"Véhicule Press began in 1973 on the premises of Véhicule Art Inc., one
of Canada's first artist-run galleries. The large space occupied by both
the gallery and the press at 61 Ste-Catherine St. West was once the
Café Montmarte--the renowned jazz club of the 1930s." Forty years later, it has developed into one of the essential "small" presses of Canada - dynamically publishing local, provincial and national history, memoirs, guides, novels, short stories, essays, and, perhaps most impressively, poetry. Anyone wanting to review a few new VP poetry books drop me a line. As a small press publisher, I can only marvel at the stamina, dedication, and dash of madness that has kept this firm going through all the downturns of our times. Congratulations are in order. If you want to know what Montreal, and Quebec culture is like, here's a mainstay, a key stop on your reading tour.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?
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