In 1957 he enrolled at the University of British Columbia where, in 1961, shortly after beginning MA studies, he became one of the founding editors of the influential and contentious poetry newsletter TISH.
[1] Frank Davey was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, but raised in the nearby Fraser Valley village of Abbotsford (1941 population 562), close to the Canada-US border.
He was the son Wilmot Elmer Davey, a hydro company laborer and truck driver, and Doris Brown, who had emigrated with her family from Britain at age 4.
Davey enrolled at the University of British Columbia in 1957 where he met the influential poetry theorist Warren Tallman and student writers George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, Lionel Kearns, Carol Bolt, Jamie Reid, and Fred Wah, and in 1960 the charismatic San Francisco poet Robert Duncan.
Woodcock, editor of the journal Canadian Literature, commissioned in 1962 the first of several essays from him, and Dudek invited him to guest-edit a Vancouver issue of his important poetry magazine Delta.
Woodcock's intervention may have been the more significant, encouraging the young poet to take up literary criticism as well, and from the 1970s to the 90s write a body of work that would be called 'the most individual and influential ever written in Canada.
Receiving an MA from UBC in 1963, Davey taught for the Canadian armed forces at Royal Roads Military College in Victoria, BC until 1969, while also working on a doctorate in poetics at the University of Southern California in the summers of 1965 and 1966, and a 1966–67 leave of absence.
He witnessed the 1965 Watts riots from an apartment within the curfew zone, feeling more endangered, he indicates in 'Writing a Life' (99–100) and When TISH Happens (224), by the US National Guard than by the mostly black protesters.
But his most important contribution in these years was his withering critique, 'Surviving the Paraphrase,' of the thematic criticism of Northrop Frye, D. G. Jones and Margaret Atwood which he delivered at the founding conference of the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures in the spring of 1974.
That paper, in Stephen Scobie's words 'a vastly influential essay',[9] almost immediately discredited thematic criticism in Canada and, forty years later, reverberates as well within Canadian postcolonial studies.
[10] In 1976 he was appointed Coordinator of the York University creative writing program, and also joined, along with bpNichol and Michael Ondaatje, the new editorial board of The Coach House Press.
With the assistance of Nichol and Barbara Godard, he was also expanding the pages and range of Open Letter to give attention to Québécois poets, women writers, and poststructuralist poetics, developing it into what Gregory Betts in The Canadian Encyclopedia would call 'Canada's most important forum for discussion and examination of innovative and experimental ideas and texts.
His new books included Post-National Arguments: The Politics of the Anglo-Canadian Novel since 1967 (1993), Reading 'KIM' Right (1993), an analysis of the public persona of Kim Campbell, Canada's first woman prime minister, Canadian Literary Power (1994), a study of how Canadian literary reputations are constructed and defended, Karla's Web: A Cultural Examination of the Mahaffy-French Murders (1994), an examination of how newspaper crime writing distorts both victims and criminal justice issues, Cultural Mischief: A Practical Guide to Multiculturalism (1996), a poetry collection that mocked both the sentimentalities of multiculturalism's proponents and the narcissism of its critics, and Mr & Mrs G-G (2002) an examination of Canadian Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson and her husband, writer John Ralston Saul, that accused both of a pretentiousness that misrepresented and stifled actual Canadian realities.
[15] Davey continued his creativity at the expense of currently established critical pieties in the poetry collections Dog (2002) and Risky Propositions (2005), both partly directed at identity politics, the 'flarf' books Lack On!
His memoir, How Linda Died, which contains many details of their life together and their relations with their children, is, according to BC Bookworld editor Alan Twigg, 'Davey's most accessible and memorable book ... his most atypically direct and personal.
Ken Norris, in his study of Canadian little magazines, calls Davey's Open Letter 'the most important avant-garde periodical in Canada.
'[20] Betts writes that '[T]hrough his books of poetry, his literary and cultural criticism and his rich range of essays on diverse topics, Davey has been a major figure involved in introducing the idea and practice of postmodernism to writers in Canada.'
The fact that he drew attention to method at a time when Canadian literary discourse was by and large oblivious to it makes his contribution all the more important.
Arcana (1973) uses longer lines, postmodern indeterminacy and the imagery of the Rider-Waite Tarot deck in purportedly unfinished 'manuscript poems,' each dated and printed within quotation marks.
The book uses comic strip idioms, mixed with occasional metafictional commentary, to analyze further the Arthurian inheritance and its imbrication with commodity culture, while also creating numerous disturbingly poignant moments.
He also published in the 1980s the bitterly humorous Edward & Patricia (1984) and the collection of poetic reorientations of Canadian history The Louis Riel Organ and Piano Company (1985).
Like most of Davey's books, including The Scarred Hull, Weeds, The Clallam, King of Swords, Capitalistic Affection!, Edward & Patricia, and The Abbotsford Guide to India, the collection functions as both a long poem and a unified sequence of separable parts.