Jamie Reid

Jamie Reid was born in Timmins, Ontario in 1941, and passed away in June 2015. At the University of British Columbia, Reid met Warren Tallman and together with George Bowering, Fred Wah and several other writers founded TISH in 1961; they would later become collectively known as the Tish poets. In the latter half of the 1960s, Reid organized Vancouver’s first Be-In, a gathering of activists following the example of a similar event in San Francisco. In 1967 he withdrew to the countryside of the Okanagan, where he wrote his first book of poems, The Man Whose Path Was on Fire (1969), which took the Canadian literary scene by storm. Reid then travelled to central Canada and, in his words, became a fierce communist for almost twenty years, which landed him numerous visits to prison, allegedly for assaulting police officers. In more recent years, he indulged his taste for Dadaism and literary anarchism by publishing a well-respected magazine of local and international avant garde writing called DaDaBaBy. Reid’s poetic work is fiercely intelligent, fearlessly incisive, and always politically charged.