Raymond Souster was born in Toronto and, aside from four years he served in the Royal Canadian Air Force in World War Two, lived there for over ninety years. And almost every day of his adult life, even when he worked full time in the Bank of Commerce, he wrote poetry about the city, its people, its nature, and its history. The fifty-some collections of poems that he published represent a unique record of one city’s life, almost an impressionistic diary of Toronto in the 20th Century.
Souster’s life was almost exceptionally unexceptional. After finishing high school in 1939, he went to work for the Imperial Bank on the word of his father — who, as a good banker, didn’t think it proper for his son to join the Standard Bank where he worked. He enlisted in the RCAF in 1941, trained as a mechanic, served in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick before spending six months in England as a ground crew member in a Lancaster squadron. After mustering out in 1945, he returned to the bank, married in 1947, and stuck to a predictable routine until he retired in 1984. He and his wife lived in the same house on Baby Point Road most of their married life, and other than the death of his parents, the biggest event in his life may have been the arrival of major league baseball in 1969.
His routine allowed Souster to channel tremendous energy into poetry. His as-yet not fully collected oeuvre amounts to thousands of poems, and his pace of production didn’t slow down until his very last days. He sometimes referred to his writing time as his graveyard shift. As he wrote in a poem of this title,
Five o’clock and still sleepless,
with eyelids half-shuttered,
I am still commanded
to remain here at my desk,awaiting the late arrival
of the last two lines
of what’s turning out to be
a reluctant, foot-dragging
little bitch of a poem.
He and his wife Rosalia had no children. In a poem he dedicated to her after twenty-some years of marriage, he proposed,
Let us call these poems
if you like the children we never had,a thousand-voiced family,
some born hard, some born easily,all bearing, I hope, some marks
of our love, our sweat and our care.
He did not, however, overestimate the significance of his work. As he wrote self-mockingly in “Epitaph for a Poet” from the early 1990s,
I wrote too much,
said too little.Perhaps being silent
now my greatest accomplishment.
And as much as he devoted his time and energy to his own poetry, Souster contributed as much or more to supporting his fellow Canadian poets. With Louis Dudek and Irving Layton, he founded the Contact Press and Contact magazine in the early 1950s and was responsible for publishing the work of dozens of young poets, including George Bowering, Frank Davey, and Margaret Atwood. He helped organized countless readings in Toronto and arranged for visits by much better-known American poets such as Charles Olson and Robert Creeley.
Coming across the work of William Carlos Williams probably had the most profound influence on his own poetry. “The Six Quart Basket” from Crepehanger’s Carnival (1958) is perhaps Souster’s most obvious imitation of Williams’ minimalist style:
The six-quart basket,
one side gone,
half the handle torn off,sits in the centre of the lawn
and slowly fills up
with the white fruits of the snow.
In some ways, however, it was Williams’ life, rather than his poetry, that may have had the greatest significance for Souster. Williams’ ability to fit the duties of busy doctor and the hours required to remain an active writer and poet into the space of a single day inspired him to find the time and energy for those many graveyard shifts at his typewriter.
Like Williams, Souster had a keen eye for the signs of natural life that could be found even in the midst of a major city like Toronto. Indeed, one of the wonderful things about reading one of Souster’s books is how often poems about weather and street people and city buses and jazz, he seems to grab us by the elbow and whisper, “Stop. Look over there.” Of “Queen Anne Lace,” he writes,
It’s a kind of flower
that if you didn’t know it
you’d pass by the rest of your life.But once it’s been pointed out
you’ll look for it always,
even in places
where you know it can’t possibly be.
Souster notices the ants in his driveway, the butterfly on a bus, the periodic return of cicadas (he certainly heard plenty of them), a raccoon patrolling at night, the stench that tells him a skunk has marked his cellar door. If anything, he seems apologetic for not paying close enough attention to nature:
Looking up to see the birds
I notice first shy traces of buds,
the tiny green fronds on all the willows,and feel as I go down this street
almost ashamed of my sorrow.
