Ellen Tallman; UBC English professor helped found the West Coast poetry movement (GREAT)
Hyfler/Rosner
UBC English professor helped found the West Coast poetry
movement
With husband and fellow academic Warren Tallman, she
welcomed streams of writers into their home and organized
the legendary 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference. She later
became a psychotherapist
NOREEN SHANAHAN
Special to The Globe and Mail
October 8, 2008
The West Coast poetry movement in Canada owes its life to
Ellen Tallman. Along with her then- husband, Warren Tallman,
she was a professor of literature at the University of
British Columbia who 40 years ago helped to create an
unparalleled literary scene that still thrives to this day.
The movement flourished thanks to her early years in
California and the connections she had made with such
American poets as Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Robert
Weaver, Denise Levertov and Gary Snyder. Years later, she
influenced the writings of Canadians bill bisset, Daphne
Marlatt, bpNichol and George Bowering.
"She was really the key figure in the flowering of new
poetry in Vancouver at that time," said Ms. Marlatt. "She
had the curiosity of an artist, the sensibility of an
artist, but really her gift was working with people. She had
an extraordinarily generous spirit."
Ellen Tallman grew up in California's San Francisco Bay
area, where it was music rather than English that pervaded
her early life. While her father was an engineer at Standard
Oil, her mother had been a supervisor of music in the public
school system.
After high school, Ms. Tallman enrolled at nearby Mills
College for Women to study music. By 1945, she had put away
her flute to attend regular anarchist meetings in San
Francisco. Although ostensibly about politics, the meetings
shifted into literature, likely because the audience was
often attended by such writers as Jack Spicer, Kenneth
Roxroth, Robin Blaser and Henry Miller, who attended a
similar group down the coast in Big Sur.
Thus inspired, Ms. Tallman dropped music and switched to
English literature at the University of California,
Berkeley. She graduated in 1949 and headed north to the
University of Washington to attend graduate school. While
there she met Warren Tallman, a graduate student who had
also gone to Berkeley. It was a convergence of ideas about
literature, and they fell in love. They married two years
later and soon had two children, Ken and Karen, all the
while staying in touch with the literary scene in San
Francisco.
In 1956, the family packed up and moved to Vancouver. The
Tallmans both took jobs in the English department at UBC,
joining a strong contingent of American professors escaping
the throes of McCarthyism. Also joining them in the
department was Canadian poet Earle Birney.
At the time, Beat poetry was well established in the United
States. Poets often converged on subversive and bohemian San
Francisco, joining up with another strand of avant-garde
poets known as the Black Mountain school who were known to
attack the domination in verse of syntax, rhyme and metre.
At Ms. Tallman's invitation, many of them soon made their
way to the UBC campus, and to the Tallmans' front door.
It wasn't long before dozens of neophyte poets were flocking
there to hear poets teach and recite, late into the night.
"It seemed there was nearly always a poet staying with us,
giving readings, and teaching: Creely, Spicer, Ginsberg ..."
she wrote in a recent essay about poet Robert Duncan.
In particular, she liked to tell the story of a visit by
Charles Olson, an established American modernist who was
older than the usual crowd. He was given a bedroom next to
that of another guest, the up-and-coming Mr. Ginsberg. Mr.
Olson, who talked in his sleep, awoke one night to discover
Mr. Ginsberg crouched on the floor with a notebook in hand.
"It's not enough that you steal all the attention," he
shouted. "Now you want to steal my dreams!"
The event likely occurred during the 1963 Vancouver Poetry
Conference, which the Tallmans organized and which is now
considered a defining moment in the history of North
American poetry. The conference was attended by the likes of
Mr. Olson and Mr. Ginsberg and Ms. Levertov. Margaret Avison
(obituary Aug. 14, 2007) was the only Canadian poet. "It was
extraordinary to have these people, giants, really, in their
medium, talking, discussing, and arguing with each other and
giving magical readings," Ms. Marlatt said.
In the late sixties, Ms. Tallman was one of the first
instructors to teach an innovative program called "Arts
One." Still offered at the university, it's an integrative
approach to the humanities that allows first-year arts
students to combine philosophy, history and English. As she
had done in other areas of her life, she invited writers
into the classroom so that fresh, lively poetry intermingled
with older, conventional verse. Her approach, as well as her
openness to students, is remembered several decades later.
