The George Bowering space at the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre includes 5,000 books and pieces of memorabilia
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George Bowering has received the Order of Canada and the Order of B.C. He was Canada’s first Parliamentary Poet Laureate, has written so many books of poetry and prose that it’s hard to count, and has given readings and lectures all over the world.
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His latest honour is close to home: His personal library has been set up as a reading room at the University of B.C.’s Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
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It isn’t a replica of his home study, like you might find in a museum. But an estimated five thousand volumes from Bowering’s vast collection now line the shelves of the reading room, with more to come.
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There’s work from famed poets and authors like Jack Kerouac, Jean Cocteau and William S. Burroughs, and lots of Canadiana from the likes of bpNichol, Sheila Watson and Margaret Atwood.
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It’s not just books, though. Bowering’s personality comes through in the improbable memorabilia that is displayed alongside the volumes, such as baseball bobbleheads, a puppy pen-holder and Hello Kitty collectibles.
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“The idea is not just the books, but the whole thing, all of the stuff that George has had on his shelves for years,” explains Bowering’s wife, Jean Baird. “His baseball glove, artwork. Katherine (Kalsbeek of UBC) got it immediately, just what this space could be.
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“Katherine was quite smitten by the Hello Kitty Pez dispenser that was on one of the shelves. George hates Hello Kitty, but he started collecting them with irony, and then people (started giving them to him) with even greater irony.”
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There’s a framed cartoon Atwood did of meeting Bowering in 1967, depicting him jumping in the air and clicking his heels while wearing a Donald Duck tie and exclaiming “Quack! Quack!”
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Atwood named it “Margaret Atwood, in Nehru collar pantsuit, meets G.B., in Donald Duck tie, 1967.” Above the illustration she’s written “For George — always young — XX Peggy.”
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Alas, George isn’t young anymore — he’s 90. His health hasn’t been great, and he now uses a wheelchair. His sight is limited, to the point where he can no longer read or write.
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That said, he’s just released two books. Pearl (Talonbooks) is billed as his final book of poetry, and Barefoot Gringo (UBC Press) is a Boweringesque take on his travels to Mexico.
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He still has enough energy to power a small city. Maybe Penticton, where he was born on Dec. 1, 1935, or Oliver, where he grew up.
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Bowering is as engaging as ever, laughing and telling a dizzying amount of stories and anecdotes in a visit to the space, which is officially known as the George Bowering Modernists and Post-modernists Collection.
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You can tell it means a lot to him. It’s more than a personal honour, it’s a way of honouring the writers that influenced him.
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“These are the authors that I felt connected with or wanted to feel connected with,” said Bowering, who went to school at UBC and taught at Simon Fraser University for three decades. “I really liked various American authors, or various English authors, or even an Albanian author an awful lot, and read all their books. But they weren’t part of my posse, right? So they’re not in here.
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“You’re not going to find Ernest Hemingway in here, but you will find Ezra Pound, and you will find Gertrude Stein, and so forth.”
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It took a decade to put together the room, which is in a space formerly occupied by the Wallace and Madeleine Chung Collection, which moved to a new location. Kalsbeek said Atwood wrote a letter of support for the Bowering project, and also made a “substantial” financial contribution.
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The books and memorabilia are arranged in shelves along the wall, with vitrines or showcases filled with some of the key items.
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One showcase is filled with beat material, such as a weathered original 1953 Ace edition of William Lee’s Junkie. It looks like a standard vintage pulp paperback with a titillating cover, a nogoodnik guy manhandling a curvy blond.
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But the title “Junkie” and subtitle “Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict” hints it’s something else. In fact, William Lee was beat legend William S. Burroughs, writing under a pseudonym.
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Another showcase has Canadian material, including the January 1965 issue of TISH, a UBC student poetry newsletter co-founded by Bowering. It’s addressed to Jack Kerouac, Box 385, Northport, New York. But the address has been pencilled out, and replaced with Kerouac’s new address, 5155-10th Ave. N., St. Petersburg, Fla.
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It’s the kind of thing you would find in Bowering’s library. When asked if he’s a pack rat, he retorted: “Jean doesn’t say ‘pack rat,’ she says ‘archivist.’ ”
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He laughs and tells a story about how Baird took part of his collection of old T-shirts and turned them into comforters. She made him get rid of his collection of 1940s and ’50s baseball magazines, though.
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“I carried them in a great big box from city to city to city for years and years,” he said. “And then she told me that was silly.”
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Naturally this leads to an anecdote.
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“My first two poems I ever published in a national professional magazine, and got paid for, were two hockey magazines, Hockey Digest and Blueline,” he said.
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One was called the ABCs of the NHL, and featured Bowering’s mini-poems on NHL players in the ’50s.
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“A is for Armstrong George, the Big Chief. Obviously, A most valuable Leaf,” he wrote.
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“B is for Boom-Boom. Big noise at the Forum. If the Habs need six goals, Bernie will score ’em.”
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Clearly the man had a future.
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