REVOLUTION AND RETREAT= THE SUCCESS AND FAILURE OF TISH SUBJECTIVIT IES

LANCE B. LA ROCQUE

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Graduate Programme in English York University North York, Ontario

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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. Tempering his own idealism, Olson repeatedly attends to the history-in-the-word. The massive presence of documentary material found in various forms in The Maximus

Poems exemplifies Barthes' description of intertextuality, text "woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages (what language is not?), antecedent or contemporary" (Barthes 160, my emphasis)'. The Vancouverites. by contrast, underplay the historical accent of Black Mountain thought. Tish's editors attempt to divest themselves of "humanism" by establishing a purified word and a purified consciousness, an innocent eye, detached from "civilisation."

But opting for innocence over history leaves the Vancouver poets ensnared in the very ego-centric world they wish to escape, mirroring anti-social bourgeois fantasies of individual autonomy.

Tish sees in the webs of discourse not the tools of its own thought and play but ideology, in the crudest sense of that word-as an ominous brainwashing force from without, eager to colonise the psyche. Because the group mistakes discourse (language as intertextual system) for ideology-or sees discourse as inherently ideologicai-it adopts a paranoid stance towards culture (i-e. the modern polis), failing to interrogate, willingly, its effects from within as Olson does.

However, against Mathews, I also argue that another, self-critical, element animates the Tish project. Writers such as Olson and Creeley (and Pound and

Williams), along with their radical innovations, often maintain heroic stances (Olson's Maximus, Wlliarns' Paterson, Pound's great men of history), wrestling with the intertextual field, as if it could be tamed or exorcized of its ideological aspects. By contrast, the Tish poets allow themselves to fail, to document a riff between their heroic pretensions and their concrete poetic perceptions. In other words, they succeed by marking the failure of the heroic self, which for Tish dwindles into the alienated, atomized individual, This paradoxical failure owes a great deal to the group's appreciation of an ethic of honesty (one thinks especially of Ginsberg's celebration of The Cantos as a radical, uncensored record of "mind flux'"), letting everything stand, documenting every blemish. I discuss this feature of Tish in chapter two, but note for now that long after Tish's first editorial period ends, Frank Davey, in Western Wndows, insists upon and celebrates this aspect of the magazine: writing as a record of process, an

"embodiment of the Vancouver 'field"' ("Introducing" 158). He asserts that the

"documentary functiont' goes beyond "acceptability to any audience or reputation," because it alone captures the desired radical particularity (158). The commitment to recording every particularity allows the group to complicate a certain naive idealism and discover the negative side of their utopian, autonomous self.

another Canadian history

Tish was not only energized by the American scene. It was also a part of the movement of Canadian modernism, with roots reaching back to the early 1920'~~

always most solidly taking hold in the small presses. Frank Davey writes in From

There to Here that while the Black Mountain connection with Tsh has been

emphasised, it is also true that George Bowering "brought to Tish a considerable

knowledge of eastem-Canadian poetry including much respect for the work of

Louis Dudek, Raymond Souster, and Irving Layton" (57). Foregrounding Ms connection to the Canadian small press tradition. Davey adds that "[ulnder

Bowering's influence, Dudekk magazine Delta became one of the models for

Tish" (57).

For Dudek, Tish continues the Canadian modernist movement Writing in

Tamarack in 1965, he argued that the bloodline of modernism in Canada starts in the mid-twenties, that the "mainline... runs through Scott, Souster, Purdy-and at present centres clearly in the activity in Vancouver" ("Lunchtime" 129-30).

Tish and Canadian modernist poetry in general is intimately connected to the little magazines. The small presses, as Dudek stresses, were the crucial site where Canadians could explore and expand European and American modernisms:

The little magazine in Canada has been the most important single factor behind the rise and continued progress of Modernism in Canadian poetry. The history of the little magazine covers a period of some forty years and closely parallels the development of modern poetry itself from the mid-1920's to the present time. (Dudek and Gnarowski 203)

The modernisation of poetry in Canada erupted-challenging "the Canadian Authors' Association and ... a quasi-Victorian verse" (Norris 13)-in the pages of F.

R. Scott and A.J.M. Smith's The McGiU Forfnightly Review (1 925-7) and later

The Canadian Me~ury(1928-9). After a decade long gap. the small presses once again offered the only significant site for modernist poetry to flourish.

Some of the most important little magazines were Alan Crawley's Contemporary

Verse (1 941-t %2), Patrick Anderson's Preview (1942-5) and John Sutherfand's

First Statement (1942-5) which fused into Northern Review (196-56), Raymond

Souster's Contact (19524), and Delta (1957-66), the magazine 7Xsh partly modelled itself on.

But equally important models for Tish were the "underground" little magazines from the US., '%id Corman's Origin and LeRoi Jones' and Diane Di

Prima's The Floating Beat' (Davey, Tish 7). What unites these little magazines,

Canadian or otherwise, is the open space for writing that commercial presses would not touch. Davey writes that "[h]istorically, little magazines have sprung up whenever new, animated, and serious writing cannot find a market''

("Anything" 136). The modernism of the small presses is often eclectic, open to a variety of styles, emphasising an alternative to traditional writing. This is the case with Crawley's Contemporary Verse, as well as some of the important little magazines of the 1960's explosion, such as Alan Bevan's Evidence, David

McFadden's Mountain, Victor Coleman's Is, and even Bill Bissett's experimental

Blew Ointment. But presses like Tish are not eclectic. Tish embraces the modernism of the Black Mountain tradition, which grows out of Pound and

William Carlos Williams,

More than most of the Canadian little magazine editors, the Tish poets were a close knit collective, joined by age, "a particular geography" (Davey,

"Introducingn 1ST), and a shared theoretical vocabulary. Before the magazine began, the group studied a specific field of discourse, a counter-canon, the

Pound tradition, as seen through Black Mountain eyes. Frank Davey, recounting this tradition in Western Wndows, describes the effects of a number of

"remarkable men," most importantly their U.B.C. Professor, Warren Tallman,

"who had influenced all of us in his work as a student of contemporary poetry."

Other important figures include

Robert Duncan, the San Francisco poet whom Tallman had been instrumental in bringing to Vancouver to lecture to us for a week that July [1961]; and Charles Olson, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, H. D., Jack Spicer, Robert Creeley, Larry Eigner, Denise Levertov, Louis Zukofsky-names that Duncan made large for us in his dramatic accounts and enactments of the inner life of 20th- century English language-poetry. (%troducingn 157)

Even before the July lectures mentioned by Davey. the group had experienced

Black Mountain poet Robert Duncan, as early as 1959 and then again in

February of 1961 "at the Festival of Contemporary Arts held in Vancouver"

(Mitchell, "A Critical Study" 5). The pre-Tishites were deeply captivated by the

Black Mountain writers, "so much so that the group decided to form a study club when regular classes ended in April" (5). Weekly meetings were held at Warren Tallman's home, and included the future editors of Tish, ''their girlfriends and

other interested students, both graduate and undergraduate" (5). At these

meetings the most important works discussed were Donald Allen's The New

American Poetry, 19451960-a collection which would have an enormous

influence on the group's own poetic styles-and Olson's The Maximus Poems, as well as his enormously influential essay "Projective Verse." What emerges is the

Vancouverites' passionate engagement with each other and the Black Mountain tradition. As Bowering recounts in an interview with Barry McKinnon, what mattered for Tish was not necessarily quality poetry but rather elaborating a shared vision:

[eastern writers] were ...mad cur they would send us poems and we would write back and say, "these poems are really good, in fact these poems are better than some of the poems we've been publishing, but that's not what we're interested in." We're not interested in publishing the best poems we can find-we're interested in a line of poetry, and so forth, and they would think that was just dreadful. We rejected a lot of famous people's poems. (Harris 'I 1)

The intensity of this focus, under the "quite belligerent" (11) leadership of head editor Davey, helped invent a specific Tish attitude and style-a discourse. The editors of the first run were immersed in a shared context, shared poetic practices and outlooks, and the consequent formation of an "an almost communal identity" (Norris 107). Tish's influence has been considerable. It was, as Marilyn Meister wrote in 1967, the "earliest and... most significant of all the mimeographed, independent and fiercely individual 'little magazines"' (9) to appear in B.C. As Davey insists in

Western Windows, the collective nature of the Tish project (joining the Black

Mountain fold; defining itself as a movement), as well as the group's concern wlh local matters, "marks the turning of British Columbia poetry away from the shadows of derived, humanistic, Toronto-focused writing and towards the lights of its own energies" ("Introducing" 159). Unlike the poets of Contemporary

Verse, Tish, according to its editors, attended to the details of Vancouver:

"Phototropic and decisive" (159).

In addition to the break with B. C. poetry's eastern-centred writing, Tish also introduced stylistic innovations. Caroline Bayard (The New Poetics in

Canada and Quebec 105) and C. H. Gervais (Preface 9) both speak of the Tish poets as being among the earliest and most influential explorers of concrete poetry in Canadian writing. John Harris writes that Tish "sparked a literary renaissance on the West Coast," whose "'spin-offs' include iron, B.C. Monthly, blewointmentpress, Talon-Books, The Georgia Straight and NMFG" (Harris 13), and one might add Bowering's lmago and Wah's Sum. He also points out that

Tish influenced prominent eastern writers "like David McFadden, bpNichol, and

Victor Coleman" (1 3). Ken Norris pushes Tish's influence even further east, writing that "[tlhe west coast Tish poets were ...an important aesthetic influence

and reference point for the Vehicule poets of Montreal," that when it made its

way to eastern Canada, Tish "provided a small group of Montreal poets with the

means to see beyond Leonard Cohen and Irving Layton, something the Montreal

poets of the 60's could not do" (Barbour 120).

Tish also made a strong impression on Raymond Souster. In his preface to the important anthology New Wave Canada (1965), defining some of the

directions experimental Canadian poetry was taking, Souster singled Tish out for

special mention:

Tish, the Vancouver-based 'poetry-newsletter' which spear-headed the new direction, was poorly mimeographed, but there was no mistaking the freshness of the poetry or the stubborn seriousness of its edito rs... This collection, by the inclusion of Daphne Buckle, David Cull, David Dawson, Gerry Gilbert, Robert Hogg, James Reid and Fred Wah, gives at last the true dimension to that scene.

Souster also emphasises that Tish was not a collection of individual writers but a

"movement" whose "influence... spilled over beyond its borders."

critical responses

A testament perhaps to its lingering counter-cultural status, although Tish is 'the best documented" (Norris 97) Canadian little magazine, substantial studies of it are few and far between. The most sustained analysis of the first editorial period is Beverley Mitchell's M.A. thesis (1972). As well as providing solid background material and an overview of Tish's project, this work gives detailed readings of

I1 the poems, attending especially to formal elements. Mitchell finds Tish poets at

their most innovative when placing ''stress on sound patterns" and attempting to

achieve an "immediacy of image" (62). For her, the most successful Tish output

realizes a sense of immediacy via precision of image and techniques of aural

mimicry. My own study criticises precisely Tish's philosophy and practice of immediacy- In this sense f follow another important work on Tish, Keith

Richardson's Poetry and the Colonized Mind: Tish (1976). Like Robin Mathews.

Richardson criticizes the group's engagement with American poetics and attacks

Tish for adopting "aesthetical and ideological positions that spring from Black

Mountain sources more centrally than from Canadian sources" (13). While his patriotic anti-modernism strikes me as largely irrelevant, Richardson does take seriously the philosophical underpinnings of both Black Mountain and Tish writers, connecting their poetics to the ideology of individualism, and exploring some of the limits of the tradition's emphasis on "the elemental aspects of life" as

"fit bases for poetry" (21). While his stance towards Tish is too narrow, he manages to draw attention to important themes running through its thought.

Some other important resources on Tish include The Writing Life (1976). a collection of interviews, manifestos, and elaborations by Tish poets and by the editor of the collection, C. H. Gervais. And finally. Ken Norris's "The Black

Mountain Influence: Tish and Beyond" in his The Little Magazine in Canada

1925-80 (1984) also deserves mention. Norris's discussion not only sets Tish in its historical and intellectual context, but also traces the particular branch of modernism Tish grew into and championed. Capturing Tish's rebellion against traditional poetry, New Criticism, humanism, Noms sums up the magazine's philosophical stance thus:

The Tish poets were proprioceptive; thus they are part of the Post- Modem stream. They do not see a poem as something shaped by human intelligence that imposes its order upon language. Instead. the Tish poets follow Olson and see poetry as a participation in a greater force. That force is language. The poet does not relate to language as artisan or craftsman, but as disciple or priest. (107)

Norris's view of Whatits poetry puts to rest the humanist subject and, in postmodem style, submits to the systematicity of language-is typical of how the group's poetry has been represented, retrospectively, by critics and by the ex

Tish poets themselves. A decade after the first editorial period, Davey plays up the postmodem Tish. He writes that whereas modernist writers try "to control both their world and their art; the post modernists seek to participate in anarchic cooperation with the elements of an environment in which no one element fully controls any other" (From There to Here 20). In theory, Tish does fit into both

Norris's (French) postmodernism and Davey's post-Tish characterisations

("language becomes medium rather than tool" Introduction 19). But Tish's poetic praxis lags behind the decentralizing liberation discussed by Norris and Davey.

More accurately, Tish poetry reveals the Vancouverites' struggle with their own bourgeois ideology.

I intend to problematize the typical view summarized above by Nonis, in particular the idea that 7ish was drawn towards ''participation in a greater force ... language." Throughout the Black Mountain-Pound discourse two options continually open up and play off of each other: one strand claims that language is the informative force of consciousness and poetry (the historicaCintertextual emphasis). This strand, which proves to be ahead of its time, linking up with continental postmodemism, represents the official Tish. However, the other strand of Black Mountain-Pound thought, stressing a liberating pre-textual. natural world, makes the heavier claims on Tish poetry.

Nevertheless, as mentioned earlier, Tish poetry is able to chart the collapse of its own ego-centric fantasies of innocence and purity. This "failure" represents a move beyond innocence and purity (beyond heroics), and the beginnings of a dialogue between the culture and self, the culture in the self. In my conclusion I will discuss how this fall into history leads to a more sopnisticated poetry for some of the post-Tish poets who instead of banishing from consciousness all signs of intertextuality (especially capitalist ideology) turn their attention to its operations.

Chapter one traces important threads, as far as Tish is concerned, running through the Pound-Black Mountain discourse, in particular the tensions between the drive for purity and the celebration of intertextuality, between a transcendent, phenomenological consciousness and a socially produced subjectivity, and between a good (natural) system and the bad (cultural) system.

Chapters two and three look at Tish prose. The prose sections, even as the group asserts the possibility of presence and authorial control, exhibit some of the more radical elements4ntertextuality, communalism, challenges to the unity of consciousness-of the Pound-Black Mountain tradition. In chapter four Iturn to the poetry, discussing the more intertextual Olson (and Larry Eigner); here I mark Tish's distance from such radical strategies of anti-humanism and from

Olson's insistence on the centrality of the polis. Instead Tish develops the phenomenological and "objectist" strands of its tradition. Hence in chapters five and six, discussing Tish's stance towards women and its own intimations of alienation, respectively, I explore how Tish poets are partially drawn into a renewed complicity with a version of humanism (a heightened self-centredness) which, despite its clear potential for subversion, tends to isolate the self from community and repress some of the more radical moments found in the lively play of the prose. Ch. 1: A Brief Genealogy

'What happens at the skin is more like than different from what happens withinmt- Charles Olson ("Human Universe")

''The subject, then, is actual wihl man1'-Olson ("The Content")

"[Blody is the Yield' and is equally the experience of it. It is, then, to 'return' not to oneself as some egocentric center, but to experience oneself as in the world.. .through this agency... we call...p oetry"-Robert Creeley ("f'm Given to Write Poems")

Tish's conception of self, world, and poetry evolved out of a specific context. As

Beverley Mitchell points out in "The Genealogy of Tish,"the Vancouver movement was part of a much larger American literary tradition:

The "movement" to which the Tish poets aligned themselves was the "movement" which had its origin in the Imagist theories of the early 1900's, was modified and expanded by the developing theories of William Carlos Williams, and culminated-for the Tish poets at least-in the theories of the Black Mountain writers. ("Genealogyn 32)

The most important "imagistWwithinthis tradition is Ezra Pound. Pound's emphasis on the imagist's "object" and just as importantly (later in his career) on the open, intertextual construction of the poem powerfully influenced many writers, including Louis Zukofsky, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Robert

Duncan, and Charles Olson, to name but a few. For the Black Mountain poets in particular, as Christopher Beach points out in ABC of Influence, "Pound, and to a lesser extent William Carlos Williams," was rallied around as "an essential counterforce to T.S. Eliot and to the 'New Critical' poetry sanctioned by the

Anglo-American academy" (1). Important instances of this "counterforce" are gathered together in The Poetics of the New American Poetry (Allen and

Tallman). As Warren Tallman points out in the preface, succeeding generations had their own take on the initial radical gestures made by Williams and Pound.

As far as Tish goes, the manifestos and practices of the early modernists come into view as seen "through the eyes of Olson's generation" (x). Through the filter of these post-war writers, what Tallman calls "Olson's generation," the Tish poets discover a field that I will call, for convenience sake, following Christopher

Beach, the Pound tradition.

My aim in this chapter is not to give a comprehensive reading of the

Pound tradition, but rather to trace some key tensions carried over into Tish poetics and practice. Most importantly, from Pound to Tish an ongoing contradiction operates between self as an irreducible, natural whole and self as the product of a socio-linguistic field. This opposition between an original self and the historical production of reality takes various turns. For example, in order to preserve the ideal self as well as an ideal of language-as-system, writers of the Pound tradition (Fenollosa, Pound, Olson) attempt to find a language rooted in natural processes. Fmm this angle, a good system (nature's rooted, linguistic field) opposes the reified languages of the city. Problematically, the Vancouver poets, echoing their mentors, theorize the possibility of a language rooted in nature and a poetic consciousness attuned to the organism, not informed by

industrial culture's ideologies. The problem with this desire for natural purity is

that it fails to generate a more complex understanding of the relationship

between an allegedly natural self and the cultural world. Consequently, Tish

cannot see any continuity between its own romantic individualism and the

humanism and economic individualism the group so violently rejects.

Several recent studies4 have underscored the deep roots of the ideology

of the individual (not seen by its proponents as such!) in the Pound tradition,

going back to Emerson and Whitman. In The Limits of American Literary

Ideology in Pound and Emerson, Cary Wolfe even compares Pound's image of self to the early humanism of Karl Man. Both Marx and Pound heavily invest in the fantasy of a non-alienated "whole self'; both imagine "the total life of the individual more various than the current economic and political structures that bound it" (37). One thread dominating the Pound tradition then stresses "a whole man" searching for liberation from mechanized culture. But just as significant for the heirs of Pound-Black Mountain thinking (especially for the post-

Tish Tish writers and the "Language Poets") is that other thread which stresses community, the materiality of the signifier, and the productive forces of intertextuality. This latter emphasis complicates the relationship between self and language (as historical system as opposed to natural eco-system), allowing the poet to document the construction of, for example, the ideology of the individual, and the related construction of masculinity.

prelude to Pound: Fenollosa 's natural language

From its first issue on, Tish asserts that authentic poetry has a continuous relationship to the world; it is not detached from life by any Hegelian dead letter.

The poet should properly be at one with the world and word. The word emerges beyond the self in the "real world" (Reid Tish 7 14)=; poetry is a total, participatory event, which transcends subjective screens of an "interpretive faculty" (Bowering

Tish 1 17); poetry emerges from the body; it is a "life-thing" (Davey Tish 1 19).

Tish owes such thinking to those idealistic moments of the Pound tradlion which celebrate instinct and action, and repress linguistic mediation. It is characteristic of American poetics to envision the new poet in the new world as an instinctual, natural being, opposed to the allegedly decrepit European poet ("haggard, dwarfed, ludicrous" says Whitman of the Europeans, in a letter to Emerson6).

Aligned with nature, the new American poet, as hero, attempts to rethink the world as process, not practice. Pound sought to find the instinct in the word, to find a theory, ironically, which justified the idea of a non-alienating language

(Wolfe 189). According to Wolfe, Pound's desire to find linguistic "first principles in nature" (f87) must be seen againsi the sweeping changes in linguistic theory occurring on both sides of the Atlantic, signified by the works of Gotlob Frege and Ferdinand de Saussure, which detach the sense (Frege) and sign (Saussure) from referent.

Pound was significantly influenced by Ernest Fenollosa's understanding of the Chinese ideogram, which offen a spirited reaction to any theory of self- referential sign systems. Pound used Fenollosa's work as evidence for his own arguments against Western conceptualization. His writing made a lasting impression on Pound's thinking, and left its stamp on The Cantos. Moreover,

Fenollosa paints a vivid picture of what a return to an authentically poetic culture must look like. As with Pound, he calls for a return of consciousness to nature. of language to substance. For Fenollosa, in "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry," the logicians, grammarians, and mtemakers impose an alien, self-enclosed order over nature, concealing its vitality.

To cure abstraction, a curiously Western disease, one must recover the natural language that "is close to things" (18). Fenollosa brings consciousness home to Eden via the Chinese character: "[llike Nature, the Chinese words are alive and plastic, because thing and action are not formally separated" (22).

With Western language, a fallen, even murdering language, "[nlature would seem to have become less like a paradise and more and more like a factory"

(28). Generalization produces distance, is-ness, mortifying "states rather than acts" (20),and "states" destroy life, like dead cells petrifying nature's organs.

Poetic life can be recovered by burning away the accidents of subjectivity and listening to "nature's suggestions" (27). Reacting to the reified sign (i-e. Frege's and Saussure's self-referential systems). Fenollosa returns language to earth:

"the primitive metaphors do not spring from arbitrary subjective processes. They are possible only because they follow objective lines of relations in nature herself" (26). Against an unrepressed nature, against life, we "impoR..our own formalisms"; we "torture this vital speech" (22). True poetry opposes this death:

"Metaphor, the revealer of nature, is the very substance of poetry... the universe is alive wlh myth" (27). Fenollosa's Chinese ideogram lacks nothing:

The fact is that almost every written Chinese word is properly just such an underlying word, and yet it is not abstract It is not exclusive of parts of speech but comprehensive; not something which is neither a noun, verb, nor adjective, but something which is all of them at once and at all times. (23)

This ideogrammatic window to natural objectivity overthrows the arbitrary play of human subjectivity and social practices in general. For Fenollosa-more fully against the ego than Pound or Olson-subjectivity ideally dissolves into a natural plenitude, a non-alienating system. The solution for a non-ideogrammatic language lies in etymology. Western language is decrepit, says Fenollosa (it

"gives little vividness" 25). The living word lies deeply entombed in cultural processes ("[tlhere is little or nothing in a phonetic word to exhibit the embryonic stages of its growth. It does not bear its metaphor on its face" 28), but it remains salvageable through etymological archaeology. Under the layers, the true word, the "primitive" word spawned by nature herself still breathes. "Abstract terms, pressed by etymology, reveal their ancient roots still embedded in direct action" (26). Fenollosa imagines a magical visibility, wherein the thing's aura extends continuously to poetic language: i-e., no Hegelian murder, for nature's vital substances course through poetic language itself. The Chinese character positively blushes, so that "[ilts etymology is constantly visible" (28). Constantly available for perception, the Chinese character preserves nature's "creative impulse and processt' (28).

Consciousness so often identified with alienation here marries the natural thing. Joining poetry and science ("Poetry agrees with science'' 3 I),Fenollosa argues that poetic consciousness is nature recovering itself from logic's perversions: "Poetry only does consciously what the primitive races did unconsciously" (27); the poet fuses with the raw "pictorial visibility" (27),by

"feeling back along the ancient lines" (27). Fenollosa's metaphors construct an overflowing world, an abundant earth and body: "heart" (28). process;

"substance1'(27), blood (29), growth, "roots" (28), "soil" (28), "primitive sap" (28).

''things" (29), mother nature, "a vast storehouse of forces" (32). These natural forces glow with a vibrant aura: "nimbus" (28); numen; "demi-urge" (32);

"luminous background" (27). While poetic consciousness emanates from nature

("Will is the foundation of our speech" 32), a deathly fragmentation characterises the modern social world. Hence he attacks modernity's signatures, such as egoism. "narrow utilitarian meanings" (31), the "commercial," mechanization,

"factory," "logic," arbitrary, abstract systems or "rows of separate 'particulars"' (27). These mechanical systems are, according to Fenollosa, unnatural. Logic

dissects. Dictionaries "embalm"; European "logic thought" is "dried like a walking

stick" (28) or "dead white plaster" (33). Fenollosa rejects a cosmos organized by

the dead letter, programmatic institutions, and abstract systems, replacing them

with a cosmos organized by natural forces. Nature itself embodies a utopian

organization, a good system.

a hawk is a hawk, the end of mediation: EmPound and W.C. Wlliams

Fenollosa provides for Pound an idealized image of what a natural language

might be. Pound however spends much of his effort in more worldly pursuits.

attacking the capitalist state. In the fish context, some of the most important elements of Pound's vision are his individualism, his insistence on the presence

of the referent and his (theoretical) rejection of modem culture (its economic systems, its language) as too arbitrary and disconnected from nature. In each of these aspects, Pound attempts to end or severely limit the mediatory function of

language over objects of perception. Pound found in Fenollosa's writing

"evidence" for his overriding project: to heal the alienating gap opened between consciousness and the natural world. He attempts to remove mediation, in a number of ways: insisting on an unchanging (natural) realm of reference and by emphasizing production (natural) over reified exchange values (economic or linguistic). His theory of imagism was an important nodal point, picked up by succeeding generations of poets. What Pound admired in H.D., whom he

deemed "imagiste", for her "Hermes of the Ways," was its insistence upon the

priority of the image. In that poem, as Hugh Kenner writes in The Pound Era,

"perception slides over perception, each line the natural unit of the process," embodying imagism in its purest spirit (175):

The hard sand breaks, and the grains of it are clear as wine.

Far off over the leagues of it, the wind, playing on the wide shore, piles little ridges, and the great waves break over it. (Hilda Doolittle 13-1 4)

Along with its precision, Pound admired the poem because it escaped the impurities of writing, since "H.D. had lived with the things she wrote of since childhood, and 'knew them before she had any book-knowledge of them"'

(Kenner 174). The history invested in language (its paradigmatic associations) gives way before the perception stored in the poet's mind. The preservation of the object was at the heart of the "principles agreed upon" by H. D., Richard

Aldington and Pound in 1912:

1. Direct treatment of the "thing" whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome. (Pound, literary Essays 3)

"Metronome" time, a rationalized time, is not lived time or natural time. Like Victorian poetic forms ("Don't chop your stuff into separate iambs1'6). and

capitalist economics, rational time has little to do with what they believed to be

"natural totality." Pound's "criteria prescribed a tech nid hygienet1 (Kenner 178).

bracketing the role subjectivity (a mere object by his second rule) and inherited

linguistic networks play in producing objects.

Pound wanted to combine the symbol and the thing, or at least to put the signified before the signifier, so that the former can shine through the latter: "if a man use 'symbols' he must so use them that their symbolic function does not obtrude; so that a sense, and the poetic quality of the passage, is not lost to those who do not understand the symbol as such, to whom, for instance, a hawk is a hawk" (Pound 9). Bad writing comes from the failure to see one's way out of the symbolic network, ''from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol" (38).

Many years after his involvement with imagism (1 912) and his initial immersion in Fenollosa's theory of Chinese poetry (1 913). Pound continued to commit himself to healing the West's division of word and thing. During a six week retreat, in 1937, he contemplated the "ideograms and the crib" (Kenner

448). He claimed that without a dictionary he could transparently recover the ideogram's underlying meanings: "When I disagreed with the crib or was puzzled by it I had only the look of the characters and the radicals to go on from"

(Selected Prose 96). In the same essay, Pound writes that, "[tlhere are the categories of ideogram not indicated as such in the dictionaries, but divided

really by the feel of their forms, the twisted as evil, the stunted, the radianr

(107). Kenner comments that Pound was caught up in "the old western dream, a

universal language; but expressed in natural signs": where one can find "in

nature are signatures" of lasting "coherence (449). This coherence is lost in the

occident in part, at least metaphorically for Pound, because of Greek

philosophy's severance of the word from the material world. "Greek philosophy,"

writes Pound, in a move foundational for Olson and Tish, "was almost an attack

upon nature" (Selected Prose 100). Chinese philosophy (i-e. Confucius) by

contrast points to an unchanging field of meanings:

The sick part of our philosophy is "Greek splitting" ... The Confucian is totalitarian. When the aims of Shun and Wan were set together, though after a thousand years interval, they were as two halves of a tally stick. (99)

"Totalitarian" is here positive, an unchanging fullness of nature, hidden beneath

"Greek" abstraction. For Pound (and Olson retraces this path closely), the

Greeks, precursors of Saussure and Frege, symbolize uprooted language and

fragmented social relations. In other words, Pound opposes, as Paul Morrison

suggestively puts it in The Poetics ofFascism, "the fetishization of tropological

displacement... compulsive mobility" (18). In Guide to Kulchur, Pound complains

that the Odyssey presents a "world of irresponsible gods, a very high society without recognizable morals, the individual responsible to himself' (38). Again,

Pound's paradigmatic counter-discourse comes from Confucius (Kung): ...the need for coordination of individuals expressed in Kung's teaching differs radically both from early Christian absolutism and from the maritime adventure morals of Odysseus or the loose talk of argumentative greeks. (38)

Against "loose talk," Pound would keep Odysseus home, as it were, tie him to his

community, in an "organic" homeostasis. Pound's Confucius pins down

community and contains language: "Kung," writes Pound, wanted "To call people

and fhings by their names, that is by their correct denominations, to see thaf the

terminology was exad' (16). Pound's lifelong project was to anchor "loose talk."

Against the fetishization of language and currency as selfenclosed, self-

referential systems (Kenner 316). Pound advances towards the things

themselves, nature the origin of authentic human unity. He exhibits a deep

paranoia regarding modem cultural systems, which seemed to constantly

congeal into rigid forms, negatively informing and colonizing the individual (Wolfe

44). Guide to Kulchuraligns the true artist with the pragmatic man, the man

close to the earth:

The nation is profoundly foolish which does not get the maximum of best work out of its artists. The artist is one of the few producers. He, the farmer and the artisan create wealth; the rest shift and consume it. (222)

His challenge to Odyssean "compulsive mobility" (Morrison) is comprehensive,

linking signifier to signified and consciousness to matter. Wth imagism,

Kungism, and his fascination with the ideogram, he puts nature before the signifier, allowing the poet to discern authentic connections from rootless abstraction, permanent voices from ephemeral ones. His emphasis on a romantic individualism grounds the poet in the sensuous, natural world-opposed to the dissociative sensibility imposed by capitalism. Moreover Pound's project includes other important semiotic systems associated with the fragmenting processes of modem culture. Most significantly, his economic solutions, like his linguistic ones, involve a radical dissolution of mediation (between money and commodity), turning the self-referential system into a servant of things themselves. In Machine Alf and Other WMings Pound insists that "Language is here to serve thought'' (112), and the same might be said of money: that it is here to serve its objects. Money, Pound complains, "is not a product of nature but an invention of man" (Selected Prose 316). Like language, money has been severed from nature and use values. Pound demands a reunion: 'The nations have forgotten the difference between animal. vegetable, and mineral; or rather, finance has chosen to represent all three of the natural categories by a single means of exchange, and failed to take account of the consequences" (316).

Tellingly, one of Pound's preferred systems was designed by the Brazilian economist Silvio Gessell:

The German, Gessell, and the Italian, Avigliano, almost contemporaneously, devised a still more interesting means of achieving greater economic justice. They proposed a paper-money system by which everyone was obliged, on the first of the month, to affix a stamp on every note he possessed equal to one per cent of the note's face value ...Under Gessell's system each issue of notes consumes itself in 100 months. (317-1 8) Like so much vegetation, money itself should decay, so that it cannot be horded,

so that it does not become itself a commodity. In accepting this economic vision,

Pound goes beyond making the sign selvant to the thing: "[his] aim is not that the single monetary unit should correspond to a single type of commodity but rather that the order of money should correspond to the order of things" (Wolfe

159, my emphasis). With the subject close to the earth and the word (or money) fusing to its object, Pound would practically abolish the moment of reflection, the pause wherein consciousness detaches itself from nature, wherein language might produce a plurality of natures and representations of social life. In such moments, he shrinks from the worldly world. He dreams of the whole man fused to the totality of nature, and gazes with paranoia, as so many pages of his prose testify, at the various signatures of modern culture (publishing industry, capitalist economics, and the Western signifying system).

If Pound resists enculturation, ironically, through an intense engagement with culture, listening to those moments throughout history where the authentic shines through the word, William Carlos Williams takes his stance more directly, more phenomenologically. As James Breslin puts it, Williams was, like Pound, another modernist poet "whose anti-romanticism is a cover for his latent romanticism" (xi). From Williams (and Olson), Tish developed its own emphasis on the poet's perception and locus, on what Beverley Mitchell describes as the "response to the locale and life of the poet" (&ACritical Studyn 72). As Mitchell insists (72). Tish takes seriously Williams' demand from in the American Grain:

But he who will grow... must sink first. ...He wants to have the feet of his understanding on the ground. his ground, the ground. the only ground that he knows. that which is under his feet. (213)

Both perception (poet) and ground (locus) appear repeatedly in Williams' writing as real objects which resist cultural systems. Like Pound, although without the intense engagement with literary history, Williams wants to severely limit the play of the signifier. Williams' work is famous for its matter of factness. The details of his verse "do not combine into symbolic clusters but instead create a literal specificity" (Breslin 52, my emphasis). Like Pound's call "to the things themselves," Williams also calls for a return to things, in "A Sort of Song":

Let the snake wait under his weed and the writing be of words, slow and quick, sharp to strike, quiet to wait, sleepless.

-through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones. Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks. (Selected Poems 145)

Taking this injunction, "No ideas but in things," to heart, Tish quotes and alludes to the phraseas well as imitating Williams' direct style-in several poems7.

Indeed Williams' spare poetry reinforces the Pound tradition's desire in general to reach the beyond of language. From Williams in particular, Tish learns, as he

writes in 'The Importance of Place." that "[tlhere is a certain position of the

understanding anterior to all systems of thought" (Embodiment 132).

Unlike Pound, Williams sees America, the New World, as a potentially

pure, natural ground. In order to emphasize this renewal, Williams rejects the

standard American canon. His hero is the very uncanonical Edgar Allen Poe

(Kutzinski 4), and precisely because he finds in Poe a writer able to escape the

burden of symbolic networks, to anchor his language in a specific sense of place.

