TDR Letter

Subject: George Bowering on spoken word

January 2003

Dear Michael Bryson:

Reading your brief aside about the poet laureate’s disdain for spoken word in your review of Catherine Kidd’s book, it occurred to me that The Danforth Review might be interested in publishing the following open letter. 

Best regards,

Harold Spout

Dear George Bowering, most esteemed poet laureate, Sir:

In your comments of two weeks ago, it seemed to me that you were throwing down a gauntlet to the community of so-called spoken word artists—if an idiom like ‘throwing down a gauntlet’ with all its noble history can be rightly applied to such crass and ignoble sentiments as those which you expressed. I am not a practitioner of spoken word (except insofar as I write verse and then read it to audiences), but the offensiveness of your slurs is by no means limited to those against whom they were directed. And so I pick up your dirty glove.

Your comments, sir, were pedantic, pretentious, and hypocritical. One would think that someone like yourself, so well-known for his role in a supposedly grass-roots/speech-oriented movement (though I personally find such claims dubious), would be tolerant, if not encouraging of, a contemporary movement with similar goals. How far removed, after all, are the spoken word folks’ aims (to de-mystify and shake poetry from its academic stupor) from those of your own mentors’ (Olson and Creeley) in the 1950s? Your griping dismissal of their work as a whole (in sweepingly vague terms that testify to prejudice rather than actual first-hand experience) reveals that, like most would-be revolutionaries, now that your battles are won, you are only interested in maintaining your position as king of the dungheap, and will kick shit on any other kids who try to climb up.

Your objections to the performative and competitive nature of spoken word are naive at best, but, given the fact that you are a professor of English literature, and therefore presumably well-versed in its history, more disingenuous than anything. Poetry has an extremely long history of public performance. Did the troubadours not accompany their verses with music? Were Shakespeare’s plays not staged and acted out (dramatically!) for an audience? Were these performances not given with (gasp!) the expectation of payment and profit? I have never heard you read your poems, but presumably you are of the school that holds to the risible notion that poetry must be read in a sort of monotonous deadpan so that the "words might speak for themselves" or some other such nonsense. Is this what your ‘humility before the word’ consists of? Of boring your audience, and thereby limiting it to a coterie of like-minded associates? It is precisely such attitudes that have rendered contemporary poetry the esoteric dead letter that it is, that have, paradoxically, opened the door for such popular movements as spoken word. 

As for the matter of competition, it seems perverse in the extreme that you should attack this as a phenomenon peculiar to spoken word, when the gears of ‘literary verse’ are amply lubricated with the grease of 1001 competitions. I guess your ‘humility’ was not sufficient for you to reject your Governor General’s Awards (although it was a lovely gesture to say that Acorn should have won in ’70...)? Leonard Cohen is the only English language poet to have done so, but it is well-known that he hardly needs the money. As a tenured professor, did you? It’s awfully easy to sneer from your bourgeois perch at those entering contests for cash, but you could at least refrain from doing so yourself if you’re going to cast stones. I’d ask if you have any shame, but it’s patently clear that you don’t.

Your derision of a movement, far from doing anything to discredit that movement, has served only to portray to the public an image of their poet laureate as a disaffected, reactionary, resentful, insecure, pedantic old fool. An alpha dog ignores the yipping and nipping of little schnauzers. Your response is that of a typical beta; if spoken word artists are the schnauzers, then you’re a cocker spaniel: you clearly see them as a threat, potential or real. You are an embarrassment to the craft you pretend to serve so humbly. Far more important than humility in poetry are imagination, intellectual breadth, and psychological honesty; you have a paucity of all of these qualities. You are a minor poet at best, a slavish imitator of dated American fads, and once you are gone, will be little more than a footnote to an appendix of literary history. 

The crux of the real problem with Canadian poetry is not even in the neighbourhood of spoken word. The real problem with our poetry is that it has consistently rewarded and legitimized mediocrity. How else explain how a dull fart-sucker became Poet Laureate?

Sincerely,

Harold Spout
Montreal

TO MR. BOWERING

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact.

Shakespeare

Thus the Bard enumerates the trinity of holy fools,
But by you, poet, the triad’s warped: dullard and bureaucrat round it out,
Imagination’s bush is mulched, made to follow a garden’s set rules,
The bears all wear collars and caper like drunks for the odd tossed trout.

See how by vain and clumsy profanation,
Sideshow acts of floccinaucinihilipilification,
The great name of poesy becomes in your hands airy nothing;
Laurels, sir, are all well and good, but where oh where is your clothing?