Locus, Region, Nation

3 Bowering’s point in much of his commentary on Canadian literature and criticism is that his type of Canadian writing will not necessarily fit in with a Central Canadian canon that includes archibald Lampman and Charles G.D. Roberts. In an interview with Ken Norris he states categorically that "your tradition is your autobiography. ... One isn’t passively schlepped into a tradition" (25). Instead, he cites the necessity of each reader creating a canon and tradition out of his or her own reading, as per Ezra Pound’s modernist strictures.5 in his idiosyncratic, personal historical treatise Bowering’s B.C.: A Swashbuckling History (1996), therefore, he jettisons the idea that there is only one way to read events, only one canon of knowledge, or only one tradition of interpretation.6 in a fascinating turn to a regionalist posture, he instead creates the distinction between "us" and "them," reversing the usual hierarchical relationship: Central Canadians say that the 401 highway between Montreal and Toronto runs west, whereas visiting British Columbians will know that it is running south…. This is the subjugation of geography (the non-human) to history (the human — read European). As far as those white people in Montreal and Toronto are concerned, the discovery and settlement of Canada was a matter of Europeans going westward. (21) While this regionalist stance provides a totalizing narrative of its own, by refusing to read the idea of discovery as a finite predecessor to ownership and settlement, Bowering creates a space to turn to idiosyncratic individual histories that comprise the larger fiction of westward expansion as a civilizing mission. His own larger enterprise thus constitutes regionality, not regionalism.

4 Bowering’s own journey eastward in 1966 cemented his inclination to separate B.C. As a different sort of Canada than the one "the text books come from." in "Reaney’s region," an article that ostensibly reads James Reaney’s contribution to Canadian writing, Bowering meditates on his own status as outsider to a regionalist ethos and a southwestern Ontario poetic in his time at the University of Western Ontario (1966-67). His criticism separates "Reaney’s region" from "Bowering’s B.C." on the grounds of poetics and literary regionalism. He writes that with Tish "[he] was involved with writers who strove mightily to make poetic sense and poetic sound out of the area, out of what we called ‘the local’" (1) or Charles Olson’s term, locus, an intimate awareness of place without an attempt to master it.7 Yet, despite this endeavour, Bowering found himself unable to understand "this peculiar thing called regionalism" (1). Why does regionalism not equate with locus? Why does Tish not equate with Reaney’s Souwesto poets and artists? Both groups represent important moments in Canada’s literary history, but while the Tish poets were influenced by the New American Poetry, Bowering names Northrop Frye as the master of Reaney’s philosophy. In 1972 Bowering writes,In school the little bit of Canadian history I was exposed to was the ringing of the names Cartier, Champlain, dollard and Cabot…. A similar education was experienced by the other BC poets of my generation. For that reason we had to discover — and invent — our land for ourselves…. I read, among other things, Menzies’ 18th-century journal and traveled on the waters myself in order to write my book on Captain Vancouver’s visit to our coast. We had to cover the ground ourselves and bring any myths to life, not out of books but from the very soil and water and air. This is the reality for a western artist and is why his work is so much different from the Jungians and Frye-heads in the east. ("Confessions" 79)Bowering asserts that he did not come out of a shared regional or national understanding of his geography or history, that he and his fellow Tish poets embraced Olson’s poetics in part because it advocated what they needed to do anyway: come to their own understanding of a place that had not been domesticated into a national or understood tradition. The great myths that Frye perceived as integral to universal writing, even writing that pursued the universal through the regional, did not work for Bowering.8 Thus, Bowering defines Reaney’s art as "a marriage of ‘documentary and myth’" (6) and defines his own poetics in opposition to it, claiming that West Coast poets "did not have time for documentary nor space for myth" (7), because they could not draw on a communal understanding of place. Bowering rejects region for locus, a "proprioceptive" stance coming out of Charles Olson’s writings that entails, in Fred Wah’s useful paraphrase, "claiming the physical in writing … as an antidote to preconception, and frequently, as a simple call for spontaneity" (Faking It 27). In providing his literary "antidote to preconception" through forty years of publishing poetry, Bowering has helped to form a Canadian poetic tradition that includes the West Coast and his anti-Frygean aesthetic. His work in discovering the individual, poet and explorer, in the exploration myths of George Vancouver and the Northwest Passage in George, Vancouver: a discovery poem is one of his first acts in destabilizing and provoking this new literary history.

