Warren Tallman was an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

-born poetry

Poetry

Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...

 professor who inspired the Canadian Tish

Tish

Tish may refer to:* Tish , a Hasidic gathering of Hassidim around their Rebbe* Tish Jones, a recurring fictional character in the television series Doctor Who...

 movement and influenced the mid-20th century poetry scene in Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

.

History

Born in Seattle

Seattle, Washington

Seattle is the county seat of King County, Washington. With 608,660 residents as of the 2010 Census, Seattle is the largest city in the Northwestern United States. The Seattle metropolitan area of about 3.4 million inhabitants is the 15th largest metropolitan area in the country...

, Tallman was raised in Tumwater, Washington

Tumwater, Washington

Tumwater is a city in Thurston County, Washington, United States. It lies near where the Deschutes River enters Budd Inlet, the southernmost point of Puget Sound. The population was 17,371 at the 2010 census...

. He attended the University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

 on the G.I. Bill, writing dissertations on Henry James

Henry James

Henry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....

 and Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad was a Polish-born English novelist.Conrad is regarded as one of the great novelists in English, although he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties...

. There he met Ellen King; they married in 1951.

In 1956, Tallman and his wife accepted teaching jobs in the English

English studies

English studies is an academic discipline that includes the study of literatures written in the English language , English linguistics English studies is an academic discipline that includes the study of literatures written in the English language (including literatures from the U.K., U.S.,...

 department at the University of British Columbia

University of British Columbia

The University of British Columbia is a public research university. UBC’s two main campuses are situated in Vancouver and in Kelowna in the Okanagan Valley...

, helped Earle Birney

Earle Birney

Earle Alfred Birney, OC, FRSC was a distinguished Canadian poet and novelist, who twice won the Governor General's Award, Canada's top literary honor, for his poetry.-Life:...

 and Roy Daniells

Roy Daniells

Roy Daniells, was a Canadian poetry professor. He helped build the University of British Columbia's creative writing department and fostered the careers of several major Canadian writers.-Education and career:...

 to organize the creative writing department. In 1963, they hosted a poetry conference attended by Denise Levertov

Denise Levertov

-Early life and influences:Levertov was born and grew up in Ilford, Essex.Couzyn, Jeni Contemporary Women Poets. Bloodaxe, p74 Her mother, Beatrice Spooner-Jones Levertoff, came from a small mining village in North Wales...

, Charles Olson

Charles Olson

Charles Olson , was a second generation American modernist poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance...

, Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...

, Robert Duncan

Robert Duncan (poet)

Robert Duncan was an American poet and a student of H.D. and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New American Poetry and Black...

, Margaret Avison

Margaret Avison

Margaret Avison, OC was a Canadian poet who twice won Canada's Governor General's Award and has also won its Griffin Poetry Prize. "Her work has often been praised for the beauty of its language and images."-Life:...

, and Philip Whalen

Philip Whalen

Philip Glenn Whalen was an American poet, Zen Buddhist, and a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and close to the Beat generation.-Biography:...

. The Tallman home itself also served as a poetry enclave of sorts. It was in the Tallman home that Jack Spicer

Jack Spicer

Jack Spicer was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. In 2009, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer won the American Book Award for poetry.-Life and work:...

 gave some of his now legendary lectures. Two years later, they held another poetry conference in Berkeley, California

Berkeley, California

Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...

.

Tallman was sometimes criticized for turning Vancouver

Vancouver

Vancouver is a coastal seaport city on the mainland of British Columbia, Canada. It is the hub of Greater Vancouver, which, with over 2.3 million residents, is the third most populous metropolitan area in the country,...

 poetry circle into a California branch plant. Tallman embraced the Black Mountain school

Black Mountain poets

The Black Mountain poets, sometimes called projectivist poets, were a group of mid 20th century American avant-garde or postmodern poets centered on Black Mountain College.-Background:...

 approach to poetry, but also showed the influence of the Beats

Beat generation

The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...

, the New American Poets and the Language Poets. Among the Canadian poets he is said to have influenced are bill bissett

Bill Bissett

bill bissett is a Canadian poet famous for his anti-conventional style. He often does not capitalise his name or use capital letters.-Life:...

, Stan Persky

Stan Persky

Stan Persky is a Canadian writer, media commentator and philosophy instructor.- Early life :Persky was born in Chicago, Illinois. As a teenager, he made contact with and received encouragement from Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and other writers of the Beat Generation...

 and Howard White.

Selected bibliography

• The Poetics of the New American Poetry New York: Grove, 1973. ISBN 0394178017 (edited with Donald Allen
  Donald Allen
  Donald Merriam Allen , influential editor, publisher, and translator of contemporary American literature. He is perhaps best known for his project The New American Poetry 1945-1960 , among the several important anthologies of contemporary American innovative writing he made available to the public...
  
  )
• Godawful Streets of Man Toronto: Coach House, 1978.
• In the Midst Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1992.

Sources

• Author Bank: Warren Tallman at BC BookWorld