Matt Fair and W.B. Sinclair: writers, irony and kindness

Matthew Fair of Victoria, B.C. is an "audio" creative artist/writer.  We were both reel-to-reel zealots when we met.  He's half-Irish and while I am legally one-quarter, the truth is I am 1/8th here and a few fractions there ...  Okay.  The truth is out.  My maternal great-grandfather was an Englishman of the occupyig army and I know nothing of his Irish wife as I know not a single cousin - they were alive in Victoria but I did not know they were there.  I may have sold them a book, checked them into a room or sorted their mail.  They may have cursed my damn bicycle in the rain.  More likley they were as suspicious of Matt as they were of Susan Musgrave.

Truth in poetry.

Michael Hamburger is dead and I do not yet have a poem for Matt.  John Dovener White, who may have forgotten that I have his copy of "Wintering Out" judged me a talker - after all he knew how to make a few bucks writing what others wanted to read.  Matt gave me the benefit of the doubt, as did Walter Bruce Sinclair, bookseller, thinker, writer and musician.  But as guitarists, Matt and Bruce did not connect - and less so as talkers and thinkers.  Even Sam Beckett was not a bond.

Matt had known such terrible poverty at the time he was getting to know Leonard Cohen's garage in Montreal (but with Mary, from Long Island.)

But I could see the connection which they could not: Matt was with rubenesque Mary, on her way to being a biologist and Bruce was with sportive Jane, on her way to being a biologist.

Matt was as kindly and bemused as he was brutally honest.  Bruce was more bemused and thoughtfully kind.  Matt would make you rice; Bruce would buy you a grilled cheese.  Both were writers.

Matt began accumulating and editing audio: what people actually said.  Bruce's irony would not see the need to preserve what they had said.

Bruce's "cantos" are unfinished; Matt's tapes have moved to digital.

There is no creative, edited, audio space for the Mayan or Aztec on Minoan marketplace, agora, bustop.  Matt will leave us with that for Victoria and its airwaves..  I think of it as a coounter-part to the miles of magnetic tape, tons of magnetic tape, recording hours of psychotherapeutic ventures and now deteriorating into noise and ferrous dust in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Rome.

I never knew Bruce's corporate father, but I did know George Fair, anarchist, house painter and one-time lighthouse keeper.  And I miss George.  Like other colourful men who were not my father, I could adore him withut painful ambivalence.

A poem for Matt Fair will require more than wit and erudition and irony and humour and rythmn and wordcraft and surprising originality - and to much of any one ingrediant will spoil that effort.  And he must hear it from the heart - no doubt while walking along a Pacific beach.

A poem for Bruce Sinclair will be fine in an e-mail although he might be pleased to see it in print and he will not hold his breath to see it in the window of a private small bookstore owned by a real bookseller.  He knows the limitations of my Greek, my lack of his Sanskrit and the many other facets of his erudition from differential geometry to St. John.  But he sold me the Penguin Book of Irish Poetry though I would rather have bought it from a daughter of Alice Munro farther up that street in Victoria.  He may owe me Robert Musil.  I owe him Sandy Bull on banjo and a Sunday morning hearing ragas transcribed to the Appalachian style that may have been favoured by some Shifflets and their Scots neighbours out of Ireland.