George Bowering, Pearl

  

Years

He was the boy
watching his mother
paring a big apple at the kitchen sink,
trying to release the peel
in one piece. 

A year or two later, whatever
she was doing at the kitchen sink
window, she tried to
retain her cigarette ash
in one cigarette length. 

When he was already
an old man,
he received the news
that she was still alive
at one hundred years.

There’s a mournful touch to Vancouver poet George Bowering’s latest poetry title, Pearl (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2026), a collection self-described as an assemblage of “last poems,” named for his late mother, who died in 2016, nearly three months after her one hundredth birthday. In her “Postscript” to the collection, Bowering’s wife Jean Baird describes the process of assisting George write and edit the poems and assemble the collection, as his eyesight diminished, writing that “[…] nothing prepared me for bearing witness to George slowly losing his sight and the many consequences of it.” What happens when a writer, especially one so prolific for so long, loses the ability to see, to write, to read? She writes, a bit further on: “Some of the poems in this collection were written when George had sight to use his computer. When that was no longer possible, he wrote poems long hand and very large, and I would type them up. I was now the one using a magnifying glass to try to decipher the scrawl.”

Regular readers might already be aware that Bowering’s work has been a touchstone of mine for some time, a poet I latched onto during my twenties and learned much from, and a handful of titles I’ve reviewed over the past few years include Good Morning Poems: A start to the day from famous English-language poets (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2023) [see my review of such here], Soft Zipper (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2021) [see my review of such here], Taking Measures: Selected Serial Poems by George Bowering, edited by Stephen Collis (Talonbooks, 2019) [see my review of such here], How I Wrote Certain of My Books (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2011) [see my review of such here] and MyDarling Nellie Grey (Talonbooks, 2010) [see my review of such here].

“It’s a bushy book,” Bowering writes, as part of his introduction to this new collection, “meaning that it’s made up of a lot of singularities. It doesn’t have a consistency.” Consistency, as Bowering suggests, is important, especially for a poet well-known for dozens of poetry collections built as self-contained projects, or, as he’s called them, “baffles.” He’s built a poetry (and beyond) career through the bricks of individual, self-contained long poems, book by book by book, although any assemblage of these self-described singularities isn’t a new structure for him. He has poetry collections that work as long poems, as projects, but just as adamant a thread through his work are the collections of loose poems, put together into a singular manuscript of recent or recent-enough, as a collection of strays. One could go back to In the Flesh (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 1974), as he wrote to open the introduction, “I Never Felt Such Love,” to that slim volume:

            The following collection is made of magazine verse written after I turned thirty. It seems to me to be not of a piece necessarily, but of a period that was entered upon & is done with. For already in my early thirties I was no longer writing magazine verse, or occasional verse. Nearly all the poems I have written in the past few years have been a book long. When I’m kidding around I refer to this present as my symphonic period. But not really kidding—you know that.

I’m reminded of Michael Ondaatje’s variation on Jack Spicer’s mantra included in his introduction to The Long Poem Anthology (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1978): the poems can no longer live on their own than can we. It would seem that Bowering has always composed stand-alone orphans, eventually clustering them together every so often into book-length manuscripts to keep them out of the cold. One could point to further volumes such as The Catch (McClelland & Stewart, 1976), Another Mouth (McClelland & Stewart, 1979), Smoking Mirror (Edmonton AB: Longspoon Press, 1982), Urban Snow (Talonbooks, 1992) and the more recent Teeth: Poems 2006-2011 (Mansfield Press, 2013) [see my review of such here] and Could Be (New Star Books, 2021) [see my review of such here]. It feels quite a trajectory of Bowering regularly gathering his orphans, consistently inconsistent, one might say. Most readers wouldn’t have noticed, most likely, due to how many other long poem poetry titles of his were appearing in print around and through the same period, obscuring this particular thread of his work. Many writers might have one or two collections of strays, or even a career’s worth, but George might have more than a dozen, buried in the seventy or eighty other poetry titles he’s published since the early 1960s. These are Bowering’s occasional volumes of occasionals, poems that didn’t necessarily fit together but were assembled thus, needing (one might say) a house of their own. As the preface to The Catch begins, offering:

