Homeless Memorial by John La Greca

[dropcap]The [/dropcap]first twenty years of my life I lived in Vernon, BC. I had a home. Which I usually took for granted. It was where I returned most nights, save for sleepovers and one night in a jail cell, futilely scrubbing fingerprint ink like Lady Macbeth. But that’s a separate story.

I went back for a writer’s residency at Vernon’s Caetani House in grey November pre-snow where I spent a great deal of time not writing, instead strolling the gardens and my hometown, the home of once homeless poet John La Greca.

I met John at Vancouver’s Poets Corner, where he read alongside industry heavyweights to a packed room. Despite the calibre of readers, it was John who people spoke most about – a complex, compact man with outsized talent. This is the man who tended that garden at Caetani House, years ago, coaxing order and beauty from ugly patches of wildness, much like his writing. Homeless Memorial is an autobiography in poems, life on the street from the inside, weeds of grit sprouting next to humour and optimism that persevere like prize orchids.

In a creative screening room, we take our seats with Terry Gilliam’s Revenge, the author’s mental film pooled at our feet. “Striving at tricks to change shit to a valuable commodity. / I’m in a similar boat as the alchemists.”

While reality rears through dialogue in Homeless Memorial, the poem. “He said it was hard to escape the street / Because the people he knew wanted him to stay where he was.”

And laconic Don’t Look Different from the Clones shares a satisfying moment of connection. “Some six-year-old kid / Looked at me in the library. / I gave him the finger. / He smiled back at me. / I think I made his day.”

In-person, La Greca’s cinched jacket hood could be mistaken for blinders. His view, however, remains panoramic. Black and white was the only way to capture the author in a photo, his face encased in shadow. Same as his writing. Not darkened, but monochrome – refreshing barbershop poetry in a genre of coiffure salons. We know without apology when La Greca’s hungry, horny, happy, or scared. I imagine editors keen to thresh the work, which would almost certainly mute the voice. As is, we read directly from La Greca’s keen mind. Akin to music aficionados insisting on scratchy Muddy Waters LPs over remastered digital, correctly choosing authenticity over the dilution of polish.

In Sveva’s God, La Greca hears his late friend and mentor, Countess Sveva Caetani, owner of that Vernon house and garden. “If I go for a walk, I find Sveva whispering in my head.”

Which I understand, having heard her in that space, where she wrote in my hand details of her life I didn’t know until she told me posthumously. Homeless Memorial is an insightful extension of Vernon – a home, or none, unrefined and inviting as the garden La Greca tended, this green-thumbed writer with residence fluid as poetry, his verse perennial.

First published by the League of Canadian Poets

About the Author: John La Greca writes with blistering honesty and humour of a side of Okanagan culture never seen in tourist brochures. For nearly fifty years, he has been our greatest poet of the streets and for all this time he has lived with a mind given many diagnoses, including schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder. He has been in and out of care since 1967. Homeless Memorial is John’s remarkable record of a city he knows better than anyone, which he places within the context of his extensive readings of history and world society.

Homeless Memorial by John La Greca
Ekstasis Editions, 2018

Bill Arnott is the bestselling author of A Season on Vancouver Island, the Gone Viking travelogues, and A Perfect Day for a Walk: The History, Cultures, and Communities of Vancouver, on Foot (Arsenal Pulp Press, Fall 2024). Recipient of a Fellowship at London’s Royal Geographical Society for his expeditions, Bill’s a frequent presenter and contributor to magazines, universities, podcasts, TV and radio. When not trekking with a small pack and journal, Bill can be found on Canada’s west coast, where he lives near the sea on Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh land.