STREAKING!

THE COLLECTED POEMS of GARY BOTTING

STREAKING!

THE COLLECTED POEMS of GARY BOTTING

Edited with an Introduction by Tihemme Gagnon Streaking! The Collected Poems of Gary Botting © Gary Botting, 2013

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Botting, Gary, 1943- Streaking! The Collected Poems of Gary Botting Tihemme Gagnon, editor

ISBN: 978-1-62857-378-7 For Ginny CONFESSIONS OF A STREAKER

yes i have streaked streaked across the drifted fi elds at dawn streaked across the campus and the town streaked with body streaked with mind streaked with others streaked alone and i am s t r e a k i n g !

streaking with the gall of that set of men who habitually fl y by the seat of their pants

this is my route this is my map

S T R E A K I N G !

vi TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction xv Piddler 15 Key to Publications xxxiv Nectar 16 Descent 3 Rocks 16 Procession 4 Kay 17 Page 5 The Battle 18 Pine Cones 6 Kennedies 19 Land Barren So Barren 7 To Heather: A Prayer 19 Silent Geese 8 Absurdity 20 Seagulls 9 Uprightness 21 The Gullery 10 Butterfl y 22 Wall 11 The Nun 23 Driftwood 11 Dyslexic 24 Metamorphosis 12 The Shrug 25 Moon and Neptune 12 Let Me Expose Longevity 13 Myself 25 Nonconformity 14 Telephones 26 Bubble 14 She 27 Spider 14 The Trip 28 Yellow Lights 15 Paradox 29 Dewdrops 15 Dilemma 30 Memento 15 Men of the World 31 Finch 15 Rebirth 32

vii Streaking! The Collected Poems of Gary Botting

Ten Limericks 33 Orange Light 117 Prometheus Rebound 35 Freckled Blue 118 Poem Written… 68 The Roundup 127 Wet Dreams 68 Young Son 129 It’s All Been Done The Note 130 Before 69 Eagles 131 Zen 69 The Day We Flew… 132 Streaking! 70 Haikus 134 Confessions of a Hips and Haws 134 Streaker iv, 70 Granary 134 Streaking 70 Nudes 134 Dogma 72 Requiem 134 The Original Technique 73 Seedy Needy 134 Technique Two 74 Bird Seed 134 Free Fall 75 For the Fallen 135 Ping Pong 76 Storm 135 Searching 77 Life Unimpeded Craziness 77 by Body 136 Hypothesis 78 Sunset Love 137 Up the Pole 78 Ezra Pound and Drake and the Pipers 79 Picasso 139 Truth 79 Science 139 Monomonster in Hell 80 Kitchen 140 Alleycats 92 Two Worlds 140 Desire 92 Moon and Spruces 141 Lady Godiva on a Plaster Grasses 142 Horse 93 Trees 142 Dreamers 111 Addled 143 Rocky Shore 112 Menagerie 143 Rosary 112 Moonrise 144 Tears 113 Rue and Me 145 The Hanged Man 114 Heaven on Earth 146 The Magus 115 Lilies 149 The Fool 116 The Quarry 150

viii Streaking! The Collected Poems of Gary Botting

Grass 150 Exit 176 First There Was the Even in Mirrors 177 Blue 151 The Lodge Tavern Can 178 Soulmates 152 2A North 179 Lady of My House 153 Space Odyssey 180 Flight 154 Signs 180 Question Mark 155 The Sultan 181 Mourning Cloak 156 Jack 182 Painted Lady 157 Slats 183 Dream Kisses 158 Fastfoods 183 River 158 Fall Fair 184 Dessert 158 Executioner 184 Eyes 159 Collision 185 Art Song 160 To Thine Own Self 186 Nymphlet 161 Cuckold 186 You 162 Outgrowth 187 Eternal Romantic 163 I Remember… 187 The Kiss 163 Limbo 188 Temptation 164 Monologue 189 The Day of My Fall 165 Ankh 190 The Miracle of Eyes 166 Penelope 191 Master 167 Masks 192 Miracle Worker 167 Onion 193 Dancers 168 Secrets 194 Pot Bound 169 Leda 195 Bumperthumpers 169 Martha 196 The Swimmer 170 Mystery 197 Red Lights on the Canabanadaman 198 Prairie 170 Trust 202 Adrift 171 Ariel 203 Loon 172 Selene 204 Corollary 173 Strawberryboxed 205 Steps 174 Stream of Rear View Mirror 175 Unconsciousness 205

