by Christine Hearn
Photograpy by Frank Vena

George Bowering is poet laureate and SFU professor emeritus. He's also a two-time Governor General's award winner - once for poetry, once for fiction - and a member of the Order of Canada. SFU professor Roy Miki is winner of the 2002 Governor General's award for poetry. aq recently sat in on a conversation between the two poets.

On the role of the poet in society and the cancellation of a poetry reading at the White House

Roy Miki: Does a poet have a role?

George Bowering: The poet is the unacknowledged legislator of the world.

RM: Unacknowledged - that's the main point. In our society acknowledgement is important. You could say profound things, but if no one is listening to you and you have no access to public space does that mean you have a role or a function? A poet operates language in specific kinds of ways, so the poet's functions may differ according to circumstances.

GB: Poets are using the Internet. That's how that Laura Bush thing got cancelled in two days. It got on to the Internet and the poets just webbed all over the country. And the White House cancelled.

RM: I heard that the poets were going to read anti-war poems. At this moment in the United States it would seem to me a function of the poet would be to take on a much more public forum to intervene in this debate. And they did show that they're doing this.

GB: Now people are actually finding out poets' names. My favourite anecdote in this whole huff between the poets and the government in the States is when Amiri Baraka got into trouble for the stuff he said about 9/11. New Jersey tried to fire him and they found out it's illegal for them to fire him so they tried to pass a law revoking the idea of there being such a thing as a New Jersey poet laureate. So immediately the Newark school board appointed Amiri Baraka the school board's poet laureate.

On the role of the poet in Canada

RM: I wonder why the poet in Canada hasn't had a more radical social role over the last 50 years?

GB: It only happens when it becomes politically interesting.

RM: When's the last time in Canada where we had a crisis where poets' voices were actually taken seriously?

GB: The invasion of Quebec by Canada in 1970 where the Quebec poets got thrown in jail. And their books got taken out of bookstores and their records taken out of record stores. The other one was when Milton Acorn's reading on the lawn outside the legislature in Toronto was broken up by policemen on horses. He was reading political poems on the lawn without a permit. People are on that lawn all the time feeding the squirrels, but if you read poems... It's like Jamie Reid said, sometimes part of the role of the poet is to just stop writing poetry and put your body on the line and get beat up by the cops.

RM: If the poet has a role in Canada, maybe it has been to say relatively nice things about perceptions and about esthetic beauty. People have felt that poets are supposed to present you with beautiful thoughts only or pretty pictures from the imagination. Our first-year students tend to assume that a poem is supposed to act in that way, so when they find out that poets are thinking, sentient beings who have all kinds of critical thoughts about social and cultural systems and so on, they often say that's not real poetry. In many ways in Canada we have developed the notion that the poet is supposed to be relatively tame. Or if they're not tame, they take on qualities like Milton Acorn who identified himself with personal idiosyncrasies. They have their own point of view, but they are not seen as serious social critics.

GB: I remember how mad Irving Layton would get when he'd be invited to a party where people would say, "Aren't you that cute little poet who uses those four-letter words?" That would just drive him mad.

RM: I always think that the U.S. has the example of someone like Walt Whitman and poets like William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein. All of them were involved in the social world, and they were very attentive to history, to language, to ideas. In Canada, I think, we developed a softer, lyric form.

GB: Landscape. They got involved in landscape in Canada.

On poetry and politics

RM: The notion that poetry intersects with politics is something a lot of people want to stay clear of. You hear a lot of poets say, "Oh, my poetry's not political in any way," things of that sort, but I think the political effect can be very subtle. It doesn't have to be in your face and always tied to mainstream politics - its political effect can have to do with complicated gender or identity issues, or anything that breaks norms, habits, patterns.

So you often see the most passionate kind of literary work - not just in poems, but in creative writing itself - coming from writers who have seen themselves as minoritized or beleaguered, or some ways in struggle with dominant power. In many First Nations writers, for instance, there's always an edge in their work. I don't see that as overtly political in the ordinary sense of the term, but more the dynamic of a relationship that comes out of struggle. Here I'm speaking from my own perspective, or from the so-called minority framework out of which I've grown.

