Don’t forget Windsor’s literary heavyweights

Re Word gets out about Windsor, June 3 In her article, Books Editor Deborah Dundas betrays her bias in her opening sentence where she writes: “The stretch of Highway 401between London and Windsor is relentlessly boring.” I say, wake up, roll down your windows and open your eyes. Later in the same article she opines “. . . This area of southwestern Ontario better known outside of the area for its thunderstorms and farms than for its literature.” My goodness.

Perhaps she doesn’t know that Alistair McLeod was a resident of Windsor for most of his writing life. Perhaps she hasn’t heard of Archibald Lampman, who came of age in Morpeth near the shores of Lake Erie. Perhaps she is unfamiliar with the life and times of Raymond Knister, widely regarded as the first important modernist in English Canadian poetry. And what of the presence in the city of Canada’s most widely celebrated literary publisher, Marty Gervais, poet laureate of the city of Windsor? His influence on generations of the practitioners of People’s Poetry is beyond measure. His press, Black Moss Press is one of the longest continuously existent literary publishing house in Canada, and it began in Windsor and it remains firmly located in Windsor. I’m sorely disappointed in the failure to give so much as a single mention to Marty Gervais.

It’s high time the books editor of the Toronto Star took the kind of drive along the 401that is attentive, and when she praises a region she might try a little harder to get to know the region she’s praising. John B. Lee, poet laureate of the city of Brantford, and Norfolk County