“Let’s go with the stout for a little flavour.”
“So I’m currently reading Infinite Jest.”
“You need to make a place in your life for that. It’s like the Moby Dick of the 21st Century.”
“I’m thinking about writing a children’s book.”
“We’ll have a pitcher of the stout, please.”
Snippets of what the table next to me at The Foundation would have heard during some food and dark brew with Cail Judy and Dave Kenny, the founders of Vancouver’s poetry alternative, Wolf Mountain Writing Collective, but what I like to call conversation with two guys enthused to light a fire under the City’s literary scene. Only picture the City’s literary scene as if it were a class of explosive pyrotechnic devices about to busy the sky’s tidy innocence with noise, lights, and a smoke of cultural purpose.
Image and poetry by Cail Judy
Between spicy tofu and, at Dave’s very serious insistence, a pitcher of stout, emerged the life story of Wolf Mountain: conceived in a UBC poetry class, born in buzz-chasing collegial revelry, and raised to this day by a community of writers, comedians, and filmmakers, lack of pretension, and rock ‘n roll. Cail and Dave lend Wolf Mountain, a young four years old, significant latitude to grow and develop with each spoken word at their curated events around town. In its short toddler life, Wolf Mountain has been featured on CBC Radio, the Westender, and Vancouver Weekly. While Wolf Mountain runs amuck to play in the dirt and track, if you will, metaphorically page-shaped footsteps into the house, what is most important to parents of such creative offspring is pie-like humbleness, that is, calling on and keeping to what some might carve out as the hoi polloi, the great unwashed, the riff raff, but who Cail and Dave gladly carve in as people just like them. That Wolf Mountain can be found on the playground with the common ones – oftentimes synonymous with the exploratory ones, the desirous ones – is fine by Cail and Dave. Even finer is what Wolf Mountain instills in the crowds it continues to draw: no pomp and frill, for where then is the crazy venture? Rather, chance and potentially error but all with feeling, for that is the art in poetry.
Dave put Wolf Mountain to me eloquently (after Cail and I bantered about Infinite Jest as above, not pretending for a second like we know much about it beyond the fact that it’s heavy, long, and annotated) in terms none other than The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac. He’s pretty sure it was The Dharma Bums. I myself was in no place to correct him because the stout turned out to be distractingly bold and glorious. “There is a scene near the beginning where Kerouac's character drives across America and arrives just in time to meet a bunch of his pals doing a reading just outside of San Francisco. What I thought was relevant to Wolf Mountain was the fact that the reading, rather than being a stuffy thing, is a raucous party. Everyone is loudly cheering for each poet, calling out for favourite poems to be read and generally getting drunk off a whole bunch of cheap wine that someone smuggled in. That is my vision for how I want Wolf Mountain shows to be: accessible, popular (in the sense of it being ‘for the people’), and above all, just a great time.”
So if you’re down for a raucous party with Wolf Mountain and of course, their wicked beard-bearing, book-talking, poetry-writing parents in close tow, check out It Came From Wolf Mountain at The China Cloud on Wednesday, December 10, 2014 from 8:00pm to 11:30pm for an evening of tall tales and radio dramas. This is an invite to seriously reclaim poetry…or at least drink and be merry with those that do.
For more information, check out It Came From Wolf Mountain.
