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George Bowering (1935- )
George Bowering was born in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley in 1935. After finishing
high school there he joined the RCAF as an aerial photographer from 1954-57.
He received a B.A. in history from the University of British Columbia
in 1960 and an M.A. in English
in 1963. While at U.B.C. Bowering associated closely with four other
like-minded writers: Frank
Davey, David Dawson, James Reid and Fred Wah; together they founded TISH
magazine, in 1961, under the tutelage of Warren Tallman. Through Tallman
Bowering and 'the TISH group' came under the influence of U.S. writers
such as Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Charles Olson and Jack Spicer. His
teaching (and graduate studies) assignments took him first to Calgary, then
the University of Western Ontario and Sir George Williams (now Concordia) before
returning to B.C. to take up a teaching position at Simon Fraser,
from which he finally retired in 2001. His literary periodical
dedicated to the long poem or serial poem, Imago, ran
for ten years between 1964 and 1974 and he was also a contributing editor for
Frank Davey's Open Letter.
Bowering's ill-fated first book, Sticks and stones
was published by Tishbooks in 1963 but few copies ever left the print shop. A much more assured
debut was his Contact Press book, Points on the grid (1964), which was followed,
in quick, prolific, succession by The man in yellow boots (1965), The silver
wire (1966), Baseball (1967), Two police poems (1968), Rocky Mountain
foot (1968), The gangs of Kosmos (1969), Sitting in Mexico (1970),
George, Vancouver (1970), Touch (1971), Genève (1971),
Autobiology (1972), Curious (1973), In the flesh (1974),
At war with the U.S. (1975) Allophanes (1976), The catch (1976),
The concrete island (1977), Another mouth (1979) Particular accidents
(1980), Smoking mirror (1982), West Window (1982), A way with words
(1982), The mask in place (1982), Kerrisdale Elegies (1984), Craft slices
(1985), Seventy-one poems for people (1985), Delayed mercy (1987) Quarters (1991), and Urban Snow (1992).
Bowering's fiction includes Mirror on the floor
(1967), his first novel, Flycatcher & other stories (1974), Protective
footwear (1978), A place to die (1983), Concentric Circles
(1977), Burning Water (1980) (which won him his second Governor General's
award to accompany the poetry award he won in 1969), Caprice, Shoot,
and many critical works, as well as his attempt at popular history, Bowering's B.C.
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