Depending on how you count Bowering's Kerrisdale Elegies, there are two or three book-length poems on Vancouver that were published before George Stanley's Vancouver: A Poem. I quite liked W.H. New's YVR, though I was less gripped by Marlatt's Vancouver Poems (revised and reissued as Liquidities), as I so rarely understood what Marlatt was getting at. Stanley's poem is certainly easier to follow than Marlatt's, though I rate Kerrisdale Elegies and YVR higher.
Vancouver: A Poem has 12 sections. The first two apparently first appeared in At Andy's, which I still haven't read. What's somewhat interesting is that they both cover the same basic territory, pointing out the large W (the Woodward's Beacon) that serves as a local landmark in downtown Vancouver, though seemingly fewer and fewer people know its history. Then the second part recapitulates this in more poetic terms and has less stream-of-consciousness journaling that I wasn't so crazy about in so many of Stanley's longer poems found in North of California Street. While I assume it isn't as iconic as a giant spinning W in Vancouver, every time I end up at the Newark Airport, I end up looking for the Anheuser-Busch logo (with its glowing A at dusk) to try to orient myself.
The first part also includes a shout-out to W.C. Williams's Paterson, indicating that Stanley is using Paterson as a bit of a template, though I'd say Vancouver: A Poem is more self-indulgent. (He also name-checks T.S. Eliot while riding on the SkyTrain, though it seems a bit of a stretch honestly.) Stanley puts his finger on it when he says this poem will be "a catalogue of moments" or disconnected glimpses, mostly seen while on the bus or the Sea Bus (a ferry between Vancouver and North Vancouver). This approach isn't so different in principle from New in YVR, but the sections are longer and less self-contained and generally harder to follow the train of thought.
Here's Bowering getting on the bus, but apparently getting stuck and not finding anything profound to write about: "The pleasure of getting on the 7 / in the chill morning / & something must follow / something non-reciprocal / stuck stuck stuck stuck stuck".
There are a few times Stanley brings up transition, and by the 1990s Vancouver's transition to becoming Canada's entranceway to Asia was well-underway and the downtown was full of glass skyscrapers (also noted by Douglas Coupland). Stanley mentions that Sears took over the downtown Eaton's store location though didn't live up to its promise to retain the Eaton name, while I lived through a later era when all the Sears stores in Canada closed (as well as the ill-fated transition from Zellers to Target), which arguably left Vancouver in worse shape than Toronto as even more storefronts went vacant.
Section 7 is all about Stanley wandering around the older parts of Vancouver (Gastown mostly) and thinking about the old industries giving rise to the modern economy. He writes about the Devonshire Hotel blown up and replaced with a HSBC branch. But not all plans come to fruition. "I'm glad Victoria screwed up the convention centre deal. It means I won't have to walk another 200 m to the Sea Bus."
Section 8 opens with Stanley considering the many times he's crossed the Burrard Inlet on the ferry: "the sun prismatic on the water -- on the eye, / unable to see the page -- a blue glow, dazzle / follow the pen."
There are many references to being on the bus, being slightly buzzed, but then a bit upset because nothing of interest occurs to Stanley to write down. "Sitting on the 210 at Phibbs, waiting for it to start up, & cross the bridge. And an hour ago, sitting at the desk while the students wrote an in-class essay, reading a critical work on Williams & thinking, yeah, economics, I should have something in here about economics..." No question there an immediacy here, and Stanley is trying to get his thoughts, even the self-reflective ones, down immediately, but here and in his other long journal poems, I would have liked an editor to come through and say maybe first thoughts aren't best thoughts... (Apologies to Allen Ginsberg, who incidentally Stanley also name-checks in this poem.)
One relatively polished stand-alone section that I did like (and could potentially anthologize) is called "Verlaine's Ride on the 99 B-Line": "The Broadway streetscape framed in the bus window / reels backward, halts, recedes again, / turning shop signs to stuttering banners, / as solitary walkers retrogress. / Phone wires & trolley wires loop & cross / with the strange allure of a signature." I would certainly have preferred more in this vein.
There is a section titled just Seniors with Stanley's thoughts on being a senior citizen in Vancouver. It is probably for the best that his thoughts about the shriveling of desire are all hived off into his collection After Desire. Then Stanley is back on the theme of transition when one of his favourite watering holes, Sausi's, is being replaced by a Banana Leaf restaurant. (I so rarely ate out in Vancouver, but I do remember meeting a co-worker and his girlfriend at a Banana Leaf. It would be more than a liitle ironic if it was the one that displaced Stanley.) The poem includes some comments on urban planning and how city staff approved plans that would involve cutting down trees, and citizens are agitating against these plans.
Stanley ends on a metaphor that any given street in a city is in a state of continual transition (or at least has the potential for such change), much like the way memories are stored in the mind but are occasionally over-written: "a territory we will keep until someone has / some other use for it / ... / The mind is this street / only the interiors / around it / arranged / differently."
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