Baird Bowering Collection

The George Bowering fonds was given to Dr. Karis Shearer in June 2019 by George Bowering. It consists of 19 audio cassettes, recorded between 1968 and 1987. The tapes were traded in return for a pint of vanilla ice cream.

These sound recordings are housed at UBCO’s AMP Lab. The George Bowering fonds is distributed between the holdings of UBC Vancouver’s Rare Books & Special Collections (RBSC-ARC-1044: 6.5 cm textual material) and Library and Archives Canada R11712-0-8-E, LMS-0115: 27.17m textual and other materials, including 57 audio cassettes).

This portion of the exhibition was curated by Dr. Karis Shearer and Sarah Cipes, PhD student. All photos courtesy of Hannah Collier, UBC Okanagan Library.

1. “TISH 30: A poetry newsletter” (1965). George Bowering, Dan Mcleod, David Laing Dawson, and Peter Auxier, editors. OKPAM OS58. Created in Vancouver in 1965, each copy of this newsletter was individually typed before being sent off. These are two of 18 pages of the 30th issue of the monthly poetry magazine, TISH. Includes poems written by George Bowering.

2.”27 George Bowering” [baseball card] [ca. 2006]. OSC BIB 04 VF no. 1. Associated with Bowering’s Baseball Love, published by Talonbooks in 2006.

3. “TISH happens” [publicity kit] (2001). OSC BIB 04 VF no. 1. A series of talks and discussions about poetry in today’s world, in celebration of the 40th anniversary of TISH.

4. 71(+) for GB: an anthology for George Bowering on the occasion of his 70th birthday (2005). Jean Baird, George Stanley, & David W. McFadden, editors. Published by J. Baird. PS8503.O875 Z995 2005.

5. [Letter from Brian Fisher to Jean Baird]. [correspondence] [n.d.]. OSC BIB 04 VF no. 1 Found between pages 96 and 97 of 71(+) for GB: An anthology for George on the occasion of his 70th birthday.

6. [Jean Baird and George Bowering Wedding Invitation] [leaflet]. (2003).OSC BIB 04 VF no. 1. [not pictured]. The invitation was designed and printed by Peter and Meredith Quartermain.

7. Writing the Okanagan (2015). George Bowering, author
Talonbooks. PS8503.O875 A6 2015.[not pictured].

8. “Thea Nov 24/80” [audiocassette] (1980). George Bowering, creator. Angela Bowering and Thea Bowering, contributors. Soundbox Collection: 2019.002.007.
This audio version of the “home video” records George and Angela Bowering and their daughter, Thea Bowering, talking and singing songs. George Bowering was a prolific recordist of family life, and particularly of different stages of Thea’s childhood.

9. Autobiology (1979).George Bowering, author. New Star Books.
PS8503.O875 A93 1972.

10. [George and Jean] [Polaroid photograph] [n.d.].
OSC BIB 04 BIB VF no. 1. Found between pages 98 and 99 of Swamp Angel (1990) by Ethel Wilson.

11. “Sheila Watson SFU Oct. 6, 1982” [audiocassette]. (1982). George Bowering, creator. Sheila Watson, contributor. Soundbox Collection: 2019.002.009.

This tape records a guest lecture Canadian poet Sheila Watson gave about modernism and Wyndham Lewis in George Bowering’s class at Simon Fraser University on October 6, 1982. Bowering’s introduction of Watson gives us insight into his career as a poet-professor.

12. “Baby Thea / Warren, Roy, Moon etc.” [audiocassette]
[ca. 1980].. George Bowering, creator. Angela Bowering, Warren Tallman, Roy Kiyooka, contributors.
Soundbox Collection: 2019.003.002

Side A of this cassette features a home recording of George and Angela Bowering interacting with their young daughter Thea between the ages of one week to five months. Side B records George Bowering, Angela Bowering, UBC professor Warren Tallman, and multimedia artist Roy Kiyooka as they gather around the television in the Bowering’s Montreal home on Grosvenor Avenue to witness the historic 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing and discuss poetics. Many of Bowering’s tapes in the SoundBox collection record casual conversations with friends in the private setting of the home.

13. [George Bowering] [Polaroid photograph] [n.d.]
OSC BIB 04 VF no. 1. Found on the title page of Craft Slices (1985) by George Bowering.

