George Bowering, Good Morning Poems

Most of a century ago, when my mother was a schoolgirl, Mr. Longfellow was still considered a serious and accomplished poet. He sold us Hiawatha and Evangeline and the midnight ride of Paul Revere, after all. He was growing up while Wordsworth was being groomed as poet laureate, and he soon set about making himself the most popular poet in the U.S.A. This would mean combining patriotism and easily consumable narratives and verse forms. He let it be known that his family came over on the Mayflower, and for most of his life he lived in George Washington’s old wartime headquarters. It worked, as he became the first U.S. poet to make a fortune by his verses. Most literature U.S. Americans know the first two lines of “The Arrow and the Song.” When I first heard the poem I thought it was pretty neat, but I had some questions. Isn’t it pretty reckless to shoot an arrow into the air? How can you say that it fell to earth if it was to be found long afterward (if this repeated word comes soon after “follow,” could he have been playing with his own name?) in a tree? Isn’t the third line of the first stanza misleading, and was the coming rime worth the confusion? Would it not be hearing rather than sight that would attempt, unsuccessfully perhaps, to follow the song chat that was to fall to earth? Isn’t it kind of amateurish or ungrammatical to say “unbroke” instead of “unbroken”? Wouldn’t the latter improve the poem, you know, breaking the tedium? The penultimate line – is its hobbling supposed to prepare us for the extra steps of the last line? Well, I guess this poem is a nice lesson in mythmaking or at least metaphor. I mean, it’s good for Longfellow’s reputation that it was not an arrow found in the heart of a friend. (“Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Arrow and the Song”)

Lately I’ve been going through Vancouver writer, editor, poet and critic George Bowering’s Good Morning Poems: A start to the day from famous English-language poets (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2023), a short critical anthology of forty-eight poems selected across five hundred years of English-language poetry, each of which include a page-long commentary by Bowering himself. In his short preface to the collection, he offers that he likes to begin each morning reading (or rereading) a poem. “Some people like to go for a walk in the woods or to the coffee shop in the morning. Some peoples have even written poems about morning walks.” he writes. “I’m not that extreme – I’ll settle for a chair at the table, a cup of dark coffee, and a page or two of Denise Levertov. Lots of poets have written to or about the early hours, which suggests that if you are working on the New York Times crossword and thus have a pen in your hand, it might be as pleasant to write a poem as to read one. I’d just as soon read a poem, though, say ‘January Morning’ by William Carlos Williams, any month of the year.”

The selection includes forty-eight poems alongside Bowering’s commentary, offering his insight on a range of published works by Sir Thomas Wyatt, Queen Elizabeth I, John Donne and Ben Jonson to Alexander Pope, William Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt and John Keats, to Emily Brontë, Archibald Lampman, Gertrude Stein and Margaret Avison. As he offers on Archibald Lampman: “Some professors who should have known better dubbed him ‘The Canadian Keats.’ Yes, he was one of those who could not resist riming ‘life’ with ‘strife,’ but even with the challenging rime scheme he forced upon himself, he wrote in ‘We Too Shall Sleep’ an affective poem about his unfortunate son without harming the language overmuch.” Five hundred years is an enormous stretch of English-language literature, so the selection is curious, from the expected to the unexpected, offering a variety of poetic structures as well as a range of poems famous to lesser-known.

There has always been a liveliness to Bowering’s prose, especially appreciated across his numerous collections of criticism, and this book provides a glimpse into his teaching methods, managing not only to articulate a vibrant commentary upon older poems, providing commentary and context, but to pass along his own obvious enthusiasm and sheer reading pleasure on works that most of us have either ignored or simply not been exposed to. If a book such as this was presented to high school students when attempting to teach poetry, we might all be in a far better situation as far as poetry reading literacy. Bowering’s enthusiasm is infectious, and he manages to pack a great deal of information and nuance, offering not only a context but some of the limitations of both poem and perspective, in his commentaries with incredible, readable ease. As he ends his commentary on Edgar Allan Poe’s “Sonnet – To Science”: “A lot of people think of Poe as the author of horror stories and fanciful verse. They ought to read this sonnet aloud, its rhythm and sounds so moving, the near perfection of its last three lines. Sonnets were invented as love poems; Poe the critic never forgets that.” Or, as he offers on Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing”:

