8. Ideopoet
how’s the living experiment going? sounds like a good idea, but 3 sister-type nuns, are you for real?
the mag [Ganglia] is the BEST I8ve [sic] seen in Canada and is better than most American mags — keep it up, baby, we need people like you.
“u & Bissett & levy doing the most exciting things in N. American Konkretian”
— D.r. Wagner to “bp!” 1966
Barrie’s decision on arriving in Toronto to concentrate on visual poetry, or “ideopomes,” as he then was calling these works, was probably the most fortuitous artistic decision he could have made — not necessarily because it would allow him to be less “arrogant,” predictable, and intention-serving in his writing, but because visual poetry had been, unbeknownst to him, enjoying since the early 1950s an international surge of interest as “concrete poetry.” In his notebooks Barrie had been creating since 1963 various visual effects through drawings, such as “Mind-Trap #1,” and through arrangements of letters, but it was only the latter that he was now thinking of as “ideopomes” — most likely because they were constructed out of words, syllables, and letters — though not necessarily out of sentences. Because these “pomes” focussed mainly on words and their component letters and syllables, and not on sentences, they steered him away from the predictability and melodrama of the narcissistic “i-fall-upon-the-thorns-of-life” kinds of poetry he had become increasingly wary of writing. He was referring to these cryptic word poems when he wrote to his old Vancouver friend Arnold Shives on June 12, 1965, that until recently he had been dubious about the literary value of his new ideopomes, but had decided — after reading William Carlos Williams’s endorsement of Joyce’s “maiming” of words in Finnegans Wake1 — that they were every bit as valid as literature as those he thought of as his “regular” poems. He wrote that in his ideopomes he had been going even further than Joyce and other writers — by dismantling real words, by ripping into the roots of language, its syllables and its phonemes, by tearing words apart and regrouping the fragments, by doing things to words that you just wouldn’t do in ordinary poems. As if to illustrate, he signed the letter with a column of variations of the word “barrie” beginning with “beerie.”
Arnold Shives was probably Barrie’s most important correspondent during much of 1964 and 1965. He was the only one of Barrie’s Vancouver circle to continue to attempt to think through aesthetic problems and to respond to Barrie’s evolving ideas — although not always positively. Others such as Dave Phillips, Barb Shore, Jim Alexander, and Neild Holloway continued to write to him but had little to relate except events in their personal lives, and very little to say in response to what Barrie was writing to them. Phillips and Holloway would merely urge him to come back to Vancouver and terminate his — in their view — dangerous dalliance with psychotherapy. Barrie characterized them to Loren Lind as “artists who were fantastically suspicious of any form of . . . ‘therapy’ because they equate their art with their illness and figure if you take away their illness you will take away their art.” Barrie had also contacted bill bissett in April 1964 to request a subscription to his magazine blew ointment, and later that year had a poem — “yur Appolainaire poem” bissett called it — published in one of its issues, Barrie’s first publication. But their correspondence would not flourish until the middle of the next year.
In the fall of 1964 Arnold Shives had enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute. In a statement he deposited in 1990 at the Simon Fraser University Library he recalled his first year there as a lonely time during which Barrie’s letters “encouraged me in my work and inspired me to continue writing poetry. I don’t think I’d be exaggerating to say that I found my correspondence with bp as creatively stimulating as my art classes at SFIA.” On Barrie’s side, his letters to Shives seemed to have been opportunities to explore or expand ideas and theories. In one late-1965 letter he told Shives that each thing that a writer writes is a creative experiment, including the letters that they were exchanging.