14. “Bowering Party Tape” [audiocassette] [n.d.]. George Bowering, creator. Sharon Thesen, Robin Blaser, Angela Bowering, contributors.
Soundbox Collection: 2019.003.012 The “Bowering Party Reading” is a home recording captured by George Bowering on August 16, 1986. The private event featured readings by Sharon Thesen, Robin Blaser, and several other poets. George and Angela Bowering’s home was a convivial space for poets to gather and share their work.

15. The Concrete Island: Montreal poems, 1967-71 (1977). George Bowering, author. Vehicule Press. [Not pictured].
PS8503.O875 C65 1977.

16. The Man in Yellow Boots/ El Hombre de las Botas Amarillas (1965).
George Bowering, author Sergio Mondragón, translator; Roy Kiyooka, illustrator Ediciones El Corno emplumado
PR9256.O896 M35 1965

17. Robert Duncan: An Interview by George Bowering & Robert Hogg, April 19, 1969 (1971). George Bowering, author Robert Duncan and Robert Hogg, contributors Coach House Press
PS3507.U629 Z512 1971

18. Prism, vol. three no. two, winter 1962 (1962).
OKPAM 305

The pieces around the perimeter of this room were selected from the donation of Jean Baird. In this aggregation, the acts of receiving, collecting, and keeping, function as sites of creation. This case is an overture to the approximately chronological sequence of the remainder of the cases.

Baird’s work in the original control and curatorship of the Baird Bowering Collection is recorded in an inventory list, received with the Collection, which is annotated with her handwritten notes.

In a now less-common convention in the digital age, these first nineteen issues of the poetry newsletter TISH are bound in a hard cover for preservation. TISH was a “publication that dramatically changed the course of Canadian poetry and announced a new generation of poets.” In addition to the editorials and poems, the newsletters within are alive with evidence of activity: stamping, folding, mailing, and annotating. Many of the issues here, made on a typewriter and printed on mimeograph, have handwritten addresses of subscribers.

Imago, edited by George Bowering, was a child of TISH and published long-form poems. The Baird Bowering Collection covers volumes one through twenty, with some gaps.

Imago is the magazine of long poems & poem sequences. It was published by turns in Calgary, London (Ontario), Montreal, and Vancouver – wherever Bowering happened to be.

A loose adaptation/translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino elegies. From the back of the 2008 Talonbooks edition: “It is extraordinary that one can take the measure of how radically cultural sensibilities can change throughout a century by a careful reading of only two texts – in this case … Rilke’s Duino elegies written in the midst of the First World War, and George Bowering’s brilliant response to Rilke’s call, the Kerrisdale elegies composed in the midst of the Cold War.”

Note the special edition binding of the 2008 Pooka Press edition, composed of multiple chapbooks and bound with a paper ribbon. Printed in limited edition of 82 copies, of which this is #13.

Set in the ranching territory and rangelands outside of Kamloops, B.C. Caprice is an example of Bowering’s postmodern experimentation in the western genre. Its descriptions of landscapes provide a literary lens into the regions that speak to Okanagan Special Collections collecting focus.

George Bowering stated that “I noticed two things about the western: one, that they were all very male-centred, and, two, that it always has something to do with dry land… And so I said O.K., I want to make a western which is female-centred. I would just turn everything around—that way it is not just a parody but an investigation of a western, putting it on trial, almost.”

George Bowering has been credited with inventing the “Mild West” genre.

Burning Water won the Governor General’s award for fiction in 1980. While officially “fiction” by genre, Burning water has been characterized as being a laudably factually accurate account of George Vancouver’s four-volume record A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and Round the World 1791-1795. Bowering soon followed Burning water with two further novels about the “west,” Caprice and Shoot!, and together, the three books can be read as a trilogy.

A blend of genres resolves in assertive treatments of place in many of Bowering’s notable works. Bowering’s B.C., provincial in scope, is an historical text – and in fact the inscription to Jean Baird on the title page is from “George Bowering, historian.”

Writing the Okanagan, brings the relevant toponym directly into its title. Compiling selections from dozens of prior works, and invoking locations such as Peachland, Osoyoos, Vernon, Rock Creek, and Oliver, this volume promises the reader “the wonder of the Okanagan” in poetry and prose.

Shoot! veers northward into the Thompson, where Bowering constructs a novel around the history of the “Wild McLean Boys” gang. While like Caprice
it conforms to many conventions of the Western genre, “Shoot! quickly moves
beyond a simple adventure novel and becomes an anti-western by denying the romance of “the west” and, instead, ranging across myriad politically charged issues, including Aboriginal land rights, violence and racism on Canada’s western frontier, youth violence, power of the Hudson’s Bay Company, mixed-race relationships, and the death penalty.”