When contemplating rhythm, I’m reminded of the “Do Sink,” one of my favourite pieces by Vancouver poet George Bowering. The fourteen part serial poem, built with three stanzas per section, builds upon John Keats’ 1818 sonnet “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be,” borrowing a line of Keats’ original in each of his own sections. Composed across July and August 1991 and first published as a small chapbook in 1992, it sits most recently in Bowering’s Talking Measures: Selected Serial Poems (2019), edited by Vancouver poet and critic Stephen Collis. “Do Sink” exists as the perfect blend of movement, lyric and rhythm, utilizing Keats’ lines as a jumping-off point to speak of and around family history and geography.
Edward Smallfield recently commented on how my “voice is distinctly Canadian, but his work has always been open to influences from American poetry. An obvious influence in his early work (which in my opinion tends to persist somewhat more subtly in his later work) is William Carlos Williams, perhaps the most American of poets.” I find that curious, given I’ve read so little Williams, that this is what Smallfield catches, although I can’t deny those elements of structure I absorbed through those that Williams’ work influenced. Bowering’s work, specifically, was such a large part of shaping much of my early aesthetic, alongside some other of those early 1960s Vancouver poets around TISH, including Daphne Marlatt, John Newlove, Roy K. Kiyooka and Fred Wah. And yet, I’ve read far more Jack Spicer than I’ve ever read of Williams. Spicer makes sense to me; Williams feels too distant. Sometimes it is hard to see or understand influence, away from its source.
As I’ve written prior, repeatedly: it is impossible to read this poem without hearing it sing, Bowering’s right hand keeping score, keeping time, a pattern as much involving sound and rhythm as any potential meaning. I saw him read this poem in Vancouver in 2005: a reading structured as a Canadian poetry trio of Georges—Bowering, Stanley and Elliott Clarke—right hands each conducting their rhythms.
When I have fears that I
may cease to be
open to pain that shines
wet on the side of a gold
fish in my own, I thought,
pond
I ought to forget
comfort, forget family
history, drive a black sedan
over thin prairie roads
looking for a town even
my mother does not believe
was ever there
knowing
pain is not colour, not value
but condition, the cost
of starting a damned life in
the first place, where no
thinking man ever was.
This is all about rhythm. Everything I write a combination of attentions to rhythm, shape and meaning. What am I talking about here? Collections held together far more across a consideration of shared rhythms and shapes than specific subject matter. The subject matter emerges as shapes build up, unfold. The loose rhythms and structures I’ve long admired in Julie Carr’s work, attempting to replicate such in my own poems, attempting to absorb her structures as I diverge into my own unshakeable directions, propelled by the prompting of Julie’s lines, Julie’s structures.