an interview with Tim Bowling

Clarise Foster: You are the author of six, acclaimed, collections of poetry and two novels, and the winner of several awards, including the Petra Kennedy International Poetry Award. In 2003 you were you were shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for your book, Witness Ghost. These are all amazing accomplishments, but at the end of the day, poetry—writing in general—is a tough gig and you are in the middle of raising a family, in addition to everything else. So how do you manage to stay motivated to keep on writing—especially poetry? What does poetry give you that you have come back to it after each novel you have written?

Tim Bowling: To be perfectly honest, I don’t find writing to be a tough gig. Of course, it has its unique challenges, its frustrations, but these seem minor to me compared with the stresses that many other types of work bring. I guess what motivates me to work hard, apart from the pleasure I derive from the process, is the fear of having to take some other job if I can’t make a go of it as a writer. Because, really, as a parent, nothing can match the flexibility of the writing life. Both my wife and I are home almost full-time with our three children, and that’s a luxury few couples enjoy, and one for which I have unparalleled gratitude. As for poetry: it’s not work for me. I’ve never set out to have a “career” in it, I’ve never taken poetry writing courses or workshops, I’ve never been anyone’s student where the writing of poetry’s concerned. My apprenticeship was done in complete isolation from other writers, so the only sense of competition or approval that I knew came from the books I was reading, which made poetry a sort of intense private world that I entered to escape all the usual trappings we associate with work. William Stafford once said he wrote poems for the same reason he liked to go hiking, that to do so gave him pleasure. I’d go even farther and say that the reading and writing of poetry have been the bedrock of my emotional and spiritual life for over twenty years. To sit down with a book of favourite poems, or to go out to a café with the idea of writing a new poem, is my idea of paradise. Perhaps it’s unfashionable not to be angst-ridden about writing, but, believe me, I have other things to be anxious about—navigating three small children to adulthood in a culture that’s not very kind to children, for example. Though there are days, of course, when I think novel writing must have been one of the seven tasks Hercules had to take on.

CV2: When did you begin writing poetry and why? What do you remember as most important about writing poetry then? What is most important to you now? How do your early experiences as a poet continue to influence your writing?

TB: I began writing poetry way back in the misty dawn of time. I began to think in terms of publishing in magazines around the age of 23, in terms of putting a book together about five years after that. I started writing poetry because it’s the most natural thing in the world for a child to do, to goof around with language. I started publishing it because I wanted to be famous and have lots of hip girlfriends. I’m still waiting. Though, of course, if the girlfriends ever did arrive, they would greatly complicate my domestic situation. So please, ladies, try to control yourselves! What’s always been most important to me about writing poetry is the sense of a dialogue with something outside the self, with other people, with other species, with the elements, with the dead, with the cosmos, with mystery. I hope I never lose that sense of dialogue. If I do, the poems will stop coming, I’m sure.

CV2: I understand that you recently moved from Edmonton back to the land of your youth, British Columbia. The weather and land/waterscapes, and experiences of your childhood, have been prominent in many of your poetry collections. What impact has relocating to the scene of your past had on your writing?

TB: Well, the west coast is pretty varied. I’m living in Gibsons on the Sunshine Coast, about an hour and a half northwest of Vancouver. I grew up in Ladner, about a half-hour south of Vancouver. Gibsons is an ocean town, Ladner is a river town; Gibsons has mountains and creeks, Ladner has marshes and sloughs. So I have come home, but slantwise, so to speak. In any case, even when I lived in Alberta, I returned to the coast a few times each year; the shock of re-encountering formative images, therefore, hasn’t really happened. But I have written a half-dozen Gibsons poems, and, like many of my poems, they rise directly out of my immersion in my natural surroundings. Which is a long-winded way of saying that there has been an impact, but I expect I won’t really feel the concussions for a while.

CV2: The past, your childhood, the coast, the weather of the coast, and its particular landscape, continue to play an important role in your writing. Reading it, I get the sense of a search, a longing for something. What are you looking for and why is poetry your primary tool of research?

TB: I’m looking for seriousness, by which I mean serious joy and serious sorrow, the willingness to feel deeply and humanly. I’m also looking for permanence, even as I know I won’t find it. Life might be meaningless, but that’s no reason not to search for meaning. Poetry, for me, however, is a celebration of the desire to search, not a method for searching.

CV2: It seems that weather in your poems exists as a consistent construct of truth, while everything changes around it—I am thinking of a poem in your book Thin Smoke of the Heart. In “A Former Fisherman Enters a Used Bookstore at Night,” the weather is, for the fisherman, a predominant presence even in a used bookstore—”Here is all the old rain of the world, caught and dried and never to pelt the flesh or start a shivering deep in the bones again …” Why does the weather of your youth provide the setting for so much of your poetry?

TB: I guess because I was out in it so much, being a fisherman’s son who lived a half-block from the river. In those days (the seventies), parents would usher you out the door, say “Be home for supper,” and you’d roam. And wherever you roamed, the weather roamed with you. So when I write about my youth, there’s no way to avoid the weather.

CV2: It is my understanding that your father was a fisherman, and you worked as a deckhand for many years—so weather was by nature your livelihood, predominant and unpredictable to the point of extreme danger. On the other hand, weather was, both in reality and in metaphor, a constant—a measurement of experience. How does that consistent vulnerability continue to influence your poetry?

TB: Vulnerability influences how I approach the world (after all, we’re tiny and fragile in the grand scheme of things), but not how I approach language. This might just be the necessary paradox at the heart of all poetry. You have to recognize your insignificance, but your language to express this must be confident. And in the process of using your language, you must feel anything but insignificant. Writing poems is all about negotiating that paradox.

CV2: The Memory Orchard, your most recent collection of poetry, begins with “The Call,” a haunting introductory piece that sets the tone for the poems that follow. In this piece you invoke the violent force of coastal windstorms that can and do periodically knock out power, an experience you liken to the voice of God in our time. It is an interesting reference, one that speaks of the constant battle of human will against nature. What does “God” represent here? And, as weather can be seen here to represent or cause a crisis of “faith,” what is the crisis that you address in this poem?

TB: You know, Clarise, it just sounded good to me, power going out like the voice of God in our time. Makes you think. But I don’t know what it makes you think. It just sounded good, you know. I didn’t work it out consciously at all. In fact, almost nothing I do is worked out like that. No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader, as Frost puts it. The crisis I address is simply the fact of our mortality, and the loss of our faith in any divine order to help us confront our mortality. As Camus would say, the idea of our death is absurd. So how do we deal with the absurdity? In “The Call,” I deal with it by admitting there’s no way to deal with it. It’s cold. It’s frightening. But, of course, poetry is one way to deal with it, at least for me.

CV2: “The Call” seems to be a pivotal piece as it also introduces the imperative “storm” of the past, which has the power to suddenly appear in the present. The title is an obvious reference to the phone call that comes literally from childhood, but what is the “larger call” represented in this piece, and what does it say about the importance of the metaphor of weather to you and its relationship to your past—what about your relationship to poetry?