Essay: A Lineage of Poets, TISH and other groups

 

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

 

 

The Hidden Trail, 20 October 2026

 Here is the hidden trail yesterday, 20 October 2026; a beautiful day, +17 C.

The Hidden Trail, 20 October 2025

 It was a year ago today . . .

On the Art of Bird Bath Maintenance / I have new friends now

Here is a video I made last April of a crow visiting our bird bath. It was the best entertainment on my birthday, what a great show!

Also, here are blue jays visiting in September 2026:

My New Friends

I have new friends now;

the crows that visit the bird bath

leave presents for me, an old coin,

a squirrel's paw, a dead bird,

this is more than my old friends ever did;

other birds enjoying the bird bath

visit me, sparrows, grackles, robins,

and cardinals dressed up in red feathers,

and I leave them fresh water every day;

they watch for my arrival, and they know

I stand at the dining room window

for their visit; they are better

than my old friends, they don't over stay

their welcome, they don't expect anything

out of me; my new friends,

            dear friends

            of an old man

            who no one else

            cares to visit.

On the Art of Bird Bath Maintenance / oh, the crows

What you don't want to do is get on the wrong side of crows, they are intelligent and have long memories and if they perceive you as a threat they will make life difficult for you. They are also long lived. I have watched crows eyeing small squirrels, when the squirrel hides the crows will walk away as though they never intended any harm to the squirrel, or were even remotely aware of the squirrel, but I have also seen a crow carrying a dead squirrel to the bough of a tree, squirrel legs dangling and swaying as he was carried away, and where he was consumed. Crows love a dead squirrel, or food from a Chinese restaurant which they will leave in the bird bath to soak. I am always courteous to crows, but I am courteous to all my bird visitors. If I enter the garden and see birds at the bird bath I stop and back out, I can return later. 

I change the water in the bird bath as soon as it looks a bit dirty, no one wants to bath in dirty water, and more birds will visit when the water is fresh and clean. If I am sitting in the garden and birds begin to visit I will stay quiet and watch them, it's all peaceful coexistence in this life. Crows will also leave  gifts for you and I hope I am not anthropomorphizing them, maybe I am. Last spring I found a squirrel's paw in the bird bath water, it had been skinned and was ready to eat... well, a generous gift but not for me. Another gift, not for me, was a dead baby bird in the bird bath. A gift from the crows from a few years ago was a single penny found beside the bird bath, it was a 1957 copper penny and I wonder where they ever found this old coin. Now, here is where I am probably reading something into this gift, the date on the coin was 1957, the year after my father died and of special significance for me. When I leave our home and the crows are sitting on the electric wires over head, I feel they are a message of good luck from the universe. If the crows like you they will watch over you to make sure you are safe.

Handsome fellows!

Here is the penny left by crows

This is the squirrel’s paw, skinned and ready for
consumption and left by crows

On the Art of Bird Bath Maintenance

One of the first things to do in any garden is to get a bird bath; a bird bath will bring you a lot of happiness, it will even bring you joy, and there will always be interesting visitors to your garden. But the thing to know about gardens is that you have to make it a desirable place to visit or your garden will remain a square of grass surrounded by a few flower beds; you need to bring some life to your garden, you might place a bird bath in the middle of the square of grass. Go to one of the big box stores and you will find bird baths in the garden centre department, they're all made in China and most will last a year or two before disintegrating, they're made of plaster with some kind of coating that disintegrates with time. I had about four bird baths before finding my current bird bath, it seems to be well made and I've had it for about four years.

One of the things about having a bird bath is that you will have different bird visitors depending on the time of year. I have many crows visit in the spring, not as many bird visitors during the summer, and in the fall I have many visitors, robins, sparrows, gold finches, blue jays, and others. In the fall there is a frenetic energy in the air, nesting has ended and some birds are about to fly south for the winter. Great excitement! I know that sparrows are here all winter but in late September they go a bit wild flying around together, having dust baths, and having a great time in the bird bath. I watch them from our dining room window, or sitting in our car in the MacDonald’s parking lot, or I might see gold finches eating seeds left on the cone flowers. This is one reason you shouldn't cut back your garden in fall, birds enjoy the remaining seeds on the flowers and it is one less thing to do before winter. Don't rake, bag, and discard the fallen leaves, it’s less work for you, just rake the leaves onto the flower beds and they will mulch your perennials and protect them from our harsh Canadian winter. These leaves will disintegrate in the spring and your plants will emerge from a bed of leaves stronger and healthier than you ever expected. If you really dislike the look of dead leaves in your garden, wait until after the last cold spell in the spring and then uncover some of your plants, but it's not necessary to do this. Last winter was one of the longest and coldest winters I have experienced, we all dread another winter like it. But none of my plants died during the winter, they were under a bed of leaves and a few bushes were wrapped with burlap, they also survived. And then the crows returned in April or May, like the welcome friends they are.

