Nelson Ball (1942-2019) was a poet, editor, publisher, and bookseller specialising in the small press in Canada. He was born in Clinton, in Huron County in southern Ontario. He moved to Seaforth, Waterloo, then Kitchener for the first 20 years of his life. In Toronto, in the 1960’s, he was part of an enormous wave of poets and small press editors and publishers. He created Weed/Flower magazine, which later became Weed/Flower Press, publisher of books and chapbooks by many Canadian poets which ran from 1965-1974.
In 1965 he married Barbara Caruso, a visual artist from Kincardine. The couple enjoyed their bohemian existence, but found it difficult economically, so they moved to Toronto in 1967, where Nelson Ball found steady work as a library assistant at the University of Toronto and made extra money as a cataloguer at the Village Book Store. That allowed him to launch William Nelson Books, with a shop and extensive mail-order catalogue. However, he needed ever-larger quarters and was being priced out of the Toronto real estate market.
He and Caruso searched from Owen Sound to St. Catharines for the right property. One afternoon, they were driving through the town of Paris, once named “the Prettiest Little Town in Canada” by Harrowsmith Magazine. (The town, established in 1829, is named, not after the French city, but for the nearby deposits of gypsum, used to make plaster of Paris.) They discovered an advertisement in a real estate broker’s window for a three-storey structure built in 1928 as the head office of Canadian Gypsum and Alabastine. The office/laboratory, owned by Domtar, had been deserted since 1984, an industrial relic in a residential neighbourhood. It was a perfect home for the couple with plenty of room for Ball’s vast collection of books plus a large studio – with a view of the Grand River – where Caruso could paint and store her completed art. A convoy of two tractor-trailers and a special fine-art van was needed to transport their possessions to their new home at 31 Willow Street. Catherine Stevenson has made an interesting documentary about the house
He ceased writing poetry during the 1980s as he concentrated on his bookselling business, but reemerged to enjoy a second chapter as a poet with the publication of With Issa: Poems 1964-1971 (ECW Press, 1991), Bird Tracks on Hard Snow (ECW Press, 1994), The Concrete Air (The Mercury Press, 1996), Almost Spring (The Mercury Press, 1999), At The Edge Of The Frog Pond (The Mercury Press, 2004) and In This Thin Rain (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2012), as well as a large array of smaller publications. He eventually retired from bookselling to devote more of his time to his poetry. In 2016, he was awarded the bpNichol Chapbook Award for Small Waterways (Apt. 9 Press). A selected poems, Certain Details (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2017) edited by Stuart Ross, offers a major overview of the breadth of Nelson Ball’s poetry over six decades. This selection of his work includes his trademark minimalist poems in addition to longer works and sequences; it spans nature poems, homages, meditations, narratives, found poems, and visual poems. The book contains selections from all of Ball’s major collections as well as works that have previously appeared only in chapbook or ephemeral form.
On December 30, 2009, Barbara Caruso died of cancer. Nelson Ball continued to live in the house on Willow Street. In the summer of 2019 he opted for a medically assisted death at the Brantford hospital, near Paris, where he had been ill for about six weeks. He died August 16th, 2019. His ashes were laid to rest, next to his wife, artist, Barbara Caruso (1937-2009) in Paris, Ontario. There is a dedicatory bench, overlooking the Nith River and Penman’s Pass.
THE POETRY OF NELSON BALL
Nelson Ball has spoken of his admiration for other practitioners of the brief poem, in particular the work of Robert Creeley and Lorine Niedecker. Their influence is evident in the poems available below. Cameron Anstee has referred to Ball as Canada’s greatest practicing minimalist poet. Stuart Ross, in his introduction to Certain Details: The Poetry of Nelson Ball, has claimed that Nelson is what might be called a poet’s poet: he is widely revered by many Canadian and international poets. But Nelson is also a people’s poet: his work is instantly accessible, plainspoken, direct.
Nelson Ball, himself, has written: I liked haiku as simple nature poems. But I didn’t want to restrict the forms of my poems, so I didn’t try to write haiku. In truth, I had difficulty identifying and counting syllables. I had a strong desire to write poems of pure description, letting the image reveal itself without any direct statement of idea or emotion. I found it difficult to make this kind of spare expression work. My observations of both the world and of words and language were too generalized, not particular enough. I was looking for some kind of magic rather than looking at the particularities of words and the world.
Brief Poems by Nelson Ball
Authenticity
A new headstone
at the cemetery
awaits certification
by birds
***
Tracks
Words
on this white paper
bird
tracks
on
hard
snow
***
Dry Spell
storm
clouds
roll
past
tease
these
rattling
aspens
***
Centipede at Midnight
startled
it fell
off
the wall
startling
me
****
Longevity Assured
cement
fence
posts
***
Ahead
In the distance
on a roadside hill
either
tree stumps
or
gravestones
***
Idleness
On this hot day
I feel languid
watching
the south wind
bend
grasses
towards an
oncoming storm
***
Shore Song
Wave folllows wave over stones
turning over & over & over
from sunrise to sunset
sunset to sunrise
for ever & ever & ever
***
Trying to See What’s There
I’m
troubled by
how
much
I didn’t see
before
that now
I see
Briefly
Lighning’s
spike
ties
sky
to
earth
***
Fall Sky
Swallows
dart
back and forth
like
hyphens
on grey paper
awaiting
words
***
Heron
A heron
stands
stalk-
still
in
water
waiting
***
Pissing On An Electric Fence
The main text of this poem
as yet unwritten
is likely
to remain so
with
good aim
and
luck
***
Anomaly
Cement
angels
***
Some Mornings
Some mornings
as I awaken
I compose a poem
in my head
usually gone
when I get to my desk
this morning
I caught one
***
In My Time
short
trees
grew
very
tall
***
The Meaning of Death
It’s
the
end
of
morning
coffee
***
Together
In the low breeze
two trees squeak
LINKS
A Rattle of Spring Frogs by Nelson Ball (complete text of this chapbook)
Cameron Anstee writes about his friend Nelson Ball
Nelson Ball & Barbara Caruso / Home Project / A Photo Documentary
Certain Details: The Poetry of Nelson Ball, ed. Stuart Ross, reviewed by rob mclennan
rob mclennan blogspot on Nelson Ball
A review by Michael Dennis of Minutiae from Apt. 9 Press
A review by Michael Dennis of Some Mornings from Mansfield Press
A review by Michael Dennis of A Gathering, an elegy to the Canadian poet, David W. Harris
The Paris Museum Blog page on Nelson Ball
Images of the dedicatory bench in Paris, Ontario
Brief Poems 