9. Captain Poetry
at certain points his idiocies became my own. particularly the Captain Poetry sonnet which is pure autobiography
— bpNichol, Captain Poetry Poems Complete, 2010
Ceci n’est pas une pipe.
— Magritte, 1928
I didn’t feel M’s film unjust to you. I just found you more confident and articulate than I remembered you. You seem so far beyond me. M says he feels that’s a fault in the film — cutting made you seem more confident, more aggressive perhaps?
— Sharon Barbour to Barrie Nichol, March 1970
Barrie had spent much of 1964–65 trying to distinguish his bpNichol ideopomes from his “regular” poems although paradoxically by the end of this period he believed that it was by creating ideopomes that he had learned to write more interesting regular ones. In late 1965 bissett argued strongly against this segregating of ways of writing.
. . . does it help to name yur pomes at all, bp, theyre there grown, the name is possibly for the filers, th staff cards, like “sweet william” or hollyhock, whether they’re ideopomes or whatever, they are still being there, an it doesn’t become an ideopome rather than an cap pomes just because they’re calld one or th other, they surely always become what they are, an’ by ideopome, yu mean they’re not as poem as untyped pome, sure they are, yu maybe suggest that th form is in sum ones a caprice by calling them anything, peopul are so slow to see a pome at all i know tho th name may encourage them, to see it as the sumthing else it is-like, what’s in a name, th ideopome is as much yu as th more “conventional” one ’bout andrew
bissett could have pointed to parts of Barrie’s “Captain Poetry” poems, which he was currently writing and beginning to publish parts of in Ganglia, as being as visual at times as the ideopomes. He knew and admired this new work, calling it in one letter a “work of genius,” and would eventually publish it as a joint grOnk/blew ointment press book — in March of 1971. However, in terms of Barrie’s intentions — to satirize and ridicule “the kind of courier du bois [sic] image of the [Canadian] poet; you go into a bar, slam your poems on the table and order a few rounds of brews for all the guys, which was an image I was never too attracted to” (Norris interview, Miki 2002 241) — the sequence pretty well failed, which possibly was why bissett liked it. A more mature Barrie speaking to Norris in 1978 was able to articulate his intention much more clearly and interestingly than the novice poet of 1965.1 Much of the text’s humour was both juvenile and ambiguous, which left it easy for someone to misread the text as being in praise of “the poet as super-hero” (241). But in its numerous stanzas that physically deconstructed words and phrases, and its inclusion of cartoonish drawings, it combined Barrie’s ideopome techniques with sequential narrative in ways that foreshadowed how he would write in the later books of The Martyrology.
Exactly which macho Canadian poets Barrie believed had cultivated a “super-hero” “courier du bois” image was not clear in the poems nor in the interview. Was it Archibald Lampman, Bliss Carman, and Charles G.D. Roberts, and their poems about canoes and photographs of themselves with Native Canadians? Was it Al Purdy brawling over poetry at the Quinte Hotel, Irving Layton celebrating his sunburned back, or bissett in his fringed deerskin jacket? Certainly Barrie himself was not attempting to develop a macho image — “an image I was never too attracted to.” Even the book’s self-parodying “autobiographical” sonnet, most likely addressed to Dace, is more black romantic than macho. While many of his male contemporaries were tasting their blood, organizing poet baseball teams, bragging about their long peashooters, or meeting regularly and “creatively” at Vancouver’s Cecil Hotel beer parlour or Toronto’s Grossman’s Tavern, Barrie was meeting with therapy groups and earnestly seeking to develop “honest” communications and, with women, long-term and trustingly monogamous relationships.
But the superhero idea of a “Captain Poetry” was attractive at a time when poetry magazines were beginning to proliferate, public poetry readings increase, and Canadian nationalism surge. bissett in a slightly later letter would jestingly refer to Barrie as “capn poetry” — because “chef” Barrie was beginning to solicit visual poems for his Oberon Press anthology The Cosmic Chef. And Michael Ondaatje would later use the title Sons of Captain Poetry for the film he shot of Barrie and other poets in 1970. Who Captain Poetry is in this film, or whether the sons are prodigal, Oedipally troubled, or chips off the old block, Ondaatje would leave largely to the film’s viewers.
Meanwhile various changes had been occurring in other parts of Barrie’s life. In the summer of 1965 he had joined an evening group of Lea Hindley-Smith’s clients, mostly Catholic priests and nuns, whom she had agreed to train as psychotherapists who would eventually leave their orders and help her deal with her expanding practice. Then in the spring of 1966 Barrie took a course in diagnostic testing, after which he was hired by Lea to administer such texts — the Rorschach, the Thematic Apperception Test, the House-Tree-Person Test — to incoming Therafields clients. The new job enabled him to leave his position at the library and to spend more hours on his writing. In September he and the other trainee therapists took on their first clients, while also continuing their own therapies, most of them with Lea. Barrie would record in his 1984 resumé that he worked as a Therafields psychotherapist from 1966 to 1982. Both the resumé and his surviving appointment books show that he often had as many as 15 clients, seeing them once or twice a week for one-hour sessions — a similar caseload to that of the other therapists. He moved that fall of 1966 from the house group in which he had lived since 1964 into a large main floor room, which he shared with Rob Hindley-Smith. The house was located at 59 Admiral Road, and the front rooms were Lea’s office. She and Harry Hindley-Smith shared the coach house behind. Next door, at 55 Admiral, was a house group in which one of the new members was Eleanor Hiebert, a member of the Sisters of Our Lady of Sion whose order was — like those of the earlier priests, monks, and nuns — allowing her to consider psychotherapy.
