memories of Milton Acorn and Canadian Liberation Movement: Jim Larwill

 part of an email from an old comrade:

Good to see that Kent Bowman poem on Milton.  Yes that sounds like Milt.  There was a time Milt told me he built a house and forgot to put any doors or windows into it.  Hard to believe unless you knew Acorn.  On the other hand when the CLM was tearing itself apart, I as the Ottawa Chairman didn’t know what the hell was going on in Toronto, so I went to TO and looked up Milton at the Waverley Hotel because I knew Milt was the only one I could trust to give me the straight goods on what was happening with the central office and the Toronto clubs.  I will always remember that afternoon hanging out with Acorn at the Crest Grill.  I think I have a vague memory of Milton telling me I was a poet, and this was before I was really starting to write.  I think at the time I took it as an insult.  Who in there right mind would run away into the woods and waste their life writing poetry?

On the political side of things it is funny… or not… how our predictions from back then have come true.  Get too tied to the US economically and it would mean a loss of independence for Canada.  In a strange way Trump is just stating the obvious outcome of being totally integrated economically.

Anyway I continue to work on my YouTube channel.  I have to say I miss live performance and I find the virtual media some what alienating, but I do like the creativity of video editing when the learning curve isn’t driving my old brain a bit crazy sometimes.  Here is a link to the latest one.  I have mostly been working on my “i Wolf” literary theory of human cultural evolution, but this one is a poem.

Keep marching comrade…

jim… aka Raven King

Jim's very cool and challenging video - watch it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EX6LVIV-vmE&t=11s

Milton in Motion (1973): Kent Bowman poem

 Milton Acorn and I were comrades in the Canadian Liberation Movement (CLM) half a century ago. Milton was a dyed in the wool Canuck nationalist, vehemently opposed to the U.S. cultural control of Canada. Fifty years later, our concerns over an Amerikan takeover have proven true with Trump's threats to annex us as the 51st state. 

Hans Jewinski, better known as Toronto's "Poet Cop", was riding

in his squad car when he noticed fellow poet and demonstrator 

Milton Acorn and his merry band walking in a westerly

direction. Hans stopped his car and asked Milton where he was

going. Milton answered, "We are on our way to a demonstration

at Allan Gardens." Hans offered to escort Milton and his group

to the demonstration. As Hans turned on the flashing squad car

lights, Hans' partner edged further down in his seat, hoping not

to be seen by any other passing fellow police officers. 

Several weeks later, Hans encountered Milton and his followers

again. This time, they were walking east towards the Don River.

"Milton, where are you going?" asked Hans. Milton replied, "We

are heading to Allan Gardens for a demonstration." With a look

of amazement, Hans declared, "Milton, you're heading in the

wrong direction!!"

*dedicated to Milton Acorn, based on an incident described by Hans Jewinski

from Looking into the Fish Tank, poems by Kent Bowman

Aeolus House, 2022

Milton Acorn, The People's Poet

from wikipedia: 

Acorn was awarded the Canadian Poets Award in 1970 and the Governor General's Award in 1976 for his collection of poems, The Island Means Minago.^[15][16] In 1977, Acorn introduced the Jackpine sonnet, a form designed to be as irregular and spikey (and Canadian) as a jack pine tree, but with internal structure and integrity. Without a fixed number of lines and with varied line lengths, the Jackpine sonnet depends on interweaving internal rhymes, assonance and occasional end-rhymes.^[17]

Great memory  & poem

Judy Haiven, PhD 

Writer/activist

Halifax NS

Canada

Tel 902 718 7445

Very nice!

Pat Connors

Thanks, Chris for this lovely memory of Milton.
btw, I tried to post a comment but a message popped up indicating to try again later. Reminded me of a pop bottle cap contest
Hope you're well.

Personally, I've found 2025 a terrible year; I'm looking forward to 1977. [sic]
cheers Henry Martinuk

Defending Milton Acorn against 'Alive Mag' (1976)

Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line

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Alive magazine

Dealing with the question: Should We Retract Our Characterization of Milton Acorn

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First Published: Alive No 55, October 16, 1976
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Malcolm and Paul Saba
Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.