ix Streaking! The Collected Poems of Gary Botting

Consolation 205 Percussion 212 Standing Ovation 205 Ambition 212 Tunnel Vision 205 Ghetto 212 Accompaniment 206 Reprieve 212 Tune Up 206 Butterfl y Kisses 213 Sunset Map 206 Autumn in New York 215 Over Easy 206 Small Claims 216 Endings 206 Alternate Routes 217 Gift 207 Ballad/Ethical Seamstress 207 Stallion 219 King for a Day 207 Jasper 223 Trapped 207 The Walker 223 Webbing Reception 207 Thrill 224 Audition 208 Thanksgiving 225 Philos 208 Being and Memories 208 Nothingness 226 Nuance 208 “God” 227 Geriatric Ward 208 In the Name of … 229 Union 209 Destiny 230 Adoration 209 “Ezra Pound and Picasso” Desideratum 209 Revisited 231 Spirit and Soul 209 All Heaven Shall Hear 231 Courses 209 Weekend to Remember 232 Forks 210 Odd Things 233 Riverbeds 210 Isabeau 234 Tribute 210 Explorers 238 Damnation 210 Solitude 239 Libation 210 Yes 240 Purgation 211 Down 241 Pupil 211 Cleavage 241 Cloudburst 211 Third Nipple 242 Consummation 211 Not One Sleep 243 Waterfall 211 Heaven 244 Sea 212 Breasts 245 Fibrillation 212 Tub 246

x Streaking! The Collected Poems of Gary Botting

Entry 247 Arches 265 Adultery 248 Walrus 266 Hike into Paradise 249 Eyes 266 Swimming Hole 250 Cowgirl 267 Rills 251 Spiral Dance 267 Acceleration 252 Wet 268 Crossings 253 Behind 268 Contact 253 Ass 269 Infi delity 254 The Toughest Part … 269 Right 254 Parting 270 Bursting 254 Driven 271 “Dodally Wong” 255 Airports 272 Infi del 255 Connection 272 Midnight Oil 256 Delay 273 The Ride 256 Flight 273 “Fuck Me” 257 Gifts 273 Briefcase 257 Sheep 274 Accommodation 257 Claim 274 Pulse 258 Absolution 275 Connection 258 Cell 276 Other Sort of Cleavage 258 Rules 276 Vibration 259 Parking Lot 277 Envy 259 Ardour 277 Voices 260 (With Your Body) 277 Moment under Inside Out 278 the Stars 260 First Kiss 278 Moons 261 Love 279 Star 261 Thighs 279 Twilight 261 Look At Me 279 Connoisseur 262 Face 280 Complications 262 Bereft 280 Spell 263 You 280 Cervix 264 Zhivago 281 Plaything 264 Personality 281 Kernel 265 Pillow 282

xi Streaking! The Collected Poems of Gary Botting

Zenith 282 Recipes 293 Therapist 283 Offer 293 Nuzzling 283 Classic 294 Cellulite 283 Contours 294 Hips 284 Berthing 295 Riven 284 Your Gentle Touch 295 Hard 284 Lion 296 All Thumbs 285 Root Sixty-Six 296 Hard-on 285 On Me 296 Mature Love 285 Six 296 Confession 285 Larks 297 Marriage 286 Running Late 297 Sharing 286 Sighs 298 Sleepless 286 Now 298 Apologies 286 There 299 Prospects 287 Lovesick 299 Landscape 287 Addiction 300 Nude 287 Clients 300 Erection 287 Book 300 Pressure 288 The Sha’an 301 Guilt 288 Title 306 Riding 288 Entrance 307 Burning 288 Stories 307 Freak Out 289 Arrows 308 Immodest Proposal 289 Hanna 308 The “A” Word 289 Gearing up 309 Djinn 290 Bunny 309 Next Time 290 Driver’s Seat 310 Blackfeet 291 Bent 310 Fanny 291 Tush 311 Skewer 292 Insomnia 311 Knees 292 Labia Minora 311 Calves 292 ’Hood 312 As I Am 292 Three and a Half 312 Sebum 293 Thumbs 313

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Inside 313 Backwards 322 Bum 313 Two 322 Toes 314 The Darker Side 323 Charge! 315 Telephone Rape 323 Hang Up 315 “Insight” 324 Letting Go 315 Crash and Burn 324 Coming 316 Tendered Words 324 Bad 316 Cuddle 325 Wet 316 Lady Revisited 326 Morning Song 317 Paper Chase 327 Near You 317 Voices 327 Vibrations 318 Lines 328 Arena 318 Coyote 328 Hair 319 Hanging Up 329 Craving 319 Water Streaming 330 Well-Hung 320 Lightning 331 The Groin 321 The Cure 332 Angioplasty 321 Afterword 333

xiii

INTRODUCTION

I Gary Botting has in his lifetime been a naturalist, missionary, journalist, motorcycle racer, high school teacher, theatre producer, publisher, literary editor, college professor, dramatist, writer, legal scholar, lawyer – and poet. Before ever attending university, he spent two years working as a journalist for the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, and later worked for the Peterborough Examiner under the tutelage of Robertson Davies. He received his B.A. with a joint major in English and Philosophy from Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario in 1968, and his M.A. in English from Memorial University of Newfoundland in 1970. By 1975, when he received his Ph.D. in literature from University of Alberta, he was a leading authority on William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies. A full decade later, he entered law school, and subsequently earned three law degrees from the University of Calgary and the University of British Columbia. As a legal scholar at the University of Washington School of Law in Seattle, he became a leading authority on extradition and wrongful conviction in Canada. His non-fi ction books cover a wide range of subjects, including aboriginal rights, biography, civil liberties, constitutional law, extradition, the history of law, xv Streaking! The Collected Poems of Gary Botting

