Formal and thematic models also came from her favourite popular songs, which, like most people, she used to understand both feelingly and critically her own experience, especially emotions and relationships (see Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil). For example, title song of the 1956 Broadway musical starring Sammy Davis Jr. (one of LJ’s favourite artists along with Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole), addresses the mystery of attraction: Why this feeling? Why this glow? Why the thrill when you say Hello? It’s a strange and tender magic you do Mister Wonderful, that’s you. (Bock, Holofcener, and Weiss) Another favourite, was best known from the 1935 film , featuring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. It addresses betrayal and loss. Her attachment for this song seems related to her husband’s infidelity and abandonment of her soon after the birth of their child. A later favourite, the 1956 Jerry Vale hit, seems to reflect on her love for her husband. It begins: You give your hand to me And then you say hello I can hardly speak My heart is beating so And anyone can tell You think you know me well But you don’t know me. (Walker and Arnold) For many people, a personal memory archive of popular song, like a scrapbook of cuttings and ephemera, was literature in and for everyday life.

LJ was a reader but, unable to afford books, owned few apart from the highly popular Reader’s Digest condensed books, hand-me-downs from her father’s second wife, also a reader. Though LJ’s poetry and life resemble those of bestselling Canadian Edna Jaques from an earlier generation, there is no evidence LJ encountered Jaques’s poetry or distinguished it from other newspaper and magazine folk poetry. In the 1950s, LJ bought a battered second-hand family Bible, had it cheaply rebound, recorded her family tree there, and at times read daily in it, a symbol of social continuity and stability she aspired to rather than experienced. She owned a cookbook, seldom opened, also symbolic: work fatigue left energy for cooking little beyond fried basics. In the 1970s, suffering chronic heart disease but leery of the public health care introduced a decade earlier, she acquired popular health books along with various nostrums. She followed the news, subscribing at times to the populist Canadian magazine and Toronto newspaper. She didn’t use public libraries, perhaps like many feeling that, with museums and galleries, they were not for people like her. Like most, she enjoyed the play of everyday language, humorously twisting common words, phrases, and names. She got her first television set, a defective castoff, in the late 1950s; her favourite programs, as with most North Americans then, were and . In the 1960s, like millions of others she took up paint-by-numbers.

She seldom showed her writing but made no secret of it and referred to it proudly as My poetry. What survives resembles her favourite poetry of childhood and school and popular songs of youth and adulthood. This poetry was unlike the modernist poetry produced by Canadian and similar literatures in LJ’s lifetime, which proclaimed difficulty and experiment and later developed a corresponding specialist academic critical discourse, both in flight from the vulgar and mass culture and designed to form literary vanguards, coteries, and professional elites (Longabucco) and restrict access to them. The poetry LJ drew on purposefully reworked the historic popular poetic idiom comprising common measure and its variants and a purified or selected vernacular, the same appropriated by Wordsworth (taking his lead from contemporary women poets) for a poetic revolution that he meant to effect a national cultural uplifting. In content, LJ’s poems, like the majority of personal lyric poetry of the past two centuries, was from her own life and usually occasional, or prompted by specific and specified events.

Most of LJ’s surviving poems are dated from the 1970s but include a few earlier ones apparently copied from memory: earlier work was likely lost in her many moves across city and country. The earliest, dated Approx 1938, is a jingle, likely inspired by magazine and radio contests of the time. It opens: I like gentle Ivory soap For every cleaning purpose It gets right in and digs out dirt Then leaves a shining surface. Another, dated Dec. 1940 (she was nineteen) follows popular love songs in sentiment and phrasing. It may have expressed early love for her future husband: What makes me think of you all through the day? In loneliness it’s you I can’t forget. … To feel your tender hand in mine is one desire That no one knows. All this means much to me, far more Than human tongue can tell. In life I am quite satisfied to have but you To love so well. In popular song and grand opera, such lyrics are animated by music, and LJ may have had a tune in mind. Further, personal appropriation of phrases from popular song validates private feelings. This poem may also have been part of a verse exchange: with it LJ kept a signed poem from her future husband, entitled

The act of writing structures experience critically: after her failed marriage and the birth of a child by another man, came this, dated 1950: I have a little stream, I made it through the years, For every little drop of water Used to be my tears. Some were tears of joy And some were tears of sorrow And some were tears I cried inside For what might come to-morrow. As often in folk poetry, light rhythm and tone counterbalance strong feeling.

