Gladys Hindmarch

A seventh, unnamed ‘editor’, Gladys Hindmarch, was near the centre of their energy vortex. At the same time she was writing nursery rhyme variations in prose rhythms derived from Jack Kerouac and from high school age experiences playing tenor sax in a Vancouver Island dance combo. Because the magazine was devoted to poetry, her ‘fiction’ didn’t appear. She was evidently born proprioceptive, so sensitized to her environment, so quick to internalize it, making it her own, that she lived in a state in which she had almost no public identity other than that created by the person or persons she was with. On still spring evenings, not a whisper of wind, when she walked through the door the leaves on nearby trees would flutter into a welcoming dance. Possessing such marked extra-sensory powers, working entirely by untuition, she provided endless hours of direct personal response to the lives and poems of the other editors. Because her being was so volatile at that time, she became for all of the others whatever image of the feminine they happened to need: mother, sister, muse, lover, consolation, inspiration, sounding-board, scold, conscience. Unable to categorize, classify, or indeed even to speak until speech was given, when she said ‘no’ to a poem, or went silent, the other editors tended to pout that poem aside. She was a living metaphor for the numinousness around, the most distinct single human form of the wonder of the place.

Excerpt from an essay called Wonder Merchants that accompanied the Georgia Straight interview. “The spores of Vancouver poetry”. By Warren Tallman.