CLASSIFICATION
Swallow ID:
1301
Partner Institution:
Concordia University
Source Collection Label:
SGWU Reading Series-Concordia University Department of English fonds
Series:
The Poetry Series
Sub Series:
SGWU Reading Series-Concordia University Department of English fonds
ITEM DESCRIPTION
Title:
George Bowering at Sir George Williams University, The Poetry Series, 25 January 1974
Title Source:
Cataloguer
Title Note:
"ENGLISH I006/SR34" written on the spine of the tape's box. "I006-11-034" written on sticker on the reel. "POETRY RM 435 JAN. 25/74 POETRY READING 8856 H. FINK ENGLISH 25-1-74" written on the front of the tape's box
Language:
English
Production Context:
Documentary recording
Genre:
Reading: Poetry
Identifiers:
[]
Rights
CREATORS
Name:
Bowering, George
Dates:
1935-
Role:
"Author",
"Performer"
Notes:
Poet, novelist, anthologist and critic George Bowering was born in Penticton, British Columbia in 1935. In 1954 he served in the Royal Canadian Air Force until 1957, when he pursued a Bachelor’s degree in 1960 and a Master’s degree in 1963 from the University of British Columbia. With fellow poets Frank Davey, David Dawson, James Reid, Fred Wah and critic Warren Tallman, he founded Tish in 1961, a poetry newsletter which had monumental reverberations across Canada. This magazine, influenced by styles of the Black Mountain Poets and of the East Coast poetry of Louis Dudek, Raymond Souster and Irving Layton, brought a “new wave” of poetry to Canada. Bowering’s first collection of poetry began with Sticks and Stones (Tishbooks, 1962) with a preface written by Robert Creeley, and was followed by Points on the grid (Contact Press, 1964) and Man in Yellow Boots (El Corno Emplumado, 1965). Bowering also founded the magazine Imago (1964-1974), which featured critical essays and poetry, and he also contributed to Open Letter as an editor. Bowering then moved eastwards, teaching at the University of Calgary from 1963-1966, enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the University of Western Ontario. A year later, Bowering accepted a position as the writer-in-residence in 1967 at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) in Montreal, becoming a lecturer in 1967-1971. Bowering joined the Sir George Williams University Poetry Reading Series Committee in the fall of 1967, which was being run by Roy Kiyooka, Stanton Hoffman and Howard Fink. In 1972 he left Montreal and began a long career teaching at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. He has published over fifty books of poetry, prose, short stories, essays, reviews, plays as well as pieces that combine and defy genres. A selection of his publications are as follows: Genève (Coach House Press, 1971), Autobiology (New Star Books, 1972), Curious (Coach House Press, 1973), In the Flesh (McClelland & Stewart, 1974), Allophanes (Coach House Press, 1976), Burning Water (Beaufort Books, 1980), Caprice (Penguin Books, 1988), Harry’s Fragments (Coach House Press, 1990), Rewriting my Grandfather (Nomados, 2005), Baseball Love (Talonbooks, 2006) and Shall I compare: July 2006 (George Bowering, 2008). Bowering published his interview with Black Mountain poet Robert Duncan: An Interview (Coach House Press, 1971), a book-length study on Canadian poet Al Purdy: Al Purdy (Copp Clark, 1970), along with editing several anthologies such as Vibrations: Poems from Youth (Cage, 1970), Fiction of Contemporary Canada (Coach House Press, 1980) and Likely Stories: A Postmodern Sampler (Coach House Press, 1992). Bowering has won two Governor General's Awards for poetry, for Rocky Mountain Foot (McClelland & Stewart, 1968) and The Gangs Kosmos (House of Anansi, 1969), and one for fiction in 1980 for Burning Water (Beaufort Books, 1980). George Bowering continues teaching, inspiring and writing at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia.
CONTRIBUTORS
MATERIAL DESCRIPTION
Recording Type:
Analogue
AV Type:
Audio
Material Designation:
Reel to Reel
Physical Composition:
Magnetic Tape
Extent:
1/4 inch
Playback Mode:
Mono
Generations:
Master
Tape Brand:
Scotch
Sound Quality:
Good
DIGITAL FILE DESCRIPTION
File Path:
files.spokenweb.ca>concordia>sgw>audio>all_mp3
Duration:
01:21:29
Size:
195.6 MB
Content:
Introducer
00:00:00
Ambient Sound.
George Bowering
00:01:54
Oh I just did a review of Al Purdy's
new book of poems so maybe I'll just start off reading that. [Audience laughter]. I said I liked it Al. [Audience laughter]. I'm related to practically everybody here. I'll turn this off now. [Audience laughter].
Introducer
00:04:12
...I think that George Bowering
has read or done— or not done, or not written. On the back of [that book (?)], it says that he has two new books, one called Curious from Coach House Press
, and another In the Flesh, coming out with McClelland and Stewart
. The one thing I can add to that is— has to do with baseball
, about which I know much less than George. You still have your team?
George Bowering
00:04:51
Yes.
Introducer
00:04:54
Okay, it's occurred to me that George understands one thing that is rather important to understand that is that the difference between stepping up to the plate and hitting the ball out of the park, and going [unintelligible], on the one hand, and on the other, stepping up to the plate and being there when the bat does what it's supposed to do and the ball takes itself out of the park. And this applies to baseball, and it also applies to poems. And that's what George understands.
George Bowering
00:05:48
For those that live in California
, that's what Suzuki Roshi
calls Zen Baseball. I'm really excited to be back here, this is really a burn for me, because, can you hear me if I talk at this level? I'm hearing an echo, but I— can you hear me? [Audience laughter]. I'm reading for the next three weeks back and forth but this is the first one so I haven't got stale with any of this stuff yet in the east. And I'm going to come back in a few minutes to Autobiology, because I've never read it in the east although I started writing it in Montreal
and finished it in Vancouver
, but before I do I'm going to read a piece that is sort of representative of what I've been doing lately in Vancouver, called "Desert Elm", the desert being the Okanagan
in this instance and the elm being the kind of tree that people planted there that wasn't there before and grew— they tried a lot of other ones and they didn't work. And it's a poem about my father and it deals with— it was begun with his heart attack he had in August and what happened after that, to me.
