9TH ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 2 :: rob mclennan on George Bowering
Thai Rope
fr H.D.I want you to match the flowers
along your terraces. Want you
to remember what smokes a pipe
and stay away from it. What grows
is for life and beauty, whoever thought
I’d be invoking their names? Are they
names? Can you give names to what
are not things? The flowers along your
gown’s edge, they distract me
from my hatred, attract me
to nature’s yearning for human company.
Make me nearly desire to be human, say
I’ll be there, you and I, truth
gleaming with a decent reserve,
I’ll be there, to love and comfort you.
When we are both dying, dying,
having lost at love, I’ll be there,
I’ll be smoke.
Just before Christmas, 2019, while going through Vancouver writer George Bowering’s then-newly released Taking Measures: Selected Serial Poems, edited by Stephen Collis (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2019), a volume of nearly seven hundred pages of some of his sixty-plus years’ worth of serial poems, I was reminded of a volume of his from the mid-1980s, Delayed Mercy and Other Poems (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1986), a collection subtitled “late night poems.” For many, the great Bowering poetry title is Kerrisdale Elegies (Coach House Press, 1984; Talonbooks, 2008), a playful and contemporary postmodern re-work of his Vancouver neighbourhood over and across the patter and patterning of Rilke’s infamous Duino Elegies (1923). For whatever reason, Kerrisdale Elegies never really spoke to me, preferring the rhythms at work in his follow-up collection of short lyrics. I’ve long wondered if the long shadow of Kerrisdale Elegies (a book that remains in print, having run through multiple editions and three different publishers) unfairly overtook Delayed Mercy and Other Poems in terms of attention. They are entirely different books, but only two years apart. Bowering seems to agree: in how i wrote certain of my books (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2011), he wrote: “If anyone asked me whether there was a book of mine that I liked and that got pretty well ignored or forgotten by the great unwashed, I would have to say it was Delayed Mercy. In fact, if people have seen fit to mention it over the years, they have usually got the title wrong, making the second word plural.” I don’t quite know if I fit specifically into the demographic Bowering mentions, but this is a volume that has been important to me for a very long time. After discovering a second-hand copy somewhere during my twenties, Delayed Mercy became very generative for my own writing, perhaps moreso than any of his other nearly-one hundred other books of poetry, fiction, criticism or non-fiction.
To be clear: George Bowering was, during my twenties and thirties, my favourite poet, and Delayed Mercy, has been, from the moment I first opened it, my favourite book by George Bowering. “Dark holds no absence, writing in dark / on what was light, a death / brought to life. // Unjust language / is none of your concern, dont touch / the moving finger in the midst / of its telling.” (“Down Long Black Stems / fr Tom Raworth”)
Bowering’s poetry became a repeated and ongoing touchstone for me from a very early point in my own development as a writer, latching onto a variety of elements that were important to his work, from the idea of the book as a unit of composition, to his play with rhythm, cadence and repetition, writing on writers, the constant experimentation, his extensive critical and editorial work, his engagement with his contemporaries, his parlay into the serial poem and his engagement with writing on the local. In Bowering’s poetry, it is the language itself that propels thought, narrative and action. My own second collection, my lyric exploration of family and Glengarry County, Ontario, bury me deep in the green wood (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 1999) was originally prompted by, among other things, Bowering’s Governor General’s Award-winning exploration of family and Alberta in Rocky Mountain Foot (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 1969). Etcetera.
Across my twenties and into my thirties, there were important things I learned from numerous books of Canadian poetry, including Barry McKinnon’s pulp/log (Prince George BC: Caitlin Press, 1991), David Bromige’s Birds of the West (Coach House Press, 1974), David Donnell’s crab cakes w/blueberries (Toronto ON: letters, 1995), John Newlove’s The Night the Dog Smiled (ECW Press, 1986), David Phillips’ The kiss: Poems 1972–1977 (Coach House Press, 1979), Dennis Cooley’s Soul Searching (Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1987), Judith Fitzgerald’s lacerating heartwood (Coach House Press, 1977), Fred Wah’s So Far (Talonbooks, 1991) and Artie Gold’s The Beautiful Chemical Waltz, Selected Poems (Montreal QC: The Muses’ Company, 1992), the latter of which I specifically picked up due to the short preface by Bowering. Essential things that I turned directly into action, into writing. One step leads to another. But it was Bowering’s work that I returned to, more than the rest; Bowering’s work that remained foundational to shaping how it was that I saw language, saw writing and even literary community, constantly working to engage other writers and their work in multiple ways, and through multiple platforms. One expanded, and kept moving forward.
