of this, a poem where Belford describes some fish, not just as a sensitive nature poet, but as a sensitive nature poet with a biologist’s eye:
In a small body of slowly moving water,
in the shadow of a balsam sweeper,
laying still in the common supply of
the warmer waters of the lake, five
pairs each a metre long, they’d been
together all their lives, surfing yesterday
up the river in a pod. I knew because
I saw them enter, saw the arrangement,
the awareness, the commodities they
paid for with their lives, and I knew
the price was fixed. But I headed out
because the water was slowing, and
pans were forming in the bay. And then
in May I returned, my shadow on the river
once again. There they were in the rising
water, and I knew they remembered me
because there was something conscious
in that eye-to-eye flicker in the instant
before the waters turned and I carried on.
This is the Belford I remember: sensitive and always evolving. Maybe he was pissed off at me in the end. Maybe I was disappointed in him. But I was also excited for and hopeful about his future poetry, and I said so.
That excitement and hope ended, not with his newfound postcolonialism (because you expect poets to experiment), and not with his anger at me (because we critics are used to the cycle of abuse and forgiveness), but with his death this year on February 19.