THE JACKET OF BARRIE’S FIRST SOUND POEM RECORDING, “BORDERS,” COACH HOUSE PRESS, 1967.
Another event during this busy September was Barrie’s meeting Ondaatje, possibly when Ondaatje was visiting Coach House Press to discuss the publication of The Dainty Monsters. He wrote to “dear bp” later that month from Kingston, where he was completing his M.A. at Queen’s University, saying it was good to see him and that he was enclosing four poems for Ganglia, and then signed his full name. The poems would appear in Barrie’s irregular Ganglia offshoots grOnk and Synapsis.
The next year began with Barrie’s first two book publications. Bob Cobbing’s small January 1967 edition of Barrie’s Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer sold out in England, and would be reprinted in 1969, but it would have little distribution in Canada. The February release of bp, Coach House’s unusual box or “slip case” of bpNichol items, however, attracted national attention if only for its uniqueness — one of a “mind-blowing succession of whatsits” Dennis Lee would recall during a 2010 Coach House celebration.2 The box contained literary constructions in four media: a “conventional” book of “regular” poems; perfect bound and titled “Journeying and the Returns”; the small vinyl recording of sound poetry “Borders”; an envelope of single-sheet poems, many of them visual poems, titled “Letters Home”; and a “flip book” of bound pages that created a moving image when riffed with a thumb, titled — with a bow to the Troggs’s Billboard number one recording of the previous year — “Wild Thing.” The box presented a quadruple-threat writer, one who could, as the accompanying manifesto “Statement” declared, “reach . . . thru the poem by as many exits and entrances as are possible” — who could deliver regular poems, sound poems, visual poems, or poem-constructions. That many people believed its title to be “Journeying and the Returns” amusingly revealed their preference for the “regular.” It would have been equally reasonable to have believed the box’s title to have been “Borders,” “Letters Home,” or “Wild Thing.” Some of these titles reflected the ambiguity of Barrie’s personal understandings of his situation. Was he a Vancouver writer temporarily in Toronto? Where was the “home” that his letters were written to? To what places were the “returns” of his journeys? What did it mean that bill bissett was now his most trusted border-testing writer friend — as he had declared in a 1966 letter, his “brother” as a writer?
The box’s bp title was also a covert “othering” of Barrie’s “bpNichol” persona, a signal — largely undetected at the time — that this persona was the name of a text and a process of writing that Barrie Nichol oversaw as much as it was an alternative name for his person. The two alphabetic signs of “bp” pointed to additional alphabetic and visual signs. “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” This divide between the mortal Barrie Nichol and his creation, the potentially immortal bpNichol, would become both more striking and more poignant as the former aged and the latter matured with the spectacular later books of The Martyrology. The mortal Barrie had in fact already gone into one of his still not infrequent depressions. He wrote to bissett that he had become depressed once his book had been published and was now sitting around and wondering what he was going to do next. He was confident that he would be continuing his work in psychoanalyis, he wrote, had some idea of what he soon would be reading, but had no idea about what he might next be writing.
A little later that spring he wrote bissett to apologize for a “misunderstanding” that had caused him not to tell bissett that there had been still time to send poems to Souster for consideration for New Wave Canada. He blamed it partly on his own continuing difficulty in writing letters, and then adopted a Steinian style as if it could help himself write this one. He told bissett that he was currently almost the only one he could bring himself to write to, that something collapsed within him whenever he attempted a letter, and that he couldn’t communicate in them like he could when he talked. He asked bissett to not only write often but also to write from his heart — that writing from his heart might cause him to be able to do the same thing. Then he told bissett that he not only doubted his current writing but was no longer sure even about what he believed, that he was nauseated by the poetry he had written since the bp book, and that he was experiencing an utter collapse of faith. He asked bissett what he believed. He worried that too many people lie to themselves and others; he asked bissett to write to him about ordinary things, not just about poetry. As in some of his earlier letters to bissett, desperation smouldered in every sentence. bill seems to have been the one correspondent that Barrie trusted with such feelings, and unfortunately in this instance his reply does not appear to have survived.
BARRIE IN 1967.
Despite his various confusions, 1967 saw Captain Barrie — already the leader of the small group who were publishing Ganglia and grOnk, and clearly a leader through bp in the range to which new poetry might aspire — offered more leadership roles. In the spring he was invited by Ray Souster, the first president and primary organizer of the new League of Canadian Poets, to be its founding secretary. Barrie was the only writer under 50 years of age on the executive. In the summer he was invited by the Canada Council to be a member of the Soundings Committee that was to be tasked with reorganizing its system of grants. In the late fall he was named by Lea Hindley-Smith to be vice president of the now formally organized Therafields corporation. The appointment, together with that of her 20-year-old son Rob as president, baffled and enraged many of the older newly trained therapists, but Barrie would hold the position until 1982. Moreover she also named Barrie to co-chair with Rob the weekly therapists seminar — the seminar that oversaw their work and dealt with counter-tranferences — during her absences.
