Michel Garneau is a Canadian poet, playwright, performer, scriptwriter, singer, composer and translator. He has achieved renown for his prolific body of work, much of it written in a spirited and mellifluous Québécois French that has helped earn him the tag “the troubadour of Quebec.”
Background
Michel Garneau was born on April 25, 1939, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He is the youngest of a large, bourgeois and cultural family with many children. He is the son of Germaine (d'Amour) Garneau and Antonio Garneau, a judge of the High Court of Quebec. Educated in strict Jesuit schools, Gameau’s adolescent years were tragically sundered by the suicide of his brother, the poet Sylvain Garneau, in 1953. He then left his formal schooling behind to embark on a career in performance and radio.
Education
Garneau enrolled at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, and then left and became a free listener as an actor at the Theater Conservatory D'art Dramatique De Québec in Montreal until June 1955.
Career
Michel Garneau began his career at fifteen. In the mid-1950s he began to work as Radio and television announcer and scriptwriter in Ontario and Quebec. His literary debut, Eau de pluie, was privately printed in 1958. The same year he began to work as a writer till 1960. At Canadian Broadcasting Corporation he worked as a television announcer and scriptwriter from 1960 till 1968. After working as a radio-scriptwriter and announcer responsible for much of the program Image en Tête and the music for Alllô Tôulmônd, he moved briefly to Paris and then returned to Montreal to write, sing, and teach.
He participated in the "Poetry Nights" in 1970 and read a poem from Michel Rossignol and Michel Lalonde: Billboards, on the stage of Gesù, in Montreal. In 1985, he was elected President of the Center for Testing Dramatic Authors, a post he held until 1987. By the 1990s Garneau had published over three dozen plays and collections of poems. Of these, an early play, Quatre a quatre, won him international success, being performed repeatedly at a number of Theatre festivals in France.
He worked as a singer in a band called Les Cailloux as well. During two years Garneau also worked in a position of freelance broadcaster from Paris, France. Last years he translated two works by his friend Leonard Cohen, including “Strange Foreign Music” and “The Book of Permanent Desire”. Finally, he appeared in the documentary film directed by Pierre Perrot, La Grande Allure, where he plays the main character.
Politics
Michel Garneau has displayed a prickly, anti-authoritarian nature throughout his life. He was once imprisoned under Canada’s War Measures Act in 1970 and several years later declined a Governor General’s Award for one of his plays. This event will play a fundamental role in his political awakening. During these years of political upheavals that are preparing for decisive ideological confrontations, Michel Garneau feels the urgent need to redefine his social function.
Views
Quotations:
"A good poem is a small machine that will work if you give it your energy. That's why poetry is not popular. Poetry excludes passivity. It is fatal, a poem. If someone reads it saying "Heille poem, marvel me", it does not work. It is not an art of satisfaction, of satisfaction. It is an art of knowledge, participation in the world. A good poem is a vehicle of emotions, thoughts, ideas, pleasure" - quote from an article dated May 22, 2014, in La Tribune "An afternoon with Michel Garneau"
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
“Conventional in theme, his plays are experimental in language, structure, and technique. He has developed a personal stage idiom based on the spoken word and using all the freedom; his dramatic structures are free-flowing, based on the principles of musical composition; and his style ranges from oneiric realism to the grotesque.” - Usmiani about Michel Garneau's legacy.