Perhaps because of her circumstances, motherhood as resistance and struggle formed a major element in LJ’s poetized self-identity. dated 1950, expresses feelings for her love-child: I have a lovely little girl, Her hair is blonde with not much curl But every little lock of hair Has a heart string tied up there… She has the biggest soft-brown eyes. Her kisses fill me full of sighs Then little feet take her away And leave me empty all the day. The poem, especially the close, echoes Stevenson’s but filled with loss rather than the child giant’spower in Stevenson’s poem. Again, frames used by popular poets and song writers were adapted to personal experience and expression, asserting the personal in a public and popular discourse and culture, here validating what would have been widely condemned at the time as an illicit love and its consequence.

Some years after both children had left home, she wrote this, dated December 7, 1974, about her first child, whom well-educated friends of her husband had wanted to adopt after he had left her, to give the child an appropriate education and upbringing: God gave to me a son, He chose me as a mother, If I was good enough for God Why can’t I please my brother? I loved him from the start This child so full of beauty, No matter where the future led To raise him was my duty… And now I’m far away. I’ve left those years behind me. My son (now a full grown man) Could what may have been, have changed thee? The struggles of lone parenthood merged with struggles and frustrations of everyday working-poor life, as in dated 1951: Here I am a waiting In another line. Seems as though I’m doing this Nearly all the time. For every time I pay a bill It always seems to be That half a dozen other folk Are just ahead of me. This recalls the sound and shape of Stevenson’s but its use of vernacular also shoulders such literary poetry as that of American modernist Lorine Niedecker. A continuation about waiting for buses is dated November 9, 1975, twenty-four years later. LJ often re-opened a poem to update it with the daily living that it engaged with.

Her poems about ecology and the environment converge a public political concern emerging in the 1970s with a lifelong personal concern for what she saw as the crowds, dirt, and confusion of the city—or the parts of cities she could afford to live in. is dated October 31, 1975, and begins: We like to turn the tap on And wash the waste away; The particles of food And dirt from children’s play. All these things go down the drain With water clear and fresh. But where do they land up? Do they only make a mess? The poem calls for solutions: Surely we can think ahead And figure out a theme So that waste goes back again To aid in Nature’s scheme.… And maybe we should go again To houses on the hill So lakes and rivers will be clean And with fish again will fill[.] A countering group of poems concerns small, free, or cheap daily pleasures such as the beach, a cup of tea, a warm bath, a warm bed. dated Wed March 5, 1975, probably refers to Kitsilano beach, Vancouver: Water is the thing to see For without it there couldn’t be Ships to sail, fish to swim, A place of peace for you and me… A day later she added: A rainbow flashed across the foam As sunshine on the beaches shone. It warmed us. We were refreshed From salty breezes that were blown. Though LJ’s poems often emphasized her solitariness, here, as in many other poems, there is an imagined and inclusive company of we and an imaginary companion you. Simple comforts are celebrated in several pieces, such as dated December 7, 1974: When you’re having troubles And you don’t know what to do Sit down and have a cup-a And think your problems through. Resembling an advertising jingle or greeting card rhyme, this poem illustrates the productive dialogue between personal poetry and commercial verse forms.

Like many other poets, she also wrote about the problems and pleasures of writing. When troubled at night she found that writing soothed her for sleep: a number of poems have dates such as Midnight or 4 a.m. dated February 1972, associates the struggle of living with the struggle of writing: At six a.m. I wake and lie And cannot sleep and wonder why As many thoughts go flying by Much disturbed am I. At seven o’clock I rise and write The poetry of my delight Because I cannot sleep to-night For something isn’t right. Many thoughts run through my head Of things I’ve done and things I’ve read But thoughts of things that should be said Were heavier than lead. The words of life come from within And flow like magic when they begin But if we dare to capture them Outside forces intervene…

By the 1970s, both her children had got through university thanks to summer jobs, living at home, and the recently instituted Canada student loan program. LJ’s poem dated February 6, 1975, shows that, whatever its benefits, education, as with many working-class families, separated her—and her writing—from her children and their world of knowledge, including Canadian literature: There is a book shelf on my wall That’s filled with books both large and small But I have not yet read them all For I am known to stall. The experiences of life that I have led All go up into my head But one day they may be read After, or before I’m dead… We each must express in our own way The things that have happened from day to day. Some folks the piano play And some pictures paint to relate what they may. What I enjoy is to write a rhyme With music there upon the line, Sometimes at a peculiar time At night, or when solitude is mine… Perhaps dissatisfied with her psychologistic closure, four days later (February 10) she added a stanza of spiritually questioning: Does it not then seem to be That more than one life is lived by me And the rest of mankind so that we Experiences may teach what we cannot see?

