Introduction by the Author

I wrote most of the poems reproduced in this e-book in my final two years as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto between 1967-1969, and in the year following my graduation. Although I had written a number of end-rhymed works in high school, I didn't begin to take myself seriously as a poet until I met the small group of students who were editing the Victoria College literary magazine, Acta Victoriana. People like Greg Hollingshead (recent winner of the Governor-General's Award for fiction) and Marni Jackson (noted journalist and non-fiction writer), who made decisions about what appeared in Acta, taught me the importance of redrafting my poems again and again, as I looked for flaws and sought a level of expression that had not previously concerned me.

Toronto was a great place to be in the late sixties. There were few, if any, status borders between established and emerging writers. In coffee shops and bars, I traded ideas and poems with Dennis Lee, Al Purdy, Irving Layton, Margaret Atwood, and Joni Mitchell, among others, along with a host of my peers. Small publishing houses like New Press, Coach House, and House of Anansi were starting up and looking for good manuscripts. Magazines like Saturday Night and Canadian Forum included poems by young writers in their pages, and there were always public venues in the city where your work could be heard and appraised.

Moving Outward is a young man's book, filled with romantic images and situations which generally have a young woman as a rather objectified muse figure. It took me a long time to discover that this figure didn't belong to me, though there are traces of my dependence on her in my later poetry (she, like me, grew inevitably older). Landscape also had a central place in my creative expression in those days, and remains at the heart of everything I have written in verse and fiction since. The style of my writing back then, as well as a few of the poems themselves, indicate the strong influence of Leonard Cohen and Irving Layton, but I read widely and was also drawn to the poetry of Cavafy, Jeffers, and Dylan (the one from Minnesota).

Though I recognize its limitations, I am still very fond of Moving Outward. The cover painting and drawings inside by my close friend Robert Markle gave the book a lustre that still shines through the years. For a long time, the opening poem about the piano player was the first I recited at any public reading, and even today I will read it and "I have a faded blue denim jacket" along with more recent work. I have, of course, my own battered original, but it is increasingly difficult to find copies in second-hand bookstores, so I am very grateful that Ron Tetreault and his students have had the interest and taken the time to produce this e-edition with the vital attention to detail that is so evident.

J.A. Wainwright
April, 1999