The Line has Shattered: Vancouver's Landmark 1963 Poetry Conference

"It was in unfixed territory - where the poem, in my mind, always should be."

- Michael Palmer

The Vancouver Poetry Conference, hosted by the University of British Columbia in the summer of 1963, is seen by many as a landmark event in the history and development of North American innovative poetry and "a radiant node" in the poetic consciousness changes brought about in the cultural attitudes of the 1960s.

Organized by UBC English professor Warren Tallman and American poet Robert Creeley, the conference was an intense, freewheeling three-week program of discussions, workshops, lectures and readings at which a rising generation of Canadian and American poets was exposed to and in many cases profoundly influenced by the personalities and "New American" open form poetics of the visiting poet-instructors: Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Denise Levertov (with Canadian Margaret Avison and a party-crashing Philip Whalen). Their personalities and poetics inspired a rising generation to embrace new, open forms of poetry, and even the field of poetry itself as a meaningful experience for a lifetime's work. 58 minutes. 2013

Poem motion graphics by David Jhave Johnston.

REVIEWS

The Line Has Shattered is an invaluable teaching tool as well as a fascinating sketch of the community that came together for the legendary Vancouver Poetry Conference. Historians, poets, and lovers of poetry must give thanks to director Robert McTavish for rescuing rare footage from the archives and contextualizing the socio-political landscape that informed North American experimental poetry in the mid-1960s. This documentary does much to explain the trajectory of the Open Field practices that began with the San Francisco Renaissance and unfurled from coast to coast for the next five decades.        - Lisa Jarnot, Poet, author of Robert Duncan: The Ambassador from Venus (University of California Press, 2012)

"If you don't know anything about the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, start here. If you've read everything there is to read about the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, restart here. This documentary provides original footage, visualization of key texts, and new interviews that highlight the importance of the event to the writing of so many key figures in Canada and the United States. If you've ever wondered what cutting edge poetry looked like back in the 1960s, what it sounded like, or how some of the top poets of a generation interacted with their audience, this film is your portal back to a time when poetry mattered and people gathered in large but tight knit communities to debate style, theme, and form. That line might have shattered, but it is well worth revisiting."      -Gregory Betts, Poet, author of Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations, forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press, and Director of the Centre for Canadian Studies at Brock University.  Robert McTavish has made a lively documentary about a significant moment of one important generation of poets speaking to another; and also about the introduction of the New American Poets into Canada as well as university life. The Line has Shattered serves as useful document to the ongoing histories of poets in the academy and the importance of open form as a strategy for both poetry and life when thinking of this interface. Highly recommended.   -Peter Gizzi, Poet, co-editor of My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, and Professor of English, UMass Amherst.

This excellent mix of older footage with recent interviews with conference attendees will appeal to a limited audience, but it is still highly recommended for comprehensive literary collections. - Cliff Glaviano for Library Journal

Relevant articles:

Karis Shearer, 2019. "It's All a Curious Dream": Nostalgia, Old Media, and the Vancouver Poetry Conference, 1963. Canlit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (McGill-Queens UP, 2020)

Deanna Fong & Janey Dodd, 2020. "Event and Archive: Remapping the Poetry Reading Series in Canada, 1957–1974," Journal of Borderlands Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 35(1), pages 1-18, January.