George Bowering
00:07:22
Reads "Desert Elm".
George Bowering
00:20:04
That's the longest one I'll read I think. I was going to go into Autobiology, but I'm just going to jump right now into one section of Curious, I'm going to read the Jack Spicer
part for Artie
, and then I'll [unintelligible] Curious is a-—that's one of the books that's coming out this week, it's about, it's a book about poets, sort of, and this one's about Jack Spicer, who, Artie digs.
George Bowering
00:20:43
Reads "Jack Spicer" from Curious.
George Bowering
00:22:10
He was supposed to be moving— that was in the summer of '65, he was up in Vancouver and just decided to move up there so he wouldn't die, and because he would die if he stayed in San Francisco
, and then he said, well just before that I'll go down to the San Francisco Poetry Festival, and when that's over in three weeks I'll come up to Vancouver, and he died during the second week. Okay, this is— Autobiology is a book that came out, two years ago this month, actually, 72, yeah. And I started writing it in Westmount
as they say and finished it in Kitsilano
. I started writing it in an expensive flat in Westmount, and finished it in a commune on the edge of the water in Vancouver and it's a story about, as it suggests, it's a story, it's a book, it's poetry, it's prose, it's something about things that have changed me in terms of my head but first in terms of chemicals and physiologically, changed my body literally and so on. So I'll just, I'll read portions of it. I toyed with the idea of reading the whole book, it's the sort of thing we do in Vancouver, like we sit down and read the whole book, and this was published the same day as Stan Persky's
The Day, a book called The Day, and it's the same length, about a hundred pages, and he read The Day and we took a break, and I read Autobiology and then we took a break of a couple of hours and he read The Day again. But that's sort of— that happens a little— it's a little easier to take when everybody is kind of a volunteer anyway, when everybody in the audience has known all the time that this was being written and that it was going to be read, the whole book. So I'll just read parts of it so you get a taste of it. Each section is about one and a quarter foolscap pages when it's handwritten, long, approximately so it turns out to be about two of these pages. "Chapter One"— there's forty-eight chapters. "Chapter One: The Raspberries".
George Bowering
00:24:41
Reads "Chapter One: The Raspberries" from Autobiology.
George Bowering
00:26:06
Did that ever happen to--I'm sure these kinds of things must have happened to--the way I was telling [unintelligible] this afternoon that the way this book is written was I knew the general frame was things that changed me that way, from things put in my body, generally, or pieces of my body taken off, or whatever. Or pieces of my body going out into someone else's body or whatever. And I'd go home in my house in Westmount, from here, and I'd say 'I got it! Today I'm going to do the broken tool part' and I'd run home and I'd start controlling the thing and I'd throw it away, so all the pieces that are in here are the pieces that are not thrown away, the ones where I didn't know what I was going to write when I started writing. I have the sense that I tried to describe that afternoon as being simply equal to what was coming in the story. This is "Chapter 2", I'll read "Chapter 1" and 2 and 3 and 4 and then I'll skip. This is "The Teeter Totter".
George Bowering
00:27:05
Reads "Chapter 2: The Teeter Totter" from Autobiology.
George Bowering
00:28:22
Reads "Chapter 3: The Pollywogs" from Autobiology.
George Bowering
00:29:31
"The Flying Dream". This is the origin of why I decided to write poetry I think, or at least I've always made that connection. "The Flying Dream".
George Bowering
00:29:40
Reads "Chapter 4: The Flying Dream" from Autobiology.
George Bowering
00:30:54
It's the basis of that West Coast
elitism, Al. I— after I'd done this whole book I found out there's two chapters called "The Breaks", I'd totally forgotten that this chapter had written me this time. So this is the first chapter on “The Breaks”.
George Bowering
00:31:15
Reads "Chapter 8: The Breaks" from Autobiology [audience laughter throughout].
George Bowering
00:32:34
Gee, there's one I've never read before, I mean, out loud [audience laughter]. I'm not going to anyway, heck with it. Oh, here's one that every once in a while there's, it comes to, the thing comes to writing itself or talking about the writing of itself, so here's one called "Composition", for those that are worried about the problem it'll be totally clear. I think. It defines composition. "Composition".
George Bowering
00:33:02
Reads "Chapter 14: Composition" from Autobiology.
George Bowering
00:34:32
Here's the other one called "The Breaks".
George Bowering
00:34:35.49
Reads "Chapter 20: The Breaks" from Autobiology.
George Bowering
00:35:53
Reads [“Chapter 21: Come’ from Autobiology].
George Bowering
00:37:13
This is one that, this is a favourite amongst the [serifs (?)] in Vancouver. The— I live in a community now as different from the community I lived in a couple of years ago of all https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5882404], Esalen
, encounters all the time and they're always talking about shrinkage and they're always telling me why don't you take shrinkage, and I say 'I don't feel like I need shrinkage' and they said 'that proves you need shrinkage'. Can't get out of it, you know, that's your problem— you don't think you need... So this one is sort of a reply to that, it's called "The Childhood".
George Bowering
00:37:56
Reads "Chapter 26: The Childhood" from Autobiology.
George Bowering
00:39:05
This one's about the literary world, it's called "St. Louis", where, St. Louis is where William Burroughs
and an earlier poet came from. T.S. Sandburn
, I think his name was. [audience laughter.]
George Bowering
00:39:21
Reads "Chapter 27: St. Louis" from Autobiology.
