Article content

When Montreal poet A.M. Klein is commemorated Thursday with the unveiling of a plaque in his honour in St. Jax Montréal on downtown Ste-Catherine St., the occasion won’t be without a certain irony.

“Klein’s most famous work is a long poem called Portrait of the Poet as Landscape,” poet and critic Derek Webster said Wednesday. “It’s a crushingly accurate description of what it feels like to be a poet in Canada — invisible, part of the background — that also captures the sad compulsion of carrying on in the face of indifference.”

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or A.M. Klein finds a home in Writers' Chapel Back to video

Klein (whose initials stand for Abraham Moses) is a little less invisible now, thanks to a small group of literary devotees who have made the Writers’ Chapel a moving and evocative local counterpart to larger-scale institutions like Paris’s Pantheon and Poets’ Corner in London. Tucked into a side room (a chapel, in fact) in the former Church of St. James the Apostle, between Mackay and Bishop Sts., the project began in 2009 with a desire to honour John Glassco, and was officially founded in 2011. Mavis Gallant was honoured last year; in between came the unveiling of plaques for A.J.M. Smith, F.R. Scott, Hugh MacLennan, Gwethalyn Graham and Louis Hémon. If not all of those names are immediately familiar, there’s a reason for that: the people behind the Writers’ Chapel are on a mission to rescue for posterity important figures who might otherwise be forgotten.