In one of his letters to Shives he drafted a manifesto, again using a rhetoric of walls and barriers, and typed in emphatic-looking capitals. Here he announced that when one writes a poem one is only creating an environment for words to interact within. The poet’s responsibility is to create the environment that is most suitable to the words. Because self cannot be kept out of the arts, Barrie argued, the artist must more vigorously throw himself into its processes. Barriers and other impediments to the development and growth of the poem — which he seems to think of as occuring at the poem’s own instigation — must be smashed and removed. Necessarily ignorant of how inspiration happens, the poet can be merely a medium through which the poem creates itself — despite the attempts of many artists to take credit for that creation. His or her main role is not construction but simply to remove any barrier that might prevent the poem from freely constructing itself into being. The manifesto appears to combine Reich’s discourse of barriers with Blake’s, Spicer’s, and Duncan’s understandings that the authors of poetry are elsewhere, in language, or “in eternity,” and to move sharply toward creating a kind of psychoanalytical poetics.
In a January 1965 letter he complained to Shives about the “coterie of poets” — he named American poet Robert Kelly as one member — who have gathered around North American magazines such as Matter, Sum, El Corno Emplumado, Wild Dog, Tish, Jogglars, Fubbalo, and Victor Coleman’s Island, and told him that he knew personally that such coteries or groups always tend to stifle one’s own convictions. He added that he was not at all one who believed in the “myth” that to be successful artists should seek to live in artists’ colonies or collectives. More than likely he was thinking of his recent little 1335 Comox Street “group” and its stifling interactions. He was also of course scorning the “regular” poems that his list of “coterie” magazines was publishing — “regular” poems that he now believed he had left behind for his “ideopomes.” He concluded the brief diatribe by telling Shives — who in his own letters had suggested that Barrie’s drawn poems seemed to lack complexity — that he was willingly following his own path, that there was no value in getting distracted by someone else’s.
In a May letter he offered an expanded definition of the “ideopome,” writing that the distinction between “poem” and “pome” was meaningful because the “pome” could be numerous things — a piece of typography, an optical trick, a small burst of sound. A “pome” can tear words apart as well as link them together. Through them a reader can learn to fill gaps, anticipate the unexpected, to see things that aren’t openly visible, he argued. He adapted Philip Whalen’s definition of a poem as a “graph of a mind moving” — which he’d probably encountered in Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry anthology (420) — to call a pome a graph of a mind moving through space into various elements of language. But he also told Shives that the pome has no author because any person could have created it. It identifies a framework of meaning and shows what else could dwell there.
Meanwhile, he had been sending some of his new “pomes” to various Canadian magazines, including Coleman’s Island, as well as The Canadian Forum, George Bowering’s Imago, and James Reaney’s Alphabet. Some were accepted by The Canadian Forum and Alphabet — Reaney commented in an April 29, 1965, letter that his wife Colleen Thibaudeau had been writing similar texts for children, which she had called “lozenge poems.” Bowering, in a letter dated July 29, 1965, informed Barrie that his “ideopomes” elsewhere in the world would be called “concrete poems,” or “Kon,” and that he hasn’t seen any Kon that makes him “excited or very interested.” He recommended that Barrie contact Cavan McCarthy whose British magazine Tlaloc did publish such poetry. Barrie would later mark Bowering’s letter as one of the turning points in his publishing career, telling Caroline Bayard and Jack David that through this letter and “through Bowering I found the European underground of concrete” (Bayard 24).
There are some complications to this story, however. In a letter to Shives dated March 10, 1965, Barrie had used the term “concrete poetry,” telling his friend that he had wanted to send him some poems but, having realized that he hated everything he had written (he was evidently referring to his “regular” poems), he had been seeing what he could produce in “concrete poetry” and similar forms, and was enclosing four of these results. He had got news of the term two months before from his friend Andy Phillips who had been travelling in Europe and sent him a Times Literary Supplement article about concrete. Also, in Barrie’s archives is a letter from Cavan McCarthy dated July 19, 1965, two days before Bowering’s letter, which began “dear bp, Thanks for poems, which are receiving the most serious consideration.” The poems were some of Barrie’s “bpNichol” ideopomes, one of which McCarthy would publish in the December 1965 Tlaloc. The remainder of this McCarthy letter was definitely door-opening, giving Barrie postal addresses for such concrete poetry stalwarts as Dom Sylvester Houédard and Pierre Garnier, and the names of magazines that would publish concrete. It could not have been occasioned by Bowering’s subsequent letter. Possibly Barrie had reasons for wanting literary history to record that he had gone his “own path” in ignorance of international concrete until pointed toward it by Bowering. Or possibly he had believed his “ideopomes” would not be thought of as concrete. He said this in fact to Nicette Jukelevics in a 1974 interview, that in 1964–65 “I never thought about my poetry as concrete, I thought about it using the fact that the page is a visual field to do visual things” (Miki 2002 135). Or possibly the spring 1965 was so busy and stressful for Barrie that he simply forgot what he had been learning from whom when.