George Bowering
00:40:49
Then there's a whole series of pieces on towns that I lived in which I'll skip over. Skip that one, skip that one, get to these ones at the end. Here's one called "The Flesh", which I guess was involved with at the time, writing a book of poems about the flesh.
George Bowering
00:41:23
Reads "Chapter 43: The Flesh" from Autobiology.
George Bowering
00:42:43
I think I'll read the last couple in this one, and then see what time it is. "The Operations" everybody is my chance, right? Every vessel, living in a house with my mother talking about operations the last couple of weeks and she couldn't really do it. So I get my chance now, ‘cause I don't really get the chance— that's my mother on the cover of the book by the way, that's my mother and that's me. There she is.
George Bowering
00:43:14
Reads "Chapter 45: The Operations" from Autobiology.
George Bowering
00:44:53
And the last two, this is "The Scars".
George Bowering
00:44:56
Reads "Chapter 47: The Scars" from Autobiology.
George Bowering
00:46:24
And the last one is called naturally, "The Body", Chapter 48.
George Bowering
00:46:32
Reads "Chapter 48: The Body" from Autobiology.
George Bowering
00:47:48
That was Autobiology, it's actually, can you imagine, a tetralogy. And the first volume was called Geneve and it was based on a found thing with the tarot pack
and with the Geneva version of the French pack, Marseilles pack. The second one was Autobiology and the third one was Curious and the fourth one is— Dwight Gardiner wrote it, in a book called the Book of the Occasional. I was going to write it but he wrote it, so I didn't have to. It's just absolutely beautiful and if you see a Book of the Occasional, you'll see what I mean. It's just a gorgeous, gorgeous book. Oh, gee, I'd love to read— how long can I have now?
Unknown
00:48:45
[Cut or edit made in tape].
George Bowering
00:48:46
...Because I just suddenly remembered I'd love to read a piece I have called The Big Leagues. But then I also have a book called At War with the U.S. that I— was the first book of poems I've written in years, but maybe I'll just read The Big Leagues, that will probably take— and then maybe I'll read one or two pieces from Curious. This is a book—a thing called The Big Leagues and it's in a few- in five sections and maybe I'll get tired before I get to the fifth one, but I'll just see how— the first one is called "The Detroit Tigers"
.
George Bowering
00:49:21
Reads "The Detroit Tigers".
George Bowering
00:51:57
That was written in South Slocan, B.C.
I think this is my favourite one, it's called "The Dallas Cowboys"
.
George Bowering
00:52:09
Reads "The Dallas Cowboys".
George Bowering
00:54:57
The next one's called "The San Diego Padres"
but I'm going to skip that one because it's about getting dope
into— what happens is that Chance is coming back, he's now wearing the uniform that Slim Chance had before he died, a U.S. Army uniform that says "Chance" on it and "U.S. Army" and they're sneaking some dope into San Diego and it has to do with some Padres whose clothes are taken off so they can use them to hide the dope and everything. The next one's called "The Buffalo Sabres"
.
George Bowering
00:55:32
Begins reading "The Buffalo Sabres".
George Bowering
00:55:37
Oh, by the way what happens is that I took four quotations from poetry, and three of them are taken from the normal Ohio academic American Poetry Anthology and one of them is taken from Robert Creeley
at the end, and you can tell. I can't even remember what poets I took from, like all those guys sorta have the same thing, you know, Donald Hall
Anthology Poets if you know what I mean.
George Bowering
00:56:05
Resumes reading "The Buffalo Sabres".
George Bowering
00:59:06
And this one is for a lot of friends of mine, it's called "The Minnesota Twins"
and he's going on, he's leaving Buffalo
and going to— has anyone here been to— has anyone here been to Bemidji, Minnesota
? You know what they got there right? That great big, blue Ox and the great big Paul Bunyan
carved about 30 feet high or something like that. And other than that, it's a beautiful town, you know, it has the— it looks like the underground of another town turn upside-down, so the bottom is up above the ground, right? "The Minnesota Twins".
Annotation
00:59:39
Reads "The Minnesota Twins".
George Bowering
01:02:26
I think I'll read like for ten minutes and that'll be for a total of an hour, five minutes or something like that. I'll just, I'll pick, this is Curious, which is a— that other book's coming out, it's called In the Flesh and it's maybe the last book of occasional, magazine book verse poetry I ever do. It deals with the experience of being in your 30s and finding out that the world isn't round after all and how sad you can be and how strong emotions can be. It has an introduction called "I Never Felt Such Love". But it's mainly lyric poetry, and I just, I've read so much of that that it's got to be too easy to read and write and everything. So I'll read a few of these. The poets who are mentioned in Curious, it happens that there are a lot of my friends who aren't in the book. Because, again, I wrote it that way, if you know, if that person did not come up, excuse me, from the other side of the page or however that feeling is to be described, if the voice wasn't there or something, for instance I really wanted to do a Roy Kiyooka
poem, and you know, I just couldn't and it didn't come and I had wanted to but if I had tried that it just would have been screwed up. Some of these are American, some are Canadians, a couple are English and maybe one or two other things. And the first one is, naturally, Charles Olson
. Olson, as you probably know, was about 6 ft 10 and weighed about 300 pounds. And I first met him— I was standing at the bottom of a flight of stairs and he was coming down them. So I said 'hello' to the knees of his sear-sucker suit.
George Bowering
01:04:19
Reads "Charles Olson" from Curious.
George Bowering
01:05:57
I'll get some Canadians in here. Margaret Atwood
, she's the first Canadian to appear in here.
George Bowering
01:06:16
Reads "Margaret Atwood" from Curious.
George Bowering
01:07:36
There are some poets in here that you won't know that are more specifically Vancouver-oriented poets perhaps that aren't as well known out here so I'll skip those. This is "bp Nichol". Everybody knows bpNichol
, or everybody is bpNichol.
