- endrefarkas
Montreal 375

Montreal is a book length poem about the history, geography and a personal poetic memoir of the city. For those of you who might find this excerpt “politically incorrect”, I ask you to read the whole poem. Also please note the ironic tone that suffuses it. He uses stereotypes and clichés to upend those clichés and stereotypes and at the end writes “…/Crushing my memories of your streets, passing/Into another country of the anarchic mind,/Killing history under my wheels,…”.
from Montreal
John Glassco 1909-1981
II
See the cornfields waving yellow
In the ante-Christian Breeze,
And the painted Indian fellow
On his ante Christian knees,
Worshipping the many Spirits
In the forest, lake, and sky,
For the life his life inherits
Tells him: Never wonder why.
Happy savage! In thy totem
Lie security and ease;
In the scalp and in the scrotum
Medicine for all disease.
But another day is coming. . .
Sound the knell for Hochelaga!
For its history is behind it—
All the simple savage pleasures
Of these folk of Donnacona,
All the thrill of tomahawking,
All the exquisite enjoyment
Of torturing of prisoners
And consumption of their livers—
All these lovely pranks and pleasures
Soon shall disappear forever!
(Sound the knell for Hochelaga!)
Soon to go, the pleasures also
of communal fornication
(Agape of savage peoples
Otherwise quite uninstructed
In the beauties of religion)
Bringing all the tribe together
For some happy celebration
In the warm and smoky long-house—
Wives and husbands, widows maidens,
Young men, old men little children
All ecstatically fucking
Groaning, grunting, laughing, yelling,
Slippery and sweaty bodies
Bubbling in the holy stew-pot
Of their ante-Christian darkness.
(Sound the knell for Hochelaga!)
For the Christian day is dawning…
Look to eastward, see the banner
Of Jacques Cartier’s Grande Hermine
With La Petite Hermine also
In her wake and La Tonnerre:
Looking like ships in bottles,
But supplied with sturdy cannon
Full of gunpowder and grapeshot,
Promising you many blessings
Of a European culture!
Here is coming Captain Cartier
Sailing up the blue St. Lawrence
On a Sunday afternoon.