A Magpie Life: Growing a Writer

Ronald Charles Epstein is a Toronto-based freelance writer and published poet.

Louis Dudek is dead and Irving Layton is incapacitated. In one manner or
another, literary lions depart and new ones replace them. Sometimes
these replacements turn out to be former pioneers, such as the B.C.
writer George Bowering. In the early 1960s, along with fellow poets
Frank Davey and Fred Wah, he founded TISH, an important Vancouver poetry
newsletter that sparked a literary movement. This early achievement,
plus a solid body of work, makes the author a literary authority whose
work deserves attention.

Fortunately, Bowering does not take himself too seriously. Any
whimsical writer can sum up his life in alphabetized sections, but a
limited number have the skill to create a successful
“Alphabiography.” Bowering is a patriot, but his attitudes toward
America are complex and surprising. Like any good card-carrying
nationalist, he slams the usual American targets—Vietnam and the gun
culture. He even refers to our neighbors as “U.S. Americans” in the
style of those who assail them for using the last name of the Western
Hemisphere’s continents to describe themselves. On the other hand, he
freely acknowledges his debts to certain American modernist poets, such
as Charles Olson and Robert Duncan, even though these links have led
Ontario-based nationalists to view him as a cultural “Americanizer.”

This book showcases Bowering’s populist tendencies. The former sports
reporter for the Oliver Chronicle devotes a section to baseball. Yet he
also taught at Simon Fraser University and has a thorough understanding
of modern American literature. One might state that he is a link between
Al Purdy and the postmodernists.

The publisher informs the reader that this book is really a form of
“biotext,” a term that sounds like a literary equivalent of
“infotainment.” A Magpie Life does teach and amuse, but Bowering’s
work should not be placed on the same level as People magazine.