Gaston Miron

Gaston Miron studied at Université de Montréal. The recorded working language is French. The field of work recorded is poetry. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are poetry. Residence is recorded at Montreal. Work by Gaston Miron is recorded in the collections of Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal and print collection of the national Library of BAnQ. Distinctions recorded are Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, Molson Prize, Prix Québec-Paris and Officer of the National Order of Quebec.

• Name — Gaston Miron • Born — 8 January 1928 • Birthplace — Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, Quebec, Canada • Died — 14 December 1996 • Place of death — Montreal, Quebec, Canada • Occupation — Poet • Language — French • Movement — Quebec's Quiet Revolution

Gaston Miron was born in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, in the Laurentian Mountains region, 100 kilometers north of Montreal. His father, Charles-August Miron, was a successful carpenter-entrepreneur, and his death in 1940 was the decisive event of his son's childhood. The next year, finding herself in a precarious financial situation, Gaston's mother sent her son to study as a scholarship student at a Brothers of the Sacred Heart boarding school near Granby in Montérégie. At Sacred Heart, young Miron's plan was to pursue a career in education as a teaching brother. Upon graduation, however, after working for a year in a school near Montreal, he renounced his vows and planned-for career as a schoolteacher. His long, painful march towards his vocation as a man of letters had begun.

On his return to Montreal, he became involved in dozens of artistic and political circles based in the cafés around St-Louis Square, where he lived. His flamboyant style and passionate speeches made him a popular figure in the then revitalizing Plateau Mont-Royal. The poems he wrote in the early 1960s focused on the inferior status of the French language in Canada and on the turbulent Quebecois political situation. He published some of them in the new literary journals of the Quiet Revolution like Liberté and the short-lived but important Parti Pris. Many of these poems would be widely circulated in manuscript form thanks to Miron's popularity among a certain literary elite. His poetry was virtually unknown to the general public until 1966, when Jacques Brault delivered an important lecture, "Miron le Magnifique," at the University of Montréal which began: "Qui parmi nous ne connaît pas Gaston Miron?" (Who among us does not know Gaston Miron?). In the late 1960s, Miron starred in several poetry readings, the most celebrated being that of 27 March 1970, the legendary "Nuit de la Poésie," which attracted an audience of 4000 people to the Latin Quarter's Gesù Theatre. In 1969, after a brief affair with her mother, he became the father of his only child, Emmanuelle, whom he raised. Near the end of the 1960s, many friends and colleagues pressured Miron to allow his dispersed works to be published as a book. Despite his concern that his poems were not yet ready, Miron agreed and published L'homme rapaillé in 1970. The book, which alternates between touching love lyrics and painful texts expressing the alienation of French-speaking Québécois, was an instant success. Characterized by the high quality of their poetic expression, poems like La Bâteche, Monologues de l'aliénation délirante, and L'Amour et le militant owe no small debt to Quebec's oral tradition. Shortly after the publication of his book, Miron was arrested and jailed without trial during the events of the October Crisis. This arrest solidified his commitment to politics and support for Quebec's political independence. In 1975, he published the collection Courtepointes, which would later be integrated into L'homme rapaillé. The crushing defeat of the first Quebecois referendum on independence in May 1980 was a bitter disappointment for Miron, as it was for other committed separatists. During the 1980s, Miron travelled widely, especially in France, where he enjoyed old friendships and felt at ease in his language while appreciating the praise his poetry was now receiving. The defeat of the second referendum on Quebecois independence on 30 October 1995, albeit by a narrow margin, was equally disheartening for Miron. In December 1996 Miron died in Montreal and became the first Quebecois author to receive a state funeral. The City of Montreal honoured the memory of Gaston Miron by giving his name to the building that currently hosts the city's arts council offices. The neoclassical building on Sherbrooke Street faces Lafontaine Park, and was the site of the city's main public library until 2002.

• Deux sangs (co-authored by Gaston Miron and Olivier Marchand), Montréal, Éditions de l'Hexagone, 1953. • L'homme rapaillé, Montréal, Presses de l'Université de Montréal (for the first edition), 1970. • Courtepointes, Ottawa, Éditions de l'Université d'Ottawa, 1975. • The March to Love: Selected Poems of Gaston Miron (International Poetry Series). Edited by Douglas Jones. Translations by Douglas Jones, Louis Simpson, John Glassco, Marc Plourde, Brenda Fleet, Dennis Egan. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987. • À bout portant (correspondance 1954–1965), Éditions Lemeac, 1989. Letters exchanged between Gaston Miron and his French friend Claude Haeffely. • Poèmes épars, edition of texts from 1947 à 1995, under the direction of Marie-Andrée Beaudet and Pierre Nepveu, Montréal, Éditions de l'Hexagone, 2003. • Un long chemin (d'autres proses), texts in prose, under the direction of Marie-Andrée Beaudet and Pierre Nepveu, Montréal, Éditions de l'Hexagone, 2004

• Jacques Brault. (1967). "Miron le magnifique", in Chemin faisant, Montréal, Boréal, coll. "papiers collés", 1994 [1975], p. 23–55. • Pierre Nepveu (1979). Les mots à l'écoute, Québec, Les Presses de l'Université Laval / Éditions Nota bene, 1979 / 2002. • Yannick Gasquy-Resch (2003). Gaston Miron, le Forcené magnifique, Éditions Hurtubise. • Christine Tellier (2003) Jeunesse et poésie. De l'Ordre de Bon Temps aux Éditions de l'Hexagone, Montréal, Fides, 322 pp. (Nouvelles études québécoises). • Claude Filteau (2005). L'espace poétique de Gaston Miron, preface by Jerusa Pires Ferreira, Limoges, Presses Universitaires de Limoges, coll. "Francophonie", 2005, 310 pp. • Pierre Nepveu (2011). Gaston Miron: La vie d'un homme, Montreal, Éditions Boréal, 2011, 904 pp. • Various popular and "pop" music artists (2011). Douze hommes rapaillés (vol. 1 and 2). Songs inspired by Miron's poems and published on two digital compact discs as well as MP3 files downloadable online. • David Palmieri. "From Personalism to Decolonization: Gaston Miron between French Canada and Quebec," Quebec Studies 60 (2015).

Gaston Miron is recorded as having received Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, Molson Prize and Prix Québec-Paris.