Jamie Reid is a Canadian poet made notable for his contributions for expanding Canada's statues within the literary world with his work with the poetry publication TISH magazine along with the likes of Fred Wah, George Bowering, and Warren Tallen. In 1969, he published his first collection of poems, The Man Whose Path Was on Fire and soon after left the world of poetry to pursue work within politics. Returning to the poerty scene some 20 years later with Prez: Homage to Lester Young (publish 1994) a poetic biography of the musician, Lester Willis Young. Since then he has been continuing his work with poetry and publication with his journal and poetry press, DaDaBaBy.

The following is an interview that I conducted with him in the month of January of this year. What I intended to gain from the interview was a few snippets and some fodder for my Poetry Column that I had with the paper I was working for (the bulk of my question pertain to poet collectives and "Canadian" Poetry). What I got was so much more. Rather than process it and give you a long winded essay of my own, I give you Jamie Reid within his own words.

Disclaimer: in this interview, Reid quotes the poem “America” by John Newlove, which has been in no way altered by myself or Mr. Reid. The words you see below are the un edited words of Mr. Reid with the previously stated exception. All my words are in bold. Thank you.


1. As a co-founder of the magazine, TISH, where you aiming to create a "group" or actual collective out of that magazine? Are you aiming for something similar with your DaDaBaBy press? What is one of the greater differences between the two projects?

I don’t think we TISH poets ever thought of ourselves as a "collective" in the way the term is used today, but maybe in fact we were a collective, and maybe one of the first to appear in Canada of a kind of literary association which later became much more common, the "literary collective."

The first time I ever heard anything about the possibility of a magazine that we might ourselves create was when Fred Wah raised the idea with Warren Tallman at one of the meetings of the group of young writers that met at the home of English professors Warren and Ellen Tallman. In those days, we met under Warren’s mentorship with the general aim of developing our own knowledge as writers and poets by discussing the work of various modernist writers, from Ezra Pound to Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan and the poets of the so-called Beat Generation. Warren Tallman, as I remember, openly opposed the idea of the magazine, saying that we didn’t know enough to start a magazine on our own. Whether this was an attempt on the part of Warren to stir us up to the rebellion of launching the magazine, I’ll never know. In any case, Robert Duncan, visiting from San Francisco to give a series of lectures on modernist poetics to us young poets, offered us enthusiastic encouragement to start the magazine and gave us some decisively important tips about about how to begin. He pointed to The Floating Bear, LeRoi Jones’ mimeo magazine from New York, as a model that we might follow. We wrote to The Floating Bear and were provided with their mailing list, which along with other names added by members of the group, became our first readership.
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The original members of the TISH editorial board, along with others who attended the weekly discussions, were in fact a loose social group before we jointly decided to produce the magazine. The actual production of the magazine transformed us into an actual literary group, not only in our own minds, but also in public reception. There were other literary groups in Canada before TISH was launched, but none of them, I think, bound so closely to a collectively adopted theory and method of verse production.

We certainly became more aware of our group identity once we had actually launched the magazine itself, and we all defended a certain sense of group solidarity, which continues to function even today, long after TISH has been formally abandoned. Each editor was responsible for making some kind of editorial contribution, in the form of a theoretical article, and all of us participated collectively in the discussion of the content of the magazine, accepting or rejecting submissions both from our own group and from others outside the group. All of us participated in the physical production of the magazine itself, from the typing to the printing, stapling and distribution.

DaDaBaBy emerged out of a very different set of historical and personal circumstances. My main conscious aim in bringing out the earliest issues was to publicise some of the poets in Vancouver mainly to Vancouverites. Another obvious aim was to re-establish my own presence in Vancouver after a long absence from the city. DaDaBaBy the magazine is now defunct, though it can be revived at whim. I use the DaDaBaBy imprimatur these days in order to publish work by myself and other writers when other publishers are unavailable.

2. What was your experience with group projects and collectives before TISH was started?

I had no experience with group projects and collectives other than participation in team sports and clubs while I was in school. I think probably the other members of the TISH group would say the same.

3. You mention that you, as well as others, would routinely meet under Warren Tallen's "mentorship" to discusses poetry, writing and the so forth: what brought about this idea of literary meetings for discussion? Do you see this as vital for fledgling poets to take up? More to that point, do you feel that a mentor or "lead" is needed?