leadership, literary criticism, religious studies, and theatre history. Over the past decade he has published on average a book a year, including several texts on extradition and wrongful conviction, as well as a biography of the famous Cree chief Bobtail Smallboy, with whom he became friends in the early 1980s. Inspired by a stormy voyage across the Atlantic in 1953, Gary began to write poetry upon his arrival in Canada from England at the age of 10. By age 14, he was a “committed” Jehovah’s Witness, and he rewrote the Psalms into iambic pentameter, an exercise far removed from his later satirical poem “Uprightness,” a reworking of the 23rd Psalm (“love/is my shepardeness/I wonTall icon get” – p. 21), and “To Heather: A Prayer,” the most anthologized of his poems, based on the Lord’s Prayer (p. 19):

O!ur HEatHer witCHart onTHeart h all Owed be Thymen yOur(K)In!gDoMe! c!O!Me! yOurswill bedOne I-n! Heave! n! a! so NearTh! -- nightLy give ourtail yBREaD & forgeTour tressespast aswe forgeThose whoredresses PressedAgainSTus Leadusin TempTaTion & deLiveRusT o! Evil! Four hours in the honey & then POW!! & then GLORY!!! For(I)nEVEr EVEr (&)EVE r(I)nEVE R- A-W G! O N!!! M+A! B! !

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In the penultimate line, “For(I)nEVEr EVEr (&)EVE r(I)nEVE R-“ several key words are repeated. Clearly the underlying meaning is “Forever and ever,” as in the Lord’s Prayer, but the line adds two “I”s, repeats “ever” four times and “never” twice, repeats “EVE” four times, and the reversed“revenir (French for “come again”) twice. The fi nal “R-” of this line takes the reader into the fi nal fragmented line “R-A-W” (which is also “W-A-R”) – thence to “raw woman,” and “raw womb.” Besides “WOMAN” and “WOMB”, the punctuation leads to other possibilities – “BAN,” “BANG,” “MA,” “MAN,” “NAB,” “NO,” “NOW,” “ON,” “WON” – culminating in Botting’s own initials, G!N!A!B! (“Gary Norman Arthur Botting”). It is illuminating to know that the Heather to whom the prayer is addressed (“HeatHer,” with allusions to heat and eating) is his former wife, Heather Harden (“HH”), a well- known anthropologist at University of Victoria and an even better-known witch (“witCHart onTHeart h”) – the fi rst offi cially recognized Wiccan university chaplain in the world to openly practice her craft. The “witch art” is the wit of hearth and heart, a path charted on the earth by the newly conquered hart (“all Owed be Thymen”). Their lovemaking begins with the poet’s premature ejaculation (“yOur(K)In!gDoMe! c!O!Me!”), and a prayer that they can make love “nightly” and redress, perhaps even forget about, “tresses past,” including “whoredresses PressedAgainSTus.” The poet invites Heather to take the initiative, to “Leadusin TempTaTion/& deLiveRusT o! Evil!” The blatantly orgiastic result? “Four hours in the honey/& then POW!! & then GLORY!!!” Underlying all this foreplay of the word is the backdrop formed by the physical shape of the poem itself, suggestive of both male and female anatomy, a device commonly used by Botting, from the phallic

xvii Streaking! The Collected Poems of Gary Botting

e r e t a s r e refracted mushrooms (p. 142) to the decidedly unsubtle cleavage of “Monologue” (p. 189):

oh close so close we cleave and stroke striving to be one selfl ess self striving to transcend the cleavage to transcend the close- ness to become one tranquil self alive and striving close close so close we stroke and strive to be one self one selfl ess self striving to transcend the cleavage we cling cleaving to transcend the striving self selfl ess oneself one to be striving to stroke us close so close close striving and alive self-tranquil one becomes too close transcending the cleavage of the self striving to transcend the selfl ess self of one to striving stroke and cleave the closeness close so close oh

Botting’s preoccupation with sexperimental poetry goes back to the mid-1960s when he lived in Ontario and wrote both concrete

xviii Streaking! The Collected Poems of Gary Botting and “shaped” poetry. Later in the 1970s he applied his insights to literary publishing as editor of Red Deer College Press. He became founding president of the Alberta Publishers Association and an active member of the Canadian Publishers Association and the Literary Press Group, dedicated to innovative publishing. He taught university-level creative writing at Red Deer College for 14 years.

