Dates

• Existence: 1942 - 2019

Biography

Nelson Ball (born 1942) was one of Canada’s most respected non-mainstream poets. He lived in Paris, Ontario, from 1985 in a building built in 1929 by the Canada Gypsum and Alabastine company as their head office. He relocated there from Toronto with his wife, the painter Barbara Caruso who died in 2009. Their cavernous home (9,000 square feet and bought for a bargain price) was large enough for Caruso to maintain studio space for her oversized canvases, and for Ball to concentrate on his rare and second-hand book-selling business, which specialised in non-mainstream Canadian poetry. In 1972 Ball took a hiatus from writing, which lasted until 1987.

Ball and Caruso were married in 1965 and lived first in the city of Kitchener, in southern Ontario. In 1967 they moved to Toronto and established themselves there at the centre of that city’s emerging avant-garde poetry scene. Nelson founded Weed/Flower Press in 1965 and ran it for nine years publishing not only his own minimalist poetry, but also early works of some of Canada’s finest poets. Ball’s own poetry was also published by Seripress, Coach House Press, and CURVD H&z; and, in the twenty-first century, by BookThug, Rubblestone Press, The Mercury Press, fingerprinting inkoperated, above/ground press, Imagist Press, press-press-pull/alabastine press, and many others.

During the life of Weed/Flower Press, Nelson Ball produced forty beautifully prepared and executed chapbooks and books. Barbara Caruso was responsible for designing some of the covers (which for that reason enhances their specialness). Caruso’s cover design for Rosemary Eckert’s The Story of Cinderella (1970) won the ‘The Look of Books Award’. Also in 1970 Weed/Flower published bpNichol’s The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid, one of a collection of four titles for which Nichol received the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for 1970. Weed/Flower published the first Canadian edition of Nichol’s Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer (1973), originally published by Bob Cobbing in London in 1967; and Ball compiled its Coach House Books edition in 2004. Ball also published two poetry journals, Weed (1966–1967) and Hyphid (1967).

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