George Bowering's concept of "locus," influenced by the theory of Charles Olson, offers an alternative response to appropriative regionalism, one that privileges "finding over founding narratives." The process of discovery offers a way of theorizing the interconnections between poetics, culture, and empire in Bowering's long poem, George, Vancouver: a discovery poem (1970). Through the idiosyncratic individual, it explodes any myth of a monologic identity and offers what Douglas Barbour calls a 'poetics of openness' in exchange for a fantasy of origins. Theories of regionalism such as Frank Davey's reveal the ways regional origins and originality are complicated by the development of the poem and by Bowering's spatial poetics as "originating" in London, Ontario.