II If sex is a recurring theme in Botting’s poetry, insects – especially butterfl ies and moths – are certainly a central recurring image. As a child in England he raised hawk (sphinx) moths from caterpillars, with his mother’s encouragement. His collecting and rearing of butterfl ies and moths continued in Canada, where he met F.A. Urquhart of the Royal Ontario Museum, then very much occupied in tracking the migratory routes of the monarch butterfl y from Canada to Mexico and back again. “Urquhart taught me to not think in a box,” Botting says. On one occasion, Urquhart took a monarch butterfl y and dipped it deep beneath the surface of the water of a tiny pond on the museum grounds on Bloor Street in Toronto, then let it go. The butterfl y popped to the surface, its wings virtually dry. It straddled the surface of the water, legs spread wide apart like a water strider – and almost immediately took fl ight, none the worse for wear. Urquhart concluded that migrating monarch butterfl ies could fl y over large bodies of water such as Lake Ontario or even the Atlantic Ocean and alight on the surface, should they become tired, thirsty or disoriented. Gary’s friendship with Urquhart allowed him as a teenager rare access to the entomological holdings of the museum, where he was able to further his study of moths. In the late 1950s, Gary imported giant silk moths from around the world and began cross-breeding them to produce fi ner, more manageable silk. He shocked biologists of the day by using techniques such as pheromone transfer and organ transplantation surgery to fool

xix Streaking! The Collected Poems of Gary Botting

moths into thinking they were mating with their own species when in fact their mates were of an entirely different species. He discovered that this particular family of moths had less complex genitalia than most moths and butterfl ies, allowing them to interbreed more freely than other Lepidoptera. Over a period of fi ve years, he crossed moths of different species, and eventually of different “genera” (according to the wisdom of the day), necessitating the reclassifi cation of the entire superfamily Saturnoidea. His exhibit Interesting Variations of the Cynthia Silk Moth won fi rst prize in biology in both the Ontario Science Fair and the United States National Science Fair in 1960, and resulted in trips around the United States and the world, sponsored by the American Institute of Biological Sciences and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. His trip to India in the winter of 1960-61 led to a fateful meeting with the famous British scientist J.B.S. Haldane, which Botting still regards as being the most infl uential event in his life. Haldane, a biologist, geneticist, statistician, and notoriously anti-American Marxist, invited Botting to the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta, where Haldane’s wife, Dr. Helen Spurway, had been experimenting with the Assam silk moth, one of the species that Botting had hybridized. Committed to the notion of Larmarckian evolution, Spurway had concluded that several caterpillars she was raising showed signs of adaptive evolution by developing black dots. Botting corrected her assumption, pointing out that the dots were the symptoms of pebrine, a deadly disease of lepidoptera. In January 1961, Haldane arranged to meet Botting at the Calcutta Zoo at dawn to give him a lesson in Indian ornithology, which Botting later described in the preface to The Orwellian World of Jehovah’s Witnesses (1984):

Birds stitched the sky, at fi rst in broad and arbitrary patterns and then in tight swooping formations moving at different speeds, in different directions and, mercifully, at different heights…, zipping endlessly back and forth,

xx Streaking! The Collected Poems of Gary Botting

a living tapestry of moving warp and weft, swooping at random across the limitless expanse of gradually lightening blue. And then the uppermost birds caught the sun, glinting and fl ashing back iridescent hues of every colour – an endless assortment of birds, birds, birds, birds, birds, each species fl ying its particular fl ight-path with unique beat of wing, spiraling upwards higher and higher to greet the rising winter sun. And when fi nally it dawned, all the birds seemed for an instant frozen in time and space, layer upon layer upon layer in a timeless Daguerrotype of Being (pp. xv-xiv).

He wrote that the “marvel” that he witnessed on the bridge that day – “the Eternal Now of the moment of dawn” – remained indelibly impressed on his brain like an after-image: “It remains still.” Two days later, Haldane went on a hunger strike to protest American interference with a third planned meeting at which Haldane and Spurway were going to discuss their experiments (which in Haldane’s case included the successful surgical transplant of the head of a dog) and introduce Gary to an array of Indian and Sri Lankan biologists. The U.S. Cultural Attaché to India, Duncan Emery, forbade Gary to attend the meeting, precipitating a protest from Haldane, and triggering the hunger strike. The story received international attention. That night, Botting and his traveling companion, Susan Brown – also a National Science Fair winner – were whisked away on a red-eye fl ight to Bombay. For a month afterwards Botting was dogged by the press, not only in India but in Europe and the United States, before returning to the relative tranquility of Canada. Gary returned home to fi nd his latest batch of intergeneric hybrid moths already beginning to emerge. The morphology of the emerging moths had taken priority over silk production: if interspecifi c hybrids such as mules could not reproduce, what hope would there be for intergeneric hybrids? His excitement