Barrie’s personal path to seeing “the page as a visual field” and conceiving of “ideopomes” is obscure. One clue, however, is that many of his early visual poems explore the effects of making minimal changes to words — “barrie” to “beerie” for example alters one phoneme, creating what linguists call a minimal pair, as would the change from “rain” to “pain” in one of the untitled visual poems he would publish in 1967 in his first Coach House Press book, bp.2 Others, by merely substituting a space for a letter, change the meaning of the remaining letters, as when “rumbled” becomes “rum led” in “Cycle #37,” a poem in his earlier book that year, the British-published Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer. Still others explore a minimal change of accent, as when he changes “warbled” to “warBLED” — in the poem “Popular Song,” also in Konfessions. In email conversations Goodbrand, who shared a room with Barrie in 1965–66, as well as working with him at the Sigmund Samuel, recalls him voraciously reading books on both linguistics and psychoanalysis throughout this period, including Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics and possibly Edward Sapir’s Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech, and Benjamin Lee Whorf’s Language, Thought and Reality, and discussing eagerly linguistics’ fundamental principle that language is a system of differential signs — a system that creates meanings not by reference to objects outside itself but by minimal differences within. Why would Barrie be reading these? Most likely it was because linguistics’ usefulness for poetry, including the work of Saussure, Sapir, and Whorf, had been widely discussed in the Vancouver poetry scene of 1961–64 — forming part of the basis, for example, of Lionel Kearns’s manifesto “Stacked Verse,” which Barrie had read in the Vancouver issue of Louis Dudek’s magazine Delta in November 1963.
As well as informing the word changes of the poems above, this understanding of minimal difference would appear to have been the ground of Barrie’s “Vowelgrrgyrations” and “The Evening’s Ritual” in Konfessions, in which the words of each line move one position to the right, and later for his “developer” poems in which each letter of every line would shift one space to the right until the first line was restored. Moreover, in the course of beginning the serial poem Scraptures, 1965–66, and along with it unknowingly beginning his lifelong poem The Martyrology, Barrie would discover, in the company of his friend and library colleague David Aylward, The Martyrology’s founding saint, “St Ranglehold” — and would discover him because of how phonemes are altered by the introduction of a single space between two letters. Visually, “St ranglehold” and “stranglehold” are a “minimal pair.” All of The Martyrology’s saints would thus be Saussurean — broken not in religious conflict but in language. Like “bp” himself they had emerged from written language.
