On the Road for Poetry: A Tour Journal

Sheila Martindale is poetry editor of Canadian Author and Bookman and
author of No Greater Love, her sixth collection of poetry.

Published journals can provide personal insight and historical data, and they are especially useful to biographers. They usually benefit from the services of a selective editor, who weeds out the repetitions and inanities. Poetry reading tours are exciting events for both the poet and the various audiences. Put these two ingredients together and you have the possibility of an intriguing and illuminating document.

Mona Fertig’s journal, On the Road for Poetry, unfortunately does not fulfil these possibilities, but it is none the less interesting in its own way. She describes, in brief non-sentences, the experiences of herself, Cathy Ford, and Penny Kemp as they travelled between Vancouver, Newfoundland, and New York in March of 1981. The jottings cover a great deal of eating and drinking, some land-and-cityscapes, and much name-dropping. But that’s what they remain — jottings; probably just as they were written down at the time in hurried moments. Fertig should have gone over her notes, cleaned up the spelling (particularly of people’s names) and perhaps expanded and explained a few points. As far as they go, her observations will be of interest to those involved with the literary and poetry scene in Canada.