Borderblur Poetics

Front matter

BORDERBLUR POETICS: INTERMEDIA AND AVANT-GARDISM IN CANADA, 1963-1988 Eric Schmaltz

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Chapter Four: Kinetic Poetry Toward a Theory of Kinetic Poetics

Kinetic Art and Literature: Borderblur’s Kinetic Context Kinetics and Poetics in Canada

Extending the Codex

Games and Puzzles

Immersive and Environmental Works

Coda: Intermedial Poetry in Canada Today Notes Bibliography

Index viii Contents

169 177 185 191 199 207

217 327 249 273

List of Figures

Front cover of Ganglia, no. 1, published January 1965.

Front cover of Judith Copithorne’s magazine Returning, no. 1, published 1972.

“What Is Can Lit?” by bpNichol, 1973.

“What Is Can Lit?” by bpNichol, 1973.

Front cover of grOnk, no. 1, published January 1967.

Excerpt from END OF AUGUST GIANT grOnk MAILOUT, published 1969.

"Blues" by bpNichol, from As Elected: Selected Writing, 1981. Excerpt from Touch by David UU, 1967.

Untitled collage from pass th food release th spirit book by bill bissett, 1973.

Untitled collage from pass th food release th spirit book by bill bissett, 1973.

"The Plastic Typewriter, 12" by Paul Dutton (text sourced from the traditional Black US gospel song "Certainly, Lord”).

Excerpt from Release by Judith Copithorne, 1969.

Excerpt from Shaunt Basmajian’s “Personal Traumas,” 1980.

Untitled collage from bill bissett’s Stardust, 1975. Untitled collage from bill bissett’s Stardust, 1975 CRACK by Brian Dedora, 1978.

16 17 42 49

83 87 90

107 109

3.1 3.2

4-1

4.2

4-4

4.6

Liner notes to Penn Kemp’s Ear Rings, 1987.

Excerpts from score for “ABCD” by Susan McMaster for First Draft, 1987.

“Like an Eddy” by Earle Birney, 1969.

Excerpt from “SCREAM (How To)” from The Scream: First Draft, The Third Annual Group Show by First Draft, 1984.

Front cover of WAR, vol. 1, by John Riddell, 1981.

The assembled text from John Riddell's WAR, vol. 1, assembled by the author in his home.

Installation photograph of The Imagination of Aldo Breun by Michael Dean, November 1981.

Installation photograph of The Imagination of Aldo Breun by Michael Dean, November 1981.

List of Figures

134 156

Acknowledgements

While this book traces the emergence and proliferation of a loose coterie of poets in Canada who sought to transgress the borders between literature and art, between national and international communities, and between art and life, this book also, in its own way, is the culmination—the blurring together—of multiple career stages, geographies, coteries, mentorships, and conditions of labour that I have had the privilege of experiencing in my life thus far. I wish to express my sincerest gratitude to the following persons, institutions, and various programs of support; each has come together to make this book possible.

WhatI am now calling Borderblur Poetics: Intermedia and Avant-Gardism in Canada, 1963-1988 began in the Department of English at York University. Stephen Cain, chair of my dissertation committee, supported this project at its most nascent stages and saw it through to the very end. His commitment to academic rigour and open exploration gave me the necessary resources and space I needed to become the scholar and poet I am today. Also on my committee was Andy Weaver, among the kindest and most generous thinkers about poetry and poetics, and Lily Cho, whose considerations encouraged me to look more deeply at my work. I am grateful for their assessments of my research. While labouring as a graduate student at York, my work was also buttressed by the generous support and insights of various York faculty members, each of whom, in their own ways, inadvertently or not, shaped what this book has become. In particular, I wish to thank Marcus Boon, Marc Couroux, Marie-Christine Leps, Thomas Loebel, Susan Warwick, Allan Weiss, and Robert Zacharias. Thank you, too, to my external examiner, Peter Jaeger.