At first you might wonder whether Whitman means that he is hearing workers in the United States or workers in all of America from Tierra del Fuego to Baffin Island. I think it’s possible that he means both – the nineteenth-century Whitman followed the eighteenth-century Thomas Jefferson in looking forward to a time when his country will have gobbled up the whole hemisphere. Such gobbling was called Manifest Destiny by some, Lebensraum by some others. Whitman’s notion of song accompanying work is pretty common. Whistle while you work, sang Jiminy Cricket, remember? He was a fictional character in the movies, as were all those melodious slaves “singing on the steamboat deck,” and in the hot cotton fields, all among the stones they piled to build the White House. The slaves who had a lot to do with building Whitman’s country did not own anything, not even themselves, and so were not referred to in the ninth line, “Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else.” Whitman the patriot liked the idea of a country made of individual states, a nation made of individual workers, and so on. His favourite poetic form was the list, as found in the Bible, a volume made up of individual books. The Ten Commandments, the begats, the Sermon on the Mount are some influential lists. Whitman in his poem lists various individuals singing, to be echoed, you might say, in his famous poem “Song of Myself.” You may sometime hear someone reading “I Hear America Singing,” but I wonder whether you have tried singing it.

Murderous Signs (2000-2007): bibliography, and an interview

this interview was conducted over email from November to December 2015 as part of a project to document Ottawa literary publishing. see my bibliography-in-progress of Ottawa literary publications, past and present here

Grant Wilkins likes letters, words, ink, paper and sounds, and combinations thereof. http://www.grungepapers.com/

Q: How did Murderous Signs first start?

A: Murderous Signs began life as a personal side project that I started while publishing The Canadian Journal of Contemporary Literary Stuff with Tamara Fairchild. The economics and logistics of trying to put out a “real” magazine – as Stuff was intended to be – meant that it was a very slow, laborious and expensive beast to put together and publish, so I saw MS as a chance to do something in the same vein, but faster, cheaper and with a more personal bent to it.

As we were trying to do with Stuff, my aim was to put out good literary work, but to do it with a sharper editorial viewpoint than most of what I saw in the literary landscape around me. There were quite a lot of little literary zines and poetry mags floating around the Ottawa scene back then, most of which followed a fairly standard poetry/prose/reviews-at-the-end format, with little sense of a point of view beyond the work printed, and minimal effort to comment on or otherwise engage with the wider cultural world.

It seemed to me even then that the arts in general needed to engage with the larger culture if it actually wanted to be a living part of that culture, so this notion of MS as being at least partly a vehicle for a broader editorial or cultural comment was part of its conception. To that end, most issues ended up being three part affairs, wherein I’d publish work from two other writers – usually some combination of poetry and prose – and then I’d either write an editorial piece, or I’d dig up an essay that I thought had something useful to say. This format became more variable as the issues went on, but that’s basically the way it worked through the 15 issues of the run.

Q: I like the idea of attempting a journal that incorporated as what you saw as the next logical step, ie: attempting to “engage with the larger culture.” How well do you feel you accomplished that, and what kind of feedback did you receive, if any?

A: The responses that I got back were generally pretty positive, and to the extent that I got feedback from outside my immediate community, it always seemed to be quite encouraging.

Ultimately though, I think MS was too fully situated in the literary world for it to really do what I wanted it to do or be what I wanted it to be. The mission statement that I ran in each issue insisted that Murderous Signs was “a literary zine dedicated to presenting comment, prose, poetry and perspective on subjects literary and cultural, and to the notion that the printed word, well crafted and aimed, can be used as a weapon.” I didn’t seem to have too much trouble finding literary work that I liked – poetry or short prose – but I didn’t have much luck attracting writing that could be considered comment or cultural perspective in any broader sense. It just didn’t seem to be the sort of thing that was being written in the part of the literary world that the zine inhabited.

The end result of this was that MS often seemed a little bit schizophrenic, with me writing an editorial about the media coverage of the G-8 meetings, or ranting about how Chapters decides what books to carry, or finding an essay by CGD Roberts about modernism – which was followed by a suite of poetry and a short story of the sort that you’d find in any standard issue litzine.