A walk on a fall day, 7 October 2013

 

Honey bees in St. Philip's Church garden

Photos taken the last day of September 2026, the last weeks of honey bees collecting pollen and nectar. Every year at this time you can trust you'll see honey bees on wild asters. Photos taken at St. Philip’s Anglican Church in Montreal West, Canada.

Essay: Recently discovered Sonja Skatstedt Interview notes, on knowing Louis Dudek

The following essay, Sonja Skarstedt's notes for an interview on CBC radio, was published on 02 October 2026 at periodicities : a journal of poetry and poetics.

Robert Creeley, Michael Andre, and Sonja Skarstedt, c. 1993, New York City

Sonja Skarstedt on Louis Dudek

 

by Stephen Morrissey

I first met Sonja Skarstedt and her husband Geof Isherwood around 1990 when they visited my home near Huntingdon, Quebec; a few years later Sonja began Empyreal Press, she had been a student of Louis Dudek at McGill University in the early 1980s and later she became a friend and then a supporter and publisher of Louis' last books.

Louis was a great supporter of Sonja's poetry. Louis often wrote personal inscriptions in his books: in Atlantis, he wrote "For Sonja Skarstedt, with admiration for your fine talent"; in The First Person in Literature he wrote, "For Sonja Skarstedt, Excellent poet!"; in 1982, in Continuation 1, he wrote, "For Sonja, great expectations for your own work!"; he could see that she was a genuine poet and someone worth encouraging. She was a poet, a playwright, a publisher, and a visual artist. Her passing, in 2009, was a great loss for Montreal poetry and a personal loss for many of us.

A few weeks ago I was writing an essay in which I referred to the Louis Dudek issue of Open Letter (spring and summer 1981); my second copy of this had belonged to Sonja and I found two sheets of paper, written in Sonja's handwriting in March 1991, in the pages of this issue. They were her preparatory notes for Dave Bronstetter's afternoon home run programme broadcast daily on CBC radio, in which Sonja was interviewed with Louis, explaining his influence on younger poets and her memories of being one of his students.

Below, I have transcribed Sonja's notes for this interview so that they will be easier to read; this is Sonja's text, her hand lettering, including spelling noting strikethroughs; I wanted the transcription to be accurate to Sonja's original text. Louis had a profound influence on his students; many of us who were in Louis' classes went on to literary or teaching careers, or we were influenced in other life choices. Susan Stromberg-Stein, who was in Louis' graduate seminar with me in 1974-1975, wrote for her MA thesis Louis Dudek, A biographical Introduction to his Poetry (published by Golden Dog Press in 1983); Susan is a prominent sculptor whose work is widely exhibited. One day in 1975, I visited the English Department staff lounge at McGill and I remember seeing Louis and Laurence Hutchman sitting together editing and discussing Laurence's first book of poetry, Explorations (1975), published by Louis' DC Editions; Laurence's Swimming Toward the Sun: Collected Poems 1968-2018 was published in 2020. Louis Dudek supervised Ken Norris's PhD dissertation on the development of modernism in little magazines in Canada; Ken's place in Canadian poetry is secure considering his large body of work. Louis published first books of poetry for Leonard Cohen and Daryl Hine, both had been his students at McGill; Cohen's Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956) was highly acclaimed while Hine became editor of the prestigious Poetry (Chicago) from 1968-1978. Dudek's influence is extensive; I suggest reading Louis Dudek, Essays on his Works, edited by George Hildebrand (Guernica, 2001) and Robin Blaser's introduction to Infinite Worlds, the poetry of Louis Dudek (1988).

Sonja's notes record her experience as a young poet, her formative years as a writer, and her appreciation of Louis Dudek. After Louis' passing in 2001, Sonja edited, with Louis's widow Aileen Collins and his old friend Michael Gnarowski, Eternal Conversations: Remembering Louis Dudek (DC Books, Montreal, 2003); for some of us the eternal conversation continues.