His essaylmanifesto, 'Edgar Allen Poe," speaks repeatedly of "a new locality," "a

reawakened genius of place" (Amedcan Grain 216), "points of firmness by

which to STAND" (219). Williams takes America as a state of mind.

characterized by the elemental and instinctual. His America transcends

historical limits, while Europe, as appropriated by Americans at least, represents

the sorry mediations of a decaying Old World ("puffed," "grotesque" bragging,

"self deceptions" 220).

Through Poe, Williams ridicules backward-looking Americans for their

"colonial imitation" (21 9), for their dependence on previous impressions ("What

you lack, copy" 219). The truly American poet casts aside all of that cheap

importation and takes possession of an authentic object making it his property:

"It was a wish to HAVE the world or leave it. It was the truest instinct in America demanding to be satisfied, and an end to makeshifts, self deceptions" (220). For Williams, Poe. a virile conqueror, grasps his female catch, without any mediation.

He writes that "[olne is forced on the conception of the New World as a woman.

Poe was a new De Soto" (220). By taking the land, his ultimate referent, as a mythic, nature goddess (a version of his feminine deity from "The Wanderer''),

Williams' ideal poet can sink into the ground and outside of history ("be CLEAN"

220), where the perceiving "sour' can always find a "fresh beginning" (219).

Whenever cultural practices muck up authentic reality, one can always return to the "least mediated state," and keep perception 'Yree from enculturation"

(Markos 46). In contrast to the mainstream poets of his era ("Lowell, Bryant, etc.") who "concerned poetry with literature" (American Grain 221), Poe's alternative "conceptions of the use of language" (221) involve plucking the substantiai word from its intertextual resonances: Poe isolates "SOMETHING from the inchoate mass" (221); for him "words were not hung by usage with associations, the pleasing wraiths of former masteries" (221)-

Interestingly, unlike Pound whose contaminating realm was always all too airy, abstractly systematic or weblike, Williams' intrusive sphere is described as an amorphous, sticky substance, cultural droppings over nature's vital definitions.

Williams writes not only of the "inchoate mass," but of "a field of unrelated culture stuccoed upon" the "primitive destiny of the land" (212), "the smear of common usage," and ''the gluey imagination" (221, a metaphor worked over by

Lionel Keams, in 'Vastation in the Stacks," Tish 7). Pernaps echoing H. D.'s transparent sand (see above), Williams demands that "particles of language must be clear as sand" (221). If history is a kind of mud, to put it mildly, poured over discrete, crystalline clarity, the truly American artist's task is to clean up the word. In a letterto Robert Creeley, Williams writes that

Bad art is then that which does not serve in the continual service of cleansing the language of all fixations upon dead, stinking dead, usages of the past Sanitation and hygiene or sanitation that we may have hygienic writing. ('William" 140)

One of the engines of Pound's and Williams' work is the strong transcendentalist impulse at odds with the limits imposed by mediation. Both of their poetic practices exceed this thrust, but idealism is essential to their thought. Both set themselves heroic tasks: to evade the clustery or gluey signifier, evade the productions of the modem city which are so removed from nature, return to the thing, recover the soul or the natural personality. The desire for a return to nature, as it appears here-and then restaged in Black Mountain thought-plays an enormous role in the Ti3h group's thinking, in underwriting an isolationist poetics (the natural soul fleeing the city, fearing contamination by the other's gaze, language, and modes of production). As its poetry attests, abolishing almost all social presence and attending to the universal in nature, such an anti- social elementalism infuses much Tish poetry. Problematically, the isolationist strain of the Pound tradition, as opposed to its powerful communal gestures,

[eaves Tish ill-equipped to gauge consciousness's connection to cultural signs, commerce, ideology, intertext. Like Mlliams and Pound, Tish remains obligated at all costs to the "priority of the individual" (Wolfe 44). Tish goes along with

Pound's critique of modernity, and falters with his same limitations. Wore argues that Pound, in the realm of education, placing his "emphasis on the objectifying power of the university anticipates, in a rather uncanny way,

Foucault's anatomy of the examination as the means by which individuals are made objects of knowledge, the better to be controlled" (44). However, because the individual is taken as an a prion'category by Williams, Pound and Tish, none can see those points, pace Foucault or Marx, where the self and culture fuse together, or, more extremely, where the self emerges as an effect of class, discourse, and technology.

Pound and Williams reject the self-referential play of language as a sort of disease. To cure the disease, both try to bolt sign to referent, individual to earth, perception to object, without mediation. Both poets recreate age-old idealistic dualisms, in particular between nature and culture and subject and object. But at the same time Pound and Williams leave the next generations with some radical points of departure. Neither poet finally accepts the ideal poet of "Hugh Selwyn

Mauberly" who is "out of key with his time," trying to "wning[l lilies from the acorn", "Unaffected by 'the march of events"' (Selected Poems 61). Both poets want to create open forms capable of addressing the non-literary world, the here and now. Williams' later work insists upon poetry as an interrelated process, as a "a field of action" (Selected Essays 280). Paterson, like The Cantos, often foregrounds the documentary, putting the poet's ego in abeyance, dispersing self into a phenomenological or textual field. The Black Mountain poets' (and to a lesser degree Tish's) appropriation of the concept of fied offers a powerful challenge to idealized notions of the self. Pound's work is most extreme in terms of potentially decentring the ego, and opens the way for writers like Olson to hear the ideological resonances in language.

The Cantos, despite Pound's intentions, confronts the reader with a thoroughly intertextual paradigm, where soul or essential personality is imbricated in "alien" textual material, a palimpsest comprised of layers and layers of ideograms, Greek script, musical scores, ecclesiastical edicts, diary entries,

"legal writs, parliamentary statutes, contracts, treaties, log books, legislative codes, and regulations governing that most pervasive document of all, money"

(Furia 2). The cubistic or collage-like presentation of voices and documents allows The Cantos to be taken in other than the conservative spirit intended by

Pound. Marjorie Perloff sees The Cantos as a postmodern break with essentialisms (of self, word to referent correspondence, metaphor) and into "the art of montage, of 'documentary' surface upon which dislocated fragments are juxtaposed" (7 57). For her Pound flattens out history into a linguistic present, a linguistic field. She points out his rapid, documentary shifts in voice, script, dialect, as in the Malatesta Cantos (Vlll-XI) with the shift from a Latin document "complete with bibliographical references to its sources" (188) to a "slangy,"

contemporary telling of the tale:

SCRIPTURAM MULTI LEGERUNT, DEINDE ASTANTE POPULO, IGNE IMMISSO, ET PYRA SIMULACRUM REPENTE FLAGRAVIT. Corn. Pi0 11, Liv. VII, p.85. Ynarte, p. 288.

...*...-**----**--*-.---*----.--*---**---.--*- So that in the end that pot-scraping little runt Andreas Benzi, da Siena Got up to spout out the bunkum That that monstrous swollen, swelling s.0.b. Papa Pio Secundo Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini da Siena Had told him to spout, in their best bear's-greased latinity.. .

(Canto X 44)

For Perloff, this paginal field is primarily a textual space where history becomes

"the impetus for the play of language" (188). But most importantly, in terms of the Black Mountain and Tish context (affecting in particular the Vancouverites' ideas and their prose), Pound's play with the document, typography, and the materiality of the signifier makes The Cantos "one of the first modem poems to question the centrality of personal emotion" (199). Even though Pound himself was attempting to impose his will (his "ego beak as Olson calls it8) on history, the sheer number of documents and foreign scripts often thrown together, paratactically or as collage, effectively displaces the controlling consciousness.

According to Christopher Beach. Pound opened the way for the Black Mountain school by displaying every influence, all of his intertextual debts, rather than

concealing them and presenting his work as if it emerged full blown from an

individual soul. The Cantos underscore history's constructive power over the self:

...the poem adopting as its source and frame of reference not only poetic language and tradition but also a world exterior to literature whose social, cultural, and historical presence is in continual dialogue with the poet's aesthetic project (Beach 84)

For Beach and Perloff, Pound's Cantos contribute to the Pound tradition's

emphasis on process-the process of textual construction, intertextuality, the

materiality of the signifier. But both Pound and Williams also contribute their

idealisms, even if rewritten. For Olson-deeply influencing nsh, in this respect- while relentlessly dispensing with such implied unities as the humanist soul,

nevertheless invents his own idealism, rooted in natural ecology and physiology.

Although he attempts to elude Williams' and Pound's dualisms, in order to preserve natural primordial origins, Olson often opens up profound tensions between ideal images of self (as pure biology) and natural systems and the negative systems manufactured by the modern city.

Olson's infiuence on Tish cannot be overemphasized. The group draws heavily on all aspects of his thought, including his philosophy of history, open form, and the poet's intertextual debt (acted out mostly in Tish prose). But most significantly, Olson's idealism animates the Vancouverites' poetry. It is essential to look at this grandfather of Black Mountain poetics, since his language of submission to nature, his organicism, his view of language as a musical score, and his view of the poet's relation to the reader are thoroughly exploited by the

Tish group, who similarly resort to organic metaphors of self, call for an

"immersion in the greater natural order" (Tish 5 101), and dramatically close the gap between poet and reader (Tish 4 71).

poetic consciousness, cleaner, greener pastures

In part, for Charles Olson, natural systems (eco-systems) and natural subjects

(as bodily reflex, rugged individual, Whitrnanesque soul) displace humanism and

European history. Like Pound and Williams, Olson believes in a more authentic world, one concealed at present by the arbitrary play of Western culture. 'There are," he writes in "Human Universe," "laws, that is to say, the human universe is as discoverable as that other. And as definable" (161). In order to discover the laws of the universe, the misuse of language ("generalizing" language 162) must be confronted: "if we are to see some of the laws afresh, it is necessary to examine, first, the present condition of language" (162). But Olson, compared to

Pound or Williams, more thoroughly desubjectivizes the self. Instead of envisioning ego or soul trapped within or beneath discourse, Olson's transcendent human being is an "instrument" ("both the instrument of discovery and the instrument of definition" 162) and more often, a cell embedded in a harmonious eco-system:

experience... needs now to be returned to the only two universes which count, the two phenomenal ones, the two a man has need to bear on because they so bear on him: that of himself, as organism, and that of his environment, the earth and the planets. (163)

Against the lyrical self-that emoting. reflecting, imagining personality-Olson, and other Black Mountain affiliates, think in terms of material reflexes, whether mechanical or organic. To remove any mediation, any arbitrary subjed-vityfrom experience, Black Mountainers, at times, dissolve the humanist mind into scientific processes. Consider the following sample of Black Mountain discourse, selected from The Poetics of the New American Poetv (Allen and

Tallman): for Charles Olson, the poem is a "high energy construct." an "energy- discharge" ("Projectiven 148); Robert Duncan writes of a "discharge of energy," the "physiological," ''the locomotor muscular-nervous system" ('Notesn 191); for

Robert Creeley, poetry is connected to "scientific thinking" ("Introduction" 258); for Robin Blaser, storytelling itself originates in the "chemical": a "scientific basis"

(239),found in children and primitive tribes, grounds poetic consciousness. The poet recalls this original relation to the universe, utilizes his proprioceptive engagement with the world (239). Blaser combines myths of childhood innocence-a perpetual theme from Whitman to Tish-with science, stating that

Edith Cobb's "cosmic sense" and Margaret Mead's "human instinctual need for a perceptual relation to the universe" (239) provide a scientific basis for Olson's

"proprioceptive process" (239).

Not surprisingly, Olson's scientific metaphors offer the reader no interpretive slack. He imagines, in a move Tish poets recreate almost exactlylg

39 the poet-poem-reader relationship as an electrical circuit, the reader merely absorbing the poem's physical force: "A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader" ("Projectiven 148). The word "energym'-rather than message, meaning, affect-emphasizes the poem (and poet for that matter) as thing. The projective poet's word is a natural, electric charge drawn through his or her body from natural objects, preserved on the page. ready to zap the reader. Olson opposes just such physical energy to meditative verse (i-e. verse for the "Egotistical Sublime," or "the private-soul-at-any-public-wall" 147), in the opening of "Projective Verse". Projective verse is described as force:

(projectile (percussive (prospective vs* The NON-Projective (or what a French critic calls "closed verse, that verse which print bred. ..

In his most scientific moments, the poetic charge or discharge is, like the laws of physics, relentless and immutable.

The organic self is closely related to the electrical self: both scientific law and natural law transcend the arbitrary values of commodified America. Olson and Duncan, in particular, attend directly to the body and nature (Olson constantly idealizes nature: man is "a creature of nature"; "Nature works from reverence" rProjectiven 1561; "nature's creatures" rHurnann1691) in an effort to break from cultural scripts or programmatic thought. Action, within nature, counters conventional institutions and semiotic systems. including rituals of versification. Olson translates the reflective ego, which has strayed too far from the body, back into pure biology, most forcefully in "Proprioception":

Today: movement at any cost. Kinesthesia: beat (nik) the sense whose end organs lie in the muscles, tendons, joints, and are stimulated by bodily tensions (-or relaxations of same). Violence: kniveslanything, to get the body in. (182)

This rneditationfdefinition displaces reff ection. returning to ''the cavity of the body," "organs," "viscera" (18l), finding "depth," not in metaphor, but literally in the "movement of [the body's] own tissue" (183). "Proprioception" ties mind directly to body, to inner organs and skin-although Olson, unlike Jack Spicer, will still speak of ''the soul" (182). Similarly undermining the ego-center, Robert

Duncan characterises human consciousness as a dynamic system of bodily functions:

THE RISK: to suggest that the conquest of babble by the ear-to distinguish and organize, to make significant, to relate as experience, to nameis the origin of speech and emotion. Speech at this level articulates internal sensation, "The inner voice." The recurrence of vowels and consonants, the tonal structure, is related to heart and alimentary tract in its rhythmic organization. ("Notesn 190)

Olson's organs and Duncan's organic system theorize a natural, universal connection between language, body and natural processes. For Duncan, the poetic consciousness can trace linguistic play to bodily sources: "Ambiguities, word-play, ironies, disassociations appear as we watch the meanings" (1gl), and these modes recall bodily actions of which words are a product, for it "is the action of the language, the muscular correlation of the now differentiated parts of the poem, that so expresses itselfr (1 91). Collapsing mind into a transcendent bodylO, Duncan and Olson create an essential point of resistance, not assimilable. to the arbitrary movement of Western history. While these naturalistic fantasies remain indebted to variations of human centredness (with their souls, inner voices, and athletic ego images) and essentialisms (the purity of flesh and perception), they also embody a collective ethic, posing field against field", discounting the tired American myth wherein the individual struggles against the masses or resists narrow communal moralities. In my view, Tish, while flirting with Olson's dispersed body (corporeal and textual), favours his more centred, muscular (Maximal) body, often looking and acting the very picture of the alienated ego!

Black Mountain rhetoric often resembles the very commodified culture it attacks, even if its goal is to appropriate the forces that colonise the authentic self. In the modem capitalistic world, the self is ideally divested of emotional content, which might disrupt the efficiency of production. Capitalism's ideal person, like the Black Mountain ideal, is an instrument, the proverbial cog in the machine, acting reflexively, without any disruptive evaluative pauses. Olson describes "man" as "an object" ("Projective" 156), a tool (he speaks of 'Yhe use of a man, by himself and thus by others" 156), and a technology (The instrument of discovery" ["Human" 1621; his human senses as "external pick-ups" 168). Jack Spicer characterises the poet, in an image from the business world, as a dictap hone. For Spicer, poet becomes machine: not a "beautiful machine which manufactured the current for itself," but an instrument that records "something from the outside coming in" (228). The poet-machine then passively takes

"dictation" from some superior force (like a "Martian," as Spicer says, or. Iwould add, a boss) that has nothing to do with himself: "there is a difference between you and the outside of you ...y ou are something which is being transmitted into"

(228). In this sense, just as the reader is imposed upon by the poet, the poet is forced to react to an equally determined set of relations. As Olson writes "Mrom the moment [the poet] ventures into FIELD COMPOSITION-Puts himself in the open-he can go by no other track other than the one the poem under hand declares, for itself" ("Projective" 148). The poet enters the realm of the visible and the present. leaving no room for negation or reflection.

in history, in the world

Olson's rewriting of American transcendentalism as a universal, but at least semi-dispersed body-substance, perhaps makes him less averse to the textual dispersal of the self than Williams and Pound. In other words the partially fragmented body might be less afraid of the fragmentation of the city. At any rate, speculation aside, Olson does plunge into the thick of the city. Both challenging commodified cities and envisioning his ideal Gloucester, he is at home in the midst of the polis, taking on the flux, fusing with its elements, disappearing into the dissemination of the historical signifiers. Olson appropriates a worldly language for his poetic consciousness, so that he can be equal to the modem city's rapid tempo. Once again, his ideal self avoids contemplative attitudes: "he has to behave, and be, instant by instant, aware of some several forces" ("Projective" 148). In the busy, business-oriented city one must act, without the luxury to pause and think:

get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen. (149)

The world simply appears. coming at you, with bewildering speed. Speed and sound, like a gunshot, closes the distance between self and other. In a telegraphic, headline style, Olson demands that his poetic consciousness "must must must MOVE and "USE USE USE" (149).

Olson's thought pulls consciousness towards a primordial human nature grounded in the body, but, as suggested above, he slides fluidly from eco-system to social system, even the reviled social system, such as the reductive

"UNIVERSE of discourse ("Human" 162) stretching from the ancient Greeks to the modem culture of monopoly capitalism. He seeks out a universal language grounded in a transcendental bio-logic. But at the same time, he relentlessly discovers the historical claims on human perception. With his '%oncepts of person, place, thing, action, past, present, reality," according to Walter Kalaidjian, Olson underscores "how such notions are generated out of the

differential weave and signifying chains of 'istorinlrnuthos" (78). And while some

critics (i.e. Beach, Kalaidjian) risk underplaying his debt to American

transcendentalism, Olson very often does submerge consciousness within the

play of historical signification. "Like it or not, see it or not," he writes in The

Special View of History, "history is the function of any one of us" (I7). Elsewhere

he writes that the poet's authentic muthos 'WII disclose the intimate connection

between person-as-continuation-of-millennia-of-all-past-peons, places, things

and actions-as-data (objects)" (Additional Prose 7).

conclusion, locus, politics, essence

Neither Olson's organic body nor his sense of history necessarily retreats from

politics. Potentially, both substance and system challenge a modern America

dominated not only by commodification but also, according to Olson, by "the

Mob, the Church, Big business, and their political lackeys, the Kennedys and the

Nixons, desperately try[ing] to run the show" (Doria 148). From this angle,

Olson's history resembles a politicized version of Williams' localism: he

decentres, isolates and appropriates those elements of the historico-linguistic

complex which are most useful or ready to hand. History is "the new localism, a

polis to replace the one which was lost in various stages all over the world from

490 B.C. on" (Special View 25). Also a sign of the local, Olson's sense of body also potentially resists the forces of commodification, refusing the sweep of alienating technologies and discourses. Ideally, body reaches out to a more humanizable machinery and rejects the alienating technologies of the past:

What we have suffered from, is manuscript, press, the removal of verse from its producer and its reproducer, the voice, a removal by one, by two removes from its place of origin and its destination. (ttProjective"153)

The typewriter recovers immediacy, the individual's share. With it, Olson seizes the means of production. In "Projective Verse," the relationship between human body, consciousness, and language is one wherein the latter is controlled by the former, wherein motion starts from "the HEAD, by way of the Ear, to the Syllable

/the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE" (151). Like Williams who wanted to cleanse the language of European historical investment, Olson returns language to its producer, taking the letter away from its poslioning wlhin the colonising culture of the commodity. In the world of capitalism, as Pound complains, the word drifts in an inauthentic, self-referential play. Olson, displacing the ideogrammatic method, has language emanating straight from the body, stamped on the page in transit, as it were. Type-writing "can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intendst' (154 my emphasis).

The poet with his humanized machinery (close to the body-locus) seizes the means of production, returns the poet from the fragmenting pull of reified discourse to graspable here and now:

And the line comes (I swear it) from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes, and thus is, it is here that. the daily work, the WORK, gets in... (1 51)

Olson empowers a subject at the mercy of incomprehensible, implacable systems. Complementing the absorption of technology and nature into the self, his typewriter, on one level, represents a fantasy wherein the individual once again rules technology. And concretely, the typewriter is "the personal and instantaneous recorder of the poet's work" (1 55). The typewriter both humanizes technology and decentres power, handing it over to the individual.

But whatever Olson's political intentions, when he fires up his language of absolute origins-of voice, breath, immediate presence ('Y he ear.. .is so close to the mind... has the mind's speed" 150), and nature-he invites a retreat from the risks of the social world. The unassimilable, proprioceptive body may not be a locus wherein to bear down for a political battle, but the doorway into the Eden of an imaginary empire, where perceptions are pure and exact. Safely ensconced, the poet might remain king of his realm (locus), avoiding dangerous encounters with Western discourse's colonising armies. This aspect of Black Mountain thought, a certain idealized individualism, powerfully influences the Tish poets' work. But Tish also absorbs Olson's communal ethic, his challenge to the poet as isolated, romantic genius. The Vancouverites, especially in their manifestos, foregound the cooperative nature of their venture; they celebrate their debt to their forebears-a victory of historyfiradition over individualism. And if they are less comfortable with Olson's heroic invasion of the city (perhaps with good reason), they do share his characterisation (a recapitulation of Pound's thought) of its most negative. alienating aspects.

It is not always easy to mark where Olson's idealism ends and his historicism begins. As Chad Walsh comments, trying to explain his own confusion, "Olson was already living in the world of complex simultaneity, with its own and different rules of logic" (Olson, Poefry and Tiuth 6). My aim is not to resolve Olson's (or Pound's and Williams') apparent contradictions, but to show the thrusts which most affect Tish: the drive towards purity in the engine of nature, and, to a lesser extent, the drive towards the play of history and a deeply

(con)textualized version of subjectivity. Tish, however, does not merely get swept up in the swirl of Black Mountain contradictions. Ironically, the group as a direct result of adopting a transcendental stance, goes even farther, albeit reluctantly, than Olson in critiquing the so-called humanist self. For they consistently mark, as if waking up to it, their profound ensnarernent in an unmasterable, dangerous cityscape. Ch. 2: Tish's "confused thinking and execrable prose"'2

Like its Black Mountain predecessors, Tish attempts to articulate a radical poetics that will oppose not merely 'reified' literary canons but also the worldview which fostered such canons (i.e., 'instrumental ~ociety''~).Rethin king the canon is a large project which, as Warren Tallman notes, the young writers of Tish may not have been entirely ready for:

Given their previous ignorance of the writing world Duncan introduced, the Tish poets were very much like the fools who rush in where more cautious men fear to tread. And did rush in managing to create a wonderfulIy garbled, goofy, and in many ways ludicrous Vancouver version of the poetics Duncan had turned loose. ("Poet in Progress" 25)

The poetics that Tish elaborates deserves as much consideration as the poetry because, as Beverley Mitchell points out, ''the Tish writers were seriously attempting to arrive at a viable poetics," and, moreover, the results "were not always 'garbled and goofy"' ("A Critical Study" 38). In fact the prose statements made in the first five issues by the editors, as well as the essays, reviews. and editorials that appear throughout the first nineteen issues, whether confused or clear, are remarkably consistent in intent. It is necessary to point out that Tish could sustain such consistency of vision because well over two thirds of Tish: 1-

19 is comprised of the output of its five editors, and engaged collaborators,

Warren Tallman, Lionel Kearns. and David Cull. On top of that. a good chunk of space is given to Tish forefathers such as Larry Eigner, Paul Blackburn. Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley, with some space left over for aspiring young writers, including, most prominently, Red Lane. Carol Berge, David McFadden,

Diane Wakoski, Peter Auxier, and Gwendolyn MacEwen. In other words, unlike contemporary little magazines such as Moment. Evidence, and, later, Blew

Ointment, which desired mainly a space for new writing. Tish actively and single- mindedly" cultivated a vision, much the way Alphabet, at least initially, insisted upon a Frygian theory of archetypes, searching for art's "secret alphabet or iconography or language of symbols and myths" (Reaney 3).

Like the Black Mountain poets, the Tish writers attempt to reimagine the role of the poet. Against the god-like author imposing order on chaos, constructing "well wrought urns," and addressing a literary tradition, the Tish poet would open himself up to the effects of the real world. In an important commentary in his introduction to the collection Tish No. f-19, Davey contrasts the "universist" poet with the "humanist" poet:

The differences lie primarily in world-view and concepts of form. The universist writers tend to see the universe as vast, divine, mysteriously structured, and essentially ungraspable by human reason. (10)

Davey believes that the world has its own order, independent of any order humans might arbitrarily impose on it. If the universe is "ungraspable" that is because of the necessarily limited position that people occupy within it. The problem with humanists is that they place human consciousness at the centre of the world; they see the world as "finite, orderly, and manageable by man." Davey goes on to say that

[tJhe univenists regard form as active and alive; the humanists as a manipulated showplace for the human mind. To the universits [sic] the poem involves the poet in recognition and surprise, it leads him to more than he knew or planned. To the humanist it is a culture- object, moulded and chisled [sic] to a shape pre-conceived by its author's intelligence and will-expressing his ideas, bearing the stamp of his style.

The "universist" Tish poets set themselves the difficult task of presenting the external world as it is, as yet unabsorbed by the devices and categories of the human mind. To this end, TTsb's poetics calls for a vigorous displacement of the controlling ego and its preconceptions; it proposes looser boundaries between the self and world. This is why Davey pays homage to strategies which seem to turn the self inside out: he points to the "importance of ecology, mysticism, dropping out, anarchism, phenomenology, and hallucinogenics" as a shift which

"promises to bring man to a new and realisticview of his role in the immense plurality of cosmic phenomenatv(Tish 11 my emphasis). Tish aims to create a poetics which would avoid assimilation of objects by individual consciousness or by mainstream cultural formations. To this end, reversing the humanist's privileging of mind over body, Tish consistently contrasts the vastness of nature with the mind. For Tish the body and nature are life forces, crashing through to consciousness, reinvigorating it and upsetting previous assumptions. spew.- existential & natural man vs. refied culture

The Tish newsletter, as a material object, deliberately eschews what Davey

might call the "chiselled." Produced with a Gestetner printing machine, it looks

raw, unprocessed, and messy. And that was the point. As E. D. Blodgett notes,

more than thirty years later,

Tish ...is marked by its refusal to be a commodity. especially in the sense of an object of exchange in Marx's sense .... Its format and mode of production themselves constitute a political statement. (Barbour 133)

Tish identifies itself with the rawness of emotion, nature, and energy, and with what culture discards or ignores as abject Davey is careful to separate Tish from the smooth, designed, or mechanical. While Bowering insists that Tish had

no interest in publishing polished poetryrf5Davey writes that the editors "had no

intention of making Tish a shrewdly designed and polished magazine" (Tish 7).

"Shrewdly," "designed" and "polished": these words all signify something

'cooked,' prefabricated, overly conceptualized. For Tish, "polished" magazines ernp hasize product, a mere surface glitter that represses procesd6 Davey complains that Louis Dudek's Delta "had a professional veneer which concealed whatever human contexts the writings had occurred in" (7). By contrast, Tish puts aside the cultural capital accrued from what might be called "the professional effect," and leaves its own textual body naked and unprotected, in the raw. Such rawness is also demanded of the poetry. In opposition to what

Davey calls "humanist" poetics, or New Critical poetics, and its high estimation of

"highly wrought linguistic artifacts" (Altieri 22), Tish would rather preserve the process of perception. That means retaining the failures, the false starts, and even the incomprehensible statements. In an essay entitled 'What's Going On?"

(Tish 2).Jamie Reid says of Philip Whalen, "there is much material in Whalen that is either meaningless or, at least, very obscure..." (39). Reid, discussing some perplexing imagery C'Hairy brown stars," to be exact) from Whalenrs poem

"Weed", goes on to say:

Okay, what's with brown stars kept they can't be seen in the dark? And how does this passage relate to the rest of the poem? The answer is, IT DOESNT MATTER. Static is inevitable. It's all part of a total awareness, and as such, demands piace in the poem. The uselessness doesn't make Whalen a bad poet, it only shows that he is sometimes not at home in his imagination. (40)

In an effort towards "total awareness," all aspects of consciousness, and all the stages of the work, polished and rough, can be incorporated. If the poet is not in an imaginative mood, then he or she might simply attend to describing the surfaces of the world. For Coleridge, says Reid. "the phenomenal world" was only important as a tool to "make his imagination more believable" (40). For the

Black Mountain and Tish writers, phenomenological descriptions of the surfaces of the world are valuable in themselves. The point is to capture raw process, traces of engagement with the world, rather than presenting polished poems that seem to emerge whole from the poet's reflective mind. What Davey says, admiringly, of bpNichol1s The Maffymlogy equally applies to fish's first editorial

period; it

is a combination of strong writing with failed poems, with banal cliched passages which nichol obviously recognized as such but which he includes as documents of places he has been... a document of his working his way through a psychic space. ("Frank Daveyn 190)

The Tish poets committed themselves to being vulnerable and sincere. Perhaps a better word would be authentic, for in his introduction to Tish: No. 1- 19, Davey characterizes Tish's attitude as a kind of shattering of the ideal ego: 'TISH was to be a record that preserved every roughness, insight, and stupidity" (7); it was a site for "unrestrained. ..unfocussed energy" (10). In this spirit, Lionel Kearns advertises his failure when he frames two poems between these comments-or are they a part of the poems?-respectively, 'Two small Poems in Different

Modes" and "(NEITHER ONE PARTICULARLY SUCCESSFUL) L.K." (Tish 19

416). Jamie Reid, in his first statement, and in a playfully foolish voice, writes,

"What's a poem? oops. silly question. but anyhowllmost of the time especially while writing you dont know -.."(Tish 7 14). The poem-and the prose-seems to emerge from somewhere uncensored by the idealized unity of the ego, and therefore leaves open the possibility of shame, as the poet gets it all down on record, stained and preserved: "anything is said here, i reserve the right if not to retreat, at/ least to feel embarrassed later."17 In his statement of poetics, David

Dawson similarly writes that his poetry is based on the practice of opening up the gates of ego censorship, "dependling] heavily on free associationt' (Tish 1 26).

But perhaps the best prose enactment of this shameless (or again, authentic) uncensored effect appears in George Bowering's free-flowing, fragmentary

Here, he invites one to believe that the poet's word is unprocessed, raw as in raw material. Entitled "Editorial: Verbatims From a Notebook," Bowering's stream of consciousness contributes to the spirit wherein Tish will speak the truth, a truth slipping through the cracks of bourgeois polish:

I have come to realize (as has LeRoi Jones) that poetry now of us young fellers is the what how of the way we sound. Heard Br. Antoninus read1 voice like ocean rolling over rocks and booming into sea caverns/ and read him, knowing how he sounds, and now have his poetry in. (31)

The notebook creates the sense that the reader is closer to the poet's

(un)consciousness. We get to sneak a look at his unpolished thought processes. One catches Bowering in the act of cuteness ('Yellers." and, below,

"old Ginsberg"), grandiose comparisons and associations; fragments of sentences, snatches of poetic emphasis ('TI); the peculiar, unpunctuated, partly nonsensical sentences which twist conventional syntax:

Also discovered how to read: intonation and breathgroups of Duncan from hearing him read (he mentions his similar experience with Edith Sitwell) and can how to study old Ginsberg and Corso. (my emphasis)

Here Bowering, in a spirit shared with the other editors, lets poetry and prose clash, run together without clear boundaries. Beyond letting the reader into the interior of his "mind," he also underscores his (desire for) intimacy with a larger social context of other writers, other scenes, other vocabularies. As we shall see in later chapters, the poetry deviates considerably in degree from Tish's lively proseplay. The poetry tends to be more controlled and controlling, more egocentric, asocial, with rigid boundaried8governing genres, boundaries which underscore the (ideal) centrality of the poet's consciousness. The prose, as we have seen, transgresses social masks, opening the self onto the surface of the world and its processes. The unscreened thoughts, the documentation of process, and the preservation of ''failure" demonstrate the value Tish writers place on documenting a radical particularity of thought and perception, preserved in the work. It does not matter if these preservations fit into ideas of traditional poetry. On the contrary: what matters is capturing unprocessed particularity; or as Keith Richardson accurately characterizes their project:

Tish committed itself to poetry which re-created particular moments of experience. Each poem was deemed unique and independent in so far as it brought to life that specific moment each time someone read the poem. (24)

Ideally, the "specific moment," maintained in its uniqueness, enacts a different relationship to the world than that of the humanist poet. Presewing an object's uniqueness, its aura, prevents the self from viewing the world around it as so much homogeneous stuff to be transformed by the managing mind. Tish also turns the mindtbody relationship inside out in other ways. Even more than Bowering's notebook entry suggests, the Tish writen, in their prose statements, break down generic boundaries. At the same time, they also challenge the priority of sense (meaning) over nonsense (sound), and individual autonomy over interdependence. First of all, many of the prose pieces make use of stanzas. To give a minor example, in his statement of poetic purpose, Davey suddenly shifts, in between chunks of prose, into poetic line breaks:

The poet "Maximus"

The Poet someone who most can (Tish 7 19)

Such gestures are also made in Tish 7 by Reid (14) and Dawson (26),as well as in Davey's essays "The Problem of Margins" (Tish 3 65) and "One Man's Look at

'Projective Verse"' (Tish 5 96). At a glance these pieces might be mistaken for a kind of free verse. They reflect, as Daveyrs 'The Problem of Margins" suggests,

Charles Olson's poetic practice of stanzaic shifts which are used to reflect sudden changes in psychic location. To get a fuller, but representative flavour of what I mean, consider this longer example from Davey's "essay," "The Problem of Margins":

-poems which do not admit margins, are dead/

are unreal. viz. poems whose lines are

balanced on a central axis as

Herbert's "The Altar" Thomas's "Vision and Prayer"

to give geometry to a poem is to escape reality

is to abstract

is to lose the poem

in a Mondrianesque tautology. (66)

Robert Duncan's essayfpoem "For the Novices of Vancouver: August 25-28

1962" (Tish I3 253) provides another extended and dramatic example of this conflation of poetry and prose, but in a way, Davey's essay makes even more radical transgressions than does Duncan's. For "The Problem of Margins" draws out another feature common to both Tish prose and radical twentieth century poetry: the presence of typographical inscriptions and arrangements which draw attention away from "meaning" to emphasize the materiality of the signifier:

Since the origin of the line

is always the poet, all lines

necessarily must locate ON

THE POET'S LOCUS.

1

Perceptions reach to locus : Lines are built on locus (66)

As Roman Jakobson argues in "Linguistics and Poetics." while poetry's job (the

"poetic function") has been to draw attention to its own written nature, the job of non-fiction prose has been to repress such materiality and concentrate on

meaning, to maintain the illusion of the transparency of the word (37).19 To put it

mildly, Davey's prose undoes the normal communicative emphasis, or the priority

of the signified. "The Problems of Margins" is in many ways a remarkable

document: it takes multiple forms-the dictionary definlion, stanzaic

arrangements, use of space which emphasizes visual symmetry. punctuation,

numerals, equal signs used mostly for visual effect (concrete poem style),

headlines (extensive upper case. made bold face in the collected Tish), conventional prose statements-and juxtaposes them in a sort of collage.

