Sitting down with George Bowering, Canada’s first parliamentary poet laureate, and George Stanley, recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award, Seattle-based poet Paul E. Nelson engages in a lively exchange with two venerated British Columbia poets as these longtime friends interpret their work and banter about the process of creating art.

Their latest collaboration is Some End/West Broadway (New Star Books, $18 CDN, $16 US)—two books of poetry in one. Stanley’s West Broadway is a narrative/lyrical work, set along the West Broadway corridor on the West Side of Vancouver. It’s a sequence of events, personally experienced but largely uninterpreted, that take place crossing the street or on the sidewalk, riding the bus, in interiors, or in dreams. Bowering’s Some End is a suite of thirty–two poems tracking his recovery from a near fatal cardiac arrest in 2015. Throughout, Bowering’s wit, his command of the idiom, and his ironic self–awareness shine through.

This an edited version of a much longer conversation.

Paul E Nelson: You’re writing about old age, and thinking, not just as subjects, but they seem to be characters in the book.

George Stanley: In the one poem, old age and thinking are characters, which takes over from “Beauty” as a character in a previous [poem]. “Beauty” is a character in the first poem, “After Desire.”

George Bowering: That’s like a proper noun, isn’t it?

George Stanley: But it’s a young man.

George Bowering: Well, of course.

Paul E Nelson: I would love to have you read the poem.

George Stanley: Which one? You want “Writing Old Age” or “The Remonstrance”? “The Remonstrance” is a better poem.

Paul E Nelson: Read that, then.

George Stanley: “Writing Old Age” is a poem about old age and writing, and at the end of that poem, Writing says, “My name is not just Writing, it’s Writing Old Age.” In response to that poem, and I never had done this before, this second poem is really a criticism of the first one.



“Remonstrance on Behalf of Thoughts”

First off, are there two of you guys? Or, just one?

Old Age says he’s bedogged

[Stanley stops reading the poem and explains: “That refers back to in the Old Age poem, but now Old Age is writing, and he goes back to his initial question: does his writing also have to imagine coming to an end? And, as if in obedience to an underlying intuition, his persistent thought of an end departs from the present moment, and goes off sort of like a dog and lies in its corner. It doesn’t leave the scene. No, by no means. It keeps an eye on Old Age from its corner. Here’s where the speaker of Remonstrance says, “Old Age says he’s be-dogged.”” Having explained, he resumes reading.]

. . . by one particular thought,

that of his coming demise (the opposite of mise en scene), so,

his leaving the scene.

(Or as Ed Dorn called it, the set.)

And, he can’t refer to himself (‘do a selfie’) without thinking

(of) it.

Speaking as a thought, myself (and as a member of NAT,

the National Association of Thoughts), I think I have a little

more freedom than that. I don’t think my right to appear is

dependent on the thinker’s intention to refer (to himself, or in

any way.) Maybe if Old Age could be more welcoming to his

thoughts, he might feel less oppressed by us.

Then, there’s Writing (as I’ve said, I’m not sure if this is a

separate being or a hand-puppet of Old Age.)

Writing presents himself as unconcerned. That’s how this

brash, youngish guy wants us to take him, as unconcerned

with anything other than his task — one of ‘self-actualization’

you might say. Writing writes writing. There’s nothing on his

mind — his plate — but his anticipation of the next sentence.

The next sentence. I don’t believe Writing — his presentation

of himself as a one-dimensional, self-generating linear

process coming into being sentence by sentence. Not a

thought in his head? What about NAT? (National Association

of Thoughts), wasn’t that a thought, popping into his head

in the middle of the night? A free gift to him as a writer. A

thought. What about the thought of NAT occurring to him

again, just now? Just occurring, no credit to him.

These are members of my bargaining unit, even if working

under the table. They have to pay dues. NAT, Local 0000,

Inspiration.

Those kind things you say about Old Age, Writing, before you

merge back into him, those are kind, loving thoughts.

Bypassing thinking? Not by a long shot. Are you some kind of

language machine attached to a hand?

I believe you more, Writing, after you’ve made your peace with

Old Age. Now, like Old Age, you acknowledge the presence of

thoughts — but you, too, like Old Age, are spooked by them.

But you’re spooked in a different way from Old Age. Old Age

feels thoughts wrapping around him. When he ‘does a selfie,’

there’s the end of a cerement, a strip of winding cloth curling

out from behind one ear. He feels like he’s being stifled,

mummified.

