Artie Gold, Ryan Larkin
I met this kid, an aspiring poet, in the Village. Maybe it was 1966. A few months later he was in Montreal where, it turned out, he actually lived. He came around, he was enthusiastic, he wanted to talk about poetry but i was too ignorant myself to have anything to tell him. I was three years older than him and that was enough of “an elder” as far as he was concerned. I left the city, saw him once after that, so briefly that it might as well have never happened. Wednesday he died.
GOLD, Artie. One of Canada’s finest poets died on St. Valentine’s Day, 2007. Gold, an honoured disassociate member of the Vehicule poets died peacefully after a long battle with emphysema and with most of the world. From those of us who loved you and your small & mean ways and your grand and tender gestures, and most all, you and your poems, love. “. . .I delight in the sun. it is monumental in the sky with certainty rising, setting looking to the greater cycle, there is colour, a yellow angel pedals about the world.”
Montreal Gazette
Almost exactly two years ago I wrote a little anti-memoir about Ryan Larkin, after Chris Landreth’s film, Ryan, won an Academy Award. Then about a year later I got an email from Laurie Gordon to say that Larkin was hanging out at her place working on a new film, his first in something like thirty years, Spare Change. Larkin died on Friday.