George Bowering
01:07:57
Reads "bp Nichol" from Curious.
George Bowering
01:09:40
"Stephen Spender"
. I was going to skip this one, but it has a few moments in it.
George Bowering
01:09:53
Reads "Stephen Spender" from Curious.
George Bowering
01:11:18
That's, boy, that's— like you're out on the West Coast where you've never seen a poet before in your life and the first one they bring you is this guy you've been reading in books and he's a white-haired— it's unbelievable. You know, John Newlove's
? John Newlove, for those who know John Newlove.
George Bowering
01:11:36
Reads "John Newlove" from Curious.
George Bowering
01:13:08
That last part is from a title of one of his books. David McFadden
is, this is the David McFadden piece and maybe I'll read it and a couple more. It's not my favourite but it's one that I like reading. David McFadden— well, it tells you what he's like, but David McFadden is a— he scared the hell out of Allen Ginsberg
because he writes really funny poems, like he literally has things, like he walks out into the backyard and sees the Archangel Gabriel
or a space man and just talks to it and talks about it in the story of the poem a paragraph after he's talked about going out and buying some cigarettes or something like that and Ginsberg thought, wow, what a weird spaced out guy, so Victor Coleman
took him down to Hamilton
to see David, David— he's got, as he said in the note of one of his books, "I was born in 1940 and I comb my hair straight back", and in his house, he's got an electric pendulum clock and you know that sort of thing. And Ginsberg took one look and said [inaudible ‘scared’ sound], and ran away. Just couldn't believe it, you know, it's unbelievable. So, David McFadden.
George Bowering
01:14:30
Reads "David McFadden" from Curious.
George Bowering
01:16:24
There wasn't a comma in there, that was the Indian food coming back. Now let's see…
Audience Member 1
01:16:31
Addresses George Bowering [unintelligible; requests poem].
George Bowering
01:16:33
No, he didn't get in there either, and I'm very sad about that, just people that got in that I wish didn't get in and there's people that didn't get in that I wish did get in.
Audience Member 2
01:16:44
[Unintelligible]...Raymond Souster
.
George Bowering
01:16:46
Yeah, I think I might have skipped over Raymond Souster, the Raymond Souster one is, as you might imagine the shortest one in the book.
George Bowering
01:16:58
Reads "Raymond Souster" from Curious.
George Bowering
01:17:59
I got a Purdy one too, but Al weighs 210 pounds. No, I've always made it a policy not to read the ones of somebody that's there. I don't know if there are any other ones that I'm going to read.
Audience Member 3
01:18:25
Addresses George Bowering [unintelligible; requests poem].
George Bowering
01:18:26
Yeah, I don't know where the hell it is. I like the Lionel Kearns
one actually...Oh I don't know what's happened to the Lionel Kearns one, it's one of my very favourites too. I think maybe, I'll see if I can find the Lionel one in a second then I'll read it and I'll finish off with the bill bissett
one. If I just had the book with me it'd be a hell of a lot easier. I don't think I'm going to find the Kearns one. I can't find the Kearns one, it's all about how he can't find anything. This is the bissett one and then I'll finish off with that.
George Bowering
01:19:30
Reads bill bissett" from Curious.
George Bowering
01:21:16
Thank you.
Audience
01:21:17
Applause.
END
01:21:29
Notes:
George Bowering reads from Autobiology (New Star Books, 1972) and Curious (Coach House Press, 1973), as well as a few poems from unknown sources.
List of Poems Read and Time Stamps:
Part 1
00:00 - Background noise, setting up microphone
01:54 - George Bowering introduces reading [INDEX: Al Purdy, review of his book of poems, Al Purdy in the audience]
04:12 - Unknown male introduces Bowering [INDEX: Curious published by Coach House Press; In the Flesh; baseball]
05:48 - George Bowering introduces “Desert Elm” [INDEX: California, Suzuki Roshi ‘Zen Baseball’; reading tour, Autobiology: written in Montreal, finished in Vancouver; Okanagan region in B.C., elm tree; father’s heart attack]
07:22 - Reads “Desert Elm”
20:04 - Introduces “Jack Spicer” from Curious [INDEX: Autobiology; reading from Curious, reading for Artie Gold, book about poets]
20:43 - Reads “Jack Spicer”
22:10 - Explains “Jack Spicer” and introduces “Chapter One: The Raspberries” from Autobiology. [INDEX: Jack Spicer, Summer of 1965, moving to Vancouver, San Francisco Poetry Festival, Spicer’s death; Autobiology (about it), writing started in Westmount (Montreal) and finished in Kitsolano (Vancouver), published the same
day as Stan Perksy’s The Day, readings in Vancouver; handwritten page length of Autobiology]
24:41 - Reads “Chapter One: The Raspberries”
26:06 - Introduces “Chapter Two: The Teeter Totter” [INDEX: artistic process of writing Autobiology; Westmount]
27:05 - Reads “Chapter Two: The Teeter Totter”
28:22 - Reads “Chapter Three: The Pollywogs”
29:31 - Introduces “ Chapter Four: The Flying Dream” [INDEX: reason he started writing poetry]
29:40 - Reads “Chapter Four: The Flying Dream”
30:54 - Introduces “Chapter Eight: The Breaks” [INDEX: Two sections called “The Breaks”; West-Coast elitism]
31:15 - Reads “Chapter Eight: The Breaks”
32:24 - Introduces “Chapter Fourteen: Composition”
33:02 - Reads “Chapter Fourteen: Composition”
34:32 - Reads “Chapter Twenty: The Breaks” [First line “I broke my nose on a girl’s heel...”]
