Experimental literature accelerated dramatically in Vancouver in the 1960s as the influence of New American poetics merged with the ideas of Marshall McLuhan. Vancouver poets and artists began thinking about their creative works with new clarity and set about testing and redefining the boundaries of literature. As new gardes in Vancouver explored the limits of text and language, some writers began incorporating collage and concrete poetics into their work while others delved deeper into unsettling, revolutionary, and Surrealist imagery. There was a presumption across the avant-garde communities that radical openness could provoke widespread socio-political change. In other words, the intermedia experimentation and the related destruction of the line between art and society pushed art to the frontlines of a broad socio-political battle of the collective imagination of Vancouver.
Finding Nothing traces the rise of the radical avant-garde in Vancouver, from the initial salvos of the Tish group, through Blewointment's spatial experiments, to radical Surrealisms and new feminisms. Incorporating images, original texts, and interviews, Gregory Betts shows how the VanGardes signalled a remarkable consciousness of the globalized forces at play in the city, impacting communities, orientations, races, and nations.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Finding Nothing
When American Literature Moved to Vancouver
Finding Nothing (or, the Avant-Garde Flowering that Was the 1960s)
The Problem of Nothing: A Short Interlude on the Theory of the Avant-Garde
The VanGardes
1. 1–19 Thoughts on TISH, 1961–1969 (A Document of Response)
2. The Birth of Blew
Harmony: Aristotle, Olson, and Vancouver, 1959–1963
Disharmony: Bissett, Collage, and another Vancouver, 1959–1983
The End of Categories: The Vancouver Litter-rary Collage
3. Blew Collage
At the Margins of the Garde
Blewointment
Collage into Canada
Literature into Collage (in Vancouver)
4. A Line, A New Line, All One: Variant Narratives of Concrete Canada
The Concrete Liturgy
Canadian Concrete
Other Narratives of Concrete Poetry
Judith Copithorne on Vancouver Concrete
Coda: The Visual Roots of the Alphabet
5. The Triumph of Surrealism: Magick Art in Vancouver
Vancouver Deformance
The Surreal West Coast
Precursors and Early Forays: Surrealism in Vancouver
Canadian Literary Surrealism
Super-natural British Columbia: From Lawren Harris to David W. Harris
Post-revolutionary Surrealism
The Colour of My Dreams
6. Performing Proprioception: The Birthing Story as Public Discourse
7. Avant Now and Then: Locating the Post-Avant
Hegemony and the Single Riot
Haling Taxi!
Locating the Post-Avant
Neruda, Chile, and Further Disenchantments
Conclusion: "we stopped at nothing"
Finding Nothing in the Avant-Garde Archive
List of Figures
Appendix A: Warren Tallman Elegy
Apendix B: Concrete Poetry
Appendix C: Glossary of Intermedia and Transdisciplinary Groups
Appendix D: Letter to the Editor of the Georgia Straight
Works Cited
About the Author :
Gregory Betts is a professor in the Faculty of Humanities at Brock University.
Review :
"Finding Nothing is an excavation site for a special moment in Canadian poetic history."
- Ron Verzuh (The Ormsby Review) "Many scholars will find Finding Nothing especially valuable for its informational and bibliographical content. Detailed lists of ephemeral little magazines and literary publishers, tabulations of contributors to the major periodicals, a fulsome index, and an appended glossary of ‘Intermedia and Transdisciplinary Groups’ further enhance this landmark study of a transformational phase in Canada’s cultural history."
- Carole Gerson, Simon Fraser University (The Canadian Historical Review) "It is difficult to characterize Finding Nothing as anything less than a singularly important critical monograph that likely sets the terms of discussion in the field of Canadian avant-garde studies to come." - Scott Inniss (Canadian Literature)
