7. Becoming bp
You & I were “other” to ourselves, our minds.
— Jerome Rothenberg, “Je est un autre”
(http://poemsandpoetics.blogspot.com/2010/09/je-est-un-autre-ethnopoetics-poet-as.html)
The fiction makes us real.
— Robert Kroetsch, Creation, 63
On May 8, 1964, while familiarizing himself with his new job and workmates, Barrie paused to sketch a plan in his notebook for a series of five or more poetry books that he hoped to present to his Vancouver friend Sybil Huba. Volume I was to be Tedious Ways by fourth-century poet Pao Chao, volume II to be Fire and Water “by bp (me),” volume III to be called Jazz and contain seven poems by Jack Kerouac, volume IV to be Over a Plea by James Alexander, and volume V to be The Singing Head by Jamie Reid. The Kerouac and Chao volumes were to be typed, and the others to be written by hand. The small “b” of the “bp” of “bp (me)” was written over top of the capital “B” that Barrie had instinctively written rather than the lowercase “b” that he had intended. The overall title was “Paper Press Poets Series.” His note “for Mrs. Huba” left it ambiguous whether this was to be a series dedicated to her or perhaps one created — at her request? — for her to distribute. The two-page plan also included a sketch of the title page of the “bp (me)” book on which the monogram/motif “bp” occurs nine times, and one of its contents pages on which it occurs 12 times. There was no mention of such a series in the several letters Barrie received this year from Sybil Huba, nor any evidence that he did more work on the series than these two pages — although he did, according to her son Dezso, in the next few months send her numerous single-copy hand-drawn or typed pamphlet editions of what he/“bp” was writing.1
The notebook pages do, however, show him working, as he was the previous month when signing the two drafts of his “Mind-Trap” visual poems “bpn” and “bp,” toward this new signature identity — toward creating a new writing self out of letter-forms. Perhaps because of his growing preoccupation with Dace, most of the remaining notebook entries for 1964–65 concern dreams he has remembered or his current thoughts about her. But he was sending out visual poems for possible publication, and requesting subscriptions to magazines, and doing both of these over his new name. bill bissett replied to his April 1964 subscription request to blew ointment by addressing him as “b. p. nichol.” George Bowering replied to a similar request Barrie had sent to his magazine Imago by writing to “B. P. Nichol,” as did Margaret Randall when he requested a subscription to El Corno Emplumado. In August Victor Coleman rejected some poems Barrie had offered to his magazine Island, writing to “bp Nichol,” and in September, after Barrie had ordered from Victor a copy of my book City of the Gulls and Sea, replied to “Mr. Nichol.” Barrie would also receive “Dear B. P. Nichol” replies when he began contacting international visual poetry magazines and their poet-publishers in 1965.2
On the notebook pages immediately following his sketches for the “Paper Press” series of poetry books, Barrie announced to himself in two-inch high letters his “TASK” now that he had come to Toronto, and then listed its parts. The task included both writing and psychotherapy as interlocking projects. His first goal was surprisingly mimetic — to record in words the things he saw, including things of “nature” and of the “real” world — instead of what his brother Don was calling his dreamworld. His second was to jettison that dreamworld by entering deep therapy. Another was to “become” by transcending the barriers that were containing him. And the last was to become a proficient writer of poetry. He signed this list “bp.” Somewhat ironically, the signature suggested that the distinction between real world and the dreamworld might be much more complex than either Don or the signifying capabilities of a list were suggesting. Was “bp” “real” or a new “dream”? Was it possible to dwell in both worlds? Or could dreams and other inventions be a part of a “real” world?
But his pen name, or perhaps his dream identity-name, was not the only aspect of his writing that Barrie wanted to change now that he had left his Vancouver friends and arrived in Toronto. The new name was part of a larger project to change how he wrote poetry. For some time he had been struggling to perceive a way to make his poetry less artificial in its rhythms and apparent emotions. In a November 27, 1963, notebook entry he had asked himself — again in theatrically large capital letters — whether the complexity of one’s emotional responses to an increasingly complex world meant that a poet should utterly abandon old ideas of poetic patterns of rhythm and possibly the concept of pattern itself. He added, foreshadowing some of his later pronouncements, that he was not trying to imply the destructiveness associated with Dada but merely one that was needed for starting anew or for finding earlier or better foundations on which to work. Despite his apparent misunderstanding of Dada as “destructive,” a simple dichotomy — destruction/construction — was again being at least unconsciously questioned.
