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Horizontal Surfaces

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George Bowering

November 2010

Alec Moran

There are few writers today who can get away with the kind of book that Horizontal Surfaces is. However, when you are the prolific George Bowering, Canadian poet laureate of over 90 books, you might know a thing or two about a book that deserves publishing. Horizontal Surfaces is a curious little thing coming in at just under 100 pages, a collection of page-long essays that open more doors than they conclusively shut.

There are few writers today who can get away with the kind of book that Horizontal Surfaces is. However, when you are the prolific George Bowering, Canadian poet laureate of over 90 books, you might know a thing or two about a book that deserves publishing. Horizontal Surfaces is a curious little thing coming in at just under 100 pages, a collection of page-long essays that open more doors than they conclusively shut.

Bowering writes on the myriad of subjects that make him him–it would be improper and futile to try to sum up Bowering by simply listing the topics of his writing, so I will not. But there is humor in his essays (of the roughly four different places of birth he is reported to have, he writes that it was a “slow birth in a fast car”), and there is lyrical language (of listening to a Jazz solo: “you are experiencing [the player’s] mind, moment by moment, as it shifts and decides, as it adds and reminds”). And on that inevitable other hand, a select few are dyspeptic, painting him as the stereotypical curmudgeon spitting vitriol about texting, young people’s music, and the like. Tone between the essays shifts rapidly, mimicking the undulations that mark long conversations—topics deep and not-so-deep (for nothing Bowering is writing about is truly “shallow”).

There is no cornerstone essay in Horizontal Surfaces; the essays are arranged alphabetically (“There is no hierarchy in the alphabet” Bowering says, admiring) and some stick out at strange angles–for example, Bowering includes a list of his favorite authors, something either bizarrely superficial or cryptically deep. His essays tend to end rather abruptly; at first one might find frustration in this–I did not feel like I was learning a lick from the book. But really, closing doors is not the thing that Bowering is trying to do here. With his experience and age, he certainly has the authority to pontificate his conclusions about life to us. But Bowering tells us he has always been one for the open form over the closed, in poetry and, one can assume, in life, because open form allows open thought.

At the end of the essay “Open,” he says “It seems to me that closed verse concludes, whereas open verse proposes. What about micro-essays? What if I were to finish this present meditation with a smart summing-up? I could be a swinger of birches.” Cheeky Frost allusions aside, Bowering leaves his essays open so that we might include our own thoughts. That is perhaps the lasting effect of this work: with the idea of this book being Bowering writing about anything, one would assume it to read as monologic and commanding; however, he has created the impression of a dialogue out of the inherently one-way road of published print. See, for Bowering every facet of life is a horizontal surface to write upon, and with this book he is asking us to bring a pen.

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