How I Wrote One of My Poems

by George Bowering

Recently I was looking through my diary as I seldom do, and fell upon early October of 1962.  U.S. president Kennedy would be starting the Cuban missile crisis in three weeks.  The Berlin wall had been up for a year.  Here is what I saw in my diary for early October, 1962: the handwriting of my oldest friend, Will Trump, who was in 1962 my roommate.  Riffling a few pages, I came upon some awkward lettering done by my left hand.

Early in the morning of September 30, 1962, I broke my right hand.  I did this by punching a concrete wall as hard as I could.  The concrete wall had burlap pasted to it.  I thought the wall was made of plaster.  In recent times I had taken to punching plaster walls as an expression of my frustration with the changeable affection of my beautiful girlfriend Angela Luoma.  I was taking some chance, I thought, that my fist would strike a plaster wall just where there was a two-by-four stud, rather than dramatically crashing through plaster.  So far I hadn't hit a stud—or a girlfriend, ever.

The concrete wall was in the staircase of the hipster apartment of poet Jamie Reid and film-maker Sam Perry, overlooking the train tracks along the side of Coal Harbour.  In the summer of 1963 Red Lane would do a poetry reading while standing on top of someone's Pontiac in the overgrown yard back of this apartment.  Sometimes we would frisbee Jamie's Thelonius Monk records from the balcony, trying to reach the salt water past the CPR tracks.

The reason that I punched the wall was, I think, Angela Luoma's suggestion that we let our relationship go.  For a young man the worst thing to see is a loved one with someone else, and that starts with a loved one's breaking a relationship.  It makes you want to hit a wall.  We had been together, more or less, for a year.  I had been punching walls for a month or so.

But this concrete punch seemed to do the job.  Angela Luoma and I wound up sleeping together at my rickety second-storey place overlooking False Creek.  I had to keep my hand on the pillow above her head.  In the morning my hand had grown to be about the size of her head.  We went to see the doctor, and the doctor said that the swelling had to come down before they could put a cast on.  On October 2 I fell while climbing through a window for some reason, and this time my hand wasted no time in getting a message to me.  I told myself that I had to get out of the youthful habit of climbing through windows.  We went down to St. Paul's hospital on Burrard Street, and Angela Luoma sat on the bus stop bench across from the hospital while the doctors and nurses put me into a daze and fixed my hand.  I remember a needle going in between the bones.  I remember waking up in an empty operating room with faint light coming from concave lamps.

On October 5 they put a plaster cast on my hand and wrist and forearm, and I hated it.  It was as hard as concrete.  It held some of my fingers straight and some of them crooked.  I went around sniffing at it—the odor was really something, irresistible.  When you have a heavy cast on your hand you are always banging it into door frames and furniture.  I was a teaching assistant at U.B.C.  Eighteen-year-olds helped me gather my notes after class.

It was a bad time to be one-handed.  I had bought a $400 Austin, my third and most expensive car, and entered a raffle at the car dealer's.  On the night of the draw, Angela Luoma and I were sitting in Scott's Cafe on Granville Street.  Abruptly, I rose and tried to get my jacket over my shoulder.  

"What?" she asked, looking ruefully at her full cup of java.

"Wait here," I said.  "I have to go over to Burrard Street.  They are going to pull my name out of a barrel."

At the car-dealer's there was some cheesy radio jocko and some car-salesmen in blazers.  Behind them was a tree that had one-dollar bills all over it instead of leaves.  There were a few two-dollar bills, too.  As a guy in a blazer and a marshmallow grin reached down into the barrel, I was already trying to get my jacket off my unbroken arm.  The guy looked at the piece of paper in his hand as if it were a poem by Margaret Avison.

"G. Bo Ring," he said.

"That is I," I said, in a white shirt.

I had one minute to pick money off the tree and put it into a basket.  Bad news: I could only use my left hand.  Good news: I am from the Okanagan Valley.  I picked fruit for a living.

I walked out with my jacket over one shoulder, and 121 sticky dollars in my pocket.  I felt pretty good walking back into Scott's Cafe.  Of course I lost 200 dollars to a bailiff a week later because I hadn't got finished paying for the Austin.

I should have stayed home using one finger on my left hand to work on my novel. I have been working on it for a year of so, but did not want to write the last chapter. I would let four years go by before writing that last chapter. Someone gets killed. Meanwhile, I was learning how to write poems, and more important, poetics, mainly domestic versions of William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson. I sat coolly and cared for the syllable. I got over an unfortunate weakness for jazzy rhetoric.