Beyond the overall "look" of the prose pieces, the presence of poetic characteristics in the prose can also be, persistently, found at the level of the line. Dawson's poetic statement uses a sort of stream of consciousness form, utilising ellipses and poetic stresses:

my poems depend heavily on free association of idea perceptionllaction...the freest minds pass lightlylin the patterns ofllthe step ... (Tish 1 26)20

His last lines are a particularly nice example of lyrical stresses: "writing by earl by breath! by freedom, I follow my mind in theflpoem, and DISCOVER what I have

MEASURED" (26).

Reid's editorial in Tish 4, though it does not look like verse, nevertheless incorporates rhyme and the pleasurable foregrounding of sound associated with poetic practice: Balance. Balance comes when you are ready to submit to the total force of the experience, when you have plumbed, with all your faculties reaching and strained, your mind strainedlsprained, every nuance and comer of your beinglbinglbong-banging . (71)

The full editorial does not make clear what Reid means by "balance"; however, most important, in terms of Tish's revolutionary stance, is how the statement bends conceptions of normal prose to a poetic purpose. In all of the examples given above, the signifier is somehowforegrounded. In Reid's last clause, semantic sense almost drifts into pure sound. The work done by this poetic undoing of meaning brings to mind Julia Kristeva's revolutionary poetical word. what she sometimes calls the "semiotic," which dissolves 'Yo the point of reverberating only as notes, music, 'pure signifier"' (Powers of HoKo~~~).

According to Beverley Mitchell "[plerhaps the most significant emphasis of the

Tish writers was on the importance of sound in poetry" ("A Critical Studyn 39).

And as she points out, the Tish writers themselves announce, in the first editorial, that they "are always obsessed with the possibilities of sound" (Tish 1

13).

Sound, for Tish writers, resists the culturally imposed linearity of the sentence as well as any settled sense of words (meaning). Like the primordial rhythms of the body's interior which shatter ossified words and sentence patterns, sounds for Tish shatter the crustified ego from without. Unlike the natural rhythms of heart and breath, spoken of by Duncan (see chapter one).

Tish's concept of sound is less predictable, more anarchic than Black Mountain thought would desireat least in its more organic modes. Sounds, for Tish. are dynamic waves rushing from world to poet to page, following the patterns set out by Olson in "Projective Verse." But whereas Olson speaks of objects, sounds are less rigid, more amorphous, unstable, and threatening to the rational mindrs desire for the visible and measurable- Reid writes: "Listen to the sound of it.

Pay attention to the automobiles and trains and people and jazzbands and

Beethoven. Listen to the strange music of your own voice in the poem" (Tish 4

71). The external world impresses itself upon the body and the page, and is documented there. The vital presence of that world, a spirit which Reid's energetic statement captures so well, is regarded as capable of breaking through whatever traditional categories ("devices") have gripped and limited the possibilities of thought and perception.

Another significant way that Tish disrupts the insularity and detachment of the humanist ego is by positing it as inseparably caught up in a vast network (or ecosystem) of natural forces and desires. Tish's ideal self is bound to body, and that body is bound to a larger natural cosmos: and both reverberate through the central nervous system and upward, electrifying "mind". Hence the prose statements often try to recover the power of the body. And just as often, no doubt in an effort to disperse the rigid structures of the ego, Tish writers will speak of submission or submersion of the self in larger orders of nature.

In his essay ''When a New Music is Heard the Walls of the City Tremble: a Note on Voice Poetry" (Tish 3 67),Warren Tallman places Tish in the context of

Walt Whitman's rude vision of the poet, a poet connected to the energies of the body. Tallman envisions him this way: "It was Walt Whitman's lean, lewd, hankering barbarian whose songs of self and earth brought voice back in with a yawp" (67). This language takes a stand against the "cultured," the solid "walk of the city": its idealized voice is connected to the physical, to the raw, in the register of Ginsberg's "howl." or Creeley's "shout-tongue."

This connection of poetry to body, this rawness, eludes colonization by the civilized; it is the sound of the "barbarian" and his "yawp," which the OED defines as an "(utter) harsh or hoarse cry, or foolish talk." This bespeaks the raw-throated poet living close to the nerves. Tallman's celebration of obscenity, especially via Whitman, pointedly contradicts the bourgeois repression of the body and its desires ("hankering").

When Tallman uses the words humanism and humanize he does not refer to humanism proper. but the opposite. He means to get away from intellectuah2ation, to a kind of unacceptable-from a bourgeois viewpoint- nakedness. He speaks positively of "lewdness." linking it to something beyond obscenity. He also casts the poet within a larger order. He imagines a powerful force capable of pulsing through and captivating the poet:

Animated by intelligence of earth .... the human organism contains the seeing eye of circumstance, the listening ear, the only memory- -turns with the seasons, moves with the tides, pulses, pulses with the underlying rhythms. (68, my emphasis) Believing that his culture has forgotten about the body and nature, Tallman's language constructs a magical, irresistible vision of natural plenitude

"organism," "pulses," "cycles," "earth," "primacy," 'the great rhythmic mother"- within which poets must rediscover themselves. And all of this fluidity passes through the channels, not of mind, but of body: "what turns, what pulses, what moves, can be contained and projected in and through the beautiful music of the human voice."

Tallman's essay captures many of the shades of Tish's understanding of nature. And Tish's discourse on nature is complex. To begin with, nature appears to be a finely ordered region of articulated objects, hidden behind veils of Western culture. For Tish, there is a stable, natural reality beyond human thought, language, history; or as Davey puts it in "One Man's Look at 'Projective

Verse"': "the world has its own order; it is not for man to order" (Tish 5 402). To connect with this nature, the ego must somehow be set aside:

Man's function (as many have heard me say before) is to act like a sponge rather than an octopus. He must find all things, all "streams of Earth" passing through himself. Man the submissive; man with the "negative capability." (102)

Significantly, consciousness is not here represented as a complex, active positor of reality. Nor is it conceived as an inner eye (or any kind of eye1I)-as it certainly is in the poetry. Instead, consciousness is quite strikingly viewed as an unobtrusive, primitive animal: the sponge. We can see some of this homage to nature in Reid, who demands that the poet "submit" to a natural order, of sorts; for him, the poem emerges out of the cycles of nature and the rbythms and Rows of the body; the poet must listen to the "process of living: peristalsis, breathing, and the silent sound of the moon" (Tish 4 71). In the same vein, Wah would disperse ego boundaries, "merging ...himself with his natural surroundings" (fish

1 23). However, even more than Tallman, it is Davey who develops the idea of an eternal natural orde? that has been mystified by Western culture:

There is the universe; there is experience. Man's righffil place, whether he be a Christian believer or not, has not changed since medieval times, and it is his job to get back to it It is still one of hurn ility before, submission to, and immersion in the greater natural order. (Tish 5 101, my emphasis)

To paraphrase religious discourse, Davey asks that we "get right with nature."

Self owes its existence to an Other-God, simple community, an "eternal order"

(1 01)-a fact which loosens the solidity of ego, or "Sprawl"" ("cutting oneself off from one's fellow man and fellow nature" 101)-

But in addition to Davey's emphasis on an orderly nature, the Tish writers also speak of its great power. This is what Tallman suggests with his discussion of Whitman. Davey, for example, believes poetry is tied up with a life force (a

"life-stance" 19) that can energize the body and break through deathly culture:

I write poetry because I am alive-a mass of living sensation-and human-intelligently perceptive of sensation.... A successful poem is one into which the poet has put the most possible of his body. (Tish 7 19)

This gesture echoes the Black Mountain desire to find poetry, what Reid calls

'the flesh of words" (Tish 2 38). emerging from the heartbeat, the pulse, breathing and passion. Fred Wah, in an exemplaryfashion, his own prose lines gushing, finds in the fluid swirl of language itself a pulsing force ('Yhe energy of musical release" Tish 1 23), an almost pure signifier belonging to sensation and not sense: "I make the case for the consonants as beats and the vowels carrying that mellismatic color-our language is that real that it does have tones- essentially collisions of sound (23).

For Wah, this poetic language is tied to the body: to the "ear," the "eye," and the body as it is "bumping into... experience" (Tish 3 51). He demands poetry be a storm, a "collision" of "rhythm," "dissonance," and "smashing," all corresponding to the poet's clash with experience. Reid's poetic signifier is an extension of the violence of world and bodily drives; it is "a result of a climaxlexplosion in the poet's life," or a "discharge of unretainable energy" which. like a bomb, "explodes" before the reader (Tish 4 71); Dawson uses a similar language of 'Yreedom," "energy," "thrust" (Tish 1 26). And finally, the group reflects these waves of energy in its demand for expansion, an expansion which promises to break out of the limits of the monadic ego.

In a sense, expansion parallels the idea of submission and immersion. A good poet does not just "submit" but also "transcends" (Tish 8 155) himself, becomes a larger being. Self is holistic, expanding, capable of "a giant feeling for the world" (Tish 5 101, my emphasis). Reid speaks of the poet having a "total response to what is happening1A Dance of the intellect imagination physiology..." (Tish 1 14, my emphasis). For Dawson the "poem is an expanding structure of thought" (Tish 126). And Bowering speaks of ''the whole poetic experience"

(Tish 1 17, my emphasis), that if the poet has the "capacity" he can get at ''the greater structure" (17).

Both the energetic push of nature and the vision of a pristine cosmos stand in opposition to the demands of the symbolic order and the humanist ego.

Modem culture is out of sync with nature. Tish writers generally wish to elude the colonising power of what for convenience's sake can be called the Symbolic

Law. I will use this term in two senges. First, it means the given social code, the governing master signifiers of Canadian culture, or more broadly, Western civilisation. Tish writers oppose the status quo. Secondly, and more extremely, at times, Tish writers resist all assimilation to the symbolic itself (to any governing logosllanguage). A pristine nature would elude such a law, and a forceful nature would shatter it.

For example, Davey's existential vision of "Man" appears to be one wherein a primordial, naked self faces nature. The language that he uses to criticize Robert Bly expresses his disgust with human design and designed humans, and the mechanical intrusion into the poetic. Davey angrily cwhy the hell") complains that: "This is no poet standing face to face with reality" (Tish 5

103). Discussing Bly's "Clear Air of October," Davey continues his assault: "Here is not a man and nature. Nothing natural-nothing credible-nothing even mystically familiar" (102). He says that Bly is nothing more than "a human machine":

[Bly] is an unusually literate fies hman trying to calculate a poetic way of relating his autumn experience so as to impress his instructor. The form of this so-called poem is not even that of an utterance of a man; it is that of the product of a machine that cuts off lines wherever they come near a certain arbitrary length. (103, my emphasis)

This statement is more extreme, but reminds one of Bowering's suggestion that

"[tleachers of freshman English" are mere "gradefls]" (Tish 1 17). In both cases, poetry itself, in its potential to grasp the numinous or the imminent, is detrimentally ensnared in networks of power struggles (impressing the teacher, grades as capital-reifying the thing itself) and colonising traditions (mechanical poetic devices). Two different forms of consciousness are at stake here. For

Davey, Bly signifies traditional social practices and a man-centred consciousness. By contrast, Davey rejects traditional discourse, seeks truth in the immanence of experience:

It is ridiculous to try to create figures of speech (such as Bly's) not only because these are of necessity relative things, off-center approximations of experience, but also because the only real and useful image is the songlpoem itself. Creating isolated tropes is a game; creating poetrylimagelsong is the way of life. (Tish 5 103)

The Tish writers, especially Davey, Bowering and Reid, want to transcend

"relative" (103) cultural rules and return to a liberating primordial nature.

Bowering writes: "All thru English poetry, and this is why it died with

Hardy, the poet has had to go away from life, its speech and rhythm, to create a beauty for him" (7ish 2 31). For Bowering the networks of cultural contexts

(weight of tradition) destroy poetry. The vitality of Life and poetry are imminent in the world and need no academic contexts. Modem "English poets have kept ahold of their unnatural iambs, poor souls" (31 my emphasis). By contrast,

Bowering's idealized Blakeclearly not the mythology-laden, historically complex

Blake of Northrop Frye's Fearful Syrnmetryryg'[s]aideverything is holy, and that is why he is read today without a need for the reader to make allowances for background, decorum, diction" (31, my emphasis). These words-"background,"

"decorum," "diction"--are all indications of symbolic freight. They suggest social practices: that one must, for example, adopt a certain, traditional language in order to write or understand poetry.

Reid similarly resists being implicated in the gridworks of social practices.

In his reading of Nietzsche, he opposes pure, contextless (i-e. Natural)

"experience" to systems of "knowledge":

... Nietzsche remained a poet for quite some time after [claiming poets were bad learners]. Why? Perhaps because he knew too little of the knowledge of other philosophers and scientists and too much of the world of experience, too much of the intangible meaning of phenomenal things. That kind of knowledge can be, and was to Nietzsche, painful. (Tish 2 38)

As with Blake, Nietzsche's strength is his ignorance--of system, context, history.

Such writers are able to see beyond the cobwebs of the symbolic and experience the world immediately. Through a more direct language (a "natural idiom" perhaps), they relay their perceptions to readers of any period. Against "knowledge," Reid poses the presence of "phenomenal things," the experiential: these "things" impinge directly on our being with all the force of Hobbesian atoms-only pleasurable. They are on the side of a life energy and resist/destroy any preconceived cultural orders.

The philosopher is suspicious of the poet because he is jealous, Reid tells us, jealous because 'We poet may know more about the nature of the universe than the philosopher can ever know, despite the philosophers' power of reasoning" (38). "Reason" and "logic" (38) represent only limits, for Reid. They are not frameworks which open up worlds in specific, historically determined ways. The poet gains his "profound insight into the nature of reality" (38) then without the benefit or need of the dense matrices of shared social practices.

This distinction between socialized art and art connected to "reality" closely resembles John Berger's distinction between Professional and primitive artists.

"The will of primitives," writes Berger, "derives from faith in their own experience and a profound scepticism about society as they have found it" (67). Blake and

Nietzsche are imagined by Reid and Bowering as if they were nonprofessional,

"primitive" artists, whose products and insights flourish precisely because they are not preconditioned by conventional training, skills, and cultural assumptions

(Berger 67).

Experience must speak. Because it is experience that the group prizes so highly, it resists not just traditional poetic discourse, but any discourse which would interpret objects before they have had a chance to speak for themselves.

In part then, as much as it can, Tish distrusts any symbolic organization, any

discourse or logos that might lay claim to experience. This is why, theoretically,

they are like outlaws flouting the Law of the Symbolic, and postulating a

plenitude of bodily being. Any law, except nature's. is arbitrary, as arbitrary as

poetic device. As the editorial of Tish 8 puts it, even one's "country is merely

incidental":

Canada does not exist except as a political arrangement for the convenience of individuals accidentally happening to live within its arbitrary area. Even if this unwieldy block of land does have any political reality (which we doubt) it is not itself noteworthy. What can make it so is what gives anything (place, objects etc.) interest-that is the poet as man, who in his humanity transcends all arfifcial boundaries. (1 55, my emphasis)

Such extreme statements of unfettered individualism are what so horrify

nationalists like Robin Mathews and Keith Richardson. Richardson complains, and the above statement would seem to bear him out, that "Tish clearly did not believe that a man was the product of his culture, rather it affirmed his individualistic nature.. ." (29). Richardson worries that Tish's individualism amounts to a kind of invasion of Canada by "an oppressive force" (the U.S.).

And yet, although Tish's individualism is problematic, it is too simplistic to characterize the group as assuming "US. individualistic anarchism" (29).

I have emphasized how Tish deconstructs and eludes the humanist project, traditional poetics, and the culture of rationalization. If Tish resorts to the ideology of the individual (universal humanity, self presence, etc.), and it clearly does, this is, in part, undone by the group's vigorous acknowledgement of the texts (the Pound line), communities (San Francisco, Black Mountain,

Vancouver), and mentors (Duncan, Creeley, Tallman) that support its discourse.

This persistent acknowledgement of poetic debt is a significant gesture. In fact, according to Christopher Beach, in his ABC of Influence: Ezra Pound and the

Remaking of American Poetic Tiadition, it is what defines the Pound line. It is also what has kept it on the margins of the academy until very recently. He argues that mainstream American academics value and canonize poets who repress their forebears and strive for originality, who sustain the idea of the

Author with a capital A. And for this reason, critics-from the New Critics to

Harold Bloom-have marginalized Pound and his descendants. Pound. and to an even greater degree Charles Olson, does not value the original, self- contained poet. Beach writes:

Underlying Pound's poetic mode, and to varying degrees those of his descendants, is a model of influence in which the poet consciously chooses literary predecessors and traditions as well as traditions of social, political, historical, economic, and scientific thought with which to interact in a freely defined intertextual space. (42) The Tish group, particularly in its prose statements, openly places itself in a tradition, from which its texts offer endless citations and quotations ("...to study old Ginsberg and Corso," learning to read by listening to "Duncan from hearing him read" [Bowering, Tish 2 311; "As Keams says..."; "...as imagined by Williams ..." [Reid, 7Xsh 2 391; "...says Allen Ginsberg..." Fallman, Tish 3 671;

"And, as W.C. Williams has advocated..." [Wah, Tish 4 821-40 list but a sample).

The group also adopts a complex of Black Mountain master signifiers

("Maximus," "Stance," "Locus," "Breath," "discharge of unretainable energy,"

"Perception"-again, to list but a few examples). In other words, Tishs prose really thematizes the presence of intertextuality, how other discourses and communities help produce Tish and its poetic visions. As I will show in the next chapter, idealized images of a unified self do appear in Tish prose. But what I am emphasizing here is how the self is written, criss-crossed by marks of textual debt, so that the Tish poet and Tish itself appear to be deeply woven into a discursive fabric, the Pound-Black Mountain tradition.

A word needs to be said about the name of the magazine itself. 'Tish" is a meaningless, although suggestive, sound-a splash, a crashing wave, or the beat of a cymbal. On this level the name is a pure signifier, and once again reinforces Tish's own materiality and unassimilability (Le. its separation from the signifiedlrneaning). Of course the word "Tish" is also the phonetical reverse of

"shit." The name was suggested by Robert Duncan, for whom %hitncarries a special and powerful cluster of resonances. For Duncan, embracing shit, conceptually at least, held the possibility of returning one to an altered, primitive state of consciousness: 'Weknow that people with aberrations... come into some kind of intense experience, eating shit, covering themselves with it, and so forth"

(qtd. in introduction to Tish 8). Shit symbolizes, for Duncan, the numinous in the apparently banal or hidden elements of everyday fife:

Almost every item of the holy has an expression in our common speech that means 'oh that's just nothing.' And every one of those 'that's just nothing's', every time we say them, we take "shC1, which is extremely important in the whole of the magical operations, and we have only to think of our agriculture, and that now we increasingly try to use chemical fertilizers, and not the actual shit. (8) Duncan imagines a discourse which would resurrect the marginal, arise from hiding, and entangle itself in the surface of the world. The abject is a source of energy here, a desirable object. The substance of Duncan's lecture signals an important theme throughout the first editorial period: it is shit (the numinous, elemental Life energy) that has been displaced by or polluted by culture (the

"chemical" equals the much-vilified contrived, designed, etc.). Shit, usually a symbol of pollution, is in Tish discourse considered a magical thing which must be reclaimed from the baroque passageways of culture.

Because the permeability or impermeability of the body is such an important theme for Tish's prose and poetry, it is worth considering the meaning of shit as elaborated by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Homr. The permeable nature of the body is one of Kristeva's major themes. According to her reading, shit and the like (menstrual blood, vomit, urine) incite fear because they confront one with the permeability of the body. Anything that falls away from the body challenges Western ideal visions of the body and soul (ego) as impermeable,

smooth surfaces, somewhat like Greek statues. She writes:

These body fluids, this defilement. this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. (3)

Shit, like the "semiotic," can potentially burst through culture's ideal images of itself, unravel sense C'meaning") which is, she argues, built upon differentiation from the abject (shit, dirt, decay, external vs. cleanliness, health, unity). From this viewpoint, Tish's play on and in shit, as well as its members' desire for submission and immersion, can be seen as a challenge to the integrity of the self and the given "symbolic." It also gives "a shock to the literary oldguard," as

Richardson puts it (22). Absorbing shit or being absorbed into shit collapses the precise division between inner and outer, nature and culture, subject and object.

The editorial of Tish I makes this shock value playfully or painfully clear with its multiple entendres, stating the magazine's monetary need and its excremental flavour "Seriously, TlSH will be always on the bum" (13); it is a

"siring movement"; and just to emphasize where Tish locates itself, the last word, unattributed to anyone, just hanging there, announces: "TlSH is a fine kettle of fecis [sic]" (30)! Deliberately obscene, then. Tish plays with the meanings of shit. making it stick, as if the editors have shit themselves, not washed the excrement away but allowed it to stick to the body, invoking Duncan's noble savage, his psychotic madman covered in shit. In both cases the reader is not allowed to separate mind from body. Shit here is a metaphor of the subjective world's entanglement with the outer, symbolic world.

conclusion

Ti'sh's prose is radical in at least two senses. First, it openly attacks the establishment (the academics, the easterners, the humanists, and so forth) and opposes it with an ideal, natural order. Second, more significantly, Tishs prose is charged with a poetic energy which resists containment by grammar, genre, and meaning. In fact the prose can be read as some of 731's most striking and challenging poetry. This is not a position the poets themselves took. Like most of its critics, Tish undervalued its prose, formally announcing an end to its theoretical project in Tish 6:

The readers have finally convinced us that poeticizing ad ad etc. was not getting us anywhere, and that poetry was infinitely more valuable. (1 11)

But the extreme playfulness of the prose signifier resembles Julia Kristeva's poetic signifier, the l'serniotic'r-especiaIly as it veers from meaning; draws attention to the ink on the page with typographical arrangements and stains of upper case typeface and underliningP, a practice that adds to the overall look of

Tish; and tries to capture bodily forces and the momentum of nature. The role of the "semiotic" is to disturb the hardened forms that a given culture has laid down.

Kristeva imagines that bodily drives push up against the hard surfaces of the symbolic (grammar, genre, meaning, etc.). For example, in a brilliantly vivid image,she writes that with Mayakovsky "we have then this rhythm; this repetitive sonority; this thrusting tooth pushing upwards before being capped with the crown of language; this struggle between word and force gushing..." (Desire 28).

Whatever its investments in an ideal order, Tish prose tries to make visible that which is normally conceaied: nature's drives, shit, shame, embarrassment, intersubjective debt (the fluid interdependence between selfitext and otherltext) and the materiality of the signifier. The prose24keeps the cracks open, allowing- at least in Kristeva's sense of the word4he "poetic" signifier to gush through and upset the assumptions of official culture.

If my comparison of Tish's prose to Kristeva's "semiotic" seems somewhat abstract, let me reinforce my point from another, perhaps more pertinent, angle.

One of the most radical developments of poetry today is "Language Poetry". which owes a great deal to writers like Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert

Duncan, and Larry Eigner. One of the leading theorists of the "Language" movement, Charles Bernstein, imagines poetry in a way that perfectly describes. not Tish's poetry proper, but rather its statements of poetics:

I imagine poetry, impossibly-l know others won't share this view- as that which can't be contained by any set of formal qualities .... Or else I imagine poetics as an invasion of the poetic into other realms: overflowing the bounds of genres, spilling into talks. essays, politics, philosophy. (63)

It is in precisely such spaces, its wonderfully exuberant prose statements, that Tish most successfully and radically gives the heave to the humanist subject. Ch. 3: Idealism, Purity and Authorial Control in Tish Prose

"Communication presupposes subjects (whose identity and presence are constituted befom the signming operation) and objects (signified concepts, a thought meaning that the passage of communication will have neither to constitute, nor, by all rights, to transform). A communicates B to C. Through fhe sign the emitter communicates something to a receptor, etc. - Derrida (Positons 23-4)

"The self is single, separate, apart. keeping its own time in its own spaces" - Warren Tallman (Tish 7 143)

city state, self

As we saw last chapter, the Tish writers foreground intertextual debt, marks of

history, and the graphematic nature of language. However, we shall now see that they also, with equal persistence, insist on the existence of primordial objects and a unified self that lives most fully beyond the constraints of language and culture. Both stancesthe intertextual self and the self-contained self-are possibilities available in Black Mountain discourse. For Warren Talhan, in his influential essay 'Wonder Merchants: Modernist Poetry in Vancouver During the

1960's."the two opposing selves exist side by side, neither one clearly dominating the other. Tallman, for example, presents the following characterization of Olson's and Tish's sense of self:

Because self becomes the subject of Modernist writings, nationalism gives way to a personal localism, not the place where you are, but the place where you are, each poet his or her own city state. ("Wonder" 40) Not only does he shift emphasis from the material ground to the self (from

"place" to "you"), but he further encloses the self within its own mini empire.

The notion of self as its own "city state" appears to clash with 7ish's

rejection of the "humanist" poet. The poet as "city state" is a perfect metaphor

for a self-managing, unified, isolated subject. The above quotation is meant to

echo Olson's poetic cityscape, Gloucester. Earlier in the same essay, Tallman

discusses how Olson was so full of the details of Gloucester that he really

became the city, absorbed it, contained it: "Eventually the city looks out through

his eyes, speaks through his voice, remembers through his memory, has its

meetings in his person" (32). For the moment, Tallman transforms Olson (as

Maximus) into a mythic, all-encompassing individual, a transcendental ego Ctcity

state," "king," "supreme individualist"). However, Tallman also quotes,

approvingly, a fragment of one of his own earlier essays:

Each man's intellect is a sum of memories so Olson searches among documents, records, manuscripts, seeking from these specifics, closely considered, a mind of Gloucester. Searches out the phrasings, weightings and soundings of both speech around him and that discemable in the writing of the place-the Pilgrirnmes voice-that mixture as of Shakespeare and the Geneva Bible cast on a rock-ribbed coast..." (32, my emphasis)

In this case, Gloucester's "mind"-itself made up, in part, of external, foreign texts

(Britain, Geneva)-is exterior to Olson's. Here, Tallman pictures Olson piecing

together a primarily textual consciousness from various documentary artifacts from a field that, at least at first, envelops him. In other words, it is not so clear whether Olson speaks Gloucester or Gloucester Olson. There are two Olsons available here: one the mammoth individualist, the other submersed and dispersed in the writing ("documents, records, manuscripts," "phrasings," "writing of the place," "speech," etc.) that informs him-of which his poetic consciousness is but an effect.

Tish beyond the text

There are likewise two Tish selves. One aspect of Tish thought constructs a poetics based on metaphysical ideals such as "experience," "communication."

"perception," "unified self," and "nature." These elements are thought to escape the other aspect of Tish and Black Mountain thought which foregrounds the differentiating, reifying operations of language. But as the philosopher Jacques

Derrida points out, there are no objects or egos that have not already been ground through the differentiating machinery of language:

In the extent to which what is called "meaning" (to be "expressed") is already, and thoroughly, constituted by a tissue of differences, in the extent to which there is already a text, a network of textual referrals to other texts, a textual transformation in which each allegedly "simple term" is marked by the trace of another ten, the presumed interiority of meaning is already worked upon by its own exteriority.... Only on this condition can it "signify." (Positions 33)

It is just such a web of linguistic prefabrication, tainted by exterior influences, from which Tish writers attempt to disentangle their image of an ideal self. In the editorial for Tish 10, Davey writes: Robert Duncan has said that the age of the masterwork is dead- that ours is the age of testimony. Which, if I read it right, takes the emphasis away from the "work of art1' and places it back on the creator and his concerns. Back on the creator as man rather than "artist." (20 1)

Davey removes poetry from the register of official culture ("masterwork," "art,"

"artist") by associating Tish poetry with a language more akin to the natural or universal ("man." "testimony") or primordial ("creator"). Deflating the authority of official culture, which is associated with artifice ("work of art"), Davey instead stresses the centrality of the poet behind the text. His language veers away from that of "submission" and "submersion"; his gestures diverge, in part, from the accent on intertext. Davey focuses instead on the originary powers of the

"creator":

The tyranny of a poem or painting as a product of an artist's "craft" independent of his personality is over; the work is the man testifying to whatever he wishes to testify-his case HAS come up ... (20 1)

There is here a characteristic disjunction between the play of Davey's poetic signifier (the alliterative "pWs,the exclamatory "HAS") and the message which limits play and privileges meaning, truth, authorial control. "Play" aside, language is an instrument, carrying out the will (%visheslI) of the artist's

"personality," or representing the accounts of a witness before some court of law

("testimony," "case," and elsewhere, "evidences" 1 9). Davey imagines an ultimate reality, one to which the poet has access and can transfer to the reader via language: "...art is a means, a go-between, a communicator, a means of testimony" (201). 1 will have more to say on this concept of "communication" in a

moment.

The idealism of Davey's editorial provoked two important letters to the

editor in 77sh If, one from Lionel Keams and the other from Denise Levertov.

Keams asks. "Is poetry, or any other art for that matter, nothing more than the

communication of personal concerns?" And more significantly, he asks, "Does a

poet know what a poem will contain before he creates it? No" (223). Kearns

rejects as "naive" the idea that an author, hislher ideas and perceptions, exist

prior to the text: "Prehension and articulation, the formulation of speech, are one and the same ace5" (223). Denise Levertov also criticizes Davey's

privileging the poet over the concerns of form:

You make it sound as if testimony and the work of art as an independent entity were mutually exclusive. I believe this is a dangerous mistake. The 'testimony,' I believe, cant be made without that craft that makes of it an 'independent entity.' Or: 'Testimony' is a soundless opening of the mouth unless craft forms it. (223)

For Levertov, the poet's primordial experience is always transformed into an exterior form of some sort For her forrn is testimony in itself and is not tied to the authority of the author's presence preserved, as it were:

What I feel before beloved works of art, old and new, is as much testimony as fom and form as testimony, and without the form there would be no testimony to feel ... (223)

In his response to Levertov's letter, Davey writes that he is happy to have been corrected (225). But the belief in an accessible reality (of object, of soul) existing prior to the text runs deeply throughout fish discoursez8. One might even say that it is foundational.

In a complex passage from 'What's Going On" (Tish 2), Jamie Reid pays homage to noise, music, song, and the potential development of a "more primitive and virile form of language" (39). In typical Tish style, he foregrounds the signifier's detachment from any signified. Nevertheless. like Davey, though not as nakedly, he insists upon the possibil-Ry of a self that preexists language.

Language

...is not, however, total mental experience, and only serves as the barest approach to time experience so that stream of consciousness fiction, even at such a complex level as Ulysses, remains, at best, a fragmentary translation of occurence [sic] in the mind. (39)

Reid, more than most of the Tish writers (or even Charles Olson. for that matter), is careful to admit the impossibility of fully capturing the real. He quite cheerfully accepts that language fails, that there is always some "static" (39) distorting the message. Still, beneath the text, "mind," "experience," and "object" are thought to have an independent existence before being "translat[ed]" (14) into the treacherous instability of language.

denoting desires

Earlier we saw how Reid and Bowering esteemed Nietzsche and Blake, in part because they elude the distortions of shifting cultural contexts (e-g. Blake requires no need for knowledge of "background, decorum, and diction" 31).

Ideally, the Tish writers would achieve a kind of objectivity by transforming the poet into a mechanical or biological perceiver. Either a purely biological (e-g.

"body" "sponge," "eye," "mouth", "ear", "~rganisrn~~")or a purely technological

C'projector," "electric chair," radio'"^ perceiver can, ideally, transcend or bracket the limits of subjectivity, ideology, discourse, poetic device-all of those formative, motivated factors which pre-interpret objects rather than letting them speak for themselves. Dismissing the excessive signifier ("ravishing music") of the Romantics, Reid offers instead a hard organism:

...it doesn't work any more to be sensitive in the way that the Romantics and even the Victorians fancied themselves. The poet must be more than sensitive (sensitivity being a rather adolescent sense of things). He must be aware and WILLING TO BE AWARE. To be open, receptive and willing to know at his heart the heart of darkness and to FACE IT with open eyes ears mouth nose fingers and toes is the duty of the poet- (38)

The Romantics had been too concerned with their social alienation. They were full of "anguish," like Kierkegaard who was 'Yorture[d]" by "the inability to communicate" (38). Reid shifts concern away from these overburdened psyches

(which promise only the subjective filtering of reality) to the innocence of the body. Bowering makes a similar gesture in his retrospective of Tish 20. He applauds Tishvspoetry for being "unem~tional.'~~And against "young romanticism" he poses Tish consciousness: The TlSH poets have striven for accuracy and clarity, and have turned their attention upon the factual things that make up the world, men included among them. The young romantics (chiefly from Eastern Canada and the US., New York and California) dont seem to work for accuracy. Instead of communicating they fall back on some intensity of feeling, hoping to inundate the reader with expressions of their own superhuman souls, interpreted by themselves. They scoop a lot of slush into the space between themselves and natural phenomena. They think they have to put poetry into things; they dont have the sense and determination to find the poetry that is already there. (423)

Both Reid and Bowering disdain any movement of consciousness out into the world. Elsewhere, Bowering speaks harshly against "judgements emanating from the interpreting mind of the participant artist;" these restrict the "things themselves" from "participat[ingl" (Tish 1 17). Subjective activity pollutes the purity of the given "natural world" with "slush." Not only are the "romantics" associated with the signs of subjectivity ("intensity of feeling," "interpret[ation]"), but they "inundate the reader." Perhaps the poets under attack are too concerned with their own subjectivity ("superhuman souls"). But in these statements Bowering and Reid leave little room for dialogue between world and subject, subject and subject: poets must empty themselves in order to receive what is "already there."

In the above lengthy quote, Bowering condenses much of Tish's thought, in particular the idea that there is an object world that can be decisively pinned down. He uses the language of "accuracy," "clarity," "factual things." Tish prose is inundated with such language, which dreams of transparency, heeding the imperatives of Pound's imagism (with its "direct treatment of the thingw')--and

Olson's renewal of it, objectism (banishing the "lyrical interference of the ego" so

perception might hear "the secrets objects sharevfi0).David Dawson, for example, writes of "definition." and "measurement" (Tish 1 26); more expansively, Jamie Reid writes of the "real world," "perception and awareness and its translation, language," "graph." "map" (Tish 114). "nature of reality" (Tish

2 38); Frank Davey, perhaps the most fervent proponent of a transcendental order, writes of "evidences" (Tish 1 19), "accuracy," "REALITY' (Tish 3 65).

"reality," "accurate communication" (66), "eternal principle," "eternal tenet,"

'7ruthM(Tish 5 97). 'Yestimony" (Tish 10 201); and Fred Wah writes of the

"actual," "reality" (Tish 1 23). "real nature," "true movements" (Tish 4 82), ''true representations," and (borrowing from Williams) "exact significances" (82).