Any collection of verse is really a recollection. The mind in composition is a gatherer, a net dropt into a river or spread upon the sea. In one’s early years of learning to write, the collection may be a springing from consciousness, out of the inconstant world of external surprise. One Sunday I was driving past some retirement apartments, & saw two old women in full Salvation Army regalia getting into a car that bore a huge bumper sticker reading: HELL’S GATE. A few blocks to the west I drove by an old folks’ recreation place with a block-long sign that declared: TERMINAL CITY LAWN BOWLING CLUB. A true story a satirist such as Earle Birney might have made much of.

For Pearl, the book is assembled as sections, some as short as a single, one or two page poem: “Divergences,” “Writing Recibiendo,” “How I Learned, Am Learning: An Essay,” “Some Last Poems,” “David Robinson,” “Pearl,” “Stuart Ross,” “Light Verse,” “Kent Johnson” and “Life Sentences,” with preface by the author and “Postscript by Jean Baird,” Bowering’s spouse and co-conspirator. Some poem-sections sit as prose poems, others as clusters of shorter lyrics. There are poems for friends, a process he’s been composing for decades, and throughout multiple collections, stretched out a bit here, from the purely single-poem to the chapbook-length cluster. There are echoes, as well, of the short, first-person poems that he composed through Teeth, and even a nine-part sequence referred to in its title as an “essay,” offering a cadence of visual cadence and line-break comparable to “Desert Elm,” Baseball: A Poem in the Magic Number Nine (Coach House Press, 1976), Delayed Mercy & Other Poems (Coach House Press, 1986) [see the essay I wrote on such here] and “Do Sink.” As the sequence begins:

Greater than his brother Joe,
Dominic DiMaggio
                                had signature
octagonal centre field wire-framed
eyeglasses. 

                        I didn’t have my specs
yet, but I agreed with the Fenway
song, knowing objectivity might
get you somewhere in baseball
business, but look, we Red Sox
swim in caramel-thick sentimentality. 

                                    People,
old and young, think they know
something, discount us for
writing poems about baseball.

The Romantic Poets and baseball and his mother, as Bowering gets as close to the bone on his life’s work through poetry as might be possible in a single collection, attempting something fresh by moving as much back into his own history as into the future. It is interesting that Bowering’s “Phil Hall” poems, produced in 2025 as a chapbook by Stuart Ross’ Proper Tales Press [see my review of such here], don’t appear in this collection. It is interesting, also, the framing and feature of the author’s mother, given the section of her poems but a slice of the overall collage of this collection, very different, say, than Winnipeg poet Dennis Cooley’s book-length long poem for his own mother, Irene (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 2000) [my review of such buried in the Globe and Mail online archive]. What one might say about boys and their mothers, perhaps. There are further examples, to be sure. Bowering’s mother purposefully sits at the centre of this assemblage of clusters, one might suppose, around which all else swirls. Or, as the piece “Stuart Ross” begins, writing:

The first time I laid eyes on Stuart Ross was from the north shore of Slocan Lake.

Where a kayak hove into sight.

Wait, I murmured to myself, who is the gink with the curly white hair who is plying that double-headed paddle?

Can it be the Ontario poet who had to stop his car high in the West Kootenay highway because he realized that he had been driving with his eyes closed by abject fear for twenty kilometres?

Sure enough. I watched the figure plying his craft across the lake, and I was filled with envy.

A sin, don’t you know?