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In his letter in this issue, ex-CLMer Chris Faiers criticizes Alive for attacking Milton Acorn for being a drunk. He goes on to state that Acorn is not a drunk. In the September 28, 1976 issue of The Ontarion (student newspaper at the University of Guelph). Acorn is interviewed and this same subject is touched upon. He says: “But I am not a degenerate, as that magazine Alive seems to think. I had an alcohol problem in my thirties, but when I realized I had it, I managed to taper off and become quite a normal drinker... I have definitely never crawled on the floors of taverns, even in the days when I was an alcoholic. My feet were very steady. I could move around lithefully on my feet and be (to all appearances) completely normal, when I was actually totally unconscious, in a blackout. So that thing in Alive about me crawling on the floors of taverns is not true....”

What about the “CLM”?

Nowehere in that interview does Mr. Acorn mention the CLM with which he has been closely associated for several years. However, other ex-CLMers have joined, verbally, with Chris Faiers in expressing concern that Alive has attacked Mr. Acorn, and they have described him as “a hero to the Canadian people”. We have promised these ex-CLMers that we will print a qualified retraction for those who assumed that we had attacked Milton Acorn for being a drunk, crawling around on tavern floors.
The article “Degenerates Are Not Heroes” in Alive 49 pointedly referred to the fact that Milton Acorn had lost his “People’s Poet” medal in Reuben’s Tavern in Toronto, where it stayed (in the cash register) for a year and a half. If Mr. Acorn truly deserved the “People’s Poet” medal surely he would have been justified to crawl around tavern floors looking for it! Our point was not that Mr, Acorn is (or is not) a drunk but that only a degenerate poet would accept something called the “People’s Poet” medal from the likes of Zionist Irving Layton. Further, and to put it bluntly, we apologise to all those who thought that we called Milton Acorn a drunkard. We called him a degenerate, and that is not the same thing. We also called htm “a thorough-going national chauvinist” and a “gutter crawling collaborator with the likes of Zionist Irving Layton” These charges do not seem to have offended either Acorn or those others who are just emerging from the murky shadows of that national chauvinist and social-fascist organization called the “Canadian Liberation Movement”.

He’s had a problem with Alive for years

In May 1973, Milton Acorn wrote to the editor of another Canadian literary publication.
Addressing that man he said:

You dirty bastard / You son of a bitch / You piece of shit.

Sometime ago, if your memory reaches into your nefarious past for more than a week you begged me to publish a letter of mine in which I stated my politics as regards Canadian Literature and my position in it. You got that permission and published the letter. The letter was a bit personalistic as I stood alone at the time, was not yet a member of the Canadian Liberation Movement, otherwise there was nothing wrong with it.

So our paths parted for a while. I saw your poems printed in ALIVE, run by a bunch of rats fooling with politics but having no political conscience but didn’t consider that meant more than that you had sent poems into them. Two issues ago, alive, unable to forgive the vicious wrongs they had done me in the past – after the fashion of vermin of that sort – printed a review of More Poems for People which was a vicious distortion from end to end, and even claimed 1 was an armchair Socialist when they know to the stinking depths of their rotten souls that I was an activist.

What do I find you doing? No protest against the slander of a man who has not only been a fighter in peoples causes all his life, but has sided with you personally. Instead I find you engaging in friendly debate with them about just what runic letters the turds of American liberal poets and Canadian Yanksuckers make. You are obviously a rotten siinking opportunist, as indeed I did suspect when I first read your outpourings. And the Canadian People will drink your heart’s blood.

Milton Acorn

Now, in view of the unfolding story of the death of CLM, a national chauvinist, social-fascist, absolutely degenerate organisation, why is Milton Acorn not carrying on a campaign to denounce the very “Movement” to which he gave a shade of credibility? The young people who have written to Alive of the horrors of life under the Perlyite clique in CLM can be excused because: 1. they were innocents outweighed by an expert social-fascist; and 2 because they are stepping forward to denounce that organisation, its degenerate practice, its whole politics and their acceptance of its line, for a period of time. Acorn, though, has been around for decades! If he is not a degenerate then: 1. how did he get hooked up with such an outfit; and 2. why has he not raised the loudest howl since its death?
Alcoholism is a disease, degeneracy is a crime! We ask again, what kind of hero is this!

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