In his history of Therafields,3 Goodbrand explains the circumstances that brought about these eyebrow-raising appointments. The 1966 expansion of Lea Hindley-Smith’s work from a single practice into an institution in which eventually more than 40 therapists would serve the needs of upwards of 600 clients, and operate approximately 25 house groups and therapy centres in downtown Toronto and at a farm in Mono township north of Toronto, had occurred at a time when the symptoms of Hindley-Smith’s largely untreated type 2 diabetes had begun to grow. The newly practising therapists, most of them in their upper thirties, holding university degrees, and backgrounds in Catholic religious orders, were eager to take initiative and responsibility in shaping the new institution, and had collectively raised the money to purchase a farm suitable for retreats and weekend-long group therapies. They had named two of themselves to liaise with the ailing Hindley-Smith as her “advisers and assistants in the administration of the nascent organization.” She, however, expected the two to “take charge” during her illnesses and absences, and when this did not happen at a crucial moment at the end of the summer, requested their replacement. She wanted people she could trust to “replace her . . . while she was away,” Goodbrand writes, “and convey her input and directions to the [therapist] group” (91). This group — called by Hindley-Smith “Hypno I” because of its training in hypnosis therapy — was one that Barrie was both within and without. He trained within it, but also lived with Hindley-Smith and her son and daughter, and was now virtually a member of her family.
Quite possibly Hindley-Smith was wary of losing control of her new organization to people who were still neophytes as therapists but overshadowed her in academic knowledge. Several of them were close to completing doctoral degrees. Goodbrand suggests also that she was aware that Barrie and Rob would have much more understanding for the new generation of clients Therafields was attracting: no longer mostly ex-priests and nuns influenced by the new freedoms of Vatican II but now predominantly young people of the 1960s who were seeking the self-understanding and group friendships that the “age of Aquarius” was promising. A typical therapist response to their appointments, Goodbrand indicates, was that of Dan Macdonald: “I thought Robbie was far, far too young with no experience. Barrie was a poet. That [administration] wasn’t his forte, and besides, he couldn’t stand up to Lea. At that point I felt we lost the dream of Therafields.”
Goodbrand suggests that such a response was understandable given the ages and backgrounds of those involved:
Rob was twenty years old, had not formally attended school since early high school and had no administrative experience. Barrie, a few years older, had been part of the learning experience in Therafields from the beginning, and had administered psychological tests and interviewed clients seeking therapy. bp, as he now preferred to be called, was thought to be astute, because he recommended the pairing of clients and therapists, and he was trusted. Rob and Barrie were best friends with a giddy bonhommie, joking around in a way completely foreign to thirty-five-year-old priests accustomed to more dignified behavior. They were still thought of as boys. Neither was interested in an intellectual or academic career. (92)
Toronto psychologist Brenda Doyle, then a young member of a Therafields learning group, who has written a lengthy blog “Thoughts on Therafields” in response to Goodbrand’s book, writes that these Hypno I reactions to their appointments were largely covert — that “[m]ost simply accepted the decision without a struggle.” She quotes therapist Philip McKenna:
When Lea went away to North Carolina she left Rob and Barr[ie] in charge which was absolutely crazy. She would bring up that kind of idea: “Wouldn’t it be great for them to lead things? They work so well together.” Then it would happen. There wasn’t much talk about it but it wasn’t much of a surprise. By then they were chairing the group when she wasn’t there. But they were “puer” in the Jungian sense — the boys. We allowed them to take over by not intervening. (“Thoughts,” October 31, 2010)
In this Therafields/Hypno I company, Barrie’s task of proving himself worthy was more difficult than it had been in the world of “letters” and alphabets. Here he was being judged not necessarily by what he wrote or produced, but also by how he looked and how he sometimes acted. He was also being judged by a different understanding of what was “intellectual,” and by people who suspected that he was being exploited by Lea for her own purposes.4 But Barrie accepted the new position willingly, perhaps because it had been offered by Lea, who was at this point was already for him the person that The Martyrology, Book II would declare was the one “without whose act of friendship quite literally none of this would have been written.” She had “literally stopped me from killing myself” he told Irene Niechoda in June 1984 (1992 67).
In his resumé Barrie described his new assignment as involvement in budgets and in various levels of decision-making, values decisions, supervision of all Therafields buildings, liaison and arbitration between therapists and managers, publisher, editor, and originator of various staff and general community newsletters, and public relations. Particularly important for him was his role in the various newsletters. Here he was on the firmest ground, and could use his command of language to define himself to the therapists and the larger client community while also writing “ex cathedra” from Lea’s implicit authority. The manifesto-like tone that he employed that spring in the Axis editorial quoted in Chapter 7 was one that had already succeeded in his “statement”-preface to his book bp.