Goodbrand also remembers Barrie at this time reading and discussing writing by Jacques Lacan — possibly articles that had been published in English (Lacan’s first book publication in English was not until 1968). Goodbrand’s recollection raises the intriguing possibility that as well as encountering Saussure’s understandings that meanings are created within language Barrie was encountering Lacan’s account of the Oedipal period as one in which the infant surrenders the illusion of being one with one’s mother, and thus with the world, for access to the second-order world of language — a world in which all events, objects, and emotions can exist only through the mediation of words. Such theories would have resounded for Barrie of his childhood substitution of writing stories, like “The Sailor from Mars,” for his Oedipal yearnings for union with his mother, and illuminated as well his new resolve both to substitute letters, phonemes, and syllables for embarrassingly “arrogant” desires and intentions, and to write and publish as that secondary signifier, “bpNichol.”3
The second fortuitous move that Barrie made in this period was to found a magazine. He and Aylward decided in the fall of 1964 to begin publishing a magazine to be called Ganglia, which would be open to various kinds of new poetry including concrete. One of the earliest records of it is a March 1965 letter from Barrie to bissett in Mexico, which mentions that Barrie and a friend are thinking about starting a magazine. The letter is signed “love barrie” with the added explanation that “barrie” is also “bp.” The magazine was mostly his own idea, he would tell interviewer Geoff Hancock in 1985, but the title was Aylward’s. It was to be a site of communication, much like a ganglion is in physiology — or Therafields was for its members. “Ganglia was more like a newspaper in my thinking about it. A lot of my editing was news edited. ‘I like this line — the rest of it is just okay’ and ‘what’s happening in this line is goddamn exciting, let’s develop it and get it out right away!’ [. . .] I was not looking to preserve immortal works in magazine form,” he would explain to Hancock (34). Barrie was also feeling far from “immortal” himself. He told Hancock that much of his impatience to publish whatever he partly liked in Ganglia, and to get something of his own into print, was that he expected to have a short life. “The model for me was Keats, dead at 26. All that bullshit about ‘make it wait, make it a considered thing,’ was not for me. I could be dead. I thought I would die at 18” (35-6).
A PAGE FROM A 1966 LETTER TO BARRIE FROM BILL BISSETT.
(bill bissett)
Barrie and Aylward had otherwise set up Ganglia as a conventional eclectic poetry magazine. It would consider all types of poetry, and would sell subscriptions to interested readers. Barrie recalled to Jack David and Caroline Bayard that Aylward himself was initially uninterested in visual poetry, thinking “it was all bullshit at the time” (Bayard 24). Barrie’s main goal was to make young British Columbia writers that he knew — bissett, Phillips, Judy Copithorne — better known in Ontario by giving them an Ontario outlet. The two editors printed and distributed the first issue in October 1965. It contained artwork by Shives, poetry by British Columbia writers Alexander, bissett, Bowering, Copithorne, Holloway, and Phillips, and poems by bpNichol, Aylward, and Barrie’s recent friend Margaret Avison, who also worked at the Sigmund Samuel. Barrie had solicited the Copithorne poems through bissett. In that summer 1965 letter he had told him that they already had four issues planned, and for the second issue had a Red Lane manuscript that he’d obtained from Bowering, and would like to make the fourth issue a bissett book, and later alternate between doing issues devoted to one person and anthology-type ones. He also wanted to do a Jamie Reid issue, telling bissett that Reid was the poet in the first period of the Tish group that he admired the most, and that for a considerable time he had been hoping to publish a large collection of his poems. He asked bissett to speak to Reid about such a project.
Phillips, who had four poems in the first issue, wrote in early November that he had received Barrie’s “neat mag” but didn’t like bissett’s poems, and his drawings even less, and also disliked Barrie’s visual poems, saying that they did “nothing” for him and asking Barrie to please explain. On November 9, Barrie, Aylward, and the local contributors arranged a Ganglia benefit reading at the Bohemian Embassy coffee house but, as he wrote to bissett, the reading had coincided with a power failure that affected most of eastern North America, and attendance, and receipts, were low. In this letter Barrie complained about his difficulty in writing letters, saying that he had a “teerrrrrrrrrrrrrbell” block about letters and indicating that he worried that his prose in them would seem stilted to the recipient. He also worried about his ideopomes, telling bissett that he was aesthetically torn between continuing to call these works ideopomes and succumbing to popular convenience and calling them concrete or op-art — and that for some reason he couldn’t find enough mental space to think that problem through. Then despair evidently overwhelmed him, and in an extraordinary outburst he exclaimed that this entire letter was shit, and then cursed all poetry, poetry mags, and their idiot-editors and wished them condemned to hell. He vulgarly and somewhat incoherently cursed the goddess of poetry for having seduced, captured, and enslaved him. Whether he’d been drinking, was overtired, or merely determined not to seem stilted is unclear. In his reply bissett — perhaps pondering the same possibilities — assured him that everything would be all right if he could “find yur place in the wheel.”
