A Bollingen for Santa Barbara

Edgar Bowers has been something of a poet’s poet. Which may only be a way of saying that his readership is especially small. But among those who know his work, he is greatly esteemed, and recently, on the occasion of his newest book, Bowers received the Bollingen Prize, the most prestigious poetry award in the United States.

An English professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) since the late 1950s, Bowers has written only three books in more than 30 years. In 1956, he published his first volume of poems, “The Form of Loss”; in 1965, “The Astronomers.” Both books, and a few new poems, were brought together in 1973 by publisher David Godine as “Living Together.”

The Bollingen Prize, awarded every two years by Yale University, usually is given for a body of work. With the publication late last year of Bowers’ new book, “For Louis Pasteur,” he was presented with the prize. This event prompted an awkward party at the UCSB English Department, which Bowers didn’t enjoy, and the demand that he read aloud from the book, which makes him extremely uncomfortable. Despite the poet’s demurring anxieties and misgivings, he’s pleased with the book itself. And for Santa Barbara and Southern California generally, “For Louis Pasteur” is an occasion worthy of notice and celebration. (A poem from the collection appears on Page 6.)

With an unlikely title commemorating a French microbiologist, no reader would guess there could be any connection with Santa Barbara. But in the slim book of 31 poems, more than half are specifically about the city and surrounding area, and many more are candidly autobiographical, relating to Bowers’ life in Santa Barbara. Through this, too, much of Southern California landscape and life style is explored broadly.

“This book is something of a departure for me,” Bowers said recently, “something new. For one thing, many of the poems are longer than I’ve written in the past and all are in blank verse.

“If it has taken a long time for me to write this book, it’s because I didn’t feel I had much to write about. Specifically, the inspiration for the section called ‘Thirteen Views of Santa Barbara’ came from going to an exhibition here at the art museum of Hokusai’s ‘Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji.’ It was from that that I got the notion that I might do something similar, poetically.”

Traditional in poetic affinities, Bowers nearly always has written in rhymed and metered verse. The new book is without rhyme but retains the pentameter measure. Preferring traditional forms since his youth, Bowers remains their champion, insisting that structured verse is liberating, not constraining; that method and system provide momentum for the writer, not impediment. Too many of this century’s most important poets, according to Bowers, have been extreme mannerists, and what they have to offer other writers in style is too idiosyncratic to be usable.

In such opinions and preferences Bowers echoes his mentor, Yvor Winters. A critic and poet, Winters was for years an important presence at Stanford University. Bowers studied with him there and received his Ph.D. from Stanford. Like Winters, too, Bowers has taught specialized classes in Renaissance poetry and meter verse, in addition to the broad range of general English courses.

Bowers’ speech is still softly accented; his father was an agronomist, and he grew up in a rural Georgian setting. He attended the University of North Carolina prior to World War II, and after being drafted did a short stint at Princeton. He went overseas in 1944 and remained into 1946, serving with an intelligence outfit in France and Germany.

The war, as Bowers looks back on it now, was something of an opportunity. It not only guaranteed his return to school on the GI Bill, it also removed him from a parochial setting he might not otherwise have left. The war introduced him to the world, to a wide range of people and experiences. This was the rosy side. The gloomier part is expressed in the title of his first book, “The Form of Loss.”

Bowers worked on the first book at Stanford after the war, many of the poems clearly reflecting his experiences in Europe: wasted cities and death. But the theme continues in the newer poem “Richard,” about the early death of the son of friends, or in “Hang Gliding,” a vivid airborne description of Santa Barbara that suddenly shifts, as though Bowers has just remembered, to his own experiences with military gliders during the war.

Of the early poems, two of the best are “The Prince” and “The Stoic: For Laura von Courten,” both from Bowers’ experiences in Germany toward the end of the war. The poems are concrete, briefly recounting incidents in a story-like fashion.”

“It was our practice,” says Bowers of the intelligence group he served with, “to go into a German city, take over a nice house and simply throw the people out. That was how I met Laura von Courten; we used her house but let her stay.

“I met the prince later. He told me the story of how his son had been killed. I remember, too, that I worked on that poem for a long time, trying to write it from the son’s point of view before I realized it was the father’s story, and rewrote it that way.”

Virtually all of Bowers’ verse is like this: tangible, palpable. When he says he has written little because he has had nothing to write about, it is because Bowers’ poetry is always “about something.”

Sometimes Bowers’ work is philosophical, obliquely grappling with intellectual puzzles. It is probably because of this, along with the formal style of his verse and the Ph.D. behind his name, that Bowers is sometimes discounted by other poets, pejoratively described as “an academic.”

“That’s an easy put-down,” Bowers explains, “and it comes from the presumption that the world of structure is somehow inferior to raw data. I’ve had as much experience as anyone. As for teaching, I’ve loved it.”

Most of Bowers’ life in Santa Barbara has been spent in a beach house in Montecito. From this vantage point he wrote “An Elegy: December 1970,” a poem that drifts from memory to the observation of surfers in the distance. In this poem, as well as in great many others in “For Louis Pasteur,” a whole range of Southern California vistas and experiences are portrayed. The special virtue of much of this is the neutral tone and personal equation of a particular sight with a special remembrance. These names make simple and real a variety of typical sights and events of Southern California life often held up to general mockery, and especially to literary ridicule.

Bowers’ Santa Barbara poems are quietly descriptive, not filled with blushing adjectives. They are portraits, but also introspection. Personal memories and the private frame of reference that make some of his work difficult also make it intense and, not least for the specificity of its location (“The Courthouse,” “The Botanic Gardens,” etc.), richly rewarding.