xxi Streaking! The Collected Poems of Gary Botting

knew no bounds: using pheromone gland surgery, he had successfully crossed Antheraea yamamai of Japan with Telea polyphemus of North America. Eventually the Polyphemus moth was reclassifi ed into the Antheraea genus, but it was still like crossing a domestic house cat with a cougar! In 1961, Botting’s prizewinning exhibit, Intergeneric Hybridization of Giant Silk Moths again won fi rst prize in the Ontario Science Fair and prizes in three different categories (including pest control) at the U.S. National Science Fair. The manuscript on his experiments, to which Haldane had obligingly written marginal notes, was said by one judge to be worthy of an M.Sc. in biology. Eventually, Botting was awarded the M.Sc. in genetics with a specialty in entomology, one of eight university degrees he holds – three of which are in English literature and three in law. (He also has a Master of Fine Arts in playwriting.) Botting spent the summer of 1961 smuggling anti-Franco literature into Spain for Jehovah’s Witnesses, then a banned religious organization (most of his compeers were arrested for their efforts), and later that year sailed on a tramp steamer from Vancouver, B.C. to Hong Kong to serve a two-year stint as a full- time “pioneer” missionary for the sect. He supported himself by working as a journalist for the South China Morning Post. His poem sequence Monomonster in Hell (1975) is a satire of his missionary experience. Anomalously, he began test-driving and racing motorcycles for Honda, an occupation which he quit after more than 20 spills culminated in a fractured spine. All the time he was in Hong Kong, he continued to collect butterfl ies and moths, a signifi cant number of which he took back with him to Canada. Indeed, to this day, most of the butterfl ies and moths in his substantial collection are from the Orient. Upon his return to Canada, Gary worked for the Peterborough Examiner under the tutelage of Robertson Davies. Enrolled at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, he once again raised moths from larvae, but this time attempted

xxii Streaking! The Collected Poems of Gary Botting to show how environmental considerations were every bit as infl uential on the morphology of giant silk moths as were genetics. Having read about how a species of salamander exposed to large amounts of Vitamin B-12 in its natural habitat failed to complete metamorphosis to adulthood, but developed reproductive organs, he fed leaves laced with the vitamin to silk worms. The vitamin triggered production of the juvenile hormone by the corpora allata, part of the endocrine system. The caterpillars stayed in the larval state for much longer than normal, continuing through several extra moults until becoming so large that they burst. The key to allowing the moths to complete their metamorphosis, he discovered, was timely removal of the vitamin-laced leaves. As soon as he discontinued the vitamins, the remaining caterpillars began to spin cocoons. Since the caterpillars were much larger than normal, they spun huge cocoons to surround themselves. One female Cecropia moth Botting raised was 10 inches in wingspan, the largest on record. Others reached 8½ inches across. He also experimented with the aerodynamics of giant silk moths, tying them like kites to thin silken threads and monitoring their fl ight. However, despite his continuing interest in entomology, after fi rst year university Botting switched majors from biology to English and philosophy. At Trent University, Gary was founding editor of the university newspaper and later was editor of Tridentine Literary Magazine. As literary and fi lm critic for the Peterborough Examiner, he wrote many reviews, and in particular wrote articles about up- and-coming poets whom he befriended, including Margo Swiss, Wally Keeler, and Stephen Woolf. He began to write poetry in earnest in the mid-sixties and became one of the founding members of the Cobourg-based Peoples Republic of Poetry, led by Wally Keeler, whose Walking on the Greenhouse Roof set the trend for alternative poetry in Ontario. Botting credits Swiss and Keeler with infl uencing his poetry in two different directions, one lyrical and the other revolutionary.

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Briefl y an exchange student at Trinity College in Toronto, Botting spent as much time at Rochdale College and the brownstone cafés of Yorkdale as he did at the University of Toronto, selling his mimeographed poems for a dollar apiece. “Wally and I were true fl ower children,” he said. “If we weren’t selling poems, we were giving away fl owers to little old ladies, most of whom didn’t thank us for our pains!” His fi rst collection of poems, Driftwood, was completed in Cobourg, Ontario in 1968. Later that year, he enrolled in graduate school at Memorial University of Newfoundland, again majoring in English, and gave poetry readings, receiving encouragement from A.J.M. Smith, the editor of Oxford Book of Canadian Verse. The following year, graduate students in the Department of English published Umwelt, a literary magazine that included “To Heather: A Prayer”; but the magazine proved so amateurish in presentation that Botting published a satire of it: BumweltS: Poems Written in Sexy ’69. One aspiring literary critic, Randy Joyce, wrote in The Muse that Botting’s low-budget satire was better than the university- sponsored original. After a year teaching high school English in Ontario, Gary and his wife Heather moved to Alberta, where Gary enrolled in the Ph.D. program in English, taught English at the University of Alberta, and became producer and playwright-in-residence of People & Puppets Incorporated. In 1970, he also became a father to the eldest of four children. He continued writing poetry, which was published in several literary magazines, including Issue, Casserole and New Thursday.

