Borderlines of Poetry and Art: Vancouver, American Modernism, and the Formation of the West Coast Avant-Garde, 1961 -69
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BORDERLINES OF POETRY AND ART: VANCOUVER, AMERICAN MODERNISM, AND THE FORMATION OF THE WEST COAST AVANT-GARDE, 1961 -69 by LARA HALINA TOMASZEWSKA B.A., The University of British Columbia, 1994 M.A., Concordia University, 1998 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Fine Arts) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA September 2007 © Lara Halina Tomaszewska, 2007 i ABSTRACT In 1967, San Francisco poet Robin Blaser titled his Vancouver-based journal The Pacific Nation because the imaginary nation that he envisaged was the "west coast." Blaser was articulating the mythic space that he and his colleagues imagined they inhabited at Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia: a nation without borders, without nationality, and bound by the culture of poetry. The poetic practices of the San Francisco Renaissance, including beat, projective, and Black Mountain poetics, had taken hold in Vancouver in 1961 with poet Robert Duncan's visit to the city which had catalyzed the Tish poetry movement. In 1963, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Creeley participated in the Vancouver Poetry Conference, an event that marked the seriousness and vitality of the poetic avant-garde in Vancouver. The dominant narrative of avant-garde visual art in Vancouver dates its origins to the late 1960s, with the arrival of conceptualism, especially the ideas and work of Dan Graham and Robert Smithson. By contrast, this thesis argues for an earlier formation of the avant-garde, starting with the Tish poetry movement and continuing with a series of significant local events such as the annual Festival of the Contemporary Arts (1961-71), organized by B.C. Binning and Alvin Balkind, who was the curator of the Fine Arts Gallery at the University of British Columbia. The diverse artistic and intellectual practices of Robert Duncan, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Stan Brakhage, and Marshall McLuhan presented at the Festivals were absorbed and adapted not only by poets and writers but also by artists, including Ian Wallace, Roy Kiyooka, Iain Baxter, Gary Lee-Nova, and Michael Morris. The cross-fertilization of avant-garde poetry and art was an international phenomenon. In New York, "anti-formal" art also embraced Cage and Cunningham as aesthetic models. Its effect in Vancouver was to de-stabilize European traditions of art that had been dominant. In the 1960s, Vancouver avant-garde artists constructed the west coast as an alternative space - alternative to American militarism and anti- communism, to Euro-Canadian cultural traditions and to the artistic dominance of New York. They helped to create a vital, transnational Pacific region. Ill TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract i Table of Contents iii Acknowledgements iv Dedication v INTRODUCTION: West Coast Counter-Narratives: Framing Vancouver Cultural Practices in the 1960s 1 CHAPTER ONE: "Against History Stands Poetry:" Vancouver, American Modernism, and the Formation of the West Coast 29 Tish Poetics: Charles Olson, A.N. Whitehead, and Language 40 Vancouver Poetics: locality, the politics of location, and difference 58 Vancouver Poetry Conference, 1963 78 CHAPTER TWO: Astronauts of Inner Space: The Annual Festival of the Contemporary Arts and the Cross-Fertilization of Poetry and Art, 1961-65 88 The Festival of the Contemporary Arts, 1961-71 94 John Cage 98 Stan Brakhage 110 Marshall McLuhan and Gerd Stern 118 Bruce Conner 127 CHAPTER THREE: Utopia in Vancouver, 1965-68: The Probable Union of Dada, Zen, and American Pragmatism 133 1965: Jack Spicer, Utopia, and the Vancouver Community of Poetry 142 1965: Beyond Regionalism 151 1966: The Festival of the Contemporary Arts 165 1967: Joy and Celebration 175 1968: The West Coast Now 183 EPILOGUE: Intersection Points: Towards a Poetics of the West Coast Avant-Garde 189 Bibliography 197 iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to my research supervisor Dr. John O'Brian for his intellectual and theoretical openness and for his astute, intuitive, and always subtle guidance. Without his encouragement and support, both academic and professional, I most certainly would not have been able to realize this accomplishment. I also thank Dr. Charlotte Townsend-Gault whose insight prompted the most crucial questions, Dr. Serge Guilbaut for helping me to grasp the significance of the artistic practices of the sixties, and Dr. Maureen Ryan for helping me to articulate my own voice while understanding the richness and complexity of discourse. I would also like to thank everyone who has contributed to this project over the last many years, including the staff at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Gary Lee- Nova, and Audrey and Victor Doray. My thanks also to Scott Watson, Robert Linsley, and Rhodri Windsor-Liscombe for offering me research opportunities in and on Vancouver art. My deepest gratitude to my dear