bpNichol was hammering on the end of a block of wood and shouting, in frenzy, “MA-YA-KOV-SKY”; he was surrounded by a polyvocal babble of sounds — words and word fragments — coming from the mouths of three others: Steve McCaffery, Paul Dutton, and Rafael Barreto-Rivera. They were extraordinary; they were The Four Horsemen. The audience laughed, gasped, and some scurried up the stairs for the exits. This is where I first encountered bpNichol. It was, I think, 1971, at a theatre in Toronto.
The Horsemen performed the viscerality of language-atoms in an explosion of poetic sonics; their compositions unglued the page. In the shakeup, ideas collided randomly as words echoed and spun other words then vowels and consonants. Nichol — a remarkable soloist with his own compositions such as “Beast” — was also the backbone of the Horsemen. Their synergistic alchemy breathed visceral force — ludic, lyric−anti-lyric, and disruptive — crumbling poetic formula with their fearless, inventive energy.1
Frame 2. Frame-up
Nichol’s view of poetry is multiple — wide and inclusive. In his writing he takes many shapes. In pictures he is often seen looking through a window, a frame. My knowledge of his multiplicities is personal, based on friendship, based on poetry — these are my windows.
bpNichol, “Lively Literary Events: Bob Cobbing Studies,” in An H in the Heart: A Reader, eds. George Bowering and Michael Ondaatje (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1994), 43. (Note: Lively Literary Studies were produced for L.A. Wallrich poetry catalogues, late 1970s to 1980s).
The Martyrology shows Nichol as the great explorer of poetic form. Begun in 1967, and with the first two books published in 1972, The Martyrology became an ever-evolving poem, the “life-long” poem for which Nichol became most known. It became a nine-book series, books one to six published in bp’s lifetime and books seven, eight, and nine published posthumously. This extended work allowed Nichol a broad inventive scope, allowing him, over two decades, to expand the breadth and depth of his investigation into poetics. The work, in its beginning, appeared to be lyric verse:
It’s such a long night to lie awake in
& the flesh does ache
& the night is lonely to belong in
“Scenes from the Lives of the Saints”2
However, fragmentation and paragrammatic play began to appear early in this work, with unusual characters’ names derived from parsed words — for example, Saint Orm (St. Orm / storm); Saint Ranglehold (St. Ranglehold / stranglehold). And the mysteriously named St. Reat and St. Agnes — both suggesting associated words. Reat — “a saint of speech and song” — can be found within the word “bREATh”; along with suggestions of “tear,” “treat,” “street,” “read,” and an anagram of “heart” with the “h” gone silent. Agnes, romantically involved with Reat, suggests “stagnant” or “agony.” (How much of this is bp’s intent? He did deconstruct and he loved the pun.) The saints — multiple identities, containers of meaning — also represented Nichol’s perception of the spiritual nature of words.
In The Martyrology the poet becomes a character. Nichol plays with the notion of biography/autobiography, using the journal — utaniki — as a generative mode. Details appear from the poet’s locales, from interactions with friends or family. Yet there are always questions: Who is speaking? Which voice is the poet; which is a persona?
i is simply
mind in motion
instances in i’s notion.
“Book V. In The Plunkett Hotel.”3
The work moves through different “looks” — free verse, concrete poetry, lettrist clusters, hypertext, sketches, musical scores, and other notations of the page. And Nichol’s love of comics shows up in frame-drawings. “If I can keep moving the structure of the poem around hopefully I can encompass different realities and different ways of looking at things.”4
In the early- to mid-1960s Nichol experimented with concrete poetry, the international movement that explored the page as surface, and text as material for visual and conceptual representation. Its images foregrounded surfaces of language — word, letter, and image, with semantic, phonetic and visual emphasis. Nichol was the earliest Canadian to gain recognition for his concrete work; he was published in 1967 in the UK by Bob Cobbing, and included in key anthologies of the 1960s and 1970s.
Concrete poetry embraces a wide range of aesthetic modes, and Nichol’s work, over time, moved through hand-drawn opto-texts and panel narratives. Employing his strong sense of the visual he also generated alphabetic designs, headline texts, and photocopier image manipulations. This work inflated the depth of the frame and the page’s physical potential. Nichol edited two concrete anthologies: the cosmic chef: an evening of concrete (Oberon Press, 1970) and The Pipe: Recent Czech Concrete Poetry (Coach House Press, 1973), presenting over forty Canadian and Czech poets.