"I told her that she looked like a fallen angel, not one who
had fallen all the way to hell, but only halfway to hell, to
the Earth itself," said Vancouver poet Jamie Reid who, while
never in one of her classrooms, knew what it meant to be one
of her students. "She sat rooted with an awareness and
composure that no one else possessed, which could not be
spoken but only guessed."
When Ms. Tallman sat, he said, she sat solidly. And when she
stood, it was her nearly six-foot frame that everyone
noticed. "She anchors whatever place she is in, and
everybody there feels anchored even though they may not
notice it. Then, too, as in all things anchored, there is
something that floats, so one feels free, but securely so,
like the flower on the end of a stem."
While she found success in her UBC classroom, she was less
happy at home. By the early seventies, her marriage was
over, although the Tallmans would remain friends.
By that time, Ms. Tallman was also teaching and conducting
workshops in the women's studies department. At one workshop
she encountered Sarah Kennedy, a like-minded woman who was
deeply involved in the human-potential and therapy
movements, and in the Vancouver poetry scene, and they fell
in love.
They decided to live together openly, which was daring at
the time. "When she left Warren and came out as a lesbian,
that was a very courageous thing to do at that time," Ms.
Marlatt said. "A lot of people were shocked and didn't
understand why. It was almost as a sort of betrayal of the
role they wanted her to continue taking in the [literary]
community. For me, she was a wonderful feminist and lesbian
role model."
It was around then that Ms. Tallman began to consider a new
career. She had already been studying under dream analyst
Rolf Loehrich when Richard Weaver, the founder of B.C.'s
Cold Mountain Institute, suggested she work with him and
become a psychotherapist.
Mentored by Dr. Weaver, she led therapy groups and workshops
at Cold Mountain on Cortes Island near Campbell River. The
workshops at Cold Mountain included encounter groups and
body-mind-spirit groups. She also trained in hypnotherapy
and dream work.
In the late seventies, Ms. Tallman settled for good in
Vancouver and opened a private practice, which she ran for
30 years. Poetry, however, remained an important element in
her life and she liked to invite poets to therapy workshops.
One of them was Mr. Blaser, a poet she had known at Berkeley
and then encouraged to immigrate to Canada.
"We were the wickeds!" he said, referring to their student
days together. In 1966, she got in touch with him to suggest
he move to Vancouver. "She said there's a nice new
university opening called Simon Fraser, and that I should
get a job there."
Some years later, they decided to share a house in
Vancouver's Kitsilano area. Ms. Tallman and Ms. Kennedy
occupied one part of the house, and Mr. Blaser and his
partner David Farwell occupied the other part.
While the arrangement lasted for 30 years, Mr. Blaser still
liked to reminisce about the literary evenings in the
Tallman living room back in the sixties.
"There was a lot of drinking going on," said Mr. Blaser, who
is professor emeritus at SFU, and this year's winner of the
Griffin Prize for poetry. "But there was also, always, great
poetry."
ELLEN TALLMAN
Ellen Murray Tallman was born Nov. 9, 1927, in Berkeley,
Calif. She died July 19, 2008, in Vancouver from
post-surgery complications. She was 80. She is survived by
partner Sarah Kennedy, daughter Karen Tallman and son Ken
Tallman. She also leaves her sister, Isabella Davidson,
three grandchildren and housemates Robin Blaser and David
Farwell. Warren Tallman died in 1994.
A memorial will be held Saturday at 2:20 p.m. at 1495 West
8th Ave., Vancouver.
Thurs. Oct. 9, 2008
CORRECTION
Wendy Barrett was Ellen Tallman's partner from 1971 to 1980.
Incorrect information appeared yesterday in an obituary.
Hyfler/Rosner
"Hyfler/Rosner" <rel...@rcn.com> wrote in message
news:gcl99v$jnr$1...@reader1.panix.com...
> ELLEN TALLMAN, 80: ACADEMIC AND THERAPIST
>
>> In particular, she liked to tell the story of a visit by
> Charles Olson, an established American modernist who was
> older than the usual crowd. He was given a bedroom next to
> that of another guest, the up-and-coming Mr. Ginsberg. Mr.
> Olson, who talked in his sleep, awoke one night to
> discover Mr. Ginsberg crouched on the floor with a
> notebook in hand. "It's not enough that you steal all the
> attention," he shouted. "Now you want to steal my dreams!"
>
Great story.