The following interview is the fifth installment of a nine-part series of conversations with BC poets about their new poetry collections. New interviews will be posted every Tuesday and Thursday throughout April for National Poetry Month 2019. All interviews were conducted by Rob Taylor, editor of the recent anthology What the Poets Are Doing: Canadian Poets in Conversation (Nightwood Editions).
The world speaks to me – George Bowering
in sentences. I can’t push words here and there the way clay sculptor poets and furniture movers do, the way Daphne and Fred can, this is not literary criticism, this is an old poet sitting naked in a chair almost remembering what he has been doing all this time. A leopard steps on very big quiet feet across the mind’s pasture, and this brain fresh out of the icebox tries to watch him till he disappears in the trees also placed there by an inattentive imagination. This is not literary theory but a cluttered desk his eyes see bit by bit, a clutter he calls method, a mess he will never catch up to. The world speaks to him this way, piece by piece, and for whole minutes he forgets his nakedness the way large cats forget gravity—
Reprinted with permission from Some End/West Broadway by George Bowering and George Stanley (New Star Books, 2018).
Rob Taylor: When did you first meet one another? Was it in real life or in books? Was it literary love at first sight/read?
George Stanley (GS): I first met George Bowering in June of 1971 when I returned from Europe. I had no place to stay and Stan Persky arranged for me to stay upstairs at George and Angela’s place on York Avenue. I guess it was love at first sight because he had just written a couple of wonderful poems, one called “Summer Solstice” and one called “Desert Elm.”
We were very close starting in the summer of 1971, and our friendship gradually grew over the years. We had a pub night every Tuesday night and that continued along even after I moved to northern BC, I would come back and go to it. Then in the late 90s we had this group called “Dads and Tads.” We called it that because all of us were either in our sixties or our twenties. We met at Shenanigans bar on Robson Street. We’d meet in the early evening and by 9 pm it turned into a loud Korean nightclub.
Also, when I went up to Terrace to teach Canadian literature I began reading his novels. I really began to respect him as a great writer when I read his novels.
George Bowering (GB): My education and training in poetry in the early days was greatly involved with the San Francisco poets, Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser and Michael McClure, and as things went, to the next batch, Stan Persky and Joanne Kyger and George Stanley. It was normal that I should be living in that rented bungalow in Kits with George—it had been what we all called an urban commune for years, but around that time, five of the seven members moved west a block to York Street West, while Angela and I continued to rent the place, living with the new baby Thea and our famous chihuahuas, Frank and Small. We let George take over the upstairs. I guess it was still a kind of poetry commune, but the members included a baby and two little dogs.
Your new book, Some End/West Broadway (New Star Books), is itself a kind of poetry commune: two books, one by each of you, brought together back-to-back as one creature. The books don’t live in isolation, though, but “speak” directly to one another in a number of ways. Both feature a “Letter” to the other poet, for instance. Bowering, you kick it off, writing an epistolary poem to Stanley in response to a section from West Broadway, and Stanley then replies. Further on, in two different poems, one by each of you, Bowering appears and lies down in (or on) one of Stanley’s poems.
I mean, this is all totally normal stuff that happens in most poetry books, but it does open up a real chicken-and-egg question about this book’s origin: were those poems late additions, stitching the two manuscripts together, or did the idea of the collaboration come in part from this emerging, occasionally prostrate, back-and-forth?
The work of poetry is never individual; poets are engaged in a big work presented to all. Wouldn’t it be great if Thomas Wyatt could reply to something you added to one of his poems?
– George Bowering
GB: As well as I can remember, I remember that I had read George Stanley’s poem about the girl running across Broadway before I read it in the book. But had I? I am pretty sure that he did not write the reply to that poem before—oh, damn! Now I cannot reconstruct the sequence! And it is more complicated than that: one of my poems makes reference to a great poem of George’s that was published in his previous book, A Tall, Serious Girl. This situation reminds me of walking on pieces of floating wood. But I am not bothered at all. For one thing, the work of poetry is never individual; poets are engaged in a big work presented to all. Wouldn’t it be great if Thomas Wyatt could reply to something you added to one of his poems? In my fiction, I have on occasion borrowed people invented by other novelists, from Audrey Thomas, Daphne Marlatt, David Markson, and even Louis L’Amour.
GS: And also George has introduced fictional characters into his so-called “histories” like Bowering’s BC.
For the book, I told Rolf Maurer (our publisher at New Star Books) that I had a 40-page manuscript and Rolf said it wasn’t enough for a book. So then George said to me, “Well, I’ve got a 40-page manuscript too, so let’s put them together.” I think Rolf was really against the idea at the beginning but George Bowering convinced him. After we agreed to do the book together, we wrote the two letters and the other poems that refer to each other. I think… As George says, it’s kind of hard to put the sequence together.
