When Tish Happens The Unlikely Story of Canada's "Most Influential Literary Magazine"

by Davey, Frank

• ISBN13: 9781550229585
• ISBN10: 1550229583
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-04-01
• Publisher: Ecw Press

Summary

Chronicling the birth ofTish,the University of British Columbia's poetry newsletter, this history describes the ideologies and devotion of its contributing poets and editors and the publication that followed. The evolution of this artistic venture, which represented a clear break from older Canadian poets and styles and a clash with entrenched Canadian cultural and political assumptions, is related by one of its founding members.

Author Biography

Frank Davey is an author and a literary critic who has taught at York University and the University of Western Ontario. He lives in Strathroy, Ontario.

Excerpts

Sometimes I wonder whetherTishwould have happened, or at least happened in the various precise ways it is said to have happened, had Tony Friedson not urged Daphne Buckle to attend the Writers Workshop in the fall of 1960, and had I not so intemperately pursued her. The “Projective Verse” party Bill and I held that January, with Lionel’s quickly legendary visit to the emergency ward, did sharply raise the profile of Olson’s essay within our circle of UBC student writers, even if it didn’t sharply increase its understanding— and made more likely Warren’s offer to hold Sunday meetings later that spring. I would not have been the same person at those meetings, or at the Duncan lectures that followed—if they had followed— without the long conversations Daphne and I had about poetics or my discovery while writing so intensely “for” her that I was a poet. I should thank her—I know I never have. Perhaps theTishcommunity, such as it is, should thank her. For me, my choice of genre when first hearing that she was about to join the Workshop turned out to be crucial. Before that week I had seen myself almost equally as a possible fiction writer, playwright and poet. When the founding of a poetry magazine happened, I might have hung back like fiction–writer Gladys or playwright–to–be Carol Johnson.

That is, I can’t separate in my own mind my attraction to Daphne from the appearance of the Allen anthology, the enormous local interest in Olson’s “Projective Verse,” Duncan’s lectures and the founding ofTish. Without her there would have at least been very few Bowering–Davey twin–poem pages inTish, no Tishbook titledD–Day and After(with its audaciously punning epigraph from Hopkins, “Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then”), no Contact Press book titled “bridge force.” The bridge of that series—prominent in the twin–poems and in those two books— was in part the Lions Gate Bridge over which I had driven to North Vancouver and Daphne’s home, and in part the attempted bridge of my desire. The “bridge force” series had come about through my efforts to follow Duncan’s advice to cease self–expression and instead explore and follow the images that one’s field of experience was proposing, to move from personal plaint toward attention to the objects and histories one lived among.Amongas Fred would write. Without Daphne I might never have felt the need to make that effort. One of the first things I read after that March of 1961, and before the Tallman Sunday meetings began, was Durrell’sJustine, and thenBalthazar,MountoliveandClea. I was on much too familiar ground while reading Justine, and then read Balthazar’s “interlinear” with enormous relief—because it demonstrated that if one could expand what one knew, alternate readings of one’s own life would become possible.MountoliveandCleafurther expanded the quartet’s perspectives and dismantled the initial novel’s romantic claustrophobia. There was a way out, and onward.

So that Hopkins epigraph—which no critic has ever attempted to read—is not perhaps all that outrageous—the “thee” that was the humbled falcon/Christ in Hopkins’s poem could be me, the “fire” could be the poems I contributed toTish, “Buckle” does operate satisfactorily as both a noun and a verb, the line could be speaking of Duncan’s move from “path poem” to “field poem.” It even could be read as a gloss on howJustinewas “buckled” into the splendour, and wisdom, of the full quartet. Interestingly, Hopkins’s “The Windhover” would be a poem that also otherwise haunted theTishpoets. Both Bowering and Dawson would greet people around theTishoffice with a “Hi there, in your riding” or a “Hi there, in your riding of the rolling” or a “Hi there, in your riding of the rolling level underneath you.” I, of course, would never stoop to such puns.