What became the final chapbook by Saskatchewan poet John Newlove (1938-2003), THE TASMANIAN DEVIL and other poems (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 1999; twentieth anniversary edition, 2019), a baker’s dozen of new and previously uncollected poems, can be read as pieces that each correspond neatly to a thread of Newlove’s own work to that point: the hitchhiking poems, the sonnets, the epistolary poems, and so on. Through Pearl, Bowering offers a sprinkling of some of his own structures and concerns, from elements of reading history to the Romantic poets, peers and baffles, first-person observational moments, sly jokes and asides, and character studies. As begins the poem “Carol,” a piece composed for his friend Carol Reid, the recently-late widow of Vancouver poet Jamie Reid (1941-2015): “My friend Ian Dunne / made a candlelit shrine to the poet T.S. Eliot. / Then he died on a highway in Ontario. / So I published a poem about him in The Atlantic. / Soon I met his little sister, / who was wearing his beautiful face, / and before I knew it, she married / my friend Jamie Reid, the poet, / who later died at a keyboard of his choosing.” Inasmuch as these poems are poems, Bowering’s pieces throughout this collection exist as responses: to his mother, his friends and his reading, as well as to any particular experience, caught in the moment. One hopes these poems aren’t purely last, of course, for such a curious, expansively-playful and engaged writer and thinker as Bowering, but the signs are there, and he and Baird have done a worthy job of putting such an assemblage together. While one doesn’t wish for a closure, it is a worthy one, and a book that leads off into all the directions that had come before.

A Spoon

A spoon
on a table 

that’s where
I sit down 

on neither.

Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part one: Bardia Sinaee + George Bowering,

Another fair has come and gone! Thanks to everyone who participated, from exhibitors to volunteers to readers to audience! And did you see I made shortbread? Be sure to save the date for this November, when the fair will turn thirty-one years old. That’s pretty exciting, yes? I’m already working on dates for June and November 2026 (which feels a million years away, I know). And of course, see my reviews from last fall’s thirtieth anniversary ottawa small press fair here (parts one, two, three), or last fall’s Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market (parts one, two, three, four) or even my notes from last spring’s ottawa small press book fair (parts one, two, three). So much small and micro press activity! Here are the first of my notes from what I picked up this time around:

Ottawa ON: The latest from Ottawa poet Bardia Sinaee, author of Intruder (Anansi, 2021) [see my review of such here], is the chapbook Flinch (2025), a title, according to the colophon, “was co-published by Skunkworks and Horsebroke Press [a press run by Ottawa poet Jeff Blackman] in Ottawa in May 2025 and distributed as issue 33 of These Days Zine.” There’s almost a wistful distance, a wistful quality, to these poems, offering a bit of distance across first-person observations so deeply personal, even intimate. “I can’t / remember why / I walked into / this room,” the poem “Still Life” begins, “with its / packed-away smell / & painting / of a water mill [.]” There’s such a lovely and delicate nuance to these short musings, these short narratives, one that holds an edge but not by displaying that edge; one that provides a clarity beyond clarity, and into a far deeper understanding of beauty, and life, such as the last three stanzas of the two-page final poem in the collection, “Love Poem,” that reads: “I don’t / miss the cancer / or the ward / but the time / we snuck into // the shower / we thought / would be our / last together / I loved shampooing / your hair // it was like / breathing / under water [.]”

Household items

after receiving the literary prize
I upgraded to ocean-friendly tuna
I finally cleaned the microwave
then thinking better of it
ordered a new microwave 

spruce tips in antique pinch bowls
reed diffusers in lavender oil
I curated the air
carrying on like I had always
known refinement 

we are instructed to do the negative
the positive is already
within us, wrote Kafka
who would have liked
to be a loaf of hard bread 

that’s why I keep my mind
smooth as a pearl
grown from a splinter
a poem is not a wild animal
roving the page 

a poem is not a journey
it is always already here
anyone can access it
with only a few household items
& ten thousand dollars