Such master signifiers and their supporting terms reveal Tish's desire for an objective (natural) order that can be named, or-to use another prevalent Tish word-"communicated." In opposition to "slush"-a slippery sounding word describing an improper language which inhabits both consciousness and the external world (a language which is poured "into things")-Bowering imagines a sort of naked staring, a scientifically sound or technologically pure poetry, or as he puts it in his poem "Poet as Projector": "I do not interpret,ll switch on & I switch out" (Tish 1 18). Consciousness as objective reflex is also expressed by

David Dawson who writes, echoing Olson. how "the poem takes the/lNSTANT response" (26). And in 'The Problem of Margins" Davey writes:

All he may (with hope of accuracy) write about are featureskffects of the universe that come to him and/or flow through him. In short, his involuntary immediate perceptions. (Tish 3 65)

lnstead of a technological receptor, here the poet transforms himself into a sort

of organic vessel3', so that he might be, as Charles Olson puts it, "equal ...to the

real itself.32" The concept of the "involuntary" perception exchanges a

subjectivity enmeshed in the machinery of writing-as well as the filters of

emotion, mood, and feeling-for a subjectivity that is considerably more neutral or

objective.

First nature, second nature

For Davey, in "One Man's Look at 'Projective Verse"' (Tish 5) the cultural in

general is external to truth: 'The goal of art. 'Truth'--the satisfaction of the human

soul-never changes; what changes is its trappings, the terms in which it is to be

sought" (97). Language here, particularly the language of culture ("trappings,"

"terms"), is made external to an underlying order ("the eternal principle" 97).

Elsewhere, in the same vein, Davey posits a primordial experience joined to a

natural language (poetry as substance) which arises out of the body ("Poetry is

sensation"; and as quoted earlier: "A successful poem is one into which the poet

has put the most possible of his body" Tish 1 19). Those elements of writing associated with culture are given a supplemental, helping function: Poetic devices may be learned things. But secondary. They help to convey the poet and his I&-stance into his poem (a life thing). Tropes I thus leave to the scholar. They are the accidents, the illigitimate [sic] children of a poem whose essence is sensation, is life, is livng. (19, my emphasis)

Language touched by "life" absorbs life's substantiality, and the poem itself becomes an essence, part of the unchanging world.

In "One Man's Look at Projective Verse,"' the internai does not change,

"outward appearance" (97) changes. For Davey, even scientific discourse is too relative, so he re-grounds its powerful neutrality in the phenomenological self:

'True art has always been a groping for the 'Real'. It has never depended on the external verifiability principle of science; rather it has appealed to the internal one of the human being" (96-7). It is an inner capacity which can see through the transitory and the "trappings" to the real.

Because cultural artifacts are pre-interpreted , artificial, transitory, Tish consistently aligns itself with nature against the social world. Nature transcends the arbitrary changes of human history. Hence "nature" is seeded throughout

Tish discourse, with differing levels of gravity. The following is but a small sampling of "nature'% work. Wah, for example, speaks of "our real nature" (Tish

4 82), "natural desire," and "natural speech-song idiom" (83). Tallman "re- assert[~]the primacy of earth," and "the primacy of the human organism," and to rediscover the earth as the "great rhythmic mother" (Tish 3 68). Bowering speaks positively of Blake as ''the man who breathed in sympathy with Nature" (Tish 2 31); 'Take away God, and Nature becomes all the more powerful" (31).

He also maintains the opposition between a natural and unnatural poetry: "...the

English have kept ahold of their unnatural iambs. poor souls" (31). And in a note

on Dan McLeod (Tish IS), which sets up a sharp division between language as a

culturally driven process and language as nature, he writes:

The formalist would establish concepts of the poetic line & the poetic rime, forcing nature to contradict itself and squeeze into habits of writing that serve to announce the mind as victor over nature's own order. (31 1 )

Along with many of the Black Mountain writers, Reid conceives of poetry as a

natural form of consciousness, that "A poem is one of the processes of living ...as

natural and necessary as breathing" (Tish 4 71). Finally, Davey calls for an

"immersion in the greater natural order" (Tish 5 101). In fact, he criticizes Bly's

poem "Clear Air of October," for its failure to properly connect with nature.

Davey asks, 'What man as a participant in nature would react to the clear

October air in this manner?" (1023). For Davey, poetry "must always be natural.

It is senseless to contain it within a metrical pattern for such is an alien, unnatural thing" (103). Nature is an order immune to cultural distortions. And as an

"eternal order" (1 01 j, it guarantees the truth of poetic perception.

dominant origins

The emphasis on consciousness and communication as a means of fixing the

89 word is further reinforced by the Tish writers' understanding of their relationship to the reader. Following Olson's likening the words on the page to a musical score preserving the author's perceptual shifts, Tish writers see the poet as the origin of the poem, and the poem as, ideally, the preservation of the experience of reality. Fred Wah, for example, writes of the poet "merging ...himself with his natural surroundings, aiming at establishing a connection between language and reality" (Tish 7 23). Reality is then frozen in the line: "Here is the poem as an energy preserving object. It must preserve the instants of the poets [sic] own dance with his environmentf' (24). The text is an extension of authorial control; the words must preserve life, become, as Davey puts it, "a life-thing" (19):

"'Stance' in poetry-the poet being himself, and his poem in turn being evidences of his self' (19). The poem, as testimony, notation or preservation of life makes present an image of the self; transports experience into the text.

For David Dawson too the poem maps and defines the poet's own centre of gravity: "a poem is both a measurement of circumstance and a definition of stance" (Tish 126). And for Reid and Bowering the poetry is a mirroring reenactment: "Reenact the experience momentarily, nakedly, with verbs

(commands to motion), and with nouns (names of things)" (Reid, Tish 4 71); and

Bowering, almost identically, demands that poetry be a "re-enact[mentIwof

"experience" (Tish 7 17). Or, as Reid says in "What's Going On?":

The poem can serve as more than a song or a piece of communication. It can also be a help to the poet if he can get something down on the page where it can be viewed as an object outside Self, as a kind of map or a diagram. Which is how Whalen defines the poem: "...a picture or graph of a mind moving". It helps to locate. (TM 2 38)

Since I am stressing here that Tish picks up a particularly self-oriented strand from the Black Mountain poetics. it is worth noting what Reid leaves out of the line he quotes from Philip Whalen: 'This poetry is a picture or graph of a mind moving, which is a world body being here and now which is history... and you."

(Allen 420). Whalen's self connects to body, and the informing body of history, while Tish emphasizes self and its connection to an idealized real-caught through measurement, definition, evidence, graph, map, transcription, notation, and so forth.

I think this stance unintentionally alienates the Tish poets from their audience. The refusal of what Bowering calls the "interpretive faculty" (Tish 1

17) theoretically excludes the reader from participating in the production of meaning (bringing his or her subjective context to the text). The reader's role becomes that of passive receiver of what the poet passes on. Bowering might well be thinking of a questioning reader when he writes "The best answer anyone ever gave to a question of Why? was the child's Because!" (4 7).

In Davey's "The Problem of Margins" this masterlslave position is further set out The poem corresponds to the experiencelplace of the poet: "Always

LOCUS OF LINE must correspond to LOCUS OF POET" (Tish 3 66).

Furthermore, perhaps in keeping with Tallman's sense of the poet as "city state,"

91 Davey emphasizes the poet's interiority and his centrality: '?he margin is

ALWAYS in the poet"; "Since the origin of the line is always the poet, all lines necessarily must locate ON THE POET'S LOCUS" (65). But not only is the line anchored to the poet, it is also shipped directly-via a transparent vehicle, language-to its destination, the reader: "Lines are vocal connectors, bridges, tram lines, that make the poet's LOCUS directly accessable [sic] to the reader"

(66, my emphasis). The reader's position is a passive one, for the line is passed on in a single direction:

A line moves either in one direction or nowhere at all. It cannot go two ways at once. There is only one way for it to go: out from the poet's locus along the page and to the reader. (66)

Davey envisions a transparent relationship between poetic experience and language, object world and symbolic field. The poet's identifications and

"correspondences" are "an absolute requirement of a communicatory art such as poetry" (66). If the poet submits to nature (more accurately he becomes nature and takes on its authority when he "re-enacts" it in the poem), the reader must likewise play the slave and submit to the master-poet's objectifications

("equations"). Elsewhere Davey expresses some anxiety when reflecting on those who believe that "whatever the reader gets out of the poem will be determined as much by this person's past individual experience as by the poem"

(Tish 17 224). For Davey, understandably, words (signifiers) not rooted in a specific content (signified), a specific locus (referent), lead poet and reader alike away from the experience of sincerity and authenticity to deception and absurdity: the poet "may be concerned about his wife's pregnancy but write a poem entirely about poplar trees" (224). Ideally, to combat culture's arbitrary and shallow fabrications, poetry must develop from the ground up, based on a genuine "content'' (224).

Finally, Reid brings the play of the reader to a dead stop. Like Bowering and Davey, he elaborates the case that poetry is largely an act of communication with the reader in the position of passive receiver. Although at times, particularly in 'What's going on?," he accounts for the poet's past as altering his message, he still wraps that personal history in a rather neutralizing, technological metaphor. Like a radio

[t]he poet takes what he can from the air, TRANSFORMS it in his mind and body according to past experience and serimage and everything else that makes him a person, a separate identity, and then TRANSMITS the actual experience, as altered by himself, with the primary instrument of communication, his VOICE. (Tish 2 39)

The implied position of the reader (as radio listener) is not creative. The reader takes in ''the actual experience" which would not be actual if he or she were to alter it. This relationship is elsewhere dramatically expressed.

In the editorial of Tish 4, Reid imagines the poet, armed with Nature's authoritative articulations, overwhelming the reader's space. The poet must

''Tear the reader from his other places to a focus on the poem, bring him into your track, along your locus. Let him hear the sound of your voice in his ear" (71, my emphasis). The ideal poet hammers his experience onto the reader's

consciousness. Like Davey, Reid describes the external world as a form of

chaos ("Life explodes in our faces day to day and moment to moment" 71) which

must be controlled by the poet-master, who can then contain the reader with his

power:

A poem is an execution. Something clean. Like executing the task of execution, pulling the switch to the electric chair when everything is ready. The reader sits in the chair, the machine, the high energy construct. (71)

In the face of the hericlitian world (culture), the explosions, Reid clears a "clean" space. He ends the play around him, imposing a rigidly contained circuit

between poet, poem, and reader-insofar as the latter exists at all anymore.

Why should the reader get to play or interpret (in Barthes' sense of the

"wtiterly" text, or Derridian deconstruction), when the poet has refused himself that very pleasure in regards to nature? Hence, Tish cannot acknowledge that any reader's view is informed, reformed, and deformed by shifting contexts. But, arguably, the reader is absolutely separated from the poet's original experience, for as Derrida writes in "Signature Event Context":

Every sign, linguistic or non linguistic, spoken or written ...as a small or large unity, can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context.... This does not suppose that the mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center or absolute anchoring. (302)

The interpretive play that inevitably follows from such recontextualizations would call into question the availability of an "eternal order," preserved or reenacted intentions, authorial control, and so forth. For the Tish poets, such interpretative play must be barred. And the projected reward for both reader and poet is, ideally, access to the natural order of the universe, and hence a more authentic relationship with the world.

concluding marks

Tkh, in its idealistic aspects, shares common purposes with the intertextual Tish.

The idealistic Tish also wants to avoid commodification of self, object, other. If

Tish writers sometimes adopt particularly controlling attitudes towards the reader, it must also be acknowledged that the whole point of refusing the interpretive faculty is to avoid a sadistic relationship to nature, to let it speak for itself. As if to supplant cultural production, Tish's nature has its own unique, unmanufactured presences. Or rather, as the ultimate origin of all form, nature transcends culture's domineering, homogenizing modes of production. Shortly after the first editorial period, in "Rime: a Scholarly Piece" (originally appearing in

Evidence 1965), Frank Davey articulates this reversal of values in the following way:

We speak freely of the rhythm of the seasons, of the tide, of the planets, of the stars, of the life-cycle, of the menstrual period, of the wind, of the mountain stream, of the breath, or of the heart-beat. Rimes surround us, make the world meaningful, make language possible. (170-1) Here, nature is not reduced to so much raw material; it produces reality. The

collapse of mind into body (organs of pure perception. proprioception) and

language into nature (the rhythms of the world "make language possiblet') then is

part of a search for a more authentic reality.

Furthermore, nature plays a double role in Tish thought. First it is an

order that repeats itself cyclically. But it is also the site of radically contingent

forms, forms that protest against the colonishg powers of what has been

variously called rationalisation, instrumental reason, and capitalism, all of which

signify an overarching "fragmentation of organic ...or traditional processes"

(Jarneson, "Ulysses" 130)? The world that Tish constructs, made up of unique organic bodies, objects, and processes, resists fragmentation and assimilation

into meta-physical or instrumental programmes. Consequently, when Davey writes that

In poetry it [rime] should have the same freedom that it has in nature. In neither can there be any fixed rhyme schemes. ("Rimen 171) one might see this as not only a rejection of traditional poetic form, but of western metaphysics in generaknot such a stretch in the context of Olson's conflationof poetic device with an insidious modem technology. Tfsh wants to recover meaning and organic wholeness in the face of a "society" that has resulted in the "increasing dehumanization and impersonalization of human existence" (Tish 5 98). However, somewhat complicating the desire to elude assimilation, as

some of the strategies discussed in this chapter reveal, the group sometimes

resembles the forms it would expel. For example, and most importantly, like the

alienated humanist self, Tish's own version of consciousness can be

authoritarian, anti-social, and domineering (this is especially apparent in their

absolutist rhetoric--"must," "always," "necessarily," etc.). We see this attifude

expressed most strikingly in 77sh's stance towards the reader. It may also be

argued that in its most idealistic moments, the objects (and objectified minds) of

TIsh's natural order appear as fixed and resistant to historical change as

bourgeois positivism, which similarly "reduces the real to the measurable"

(Callinicos 82), to the presence of always already articulated objects.

Finally, the group's attempt to find a naturallneutral consciousness and a

natural language is obviously problematic. As Derrida has demonstrated, every

word is already "contaminated" by a complex relation to every other word. The word, the very material of Tish's project, is marked by-is the mark of-culture, of

pre- and re-fabrication. By now it should be clear that Tish prose offers a rich, though contradictory, complex of ideas, which nevertheless always attempt to resist commodification. It remains now to explore how the different twists and textures of Tish's philosophy inform its poetic practice. Ch. 4: The State of the Self in Black Mountain and Tish Poetry

"The Maximus Poems stand squarely against a literary ideology of rationality, preconceived unity, and stasis as the prime arbiters of the real." -Charles Bernstein (Content's Dream 322)

If two conflicting ideals of su bjectivity-intertextua l and unified-cohabit within

Black Mountain discourse, one should not be surprised to find expressed there

extremely divergent poetic practices. Despite sharing the same tradition, the

kind of poetry that appears in the first nineteen issues of Tish and the kind found

in Charles Olson's The Maximus Poems could not be further apart. While Olson

explores the self's production and dispersal through webs of textuality, and while

he struggles with ways to reclaim the city, the Vancouverites underplay collective

life, seeking refuge in a centred ego, and a signifier, following Pound at his most

idealistic, pinned to nature. The deep tension between these two stances

emerges in the group's wavering reception of Larry Eigner's writing, which

converges with Olson's in its foregrounding of the signifier, the social, and the

shaky foundations underlying human subjectivity.

Olson's marks of history

Charles Olson's Maximus Poems insists upon the materiality of the signifier, moving from simple record of meaning to foreground the construction of

meaning. Charles Bernstein notes that Maximusfl'staggered line arrangements

and ample use of white space" have an impact far beyond being merely a

notation for the "aural I oral dimension" (322). The spatial dimension, the visual

effect, has its own value: "no meaning but in space, materialized on a physical

page with printed marks" (322). One might add to Bemstein's observations

Olson's purely graphematic elements, his arrows (e.g., The Maximus Poems

206, 223), heavy black horizontal bars (e-g. 253), and equally heavy black

diagonal slash marks (e-g. 281). Bemstein emphasizes those points in Olson's

writing where he de-naturalizes language and ego control (instead of

emphasizing his "heroic conceit"):

Such an articulation goes significantly beyond Olson's organicist explanation of line breaks as measuring "breath." The effect of the visual layout of Maximus was to foreground the page as field-more process of material construction than Olson's more limiting breath metaphor allows. (322)

The force of "field" on the page, or the page as field, is a metaphor for the

decentring of the ego's control. The visual effect of The Maximus Poems is to

present, sometimes quite radically (see for example "Letter, May 2, 1959 150),

the look of a field, an intertextual web-not easily assimilated by consciousness.

The reader cannot transparently find a position for him or herself along the

syntagmatic chain, because Olson disrupts the linear track upon which the ego finds its unity, as in this poem from The Maximus Poems (228): ta meteura

meteor things

after the weather the meteors

parsonses field

Lacking pronouns or grammatical logic, this piece does not allow the reader a point of identification-no character to identify with, no speaker to overhear, no movie voice-over to follow along with, or, as Antony Easthope anglicizes

Benveniste," no "subject of the enounced" to pin down the "subject of the enunciation" (42-3). Furthermore the poem's signifiers only accrue meaning through reference both to other signifien elsewhere in Olson's The Maximus

Poems and to documentary research (e-g. as painstakingly carried out by

George F. Butterick in A Guide to the Maximus Poems of Charles Olson). In order to make sense of this poem. the reader must gather material that is simply not present: consequently, the words do not create the illusion of a "present" meaning over-seen by a "present1' speaker.

Thus, there is no speaker within the imaginary universe of the poem that the reader can identify with, as in, for example, the romantic lyric or the sonnet.

In Poetry as Discourse, Easthope argues that most poetry since the

Renaissance has "disavowed" the dominance of the signifier in the production of meaning; in opposition, he champions poetry which does not invite the reader "into simple identification with a represented speaker" (46). For Easthope, poetry which allows the reader to identify with the speaker in the poem uncritically reproduces Lacan's sense of "misrecognition." In other words, in traditional poetry, the reader is led to ignore that his or herexperience of self- unity is an effect of signifiers:

The English bourgeois poetic tradition... can be defined precisely as a regime of representation aiming to disavow enunciation [marks of signification] so as to promote only a position as subject of the enounced [the illusion of coherency within the imaginary space of the poem], especially when it creates the effect of an individual voice 'really' speaking by concealing the way it is produced as an effect. (46)

Recovering the process of signification and the structures of identification mirrors

Tish's desire to decentre the humanist subject. Poetry which ignores the material nature of the signifiers-allowing one to misrecognize oneself in the speaker in the imaginary universe of the poem, forgetting that identification is an illusory effect of signifiers-recreates the self as the origin of wholeness and coherency. Olson's The Maximus Poems, for the most part, does not allow the reader to digest the text, to discover a solid point of identification along the syntagmatic chain. Hence, Bernstein writes that "Maximus never errs on the side of caution or conventional literary values (closure, smoothness of transition, propriety of fit)" (322).

Easthope's understanding of poetry is not unrelated to Tish's. First, his exemplar of radical poetry is Pound's Canto's; second, and more to the point, Easthope's insistence upon the work of the signifier in producing the effect of the

speaker or the effect of transparency is an attempt to undo the ideology of

individualism and demonstrate how self belongs to larger orders, what he calls,

after Lacan, the discourse of the Other (37): sig nifiers, unconscious processes.

linguistic structures, historical contexts, "[all1 of these absences and

dependencies which have to be barred in order for meaning to take place..."

(37). Olson's poetry certainly demands that the reader attend to the textual

unconscious. But Olson also practises a reorienting of individualism on a larger, more concrete level. His self is thoroughly social. Olson's The Maximus Poems is completely absorbed in the workings of the city, social-textual networks: with its letters (i-e. 30 and throughout), chronicles (i-e. 120, 272), lists (i-e. 227). ledgers (122), and the documentary material:

Letter # 27, to Pickering, Aug 16, 1795:

"...Salem, Newburyport approve-..

"At M'Head and Cape Ann they are all quiet and think very well of. ..

At Portsmouth "all the best men-.-

No noise.

And no discussion. (80)

As with this fragment, much of this information is obscure: a mark of history, intertext, a productive social ground. And like the city itself, this network is not subject to the control of any individual seif. Arguably, the open quotation marks signify the intersection through which pass endless historical citations, meeting with and forming the present text, the author's own line. In this sense Olson's

Gloucester resembles Davey's natural universe; both serve to humble the individual's grasp. Speaking of The Maximus Poems as a whole, Bemstein finds that Olson's poetic production, like the city's, is not available as a rational, linear narrative:

The competing ideological materials and the surplus of indecipherable passages and obscure references work as Brechtian epic devices to defamiliarize, to pull the reader away from the intensive and uninterrupted reading (consumption) of the text. In this sense, the length of the book operates to prevent any fixed or final or outside image of the poem's meaning; rather, the length tends to locate the meaning in the reader's periodic reimmersion in the text, with its multidirectional vectors and eddies. (323)

For Bernstein it is just such practices which, again despite Olson's "heroic conceit," upset the humanist reader. It is worth noting that Tish writers- especially Wah, Bowering, Kearns and Davey-in their post-Tish years move in precisely this direction, away from the lyric to the long line, the book-length poem-

Despite what Bernstein calls his "heroic conceit," Olson's voice, when it is not laying down the fabric of historical utterances, never strays far from the collective, from the people, the polis, the "we." Olson wants to recover material, but he never leaves the possibilities of the city ("The earth with a city in her hair l entangled of trees'' Maximus 289). He redefines the idea of the city, opposes the particular (good) polis against the universalizing (bad) polis:

As the people of the earth are now, Gloucester is heterogenous, and so can know Polis not as localism, not that mu-sick (the trick of corporations, newspapers, slick magazines, movie houses... (Maximus 14)

Against the homogenization brought about by mass media and corporations.

Olson idealizes the local, as he writes in volume Ill of The Maximus Poems:

I am a ward and precinct man myself and hate universalization, believe it only feeds into a class of deteriorated personal lives anyway, giving them what they can buy, a cheap belief. (379)

Olson's poetry presents an "I"which is immersed in historical and social systems. It is not possible to imagine Olson's vision of subjectivity outside of this vast other: the city. What he wants to maintain is that very human subject in dialectical, active, creative relation to his or her surroundings. He fears that subjectivity is on the verge of being snuffed out, made utterly passive. Or as he puts it in the first song of Maximus:

colored pictures of all things to eat: dirty postcards And words, words, words All over everything No eyes or ears left to do their own thing (all

invaded, appropriated, outraged, all senses

including the mind, that worker on what is And the other sense made to give even the most wretched, or any of us, wretched, that consolation (greased lulled even the street-cars

song. (17)

For Olson there is no turning away from the city. It simply has to be reimagined with and by active subjects. The text itself begins to invent the new citizen of the ideal city. In total, both thematically (as the text expliclly demands participation) and in fact, The Maximus Poems is what Barthes called a writedy text: "[a] text that cannot be read (or decoded) in terns of welldefined constraints, conventions, and codes... a text that is (to be) written rather than (already) read"

(Prince 103). What Olson demands of himself and the reader is to actively put the textlcity together, to resist being colonised entirely by a bloodless, self- interested (corporate-controlled) system of signs.

The case of Lany Eigner

Within Tish poetry, there are few examples that thematize the production of poetry or poetic consciousness in the ways discussed above: i.e. foregrounding intertextuality, marks of historical information, the graphematic, paratactical lines, collage, and so forth. However, some examples-significant because of the debate they raise among the editors-appear in Larry Eigner's poems in Tish 5 and 6.

Eigner's work offers Wo revealing moments in the early Tish movement.

The first poem is published under protest by most of the editors. The other poem slips by, but not without some comment by the editors. The untitled poem

(Tish 5 103-5) presents the reader with virtually no place for the transcendental ego to discover itself, no standard grammar, normal syntax, linear logic. It is too long to quote in full. but what follows gives an adequate sense of its chaotic logic:

history weights, derivatives, number crosses not generation you have your room into day continue on the ridge attack of diseases

... 5.000 brass plates

youth the most perilous season

Huns against Goth the undersides Italy

inaccessible mountain at Papua

"vile nation" Eignefs poetic line is less interested in constructing a place for the ego than in

playing with the idea of history as discourse. Through its dramatic isolation or

dissection of the elements of historical narrative-geography ("mountain at

Pa pua") , country rltaly"), period ("Christian age" 1O4), and citation ("vile nation"; "trivial" "promiscuously" 104)-the poem underscores "history" as an effect of the

sig nifier.

By removing most conjunctions (ordering relations) and adverbs

(expressing time), Eigner undoes and leaves open-ended the logic of history.

His history is deliberately textual, without essences. Like Olson's The Maximus

Poems, this is a "writerly" poem-demanding reader participation. Moreover, its

references belong not to private language or individual sense perceptions but to

publicly shared categories ("history I weight, derivatives, numbers Icrosses Inot

I generation ..." 103).

What is especially revealing is Tishls attitude towards the poem. Davey

insisted, over the other editors' objections, on running the piece:

I have published this poem over the objections of the other editors. Most of them tell me that it is almost incomprehensible-in intent as well as effect. However, I receive a curious feeling for history from reading it... (1 05)

While not going so far as to call the piece comprehensible, Davey admits that a good poem might work without authorial intention and narrative device. He affirms that "[olne remarkable thing about the poem is that the causes and effects expressed in Gibbon completely disappear, leaving only a series of temporally connected human events1'(105). Nevertheless, for Davey, despite the textual fragmentation, certain essential truths emerge: he struggles to find in

Eigner a sort of humanist, who lays down "temporal[ ...I connection[s]" (105 j beneath the surface (textual) fragmentation. Precisely against such humanism though, the poem transcends the individual perceiver, accenting the systematic forces that shape consciousness-history. discursive Mds. Wth an emphasis on number and object, the warmly "human" recedes before abstraction and broad categorization, which transcend the individual's grasp, which in fact shape the "individual": "Huns"; "Goth"; "nation"; "generation." Eigner captures a feeling of estrangement, the personal lost in the sweep of history and the objectivity of science. He does not humanize but alienates: "your beautiful wives / the property shares"; "Gibbon Iby jove I thunder Icertain minute and sonorous particles..." (104). Testifying to the effects of ideology, Davey pours the evidence through the Tish grid: "I believe this is a tribute to both man and Eignet-

-that after reading such a work as the Decline and Fallonly the human movements, the human rhythms, remain in the consciousness. This is a real poem" (105, my emphasis). For Davey, in keeping with the transcendentalist

Tish discussed in the last chapter, essence is contained "in the consciousness."

Hence he imagines Eigner reading Gibbon and capturing human essences beyond the text, even as Eigner demonstrates the very absence of a guiding

historical zeitgeist or human consciousness.

In the next issue of fish, the editors are more positive towards Eigner's work, and seem to recant, somewhat, the harsh feelings from the previous issue.

This may have something to do with a note from one of the godfathers of the

Black Mountain poetry scene, Cid Corrnan, to which the editors respond: ''We now agree with Cid Corrnan (recent postcard) that the note on Eigner's poem in no. 5 was 'unnecessary.' But not inadequate in relation to local objections" (Tish

6 111). Eigner's "From the Cleared Window1'gets a good review from the editors. If the earlier Eigner poem was considered "almost incomprehensible"

(Tish 5 105), "From the Cleared Window" is found otherwise: "[tlhis month we like Eigner's poems because of the depth of the sense of place they convey.

They are rooted in a consistent reality; not merely [in] an incidental one" (Tish 6

11 1). This seems puzzling because "From the Cleared Window" is no more

"comprehensible" in any linear sense than Eigner's "history" poem from Tish 5.

The first and in my opinion most transparent of the five sections reveals a somewhat surreal perception of reality:

Come out of your eyes the soul is a corner universe

back two steps now you're shadowing walls broken into houses carry the ground

eternal spaces

weeds

the sun turns west

you are what I am the empty flat has clean sills still been taken

that dog is younger than you memory is less, not so crowded as the trees are

Slightly, the earth is changing as much

you remember the papers the dim place the branch held by the attic

it's lengthy view

night coming tomorrow

the sun to divide

and suppose the rain shadow go down

in one window and out of another (I13-14)

Eigner's five poems are full of fragments of radically contingent or finite perceptions ('We empty flat," "shadowing walls," "that dog") set against the

backdrop of the etemai or elemental ("universe." "eternal spaces," "the earth." the sun"). Individual memories and perceptions both gain in intensity, because they are fleeting, and shrink before eternity, for the same reason. The earlier

Eigner poem conceives social history from a poslion of detachment: speaking of

universal ("weight, derivatives. number") or collective categories ("Huns against

Goths"). "From the Cleared Window" appears to look at events, however chaotically, from the viewpoint of a particular subject. But it is not easy to see how the latter piece can be accurately described as "rooted in a consistent reality" (Tish 6 11 1). Although they do seem to cohere (or fall apart, depending on how you look at it) around an individual subject: "you are what I am" (I13);

"the crickets Ido not keep me" (1 14); "the way I am standing" (1 15); "why should it be around mei1 (1 16), and so forth.

All of the fragmented images can be seen to revolve, loosely. around a perceiver. Many images of windows, rooms and the passage of light, may be read as commentaries on consciousness and unconsciousness ("Come out of your eyes" 11 3; "you are what I am the empty Rat" 11 3; "say like those crooked houses I1 the way I'm standing" 115; "1 can here imagine other houses I/ emotions in space" 116). On the other hand, most of these gestures may more easily be read as deconstructions of the privileging of perception. The many sharp, imagistic fragments produce no clarity; one struggles to place these bits of light (and shadow) into some contextwherein they might be understood. In fact, the visual is often immediately obstructed: "seeing Ioutside partly Istoried, and part clouded" (1 16); "1 am through glass Itill it should become thick" (1 16);

"Light retreats now from inside" (1 17). The poem's ruptured syntagmatic chain would support such an attack on the purity of perception:

Break the dogfight

the lawnmower too UP the rollercoaster

as the lark flew the field plane

a sudden sky you hold in distinction...

Nevertheless, there are places where a central subject could be reconstructed.

There are enough signs of consciousness, "l"s, "eyes," and, metaphorically,

"windows," "houses," that one could construct a tenuous centre of consciousness. In other words, the consistency that the editors find might be the apparent self-containment of events. Another form of coherence that is consistent with the thread picked up by the transcendental Tish, discussed in the last chapter, is the many images of nature. Eigner refers to three layen of nature: what might be called the cosmic or transcendental (again: "soul,"

"universe," "eternal spaces"), local nature ("'weeds,""lark," "roots." "crickets,"

"stream of trees," "a nest," "leaves," and so forth), and elemental nature ("sun," "sky," "sea." "clouds," 'ktars," "eartht')). These elements combined with the references to houseshodies emphasize the fact of some place. but not any specific locus. Just as the presence of commands ("Come out of your eyes.).."), images of eyes, windows, houses, first person pronouns. allow that there might be some subjectivity, it is hardly a coherent subjectivity!

One could argue that the opacity of Eigner's lines deconstructs the coherency of the perceiver; the fragmented placement of his geographies, the isolation of all imagery, problernatizes the sense of place. Contrary to the Tish understanding of the poem, Iwould argue that along with enacting it, Eigner even seems to thematize the dissolution of self and place:

I can here imagine other houses

emotions in space once I'm crazy, secondly then all things

a time for plowing

a great light

all things all things everything

and each form so is it formless

hug the wail easy have to search

don't get it right in the hallway (1 16-17)

Complementing the extreme disjointedness of the statements, the lines speak of insanity ("I'm crazy"), psychotic fusion (I am "all things'?),dissolution ("so it is formless"), shattering anxiety and groundlessness ("hug the wall"; "have to search I/ don't get it"). Admittedly, the final section. with its relatively gentler rhythms and wistful tone ("Last autumn but a memory I should've swum, dipped I once, in that blue offshore") offers a modicum of emotional relief. The shattered

"I" joins with another or others ('is apt to drive us"; "no matter how we lift the blinds"; "we steeled"), sharing the suffering brought on by the "the bare earth"

(1 17). Despite the shift in tone, the final section is not obviously if at all grounded in "a consistent reality." But whatever reading fits, the point is that

Eigner and Olson demand participation of the reader. Both poets problematize the easy consumption of the text; both destabilize the traditional poetic constructions which support the centrality of the ego. One of the key premises of

Olson's and Eigner's poetic lines, as different as they are from each other, is that the self is not the centre: production comes, in large part, from outside.

some Tish traits

For the most part, the Tish editors and regulars do not draw from these particular resources. And in the rare moments when they do, as in Bowering's "Poet as

Projector," the effect-the marks of production-is subordinate to the linearity of

114 the line and the consistency of a subject position. Bowering's piece demonstrates some of the principles laid down and practised in the more radical elements of Tish prose. The piece is ''prefaced" with a quotation from Charles

Olson: 'The process of image cannot be understood by separation from the stuff it works on" (Tish I 18). The status of this epigraph takes on special significance in "Poet as Projector":

I am the light & the way, I, that I, that - inner light

(undomesticated finger on the switch)

(of - "God?")

And the film

My nature to correspond, to project to project the image. the image of a reflection...... p erhaps

a projection, yes light thru film enlarged in image for

it does not translate at the skin

"Art does not seek to describe but to enact" ibid

I do not interpret, I switch on & I switch out, I enlarge the Clm, my latent image of all phenomena

Me, the soul machine, projecting on a silver screen, inner energy a long photo cell, to light up a picture,

no ideas buf in things.

Vancouver; B.C. 1961

On the one hand this poem illustrates the more worldly position of the intertextual

Tish, hence the continuation of Olson's text in the middle of the poem. In keeping with Olson's desire to disrupt the unity of the ego with marks of history,

Bowering disrupts his meditation, referring us outside his text, to other texts. In addition to the documentary mark "ibid," the first line alludes to John 8:12 and

14:6 and the final line cites William Carlos Wlliams' famous command: "no ideas but in things." Breaking down genres (the poem is also a lecture and manifesto),

Bowering at the same time acknowledges the sources of his own thinking. In other words, the emphasis shifts from the purity of consciousness and the presence of object to welcome recognition of intertextual dialogue.

But at the same time that Bowering foregrounds marks of history and influence, above and beyond the immediacy of consciousness, he also maintains the centrality of self as evidenced by the many first-person pronouns which dominate the material. Even though Bowering undercuts the role of the self

("undomesticated finger on the switch"), he nevertheless makes a connection

116 between self and God ("I am the light & the way")-just as he claims to be able to project objects innocently ("Ido not interpret, I I switch on & Iswitch out") from world to text. Furthermore, despite the fragmentation brought by the citations and ellipses, the piece, compared to Eigner or Olson at least, is more or less linear. A subject position, or point of view, is prefabricated so that the reader can easily find a place for him or herself, without need for "participation."