The second Ganglia, The 1962 Poems of R.S. (Red) Lane, with an introduction by Bowering, was published shortly after the unfortunate Bohemian Embassy benefit. Barrie’s attempts to obtain a Jamie Reid manuscript, however, were in vain. bissett’s letters suggest that either Reid didn’t have sufficient poems for a collection or that he was worried about the political implications of having his poems associated with Barrie, with Toronto, or possibly with bissett. Barrie told bissett in an early 1966 letter that he might write to Reid himself, and then exclaimed again that he was exasperated, “pissed” at poetry. This time it wasn’t the goddess who had angered him, but the poetry scene. Too many of the current poets, he complained, kowtow to established contemporary taste and opinion. He hadn’t written any poems for weeks, he boasted, and if this killed the bitch of poetry he didn’t care. This condemnation of his contemporaries was similar to the one he had made to Shives the year before, and may have reflected his frustration at getting magazines to accept his visual poems. However, he had actually been having some success at this. In the past year 31 of his visual poems had appeared in various magazines, in addition to those in his own Ganglia. But this success was evidently not enough, and his anxieties about “coteries,” and about getting wider Canadian acceptance for his “ideopomes,” were continuing to fester.
In May 1966 Barrie and Aylward published Ganglia 3, with poems by Alexander, Aylward, Bowering, Martina Clinton, Victor Coleman, Judy Copithorne, Pat Lane, Pat Lowther, d.a. levy, and Ian Hamilton Finlay, as well as by Barrie and his brother Don. For issue 4, they published bissett’s collection, We Sleep Inside Each Other All, with a preface by Sam Perry and an afterword by Barrie. The issue came out in early July in time for Barrie’s first visit to Vancouver since his 1964 departure. Victor Coleman and his wife Sarah had done most of the final typing.
For both editors Ganglia was a learning experience. It moved Aylward toward becoming a writer of visual and conceptual poetry. It caused both Barrie and him to lose interest in publishing an eclectic poetry magazine for paid subscribers. “Gradually our interest waned,” Barrie wrote in his introduction to his Ganglia Press Index (1972), “there seemed so many mags publishing more or less straight [“regular”] poems & really as far as publishing went we were less & less interested in that.” He continued, “We were discouraged with the whole business of subscribers . . . demanding where their paid for copies were . . . of poems & the endless stream of self-addressed stamped envelopes.” Their declining interest meant that it is difficult to know when the fifth and seventh issues were “published” — sometime in 1966 and 1967, receiving, in Barrie’s words, “truly pitiful distribution.”
But Barrie had enjoyed publishing the small bissett and Lane collections, and printing the occasional pamphlet to give away to friends. With Aylward’s financial help, and the co-editing of Rob Hindley-Smith, Lea’s son, and the young Ganglia fan David W. Harris, recently arrived from up north in Collingwood, Barrie launched in January 1967 the irregular pamphet series grOnk. All of its issues were to be mischievously numbered as parts of Ganglia 6. All were to be given away to whomever the editors thought would be interested in receiving them. The first issue would include work by the French spatialiste poets j.f. bory and Pierre Garnier, as well as levy, Wagner, bissett, Nichol, Smith, Harris, and Coleman; the second would include the British concrete poets Kenelm Cox, John Furnival, and Cavan McCarthy, as well as Nichol, Harris, and David Phillips. For Barrie this change from selling the magazine to subscribers to giving it away “for free as a news-sheet” (Hancock 32) was both personally liberating and useful in terms of poetic theory.
Ganglia was becoming burdensome. I wanted something that was quicker, and I wanted something that involved no accounting. Since you lose money anyway with a small press, why not do it for free? Do it for free as a news-sheet. Part of the reason for this was Tish which I read in Vancouver.