III As with most poets since Robert Blake, Botting’s poems mark a progress from innocence to experience. In “Descent” (p. 3), each snowfl ake, like every human being, is a product of chance, and therefore unique. This realization stemmed in part from a

xxiv Streaking! The Collected Poems of Gary Botting comprehension of the complexity and randomness of life as refl ected in his early study of DNA theory. Botting saw that life is a descent rather than an ascension – a major departure from the creationism he had been forced to adopt by the religion of his youth. The innocence thus sometimes has an edge to it, as in “Menagerie” (p. 143) when the fantasy world of Peter Pan Poodle and Olly Octopus (toys actually given to his daughter) is counterpointed by the social consciousness of “Maggie Mead Mouse.” Childlike innocence is similarly explored in his earliest published poems “Procession” (p. 4) when, during the 1953 Coronation of Queen Elizabeth, two boys are so preoccupied with binding a pigeon’s crushed leg that they miss seeing the Queen – and “Pine Cones” (p. 6) when the mother chooses the brown, lifeless husk of an old pine cone over the life-bearing potential of the unopened green one. Botting’s fi rst chapbook of poems, Driftwood, contained several shaped poems in which he played with space on the page. In “Silent Geese” (p. 8) the words form vees, and later in “Moonrise” (p. 144) and “Seagulls” (p. 9) he starts the poems at the bottom of the page and forces the reader, against convention, to read up the page rather than down. “Driftwood” (p. 11), the theme poem of the collection, indicates an easy familiarity with marijuana: “Down by the willows I took a toke/and a piece of driftwood spoke.” The 1960s were not only a time of revolution, they were a time of war. While a journalist for the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, Botting was assigned to the military beat, and his interest in developments in Vietnam continued after his return to Canada. In “The Battle” (p. 18), a plane is shot down and the pilot ejects, dangling helplessly beneath a parachute as the “shrill cylinders” of guns keep fi ring. By typing the fi nal word down the page instead of across, the reader’s eye is forced into descent, creating the brief sensation of falling (a technique repeated in “The Nun” (p. 23) and “The Shrug” (p. 25)). This image anticipates “Free Fall” (p. 75), where a

xxv Streaking! The Collected Poems of Gary Botting

skydiver glories in the sensation of free fall until she pulls the ripcord and her parachute fails to open properly: “Snarled nylon limply straggled out in an aimless abortion.” Her terror is immediate:

With somersaulting heart she twisted in a desperate contortion to tear in terror at the tangled traces.

Here, Botting uses alliterative patterns of assonance and consonance to capture the parachutist’s fi nal “panic of revelation as she merged with rock.” Images of war – and the Cold War in particular – continued into the poetry of the 1970’s, with Botting exploring both outlandish puns and visual imagery to achieve a sense of confl ict (“peeking tim/with shiner/dotty bombs with/mousie dung”) in which endless multitudes of individuals (wee me/ wee me/wee me), running off the page, are helpless (“Paradox,” p. 29). In “Ping Pong” (p. 76), the reader’s eyes are forced from one side of the page to the other like a person observing a ping-pong game. A similar visual technique is used in “Dogma” (“Am god,” spelled backwards, p. 72) – the continuing cause of confl ict in the world, whether the weapons of dogma used in the name of God are shaped as arrows or as bombs. Today, armies “bombard” into submission (or oblivion) the “drab mob” of civilians who hold a different ideology from the bombardiers. All too often, the proliferation of ignorance and socialization leads to a different kind of oblivion – a form of social castration described in “Men of the World” (p. 31) as arising from the inability to learn from one another, generation after generation. The communication gap is also the theme of “Telephones” (p.26), in which Canadians, statistically “the greatest gabbers in the world,” still fail to listen to one another, a trend that continues in the age of cyber technology.

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IV While working towards his Masters degree in English at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Gary wrote and circulated “Ten Limericks” (p. 33) designed to shame the Department of English Language and Literature into departing from a proclamation by the administration that fi nal exams should count for 100 percent of the course grade – a policy which the chairman of the department had endorsed. Gary envisioned industrious students who wrote essays being sidelined in favour of “crammers” who had abysmal attendance. The controversy led to the resignation of the chairman and the ascendancy of more liberal minds. While in St. John’s, Newfoundland Gary became secretary of the Open Theatre, for which he began writing Prometheus Rebound (p. 35), set on a cliff near Cape Spear – literally “the eastern limits of the western world.” Here it is that Prometheus, having been unbound by the Romantics, is once again enchained – this time for prematurely giving to man not fi re, but insight into secrets of nuclear energy that could lead to the destruction of the world. It will be remembered that the fi rst cross-Atlantic radio message was relayed by Marconi from the Cabot Tower in St. John’s, a few miles away – the beginning of a new revolution that culminated in global communication, and by proxy made possible global warfare – a turn of events that even the Shelleys could not have anticipated. At the end of the day – the end of the world – the gods and Titans are forced to square off in a cosmic poker game in which the stakes are the future of the planet. Through Hermes, Prometheus gives Zeus an ultimatum: release him so that he can once again direct man towards reason, “or leave me here and let me watch the fi reworks/ of rockets, fl aming missiles, nuclear bombs!/Nothing shall live!” With mankind’s self-destruction, Zeus would be powerless, since he would have nobody to govern, nobody to impress, nobody to boss around. The play ends with a projected atom bomb blast, as Prometheus marvels, “These manmade miracles outshine the sun!”