Bowering's "Poet as Projector" is especially interesting as it demonstrates the tensions--between egocentrism and intertext, the desire for a controlling subjectivity and revealing the presence of formative, exterior forces-in Black

Mountain discourse, and in 77sh's own version of Black Mountain discourse. For

Beverley Mitchell, though, the best of Tish poetry, that which remains true to the movement, emphasizes the immediacy of conscious perception, which, through sound and shifts in margin, "project an emotional experience" rACritical Study"

65). For Mitchell, the most significant and pervasive aspect of Tish is the focus on immediacy of perception, the poet's consciousness. The sort of textual play just observed that turns beyond "experience1'does not conform to the basic precepts of "the movement." She finds Bowering, with minor exceptions, to

"have missed the point of it [the movement] completely" (66). Mitchell argues that Bowering's best poem, most illustrative of Tish precepts, is "The Sunday

Poem" (Tish 2 47-8):

I love your mystical overnight opening of the flower autumn purple reflected lights in your noon day sun day eyes

So that I catch my breath

(lungs full of midnight air :the overnight opening)

I swear there are pieces of pollen in the air you breathe into my lungs

And your hair I am mystified by the forehead dance of air in the night verdant

I feel the light blood in and around my legs and arms

LONELY THIS MORNING is good lonely this morning in the swab of sunlight - is the personal generation of the

I love you in the night As Mitchell writes, "'The Sunday Poem' demonstrates quite clearly [Bowering's]

sensitivity to delicate nuances in human emotion as well as to evocative nuances effected by sound and image" (65). Following the theory presented in "Poet as

Projector," Bowering projects onto the "screen" of language the drama of his emotions, actions and thoughts. What Mitchell finds exemplary in The Sunday

Poem" are those elements of Black Mountain discourse which focus on the self, unity of experience, identity of word and event. Hence she points out how through a certain abruptness in spacing and margins Bowering captures ''the immediacy of the physical act of catching one's breath" (64) or how through the use of sound he "project[s] an emotional experience with the immediacy the Tish poetics envisages" (65). Whether she is writing of Reid, Bowering, Dawson, or

Davey, Mitchell inevitably finds the group's desire to effect a resemblance, or what Antony Easthope calls "iconicity" (I04-S), to the real world. For example, in addition to the example from Bowering's "Sunday Poem," Mitchell points out how in Reid's "Poem to Marc Chagall, Saintly Painter" the "spacing between each letter in 'd a n g I i n g' ...g ive[s] a visual effect consonant with the meaning of the word" (66); and how in his "For the Guitar Girls" Davey linguistically effects "the quick movement he associates with [the guitar-girl]" (73). One would have to add also how relentlessly and successfully the Tish poets create the illusion of the presence of the speaker. It is difficult to disagree with Mitchell's assessment of Tish. Although the prose might sometimes disagree, in the poetry the Tish movement is preoccupied with grasping the object in all its immediacy. The group takes this emphasis to an extreme that Olson, arguably, in his poetry at

least, does not. And overseeing the immediate, there generally stands a watchful subject.

Boweringts'Sunday Poem," which tightly revolves around the ego ("I love," "I catch," I swear," "I am mystified," "I feel," "I love"), and "Poet as

Projector" both announce the dominance of the self in Tish poetry. This is a predominant tendency in all Tish writers: wherever the object is there the self goes too, as the first stanza of Davey's "Daniel at the Lion's Gatet' reiterates:

I remember in the country when the flowers came I goosed them with my cornucopia (they liked that) and in the winter I melted each snowbell quick with a poke from my gypsy walking stick. (Tish 7 20)

In this case the speaker's self, his self-reflexive commentary, thoroughly controls the object of perception. The real subject of the poem seems to be the presence of the self, as Robert Duncan observed of Davey's poem:

in the first issue, Davey 'discovers' the Lion's Gate Bridge. In Daniel at the Lion's Gate he is self-conscious in the presence of the poem and strives to keep this lively personality of his in evidence.... Every opportunity is taken to remind us that he is wise to what he's doing. (Tish 13 255) While many of Davey's poems exhibit the same kind of self4eprecating humour found in "Daniel at the Lion's Gate," he, like Bowering. also meditates on the purer potential of self. imagining self as a sort of machine or vessel capable of containing external objects. For example, in a theoretical mood, Davey's

"Intentionsf' (Tish 6 118) depicts consciousness as the place where things of the world wander in and out, the place from where he can impress himser upon the world:

The seagull on the grass using claws and beak wrestles with a piece of apple: regarding the problem it is a personal thing and my poems

Looking back to the present the task is to illumine whatever nestles in the mind the form - the inexpressibly human form that wanders in and out the doorways eyeways

These first two stanzas express important Tish ideas of consciousness.

Significantly, perception and thought-the two come together here-are wrenched from abstract conceptuality and imagined as visceral physicality: ego conceived as "claws and beak" (a reference to Pound's ego-beak?). Thinking and perceiving are here animal actions, clawing the object ("apple"). The second stanza combines this feral vision with some of the more passive notions of perception expressed in Tish thought. Now mind is empty vessel, space, and receptacle for incoming images and sounds. But the animal-perceiver brings its objects back to this space, taking nature, the apple, into the nest ("nestle1') of the mind, and then-seagull-like-examining it

In a sense this second gesture tames the first, allowing a contemplative gaze to take over the visceral "claw"; the "wildness" of the phenomenological line is also tamed by the formative consciousness. The censor is at work, as it were, in a way that it is not, at least stylistically, in Eigner's poetry. In other words, the reader walks down Davey's line as through an orderly clearing, rather than cutting his or her own path through the wilderness of words.

The accompaniment of self and perception is expressed by the lines that follow the first two stanzas:

I looking me out into the object lsubject

subject she is little jaunty despairing girl a woman each day of my life these days

and you are how I am brown coated and bright each time I look at you

The "I" here is explicitly tied to the eye, and its gaze now impresses itself upon or penetrates ("into") the object. As in "Daniel at the Lion's Gate," the repetition of the first-person singular attempts to make self substantial, repressing the work of

the signifier. Here Davey, in accordance with his own interpretation of

humanism, projects his ego onto the world ("looking me out1')-although there

seems to be some confusion, some blending of subjectivities, at least

temporarily: subject and object ("object Isubject"), self and other ("you are how I

am"), seem to fuse. However, the other here is ultimately subsumed beneath

the poet's subjectivity. Hardly mentioned, her position in relation to the speaker

("each day of my life") presumably compares to the seagull's relation to its

"problem." The female is also defined in reference to his being.

Although Iwill turn to the topic of women in Tish in the next chapter, it is worth noting here that when it comes to the "girl" in "Intentions" the tone

becomes humorous and she appears somewhat trivialized ("little...girl")35-

Furthermore, her subjectivity is suspended; a contrast is drawn between his cool detachment and power and her uncertainty. Compare his active "I looking me out I into the object" to her uncertain place as (his) 'rsubject", a "little jaunty despairing girl." Reinforcing the poet's difference from her, the statement

"subject she is" resonates with condescension, as if he were saying "Aren't you a big girl now." In "Intentions" the poet's eye11 is the pivot around which the world revolves, or the hole into which it sinks. Such an egocentric inlout structure drains the outside of its force. In this instance, Daveyls division of the world implies that the self is equal to,36if not quite master of, the external flux. Even more extreme, Lionel Keams' 'Things" (Tish 4 87) dramatizes an ego-centred phenomenology. The first stanza, with a modestly Eigneresque disjointedness of line (see also his 'Suspension Bridge" Tish 5 108), presents isolated perceptual images unconnected to any speaker:

tail-lights on the bridge somewhere squealing tires the faint pulse of tug engines off the inlet even the instant flick of a swallow past the street lamp

But what begins with an atmosphere of ambiguity ("somewhere." "faint." "flick"), of a decentralized Yield" (a context beyond "I"),is suddenly pulled together into linear form, overseen by the poet's constituting presence. All of the elements just named, it turns out,

are nothing without a CENTER exposed awake suffering it all the essential witness the soul the self the

shivering on the balcony aware of my wife pregnant and retching in the background

and the slight wind

over the roof-tops among the flashing neon signs the clock face on the distant city hall is a small splotch of red

Visually, the poem resembles waves rippling outward from the self-centre, a kind of inverted representation of field. The "essential witness"-grounded, perhaps in the TishIBlack Mountain notion of testimony, report, dictation, phenomenology- looks but is scarcely present (except as "shivering"). Despite the desire wlhin the Tish movement for "discovery," for letting the world speak without censor, this field of elements is really overseen by the self. The speaker is hyper-alert

("'exposed," "aware," "witness") compared to the representatives of the social world ("my wife Ipregnant"), which are positioned off in the distance or in the

"background," behind the imperial "I." The self is detached from the phenomena, which appear either uprooted as hallucination or remote-not affecting the self's armour, as he stands in the foreground, on a "balcony" looking "over the roof- tops." Even the ambiguous "splotch" is contained by explanation. That the penona is "shivering" and that his wifek existence and pain are secondary to his consciousness of her existence suggests the possibility of irony. But even then, irony still has the effect of detaching the penona from his surroundings.

The wife represents the abject, the impure, doubled, "retching." As I will show, Tish poets tend to repress theirown bodies: in her pregnant and permeable state, the persona's wife epitomizes abjection for the poet, who strives to be impermeable, whole, detached, even disembodied. He would rather deal with the cold than face the overwhelming fact of corporal mutability and the

125 unpleasant immediacy of the smell of vomit.

Like "Things," Kearns' "Vastation in the Stacks" (Tish 7 154) places the

Veye as the organizing centre of the phenomenological and social storms. The

latter poem makes explicl the ego's transcendence over the linguistic network as well. In fact the real hero and subject of this poem, delineated with much bravado, is the heroic poet:

there is the agglutinous WORD which from the beginning extends in the dark filling the mouths and ears of men -stopping their blood.

interval or intellect feet in the shade of it lethal cryptology along the shelf

hysterical signs in the dusty air hand lip and flickering synapse faltering rhythms from under the racks

but I would usurp that adhesive godhead of WORD -making my poems with a knife

The feel of presence, immediacy, comes from the pores of the self, pours from the self. The objects in the poem, that which makes up the fantasy space of

"field," are, by contrast, imagined as dead. The dead letter on the dusty page, associated with the biblical word ("from the beginning" of time to the present day), is charged with murdering both body and consciousness~This "word" mortifies ("stopping their blood") and multiplies, becoming a "lethal cryptology along the shelf' which kills the 'lsynapseR'(1 54). Kearns extracts those elements of the biblical characterized by dependence, formula, and communal enmeshment. For him, such language is cooked (or "Fryed" as Bowering says in

A Way with Words 27). According to Tish poetics, natural rhythms are stifled by the cultured intellect, or, as Keams puts it: "interval or intellect I feet in the shade of it" (1 54). So there is an old word and world and a new one; one govemed by death, the other govemed by life.

Significantly, in the bad old world, the socio-linguistic field-the tribe, wherein the word of godAaw precedes the individual--is prior to "man": it colonizes his raw perceptions. The word acts on being, charges meaning-if not life-into the self, "filling the mouths and ears of men" with the spirit of the other

(god, tribe). The biblical subject is founded upon some exterior source (God, nature, law, word, world). But for Kearns the "I" is source and sorcerer: "but I would usurp that I adhesive godhead of WORD I -making my poem with a knife1

(154). As actor, usurper, maker, master of the word, Kearns' persona is the world. The poet cuts himself off from 'Yhat" text-ure of the communal world, which is gluey or "agglutinous" (1 54), a liquid which represents the sticky fact of intersubjectivity and interdependence, where the subject is stuck to the world and not so stuck on sticking out as Kearns is. According to Kearns' dreaming, anchors are lifted, social glues dissolved, so that the poet can, like Columbus, set sail for a new world. Wth his "knife," Kearns represents the interests of individualism (individuum, separation, autonomy) by castrating the castrator (god, bible, law).

scattering

I have been suggesting that at the centre of Bowen'ng's, Davey's and Keams' poems is the self as the organizing principle. An older metrics may have passed away but the self and its linearity remain. Certainly in the few examples given, all sentences maintain a linear logic, controlled by the speaker. Even in the most dramatic examples of line breaks and spacings, the grammar rarely breaks; the sense of the sentence is preserved. The poet's "I"subjects this sentence to its own transparent order. One gets the feeling that the poetic consciousness, despite the attacks on the humanist, ends up organizing the world after all.

To explain why this attitude towards "meaning" is so important I must briefly return to Olson's "Projective Verse," for one of Olson's most urgent purposes here is to challenge the prominence of "meaning." Hence when he demands that "one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON

ANOTHER!" (149) he is asking that poetry be "orderedut-orrather disordered-as the word traces the unpredictable inpourings of the world upon sense organs.

Olson thus opposes the transient, wondering eye (ear, skin, etc.) to the rational

"I"and its censoring reign over the sentence. One direction phenomenology might take then would be to allow the pre-reflective consciousness to usurp logic, to enact a split between "I" and the eye. This route is explored, as we have seen, by Eigner and Olson-and elsewhere. most thoroughly perhaps, by

Daphne Marlatt.

Olson also attempts to shatter ego control and the concept-laden sentence when he shifts value from word (and sentence) to syllable: "Let's start with the smallest particle of all, the syllable. It is the king and pin of versification, what rules and holds together the lines, the larger forms of the poem" (149). By breaking the poem down into atomistic units ("these particles of sound" 149). the poet defamiliarizes, mimicking the physicist perhaps, the larger units-words, sentences-where meanings are already hard and fast-

Olson is not, as Mitchell would have it, looking for a new unity of consciousness, sound, and sense (see above my discussion of Bowering). On the contrary he asks the poet 'Yo step back here to this place of the elements and the minims of language... to engage speech where it is least careless-and least logical' (150 my emphasis). For Olson, the instant of the perception (too fast and wild for reason to tame) and the energy of the syllable (which again undercuts western logic) clash with the conventional organization of the sentence, and of the ego residing in that sentence. Of course, ideally, Olson claims that these non-linear, non-rational elements have their own logic. Hence

Olson, and the Tish poets, emphasize the process of "discovery," whereby the poet might uncover a new arrangement of poetic line according to the syllables' and perceptions' own peculiar logics-the poem will have its own "proper confusions" (152):

Which brings us up, immediately, bang, against tenses, in fact against syntax, in fact against grammar generally, that is, as we have inherited itJwould argue that here, too, the LAW OF THE LINE, which projective verse creates, must be hewn to, obeyed, and that the converxions which logic has forced on syntax must be broken open as quietly as must the too set feet of the old line.... lt is my impression that all parts of speech suddenly, in composition by field, are fresh for both sound and percussive use, spring up like unknown, unnamed vegetables in the patch... (153)

For Olson, the energy of the syllable is not something added to traditional sentence structures. The syllable-sound-will not decorate or reinforce old meanings, but rather will create "unknown, unnamed vegetables." This sort of play with the logic of the sentence is, as we have seen, explored in Tish prose.

The poetry, however, is in this respect more conservative: it rarely explores the kind of chaotic typography and attendant disruption of syntax displayed by

Eigner and Olson. A survey of the most adventurous examples of typographical play in Tish: No. 1-79, where one would most expect to discover the effects of hybrid syllables and alien perceptions, yields mainly an easily digestible fare.

Consider the following typical example from the first part of David Cull's poem in

Tish 2:

Hot Day: Upper Levels I (Criticism)

It was still,

beautiful

And still possible

To put in paint or print

Impressions of its beauty

As before,

But, for myself

I could not see

How, to gain

Coitus

With a mountain". (32)

Cull obviously makes pleasing use of alliteration and pacing (breathline). But while he states the difficulty of matching arVperception ("Coitus") with object

("mountain"), there is little or no disruption or challenge to the speaker's containment of events. It is not just that no signifier rebels against its signified, but that the whole stanza is no more than a single, logical sentence. In other words, it testifies to the speaker's ability to effect closure, to tame the linguistic and perceptual challenges presented by the external world. Like all of the pieces by Bowering discussed in this chapter, as well as Davey's "Intentions," and

Kearns' "Thingsi' and 'Vastation in the Stacks," Cull's perceptions take the form of a statement. And as in the works of these other writers, narrative and speaker, rather than "syllable"--in the largest sense of that word-dominate the poetry.

At any rate, one finds the same type of containment in most Tish poetry.

Perusing poems like Bowering's "The Sunday Poem" (Tish 3 47). Davey's "The

Following" (Tish 4 73), Wah's "Bedtime Ill" (Tish 4 81) and "The Landscale

(cont'd)" (84). or Cull's "Lig ht-Town" series (Tish 6 124, Tish 8 161). one finds exactly the same effect To give another example. this selection from Fred

Wah's "The Landscale (Intro)" (Tish 2 43) maintains a similar authorial control of the external world (in this case, as in Cull's, the world of nature):

sometimes we know that the wind sings coming all over the land did it so sound when through everything it blew

and the sounds rested in places

in me my direction sways with their leaning ways these trees include me as being bent with them selves..

I become big with remembering and cast ofF weeping the past laughing with song my reentry

I am here now I am here now I know where my loves going with me

The way the line "sways" here exemplifies form mirroring content (the swaying of the trees). It also inscribes the speaker's presence in the word ("...me as being I bent with them"), placing a heavy accent on that presence ("Iam here now I I am here now") as the scattered lines tighten into a skinny strip (comparable to

Keams' loose stanza in 'Things" which converges on the pointed "I").

And since I am also discussing how Tish writers contain their subject matter through the filter of the speaker, note that the content of Wah's poem is contained and controlled by the speaker's narrative. Going beyond the limited dimensions of "statement," Wah, like Davey in "Daniel at the Lion's Gate," orders his perceptions, memories. etc., by telling a story. And the characters in the story-the wind, the trees, even the swaying lines-do not represent nature amplified through a purified consciousness (as promised in the prose). These characters are creations of their authors, and are not left open in the way Olson and Eigner leave language open (emphasizing the thingness of the word, and the alienating features of public discourse), undoing the author in his role as tour-guide.

Some of the Tish theorists discussed in the last chapter demanded that a poem should tear the reader from his or her own track onto the poet's; this would

guarantee language's direct tie to its objects, and that the transient objects of

perception could be preserved. One enters the poet's world, or his perceptions,

which is problematic because it recreates the humanist's vision, where a centred

self orders the world in its own image and represses the presence of the Other.

Unlike the intertextual vitality expressed in its prose, Tish's poetry severely limits

the play of exterior forces (the reader, marks of culture, the materiality of the

signifier) which would disrupt authorial control. While Olson idealistically

attempts to seize the city for the self, simultaneously freeing both from

commodification, while he makes of himself an expanding universe. Tish writers

resist commodification by shrinking from the city, shrinking from pollution by outside forces, shrinking from the risks of community.

Tish poems, then, present the reader with the miniature, alienated worlds of their speakers and hence, ironically, resemble the, by now, cliche of capitalism's alienated individual. In the next two chapters I will more fully discuss just how Tish traces and embodies these contradictions, and in a sense takes its own version of subjectivity to its logical dead end. Ch. 5: Women: Regulating the Other in Tish Poetry

'You've made two mistakes in your life And everything that is happening to you now Is a result of them

The first is that You didn't screw the hometown girl" -RS. Lane to George Bowen'ng (Tish 12 238)

Film critics have noted how the film camera in commercial movies isolates parts of the woman's body much more frequently than it does parts of men's bodies. It lingers on legs, buttocks, ankles, hair, neck, offering these as parts that are independently significant from the woman herself-performing, as it were, its own kind of dismemberment -Frank Davey from Kadaa's Web (1 53)

controlling influences, dissolving the symbolic other

In the last chapter I argued that Tish poetry tried to banish the presence of cultural influences so that the poet could perceive the world freshly. Here I would like to discuss how Tish handles a potential exterior intrusion. For in one rare respect. a representative of the social world persistently appears in Tish's discourse. I am speaking of women, or more accurately, as they appear in Tish discourse: "girls". Writing from 1961 to 1963, before the flowering of feminist discourse, Tish, as one might expect, expresses mainly traditional, modernist views of women.38 In this respect Tish resembles its spiritual fathers south of the border. Michael Davidson says of the San Francisco scene of the 50's and early 60's (including many of the writers in The New American Poetry) that

...a boys' club mentality pervaded literary associations, a patriarchal ideology pervaded the poems. The revival of a primitivist ethos carried with it a psychic division of labor in which the male was regarded as the maker and the female as the formless material of his art. (177)

No matter how typical Tish is in this regard though, the fairly extensive role that women play, as well as their particular configurations, reveals a great deal about the group's stance towards society as well as its vision of self.

To expand on Warren Tallman's metaphor discussed in an earlier chapter, if Charles Olson's self is like a city state, it is one that allows a multitude of others (in the largest sense of that word: persons, discourses, artifacts, graphemes, etc.) to flow in and out, expanding in different directions, displacing ancient centres, building and destroying, fundamentally altering the city's (self's) shape, again and again. By contrast, the imaginary state in Tish is far less open to the movement of the other(again, in the largest sense of that word) through its borders. The Tish state certainly does not allow foreign voices to take up residence, altering its infrastructure, addressing its authority.

For this sense of the other as formative field, I am indebted to Lacan, for whom the other is not just or even mainly another person but rather dispersed systems of signifien (including objects of exchange and social hierarchies), which are, he says, "anterior to any possible link with any particular experience of the subject" (Lacan, Ecrits 634). In a sense Lacan's other is a sort of socialized version of Derrida's more philosophical machinery of language. For my purposes, 1 is important to point out that Lacan's alienating symbolic other tends to be recast by the individual subject into a reassuring. fixed imagegod, nature. self, object, woman-which stabilizes his world. He gives the example of

Descartes, who upon experiencing a radical ontological doubt must reinvent an ideal or good other-"the perfect God1'-who can underwrite the ego's perceptions and thoughts (Lacan, Four Fundamentals 36). In part Tish poets tend to allot to women the role of the good other, controllable sign or object which masks the destabilizing omnipresence of the symbolic other.

Evidence of this rigidity can be found in how the signs of women, the most significant single other in Tish poetry, circulate according to strict regulations: for the most part, either as distant images, without subjectivity. or, if present to the poet's consciousness, as abstract, unconscious bodies. In other words, not only do women function as other to men, but they are really a shorthand for otherness in general, all those formative regions which threaten the unity of the subject, and which must therefore be controlled. What the role of women reveals about

Tish's view of subjectivity (in its poetic practice) is the poet's need to continually reassert the authority of his ego at the expense of the other. It is as if, in order to maintain a certain law and order of the lyrical ego-of the lyrical form-the play of any Other's subjectivity must be finally fixed, halted, or outlawed. Wah's natural woman, or libidinal linguistics

Perhaps more than any other Tish poet Fred Wah consistently attempts to upset

the kind of authorial control discussed in the last chapter. He often presents

imagery of fusion and dispersal, enacting his call for a "merging" of poet with

"natural surroundings" (Tish I 23). Furthermore, Wah also wants to give to

language an erotic charge, based on a sexual union between male and female.

Attempting to bring into language the rhythms of the body, Wah often projects an eroticized female flesh onto the scene, as in the sexual language of "Bedtime

Story Ill" (Tish 4 81) or in the facetious fusion of the woman with the landscape in "The Landscale (conttd)" (Tish 3 61-2) where he writes "the story runs I between her legs"; "her breasts are pressed in the grass." More seriously, Wah uses this female eros to explore the relation between the artist and his environment. Consider an entirely characteristic example. "Dance" (Tish 125):

Sing a song of women each one a different vowel a mellisma [sic] of thighs held long

it is carried over top of things the feeling first to push the sound up

Aeiou the touch of her breasts the fragrant shoulders the push of the bodies at love time

the gutteral is down to start with this is the base the beginning of the rhythms at the heart

Wah captures the Black Mountain and Tish vision wherein the physical rhythms and energies well up from the body, shaping and energizing the poem. He writes of "touch," ''feeling1' and smell ("fragrant?). Eliding the first person singular,

Wah seems to dissolve the self-conscious ego that so pervades some of the works examined in the last chapter (especially, Bowen'ng's "Poet as Projector,"

Davey's "lntentions," and Kearns' ''Things"). Instead, Wah insists upon the corporeal over consciousness: ''thighs." "breasts," tlshoulders." "heart," and the

"gutteraltr-sounds like "guts-and-all"--corporality of the throat in place of the more alienating eyell. He presents here and elsewhere the charged "push of the bodies." a "push" which precedes and generates the song ("the feeling first / to push the sound up" [my emphasis]).

However, in order to achieve this primitive, naturalized corporality Wah must sacrifice the subjectivity in his descriptions of "women." The first line sets an unfortunate tone ("Sing a song of women"), somewhat tritely lumping all women together as objects of his interest, without regard for particularity. This is followed by the further simplification of women to sexualized bodies/vowels (as the "mellisma [sic] of thighs" and then as "Aeiou the touch of her breasts"). Wah wants to invest eros in language via the charge of a natural, eroticized female body. Womanfvowel is soft and fluid and dispersed into the multiplicity of language and sound, "each one" part of a harem of vowels which ultimately serve the creator as so much material to be shaped, contained between consonants and the poet's baseline rhythm. This erotic materialization precludes consciousness. Mind recedes into body, matter. letter, so that instead of a dance or a dialogue, Wah presents something more lonely, what he calls in his first poetic statement ''the poets [sic] own dance with his environment" (23).

Furthermore, despite the framing of poetry almost entirely in terms of body, the submerged figure of the poet, in contrast to his dispersed material

(letterslwomen), does nevertheless emerge wlh a certain centrality, for the last line suggests that the poet's voice ("the gutterall') is the point of origin, the source of nature's intelligence and creation ("the base Ithe beginning I of the rhythms I at the heart").

The poet's stance in relationship to the other (object, woman, fantasy) is further clarified in Wah's "A Tale." He again returns to a fragmented image of female anatomy, as well as Wah's reflection upon his own role as creative, alienated consciousness:

The smoothness of her thighs is one thing.

The memory of a cedar bough's softness is the same thing.

These two things in one I could be master of,

And am. The sheets are also cool. (Tish f 24. my emphasis)

Wah emphasizes the conflation of the Incedarboughs" and "her thighs": they can be "one" and the "same thing" only because they both belong to the poet's imagination, memories, and writing. They are both items contained within his consciousness, a fact which foregrounds that both objects ("cedar boughs" and

"her thighs") have been abstracted from any objective (or, in Olson's language, objectist) contexts. Moreover the word "same" joins woman and nature in an e roticized union-nature-woman the object for the poet's sexual fantasies, as in

"Dance."

"A Tale" testifies to the poet's sense of power over woman and nature; or perhaps, more accurately, it testifies to the woman's absence from the scene, for the focus is on the poet's imagination whereas she is only a body part, an image, a fantasy. But Wah realizes that his poetic power comes at a price, as is demonstrated by the two shades of meaning available in the last two stanzas.

On one level, objects (and subjects) are mastered on the "cool sheets" of the printed page. This is the realm of the imagination, where the speaker can express the certainty and virility of his being ("...master of. ll And am"), and

where he can admire his own writing ("The sheets I are also [as in "all sol1 cooi").

But on another level the coolness of the sheets refers to passionless bed sheets,

accenting the speaker's solitude. According to this reading one might rewrite-

keeping in mind Tish's hyper-consciousness of phonetic resonances--the last

stanza as follows:

And damn. The sheets are ail so cool.

In any case, whether the poet is the confident creator or the lonely male, the

"woman" is simply so much stuff for fantasy. She does not exist as conscious soul or even as objective record of historical presence (i.e. following Tish-Black

Mountain ideas of phenomenological documentation, citation, etc.), but rather as an ahistorical, dismembered image. The speaker by contrast takes centre stage in "A Tale" as hyper conscious, if alienated, master.

By contrast, in What of Music, Dancer" (Tish 124), Wah allows his female material a considerably fuller role on the stage. His concern is still with an erotics of language and body, as shown in the first stanzas of the poem:

The first note the breaking away The first change in the fabric swinging

like thighs turning love fingers burning Twisting melodies the strings weave Fretted songs forming

like hands moving lover bodies pushing

Wah's imagery dramatises the bodily (and material) energy exploding into

existence. content extending into form ("fabric I swinging"; "thighs turning";

"fingers burning"; "bodies pushing"; 'Twisting melodies"). Here the figures are

both male and female, the female even given a voice. Indeed in a very rare

gesture she is made part of a sort of social pact, as the final stanzas reveal:

"I will make it" I said "I will dance it" she said feeling

The way of love is the way of creating Of this guitar here Of this body here

The whole of the mat to be danced upon

And yet even here the role relegated to the female subtly resembles her

positioning in "Dance" and "A Tale." She is a sort of material-an extension of the male creator's inventiveness, the realization of his musical ideas. The speaker possesses the guitar, the cultural instrument; he achieves a level of detachment from the dance of life by "forming," scripting or scoring it. She, by contrast, is closely bound to body, nature, rhythm, 'Yeeling," following his lead. In the crucial lines which zero in on the presence of the two figures-"Of this guitar

here / Of this body here1'-his body appears (or disappears) veiled behind his

instrument while hers appears more vulnerably, simply ''this body here."

In Wah's poetry the figure of the woman never gains much individuality or historicity. She always appears as an abstraction or as pure flesh (opposite the poet's purified, transparent eye), described in such a way as to divest her of subjective presence. This is so even when a woman is the focus of the speaker's attention. In two poems called "The Woman," one appearing in Tish

7 1 and the other in Tish 12, Wah associates the enigmatic "woman" wlh shadows and absence, an unconscious sexualized nature. In "The Woman" from Tish 12 (248-9), for example, Wah's speaker is involved in an intense struggle between art and its objects, trying to make sense of memory, nature, the thing itself (the real, as Lacan would say), the woman. I quote in part:

the first lines were realizations now realized . misting lines glisten in my head at night

finally knowing her after she's gone an6 that I've come what I should ask for

in the first place and didn't know it

couldn't hear her with me and I would say in the trees but that was once or on the bed even then I didn't know what to call her running this line and that line diagonally through the trees either: wet or green or sun roaring into the brain and out again back to her eyes

spinning in the quiet pool quiet puddles or the soya sauce past

Ididnt know what to call her

The female figure is an elusive. general entity ("the woman"), a mysterious other-

-associated with the amorphousness of fluids ("puddles", "soya sauce", "pool").

Before the speaker's flux of thoughts and memories ('HNisting lines I glisten in my head at night") with which the woman is associated, he struggles to "name her," repeating that he "didnt know what to call her." She is positioned as an anxiety- producing play of differance against which the speaker must struggle, attempting to make her coincide with his "name[s]," "lines," "note[s]." He is able to make sense of her (solidify his own presence?) only as she-whoever she is-recedes from the scene ("finally knowing her after she's gone"; "couldn't hear her with me"). The poem closes as the poet settles on a simple, general definition: "she becomes one Ithe woman." Hence she is like an unconscious region whose repression allows for the poetk "realization."

The same can be said of the female in 'The Woman" from Tish 11 (233).

Not only is she associated with "night's shadow" but she is also an unconscious body. I quote in part: the woman stands in the window tanning her naked body under the sun and no cloth covers her pregnant belly

the woman sleeps under my shadow my hands move over her browned body soothing the heat of her skin under cool sheets

Despite being framed by culture ("in the window"), she appears naked, pregnant, bodily, a piece with nature. The speaker on the other hand stands over the female creator, moulding and eroticizing her. She is "under his shadow"; she is like an element, earth, moon, naturalized and uncomplicated by consciousness or individuating cultural marks-'"the woman sleeps." The speaker, by contrast, is caught somewhere in between the earth and the sun, the unconscious and the ego, body and soul.

Despite his ensnarement in traditional binaries, Wah does give us something extra. As Davey asserts in his "introduction," one of the group's goals was to witness "the mysteriously structured", the "divine" (10) and the "cosmic"

(1 1). Tish writers want, especially in the prose, to transcend a secular humanism which sees the external world as inert, dead matter left to the mercy of a formative consciousness. Davey calls for an escape from the mechanical universe of the rationalist paradigm. Wah responds by attempting to reanimate the dead world of matter. If he insists on authorial control, at least language and

matter are resurrected-even if caught up in age-old dualisms (i-e., male as

subject. mind, hard, creator, detached; female as soft, fluid, body, sexual, nature

etc.) .

Problematically, however, Wah allows for only one conscious spirit to

inhabit the earth: a monologic male voice. He makes of earth and language

"flesh" (as does Reid in the prose, with his "flesh of words" Tish 2 38), gives it, in contrast to his own "cool" stance, fluid rhythms, pulsions, sexual energy: all those elements controlled by the creator. Echoing Nietzsche from The Birth of

Tragedy-JWberever the Dionysiac voice was heard, the Apollonian norm seemed suspended or destroyed" (35)-Wah seems on the verge of threatening the polished world of culture with his own Dionysian evocations.

soft porn sfylings

While Wah's primordial, female landscape represents some measure of

(welcome) disturbance to the transcendental creator, most of the other key Tish writers are usually more cautious. They disavow intertextual (intersubjective) bonds-the communal language spoken of in the prose-and accent a stance which divides the speaker from the world. For the most part, in their poetry, woman appears neither as threatening bodily pulsion invading a reified language nor as a subject capable of dialogue or speaking her own desire. Rather "women" are constructed as alienated appearances or fantasy objects for the eyell .

As with his "Poet as Projector," Boweringfs "Anniversary Recall" seems to hover somewhere in between, allowing a moment of female presence, but then retreating inward. In "Anniversary Recall' (Tish 7 7 227). with a sense of vulnerability and humour, Bowering does present a "girl" somewhat briefly as a lively desirous creature:

Putting it in neatly for only a second

I felt the whole rush behind me that was in me

the smooth & easy insistence of it

(unlike the funny lunging of white buttocks

I have accidently seen in other rooms other times)

it was for the simple taking of me

That she had said "You don't want to stop, do you"

& I had followed her upstairs

quietly climbing a surprised &thumping chest of me then all & then nothing

but then actually thinking "I am noting this

I am different now & this is my girl & I lying here."

The whole thrust of the piece moves from charged event ("the whole rush") to distant mental reflection. The present participle ("putting it in") and simple past

("I felt'') of the first three stanzas suggest immediacy. But this is quickly followed by a mental shift-indicated by the change in margins, and the bracketed lines which take us outside the initial sexual encounter altogether ("other rooms other times"). The movement away from the present-implied by the first three stanzas-is furthered by the use of temporally distancing verb tenses: "I have... seen"; "it was"; "she had said"; "Ihad followed." By the end of the narrative, the speaker has travelled far from the first impression reflecting, with some amazement ("then actually thinking"), upon his past reflections ("'I am noting this..."'). While Bowering gently mocks the speaker's earlier premature translation of event into cliche ("I am different now"). he also reveals the difficulty of escaping ego (himself reflecting upon reflection), a difficulty which goes along with Tish's general tendency to objectify or shrink the role of the other (women) in their work. Poems like Wah's "A Tale" and Bowering's "Anniversary Recall"

(as well as his "Poet as Projector") articulate a dilemma: how to sustain the powers of the centralized creator while admitting the presence of the other into his realm. Or similarly: how to allow that one is spoken (by nature, culture. language-the other) while maintaining sovereignty over one's city state.