 

                                                            Stephen Morrissey

                                                            29 September 2026

(Page one, handwritten by Sonja Skarstedt)    

 

 Sonja A. Skarstedt (her signature)                             Prep. Notes for Dave Bronstetter's

                                                                                    CBC Home Run

                                                                                    (Interview w/ L. Dudek

                                                                                    & SAS   March 1/91 (written in                                                                                                                                              pencil)

 

 

How has Louis Dudek influenced you?

 

As a "renaissance" individual: his words and actions convey the message: don't waste any of your potential, whether your talents are singular or multi-dimensional. Louis of course has branched out into many fields, from poetry (at the center of it all) to essays, teaching, broadcasting, translating, publishing, editing… bound together by enthusiasm.

 

I've always been obsessed by words, (whether) written down and bound in beautiful volumes—whether spoken or invented. I write poetry and edit Zymergy—which I may have been doing if I'd not encountered Louis. However, his stamp on the importance, the vitality of literature in this country—would have been unavoidable. "Hearing" this vitality firsthand then, has made the purpose of putting out everything as caustic as a literary magazine more plausible, more necessary.

 

I first encountered the name of Louis Dudek in Endre Farkas's History of Montreal Poets at John Abbott College. He was included in the Smith-Scott-Klein category (if these can be called a category!), his poetry briefly covered. During my first year at McGill I was combing the Gazette's book section & came across an article on the Vehicule Poets. I was impressed by the writer's wit, the bouncing from one name or element to the next (while remaining in context). "Louis Dudek," I noted, remembering the name from somewhere at McGill, "if he can teach as well as he writes…what a phenomenal way to learn!" I went to the McGill course directory & was delighted to see "Canadian Literature" Louis Dudek, prof/. (that review found now: The Defense of Art)

 

I've always gravitated to art, graphic & comic books as opposed to classics; after attending the second or third class of Dudek's, I noted that I was making elaborate doodles not only in the margins but in the middle of my notes. It certainly wasn't boredom—every word of the lectures was sinking in, flipping around in my imagination then re-emerging in the form of detailed birds, profiles and experimental lines. Next class, I brought with me a pad of vellum art paper and my drafting pens: I might as well conduct a full-scale experiment!

 

(Page two, handwritten by Sonja Skarstedt)

 

—How has Louis' poetry changed (40s vs. 80s e.g.)?

There is less formality, I think, although the same questioning, philosophical voice is there. There might be a grain more pessimism, a mellowered anger.

—Aserbic?

Louis I think pours whatever acid he wishes to convey into his essays & articles rather than the poetry. Even in EPIGRAMS the barbs are gentle, presented with humour & wit rather than Layton-esque vinegar!

—Does Louis differ from Scott, Klein, Smith ... how?

They somehow belong in a category, perhaps generation, of their own. One sees Dudek as either on his own, or within (a word here is illegible and with strikethrough) Laytons the same era as Layton. Layton & Dudek = twins, nonidentical yet pulled from the same musing ribcage.

Scott, Klein & Smith might be viewed as more (overtly) political (religious or mytho-traditional.) Their main preoccupation might be the jabbing and spearing of political monsters. With Dudek & Layton, the "monsters" can be found in ourselves, in sociology, psychology. The terrain is trickier.

Louis' voice is gentler, & his mind is the launching-pad for the universe of perplexities, imperfections.

Elements of this universe: the sea, movement, the sky, emotions,

                                               LOGIC, auroras, creatures (from octopito an

                                                                        "Octopus w/saucer-like suckers"

                                                            to "the weeping beech/ hanging like a great

                                                                                    pavillion") Atlantis

                                                                                                                

rhymes not as frequent, more "everyday" conversation

* ("why don't you," he once suggested), "take out a pen & paper

 when you're in the cafeteria or some such place, & write down what you hear, slivers of chit-chat, whatever ... & see if you can make a poem out of that?"

* the Ogilvy's rose

* Phyllis Webb: rare books & rich enthusiasm over an interview.

"Who knows ..." he would pause, staring into the rows of faces in his classes, who knows which of you sitting in this room will someday become famous, produce something astounding & enrich the human race ... who knows? But we all must try ..."

* CBC reading poetry w/ Jane Lewis. Enthusiasm over poetry: honesty ("try prose!)

Page one of two

Page two of two

Note: Geof Isherwood informs me that today, on which this essay was published, is Sonja`s birthday, she would have been 66 years old; synchronistic or just coincidence?

The Hidden Trail, 01 October 2025