35:53 - Reads “Chapter Twenty-One: Come”
37:13 - Introduces “Chapter Twenty-Six: The Childhood” [INDEX: Vancouver, community living, Cold Mountain, Esalen, [?] shrinkage]
37:56 - Reads “Chapter Twenty-Six: The Childhood”
39:05 - Introduces “Chapter Twenty-Seven: St Louis” [INDEX: William Burroughs, T.S. Eliot]
39:21 - Reads “Chapter Twenty-Seven: St Louis”
40:49 - Introduces “Chapter Forty-Three: The Flesh” [INDEX: series of poems about towns George Bowering lived in]
41:23 - Reads “Chapter Forty-Three: The Flesh”
42:43 - Introduces “The Operations” [INDEX: Operations, chance, living with his mother; cover of the book is a photo of George and his mother]
43:14 - Reads “Chapter Forty-Five: The Operations”
44:53 - Reads “Chapter Forty-Seven: The Scars”
46:24 - Reads “Chapter Forty-Eight: The Body”
47:48 - Talks about Autobiology [INDEX: Tetrology: 1st volume: Geneve: based on a found poem in the Geneve version of the tarot card pack, 2nd volume: Autobiology, 3rd volume: written by Dwight Gardener Book of the Occasional]
48:45.59 - END OF RECORDING.
Part 2
00:00 - George Bowering introduces “The Detroit Tigers” [INDEX: wants to read “The Big Leagues”, book At War with the U.S.; book Curious]
00:35 - Reads “The Detroit Tigers”
03:11 - Introduces “The Dallas Cowboys” [INDEX: “The Detroit Tigers” written in South Slocan, B.C.]
03:23 - Reads “The Dallas Cowboys”
06:11 - Introduces “The Buffalo Sabers” [INDEX: “The San Diego Padres” about smuggling dope into San Diego, Slim Chance (Character), U.S. Army uniform]
06:46 - Reads “The Buffalo Sabers”
06:52 - Interrupts reading with explanation [INDEX: quotations taken from anthologies of American poetry, Ohio, Great Anthology: New Poets of England and America edited by Donald Hall; Robert Creeley]
07:19 - Resumes reading “The Buffalo Sabers”.
10:21 - Introduces “The Minnesota Twins” [INDEX: leaving Buffalo going to Bemidji, Minnesota; Blue Ox and Paul Bunyan statues]
10:54 - Reads “The Minnesota Twins”
13:40 - Introduces “Charles Olson” from Curious. [INDEX: In the Flesh, Curious: book of the occasional, magazine verse, how strong emotions can be, Introduction: “I Never Felt Such Love”, about poets, how he chose what poets to put in the book, Roy Kiyooka, American, Canadian and British poets; Charles Olson and his first meeting with]
15:33 - Reads “Charles Olson”
17:11 - Introduces “Margaret Atwood” [INDEX: introduced as “Peggy Has”, Margaret Atwood]
17:31 - Reads “Margaret Atwood”
18:50 - Introduces “bp Nichol” [INDEX: Vancouver-oriented poets]
19:11 - Reads “bp Nichol”
20:55 - Introduces “Stephen Spender”
21:07 - Reads “Stephen Spender”
22:32 - Introduces “John Newlove” [INDEX: explains his first meeting with Stephen Spender]
24:23 - Reads “John Newlove”
24:23 - Introduces “David McFadden” [INDEX: tells story about how McFadden scared Allen Ginsberg, Victor Coleman]
25:44 - Reads “David McFadden”
27:28 - Introduces “Raymond Souster”
28:13 - Reads “Raymond Souster”
29:13 - Introduces “Bill Bissett” [INDEX: Al Purdy poem, Lionel Kearns]
30:44 - Reads “Bill Bissett”.
32:43.73 - END OF RECORDING.
Content Type:
Sound Recording
Featured:
Yes
Title:
George Bowering Tape Box 2 - Back
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
Title:
George Bowering Tape Box 2 - Front
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
Title:
George Bowering Tape Box 2 - Spine
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
Title:
George Bowering Tape Box 2 - Reel
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
Photograph
Dates
Date:
1974 1 25
Type:
Performance Date
Source:
Accompanying Material
Notes:
Date written on the front of the tape's box
LOCATION
Address:
1455, Boul de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Venue:
Hall Building Room H-435
Latitude:
45.4972758
Longitude:
-73.57893043
Notes:
Location specified in written announcement "Bowering Back At SGWU"
CONTENT
Contents:
george_bowering_i006-11-034.mp3
Introducer
00:00:00
Ambient Sound.
George Bowering
00:01:54
Oh I just did a review of Al Purdy's
new book of poems so maybe I'll just start off reading that. [Audience laughter]. I said I liked it Al. [Audience laughter]. I'm related to practically everybody here. I'll turn this off now. [Audience laughter].
Introducer
00:04:12
...I think that George Bowering
has read or done— or not done, or not written. On the back of [that book (?)], it says that he has two new books, one called Curious from Coach House Press
, and another In the Flesh, coming out with McClelland and Stewart
. The one thing I can add to that is— has to do with baseball
, about which I know much less than George. You still have your team?
George Bowering
00:04:51
Yes.
Introducer
00:04:54
Okay, it's occurred to me that George understands one thing that is rather important to understand that is that the difference between stepping up to the plate and hitting the ball out of the park, and going [unintelligible], on the one hand, and on the other, stepping up to the plate and being there when the bat does what it's supposed to do and the ball takes itself out of the park. And this applies to baseball, and it also applies to poems. And that's what George understands.
George Bowering
00:05:48
For those that live in California
, that's what Suzuki Roshi
calls Zen Baseball. I'm really excited to be back here, this is really a burn for me, because, can you hear me if I talk at this level? I'm hearing an echo, but I— can you hear me? [Audience laughter]. I'm reading for the next three weeks back and forth but this is the first one so I haven't got stale with any of this stuff yet in the east. And I'm going to come back in a few minutes to Autobiology, because I've never read it in the east although I started writing it in Montreal
and finished it in Vancouver
, but before I do I'm going to read a piece that is sort of representative of what I've been doing lately in Vancouver, called "Desert Elm", the desert being the Okanagan
in this instance and the elm being the kind of tree that people planted there that wasn't there before and grew— they tried a lot of other ones and they didn't work. And it's a poem about my father and it deals with— it was begun with his heart attack he had in August and what happened after that, to me.