But for you, Writing, your work space has become like a

tomb, your access even to your writing materials blocked by

a thought that lies on the table ‘like a dead body’. You go to

reach for your writing book, and it’s under the thing’s cold

shoulder, your pen just out of reach behind a knee.

Well, let me run some footage off of CCTV camera you’ve never

noticed, just up there behind your head (we put it there to

catch thoughts working under the table). Well, what do we see?

It’s a dark room. The timer reads 7:29 am, a Wednesday in

mid-October. Off camera audio: sound of a shower running,

then a young male voice, singing.

Now from the adjacent bedroom there enters an old man,

wearing just glasses (and, oddly enough, a Vancouver

Canadians baseball cap.) He approaches the table and climbs

up onto it, then lies down prone over an open writing book

and some pencils and pens, and apparently goes to sleep.

Look, Writing, as you emerge from the washroom, that’s no

thought, that’s no dead body. It’s Old Age, stretched out on

your half-finished page.

—Signed, A Thought (rank and file)



George Bowering: These get better, the more often you hear them. You say, “Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah!”

Paul E Nelson: You discovered stuff in the poem when you read it, that you didn’t even know had happened?

George Bowering: I might have, because it’s always a step ahead of you, right?

Paul E Nelson: Is it always a step ahead of you?

George Bowering: Almost always, and you’re trying to catch up. You can’t stop and think about it, because it’s still ahead of you, so you say, “Wait! Wait! Wait!” This stretches out into the time when you’re not writing, okay?

I’m so pissed off, the best chapter of the book I’m writing now, in two-page chapters, was one that I thought of before I went to bed, so I wrote the whole chapter in my head. Then, I thought, I better get up and write this down. I thought, no, this is so fucking good, I couldn’t possibly forget it. I’ve been trying, and trying, and trying, and trying. I’ve got all kinds of clues, and so forth, but I can’t find it anywhere.

Paul E Nelson: Ed Dorn said the same thing in Spokane, he had something like that, and he lost it. It was the best thing he’d ever written.

George Stanley: Well, you’ll just have to write a chapter about trying to find it.

George Bowering: I was just thinking of that, but it doesn’t work, because in this book, it’s in three parts. The first part is objects, the second part is food, and the third part is rooms.

Paul E Nelson: But, you say the poem—you didn’t say it word for word—the poem beats you down the street, but not everybody writes like that.

George Bowering: Too bad. Or, maybe, good thing, because then we don’t have to read so many people, right? As soon as I see a poem in which that is not happening much or is not approaching it, or that is totally orderly, that looks like it might have been in The Walrus, I stop reading it.

Paul E Nelson: In the book, George Bowering, there are at least two elegies, to Jamie Reid, and Peter Culley. Do you want to talk about those gentlemen, and their poems and your poems for them?

George Bowering: Well, the Peter Culley one started—there are two reasons for that. One reason is I read a lot of—if you look at any of my last six, seven books, they have some of those in them, and it’s not necessarily elegies. It could be other things, like, for instance, there’s a poem I write when somebody is turning 80, and people want to do a collection of stuff about that, so I do them.

George Bowering: I really like the Jamie Reid one. I like the way it ends.

George Stanley: You should read that one. The Jamie Reid poem.

George Bowering: Jamie Reid, incidentally, was one of the five editors of TISH [the influential literary journal founded at the University of British Columbia in 1961]. I knew him, of course, before that. I knew him when he was probably 19, or something like that. A long time ago, in this neighborhood.



“Inside Ours“

I’ve already thought of four things I wanted to tell him, but he

fell from our lives last week.

Fell from so many lives we will walk like holes through each

other’s environments.

He broke his mother’s glass table with a Christmas tree, and

she laughed. She was so proud of him.

Maybe not proud, really, maybe just enjoying him so much,

what a lesson she was.

He was a bit like a four-legged spider in his skinny black

pants, black turtleneck sweater, a good-health spider.

When we were assigning poet roles among us, he became

another Rimbaud, minus the sacred.

Jamie Rimbaud ran away from home and joined the insurgents

in the Paris Commune and national television.

He slammed our door, when he left us for good from time to

time.

He came from the sky into Stanley Park with his beautiful

wife, who just could not be a spider.

She could not be a spider with her beautiful blue eyes — they

picked up the color of his soul.

The old joke went that we would adopt door-slamming Jamie

and give him a place to eat breakfast and poetry.

There is an old round stone fence that used to surround a

school, then a college, then a hospital.