Overall, her concern in these 1970s poems, even when dealing with large issues such as pollution, social conflict, or the economy, was with small everyday challenges and pleasures, overcoming or arranging, which, like writing a poem, engaged the creativity that constitutes everyday living, making a life from available materials. Here, for example, is dated January 28, 1975, when she was at Canada Post: I work part time at a job that I enjoy. I’ve seen mistakes when a man becomes a boy When the pressures of a job makes someone lose his senses And the damage that creates is really quite tremendous. We study and we try hard to make their program function, A machine can only do so much and then it starts a munching. It munches on the letters and it spits out all the stamps Or pens that sometimes come inside are chewed up, then it jams. We mostly pull together as a group of willing workers. Still no matter where you work there will always be the shirkers. The job pays well. I really can’t complain. Yet industry does make mistakes and who or what’s to blame. A fourth stanza is dated February 9, 1975: We climb up the mechanical stairs ’cause they’re not operating, And pick up parcels from the floor when the round table can’t contain them. For ten minutes each evening, we have no time to wait Up in our cafeteria, where we vie for coffee and cake. A final stanza is dated November 6, 1975: We picket the post office when our members are on strike A few come in the evening or in the black of night. Because I am a worker it seems the thing to do. If you are a worker won’t you come and picket too?

Here is writing used as most people use it, for its most important purpose—as ethnomethodologists (Garfinkel, McHoul) would insist—creating everyday life day by day. Here is Canadian literature in the fullest sense, the literature of most Canadians, creating their own imaginary and reality, for themselves.

Since the Romantic era, national literatures have been fabricated to depreciate, marginalize, and displace such people’s literatures in the interests of coalitions of professional, business, political, and social elites who strive to impose their imaginary and reality as national (Woodmansee). Certain discursive and disciplinary practices have been taught in schools and colleges, professionalized in academia, funded by the state, and deployed in cultural media to promote elites’ national literature at the expense of the people’s. Despite policy-driven cultural pluralization and poststructuralist theorizing of recent decades, prominent among these practices remain literarism, or the notion that literary value or quality inheres in texts and that it is what matters about them; textism, or the notion that meanings inhere in texts; and telepathism, or the notion that meanings are encoded by authors in texts and decoded and internalized by readers. Texto-telepathism has been around for centuries in various forms, but its most influential version today is the Franco-American neo-Hegelianism traceable to Lukács’s 1923 argument that mass culture commodities massify their consumers. This view was adapted and passed on by many across Europe and the Americas through the twentieth century, including such often cited figures as Kojève (1930s and 1940s France); Adorno and Horkheimer (1930s to 1960s, Germany, United States); Hannah Arendt, C. Wright Mills, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and others (1950s and 1960s, United States) (Jamison and Eyerman ch. 2); Debord and the Situationists ( 1960s, France); Hoggart and Stuart Hall (though modified; 1950s to 1980s, Britain); Daniel Bell, Judith Butler, and others (1970s to 1990s, United States); Blaser and Davey (1960s to 1990s, Canada); and Dorfman (1970s, Chile, Latin America). In their apocalyptic narrative, culture is being overwhelmed and democracy distorted by the mass culture produced by agents of the dominant classes or capital, encoding their ideological, political, and economic interests in products to be decoded and passively internalized by consumers (Davey 16). Poststructuralists claimed to dispel texto-telepathism but actually occulted it, refashioning literarism in the interests of a cadre of academic experts.Reading in the classroom (McHoul), a highly specialized though diversified and conflicted kind of reading that is by no means paradigmatic, still dominates literature in academia and the upmarket media. It relies on the argument that, despite the emancipation from dominant reading (dominator’s reading) supposedly effected by theory (usually standing for [neo-Hegelian] critical theory), there remains a preferred, exemplary, or resistant reading, in fact usually the professor’s or professional critic’s reading.