Phil Hall, Canadian poet

Vancouver BC/Cobourg ON: From Stuart Ross’ Proper Tales Press comes an odd assortment of poems from Vancouver writer and troublemaker George Bowering, the chapbook Phil Hall (2025), a collection with a photograph of Perth, Ontario writer and editor Phil Hall by Paul Elter on the front and back cover, as well as within, although the poems in this collection may or may not have anything to do with that particular Phil Hall. These are poems by Canadian poet George Bowering that reference Canadian poet Phil Hall, playing with a slightly fictional Phil Hall that may or may not resemble the actual writer. As the opening piece, “Notes on the Life of the Canadian Poet Phil Hall” begins: “Phil Hall once took a jar of sand from a beach on the west coast of Costa Rica to Chad and emptied it into the Sahara. A companion reported him as saying, ‘Find that, you arseholes.’” These pieces are delightfully odd, with narratives running from the entirely plausible into the completely implausible, running a fine line between the two until, of course, Bowering takes the whole surrealist play up a level. With poem-titles including such as “Phil Hall and the Chickadee,” “Phil Hall and My Mother,” “Phil Hall’s Macaw” and “The Mallade of Phil Hall,” this is a delightfully odd and entertaining small collection, one I entirely recommend you pick up a copy of. Although, I probably should have asked: What does Canadian poet Phil Hall think of all of this?

Phil’s Fiction

Over a warm October week in Oliver I wrote a terrific love poem to my wife, who was visiting friends in Cumberland.
            Then one afternoon it rained, so there was no orchard work, so Phil Hall sat down for an hour and wrote what I knew was a better poem for her.
            They were nice about it. They sent me a postcard from Cumberland.
            I decided to quit poetry and wrote a story about lost love and orchard work.
            Phil wrote a story while having lunch with some of my Vancouver friends. It won a prize in a Victoria literary magazine.
            Over seven years I wrote a novel about a matricide in Vancouver. It made the short list in a national creative writing contest. Phil came in the winner. And wrote three other books on the short list under pen names.
            They sent me a nice postcard from Ottawa.

 

SOME: seventh issue,

 

Creeps

Old creep

staring at blooming,
solid flesh,

remembering home. (Rae Armantrout)

I’m always interested to see the latest issue of Vancouver poet Rob Manery’s SOME magazine, and the seventh (summer 2023) landed on my doorstep not that long ago. Compared to the issues he’s produced-to-date [see my review of issue six, issue five, issue two], this issue appears to focus on literary elders (each of this list began publishing their work in journals in a range that extends from the late 1950s—as with George Bowering—into the 1970s). One might say that experiment without attending our influences can lose foundation, so the acknowledgement is one appreciated, and this issue includes extended poems, sequences and prose by Rae Armantrout, George Bowering, Phil Hall, Lionel Kearns, Ken Norris and Renee Rodin. There is something of Rae Armantrout’s work that I’ve always found reminiscent of the structures of poems by Ottawa poet Monty Reid, in the way they both extend small moments, stretching them out further than one might think possible. Reid does this in part through the physical line, which Armantrout breaks for the sake of slowness, pause, extending moments into a particular kind of simultaneous extended and sharper focus. She writes in portions, in sections, and her contribution of five poems are incredibly sharp. As the second half, second section, of her poem “First Born” reads: “To be present / is to start, // to feel a flash / of dread // when opened. // Dead the eldest / child of what?”

George Bowering gets a pretty hefty section in this issue, a sequence of twenty-four short lyrics under the title “Divergences” that feel reminiscent of some of the poems in his Teeth: Poems 2006-2011 (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2013) [see my review of such here] and Could Be (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2021) [see my review of such here], and even through his collection Smoking Mirror (Edmonton AB: Longspoon Press, 1984), through the use of the short, lyric burst, although one that extends across short stanzas as a loose narrative thread down his usual seemingly-meandering but highly purposeful cadence. Although, one might say, there’s a calm resoluteness to these poems that differs from his other work; the electrical energies of his prior lyrics are quieter here, seeking a kind of intimate calm. Ever since working his one-chapbook-a-month-year-long-manuscript, My Darling Nellie Grey (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2010) [see my review of such here], Bowering appears to be more overtly working sequences of chapbook-length sequences, each of which he seems to attempt to each get into stand-alone publication before the publication of the full-length collection; given the reluctance of literary journals to publish such long stretches across a single author, he’s focused on chapbook publication, so this sequence, whether it be part of something larger or not, does appear to be one of those rare journal placements. As Bowering writes as a kind of afterword to the poems: “Each of the sequence’s 24 sections begins with a line or two from the start of a Romantic poem of the 19^th century, then diverges into something from the mind/soul/mood of the present old poet. You may notice that Goethe gets pilfered from twice. That was an accident. It takes, they say, nine accidents to kill a cat. Which is odd, because curiosity means carefulness. It is also the last word of the poem. Poems, the old poet thinks, are made through accidents and carefulness.” His first poem in the sequence “Divergences” reads:

