Revolution and Retreat= the Success and Failure of Tish Subjectivit Ies

REVOLUTION AND RETREAT= THE SUCCESS AND FAILURE OF TISH SUBJECTIVIT IES LANCE B. LA ROCQUE A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Programme in English York University North York, Ontario September 1999 National Library Biblioth4que nationale du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographic Services services bibliographiques 395 Wellington Stmet 395. rue Wellington OttawaON KYAONQ OttawaON KIAW Canada Canada The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accorde melicence non exclusive licence allowing the exclusive pennettant a la National Library of Canada to Bibliotheque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distriiute or sell reproduire, preter, distn'buer ou copies of this thesis in microform, vendre des copies de cette these sous paper or electronic formats. la fonne de microfiche/fh, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format electronique. The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriete du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protege cette these. thesis nor substantial extracts &om it Ni la these ni des extraits substantiefs may be printed or otherwise de celleci ne doivent etre imprimes reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son pemission. autorisation. REVOLUTION AND RETREAT : THE SUCCESS AND FAILURE OF TISH SUB JECTIVES by Lance B. La Rocque a dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies of York University in partiai fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 0 Permission has been granted to th&??&~W OF YORK UNIVERSITY to lend or sell copies of this dissertation, to the NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CANADA to microfilm this dissertation and to lend or sell copies of the film, and to UNlVERSllV MlCROFlLMS to publish an abstract of this dissertation. The author reserves other publication rights, and neither the dissertation nor extensive extracts from it may be printed or otherwise reproduced without the author's written permission. DlSSERTATlON ABSTRACT Revolution and Retreat: The Success and Failure of Tish Subjectivities Ph-D., 1999 Lance La Rocque Graduate Department of English York University "Revolution and Retreat: The Success and Failure of 7Tsh Subjectivitiesn looks carefully at the poetry and prose of the first editorial period of Tish (Tish: 7- 19)-a Vancouver little magazine from the early 1960's-within the context of both the Pound-Black Mountain tradition and the original editors' own explanations of what they wanted to achieve. While Tish's prose often expresses the more postmodern elements of the Black Mountain school, with its emphasis on community, intertextuality, and the materiality of the text, its poetry, most of it written by the editors, tends toward the more idealistic aspects of Black Mountain thought, a fusion of organicism and bourgeois individualism. Most sympathetic critics, as well as the original Tish editors themselves, describe Tish as a postmodern phenomenon or celebrate the group's importance as an early enactment of the 1960's small press scene. Such emphasis moves too quickly away from the poetry itself. It ignores how, rather than emerging as a full blown postmodem entity, Tish had to work through its initial complicity with iv. both humanism and a self-centred, bourgeois individualism. Pound-Black Mountain thought, while radically expressing advanced views of language (as intertext, the materiality of the signifier, etc.) at the same time argues for a pristine vantage point. beyond ideology, language, or subjectivity. Out of this discourse, Tish forges a kind of organic individualism, fuelled by a deep suspicion of otherness (other languages, individuals, communities). Placing Tish in its historical and intellectual contexts, as well as deciphering its unique articulation of that context, this dissertation sees the little magazine as an in-between point, still very much reflecting the liberal humanist category of the individual, while struggling toward a more decentred conception of community and self. While critics have underplayed or dismissed Tish's prose statements, the dissertation compares Tishrs poetics with its poetry, measuring them against each other. What emerges in Tish poetry is an expression not of liberation, but of the stranglehold of the individualistic culture Tish rejects. Acknowledgments I would like to thank my Supervisor Terry Goldie and my readers Len Early and Ray Ellenwood for their advice and assistance throughout the writing of this dissertation. vi. