In 1973, I was twenty-two, with a newly finished master’s degree – too early – yet convinced that ideas mattered—especially the ones that sat uneasily with the world as it was.
I was already interested in poverty in Canada, not as an abstraction but as a lived condition shaped by institutions, language, history and policy. At the same time, I was absorbing existential philosophy through doctoral-level courses at York University, trying to understand how meaning is constructed, how experience precedes explanation, and how people live inside structures they did not design.
I flamed out before getting my PhD because I had – somewhat later – come to the point where I could not stand the thought of sitting in a classroom listening to anything about anything. Twenty-two may be too young to get a masters. It was for me.
Still, I didn’t yet know how those two strands—poverty and intellectual deconstruction—would braid together. But I was alert to moments where language and life collided.
John Prine
Some of the encounters that year I sought out deliberately. I went out of my way to meet John Prine at Mariposa. He was just breaking through then, still close to the ground. I remember buying him a carton of Salem cigarettes he couldn’t get on Toronto Island—a small, practical gesture that mattered at the time. There was nothing performative about the meeting.
What stayed with me was how greatness can seem ordinary and unprotected. The songs already carried moral weight, but the man was still fully human, not yet insulated by reputation or myth. He was nonplussed that he could not easily find Salems in Toronto but was ironic and guarded by what that may have meant. He offered me a US $10 bill, more than I had paid. I recall him saying, “Take it, man” or something similar.
Phil Ochs
I also went out of my way to meet Phil Ochs at the Riverboat on Yorkville. By then, he was struggling. I didn’t know what I was looking for exactly—perhaps confirmation that political art could still matter, or perhaps a warning. What I found was someone agonizing over the inability to write, over a world that no longer seemed to respond to the language he had honed.
It wasn’t despair as theatre. It was disorientation. Watching someone lose confidence in the adequacy of their own voice left an imprint I didn’t fully understand at the time. He substituted Richard Nixon for Mississippi in his song about finding a new country to be part of. He was unaware of how impressive he was. I could see that Ochs had one of the greatest right hands – strumming as well as Ed Robertson or George Harrison – that I had ever seen before or since. Unfortunately, both then and now, that may not be a criterion of legend.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The meeting with Lawrence Ferlinghetti—and Gregory Corso—was different. I didn’t seek it out. I stumbled into it, impromptu, in a professor’s office at York University. There was no audience, no reading, no performance. Ferlinghetti wasn’t holding forth. He was worried. He spoke about William Burroughs with grave concern. He talked about Rachel Carson. What struck me wasn’t the names, but the weight of responsibility he seemed to carry for people who had spoken too clearly, for too long, and paid for it.
Memory grows meaning
At twenty-two, I didn’t yet have the language to connect these moments. I was collecting them without knowing it. Each encounter sat in a different register connected I think by their fame: Prine, grounded and present; Ochs, unmoored yet energetic; Ferlinghetti, reflective and burdened. What they shared—though I couldn’t yet see it—was a relationship to language as something that once held, and was beginning, in different ways, to hold new meaning.
More than fifty years later, these meetings have become more vivid, not less. That surprised me but I understand that often happens. Older folks especially curate special memories once they survive decades alongside them.
I used to think memory faded with time. Now I see that it can clarify. What persists are not the famous names or the stories worth telling at dinner parties. What persists are moments where I glimpsed the limits but importance of voice , the cost of witnessing, and the fragility of meaning in public life.
Those early interests—poverty, existentialism, deconstruction, the structures that shape lived experience—have stayed with me. So have these men. I can now see that they weren’t just encounters; they were early lessons. Lessons about honesty, about integrity, about how culture consumes its truth-tellers, and about how ordinary decency can sometimes outlast brilliance.
I didn’t know then that I was being shaped. I know now. And I’m beginning to understand why these memories insist on returning: they are about who I met, but also about what I learned—before I had the words to say it—about how meaning is made, strained, and sometimes regained.