Barrie had also been looking for ways to make his poetry less self-serving, but despite having encountered in debates among Vancouver poets ideas such as Olson’s “against wisdom as such” and Duncan’s understanding that poets serve the language rather than themselves,3 or that content can result from the poet’s following of the music of a poem through “tone-leading,” he had experienced difficulty overcoming older notions that a poem is an expression of one’s ongoing experiences or makes important statements about life (notebook, November 13, 1963), or that it should honestly express one’s feelings (notebook, November 27, 1963). His discussions with himself on these pages had tended often to be as confused and agonized as his thoughts about his relationships with women. However, on April 8, 1964, scant days before leaving for Toronto, he had written after a discussion with his friend Neild Holloway — again employing theatrical capital letters — that a poet should be “directed” by his poem rather than by the words he is using. His distinction between the poem and its words is somewhat obscure — but by “words” he seems to have meant a poet’s conscious intentions. And in Toronto in a notebook entry of May 8 he was able to foresee being a poet who does not merely fulminate and lament but can offer invented experiences of which he is only part. He added that the poet should forget playing at being a poet as if it were a role, and give up any preoccupation with self-celebration. In a few months these were to be the goals of an “ideopome”-writing bpNichol.
Barrie was much clearer about this period in his poetry and in his thinking about poetics when interviewed about them in the next decade. In 1978 he told Ken Norris that in 1965
I just became aware that it didn’t matter what I set down, what mood I was in. I was essentially churning out the same poem, and that I could become very proficient at that poem cause that’s what it was, it was a poem and had this minor variation. . . . There was a type of arrogance, I thought; that is to say I was coming to the occasion of the poem to force myself upon it. I was being arrogant rather than learning. (Miki 2002 237)
He used the same word, “arrogant,” when replying to Dwight Gardiner in a 1976 interview:
. . . I thought I was being too arrogant, that . . . I was coming to the situation obsessed that I had something to say per se: a very didactic purpose as opposed to simply giving myself up to the process of writing. And as a result, I was not learning anything from the language. . . . (154)
He told Jack David in an interview later that year that he had been automatically “imposing some sort of preconceived notion of wisdom on the occasion of writing.” His way out of this impasse was to stop writing any poetry except visual poetry.
So my focus shifted onto form and I stopped writing lyric poems and began writing what I at that time called “ideopomes,” which were just these little ideogram type things. [. . .] So that I, in essence, abandoned “straight” poetry for a period of about a year and a half . . . . (Bayard 19)
Barrie’s concerns about “arrogance” and about imposing a “preconceived notion of wisdom” were expressing a common concern among poets at this time about intentionality. In Charles Olson’s “projective” poetics this concern had been reflected in an environmental poetics: the poet wrote out of the field of events in which he or she was situated, and those events contributed to the linguistic events of the writing. In Duncan’s poetics the poet followed the sounds proposed by the phonemes of the poem. In Jack Spicer’s poetics one imagined one’s poems being “dictated” by minds from another place and time. In the “serial” poetics that both Duncan and Spicer practised, the sections of the poem were to emerge from a series of “riming” events that the poet encountered. In the visual poems or “ideopoems” that Barrie was now proposing to restrict himself to, the content was generated by the shape of the letters, or by the words concealed within words and the contrasting meanings those words might have. Later Barrie would realize that he could avoid intentional expression of meaning through dialogue — by talking to the saint characters of his poems, and to their persona-character bpNichol, and creating dialogical meanings.
However, there was something more to these interrelated decisions to give up “straight poetry” and invent an arrogance- and intention-avoiding bpNichol. In his notebooks as early as 1963 he had begun linking the problem of “honesty” and honest communication in poetry with the problem of honest communication between human beings that Lea Hindley-Smith had begun helping him resolve. As in his notes on his “Task,” he had begun to see the blocks he was experiencing in his writing as inseparable from the blocks he was encountering in his emotional life. In April 1964 he copied long quotations from Wilhelm Reich’s The Murder of Christ into his notebook, beginning with “It IS possible to get out of a trap. However, in order to break out of a prison, one must first confess to being in a prison. The trap is man’s emotional structure, his character structure. There is little use in devising systems of thought about the nature of the trap if the only thing to do to get out of the trap is to know the trap and to find the exit.”