I did manage to bridge the gap between comment and content a couple of times. Issue #5 had several letters by jwcurry to the McMaster University Library about how they were (or weren’t) collecting Canadian concrete & visual poetry, while issue #10 had poetry by George Elliott Clarke and Stephen Collis – both of whom contributed work that seemed to explicitly look outward at and have something to say about the world around them.

Aside from that though, most issues of MS seemed to have this slightly split-personality feel to them that I never quite managed to get a grip on.

Q: In hindsight, how do you think you might have changed your readership, ie. beyond the immediate of the literary community?

A: Practically speaking, I don’t think there was any way that I could have significantly changed the demographic that was reading MS. In however peripheral a way, I was an inhabitant of the local small press/literary world, and I’d set MS up to be a literary organ that functioned in that world. Short of metaphorically packing my bags and wandering off to find some other niche or community on the cultural spectrum in which to hang my hat, Murderous Signs was always going to have to be largely aimed at what I perceived as being my corner of the litverse.

I did make some sporadic efforts to find people and places beyond my immediate world who might be interested in Signs. Mostly this entailed mailing copies out to an ever-evolving list of addresses – university english departments, libraries, writers groups, poetry readings, writers, other magazines, etc etc. Still a literary audience, just a little broader, and further afield.

Mostly though, MS’s readership was largely determined by the fact that I’d always intended its distribution to be done by hand. I’d set MS up to be a print vehicle – it was very much in the standard photocopied/folded/pamphlet-stapled form – which made it easy and inexpensive to make, and which meant that I could give it away for free at small press fairs or mail it out pretty cheaply. The fact that I was only doing it as a biannual meant that it was never going to cost me a huge amount, which I liked, and it meant that I could time the publication for the spring and fall small press fair seasons, which I variously attended here, in Toronto and Montreal.

So yeah, MS started out as at least mostly a literary creature, and thusly always had to be aimed at mostly a literary audience. By about half way through the run I’d come to realize that the slightly bifurcated approach of the zine was a little problematic, and so I began more consciously trying to write or to find editorial/commentary content that was more directly related to the literary world. As I said before though, I never really ironed that part of it out.

Q: Is this something you’ve attempted to reattempt through any other means since? Meaning: have you written any non-fiction pieces for other media since the end of Murderous Signs?

A: Not as such, no. I hadn’t started Signs with the intent or desire to write content for every issue – it had been a long time since I’d had any particular aspiration to write – so by the time it ended I kind of felt like I’d had my say, and that that was enough.

By that time too I had developed a fairly generalized dislike of most kinds of linear or narratival writing – non-fiction, fiction or poetic. Partly this came out of what I was reading in the literary world around me, and partly it came out of the submissions piles I’d been wading through for years with Signs, Stuff, and MPD before that. It often seemed like mostly the same sort of people were writing mostly the same sort of thing mostly the same sort of way – and it didn’t really matter if it was poetry or prose or fiction or not, it was just mostly really uninteresting to me.

My solution was to start exploring more actively in the concrete, visual, sound & process-based poetry worlds. Eventually I started to do some experimenting in these sorts of writing myself, and ran a couple of reconfigurations of Archibald Lampman poems in the last few issues of Signs. To the extent that I’ve done any writing since Signs that qualifies as non-fiction, it would probably be this sort of thing.

(Amusingly, I’m realizing that what was probably only my second ever piece of process writing – the second of my “2ND H@” series – was created out of a program for a literary conference at Ottawa U that you gave me).

Q: I’ve always been intrigued by your fascination with the Confederation Poets – Archibald Lampman, et al – in your publishing, even to the extent of publishing contemporary poetry alongside essays by the Confederation Poets in various issues of Murderous Signs. What is it about their work that you find so compelling?

A: I’ve got a degree in History and Classical Civilization, as well as a degree in English, so I think my interest is partly just a function of these things sitting at the point where my different enthusiasms intersect. There is in some way a feeling of real physical proximity to my interest too, as I’ve been living no more than four blocks away from one or other of Archibald Lampman’s old addresses since the late 1980s.

In that vein, I was also a member of Steve Artelle’s “Ottawa Literary Heritage Society” in its early stages of lobbying for what became “The Poets Pathway,” and I spent some time a few years back rooting through documents and microfiches at the Ottawa Public Library and at Library and Archives looking for information on Ottawa’s printing and publishing industries in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Ultimately, Lampman, the Confederation Poets and Canadian literary history are all just part of the spectrum of things that I’m interested in – so it isn’t really a surprise that some of it has shown up in my various publishing ventures.

