A Way with Words

Terry Goldie is an associate professor of English at York University and
author of Fear and Temptation.

Once again a reasonably good book is defeated by the fulsome attention of its cover blurb. The back of A Way with Words begins by asking, “How long can a national literature survive without a body of criticism to sustain and support it?” Implication: this book supplies that support. The promotion then continues by mentioning three critical works which also contribute to the great task. They were also published by Oberon, but, since the blurb doesn’t mention their names, I don’t know what they are. Then, finally, it states that in this book “George Bowering seeks to define the dimensions of a specifically personal poetic.” Among other things, this book will reveal “what exactly we can expect to learn from our poets.”

This is a collection of criticism that Bowering has published over a number of years. The essays are all comments on contemporary Canadian poets, primarily those that have always been associated with Bowering, such as Roy Kiyooka, Red Lane, Lionel Kearns, Fred Wah, and Frank Davey (a lamentable absence is something on Daphne Marlatt). They are personal, in that they present one man’s subjective reaction to one person’s poetry. This is true no less when Bowering is examining those who are not his associates: “Now you see why I am writing this piece not as a measured treatise on James Reaney’s regionalism, but rather from the point of view of a BC stranger puzzling out what I found in Reaney’s Listeners’ Workshop and what I find in his printed work.”

Personal — but is it specific and is it a poetic? Bowering seems devoted to something like realism and reflection of individual experience, and he is much more willing than most to light out against what he doesn’t like — as in his attack on the effect of what he sees as too much detachment after World War I: “It unfortunately met the Anglo mind like an epi-psyche, and gave us the neo-neo-augustans in Britain and the New Criticism in the USA. In Canada a little later we heard and rewarded the genteel mystified despair of poets such as Wilfred Watson and Douglas Le Pan.”

But there is no clear poetic here, no statement of position, although a general one can be inferred. Instead, A Way with Words provides a series of academic studies, decidedly less arid and more perceptive than most. However, as a collection their only justification is either that they cover a number of poets who have been seldom examined or that they are by George Bowering. A student of his poetry would be interested in the development of his critical ideas. Here again, however, the book defeats itself by providing no dates or locations for the essays, although internal evidence suggests that they cover a period of fifteen, perhaps more like twenty years. The only reference to location is “Grateful acknowledgement is made to the periodicals in which many of these essays first appeared.” Graceful and useless.

George Bowering is a significant poet and a wide-ranging thinker. Besides the expected many references to Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley, Bowering sails through space and time for ideas. In his study of Lionel Kearns he touches on Heidegger, Saussure, Whitman, Pound, Bosch, Barthes, Mallarme, Hegel, Wordsworth, Blake, and McLuhan. All in useful ways. I think he deserves a book. And a better one than this.