Exploration and Discovery

5 The writing of George, Vancouver precedes the institutionalization of postcolonialism; "however, the poem anticipates postcolonialism’s concerns with mapping, cartography and the assertion of control that is the act, not process, of ‘discovery’ through the naming of places." Bowering attempts, therefore, to make the act of discovery, obtaining "sight or knowledge" "for the first time," an ongoing process in George, Vancouver. The book begins with an assertion of action in the infinitive: "To chart this land" is the proposed project. Bowering’s charting, however, sets up an assertion of poetic process against Vancouver’s charting, which is a scientific, geographic, and imperialist one. "Charting" the land in terms of language is the poet’s territory, which Bowering accesses through his eyes and experience,9 precisely by noting the impossibility of geometry reproducing the complexity, the nooks and crannies and endless peregrinations of the coast/line, especially for the narrow mind with its preconceptions, assumptions, and expectations. Bowering foregrounds the tension between the goal and the reality. Even as he acknowledges the historical Vancouver’s desire to explore, map, and pin down each detail, to discover in The Discovery, Bowering’s insertion of the personal, experimental, and aesthetic thwarts a linear narrative of a controlled and contained geography.10

6 As "a discovery poem," as its subtitle calls it, George, Vancouver is Bowering’s first extended play with the terms "exploration" and "discovery," and it is Bowering’s first long, or at least book-length, poem: 590 lines of poetry over thirty-five pages. In these lines, it spans two centuries from the Madness of King George the III to the idiosyncrasies of George Bowering. Often critics, including Bowering himself, seem to see George, Vancouver as a blueprint for the better-known Burning Water and not much more.11 To me, however, it cements the differences between Bowering’s B.C. And Reaney’s region. History and geography here do not provide the comfort of a shared understanding but the space for a mobile subjectivity Bowering continually creates through his poetry that goes by the singular pronoun ‘i,’ which refers to multiple individuals.

7 In "Bowering’s Lines" (1989), Fred Wah examines analogies between the coast line, the poetic line, the line on the map, and the narrative ‘line’ of Bowering’s biography, connections he encapsulates in the phrase "line is lineage": "Here the map becomes the explorer’s mind, the line of Menzie’s [sic] mind, the king’s minds. The coast is only a line, to reiterate the title of a conference on West Coast writing at Simon Fraser University several years ago…. But it is, finally, a measuring of the self that is at work in the poem" (104). Thus, the poem performs a work that the novel Burning Water cannot: the long poem measures the self through language, distinct from narrative. Bowering adheres to Olson’s conception of "locus"; thus, his poetry must be measured by its balance between the poet as object and the objects that surround him, the self as aware of place, in situ, rather than bolstering a preconception of place with its attendant myths.

8 Frank Davey discusses the potential destabilizing power of poetic form in his paper on the long poem given at The Coast is Only a Line conference at Simon Fraser University, 25 July 1981, the same conference that Wah references. Davey argues that the long poem, in moving away from narrative, needs to form/find other iterative structures to make connections within the poem. He cites using "language itself," "the recurrent image," "inventiveness, linguistic and narrative adventure, game, jest, and play" as strategies used by writers of the long poem. He continues in this vein: "The very structures writers have used to replace sequential narrative — collage, symphonic form, geography, play, recurrent image — become, if successful, other kinds of narrative, sources of motion, energy, and surprise" (8). In George, Vancouver, geography, play, and the recurrent image provide the energy and motion within the long poem by connecting its disparate pieces, energizing the trope of exploration to engage the process of discovery in the reader. Among the recurring images of George, Vancouver I have chosen to focus on the weed book and the bridge, because these images offer strategies for finding narratives within Bowering’s long lyric poem, but also because these narratives lead to further readings, proof of Bowering’s ‘poetic of openness.’

