Artvoice: Vermeer’s Light is your first new major poetry collection in some time. Given the recent changes in your life, such as your appointment as Canada’s first parliamentary poet laureate, what were the unique pressures in compiling this book?

George Bowering: I don’t think that there were any real pressures, unique or otherwise. There is the curious fact that I don’t do poetry collections as frequently as I used to. Long ago I might do one every three years, and there might be a long poem in between them. This one is the first in ten years, and before that the gap was about five years, I think. I guess I am just not as eager as I used to be. You will see that most of the poems in these 200 pages, or whatever the number, are parts of something larger, a series, or a little book, such as 26 by Ellen Field, my faithful nom de computer. In my youth I was writing lyric poems all the time. Now they come to me, but I don’t often bother writing them down.

GH: The lyric form you mention is one of your hallmarks, and yet your lyric poems are often fused with historical, social and nationalist concerns. Does this hint at an ambivalent attitude towards the lyric form? Where do you see the place of the lyric in contemporary society?

GB: As you perhaps suggest, I am of two minds regarding the lyric poem. There are two main features of the lyric poem. It is musical and it is individual, personal. I will never be resistant to the musical, as certain Language poets are, but I do believe that the personal can be a great bore, as it so often is with “confessional” poets. My tutor Robert Duncan can be said to retain the musical and find a way out of the personal. La la. He was always insistent on the song to be found in language. He didn’t know much about a lot of music. Once he said that he was going to experiment with jazz bits. Knowing Robert, I squinched up my face and asked him what he meant. He said, “Oh you know, Noel Coward, that sort of thing.” Someone wrote something somewhere recently saying that I was doing something unusual by constructing long poems with the lyric running through. Could be. There are some strictly lyric poets practising now that are really good. First one always thinks of Sharon Thesen. But listen—couldn’t you say that Lorene Niedecker was a great lyric poet? Isn’t James Schuyler, among other things, a great lyric voice?

GH: Perhaps even bpNichol, who you mention in Vermeer’s Light as your favourite poet, has much more lyrical inclinations than some are willing to admit. That said, I think it’s safe to say that your collection does often transcend the lyrical form. Can you define your relation to experimentation?

GB: Well, bp is mentioned as Ellen Field’s favourite poet. Of course, as EF is now revealed to be me in all likelihood, you may have a point here. I don’t know. I don’t know whether I have a favourite poet, really, or whether I keep on having the same favourite poet. Right now my favourite US poet is Ron Padgett, but that could change the next time I read something great by Rae Armantrout. But I suppose that I have to get to experimentation. I recently published a short story that was subtitled “An Experimental Story,” because it was laid out in the form of a high school chemistry experiment, with materials, and method and all those headings. In the tangle of terms used to talk about contemporary writing, I don’t mind the term “experimental” as long as it does not just refer to something out of the ordinary; as long as the writer is clearly doing an experiment, with the knowledge that a majority of experiments will fail. I will tell you one of mine that failed. For years I planned to pretend that the word “canto” rather than the word “camera” meant “room” in Italian. Then I planned for a guy to wander through the “rooms” of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. I actually tried and tried, and it just did not work. I have always been interested in the unconventional as necessary to waking up. That’s why I was so happy to have my linguistics prof Ron Baker introduce me to the Oulipo in 1960.

GH: As a Canadian poet with a heightened awareness of history and American culture (and I’m reminded here of your friendships with politically minded writers like Ginsberg and Olson), has the recent upsurge in American neo-conservatism played any part in your consciousness as a poet?

GB: US neo-conservatism is perhaps the saddest story of my life, because when I was a kid I swallowed all that stuff about the US as a beacon to the world, as the home of democracy and forward-looking governors, etc. But as I grew up I studied US history at University, and kept reading all I could about public life, as we are encouraged to do as democratic people, etc., and I learned that the US is a country that has to be dragged kicking and screaming into modern reforms or current centuries. It was one of the last places to make slavery illegal. It is one of the last places to continue killing prisoners. When there is a war against fascism it enters the war halfway through, but when there are left-wing governments elected in Latin America, it overthrows them violently. It hangs onto miles and pounds and Fahrenheit when the rest of the world has thrown them out along with furlongs and cubits and the like. It runs health care and hospitalization on a business model. The problem with the neo-conservatives is that they make progress—catching up with the world—harder to achieve. They make ignorance powerful and hate groups such as the Moral Majority influential. As to the effect of this sad story on my writing? I have despaired of satire. Satire requires an audience that is intelligent enough to see what one is doing, and a hope that it can do some good. In some dictatorships it is a crime to be a satirist. In other places, where the people have lost touch with the principles that started their civilization, satire gets hidden behind the search for an American Idol.

GH: Finally, do you have any special memories of Buffalo?

GB: I don’t have spectacular memories. But one day two years ago I was driving through downtown, looking for a way to get to the bridge to Ontario, and got snarled in a lot of contradictory construction, and a Buffalo cop told me to get out of the country. Then he pointed my way. “Thanks” to him. Couple years ago we went to a Bisons’ game, and it was a cold night but my friend Jack C. had brought a huge thermos full of hot tea, apparently a Buffalo ritual, and when we drank it in the stands it tasted a little like something else, or maybe tea tastes different in the USA. In 1966 or 1967 I drove from London, Ontario to Buffalo to attend a reading by Anselm Hollo. First time I had seen him since the previous summer in London, England. Buffalo was hopping then, threatening to take away the governorship of poetry from Vancouver. John Wieners was there, and he had a tooth. I went to the Anchor Bar and ate real wings and learned one of the two things that promise redemption to the USA, the other being the Tampico Mexican restaurant in Everett, Washington.