Early Days of the Montreal Small Press

LR: The Powerhouse which eventually became La Centrale Powerhouse has taken part of Expozine a number of times actually along with Véhicule, it’s weird that there is such a connection back then to now.

NM: Véhicule started out as a gallery, as the first artist-run gallery in Montreal and the second artist-run gallery in Canada. Powerhouse was the women’s run gallery which was very, very important to establish a place where women felt safe and comfortable and where their work was able to be displayed.

SD: Yeah I’d like to add a little bit about Véhicule. As Nancy mentioned it had been a club, and we didn’t know what kind of club it was until we did a book on jazz called Swinging in Paradise. At the back of the book, the author had put where all the old jazz clubs were. We realized that all these years that the Véhicule art gallery with the press at the back of the gallery that we had been working in this club called the Café Montmartre- a very popular place in the 30’s, a sort of a Blind Pig too I guess in the 40’s.

So we then understood the architecture of the place with the huge tall ceilings and the lodges, it was a great place to have an art gallery – which was an artist-run gallery.
We would arrive in the morning and we would never know what to expect. There would be all kinds of odd and interesting things happening at the gallery all the time. It was very diverse, it was dance, it was poetry readings on a regular basis, it was a pretty exciting place for us.

We were printing a few things ourselves, our own publications, but we ended up being the printer for a lot of the small literary presses in Montreal. So we know about a lot of stuff because of that. It was sort of what was passing before our eyes. In fact, in 1976, we did a little catalogue, and in that catalogue I noticed that we became the so-called distributors of about seven or eight little literary presses, presses like Cross-Country Press, run by Ken Norris, Jimmy Lee and the third person I can’t remember. So we printed little books for them. Here’s a lovely little book called Some of the cat’s poems by Artie Gold, one of our favourite writers.

Véhicule Press, from the collection of Adrian King-Edwards

NM: I think it’s worth saying that at the time it was really, really important to people and the arts scene generally, to be very multidisciplinary, this idea of breaking down the barriers of who was a visual artist versus who was a writer or stage presentations or whatever and there was a tremendous movement to think about the arts in a much broader kind of way and that’s why the gallery had poetry readings and it was an attempt to really mix things up. I think it was fairly successful for a good amount of time. There was dance and all kinds of other things that were going on all at the same time in the same places and there was a lot of cross-fertilization between the arts.

SD: You know what, I didn’t see that happening, there was tremendous artistic activity across the country, but I think Montreal was very different in the sense that you had this diversity, right from the get go. And because we were printers, so many people passed through us with printing jobs within the arts community, one way or another: posters, catalogues…

LR: You would do posters as well for these bands?

SD: Yes, and for the events of art galleries and it sustained us when weren’t on employment insurance or some other acronym it was back then, off and on. It was hard to make money, but we managed to do it. We also had great relations with our colleagues, with other printers in the city, we did a sort of alternate printing, one was Press Solidaire, the Marxist-Leninist printer. And they had bigger presses than we had so when we couldn’t do a certain job, we would run it off to their press. The really interesting thing with them is when the 1976’s Olympics were going to happen, they were concerned their printing plant would be raided by the RCMP and decided to close down. They didn’t want to be damaged in any way and maybe that was paranoia or whatever, and so for three weeks before the Olympics, they closed down and sent all of their customers to us. Which was wonderfully bizarre because we used a whole lot of red ink! It was a really interesting time as we were sort of the non-sectarian press in the city then.

LR: For the most you were printing English publications or did you sometimes print French ones?

SD: Well, we worked with Lucien Francoeur, we did a translation of his work and I loved when we showed him the book and he went: Oh my God! It looks so American! He was so happy it looked American– we didn’t see it as looking American but anyway. I actually have a… it’s not the one we printed but I just thought it was really neat book published by Les Herbes Rouges by Lucien Francoeur called Snack Bar, it’s really interesting when we look back – this was the 70’s – it’s sort of as much French as it is English. So he was really experimenting.

LR: Well, the sense that what we’e looked into so far with this project but also from myself of being a veteran of sort of the early 80’s, the underground, the DIY press scene, the two solitudes are a little less present because I don’t think they could afford to be so separate when we’re basically very small and I am just wondering to what degree that was the case there too that there might have been some cafes, hangouts, and poetry readings with poems in both languages… what was the situation back then, how much intermingling was going on?

SD: You know it’s funny because in a certain way – at least from our point of view, from our presses – there is more mingling now then there was then. Not that we have more money now and that we can exchange rights with our francophone colleagues but it just seems that we were very wrapped up in our own little scenes and sometimes there would be some crossover but not a heck of a lot. On our part as a printing company, a cooperative, we had that kind of exchange; we would do favours for each other. But generally speaking there wasn’t a lot I don’t’ know what’s your experience Adrian?

AKE: It was an extremely small community, which was a plus because you knew everybody. If you went to Véhicule readings, you could know all the English poets in Montreal. The extraordinary thing was that all this flowering seemed to happened all at the same time. It was right then in the early 70’s. I brought a magazine produced by Raymond Gordy, this is from December 1972, again poems stapled, it’s called Booster and Blaster, and the idea was that if you were a Montreal English poet, you could easily be published in there but the back of it, interestingly enough, carried criticism. So you’d have other poets criticizing poets’ work, and there is a declaration in here at the beginning of what they are up to as if they have a sense in 1972 – this is before the Véhicule readings – that there was a flowering about to take place and that they were starting off by making a declaration which I am going to read to you. This also reflects on the English language community feeling like a distinct minority. So this says: – it’s headed:

“The English poets in Quebec today – The Montreal Free Poet Booster and Blaster publishes Montreal poets only, a very distinct community. There is a reason for this. We are an English-language, English-speaking community physically circumscribed within a larger French-speaking community. but paradoxically a community which shares a majority English-speaking consciousness. This is difficult politics and should create a poetry of meaningful content and commitment. This is in a sense a beginning. Too much poetry is also a criticism of the rest of English Canada. Too much poetry in English Canada is a poetry of experiences, a recording without reflection. Here in Quebec, that approach is unacceptable. We are going to be special. Here great English-speaking poetry will be written; not only confessional but historical, dealing with Quebec’s distinct and local reality survival.”

(read the rest of the passage in our scan of this publication on our image blog here.)

I think that’s something passed away but definitely, English-language poets felt like a community, and they were going make a stand, and it was going to be good.