B.W. Powe is a writer whose literary power comes from the multiplicity of his of talents at work. As a poet, academic, teacher and visionary, he communicates a passion about literature and the imagination with an energy seldom seen or felt in the literary or academic worlds. He has studied under the prophetic likes of Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye, and in addition to being the author of several influential books, is a professor of literature at York University. His novella, These Shadows Remain: A Fable, is to be published this winter by Guernica Editions.
McLuhan saw poets and scholars of literature as the ones who could most fully perceive their contexts. He saw poesis, Greek for "making," as the kernel of creative impulse, and that “making, not matching” was the key to meaningful experience.
B.W. Powe can only be described as a matchless author whose writings are cosmic yet grounded in the quest for authenticity, and always bordering on the exegetical. It is clear that poesis is of utmost importance for Powe, in that his craft has itself been made into a way of life.
Open Book takes an esteemed moment in time to interview B.W. Powe.
OBT:
What was the inspiration for your upcoming work by Guernica Editions, These Shadows Remain: A Fable?
B.W. Powe
It came in a dream. I don’t always like to pirate my dreams. Sometimes they should be left as they are, to guide your waking life. But this one came intact. I saw the beginning, middle and end, in a moment’s dream. I had no idea what to do with the images. So I wrote what I’d dreamed in a quick outline. I put the outline aside. Then sometime later I dreamed the story again, although this time it was slightly different. I modified and extended what I’d written. More dreams infiltrated the words. And the story grew.
OBT:
Why a fable? How does the collection function as a fable? Is not all literature part of the reality of "Verum factum" ("we make the truth")?
B.W. Powe
I liked the sound of the word “fable.” Fables, parables, dreamtales, reveries. I write them quickly. Sometimes it feels like they are springing up intact. Though, I admit, my style, my command of technique, often lags far behind the imaging, the reverie. I’ve yet to find a way to completely capture what happens in this way. My re-visions are just that: ways of trying to clarify or hone or illuminate or make intelligible what I’ve seen. I keep trying to make poems and stories out of what I’ve been given. Something comes, and sometimes I’m up to it. Nevertheless, something comes. These days, whether I will it or not. “Fable”, then, is not truly a category. It is a term that freed me to spin from the dream.
OBT:
The shadow (or perhaps light) of the prolific Marshall McLuhan, who you knew in person, has found its way in much of your scholarly work as a professor at York University. McLuhan’s probe “making, not matching” has remained dear to me, in that it prompts me to always reconsider the world I live in by considering how I might create new experiences. Poetry, however, is both a creating and re-creating, is it not? And we came to be writers because we feel somewhat “matched” to our literary ancestors, do we not?
B.W. Powe
I’m often zipped up—hermetic—and writing is my breakaway and energizing. Full-throttle, it beats along almost everyday. But in that beat come other voices too. No matter how much I try to find my own voice, I find that voice inhabited. Sometimes I hear McLuhan’s. Sometimes others. Frye’s too. And those writers I’ve loved. Maybe I should revise The Anxiety of Influence, and write a counter essay that says we are always in an Exodus fervour releasing ourselves from the passions of others, yet again we wander back into the wilderness, desert, tundra, and find strange bleak places flitting with ghosts and calls. Born, reborn, borne, newborn, stillborn, born again; that’s making, not matching. In another way, teaching is also about bringing in voices. I like to glide on the energies of my students, and letting that energy release into the conversational or dialogic air. When I teach works by others, whether it’s McLuhan’s aphorisms or Rimbaud’s prose poetry, or Dickinson’s splinters or Joyce’s esoteric structurings, or Frye’s revelations of the great code, or Plath’s witty kamikaze performances, or the strangely endearing companionship of the self-enclosed Henry Miller, I sometimes sense their presences in the room. I try to let them come through. Better abundance, a surplus, than a meager trickle. The stream of souls is available to us in the words they left us.
OBT:
Is there a difference between a writer and a visionary writer?
B.W. Powe
All strong imaginative writers have the trace of the visionary in them. Visionaries can be so without being writers or artists of any kind. I’ve known people who are graced by insight and awareness, and do not write. Visionaries can be musicians, painters, dancers, politicians, healers, teachers, neighbours, pilots, cooks.
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