Feature Poet Interview: George Bowering (Canada)
Adam Fieled: Your poems often allude to the great Romantics, particularly Keats. Do you find the Romantics have continuing relevance for you, though they often get short shrift from experimental/innovative poets?
George Bowering: On my study wall I have a bunch of pictures, including, to my right, two big portraits of poets. There are Charles Olson and Percy Bysshe Shelley. I know. That is odd. Before the summer of 1963 I resisted the Romantics, except for Blake, because everyone I knew was reading Blake, and not just because Allen Ginsberg had mentioned him. Ezra Pound was not happy about the Romantics, nor the "sludge" that followed them, before the light of day provided by Hulme. etc. So of course I read Pound and the people Pound said we should read. My friends and I were reading "Donna mi Prega" or whatever and so on; but in the summer of 1963, during the big poetry bash in Vancouver, Allen Ginsberg, just back from Asia, recited Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," and later "Adonais," and I was swept along. I had expected to follow Olson all over for those 3 or 4 weeks, but was surprised to find myself enjoying being in the orbit of Ginsberg. Then I went to Calgary and taught for three years, and then I went to London, Ontario, to be a graduate student, and took a course on the Romantics, and paid most of attention to Shelley, and so the years went by, and most of the Romantics fanciers I knew were hot for Coleridge, but I persisted in reading Shelley, even reading 10 biographies of Shelley. Eventually I went to Italy and checked out houses Shelley had lived in, went to the Protestant graveyard in Rome, saw grave of Keats and took a leaf to give to my Keats friend in Vancouver, saw the "grave" of Shelley, etc. Yes, I do allude to Keats, especially in my 14-page poem "Do Sink" that explodes Keats's "cease to be" sonnet. I have also written a miniaturized translation of Shelley's "Adonais," something called "He is Not." Etc.
Yes, the innovative poets don't lean on the Romantics much. Shelley, for example, rather than creating new forms, decided to write the best poem going in every verse form then known. I have for decades looked for a way to combine the accuracy of Louis Zukofsky with the openness to spiritual music of the Romantics. I suppose that the most pleasing source is Robert Duncan; and it so happens that of all the poets in the Allen anthology, Duncan was the one we were most early and most closely
connected with, my generation of poets here in Vancouver, Fred Wah, James Reid, Frank Davey, Daphne Marlatt and David Bromige, etc.
AF: The main sequence for which “Blonds on Bikes” is named reminds me very much of Kerouac’s travelogue poems “Mexico City Blues”, though I’d give you the edge for assurance and maturity. Was this a planned resemblance or something that just happened? Following this, do you go in more for conscious craft or happy accidents? Has this changed over the years?
GB: I think that you might be the first person who has noticed this within my hearing. Yes, that sequence was written with the Kerouac method in mind. Not "Mexico City Blues" in this case, but the ones in San Francisco. I made myself an extra rule, as I will do. That is, I had just one entry a day, trying to go as fast and unplanned as Jack, whatever was there, something that worked because like him I
was on foreign ground, in my case Denmark and Germany. Of course, I was older than K was while he was writing his, and I had his space to piss in. So thanks, JK.
I guess I go for happy accidents once I have set up rules, what I used
to call baffles. So I wrote a novel the way I wrote that poem. It was a translation of the Fragments of Heraclitus. That is, I carried that book with me, and what I wrote each day (and I did not miss a day) had to use whatever was in the Heraclitus that day, and also what I had seen and done that day. It takes place "Harry's Fragments," in Australia, Vancouver, Rome and Berlin. It also had to be a spy story, and it had to involve Thai restaurants, something not common
in 1985. Lots of happy accidents. I arrived for passage one in Sydney,
Australia, the same day as the Queen Elizabeth II and the SST, on St Valentine's Day, etc. The SST shows up later in Berlin. It happens that the day we got to Heraclitus's famous "The way up is the way down" on the day I first went to East Berlin,who had a rule that said that you must leave East Berlin by the same way that you entered, the S-Bahn, the U-Bahn, or Checkpoint Charlie. A lot of those happy accidents happened, as they do in all my books, it seems. Right now I
am writing a baseball fiction about the 1962 season in Vancouver, and I have found that there was a UFU that chased people out of the stadium one night in August. In an earlier book I chose to write about 1888-89 in Kamloops, and not mention baseball. Turns out there was a game on New Year's Day that was postponed by an eclipse of the sun. What could I do?
AF: I’ve noticed that you write very candidly and openly about the
aging process. Despite this process, have you felt a sense of
progression as you’ve continued to write? Is this progression perhaps
related to aging?
GB: I never set out to write about the aging process, but there it is, so
of course you have to write with it or you will screw up whatever it is you are writing. I always noted, when I was a young punk, that Hemingway's hero was about 3 or 5 years younger than he when he wrote the story or novel. He did get at the process, too, in his later books, Across the River and Into the Trees, for example.
I think that there might be a sense of progression as you suggest, but I don't know how to say anything intelligent about it. Like other people, I imagine, I see recent work as better than older work, having built on its practice. But once in a while one sees an early piece and wonders how one could have got that. Maybe one at the time was afforded a glimpse into the future when one would be writing better.
