A Temporary Stranger: Homages/Poems Recollections by Jamie Reid (Anvil Press $18)

A posthumously published book is like an invitation to the Reading of the Will; you can’t help wondering what you might get.
If you knew Jamie Reid, as so many Vancouver writers did before his death from a heart attack in 2015, you know a post-mortem work may have been penned by your Absent Friend, but he didn’t get his say about its final shape. That’s the work of an editor; in this case Talonbooks publisher Karl Siegler.

Like Reid, Siegler is a veteran of the explosive period of CanLit, the 1960s. The job must’ve been made harder by emotions that accompany trying to produce a fitting “Hail and Farewell” for a life-long comrade, yet Siegler succeeds in assembling a sampler representative of the range not only of Reid’s writing, but of his thought and influence, which were far more extensive than his bibliography suggests.

A Temporary Stranger consists of three superficially different parts; Homages, Poems and Recollections. Each part can be enjoyed separately, just as the pieces can be read individually, but read in sequence they achieve a kind of swelling symphonic effect, likely due to Siegler’s editorial skill. The result may not be “the man in full,” but in under 200 pages, it’s more than just a good sketch and captures his essence.

The Homages are transliterations, not translations; works created the way jazz musicians riff on a old standard show-tune, beat the hell out of it, put it through a blender and produce something that’s mockingly familiar, yet totally fresh and new. Significantly, Reid based them on poems by Apollinaire, Paul Eluard, Andre Breton, Jacques Prevert, Baudelaire, Rimbaud; all French poets of a century ago or more who were rebels in full: politically, socially and artistically. A recovering radical Marxist who never lost his faith in the importance of the struggle for social justice, in later life Reid returned to these poets to revive and nourish his resurgent literary soul.

The centrepiece section Fake Poems (so called because Reid once observed, at heart, “all art is a fake), appear here as a kind of interlude that introduces a new theme, a counterpoint to poetry as it’s usually understood.

Reid uses the athlete’s slang for a ‘fake out’ or ‘deek,’ as he explains: “The head goes one way, the body another, the ball or puck slips by unhindered, the movement called a fake. These poems, at their best, shake and lean the head in one direction in order to move the body’s stem in the opposite direction. All of them are rooted in language and its easiest vagaries, which always speak for themselves, even as I intervene with them.”

Here the ‘fake’ poems emerging out of his lifelong interest in poetics are bracketed by two ‘real’ poems, “Warbler” and “Where to Find Grace,” the latter an elegantly simple rephrasing of the Taoist adage, Tao lives in the hearth:

Under the kitchen table with the floor
and the cat dish, in the kitchen sink
with the supper dishes and
the bubbles of soap.
Behind half closed eyelids in
the sunlight.
Round About Midnight
in the moonlit garden.

Ironically (for a poet), it’s the prose Recollections that reveal the literary and social critic we knew from Reid’s table talk over glasses of red wine. In one, Reid conjures up memories of Vancouver’s infant hipster scene in the early Sixties. Confined to a few blocks of Robson Street called Robsonstrasse because the small cafes and shops all seemed to be run by European emigres some people still referred to as DPs (displaced persons); people who had fled countries crushed by the weight of too much history for a country that seemed to have a comforting lack of same. In those days, it was like being in The Third Man without the ruins of Vienna in the background.

In another essay, he recounts a chilling memory of being stopped at a red light with friends en route to Bob Dylan’s first big Vancouver concert, realizing the skinny shaggy guy in the limo beside them was the man himself, escorted by two sleek thuggish minders. Dylan’s response to their enthusiastic waves was a shrivelling goblin glare of pure hatred.

Encountered at the gig, the minders (A&R men, as they were called), confided “there’s a lot of money riding on this guy.” It’s one of those telling moments when some of us realized the social revolution we believed in had already been co-opted by corporations that would re-package and sell it back to us in one of those cynical daisy-chains that have since become a familiar feature of post-modern life.

The best essays preserve what you never remember after a late night involving wine. As a literary critic, Reid possessed not only penetrating insight but the ability to convey it in clear, incisive language—a talent notably lacking in supposedly expert academics. Reid’s essays on the influence of UBC Prof Warren Tallman, who nurtured the TISH movement in the Sixties, on John Newlove, and especially on marginalized poets Gerry Gilbert and Neil Eustache, are more valuable than all the volumes of jargon-enriched compost produced by English profs and published in university-funded ‘literary magazines’ for over four decades.

Reid’s awareness of the wider social and political context of poetry enables him to locate poets like Gilbert and Eustache—neither of whom have ever been acknowledged, never mind treated with courtesy either by the Canada Council and the publishers who depend on it—solidly within the tradition of rebel poets that extends from the Beats through Apollinaire, Cendrars, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, to the English Romantics, right back to His Unholiness, Francois Villon.

The Recollections make a knock-out symphonic finale to A Temporary Stranger, but you can’t help hoping that Reid, like most writers, had a basement, attic or garage stuffed with boxes of manuscripts and notebooks he never got around to turning into books and that this volume may turn out to be a temporary epitaph.

978-1-77214-098-9

John Moore reviews from Garibaldi Highlands.