Tish was an inspiration for one notion — you didn’t have to have subscribers. It could be just something you sent out if you thought the writing was interesting to people. (Hancock 32, 34)
Publishing for Barrie was becoming an act of both communication and friendship — “The results were fantastic. We were able to send news from Canada to other writers we admired” (33). The press’s various chapbooks and pamphlets were no longer products but gifts — a concept that would eventually inform not only Barrie’s private printing of the personal pamphlets and booklets, such as Familiar (1980), that he created as gifts to family and close friends, but also the poetics and overall conception of the seventh book of his The Martyrology. It would also inform his later refusal of publication with large commercial publishers.
THE COVER OF PORTRAIT OF DAVID, GANGLIA PRESS, 1966.
At a 1964–65 New Year’s Eve party Barrie had been introduced by Lea Hindley-Smith’s daughter Josephine, at that time a young folksinger, to Stan Bevington who had gone into business that year as a printer and would soon found Coach House Press. Only slightly older than Barrie, Bevington welcomed young artists into his shop, which quickly became a place for Barrie and others to hang out, learn how to set type, print single pages on Bevington’s Vandercook proof press, and meet other Toronto-area writers. The shop was also a source for Barrie of random pieces of paper left over from commercial printing work, and suitable for irregular pamphlets. Much of Ganglia was printed on a hand-cranked mimeograph machine, but some of Barrie’s first self-published ephemera, and some grOnk releases, would be hand-set by Barrie on Bevington’s proof press and then xeroxed at the Sigmund Samuel Library. He recalled in 1987 that these early 1965 experiences at Bevington’s shop
had a fundamental effect on my view of literature. i was already heading this way anyhow, which is to say toward an increasing awareness of how visual literature was, because of my interest in visual poetry, etc., but there’s no doubt about it, the effect of setting my own texts, letter by letter, word by word, line by line, was to create in me a whole new awareness of all the components that go into any literature.
He also recalled that Stan and early Coach House editor Wayne Clifford invited him to start work “on what became known as my purple package, a slipcase that included a long poem, a flip poem, a record of sound poems, and an envelope full of visual poems and poem sculptures” (Miki 2002 425). This was to be the box book bp, whose contents and shape evolved over the two years it took to produce it. In a sense, Barrie had been invited to compile a book.
With Ganglia Barrie had quickly plugged into an international network of visual poet-publishers: bill bissett and his blew ointment magazine and press in Vancouver; d.a. levy and his Renegade Press and Seven Flowers Press in Cleveland; D.r. Wagner with his press : today : niagara in Niagara Falls, New York, and later magazine runcible spoon in Wisconsin and then California; and in Europe Ian Hamilton Finlay and his magazine Poor.Old.Tired.Horse; Bob Cobbing and his Writers Forum Press; Cavan McCarthy and Tlaloc; Nicholas Zurbrugg and his magazine Stereo Headphones; and Dom Sylvester Houédard who on first receiving Barrie’s “packet of truly surprising concrete” in October 1965 was able to quickly forward and recommend them to Jasia Reichardt. She was curating a show of international concrete work, “Between Poetry and Painting,” for spring 1966 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Arlington Mill, Gloucestershire. That show and its catalogue introduced Barrie’s work to more European visual poets such as John Furnival and Pierre Garnier, who exclaimed in his first letter to Barrie “vos poèmes . . . sont une révélation.”
Each time Barrie wrote for a subscription or publication list from such poet-publishers he would offer to send some of his own work, which, in such a small circle of visual poetry practitioners, was quickly becoming known. Needing interesting work for Ganglia, he would also invite them to send work to him. Ganglia would publish the book by bissett, and individual poems by bissett, levy, and Finlay, and in its 70-plus-issue successor grOnk would publish poems by bissett, levy, McCarthy, Wagner, Garnier, Furnival, and Zurbrugg, and a book by Wagner. bissett would become the Ganglia and grOnk distributor in Vancouver, levy in Cleveland, and Cobbing in England.