Social changes made elites and their national literatures more diverse, inclusive, self-critical, and contested while excluding most people and most reading and writing and while access to the national literature and arts remains restricted by factors from unequal education to cultural and social prejudice. Construction of a Canadian literature was undertaken in earnest relatively late, after the Second World War , as (among other things) the response of Canadian elites and the institutions they dominated to greater demand for higher education, to increased immigration and social diversity, to exacerbated regional differences, and to the resulting perceived need for an ostensibly unifying and indigenous national culture to distinguish Canadian elites from others and from most Canadians, justifying their power and privileges. This culture, unlike LJ’s literary sources, could be neither popular and imported (mainly from the United States) nor elite and imported (from Britain, France, and the United States). Critique of such national literatures is under way but, like the organized institution of a Canadian literature, has been late reaching Canada, and operates within a relatively closed world defended by versions of literarism. Canadian literature continues, with much government support, to write, publish, teach, archive, research, promote, and read what most Canadians don’t read or write and hardly know about (Davey 101–02). Scholars and critics continue referring to the influence of Canadian literature on the national consciousness (among many, see Keith 2006 2:67), though, by a frequently cited criterion, a work of Canadian literature is a bestseller if it sells five thousand copies (Wigod; Gedymin and Driscoll 42–43). Canadian media’s bestseller lists are rigged to reflect their targeted advertising demographic’s self-image (MacDonald). Accurate sales figures show that most Canadians’ reading originates outside Canada, isn’t written by Canadians or about Canada, and is similar to what most people read in the United States (174–77).

As a necessary counterpart, Canadian literature largely ignores, disdains, mutilates, or occasionally appropriates what most Canadians read and write. Many Canadian writers with huge global sales are unknown to Canadian literature. Marshall (Margaret) Saunders’s international bestseller, (1893) with sales well over a million, and one of LJ’s favourite lifetime books, has received almost no attention from Canadian scholars and critics. The late Arthur Hailey, naturalized Canadian, praised by Robertson Davies and whose papers are deposited in the University of Toronto Library (Shoesmith), enjoyed world sales of 170 million; I found one study of his work by someone in Canadian literature. World sales of Janette Oke’s inspirational romances approach twenty-five million, but at a recent meeting of forty-odd literature professors, including Canadianists, in Oke’s home province of Alberta, not one had heard of her, nor had the books-page editor of a major urban newspaper in the same province. A few song lyrics by globally popular and respected Canadian artists such as Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell are included in literature anthologies, severing words from music, text from performance and audience, in aesthetic violence and social disregard. Until recently, on the rare occasions when Canadian literature considered what most Canadians read and write, alarmed disdain prevailed, as in the special issue on Popular Culture in (Spring 1986); though francophone scholars and critics showed both serious interest and more respect, as in the 1982 issue of on La Consommation littéraire de masse au Québec. Book history, print culture studies, audience studies (Bird), daily-life poets and editors, and others have begun to loosen the neo-Hegelian hegemony, as chapters of the (2004–2007) and Wayman’s anthology demonstrate. But few in Canadian literature, and more recently cultural studies, take an interest in what most Canadians read, except when it can illustrate massification or be construed as resistant or countercultural. The few studies of the kind of poetry most Canadians write distinguished it as folk poetry from the bardic poetry and folksong of Romantic national cultures. This pioneering 1980s work was outside Canadian literature and has since been far outstripped by research on oral, minority, marginal, or non-Western poetry that can be positively valorized within and in the interests of academia as traditional, communitarian, resistant, countercultural, and so on (Damon and Livingstone; Fuller).

Rejecting literarism enables us to understand literature as democratic art, not the writing and reading of a few, reflecting and promoting their interests and restricted to those able to afford prolonged special training, but the cultural right of all and the practice of many or most, with its own poetics and politics. Rejecting texto-telepathism enables us to understand Canadian literature as anything read or written by someone reading or writing as a Canadian, however defined. Against texto-telepathism, Harris’s integrational linguistics insists that communication is the active and collaborative creation of meanings in particular instances by and between people. And against literarism, McHoul’s effective semiotics (74–85) insists that meanings do not inhere in texts but are created by readers in instances that are always unique but equal. As LJ put it, We each must express in our own way The things that have happened from day to day.