And yes, there were influences on my work by further women poets as well, a list of predominantly male poets during my twenties that had been replaced, overwritten, by predominantly female poets by the time I had entered my forties — Rosmarie Waldrop, Julie Carr, Jessica Smith, Lydia Davis, Pattie McCarthy, Sylvia Legris, etcetera — but this isn’t the space to discuss the reasons for and results of those shifts.
Through his poems, Bowering has been accused of name-dropping, but it was through those names that I expanded my own reading. Through his poetry, his critical work and his editorial work, I asked my own questions, heading off to the library to seek out answers: Who is Daphne Marlatt? Who is Artie Gold? David Phillips? Nicole Brossard? For me, all roads, if would seem, led to and away from George Bowering. Who is Robert Creeley? Who is Robin Blaser? Who is Sheila Watson? Who is Jack Spicer? Who is Judith Fitzgerald, Roy K. Kiyooka, Sharon Thesen, Judith Copithorne, Maria Hindmarch? There are dozens of writers I discovered, thanks to George Bowering. The hub from which so much else of my reading expanded outward. I even read the thesis on Sheila Watson written by his first wife, Angela Bowering’s Figures Cut in Sacred Ground: Illuminati in the Double Hook (Edmonton, AB: NeWest Press, 1989).
What I first latched onto in Delayed Mercy and Other Poems was the cadence, the sing-song elements of Bowering’s rhythms and line-breaks, listening to how his combinations of tempo and language propelled the movement of the lyric, bouncing further across lines and breath and meaning: “All this breathing & blood flow & sometimes / speech, all this becomes a fiction / when you are in a poem. Oh stop / saying ‘poem’ in a poem. // Say ‘boy.’ / All right, in a boy. When you are a pronoun / in a watery grave. Everyone is dead. // This is not a story.” (“It’s Another Miracle / fr bp Nichol”). Every time I opened the collection, I would discover something new, something else. I would discover another prompt that would propel my own writing just a little bit further. Later in the same essay, Bowering continues:
After my Rilkean adventure in my previous book, I was looking for other ways to generate texts without the inference of my will, as Duncan would put it, or ego, as Olson would put it. So I tried to combine two main constraints. In terms of the actual sitting down and writing, I wanted to find a time when my poor brain would be at its most vulnerable, so I started each session’s writing at two in the morning, when I just wanted to get this over with and go back to bed. As it turned out, once I got into the poem, my brain was wide awake, but it didn’t have much of a clue as to where the clear words were coming from. In part, they must have been coming from the experience of reading — before writing each night I would read an entire book of poetry, and you know that reading a book of poetry involves quite a bit of rereading. You can tell whose book I had been reading by looking at the top of that night’s poem. For example, atop the poem called “A Rowboat on Fire” in section 4, it says “fr Amiri Baraka,” and yes, it is ambiguous, as “fr” could be smart guy sixties abbreviation for “for” or “from.”
Oh, and I forgot to mention, each of my poems contains one line from the book I read that night.
Bowering has offered numerous influences on his poetry over the years, from Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth to Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan and eventual Vancouver compatriot Robin Blaser, to Robert Creeley and Charles Olson, and even Canada’s own rumpled, self-made lyric documenter of history and home-brew, Alfred Wellington Purdy. Through the title section of short lyrics, which make up roughly half of the content of Delayed Mercy and Other Poems, Bowering works through his extensive library, which would have been filled with works by mentors, friends and contemporaries, all of whom he opens to allow their influence in. I’m hoping that someday, some overly ambitious and particular student or critic will take it upon themselves to try to figure out which of each author’s books might have triggered each poem, but I won’t even think about attempting anything so bold. “So the old fat flies toward the brain / we were born with. Pardon me, is that / the editorial we? // No editors here, chum, / only blue birds invisible against a blue sky, / mirrors on their wings for your blue eyes.” (“French Something in the Oven / fr Ted Berrigan”).