In a notebook entry in mid-May 1965, which Barrie titled “Thots on the Creative Process,” he reflected on the fact that his old 1335 Comox Avenue friends Dave Phillips and Barb Shore were now unable to write. He commented that not being able to write anything that you can perceive as “good,” or feeling that you have nothing to say, was a problem that he thought he had found an answer to in psychotherapy. He added that anything that blocked one’s ability to write or express was also a hindrance to one’s personal development and thus properly a problem of health, and then repeated that any barrier that prevented personal growth, particularly in one’s creativity, was not only unhealthy but unnatural. Once one had recognized such a block or barrier, he wrote, any further action was useless — except that of breaking through the barrier. He again quoted Reich, this time printing most of the quotation in capital letters: “All that is necessary to get out of a trap is to recognize that it exists and to find the exit, knowing anything further is useless, except where it has a bearing on your escape.”
THE COVER OF DADA LAMA, 1968, PUBLISHED IN BRITAIN BY TLALOC.
The concepts of traps, barriers, blocks, dead-ends, and finding exits were ones that Barrie would repeat in various poetics statements over the next few years, as in the “statement” he would write in 1966 for inclusion in his boxed Coach House Press book bp: “. . . we have come up against the problem . . . of finding as many exits as possible from the self (language/communication exits) in order to form as many entrances as possible for the other.” In the concluding paragraph of this “statement” he would make the soon to be well-known pronouncement that “there is a new humanism afoot that will one day touch the world to its core: traditional poetry is only one of the means by which to reach out and touch the other.” One of the other means, although Barrie would only hint about it here, was of course psychotherapy: “dialogues,” he writes, “with the self that clarify the soul & heart and deepen the ability to love” (Miki 2002 18).
In September 1968 in an extended entry on “time” in his notebook he would describe the psychotherapy offered by Lea Hindley-Smith’s recently christened therapy institution Therafields as a “communication therapy,” repeating a word he had been using in his thoughts about poetics since 1963. What role Barrie was playing in the creation and general use at Therafields of this phrase is unclear. However the next year when he was editor of the new Therafields in-house newsletter Axis, and launching its first issue, he would emphasize this phrase while writing a lead editorial with a striking rhetorical resemblance to his “statement” in bp.
Now we are beginning the move outward, outside of ourselves moving to take over the inward feelings and realizations to present them here first in a form accessible to all of us to be shared. This is the very real necessity. The very real necessity is that the insights that our working is now generating be shared as a common source of energy to further us all in our searches in these areas of human communication. What Axis is is first of all a living dialogue, a living continual communication to be shared among us, an ever growing work and source book for the work which we call communications therapy. (December 24, 1969)4
He would sign the editorial “bpNichol,” just as he had signed all his literary writing after April 1964 and all of his writing for Therafields. By this point he had firmly established two trademark signatures — one the actual signature of bp/bpNichol and the other a signature style, a liberation rhetoric of barriers surmounted, freedom to live achieved, communications established, exits discovered, lives renewed, poetry resurrected. As he would write three times in his 1971 ABC: the Aleph Beth Book, “the poem will live again.” So too, he believed, would the Therafields client.
The undeclared keyword of the above passage was translation — concealed there within the word “communication.” “Inner feelings” were to be presented “in a form.” “Insights” were to be shared as an “energy,” and from there become part of a “dialogue,” and from there become a “book.” Like poets, and like the subjects of Freud’s “talking therapy,” the Therafields clients were to outer themselves — “communicate” — in words, and find their insights in words. They were to create meanings through “dialogues” with their selves, and with their internalizations of their analysts. Barrie had also translated himself into a word, “bpNichol,” not only finding within it an “exit” from his self, but also creating an alternative Nichol who was a position in language as well as a rhetoric and a deployer/product-in-process of an expanding number of genres. Translation of course sallies out from but does not eliminate the item translated. Barrie, another position in both linguistic and biological systems of signs, was still here keeping his notebooks, having feelings and insights, making and changing plans, attempting to “communicate,” engaging in dialogue, and both translating and blurring himself into that increasingly imaginative communications device, “bpNichol.”