Finding Nothing: The VanGardes, 1959-1975 (2021) by Gregory Betts

Finding Nothing: The VanGardes, 1959-1975 (2021)
by Gregory Betts
University of Toronto Press
392 Pages
120 b&w illustrations
7.25 x 10.30 inches
ISBN-13: 9781487505318
 
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.
 
Reviews:
 
"Finding Nothing is an excavation site for a special moment in Canadian poetic history."
Ron Verzuh, The Ormsby Review
 
"Gregory Betts has produced a literary history of the avant-garde in Canada like no other. Finding Nothing offers deep reflection on the meaning of the new, including accounts of the positive transformational effects upon human structures of perception and the violent forms of erasure that the ‘transnational cultural flow’ of literary activity in and out of Vancouver has entailed since that space’s appropriation by European settlers, through its examination of the histories of modernism, up to the present. With a combination of fastidious archival research, deep critical insight and empathy, and a most engaging style of historical storytelling,　Betts has opened up important space for the development of alternative, decolonizing accounts of the literary avant-garde in settler Canada."
Jason Camlot, Professor of English and University Research Chair (Tier I) in Literature and Sound Studies, Concordia University
 
"Rich in aesthetic and personal anecdotes gleaned through interviews, Finding Nothing proposes that the mythologies of Vancouver modernist poetics both arose from colonial conditioning and worked against it. Readers will appreciate the intimate photographs and reprints of rare materials from private collections and institutional archives – the collation of these dispersals makes visible these absences from public spaces as an ongoing colonial erasure."
Felicity Tayler, Research Data Management Librarian and Interim Head of Research Services, University of Ottawa