Also, frankly, I’ve always been kind of appalled at how little attention we seem to pay to our history as a culture, and how little there is of it left around to engage with. Even here in Ottawa – a place that does have some historical significance – we physically don’t really have much more than a handful of buildings and a canal that go back past the early 20th century – we’ve knocked the rest of our history down, built over it, and now most of us aren’t even aware that it was there in the first place.

Our arts culture works the same way too, and when you combine that dynamic with the short shift arts and literature have been getting in our educational system in recent years, the end result often seems to be a generation – maybe a couple of generations now – of writers and artists who are largely unaware of the writing and art that came before them. I’ve been going to poetry readings for more than 20 years now, and reading submissions to literary magazines off and on for almost as long, and it’s deeply depressing to see and hear work by people who appear to be struggling mightily to reinvent the wheel – apparently oblivious to the fact that not only has it been done before, but that there was actually a very strong local tradition of the doing of it.

So yeah, I reprinted – and continue to reprint – that sort of work as the opportunity allowed and allows, in large part because I’m really quite interested in it, but also because I can really be pretty pedantic.

Q: One of my favourite issues had to be the one that included the correspondence between jwcurry and McMaster. How did the issue come together, and what was the response?

A: To be honest, I can’t really recall how that one came about. I think it must have developed out of the conversations john and I would occasionally have at the Ottawa small press fair or at readings. At that point I’d known him for a few years and known of him for a few years more, and of course I’d have been happy to publish anything from him – but this was just issue #5 of Signs, and I hadn’t yet gotten to where I was brave enough to actually go out and directly solicit work from people.

Anyway, what he gave me was a sequence of letters that he’d written to Carl Spadoni at the McMaster University Library. McMaster had seemed to be interested in the work curry was creating & publishing, and had bought some of it from him previously. Things had recently gone silent though, so john had written these letters in an attempt to see what was up and elicit some sort of explanation as to what their interests and intentions were or weren’t.

Not surprisingly, the letters were very interesting, being partly a general history of the institutional neglect of the corner of the literary world that john inhabits, partly an attempt to determine McMaster’s interests on the basis of their previous purchases, and partly an essay on the value and valueing of the sort of work that john produces, publishes and is otherwise interested in. The only reply he managed to get from Spadoni was a very short and very belated note to the effect that McMaster was not going to be collecting any Canadian poetry published after 1999, thank you very much. Apparently they had more important things to spend their money on than books of poetry.

The response to the issue and especially to the letters was as positive as these sorts of things get, and I was giving away copies fast enough that I quickly had to print a second run of it. Several people and institutions that I wouldn’t expect to pay attention to something like Murderous Signs – or even be aware of its existence – ended up contacting me for copies or subscribing. I did mail a couple of copies to McMaster too, though without generating any response.

Q: What was behind the decision to finally suspend the journal?

A: It was a combination of things, as these decisions usually are. Partly it was a matter of time, and my being about to have a lot less of it, as I was going to back to school for at least a couple of years. I’d done the full-time job & part-time school thing before, and knew that it would be hard to fit Signs into that, especially if I had ambitions of doing anything else.

In addition to that, my interest in the project was waning. Fairly early on in the run of Signs I’d taken a weekend workshop in papermaking, and immediately fallen in love with the process. This in turn led me to letterpress printing, about which I became even more enthusiastic. It took a while for these new interests to chrystalize into a coherent practice, but as the years went on my enthusiasm for the book arts (as these kinds of arts & crafts get labelled) simply overtook my enthusiasm for small press publishing of the sort that I’d been doing – so when I was put in a position of needing to wind down at least one of these things for the sake of my sanity, Murderous Signs was the thing I dropped.

In the end, I didn’t really feel too bad about it. I’d been involved in running zines and magazines more or less continuously for about 14 years at that point – Signs, Stuff before that, and MPD before that – so the more I thought about it, the more a change of pace and focus appealed. And that was that.

Q: Given your move deeper, as you say, into the book arts, do you see yourself returning to any kind of small press publishing, or even a blending of the two?

