It is difficult, midway through the 1980s, to remember a time when John Robert Colombo was not an important figure on the Canadian literary scene. As editor, consultant, reviewer, general cultural gadfly, and the prime practitioner of found poetry in Canada, Colombo has exercised his influence in art and letters for well over two decades, gaining increasing popular acceptance, especially for such mass-market compilations as Colombo's Canadian References (1976) and Colombo's Canadian Quotations (1974), the latter of which generated an occasional column in the Canadian magazine, a popular journal reaching hundreds of thousands of Canadians weekly as a supplement to Saturday newspapers.

Yet long before his efforts as a kind of cultural pack rat brought him fame and a modicum of fortune, he had made his presence known as an adviser to the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council, as a member of the editorial board of the Tamarack...