FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.
The Natural History of Milton Acorn
by Chris Gudgeon
Arsenal Pulp Press, 239 pp.On Toronto's Church Street a hero-sized mural of Stompin' Tom Connors honors the people's patriotic barroom strummer. But where is the mural for Milton Acorn, the mighty people's poet from PEI? After reading Chris Gudgeon's sympathetic biography, someone is sure to be popping the paint-tins and readying the rollers.
Author of many great and much-anthologized poems including "The Natural History of Elephants," "I've Tasted my Blood," and "I Shout Love," Acorn had his troubles. A sickly childhood and an army encounter with explosives shattered his nerves. He smelled bad. He drank too much. He was a big-forearmed, raw-boned man - no elegant dinner guest. But he had so much faith in poetry, in people and in the need to bring the two together in Canada that he won people over. He won over the ferociously talented poet Gwendolyn McEwan, 18 years his junior. (During their brief marriage, people called them "Beauty and the Beast." Milton wasn't the beauty.) He won over poets like Al Purdy, who talked, quarreled and drank with Acorn, while the two published Moment magazine from Montreal in 1960. Acorn even won over George Bowering, once his critical opponent. By 1966, Bowering was calling him "acomplished as an 'artist,' not so much the 'natural' as he has so often been pictured." Acorn learned his craft through hard work: Al Purdy claims he wrote so many poems that he once left a whole trunk of them in a train station - it's just that he could never remember in which city.
Gudgeon writes about Acorn in an easy-going first-person style. He admits straight off that the stories and records concerning Acorn are so mixed up that a definitive biography is impossible for now. So he simply pulls together the existing evidence, adds telling anecdotes from surviving friends, and places Acorn's history and accomplishments in their Canadian historical context. Things sure have changed; less than 30 years ago "people would applaud and scream and buy his books; they'd line up for hours before we'd open the doors, just to get a seat near Milt." Now many of the same poems are out of print and Dudgeon does a great service in collecting many of them in the final 60 pages of his book. Drop your Burroughs and Bukowski for a while and try the real home-grown. Acorn's passionate poems and life speak more strongly now than ever.
Harry Vandervlist
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