The documentary film about the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference at UBC reunites renegade poets
George Bowering, now an award-winning poet, author, and professor emeritus in SFU’s English Department, was finishing his degree at UBC in 1963. ENG 410 — also known as the Vancouver Poetry Conference — was the last course he took in the summer of ’63 before leaving for a job in Calgary as a professor.
The 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference at UBC is referred to as a “defining moment in the history of North American poetry.” Five American radical poets were invited, as well as one Canadian, all of whom had been vilified or ignored by academics for the new open form they were writing in.
“These were the people I already read, and I imagine it was a fairly similar situation for others,” explains Bowering of the guest instructors. Listing poets such as Charles Olsen, Robert Creeley, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Duncan, and Gregory Corso, Bowering says that they were already on their radar, but “not mentioned in the classroom.”
Organized by UBC professor Warren Tallman and American poet Robert Creeley as a threeweek summer intensive, the ENG 410 syllabus included discussions, workshops, lectures, and readings. The influential guest instructors were Charles Olsen, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Margaret Avison.
Filmmaker Robert McTavish said the conference was an “intense incubator.” He was inspired to create a documentary about it after becoming friends with Phyllis Webb when he lived on Salt Spring Island. Webb had attended UBC and was a radio broadcaster in 1963, preparing a program for CBC about the Vancouver Poetry Conference. McTavish learned that Webb’s program never aired, and the project gained momentum after digging up her old recordings.
In 2009, as McTavish was becoming immersed in the documentary, Stephen Collis of the SFU English Department organized a reunion symposium for a dozen writers who were attendees at the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference. These nowinfluential and award-winning authors were Bernice Lever, Maria Hindmarch, George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, Robert Hogg, Michael Palmer, Jamie Reid, Judith Copithorne, Fred Wah, Clark Coolidge, Pauline Butling, and Lionel Kearns. The reunion symposium, also called “The Line Has Shattered”, took place on Aug. 14, 2009 — 46 years after the original conference.
Now, 50 years after that landmark event, McTavish has begun screening his documentary film, The Line Has Shattered, featuring interviews with attendees, or iginal mater ial from the unaired CBC program, and even original audio recordings of the lectures and readings. The audio recordings were created due to a request from Warren Tallman, who instructed one of the students in 1963 to record lectures and readings.
That student, running around with a Wollensak 4-track, is now an award-winning author and the current Poet Laureate of Canada, Fred Wah. He donated his reel-toreel tapes to the Slought Foundation and they were digitized and remastered in 2002.
Listening to these original recordings was awe-inspiring, as the poetry washed over the film’s audience at the Vancouver premiere on March 21, But unfortunately, I was left confused as to who was reading whom, as the screen only showed a poet’s headshot and some fragmentary words. A simple lower third on the screen denoting the speaker and what they were reading from would have sufficed.
Knowing only the bare bones, I felt the film required a bit more set-up and identification of individuals. Its narrative, although eloquently delivered by Phyllis Webb, catered to those who played a previous role in the pivotal event.
As McTavish explained in a telephone interview after the screening, “The whole idea behind the film is to show how the five poets inspired a generation of young poets . . . my whole goal was to get to the bottom of the conference, and share it, and let [the audience] take it however they wanted.”
Bowering expressed that as students, they were “enamoured with these poets” and “star struck.” All five poets were fr iends and contemporar ies who had exchanged letters with each other, but had never been all in the same room together.
“They were knocking us out of our socks,” reeled Bowering. In the film, poet Michael Palmer states it eloquently and simply: “these tiny events have a resonance.”
