22. The Waste of My Words
His imagination was so vast, his skill level so accomplished, that he would help you to completely reimagine what you had written in multiple ways, so that it suddenly dawned on you that you had infinite choices, abundant options, as opposed to the one way you thought the poem inevitably had to be written.
— Ken Norris, interviewed by Kevin Spenst,
Prism International
In the spring of 1986 Barrie and Ellie, unhappy about difficulties in keeping boarders, decided to take advantage of the changing Toronto real estate market by selling 98 Admiral in what was becoming a fashionable downtown district, and purchasing a smaller house at 114 Lauder Avenue approximately a mile northeast. The house was coincidentally less than a block north of one that Rob and therapist Gus O’Brien had purchased two years before to house the now nearly blind Lea Hindley-Smith. Unable to move without help, Lea would die following heart surgery 15 months after Barrie and Ellie’s mid-June move. What with her weakness, and Barrie’s back and leg pains, they would have rarely seen each other. In April Barrie had written to poet Clint Burnham that he’d had a bad year, his back fucking up, having to have an operation just before Christmas, and a pile of mail accumulating on his table. He was unable to pack or lift boxes or otherwise help the move into the new house, and was consulting again with his family doctor. The small house was the first residence that Barrie had not shared with Therafields friends since 1964.
In his next letter to Phyllis Webb, August 8, 1986, he wrote that he was finding his new living situation “okay.” It was just his little family and he was enjoying that. Family living was more intense, he thought, than living with others, but good. Anyway, he told Webb, he figured he’d more than done his communal bit. As well, he wrote, starting a family is like starting one’s own commune. His remarks would have been greeted as provocations had they been published years before in a Therafields newsletter. But in fact they pointed to the overall journey his life had been taking, from his confusions of 1964, through therapy, house groups, joint ownership of houses with Rob, Janet Griffith, Sheron Fadel, Grant Goodbrand, Ellie and Renwick, owning 99 Admiral and renting space to others, to the present.
The actual move, however, with its familiar recapitulation of all the other moves he had experienced, still dismayed him. He had written to Robert Kroetsch on June 18, while thanking him for having agreed to recommend him for a Canada Council grant, that he loathed moving, and hoped that they would be in this new house for many many more years. He hated being surrounded by a chaos of books stacked on top of books stacked on top of books. He believed in Gertrude Stein’s advice, he told Kroetsch, that “to be extraordinary in your writing you must be ordinary in your living,” and this chaos sure wasn’t ordinary.
Amidst the physical pain, household adjustments, and script writing for Nelvana’s Care Bear series, he was still working on The Martyrology, overseeing the publishing of Book 6, and working at least on the conception of Books 7 and 8. In a letter to Robert Bertholf, co-organizer of the 1980 Buffalo Canadian Poetry Festival, Barrie had written that he was busy with writing Books 7 and 8, and explained that Book 7 was to be a “shuffle text,” and Book 8 would use both an ode and the concept of “paragogy” as its organizing principles. Eight, he wrote, would appear at random among Book 7. By “shuffle text” Barrie meant that the book would be unbound and unpaginated, most likely boxed, so that its parts would have no fixed relationship to one another, somewhat like those of his first Canadian book, bp.
He wrote several letters that spring to writers hopeful of publishing books with him through Coach House — Diana Hartog, Douglas Barbour, and Clint Burnham — advising them, as in the Hartog letter, that because of recent editorial board changes there was at best a slim possibility of his getting someone’s poetry book accepted there (March 10, 1986). He was also getting into royalty disputes over both Fraggle Rock scripts and one Raccoons script — the one he had co-written with Carol Bolt. In March he wrote to Fraggle actor Karen Barnes about an episode in which he and Phil Balsam had written the music and lyrics and that had been mistakenly labelled in its videotape release as having “music and lyrics by Phil Balsam and Dennis Lee.” This was the second instance of such careless labelling by Henson Associates. He told her that he felt simultaneously impotent, frustrated, enraged, and despairing about being able to stop this from reoccurring. He thought it could affect both his royalties and his reputation. In April he and Bolt wrote to three of the Evergreen Raccoons principals demanding that producer Kevin Gillis withdraw the co-writer credit he had given himself for a script, “The Intruder,” which they had written. They argued that it was a normal part of the script writing process for producers to ask for things to be included, or parts of a script to be rewritten if they didn’t seem to work, and that it was utterly wrong for them then to think that just having done their job had made them into co-writers. They were considering complaining to ACTRA. The fact that both of them continued to write for the series, and that there was no further written correspondence, suggests that the dispute was resolved amicably.