Speaking of your publisher, GS, all of your books from the last 20+ years (back to 1995’s Gentle Northern Summer) have been published with New Star. In fact, both of you were involved in the early years of the press, when it was the Georgia Straight Writing Supplement and then Vancouver Community Press. GS, can you talk about how your relationship with New Star influenced where you’ve gone with your writing? Do you think working with a Vancouver-based publisher had any role in your steadily-increasing focus on the city?
GS: I don’t think Rolf Maurer has any direct influence on my writing, but I’m certainly grateful to Rolf for publishing my books. The first book he published of mine was in 1995, as you say, but I’ve known Rolf since back to the 80s when he first took over New Star from Lanny Beckman. So he’s been a good friend for a long time. But I don’t think it’s mattered that New Star is in Vancouver. My publisher could be in Toronto.
GB, you’ve had eight books published or reissued with New Star too (seven-and-a-half, I guess), though you’ve published with many other presses in between the New Star titles. Do you think the books you’ve published with New Star have a common thread, something which makes them “New Star books”?
GB: Eight? Are you counting Autobiology? That works. It was during those wonderful Kits years in the 70s that we took to working a home-made press that had a number of names before it became New Star. I like it because it has the same initials as the Nihilist Spasm Band, the great noise group in London, Ontario, that I hung around with. That is, believe it or not, significant. In a way, there is a common thread among several of my New Star Press books: Rolf likes to keep some of my older better titles in print after their Toronto publishers have decided not to for their Toronto reasons. A big part of my reason for publishing with New Star is our history, and another big part is that they have been the publisher of David Bromige, Lisa Robertson, Brian Fawcett, Stan Persky—and George Stanley.
You are two of the great chroniclers of the city of Vancouver. What is it about this city in particular that makes you want to write about it? Or is it more about you than it is the city? Would you do the same in Moose Jaw? New York?
GB: I had to think for a minute. I think that when I lived in Calgary, Montreal, and London, Ontario, I didn’t write poems about Vancouver. But it is certainly not that my poems were about me. It is true that when I was a tyro poet in the exciting days of youth, I often made remarks about the importance of place in my poems. Right now I am looking at a photo I took looking down at a fishing village in Jalisco that I have spent a lot of time in. I wrote poems there, and the photo makes me nostalgic, while the poems do not. I’m not sure what that tells me, but it tells me.
How about you, GS?
GS: My focus on the city goes all the way back to my grade 11 teacher, Edward Dermot Doyle, who is the person to whom my long poem “San Francisco’s Gone” is dedicated. Part of his teaching in the American Literature class was to introduce the students to the history of San Francisco. Ever since then, I’ve written about the city I was in. I wrote a lot of poems in San Francisco about San Francisco; then when I moved to Vancouver in 1971, I wrote a couple poems about Vancouver; then I was in Terrace for 15 years and most of what I wrote was about the town and its history. I’ve been a “city poet.” Probably about 70% of everything I’ve written deals directly with the city I’ve been living in.
GB, you open your half of the book, Some End, with a series of poems about coming “out of the icebox,” which I assume refers to surviving a heart attack in 2015, which involved your being placed in a “cooling machine” to lower your temperature and “save the brain” (and which later turned you into the poster boy for Vancouver General Hospital, grinning down on 10th Avenue cyclists). Did that event change in any way what you wanted to say in your writing? Your urgency to say it?
I didn’t have a heart attack, despite what one of those posters said—I had a cardiac arrest, which means STOP. I was very aware of my rare luck. But I did not hurry to the desk with particular intent.
– George Bowering
GB: You mean did the angel of death make me want to get the important stuff said before it was too late? For those looking on, mainly my dear Jean, it could have been a question of the end by death or the end of writing by brain damage. Well, it is true that a lot of my poems since that time have been written while thinking of mortality, and at my age you think of dying a lot of the time. But as to the important effect—there hasn’t been a substantial change in the way I write poems. I was reading my 2018 poems yesterday, and I thought they were getting better and better, if that is not immodest. But if it is true, that is not because of what I have been writing about. I didn’t have a heart attack, despite what one of those posters said—I had a cardiac arrest, which means STOP. I was very aware of my rare luck. But I did not hurry to the desk with particular intent. Often I get asked questions that enquire about what I wanted to say. But I write what the muse tells me to write.
GS: I write what the muse tells me to write, too. One thing that I said after a reading at Berkeley was, “Creativity is the enemy of inspiration.” Creativity is thought of as something genetic: creativity, talent, genius, all that… No.
When George says “I write what the muse tells me to write” he’s following on the great poet Jack Spicer, who is my mentor. That’s another thing that brought George and me together: our love and honour of Spicer.
