Frank Davey

Sometimes I wonder whether Tish would 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 the Tish community, 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 of Tish. Without her there would have at least been very few Bowering–Davey twin-poem pages in Tish, no Tishbook titled D-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. Among as 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’s Justine, and then Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea. 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. Mountolive and Clea further 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 to Tish, “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 how Justine was “buckled” into the splendour, and wisdom, of the full quartet. Interestingly, Hopkins’s “The Windhover” would be a poem that also otherwise haunted the Tish poets. Both Bowering and Dawson would greet people around the Tish office 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.

For William Carlos Williams by Louis Dudek

You want your truths told of you—

those wavery lines!

Each pencil mark's a fiddlehead

unfolding to an island of wild fern,

O hell, did you have to do it

now, Bill

when we were just getting

the whiplash of your New Measure, crack

of the words in the sun, over the woman eating

plums, over the burning greens?

When we were getting the hang of it, to your glory,

and bringing the baskets home,

stuff you planted in your Earlier and Later

Collected Poems

praising the world

and talking to the cabman

about “Pound and economics” so many beginnings

Those forceps, stethoscopes (the way to their hearts)

and medical books you could never keep up with

—thrown away, finished?

Isn't it (death) stupid? That all a man is,

those immediate moments

you tried to cling to, should be thought “ephemeral”?

Death is a liar, Bill Williams Don't think for a minute

that we believe him It's all the same

It's as you said, every minute of it, here, now, real and forever.