
When Canada finally got around to choosing its first Poet Laureate, they skipped right past the high-falutin’ Ontario crowd and the Quebec other-solitude cadres to select one of us, BC’s own George Bowering.
He’s written dozens of books, not just poetry but also novels and non-fiction. He’s also taught thousands of writers at SFU and elsewhere. I’ve been a fan ever since he was kind (or dazed) enough to agree to appear as a guest on an early livestreaming show I hosted called The WritingLife. We filmed at 6am on Saturdays on a floating “cyber den” in Coal Harbour. I’m sure it was the novelty of livestreaming around the world that got guests out of bed; today I can’t even imagine having the gall to ask.
Bowering was an excellent guest. He’d just been named Poet Laureate, and when I asked him how he felt when he heard about the honour, he held up a clipping from a headline about a war tactic then being applied in Iraq: “Shock and Awe.”
One thing I didn’t ask him which always puzzled me was, as a good Canadian boy, why the big love for baseball? His autobiographical book Pinboy helps explain. Here’s my review of it for the British Columbian Quarterly.
BC Studies: The British Columbian Quarterly.