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.

Margaret Christakos, Dear Birch,

 

She is a diarist, & as such wants
to remember thoughts & events she has lived,

especially the delicate events & contradictory thoughts she
perceives herself to be hearing & watching. She

is reporting on her own attentions, while feeling
the sensations spring from her entire body. She

senses you shiver there, twelve feet ahead, beyond
the iron tabletop. She tries to define why

she comes here, sitting & growling, when it
is not exactly pleasant. It aches in ways

that still need naming. (“Aug 24”)

Toronto poet Margaret Christakos’ latest poetry title is Dear Birch, (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2021), a book that exists as a curious extension of the expansiveness of her poetry collections over the past few years. Her first few poetry collections, beginning with Not Egypt (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1987), were composed as self-contained poetry titles that wrapped poems in and around each other within the bounds of the individual collection, slowly evolving to work and rework her own texts in a way that reshaped both the language and thinking of her ongoing work. Her more recent collections, predominantly over the past decade or so, have explored larger structures and themes that seem to move through and across multiple book-length titles. Even the notion of the cycle, a self-described structure this collection shares with her prior collection, charger (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2020), could be suggested as both an excised thread (from some larger, more ongoing consideration), and a journey that returns to where she began.

The ten-poem cycle of Dear Birch, (yes, the comma is part of the book’s title) excises some of its poems from other of her publications, pulling from the chapbook Retreat Diary (Book*hug, 2005), her full-collections charger [see my review of such here], Multitudes (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2013) [see my review of such here] and Welling (Sudbury, ON: Your Scrivener Press, 2010), as well as through the non-fiction lyric of her remarkable lyric essay/memoir Her Paraphernalia: On Motherlines, Sex/Blood/Loss & Selfies (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2016) [see my review of such here]. Through pulling from the threads of other collections, she simultaneously establishes something self-contained and reinforces the idea of how her published books speak and relate to each other.

Individually titled via date, her cycle is presented in an order slightly out of sequence, and only one of these poem titles includes a year: “Aug 24,” “Aug 19,” “Aug 20,” “Aug 21,” “Aug 22,” “Aug 23,” “Aug 26,” “Aug 27, 2009” and “Aug 28.” She writes of social media, intimacy and human connection and the shadow of her mother’s death; she writes of her adult children, who sit in close proximity, and her experiences and thoughts on dating sites and lovers, from those who have begun to drift away, to those potentially emerging across the horizon. She writes of the two poles of her life meeting, from the loss of her own mother to what her children will have to endure.

               She wonders if she has yet said the
thing to any of her three children that

will work as a healing talisman after she
is dead three years & they feel themselves

to be broken at the edge of anyone
new ever arriving in their future. (“Aug 26”)

The lyric of Dear Birch, exists as a sequence of poetic meditations, working the lyric through a cycle of ongoingness, moving through family, loss, intimacy, reading and desire. “Inside // the house are two of her adult children,” she writes, as part of “Aug 20,” “one in the basement adjusting sound levels, making // music out of beats, beats out of music, / & one upstairs working, typing, planning, cataloguing her // extraordinary photographs, moving in her many directions, at / once.”

The poem “Aug 27, 2009,” seemingly, exists almost as the central core around which the rest of her cycle swirls; the poem is structured far differently than the rest, as a single-page poem of four-line stanzas, instead of the rest of the collection, her poems set via accumulating couplets. It almost gives the impression of an earlier poem, the root from which the rest of the collection emerges, folded into the suite as an earlier portrait of her birch tree. Here, perhaps, is the core of how she begins to connect with this particular tree, attempting to articulate the swirls of human interactions she works through, as she writes: “I have too-white bark that peels from my core. […] I am curling like a fetus / Into the non-birch world. Enough I have had // Of my paper-skinned nature.” She writes simultaneously of her vulnerability, and her wish to be less so. She writes of her ability to endure, through all the breaks and losses, and all of those potentially yet to come. As she writes as part of “Aug 24,” the first poem-cycle of the collection: “She doesn’t want / to get too close to the fragment, respecting // it’s already a wet broken thing lucky to / have survived at all.”

There is something interesting about wrapping a poem-cycle around a birch tree in the yard of her rental, allowing herself the contemplative and meditative space of directing her thoughts toward this singular tree. “She can’t tell you how // her heart would seize if someone came in / the night & decapitated you, dear birch,” she writes, as part of “Aug 22,” “& // your reign over the patio, if someone should / enter to burglar your branches or, worst, slice // your trunk & grind the spine of it – / she would vomit. She would rage. What a // tree provisions her cannot be conducted by air / alone, cannot be restaged by a greenhouse sapling // slipped into the massive root cavity that would / be left torn open if you, dear birch, // were routed. She prays there’s no morning where / she wakes to such a scene.” There is something of the echo of the late Roy Kiyooka’s backyard pear tree to these poems, in which Kiyooka composed his own book-length cycle of poems directed at the pear tree, one which focused on his recent break-up with poet Daphne Marlatt, through his pear tree pomes (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1987). And then, of course, there is her reference to Walt Whitman, as she writes, as part of “Aug 22,” offering another poet who wrote meditations on what was growing, there, beneath his feet:

            Whitman’s observation of a leaf of grass: How
does he portray it as in motion? How

soon does this happen in the observation? Breath
of life, of course.

