David Phillips (1944-February 10, 2025)

Sad to hear through Vancouver artist Pierre Coupey that BC poet David Phillips, who turned eighty years old last August, died on February 10 in Sechelt, after a brief stay in hospital. Born in 1944, the same year as his pal Barry McKinnon [see my obituary for McKinnon here], his selected poems, The Kiss: Poems 1972-77 (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1979), “seen through the press by bpNichol” (most early photos of Toronto poet bpNichol were taken by Andy Phillips, David’s brother), was his only full-length collection, although it followed a flurry of chapbooks and pamphlets, including those published through Talonbooks and McKinnon’s Caledonia Writing Series. Phillips’ other titles include The Dream Outside (Coach House Press, 1967), Wave (Talon Books, 1970), The Coherence (Talon Books, 1971-1972), The Book of Snow Poems (54 40 Press, 1972) and Wild Roses (Preston John, 1976). With Hope Anderson, he edited the anthology The Body (Tatlow House, 1979). His poems appeared in The Capilano Review, Iron, Ant’s Fore Foot as well as the chapbooks, WAKE ME WHEN TH DANCING STARTS (Caledonia Writing Series, 1978) and Wild Roses (Preston John, 1977).

David Phillips and bpNichol : photo provided by Maggie Guzzi

On my overflowing shelves, Phillips’ Talonbooks titles are so early they were stapled, most likely done by the cast iron Talonbooks stapler that rests in our basement. “what is this / writing / written toward, attempting.” he wrote, to open the poem “fragments: the broken passage.” Further on, “hand on my wrist, soft voice / in my ear / guiding this to a completion / an ending / only you know/ the way of, / out of // there is no way / out of it // i could simply get up / & walk away [.]” He wrote poems that questioned the poems and the writing of poems, offering his own self-aware step after step through the process. Through my years of reading tours and scouring used bookstores, I most likely picked up my copy of The Kiss through Janet Inksetter’s Annex Books, back when she had her storefront on Toronto’s Bathurst Street, just south of Dupont. Her familiar handwriting, the pencil-mark of price and publisher notation, on that first page. For years, she was my best source for early Coach House titles, as well as lively conversation. I looked forward to our visits.

There is such an immediacy to Phillips’ poems; poems aware of themselves as poems and held to a high standard of placement, breath, even through such casual tempo. “teach me / what i know // i have / forgotten,” he writes, to open the poem “the teaching,” dedicated “for bp,” the first poem in his collection the coherence (1971), “forgiven myself / so many times // the trying / is harder // the forgiveness / less than [.]” Oh, his pacing, his pacing. I attempted a stretch of my thirties to echo his timbre, his tone, with only minimal success. There is something of Philips’ pacing that really struck, and one comparable to what David Bromige was working during the same era [see my review of his posthumous selected/collected poems here], such as his Birds of the West (Coach House, 1973), another title I know I picked up from Inksetter’s shelves. Across my early thirties, attempting poems, The Kiss became one of my touchstones, heightened through conversation with McKinnon and others on his work. Phillips’ piece “Poem For Barry McKinnon,” for example, responded to McKinnon’s infamous I Wanted to Say Something (1976), a prairie long poem that sent ripples across Canadian writing, despite its lack of wider availability. As it begins:

‘i wanted to say something’ the
right thing

then you would talk to me

beyond this self
seeking,       just then

i was trying to talk to you
& don’t have to
know why

i know it makes you
some one else
in this

Poet and editor Al Purdy included Phillips in the first of his infamous Storm Warning anthologies in 1971, eight years prior to the appearance of that Coach House selected. The anthology, one held as an assemblage of the next generation of Canadian poets, includes a photograph of Phillips as a young man in work gloves, winter coat and toque, sitting on a step smoking a cigarette, staring straight at the camera. Most of the author photographs included offer the contributors as serious young people, young poets, but Phillips’ adds that extra layer of no nonsense, and a sense of work that includes both literary art and physical labour, a consideration shared by a couple of the contributors—Ken Belford, Patrick Lane, Sid Marty, Andrew Suknaski, Tom Wayman—as well as the editor himself. Phillips’ bio writes: “Born 1944, Vancouver, B.C. Four years at U.B.C. Has lived in bush cabin in northern Ont., and worked in apple and cherry orchards. Now in North Van.” His short statement on poetics, included as part of the anthology, reads:

Perhaps writing is like running down or up a hill; an activity. i also agree communication is involved. i like the idea of the poem being a means of transport – as if it is, at the same moment, the telegram & the means of sending it. its messages. whose ideas are these? are all these ideas merely in the way of our seeing the poem? it seems a matter of access to the poem & each of us has access to certain poems at certain times, & some poems have to be left until yu suddenly find yourself reading them.

I met Phillips in Vancouver back in 2004, when McKinnon and I were in town to launch new Talonbooks, including his The Centre: 1970-2000 (2004). As McKinnon read via the Kootenay School of Writing, someone at the back of the packed house kept talking throughout. Shush, I kept turning around. A man I didn’t recognize, whispering repeatedly in Pierre Coupey’s ear. Later, finding out it was David Phillips, able to fumble to him my long appreciation for his work, oh and how I would love to produce a chapbook, if he had anything. Why did you stop writing? I asked him. I found out: he didn’t stop writing, he just stopped publishing, not seeing the point, pushing a boulder up that same hill. He became a carpenter, and focused on that, although he did continue writing, he told me. And as he described, eventually losing four complete and unpublished poetry manuscripts due to a basement flood. There were poems, and then there weren’t poems. Oh, the heartbreak.

David Phillips : photo provided by Maggie Guzzi

I’ve been in the midst of producing a chapbook of previously-unpublished poems of his for a while now, attempting to shape a handful of typed poems into a manuscript. He mailed me a file folder of poems moons back that I was attempting to hammer together, and was sent a further file folder of poems more recently, from his wife, Maggie Guzzi, who also put together the small chapbook David Phillips Poems (Tatlow House, 2022). What I’ve been putting together, an array of his poems for and after his dear friend and clear influence, bpNichol. I have been taking too long. Or, as his small chapbook-poem WAKE ME WHEN TH DANCING STARTS (1978), one of his rare publications that appeared since the assembling of his selected poems (and a title that perhaps began that lengthy publishing silence), writes:

no word, i wait

foolish ache