So I’m hepped up thinking good thoughts about Canada and I slip back to Open Field. Among all the names that call for my attention, this side of bp Nichol ( and yes, they don’t have enough of him in this book)–one of the first is George Bowering’s. I recall really liking this guy back about 24 years ago when I read his stuff (ALLOGENES? Also recall a selected from Talon Books with a beautiful cover, plus his work in THE LONG POEM ANTHOLOGY) at Woodland Pattern Books. There was a restless intelligence–an energy– in what he did that attracted me. I guess one of the great things that Nichol and Bowering could do was to open up the page in a way that poets stuck in the memory game cannot do. Memory game poems–this is what passes for poetry in most of the anthologies these days. The memory of mother or father, or etc., is the good contemporary poet’s cue to get “intense.” Here’s an example from the late Roland Flint, a poet I once met in the mid-70’s in Maryland, and even published:

Well, mother, tomorrow night
I will be born, if this were 57
years ago, and you were 29.
Twenty-nine! How young you
would be to me now, mother!

and it goes on, artlessly, sentimentally, from there.

Bowering would never do that. (Would he?) Never get sickly sentimental, I mean, yet Queyras chooses to include a selection from Kerrisdale Elegies, which is not only based in memory, but is steeped in the same kind of sentiment that is a poet like Flint’s stock in trade. In fact, Flint could have written lines exactly like these on a good day, if he’d developed a liking for indenting a line or two per stanza once in a while:

Maybe I should walk along 41st Avenue
where mothers in velvet jogging suits push prams
and imitate the objects of my first lyrics.
Maybe I should comb my hair
the way I did in high school.

Ok. ok. Prufrock, right? Or am I just reading into this. If it’s Prufrock, it’s Prufrock without the crisp line breaks, the tension between form and content–the craft.

Or how about this:

Isn’t it about time we said to hell with agony?
Shouldn’t we be rich with hit parade love by now?
Aren’t we really free to choose joy over drama,
and haven’t we come through looking pretty good,
like a line-drive off a perfect swing
in the ninth inning?

George Bowering has written better than this. I swear he has.