Tim Bowling is the author of 23 works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. He is the recipient of numerous honours, including five Alberta Literary Awards, a Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal, two Writers’ Trust of Canada nominations, two Governor General’s Literary Award nominations, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Writing with rich lyricism, Bowling intertwines autumnal themes in his newest collection, In The Capital City of Autumn: the loss of his mother, the demolition of his childhood home, his children growing and the inevitable passage of time. These are elegant, contemplative poems, touched lightly with whimsy, poems to sink into on a quiet evening.
Interview by Barbara Pelman
Barbara Pelman (BP): I love the title of your book, the surprise syntax. Titles can be so powerful. How does the title come to you. Like this one which is also the title of a poem in the book, how do you choose which poem for the title? What are you looking for in a title?
Tim Bowling (TB): Ah, titles. I really enjoy coming up with them. In this instance, my natural melancholy blended with my long-standing sense of place and resulted in the idea of a capital city for poetry’s most traditionally melancholic month. The idea then gave me some images and eventually the poem was written. When considering the collection as a whole, that same title seemed to capture what I think of as the quality of the most important poems. But beyond that, I always aim to create titles that are memorable in some way, usually in terms of image or sound, titles that give the reader something to think about. I hope this one will make readers wonder what they’d find in their own capital city of autumn before they’ve even opened the book and discovered the poem.
BP: Punctuation in your poems seems deliberately spare. Do you have some wisdom to impart about how to deal with the intricacies of punctuation? None, like Merwin, or some? And what about the choice to use space instead of punctuation, as some poets do?
TB: Punctuation, like so many elements of a poem for me, happens by pure instinct. Mostly I follow the rules of the language, but sometimes I just don’t like the ugliness of a dash or a semi-colon and will then opt for an extra space instead. I maintain that punctuation in poetry, as in prose, is meant to clarify and direct in order to enhance communication, but liberties can certainly be taken (if the poet has at least some specific and legitimate reason for taking them and isn’t just making random choices).
BP: I love that you gave poetic voice to characters in a novel! (one of those moments when I say, I wish I had thought of that) Can you talk about how you came to this idea, and why The Great Gatsby?
TB: Why create poems that give voice to characters in a novel? Partly because I’m also a novelist (my sixth novel, The Marvels of Youth, appeared less than a year ago, and I’m now working on my seventh), but mainly because, since reading Robert Browning in high school, I’ve always loved dramatic monologues. As for The Great Gatsby (not a very good title, by the way – Fitzgerald struggled with titling the book, and in fact sent a desperate last-minute telegram urging his publisher to change it to Under the Red, White, and Blue, which isn’t any better), it’s one of my favourite novels, an extended lyric cry of aspiration, regret, and loss. But it’s such a famous novel, so heavily dissected, that I wanted to celebrate its upcoming 100th anniversary by doing something different, even odd. Playing around with the really minor characters, and with some characters from Fitzgerald’s own life, just turned out to be a lot of fun. I mean, who doesn’t love the Jazz Age?
BP: I was delighted to see your Georgia Strait insults poem in this book. Nobody can throw an insult like you, well, since Shakespeare! This isn’t really a question.
TB: The greatest insult thrower since Shakespeare. I’ll take it! In fact, I’ve always wanted to put the following on one of my books: Not since Shakespeare has anyone written such powerful poems about the Fraser River salmon fishery. But I think publishers have always worried that people might not get the joke.
BP: Two questions I always love to ask, though maybe you might not be so delighted to answer: first, what is your writing practise? Are you a disciplined master of routine, or do you follow the whims of the intermittent muse?
