It turns out the hottest thing about the summer of love was one of London's greatest artists reading about fire.

The artist was the late Jack Chambers and the recording of his poem, Fire, is one of a multitude of London cultural artifacts to be found in the August/September 1967 issue of artscanada magazine.

All the components -- the recording, magazine-style essays and illustrations and a tabloid newspaper about the arts -- are separate. Artscanada arrived in a clear plastic bag in those heady times.

Of London interest in this 1967 bagazine are two separate articles its index calls "John Chambers' recent work and Western Ontario region." (I'm not sure when the artist stopped being called John and became known as Jack, which is the name used almost everywhere now.)

There is the "recording: Nihilist Spasm Band and John Chambers' Fire." In the newspaper, there is an article by the late London photographer and critic Don Vincent titled A Season in London (Ont).

Opening up this bag of delights all these summers later, I find all the London items fascinating.

Fire I find to be incandescent.

Now that it's in context, Fire consumes. Jimi Hendrix, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown and the Ohio Players may all have dabbled with songs about fire. Chambers gets to its heart.

The recording is on a floppy disc or "flexidisc," a cheap form of plastic that bends much more easily than the old similarly sized vinyl 45s. It's almost impossible to play without it skipping, but that wasn't why Fire never seemed too hot until now.

For decades, I thought the poem was just Chambers saying the word "fire" over and over again. That -- and the fine Nihilist Spasm Band of London tune on the flipside -- kept Fire off the turntable.

With Fire in context as part of the London culture featured in the issue, I'm finally hearing it.

Yes, Chambers does intone "fire" at least 13 times in a slightly quavering voice over the first 80 seconds of his poem. For years, that was enough to stop me from listening.

Fire? It didn't even glow.

But, obviously, I gave up too soon in assuming that is all he has to say. "This London, Ontario artist is painter, filmmaker, poet," former Londoner and artscanada's then-new editor, Anne Brodzky, says in opening her article on Chambers' films -- produced in collaboration with him. The article is to be found elsewhere in the artscanada bag.

By the late 1960s, Chambers was winning awards for his painting and his films -- sometimes at the same juried exhibitions. He is perhaps best remembered for his painting Sunday Morning, portraying his two sons watching TV, which sold for $25,000, the highest price paid at the time for a contemporary Canadian painting.

He was also an activist for artists' rights and strongly opposed the war in Vietnam.

His films are hailed as major works in experimental and independent filmmaking history. London-born and BealArt-trained, Chambers also studied in Spain. He died in 1978 of leukemia.

Fire is a Chambers' masterpiece I've ignored too long.

Over little more than six minutes, Fire shows how the great artist could use words as beautifully as his visual images.

In the poem, Chambers suddenly stops his "fire" drone to say "fire turning" twice. The poem then blazes with images of light, sky, breath, illumination and water.

Chambers' voice rises and falls. "We are the images of light and water and the light," he reads. "You are the water in ourselves. We turn and, in each other, turn together -- copious, profuse, abundant."

Chambers concludes his poem by saying, "We are the image of fire and darkness, and darkness."

At artscanada's helm that summer was Brodzky, who had recently left the old public library and art museum here to become artscanada's editor. She had arrived at the Toronto magazine (known previously as Canadian Art) in July 1967 and was to be assistant to Barry Lord, a great admirer of the London arts scene who had helped pull together all the issue's Forest City content. Lord suddenly left and Brodzky was in charge.

"The London years were amazing for me," Brodzky says from San Francisco's Meridian Gallery. She has been in that area for about 20 years.

Her artscanada piece on Chambers' films explores fire imagery in the the artist's work. Fire "can signal holocaust and the terror of grotesque birth into new understanding," she writes. It would also seem to be sexual and liberating, at least in the poem's sense of fire.

The artscanada piece also says Chambers intended to use Fire as the basis for a film-poetry-dance performance. (I would welcome more information on this project, which isn't explored in the recent essay collection, The Films of Jack Chambers, edited by York University's Kathryn Elder.)

Meanwhile, Brodzky reports Chambers' films, revered around the world as iconic works, are often shown in the San Francisco area. She is also investigating to see if the Nihilist Spasm Band, revered around the world as masters of noise music, might one day play the area.

The great Fire of 1967 is still burning.