To begin with, I'd like to attribute the diurnal format of a book When TISH Happens (ECW Press, 2011) purporting to be about Canada's "most influential literary magazine" to the usual incongruity between design and intention (thematics and poetics, to put it in old school Jakobsonian terms). Here's the comical inappropriateness of poetry's star-making potential in Canada told in narrative (at least if you consider the literary success of most of the characters in Frank Davey's book as a type of stardom). To make an historical event too easily readable won't, not in Canada anyways, give the heady 60s TISH days at UBC more glam than it deserves nor burn the names Davey, Wah and Marlatt any more indelibly into the national psyche. It's just not something literary movements in my country tend to do. So Davey's flat line style, interspersed with the usual American influences and skinny-chested daring, the soupy anecdotals about dad & camping trips and campus flings with Daphne, are all the usual suspects in a dull literary autobiography. Not even Davey's own purported Metis background works for him either.
And then, of course, there's content never relieved by consistently clear development of TISH poetics, which would certainly have served as some compensation ( we'd best go to Robin Blaser's The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser for that). Yet TISH is a topic of perennial interest, whether as the usual fawning over big Olson-style manifestos (and everything about America came super- sized to these impressionable working-class kids) or some pretty ingenious adaptiveness to growing trends. If the grounds were ripe for Olson and Duncan in the 60s, Objectivist credos and parties at Warren Tallman's "Tish salon" it was because of the essentially full-credit Writers Workshop ethos (a minor version of the American MLA ideal also brought to Canadian campuses) that had already existed there and, quite frankly, enabled it. It was here the notion took root, perhaps for the first time and contrary to traditionalist spirit of A.J.M. Smith, Dorothy Livesay, that universities could be places not just for learning but teaching writing. There was a beginning of sorts here.
So there's the lack of a clearly developed TISH theory, not so much as once formulated as a keystone for discussion, always skirted, intermixed with anecdote and cars and parties, lost in the "small-time boy" leaving home for school narrative. What exactly were the origins of TISH then? Duncan's monotonous lectures on the transition from "path" to "field poems", the interminableTallman home parties, or perhaps just the very idea for a magazine somebody--probably Tallman--had proposed quite spontaneously in the Summer of '61? Creeley had once read in the mathematics department and had been hired to teach at UBC shortly after: perhaps that had done the trick. The early squabbles about the real Tish 1-19 (Tish is here a variant on TISH meant to distinguish the magazine from its ghostly origins) once Wah, Bowering, Davey, Marlatt had formed its first editorial board did represent some interesting action on the ground, at last. Pauline Butling with her later "gender and age relationships" criticisms got my attention but apparently not Davey's. But the only interesting part was too short-lived. And besides it did beg the question.
With editorials, student essays, and a provocative title rearranged every which way for maximum shock (perhaps Canada's first real "concrete" poem) the magazine appears, and even the promise of a Tishbook to be produced by quality offset press. But TISH? More Americans, Levertov, Ginsberg, Whalen and Coolidge and Tish spin-offs like Dudek's Delta; preparations for an oral defence; Birney's dispraises of TISH writers and writings in general, and the peculiarly "anxiety of influence" issues arising between Davey and the elder Birney; of course, the Canadian Forum, Mountain, Fiddlehead, Tamarack Review competitors who'd, of course, have eclipsed it entirely without some token concessions to Fraser Valley inventiveness; and even the disdain of the 'modernists' Dudek, Reaney, Page, Livesay and even Layton for Tish--all these promised but failed to deliver, too.
As a chronicle of its times Tish did coincide with some rather interesting current events, Vietnam, Kennedy assassination, Cold War, etc. And the substitution of the offset-printed for mimeograph press did begin a lifelong interest in typography for the author. 'Tis true. But, unless I misunderstood, maybe Davey's postulating some connection between TISH,via its lettering and iconography, and an interest in text production with a view to making some Da Vinci Code-type revelations: perhaps it's encrypted anti-lyrical messaging. Or maybe TISH is just the inverse of SHIT. Open Letter magazine is presumably a direct descendant of Tish, given to the same need for writing "open or serial poetics", and to be produced in "booklet" printing style with the aid of "Letraset" letters. And with the announcement of a young academic's literary mag comes a Canada Council doctoral fellowship. And a growing assimilation of radical poet turned academic (practically an archetypal figure in Canada) to a generous subsidized arts milieu signalled a renewed interest in old friends, flings who'd like perhaps to co-author new writing ventures: and so, for example, the interminable Daphne and David correspondences. And so the curious fact that today most mainstream publishing houses, and oddly even Parliamentary Poet Laureate positions, have strong ties to this one TISH phenomenon.
Friends, colleagues winning scads of Governor-General awards, and applying for teaching positions in an age of proliferating baby-boomer campuses, and getting more successful Talon books, Coach House publications and spawning TISH imitations like the 70s Kootenay School of Writing--well, what are all these but just desserts for those who contributed to the making of "Canada's most influential literary magazine".'Tis true, and little else is to be expected from post-TISH self-aggrandizement of this sort. Unless I misread I thought I saw a reference to the Nobel committee under a picture of Davey holding his horse steady for a picture. Presumably Davey's version of open poetics reaches beyond our open shores, as far as to the Academy itself. Again, the usual hilarious incongruousness. Perhaps to Davey TISH equalled Davey and all the goodies that came out if it. Brian Fawcett, who happened to be there also, seems to have arrived at pretty much the same conclusion. But TISH? Where is the impetus for Canada's "most influential literary magazine?|" I suggest that, in typical Canadian style, it probably never was.
Consider. TISH was, on its surface, a fortuitous display of lettering and parochial adaptiveness: at best, a small-town penchant for curiosity, added to expanding postsecondary opportunities after World War II. Again, its strength and mainstay was nothing more than wide-eyed curiosity. Placards and some campus demonstrations that hadn't had a chance to settle to the bottom yet would have been preferable. So what I believe happened was not TISH (though something to that effect, encouraged by the American Objectivists, did get started) but rather an emerging pedagogy of imitation that's uniquely Canadian and continues with us to the present day. There's also, by the way, that pesky Robin Mathews American-Imperialist conspiracy theory in Poetry and the Colonized Mind: Tish. And given the recent revelations about a Cold War CIA and American Abstractionist Painting connection, who's to say?
But then maybe Davey was playing on some delicious ironic sense after all: namely, that TISH (or whatever the preferred reading of that title) does really happen in Canada. And nothing but TISH. A view I'd be prepared to entertain except that, well, Davey's even made a book of Tish 1-19 publications (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1975), codified, bound and scattered to wide undergraduate audiences everywhere. And, of course, Tallman's done something like it already.