Poems by Barrie would be published as pamphlets by levy’s Seven Flowers Press in Cleveland in 1965 and by Wagner’s press : today : niagara in Niagara Falls, New York, in 1966 and by his press Runcible Spoon in Sacramento in 1968. Barrie’s poems would also be published in England by Finlay’s Poor.Old.Tired.Horse, as well as by McCarthy’s Tlaloc, during 1966. Tlaloc Press would publish his Dada Lama as a pamphlet in 1968. His first book, a collection of visual poetry called Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer, would be published in England in January 1967 by Bob Cobbing’s Writers Forum Press — a month before his first Canadian book, Coach House Press’s bp. His visual poetry would be exhibited not only at Jasia Reichardt’s Gloucestershire show in 1966, but also at shows later that year in Paris and in San Sebastián, Spain. In 1967 his work would be included in shows in Paris and Madrid, in 1970 in a show in Indianapolis; in 1971 in shows in Holland, Germany, and England; and in 1972 in shows in Uruguay, Chile, and Spain. When Emmett Williams began editing his international Anthology of Concrete Poetry for New York’s Something Else Press in 1966, Barrie was among the first writers he invited to send work. In less than two years Barrie had gone from being a confused young man who could see “no future” to being — in the small but intense world of visual poetry — an internationally respected literary figure. His brother Don would be astonished by his sudden shift from timidity to the self-confidence required to perform the strange noises of sound poetry — Barrie’s newest genre — in public.
Lea Hindley-Smith had a large role in this — Goodbrand writes that she could “almost magically reveal to individuals what was hidden within them” (27). It seems in fact likely that much of the work Lea did with Barrie was to make him see himself as worthy of speaking, writing, publishing, of releasing his voice. Lea herself, according to Goodbrand, had in the late 1950s been strongly influenced by Edmund Bergler’s theories of psychic masochism in his book The Basic Neurosis. That book and its insights, she had told Goodbrand, had been the key to her own renewed confidence in Toronto in 1955 — confidence that had freed her to resume work as a therapist. “Lea [had] now realized it wasn’t others who were holding her back; it was her own self-hatred.” She had been moved by Bergler’s book to “change her own destiny rather than blame others.”
Bergler believed that the internal, frequently vicious voice of self-criticism is interested in inflicting pain, not in remedying our deficiencies. We are controlled by our guilt because we listen to and accept its cruel judgments. More sinister still, we take unconscious pleasure in being punished because we hate the helplessness that persists in us from our infancy. (23)
Barrie — convinced that he had been ignored by a depressed mother when a “helpless” infant, and that he had been given little parental encouragement when he had become a budding writer — may have had ample reason for the lack of self-confidence his brother had noted in him on his arrival in Toronto, or to blame circumstances or the non-understanding of others for his unhappiness.4 It is very likely that psychic masochism was a part of Lea’s diagnosis of him. Paul Dutton recalls Barrie telling him once that, early in his therapy, Lea and another woman had praised him repeatedly while he was under relaxation, and that he had wept and writhed at having to endure their words.
The various letters in Barrie’s correspondence files also show that the poets he was contacting in Europe — Finlay, born 1925, Houédard, born 1924, Cobbing, born 1920, Garnier, born 1928, McCarthy, born 1943 — recognized him as a talented peer from the outset.5 That alone, to be judged by his work rather than by his history, appearance, or ability to amuse and entertain, must have given Barrie an enormous boost of confidence. The European poets also routinely mentioned their sound poetry performances as extensions of their visual poetry, and inquired whether he was also doing sound performances. The question made a certain sense, because unlike writers of “regular” poetry, visual poets had nothing to read in public unless they could find a way to perceive their visual poems as scripts for sound poems — as Barrie would do in 1966 with “Dada Lama” and the “Turnips Are” poem he had written on the back of Dace’s despairing letter. Both of these works would be included on Barrie’s amusingly titled 1968 sound poetry LP Mother Love, and the jacket would feature photos of some of those who had presumably, in various ways, helped make it possible — his mother and father, his brother DJ, his sister Deanna and husband Barrie, bill bissett, Andy Phillips, David Phillips, Rob Hindley-Smith, and David Aylward.