            The end of wind. Wind’s end. Wind winding
down.

Perhaps this is what Sudbury-born and raised Christakos is deliberately working: through the core of seeking out and maintaining human intimacy and connection—family connection and loss, how one connects through social media, and romantic and sexual hopes, fears and frustrations, all of which has been prompted by an extended period of mourning—writing out her own version of Kiyooka’s Vancouver cycle of mourning and rebirth through a type of tree she would know to be familiar, and of home.

Fenn Stewart, Better Nature

Hell, Kathleen, this is it: it’s my last chance

to reach all of Ontario. It’s summer,

I’m replete & steeping in errata,

got my tongue fluent in the motherese.

Come on down, sweetcheeks: it’s my last night in Nice!
if you get wood by midnight then you’re Welcome:

help us defend our climate, put paint on

something live, smooth out your creases. Be sudden

and amazing, Shine bright like the new day—

lighted streams, revitalize fine urban

destinations. Cell phones spread like democracy

(by parthenogenesis); our masses

are massive, our Beauty takes neither prisoners

nor shortcuts.

My seat is sizzling, I’m all ready to adopt a cub.

Don’t miss your chance to make a difference

in the world/ ‘cause you were soaking in it.

After publishing a small handful of chapbooks (including one from above/ground press), Vancouver poet Fenn Stewart’s first trade poetry collection is Better Nature (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2017), a wonderfully playful and urgent collection adapted from one of American poet Walt Whitman’s diaries, composed while he was travelling through Canada: Whitman’s Diary in Canada, ed. William Sloane Kennedy (Boston MA: Small, Maynard and Co., 1904). Set against Whitman’s Victorian-era diary of the Canadian wilderness, Fenn counterpoints with, as the press release informs, “found materials including early settler archives, news stories, email spam, fundraising for environmental NGOs, and more to present a unique view of Canada’s ‘pioneering’ attitude towards ‘wilderness’—one that considers deeper issues of the settler appropriation of Indigenous lands, the notion of terra nullius, and the strategies and techniques used to produce a ‘better nature’—that is, one that better serves the nation.” As she writes in her “Preface”:

THIS PROJECT BEGAN WHILE I WAS STUDYING Indigenous-based analyses of colonialism and work toward decolonization; it is necessary to acknowledge the specific writers and thinkers to whom Better Nature is most indebted (see “Major Debts/Reading List”).

            I also want to recognize that, as Deanna Reder points out, a focus on “the effects of colonization” can be limiting; critical or creative projects may end up recentering the thoughts and actions of settlers, even when the intention of such work is to “unsettle” or “deconstruct” colonial formations. Better Nature runs this risk, as it mostly remixes settler voices (one exception is Chief Joe Capilano’s polite interrogation of King Edward, quoted on page 55) and reflects on settler institutions and attachments. In contrast, work toward decolonization is necessarily Indigenous-led and Indigenous-focused. Decolonization is about restitution, and it will not emerge through existing forms of Canadian culture, politics, or law (including forms of “reconciliation” that ultimately work to shore up the nation).

            Perhaps what this project offers is a partial record of how my conception of Canada is shifting as I learn, as I come to see the horizons of my “home” as imagined and impermanent. In this learning I am not singular, but accompanied and guided by people (in “real life” and in books), non-human beings, and landscapes that are at once familiar to me, and unknown.

Her titles (listed in the table of contents as “List of Whitmans”) include such whimsical, and lengthy, titles such as (I mention two here only, for the sake of length) “if Walt Whitman were a youngish woman walking to work along Northwest Maine Drive in the Endowment Lands, just west of Vancouver, BC: if to her north were a series of mountains, on the other side of Burrard Inlet; if to her south were mansions, mansions, mansions up the hill; if she had a first trimester miscarriage, and then another one.” and “if Walt Whitman were a wealthy Vancouver resident bobbing about in a life raft in the suddenly much deeper Burrard Inlet; & if the occasion of this bobbing led to reminiscences about the creation of the city, via Major Matthews’ Early Vancouver archives (re: the ‘purchasing’ of land in the late 19^th century) & Jean Barman’s historical research (on the destruction of the Kitsilano Reserve in the earth 20^th).” The blend is compelling, mixing Whitman’s Victorian-era gaze of the Canadian “wilderness” against her own hometown of Vancouver, as well as a lengthy list of both “Major Debts/Reading List” and “Sources,” from William Shakespeare to Liz Howard to Chelsea Vowel to Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. From the opening line to the final yawp on its last page, Better Nature is a rich and provocative exploration and critique of colonized space, composed in such evocative collisions of language, sound and meaning, and allowing the collisions to bring out new ways of seeing what had been there all along.

you know, boundaries are often indistinct

because we did not want the others bothering us

he said “I will put in the island for five dollars”

you know, archetypes are intentionally flexible

we had no idea there would ever be a Vancouver

nothing ever perfectly conforms to its description