George Bowering
00:07:22
Reads "Desert Elm".
George Bowering
00:20:04
That's the longest one I'll read I think. I was going to go into Autobiology, but I'm just going to jump right now into one section of Curious, I'm going to read the Jack Spicer
part for Artie
, and then I'll [unintelligible] Curious is a-—that's one of the books that's coming out this week, it's about, it's a book about poets, sort of, and this one's about Jack Spicer, who, Artie digs.
George Bowering
00:20:43
Reads "Jack Spicer" from Curious.
George Bowering
00:22:10
He was supposed to be moving— that was in the summer of '65, he was up in Vancouver and just decided to move up there so he wouldn't die, and because he would die if he stayed in San Francisco
, and then he said, well just before that I'll go down to the San Francisco Poetry Festival, and when that's over in three weeks I'll come up to Vancouver, and he died during the second week. Okay, this is— Autobiology is a book that came out, two years ago this month, actually, 72, yeah. And I started writing it in Westmount
as they say and finished it in Kitsilano
. I started writing it in an expensive flat in Westmount, and finished it in a commune on the edge of the water in Vancouver and it's a story about, as it suggests, it's a story, it's a book, it's poetry, it's prose, it's something about things that have changed me in terms of my head but first in terms of chemicals and physiologically, changed my body literally and so on. So I'll just, I'll read portions of it. I toyed with the idea of reading the whole book, it's the sort of thing we do in Vancouver, like we sit down and read the whole book, and this was published the same day as Stan Persky's
The Day, a book called The Day, and it's the same length, about a hundred pages, and he read The Day and we took a break, and I read Autobiology and then we took a break of a couple of hours and he read The Day again. But that's sort of— that happens a little— it's a little easier to take when everybody is kind of a volunteer anyway, when everybody in the audience has known all the time that this was being written and that it was going to be read, the whole book. So I'll just read parts of it so you get a taste of it. Each section is about one and a quarter foolscap pages when it's handwritten, long, approximately so it turns out to be about two of these pages. "Chapter One"— there's forty-eight chapters. "Chapter One: The Raspberries".
George Bowering
00:24:41
Reads "Chapter One: The Raspberries" from Autobiology.
George Bowering
00:26:06
Did that ever happen to--I'm sure these kinds of things must have happened to--the way I was telling [unintelligible] this afternoon that the way this book is written was I knew the general frame was things that changed me that way, from things put in my body, generally, or pieces of my body taken off, or whatever. Or pieces of my body going out into someone else's body or whatever. And I'd go home in my house in Westmount, from here, and I'd say 'I got it! Today I'm going to do the broken tool part' and I'd run home and I'd start controlling the thing and I'd throw it away, so all the pieces that are in here are the pieces that are not thrown away, the ones where I didn't know what I was going to write when I started writing. I have the sense that I tried to describe that afternoon as being simply equal to what was coming in the story. This is "Chapter 2", I'll read "Chapter 1" and 2 and 3 and 4 and then I'll skip. This is "The Teeter Totter".
George Bowering
00:27:05
Reads "Chapter 2: The Teeter Totter" from Autobiology.
George Bowering
00:28:22
Reads "Chapter 3: The Pollywogs" from Autobiology.
George Bowering
00:29:31
"The Flying Dream". This is the origin of why I decided to write poetry I think, or at least I've always made that connection. "The Flying Dream".
George Bowering
00:29:40
Reads "Chapter 4: The Flying Dream" from Autobiology.
George Bowering
00:30:54
It's the basis of that West Coast
elitism, Al. I— after I'd done this whole book I found out there's two chapters called "The Breaks", I'd totally forgotten that this chapter had written me this time. So this is the first chapter on “The Breaks”.
George Bowering
00:31:15
Reads "Chapter 8: The Breaks" from Autobiology [audience laughter throughout].
George Bowering
00:32:34
Gee, there's one I've never read before, I mean, out loud [audience laughter]. I'm not going to anyway, heck with it. Oh, here's one that every once in a while there's, it comes to, the thing comes to writing itself or talking about the writing of itself, so here's one called "Composition", for those that are worried about the problem it'll be totally clear. I think. It defines composition. "Composition".
George Bowering
00:33:02
Reads "Chapter 14: Composition" from Autobiology.
George Bowering
00:34:32
Here's the other one called "The Breaks".
George Bowering
00:34:35.49
Reads "Chapter 20: The Breaks" from Autobiology.
George Bowering
00:35:53
Reads [“Chapter 21: Come’ from Autobiology].
George Bowering
00:37:13
This is one that, this is a favourite amongst the [serifs (?)] in Vancouver. The— I live in a community now as different from the community I lived in a couple of years ago of all https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5882404], Esalen
, encounters all the time and they're always talking about shrinkage and they're always telling me why don't you take shrinkage, and I say 'I don't feel like I need shrinkage' and they said 'that proves you need shrinkage'. Can't get out of it, you know, that's your problem— you don't think you need... So this one is sort of a reply to that, it's called "The Childhood".
George Bowering
00:37:56
Reads "Chapter 26: The Childhood" from Autobiology.
George Bowering
00:39:05
This one's about the literary world, it's called "St. Louis", where, St. Louis is where William Burroughs
and an earlier poet came from. T.S. Sandburn
, I think his name was. [audience laughter.]
George Bowering
00:39:21
Reads "Chapter 27: St. Louis" from Autobiology.
George Bowering
00:40:49
Then there's a whole series of pieces on towns that I lived in which I'll skip over. Skip that one, skip that one, get to these ones at the end. Here's one called "The Flesh", which I guess was involved with at the time, writing a book of poems about the flesh.