Open the Window

Open the window, and let the air
freshly blow from treetops to faces
that care not.
                        They are turned
heedless away from the blue sky
they will never glance while some
they do not see are lowering
them beneath fresh air’s reach.

Perth, Ontario poet Phil Hall’s contribution to this assemblage are three poems from his forthcoming collection Vallego’s Marrow (Toronto ON: Beautiful Outlaw Press, 2023) [see my review of his 2022 title with the same publisher, The Ash Bell, here], a title that should be out somewhere in the next couple of weeks. The poems here offer a continuation, a furthering, of Hall’s unique blend of lyric first-person essay, swirling through memoir, memory, literature and what I’ve referred to in the past as a kind of “Ontario Gothic” almost folksy charm. Hall’s straight lines are never straight; his lines have a way of turning, moving, altering in tone and shape while retaining direction, akin to white light through a prism. There is such a scope of length to Hall’s ruminations, one that seems to extend with, and even through, each new poem, each new collection. “I see my dead parents as characters in fables / or extinct creatures trapped in an old story,” he writes, as part of the first of these three poems, “there is no memory that has not savaged or been savaged / a tongue is eaten & thumb grease sees through a page // now here comes my own little train / the doors of its empty boxcars rusted open on both sides // black fields black fields black fields black fields / I can see through each clanging frame [.]” Lionel Kearns is one of those Canadian poets that I don’t think has ever been given his due, in part, I’m sure, through the fact that he doesn’t publish books terribly often. An early experimenter with form (his author biography includes the note that “His most anthologized work, Birth of God / uniVers, first published in 1965, stands today, in its various forms and formats, as one of the earliest examples of digital art.”), his contribution to this issue sits under the umbrella title of “Selections from Very Short Essays,” each of which sits, stand-alone, as text within a box shape. The poems read akin to koans, offering compact lyrics and twists in the language.

Of the eight poems included by Ken Norris—originally American, then Montreal, back to Maine and now retired in Toronto—the first two offer themselves as projects, responding to the works of poetic influence: “The Wordsworth Project” and “The Shakespeare Project.” “To realize the full variety of humanity.” the second of these begin, “To get it all down in a cast of characters.” Each of Norris’ poems in this assemblage are slightly different than where his poems often go [see my review of his 2021 Guernica Editions title, South China Sea, here], offering a broader overview of thinking, reading and response. After some thirty or forty-plus poetry collections since the 1970s, there is something of Norris once again seeking out origins, even legacy, perhaps, through these short narrative lyrics. Or, as he offers as part of the poem “Cultural Marginalia,” a poem dedicated to Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell, “Louis [Dudek] said we were kibitzers, / and I guess that’s true. My poems have never been / broad cultural statements. // Someday someone will realize I was speaking / to them, for them.” Vancouver poet Renee Rodin is another poet too often not given her due, and for reasons similar to that with Kearns: her biography references her Talonbooks published in 1996 and 2010, respectively, as well as a chapbook with Nomados in 2005, now long out-of-print. Her two-page prose piece included here is “Here in the Rainforest – The Lighter Version,” a piece composed “during the invasion of Ukraine and the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria” that begins:

Suddenly the morning is dark, hot water cold, no heat, no stove. My phony landline doesn’t work, cellphone almost dead. The last text is from a friend, also in Kitsilano, asking if my electricity is out too.