But really, a person keeps reading as he gets older, and so crams more
into his head, and one gets more sensitive to human experience. You do not want to repeat yourself, so you try something else, and you might as well make that something better.
George Bowering: On my study wall I have a bunch of pictures, including, to my right, two big portraits of poets. There are Charles Olson and Percy Bysshe Shelley. I know. That is odd. Before the summer of 1963 I resisted the Romantics, except for Blake, because everyone I knew was reading Blake, and not just because Allen Ginsberg had mentioned him. Ezra Pound was not happy about the Romantics, nor the "sludge" that followed them, before the light of day provided by Hulme. etc. So of course I read Pound and the people Pound said we should read. My friends and I were reading "Donna mi Prega" or whatever and so on; but in the summer of 1963, during the big poetry bash in Vancouver, Allen Ginsberg, just back from Asia, recited Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," and later "Adonais," and I was swept along. I had expected to follow Olson all over for those 3 or 4 weeks, but was surprised to find myself enjoying being in the orbit of Ginsberg. Then I went to Calgary and taught for three years, and then I went to London, Ontario, to be a graduate student, and took a course on the Romantics, and paid most of attention to Shelley, and so the years went by, and most of the Romantics fanciers I knew were hot for Coleridge, but I persisted in reading Shelley, even reading 10 biographies of Shelley. Eventually I went to Italy and checked out houses Shelley had lived in, went to the Protestant graveyard in Rome, saw grave of Keats and took a leaf to give to my Keats friend in Vancouver, saw the "grave" of Shelley, etc. Yes, I do allude to Keats, especially in my 14-page poem "Do Sink" that explodes Keats's "cease to be" sonnet. I have also written a miniaturized translation of Shelley's "Adonais," something called "He is Not." Etc.
Yes, the innovative poets don't lean on the Romantics much. Shelley, for example, rather than creating new forms, decided to write the best poem going in every verse form then known. I have for decades looked for a way to combine the accuracy of Louis Zukofsky with the openness to spiritual music of the Romantics. I suppose that the most pleasing source is Robert Duncan; and it so happens that of all the poets in the Allen anthology, Duncan was the one we were most early and most closely
connected with, my generation of poets here in Vancouver, Fred Wah, James Reid, Frank Davey, Daphne Marlatt and David Bromige, etc.
AF: The main sequence for which “Blonds on Bikes” is named reminds me very much of Kerouac’s travelogue poems “Mexico City Blues”, though I’d give you the edge for assurance and maturity. Was this a planned resemblance or something that just happened? Following this, do you go in more for conscious craft or happy accidents? Has this changed over the years?
GB: I think that you might be the first person who has noticed this within my hearing. Yes, that sequence was written with the Kerouac method in mind. Not "Mexico City Blues" in this case, but the ones in San Francisco. I made myself an extra rule, as I will do. That is, I had just one entry a day, trying to go as fast and unplanned as Jack, whatever was there, something that worked because like him I
was on foreign ground, in my case Denmark and Germany. Of course, I was older than K was while he was writing his, and I had his space to piss in. So thanks, JK.
I guess I go for happy accidents once I have set up rules, what I used
to call baffles. So I wrote a novel the way I wrote that poem. It was a translation of the Fragments of Heraclitus. That is, I carried that book with me, and what I wrote each day (and I did not miss a day) had to use whatever was in the Heraclitus that day, and also what I had seen and done that day. It takes place "Harry's Fragments," in Australia, Vancouver, Rome and Berlin. It also had to be a spy story, and it had to involve Thai restaurants, something not common
in 1985. Lots of happy accidents. I arrived for passage one in Sydney,
Australia, the same day as the Queen Elizabeth II and the SST, on St Valentine's Day, etc. The SST shows up later in Berlin. It happens that the day we got to Heraclitus's famous "The way up is the way down" on the day I first went to East Berlin,who had a rule that said that you must leave East Berlin by the same way that you entered, the S-Bahn, the U-Bahn, or Checkpoint Charlie. A lot of those happy accidents happened, as they do in all my books, it seems. Right now I
am writing a baseball fiction about the 1962 season in Vancouver, and I have found that there was a UFU that chased people out of the stadium one night in August. In an earlier book I chose to write about 1888-89 in Kamloops, and not mention baseball. Turns out there was a game on New Year's Day that was postponed by an eclipse of the sun. What could I do?
AF: I’ve noticed that you write very candidly and openly about the
aging process. Despite this process, have you felt a sense of
progression as you’ve continued to write? Is this progression perhaps
related to aging?
GB: I never set out to write about the aging process, but there it is, so
of course you have to write with it or you will screw up whatever it is you are writing. I always noted, when I was a young punk, that Hemingway's hero was about 3 or 5 years younger than he when he wrote the story or novel. He did get at the process, too, in his later books, Across the River and Into the Trees, for example.
I think that there might be a sense of progression as you suggest, but I don't know how to say anything intelligent about it. Like other people, I imagine, I see recent work as better than older work, having built on its practice. But once in a while one sees an early piece and wonders how one could have got that. Maybe one at the time was afforded a glimpse into the future when one would be writing better.
But really, a person keeps reading as he gets older, and so crams more
into his head, and one gets more sensitive to human experience. You do not want to repeat yourself, so you try something else, and you might as well make that something better.
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