Tim Bowling was born in Vancouver and raised in the nearby town of Ladner. He is the award-winning author of a number of books, including the novel The Paperboy's Winter (Penguin, 2003) and The Witness Ghost (Nightwood, 2003), which was short-listed for the Governor General's Award for Poetry. He edited Where the Words Come From: Canadian Poets in Conversation (Nightwood, 2002). His most recent collection is The Memory Orchard (Brick Books, 2004), and Bowling appeared in The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry, 2005. The following poems are reprinted by permission of the author.
Any letters for me, please put them
In the burnt-out jack-o'-lantern.
If you find a fallen leaf
from my tenth or thirtieth year
please hang it on the clothesline
with my grandmother's linen.
Please don't press your face
to the screen on the porch door;
the moth-hunger in the human eye
is more than I can bear.
Tomorrow, perhaps, I'll begin again
the terrifying heart of life and muscle,
scrape the ash from the lantern
and circle my eyes, reel in the damp
of memory on its rusty wheel,
and greet you as any other man.
But not tonight. Please,
If you would come to me at all,
come as the smoke of one fire
to another, or as the voice of the moon
to the body of the slackened river.
At daybreak
a gull walks between
the empty beer bottles
the teenagers arranged
like birthday candles
on your bulk,
then flies off,
a vivid flare.
But there's no rescue now.
The absence of god
is filled with the longing
for the presence of god.
Night after night,
the stars attend
your stench
as scholars attend
the turning of time
into history.
Whale jaw, jack spring spine, rock cod gill,
scallop under skin of my hand; these
are the bones I'm burying now. Tomcat skull,
sparrow wing, spaniel paw, full moon behind
my bluest gaze; I'm planting them all.
No animal returns to gnaw its gnawed limb
left in a trap; I've thirty years to dig
the deep six for, and hard shoulderblades
to gunnysack. Darling, carry the spade
for me, chant my years without you down;
I want the sunlight on a new foundation,
my old bricks in the wormsweet ground.
Cattle hock, heron claw, muskrat rib,
mast I hang my breathing from; I'll part
the grass and roll and die; I'll build
new castanets: here's a fresh gentility:
as the hummingbird twines its tiny nest
of spiderweb and moss, so I build
my hope and sleep from the marrow
of your kiss.
So, I'd like to start with a comment made near the end of your Late Nights with Wild Cowboys, in the poem "Jawbone." You express real fear and anxiety over the prospect of having your life and love be objectified, turned into summary, a bowdlerized rendering that "[leaves] nearly everything out." More than that, though, you are worried about how we ourselves are complicit in this sort of exclusionary act. I guess what I'd like to ask first, then, is: do you imagine poetry as a means of letting things in rather than keeping everything out? And what are you aiming to let in, exactly?
I really do think of poetry in that way, in terms of providing a space -- an opening -- in which it might be possible to say the things that are hard, and perhaps impossible, to say otherwise; in which to express that inarticulate feeling that you get sometimes...continue reading
Steve McOrmond's new collection of poems begins with a caution. In the style of TV content warnings, "Advisory" lists potential disturbing content to come: "themes which could threaten the viewer's sense of security," "Evidence of fatalism and irreligion," and the typical forewarnings about sexuality, violence and "language." Here McOrmond displays the dual cautionary and playful perspectives that interact throughout the book, switching from warnings about a drowning and an animal attack to the line, "The following program may contain scenes not suitable for language."
The poem raises the expected questions about what we censor and screen in popular media. What is considered objectionable, and why? Placed at the start of a collection whose title references Armageddon, "Advisory" leads the reader to expect a certain discomfort.
With that warning, the book moves to the title...continue reading