“That city, that self”: Tracing a Historical Trajectory of the City Writer

Ceilidh Hart

doi:10.21825/aj.v10i1.20631

Abstract

This article traces a historical trajectory of the city poet in Canada—a writer whose “street-level perspective” defines their methods and shapes their authorial personae—from the nineteenth-century through to the twenty-first. It first provides a brief exploration of some of the literature published in the Toronto Evening Telegram newspaper in the 1880s and 1890s to consider the origins of a literary tradition and an authorial persona rooted in the city. This part of the article uses the example of Robert Kirkland Kernighan to show the way early writers exploited the opportunity provided by city newspapers and the city itself to map and define themselves in artistic and professional terms. The article goes on to consider the work of contemporary city writers like Bren Simmers, who continue mapping themselves onto the street in sometimes deeply personal and increasingly unsettled ways. At base, the article argues that by extending critical discussions of urban writing back to its nineteenth-century roots, we can better understand how the city works as a unique marketplace for literature and a unique cultural economy through which literature circulates, but also as a unique context for the creation of authorial identity.

Highlights

This article traces a historical trajectory of the city poet in Canada—a writer whose “street-level perspective” defines their methods and shapes their authorial personae—from the nineteenth-century through to the twenty-first
Hart 2 In April 1883, a late-spring snowstorm threw the city of Toronto into chaos. In his regular column in the Evening Telegram, Robert Kirkland Kernighan—at the time, Toronto’s most famous poet—published a poem titled “Whoa and Swindlin,” in which he describes the scene at a muddy street corner following the storm: T’ronto’s dirt on every dud, All filthy lay the seas of mud
On a spring evening more than 130 years later, poet Bren Simmers tracked a walk through her neighbourhood in Vancouver’s northeast end, mapping swing sets as she did so, and translated that map into poetry for her 2015 long poem Hastings-Sunrise. They stand at opposite ends of the country, and are separated by more than a century, what Kernighan and Simmers have in common is their intense “street-level” perspective; theirs is a poetics defined by the cities in which they are situated

Summary

Introduction

This article traces a historical trajectory of the city poet in Canada—a writer whose “street-level perspective” defines their methods and shapes their authorial personae—from the nineteenth-century through to the twenty-first. As the study of urban literature and the related fields of public poetics, activist literature, street poetry, and the creative city continues to expand, there is a noticeable tendency to divorce “early” Canadian authors from the dynamic ways contemporary writers engage— through the city—with local issues, thereby negating the role early writers played in shaping the worlds around them.

Results

Conclusion