One of my favourite poets I’ve never met, Raymond Souster, the unofficial poet laureate of Toronto and vastly underappreciated in many circles, is profiled (for some reason—given the fluff length and content of the article, I can only guess it’s a Poetry Month thing and not a real appreciation of poet) at the Star.

His most recent verse, written a few hours earlier, was a gloss on a work by his late pal, F.R. Scott, who once wrote a poem about the old Montreal Star newspaper.

Souster’s poem?

From memory he recited, “Twinkle, twinkle, Toronto Star/How I wonder where you are/ high above this teeming city/ with little love or human pity.”

I am confident that he meant that it is the city, and not the newspaper, that is deficient. Frankly, love and pity fairly drip from these pages on a daily basis.

And I was delighted to learn that Souster’s first poem was published in this paper. He said, “I think it was called ‘Field In Winter.’ The Star had an editorial page in those days consisting of aphorisms, and things people sent in. I wrote the poem and my father sent it. I was 15 years old.”

More than 70 years ago.

Because of his vision, Souster uses a special ruler when he writes; it helps him lay a straight line of words, helpful because if his images are sharp, his handwriting is approximate. A neighbour translates his ink squiggles into legibility and reads the work back to him for his approval.

I said he was never not writing. Last year, Souster published an epic about the fall of Dien Bien Phu. This year he is working on a series of poems about the war of 1812. He is a veritable machine-gun of verse.