George Bowering is one of Canada’s most profoundly influential writers. He has published over 100 books and chapbooks, and from 2002 to 2004, he served as the first Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada. He also holds the distinction of being the first English-language writer to win the Governor General’s Literary Award in both Poetry and Fiction—a feat only two other writers, Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje, have matched. More on vancouver1.one.
Education and Early Career Milestones
Bowering, an Officer of the Order of Canada, a Governor General’s Literary Award recipient in both poetry and fiction, and a founder of the literary magazine Tish, is truly one of Canada’s most widely influential writers. After serving as an aerial photographer in the Royal Canadian Air Force, Bowering enrolled at the University of British Columbia (UBC), where he earned both his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. At UBC, he met fellow poets such as Frank Davey, David Dawson, James Reid, and Fred Wah, and studied the emerging style of American Black Mountain artists: Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson. Starting in 1961, Bowering, along with Davey, Wah, Reid, and Dawson, co-founded the poetry newsletter, Tish.
In 1963, US professor Warren Tallman organized a pivotal poetry conference in Vancouver. It drew important American writers like Denise Levertov, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Louis Zukofsky, and Philip Whalen, alongside Canadian poets such as Margaret Avison and Phyllis Webb, and the young Bowering and Wah. Tallman also hosted famous poetry readings at his Vancouver home, where San Francisco Renaissance poet (and close friend of Robin Blaser) Jack Spicer delivered a series of legendary lectures on language and poetry.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Bowering remained active in academia: he began teaching at the University of Calgary in 1963, traveled extensively, and started publishing poetry chapbooks and books. In 1966, he enrolled to write his doctoral dissertation at the University of Western Ontario. He left a year later and became Writer-in-Residence at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia), where he met Eastern Canadian poets and writers like A.J.M. Smith, F.R. Scott, Louis Dudek, and John Glassco. In 1971, thanks to a Canada Council grant, he returned to Vancouver to write, and in 1972, he began teaching at Simon Fraser University.
The Writer’s Most Brilliant Works
George Bowering’s career has been extraordinarily prolific. He has published over 100 books of poetry, including Rocky Mountain Foot (1969) and The Gangs of Kosmos (1969), which earned him his first Governor General’s Literary Award, as well as Autobiology (1972), The Catch (1976), Selected Poems: Particular Accidents (1980), West Window (1982), Kerrisdale Elegies (1984), Delayed Mercy and Other Poems (1987), Urban Snow (1991), Blonds on Bikes (1997), Vermeer’s Light: Poems 1996-2006 (2006), and The World, I Guess (2015).
Similar to the work of American poets William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley, Bowering’s poetry, even in its most expansive and philosophical forms, uses conversational, everyday language and focuses concretely on the inseparable aspects of daily life. For instance, in the poem Passport Doves, he begins: “The pigeons followed us / from city to city / their wings caught / between the pages of my diary…”
Much later, the Kerrisdale Elegies poetry cycle is a “translation” of Rainer Maria Rilke’s great and complex poem Duino Elegies (1923) into the contemporary reality of the Kerrisdale neighbourhood in Vancouver. Exploring universal themes of loss and grief, as well as the place of the Canadian poet in the Eurocentric literary canon, these poems maintain a close connection to the mundane. The closing lines of Kerrisdale Elegies are famous for their paradox: “the single events that raise our eyes and stop our time / are saying goodbye, lover, / goodbye…”
Regarding his prose, Burning Water (1980)—a novel about George Vancouver’s travels, which earned him his second Governor General’s Literary Award—and Caprice (1987) stand out. He also wrote another “historical metafiction” about infamous bandits from Canada’s southwest, the McLean Gang. Together with his wife, Angela Bowering, he co-authored the semi-autobiographical novel about 1950s Vancouver, Piccolo Mondo (1998). He continues to write fiction productively, having published Attack of the Toga Gang and Writing the Okanagan in 2015.
Bowering’s View of His Art
Although Bowering has turned to lengthy historical narratives in his poetry and prose, he considers his work “post-realist,” a direction in postmodernist literature that questions the representational assumptions inherent in many forms of writing. In his essay The Painted Window: Notes on Post-Realist Fiction, collected in The Mask in Place, he compares post-realism to a collage: “If [the reader] lives in the city, as most contemporary readers do, he is living in a collage… a laundromat will be flanked by a Greek restaurant & a Chinese curio shop. Where unlike things are stuck together they create a new reality.”
George Bowering has published seven collections of critical essays: A Way with Words (1982), The Mask in Place (1983), Craft Slices (1985), Errata (1988), Imaginary Hand (1988), Left Hook (2005), and Horizontal Surfaces (2010). He has also penned five memoirs, three books of historical non-fiction, and six plays.
The Legacy of George Bowering
The best introduction to George Bowering’s work is Robin Blaser’s essay in Particular Accidents, a collection that, by covering a wide range of his earlier work, provides readers with a privileged overview of his output. Roy Miki’s annotated bibliography of Bowering’s works, compiled in 1990 under the title A Record of Writing: An Annotated and Illustrated Bibliography of George Bowering, though dated, also provides a thorough grounding in his early works. Burning Water remains his best novel, not least because of how it stresses the emotional integrity of its characters while simultaneously asserting that we must perceive them as fictional constructs. Similarly, Kerrisdale Elegies, both trenchant and witty, is Bowering’s finest extended poem. Translated into Italian in 1996 and reissued in 2008, it has also been recognized by scholars as one of his more influential works and has been the subject of numerous academic articles.
In 2001, Bowering retired from his post at Simon Fraser University, where he had taught for nearly 30 years. For the following two years, he served as the first Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada. Furthermore, he continues to write, with recent works including the poetry book My Darling Nellie Grey (2010), the memoir Pinboy (2012), the poetry collection The World, I Guess (2015), the short prose collection Ten Women (2015), the novel Attack of the Toga Gang (2015), and the non-fiction book Writing the Okanagan (2015).
In 2016, Bowering was appointed to the Order of British Columbia for his immense contribution to Canadian literature. His work remains a subject of academic study and continues to inspire new generations of writers. Despite a career spanning decades, he has not ceased his literary activity and remains an influential figure in Canada’s artistic landscape.