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