Warren himself was one of the sources of the idea for the discussion group, although Pauline Butling, Fred Wah's partner, suggests that he developed the idea out of desires expressed by George Bowering and Lionel Kearns and maybe some others. The idea was well supported in any case: the weekly sessions were attended by up to two dozen people, sometimes more, filling the Tallmans' living room. Many of the participants other than the actual five editors of TISH itself, were also later active in Canadian literary and artistic life…I’ll mention Sam Perry, a budding film maker who was the main organizer of the first Vancouver Trips Festival in 1966, and Carol Bolt (nee Johnson), who was later a founding member of the Canadian Playwrights’ Co-Op, and an early participant in the theatre movement of the 1970s and 1980s in Toronto. Daphne Buckle (Marlatt) was a regular attendee and so was Maria (Gladys) Hindmarch. Poet Gerry Gilbert sometimes came to the meetings, and so did Judith Copithorne and Maxine Gadd. Several other UBC professors also attended. I remember Elliott Gose, Peter Quartermain, Phil Pincus, and Frank Newby. Dan McLeod, a later editor of TISH and still later the publisher of the Georgia Straight was brought in by George Bowering because he was in Bowering’s English class at UBC. So the group sessions initiated and led by Warren Tallman had a pervasive and long-lasting influence in Canadian cultural circles.

Because the events took place in an atmosphere of sociality and conviviality supported by beer, etc., we participated more voluntarily than we otherwise would, and learned a great deal more than we might have learned in any classroom sessions. Tallman’s role was not so much to give leadership as to provide an atmosphere in which we felt free to speak and talk with one another and express our own ideas. Nevertheless, he was also available to provide advice and encouragement, and so was Ellen Tallman, whose role cannot be overstated. It was through Ellen’s contacts at Berkeley that the young writers and poets were able to meet with the San Francisco poets, first Robert Duncan and then Jack Spicer, not to mention the groundbreaking poetry conference at UBC in 1963. Well, in sum, I’d say that leadership of this kind might not be “necessary”, but in our case, I think all the TISH poets will agree, it certainly helped. The discussion sessions became a real engine of literary creation throughout the country, and I’d say they are still exerting some influence. Speaking in a very general way, it seems to me that every important art movement of the modernist era, at least, has been supported by an atmosphere of collegiality and exchange of some kind, often formalized in groupings or in salons of one kind or another. The isolated “genius” is as rare in the arts as in any other discipline. And when it comes to forming social groups of any kind, somebody has to take the initiative, often a single individual. Warren and Ellen Tallman took that initiative on behalf of the young poets of Vancouver during those times. I have to say that in the absence of that generative initiative, and the community that it created, which still exists, although altered by time and history, my life would not be what it is today.

4. With your conscious aim to create DaDaBaBy for Vancouver based writers what is your view on current Vancouver writing trends? Is there a difference from when you started the publishing company?

Well, it wasn’t all that conscious. DaDaBaBy was never a publishing company in the generally accepted sense of the term. I was inspired by the possibility of self-publishing made possible by the advent of the personal computer. A publishing enterprise, yes, but not a company. DaDaBaBy continues to exist because I sometimes use its name to apply for ISBN numbers, so its real existence is now mainly bureaucratic, I suppose. It was first created as a means to bring me into productive contact with other writers and maybe also to provide links between writers of different schools and approaches, but none of this was programmatically outlined as a matter of fixed policy or anything like that. The enterprise was much more catch-as-catch can than any programmatic effort might have been. I more or less followed my whims. When it came time to produce a new DaDaBaBy, I looked around for something that caught my attention, with the expectation that what caught my attention might catch the attention of somebody else.

I have no fully worked out view of writing trends in Vancouver. I’m impressed though by the volume of activity that goes on, much bigger than in our own days and much more various. I tend to prefer the avant garde in language practice and the socially challenging in subject matter. I think there’s room for both page poetry as it’s called, and for performance poetry. Both are needed for a lively cultural atmosphere. I sometimes wish the poets of Vancouver were more interventionist, and that they played a wider social and political role.

5. Do you feel as though there is (still) admiration from younger Vancouver poets/artists towards what you and your colleagues produced during the TISH period?

I honestly can’t say. I’ve never discussed it with them. My own feeling is that they don’t totally despise it, because we are still welcome at the gatherings and readings that they organize, and I expect they are grateful for the support that we provide by showing up. That being said, it seems to me that in the conditions of modernist and postmodernist literary production, the aim of each generation is to differentiate itself from the one that went before. So the poets of the two generations since TISH are bound to be negatively critical in some sense of what TISH was, because that’s their job as artists, to go beyond what went before.

Some of us poets used to meet weekly to drink at a downtown bar. The crowd included poets of our generation, mostly from the old TISH crowd, but also from the so-called "downtown poets" of the 60s. There were also poets from the younger generation. The "dads" and the "tads." The dads have now become granddads and grandmoms and the tads themselves have become dads. We produced five or six issues of a magazine called "Tads," each by different editors drawn from both generations. I think that the dads felt honoured to be included, and our inclusion seems admiration enough to me. I have the honour of reading at Capilano College because of the invitation of two of the former tads, Roger Farr and Reg Johanson. Perhaps that speaks for itself in answer to your question.

6. On your point of TISH attempting to connect to Canadian poets as well as American poets, have you ever seen a great deal of difference between the two countries in the way of poetics? I'm aware of the many influences the American poets have had on the Vancouver community but have you ever known or seen a difference between the two in style or subject matter?