Reading the Weed

9 In George, Vancouver, Bowering makes extensive and complicated use of the first-person pronoun. The poem’s voice moves from third person imperial tones, to an "I" that seems to be Vancouver, to another "I" that uses Bowering’s own anecdotes, to the "i, George" of the final pages that can be usefully read as either or both of George Vancouver and George Bowering meditating on Vancouver. All of these I’s help to destabilize the concepts of authoritative geography or history, and allow room for multiple "finding" narratives. The term "finding narratives" emphasizes the active process, and the exploratory nature of writing, that is a crucial part of my reading of Bowering’s biotextual impulse. Nothing is assured, because that would halt the process of discovery, stabilizing "discovery" into a past act. At most the poem’s voice offers "some surety," as George, Vancouver’s first page states:A drawing of an indian weed
is some surety,
an illustration of a leaf
with only a thousand lines in it.

To say the ship floats
in this water,
the sun sinks behind the offshore islands
of the inland sea.

That is the possible.

The degree of "certainty" and the "feeling of safety; confidence" (OED) is modified and destabilized by the qualifier "some." This passage explores the eighteenth-century rational mind that uses empiricism in the face of a strange and foreign world. There seems to be an implicit faith here in what can be seen and transcribed by men. However, the possible is confronted, or at least unsettled, by what is impossible to this mindset: the possible authority of the "indian weed" that denies surety.

10 When living in London, Ontario, Bowering rediscovered Vancouver and its environs through the journals of archibald Menzies, botanist to Captain George Vancouver. Text generates text as Menzies’s "weed book," Vancouver’s epithet for Menzies’s journals within both George, Vancouver and Burning Water, becomes one of the sources for Bowering’s first weed book, George, Vancouver: a discovery poem, published, significantly, by Toronto’s Weed/Flower Press. This is a moment of discovery to which Bowering returns again and again in interviews and discussions of his literature. Two decades after leaving London, he would recall,When I went to London, Ontario, … There didn’t seem to be any ‘place’ there …, all that was there was names. That is to say, you couldn’t get lost in the woods because there weren’t any woods. There were wood lots, and the wood lots had somebody’s name attached to them, and had had for two hundred years. So what I said was, ‘what am I going to write?’ (qtd. In Miki 25)Feeling dislocated among too many named places, Bowering discovered new territory and old terrain in the library. It is Menzies’s writing that returned to him the place out of which his own writing began, "the kind [of place] you can get lost in and find your way in" (Bowering qtd. In Wah 105), antithetical to the kind of settled place Bowering found in London, Ontario that he relates to James Reaney, Northrop Frye, and a Central Canadian tradition.

11 Weeds, or at least plants, are the basis for Menzies’s botanical writing; historically, his authority came from his instructions from Sir Joseph Banks and the Secretary of State. The word "weeds" designates plants that do not serve a gardener’s purpose, that are in the way of "progress," unauthorized; thus, a "weed book" serves as an alternative authority to the authorized version of Vancouver’s voyage. Bowering makes much of the contest between botanist and explorer in Burning Water,12 having the battle of wills and authority over writing set the stage for Menzies’s eventual (fully fictional) murder of Vancouver in the name of science and in revenge for his ruined botanical specimens, termed "weeds" by Bowering’s George Vancouver. What Bowering’s Vancouver sees as weeds, however, are valuable treasures to the botanist, whose faith lies in the surety of science.

12 Unlike his historical personae’s journals, Bowering’s weed book does not put forth a rival authority, but contains multiple concomitant versions through the displaced utterance of found poetry (2, 21), quoting directly from Menzies’ and Vancouver’s journals. Bowering’s long poem is more interested in process, acknowledging the act of writing — "I keep losing sight of the subject, / Captain Vancouver seems lost in the poem" (15) — rather than only the end result. Vancouver’s authority, however, rests in his pursuit of cartography, which ideally weeds out the North american continent to find the Northwest Passage: In the king’s mind
ships sailed full of guns & furs.