I rewrote a significant portion of this book during a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Thanks to Charles Bernstein for his support during this time. I also extend a heartfelt thanks to my dearest friends Martine Tchitcihe and Benjamin Sieff, who showed me such gracious hospitality while living in Philadelphia.

xi

I must also thank poets David Aylward, bill bissett, Judith Copithorne, Michael Dean, Brian Dedora, Claude Dupuis, Paul Dutton, Penn Kemp, Susan McMaster, Andrew McClure, Colin Morton, Gerry Shikatani, and George Swede, and the stewards who care for the works of certain poets discussed here, including Eleanor Nichol, Madame Justice Wailan Low, Adrienne Copithorne, and Ingrid Harris. Iam honoured to have their support and trust as I engage with the legacy of this work.

Thank you to the staff at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto for their assistance in accessing materials in their collections, especially John Shoesmith; likewise, thanks to Anna St. Onge for her assistance in the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections at York University. Additional thanks to Tony Power and David Kloepfer at Simon Fraser University Library Special Collections and Rare Books, Sara Viinalass- Smith of Library and Archives Canada, and Claire Sutton at the Ottawa City Archives.

Thanks also to friends and colleagues who supported this project with their time, resources, and attention, especially Patty Argydes, Derek Beaulieu, Gary Barwin, MLA Chernoff, Igor Djordjevic, Kit Dobson, Christopher Doody, Gregory Fast, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Deanna Fong, Kristina Getz, Beatriz Hausner, Karl Jirgens, Max Karpinski, Kyle Kinaschuk, Zane Koss, Aaron Kreuter, Mat Laporte, Jeremy Lucyk, Shannon Maguire, Donato Mancini, Philip A. Miletic, Jay Millar, Julia Polyck-O’Neill, Kate Siklosi, Dani Spinosa, Divya Victor, and Stephen Voyce.

Thanks, too, to my esteemed colleagues Charles Bernstein, Gregory Betts, Suzanne Zelazo, and Myra Bloom for their supportive words that accompanied this book into the world.

It has been a privilege to work with the University of Calgary Press, whose staff treats projects like these with the utmost care and dedication. Thank you to everybody at the press for your patience with me, for supporting this project, and for all the hard work done on its behalf—especially Alison Cobra, Melina Cusano, Helen Hajnoczky, Ryan Perks, and Brian Scrivener.

The work in this book benefited immensely from the significant support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) in the form of an SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Doctoral Scholarship. I also wish to acknowledge the support of the Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program and York University’s Linda Heather Lamont-Stewart Fellowship in Canadian Studies, Clara Thomas Doctoral xii Acknowledgements

Scholarship in Canadian Studies, and Provost Dissertation Scholarship. I am grateful, too, to the coordinators of York’s CUPE 3903 Contract Faculty Research Grant.

Thanks to FORUM, Canadian Poetry, and Jacket2 for providing publication venues for certain sections of this work.

Finally, my deepest thanks to Alysha Dawn Puopolo. None of this would be possible without her tireless support and patience, which buoyed me during moments of struggle and permitted me the opportunity to dedicate many long hours, days, weeks, months, and years to this work.

Acknowledgements xiii

But there is always an avant-garde, in the sense that someone, somewhere is always trying to do something which adds to the possibilities for everybody.

—Dick Higgins (1981)

xv

Introduction literature doesn't mean long live the empire; literature is words

—bill bissett (2 July 1967)

