![]() ![]() Glassco’s poetry had already been left in the dust by the likes of Leonard Cohen and Layton. Otherwise a minor poet - his poems “all look like bad trips to me,” opined bill bissett - Glassco was given the award because another G-G jury had overlooked Memoirs of Montparnasse the year before. In 1972, Glassco’s Selected Poems beat out The Collected Poems of Irving Layton for the Governor General’s Award. ![]() He was also a McGill University dropout, a horse-and-buggy mailman in World War II rural Québec, a town councillor, founder of the Foster Horse Show, sponsor of the Graeme Taylor Memorial Cup and was at one time happily working away on his porno while planning to run as a provincial Liberal candidate. Glassco (1909-1981) is perhaps better known to the wider world as the author of Memoirs of Montparnasse, a wonderful, if spurious, account of his misadventures as a young man in the heady days of the Paris of Joyce, Stein and Hemingway - none of whom he actually met. ![]() ![]() Montreal’s John Glassco - known as Buffy to his friends - was a poet, translator and pornographer, who could boast of being an international bestseller in a restricted market (bondage and discipline), with two of his books banned in two different countries. So it’s nice to see that one of our more exotic exhibits is at last getting the biographical treatment. The category of kinky writers is not, to my knowledge, an overpopulated one in CanLit. ![]()
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