Inspirations — Marilyn Bowering

1. Describe a place that has had a profound effect on you and why.
I have always been particularly affected by place: it took me years, after moving, as a small child, from the prairie city where I was born, where the world, obviously, was flat and you could see all of it at once, to adjust to the mist, mountains and enclosing forests of coastal British Columbia. The epitome of this landscape is in the Queen Charlotte Islands where I went to live in my early ‘20’s. It distils, somehow, the senses of tragedy and beauty: the light is muted, the sky changes constantly, the landscape, even on the clearest day appears through a veil: looking at it is like visualising the layers of a poem, one receding into the next, yet the whole remaining indivisible. It is a place where, as the poet Robert Bringhurst describes, the Old World and indigenous traditions are still permitted to exist and acknowledged to have meaning. He calls it the ‘old growth forest of the human mind.’ For me it was the place where I could understand, without distraction, what it would mean to be a poet.

2. A play that has inspired you? Why?
I was starved for high culture as a child—my parents were very religious and as a result theatre going, even seeing movies, was forbidden. Whatever I did see went deep. One of the first plays I saw was ‘Hamlet’: as directed by Ralph Allen in the Victoria Fair Festival. I keep ‘finding’ elements of it in my work: a ghost pulling emotional strings, a play within a play, love misdirected and misunderstood leading to madness, the dangers of eavesdropping! Recently, after a binge of reading mystery novels, I dreamt poison was being poured into the ‘porches of my ears’ – my dream informant using that phrase exactly.

3. A film that has influenced you? Why?
Likewise, with films (as with plays) it is the first that sticks. We went to Seattle to see Cinerama’s "Seven Wonders of the World" presented by Lowell Thomas. My parents couldn’t have risked being seen entering a movie theatre at home. I was disappointed at the lack of story line but thrilled to be in the darkened balcony. I watched the people watching the film when Lowell Thomas interpreted the elephant-training school at Gangala-Na-Bodio or a visit to the Grand Canyon. The film, though, gave me a sense that it was natural to slip between cultures, to behold wonders: you should always try for the marvellous when you were asking for people’s attention.

4. A work of art that has inspired you.
I write in a kind of ‘nest’ of artefacts and works of art that I find inspirational. I have several paintings by my friend, the Spanish painter, Mercedes Carbonell: her work
studies and reflects on the creative process of the female artist. It is self referential, humorous and profound. These pieces ‘inspire’ partly by not letting me take myself too seriously. Her series of the painter painting herself into existence is brilliant. A work that haunts me is a photograph of the race car driver, Jimmy Clark, taken by Jesse Alexander, in Belgium in 1960 moments after he had learned that his team-mate Alan Stacy had died on the track. It is the most ‘human’ face imaginable: unforgettable, moving, an emblem, a reflection on mortality, everything…

5. A piece of music that has influenced you. Why?
I’ve loved Prokofiev ever since my mother brought home a recording of his ‘Cinderella’. I believe it was a give-away promotion by a local grocery store. Many years later I heard his film music, ‘Alexander Nevsky’ (for Sergi Eisenstein) and played the music for months while I worked on a book to go with it. It was to do with the space dog, Laika—quite different from what Prokofiev had in mind.