I wanted to see what George Bowering did with what R.M.Rilke did with his famous Duino Elegies. In Bowering's case it's Kerrisdale, a district of Vancouver. I wanted to see (not wee, as I just typed) what Bowering made of his district since that's, broadly speaking, what I'm trying to do with a district of my own.
Bowering's often a McFaddenesque figure in writing, by which I mean a writer never unwilling to play or stick his beak where it's not supposed to go (A Magpie Life, being the title of his autobiography). Kerrisdale Elegies, which includes a visual echo of Rilke's Duino castle on the cover, seems more serious in tone. Pretty straight lyric material. But it works. Just a while ago I read about two lines from his "Elegy Four" then turned to my notebook and blasted through about 4 pages of stuff to do with my life in Hillsdale, just following one thing with another. After a while I couldn't remember what it was in Bowering's text that set me off and I went back to it to look. Must have been this: "my father's voice". It was all kinds of stuff I got into, though, not just father.
Hillsdale, as I just observed in my notebook, was what all of us made--dad and mom and me and my three sisters.
Yesterday in the Leader-Post was a story about the first family to move into the new subdivision south of the Regina airport, almost an exact parallel, fifty or so years on, to the experience of the first Hillsdale family. I think I'll try to interview those folks.
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