Poet Tim Bowling finds a fine balance between anger and love
By Peter Simpson, Ottawa Citizen
We may be in the digital age, when everything moves and wants only to change, but even amid the hustle and e-bustle a few simple words of poetry on a page can jar me into a stillness, a brief, luxurious stillness.
That line of poetry at the top, that brilliantly visual metaphor, is by Tim Bowling, who was a boy on the west coast and is now a man in Edmonton. He is landlocked, which is a bearable but melancholy existence for anyone who was born by the sea.
"I don't think I could ever live more than one province away from it," he says.
Such longing for a place, for a perhaps fading ideal of a place, permeates Bowling's poem, which is titled West Coast, from his 2003 collection The Witness Ghost.
I ask Bowling, in an interview by email over several days last week, where he was ("literally, and in your own thoughts") when he wrote that line.
"When I fished on the Fraser River as a small boy with my father, the drink of choice was always tea, strong tea," says Bowling, who reads at Ottawa's Versefest on March 3. "Steeping tea bags were a constant, potent part of my childhood in general, and not something I might have appreciated as a poet just starting out (in youth, the more dramatic images usually overwhelm everything) -
"I try very hard to capture the essence of the physical sense of the coast in my poems, and sometimes that dark, rainy weather just has a steeping feel about it."
Oh it does, it does. I remember many nights as a teen by the ocean in my damp hometown, it steeping in the darkness, me brewing in angst.
Bowling is good at capturing the turmoil of conflicting emotions, which flower in adolescence and insist on following us into adulthood, like hateful perennials that bloom and stink up the place.
I say to him, there are a lot of emotions simmering beneath your words when you write about the coast, the people, the salmon. There's love, and longing and, I think, a level of anger.
"It's pretty clear that if you destroy watersheds and develop and pollute estuaries, if you create a fish-farming system that has been proven to destroy wild fisheries in other countries, then you don't really give a damn about the coast as a place of beauty and spirituality," he says.
"That's obvious, right? Yet it just wasn't, and still isn't, being said. In my lifetime, the lust for money has grown to such proportions that you're almost laughed at now to suggest that profit isn't a good enough motive in itself."
He wrote a book about it in 2007 - "I needed the prose form to get a lot of things off my chest" - and he called it The Lost Coast: Salmon, Memory, and the Death of Wild Culture. "I was sick and tired of hearing how fishermen were to blame for declining fish stocks," he says.
His father - a frequent and fondly cast apparition in Bowling's work - was a fisherman, a "tenderman," in the local parlance.
"The world says it's your fault/ the fish have gone," he writes in his 2011 book of poems Tenderman, "though yours was not the greater profit/ And I am scorned for translating/ my hatred of power into verses."
Fatherhood is the base element in Bowling's work, constantly poked and prodded, turned over and inspected, rolled in the hands like a puzzle to be solved. Bowling, once a son and now a father, looks back on his own late father, and looks at his own young son.
"Like Neruda," he says, "I'm sometimes tired of being a man, especially in this culture, which remains obsessed with wielding power over others (look at our politics, look at so-called sports like UFC). At the same time, I recognize that there is something honourable and true in genuine masculinity. So Tenderman is balanced, perhaps uneasily, between that anger and that love."
Why struggle for that balance, why write poetry at all in an age when everything is faster, smarter, cooler? Does poetry even matter in the Internet age?
"We live in a disrespectful, fast-paced age of mass production and mass conformity, but there's always resistance, always something in us that longs for the beauty of form," he says. "What gives any poet a sense of purpose and meaning? The work, always the work. I put my faith there as a teenager, and 30 years later I'm still putting it there."
We're in an age of digital discovery and, as Frost once wrote, "writing a poem is discovering."
READING BY TIM BOWLING
When: Versefest, 5 p.m., Saturday, March 3
Where: Arts Court Theatre, 2 Daly Ave.
More: See more on Tim Bowling at ottawacitizen.com/bigbeat
psimpson@ottawacitizen.com
Twitter.com/bigbeatottawa
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