“This is the death of the poem as I have faithfully reported it, November 29, 1966, as I have faithfully reported it, this is the death of the poem” intones Canadian poet bpNichol one day after the Dominion Day celebrations marking Canada’s centennial year. Addressing a national television audience, Nichol reads these lines with poets bill bissett and Phyllis Webb, who chant the words “obituary” and “mortuary” alongside him.' This poem was published in January 1967 in issue 1 of Nichol’s mimeographed publication grOnk; it declares that “THE POEM IS DEAD,” signifying, for Nichol, the potential for poetry’s rebirth.’ After the poets conclude their chant, the camera cuts from a close-up of bissett to a shot of all three poets sitting at the studio table. Webb instructs bissett, who wears a grotesque mask with a knife protruding from his neck, to “Take off your mask, bill, and join the group,” and in doing so, as scholar Katherine McLeod recognizes, Webb “symbolically unmasks the strange identity of the new Canadian avant-garde” for the literary public? Announcing poetry's demise and subsequent regeneration, this episode marks a meeting between Canada’s literary public and an emergent generation of avant-garde writers who proclaim a poetics that secedes from established literary traditions. Nichol and bissett televise the advent of an expansive, liberated intermedial poetic they call borderblur. Taking borderblur as its subject, this book combines archival research, historical analysis, canon intervention, and literary criticism to trace the poetic’s emergence and proliferation as a significant but underexamined node of avant-garde activity in Canada.

Nichol and bissett delivered this performance at the youthful ages of twenty-two and twenty-seven, respectively, on the CBC program Extension: Here, Now, and Then; the show was hosted by Webb, a well-known Canadian poet and public intellectual. Airing during Canada’s centennial celebrations, in the summer of 1967, Extension featured the nation’s established literati alongside some more emergent personalities.‘ Each episode was “an experiment in the staging of poetry in distinct contexts and manners, with poetry presented through film, theatrical readings, conversations at a table and even at a piano.” As avant-garde writers who experiment with language and media, Nichol and bissett were well-suited to a multimedia presentation of poetry. With cameras directed at them on a sound stage, a reel-to-reel tape player in the foreground, books, magazines, and papers spread across the table, and their drawings and poems tacked on to the walls, the studio space reproduces the distinctive multimedia characteristics of their work. They sip coffee and smoke cigarettes while Webb guides them through a conversation that touches on such topics as the influence of Allen Ginsberg's Beat poetry and lifestyle, the rock ‘n’ roll of Mick Jagger, the protest songs of Bob Dylan, and the jazz of Vancouver's Gerry Walker, all while weaving in discussion of their poetries’ polyphonic qualities, the destabilization of Western reading practices, diverse uses of media, and implicit forms of social engagement. For Canada, the 1967 centennial signifies a historical turning point, a coming-ofage moment for the country and its cultural identity. I imagine that viewers who tuned in for Extension's investigation of the nation's poetry one day after Dominion Day might have been perplexed by Nichol's poetic eulogy, bissett's grotesque disguise, and their discussions of new music, intoxication, and alternative lifestyles. While the show was meant to take the pulse of Canadian letters, Nichol and bissett ultimately offer their viewers evidence of an emergent poetic milieu distinguished from Canada’s existing national literature by its playfulness, penchant for experimentation, and internationalist attitude.

Regarding nation and literature, Nichol and bissett discuss the ideas that inform their poetics within the context of an emergent sense of the world, unbound by electronic media and untethered from a particular nationalist ideology. At the time, this unbound sense of the world is described by renowned Canadian media critic Marshall McLuhan, who in The Gutenberg

Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) first identifies this period as the electric age (more commonly known as the electronic or information age), wherein electronic media—radio, television, film, computers, and so on—accelerated the possibilities for information consumption and communication. “Now, in the electric age,” McLuhan writes, “the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious."5 And in turn, the conditions of this age inspired a shrinking sense of the planet he referred to as the global village, a term he advanced in The Gutenberg Galaxy and recapitulated with more nuance in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) Nichol and bissett, it seems, had absorbed this sense of the world by 1967. bissett explains to Webb that their poetry emerges from “not having the margins, not having the borders... . Not being limited to a sentence construction or an idea."? By invoking “borders," bissett draws attention to the intermedial characteristics of his and Nichol's poetics while implicitly undercutting the nationalist ethos of the government-funded television show. For poets like bissett and Nichol, poesis occurs when poetry is enmeshed with other media, including song, image, movement, sculpture, painting, drawing, print, and more.

