John Glassco Letters: Excerpt I

To ROBERT MCALMON 

Jamaica Farm 

Foster, Quebec 

December 1, 1946 

The poetry I’m doing now is all of a pattern with ‘The Rural Mail’ and ‘Stud Groom’: loose lines with a definite beat, full of puns, sneers, regional expressions, and gloomy as hell. When the projected volume is finished the whole rural scene will have changed (it’s changing now), and the decayed farms and decayed people will have been replaced by cheery, brisk, mechanised, subsidised, electrified artificial inseminationists, which will probably be an improvement though rather humdrum from a limited point of view… The big problem with getting this part of the country on paper is that the landscape is so beautiful (no other word) that it looks just like the picture-postcards for nine months of the year, and it’s only for a while in the late fall that the country has a third dimension, depth.

From The Heart Accepts It All: The Selected Letters of John Glassco, edited by Brian Busby