Wazhashk Poetry

We need not be reminded that we are living in troubled times. A glance at the smoldering cultural ruins of what once was our southern neighbour, the manner that our downtrodden wandered our streets addled in a pain medication stupor, and witness business after business fold as money disappears from the grasp of all but the wealthiest among us. And the view from the border cities, is perhaps among the darkest. For many, the future afforded us in our dreams as children and the dreams of our children, have slipped away. The miasma of broken promises and failed relationships clots our path. We have been failed, by not one generation but many. Young generations left for the gutter, left to fight for scraps, and scolded when we speak out against our predicament. And we have been failed by members of local community. Members that often say they speak for us and have our arts community’s best interests in mind.

I come to this brief meditation from the literary arts community of Windsor-Essex. A community that has been decimated by a small number of aging, power and attention thirsty mid-level at best white CIS writers, that continue to believe, after decades of control, that they are entitled to the sole driving attention of readers and consumers of literary work in the region. This cadre has become a great violence visited on our youth and has decimated our literary community. A city once renowned for not only its literary output but also the embrace of these writers by the community is now most silent. Our literary festivals and events have collapsed. And only a handful of bookstores survive, with none of them willing to work with writers outside the aforementioned small group. Once the group could no longer compete, could no longer hold the center of attention, they destroyed what was once their cornerstones.

Elders among my Indigenous community have a role and critical function in our society. While critical, they are not the focus on our lives and of our work. This is reserved for the youth. And the elders know this, they train and guide the youth along the path. Most importantly, they step aside and let the youth and next generations come into their own, hand over the levers of power and creation and economic earnings to them. They let them grow, to flourish, to allow for society and the work they do to move on without them.

In Unami Lenape, one of our worst insults is to refer to people as pitay, as the white foam on water. The word describes the foam that occasionally forms on waves crashing ashore, toxic These men and their cult followers, they are pitay. They are strangling the life from our literary community. They’ve been doing it for years. And now without a functioning literary festival or reading series (which the current PL Hrastovec let lapse without even a gesture of help), without a function literary magazine (which the university cancelled to save a couple thousand dollars a year), and a university English department built towards fortifying the cult, the community is on life-support. We wait for the demise of the old so that young may live. But the air is running out and a great many of us gasp while the old man cling tightly to what little remains.

Consider the absolute dearth of praise, literary recognition, or presence of these men outside of the tightly controlled media and power centres of our region. The current poet laureate has never had a legitimate publication outside the city either in book or literary journal, let alone sniffed at a long-listing of legitimate awards. Gervais, who had long ago given up being a legit poet for journalism and the relative fame he earned doing that, is living on accolades at least two-decades removed, and a closed literary press that became known as a pay-to-play vanity press. The two of them have found praise heaped up them from the Poet Laureate Emeritus’ former employers the Windsor Star, the university, and city hall. A city that oddly appointed him Poet Laureate for the better part of a decade. The three poets laureate that have followed him are best known as his chosen, having published them at Black Moss Press, and have full welcomed them into his strange little cult. And to the extent that the door was closed on outsiders, Mary Ann Mulhern, the poet laureate who followed Gervais’ decade long run and former Catholic nun, was spotlighted by this same group after she appropriated the voice and experience of Indigenous children in a residential school for her own poetry collection. The work was intended to earn profit of herself and Gervais’ press, cashing on the outrage and suffering of residential school survivors and their families. While the book was removed from circulation (after considerable fighting with local bookstores), there was never an apology from the publisher nor the author, never any engagement with the local Indigenous community on the matter, or (most importantly) with a single residential school survivor. The goal of the book was always extractive. Another move that further hurts and holds down the voices of the Indigenous community.

But these are grifters, political lackies, not artists involved. They generally lack the morals and ability to illicit praise of their work outside the local institutions they have built their wealth and connections to. I mention this part of the praise because outside the city, we have had a good number of local-based writers short-listed, long-listed, reviewed, and praised by national and international level magazines and awards juries. But locally they have been ignored or blacklisted. All of these successes have happened while the “cult of the anointed poet” has held sway over the reigns of power. That these writers have been younger, often not white or male, not CIS, and not approved by the poet laureate emeritus and his company of hangers-on should not surprise anyone. That the media and government representatives remain silent if not combative to these younger writers’ successes is indicative of how power functions here in the deep and dirty south of Ontario. There have been literary successes, many spotlighting the diversity of history and culture here, but they don’t matter to these pitay. Those other writers, who wish to chase the success of working at a post-secondary institution, holding the office of poet laureate, or simply hosting a reading at a bookstore, have to leave the region to do so. At least until this power can be broken.

The Cult of Anointed Poet arises here in Windsor not out of quality of work but out of the strength of connections. And in this particular case, the connections are to those in the seats of municipal institutional power. This is the circumstances in which we endure an unending reign of a “poet” who is most known for his amateur history hot takes (rum running and old hospitals) than his poetic lines and metaphors. This is a cult that relies upon nostalgia for a halcyon past that never existed, mostly white-washed of slave owners and Indigenous peoples, and more importantly an unwillingness to allow others and disagreements into the monologues that are accepted by a statue building, legacy-centred style of governing and control. Control that is, quite unsurprisingly, in the hands of CIS white men who are most interested in building their bank accounts and their own statues to “virtuous” legacies, all the while enacting and enforcing policies that hurt disadvantaged, BIPOC, and most often non-CIS male gendered supporters. They have their allies in at least two of the major bookstores in the region and as such locals who aren’t approved can’t hold book launches or readings and aren’t actually marketed to local readers because of the economic threat that good work, their work, has on the cult of anointed poet.

All of this is to say that a small group of mostly wealthy, well-connected men, have placed a vice-grip on the literary scene of the city. Long dead are the days of Eugene McNamara, Alistair MacLeod, and the creative institutional beacon on the hill. The work these current anointed writers are dismal reflections of this past. Like the Golden Bough, the land is sick because the governing elite are no longer fit to lead. And the old order must collapse before the young and those waiting to be born are strangled beneath the greed and endless hunger of these pitay and their “cult of the anointed poet.” Until then, we wait, balanced up a wire that vibrates between survival, unwelcome endings, and the successes that wealthy connected men get in provincial cities like ours.