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George Bowering

George Bowering was born in Penticton, British Columbia, in 1935. After serving as a photographer in the Royal Canadian Air Force, Bowering attended the University of British Columbia. There he met Frank Davey, Fred Wah, David Dawson and James

Reid, with whom he started TISH. He later founded Imago and is a contibuting editor for Open Letter. George Bowering is a major Canadian literary figure and one of the most prolific writers in the country with over 70 books published to date. Two-time winner of the Governor General's Award, his most recent collection of poetry, Changing on the Fly, is short-listed for the Griffin Prize for Poetry. George Bowering approaches literature as he does life: with a playful gravity and a grave merriness that makes intellectual life and writing seem at once attractive, unintimidating and remarkable. He dispels the myth of literature being hard or tricky and demonstrates, as he reads and chats, the accessible and enriching nature of great literature. His appeal and great influence lie in his decision to work consistently against the grain of dominant aesthetic conventions and expectations.

She Drives

George Bowering

She drives the car, and this
is her theory—get into the left lane
and floor it.

Sometimes my chair
was in the trunk, sometimes
I just want to hear poetry
on the radio, poetry from a mouth
of a friend who just will not
shut up.

She never curses other drivers,
those people the rest of us call
assholes.

She drives the city, and now
she knows it, right lane or left,
she drives the car
while the choir ascends
and the dog makes carcinogenic smells
in the rear seat.

She’s a good driver, another reason
to live with her, who knows
how to unfold that chair
as if it were a heart
and I need a new one.

They did my right eye that way
so I can see her,
eyes intent on the QEW
and its huge turning wheels,
its poet below the underpass,
its voice a pile-up in the snow.

She drives the Volvo in Oklahoma
and we never get pulled over,

another reason to put my hand
on her right knee
and to say
thanks for the lift.

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