George Bowering
00:41:23
Reads "Chapter 43: The Flesh" from Autobiology.
George Bowering
00:42:43
I think I'll read the last couple in this one, and then see what time it is. "The Operations" everybody is my chance, right? Every vessel, living in a house with my mother talking about operations the last couple of weeks and she couldn't really do it. So I get my chance now, ‘cause I don't really get the chance— that's my mother on the cover of the book by the way, that's my mother and that's me. There she is.
George Bowering
00:43:14
Reads "Chapter 45: The Operations" from Autobiology.
George Bowering
00:44:53
And the last two, this is "The Scars".
George Bowering
00:44:56
Reads "Chapter 47: The Scars" from Autobiology.
George Bowering
00:46:24
And the last one is called naturally, "The Body", Chapter 48.
George Bowering
00:46:32
Reads "Chapter 48: The Body" from Autobiology.
George Bowering
00:47:48
That was Autobiology, it's actually, can you imagine, a tetralogy. And the first volume was called Geneve and it was based on a found thing with the tarot pack
and with the Geneva version of the French pack, Marseilles pack. The second one was Autobiology and the third one was Curious and the fourth one is— Dwight Gardiner wrote it, in a book called the Book of the Occasional. I was going to write it but he wrote it, so I didn't have to. It's just absolutely beautiful and if you see a Book of the Occasional, you'll see what I mean. It's just a gorgeous, gorgeous book. Oh, gee, I'd love to read— how long can I have now?
Unknown
00:48:45
[Cut or edit made in tape].
George Bowering
00:48:46
...Because I just suddenly remembered I'd love to read a piece I have called The Big Leagues. But then I also have a book called At War with the U.S. that I— was the first book of poems I've written in years, but maybe I'll just read The Big Leagues, that will probably take— and then maybe I'll read one or two pieces from Curious. This is a book—a thing called The Big Leagues and it's in a few- in five sections and maybe I'll get tired before I get to the fifth one, but I'll just see how— the first one is called "The Detroit Tigers"
.
George Bowering
00:49:21
Reads "The Detroit Tigers".
George Bowering
00:51:57
That was written in South Slocan, B.C.
I think this is my favourite one, it's called "The Dallas Cowboys"
.
George Bowering
00:52:09
Reads "The Dallas Cowboys".
George Bowering
00:54:57
The next one's called "The San Diego Padres"
but I'm going to skip that one because it's about getting dope
into— what happens is that Chance is coming back, he's now wearing the uniform that Slim Chance had before he died, a U.S. Army uniform that says "Chance" on it and "U.S. Army" and they're sneaking some dope into San Diego and it has to do with some Padres whose clothes are taken off so they can use them to hide the dope and everything. The next one's called "The Buffalo Sabres"
.
George Bowering
00:55:32
Begins reading "The Buffalo Sabres".
George Bowering
00:55:37
Oh, by the way what happens is that I took four quotations from poetry, and three of them are taken from the normal Ohio academic American Poetry Anthology and one of them is taken from Robert Creeley
at the end, and you can tell. I can't even remember what poets I took from, like all those guys sorta have the same thing, you know, Donald Hall
Anthology Poets if you know what I mean.
George Bowering
00:56:05
Resumes reading "The Buffalo Sabres".
George Bowering
00:59:06
And this one is for a lot of friends of mine, it's called "The Minnesota Twins"
and he's going on, he's leaving Buffalo
and going to— has anyone here been to— has anyone here been to Bemidji, Minnesota
? You know what they got there right? That great big, blue Ox and the great big Paul Bunyan
carved about 30 feet high or something like that. And other than that, it's a beautiful town, you know, it has the— it looks like the underground of another town turn upside-down, so the bottom is up above the ground, right? "The Minnesota Twins".
Annotation
00:59:39
Reads "The Minnesota Twins".
George Bowering
01:02:26
I think I'll read like for ten minutes and that'll be for a total of an hour, five minutes or something like that. I'll just, I'll pick, this is Curious, which is a— that other book's coming out, it's called In the Flesh and it's maybe the last book of occasional, magazine book verse poetry I ever do. It deals with the experience of being in your 30s and finding out that the world isn't round after all and how sad you can be and how strong emotions can be. It has an introduction called "I Never Felt Such Love". But it's mainly lyric poetry, and I just, I've read so much of that that it's got to be too easy to read and write and everything. So I'll read a few of these. The poets who are mentioned in Curious, it happens that there are a lot of my friends who aren't in the book. Because, again, I wrote it that way, if you know, if that person did not come up, excuse me, from the other side of the page or however that feeling is to be described, if the voice wasn't there or something, for instance I really wanted to do a Roy Kiyooka
poem, and you know, I just couldn't and it didn't come and I had wanted to but if I had tried that it just would have been screwed up. Some of these are American, some are Canadians, a couple are English and maybe one or two other things. And the first one is, naturally, Charles Olson
. Olson, as you probably know, was about 6 ft 10 and weighed about 300 pounds. And I first met him— I was standing at the bottom of a flight of stairs and he was coming down them. So I said 'hello' to the knees of his sear-sucker suit.
George Bowering
01:04:19
Reads "Charles Olson" from Curious.
George Bowering
01:05:57
I'll get some Canadians in here. Margaret Atwood
, she's the first Canadian to appear in here.
George Bowering
01:06:16
Reads "Margaret Atwood" from Curious.
George Bowering
01:07:36
There are some poets in here that you won't know that are more specifically Vancouver-oriented poets perhaps that aren't as well known out here so I'll skip those. This is "bp Nichol". Everybody knows bpNichol
, or everybody is bpNichol.
George Bowering
01:07:57
Reads "bp Nichol" from Curious.
