Warren Tallman (17 November 1921 – 1 July 1994) was an American-born

poetry Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings i ...

professor who influenced the

Vancouver Vancouver ( ) is a major city in western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the ...

Tish ''TISH'' was a Canadian poetry newsletter founded by student-poets at the University of British Columbia in 1961. The publication was edited by a number of Vancouver poets until 1969. The newsletter's poetics were built on those of writers associa ...

poets.

History

Born in

Seattle Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...

, Tallman was raised in

Tumwater, Washington Tumwater is a town in Thurston County, Washington, United States. The population was 25,350 at the 2020 census. It is situated near where the Deschutes River enters Budd Inlet, the southernmost point of Puget Sound; it also borders the state c ...

. He attended the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

on the

G.I. Bill The Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly known as the G.I. Bill, was a law that provided a range of benefits for some of the returning World War II veterans (commonly referred to as G.I.s). The original G.I. Bill expired in 1956, bu ...

, writing dissertations on

Henry James Henry James ( – ) was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the ...

and Joseph Conrad. There he met Ellen King; they married in 1951. In 1956, Tallman and his wife accepted teaching jobs in the

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

department at the

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public research university with campuses near Vancouver and in Kelowna, British Columbia. Established in 1908, it is British Columbia's oldest university. The university ranks among the top thre ...

, helped

Earle Birney Earle Alfred Birney (13 May 1904 – 3 September 1995) was a Canadian poet and novelist, who twice won the Governor General's Award, Canada's top literary honour, for his poetry. Life Born in Calgary, Alberta, and raised on a farm in Eri ...

and Roy Daniells to organize the creative writing department. In 1963, they hosted a poetry conference attended by

Denise Levertov Priscilla Denise Levertov (24 October 1923 – 20 December 1997) was a British-born naturalised American poet. She was a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. Early life and influences Levertov was born and grew up in Ilford, Ess ...

Charles Olson Charles Olson (27 December 1910 – 10 January 1970) was a second generation modern American 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 ...

Allen Ginsberg Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Gener ...

, Robert Duncan,

Margaret Avison Margaret Avison, (April 23, 1918 – July 31, 2007) was a Canadian poet who twice won Canada's Governor General's Award and has also won its Griffin Poetry Prize.Michael Gnarowski,Avison, Margaret" ''Canadian Encyclopedia'' (Edmonton: Hurtig ...

Robert Creeley Robert White Creeley (May 21, 1926 – March 30, 2005) was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school. He was close with Char ...

, and

Philip Whalen Philip Glenn Whalen (October 20, 1923 – June 26, 2002) was an American poet, Zen Buddhist, and a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and close to the Beat generation. Biography Born in Portland, Oregon, Whalen grew up in The Dalles fr ...

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

Jack Spicer Jack Spicer (January 30, 1925 – August 17, 1965) 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. ...

gave some of his now legendary lectures.See

Peter Gizzi Peter Gizzi (born 1959 in Alma, Michigan) is an American poet, essayist, editor and teacher. He attended New York University, Brown University and the State University of New York at Buffalo. Life Gizzi was born in Alma, Michigan to an Italia ...

Two years later, they held another poetry conference in

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland and E ...

. Tallman was sometimes criticized for turning the

poetry circle into a California

branch plant It is not entirely evident who first used the branch plant economy concept; however, it has been extensively used in Canadian and UK literature since the 1970s. This concept broadly describes the negative consequences on the growth of the regions ...

. Tallman embraced the Black Mountain school approach to poetry, but also showed the influence of the Beats, the New American Poets and the

Language Poets The Language poets (or ''L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E'' poets, after the magazine of that name) are an avant-garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The poets included: Bernadette Mayer, Leslie Scal ...

. Among the Canadian poets he is said to have influenced are bill bissett,

Stan Persky Stan Persky (born 19 January 1941) 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 Ginsb ...

and Howard White.

Selected bibliography

* ''The Poetics of the New American Poetry'' New York: Grove, 1973. (edited with

Donald Allen Donald Merriam Allen (Iowa, 1912 – San Francisco, August 29, 2004) was an American editor, publisher and translator of American literature. He is best known for his project '' The New American Poetry 1945-1960'' (1960), one of the anthologi ...

) * ''Godawful Streets of Man'' Toronto: Coach House, 1978. * ''In the Midst'' Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1992.

Notes

References

Author Bank: Warren Tallman
at BC BookWorld

External links

Records of Warren Tallman are held by Simon Fraser University's Special Collections and Rare Books
{{DEFAULTSORT:Tallman, Warren 1921 births 1994 deaths Canadian literary critics Educators from Seattle University of British Columbia faculty People from Tumwater, Washington American emigrants to Canada University of California, Berkeley alumni