GB: There always have been people, including poets, who will say that you can't really be a politically committed poet if your poetry is going to be esoteric, i.e., if it's going to have knowledge and a scholarly edge to it. The great revolutionary political poets in England 175 years ago were Blake and especially Shelley.

All the Romantic poets were involved, they were all supporting the French Revolution, but Shelley was also the most intellectual of all the English poets. He gave his poetry to people who were fighting oppression all over Europe. All the little countries that the Hapsburg Empire gobbled up, Shelley was promoting their uprisings. And he was opposed to kings, he was opposed to popes, he was opposed to anybody that had hegemonic power.

A lot of poets see both kinds of political poetry as useful. You can dumb your poetry down in order to get a rabble roused. But that poetry won't be very useful to people 100 years from now.

On poetry and a new public

RM: There seems to be something going on with poetry right now among our contemporaries, even among younger folks. There was an intense public quality to a recent reading in the Vancouver Public Library that I'm not used to. I'm not used to reading in a public space where people ask you questions about poetry. Most of the readings I'm familiar with, you read and then a few people mumble some often deep comments to each other, and then off you go for a beer.

GB: Well, you sometimes get asked questions like "Where do you get your ideas for poetry?" or "How do I get my book published?"

RM: The generation of my young students, though, is saturated with loud multimedia stuff that is assaulting them all the time. So poetic language - soft language, or spoken language, or even complicated and dense language - is something new to their ears. It's new because they're so used to fairly transparent language, the language of everyday popular discourse that is pretty much a canned language.

Some of my students get fascinated by the possibility of poetry. They say, "Oh, you mean you can really write like that?" or "You can really think that way?" The poets are doing things with language and producing different ways of thinking that students are not used to at all. So I think that might be one of the attractions of poetry - that it's coming out of an exhaustion with a mass media that finally lets you down because it doesn't tell you much about the world.

On teaching poetry in high schools

GB: This is all happening while poetry is getting handled less and less and less and less in the schools in Canada - not just Canadian poetry, any poetry. A lot of the schools are making English an elective, and in the schools, instead of studying literature, they are studying text. The kids get will get a poem that will illustrate life in Canada, and then cartoons from the newspapers, and pictures of the Backstreet Boys or whatever is popular now. They'll have all different kinds of things called text and they're all treated the same. This is sort of post-modernism filtered down to the intelligence of the high school curriculum.

RM: Because that was an opening in the seventies when we kind of started to talk about text as a way of thinking about language structure. Now it's used for dumbing down. GB: There's a recent report for the Canada Council on the teaching of Canadian literature in the schools and it's plummeted. Now you're not likely to read a Canadian novel in school, you're more likely to read To Kill a Mockingbird.

On poetry as a reader-friendly medium

RM: Louis Zukofsky was this great American poet of richly textured, musical and highly, highly intellectual poetry. He always used the three elements: sight, sound, and intellection. Intellection is really a lovely word because you get rid of feelings, and you can then say the language of this poem is intellection. There's thinking going on here, folks.

GB: I've been getting all kinds of email, one person who is kind of typical, says, "I think poetry should be reader-friendly." I said, "No, no, no, no, no!"

RM: Reader-friendly - completely the opposite!

GB: Television is reader-friendly. That's not what poetry is for. One time William Carlos Williams said to his wife, Florence: "I want to write a poem that you can understand, but you gotta work hard."

On teaching poetry in university
RM: It's not too difficult to get students interested. You start working through the poem meticulously and then you draw them into it as a thinking process.

GB: Sometimes you just have to show them one thing that they didn't notice and they'll say, "Oh, wait a minute. That really wasn't in there, was it?"

RM: I had a class in American poetry where I started getting down on them at the beginning of the course. They were so lazy they only read the poem once. "You read the poem once? You read the poem only once, for class. This is all?" We then read the poem together, which didn't take long, and I asked them, "How many words did you look up?" "None." And I said, "I can't believe it." I would take a word from the Oxford English Dictionary. Just to show them how words can have many definitions. I try to get them to see that a poem is like an encylopedia of knowledge. If you look at a poem really carefully the whole world is in there. So you're trying to get them to stop and look around in a poem because there is so much information about life in a poem that they're never going to find anywhere else.

