Craft Slices

William Blackburn is a professor of English at the University of
Calgary.

Having “a lot to say about the world of writing I have happily inhabited during the last couple of decades,” George Bowering has elected to say it in Craft Slices — “This pile of slices...piled by a writer who wrote them and typed them and gave them titles and then stacked them alphabetically.” He does indeed have a good deal to say, and speaks with his customary wit and insight in this collection of short pieces on subjects including our habits (“habit is mind cancer”), our confused notions of poetry (and our consequent veneration of “the metrical artichokes of the Academy”), and our Professional Patriots (delightfully parodied in a plot to occupy the Kingdome and petition Ottawa for sovereignty-association: “My country, my ball park. Take me in to the ball game, what a national anthem! My season’s ticket, what a passport! The pennant, what a beautiful flag for which to stand on guard”). With its conversational tone and its air of knowledge hard-won from personal experience, Craft Slices recalls a work by another poet-critic, Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading. In fact, Bowering’s reference to Pound as “an intemperate reformer” applies equally well to himself. And, also like Pound, Bowering has a clear rationale for his unorthodox approach; that rationale is post-thematic and post-modernist. Impatient with fictions that describe or interpret the world, Bowering celebrates the writer “who continuously discovers his own speech as phenomenon.” His conversational tone is not just direct and engaging; it reflects his belief that “the storyteller’s words are acts of a person’s voice, and there resides the chance at offering a listener some reality.” Perhaps the only reality the writer can offer is an awareness of his own voice, his own being in the universe he creates and shares: “No artist can really create. He gathers and arranges materials found at hand... The artist excels as he enters, not as he controls.”

There is much in Craft Slices to reward the general reader interested in Canadian literature; there is yet more that will be valuable to new and beginning writers, especially those intimidated by the literary establishment (like the advice to ignore the pantheon and “look into your ear and write”). More than one novice is likely to find, in Bowering’s wit and wisdom and concern, the proof of Pound’s observation that “artists are the antennae of the race.”