Beyond these complexities, Barrie was also still enduring the pain occasioned by travelling. In June he went with the other Horsemen to perform at the Future Indicative conference at the University of Ottawa. Afterward Barrie had misgivings about both the performance and the travel, and wrote to organizer John Moss that he didn’t think they’d been especially good, but that they were grateful to have had the opportunity to perform. He commented that it might have been their last performance, and that Moss might want to record the moment for posterity, adding that he had said much the same to the other Horsemen (June 18, 1986). The same day that he wrote to Moss he also wrote a note to Judy Copithorne to accompany 25 copies of her book, A Light Character, which he had recently edited for Coach House. He told her that his back was better, but his foot was still getting increasingly puffy throughout the day, and that he was still limping and not writing much new poetry. But he was hoping all this would improve with time — that he’d decided no longer to pursue the muse, and simply let poetry come to him when it did. He was still doing other things, “of course.” The other things — scripts, children’s books — he was very much pursuing. In a June 13 letter to Dick Higgins, he asked the American poet to blurb Martyrology Book 6. Very shortly after this letter, however, he changed the book’s name to Martyrology Book 6 Books, using this title in his July 31, 1986, afterword — presumably in recognition of the “set of books,” which, five years earlier, he had told Scobie it was going to contain. The book had come all the way from being titled A COUNTING to being called a book of six books, but in small letters the words “a counting” would still appear mysteriously on its fly leaf.1
An invitation to the Horsemen to read that September in Amsterdam, however, changed his mind about both travel and performing. Obtaining funding from the cultural branch of the Canadian Department of External Affairs, Barrie and Rafael flew to Paris in early September, to be joined later in Amsterdam by Steve McCaffery and Paul Dutton. Barrie spent a week at a hotel on rue de Caumartin working on new text for The Martyrology 7. In Amsterdam they performed at de Meervaart Theatre to a very small but entirely Dutch audience as part of a festival of Canadian culture. Barrie reported back to External Affairs that the publicity for the festival had been ubiquitous — that the official maple leaf had glowed from lampposts, construction barriers, the covers of weekly entertainment magazines, et cetera (October 28, 1986). But the visit had contained incidents. In Amsterdam Barrie’s wheelchair — he had rented one in each city to get around — broke down, making it difficult for him to get to the theatre. And one night a man drowned in the canal outside their hotel while they slept. Barrie wrote a passage about it in his notebook (now one called the “Four Years Later Notebook”) for Martyrology 7 — about being troubled that night by things that couldn’t be reached, by someone calling out to them, and by a terrible silence — but does not appear to have included it in the Martyrology manuscripts he would leave for publication. On adjacent notebook pages he also made notes for a computer game, “Trial of Champions,” and for another TRG board game.
The Fraggle Rock series had ended earlier that year. Barrie felt wistful about the excitement and camaraderie he had experienced in helping to create it, and also missed the income his writing for it had generated. He still had Nelvana Care Bears and other assignments, and in October managed to get a small Ontario Arts Council grant on the recommendation of David Lee’s Nightwood Editions. He reported to the council that it would allow him some time free from “commercial work” and that he would work on “The Martyrology Bo(o)ks 9 (VI(8)I),” his “Organ Music” series, a new work called “Unsigned,” and the John Cannyside manuscript — which he’d be delighted to finish off he wrote (November 24, 1986).
In the October pages of his notebook he penned a note about writing a book on his sound poetry of the past two years, a book with the title “S Ays.” In it he told himself to try to think of those poems not as sound poems per se but as essays that had incorporated what he had learned about sound. On the same page he wrote a note about undertaking “The Bard Project”: which he saw as a project that would formalize how to talk about technical matters in writing. He wanted a work that moved forward through the history of literary form — possibly by successively employing historical forms — with the goal of creating a poetry Frankenstein, a bardic Frankenstein that would re-enact in literary terms the doctor’s original corruption by the illusion of possible immortality. Barrie would build a (presumably satiric) bard rather than a monster — thus a “bard project.” The note was somewhat ambiguous about whether this was to be primarily a poem written in a Frankenstein-inspired combination of historical forms — the poet as Dr. Frankenstein — or whether it was to be an essay written in various verse forms — a kind of “Essay on Criticism” for all time. It was to be part of The Martyrology, Barrie wrote, but he wasn’t sure exactly what part — possibly it would be Book 10. What was not ambiguous was that these were large ideas and that he expected to have the time to explore them.2
That month he had been booked to take part in a joint reading at Harbourfront with George Bowering, Sharon Thesen, and Michael Ondaatje — a booking that, unbeknownst to him, was part of a much larger event. When he arrived he was impressed to find the Brigantine Room packed with an overflow audience of more than 500, and somewhat puzzled to see many of his out-of-town or even out-of-country friends — Stephen Scobie, Robert Kroetsch, Fred Wah, Douglas Barbour, Bob Cobbing — present. Paul Dutton greeted him, commenting on the large turnout. Barrie beamed and replied, “Yeah, George is always a great draw.” The evening got underway with Barrie as first reader, but when he started to speak his microphone cut out — by prearrangement having been turned off at the sound board. Dutton and Steven Smith rushed from the audience on the pretext of helping to fix the “malfunction.” Barrie, however, unaware that the microphone wasn’t working, assumed that Paul and Steve must want to join him in doing a trio, to which he had no objection. Dutton took over the mike, its volume now restored, and presented him with a 270 pp. bpNichol Festschrift issue of Open Letter — an issue that he and Smith had covertly edited over the past year, even sneaking some of Barrie’s own photos out of his house for quick duplication. Shocked to incredulity, Barrie could only stare at the volume in his hands and repeat in amazement, “Holy shit! . . . HOLY SHIT!! . . . HOLY SHIT!” Thereafter the evening unfolded with a panoply of readers whose work he had long admired and who were among the many contributors to the Festschrift, including those he’d been surprised to find in the audience when he had arrived. What also astonished him was that a hundred or more of his friends in the audience had come not because of the regular Harbourfront advertising but because they had been told of the clandestine arrangement — and had been able to keep that arrangement a secret. His brother Don was among them, and was also astonished. He had expected a gathering of a few dozen, and had at this time no inkling that Barrie’s writing had such large and often affectionate national and international audiences. For the editors and contributors this was a well-earned mid-life tribute and celebration; none of them saw his “bum leg” or “pinched” sciatic nerve as ominous.