Souster saw not only that nature came before man but that it intended to stick around long after man has gone. In “Seven Days of Looking at a Rubber Plant,” in which he records the changes in a sorry rubber plant in a downtown hotel window, he imagines the plant planning its escape:
The rubber plant
in the plain front window
of the Peacock Hotel
has become two legs,one trying to escape
through the back door,
the other hoping somehow
to make it out the front.
Alongside the natural life in Toronto, Souster’s poems are full of the homeless, the poor, the druggies and drunks, the mad, the sad, and the lonely. He was fully aware that he shared the streets with people who couldn’t enjoy the comforts of his routines. As he once told an interviewer,
This isn’t an easy city or an easy time. And I suppose I write so many poems about poor people because frankly they’re the most interesting, the only ones who seem to have really come up against life; their scars are almost like medals from the engagement.
And so, as with the signs of nature, Souster is constantly reminding us to look at these people, not to avoid them. “You can’t keep walking around/the same block day after day,” he write in “Bad Luck,”
just because you don’t want to meet
the heavy woman with the limp,
the woman with the crazy look,
old winter hat pulled over her face.
If anything, it’s the tendency of advertisers, city planners, and boosters to gloss over or pretend that there are uglier sides to human life that angers him most:
today’s smart drinkers are shown
as handsome, well dressed,
always surrounded by many
young and beautiful women
glasses held just so:the bastards never show them
crowded into drunk-tanks hardly
able to breathe,
still retching a little,
or clawing at the walls
in an effort to escape
the oncoming slimy
crawling, multiplying beetles.
It’s not enough just to notice, however. Souster wants to know how to share their pain and suffering as literally as possible. “The Problem,” as he poses it:
How to share the aching feet
of the already limping
deliverer of handbills.
In “County Courtroom,” he wonders if his responses — his empathy and his poetry — are both futile:
either because I don’t believe
this evil can be changed,
this system I’ve helped create,
help perpetuate,
and so I don’t ever let it
really get to me,or it may be I don’t mind too much
the way it works
the way it fiendishly destroys….Besides, I still hope
to buy off my conscience
by writing a page or two
of angry verse.
At times, the simplicity of Souster’s style threatens to verge into the territory of Edgar Guest, into the superficiality and pat satisfaction of newspaper poetry of the mid-20th Century. As Bruce Whiteman wrote in Raymond Souster and His Work (1985), one of the few dedicated studies, Souster wrote no reviews or criticism, abstained from postulating or advocating any theories. Instead,
His poetics is correspondingly practical. Though there is certainly a good deal to be said about the influences upon his work, the poems as a whole do not emerge from a poetics any more complicated than that of a man talking about his experiences in words recognizably his own, but not directed by any elaborate theory of poetic voice or procedure.
Whiteman also points out that Souster produced no single great work comparable to The Waste Land or Paterson. Souster himself admitted this. In “Confession” he wrote,
I’m not sure I’m ready for epics —
there are far too many
little songs the rest have left unsung.
I’m not sure I entirely agree, though. The issue is not that Souster has no single great work: it’s that he published his epics in bits and pieces over the course of decades.
In the nearly thirty years between Whiteman’s book and Souster’s death, for example, he wrote several dozen poems sharing the title “Pictures from a Long-Lost World” which were 6-10 page-long accounts of historical events such as the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Taken together, these represent a substantial work. It is not, however, a very good one. As much as I hope the bulk of Souster’s work will be long-remembered, these poems, I think, are best quickly forgotten. Historical poetry is even harder to write well than historical fiction, and whenever Souster ventured beyond the territory of first-hand knowledge, the immediacy and simplicity of his writing suffered.
