Summer of Bowering: February

In the Summer of Bowering, Geist blog­ger and Poetry Is Dead mag­a­zine Editor-in-Chief Daniel Zomparelli will be review­ing George Bowering’s lat­est poetry col­lec­tion, My Darling Nellie Grey. The col­lec­tion is divided into twelve chap­ters, named for each month of the year, and Zomparelli will review one chap­ter a week all sum­mer long.  

In case you missed last week’s post, here is a video of George Bowering read­ing from the January chap­ter of My Darling Nellie Grey.

Reading the February chap­ter of My Darling Nellie Grey made me think about how hard it is to be the less fun per­son in a rela­tion­ship. Everyone gets excited when you walk through the door and asks, “where’s your part­ner?” Your blank stare shows that your part­ner is not with you, and soon every­one at the party is say­ing, “oh, it’s too bad your part­ner couldn’t make it.” This, I felt, was one of the under­ly­ing themes of the February chap­ter, which I loved.

Never have I been more moved by poems that con­tin­ued to return to some­one (George Bowering) being pantsed in the kitchen. And even with his pants down, Bowering main­tained a lov­ing tone. As some­one who is being pantsed by my part­ner on a reg­u­lar basis, the pants­ing hit all the right chords. Having that fun and wild part­ner who bal­ances out the quiet writer is some­thing I know all too well.

The love theme in this chap­ter was a nice sur­prise that con­trasted well with the chap­ter before. In the chap­ter January, the nar­ra­tor is alone, in his thoughts, in his space, and in his writ­ing. Writing is a soli­tary task, but Bowering moves to a gen­tler and com­i­cal tone in the chap­ter February. I was laugh­ing, I was moved, and by the end of it, my pants had dropped as well.

Bowering gen­er­ated the poems in the chap­ter February based off of his “wife’s comic acts in the kitchen.” To do so, he used min­i­mal­ism, keep­ing the poems set as “two stan­zas of short lines highly atten­tive to the sounds of vow­els and con­so­nants.” His atten­tion to form allows some of the poems to hit like a punch line. The first poem had me in stitches. A sim­ple, matter-of-fact tone and an epi­gram style make this poem spec­tac­u­lar. The musi­cal­ity of the poetry makes the poems slip­pery, quick, much like the char­ac­ter Bowering is attempt­ing to por­tray. Wonderful pieces to be read aloud.

One of the great­est things a writer writ­ing in English can do is show how to fall in love using only the words of the English lan­guage. Yes, it is all a bit lovey dovey and mushy, but Bowering man­ages this in less than a month’s time (28 days) of poems, it is February after all.

You can fol­low along with Summer of Bowering by buy­ing My Darling Nellie Grey at Talon Books. If you have a review for this chap­ter, please post it in the com­ment section.