Cut off from communication I panic. My kids are long distance calls away, there’s nothing closer that the sound of their voices. Now I’m scared they might need me and won’t be able to get through. I find this thought unbearable.

Here in the rainforest we’ve had a severe drought, I loved the months of sunny, warm days. To not enjoy the beautiful weather would have only compounded the waste. Today we’re having an atmospheric river, a lovely sounding name for prolonged pelting rain.

Rodin has long utilized the prose lyric, similar to the work of Vancouver writer Gladys Hindmarch [see my review of Hindmarch’s 2020 collected, published by Talonbooks, here], as a way in which biographical threads are offered as the structure through which she is able to comment on all else. Similarly to Hindmarch being a prose counterpart to the 1960s TISH poets, Rodin’s work feels akin to emerging as a prose counterpart to the poetry experiments in and around Vancouver of the 1970s and 80s, all of which made Rodin, and Hindmarch as well, literary outliers. There is a seriousness to Rodin’s work, an ecological and social engagement, that underlies much of her work as well. One would hope we might even see another collection at some point, hopefully soon.

The colophon to the issue reads: “Contributions and email correspondence can be sent to somepoetrymagazine@gmail.com / Subscriptions are $24 for two issues. Single issues are $12. E-transfers are welcome.”

rob’s clever substack : Lecture for an Empty Room

For those unaware, I’ve been posting weekly-or-so over at a substack I began back in November, constructed to prompt further thinking into a potential book-length essay, “Lecture for an Empty Room.” I had started scratching note-fragments somewhere across those first two years of Covid-19 lockdown, thinking upon literary community, reviewing, notions of work, connection, responsibility and various other scattered thoughts. I’m attempting to post something weekly, with every third or so as a paid-subscription-only piece, with the rest offered gratis to anyone who signs up (free subscriptions are the bulk of the subscriptions, which is fine also). I’m aiming to post self-contained fragments of this work-in-progress as I attempt to move forward, interspersing these with occasional other pieces, whether short stories, possible fragments of this novel work-in-progress as well as a chapbook-length essay I worked across the same original lockdown period, a kind of notebook on a call-and-response poem collaboration that Denver poet Julie Carr and I were working on. I had thought back to an essay I saw once by George Bowering, composed as journal entries during a period he was working a novel (I can’t recall which book this was in, or which novel, naturally; was this an essay on/around composing Caprice?), or even Robert Kroetsch’s The Crow Journals (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 1980), a book-length journal composed around the composition of his novel, What the Crow Said (1978). I’d always envied that particular form, wishing to echo an element of it somewhere, somehow, and there are some wonderful observations through that particular non-fiction work (I would recommend you find a copy and go through it, even if you haven’t read that particular novel of his, which is actually still in print, by the way).

Here's one of the recent fragments of “Lecture for an Empty Room” I posted over at my clever substack (sign up here for free (or for a wee bit of coin), if such interests). I am curious to see where this project might end up, myself.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

A conversation. All these little echo chambers.

At the end of December, 2022, Matthew Walther’s “Poetry Died 100 Years Ago This Month” appeared in The New York Times. Why is it so important for opinion writers to return, once again, to declaring the death of poetry? Perhaps they wish to claim credit, whether through a kind of critic-assisted end of literary suffering, or wishing to be seen to have the clarity of childlike wisdom, akin to “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Walther speaks of modernism, a contemporary dearth of MFA programs churning out literature professors, and an endless array of chapbooks. Nothing useful since TS Eliot; remember TS Eliot? TS Eliot was cool, right?