GB: One of the things is that the teachers themselves are often afraid of the poem. They think, if I can't understand this how am I ever going to teach it to the kid? so I'll just ask the kid, "How did it make you feel?"

RM: That's the thing I said when I was doing the talk with teachers. I advised them to allow themselves to not know. At times it's important to be able to say, "I can't go any further here at this time."

GB: When I come into a class the first thing I say is, "I want you to give lots of room for your stupidity. I want you to be dumb in front of this poem." And take it literally. If it says the cow jumped over the moon, accept that as a fact. Now where do we go? Don't immediately start thinking, "Hmmm... the cow is a metaphor for..." No, the cow did jump over the moon. Now what? Why did the dish run away with the spoon? Cause it rhymes with moon?

On Bowering's newest book

GB: It's called Stone Country: An Unauthorized History of Canada. I figure you can't go wrong with stone in your title. It's coming out in May. It starts with the formation of the land and it ends with that guy, Long Ago Man Found, that they found up in the glacier. It was really neat because where they found him is where B.C., the Yukon, and Alaska all come together. What a neat story. And the curious thing is that about the same time they were putting him to rest - this is such a weird coincidence - they were re-burying Montcalm. And Long Ago Man Found was missing his head and one arm. And all they had left of Montcalm was his head and one arm. He had the parts that Long Ago Man Found didn't have.

On writing and the writing community

GB: That's been one of the neat things: knowing people all across the country who are also in the writing game. For me, that's been one of the two or three best things about having turned out to be a writer instead of whatever else I might have turned out to be.

RM: It's interesting, when we talk about the function of a writer, how intricate the networks of friendships are in both the literary and cultural worlds all across Canada.

GB: It used to be when I was younger we'd write letters and now we write emails to each other. The difference with Roy is that he can write poems on airplanes and I can't.

RM: I love writing on airplanes.

GB: Do you write them right on your laptop or do you write them by hand?

RM: Usually by hand, because I sense I intimidate people by using the laptop.

GB: That's what you share with Allen Ginsberg; he wrote in his notebook wherever he went: in people's cars, on airplanes, wherever he was he was writing in his notebook. It's a method a lot of people use. I just can't do it myself, but a lot people do that and then every couple of years they go through the notebooks and pull out the poems.

RM: It's weird, there are certain things you find.

GB: That's how Roy wrote the whole poem he got the Governor General's award for. He wrote it on the road in Australia, and so forth.

RM: That's what I'm saying, "Why are you giving me an award for something when I was just trying to keep my life in order?"

GB: I just have be in my place to write. Occasionally I can do something somewhere else, but usually I have to be in my place to work on a book. When I'm zipping back and forth across the country, I don't write.

On writing a book and risking failure

GB: But you are touching on a thing - looking for a way to write a book. If you write a book like the last book, you're just writing the last book again. So Roy has done things like renting a place on the other side of town so he could go there to write. And it's a way of writing a book.

Or you can do it another way, like all kind of gizmos I've used to write a book. Write at a certain minute of an hour every night. Or write a book starting at A and write all the way to Z. Or write a book of 48 portraits of 48 friends or something like that. Some way of organizing the book. And what that does is takes your attention away from what Roy was talking about: "I feel this way about that dog walking down the street, I'd better write it down." You can be sure somebody's already done that.

What I love is finding the method to do the book. And sometimes they fail, utterly. And that's what experimental poetry really is. Once I was going to take the cantos of Ezra Pound and pretend that each canto is a room and have a guy go into these room by room and see what happens. I worked on it, worked on it, worked on it, didn't work, didn't work. I wish it had.

RM: Maybe what you did was conceived it too much. And when you tried to create this whole fictional scenario, the thinking about it was more interesting than actually doing it.

GB: I guess the main job is to get outside yourself when you're trying to write a book. That's a political act to start with. I think the most important word is invention. Invention is an important thing to do as opposed to description or expression or whatever all those other things are. The word invention means that something is flowing in rather than you expressing something out. aq

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