The Canadian military didn’t participate in the US war effort in Vietnam, but Canadians were involved in the conflict in many ways, whether watching reports on television, marching in protests, counselling draft dodgers, sending humanitarian aid to Vietnam, or manufacturing materiel for the US military.
Canadian writers often addressed the war in their work, but many of these texts haven’t been republished since the conflict ended. This online anthology of poems, short fiction, and essays in English from 1964-75 is intended to bring such writings back into the public eye so they can be considered as evidence of how Canadian literature approached the conflict.
The texts appear with idiosyncratic spellings, punctuation, and formatting preserved. Some of the texts centrally consider Vietnam; in others, references to the war are indications of how the conflict influenced the writers’ perspectives on other issues. The texts featured here by no means constitute the complete corpus of wartime Canadian literature about the conflict in Vietnam, but they offer a range of voices from across the war years.
Click here to read an introductory essay about the Vietnam War and Canadian literature.
Poetry
Milton Acorn, “The Canadian Statue of Liberty Speaks to the U.S. Draft Dodgers”
Milton Acorn, “The War in Viet Nam”
Henry Beissel, “Good Tidings and Good Will in a Monsoon Drizzle”
Earle Birney, “Canada: Case History: 1973”
Earle Birney, “Looking From Oregon”
Earle Birney, “Way to the West”
bill bissett, “As I Think of Where Today I Can Get th Rent Money”
bill bissett, “LOVE OF LIFE, th 49th PARALLELL”
George Bowering, “Even Los Angeles”
George Bowering, “The Late News”
George Bowering, “Place Names in the Global Village”
David Helwig, “After the Deaths at Kent State”
George Jonas, “American Girl: A Canadian View”
Dennis Lee, “The Children in Nathan Phillips Square”
Pat Lowther, “The Earth Sings Mi-Fa-Mi”
Pat Lowther, “A Lullaby Not to Be Sung”
David McFadden, “For Dwight D. Eisenhower on His Death”
James Reid, “Saturna Island as Vietnam”
David Solway, “Paris Peace Talks”
Raymond Souster, “Death Chant for Mr. Johnson’s America”
Tom Wayman, “The Dow Recruiter, or This Young Man Is Making up His Mind”
Tom Wayman, “For the American Deserters”
Tom Wayman, “The Indochina Victory Celebration, April 26, 1975”
Tom Wayman, “There’s a Kind of Hush”
Short Fiction
Elisabeth Harvor, “A Day at the Front, a Day at the Border”
David Lewis Stein, “The Night of the Little Brown Men”
Essays
Milton Acorn, “What Are the Odds?”
Henry Beissel “A New Nest of Eagles”
George Grant, “From Roosevelt to LBJ”
David Helwig, “A Borderline Case”
Farley Mowat, “Farley Mowat Speaks Out on Vietnam”