In the Capital City of Autumn

Emily Cann talks to poet Tim Bowling about his latest poetry collection In the Capital City of Autumn (Hamilton: Wolsak and Wynn, 2024)

Emily Cann: You’ve authored over twenty works of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. In In the Capital City of Autumn, what are you most energized by? What excites you the most about this most recent publication? How is it a divergence (or continuation) of your earlier projects?

Tim Bowling: When writing poems, I’m only and always energized by my experience of life and my love of language. Thirty-five years ago, I wrote out of being a young, single, childless man whose parents were both alive, and I was excited to create strong rhythms and original metaphors. Now, I write out of being an old, married father (three adult children) whose parents are dead, and I’m still excited to create strong rhythms and original metaphors. The source and purpose are the same; the changing life changes the poems.

Emily Cann: Part 2 of this collection reanimates minor characters from The Great Gatsby. What inspired your attendance to these characters? How did you go about bringing them and their stories to life, considering how little about them we know from the original story? (And, as a side note, what do you imagine Fitzgerald would think of the directions you’ve taken each of them in?)

Tim Bowling: I have loved The Great Gatsby since I first read it as a teenager in the 1980s, and I have read it every three or four years since. In my brief period as a university instructor, I always made sure to teach it. Why? Because as H.L. Mencken said (or at least I think he did), Fitzgerald’s writing has charm. That’s a rare quality and an admirable one. And even though the plot of the novel is straightforward noir fare, and even though the characters are mostly unlikeable, the atmosphere and the wonderful blend of elegance and toughness in the language always entertain me. So, as the novel turns 100 next year, I thought I would have a small go at honouring it. Why mainly dramatic monologues about the most minor characters? Three reasons. One, I read Browning’s “My Last Duchess” in high school and that gave me an early appreciation for the dramatic monologue form. Two, it seemed like something nobody else would bother doing. Three, the sequence is really about the pleasure that reading great literature gives us. What would Fitzgerald think of my efforts? I hope he’d hate what I’ve done. I hope it would irritate the hell out of him that some bum in western Canada was making hay with his intellectual property. After all, the man was a professional writer who knew the business inside out. Then again, he was also pretty insecure, so he might, from beyond the grave, if there is a beyond the grave, be one of those writers who cares about posthumous fame and admiration (not that he’ll get much of the former out of my homage, but he does get plenty of the latter).

Emily Cann: Themes of loss innervate this collection, but perhaps never so much as in Part 5. “The Old Communion” offers one of the most tender reflections on the death of a pet that I’ve ever encountered. “We couldn’t get the collar off the corpse” is a particularly striking (if not startling) first line. When you approach loss as a topic for your poetry, how do you go about representing something that is no longer there? What strategies do you have for outlining the shapes of these absences?

Tim Bowling: Thank you for your generous comment on the death of the pet sequence. It meant a lot to me at the time. In fact, I wrote most of those poems with tears in my eyes, which just goes to show you that the old boy Wordsworth knew what he was talking about when he defined poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquillity.” Well, I’m not sure I was exactly tranquil in recollection, to be honest. But I also agree with the old boy Eliot that poetry is impersonal and not personal. My focus in writing those poems—or any poems—is to create memorable language out of emotion, and that’s a craft, not cold-blooded, but steely at the core. As for loss, and writing poems about it, I don’t have to represent something that is no longer there, because, alas, the feeling of loss is always present, especially as one reaches fifty and beyond (yes, it sucks, or as Fitzgerald wrote in a letter to his teenaged daughter, “life’s a cheat”). In terms of strategy, it’s always the same, no matter the subject, and I don’t think I’d even call it a strategy; I’d say it was the poet’s job—to create memorable language.

Emily Cann: What do you intend for the readers to be left with after the final page?

