The silence of AM Klein: an essay by Carmine Starnino

Carmine Starnino has written a fascinating essay on the important Canadian poet AM Klein, for The New Criterion, which you can read here: https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/4/the-silence-of-a-m-klein

The essay is also extremely interesting for its exploration of the role of a poet in society and how this affected Klein and his work. Also, I must admit I was delighted to learn that Klein authored a spy thriller (apparently called That Walks Like a Man, about the Gouzenko affair in Ottawa which helped to start the Cold War) but saddened that it was never published.

AM Klein (1909-1972) was one of the Montreal Group of modernist writers whose literary innovations created radical change in Canadian literature from the 1920s on. He was an associate of poets such as FR Scott and PK Page. (My Montreal grandparents had some connections to FR Scott, while PK Page is one of my most important influences all the way back to my teenage years. She lived in Sidney, BC, near where I grew up in Victoria, and I was privileged to go to one of her readings and meet her some years before she died. I like to think that these slight connections give me a cool "degrees of separation" angle on AM Klein...)

More significant than those degrees of separation was the Canadian poetry class I took at UVic at the end of the 1990s, taught by another Canadian poet, Doug Beardsley. I have mentioned this class before on the blog; I took it rather reluctantly with much eye-rolling over a Canadian literature requirement. It turned out to be absolutely life-altering for me in a literary sense, particularly (but not only) in my discovery of PK Page. The great Al Purdy also came to speak and read to us, once. I loved AM Klein's poetry too.

You can read some of Klein's poetry here: https://canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca/klein/index.htm


Photo: AM Klein in the 1940s. Library and Archives Canada. Public domain