TB: I’m hardly ever asked about poetry, so I’m delighted to answer any and all questions. Discipline for a poet is a curious thing. I like to say, I’m always working, but remotely! Because when is a poet NOT working? Sometimes I wish I could turn that image and rhythm-making part of my brain off for a week, but I haven’t managed that in over forty years, and I doubt I’ll manage it in the next twenty either. Everything I experience is grist for the poetic mill, and the turning of that mill is constant, even to the point of annoyance sometimes. But I certainly have no sit-at-the-desk every day for X amount of hours sort of process, nor do I believe in pure inspiration. The groundwork is laid by years and years of attuning your instincts to the possibilities of your language and to what Keats called the holiness of the heart’s affections. I suppose, if I had any kind of reliable routine, it would be going for long walks. “Nobody stuffs the world in at your eyes/The optic heart must venture,” as Margaret Avison puts it. Out on my long walks, with my eyes and other senses open to chance encounters, and with my pace and my pulse giving me the rhythms for what I experience, I guess I could say I’m in my office, slogging away. But I doubt that most Canadians would have much respect for that sort of work ethic!
BP: Second, how do you edit? Is it a constant thing? Do you get poet friends to offer suggestions? Do you put it away for a while then look at it with ‘new eyes’? What’s your secret? And what are you looking for, to edit? More soundscapes? Expanding metaphor? Change of structure?
TB: I do most of my editing before I commit pen to paper (yes, I still write my first drafts by hand), and I’m ruthless. If I don’t have four good lines memorized, four good lines of promise, I don’t even start. When I do carry on to write a complete poem, I leave it be for a long while (weeks or months, sometimes years). Going back to it, if there’s still some energy there, some pleasure-giving qualities, I might cut words to improve the pacing, but I rarely change anything major. And if there isn’t enough energy or pleasure, I just abandon the poem wholesale and wait for the next one. For better or for worse (not my call), I don’t have any poet friends to whom I turn for editing advice. I often exchange poems with the superb North Van poet Russell Thornton, but we admire each other’s process too much to stick our noses into the details. We just applaud each other, not out of the duty of friendship, but because we generally love each other’s work and happily overlook minor things that we might change because we’re so grateful for the overall effect. It’s very important for a poet to have at least one such relationship. The loneliness would probably kill you otherwise.
BP: Your metaphors are wonderful. Here are a couple of my favorites: “the clavicle bones of the hangers…/,” “the up-late artist auguring holes of light/in the night’s ebon parapet,” “So cold my breath breaks,” “Gulls the colour of breast milk drift/on a tide the colour of sperm,” This is not really a question really, just an admiration.
TB: Thank you for your nice words about my use of metaphor. It’s probably the one aspect of my poetry that matters the most to me. In fact, being on the search for original metaphor is my entire raison d’etre, as a writer and as a reader of poems. The poem “Yesteryears,” for example, is almost just a long list of metaphors. And the very last words in the book? Let’s just say that when I compare the stars to baby’s teeth in a grave, I’m a happy camper (which sounds odd, but I’m sure you know what I mean).
BP: There are five sections in your book, and each seems to have a different theme and tone, ending with the poignancy of the dog elegies. How did you decide on the format of your book? Its structure? Which poems to include and where?
TB: Over my long career, I’ve published either collections based on one mood or one defining subject (elegies for my father in The Witness Ghost, for example, or working-class persona poems in Tenderman and The Dark Set) or what I call “grab bag” books. The latter are more varied in subject matter and tone, but these still need to be carefully structured. With this new collection, I enjoyed the luxury of combining both types of structure, since there are two obvious sequences, two long poems, and two sections of individual lyrics (the first of which is darker and more dramatic, and, frankly, contains the best poetry). So, in a real sense, I’ve brought all my experience to bear on In the Capital City of Autumn. I hope it shows.
BP: The many references to salmon, and fishing, and small-town life that come from your early years—how do such early influences affect the writer? In what way is the phrase “geography is destiny” true in your work and the work of others?
TB: Everything I’ve done as a writer comes directly from the experiences I had as a child and young adult living and working at the mouth of the Fraser River. I can’t speak for other poets, but my work is of no value at all if I remove it from my specific attachment to that place. Any other poems I write on different subjects also have their origins in my natal source of imagery and language. Of course, in our increasingly globalized and virtual world, any deep feeling for a specific geographical connection is becoming as rare as hen’s teeth (much as these nature-based expressions are themselves now as rare as hen’s teeth). It isn’t just the earth that’s constantly under attack; it’s our ancient relationship with it too.
BP: Thanks Tim for a fabulous interview! Looking forward to hearing you read these at the Festival.