Frame 5: Plotless Prose & Translation
Never one to resist challenges, whether through refusing an already-validated mode or creating constraints to explore the boundaries of form, Nichol delved into prose in Two Novels (1969) which contained hybrid narratives: Andy and the related tale For Jesus Lunatick. In addition, Nichol wrote: the metafictive The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid, first published in 1970, and awarded the 1971 Governor General’s Award for Poetry, then included in the 1978 collection Craft Dinner (Aya Press); the prose poems Journal; and the witty story-essays in Organ Music: Parts of an Autobiography (Black Moss Press, 1988). Notable among his prose projects is his novel Still (winner of the 3-Day Novel Contest, Pulp Press, 1992). Still works against conventional narrative by setting a “nouveau roman” tone through descriptions of two “scapes”: a house’s interior and the rural landscape beyond its windows, a trope that alternates with a conversation between a couple whose relationship is at a turning point. This story seems to contain no “action,” but simply the evolution of conversation, and shifts in the light and weather. There are no character names, no omniscient narrator insights, no relation to events in the larger world; just an elegant, compelling movement through novella-length constrained construct.
[. . .] & the wild grass & the scrub curve on around behind the house,
beyond the lawn & the hills take up more & more of the horizon.
“Cigarette?”
“Sure.”
“Light?”
“Please.”5
Translation, in the broadest sense of the word, enabled Nichol to employ a variety of non-traditional techniques and collaborations with like-minded artists to explore new entrances into text generation. The methods might be called trans-creations — not meaning-transposed interpretations, but transformations of the original into “new-sense/non-sense” assemblages. Techniques include: homolinguistic translation (with several sub-categories), punning, free association, and sonic, graphical, grammatical, and mathematical methods. The process might move a text within the same language, or across different languages. Explanation of these theories and techniques can be found in 1992’s Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book Machine.6
Publications of his translations include: from Catullus poem XXVII; SIX FILLIOUS, featuring transformations of Robert Filliou’s 14 Chansons et 1 Charade; the Nichol created/curated collection Translating Translating Apollinaire: A Preliminary Report; and Sharp Facts: Selections from TTA 26. These present yet further examples of Nichol’s explorations of language as an infinitely malleable medium.
Frame 6: Collaboration
Collaboration is a practice that can push an artist out of the comfort zone, yet can foster artistic open-mindedness and generosity, and so it was with Nichol. Some of Nichol’s collaborative work is addressed elsewhere herein, but it is worth noting additional instances: he worked with visual artists, including Barbara Caruso, in shaping and rendering his visual pieces; he collaborated with musicians for and in performance; he lent his imagination to operatic projects with composer R. Murray Schafer (for example, in Princess of the Stars); he created music theatre — his first production was Group (1980), with the composer Nelles Van Loon, staged in Toronto, and, later, Tracks (1983) and The Gargoyle (1985) were produced in Cobourg, Ontario; he co-wrote (as librettist) Space Opera with composer Howard Gerhard, with whom he created Ad Sanctos, which became Book 9 of The Martyrology. Nichol wrote television scripts, too, collaborating with producers and directors for, among others, Fraggle Rock and Blizzard Island.
No form was intimidating to Nichol; each presented an opportunity for a new mode of expression.