A: For the last few years all of my publishing has been in the “book arts” vein – handmade paper, letterpress printing, hand binding, combinations thereof – and has mostly involved the reprinting of what I think of as classic work from the “old dead Canadians” (the Confederation Poets, Pauline Johnson) and the “old dead Brits” (Shakespeare, Sidney, etc). I have printed a little bit of my own work along the way – in my mind letterpress seems to lend itself to the sorts of process/chance/indeterminant forms of writing that I’ve come to focus on in my own still very minimal writing practice – but aside from that I don’t think I’ve yet printed the work of anyone who’s been alive to complain about the typography.

It is a kind of vaguely held, long-term goal to eventually get back into printing some contemporary work (other than my own). I don’t think I’m quite there yet as a printer though, and I’m certainly not set up to do the sort of ambitious book work that some of my letterpress friends do – so I think that the fulfilment of this ambition is still a ways off. Having left behind the need for deadlines, mailing lists, submission piles and the like – and having no interest in going back to them – I expect that my re-entry into the printing of contemporary work will be a very small scale thing when it happens, and I’ll be fine with that.

Murderous Signs bibliography:

ISSN: 1499-6006. All issues distributed free. Print run: 150-500+, varying issue by issue.

Issue 1: March 2000. Editorial by Grant Wilkins. Poetry by Huang Di. Short story by Sean van der Lee. Cover art by Esther Deitch. 14 pages.

Issue 2: September 2000. Editorial by Grant Wilkins. Poetry by Jeffrey Mackie. Short story by Jim Larwill. 18 pages.

Issue 3: May 2001. Editorial by Grant Wilkins. Poetry by Stan Rogal & LeRoy Gorman. 18 pages.

Issue 4: October 2001. Editorial by Grant Wilkins. Prose by Adam Elliot Segal. Poetry by Giovanni Malito. 18 pages.

Issue 5: June 2002. Editorial by Grant Wilkins. Poetry by April Severin. Letters from and to jwcurry. 26 pages.

Issue 6: October 2002. Editorial by Grant Wilkins. Poetry by Frances Ward. Short story by Beverley Cook. 26 pages.

Issue 7: May 2003. Editorial by Grant Wilkins. Poetry and short story by J.J. Steinfeld. 22 pages.

Issue 8: October 2003. Comment by Archibald Lampman. Poetry by T. Anders Carson and James P. McAuliffe. 26 pages.

Issue 9: May 2004. Editorial by Grant Wilkins. Poetry by Becky Alexander. Prose by Bradley Somer. 26 pages.

Issue 10: October 2004. Essay and poetry by Charles G.D. Roberts. Poetry by George Elliott Clarke and Stephen Collis. 26 pages.

Issue 11: May 2005. Essay by Stéphane Mallarmé. Performance documentation by the Max Middle Sound Project. Cover art by George Dunbar. 22 pages.

Issue 12: October 2005. Essay by Frederick Philip Grove. Poetry by Richard Stevenson. Cover art by George Dunbar. 22 pages.

Issue 13: May 2006. Essay by Kyla Dixon-Muir. Poetry by Deborah Schnitzer and rob mclennan. Cover art by George Dunbar. 34 pages.

Issue 14: October 2006. Essay by Frederick Philip Grove. Poetry by Anna Panunto and Archibald Lampman. Cover art by George Dunbar. 34 pages.

Issue 15: May 2007. Editorial by Grant Wilkins. Short story by Edward McDermott. Poetry by Tim Conley and Archibald Lampman. 30 pages.

The Examined Space, by rob mclennan : Ottawa Magazine,

I had a back-page piece in the September issue of Ottawa Magazine, solicited by Dayanti Karunaratne, that I am extremely happy with, on Centretown, history and neighbourhoods. In case you didn’t happen to see such on newsstands, I reprint (with permission) here:

Ottawa Journal |by rob mclennan

The Examined Space

I’ve lived in Ottawa long enough to appreciate the layers that exist in the city, and long enough to become bored with the repeated self-designation of sleepy government town. One has to know where to look. Perhaps during such a period of urban development is the best time to re-think a self-portrait. The unexamined space, one might paraphrase, ain’t worth living in.

