George Bowering: The Ecological Concerns Of Canada

The ecological concerns of Canada have been more or less the same as those of the rest of the world. Canada also has faced severe ecological crisis since the migration of the whites to the land. An ecocritical reading of George Bowering’s poems would bring out the anti-ecological attitudes of the settlers, as his poetry becomes a critique of the colonial centrality, which distorted the ecological concord of Canada preserved by the natives. The colonial formula of exploitation has been strongly resisted by George Bowering in his search for an ecospace.

Canada had been a land of people who considered nature as part of their culture, till colonizers dictated new terms of man–nature relationship in terms of European convictions. The ethnic culture

Bowering has been a vibrant presence in the contemporary Canadian literary arena as a poet, critic, editor, theorist as well as novelist. Bowering’s poetic visions are influenced by the Black Mountain group of poets, viz., Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov. The literary movement was named so because of its association with Black Mountain College, North Carolina, during the early 1950s. Charles Olson, one of the major figures of the Black Mountain Group, advocates an open-ended form to liberate poetry from artificiality. Poetry for him is a high energy construct in which energy is transferred from the poet to the reader. He wants to take poetry back to the form of oral art banishing rhyme and metre, which are part of the written form. Sense and sound are given more prominence by Olson and he considers rhythm the life breath of the poet. Thus Olson views poetry as alive rather than as an inanimate bundle of words. Impressed and inspired by Charles Olson and other Black Mountain poets, Bowering, Frank Davey, Fred Wah, Lionel Kearns, Jamie Reid, and David Dawson formed a new study group of poetry and later initiated the publication of the literary magazine entitled TISH. The publication was an important landmark in the development of Canadian poetry from the postmodernist, romantic and ecological point of

Moreover, postmodernism agrees with the eco-critical rejection of dualistic categorizations. Both the theories make critiques of the Enlightenment philosophy that has led to the anthropocentric ideas of unlimited progress based on scientific rationality. The postmodernist standing of Bowering is ecologically significant as his green sensibilities are modified mainly by his postmodernist attitudes along with his romantic perspectives. Postmodernism in Canada, thus, has contributed largely to the evolution of eco-consciousness in Canadian literature as writers involved in the postmodernist movement “. . . have shown faith in the ability of the universe to direct composition through open, random, or multiphasic forms, or a belief that the ‘craft’ of writing involves a listening to ‘Mother Nature’” (Davey 111). Whereas Canadian modernists tried to keep nature away from their writings, a lively representation of nature is seen in postmodernist writings. The postmodernists have taken the effort to bring back romantic elements to their writings and thereby move against the modernist perception of controlled expression of imagination. In accordance with their romantic sensibilities, the Canadian postmodernists hold the view that the imagination is a force of nature that operates best when it is freed from unnatural