I was a journalist, too, don't forget. I took Angela Luoma to hear Cannonball Adderly's sestet with Yusef Lateef, because I had to review the music for the Ubyssey critic's pages. I took notes with my left hand and tried to hold my cigarette with the two straight fingers sticking out of the redolent cast.

But for some reason I cam home by myself on the night of October 6. I had probably gone on one of my old-time pub crawls, or a shortened version that did not carry me as far east as the Princeton Hotel. I do, despite the fact that I was too drunk to drive a 1954 Austin, remember trying to get into my linoleumated False Creek digs that night. It was dark. It was raining a straight-down rain. I was carrying twelve bottles of Old Style Pilsener hanging from my two fingers, now as bent as the others. I could not find my front door key. I looked through every pocket, as one will do, three times, with my left hand.

Maybe Will was home. It was about three in the morning, if you can call anything morning above the False Creek warehouses in the rain. Will's girlfriend had to work weekends. He was probably sleeping in the little front room. I thought you were supposed to do the following to wake up a girlfriend, but things are different in the rain when you're between drunk and hungover. I could throw a stone that high with my left hand, I told myself. The streets are really steep above False Creek, so a second-storey window is pretty high. I started pegging little stones. They got harder and harder to find. I had to keep walking to the streetlight at the corner. Some rattled down the bent creosote shingles below our windows. Some hit nothing but trees and automobiles. But some snapped on a windowpane.

You know what a stone against your windowpane sounds like when you're insideBit's really loud. Especially at three in the morning. But I looked at the dark window for Will's scruffle-haired head, in vain. I would have to use the so-called fire escape. The so-called fire escape was a ladder nailed to the side of the house. If it were possible to get two storeys up on that ladder, I would find a little flat roof covered with warped asphalt shingles outside our little kitchen window. This was the window favoured by two cats we called Meredith and Phyllis.

I did not think that I could make it up that ladder with its rungs so close to the ugly green wall, black wall now in the 3:30 a.m. rain. It was raining persistently, and my eyeglasses were opaque with rain. I was still drunk, or angry enough to make up for whatever sobering I had suffered. I was carrying a dozen Pils. I thought of drinking a couple to lighten the load, but I could not think of a way to open them. I had to decide what to do with the two bent fingers protruding form the wet and soiled cast around my aching hand. Should I hang the case of beer from them, or use them to support my hundred and eighty pounds (counting the beer)? And how would I reach for the next rung without falling? How do I get into these situations, I asked, as usual.

Now I am trying to remember how I got up there, and I simply can not, can hardly believe that I did. Getting the kitchen window open was little problem--it stuck and rattled, but the sill was rotted like a rain forest floor, and it would always open eventually.

I got in. Then I put the case of beer into the refrigerator, moving some sushi to make room. Then I snapped on the kitchen light and looked into the front room, where I saw Will's puzzling shape under a dark blanket. There were no blinds on any of our windows in any of our three rooms. Feeble light fell out of the rainy sky. Dawn would be late and grey.

"I'm home safe and sound," I said quietly.

"Jeeze, Cap'n," he said. "That horrible kid upstairs has been dropping marbles on the floor and out their window on that little roof. What time is it? How do I get any sleep around here?"

I closed the door to the front room.

Then, with my soaked hair on my forehead, I sat down at the kitchen table and wrote my poem "Grandfather." I have not lately seen the manuscript, so I don't know whether I wrote it with my left hand or the aching fingers sticking out from my smelly cast. Then I went to my bed in the side room.

When I got up that afternoon it had stopped raining. Will was gone, probably to get sushi at his girlfriend's. Meredith and Phyllis were at the window. I let them in and gave them some of the oldest raw fish and rice. Outside every piece of nature and rotted fence was silver. There was almost a whole cup of coffee in the pot on the leaking gas stove. I had a bad pain right back of my forehead. I was still emotional but prepared to forgive Will when he blundered through the door.

We went through our usual comic routine, and then he told me that my grandfather poem was the best thing I'd ever written. He had known my grandfather, an old man with bad feet and a British vocabulary.

"What are you talking about?" I inquired. "This thing ignores or violates all the poetic principles that I have been working on these last two years."

"It's really good," he said.

Maybe it is, I thought.

"No, it's all that's wrong with poetry," I said.

Will was studying Japanese. He didn't know anything about poetics.