Davey's girls

Other Tish efforts merely banish women by reducing them to commodities, shrinking the presence of the other through a simplifying objectification, reduction to cliche or sight, as in Cull's "the resemblance" (Tish 73 265). where the female figure is spoken of as if absent from the scene or receding into the distance:

always turning comers in my eyes you are

the bright gold figure at the edge of sight-

the bars are streets in sun-lig ht, mooniight, shadow on the night-

you are

the girl I drive past

turning the corner.

As in the male-female relations expressed in Davey's "Intentions" (Tish 6 118). the first instance in ''the resemblance" of "you are," before it connects up with

"the bright gold figure," implies that she comes into existence when contained "in" his vision. Under his gaze, she is pictured as both a fixed essence and commodity ("gold figure"). At no point does Cull suggest her subjective presence: the "figure" appears on the periphery of his consciousness ("at the edge of sight"). Bowering's cheeky '7he Problem of Margins" is similarly reduct ive:

The darker top of a woman's stocking is a margin, the meta that strikes horizons into the eye-wielding mind of me- The young girl almost a woman you - veritable Diana girl of cafeteria woods ... (1 08) As is Cull's "figure." Bowering's is beholden to his "eye-wielding mind." The almost-woman, typical of the Tish object, is characterized on the border between girlhood and womanhood, and is reduced to an appearance (an unaddressed. and perhaps undressed, as "Diana" suggests, addressee), a fetish (stocking), and a myth ("Diana"). She is made into an arousing, idealized object for male fantasy ("lifted I a wanderlust" in him). Bowering depicts this arousal visually

Did you realize

that sitting there I had begun to move against my margins? (108-9) mapping the phallus onto the page. For a similarly facetious, even obscene gesture, I refer the reader to Kearns' "Moral Rearmament'' (Tish 16 345), where he depicts the "sweet-lipped librarian" who "breasts a pair Iof ICBMs."

But only Davey's extensive use of the female as other compares to Wah's in scope, if not kind. Davey's female figures take a variety of forms, sometimes idealized images: appearing like Daisy (from The Gmat Gatsby) to the searching, romantic gaze of the rich man in the white suit, alluded to in "Bridge Force"

(269): "the girl across the inlet I the bay IGatsby pacing the sand.-." (269). One way Davey positions women as objects is through his reduction of them to "girls"

(no names, no affiliations). Another way is his association of them with a physical characteristic, accessory, or place-all of which elide subjectivity. As well, his fusion of the "girl" with various places lends her a strange anonymity, vagueness, lack of mobility, as though she were not important in her self, but only as a part of a stereotypical fantasy scene. Bridge Force" constitutes "the girl across the inlet" and "the girt next door" (269) through epithets. or as Davey says in Karla's Web in camera fashion: the "...blue...coated female" from a poem called "For a IGirl" (79). More often 'Yhe girl" is associated with a body part or some physical characteristic: "gold-hued girl" (''The Visit1'232); "dark fuzzy-haired girl" ("No Vision but in Things" 84); "Little grown up girl" ("For the Guitar-Girls"

109); "Blonde girl" ("Synthesis" 119). Presented as generalizations ("a girl we all might have married," "For F. J." Tish 78 39 1) or simple appearances, women are constructed only vaguely, without a space in his discourse which might signify their subjectivity. At times the commodifying language of culture. the language that Tish most wants to avoid, returns uncritically, sticking out almost obscenely, as in Davey's "Blow Wind (Tish 2 33) and "For the Guitar-Girls" (Tish 5 109). In the former poem, the girl's body is described, using the language of advertising, as ifit were a car. The speaker gazes at "the girl" as if at an erotic object, inflating her into a perfectly reified image. I quote in part:

And you my sweet live as young womanhood has and should with body t7a wless all parts running slowly smoothly waiting foruse... (myernphasis)

In "For The Guitar-Girls" the "girl" is constructed as childlike, with her "doll shoes" and her "tiny guitar" and her "glow[ing]", "young ... limbs". And as in "Blow Wind,"

Davey constructs her body as a one-dimensional site of sexual enjoyment:

Your body especially those legs perfect and pressing ripe in an invisible perhaps maiden-forni... (my emphasis)

Beverley Mitchell's sympathetic "A Critical Study of the Tish Movement, 1961-

1963" laments the use of "especially those legs" and "maiden-form", writing that they do not contribute "anything of significance to the poem" (74). Mitchell's overriding concern though is not Davey's particular image of the guitar girl, but rather what she sees as a lapse of form or technique. But this concern with form ignores a significant repetition of theme. Women appear in Tish only in highly specialized ways-objectified body part, accessory, cliches-almost never with any dimension of subjectivity, never as participants in an intertextual community.

In this way, within the space of the Tish poets' lyrics, social others are contained or kept at a distance, not intruding on the space of poet's self. Often oppositions are drawn in which the female plays passivity and softness to the male's activity and hardness. The light-hearted playfulness of "For a I Girl," for example, seems at odds with the poem's stereotyping. Its opening two lines foreground the woman's appearance:

Faint green-checked blue coated uncertain female figure head bowed you have managed to smile come over and compliment the surety of my steel heel click (Tish 4 79)

The signifier "uncertain" seems to refer to her state of mind, and not her mysteriousness before the persona's eye. In other words her lack, her weakness

(she appears like a child, barely "managing" to smile, "uncertain", "bowed",

"slouched", on a "wobbl[inglWbike) contrasts to his strength ("surety", "steel" heels). She plays object to his subject, as she appears only as a sight ("figure,"

"shape," etc.), while, characteristically, he is not pictured at all, a fact which underscores his directing, perceiving consciousness ("come over," "I see your...").

complicaiihg solitude

In two striking poems, "Synthesis" (Tish 6 19) and "For F-J" (Tish f8 391).

Davey goes beyond one-dimensional images of the otherlwoman, making space for female subjectivity and history, respectively. In "Synthesis" the speaker scrutinizes a female classmate's artistic creation (doodling?), as it emerges, in process. She has a consciousness. Nevertheless, before proceeding to her art. the poem begins by locating her being in her appearance:

Blonde girl spike heels and sorority pin nodding to the sound of Hegel makes pen drawings in her notebook lines the frame then one-dimension black men commune with floating cluster-drums naked on Velasquez seas

One frame complete another neat set of lines squared black man sketched again dances drums forth skins laced down beat a third now framed and done- the small hand stops how neat the narrow fingernails shine Xs out the top one second pauses then folds the third into glory

Round pale face seems pleased Hegel is destroyed (does she know) Final feathering lines halo the last scene and I see her in a chrome kitchen looking out the window a collector of silk screens

At first the speaker's attitude towards his subject appears somewhat condescending. "Blonde girl," "spike heels." and "sorority pin" repeat the epithetic reductions spoken of earlier, as do the remarks mid-way through the poem about her "small hand[s]" and her shiny "fingernails." The speaker here, and in most Tish poetry, never describes his own or any other male's hairstyle, finger nails, or decorations which would position him in the place of the looked- at, and which would reveal his inevitable links to culture and a particularized corporality-all of which would shatter the power of the illusion of transcendence.

Davey seems to contrast her triviality (her unconsciousness) with the presence of Hegel (symbol of consciousness). But on the other hand she does keep a notebook. She is creating something tangible. The first frame of her drawing coincides with Davey's first stanza suggesting a similarity of activity. It is also not entirely clear whether she is "nodding" in understanding to the lecture or:

Hegel or merely "nodding to the sound of Hegel." But what is perhaps most

unusual and intriguing about this piece is that Davey spends most of his lines detailing her sketching, at her service in a way, dictating her subjective presence, not just her appearance but her creative statement. Visually, the first and last stanzas look stable, boxing her presence in, as it were. The middle space (from the fifth line to, say, "done--"), her space, is where Davey's own lines become playful: breaking up the lines, documenting and participating, reenacting her visual rhythms. Judgement (for the most part) gives way to a linguistic dance- with her. Is this the "SYNTHESIS" to which the title refers? And when the speaker says "Hegel is destroyed" does he mean for both of them, in the sense that the attention of both has been diverted from the lecture to her notebook?

This may be true in part. But the final stanza returns us to a division between the speaker and the girl. For while they have both been diverted from

"Hegel," the speaker remains conscious of the fact, while questioning her awareness, asking, "does she know." It is also apparent that the speaker somewhat voyeuristically glances over her shoulder, so to speak, without her being aware of his presence. Moreover, it is difficult not to reframe the entire poem in light of the 'Yinal scene" where the speaker, god-like, predicts her future boxed in within a "chrome kitchen," no longer a creator but a "collector of silkscreens." She is not only boxed in her kitchen, "looking out the window," but boxed in between the implied judgements at the poem's beginning and the explicit judgements at its conclusion. The poem's frames suggest that Davey finally maintains his distance, playing prophet, judge, phenomenologist, and

Hegelian while relegating the girl to her limited bourgeois destiny.

Davey's "For F. J." (Tish 78 391) also lays out the details of a woman's presence, with more complexity than usual for Tish poetry. In "For F.J." the speaker does not detach himself through philosophical associations but rather maintains his distance from the fallen world through an ironic attitude. The first stanza tells us that the speaker views the world through an identification with high literary language, a discourse which radically divides him from the sluation he describes:

Desdemona wise to marry Othello tho an ugly match, but handsome Ferdinand0 can never see why Elinor prefers the cankered secretary.

Davey then proceeds to tell a modem tale of social despair using the language of romance. At the core of the narrative, as the first stanza suggests, is the speaker's incomprehension at the woman's choice of lover:

In this time a girl we all might have married was made pregnant by a half-breed who by now has given her two children a rented cabin and a thin string of social assistance checks.

Her wedding night present was a beating, her second child a rape she implies, and his only other occupation drinking.

He lies in the cabin fattening while she seeks part-time jobs to feed him-

A good Griselda from her first seduction, tho I cannot picture that first parting of the flesh for him, or now how she can slave for the feel of him.

The narrator overbearingly looks down on his subject matter through the lenses of privilege, increasing his distance with his racial stereotyping. Furthermore, the valuation of the woman is sexist. The speaker can perceive the woman/victirn only as a prize in the wrong hands, unable to understand how "she can slave I for the feel of him." If only she were slaving for "handsome Ferdinando." he seems to say, her "slaving" would be more acceptable. It is as if one of the two- dimensional, yet idealized ("a girl we all might have married") women of a typical Tish poem had fallen deep into the corrupting complexity of the social world: she is married, has children, works, is sexually active and desirous; in other words, unlike the girls of most Tish poems, despite her unfortunate situation, the woman in "For F.J." is an active subject. Hence the other male of the poem has robbed her of her proper role as prop for male fantasy, so that now she herself has become repulsive-

Indeed "For F.J."'s language indicates that the speaker is disgusted with- even as he cannot help imagining it-the couple's corporality. He tries to further degrade them by reducing them to body ("half-breed," "made pregnant," "rape,"

"fattening," "drinking," 'Yo feed him," "parting of the flesh," 'Yeel of him"). In the end, the speaker cannot cast his eye upon her; although he tries to imagine her, he "cannot picture Ithat first / parting of the flesh for him." I would argue that he cannot look at her because she might look back. In other words. one way of reading the intense distaste for body in the poem is to see the speaker pushing these others away, fearful that they-as symbols of poverty, race, body, female subjectivity, the social world in general-might disturb his ironic detachment.

Obviously this is a complex piece and much more could be said about it in terms of class, race, and gender. However I would like to suggest how Davey transcends the limits of the isolated speaker, so prevalent in the poems discussed in this chapter and the last, by sketching out or objectifying in some detail an other's (woman's) desire. Certainly the speaker can hardly comprehend ("how can she slave...") let alone accept her desire. But his incomprehension only intensifies the sheer fact of her divergent interests-as if he were saying, "despite the horror of her situation, she persists in her passion!"

Unlike most Tish poems where the female (and these females are virtually the only signs of social life in Tish) appears as nothing more than an abstraction or a cipher, in "For F. J." and "Synthesis" the female figures represent the presence of consciousness separate from the speakers. In the same vein, before concluding, mention must be made of a piece by George Bowering. If Davey teaches3' us how the lyric might be transformed via a kind of ironic-documentary commentary or by incorporating the other's objects of desire into his writing,

Bowering's "Husband" (Tish 17 352) also alters the predominance of the transcendental ego but in a more intimate way:

My wife lies sick in bed looked so well in the bath

I boil water and watch helpless as she tries to ease out the pain

to nurse heat from the stove while the ice settles outside

is a man's job, what is a man? but the listener, the watcher

what is a man but the waiting 8 standing half of a11 this?

"Husband" (Tish 17 352) stands out as a refreshing instance of deviance, questioning the male poet's sense of certitude and masculinity, reversing male female roles. As with "For F.J." the persona is disturbed by the reversal, but

Bowering here does not quickly brace himself or detach himself from circumstance, Moreover, while the woman is called "wife", as the title indicates he is also particularized into a social role. He is pad of a world larger than himseff. The boundaries therein are not rigid, witnessed by the speaker taking on the traditionally female role of nurse. In the Tish context of the autonomous. roving Veye, such intimate social involvements are unusual. But here Bowering goes so far as to question the autonomy usually associated with masculinity. asking ''what is a man," and concluding that he is a being thoroughly involved with another.

In contrast to the Tish poems discussed so far, where the speaker's ego acts as the organizing linchpin of the poem-world, these others (the sorority girl, the girl we all might have married, the wife) disturb the centrality of the "I"within the poem. Their desires circulate within the field, opening it up. directing the reader away from the poet's consciousness, if only for a moment. Such poems invite a recognition of the effort that the speaker apparently must put in in order to contain the alien desires and maintain his authority. Of course Davey's gestures here are partial, a beginning, and they mainly underscore how Tish poetry in general consistently rewrites a humanist self, an individualization which depends upon controlling, containing, or masking the presence of others. conclusion, 7Tsh and the repression of two eyes

Most consistently, Tish poets try to maintain a "sovereign consciousness,'40 an innocent eye endlessly rediscovering itself in the mirror of nature. As the group underplays the socialized network of language, it ignores the socialized network of the visual field, what Lacan calls the gaze, the visual as already socially articulated. As Norman Bryson writes, in "The Gaze in the Expanded Field," whenever subjects look, they never perceive brute facts:

the rays of light are caught in a rets, a network of meanings... For human beings collectively to orchestrate their visual experience together it requires that each submit his or her retinal experience to the socially agreed upon description(s) of an intelligible world ... Between the subject and the world is inserted the entire sum of discourses which make up visuality... (91)

Tish underplays the presence of discourse in the visual field, the visual field as

"the preexistence of a gaze" (Four Fundamentals 72). If such a gaze appears it does so as an aberration. a cultural sign polluting nature's essential language.

Only nature's pristine discourse speaks, for it guarantees the validity of the poet's perceptions.

Tish, desiring an uncontaminated locus, protects itself from this underlying or unconscious level of the gaze. More surprisingly though, given its alleged anti-humanism, Tish also refuses to admit any human others into its imaginary loci, banishing in the poetic space all the fantasies and practices of collectivity found in the prose manifestoes, Black Mountain discourse, and the very production of Tish itself. In the poetry, the assertion of self control is a pressing concern. Consequently the absence of reciprocity makes perfect sense.

Consider very briefly Sartre's influential statements in Being and Nothingness on

"le regard."

Sartre imagines himself sitting on a parkbench, reassured that he is the centre of the field of vision, all the "distances" converging on his eyes, all objects arranged around him. Unfortunately, another person enters the park. Suddenly all the lines that had revolved around Same shift ("Icannot put myself at the centre of it" 342), as if the other's consciousness were a "drain hole" (343), or a

"haernorrhage" (343, dissolving his centrality, intruding into "his" locus: 'Yhere is a total space which is grouped around the Other, and this space is made with my space" (343). Tish attempts to do what Sartre cannot: maintain the other as a mere object, prop, or "puppet" (341) rather than acknowledge that "[alt each instant the Other is looking at me" (345). And Tish ignores this for good reason: the presence of "the Other" represents a certain "disintegration of the universe"

(344), the universe of my "sovereign consciousness." For Lacan the subject is an artifact at the mercy of the movement of the visual field 'What determines me, at the most profound level, in the visible, is the gaze that is outside ...the gaze is the instrument through which light is embodied and through which ... l am photo-graphed' Four Fundamentals 106). For Sartre, the "sovereign consciousness" is frozen into an object by the gaze of the other, subject to his or her intentions. Both Lacan and Sartre attempt through a reversal of the seer and

the seen to undo the cartesian subject. The Tish poet wants to maintain self-

possession and control over all he surveys, to keep the other dismantled or

positioned at a safe distance, unable to look back, exhibit her desires, the force

of her subjectivity.

To put it another way, in keeping with my contrast between Olson and

Tish at the start of the chapter, the stance that these writers adopt with respect to women insists upon the fact of one kind of otherness in order to contain a more disturbing one. In Tish women appear as manageable ideals or commodities ("bright gold figure"; "veritable Diana"; "maiden form"; "flawless I body"; "parts running.. .smoothly1'),as sexualized substance or tool ("Aeiou"), as unconscious bodies (thighs, breasts, hips, etc). Transforming women into commodity, tool, substance, sight, the poet seems to condense the larger other, the big other as Lacan calls it, the largely unconscious symbolic field, and imagines it as something that is at his disposal, that he can buy, grasp, mould, and gaze at. Such objects one can take or leave. Instead of the constructive systems that crisscross Olson's Maximus, invading his entire being, the Tish subject is overwritten, if at all, only by the mainly harmonious rhythms (a displacement of social system?) of nature. The price of this purity and self- containedness is not only the shrinking of the self into its shell, but the attendant shrinking of the other (woman) into nothingness. And yet as even this shrinkage suggests, despite their intense desire for immediate presence of self and object. the Tish poets do not, after all, achieve plenitude. In fact, as I will show, their poetry "documents" the inaccessibility of the social world as viewed from the position of the individualized consciousness. Ch. 6: Limits of Autonomy: Burning Bridges

"If you never do anything for anyone else you are spared the tragedy of human relation-

ships. If quietly and like another time there is the passage of an unexpected thing:

to look at it is more than it was- God knows

nothing is competent nothing is all there is. The unsure

egoist is not good for himself' -Robert Creeley ("The Immoral Proposition")

"Olson has said that, if a man has the wrong stance-wrong attitude to nature-, he will necessarily sing 'of himself, that is, of his fictitious, self-created world. And he will also sing in a form 'outside himself-an artificial self-created form foreign both to nature and to himself as part of nature" -Frank Davey ("'One Man's Look at 'Projective Verse'")

Introduction: the modem cityscape: Tish through Sadre, Jameson

In the last two chapters I suggested that the self in Tish poetry tends to be imagined as an autonomous, sometimes authoritarian entity. In a way, despite claims to the contrary, Tish's understanding of subjectivity resembles the humanist's self-centred vision wherein consciousness organizes the world through imagination and intelligence, rather than letting the world "dictate," as Jack Spicer would say. However in Tish poetry an impossible relationship develops between the individual perceiver and the world. It is as if, precisely because they retain humanist fantasies instead of having moved beyond them as they claim, the Tish poets come face-to-face wlh the limits of their own brand of individualism-

At the same time that Tish selfconsciousness crystallizes, other objects fade from view. The personae of Tish poetry find themselves disconnected from other individuals and any sense of collective social life. For them the polis lacks vitality and destroys human energy and vision. This mood of disintegration and loss stands in opposition to recovery of the means of production in the practice of small press as well as the playful gathering up of community so brightly expressed in the play of Tish prose. By contrast, in the poetry, the speakers are more like what Jameson calls "isolated subjects" ("Ulysses in History" 131) or what Sartre, in The Critique of Dialectical Reason, calls subjects of "seriality" ("a plurality of isolations" 257), more like alienated individuals than members of a community. Or more accurately, these selves are the products of a social world that produces subjective isolation, rather than subjects who spring cleanly from nature or any of the forms of pure perception urged by Tish poetics.

Within Sartre's "serial" social order, the reality of the other disappears. In the modern megapolis (Jameson). relations are not organically connected, integrated, or 'Yusedtf (Sartre). Instead, human relations are programmed as it were from some exterior point so that people exist side by side without being able to see each other. Similarly, the Pound-Black Mountain tradition presents the spectacle of overly formalized, homogenizing social systems, and how such negative systematicity applies at both the level of the social world and the world of poetics. Thus Tish attacks inherited form, "the product of a machine that cuts off lines1'arbitrarily and mechanicslly (e-g . Tish 5 103). academic formalism (e-g.

Tish I 17, 'Two Retrospectives" 423), commercialism and professionalisation

(e-g. Tish 7),and modem social "orders" leading to "dehumanization and impersonalization" (e-g. Tish 5 98). Creeley likened traditional poetry to an automobile factory, wherein the "idea of form" is "extrinsic to the given instance," where the poem is "equivalent to cars insofar as many could occur of a similar pattern" ('Mtroduction" 254-5). And Olson's The Maximus Poems criticizes mass technology and large scale commercial corporations for displacing local culture and ordinary language, and uprooting individuals.

Sartre's classic example of such alienation imagines people waiting at a bus stop:

To begin with, it should be noted that we are concerned here with a plurality of isolation: these people do not care about or speak to each other and, in general, they do not look at one another; they exist side by side alongside a bus stop. At this level it is worth noting that their isolation is not an inert statute (or the simple reciprocal exteriority of organisms); rather, it is actually lived in everyone's project as a negative structure. (256)

For Same, despite their experience of being fragmented, these people really are a group, but a group that fails to recognize its own elements and that cannot grasp or visualize the overall plan uniting it. The community of others, in effect, has disappeared, at least partly because. as in accord with the Tish notion of the individual, eacn person's lived experience is misrecognized as one of autonomy.

Jameson states that in Sartre a "background of swarms of other human relationships" is concealed by the subject's isolation from production (Marxism and Fom 242-3). As a result, the city itself in its production and growth is so dispersed that it appears to disappear, especially from the standpoint of the individual. This is the point he makes emphatically in "Ulysses in History," where the human subject's disconnection from the processes of production renders "the products of that production as meaningless" (130). In Postmodemism, Or the

Cultoral Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson suggests the modem city is simply not available, in any unfed way, for perception:

the alienated city is above all a space in which people are unable to map (in their minds) either their positions or the urban totality in which they find themselves: grids such as those of Jersey City, in which none of the traditional markers (monuments, nodes, natural boundaries, built perspectives) obtain, are the most obvious examples. Disalienation in the traditional city, then, involves the practical reconquest of a sense of place... (51)

Such an alienated city is precisely what Olson tries to revitalize, to re-sensualise, to make intimately available in The Maximus Poems. Tish,however, takes another path. In the prose, as I have argued, Tish writers have powerfully re- mapped community, created a lively psychic community or locus, a vibrant sense of history. and an understanding of intertextual production. But the poetry behaves differently. The Tish poets, reluctantly at times, come face-to-face with the alienating effects of the city and their implication in its processes. In this context their heroic dreams of a natural self, self as pe~cepfualmachine or self as Whitmanesque, rugged individual look much more like effects of modernity. the isolated, "serial" self-

However. Tish not only expresses an anguished perception of isolation but simultaneously expresses a sense of the opacity of its vision, and of the loss of all its objects. In other words. the Tish selves, for the most part, discover not the immediacy of nature (Mitchell) or the polis (Olson) or the elemental

(Richardson), but, more profoundly, the alienation painted by thinkers like

Jameson and Sartre. wherein the city recedes and the powers of phenomenological perception fail.

Bowering's car space, technology, veils of darkness

The city is not a good place for the Tish poets. When they come up against it they almost inevitably experience crisis. The city represents ungraspable systems. technological fragmentation, and alienation. Even the automobile appears as part of a larger problem. Typically viewed as a symbol of the freedom of youth or a transformation of the "modem secular ego" into the "self- moved mover" (which James Hillman points out is "precisely what the word automobile means" V7),for Bowering, Davey, and Keams there is little of the exuberant pleasure, however short-lived, associated with, say, Kerouac's road trips in On the Road. Unlike the beats, the Tish poets meet with no community or adventure; and they express almost none of the joys of driving. The car does not quite work for the Tishites. On the contrary, their experiences of the automobile might best be conveyed by Keams' "Highway" (Tish 4 86), with its angry expression of division:

Watch it Driver there isn't any road there's only the squeal of tires in the night

You see Driver you make it by burning it up yeah you and your horn and your headlights jabbing into the black -that's the highway

But don't bother to look in the rear-view mirror Driver because it's a trail of exhaust

Not only does this road divide people emotionally and physically, but the car destroys the clarity of perception ("trail of exhaust" clouding the road), objects appear disconnected from any ground (no road, "only the squeaVof tires in the nights"), like hallucinations (an effect Kearns also creates in 'Things." as we have seen). Such poetry, particularly that by Bowering and Davey, shows technology pmducing the isolated self. Consequently the Tish self comes to resemble that self blossoming in the

"age of the suburb or the megapolis or the private car," as Jarneson nicely

conflates it ("Ulysses in History" 133). wherein the city steals the object, and

denies people all those "nodal points" and "pathways," the concrete loci of

embedded, collective memory "which make shared experience possible" (1 33).

In other words, the individual perceiver figured in Tish poetry does not

experience his freedom and autonomy with godlike exuberance, but with despair

and nostalgia. One might say that the position of the speaker is overdetermined:

springing from various levels of overlapping and conflicting determinations (e-g. the naturalized phenomenological subject, rugged individualism, bourgeois

individualism, "seriality," romanticism, the formative background of the modern city, etc.) which come together, uncomfortably, in that imaginary self at the centre of the greater portion of Tish poetry.

Bowering's "Motor Age" (Tish 4 80), for example, constructs the speaker as an isolated seeker, unable to attain his object:

Today I saw your famous bicycle niched into the comer beside the cafeteria door, steady there-all its bent fenders & haywire, waiting for you to approach & begin the business of hitching up for a ride Home where it will lean against a pile of wood, under its own roof.

It's down in a poem -how we used to ride our bikes in little races or lallygagging it all along the road from the cafeteria to home. Now4 drive my banged up car along the road. seeking your two wheel shape. ready to pass, but never seeing you, seeing only your bicycle once or twice a week, leaning there-ready.

In this piece, as the title suggests. Bowering indicates a series of shifts: from childhood to adulthood, community to isolation, bicycle age to motor age, presence to absence. The promise and presence of the bike, "leaning there ready," heightens the experience of the loss of the friend. Neither promise nor presence materialize. The speaker has lost the other. Bowering places the lonely speaker behind glass (in his "banged up car"). on the other side of Eden, as it were: uprooted in technology, isolation, adulthood.

By contrast, his lost object reminds him of something prior to citylife, the autonomous ego (the I'we"). adulthood, or technology. The lost friend represents more rustic times ("pile of wood"; "bicycle"; play-"how we used to ride/ ... in little races"), with a grounded, pleasingly familiar world ("niched," ''famous," "steady,"

"home"). In his present ("Now") situation, the familiar vanishes ("never seeing you"). While the speaker searches for her from behind the glass (a mobile, detached "look" linked to the windshield), inside the wrap-around space of the car, she dwells, in his imagination, out in the open field somewhere, leaving behind only traces of a lost plenitude or a magical past. In this sense, the other person resembles 'The bright gold figure" that Cull's speaker Itdrive[s] past'' and loses sight of in his poem 'Yhe resemblance/for S" (see chapter five). Bowering's "Driving Past" (Tish 4 89) even more pointedly depicts a desirous gaze that has lost its object, discovering instead layers of mediation that seem to devour the sought-after thing. In this poem the object is ominously enclosed in the "dark house":

Driving past your dark house every night (in the rain) I look in the rearview minor, see bleared in the back window the road I have been over.

I run the road every night, speed a little where I used to stop. The rain reaches the comers of my windows and blacks the road before me.

The other person recedes behind windows and mirrors or appears distorted

("bleared"). The rain veils his course ("rainlreaches the corner of my windowsland blacks the road"), and the whole complex of car space-speed- roads-rain shows the driver cut off from the external details of the environment.

It is not so much that the other is contained: he is imprisoned in his car space.

"A Vigil of Sorts" (Tish 4 88) describes an intense division between subject (poet, car) and object (woman). Bowering depicts the persona contained in his car, a claustrophobic interior space: "Sitting late in a side roadlfilling the car with invisible cigarette smoke11 contemplate the whole dark of the city." It is as if he were a spectator in a mobile cinema, staring through the darkness at the distant

"Lights from the north shore." The woman he desires is "asleep/ ...across the citylfive miles..." away, unavailable to consciousness (''there is no lightlaround your surrounded house").

The car and technology in general disturb pastoral fantasies of play and suggest the reifying alienating potentiar in the modem world. The car not only signifies modem mobility and the breakdown of relationships, but also the negative side of autonomy: it closes off, breaks apart, creates a mood of disconnection from the earth. Caught up in a "fantasy that identifies the control of motion with the control of individual fate" (Hillman 177), one glides too quickly over the details of locusY4'repressing the fact of communal indebtedness4'. The result can be a lonely existential separateness.

The fact of loneliness, of a terrible separation from the other, appears frequently in Bowering's work. In "Dark Around Light" (Tish 6 122), for example, he writes:

lying here alone the phone under my hand a whole city of night between us

Significantly, while human beings are associated with light ("the sunrise inlthat is in you"), the city is associated with darkness and distance. It blots out human brilliance. Such a disjunction, perhaps, between the city and the human transforms the city into something of a skeletal husk devoid of authentic human energy. Even in his more positive images of life something often comes between

"us." In "Red Lane" (Tish 73 264), for example, the subject of the poem achieves a kind of pleasurable release (the last lines are: "And you, man,/letting it ride"), a moment of fieedom that, however, depends on separation:

You are on the road, keys jingling in your pocket, unlocking miles between yourself and the rest of us.

In this piece, though, the human scale seems diminished, as the hero, Red

Lane, not only speeds away from his friends, but also speeds past towns

("Swung on the highwaylpendulum of timelcounted in towns"), that seem to shrink in importance, moments of scenery.

In a different way, "Telephone Metaphysics" (Tish 5 95) also describes the destruction, via technology, of an intimate, human scale. Here is the poem in

Most times you are a voice made tiny by a telephone. You must tell me what you look like, the way you are sitting, what you are wearing & you cannot tell me the look of your eyes because that does not come thru a talking machine.

The things I hear you tell me are past the meta margin of the mind You are really there when my eyes can go out & tell it back to my hand & mouthf the texture and the turn of you. You sitting beside me in my car/ your face made real by the lightlfrom a lamp post

Your eyes touching your light on me

:things you could never tell me on a telephone

But standing in a gaslit phonebooth I still ask you to tell me how you are wearing your hair You are not really there but I push against the margins of my mind

The desired "voice" is strung out across an infinite (telephone)line, caught in a cultural "machine" (signified by the "talking machine"), a system that diminishes human shape and scale ("made tiny"). Bowering's romantic image of the couple in the car mirrors the voice strangled in the phone, and the man alone in the

"gaslit phonebooth." In other words, even the fantasy of togetherness lapses into an image of containment-within the car space, or the "carapace" as

Marshall McLuhan calls it, that "protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man" (224). Wthin this shell, the speaker seems to think, the couple might form a fleeting union, holding out against the surrounding darkness. At any rate, Bowering never brings her into his floating "carapace." He emphasizes how the speaker cannot grasp an immediate presence, of human style and detail

("the texture 8 the turn of you"), cannot piece her together as a unified being ("'you cannotnell me the look of your eyes"); she has been ground through a

depersonalizing machinery. So, instead, he experiences only an impoverished

intimacy, heightening his sense of her absence (she is "not really there").

Scientfic apparatus, Davey's bridge poems

Significantly, Bowering and the other Tish poets are not just concerned with the

lost human other or with lost love. In "Literary Criticism" (Tish 3 58-9) a

companion piece to Davey's "No Vision But in Things: 10," Bowering observes

repulsive traces of animal experimentation at his and Davey's shared office

space, at UBC:

In the office where Iwrite a paper on the Bronte genius

there are still the signs of severed brains along the sinkboard.

Last year this was a laboratory where ape cerabella were sliced.. .

Davey also writes of the "previous occupants1rernains" (59), which turn out to be

the "remains" of lab "monkeys." Both poets effectively connect dismemberment

with smell. Bowering writes of "severed brains," "sliced," "the scent." Davey writes of 'Yhe odor," "the stains," "the smell." These elements tie the scientific

operations to the death they inflict on the primates (the lost objects, lost life). The two poems, under the heading 'Two Poems for the Critic," dramatically

conflate academic criticism with scientific dissection: both of these disciplines

destroy some sort of life force-the "Things" of Davey's title, animal life, the

creative human spirit (hence Bowering's mention of the "Bronte Genius"). Davey

in particular underscores the strangeness of the neurological lab world:

In this room of mysterious pipes and fixtures now my office the odor of the previous occupants remains

The drain below the two massive scientific-looking taps is plugged and the stains along the sideboard seem to have an existence independent of the human arm

Davey presents the scientific world as a "mysterious" system, separate

("independent1') and separating from a more human scale-and at the same time

caused by the human world ("'of the human arm" also implying belonging to).

Even more than Bowering's comments on the social world. Daveyfs vision,

especially in his "bridge poemst'-and among those, especially "Bridge Poem"

(Tish 3, "Bridge Force" (Tish 73), less explicitly "Daniel at the Lion's Gate" (Tish

7) and "Bridge Force IX" (Tish 75)-rages against the cultural gridwork for destroying the presence of authentic community and objects.