xxvii Streaking! The Collected Poems of Gary Botting

The play was fi rst produced in Edmonton, Alberta in 1971 by People & Puppets Incorporated, directed by David McIlwraith, with Ann French and Linda Rabinovitch among its cast. (This was not the fi rst of his plays to be produced – while teaching in Ontario in 1969-1970, Botting had seen the production of Who Has Seen the Scroll? and The School of Night.) Once he was in Alberta, the imagery of Botting’s poems changed with the landscape and the unaccustomed cold of Edmonton weather. Birth and death both fi gure prominently in Botting’s poems of the early seventies – as do the bitter cold and chilly receptions from editors. In “Up the Pole” ( p. 78) the heroic Macdonald achieves his goal of reaching the North Pole but freezes to death even as he claims victory. In “It’s All Been Done Before” (p. 69), Sutherland, 90, an aspiring writer, “cut clichés and tore with sawtoothed metaphors into the night of Newness” – only to die in disappointment when he receives the long-awaited answer to his submission. Disillusionment of a different order is captured in “Alleycats: A Sonnet” (p. 92), where protesters brave fi re hoses, clubs and teargas in the name of freedom. Botting’s initial doctoral supervisors, Wilfred and Sheila Watson, were among the most creative talents at the University of Alberta in the early seventies, publishing The White Pelican, whose guest editors included Dorothy Livesay and Norman Yates. At the time, Michael Ondaatje, Rudy Weibe, Stephen Scobie and Douglas Barbour were all peaking in their literary careers. Botting drew inspiration from these new infl uences in his life, particularly from Wilfred Watson, whose sound poems and mixed media art straddled literature and theatre. Watson and Marshall McLuhan co-authored From Cliché to Archetytpe that year, and Botting drew inspiration from a series of books by McLuhan that experimented with the boundaries of the written word and visual images – including The Mechanical Bride, The Medium is the Massage (a play on McLuhan’s seminal text The Medium is the Message), and War and Peace in the Global Village.

xxviii Streaking! The Collected Poems of Gary Botting

With the fi rst publication of Streaking! in 1974, Botting turned a corner of his own in experimentation, and in the process exposed both body and soul. One bookstore in Botting’s home town of Peterborough, Ontario, found it diffi cult to keep the book on the shelves, and Botting asked a friend to fi nd out why. The bookstore clerk explained that every time they received a new shipment of the book, which sported the image of a streaker fore and aft, the same woman came into the store to buy them all up. Further investigation revealed that the “fan” was none other than Gary’s mother, a puritanical Jehovah’s Witness to the end, who was attempting to keep her son’s “fi lth” off the bookstore shelves. It wouldn’t do for her son to target religion with his sardonic wit:

I envy the preacher who can fi nd truth in a book, Envy even more the poet who can fi nd truth in a broken leaf.

As far as Joan Howson was concerned, most of her son’s poems were immoral and, worse, sacrilegious. Perhaps the most acerbic of the collections published in the 1970s was Monomonster in Hell (p. 80), based loosely on Botting’s experience as a pioneer missionary for Jehovah’s Witnesses a dozen years earlier. The governing body of Jehovah’s Witnesses had suggested in 1966 that the end of the world as we know it would come before 2 October 1975, and many Witnesses who didn’t buy into that deadline for Armageddon “fell away from the Truth.” The monthly entries in Monomonster’s diary describe Gary’s early rift with the values of his religion, which to this day refuses to be called a church. The arrival of son Trent inspired poems in which Gary admonished his young son to walk the trails rather than the highways – and better still to “strike a path of your own/through briar and spruce/to reach a destination fi tted for you/by you alone.” The route taken through life, said Botting, was a matter of personal choice – a philosophy vastly different from the restrictive directives imposed on the young Gary by his mother.

xxix Streaking! The Collected Poems of Gary Botting

The existential angst of the persona in the face of adversity was the subject of the narrative poem Lady Godiva on a Plaster Horse (p. 93), in which the very prospect of jumping back into the mad activities of yesterday are dizzying:

We were instantly melded in a fl ashing crashing union incorporating rain. We were alight with the fl ames of each other sparks like a welder’s torch for brightness impossible to behold.

All that is left of that white-hot love is “a splayed-out clinker in an obsolete furnace.” The narrator of the poem is now an irrelevance; Lady Godiva simply does not care about him or even his existence. Any reprieve is merely an illusion, for the world still rotates, a carousel impossible to stop as it whirls through time and space. Botting soon returned to the more positive imagery of transcendence discoverable within nature. In the twin poems, “Eagles” (p. 131) and “The Day We Flew with Eagles” (132) the view of soaring eagles creates within the poet a rare and ecstatic freedom:

We were eagles released spiraling to the zenith where in four dimensions – in mindless euphoria perceived as one – we arced in triumph, taunting sun!