friends - especially Marta Sesin and Dorothy Barenscott for the years of support and humour, Lisa Sinclair and Laura-Dawn Petrie for their lifelong encouragement, and also Kalinka Poprawski, Alexandra Frison, Alison Rippington, Stephen Kukucha, Helen Raicevic and Helen Court. Lastly, I thank my family, Tania, Monika, and Mirek, for their belief in me and unfailing support. Thank you to Leo for his funny antics and most of all, to Andrew for his love, acceptance, and strength in this project and in our lives together. For my mother Monika 1 INTRODUCTION West Coast Counter-Narratives: Framing Vancouver Cultural Practices in the 1960s I wish to put together an imaginary nation. It is my belief that no other nation is possible, or rather, I believe that authors who count take responsibility for a map which is addressed to travellers of the earth, the world, and the spirit. Images of our cities must join our poetry. - Robin Blaser, The Pacific Nation 1 In this remote, uncrowded, lotus-eating city, seemingly far from many of the world's agonies and excesses, there is room for art to grow, even in the face of (or perhaps because of) vast public and official indifference. Though isolated, yet there are very strong umbilical cords connecting Vancouver with the artistic "precious body fluids" elsewhere.. .A Western sense of freedom and expansion, an absence of rhetoric, and a need to search and probe into and beyond the sound barrier... - Alvin Balkind 2 The CITY no longer exists, except as a cultural ghost for tourists. - Marshall McLuhan 3 By the late 1960s, the west coast of North America had already achieved mythic status as Lotusland, Land of Eternal Youth, and land of freedom, love and the counterculture. Robin Blaser, poet of the San Francisco Renaissance and cultural guru in Vancouver, titled his journal The Pacific Nation because the imaginary nation that he was envisioning, one of open and free discourse, intellectual rigour and spiritual 1 The Pacific Nation, no. 1, 1967, 3. Pacific Nation Archives, Contemporary Literature Collection, Simon Fraser University. 2 Joy and Celebration, exhibition catalogue, University of British Columbia Fine Arts Gallery, 1967, 3. Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery Archives. 3 Marshall McLuhan, "Five Sovereign Fingers Taxed the Breath," in Explorations in Communication: An Anthology, eds. Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), 207. travel, was the nation of the "west coast."4 When Alvin Balkind, curator of the Fine Arts Gallery at the University of British Columbia, proclaimed Vancouver's natal artistic connections, he was referring primarily to the umbilical cords between Vancouver and both San Francisco and Los Angeles, ones that symbolized shared post-war artistic and cultural histories.5 An avant-garde of modernist poets and artists had formed and was practicing with vigour on the west coast of North America; it was as if there was an invisible north-south line connecting Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver. Writers and artists travelled up and down this line, with a majority of the impetus travelling from the south to the north. From the early 1960s, Vancouver's cultural scene started to transform from one of colonial provincialism to that of an edgy and thoroughly modern one - vanguard poetry, experimental printing presses, hard-edge painting, pop art, and collaborative multimedia became central practices and, indeed, Vancouver began to develop its own artistic identity. My thesis examines art practices in Vancouver between 1961 and 1968, a period that encompasses several distinct phases or shifts both locally and internationally: the birth of the "west coast"; the renewed artistic interest in early twentieth-century avant-garde movements, such as dada and surrealism; the increasing agitation and violence in Vietnam; the de-colonization of African nations 4 Blaser founded and edited The Pacific Nation at the beginning of his long tenure in the English Department at Simon Fraser University. The first issue (there were only two ever published) included contributions from Gerry Gilbert, Stan Persky and Karen Tallman from Vancouver, as well as American modern poets such as Charles Olson, Michael McClure, George Stanley. The cover of the first issue is a doodle-like image with moonlight and water in the background and a flowery, rocky and forested shore in the foreground. The letters of "Pacific Nation" are reflected by the moonlight in the water and to the right, a wild dog is howling at the moon - a harmonious call of nature (in contrast, for example, to the violent dog in Jack Shadbolt's Dog Among Ruins, 1947). In the centre foreground is a partially filled-in vertical figure eight, alluding to both the symbol of eternity and the yin yang, both symbols which would have resonated with the west coast interest in eastern mysticism and notions of balance and unity in the universe. 5 Joy and Celebration, 3. and the creation of the "third world"; the politics of conscience followed by post- 1968 cynicism; and, increasing economic prosperity in North America.