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September 2, 1969, Sir George Williams University's
Henry F. Hall Building |
This essay was published in Public Reverie on 3 October 2026.
A Lineage of Poets,
TISH and other groups
By
Stephen Morrissey
It
was an exciting time to be a poet in Canada in the late 1960s and 1970s. Some
of this excitement was generated by the TISH group of poets; I remember some of
the TISH poets who lived in Montreal or who visited here, George Bowering,
Frank Davey, and Lionel Kearns. Of course, it wasn't only the TISH poets who contributed
to the popularity of poetry at that time, it was also poets like Al Purdy, Irving
Layton, Louis Dudek, Gwendolyn McEwen, Phyllis Webb, Gerry Gilbert, bill
bissett, bp Nichol, Alden Nowlan, John Newlove, Leonard Cohen, Margaret Atwood,
and others. Poetry was more popular than ever and TISH was a part of it.
Around
1974 Artie Gold, my future first wife, and I visited the National Gallery of
Canada, we took a train from Montreal's Central Station to Ottawa one winter
day to look at art. While there I bought a back issue of The Far Point, edited by George Amabile, a professor and poet at
the University of Manitoba; this issue featured an article on the new Canadian poetry including the Vancouver
poetry scene. I was familiar with some of the poets mentioned in this article, but
it was also an introduction to an important avant-garde movement in poetry that
was centred in Vancouver.
I
was never a student in George Bowering's creative writing class at Sir George
Williams University (present-day Concordia University); however, Artie Gold, John McAuley, and Tom Konyves were Bowering's students and made names for themselves, they were future members of the Vehicule Poets group. I remember that Bowering
seemed to be present everywhere while he lived in Montreal. When Allen Ginsberg
read at SGWU in November 1969, Bowering introduced Ginsberg and I could see him
sitting in the front row beside Ginsberg's partner Peter Orlovsky. Another
time, Sun Ra (or was it Rahsaan Roland Kirk?) performed at the Selby
Campus of Dawson College and Bowering was in the audience. Bowering was a prolific
writer, highly talented, and a hard worker for poetry. The last time I saw
George Bowering was at the Artie Gold memorial reading in April 2007, held at
The Word Book Store on Milton Street near McGill University. Bowering had a
great reading voice and was approached by CBC radio and asked if he wanted to host
their popular national daily morning show, he wisely declined.
Bowering's
Kerrisdale Elegies (1984) is one of
his finest achievements, I would place it among the most important poetry
collections published in Canada. Another book by Bowering is Delayed Mercy and other poems (1984), a
book published immediately after Kerrisdale
Elegies; this is a collection of poems dedicated to American and Canadian
poets. One day I walked into a bookstore in Toronto, it must have been the
mid-1990s and I was attending a League of Canadian Poets' AGM, and flipping
through Bowering's book for the first time I found a poem, "Sequestered
Pop & a Stripe" dedicated to me. I was taken aback!
Bowering
was friends with Artie Gold. It was Bowering who compared Artie to the French poet
Arthur Rimbaud but I always questioned this comparison; and then I read, just
recently, in Dudek's 1980 review of the anthology, The Vehicule Poets, where he calls Artie the Tristan Corbière of
the group, a "wandering clochard,
bohemian, mourning minstrel". I don't think either comparison, Rimbaud or
Corbière, are correct. Artie is in a class of his own, he was highly talented
and individualistic but also self-destructive and narcissistic. I know that
Artie was a great fan of Frank O'Hara's poems but I think he may be closer, in
aesthetic sensibility and poetic voice, to James Schuyler.
In
1969 I used to borrow books from the Norris Building library at SGWU, where I
was a student, and there were old copies of the TISH newsletter still on
display with other periodicals. TISH seemed to be everywhere; I suspect
this was mainly the work of George Bowering. My wife, Carolyn Zonailo, lived in
Kerrisdale when George and Angela Bowering lived there; Ed Varney, George
Woodcock, and it`s possible that one of my favourite Canadian authors, Ethel
Wilson, also once lived in Kerrisdale; by our standards it is a pretty
exclusive neighourhood. Carolyn discusses George Bowering's presence in the
Vancouver poetry scene in her book, The
Letter Z, On Poetics (2026); she writes that he was always generous and
supportive of younger poets.
Another
TISH poet, Frank Davey, also taught at SGWU in the early 1970s and I attended
several of his readings. I remember Davey reading his Tarot card inspired poems
at Loyola College (before it merged with SGWU and became the Loyola Campus of
Concordia University), he read at the
same, small auditorium where I heard a disheveled and apparently disorganized William
Empson give a lecture. I guess the TISH poets wanted to distinguish themselves from
previous groups of Canadian poets, for instance older established poets, but in
fact TISH is part of a continuum of poets, a lineage of poets.