The bulk of my twenty-five years — in some half-dozen houses — have been in Centretown, and I’ve long been aware of the former lots granted to Colonel John By and William Stewart, which were part of the central core of what was once a Victorian town of lumber and rail. Before that, this was the site of some hundreds of years of native settlement, exploration, and travel. Montreal Road, for example, is quite literally the road to Montreal, and lies on the trails First Nations peoples established as they travelled back and forth between what wasn’t yet Ottawa to what wasn’t yet Montreal.

To live in any space or landscape, one should at least make some attempt to understanding it, both as a current entity and a historical one. There were the riots that regularly began between Irish Shiners and French in Bytown throughout the early part of the 19th Century, culminating in the infamous Stoney Monday Riot of 1849. For their own safety, the police wouldn’t interfere with most of these fights until they began to threaten the more expensive neighbourhoods further east beyond Lowertown. Imagine: in 1845, we were the most dangerous city in the Commonwealth. From these events, we remember Joseph Monferrand, who later became known as Big Joe Mufferaw, the legendary hulk of a man waist-deep in a number of those battles.

The bulk of Centretown is the former Lot F, picked up by Colonel By in 1834, with the southern stretch picked up by William Stewart, where he and his wife eventually created Stewarton, with streets his wife Catherine named for their children: Ann (later renamed Gladstone), Catherine, McLeod, and Isabella. To understand a space is to understand what it has come through. There is the used bookstore at Bank and Frank streets that housed a punk club beneath, back in the 1970s. There is the former theatre still known as Barrymore’s that every so often someone inquires about, wondering why someone doesn’t clean up the outside. Confederation poet Archibald Lampman once lived on Florence Street with his mother. Elvis performed at the Auditorium on Argyle Street, the same stadium that once housed the Ottawa Senators — it was later demolished and replaced with the YM-YWCA.

There are more recent events as well. The collapse of the wasted space that occupies Bank and Somerset streets, at the husk of the Duke of Somerset building, for example. Imagine: someone with money could refurbish such as an Ottawa version of Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel, providing much-needed hotel space downtown, a martini bar and a cool arts space.

At the corner of Bank and Argyle streets, there was the crossbow murder of crown attorney Patricia Allen by her husband in 1991. There are events we remember because we need to remember them.

The shifts are constant, continuous, and to be expected. Condos arise like mushrooms, including around McLeod and Bank, within the former village of Stewarton. Recently, we discovered that the house we lived in, just west of the intersection, was once owned by a friend’s great-grandparents. He sent wedding portraits from the 1920s of his grandparents as they stood in our driveway. Ottawa poet, songwriter, and cabdriver William Hawkins claimed to know the house in the 1970s as a very sketchy rooming house, as he delivered various unsavory types to a front door we would grace for two years. The house itself, with our enviable third-storey turret, was one of the first on our block, constructed in 1895. That stretch of McLeod sits on such a ripple of bedrock that basements become, from house to house, of a completely random depth.

Some might resist the construction of condos in the city’s core, but it far beats the alternative. Most of the 1990s seemed to include every second or third business closing, and it felt as though the plan was to actually exclude downtown residents. I feared for Ottawa turning its downtown into a dead core, much like what Calgary had been for a long time. The revitalization, done properly, can provide new energy to a city that requires both renewal and the knowledge of what had come before.

And, as Saskatchewan poet and Chinatown resident John Newlove once wrote, the past is a foreign country. And yet, so much is familiar. He lived on Rochester Street for 17 years, the longest he lived anywhere. Arriving from British Columbia in 1986, he once claimed to live in Ottawa, “for his sins.”

A recent postcard-sized story of mine reads: “Every city constructed out of a series of markers, of landmarks, but what happens to a city when it is constantly in danger of losing? What happens to memory when a city is constantly new? There is nothing to hold on to, there are no regulars to keep the rent in your restaurant. There is no heart, no soul, no loyalty. When a city is constantly new, it runs the risk of losing all meaning.”

This knowledge provides a richness to the landscape. Part of why we resisted the condo-company attempting “South Central” was precisely for the sake of our own history. We don’t need a new name. We already have one.

Ottawa-born rob mclennan is the author of, among others, The Uncertainty Principle: stories, the non-fiction Ottawa: The Unknown City, and the poetry collection If suppose we are a fragment. He blogs at robmclennan.blogspot.com