The editorials included in the first run of Tish magazine (1961-63) show editors George Bowering, Frank Davey, and Fred Wah at their most optimistic about the role of poetry, the possibility of community, and the project of recovering a non-appropriative relationship to the world. Key to Tish's nascent aesthetic was the notion of "embodied" poetics, of denying the mind/body divide instituted by the ancients, a stance that owes much to the influence of Black Mountain poets such as Charles Olson. Moreover, the Tish editors' poetry aims to track, map, and relate intimately to place, or what Olson calls "locus." Yet, oddly, Tish poetry seems less optimistic than its prose. This is because, unlike the Black Mountain poets, the Tish poets found that the self is an effect of social organization not escaped by fiat, and that their particular urban social world demanded an atomized anti-communal self, in keeping with J.P. Sartre's concept of seriality.
