Frankland Wilmot Davey (born April 19, 1940) is a Canadian poet and scholar.
Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, he grew up in the Fraser Valley village of Abbotsford. In 1957 he enrolled at the University of British Columbia where, in 1961, shortly after receiving his BA, he became one of the founding editors of the influential and contentious poetry newsletter TISH. In the spring of 1962 he won the university's Macmillan Prize for poetry, and published the poetry collection D-Day and After, the first of the Tish group's numerous publications. He married Helen Simmons, also of Abbotsford, in December of 1962, and completed an MA the following spring. That fall he began teaching at Canadian Services College Royal Roads Military College in Victoria, where in 1965 he founded Open Letter, a journal of writing and theory which he has continued to edit and publish. He began doctoral studies at the University of Southern California in the summer of 1965, which in 1966-67 he took advantage of a one-year leave from Royal Roads and a Canada Council fellowship to complete. Shortly after he and his wife separated in 1969, he left Victoria to become Writer-in-Residence at Sir George Williams University in Montreal, where he married Linda McCartney. He joined the English Department of York University in Toronto in 1970, and became department chair in 1985. He was appointed in 1990 to the Carl F. Klinck Chair of Canadian Literature at the University of Western Ontario in London. From 1975-1992 he was one of the most active editors of the Coach House Press. He currently lives in Strathroy, Ontario.[1]
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Frank Davey was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, but raised in nearby Abbotsford. He was the son Wilmot Elmer Davey and Doris Brown.[2] Much of his childhood in Abbotsford is pseudonymously recounted in his 2005 poetry volume Back to the War.[3] He 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, Carol Bolt, and Fred Wah, and in 1960 the charismatic San Francisco poet Robert Duncan.[4] With Wah and Bowering, and the advice of Tallman and Duncan, he founded the poetry newsletter Tish in 1961.[5]