In the mind, no icebergs —
the mind has mountains
& waters, & ships to sail them. (9)

The Passage is "a cold dream" that rejects the scientific realities the West Coast has to offer for its fantasy road to riches, glory, and conquest:They say
the Strait of Anian
leads to Scotland snow.

A cold
dream,

here the rains
nourish maiden’s bellies
such as Huklyt never felt,

& flowers, here
where no weed grows,
what we will call

epigaea repens
for fancy,
lately called science

Epigaea repens, which can be translated "discovering/ upon the earth" (my translation), is an apt fancy and emblem for such an expedition as Vancouver’s and Menzies’s. It also demonstrates that Bowering shares neither Vancouver’s monolithic goal nor Menzies’s faith in science. For Bowering believes in the "open field"13: "no weed grows" here because Bowering does not limit his field of fancy or authority, designating what belongs and what doesn’t by category. Epigaea repens is also the Latin name for the trailing arbutus, better known as the Mayflower, that other ship of discovery, founding flower/vehicle of North america’s south and east, a ship that, in american culture, embodies a kind of fantasy of origins, a founding, not a finding, if you will.14 Ultimately, Bowering’s weed book is a finding narrative that rejects the categorizing of plants, discoveries, or words as weeds; it is his irreverent take on origins, using his version of the "mayflower" to turn a potential story of origins on its ear, that opens the possibilities of discovery in poetry and history. While finding narratives do not lend themselves to fomenting nationalist fervour, Bowering’s weed books publicly endorse the value of idiosyncrasy in destabilizing both tales of discovery and originary fantasies.

13 It is the extraneous and unexpected that do not add up to the completed chart, or passage, or poem — that unfinalizable "surplus of humanness," to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s phrase, that cannot be contained — that has an outlet in Bowering’s poetry, and that moves the poem beyond the "easy trope" of nautical exploration to further finding, not founding, narratives: On water-skis to Passage Island
she followed me, sunlight
cast up from the sea,
rippling across her bare legs.

Spanish Banks, where we’d circled
out from the river, became a low bluff
of outline, the soft city gone quiet.

I shut off the engine & went ashore,
looking for the rumoured snakes
on the island’s one acre. (13)

Bowering’s 1960s anecdote here asserts that the authority of explorer, monarch, and empire have had their day, and that the "I" of the poet and his process of discovery has an equally important life in the writing to be charted. The "rumoured snakes" manifest a type of averted "finding narrative" in that all the speaker finds are used condoms, again defeating any anticipated discovery of origins with the wry image of the prophylactics: the documented, found sewage that defeats the potential mythology of the snake. Bowering’s biotextual impulse repulses any attempt at using anecdote as a bridge to a master, founding narrative.

Bridging the Gap

14 Bridges, however, are a reality of the Vancouver cityscape and its emergence in the midst of various rivers, channels, and inlets. More importantly, the Tish poets felt that their attention to the bridges gave them access to the city’s language. In a conversation between Bowering and Frank Davey, both comment on the prevalence of the bridge in Tish publications:GB: … I recall that all the Tish poets were writing about bridges; why were the bridges so important to all the Tish poets?

FD: I think we did decide that this was a characteristic of the city. … The problem in constructing Vancouver was in fact bridging these gaps in the irregular space of the city. Much of the energy of the city must have gone into that kind of reaching out, that kind of bridging — even now of course they talk about bridging over to Vancouver island.

GB: So we had the whole idea of doing something with Vancouver such as Williams did with Paterson; and as Williams used the mountain metaphorically we were using bridges.

FD: Yes, and I think we weren’t just writing about bridges, but that most of us were aware that the bridge had to be an emotionally true metaphor — that we had to feel the impulse of the bridge, not just talk about bridges.