Given Webb's penchant for innovative and avant-garde poetic forms, it is hardly surprising that she pushes deeper into the fray? She asks them, "is there any real point to trying to affix a label to a kind of poetry?” Nichol responds by explaining that "there's an Englishman who just called it borderblur." Webb chuckles at this, perhaps already familiar with British poet and theologian Dom Sylvester Houédard (also known as dsh), who coined the term. Nichol explains that borderblur reaches into "all the areas, crossing over into all the arts" to, in effect, dissolve boundaries between linguistic, visual, sonic, and performative modes of creative expression." It may at first seem ironic that Nichol connects his and bissett's practices to the terminology of an Englishman, one who might conjure visions of Canada's ongoing colonial legacy. However, borderblur, as Nichol describes it, refuses traditional poetry's conventions, and it undermines the conceptual solidity of national borders. bissett agrees with Nichol and earlier in the episode locates their work within a global movement, suggesting that the point of borderblur is "to drop off the borders," like those poets, he notes, publishing in Brazil, Belgium, England, Holland, Japan, and Scotland. "It's not just a Canadian trip,” he contends." With this list of nations home to kindred avant-garde practitioners, bissett is likely thinking of the global currents of concrete poetry, which were being recognized in international anthologies at the time. This includes Emmett Williams’s An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (1967), which was published by Dick Higgins’s then New York-based Something Else Press and featured Nichol’s concrete poem "eyes." bissett further emphasizes his suspicions of nationalism by pointing out that “literature doesn’t mean long live the empire; literature is words."? While it’s difficult to know exactly what bissett means here, I do not read this as an apolitical statement severing poetry from its social or political contexts; rather, by pledging a primary allegiance to words, bissett signals his rejection of the colonial spectre that looms over Canadian literary culture through the importation of its literary tradition and standardized use of British spelling and syntax. Instead, he imagines language to be part of a greater artistic force that does not require falling into the standards of conventional English, and through which he can reject singular notions of national literary hegemony and its “early fantasies of homogeneity.’ By invoking borderblur, both poets articulate their poetics as distinctive and formally inventive and locate their work within a broader international network of avant-garde practitioners. This book examines how this strain of avant-garde activity complicates long-standing narratives describing Canadian poetry as an expression of Canadian national identity.

I reflect upon this episode of Extension for the ways it highlights three central considerations of this study. Firstly, it tidily introduces the terminology that animates this project: poetry, nation, media, and avant-gardism. Working through these interlocking terms in chapter 1, I take up the idea of borderblur to theorize it as a poetic that allows me to understand the central characteristics and concerns that emerged under its immediate usage, and also how that idea formulated a network of like-minded poets in Canada in the second half of the twentieth century. This is important to note since borderblur is no longer really a term in vogue. Few poets today would use it to describe their work—they would likely prefer terms like multimedia or hybrid—even though many still fold poetry into other artistic modes; included in that group could be Jordan Abel, Oana Avasilichioaei, Gary Barwin, Derek Beaulieu, Stephen Cain, Wayde Compton, Adeena Karasick, Kaie Kellough, M. NourbeSe Philip, Jordan Scott, Kate Siklosi, Dani Spinosa, Matthew James Weigel, and many others. Borderblur emerges and proliferates within a specific context in the mid- to late twentieth century. Secondly, this episode of Extension introduces one of the main contentions that this study investigates. bissett’s statement against borders highlights how these poets used the term “borderblur” to not only distinguish their poetic work but to announce their cosmopolitan outlook. As they note, the poets borrowed the term from British poet Houédard, thereby positioning themselves as Canadians who, by virtue of their poetic and its connection to an international context, complicate notions of poetry as an expression of national identity.

