Family of poets

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This article was published 11/04/2020 (2363 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg is many things, including a city of poets.

How many cities can boast having statues of two internationally renowned poets on its parliamentary lawns? But there’s the province’s founding father, Louis Riel, and Ukrainian nationalist Taras Shevchenko in the shadow of the Manitoba legislature.

And which other Canadian city can proudly claim among its citizens three of the most prominent women poets of the early 20th century? Florence Randall Livesay, her daughter Dorothy Livesay, and Miriam Waddington helped shape the literary identity and expression of the country in numerous ways.

Today, I shall highlight the poetic achievements of the Livesays. They became renowned across the country and internationally for their literary achievements.

The Livesays were a newspaper family. Florence’s husband was John Frederick Bligh Livesay, a Scottish-born Canadian. He worked as a reporter with the Winnipeg Tribune and Winnipeg Telegram, where he met Florence. They married in 1908.

Later, JFB Livesay became a national manager with the Canadian Press, and moved the family to Toronto. He authored two books: Canada’s Hundred Days: With the Canadian Corps from Amiens to Mons, based on his year-long experience as a war correspondent for CP during the war, and The Making of a Canadian.

Florence wrote for the Evening Journal in Ottawa and later for the Manitoba Free Press (now the Winnipeg Free Press), and the Winnipeg Tribune. She spent a formative year in South Africa, teaching in the Boer War concentration camps.

Their marriage effectively put a stop to Florence’s journalist career. (Married women were actively discouraged from paid employment outside the home in those days. For many decades of the 20th century, it was illegal for them to do so.)

Unfazed, Florence redirected her literary talents. She became known as the English translator of Ukrainian folk songs and poetry, which she learned about by interviewing Ukrainian immigrant women in Winnipeg. Songs of Ukraina, with Ruthenian Poems, was published in 1916 in Canada, the U.S. and the United Kingdom. The collection included the translated lyrics of traditional Ruthenian folk songs, as well as poetry by Shevchenko and other well-known poets. The anthology is considered a classic, and the entire text is available online.

Florence also wrote original poetry, in the new (spare) modernist style that was becoming fashionable then. Her poems appeared in prestigious Canadian and American journals, such as Saturday Night and Poetry (Chicago). Her two poetry collections were Shepherd’s Purse and Savour of Salt.

Dorothy was born in 1909, a year after her parents married, during an October snowstorm. The family lived at 112 Lansdowne Ave. in the North End, and later moved to 166 Lipton St. in the Wolseley area. They moved to Toronto when Dorothy was 11 years old.

Dorothy was educated at the University of Toronto, the University of British Columbia and the Sorbonne in Paris, a rare privilege for Canadian women of that era. She began publishing poetry early, encouraged by her literary parents, particularly her mother.

Her first collection, The Green Pitcher, appeared in 1928, when she was 19. The book announced her as a major new talent, and the poems of this collection are still read and studied in universities.

Dorothy went on to publish more than 30 volumes of acclaimed poetry, known for its passionate expression, ecstatic vision and rhythmic finesse. She continues to inspire poets today with her powerful style and voice. She lived and wrote poetry into her 90s, and was involved in many social and political causes in her life, many of them finding their way into bold pronouncements in the poems.

She lived adventurously, travelling widely, walking with demonstrating workers in the 1930s, hanging out with the black community in New Jersey while doing a social work stint there, experimenting with lesbianism in Paris and later in Canada. She married Duncan Cameron McNair, a curator at the Royal British Columbia Museum, in 1937, and they had two children, Peter and Marcia.

It was a troubled marriage. Dorothy lost her social and economic independence and, as she confessed in a memoir many years later, he sometimes beat her. She was more relieved than grieved when he died of a heart attack in 1959 and she could be her spirited self again.

Dorothy did not forget about her home city. She returned to serve as writer-in-residence at the University of Manitoba in 1975, and founded a new literary journal that year, Contemporary Verse 2, which still publishes new poetry by Canadians today.

Winnipeg did not forget about Dorothy either: the Manitoba Book Awards named its biennial poetry prize, the Lansdowne Poetry Prize, after the Winnipeg street her family lived on when she was born. Given the importance of Dorothy and her parents to writing, we should consider a statue at the legislative grounds for all three.

Di Brandt was Winnipeg’s inaugural poet (2018-19)

dibrandt@shaw.ca