GB: We weren’t building a bridge to Toronto.

FD: No [laughing]. (Three 120)

According to Davey the bridge has both a concrete reality and a metaphorical life, again following from Olson’s strictures on locus: the Tish poets needed to be aware of "the impulse of the bridge" for it to figure in their work. Thus, the recurrence of the bridge image is another continuation of Bowering’s work with the Tish collective, and thus I argue that George, Vancouver can be seen as a bridge itself between that work and his later long, biotextual efforts such as Autobiology (1972) and His Life. Formally, Bowering reaches beyond the lyric through the connective tissues of the reiterated image to the long poem and the biotext, marking George, Vancouver as foundational to Bowering’s larger writing process.

15 In one of his many pronouncements on writing and its processes in Errata, Bowering comments on the relationship between "himself" and his writing and so defines the biotext as a form that privileges literary form as "the very place where the writer of the poem or the fiction found himself…. Readers of [Ondaatje’s] Running in the Family know right away that they are not getting history, not getting autobiography. Autobiography replaces the writer. Biotext is an extension of him" (34). Bowering privileges literary form as instrumental to the growth of a writer and the writer’s process. The "extension" of the writer is neither normative nor "natural"; rather, it is a conscious effort of will to use form to defeat preconception and passive reading. This experimental reaching beyond tradition in turn affects the artist, his abilities, his ‘self’ and life. Bowering on various occasions has described his own process of creating a "baffle," a rigid set of boundaries that gives a writing form and that limits, in Bowering’s understanding, the tyrannical efforts of the writer to control the story or poem, the form, and the possibilities. Contrary as it may seem, in Bowering’s process the baffle extends the writer, perhaps in the same perverse way that the constraint of being physically distant from Vancouver allowed Bowering to extend his sense of that place in poetry. Bowering pushes the boundaries of form in the direction of the documentary poem as well in George, Vancouver: the documentary poem not as written by dorothy Livesay, with her concern for the historical record, but with an idiosyncratic twist. Bowering’s poem is both based on documents from the library and simultaneously documents aspects of his life and writing.

16 So, then, in George, Vancouver the "Twenty-nine bridges to cross" in Vancouver also represent a mindset, the psychological space of a bridging between self and writing, between previous and present writing, and between Vancouver and London, Ontario. One of the first "contemporary" parts to the poem begins,Twenty-nine bridges to cross,
one to leap from
thru the soft air
of the inland sea. (10)

The passage tells of a young suicide in the city’s downtown core, but later in the poem (though "historically" prior), the air becomes the only bridge or passage across the continent in the flight of fancy "Vancouver" the navigator broods upon periodically, imagining himself as "the flying dutchman" (12). The OED lists among its definitions for "passage," "a part of a discourse or writing in which the author passes or turns aside for a time to some other subject; a digression," but also "a crossing; a ford, ferry, or bridge"; and "a way, road, path, route, channel; a mountain pass; an entrance or exit." Bowering’s "digression" into fancy enables a historical, mythic, albeit farcical, revisioning. Thus, in the poem’s penultimate page, the soft air offers a dream of success: If we could invite the fog
of the Japanese current
& sail the map in their minds,
we may be in Hudson’s Bay
tomorrow. (38)

Air and thought become the sea on which Vancouver wishes to sail, the only possible bridge across a continent,15 for the only way to succeed in finding the bridge, the passage, the Strait of Anian that his British masters abjure him to find is by "inviting the fog" of willed ignorance embodied in a monarch’s distant power and to close down "the open field of possibilities" that Bowering’s poetic and British Columbia’s geography demands. We see the historical Vancouver’s documented goal and authority as the fancy that Vancouver as geography denies.