George Bowering
01:09:40
"Stephen Spender"
. I was going to skip this one, but it has a few moments in it.
George Bowering
01:09:53
Reads "Stephen Spender" from Curious.
George Bowering
01:11:18
That's, boy, that's— like you're out on the West Coast where you've never seen a poet before in your life and the first one they bring you is this guy you've been reading in books and he's a white-haired— it's unbelievable. You know, John Newlove's
? John Newlove, for those who know John Newlove.
George Bowering
01:11:36
Reads "John Newlove" from Curious.
George Bowering
01:13:08
That last part is from a title of one of his books. David McFadden
is, this is the David McFadden piece and maybe I'll read it and a couple more. It's not my favourite but it's one that I like reading. David McFadden— well, it tells you what he's like, but David McFadden is a— he scared the hell out of Allen Ginsberg
because he writes really funny poems, like he literally has things, like he walks out into the backyard and sees the Archangel Gabriel
or a space man and just talks to it and talks about it in the story of the poem a paragraph after he's talked about going out and buying some cigarettes or something like that and Ginsberg thought, wow, what a weird spaced out guy, so Victor Coleman
took him down to Hamilton
to see David, David— he's got, as he said in the note of one of his books, "I was born in 1940 and I comb my hair straight back", and in his house, he's got an electric pendulum clock and you know that sort of thing. And Ginsberg took one look and said [inaudible ‘scared’ sound], and ran away. Just couldn't believe it, you know, it's unbelievable. So, David McFadden.
George Bowering
01:14:30
Reads "David McFadden" from Curious.
George Bowering
01:16:24
There wasn't a comma in there, that was the Indian food coming back. Now let's see…
Audience Member 1
01:16:31
Addresses George Bowering [unintelligible; requests poem].
George Bowering
01:16:33
No, he didn't get in there either, and I'm very sad about that, just people that got in that I wish didn't get in and there's people that didn't get in that I wish did get in.
Audience Member 2
01:16:44
[Unintelligible]...Raymond Souster
.
George Bowering
01:16:46
Yeah, I think I might have skipped over Raymond Souster, the Raymond Souster one is, as you might imagine the shortest one in the book.
George Bowering
01:16:58
Reads "Raymond Souster" from Curious.
George Bowering
01:17:59
I got a Purdy one too, but Al weighs 210 pounds. No, I've always made it a policy not to read the ones of somebody that's there. I don't know if there are any other ones that I'm going to read.
Audience Member 3
01:18:25
Addresses George Bowering [unintelligible; requests poem].
George Bowering
01:18:26
Yeah, I don't know where the hell it is. I like the Lionel Kearns
one actually...Oh I don't know what's happened to the Lionel Kearns one, it's one of my very favourites too. I think maybe, I'll see if I can find the Lionel one in a second then I'll read it and I'll finish off with the bill bissett
one. If I just had the book with me it'd be a hell of a lot easier. I don't think I'm going to find the Kearns one. I can't find the Kearns one, it's all about how he can't find anything. This is the bissett one and then I'll finish off with that.
George Bowering
01:19:30
Reads bill bissett" from Curious.
George Bowering
01:21:16
Thank you.
Audience
01:21:17
Applause.
END
01:21:29
Notes:
George Bowering reads from Autobiology (New Star Books, 1972) and Curious (Coach House Press, 1973), as well as a few poems from unknown sources.
NOTES
Type:
General
Note:
Year-specific Information:
In 1974, George Bowering had published At War with the U.S. (Talonbooks, 1974), Flycatcher & Other Stories (Oberon, 1974), In the Flesh (McClelland & Stewart, 1974) and the last issue of Imago: 20 (Talonbooks, 1974) and was teaching at Simon Fraser University.
Type:
General
Note:
Local connections:
George Bowering was very influential in promoting and enriching the Vancouver poetry scene in the early 1960s, through his magazines Tish and Imago as well as the hundreds of connections he made with other poets. His early connections with the Black Mountain Poets and the relationships he made with Canadian poets from Vancouver across Canada to Montreal have been essential because he bridged the gap of distance and made new types of poetry available to young poets. Montrealer Louis Dudek wrote that Bowering’s “most important contribution to the new generation of Montreal poets was the institution of a series of readings at Sir George [Williams University] which exposed them to the diverse experimentation that was taking place across Canada and the U.S.”
Type:
Cataloguer
Note:
Original transcript, research, introduction and edits by Celyn Harding-Jones
Additional research and edits by Faith Paré (2020) & Ali Barillaro (2021)
RELATED WORKS
Citation:
“Bowering Back at SGWU”. The Georgian. Montreal: Sir George Williams University, 25 January 1974.
Citation:
Bowering, George. Autobiology. Vancouver: New Star Books, 1972.
Citation:
Bowering, George. Curious. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1973.
Citation:
Bowering, George. (ed). The Contemporary Canadian Poem Anthology. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1984.
Citation:
Davey, Frank. From There to Here: A Guide to English-Canadian Literature Since 1960.
Ontario: Press Porcepic, 1974.
Citation:
Farkas, Andre & Ken Norris, ed. Montreal English Poetry of the Seventies. Montreal: Vehicule Press, 1977.
Citation:
Geddes, Gary (ed). Fifteen Canadian Poets Times Two. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Citation:
Mandel, Eli (ed). Poets of Contemporary Canada 1960-1970. Montreal: McClelland and Stewart, 1972.
Citation:
Miki, Roy. “Bowering, George (1935-)”. Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English. Ed. Benson, Eugene; Conolly, L.W. London: Routledge,
1994.
Citation:
Miki, Roy. A Record of Writing: an annotated and illustrated bibliography of George Bowering. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1990.
Citation:
Quartermain, Peter and Meredith. "George Bowering." Canadian Writers Since 1960:
First Series. Ed. William H. New. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 53.
Detroit: Gale Research, 1986.