Davey's "bridge" might not be a direct reference to Hart Crane'sU ''The

Bridge" (1927), but the poems might nevertheless productively be compared. Crane's poem, in the tradition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, condenses in the image of the Brooklyn Bridge a celebration of industrial society, the culmination of American history and myth, and the possibilities of collective communication:

0 harp and altar, of the fury fused, (How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!) Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge, Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,-

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars, Beading thy path-condense eternity: And we have seen night lifted in thine arms. (Crane 46)

For Crane, mythic America produces no alienated labour. The social, cultural work done in the US is available to everybody (''And we have seen"), as symbolized by the presence of the Brooklyn Bridge. Crane's visionary fusions (of spirit and matter, culture and nature, rich and poor, insane and sane) sew together disparate regions of his environment. He unifies the vicissitudes produced by industrial labour as it writes over nature, history, myth, aboriginal peoples, classes, and so forth. Davey's bridges reveal a very different landscape and intent. In his prose statements, the natural self and ideal community fit snugly into an orderly cosmos. Such a vision cannot be mapped onto

Vancouver. Davey's metaphorical bridge operates more as an anti-bridge, or an anti-symbol (or perhaps a metaphor for the failure of metaphor), in that it creates distances rather than spanning them, and destroys rather than embodies meaning. With his bridge poems, in accord with his prose statements, Davey tries to get to the other side, the side of the other, the real thing. But as with Bowering and even Wah (in "Little Girl," she is "a distance 'cross the inlet," a "blurred smilelin the distance" Tish 8 172), the object or image of the other won't come into focus. The bridge of "Bridge Poem" (Tish 5 106) does not bridge

(communicate, commune) any spiritual gaps:

Going up the approach Mountains High ahead and on the radio.-. City of greasy bridges I am always going over them bridges toll bridges

I hear a truck-trailer jack-knifed on one today crushing one family one car 'the baby.. . not expected to live"

So this one across the inlet There is supposed to be a difference between sea and land city and mountain...

beneath are ships I cannot set foot on water I cannot walk on driftwood from another world moving going at odds with me As in Boweringnspoems discussed above, the individuality of the poet-

sometimes an ideal, as we have seen-is maintained and undermined at the

same time. In other words, the self retains its separation, its autonomy, but

simultaneously this very autonomy seems to be an effect of the alienating

cityscape-

It appears that Tish writers in general inhabit a psychic space somewhere

between support for the individual in opposition to the city and a keen awareness

that the fragmentation of the modem city produces just such an individua1. Like

Jarneson's vision of an opaque cityscape that obliterates human scale (i-e.

"monuments, nodes, natural boundaries, built perspectives." see above), the city

for Davey is unnatural, an artificial boundary ("There is supposed to be a

d ifference betweenlsea and land"). It destroys the numinous immediacy of

experience which the prose manifestos demanded. Like inherited form or poetic

device, the bridge obstructs its own aims: to transparently transport one being to

another. Moreover, Davey's bridge, abstract and unstable, pushes the world

away from the speaker, impoverishes his experience ("beneath are ships I

cannot set foot onhater I cannot walk on'?. The speaker finds himself "at odds"

with his connection to the cosmos: the bridge forces4 the signs of nature

("driftwood from another world") to float away, untouchable-ensnaring him in an

apparatus as psychically destructive as the scientific apparatus of ''Two Poems for the Critic." The city ("...of greasy bridges") is associated with death (itself emerging

out of the modem form of travelfcomrnunication). Moreover this destruction is

itself indirect, alien, secular. It has become normalized, banally filtered through

"the radio1'-itself as much a symbol of the reification of communication as the bridge. The network of roads and especially bridges lifts one away from the ground onto a dead machinery that robs the world of its promise, a fact Davey emphasizes with dramatic pause: "'the baby... [not expected to live."' If most of the poem sketches out the feel of the driver literally isolated from ground, nature. a healthy city, the last section powerfully captures the loneliness of the "I":

at the end here a man who communicates thru an orange piece of cardboard which I've paid for and ahead people people person I can never get thru to

Like Bowering, Davey dramatizes a situation most concisely described by

Sartre's term "seriality," wherein the atomized self lives among others but feels at the same time alone in his own space4', organized not communally but programmatically, according to the dictates of some external source.

Communication is reduced to the ultimate universalizing device: money, a ticket. objects devoid of the irreducible richness, between self and event. His bridge poems represent an obstruction to the smooth running of the world, or of human relations (relations on a human scale). Davey's "Bridge Force" (Tish 13 269-72) powerfully expresses both the futility of action (as conquest) and the blockage of communication. If Hart Crane's Brooklyn Bridge marks a point of amval for all

Western history and myth, for Davey the grand Western quest (the "romance of the remote") appears futile and counterproductive (especially from the phenomenological standpoint). The first part of Bridge Force" undoes the seriousness of Crandike myth building, reducing all the "great" quests (historical and mythic), including the speaker's own. to simplistic tales of love:

The lights the torches the girl across the inlet the bay Gatsby pacing the sand, I driving nightly along this beach. Magellan may have loved the girl next door, de Lesseps a maharani- de Fuca Quadra Valdez all compulsively squawmen brought even to these shores

(who loved if who was Burrard?

led by Leander Paris Menelaus back and forth too across gray waters- lis the bridge force romance of the remote lights made many by the luring dance of waves: the push breast stroke hammer stroke pike staff or sword out and on.

Of course Davey elevates the speaker's mundane desires (juxtaposing "Gatsby,"

"I," Magellan," and so forth), but more significantly, he slyly reflects upon and undermines the heroes, mythic and historical. Echoing Pound's attack on the

West's "compulsive mobility,'" for Davey "bridge force" names a mad desire, devoid of content, drawing the heroes nowhere, just "back and forth." Although the objects of desire might live in the neighbourhood, "next door," these heroes are driven (away), crudely obsessive: they are all "compulsively squawmen" brought to distant shores.

Davey's notion of "bridge force" then, instead of spanning, pushes the object farther out of reach. A stanza from the second section of "Bridge Force" emphasizes the absence of any real content (i-e. land, women, treasure) to the heroic drive:

The problem is still one of movement and mastery I will go to and go to and to taking- that is taking- The heroic energy does not go anywhere; it just goes 'Yo," as Davey writes, underscoring the sheer lack of content. Such a constant (postmodem?) desire is not a cause for celebration as it is for many postmodem thinkers. Unlike, say, in

Lacan's concept of desire, Davey's critique of the heroes' desire has political meat For Tish, and for the Pound-Black Mountain tradition generally, the restlessness of desire is not an absolute psychic structure; it is an historical development," a matter of political struggle. Consequently, Davey connects this restless desire to worldly and historical forces, as is made clear in his choice of heroes (exploiters), his repeated observations about alienation on the road

("burning the world's oillpresenting its cardboard to be punched") and his sense of bridgelroad colonisation of everything, made in section two. These bridges and roads, having set him on a track (much like the rigid tracks of inherited verse form), channel him away from authentic regions of experience:

I will reach you Lover please come back I've been travellin over mounds miles mountains inlets and mountains without end I'm travellin over over and will do it over

I try bridges I try bridges here there

all over the city bridges toll bridges tickets for punching bridges- suspension arch cantilever 'the can't you leave here alone bridge' he said- random bridges everywhere the world must be an obstacle-..

The clipped pace of the short lines and the repetition of the words "mountains"

(conjoined with "mound"), "over," and "bridges" enact a kind of manic searching- for something. But the motorist (like the explorer?) never arrives. He or she discovers only more banal tracks, roads, and bridges covering over a more important, more authentic reality; the car moves too quickly, steering consciousness away from whatever lies beyond the overly familiar, narrow limits of the pavement.

For Davey, this networking and tracking trace a will to power, a force of domination that uproots community, and destroys both the numinousness of perception and the natural environment: in section three he condemns the bridge, or rather the bridge force, howling "FUCK YOUR DISTANCE (Tish 73

271); in "Bridge Force IX' the lost object ("stars"? "some summer day"?) hides behind "midnight curtains of rain," "across distancesland distances." The mythic and historical heroes' constant, questing desire leads to a destructive, but futile, will to power, which Davey links to the rise of modem cities and centralizing technologies. In this sense. the everyday world obtrudes; it ceases to work. drawing attention to the fact of breakdown and crisis. The world appears as "an obstacle" to perception.

Heavier atmospherest ligcids, sludge

Many Tish poems, instead of detailing a finely articulated field, depict amorphous veils. Ironically, such veils function as a kind of privileged object or non-object, just as absence and distance operate as palpable objects or non-objects in the poems examined above. It is as if the speaker in all his solidity comes to an edge, confronts a point of dissolution-of himself, of his objects and objectives.

In other words, many Tish poems thematize an ambiguous environment resistant to the very sharp-eyed apparatus of perception and solid self that the TMpoet is supposed to embody. The things of the world shrink or recede from the speaker, as in David Dawson's "sometimes the skies are" (Tish 2 37), which might senre as an emblem for this discussion:

sometimes the skies are sad and sullen

and twilight lingers in wasted eyes

each like the last:

sometimes men are shapes in the fog and a sunless day is an endless thing

each like the next

Dawson's images are sharply drawn. The language is crisp and precise. Indeed

one of the key tensions growing out of the poem is between this sharpness of

language and a vagueness of object. Dawson draws on his imagisvobjectist

heritage, but his is an imagismlobjedism with a hist: one that attempts to name

a void, a distorting smoke, a veiling of the object. A certain opacity inhabits the

eyes themselves. And as if it were the object of these eyes, the object of

perception, the social other, appears or disappears: "men ...shapes in the fog."

Dawson turns our attention to an in-between point, a visual viscosity that clouds the phenomenologist dream of transparency and depresses the spirit. Arguably. these enfogged human shapes are images of dehumanization, of a sort of homogenization, and of the unavailability of human contact. People are just out of reach, fading away. The "sunless day" that clouds the visual field oppresses precisely as it swallows up distinctions, visual and temporal (''each day like the next").

Ironically, in Daveyrs "Clouds" (Tish 72 245) the ego itself rapidly retreats inward. After a mere three lines of staring at the "dark rain," the speaker withdraws from the oppressive force of the external world. At the same time, he emphasizes the lleye's own impotence:

Standing high in a building alone watching the dark rain flash down somehow I remember the childhood snowstorms Icould not start and then that last one when, (huddled in a ditchapilled car with three feet of the stuff) implacable clouds of hand-sized Rakes kept coming down anway Davey's speaker, contained within the building (icon of an "I"?), a lone consciousness, underscored by the isolation of the word "alone," quickly recedes within the architecture of his body, struck by the image of the "dark rain."

"Clouds" seems to parody some of the phallic poses or fantasies of the Tish self as well as the poses of modern architecture. The poem dramatises a psychic retreat, a captivation in an inner space, one shared perhaps by many disconnected souls, as numerous, at least, as the windows in a high building.

The persona stands "high in a building/alone," caught between two storms, a remembered snowstorm (with its "implacable clouds") from "child hood" and the

"dark rain" pouring outside the building in the present; inside his imagination he is contained in a "ditch-spilled car"-which is itself contained within parentheses.

It is precisely this atmosphere that drives him inside (the building, his mind. the car), this "dark rain," "clouds," 'lakes."

Many of Davey's poems make of the weather a palpable obstacle to perception or connection, such as "Bridge Force IX(Tish 15 301-2) with its "midnight curtains of rain" blotting out a view to the future, or more significantly his ''Today" (Tish 8 174) which captures a fading of the other within the thickening mists, as does Dawson's "sometimes the skies are." Davey writes that "The fog more sure/creep[s] further inland," and that "all over the lower mainland/Men and womenkander among shadows"; the lights are "dim," and the streets "almost invisible." Like Dawson's poem, 'Today" teeters on a kind of ambiguous "twiiight," a suicide, "out here in the foglat the edge of things" (175), where social relations or objects get veiled. Keams' "Levitation" (Tish 8 169) also focuses on a deadened, deserted city space. He writes of the "viscous shadows of city vacant newstands [sic] dead neon tubes," a "dark cafeteridfghostly hands among my gut."

In Bowering's lengthy 'Thru My Eyes" (Tish 78 382-3), the speaker meditates on blindness ("But to be blind!"):

Not wanting my light of blue sky to drop into the ocean night

Bowering presents images of groundlessness and sudden death (falling "into the hole ofldarkness''). His speaker fears the intrusion into his eyes and objects of a

''yell~w'~and "white haze" and an attendant distortion of objects ("Shapes meld and swellfsurge into moving outlines"). Wthout ever giving up control of the line, of the ego as imaginary centre of the poem's universe, Bowering manages to express the tenuousness of that centre: Eager and wary for the energy thru my eyes lit every moment lighting my way to the world

around me I feel the batteries running down

It is too long to present in full, but "Thru My Eyes" offers an abundance of sharply drawn images (eye, moon, lamp, glass), suggesting a kind of elemental unity or solidity. However, these figures are all threatened with dissolution, with being infected by or absorbed into the amorphous spheres of gases and liquids: haze, ocean, dark, empty spaces, amoebas. Bowering draws attention to an intense flickering light of consciousness, one well aware that soon an omnipresent darkness will overcome it. Most of these pieces paint a mood that is in part depressing and anxious. But Wah's exemplary "Of a City" (Tish 8 166) perhaps most thoroughly explores the seductive nature of the amorphous fog and the intimate connection between culture and nature, self and system, purity and pollution. This poem examines the fascination with gases, bodily incapacity, the desire for flight, and the experience of time as a distressing drag.

"Of a City" analyses the relation between cultural excrement ("smoke") and the processes of nature. The "smoke" symbolizes the speaker's inability to incorporate or expel cultural products. Here the amorphous, omnipresent cultural object seems to dramatically undercut Tish's claim (if not its desire) that consciousness can fix (or "preserve," as Wah says in the prose, Tish 123)

"reality," uncover a purer order of world and word. I quote the poem in its entirety to capture the graphic effect of the line breaks:

a black smoke stack sticks straight up silently the white smoke escapes into the gray sky

does actually become the cloud for me or acts with the wind on the wind floats over some drab buildings disperses...

which is peaceful to watch

the unheard billowing broken down into the dull day

un exciting way of the mind acts on the mind useless-.. silence broken by the silence

I shiver and yawn at the fuming structure with with no end to it that continual smoke drifting drives the man into himself and also then to the water

With its initial articulations of the phallic smoke stack, "Of a City" seems to mock

both the solid, hard Tish self, and the imagist's (objectistk) demands. For while the poem begins with brilliant, energetic precision, etching the smoke stack with

"SUs,"K"s and Ts, it then drifts off entirely into the fluid "C's and airy 'Ws,

reaching, towards the end, a depressing loss of breath with the repetition of

"with." In opposition to the incisive aura of the "black smoke stack," the resultant smoggy environment both invents (via a kind of ontological ground) and mirrors the speaker's psychic state: isolation, boredom, drift, dullness, silence (the poet's voice muted and poisoned), a useless "yawn" instead of Whitman's vigorous

"yawp," or Tishs idealized, hale breath. Wah's is a vision of depression and paralysis.

The line breaks of "Of a City" make substantial use of the poem as field, mimicking a sort of textual geography. And unlike Olson's paginal fields made up of networks of documents, geographies, commercial signs, proper names, technologies, all suggesting the substance of a renewed city landscape, Wah's landscape lacks all concretion, except for the "smoke stack," and "drab buildings." His vision signifies the very undoing of Olson's kind of specificity, as

well as Pound's desire for clean, transparent edges. Wahrs world evaporates,

"disperses," collapses ("broken down") into a tangible nothingness: "gray sky,"

"white smoke," "wind," "cloud." It is unable, or unwilling, to breathe life into the fantasy of the vital polis. Instead of Olson's compulsive (and seductive) articulations of a field of auratic, resonating objects, Wah presents an absorbing veil of homogenizing smog. Such amorphousness is the primary object (or anti- object) of his landscape. One can easily read this blanketing of the field as

Wah's face-to-face confrontation with the very social reification that Olson heroically tries to rewrite. As the title reminds us, Wah's speaker remains within a cityscape that veils social relations. One is, for example, reduced to "silence" and "useless[ness]"; "man" is driven "into himself." Clouds of smog, that both corrupt and fascinate, distort perception: we are told that the seductive play of pollution-arguably a sign of the power and corrosiveness of technology-and wind over the dull buildings "is peacefullto watch." Indeed, here the corrupt environment even seems to invade and inform consciousness ("acts on the mind"), penetrating, albeit in a negative way only, Tish's organicist, autonomous ideal of selfhood. No wonder the poem ends with an image of flight from the scene, accenting the sense of horror over the ennui ("Ishiver and yawn").

This threat to solidity repeatedly appears in Wah's work. Elsewhere his personae or their objects similarly teeter on the brink of solidity and fluidity-in "Isabella: 2 thoughts," for example, the speaker is "at the edgelfalling" (Tish 9

19 1); in "A Testimony" (Tish 7 152) rain washes tears "into the sea," streets

dissolve into "tog," and earth melts away: "the death of the landlgoing down to

the seafto the seabeginning again"; or in "My Horse" (Tish 18 376), where the

speaker's fantasy object, a horse, is simply "not there," even in fantasy.

Jamie Reid's untitled poem fmrn Tish 15 (307) thematizes, from a more

detached position, the loss of objects (social relations), covered over not by a

cloud or a haze but, in this case, the snow. Like Wah's "smog," Reid's "snow" signals the shift from the firmness of "ground" to an ambiguous, unfixable atmosphere, an unapprehendable object; a swirling opacity surrounds the hard apparatus of perception or the mirroring other:

"Only silence remains possible in face of the silence which is in the world."

Childhood winter in the Rockies, snow fell, silently hiding all the dark patches in the old snow that 1 took for the blood of deer perpetually in agony, bleeding inside, spitting from voiceless mouths into the snow.

All that breathless quiet whiteness, gaping avenues and evenings of concealed violence fraught with the howling of rampant wolves, killers of the deer and whatever other children wandered silent and afraid among the rocks, their fathers at war, their mothers weeping alone, never speaking.

while the snow fell and silenced all that blood.

In face of the silence which is in the world, the one response, the one possible response, is silence.

This multilayered poem alternates between prosaic statement and some

arrestingly raw syntax that temporarily throws one off balance. In particular, lines

such as "of deer perpetually," "All that breathless quiet whiteness," and "of

concealed violence fraught1'appear like strange fragments hanging in mid-

meaning a moment before falling into illumination. The rhythm of the line breaks,

along with the images of layers of snow and the situation of the speaker re-

membering his childhood, throw into relief a demand for some kind of psycho- social archaeology of individual (speaker), family ("mothers," "fathers."

"children"), town ("avenues"), and World" ("'war"). The poem insists upon this point: that there are depths (human relations) which are systematically covered over or otherwise concealed. For example, Reid's striking and disturbing description of the wounded deer suggests some traumatic memory (''dark patches in old snow"), intense pain repressed, held within the self ("in agony, bleeding1inside")-in the third stanza this trauma transfers over to the neighbourhood itself, which also appears wounded ("gaping"). The snow

("breathless quiet whiteness"), as a symbol of all such covering-over, threatens

to destroy both emotional history and the capacity to speak. Indeed the speaker

is preoccupied with "silence" and t8voiceless[ness]." He imagines a world of

silenced children, absent fathers, and isolated mothers "weeping alone, never speaking." And of course the snow that drives one inside, both literally and figuratively, makes visible the distances between self and self, self and other, self and object, realising a network of reification throughout the community.

Unlike some of the poetry examined in this chapter (especially that of

Wah, Davey, and Bowering), Reid's does not detail the specific quality of the social world he writes about. Significantly, the fading of the object and the other is expressly seen as a function of a social malaise: the "silence" (loneliness, concealment, repression, etc.) is "in the world" like a structure that produces silence among its individual members. As the first and last stanzas insist, first one realizes the terrible "silencelwhich is in the world" and then "the one possible response" to it: "silence."

Elemental poetry and its other

Even away from the road or the city, in or near nature in all its immediacy, the numinous cosmos pales before a disturbing intuition of dissolution. The shape of the object appears veiled, and the self, almost always the hard kernel of the poem (even as it trembles before the void), constantly loses ground, falling off the earth, sinking into the mud- Nature, in the strongest of these poems, represents not so much a phenomenological record as a mapping of the speaker's psychic stress. Sometimes then the focus shifts from the fading objects to the self's awareness of its own limits, its fragmentation from the centre.

James Reid's "Autumn Again" (Tish 3 42), for example, attends to the lone speaker (divided from some other) experiencing a powerful feeling of fragmentation. Like Bowenng's and Davey's work, Reid's demonstrates a keen sense of the presence of absence:

rain-

fall

Autumn.

and the wind, slashing the leaves! again.

If YOU WERE HERE.

If you were here, my hands would be stretched toward

like leaves

AS IF CONTINUALLY MISSING THE POINT

I'm lucky we have an Indian summer this month I donY think I could bear the fadthat the wind tears at your heart as it has done mine,

Reid creates a sense of fragmentation in the line break (mimicking rainfall). and in the halting syntax. He recreates the stammering brought on by a feeling of incapacity and stress ("If YOU WERE HEREJlf you were here"). The speaker's self-presence, lost in the turbulence f~rthe most part-except for the straining of

"my hands.. .stretched"-finally solidifies only in the final stanza as the unsettling drama of the wind, rain, and derailed syntax fades. In keeping with the theme of the self as disconnected (alienated) from the ground, it is worth noting that Reid's comparison of the self to the tree, or more accurateiy to the branch and leaves at the mercy of the wind, imagines the psyche as somehow suspended above the ground. Like Davey's bridges, Reid's hands cannot span ("my hands would be stretched toward you/like IeavesIAS IF CONTINUALLY MISSING THE POINT') the distances separating his objects from him. (In fact, there are two levels of distancethe absence of the person spoken of, and then the statement that even

"if' that person were "here" he would not be able to reach her).

Uprooted, sometimes the Tish signifier is playful. A leaf is not always a leaf, not always an accurate depiction of Vancouver, as it lifts off the ground, hangs in the wind, drowns, or finds itself lost in the snow. Nor, of course, is the autumn of "Autumn Again" only a season: it is death, helping institute a mood that disturbs the smooth operations of the unified self. If Reid expresses physical uncertainty, psychic vulnerability and separation, using metaphors of nature, David Dawson goes further into the skin of the leaf in "theme 3" (Tish 2

movement of leaves in ocean silent sweep of crisp fragments bronze-burnished browned autumnal leaves in the lordly flow of tide

high along the water line leaves of red and brown clog the smooth expanse of sun-blanched beach rioting colors among the kelp

but on the sea isolate fragments from the land float silent

intense

Here Dawson records the cosmic in nature, rediscovering the object's aura,

"captur[ingJthe effect of immediacy" (Mitchell 69). For Beverley Mitchell, in her study of Tish, this sort of imagistic presentation, through sound and image, of the

'poet in relation to his locale" (70) most deeply characterises both this poem and

Tish poetry in general: for Mitchell, all Tish writers strive to capture an accurate, immediate presence, to discover the aura in both the object and the language.

She argues, writing on this poem, that Dawson accurately captures 'Vancouver's tree-covered beaches" (70). Echoing Tish's prose theories, a literal description leads to a deeper mystical relation to nature:

Dawson's recognition that "isolate fragments" although "silent" are. at the same time "intense", applies quite literally to the leaves in the water in terms of their movement and colour. Moreover, the implicit idea that silence may be the result of intensity has an application beyond the poem, and there is an indication even here that Dawson will respond to the hidden and the mysterious-the "silent" yet "intenseit4ements of his locale, to the "secrets objects share" which Olson suggested. (70)

Mitchell's sympathetic portrayal of Tish's intentions mirrors Tish opponent Keith

Richardson's understanding of Tish writing. Richardson adds that Tish's desire

"to find magical realization in the most prosaic" (23) aspects of experience was part and parcel of its broader "defiant literary posture" against the overly aesthetic practices of Canadian poetry (23). While Mitchell praises Tishk prosaic, literal records of experience for their immediacy and sense of sound,

Richardson finds them merely banal descriptions.

But instead of taking Dawsonts elemental poem at face value--as the depiction of aura (glowing presence) or as the accurate articulation of natural objects only-one can see how "theme 3' also invites the reader to identify with certain privileged signifiers; and in this way, the poem does not deviate so much from Davey or Bowering's poems of subjective desolation, their articulations of a distance between self and social other. Here Dawson privileges that little island floating away from the mainland. The drifting leaves, described as "bronze- burnished," are paradoxically heavy, solid. The image of polished metal

("burnished") gives the leaves corporeal integrity to counter the power of the sea. They are '%risp'*-thebrittleness of which is countered by the bronzing of them- as if they were impervious to the corrosive effects of salt water. In other words, the ieves on the ocean are not "submersed" or "submerged," to use some key

Tish words. On the contrary, as individual entities they ride the cosmic wave; and by identifying with these leaves, the reader is invited to experience a pleasurable "sweep of crisp fragments. ..in the lordly flow of tide."

Furthermore, in addition to the seductive images of autonomy, the pleasures of distance, the "isolate" leaves as they drift over the sea evoke feelings of depth and intelligence. The signifiers "silent," "isolate," and "intense"

(words visually separated from the body of the text) evoke the fantasy of the romantic genius. It is worth noting that one of the poems preceding "theme 3" also imagines the sea as a source of mystical power. In "who is more than certain" (Tish 2 36). Dawson's speaker, this time more passively, contemplates the sea, or, more accurately, that which rises out of it, death:

he has come from the sea. I know by the sound of his feet on suspended air, the still sound of a profound silence, everpresent and dark. from the ocean.

he is antiquity; he is posterity. a mother-child, lover he whose eyes are open unlike man whose ways, decisive unlike man. In this excerpt, the ideal, wonderful image of bodily unity transfers over to death, who is described as "wan and finalhecessary and complete unto himself." The speaker's consolations are two-fold. First "Deatha'-who is not so unlike "man" here-appears more comforting, taking a human shape. a shape with a unity that the speaker can vicariously enjoy through a submissive contemplation. Second, the speaker's understanding of the world becomes limited but decisive; in accord with the Cartesian solution to uncertainty ("I know"), the speaker can cling to a moment of certainty ("before him11 can only whisper 'death is more than certain"'). In "theme 3," however, the ideal of unity is less alien. What appears alien is the social world.

The individualised leaves-consciousness floating over the elemental deep-contrast with those leaves crowding together on land. These latter are the social leaves: a sloppy multitude that "clog the smooth expanse." These leaves operate within a language that destroys the satisfaction of the fantasy of individual impermeability, of body unity: "clog ," "blanched," and "rioting ." And yet despite the social action suggested by "rioting" (revelry, anarchy, etc.), the mass of leaves lies stranded, immobile, waiting to dry up. "theme 3," then, does not merely present a phenomenological record of experience but an expression of the tensions between the individual and the social world, of Tish's desire to institute an autonomous subject. But while Dawson's poem exemplifies the dialectical tensions between individual and social world, it is more blatantly ideological than the works discussed so far in this chapter: for in a black-and-

white fashion he positions the individual subject ("bronze-burnished" leaf) as a

pleasurable point of identity against the congested, clogged masses. Unlike

Davey's bridge poems, Bowering's road poems, or Reidk description of leafy

anarchy, Dawson's self does not pay any price for its separation from the continent; or perhaps a romantic aura of individual intelligence, of heroic self-

unity set against the chaotic, indistinct crowds, masks a significant price

(alienation, dissolution).

Still, I find Dawson's "who is more than certain" and ''theme 3," with their poignant expressions of a struggle to construct individual security, more powerful than his (and other Tish poets') simple celebrations of the elemental or the cosmic. His "a searching after order (Tish 10 214) merely restates some of the more cocky, essentialist prose assertions ("the enduring object of a poet's mindlis vital in his words"). Dawson's "Meditation" (Tish 17 230) also fails to haul the elemental into some more challenging social framework:

that tree bears fruit in spring

(which is not to say of its own accord).

who challenges such mysteries will

lose himself.

Tish poems that attempt to seek out the archetypes or mysterious cyclical processes of the natural universe are the most static, as in Cull's "Hot Days:

Upper Levels I (Criticism)" (Tish 2 32) with its mythic "coitus"; Reid's wafer-thin

'The seduction" (Tish 7 142, "the sun, and the sea,lthey play tricks on us, we'?; and Dawson's "Meditation," or his "an elemental poem" (Tish 15 312), with its focus on a sort of cosmic alphabet, including "air water leaves," the "moon, the sun, earth," and of course "woman."

Suffering from a similar essentialism are the poems that attempt to describe the poet in a state of existential wonder or shock at more local elements of nature. Such is the case in Cull's "sea- lion" (discussed below) and 'We praises" (Tish 12 241), with its self-consciously innocent naming of "seaweed ,"

"rocks," and "mountains," or Bowering's "Feel of a Leaf' (Tish 6 123),with its insistence on the sheer auratic presence of its object. One may observe this effect in the last section of Boweringrspoem:

Feel the metaplasrn leaf of winter underneath snowpile at the door :the thing itself a leaf still and more

because a leaf despite the list of snow

against a wall of any season against a law of any weather

Pluck it from the snow see it couple it in your hand :the thing itself folded in the folding of your hand it is to you skin to yours metaplasrn unsoured by the season

Here the leaf shines like a magic object glowing against the backdrop of change

("unsoured by the season"; or "the wall of any season"; or 'me law of any weather"). Bowering foregrounds the leafs thingness, both visually on the page by isolating the phrase "a leaf still" and by insisting hnrice-emphatic colon and all-

-on ":the thing itself." This effect of solidity gives the speaker's own body a greater substantiality since this "thing itself' reflects physically his body ("folded in the folding of your hand"; "is to youkkin to yours"). Perhaps despite itself, this poem creates a peculiar angst, arising due to the way the linguistic mirroring-the title can be sounded out backwards like a palindrome, as other words throughout mirror or echo each other: 'Yeel'Yleaf," "still'T'list," "wall'T'law"-promises but does not achieve an exact identity, a failure increased perhaps by the effects of print. This is so even of the mirroring leaf. The leaf, partly because of its extraordinary presence (differentiation from the background), promises to fall away from the "skin" that envelops it. In other words, despite the work's drive for essence and identity, the very sharp focus placed on the point of connection

(skin to skin) a split second later feels like a hinge or a break.

Like Bowering's poem, David Cull's "sea-lion" (Tish 16 342) expresses awe at an auratic, natural thing. This poem was singled out by Keith Richardson as an example of Tish's orientation towards uncovering the "magical." "elemental experience" (Richardson 23) in the ordinary. "sea-lion" presents a literal, detailed description of a corpse:

that was another summer and C come, by sea, upon that huge corpse tangled in the bushes, just above high water came, unknowing, on the pieces of that soft, sleek thing impaled on twigs and dribbled down the rocks, fat flesh on stone, still slender, even in decay; the day was hot the flesh strained fingers to the sea, still, even in decay, the form was visible-

that was another summer, I, not knowing Williams, only shuddered as I turned away-

the day was hot the smell was bad, I said.

It is as if before having read W. C. Williams, Cull had not the strength to stare at the terrible facts and processes of nature, the concept and physical presence of death. But now he can face the minutiae of the body, even finding in it a fascinating sensuality, rendered partly through alliteration ("that soft sleek thing";

''flat flesh on stonellstill slender even in decay") and partly through the transformation of the sea-lion from "corpse" to the more eroticized "flesh," a flesh sup ported by other such sensualizing sig nifiers as "soft," "sleek," "slender," "strained." Like Bowering's leaf, Cull's sea-lion is given an aura. And, also like

Bowering's leaf, Cull's special object appears on the verge of disappearance. He marks the loss of an object; it is both a "huge corpse," in "pieces." in "decay," and an erotic phallus.

Some of these more elemental poems, however indirectly or unconsciously, reff ect the "serial" self, that apparently isolated, contemplative consciousness insulated from the rest of the community: a man and his leaf, man as lone leaf, a man and his corpse, and so forth. They also grasp after presence, in the most essentialist meaning of that word, as a kind of sensory certainty!8 Many Tish statements do dream of such certainty. But on the other hand, as we have seen, that kind of religious presence, in the strongest of Tish poems, also contains within it, simultaneously, another sense. In other words, beyond presence as natural thing-in-itself, Tish poets crave more worldly presences: including intimate communities, owning the means of productionlcommunication, an appreciation of historical traces and many of the scraps (including nature, and the uniqueness of individual experience) that are marginalized by mass, consumer society. In fact, it may well be that the constant call for numinous presence-presence as essenceoperates as an impoverished substitute for a lack of authentic community. Conclusion

Despite the many gestures towards an individualistic autonomy, gestures that sometimes turn away from the systematicity of the city altogether, the Tish writers, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, describe deep contradictions inherent in their notion of subjectivity. Instead of celebrating a rugged American individualism (Richardson) confronting the riches of immediate perception, the poems more often present impressions of isolation and loss, the failure of the self to cope with or even find the social world. In this way, the rugged individual

(in its various guises), deeply connected to nature and free from the dictates of the city, suddenly finds himself motoring around a fragmented and fragmenting

"serial" landscape; the very shapes of his consciousness appear to hinge not on the clean, physiological organ but on a profound immersion in the confusing productions of the city.

Not surprisingly, the "objects" presented most forcefully and immediately are, ironically, the prominent images of veils, fogs. smoke, rain-sharp images of opacity. Despite the celebration of the idea of locus, the writers often express the difficulty of finding solid ground, place, history. Locus fades away. The automobile glides over it too quickly, without rest, exhausting the psyche, creating great distances between self and the texture of the environment. Or else, the details of the ground (locus) are covered over by an alienating systematicity: i.e., programmatic "device" and "artifice" encroaching at several levels: from inherited poetic form to formalistic academia, to the city's overgrown, alienating infrastructure.

The Tish selves seem to consistently perform a number of tasks. First, they celebrate autonomy, organic difference from the city and system. They desire to find a clean, pure language, without artifice; the desire to rediscover nature, and the aura of the elemental. Second, this self is a critique of and a reflection of the fragmentation of the city, its effect: entrapment in can, social alienation, failure to connect with others, failure to discover meaning, and of course explicit critiques of the social system, in particular in the writing of Davey and Bowering. A shift has taken place. Instead of the heroic individual (Olson) starting afresh, ripping himself out of the inherited forms of the past, the Tish poets waver. Their sense of self is certainly at times cocky, apparently free,

Godlike, autonomous. But it is as if this form of subjective autonomy were awakening to realise an inescapable connection to fragmentation, that such autonomy is an aspect of the inherited form of the modern city. Hence the speakers of Tish poetry so often experience not freedom but loss, not phenomenological detail but a precisely imagined distorting smog. They seem to be preparing for an even greater confrontation. Somehow the speaker must pass through the veils or perhaps incorporate them into himself, giving up fantasies of autonomy and settling into the impure details of the locus, a locus which is an entanglement of an oppressive, increasingly reified city and the disappearing pleasures of the eccentric, natural, and local. Conclusion: Expanding the Subject

Introducing The Wriing Me (1976). Frank Davey once again emphasizes the

"sense of belonging-...projected by Tish magazine and by Vancouver poetry since

Tish" (19). He asserts that critics and writers from other provinces found

"incomprehensible" and "even unacceptable1'this non-alienated collectivity.

Outsiders do not understand

the sense of belonging to a specific geography, of belonging to the political and social life of that geography, of belonging to both a local community of writers and an international community of writers, of belonging to (rather than possessing and using) language, of being at home in place, community, and language. (1 9) Against this utopia, Davey continues to vilify the humanist for his "Crusoe-like fixation on independent man," his "paranoid views of communal activity" (1 9).

But, as I have been arguing, Tish consciousness often comes surprisingly close to this very paranoid individualism. Collectivity is one of the Black Mountain imperatives embraced by the Tish poets. But, as suggested in chapter one, embedded in this collectivity is a vision of individual purity eager to elude the imprint of the city and its threat to the friendly cosmos.