Here, Jamie, it said, I have what you need, you and King

Edward the Peacemaker.

I wanted to stand on the street and deliver that message, but

you are outside our galaxy’s skin now.

Outside our galaxy’s skin, and inside mine.



George Bowering: King Edward among other things, was the place he went to high school.

George Stanley: Of course, the title of the poem, is “Inside Ours.” The title says, not just inside yours, but…

George Bowering: And it’s got the name with Stanley in it. Did he put the word Bowering in any of his poems? No.

George Stanley: Bowering is not a word. It’s a name.

George Bowering: It’s a present participle.

George Stanley: Right. When people ask me how I spell my name, I just say like the park and the car.

George Bowering: Whenever they ask me how I spell my name, I say, “Like the author.” I do. Not always, but often.

Paul E Nelson: Outside of our galaxy’s skin.

George Bowering: Yeah.

Paul E Nelson: That’s one of those that just kind of falls into your lap?

George Bowering: I just, there it was, and I knew that it was getting to be the end of the poem, because I’d arrived.

George Stanley: Now there’s a feeling: “getting to be the end of the poem.” I like that.

George Bowering: Yeah, you can tell, can’t you?

Paul E Nelson: How do you tell?

George Stanley: I’m not quite sure I do have that sense, so how do you tell?

George Bowering: Sometimes it surprises me. Sometimes, occasionally I stop a poem halfway through, because I’ve run out of something, but I’m not done. And so, maybe the next day, or day after, I’ll try to finish it, and sometimes I will. . . . and then, you put it aside and you come back, and you say: it’s finished! Like, you didn’t think that’s where it ended, but now you know it is. That happens a lot.

George Stanley: But, other times…

George Bowering: Other times you pick up and you go. You just keep going. Sometimes you try to go and you can’t, because it was ended. It knows better than you do.

George Stanley: What really surprised me in “West Broadway” is that the book suddenly came to an end.

George Bowering: He didn’t know he finished it.

George Stanley: I didn’t know I was finished.

George Bowering: On the other hand, maybe next year you’ll say, “An epilogue here.”

George Stanley: Now, I’ve written 12 very short poems.

George Bowering: That’s a year’s worth.

George Stanley: Yeah, but I haven’t written one for several months.

George Bowering: I haven’t either. I haven’t written a poem since one poem I wrote last fall.

George Stanley: OK. Let’s stop talking about ourselves now.

George Bowering: You haven’t written a poem lately.

George Stanley: I just finished one of them, the twelfth one.

George Bowering: See, I’m talking about you instead of me, now.

George Stanley: I can quote you the last little poem I wrote.

George Bowering: Eh. Don’t bother.

George Stanley: Alright. It’s called, “Goodbye.”

George Stanley: The condo towers on Burrard are not me. Once, they were me.

George Bowering: And?

George Stanley: That’s it. That’s the end.

George Bowering: OK. That came from something… came from somewhere, in the Vancouver poem. Somewhere, there’s something that put that there.

George Stanley: Could be. I was just riding the bus on Burrard, looked at those condo towers and realized they were not me. Then, I realized a couple of days later that, once, they were me.



George Bowering has published more than 80 works, including poetry, plays, short stories, novels, and historical non-fiction. Bowering is the founding editor of TISH and has served as a contributing editor for Open Letter. He has received the Governor General’s Literary Award in both poetry and fiction, the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry, and the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. Bowering has taught at the University of Calgary, the University of Western Ontario, and Simon Fraser University. He lives in Vancouver.

George Stanley has published over 60 works. After becoming a resident of British Columbia in 1971 he was active in Canadian politics, unions, and alternative media. Stanley’s poems have appeared in publications such as J, Floating Bear, and Open Space. He worked on the underground newspaper The Grape, edited and contributed to the intergenerational Vancouver literary journal Tads and served as a board member of the Capilano Press Society. Stanley has taught at the Northwest Community College, in Terrence BC, and Capilano College. He lives in Vancouver.

Father/poet/teacher Paul Nelson is a Chicago native, founder of SPLAB (Seattle Poetics Lab), founding director of the Cascadia Poetry Festival, and author of a book of essays on poetics, Organic Poetry (2008) and a serial poem re-enacting the history of Auburn, Washington, A Time Before Slaughter (2009, Apprentice House). His most recent collection is Pig War (2015, SPLAB).

Some End/West Broadway

by George Bowering & George Stanley

(New Star Books, $18 CDN, $16 US)

104 pages