Circa 2001, Ken Norris suggested to me that MFA programs throughout the United States had caused the death of American poetry. Given my broader reading experience since, I’d say I disagree with that statement, but I don’t know what he might have seen since 1985, the year he landed to teach at the University of Maine. I’m sure writing programs everywhere churn out an array of unremarkable writers producing semi-publishable work that later end up littering the landscape of journals, chapbooks and trade collections, but I don’t see American programs doing this with any greater percentages than their Canadian counterparts. It might simply be a matter of scale. Layli Long Soldier emerged from a program. Megan Kaminski emerged from a program. Sarah Mangold emerged from a program. Jericho Brown emerged from a program. I don’t think the issue, if there is one to be discussed, is that of the MFA program.

But still: given so much activity, productivity and production, why declare the state of the union, as it were, past tense? Oh, Matthew Walther, literature isn’t there to do what you think it should, or you heard once that it might have. It isn’t there to obey your rules. Literature remains in constant motion. It evolves, just as much as language and culture, from pop to human. We should never think of any of these as absolutes, or fixed. Stagnation, not evolution, is what causes the death you are in such a rush to declare. But I want things to be as they were, they say. This creature is already dead. Instead of bothering to understand the art on its own terms. Matthew Walther, have you a difficulty with an art that includes both Rupi Kaur and M. NourbeSe Philip?

Every article on the death of literature, whether poetry or the novel, exists as a variation on the same: the misunderstanding that any art is not a fixed point, nor is it meant to do, whether solely or otherwise, what it is that you wish. Adaptability, for both the reader and the practitioner, remains key. What was American poetry before Walt Whitman? What was Canadian poetry before bpNichol? What was literature before Dionne Brand? Each of these changing the very foundation of how the literatures they lived in was heard, written and seen. Arguably, every poet writing shifts the foundations and boundaries of literature, even if only a little, so the very notion of the fixed point. Declare your intentions! the traditional poets blast at the avant-garde. They counter: We can’t declare what won’t stand still.

Alice Notley, Jordan Abel. Lisa Robertson. Fred Wah. Anne Carson. Margaret Christakos. Andrew Suknaski. Stephen Collis. Jack Spicer, Lorine Niedecker or Robert Creeley. Ron Silliman. And then those in the nebulous between-states, working experimental texts across more subtle landscapes: Judith Fitzgerald, Kathleen Fraser, David Donnell. The long sentences of between of Monty Reid.

Call this a mantra, if you wish: my literature includes difficult work. To comprehend the centre one has to examine the edge.

Rupi Kaur: she seems an easy and lazy target for literary archers. I don’t care for the lyrically uncomplicated statements of her poems, but she might have allowed more young readers into literature than most of us combined. Maybe?

George Bowering, Good Morning Poems

Most of a century ago, when my mother was a schoolgirl, Mr. Longfellow was still considered a serious and accomplished poet. He sold us Hiawatha and Evangeline and the midnight ride of Paul Revere, after all. He was growing up while Wordsworth was being groomed as poet laureate, and he soon set about making himself the most popular poet in the U.S.A. This would mean combining patriotism and easily consumable narratives and verse forms. He let it be known that his family came over on the Mayflower, and for most of his life he lived in George Washington’s old wartime headquarters. It worked, as he became the first U.S. poet to make a fortune by his verses. Most literature U.S. Americans know the first two lines of “The Arrow and the Song.” When I first heard the poem I thought it was pretty neat, but I had some questions. Isn’t it pretty reckless to shoot an arrow into the air? How can you say that it fell to earth if it was to be found long afterward (if this repeated word comes soon after “follow,” could he have been playing with his own name?) in a tree? Isn’t the third line of the first stanza misleading, and was the coming rime worth the confusion? Would it not be hearing rather than sight that would attempt, unsuccessfully perhaps, to follow the song chat that was to fall to earth? Isn’t it kind of amateurish or ungrammatical to say “unbroke” instead of “unbroken”? Wouldn’t the latter improve the poem, you know, breaking the tedium? The penultimate line – is its hobbling supposed to prepare us for the extra steps of the last line? Well, I guess this poem is a nice lesson in mythmaking or at least metaphor. I mean, it’s good for Longfellow’s reputation that it was not an arrow found in the heart of a friend. (“Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Arrow and the Song”)