17 Throughout the poem, Bowering characterizes the continent as a "barrier" to any sort of bridging: "the pressure of all that / continent, trackless, without waterway, / blunt barrier to commerce" (14). The language of Vancouver’s day both represented and refracted in this new context allows for a moment of Bakhtin’s heteroglossia, which suggests that "each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions" ("discourse" 293). Here, George iii’s imperialist desire gives one context, George Vancouver’s cartographic purpose another, and George Bowering’s replacement and citation of this language within his displaced poem of the West Coast a third. I would add that the "barrier" is not only one to commerce but the barrier that Bowering erected between Bowering’s B.C. And Reaney’s region. In the West Coast, he finds space for the idiosyncratic and individual that he feels "regionalism," presumably leading to nationalism and imperialism, will not permit. In George, Vancouver he writes,To step from the sea
ashore
is to make one move
eastward.

No sea passage
across this land
should be
or is. (6)

To move eastward is to move out of place and into names, history, and, in a sense, proto-nationalism, if not imperialism, out of any sense of the local that Bowering and Tish privileged. Nevertheless, "His Majesty’s dominions / want the Strait of Anian" (29), and historical exploration came with that purpose: to discover, not to process. Vancouver’s place in the landscape, on the coastline, however, dictates the impossibility of this project: he cannot provide such a Passage: "Clear vision. / Cook’s river is no river" (17). The historical Vancouver’s renaming — Cook’s river becomes Cook’s inlet on the map as well as the poem’s page — clarifies and recategorizes the waterway as one with a definitive end, and therefore one that refuses to weed out the continent to maintain the king’s fancy.

18 The only bridge is George’s voice, be it the poet’s, the king’s, or the explorer’s. The voice, however, unlike the vision of Cook’s river, is unstable. It is unmarked by the possessive patronymic that functions as the waterway’s name. Readers must tentatively establish the "I" in question for themselves:I keep losing sight of the subject,
Captain Vancouver seems lost in the poem.
………………………………………..

Trusting himself to the Inland Sea,
forgetting stories of the Strait of Anian,
setting foot among actual salmonberries.

The king’s voice has dominion,
it stretches from sea to sea.

His majesty also commanded
exploration of the coast.
He left that much open. (15)

In "setting foot among actual salmonberries," George cannot acquiesce to the myth of the Strait when he sees the real world around him that belies such fantasy. While "The king’s voice has dominion, / it stretches from sea to sea" (15) on the bridges of his boats, which are both site of the captain’s orders and the king’s authority, that voice cannot find the passage it seeks to help substantiate the dominion it envisions. In this poem’s passages there is no authority but the poet’s, and it allows for multiple readings or the process of discovery would come to an end.

19 Bowering’s corpus asserts that the discovery of self is a process without either limit or achievable goal: "On entering this inlet, I, George, / sail beneath a suspended bridge / invisible in the fog" (14). Who is this "I"? Who is this "George"? The moment, the subject, the geography, all are suspended in this moment of discovery where the "I" is speaker, poet, and historical subject all in one object extended and mobilized through form. Even the place is unfixed, "invisible" if not absent, in the fog: the awareness of the proximity of land and sea — the bridge marking the link between points on the coast — makes place present, but Bowering rejects the patronymic, the choice of Western explorers and namers everywhere for establishing imperial connection to place. In doing so, he refuses to stabilize the identity of "George," and so rejects the naming he found in London, Ontario, along with the limitations of regionalism and narrative — where, we remember, he said, "there wasn’t any ‘place’, all that was there was names" (qtd. In Miki 24) — for the immediacy of sounding, sighting, touching, writing, and rewriting place and self through poetry. Here, the "process of discovery" will allow no one, authorized version of evidence on which to base a case or a claim, only weed books: in his continuing work with form and self, in his demand for process, he continues to reject the value of pragmatism that so often drives political and public demands for accountable culture or, historically, the Northwest Passage. As a poet, Bowering has garnered public attention without catering to popular tastes. His idiosyncratic contributions to Canada’s literature and history challenge traditional poetics, aesthetics, and nationalism, allowing his readers to see beyond the map or imperialist narrative to the coast/line beyond.