Gwendolyn MacEwen Park

Rosemary Sullivan on Gwendolyn MacEwen as a Burgeoning Poet

At the age of ten, Gwendolyn MacEwen wrote her first poem. She saved the pencil with which she wrote it in a sealed white envelope. On the back, in the large lettering of a child, is the date 1951. Precociously, she had determined she would be a poet. At the age of twelve, she insisted that her family was no longer to call her by her nickname Wendy, but rather by her proper name Gwendolyn. As she explained to her sister Carol, she thought one day she might be somebody important. With exquisite determination, she was secretly constructing a myth of her own selection. . . . She published her first poem in the prestigious Canadian Forum when she had just turned seventeen. . . . Looking back in her poem "The Wah Mai Cafe," she would explain that when the police raided on of the seedier cafes and asked her, the kid in the corduroy jumper, what she was up to, she said she was learning to be a poet: "Actually I'm just a page / But one day I'm going to be a Book."

Excerpted from Rosemary Sullivan's introduction in The Selected Gwendolyn MacEwen by Gwendolyn MacEwen, Meaghan Strimas and Rosemary Sullivan (Exile Editions)

Meaghan Strimas reflects on editing The Selected Gwendolyn MacEwen

On how the most recent The Selected Gwendolyn MacEwen came to be, about four years ago, Barry Callaghan, the editor of Exile Editions, called me up and asked if I could stop by his house to have a chat. I had published one collection of poetry with Exile at that point in time, but had been out of touch with Barry for a few years, though we’d recently been reunited at a house party thrown by a mutual friend.

Barry along with Margaret Atwood had planned on putting together The Selected themselves (the two had co-edited another edition in 1993, now long been out of print), but later decided that the book might be better in the hands of a younger poet who held an admiration for MacEwen, a person who might bring a fresh perspective to a new Selected. I was the lucky person. In many ways, I was delighted and exhilarated by the idea of rereading all of MacEwen’s writing and putting the book together, but I was also afraid of failing. I’d always held MacEwen in such high esteem.

The book took about a year. I was working a few jobs at the time, and so had to fit my research in when I could, mostly evenings and weekends. Barry was kind enough to supply me with a number of MacEwen books. For the others, I went to various libraries around the city. I spent a lot of time at the Toronto Reference Library, and somehow it always seemed that I spent a good deal of time helping other library patrons work the machines . . .

In some ways, I wish I had another shot at the book. I know it has pleased many people, and I do hope the book has recruited new MacEwen fans and inspired old fans to read more of her work, and, more importantly, talk about MacEwen the writer, but there are things I would change. For one, I wish the collection included more of "The T.E. Lawrence Poems." Reprint rights are costly, as I learned. However, Carol Wilson, who is Gwendolyn’s sister, was extremely generous throughout the process: she waived the rights payments she would normally receive as the trustee of MacEwen’s estate.

As it stands, I still think The Selected Gwendolyn MacEwen provides readers with an able retrospective of MacEwen’s stunning legacy. Her voice is so transcendent, unearthly. There are times when I don’t quite believe that MacEwen actually walked the streets of this city not so many years ago. -- Meaghan Strimas

Gwendolyn MacEwen Park: a poem by Karen L. L. Anderson

Gwendolyn MacEwen Park

Your park is a tiny round island,
swarming with pigeons,
circled and swept
by gasoline waves of cars.

A mumble of green
dissected by two inter-
secting sidewalks
that drop onto the road.

Here are seven trees, a couple of benches.
And here’s the official sign
with your name on one side only.

Not a line of your cobalt poetry in sight.
Yet, in the Annex, your neighbourhood,
you’ve left this Lilliputian clue:
“one island
small as a wish . . .”
that has
“never quite been found.”

— KAREN L. L. ANDERSON

(Originally published in Taddle Creek Magazine, Christmas, 1998.)

Judith Fitzgerald on Meeting Gwendolyn MacEwen for the First Time

It's Casa Loma, March 1977, several degrees below freezing, and it's an official literary event. We gather for the glitzy celebration of Irving Layton's milestone 64th, an unforgettable evening topped off with Sylvia Fraser popping out of a tank-sized cake. That was the night I first met Gwen. She and yours truly, scrunched in back of a rack of checked coats, drowned our stories with Scotch and Vodka sans rocks.

What a night! What a time! Intensity squared. Air porous with radiance. Energy palpable and raw.

"It doesn't get any better than this," confides Gwen, doffing her bottle in the vicinity of elsewhere, whispering ruefully, "let's just hope it doesn't get any worse."

Over and over, these past few decades, Gwen's simple confidence reverberates in ways I could not, at 22, either understand or guess. That's life. The gift that happens. The thing that reaches its own conclusions.

That night, at Toronto's Casa Loma, Gwen and I began a decade-long friendship that continues to variously haunt, fortify, and terrify me, a friendship I now consider a blessing and a treasure, a memory worth its weight in time.

In the midst of the maelström, I thank God for Gwen. Daily, I thank Him we remember now what we hardly considered memorable then: That poetry mattered; that our world reeked of promise; and, that the pall had already begun to descend.

-excerpted from "Gwen and Yours Truly" by Judith Fitzgerald