Frank Davey

Born in Vancouver, Frank Davey was Carl F. Klinck Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Western Ontario. Upon his retirement in 2005, the conference “Poetics and Public Culture in Canada” was held in his honour. Davey attended the University of British Columbia where he was a co-founder of the avant-garde poetry magazine TISH. Since 1963, he has been the editor-publisher of the poetics journal Open Letter. With fellow TISH poet Fred Wah, Davey founded the world’s first on-line literary magazine, SwiftCurrent in 1984.

A prolific and highly-esteemed author of numerous books and scholarly articles on Canadian literary criticism and poetry, Davey writes with a unique panache as he examines with humour and irony the ambiguous play of signs in contemporary culture, the popular stories that lie behind it, and the struggles between different identity-based groups in our globalizing society—racial, regional, gender-based, ethnic, economic—that drive this play.

Books by Frank Davey

Everybody’s Martyrology

Poems Suitable to Current Material Conditions

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aka bpNichol

When Tish Happens

Bardy Google

All These Roads

Back to the War

Mr. and Mrs. G. G.

How Linda Died

ABC of Reading TRG

Cultural Mischief

Outsider Notes

Canadian Literary Power

Popular Narratives

Louis Riel Organ & Piano Co.

Margaret Atwood

Surviving the Paraphrase

Selected Poems