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: The Tish Phenomenon: Finding a Place in Black Mountain Discourse 1 Chapter 1: A Brief Genealogy Chapter 2: Tishls "confused thinking and execrable prose" Chapter 3: Idealism, Purity, and Authorial Control in Tish Prose Chapter 4: The State of the Self in Black Mountain and Tish Poetry Chapter 5: Women: Regulating the Other in Tish Poetry Chapter 6: Limits of Autonomy: Burning Bridges Conclusion: Expanding the Subject vii. Introduction: The Tish Pbnomenon, Finding a Place in Black Mountain Discourse Tish, its history In an attack on Canadian writers, including the Tish poets, who had turned south of the border for their models, Robin Mathews complains that these "annexationists" very often argued that a death principle is present in the cluster of ideas expressed by the words England/tradition/form/comrnunity/ Canada, and a life principle is present in the cluster of ideas expressed by the words U.S./noveltylexperimentlindividuaf/cosmopolian (152) Mathews argues that the American, Black Mountain poetics demands liberation from the weight of tradition and the constraints of traditional subjectivity. But more accurately, the Black Mountain poets create a complex and contradictory discourse which sometimes emphasises historical indebtedness and sometimes an organic transcendence of social forms. Tish can only be understood if it is viewed as situated within this tension between history and nature. Overseen by Warren Tallman, the Vancouver poets immersed themselves in Black Mountain thought, swallowed the vocabulary whole, and gave it their own shape. Shortly after discovering writers such as Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley (and through them, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams), Frank Davey, George Bowering, Fred Wah, James Reid, and David Dawson (as well as David Cull and Lionel Kearns acting as de facto editors) put out Tish, "A Magazine of Vancouver Poetry." first appearing September, 1961. In all, Tish ran through four editorial periods and 45 issues, finally folding in 1969. But because the founders of Tish instigated a new Vancouver scene and most fully articulated the Tish poetics, this dissertation refers only to the first editorial period, collected in Talon's Tish: No. 7-1 9. The succeeding editorial periods- edited respectively by David Dawson (Tish 20-24). Dan McLeod (Tish 25-40), Karen Tallman and Stan Persky (Tish 41-45)-built on the theories and practices laid down by Tishrsoriginators. Headed by Davey, the young editors of the first editorial period, with no prior experience producing a magazine, began to explore Black Mountain theory and put it into practice. And in its practice, the Tish movement put its accent on being, on the mythology of liberation and innocence rather than historical indebtedness. Except within privileged moments, the Vancouverites in fact cultivated that anti- Canadian, anti-social anarchy, which so horrified Mathews. My own concern with Tish has less to do with its rejection of a Canadian tradition than its attempts to achieve purity of perception. In their poetics and poetry, the Vancouver writers search for an organic consciousness, where self reflects the innocence of nature. This move was not necessitated by Black Mountain thought, which balances its yearnings for innocence with an equally strong accent on community, intertextual debt, and the decentring of the so-called humanist subject. This undoing of the humanist was crucial. and the Black Mountain return to natural innocence and its emphasis on intertextual construction were both used to undermine the centrality of the self. Hence Olson opposes poets like Wallace Stevens, W.B. Yeats, and T- S. Eliot because, for him, these writers, in Kantian fashion, order the world according to their imaginations rather than letting nature shape them.' Similarly, Tish takes a stand against Canadian "humanist and rationalist" poets such as Pratt, Reaney, and Gustafson (Tish No. 1-79 10). Echoing Olson, Davey stresses that these humanist poets take nature as something consciousness can order or manage (Tish No. 1-1 9 10): their poetry merely displays the detached workings of the "human mind" (10); or as he puts it in Western Wndows (1977), humanists look for "meaning in the 'order' of generalization" ("lntroducing" 158). Tish then shares the Black Mountain school's general antipathy towards the self-possessed self. Nevertheless, Tish's own version of poetic consciousness resembles the humanist's ego-centricity. For the Tish writers also place the poet at the centre of his world, dominating a stable field of natural objects, albeit through a universal, organic consciousness instead of the hurnanist's historically inscribed literary categories. Tish's overemphasis on natural purity inhibits it from facing what might be called, from an organicist viewpoint, the trauma of discourse-how language, full of historical resonances, shapes consciousness and renders pure perception impossible.

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