Gregory Betts
Gladys Hindmarch, WANTING EVERYTHING: The Collected Works.
Edited by Deanna Fong and Karis Shearer.
Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2020. $29.95.
My interest in this book runs very deep. I have been working on a scholarly assessment of experimental writing in Vancouver between 1959 and 1975 for ten years now. The results of that study are set to be published by the University of Toronto Press in a book called Finding Nothing, and Hindmarch plays a consistent role throughout the book, even though she rarely appears in histories or essays on Vancouver writing in the second half of the twentieth century. All of her books, and writing, have been long out of print—until now.
One focus of my book is on the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference (VPC), a landmark event in terms of Vancouver poetry history, but also, as Kevin Killian and others have argued, for the wider New American school of poetics. It was a great meeting place, and one that has been the subject of debate, analysis, reunion, memorialization, and archivization. It was an important, galvanizing moment that intensified a generation’s commitment to literature. Hindmarch attended the VPC as a student, alongside Daphne Marlatt, Fred Wah, bill bissett, Judith Copithorne, and many others. All of the students were obliged to create a journal of their experience of the event, almost all of which have been lost—only Marlatt’s and Carol Bergé’s journals have been published since. Before even considering the wider contributions of this collection, people need to know that Wanting Everything publishes the entire journal that Hindmarch kept throughout the conference. Editors Fong and Shearer have done a great service to the record of midcentury Vancouver modernism from salvaging this text alone, let alone the other treasures they have amassed.
Wanting Everything is a landmark publication, truly wanting nothing. Not only does it add a new-to-most voice to the mix of familiar figures from the Vancouver scene, but also it reinvents the story of what really happened in that time and space. Hindmarch’s VPC journal, for instance, notes moments when Sam Perry disagrees in class with the great Charles Olson, when Allen Ginsburg runs out of things to say, how Denise Levertov comes across as romantic and “prissy,” and Robert Creeley as “too inside himself, making problems where none existed, consciously becoming alone.” Hindmarch was a behind-the-scenes powerhouse at the time, making the space of literary production as much as being productive within that space. Fong and Shearer attend to this distinctly female labour, and demonstrate how Hindmarch’s creative writing does similar holistic space imagining. Her novel A Birth Account, that I write about in Finding Nothing: The VanGuards, 1959-1975 (forthcoming from University of Toronto Press, 2021), and which is included in full here, breaks the code of silence surrounding pregnancy and women’s own experience during labour. Hindmarch’s narrator hears what people say and documents how public language shapes her own access to her experience. She wants more from the world for herself (and vice versa).
Wanting Everything adds in two more book-length works, various letters to other writers, notebooks, interviews, and prose sketches. Across the compilation of all this material, a voice emerges that is attuned, attentive, and responsive to literature, literature’s role in a society, and literature’s potential role in reshaping that society. It is a voluminous perspective, one that sees everybody in their fully assumed subjectivity experiencing a collective, hardly objective world. Her writing, from the early fable reversals, to the multivalent journals, to the longer, more carnivalesque prose works, sees a larger picture and articulates a more contested space, while gently elaborating on other ways to see what’s going on. Wanting Everything makes it easier to access this singular perspective on it all.
GREGORY BETTS
is the author of seven books of poetry, including most recently Foundry (Redfoxpress, 2021), a collection of visual poems, and Sweet Forme (Apothecary Archive, 2020), a data visualization response to the sound patterns in Shakespeare’s sonnets. He was the Chancellor’s Chair for Research Excellence at Brock University (2014–2017), the Craig Dobbin Chair of Canadian Studies at University College Dublin (2018–2019), and is currently the president of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English. He is the curator of the bpNichol.ca digital archive and a professor of Canadian and avant-garde literature at Brock University.