Certainly Barrie’s reception by European visual and sound poets was different from the one his parents were giving to his new life. Being told in 1965 that some of Barrie’s new poems were being published, his father declared that some people might like them, but they would never be included in a school textbook. His mother responded to a new photograph Barrie had sent her that year by telling him that the picture hadn’t been a big hit with his brother Bob, and that it didn’t look like her son. She urged him to take better care of his appearance and advised that he could be quite handsome when his hair was much shorter.
And in 1971 she would write a poem in couplets for him, saying that she had never believed that the day would come when she wouldn’t understand her youngest son — possibly hoping to gently remind him how different his poems were from her understanding of poetry. She and Bob were not alone, however, in lamenting Barrie’s ever-lengthening hair. His future wife Ellie recalls that one of his Sigmund Samuel supervisors had offered him five dollars to get it cut.
His reception in Canada in this period was similar to that in Europe. When accepting one of his poems for Alphabet in April 1965, James Reaney respectfully asked him how he would like his author-name to appear. In February 1966 Louis Dudek asked him if he could publish six of his poems in the final issue of Delta, and concluded his note, “I’m definitely with you.” Also warmly receiving him as a writer was Margaret Avison, whom Barrie seems to have met in late 1964 or early 1965 at the Sigmund Samuel, where, as a doctoral student, she had a study carrel for which he was responsible. His playful letters to her in the summer of 1965, when working toward including a poem of hers in the first issue of Ganglia, together with her similarly playful replies in some of the margins, reflected an easy and comfortable relationship.6 He told Bayard and David that as well as being a good friend, Avison “was a tremendous influence. When I got into Winter Sun and read those poems — once again it was an education to the ear. The same sort of education Sheila Watson was to me. I heard better after reading those books. It extended my sensibility of how language could move.”
In late 1965 Avison would also be the one who inadvertently pointed him back toward “straight” or “regular” poetry — poetry constructed primarily out of sequences of sentences. She had heard of Raymond Souster’s project to edit and publish a Contact Press anthology of “new” poetry by young writers, tentatively titled “Poetry 67” after the now defunct Ryerson Press “series” of Poetry 62 (ed. Mandel and Pilon) and Poetry 64 (ed. Colombo and Godbout). Part of Souster’s plan was rumoured to be to include all the Tish poets whom Colombo’s anthology had been too early to include — Marlatt, Wah, Reid, Hogg, and Cull in particular. These were poets who would not be able to have full Contact Press collections now that the press was about to cease operation. Souster had already solicited submissions from numerous poets with whose “regular” poetry he was familiar through Tish, Island, Evidence, Imago, The Canadian Forum, and similar magazines. In the 1976 Bayard/David interview, Barrie related that on hearing about the project from Avison,
I roared home and literally sat down with everything I’d learned in a year and a half of focussing on form and on the page as a field of play, and rewrote those [earlier “regular”] poems. My ear was better. I could hear better after that year. I had a much better sense of rhythm, of music. I was better able to listen to the words and less concerned with imposing some sort of preconceived notion of wisdom. . . . (Bayard 19)
He was attempting to transform old Barrie Nichol poems into new bpNichol ones. He sent a package of 29 poems to Souster, 14 of which appeared in the anthology, now titled New Wave Canada. It was published very late in 1966. Some of these poems would reappear the next year in the booklet “Journeying and the Returns,” as part of the Coach House box-book bp that Barrie was still assembling. In bp Barrie would thus be a “regular” poet as well as an ideopome poet and sound poet.
THE COVER OF GRONK, VOLUME 1, ISSUE 6/7, SHOWING DAVID AYLWARD, DAVID W. HARRIS, BARRIE NICHOL, AND ROB HINDLEY-SMITH.