There are others, and good ones, however. In Riding the Long Black Horse (1993) and Close to Home (1996), he published a series of poems about his father and mother’s last days and deaths. Souster’s mother and father, also Toronto natives, lived to the age of 96 and 98, respectively. He was in his seventies when each failed, suddenly and seriously, and entered into downward spirals of ambulances, hospitalization, and care homes. Souster recorded their last weeks in poems that read like journal entries: never too philosophical, never too sentimental, simply noticing. In “A Matter of Dentures,” he describes how his father, with weak and shaking hands and nearly blind, attempts to fit his dentures into place. After many attempts, near exhaustion with the effort and frustration, he asks a nurse for help.
… she smiled,
took the dentures from me, said “Open wide”
to my father, then deftly pushed them in
with an expert’s sure touch, finishing with a
“Try that for size,” and Dad closed his mouth,
and I knew right away his old grinders
were back in place again.We were still both thanking that nurse
when she left to answer a buzzer,
then, in the sudden silence of your room,
both of us must have known, almost at the very same moment,
that you’d just finished suffering another
in a string of defeats you’d never
bounce back from. And from that day on,
never once did you put your teeth back in on your own.
Taken with other poems he wrote around this same time, recollections of moments with his mother and father over their many years together — “All the Long Way Home,” for example, about how Souster and his father walked for miles from a downtown Toronto bar on Christmas Eve 1940, supposedly because his father wanted to “take the air” but really because he needed to sober up before facing his wife — these points constitute a single and remarkable work, perhaps the longest extant record of the relationship between a child and his parents.
And then, there are Souster’s many poems about Toronto. Some were published in Queen City (1984) and Of Time and Toronto (2000), but most are scattered across dozens of books. Were these to be collected and curated, the resulting work would represent a unique portrait of a major city over the course of seven decades. Souster’s history with Toronto allowed him to mark the passage of time and the city’s evolution. He knew, for example, that where the H & R Block office stand on the corner of Jane Street and Harshaw Avenue, “the sign CAIRD’S CONFECTIONERY/Candies, Soda Fountain, Light Lunches/no longer swings with the breeze.”
There is relatively little nostalgia in Souster’s early Toronto poems. “When I look across today at this,/the first school I ever attended,” he writes in the early 1950s, “I think of how little/of anything really useful/it gave me to take/to the big world outside.” By the late 1960s, however, looking around his old neighborhood, “it’s only ghosts I see around these houses.” He was willing to admit that he was “well hooked on the past,/and a sucker for memories.”
But the best of the Toronto poems put you into the middle of the city’s life. If Souster had a favorite place in the city, it was undoubtedly on the sidewalk at rush hour: “Where Yonge Street meets Queen/the flood of human faces quickens,/seethes in its quicksand run”; “People out in droves,/spilling out over the sidewalks.” In “St. Catherine Street East,” he imagines the cityscape as a palimpsest on which all the lives ever lived there are written:
Every face in every window
of these buildings watching as we go
down the steaming pavement, on and out of this jungle
where the dead are never buried by the living,
but crowd onto buses, sit late at bar-stools,
or wait in the darkness of always-airless rooms.
For Souster, the city had a life of its own, a power greater than that of any (or all) of its inhabitants. He knows that even he will ultimately be defeated by it:
Strange city,
cold, hateful city,
that I still celebrate and love
while out there somewhere
you are carefully working at my death…
Souster died in 2012. Between 1980 and 2000, Oberon Press published ten volumes of Souster’s collected poems, covering the bulk of his published poetry between 1940 and 2000. Unfortunately, these are now out of print and a few of the volumes almost impossible to find. Volumes 1 through 5 and Volume 8 are available, along with at least two dozen of Souster’s books, on the Internet Archive. You can also hear him read a selection of his poems there, from a Folkways record titled Six Toronto Poets.
Life could not keep up with Souster, however, so it’s understandable that Contact Press, the successor to his home-run publication venture of the 1950s and 1960s, came out with Come Rain, Come Shine: The Last Poems of Raymond Souster two years after his death. Probably the best place to start discovering Souster’s work is with his 1964 collection The Colour of the Times, which won the Governor General’s Award for poetry that year.