Frame 7: Computer Poems
Nichol embraced the computer with enthusiasm in the 1980s, and was among the first to see computer-programming language as a tool for poetry. He created twelve groundbreaking text-in-motion pieces for the computer screen on an Apple IIe computer using the Gutenberg Word Processing program, calling these pieces First Screening.7
Frame 8: Critical Thinking
bpNichol met Steve McCaffery in 1969. In McCaffery’s words, they shared “sympathetic interests and common concerns in writing (especially the felt need for an investigative stance and formal risk) . . . we had been starved for critical response and discussion of poetics, theories and forms.”8 Their conversations evolved into the Toronto Research Group (TRG), a two-man provocative and entertaining hypostasizing around text creation. They embraced a wide range of poetic and narrative strategies. Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Gertrude Stein, and other theoretical and poetic rule-breakers informed their “research.” Though their thought was informed by post-structuralist theory, the first point of their seven-point manifesto states their belief that “all theory is transient & after the fact of writing.”9
Frame 9: ”Pataphysics
In another radical mode of practice, Nichol explored the realm of ”Pataphysics — defined according to French absurdist Alfred Jarry as “the science of imaginary solutions,” and expanded upon by TRG as “the source of answers to questions never posed.”10 In Toronto Nichol initiated an intense explosion engaging several artists in ”Pataphysics. (The double “reverse” quotation marks, Nichol asserted, designated the Canadian branch of ”Pataphysical exploration.) Writing and collaborations culminated in L’Affaire ”Pataphysique, an actual and conceptual fair held at ArtCulture Resource Centre in Toronto in 1985, with over a dozen artists participating. Featured among them was Proprietor Nichol’s ”Pataphysical Hardware Company: “Everything for your imaginary needs.” Offerings for sale were conceptual and humorous products that were listed in his company’s catalogue. Nichol’s playfulness and humour, often enacted in his writing, is perhaps most evident in his ”Pataphysics work.
Nichol had an unwavering belief in the anti-establishment “little press” as the most suitable venue for publishing poetic work. Nichol’s own imprint was Ganglia Press (1964–1983), which published work by Judith Copithorne, bill bissett, John Riddell, and many others. Ganglia publications often appeared as the periodical grOnk.
In 1978, in an act of community-building typical of Nichol, he called a meeting of eight Toronto small press writer-editors — from Wild Press, Phenomenon Press, etc. — and invited us to converge into a larger cooperative press where each editor would have his own curatorial authority while adhering to agreed-upon quality production standards. We eight named ourselves Underwhich Editions, in answer to the question, “Which imprint should we publish under?” Over eighteen years, Underwhich published more than sixty-five pieces of literary work in a variety of forms, including chapbooks, books, one-sheets, pamphlets, and audiocassette recordings.
Frame 11: Wherein the Essayist Pauses to Reflect
bpNichol became, for me, and for many others, a treasured, revered, and noteworthy “bar-setter.” His special personal traits included a restless, ceaseless imagination; a continual striving to push beyond his own creative comfort zone; an expansive, inclusive “definition” of poetry (“poetry is what poets do”). His selflessness was built into his creativity and is reflected in all of his collaborative and curating endeavours. He extended his positive spirit, modesty, and encouragement to every writer and artist he met and fostered the individual within a community of artists. His generous heart still beats in the pulses of many Canadian and international writers and artists.
bpNichol died at age forty-four in Toronto in 1988, but he is still with us via well over 500 separate publications, and over 450 contributions to periodicals (according to jwcurry’s update on his ongoing “beepliography”). And the books and pamphlets just keep coming — critical studies, re-prints, re-collections and re-evaluations, such as ST. ART: The Visual Poetry of bpNichol (Confederation Art Gallery and Museum, 2000), bp: beginnings, Poetry by bpNichol (BookThug, 2014), and those cited herein.
The work of bpNichol continues; there is no last frame.11
1 “Mayakovsky,” 1977, LP recording Live in the West, or at PennSound, http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/.
2 bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 1 (Toronto: Coach House Books, 1972, 2003).
3 bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 6 (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1987, 1984).
4 bpNichol, Meanwhile: The Critical Writings of bpNichol, ed. Roy Miki (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2002): 276.
5 bpNichol, Still (Vancouver: Pulp Press, 1983), 26.
6 (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1992), 27–56.
7 First Screening: Computer Poems by bpNichol (Toronto: Underwhich Editions, 1984). See: http://vispo.com/bp/emulatedversion.htm.
8 Steve McCaffery, “Introduction,” in Rational Geomancy (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1992), 9.
9 McCaffery & Nichol, “Manifesto,” Rational Geomancy, 23.
10 Ibid., 302.
11 bpNichol, “Allegorical Return: H is I,” ed. Stephen Voyce, A book of variations: love — zygal — art facts (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2013), 248. Also in bpNichol, Zygal: A Book of Mysteries and Translations (Coach House Books, 1985), 123.