My
friend, George Johnston, told me that he corresponded with George Bowering and,
I believe, some of the poems from this correspondence have been published; they
are acrostics on the name "George". George Johnston had been a
student and later friend of Northrop Frye; in the 1950s George Johnston and Jay
MacPherson, and others, were members of the "Little Fryes" group of
poets who were influenced by Frye. In the old days of youthful vigour and folly
George Bowering and Frank Davey were dismissive of this group, as was Louis
Dudek, but all things pass and some of us end up being friends or appreciative of
those we dismissed in our younger life.
I remember exactly where I was on the afternoon of January 9, 1979, I was
at a reading by Lionel Kearns and later Lionel and I and Louis Dudek went out
to eat at a restaurant in Montreal's underground city. When I returned home a
few hours later I learned that my wife had given birth, prematurely, to our son,
Jake. Lionel was a good friend of Louis Dudek, he named his son Louis after
Dudek. Here is something we forget, the TISH poets weren't baby-boomers, they
were born in the late 1930s to the early-1940s, but any generational divide has
less importance when we decide the value of poetry. TISH were the significant poetry
group that came after Montreal's First Statement and Preview poets from the
1940s and 1950s, and after TISH it is our own Vehicule Poets in the 1970s who
continued the tradition of like-minded poets gathering in groups..
In a curious literary synchronicity, the important 1963
Vancouver Poetry Conference, July 26 to August 16, 1963, was held at the
University of British Columbia. Meanwhile, two months later, there was
another important literary conference in Foster, Quebec. My introduction to the
Foster conference was from a book in my high school library, English Poetry in Quebec,
Proceedings of the Foster Poetry Conference, October 12-14, 1963 (1964); participants included Leonard Cohen, Louis Dudek, F.R.
Scott, Irving Layton, Doug Jones, A.J.M. Smith, and George Whalley. The
Vancouver conference was America-centric, the Foster conference was Canada-centric,
but they are both important conferences. However, sixty years later I would say
that the talks given at the Foster Conference are more important to us as
Canadians than the more widely known Vancouver Conference that aligned West
Coast, especially the TISH poets, with popular American poetry. In retrospect,
the Vancouver Poetry Conference may have been a part of the 1960s American
invasion of academia in Canada that Robin Matthews so opposed. I know that I've
read a lot of contemporary American poetry; meanwhile, George Whalley, a poet
and professor and attendee at the Foster Conference, who published a
multi-volume annotation of Coleridge's marginalia, and whose Poetic Process (1953) is a classic on
the art of poetry, is almost unknown. This emphasis on American poetry, the
Beats, the San Francisco poets, and Charles Olson, is interesting but it ends
up being a diversion from finding our authentic Canadian voice as poets.
It was in Louis Dudek that the West Coast poets,
including Bowering and Davey, found a member of the previous generation they could
wholly relate to. I doubt they could relate to Irving Layton who was, always to
me, a nice person; but his public bombast and narcissism was not attractive. Dudek
was different, highly intelligent, a friend of Ezra Pound, the author of a
large body of work, and someone who was always willing to take risks in his
work, for instance his long poem, "Continuation". Louis made an
impression on many poets because of his intelligence, his openness to new
ideas, and his impressive work as a poet, scholar, and man of letters. TISH and
others eventually recognized Louis Dudek's importance. Frank Davey published a comprehensive Louis Dudek issue of Open Letter
(spring & summer 1981), and Dudek gave an important talk at the Long-liners
Conference at York University in
Toronto in 1984.
Robin Blaser, an American, a poet, and professor at
Simon Fraser University, edited Infinite
Worlds, the poetry of Louis Dudek (1988); Blaser`s introduction is one of
the best appraisals of Dudek's work in poetry.
TISH is an important episode in Canadian literary history, it is part of
our lineage as poets extending from the Confederation poets to the McGill Group
of poets, to First Statement and Preview, to the "little Fryes", to
TISH, and to the Vehicule Poets. The gathering of a cohesive group of similar
minded poets is a medium for poetry to advance and to be noticed in a way not always
possible for the solitary poet, it is synergistic; several poets working
together compounds the work one poet can accomplish on their own. While a
group, like TISH, is collaborative it is not at the expense of any member of
the group's individual creativity. A group is sustaining for younger poets, the
life of a group lasts a few years and then is finished, but the gains for
members are long lasting and here we are all of these years later honouring the
TISH poets. TISH and the other groups of poets are important and the members
have all written poetry that is worth reading. But at base, it is the poetry
that is important; and for Canadian poets it is important to situate oneself historically
in a lineage of poets that goes back to Confederation and then to the pre-Confederation
era. This is how a national literature that defines a country is created, it is
how a readership for poetry is created, and TISH is an important part of this
lineage.
Stephen Morrissey
5 September 2026
Edited with corrections on 13 October 2026
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