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In 1980, the year Marshall McLuhan died and when Bill Davis was still premier of Ontario, a group of journalists, novelists, academics and fellow travelers gathered for lunch at Dooley’s* restaurant at Bloor and Yonge in Toronto. The purpose was to get interesting people together and see what happened. The event, presided over, then and still after 30 years, by Jack McLeod, a novelist and University of Toronto professor of political science, was dubbed POETS Corner. Which stood for Piss On Everything, Tomorrow’s Saturday. (The raunchiness of the title is somewhat muted by the fact that it has been rendered in needlepoint and posted above the table where the group meets.)

There were no dues, no membership rules. You became a member by being brought along by another member. If you were found congenial, you were welcomed back. That’s it. How a notion became a Toronto institution.

(*Actually sticklers will say that POETS started at the Duke of York pub, but will agree that the group adjourned quite quickly from there and put down roots after a few weeks at Dooley’s, an Irish pub presided over by a Greek publican, Steve Barootes.)

The way it worked was that, at noon every Friday, Jack McLeod would take his place as compere at the big round reserved table at the back and be joined by anyone who was available that day.  Sometimes it was a smallish gathering of half a dozen; other times, there were two dozen and additional tables had to be appropriated. Often the largest gathering was, not coincidentally, the Friday closest to Christmas when Steve Barootes laid on a bottle of Black Bush whiskey in appreciation of the table’s custom the other 51 weeks of the year. The event went on every Friday, without fail, for years until the Barootes family sold the building and it was demolished. No one held the decision against the Barootes family, but there followed a peripatetic existence, moving from watering hole to watering hole until, two years later, Steve Barootes got around to opening a new place on King Street across from Roy Thomson Hall. Upstairs, there was a restaurant called Barootes’s, which had such fripperies as tablecloths; downstairs was a more relaxed eatery called Quotes which has, ever since, been the home of POETS, an informal gathering that has become a legend in its own mind(s). As with any such group, there was an ebb and flow of attendance. Some members veered off when they discovered that Friday lunch turned into the whole afternoon lost. Others stopped drinking and, well, what was the point? Still others perhaps found other distractions, or ran out of conversation or patience with other members.

Some members, lamentably, died (for instance classicist Des Conacher, journalist Du Barry Campau and ad copywriter Don Ryan).  Others moved out of town and came only sporadically when Friday and a Toronto visit coincided.

However, a good many people stuck with it and some of the originals are still attending, including Jack McLeod, poet and raconteur Kildare Dobbs, novelist Howard Engel, economist Ed Safarian, photographer John Reeves and magazine consultant D. B. Scott. Others who attended frequently have been  journalists David Cobb, Gerald Owen, Catherine Ford, Kenneth Kidd, Joey Slinger, Martin O’Malley and Charles Oberdorf, radio producer Sam Levine and radio presenter Michael Enright, broadcaster Brian Banks, art dealer Lonti Ebers, art historian Elizabeth Legge and cellist George Meanwell.

And what went on at those lunches? Good talk mostly, about books, about politics, about language, about personal crises, about the state of the world. Occasionally there were contests, such as writing the précis of a great classic in words of one syllable. From time to time there were star turns, mostly by leading novelists such as Sylvia Fraser, Giller Prize winner Richard B. Wright,  John Irving and other notables in town and dragged along. Cheers.

For further information:

Jack McLeod 416-488-6117