Finally, but most importantly, the episode introduces the relationship between two of this book’s principal figures—bissett and Nichol—and the contextual environment within which they created and published. I position them as two main actors whose poetries embody a set of common presumptions around which many other poets gathered in Canada. Some of these like-minded writers and artists include David Aylward, Shaunt Basmajian, Martina Clinton, Judith Copithorne, Brian Dedora, Paul Dutton, Roy Kiyooka, Steve McCaffery, Susan McMaster, Penn Kemp, John Riddell, Ann Rosenberg, Gerry Shikatani, David UU, and others—all of whom make an appearance in this book because of their shared interest in dissolving boundaries that separate creative fields, and because certain facets of their poetic outputs can be understood as representative of borderblur. To locate poets under a single banner may be more expedient than necessarily precise, but they are united by a network of small presses, little magazines, and performance spaces that distinguished them from the majority of the writers in Canada at that time, and, more concretely, they developed their work in proximity to Nichol and bissett, either through publication, friendship, performance, collaboration, or financial support. Taken together, they form an avant-garde network of affiliation that developed an alternative vision for poetry and its production in Canada, one that exceeds the traditional, page-based work that dominated the literary mainstream during the second half of the twentieth century. This book begins to tell the story of how this network of Canadian poets came to be connected by a shared poetics.

In the works of the poets examined in this study, I find indications that they imagined themselves to be working with a dynamic cosmopolitan outlook as the complexities of emergent electronic media and international relations formed their sense of poetry at home. But what specific conditions gave rise to this explosion of intermedial creativity in a Canadian literary context? If borderblur did not actively nurture the dominant national literary discourse, to what conversations and contexts does it contribute? How did borderblur intervene into the imaginative process of national identity formation? If borderblur is conceived as a cosmopolitan alternative to the dominant nationalist literature, what conditions have since arisen to welcome some of these poets into the fold of the Canadian literary canon? How does the legacy of borderblur live on in Canadian literature today? These are the questions that animate this study.

As cultural actors sought to modernize Canada’s national and cultural identity in both the lead-up to 1967 and the years since, it seems that Nichol and bissett had already realized literary critic Jahan Ramazani’s claim that “even a ‘national poet’ turns out, on closer inspection, to also be a transnational poet.”! With that said, this book does not necessarily adopt a transnational critical approach. Rather, it maps the emergence and proliferation of borderblur poetics in Canada in the mid- to late twentieth century as the formation of a literary identity that is aesthetically diverse, internationalist, and intermedial. Borderblur is profitably recognized as a Canadian literary avant-garde “paratradition,” a term used by scholar Gregory Betts to describe avant-garde literature, and which I invoke here to account for borderblur’s Canadian context and its deviation from the national literary matrix. Despite borderblur’s rootedness in the counterculture, as a description “paratradition” is preferable to “countertradition,” since this latter term might suggest a persistent opposition to literary hegemony." Given the poetic’s propensity for aesthetic openness, to suggest that borderblur poets were explicitly nationalist, transnationalist, or anti-nationalist would be antithetical to their work. Just as they resisted aesthetic foreclosure, political circumscription risks over-generalization and does not account for the way their relationship to nationalism may shift over time and across contexts. Regardless of what this means for each poet's relationship to nationalism, I argue in this book that they created an intermedial literary paratradition that eschewed a distinctive nationalistic agenda and instead formed an active branch of an international avant-garde network that was entangled with the emergent conditions of their time.

Canons and Controversies: Literary Traditions and Intermediality in Canada

In the following chapters, I examine three manifestations of this Canadian literary paratradition by focusing on concrete poetry, sound poetry, and kinetic poetry, each of which can be neatly located under an umbrella term advanced by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins—namely, intermedia, which describes a broad range of creative work that falls “between media.” Originally published in 1966 in the Something Else Newsletter, Higgins offered “intermedia” as a term for engaging with works that fuse multiple art forms in such a way that it’s difficult to distinguish them from one another. These kinds of works prompt critics and audiences to reconsider the conventional “separation between media [that] arose in the Renaissance,” and to effectively unsettle the conventions of genre, literary practice, and the discourse of analysis. When Higgins began to take stock of his own avant-garde milieu, “intermedia” was an effective term that captured a broad range of practices happening across Europe, North America, South America, parts of Asia, and elsewhere. Reflecting on the mid-1960s when he first offered the term, he writes, “The world was filled at that time with concrete poems, happenings, sound poetry, environments, and other more or less novel developments.””? This description corresponds to much of the work examined here.” In the context of this study, intermedial works create meaning and effect through the inseparable combination of language with other media, as implied by Nichol’s definition of borderblur above.