Even the plunge back to earth is “triumphant, jubilant,” and reality is more bearable with the souvenirs of the imaginary fl ight: “weathered wood/sprigs of cranberries/a feather/and memories of/the day we fl ew with eagles.” The title poem of Freckled Blue (1979) focuses on insects as images of transcendence, in particular the iridescence of a

xxx Streaking! The Collected Poems of Gary Botting

butterfl y, “herself a magic mirror of sky” – the object of tenderness and love (p. 118). The freckled blue is full of potential:

Butterfl y, soar! … Soar high, higher Do not stop even for the oppressive sky! Not today, not ever! (p. 122)

Borne on the wings of pure love, persona and butterfl y transcend themselves “without the need to touch” (p. 125). “Sunset Love” (p. 137), on the other hand, celebrates a more conventional form of lovemaking, exploring the metaphor of the sun rising and setting in the course of a single ecstatic day, from dawn to dusk and beyond: “Day must be blasted by the fearful night/ unmentionable blight of darkness” – to leave the earth to ponder “the frost/to be endured before another dawn.” Similar imagery is used in “Heaven on Earth” (p. 146), where the dawn sky, Aurora, attempts to seduce the “fl accid earth” – in this poem, decidedly male. Earth attempts to ignore the seductive beauty of the sky as bulbous clouds converge, “moistened labia/layer within layer.” Heaven is “a moist chasm/yearning to be fi lled,” while earthbound mankind longs to “thrust missiles deep into your unquiet womb/to probe and sacrifi ce until we hold your centre.” The eventual outcome? “Once fi nding it we shall erect our Earthman’s fl ag” – and eventually take up residence among the stars. Lady of My House (1986) again focused on the imagery of nature, including butterfl ies, this time from the family Nymphalidae: the Question Mark (p. 155), the Mourning Cloak (p. 156), and the Painted Lady (p. 157), each a metaphor for a different woman. In “Butterfl y Kisses” (p. 213), the central butterfl y is the Diana, which mimics the poison Pipevine Swallowtail. Just as in “Freckled Blue” (p. 118) and “Soulmates” (p. 152) the personae love without touch (“love so innocent and

xxxi Streaking! The Collected Poems of Gary Botting light and chaste/our souls alone met in some secret place”), so in “Lady of My House” (p. 153) the persona and his love search for each other, yet “we shall ever/miss/and miss/and miss/shall ever/miss.” Unrequited love is borne of miscommunication, as in “Art Song” (p. 160), where the naïve observations of the narrator about “the magentic majesty of sky” transcending reality are rejected out of hand by the visual artist, who fi nds herself immersed in the very reality of the moment: “the miasma of seduction and event/the being there. Of living in the landscape/ of being part of it and all of it. Because the landscape merges in my being/and is my All.” Humbled, the narrator is able to use his senses to perceive the landscape in a new way, “knowing that that tonality of sense and sense/that fl ash of yet another kind of vision felt deep within/shall take me far, unraveling the secret landscapes of my being.” Indeed, this poem marks a shift in focus for Botting, who begins to see nature more visually, as in “Master” (p. 167), where the persona “would not/could not/ sell this glimpse of seeing/for all the world.” A similar insight is seen in “Dancers” (p. 168), where the persona “wonders/when chords will play/when fl utes will echo/when dancers will stride into the feeble stars.” “Canabanadaman” (p. 198) brings many of the elements of poetry used by Botting under a single thematic umbrella rich with literary, geographical, religious and political allusion. The outrageous puns are back (“C/to shining see/to shining sea”) – “C” in this case standing for “Church”. Caliban and Ariel appear from The Tempest – but here Caliban is a chartered accountant, dull in his secularism rather than in intelligence. Ariel is as bright and spritelike as Shakespeare’s original – as she whispers the answer to every conundrum into Caliban’s ear. But underlying the wordplay is a serious message: “Who can ban liberty?/ Liberty can!” And similarly, “Who can kill Canada?/Canada can!” By the end of the poem, God is nearly dead, but within the soul of the dying god a “new force stirs.” Yet, whatever that force is, it remains disinterested in mankind’s messy existential

xxxii Streaking! The Collected Poems of Gary Botting

dilemma – and goes back to sleep, leaving mankind, for now, to its own devices, “passing through nada/passing through pain/to an ecstasy born of the seashore again/to an ecstasy born of the/ See?” Now 70, Gary Botting practices criminal defence law in Vancouver, B.C. with a focus on major crimes and extradition. His most recent collection of poems, Isabeau (2013), incorporated in its entirety in this volume, continues the tradition of intimate, sexperiential poetry that characterizes Botting’s inimitable style.

Tihemme Gagnon Writing Department Vancouver Film School Vancouver B.C. Canada July 2013

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