by Tim Bowling

In September 1970, at the age of six, I was sent to school. It was a shock from which I’ve never really recovered. In fact, several of my most vivid early memories come from that painful transition when I had to exchange going out with my father on his salmon fishing boat and roaming the fields and muddy riverbanks of the Fraser River estuary with my dog and a neighbourhood pal for sitting half of each weekday in a desk under fluorescent lighting while the sun shone and the seagulls cried and my father fished alone and my springer spaniel and best friend explored the tall bluejoint grass of the vacant lots without me.

In memory number one, another boy and I are sent to the principal’s office for (and I kid you not) laughing too much. In those days, corporal punishment was still allowed, so we basically faced getting strapped with a leather belt for acting like, well, small boys. It was not a sanguine prospect, especially since the principal was a beefy ex-football player with a Marines crewcut, but it was the real beginning of my knowledge of the poet’s natural relationship to power.

Memory number two, however, speaks more directly to the nature of my own poetic labour over the past forty years since I first started sending my poems out, via Canada Post, in large manilla envelopes with smaller stamped self-addressed envelopes inside, to small, mimeographed magazines (remember the mimeograph – Ode to the Mimeograph!) in such exotic and far-flung places as Windsor and St. John’s. For some reason, in one corner of our classroom, sat a tank in which two crayfish, presumably there to teach the children of fishing families about aquatic life, constantly clawed at the glass. Scritch, scritch, scritch. All day long. The sound became as familiar and repetitive as the teacher’s chalking of the blackboard. But I wouldn’t likely remember the crayfish, sad as they were, if not for their heroic and ultimately futile efforts to escape. Often, during the night, they would force the lid off the tank and pull themselves over one of the glass sides (I never knew how they managed it) and the janitor (who liked to tell stories while resting on his broom) would come upon them in the hallway or, on rare occasions, up against the most westerly wall of the school, the wall closest to the sea. “They can smell the salt,” he explained. “They’re trying to get home.”

As a poet, I suppose I’m still just like those crayfish: trying and failing and trying again to work my way back to my natural place – in the first instance, of childhood’s full wonder and sensual pleasure and free-roaming delight in the world, and more recently, of the time that I can’t have again, when many people I loved were still alive, when my children were small, when I had so many more years of life to look forward to. The poems in my new collection, consequently, reside mostly in the capital city of autumn, and bear all the weight of the accumulated years, but the laughing six-year-old hasn’t disappeared either. And whether a poem is sad or funny or a blend of both, whether it explores the demolition of my childhood home or presents a report card on my middle age, I still see each one as a serious dramatic occasion, a theatre in which the actors are words that I must endow with meaning and music and move around in such a way that the reader understands that I’ve put a great deal of care into trying, through metaphor, rhythm, and authenticity of emotion, to delight. Robert Frost famously wrote, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader,” to which I would add, modestly, “No joy in the making, no joy in the receiving.”

“Whatever else poetry is freedom,” as Irving Layton put it, and not only do I agree, but I’m also happy to report that the making of poems, the ongoing scritch scritch scritch of them (I still write longhand), continues to be my greatest source of joy and freedom, even if there’s always a wall of some kind to keep me from finding my way back home again.   

Tim Bowling is the author of twenty-four works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. He is the recipient of numerous honours, including two Edmonton Artists’ Trust Fund Awards, five Alberta Book Awards, a Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal, two Writers’ Trust of Canada nominations, two Governor General’s Award nominations and a Guggenheim Fellowship in recognition of his entire body of work.

(Tim Bowling’s latest book is In The Capital City of Autumn out with Wolsak & Wynn Spring 2024!)