In the fall of 1999 I presented a paper called The Lunatic Muse: The Mythopoetic in Canadian Poetry at a three day conference (Sept. 8 û11) celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Associazione Italiana Di Studi Canadesi (Italian Association for Canadian Studies) at the University of Bologna . The theme of the conference was Canada, The Cultures of Globalization.
Encouraged by the reception of my presentation, I decided to expand on the topic of lunacy in Canadian poetry for a book. Hadn't I known wonderful eccentrics, mythomaniacs who reinvented themselves each time they wrote a poem? Hadn't I encountered poetry hangers-on who delighted in drawing attention to themselves at a reading? Certainly the claque of humourless feminists and their doughy male supporters, with whom I fought as president of the League of Canadian poets for two consecutive years would be grist for the mill.
There was an assortment of other colourful nutbars outside the League asylum: Ronny the one-eyed mature student who sabotaged a reading I gave at Malaspina College on Vancouver Island when he flashed his glass eyeball at me, and the demented woman in the audience at a Toronto Library who called me the Anti-Christ after I finished reading a group of bat poems. Their bizarre behaviour would later be outdone by a very ordinary individual who invoked the mystic manquT in me as she described in almost pornographic minutiae her out-of body experience and her voyage on the astral plane to the bedside of her cross-dressing boyfriend living somewhere in the Australian outback.
Over the decades I have been privileged to witness the dark side of the combustible muse in talented men and women. I want to share some of my experiences in confronting facets of that grotesque comedy residing in the nucleus of the Lunatic Muse with the readers of Books in Canada.
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Perhaps if the present bulk of approximately seven hundred dues-paying members of the League of Canadian Poets spent a weekend on Death Row, a few would stumble upon two equally memorable lines that a prisoner managed to scribble down: Whether king or street sweeper/in the end we all dance with the grim reaper? Why then have some members put my name forward as honorary life time member, and am I a lunatic to have accepted this honour? Or is it an invitation to a Mad Hatter's Tea Party? Do I want to be associated with those individuals in this organization who in real life represent respectable sane inmates of the greater asylum of society, from psychiatrists to raw-hide cowboys, with a few impoverished societal malcontents, and with an ever thriving Feminist Caucus who still recall my attempt to block their take over back in the early eighties?
I vividly recall one stormy League meeting when my friend, Milton Acorn, his face red as borscht, rose from the floor to attack savagely a member's gay rights resolution. So vitriolic was his attack, that something in me snapped, for the depth of his anger smacked of genocide. I heckled him as a Nazi, and then another League member, a psychiatrist, rose to denounce me as an unsuitable candidate for League president. He in turn was attacked by another member who suggested that he was a lousy psychiatrist, since he was asking a fellow member to repress his anger, which ran counter to the psychiatric practice of encouraging patients to release those bottled up emotions. And then to my surprise, Frank Scott, Canada's most eminent constitutional law professor, and poet of conscience (not to mention a founding member of the agrarian-based Social Democratic movementùthe Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, formed in Regina, Saskatchewan during the Great Depression), rose to defend Acorn's right to free speech. It jarred me to think that Scott would defend such a repugnant outburst, that smacked of the language of genocide, for he had also been a mentor and a source of inspiration to a younger and more idealistic 50s Pierre Trudeau fighting a stultifying theocracy that bordered on clerical fascism. Trudeau had possessed a sublime humour up until he imposed The War Measures Act in 1970 which reined in all dissents across the political spectrum. The imprisonment of the leading intellectuals and social activists in Quebec had been done with military precision and muscle, and sadly, Scott had lent his support to that repressive act. Ironically it was the bigoted Marxist Acorn who encouraged me to write a poem against The War Measures Act, which was subsequently published in The Varsity, The University of Toronto's student newspaper.
My outburst had cost me the presidency of this association of Canadian poets. Surprisingly, I almost received a majority of feminist votes, and later that same Indo-Canadian writer who tried to pass the gay rights resolution sent me a thank you note, and a red rose. Later she would invite me to read my poems to her class where I would be subjected to gender politics, and my mythic piscatorial muse would be attacked for its male-ized buzzing images, which while playful to some, proved offensive to others in that bunker of a classroom. For me what transpired at that humourless annual general meeting was all pure lunacy, especially when Acorn spoke out passionately in my defence, declaring, that with some proper anger management, I would make a wonderful president of that exalted organization. I believe Frank Scott and other delegates thought the opposite, accepting the prognosis of that Aussie headshrinker and bard of the Outback that I was too prone to violent outburst and thus mentally unsuitable to be president of the League. Normalcy had won the day at that conference. Lunatics would not be at the wheel of this sound government subsidized organization; the chairman (chairperson) could sigh his relief, and an attending West German trade union delegation present as observers would know that Canadians were pleasantly boring on the whole, but could rise to the occasion, be a little piquant under trying circumstances. I had called Acorn a Nazi for his visceral hatred of gays. Had he attacked a particular race, he would have been soundly denounced by nearly everyone attending that AGM as a racist. Despite his crude homophobic rant, he appeared to have gotten the ear of some League members bearing homophobic fears and prejudices. They appeared to be politely shocked at his vituperative homophobia, and assumed the mantle of civility, but had agreed in spirit with his views. They were mild-mannered surface volk calling themselves poets and associate members, who in a different era, and in a more culturally elevated country, followed the fuehrer principle, acting out their revulsion and phobias against the mentally-retarded, physically-challenged, communists, gays, Jews, Gypsies and other ethnic groups considered untermenschen, rags fit to be gassed and burned, or enslaved. Politeness can be a civil disease. Add politeness, intellectuality, the exterior of poetry and a veneer of sexual bigotry and you have a white revolutionary party with a obsessive compulsive disorder to keep washing their handsùin blood. ò
In June 2002, Joe Rosenblatt was given an honorary membership in The League of Canadian Poets "for his outstanding contribution to Canadian poets and poetry."