Lately I’ve been going through Vancouver writer, editor, poet and critic George Bowering’s Good Morning Poems: A start to the day from famous English-language poets (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2023), a short critical anthology of forty-eight poems selected across five hundred years of English-language poetry, each of which include a page-long commentary by Bowering himself. In his short preface to the collection, he offers that he likes to begin each morning reading (or rereading) a poem. “Some people like to go for a walk in the woods or to the coffee shop in the morning. Some peoples have even written poems about morning walks.” he writes. “I’m not that extreme – I’ll settle for a chair at the table, a cup of dark coffee, and a page or two of Denise Levertov. Lots of poets have written to or about the early hours, which suggests that if you are working on the New York Times crossword and thus have a pen in your hand, it might be as pleasant to write a poem as to read one. I’d just as soon read a poem, though, say ‘January Morning’ by William Carlos Williams, any month of the year.”

The selection includes forty-eight poems alongside Bowering’s commentary, offering his insight on a range of published works by Sir Thomas Wyatt, Queen Elizabeth I, John Donne and Ben Jonson to Alexander Pope, William Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt and John Keats, to Emily Brontë, Archibald Lampman, Gertrude Stein and Margaret Avison. As he offers on Archibald Lampman: “Some professors who should have known better dubbed him ‘The Canadian Keats.’ Yes, he was one of those who could not resist riming ‘life’ with ‘strife,’ but even with the challenging rime scheme he forced upon himself, he wrote in ‘We Too Shall Sleep’ an affective poem about his unfortunate son without harming the language overmuch.” Five hundred years is an enormous stretch of English-language literature, so the selection is curious, from the expected to the unexpected, offering a variety of poetic structures as well as a range of poems famous to lesser-known.

There has always been a liveliness to Bowering’s prose, especially appreciated across his numerous collections of criticism, and this book provides a glimpse into his teaching methods, managing not only to articulate a vibrant commentary upon older poems, providing commentary and context, but to pass along his own obvious enthusiasm and sheer reading pleasure on works that most of us have either ignored or simply not been exposed to. If a book such as this was presented to high school students when attempting to teach poetry, we might all be in a far better situation as far as poetry reading literacy. Bowering’s enthusiasm is infectious, and he manages to pack a great deal of information and nuance, offering not only a context but some of the limitations of both poem and perspective, in his commentaries with incredible, readable ease. As he ends his commentary on Edgar Allan Poe’s “Sonnet – To Science”: “A lot of people think of Poe as the author of horror stories and fanciful verse. They ought to read this sonnet aloud, its rhythm and sounds so moving, the near perfection of its last three lines. Sonnets were invented as love poems; Poe the critic never forgets that.” Or, as he offers on Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing”:

At first you might wonder whether Whitman means that he is hearing workers in the United States or workers in all of America from Tierra del Fuego to Baffin Island. I think it’s possible that he means both – the nineteenth-century Whitman followed the eighteenth-century Thomas Jefferson in looking forward to a time when his country will have gobbled up the whole hemisphere. Such gobbling was called Manifest Destiny by some, Lebensraum by some others. Whitman’s notion of song accompanying work is pretty common. Whistle while you work, sang Jiminy Cricket, remember? He was a fictional character in the movies, as were all those melodious slaves “singing on the steamboat deck,” and in the hot cotton fields, all among the stones they piled to build the White House. The slaves who had a lot to do with building Whitman’s country did not own anything, not even themselves, and so were not referred to in the ninth line, “Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else.” Whitman the patriot liked the idea of a country made of individual states, a nation made of individual workers, and so on. His favourite poetic form was the list, as found in the Bible, a volume made up of individual books. The Ten Commandments, the begats, the Sermon on the Mount are some influential lists. Whitman in his poem lists various individuals singing, to be echoed, you might say, in his famous poem “Song of Myself.” You may sometime hear someone reading “I Hear America Singing,” but I wonder whether you have tried singing it.