Still, I published the poem in Tish 14, along with a review of Jack Kerouac's Big Sur, a book that ends with a long poem a lot different from my short one. "Grandfather" would show up in my first book in 1964, and would appear in all my selected volumes, I think. And it would show up in lots and lots of anthologies, including all those anthologies created for colleges and high schools. It's a "teachable poem," I guess, and thus confirms the reservations I expressed about it when it was less than one day old. Those editors must have agreed with my roommate.

I guess all the poets in Canada were writing poems about their grandfathers in those days. At least the male poets were. I don't remember all that many grandmother poems, although I wrote one that didn't get into the anthologies. Grandfather poems were good for the thematic nationalists of the sixties and seventies, and are probably good for their successors, the identity post-colonialists of the nineties. Those old relatives got called things like "prairie patriarchs." They were pioneers of a "national literature" or something like that. They were examples used in essays that employed the adjective "cultural."

Part of the reason that my "Grandfather" poem was so rhetorical is that my grandfather (he was never called "Jabez" in the family) was a circuit rider in Manitoba and Alberta. I never heard him preach, but I wanted some Baptist noise in the poem. Besides, I was wet and drunkish, and my hand was killing me.

The anthologists made their selections from other anthologies. For years I claimed that I made more from the poem than my grandfather made as a circuit rider around Pilot Mound and Wetaskiwin.

I never even went to church with him. When my grandmother was alive I went with her to the Baptist church in West Summerland, B.C. At home in Oliver, B.C. I went to Sunday school in the United Church. There was no Baptist church in Oliver. In West Summerland with my grandmother I heard the choir and everyone else singing "Holy holy holy, Lord God Almighty." It seemed to bulge the walls a little. The song ended "God in three persons, blessed Trinity." I didn't have a clue what that meant, but it sounded great, and I figured that that's why you would sing "holy" three times. I also knew that the line wouldn't have worked with two of them or four of them. My grandmother did not know that she was taking me to a poetry lesson.

I remember reading experiences with here. She disapproved of a book I was reading: The Gashouse Gang. She had no idea that it was about the St. Louis Cardinals of the thirties. Her favourite comic strip was Orphan Annie. She would read it out loud to me. When the gangsters said "yeah," she read it as "yea." I expected a "verily." I never had the nerve to ask her how she understood that narrative.

There came a time when Allen Ginsberg did not want to read "Howl" to audiences any more, and I know my own little version of what he meant. After a while I would not read my grandfather poem, despite its rhetorical nature, or because of it. Or because, despite the anthologies, I did not relish being a one-trick peony.

Besides, it became embarrassing to recite the errors in the poem, or warn about them before reading it. If you understand poems as linguistic events, they don't have errors in them, but if you read the short handwritten autobiography my grandfather wrote in his last days, you knew that the poem could use a little revision. (It is going to get some, but not because of the errors.)

For one thing, the child who would become my grand-dad did not take an Anabaptist can across his back every day. I don't think that I even knew what an Anabaptist was when I angrily wrote the poem. According to my grand-dad's autobiography, he was a normal Church of England orphan. In fact, his sister would become a Church of England nun. He became a Baptist (not an Anabaptist) when he found out that he had lost an argument about religion with the farm couple who employed him as an (almost) indentured labourer in Manitoba. He converted, and soon decided to go to divinity school and become a Baptist preacher. So my father's father was not an Anabaptist, but my mother's mother was. Born in Michigan, she was a Mennonite girl, whose family had moved from Oregon to Alberta, where she and her sister married Baptist brothers who had moved there from the Ozarks.

When my grand-dad and his brother came from England to Canada, they came first to Quebec, not the Ontario of the poem; and when my preacher grandfather moved form Manitoba to Alberta it was not via Saskatchewan that he travelled, but rather through Minnesota, where he was a circuit rider north of Minneapolis. He was all set to take employment in Idaho, when the church asked him to go to work south of Edmonton, where the Lutherans were snapping up too many of the available young believers.

But that's just political geography. He wound up living with my parents after his second wife Clara died, my father Ewart being the dutiful son, I guess. We built another addition to the house. I got my middle name from my grand-dad, as did my father. As for the Catholic hospital in Oliver, B.C., it was the only hospital between Penticton and the border. It was a block from our house. My father was the most energetic organizer in the creation of the new secular hospital. A couple of years ago the beautiful old one was torn down to make room for condominiums. My grandfather took classical languages at divinity school, but he never heard that word.