This is a very complicated question that in my view requires an entire book to answer. I’ll start with the simple premise that the lives and therefore the culture and attitudes of most Canadians are not terribly different from those of most Americans, no more different, for example, than the difference between say Virginians and Californians or New Yorkers. I myself have always been a fan of American jazz, which was very influential in the formation of my youthful emotional outlook. We as Canadians almost all watch American movies and television, and eat at Mcdonald's, so our experience isn’t that much different from that of Americans, except that the better off Americans are better off than we are, just as the poorest Americans are probably much more poverty-stricken than the poorest Canadians. The United States is a richly various country, containing many different modes of life -- the Latino-American experience is different from the experience of white Americans and so is the experience of the Afro-Americans, so there is not just one mode of poetry in the United States, but many, and we as Canadians, because we have access to the American mass media, are influenced to some extent by all of them, myself included, as the different trends within the United States are mutually influenced by each other. Americans and Canadians generally understand each other very well, because we speak a common language, and language, of course, is the bedrock of poetry.

The U.S Americans have the advantage of a deeper and more profound historical experience, having undergone a powerful social revolution and the wrenching experience of the Civil War required to consolidate their nation. Canadians have inherited the benefits of the American Revolution almost by default, as it were, as the U.S. Americans themselves inherited and built a new country untrammelled by the remnants of the old feudal, aristocratic and monarchical societies of Europe. Today, we live as an adjunct to the nation whose democratic foundations have made it the most productive and politically powerful nation that has ever existed on earth, even if that power today is used for selfish and chauvinist purposes of imperial domination, nefarious and destructive to the well-being and the future of the rest of humankind.. I don’t believe, for example, that Canada has a single poet that can compare in scope and power, not to speak of popular appeal, to Walt Whitman.

Speaking about more recent times I don’t believe that Canada has produced a poet comparable to William Carlos Williams or T. S. Eliot, either. This does not mean that the contributions of poets like say Leonard Cohen or bill bissett do not have their own special character. But I don’t believe in the existence of a Canadian tradition in poetry, per se. The first poetry in Canada was a colonial poetry built on models of English literature. More recently, with the rise of the influence and power of American within Canada and the world, we have been bound to be influenced by cultural and poetic trends within the United States, and the effort to avoid or purge this influence would be ridiculously parochial and self-defeating, and there is already far too much parochialism in Canada, a kind of blindness to life and culture in rest of the world, and we Canadians are also infused with some of that parochialism from the United States as well, where so much of the discourse is so profoundly and ridiculously centred on the United States alone.

Poetry at its heart is a language of dissent, and most of the greatest American poets are dissenters in one way or another. Walt Whitman was a dissenter to the entire anti-democratic traditions of Western European poetry, and William Carlos Williams was a dissenter within the United States. itself, as are almost all of the poets that we as poets in Canada, read and are heavily influenced by today. I wouldn’t think that there is a single credible poet in the United States today who would feel comfortable in vaunting the purported virtues of American democracy today as Walt Whitman did in the historical context of the Civil War. The same is true of most Canadian poets. William Carlos Williams, who influenced all of us TISH poets very deeply, certainly was never a vaunter of American democracy, other than the intellectual ideal of democracy, within the historical context of the Great Depression and World War II through which he lived. One would be hard-pressed to find credible poets today who openly and unreservedly supported the American military adventure in Vietnam, or today’s military adventure in Iraq, for example. So in that sense, at the very least, American and Canadian poets, like the U.S. people and the people of Canada have a common cause in resisting the evils of American imperialist power, and this general resistance takes place at various levels of social understanding and consciousness in both countries.

The best poetic answer I have ever seen to this question is by the Canadian poet John Newlove, who, as a Canadian, writes as a citizen at least in some way implicated in what might be called the false consciousness of America.

AMERICA

Even the dissident ones speak
as members of an Empire, residents
of the centre of the earth. Power
extends from their words
to all the continents and their modesty
is liable for millions. How must it be
to be caught in the Empire, to have
everything you do matter? Even
treason is imperial; the scornful
self-abuse comes from inside the boundaries
of the possible. Outside the borders of royalty
the barbarians wait in fear,
finding it hard to know which prince
to believe; trade-goods comfort them,
gadgets of little worth, cars, television,
refrigerators, for which they give iron,
copper, uranium, gold, trees, and water,
worth of all sorts for the things
citizens of Empire take as their due.

In the Empire power speaks from the poorest
and culture flourishes. Outside the boundaries
the barbarians imitate styles and send their sons,
the talented hirelings, to learn and to stay;
the sons of their sons will be princes too,
in the Estate where even the unhappy
carry an aura of worldly power; and the lords
of power send out directives
for the rest of the world to obey. If they live
in the Empire, it matters what they say.