Both your muses are in good shape!
GS, when your muse tells you what to write, they seem to want you to revisit old poems as much as to write new ones: the opening section of West Broadway was published under the same title as the closing poem in your 2013 collection After Desire (New Star, 2013). Similarly, parts one and two of Vancouver: A Poem (New Star, 2008) were published in At Andy’s (New Star, 2000). This seems to suggest you work on your long poems over a significant stretch of time, slowing collaging them together. Is that accurate? Do you think these poems are “over” when you publish them the first time, or do you have some inkling in the back (or front) of your mind that they are going to continue to grow?
GS: I do work on my long poems over a significant stretch of time, but I don’t collage them. They come chronologically. But they’re also part of a longer sequence of books located in the same city, so Vancouver: A Poem is followed by West Broadway and then what I’m writing right now, the first part of which is called “Balaclava Street.”
So, say the poem “West Broadway” at the end of After Desire which shows up in this book: when you put that in After Desire were you thinking it was done and then you kept going or were you thinking it was going to keep expanding from there?
GS: At the point of publishing After Desire it was not done. Or no, maybe it was. I don’t know. I don’t remember whether it was done! But I feel alright publishing something, knowing that I’ll be able to follow it up in the next book.
GB: Or if he doesn’t, maybe I will.
Or you’ll follow one another up in the same book, like you did here. Soon you’ll be writing poems together, handing the pen back and forth one word at a time! Your friendship, on the page and in real life, is obviously a valuable and productive one.
GB, in the title poem in Some End, you write “where did lyric poems / ever get me? I always said poems weren’t / supposed to get you anywhere but the end of the poem.” And yet the rest of the book is filled with people who were brought to you, GB, in one way or another, by poetry: Daphne Marlatt, Fred Wah, George Stanley, Peter Culley, Al Purdy, bp Nichol, Margaret Avison, Jamie Reid (the book closes with a very moving tribute to Reid). What role does lyric poetry play for you in your life? And how is it tied to your literary friendships, with GS and the many others?
The Irish brothers, George and Gerald Stanley, became a poet and a priest, two professions in which one serves, in ways quite similar, I think.
– George Bowering
GB: Lyric poetry has been getting a bad name in the past decade or two, at least among the poets and critics I like to hang with. I take part in the putdown, I will admit, but I also have to admit that I like poetry that sings. This is a confusing issue, isn’t it? Listen to those erstwhile friends Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer. They are both serial poets, two of the San Francisco poets who began using that term. Duncan was, to my ear, a lyric poet. He even tried singing with his honking voice, and you’d see him strongly tempted to dance on the stage. Spicer, though, was very plain-spoken. He wrote in sentences. You will hear his influence in the public transit poems of my friend George Stanley. Anyway, the poem you quote here is part of the unoriginal argument I have been making all this time, that poets serve—they don’t get served.
GS: Poets serve, they don’t get served? I’m not sure what that means. I agree, though, that the lyric is the essential in poetry even if you find the lyric in some larger form, like among the Romantic Poets. George has always had a fascination with Percy Bysshe Shelley‘s poetry, so we read some Shelley poetry publicly. When I think of poetry I think of the lyricism of Shelley, of Anna Akhmatova, of W.B. Yeats.
GB, care to clarify who’s serving who?
GB: The Irish brothers, George and Gerald Stanley, became a poet and a priest, two professions in which one serves, in ways quite similar, I think. Even if the poet, like Shelley, is a renowned atheist.
Read part 2 now here.
George Bowering was born in Penticton, BC. He spent his freshman year at Victoria College, then joined the RCAF for three years, then got two degrees at UBC, then went to teach at Calgary, Sir George Williams, Simon Fraser, and three European universities. Then he retired so that he would have time to write books and so on. He is currently writing a little book in which he looks at the poetry of John Keats, Emily Brönte, Sir Philip Sidney and others.
George Stanley is the author of seven previous books, the most recent being After Desire (2013), Vancouver: A Poem (2008), and North of California St. (2014), which collects poems from three earlier, out–of–print books. Born in San Francisco and living in Canada since 1970, Stanley was the 2006 recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award from the American Poetry Society.
Rob Taylor is the author of three poetry collections, including The News (Gaspereau Press, 2016), which was a finalist for the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Rob is also the editor of What the Poets Are Doing: Canadian Poets in Conversation (Nightwood Editions, 2018) and guest editor of the 2019 edition of The Best Canadian Poetry in English (Biblioasis, 2019). In 2015, Rob received the City of Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award for the Literary Arts, as an emerging artist. He lives in Port Moody, BC with his wife and son.
Read more 2019 National Poetry Month features here.
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