In the contemporary context, we might draw parallels between intermedia and the concept of multimodal communication, which recognizes, as leading scholars Gunther Kress and Carey Jewitt point out, that “language is partial"? to the pursuit of meaning-making, and this is true, too, for the poets discussed in this book. While I find multimodality to be a useful term for retroactively theorizing borderblur as a poetic, since it emphasizes that language is not the only means of communicating, intermedia is more directly applicable to the works that this book examines. Given the close temporal proximity between Higgins and the poets discussed in this book, as well as the network of avant-garde practitioners that they shared, intermedia as a term embodies both aesthetic principles of borderblur and gestures toward the cosmopolitan scene they were responding to. We shall see, too, the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that the term directly informed certain facets of avant-garde practices and communities in Canada. There was the formation in 1967 of the Intermedia Society, for example—an artist-run space in Vancouver dedicated to the exploration of emergent media by a variety of creative practitioners, including poets such as Copithorne, whose work is discussed in chapter 2. The term also places media near the centre of this book's discussion, an especially important point since the work of media theorists such as McLuhan (discussed below) were touchstones for situating borderblur as a practice in Canada. This is important to recognize because many of the books, poems, games, installations, and ephemera examined in this study are representative of borderblur in that they rely on the fusion of language with other media. Higgins’s definition of intermedia is echoed by Nichol’s fundamental argument, made in 1967, that “we have reached a point where people have finally come to see that language means communication and that communication does not necessarily mean language.”” For Nichol, like Higgins, writing and art making occurs through interactions between language, image, sound, gesture, space, and so on. Thus, I recognize that the poets that I have here gathered under the umbrella term *borderblur" often embrace intermediality and all it offers. Though concrete, sound, and kinetic poetry have substantial, and at times overlapping, histories and meanings, each form sees specific combinations of language with other media. These forms distinguish borderblur poetics as a Canadian paratradition, since they are generally acknowledged as unconventional and certainly not mainstream. Concrete, sound, and kinetic poetry will be more thoroughly defined in each respective chapter, but for now, these three terms bear some cursory definition to understand what distinguishes this poetry from the singular media of Canada's dominant national literature.

Concrete poetry, sometimes also referred to as visual poetry, describes a poetic form that fuses literary and visual arts by combining language with non-linguistic elements. Concrete poems are often recognized for the ways that words and individual letters form shapes, patterns, and images through the poet's intentional arrangement of language and attention to related materials such as typeface, colour, graphics, and page layout and size. Sound poetry is a form that seizes upon the historically oral and aural aspects of poetry by bridging literature with auditory practices such as music, chant, and sound art. Sound poetry is often intended for performance and utilizes language and language's elemental parts—such as phonemes and morphemes—to create dramatic and often chant- or song-like poems. Kinetic poetry, meanwhile, as a pre-digital form, is significantly under-theorized in the Canadian context. While concrete and sound poetry, respectively, engage the optic and sonic realms of the human sensorium, kinetic poetry is holistic by comparison and incorporates body movement and gesture, feeling, and sensation. The kinetic poems examined in this book often require a more fulsome engagement with the audience's body in the process of meaning-making, as exhibited in flipbooks, immersive installations, and interactive and game-based works. Chapters 2-5 address each term’s history and theorization in more detail, but it is significant to note, for now, that this book attends specifically to their manifestation under the aegis of borderblur poetics in the early 1960s and its proliferation in Canada through to the late 1980s.