In certain ways, I deploy “favourite” as an imprecise term: Delayed Mercy and Other Poems is the poetry collection of his I return to most often, for whatever reason. This is the book I carried around with me far longer than any of his other collections, returning to open and reopen, prompting my own thoughts on writing, and my own writing. Okay, so perhaps it is my favourite, after all.
I think there is a strong argument to be made on how Bowering’s most successful poem, “Do Sink” (originally produced as a single-poem chapbook by Vancouver’s Pomflit in 1991, an item that went on to win that year’s bpNichol Chapbook Award), combined a blend of the best of what he worked on and through with Kerrisdale Elegies and Delayed Mercy and Other Poems: that blend of overwriting the structure of another poet’s work, the adherence to pre-determined structures (what he refers to as a “baffle”), and a rhythmic pulse that demands the poem be read aloud for full effect. Composed as a fourteen part poem, three stanzas per, “Do Sink” builds upon John Keats’ 1818 sonnet “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be,” borrowing a line of Keats’ original in each of his own sections. Bowering utilizes the English Romantic poet’s singular poem as a bouncing-off point to write about his own mother’s family, and searching for a home that is no longer there. As I’ve written before, elsewhere, it is impossible to read this poem without hearing it sing.
More recently, I’ve become more aware of how the structure of the poems in Delayed Mercy and Other Poems engages with what Fred Wah referred to as “drunken tai chi,” a process of allowing the conscious mind to move aside, and allow the unconscious, as well as one’s own training, to take the lead. This is something Wah discussed around the original composition of what would become his own, ongoing serial poem, “Music at the Heart of Thinking,” a project that opened through a volume of the same name, published in 1987 by Red Deer College Press (and sporting a blurb by George Bowering on the back cover as well, I might add). As Wah wrote as part of the preface for that first volume:
The notion underlying Music at the Heart of Thinking comes from a Chinese movie I saw in Japan several years ago. It was a martial arts film about the Shao Lin monks in China. One of the monks would practice his tai chi while drunk so he could learn how to be imbalanced in the execution of his moves without falling over. In real battle his opponents were confused by his unpredictability. I’ve tried to use the same method in these pieces, sans booze of course. This method of composition is the practice of negative capability and estrangement I’ve recognized for many year, through playing jazz trumpet, looking at art, and writing poetry. I’ve tried to use it here in a series of improvisations on translations of and critical writing about contemporary texts and ideas.
There is a story I recall from one of Bowering’s own essays, at some point, in which he discusses the years he spent attempting to title a collection Death and other poems, forced to relocate a poem on death into the subsequent manuscript, and beyond, as publishers, in turn, refused to offer a collection with such a title. There certainly are enough references to mortality and death throughout Delayed Mercy and Other Poems. Might this have been one of those? “I stop to inspect the junk / beside the logging truck ranch road, / a piece of some local machine, a red / cigarette package, a Kokonee Beer cap, & finally / a dead calf, its colours perfect, / brown & white, & its legs straight up. (“Gentian Coloured Frock / fr James Schuyler”).
Keep moving. Move outward. Bowering might not have originally prompted my writing or writing life, but he certainly launched me, opening up an enormous series of possibilities. If we speak of literary mothers, or literary antecedents at all, George Bowering would be my literary father. At some point, I should probably thank him for that. “You / write? So do I / my friend, quiet // as a mouse / in the gaze // of a cat.” (“Side / fr Michael McClure”)
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent poetry titles include A halt, which is empty (Mansfield Press, 2019) and Life sentence, (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds), Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com). He is “Interviews Editor” at Queen Mob’s Teahouse, editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. He spent the 2007–8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com
