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

 

 

Commentary on The Epic of Gilgamesh (1)

 

    

                                     "He who saw the Deep"

If you begin with the first great work of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, written between 2700 and 2000 years B.C., and you follow a literary continuum, from Gilgamesh to what is being written today, then, in total, you have the great exposition of the human condition. It is the collective vision of millennia of poets and artists; they see “the Deep” where it has always existed, in the unconscious mind—in the psyche—in the creative expression of what it means to be human.

-o-

Our literature—our heritage, our inheritance, our legacy—describes what it means to be a human being living in relationship with other people, living in a community, in solitude, with or without God, living a life of the imagination, with the human spirit, in war, in peace, in love, in anguish, in grief, and it describes the whole panoply of human experiences. By its very nature this literary continuum always affirms and celebrates human life no matter how much it expresses the dark side of human existence; to write, to create, to make something new, this is always affirmative.

-o-

Lucy Worsley, one of my favourite television personalities, recently presented the life of  Agatha Christie. In her old age, when Christie was planning her funeral, she considered having Edward Elgar's Nimrod performed. Nimrod is a deeply moving memorial for Elgar's friend and business associate Augustus Jaegar; coincidentally, it was at Nimrod in Iraq, that Agatha Christie met her future husband, Max Mallowan. Similar to Gilgamesh's grief when his friend Enkidu died, Elgar experienced grief and despair when Jaegar died, this music is an expression of these deeply felt emotions. Nimrod is associated with Gilgamesh, so this music had a deeper and synchronistic meaning for Christie who accompanied her husband on the various archaeological digs at Nimrod. Coincidentally, Nimrod is also a biblical king, and some scholars associate (apparently wrongly) Nimrod with Gilgamesh. The grief of losing a close friend—an ally, a companion—is as though to lose a part of one’s own being; as Gilgamesh grieves for Enkidu, as Elgar grieves for Jaegar, as Max would grieve for Agatha upon her death.

-o-

Gilgamesh's loss of Enkidu also reminds me of John Milton's poem, "Lycidas", an elegy written after the loss of Milton’s close friend, Edward King, who died by drowning; death is certainly a cause for questioning life and one's place in life. There is a meeting and connection of souls between Gilgamesh and Enkidu; when Enkidu dies, part of Gilgamesh's inner being is also lost; but what will Gilgamesh do about it? Milton's father, well-meaning and supportive of his son's poetry, thought writing about the death of Lycidas was a poor choice of subject matter for his son, but Milton was driven by what the soul demanded and in writing poetry this is of greater importance than anything else. In "Lycidas" Milton reflects something of Gilgamesh's loss.

Milton writes:

For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime

Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer;

Who would not sing for Lycidas? he well knew

Himself to sing, and build the lofty rime.

He must not flote upon his watry bear

Unwept, and welter to the parching wind

Without the meed of som melodious tear. 

And, at the poem's end, he writes"

Now Lycidas, the shepherd's weep no more;

Henceforth thou art the Genius of the shoar

In thy large recompense, and shalt be good

To all that wander in that perilous flood.

.  .  .  .  .  

And now the Sun had stretcht out all the hills,

And now was dropt into the western bay;

At last he rose and twitcht his mantle blew:

To morrow to fresh woods and pastures new. 

-o-

I remember studying Tennyson's poem, "In Memoriam A.H.H.", at university; it is one of the great poems of the Victorian era, a greater poem than I realized when I first read it. "In Memoriam A.H.H." has a thematic connection to Gilgamesh in that both texts are written out of grief for a deceased friend. Like Milton’s "Lycidas" it is an elegy; it took Tennyson almost twenty years to write and publish "In Memoriam A.H.H.", a poem that memorializes Tennyson's friend, Arthur Henry Hallam. It is grief over the loss of a loved one that Gilgamesh, Milton hi, and Tennyson experienced. And while these poems are expressions of grief they are also means of going beyond grief; alas*, grief has its own schedule, one that may require acceptance of things as they are and living with grief. Here, I must also emphasize the importance of writing poetry, and reading poetry, as healing; "In Memoriam" is a kind of confessional poem but written long before the invention of confessional poetry by Robert Lowell; writing this poem, and reading it, was a healing experience. “In Memoriam” was Queen Victoria's favourite poem, in it she found solace and consolation from grief after the death of her much loved husband, Prince Consort Albert. This is why poetry is not "writing", it has a greater importance than mere writing; the best poetry is, as Keats understood, soul work, it is the archaeology of the soul, it is to see “the Deep”. Tennyson writes, 

CVI

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

-o-

Notes:

 (1) Please forgive me for using this word, "alas", but I will never get another chance to say "Alas..." and I couldn't let it go...

          (2) I hope the reader has some familiarity with The Epic of Gilgamesh; if not, there are summaries of Gilgamesh online, as well, it isn't a long text, it's accessible and fairly easy to read, and reading Gilgamesh is a good idea even if what I've written here is of no interest.           

    (3) Some of the above links have been inserted by Google AI.

Note: revised on 29 December 2025.