As is well established in Canadian literary scholarship, there was a flurry of activity in the years before and after 1967 that effectively consolidated a distinguished national literature in Canada that largely excluded concrete, sonic, and kinetic poetries. These activities are recapitulated in Nick Mount's Arrival: The Story of CanLit (2017), which describes the establishment of Canadian literary hegemony, or as he calls it, the “CanLit Boom.” Convinced that postwar affluence encouraged Canadian cultural development, Mount traces the emergence of Canadian literature as a distinctive part of Canadian public and private life. The period, according to Mount, begins in 1959 and concludes in 1974, and he narrates the emergence of such renowned Canadian literary personalities as Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje; the rise of Canadian literary grant and prize culture as distributed by national institutions such as the Canada Council for the Arts; the establishment of Canadian literary presses like McClelland and Stewart, Anansi, and Coach House; the flourishing of new bookstores; and the arrival of an affluent Canadian reading public. Arrival has been criticized for its lack of diverse representation, which results from Mount's focus on a narrow canon of authors who assumed powerful cultural positions during the boom. In his review of the book, literary critic Paul Barrett, for example, finds fault in Arrival because its "cast of characters are exceptionally white in a way that is not truly reflective of the CanLit community"? Mount omitted, for example, indispensable writers such as Maria Campbell and Austin Clarke.

Though it might not call for the sort of urgent correction Barrett advocates, the fact is that avant-garde writers of the borderblur paratradition are similarly given only slight acknowledgement in Arrival. Though no single book of criticism could achieve encyclopedic completeness, such omissions and under-representations combine to produce an uneven account of the Canadian literatures that emerged during the postwar era. While Mount briefly attends to bissett and Nichol in his narration of the Canadian literary establishment, his predominant focus on traditional literary expression at the expense of intermedial forms of expression directs readers' attention away from many writers who were captivated by the possibilities of borderblur, some of whom were women and feminists like Judith Copithorne,

Penn Kemp, Susan McMaster, and Ann Rosenberg, as well as writers with compound identities such as Armenian Canadian Shaunt Basmajian and Japanese Canadian Gerry Shikatani. Within the existing scholarship, these writers remain under-acknowledged or ignored altogether. This book seeks to remedy this issue by writing these figures more forcefully into the narrative of borderblur’s proliferation, thereby providing a critical aperture just wide enough that I hope other scholars and readers will continue to gaze. In 1964, Copithorne, for example, arguably produced the first concrete poem among the borderblur poets, published in blewointment, with her hand-drawn mixture of text and image. Soon after, blewointment featured an increasing number of related works (a significant point first publicly recognized by Betts in his 2021 book Finding Nothing: The Vangardes, 1959-1975). Likewise, Rosenberg’s semi-erotic novel The Bee Book (1981)—which blends concrete poetry with prose narrative—has been overlooked by scholars, despite W. H. New’s comparison between Rosenberg and the celebrated Québécois writer Nicole Brossard.”* With its attention to these important figures, this study, generates a more diverse account of avant-gardism in Canada in the mid- to late twentieth century.

The beginnings of this thriving avant-garde literary culture can be seen, for example, in the network of little magazines and small presses that promoted borderblur poetics in Canada and brought scores of intermedial works into circulation. These venues and their publications gave writers an opportunity to combine and experiment with media and materials and write about taboo subjects while reaching a small but receptive audience. For example, bissett began publishing blewointment magazine in Vancouver; it ran from 1963 to 1977 (Blew Ointment Press operated from 1968 until approximately 1984) and inaugurated borderblur as a recognizable paratradition by featuring concrete poetry, lyric poetry, pattern poetry, collages, drawings, found materials, and more. Nichol, who lived in Vancouver during the early days of blewointment, relocated to Toronto and brought the publication’s spirit with him. He then started Ganglia Press, which produced Ganglia magazine (active from 1965 to 1967), jointly edited and published with Toronto poet David Aylward, to initially feature some of the writers Nichol knew out West, notably George Bowering, Copithorne, and bissett. Its related outgrowth, grOnk, was published starting in 1967 and, formalizing its interests in international borderblur, called for “manuscripts concerned with concrete kinetic and related borderblur poetry."