Tim Bowling: I intend for my readers to be left with a feeling of pleasure, with an awareness that they have been through an authentic human experience with a poet who loves animals, books, his family, and the English language, and who has a sense of humour to go along with his melancholy. But the serious poems are the most important ones. “Out here the stars/like baby teeth in a grave/never really disappear.” If those lines (the final three in the book) don’t catch your interest, you probably won’t like these poems.

Emily Cann: Are any aspects of the book autobiographical? How did you consciously deal with your intimate material (i.e., experiences – emotional and physical) in a way that avoids the dangers of straight autobiography?

Tim Bowling: Autobiography is my poetry bread and butter. But the self in poetry is no damned good if the self’s experience isn’t subordinate to the linguistic quality of the poems. I know that most readers, for example, have no experience of the Fraser River and its salmon runs. That’s why I build poems out of those life experiences that contain sharp imagery and sonic potency. Poems are crafted language built on a linguistic tradition. As is commonly said, every person has a story to tell. But obviously not every person becomes a writer. When I explore my own life in my work, I understand that the art is in the writing and not in the life. My story is personal; the writing that comes out of my personal story is subordinate to the dictates of craft.

Emily Cann: How do you intend for the value of the work to be assessed – as a piece of work that shares a compelling message or makes a social, political, or practical point or is it to be seen as a cultural event/phenomenon – an object of taste or a statement of your aesthetic?

Tim Bowling: My poems, no matter what point they might make incidentally, are first and foremost meant to give aesthetic pleasure.

Emily Cann: Did you have an intended audience for the book?

Tim Bowling: The question of writing for an audience is an interesting one. Honestly—and I don’t mean to sound pretentious—I don’t write with any other human in mind, including myself (odd as that might sound). I write out of a kind of ego-less immersion in language. I think that’s the only way I can write poems. When I write a poem about a family member, for example, I’m thinking mostly about words and rhythms and images and not the person. Afterwards, it’s a little different. I guess I feel the way the poet Delmore Schwartz felt about being a poet: he imagined the afterlife as a big table with all his favourite poets seated around it, and he just wanted a seat at the table. I don’t believe in any afterlife, but I can relate to the sentiment anyway.

Emily Cann: Have you ever collaborated on a writing project with another writer or artist? Can you share that experience?

Tim Bowling: I have never collaborated on a writing project. In fact, I became a writer specifically because of my intense desire to work alone. The whole idea of a “school” of poetry has never made any sense at all to me, for I think of poetry as pure individual expression and freedom that, when done well, satisfies that same urge for expression and freedom in others.

Emily Cann: What emotions do you associate with writing? Or, differently put, how does writing impact your emotional state?

Tim Bowling: Every single aspect of writing gives me pleasure. Not every aspect of being a writer gives me pleasure, but writing itself has never been anything but joyous. I especially love the feeling of coming up with a memorable image and knowing that, eventually, it will evolve into a poem. Whenever I am at my healthiest and most optimistic, I inevitably think of either writing a poem or listening to music. It’s been that way since I was a teenager. 

Emily Cann: Can you name a source of inspiration before the age of 12 that impacted your writing in some way? Tim Bowling: My greatest source of inspiration before the age of 12 is the same as it is today at the age of 60: the Fraser River estuary. I grew up in a commercial salmon fishing family, and my earliest memories involve the river, its fish and other wildlife, boats, and the people who worked in the industry. When you’re four years old, staring over the stern of a gillnetter into the black fathoms of a fast-running current as your father pulls a net up from the muddy depths, you can’t help but be deeply affected by the experience. When you’re twenty years old, sitting on the deck of a different gillnetter at slack tide and reading Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Melville for the first time while the sun slips below the Gulf Islands and the smell of blood and slime on your clothes already seems like a memory you’re destined to hold onto with language, you can’t help but be deeply affected by the experience. And when you’re sixty years old, and you haven’t fished on the river of your childhood and youth in thirty years, and most of the adults you knew growing up are dead, and you’ve written about that lost world for half your life, your only hope of continuance and of keeping off the chill of the grave is through the marriage of memory and language.

About the Author