After rejecting the existential despair of Sartre and Camus (choice of too many easterners) and embracing the philosophers of immersion (Heidegger.

Jaspers, and Merleau-Ponty), Davey describes the Tish ethos as follows: "the world outside the self becomes not adversary, to be feared, attacked, used, or manipulated, but environment40 be lived in" (19). Language must not be seen as "tool" but as "medium," so that the "act of writing becomes a "poetics of dwelling" (19). Yet the holistic poet cannot so easily "dwell" harmoniously with nature, in a landscape rife with hostility generated by eastern (and western) humanists, academics, the business world, nationalists, class division, and sexism. The fractious world disrupts Davey's own peace of mind, inciting his hostility. Davey's generally "belligerent" tone keeps him in the combat zone, suggesting no escape from the corrupting effect of worldly discourses, no safe, pure space for immersion into natural.

The pollution keeps returning. By the time of The Writing LZe, some of the Tish poets, including Davey, had moved beyond their own simplistic brands of individualism. During the first editorial period the inadequacy of an individualism separate from history generates some tension in the Tish project.

In The Man Whose Path Was on Fire (1970). Jamie Reid admits the impossibility of such a stance, in his introduction:

The world, finally, is a world founded on facts, no matter how far the dream will take us into ourselves. One wants to be useful, otherwise survival is empty. One takes a job, a wife or a task only at the possible cost of honesty. They are not. as we had assumed, simple facts, but bring with them consequences, also facts, the accumulated conditions of history.

Fortunately Tish poetry does not entirely bar the accumulation of history from its sight. Side by side with the illusion of mastery, stands the unbearable absence of the other, its inaccessibility from the position of the atomized ego. Tish reaches a limit Above all the communal minded group did not want to

incorporate into consciousness traces of the city, the unstable movement of its

commodification, its reified language.

opening up fhe gates, a crack, Gervais' discovery

Without detailing the long careers and divergent paths taken by the post-7kh poets, it is possible to mark, early on, moments where the old egoistic amour comes apart. The most radical openings of self to social world in the immediate post Tish era come from Cull, Davey, and Bowering. Dawson and Wah continue to explore, in more sophisticated ways, the place of nature, while Reid. acknowledging the importance of "history," also largely sticks to natural metaphors. Typical of the latter move, David Dawson's collection CeremoniaE

Poems 1961-1967 discovers in nature (a point of resistance against rationalism), the irreducibility of the flesh, of myth, dreams, and natural rhythms and objects.

In "notes for a dancer," he finds sanctity in nature:

in its own service his body flowers from its roots

turns petals to sun & moon.

not mimicry, ritual a rooted gesture of the whole body

a dance complete in a finger's movement or a pelvis turning against a body.

a dancing ground is what he wants:

a place to be flowering in a rooted gesture of flesh. (47)

Dawson continues Tish's desires for some solid ground, "the line of the poem. onyx, steel" (57). Still, the radical element in works such as Dawson's, Reid's, and Wah's enacts a critique of the industrial city that Davey finds operating in

Raymond Souster's poetry. Davey argues that Souster's work focuses on the marginal, finding it "dogged and alive" (Louis Dudek & Raymond Souster 1 27). resisting

directly the quantitative emphasis of commodity fetishism. In a culture based on giantism, on continuing increases in industrial production, in standards of living, in the scale of aircraft and buildings, minimalism announces the contrary doctrine that "less is more." (127)

The same can be said of the nature-oriented post-Tish poets. Wah's Pictograms from the Interior of 8.C. (I975), for example, copies and reacts to native pictograms. In response to an amoeba or jellyfish-like figure, he writes the following:

Lost amidst Caloplaca and rising as a bubble from earth to sky. (27)

Wah's work in particular explores objects which resist colonisation by the industrial city. He also avoids oversmphasising the presence of the poetk "I,"

and Tish's old rhetoric of the whole, natural man, focusing instead on the artifact.

C.H. Gervais has found the Tish poets' use of documentary material

characteristic of the group's practice. In his discussion of what really amounts to

post- Tish writing, he notes how writing like Dawson's-he adds Bowering's

Geneve, and Robert Hogg's "Eclipse1'-instigates a "willing fusion of subject and

objectt' ("Tish" 197). The poet stares into some form of mirror (nature, tarot

cards) and discovers an element of himself. Problematically, the poetk self still

emerges at the centre of things, recharged in its identifications. But for Gervais,

Tish exemplifies Dorothy Livesayk concept of the "documentary" (203),which

promises to bring self out of the spell of imaginary identifications and into a more

complex relationship with the devices that construct the strong Tish personae:

Essentially, the "Documentary" theme studies the relation of the poet to 'place'. It is in Livesay's words: a conscious attempt to create a dialecfic between the objective facfs and the subjective feelings of the poet. (203)

Gervais gives the example of Geneve (significantly, almost all of his examples

come from after the first editorial period, sometimes long after). But the example

of Geneve is unworldly, unrelated to place, and fails to draw out the implications

of Gervais' "documentary" connection. Unlike objects or artifacts, the tarot cards

of Geneve are more like Rorschach blots, blank spaces filled in by the poet's fantasies, allowing no interposition of cultural artifact that might upset the poetk

egoistic stability. On the contrary, the tarot cards function to deepen the poet's self-intrigue. In Geneve, Bowering contemplates each card, identifying or disidentifying with the images:

She is no mother of mine, this woman with fleshy knee on earth, she is the eighth star of a circular heaven, 8 not weeping (2)

Discussing The Monarch, he writes "I have never liked that number five I or the V those emperors calld it" (3). More positively, sometimes Bowering finds himself, exclaiming "HE IS LIKE ME, holding the sword Inot to fight, but to deliver it Ito one who knows he wants to use it" (4). The tarot world allows Bowering a dreamlike space to enact his fantasies, but there is little sense that the frame creates him or that he is out of control ("I learn to create the past II live in" 7).

There is not the shock of the believer for whom the tarot and the occult in general upset self-possession-his or her fate centred elsewhere, in the stars, destiny, the gods, the cards. Gervais writes that

what Livesay calls the "dialectic" is actually no different from the process taking place in Geneve. Just as Bowering goes into the cards to pull himself out, so too does he go into the historical past with a similar intention: to let the poem create itself-but it seems more than coincidental that there is always some point of self- discove~.(203, my emphasis)

He captures Tish's desire to find an open form, to trace the movement of the self as it plunges into the field. He also detects, but does not in my opinion fully bring out, the post Tish-poets' explorations of an intertextual, historically-constructed consciousness. Mostly underplaying the post-Tishites' interest in the social formation of perception, Genrais accents self-discovery and identity: the dialectic is a "fusion" "between the poet and the poem" (203); "with this 'dialectic' must inevitably come a point of recognition" (204); "the poet goes into the experience

'to pull himself out'" (204).

But more radically, fish's documentary impulse is capable of making space for an irreducible otherness and non-identity. Gervais gives such gestures some play when discussing the following selection from Davey's 'The Scarred

Hu11":

Shipwrecks litter this coast one source, Nicholson, listing 243 since 1803. plus seven hulks unidentified

Shifting away from the primacy of the self, Gervais describes "The Scarred Hull" as a documentary, where one gets the sense of the artifact creating the perception. The poem, he writes, has "an over-all effect, like a film"; such poems are ''documentaries of numerous activities, collages of action-life shots, journalistic reports and photographic stills" (206). The poet does not simply name events, but rather his voice "is registered insofar as it is indicative of the form imitated (i-e. a joumalistk speech)" (206).

Gervais does not make enough of a distinction between narcissistic fusions with exotic objects (tarot cards), submersions into nature, and the more decentring engagement with cultural artifact. Only the latter forcafully opens the insular Tish consciousness to the sticky movement of discourse. Davey's career goes the farthest, taking the historical (social) artifact into the heart of the se!f, as well as placing that self within a larger politically charged economy. But Davey is not the only post Tishite to finally incorporate the dangerous exterior world.

David Cull, for example, breaks with both his earlier linearity and egocentricity to radical effect In fact Gervais criticises David Cull for "taking Olson too literally"

(201). Of Cull's 3 x 4 is (I966), Gervais writes

When Olson said that syntax should be broken open, Cull broke it open to the extent that his lines make very little sense. In fact, the nearly non-existent syntax of his poetry makes it almost impossible for a reader to get into his work. The poems are ironically "closed"beyond Olson's wildest nightmares. (201)

Cull does not match Davey according to Gervais. But he does intensify something toyed with in Tish 14 and 75, namely, citation, and the facilitation of an other's discourse (his grandfather's) into his own. "bird study in british columbia" republished in 3 x 4 is starts to take the sentence as artifact, as a document. The poem-as with the others in the collection-seeks a natural language (the "bird song" as "music oflthe mind"), but it also attempts reconciliation with documentary details of his grandfather's notebook ("1931la document for childrenW;'thepreface to the second printing").

Throughout 3 x 4 Is, mixed in with a strong presence of a desiring, sexualized body, Cull acknowledges the presence of the other (persons, historical documents, institutions), as in "the court": as "packed into the pit of- PRUNEFACE! they will never get out of it-

or, "as a man be ffty and has accomplished nothing

one can offer him

nothing"

from another place, my father, standing in the box, spoke (truth)

-they scramble to keep up: appearance, front, to get it all down, face

(machines to take down what has happened

they will never straighten out what happens

was the small child spherical? were even these ones- "sleep without dreaming?"

Snarled men! even death

permits them- (8)

Gervais finds "bird study in british columbia" too private and therefore incomprehensible. But the poem makes sense in its new context, 3 x 4 Is. "bird study in british columbia" initiates questions asked in the above poem: how is time stilled? what is the meaning of textuality? how do we read the past? Such questions rarely materialize in Tish proper. In "bird study in british columbia," the persona examines both the presence of his textualized grandfather and how his grandfather captures birds in textual snares. Birds for Cull symbolize escape into nature (appearing repeatedly throughout the collection). Ultimately "bird study in british columbia" resists the textualization of being, setting the bird free:

...a bird song warmth (the sexual endeawur) fills the air-

a music of the mind? alone-

as he was I am not permitted to assume that definition

leaving, in the end,

the empty air, the warm bird,

singing. (7)

Cull's bird flies out of its textuality (its "definition"). In the context of Tish this emphasis on ineffable organicism fits. But in 3 x 4 Is nature's presence is balanced by the presence of others, of a historical word that is internal to natural ~~n~~i~usness.

As ''the court" demonstrates, Cull's typographical play embraces artifice, ernphasising both the materiality of language and language as invested with history. Quotation marks ('"packed into the pity of-") and parentheses

("(machines...") appear without closure, suggesting the lack of boundaries between the natural and the social world, The natural world, the voice, is objectified and thrown into question, leaving no clear escape into pure perception or untouched nature. Moreover, "the court"'^ proliferation of caps, quotation marks, dashes, question marks, and exclamation points suggests that, far from being natural, language is a kind of machinery made up of bits and pieces, cogs and wheels, as it were, exhibiting the mechanical processes of typewriting.

Contextualizing subjectivity, Cull opens himself up to a complex of cultural allusions, theatre, movies, movie-lines, a cartoon festival, television, music, citation, and Greek script. In the world of 3 x 4 Is other beings appear (a change from the lonely subjectivity of Tish). Cull lets the language supersede the phenomenological perceiver. Gervais cannot find the narrative thread of the lyrical "I." But Cull's poems have their own decentred meaning, as he explores the ecstatic language, the attempt to frame the self in the framing of self, ego spilling into an unmasterable field of communication. He writes in 'the courtt':

justice; the machine is noiseless

and records "everything" (9) Cull puts "everything" in quotation marks, emphasising the self constantly under construction, falling into language. While discussing the city's social processes,

Cu ilk later Cancer Rising veers from the radical explorations of 3 x 4 is- The later work is cooler. The aim puts much faith in the motherearth, the body, the female body to resist the given order.

Significantly, Cull's documents are not just material in a subject-object dialectic. Instead documents (along with all the impinging social discourses) shape perception. There are other striking examples where the Tishites find the other already inscribed on the retina. More than Geneve, Bowering's Rocky

Mountain Foot (winner of the Governor General's award along with his The

Gangs of Kosmos) offers a sustained instance where the old Tish ego makes room for tainted urban scripts. Some of Rocky Mountain Foot was begun shortly after Tish, as Roy Miki writes: "The poems, written as they were in the period immediately after Tish, test out GBL theory of localism" (18). 'Calgary

Downtown Sunday" from Rocky Mountain Foot was written in 1964:

Sunday after getting out of the house twelve oclock of a winter's day: the stucco churches empty out their old women & small boys with home haircuts

like the politicians on TV all rural all interested in crops & the flag built on the new testament that is the Scriptures converted to piano in the tabernacle Sunday sound off the brown snow of Seventh Avenue:

"Hear the message.,.

EAVESDROPPING ON THE ANGELS

Enjoy the music...

Ministry of Music by our Young People"

I drive past at twelve oclock my car radio tuned to music of distant Mozart my eyes indulgent on old women

And they were all filed with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. (26-7)

Cruising at one remove from those local others, the poor, the old, and the religious, etc., the persona of Rocky Mountain Foot merits some of the criticism

Red Lane makes of Bowering's early post-Tish poetry: "I do see a weakness come on yer poems like you have no real concern for the things yer writing of ...a sort of disgusted tourist thing ...( Letters Mar. 1964). Nevertheless, Bowering sees a world submerged in a collage of textual processes, writing, signs, scripts. Miki writes that "[tlhe prose quotations inserted in the text were found by GB in the local newspaper and from OurAlberta, a number of flyers that came out from the Alberta Power Company" (18).

In Rocky Mountain Foot, the documentary element (as unassimilable other) emerges, but not for a narcissistic feast, or fusion of subject and object. In the thick of a cultural field of influence, the persona appears minute before the burning communal energies, including the passions of the young. This ego- retraction (a partial negative capability?) appears to be the intended effect as the transition from the penultimate to the last stanza suggests, from his "indulgence" toward the old women to a real energy (and dignity) in their collective passions:

"the Spirit gavedhem utterance."

For Gervais the documentary recreates the poet's voice. But any relation to the world (poem about a flower, rock, sea, political event) may exhibit the poet's voice. Rocky Mountain Foot shows that documentary can have a far more specific meaning: the poet not just creating a document or donning a mask but foregrounding-echoing here Russian Formalism's "literariness"-the presence of

"artifacticity," the point where textuality constructs individuals and communities.

The most profound explorations of how consciousness is itself a cultural document emerge in Davey's work. l ntroducing Davey's The Arches: Selected

Poems, bpNichol argues that Davey, beginning with The Scarred Hull (1966), moves beyond both romanticism and "simplistic reformulation[s]" of Williams' "no ideas but in things" (8). In place of an innocent phenomenological perceiver "stands a sense of the human being as a construct of what he or she knows at a given point in time" (8). The unity of the maximal poet cracks under the pressures of cultural scripts, so that self looks like an explosive site where various dramas play themselves out. In Arcana and Mng of Swords the phenomenological subject and object are a pn'ori written over with myth, history, and contemporary social life. The force of these elements is presented in section xviii of King of Swords:

Dying the death of Arthur, emblazoning my initials on books, on manuscripts of poems, telephone memos. Swaggering to your door with chocolates, flowers. Playing the classroom like theatre, the teacher on horseback. Writing jokes, for poems. Writing poems, for love. & you. Thinking to have married a king.

Davey insists that this Arthurian story is contemporary, rather than an escape to a fantasy. He calls it "a record of accumulating insight":

Arthur, Guenevere, Lancelot, and the Tarot figures, could speak to the readers as contemporaries.... all its elements whether Arthurian, American, or personal are happening on the day of the poem's writing. None of these elements to me were allusional, historical, or even archetypal-they were intrinsic to the phenomenological now. (Ondaatje 326)

King of Swonls exemplifies the shift and continuity with early Tish. While the poem still maintains the phenomenological self confronting the locus, a thoroughly textualired locus and self are no longer separate entities (i.e. subject

228 and object). If Tish strove to empty perception and language of subjectivity. now

Daveyrs personae swim in it. Criticizing subjective stereotypes from within,

Davey finds himself constructed by the intertext, by the act of writing.

King of Swords goes so far as to vigorously challenge any natural sense of the bodykex. Sexual desire appears not as a natural rhythm but as chaotically culture-bound. As Nichol suggests, Davey writes about power relationships (Davey, Arches 1O), body as encrusted with meaning: 'Welding her cuntnike the dishes Maggielhurld at Jiggs"; "Killd by his own prick"; "Arabella throwing a pig's dork at Jude"; "Breasts encrusted with jewels,/a clitoris of gold: our/Gwenevere, cloisteredhvith her Avonllady"; "Spawning monumentslto the prick that stirs, violence, love"; '%ock-proud, cunt-blind." Moreover, the sex organs circulate within a political economy, not a spiritual or natural realm:

This, enslaved us: knights, with lances chasing grails- ladies, cloisferd in castles & lakes. & the knights beating down the gateways & Arthur at last sailing off on his barge into the water. Generalizing, militarizing, the sexual roles, the women posted to hearth & bedroom the men to pens in council chambers, swords on Mt Badon. (section xi)

When the poet's consciousness appears it too is inserted in the midst of the storyltext ("But how could I be Sir Lancelot,Ewho wins gratitudelfor battle, welcorneito an enemy' tower"; "So I quit -would notlfight duels for you, invade kitchens, /playrooms, not screwfall your housewife girlfriends").

Works like Arcana, King of Swords, and The Ciallam, Bowenng's Rocky

Mountain Foot, and 3 x 4 is rethink and transcend earlier idealistic readings of the Pound tradition. They overcome the limits of the isolated individual, giving perception a history, and allowing for a certain reversibility which upsets egoistic pretensions; the not-so-"pure" perceiver is equally seen; the poet both speaks and is spoken. Or as bpNichol puts it describing Davey, and Iwould add

Bowen'ng and Cull, ''The 'real' has shifted. The subjectivity of knowledge is acknowledged. The writer is free to move between contradictory 8 shifting modes of thot because the nature of thot itself is a constnrcC1(Davey, Arches 8-9 my emphasis).

And yet the 'subjectivity of knowledge" was not always recognized by

Davey, and such an idea was energetically rejected by the editors of Tish: 7-19.

The movement towards the decentring of a pristine consciousness came slowly, and is now mostly forgotten by critics and even the original editors. Tish's accomplishments seem to run along two uncrossing tracks, one celebrated, the other hidden. The first track might be called the Tish phenomenon. in a recent interview, Stuart Ross, a co-founder of the small press fair in Toronto, argued that ''the small press scene embodies a punk ethic*: do it yourself, write about the local, without conformity to the mainstream. This attitude is in part a legacy of important little magazines like The Floating Bear, Own(both US. zines),

Tish, and later Blew Oinfment, Island, and WeecVFlower. Tish offered a sustained example of not only the do-it-yourself ethic, but of a focus on the marginal, the local, as opposed to, say, the archetypal, literary (cf. Frye and

Alphabet), or merely eclectic (Evidence). Moreover, Tish's abrasive editorial staff managed to both offend the literary establishment (another punk trait) and generate a lively theoretical debate, wherein the group advocated a new poetic consciousness, a new language which could seize upon immediate matters, including the images and sounds of their own environment. Other writers in

Vancouver, such as the downtown Vancouver bohemians (including Gerry

Gilbert, Roy Kiyooka, and John Newlove) were playing with ideas like those expressed in Tish, but without the benefit of their own presses. As a vehicle,

Tish could more concretely record and give shape to, as Roy Miki writes, "a whole different take on poetics in Canada" (Barbour 97), with its insistence on process over polished product, localism, a language tied to the body

("proprioceptionn),and community.

With its influential celebration of the local, its vigorous (re)introduction of modernism (of the Black Mountain brand), as well as its effect on Canadian writing (see introduction), Tish was more than an apprenticeship movement.

Although it was that too, as the Tishites branched out into other small press concerns: David Dawson carried on the next editorial phase of Tish. George Bowering started Imago Magazine and Beaver Kosmos Foliost Wah helped edit

"Sum magazine... and when he and Pauline [Butling] came.. .back home to

Nelson, Scree Magazine" (Barbour 117), and perhaps most significantly, Frank

Davey started Open Letter in d 965, carrying on the theoretical explorations begun with Tish. As Warren Tailman points out, the Vancouverites' spirit continued Vowering out, into all kinds of dooryards of the richness of communal imagination Tish had begunn(I 17).

But there is that other track: the twists and turns of the poetry itself, far less attended to than the celebration of the Tish phenomenon. Retrospectively. the Tishites and critics alike have been too quick to place Tish poetry in the post- modem stream, without exploring the complexities of the work. One should not too readily accept Davey's proclamation of the demise of a controlling subject-it lingers in a Tish lyric haunted by fantasies of a pure, self contained being, free of the pollutants of modem culture. The particular way the Tish poets chart a path through Pound-Black Mountain idealisms is one of their contributions to

Canadian culture: in between Charles Olson and the potential exploited in works such as King of Swords, 3 x 4 Is, and Rocky Mountain Foot are the struggles of

Tish 7-79. For Olson, poetic consciousness must battle heroically to elude the effects of modem America, seeking something beyond the given prisonhouse of language (via nature, non-Western or pre-Western cultures). He was stuck forever attempting to control the play of language and history. By contrast, Tish. from within the fantasy of self-contained consciousness, more humbly experiences the impossibility of banishing otherness. demonstrating that any purity of soul comes at a high cost, namely, the disappearance of the social world. Part of 7ish's legacy then is its often unintended deflation of an alienating lyric and lyrical consciousness, making way for more decentred, intertextual explorations of language. 1. See Charles Altieri's Enlarging the Temple (1 7).

2. Christopher Beach finds the Pound tradition, in general, playing with notions of intertextuality comparable to Kristeva's and, even more so. Barthes. However Beach finds Kristeva's and Barthes' notions of intertextuality do not pay adequate attention to "historical and biographical specificity" (14).

3. In this way, Ginsberg could accept, on some level, even Pound's most serious failings, his intolerance of Buddhists, Taoists, and Jews": The Cantos were for the first time a single person registering over the course of a lifetime all of his major obsessions and thoughts and the entire rainbow of his images and clingings and attachments and discoveries and perceptions. (qtd. in Beach 38)

4. See Carl Rapp's Wlliam Carlos Wiliams and Romantic Idealism (1 984), Cary Wolfe's The Limits of American Ideology in Pound and Emerson (1 993), and Pau l Morrison's The Poetics ofFascism (1996).

5. All parenthetical references to Tish, unless otherwise noted, are from Tish No. 7-19, ed. Frank Davey (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1975).

6. Allen and Tallman 7.

7. See for example Bowering's "Poet as Projector" (Tish 118), Davey's "No Visions but in Things: 10(Tish 3 59), and Culls "sea-lion" (Tish 16 342).

8. Selected Writings (82).

9. See, for example, Bowering's "Poet as Projector" (Tish 118) and James Reid's editorial for Tish 4 (71).

10. In "The Fire," Robin Blaser gives a nice image of fluidity and the collapse of spirit into body: "If you imagine, as I do, that, at any waking moment, you are a corpuscle in the left wrist of god, then any reality is precisely to be found in the flow of corpuscles in that vast body" (237).

11. These primordial bodies, once recovered, can burst through reified cultural law, the backdrop against which Duncan's and Olson's discourses take place. One can appreciate an affinity between their pulsing body-fields and Julia Kristeva's subversive body. Both attempt to subvert the given order's authority. In a way, the Black Mountain body represents non-conscious drives. instincts and desires. which, as Kristeva argues, pulsate against the symbolic's barriers. But Duncan's body-self is comparatively more organized and centralized (more historical?) than Kristeva's preconscious "semiotic."

12. This phrase is taken from Davey's introduction to Tish: No. f-19 (10).

13. Tish's understanding of modem culture as "instrumental society" can be extrapolated from the group's debt to Black Mountain thought (i.e. its concern with mechanization, alienation, social fragmentation and so forth), and through some of its own statements. See for example Davey's comments in "One Man's Look at 'Projective Verse"' (99). where he broadly traces the &if€ from premodemity to modernity, holistic community to rationalized society. One criticism that might be made of Davey's discussion is that he places too much importance on, and therefore on some level buys into, the illusory autonomy of the individual, rather than focusing on the social changes which facilitate such a being. Of course to shift the focus in this way would demand more of a confrontation with the "establishment"; Tish in general solves the problems of modernity (fragmentation, alienation, mechanization etc.) by sharply turning away from it altogether (conflating the "symbolic" with modernity), finding solace in a mothering Nature.

14. In an introduction to The Last Blewointment Anthology, which was quite experimental whatever its eclecticism, bpNichol compares the openness of BisseWs magazine to Tish single mindedness. He writes that when Bissett's magazine arrived on the scene, "it was the new poetry mag in our town, an alternative to TISH, which had a very heavy 'this is the right writing' stance" (Bissett 9).

15. See introduction (8-9) for Bowering's comments on poetry that did not fit the Tish ethos.

16. Of course, Davey's oppositional views reflect an attitude common to North American little magazines. Louis Dudek has noted, in a rather more worldly fashion (one that looks more explicitly at formative elements like class, capital, and mass society) than Davey's, how the little magazine has historically revolted against the effects of "advertising" and the homogenizing effects of "mass entertainment mediaf' (see The Making of Modem Poetry in Canada 206).

17. This attitude also seems to undermine the contained sense of self, a twist on Wordsworth's "emotion recollected in tranquillity"- a statement suggesting containment and control. Reid by contrast recollects in humiliation, leaving the sense of self as exposed, observed and controlled by the public like Sartre's ''man at the keyhole," frozen by the power of the Other. In this sense the whole idea of shame and embarrassment throws the self on the mercy of the otherdust the opposite of the poetic practice and the other aspect of the prose (its idealized ego image) which emphasizes individual control.

18. Except. of course, for the one important gesture of prosaic (and therefore more Natural. in the group's view) style.

19. Developing the idea of "literariness," in "Linguistics and Poetics," Jakobson's "poetic function" will "focus on the message for its own sake" (published in David Lodges' Modem Criticism and Theory 37). In prose, for Jakobson, emphasis on the signifier (the "poetic function") is repressed in favour of the signified. But for Davey, in these prose statements, no such hierarchy holds.

20. In order to mark where I have broken the lines to ft the quotation on the page, I have added double stress marks.

21. In Evidence, No.9, Winter 1965, Davey writes movingly of "the rhythm of the seasons," 'Vde," "life-cycle," "the breath," and "the heart-beat." ("Rime1' 171). This statement captures the productive fluidity of Nature, and even embraces the abject ("menstrual period"). One could underscore either fluidity as counter- cultural energy (ambiguous) or as a regulated origin, an a priori unity which opposes the mechanical rhythms of culture. See next chapter.

22. For now, I am interested only in pointing out the revolutionary element of Tish's vision. But Davey's stance here is contradictory. On the one hand he rejects any sort of projection of subjectivity ("Sprawl"), and on the other he recognizes the formative consequences of intertext, community, intersubjectivity. It seems as though he can only, or mainly, accept intersubjectivity when it is projected onto a utopian community that is eternal, cosmic, natural (101). "Sprawl," a very allusive ten, for Davey seems to refer to the isolated, monadic. born-of-fragmentation part of modem life. Hence he calls that "unnatural" (1 01). The problem is that he seems to generalize all-except the utopian-forms of subjectivity as, to put it mildly, "lyrical interference." One can sympathize with his critique, but not his all too pure return to a primordial (imaginary) world.

23. To recapture this materiality, perhaps, the collected Tish adds bold typeface to some upper case sentences from the original magazine. All underlined sentences are substituted with bold typeface. 24. These graphematic blasts spill all over Tish, wherever there are titles, for prose or poetry, since headings are presented, mostly, in upper case, sometimes underlined. Also contributing to this ragged effect, some of Lionel Keams' poetry exhibits his markings for his "stacked verse" method.

25. On the other hand, Keams himself, in the same letter, takes the word as a stable entity grounded in meaning. Poetry is divided into two components: communication and music: "The poem's linguistic function can be called communication, but its musical function is evocation" (Tish 11 223). But in keeping with Tish's more radical edge, Keams does not privilege communication. He adds that "this musical-evocative characteristic is most important, because it is the distinguishing feature of poetry" (223).

26. Moreover, arguably Davey's editorial really fleshes out the idealism implicit in Black Mountain discourse, even Levertov's discoune. For despite her homage to form, Levertov's own letter grounds the poem in authentic experience and communication:

I say: No possibility of viable form without genuine experience. But: No possibility of communicating experience (i-e. testimony) without crafted form. (223)

27. The many references to body in Tish prose are perhaps guided by Charles Olson's concept of "Proprioception." Throughout Olson's series of definitions of the term ("Proprioception" 1814) he seems to be caught in the same space as his heirs, resorting to a reductive spiritual-material theory of the body ("The 'soul' then is equally physical"): surface (senses) projection cavity (organs-here read "archetypes") unconscious the body itself- consciousness: implicit accuracy, from its own energy as a state of implicit motion- (184) It is not easy to separate his desire for an innocent body from his deconstruction of the subjectlobject, mindbody opposition ("anything, to get the body in" 182).

28. Neutralizing technological metaphors run from Pound's "Antennae", to Olson's typewriter, to Spicer's "camera," and his sense of the poet as a kind of dictaphone, onward to Tish's contributions. 29. Bowering writes that "most of the adverse criticism has come from young romantics who feel that TlSH has been unemotional and academic, the two terms somehow thought of as interchangeable. Academic it has not been, except occasionally" (423). No comment is made about the charge that Tish has been unemotional because for Bowering this is hardly a negative feature!

30. Olson's statement comes from "Projective Verse'' (156). See chapter one for a fuller discussion of Pound's, and to lesser degree William Carlos Williams', desire for transparency between perception, word, and thing.

31. See the previous chapter for more examples of this gesture, as well as a different take on it-

32. 1 take this suggestive phrase from the title of Olson's essay "Equal, That Is. to the Real Itself" (175). Actually Olson most fully articulates the conflation of human perception with the organic in an "essay" in the same volume, "Proprioception" (see note 3).

33. Jameson, in "'Ulysses' in History," goes on to give an excellent overview of such social reification: Such fragmentation can be seen on any number of levels: on that of the labour process first of all, where the older unities of handicraft production are broken up and 'taylorised' into the meaningless yet efficient segments of mass industrial production; on that of the psyche or psychological subject, now broken up into a host of radically different mental functions, some of which4hose of measurement and rational calculation-are privileged and othen- -the perceptual senses and aesthetic generally-are marginalised. (1 30) It is important to see Tish recovering the "perceptual senses" and the "aesthetic generally'' from their marginalisation in modem culture.

34. See "The Nature of Pronouns" in Problems in General Linguistics (Benveniste 217-222).

35. The epithetic "brown coated" is also typical of Tish practice, reducing women to some slight, physical (non-subjective) characteristic. As in this poem, the speaker's own body rarely appears except in abstracted terms. 36. 1 do not mean "equal to" in Olson's sense of the phrase. where self is one object among others. Rather Davey's persona appears as "equal to" an entire field.

37.1 have arranged the words according to the text in the original Tish 2, which is less regular than the reprint in Tish: No. 149.

38. In After the Great Divide Modernism, Mass Culfum, Postmodemism, Andreas Huyssen finds in modernism from Flaubert to Adomo a rigid, masculinist, ego boundary posed against a feminine other-a feminine other who stands in for an inferior mass culture, threatening to overthrow an "heroic" male autonomy (53-5).

39. See the concluding chapter for a fuller discussion of Davey's development of the lyric.

40. Barthes' term in Camera Lucida (26).

41. James Hillman's view of "locus" shares much with the 77sh view. Unlike Jameson, he argues that people do carry inner maps of the city, but that such maps are rationalized, abstractions. This leads to a loss of concrete relation to the world. In a statement with which the Tish writers would surely agree, Hillman writes that The loss of regional embeddedness makes us forget that cities rise from the earth, from land with local produce. Map thinking favors long-haul trucking, neglecting what belongs right here at hand. (176) 42. According to Hillman, the fantasy of the modem secular ego as selfmoved mover involves shifting attention away from the social infrastructure (i.e., communal taxes, attending to "street lighting, street signs, and street repair"); this fantasy cannot conceive of transportation as "a service required by the community, much like justice and education, fire protection and public safety." For Hillman, transportation is too often "imagined ..-from a private viewpoint" (177).

43. Crane is himself embraced by many poets in the Pound/Black Mountain tradition, and, of course, he is included in Allen and Tallman's The Poetics of the New Americen Poefry.

44. 'Yorcesl'-in the same way that artificial poetic devices, for Tish, push aside or bar authentic perception, actual connection to objects of nature. 45. Davey is often particularly attentive to different qualities of separation. For example, in "HAPPY ARE THE LONESOME PINES (Tish 12 245), he traces at least three kinds of distance: natural, social fusion, and social alienation: Viewed thru the rain from the musty flap of the tent the pine trees I remember all equally drenched looking distant and together

Today you and I tho at first saddened by the loss of the gregarious sun now kneel at a spotted window and feel no need to shout to the slowly walking couples that pass huddled under single umbrellas, nor lack of reasons to turn away into a solitude of eyes Most ideally, as the title indicates. distances in nature are not signs of alienation. Natural objects are separate but connected, illustrating Charles Olson's idealized vision wherein people are contained objects, biological entities, objects facing other objects, so that one can discover the "secrets objects share" (as he puts it in "Projective Verse" 25). Hence Davey speaks of the pines' "equality,"and "looking distanvand together." In the next section of the poem, the couple ("you and I")peer out of a partitioned (in terms of insideloutside) space, the "spotted window," as opposed to the more continuous opening "of the tent*" The couples, "huddledlunder single umbrellas," suggest physical and psychological closeness, a sort of fusion. But this fusion is thrown into question by the ambiguous relationship between the "you and I" of the poem and their potentially experiencing each other as "a solitudelof eyes." In other words, physical nearness has nothing to do with psychic closeness. Rereading the poem, given how it closes, the umbrella couples may look more like disconnected atoms, disconnected from each other (other umbrellas, and even within the umbrellas), and disconnected from the eyes behind the "spotted windows.''

46. This is how Paul Morrison charaderises Pound's critique. See chapter one.

47. See chapter one. For Pound and Olson such desire starts with the Greeks, with the disconnection of the word from the body and the thing. I invoke Lacan, whose notion of desire (like a whole generation of thinkers) comes from Kojeve, because for him the negativity of desire is eternal, boundless. Any attempt to not desire is just another manifestation of desire "not to want to desire and to desire are the same thing" (The Four Fundamentals 235). In opposition to the postmodem notions of constant desire, many Black Mountain thinkers, in their experiments with eastern religions, explorations of pre-socratic and Mayan culture, tried to stop such play, which they associated with domination.

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