Finding Nothing: The VanGardes, 1959-1975

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)