In general, this fall was a productive one for him, although not necessarily for the writing he most wanted to do. He gave readings in Detroit, Quebec City, Castlegar, Nelson, and Victoria. In Detroit he shared the bill with Gary Snyder; in Quebec City he read both solo and in duo with Steve McCaffery as TRG, doing two sound poems in French. He completed the children’s manuscript “Shopping with My Aunt,” and planned a children’s collection to be titled “Tiny Commotions.” He did more rewriting of his ever-present “John Cannyside” novel, working especially on how to conclude it, and deciding to add a section that would debate the morality of detective fiction. Perhaps not surprisingly, given his medical condition, he drafted “The Hips” for his “Organ Music” series. “You can never forget about your hips,” he wrote, in a prose poem in which he created a genealogy or biological lineage of hips that moved from his own hip pain back into family memory.
And now most days I feel this pain in my left hip, if I sit in a chair that isn’t made just right, I feel this pain in my left hip, and I think about Maw, I think about Grandmaw, I wonder if all their lives too there was there this little nagging pain saying I won’t let you forget about me. And you don’t let me forget about you do you? You’re there reminding me, every time I stand too long, reminding me, every time the chair’s too soft or too hard or too wrong. You’re never going to let me forget about you. Are you hip? (41)
Barrie’s hip of course was not at all “hip,” and no “nagging little pain.”
In November and December he sketched in his notebook approximately 30 pages of visual poems — something he had not done in his notebooks for many years. And as he often had done near a year’s end, he wrote a brief personal retrospective for one of his correspondents. It was in a letter to the British poet Lee Harwood, whose edition of Tristan Tzara’s selected poems, Chanson Dada, he was supposed to be guiding and partly financing to joint Coach House/Underwhich publication. The past year had been a trial for him, had been “wierd,” he began, listing how it had included the leukemia death of a niece, his back “op,” selling their Admiral Road house, moving to a smaller one, having once-trusted long-term sites of income disappear and thus having to find new ones, and having to be out of town too much doing readings. He then addressed the various delays at Coach House. These were one of the reasons he had been getting increasingly discouraged, he said; he was finding it hard to keep his enthusiasm up when a book took as long to push through to print as the one he was editing for Harwood. In such situations, he wrote, misunderstandings were almost inevitable. “Wierd” — a word (along with “concious”) that Barrie had chronic difficulty in spelling — is not quite accounted for by the events he lists. Cheerful Barrie was still not one who could easily bring himself to complain. In both “The Hips” and the Harwood letter he was grossly minimizing the pain that had required him to obtain bedrooms on intercity trains and wheelchairs at readings — much as he was reducing a key word when he wrote about his back “op.” He was minimizing also his discouragement with Coach House — his editorial contributions having been capped at two titles, poetry titles been given low priority, the culture of the editorial board having become increasingly commercial and unfriendly to literary innovation.
He also did not mention an even greater commercial woe he was encountering. For several years he and other Fraggle Rock writers had been dismayed by the unexpectedly small amount of the residuals payments they had been receiving despite the overall success of the series. They had vainly requested a complete and transparent accounting. In November Barrie had co-signed a letter with David Young and three others script writers to Henson Executive Vice President Diana Berkenfield, and copied it to other Fraggle writers, expressing their “collective dismay with the way we are being treated by the Henson organization” and asking her to organize a meeting to resolve matters.
Since the show went out of production we have had to make repeated calls . . . about the status of these payments. When the cheques arrive they are months late and, to be blunt about it, rather less than we expected. Despite repeated requests over a period of years we have never received ANY clarifying information as to what gross receipts have been or how our residual payments have been arrived at. When we ask pointed questions the answers are vague, incomplete, and cloaked in mystery. At the best of times we feel bewildered — in our worst moments we feel positively patronized. (November 26, 1986)
The meeting would occur the next year on June 22, but accomplish little. Barrie learned there that many of the shows listed Jerry Juhl as “Head Writer,” thus making Juhl “the credited writer” to whom all residuals would go. He then screened each episode and discovered that almost all of the ones that he had been contracted to write or co-write had been credited onscreen to a “Creative Producer” (all shows) or “Head Writer” (four shows) — in each case either Jerry Juhl, Jocelyn Stevenson, or (in two instances) Duncan Kenworthy, with possibly all of the residuals in the “Head Writer” instances having gone to Juhl or Stevenson. In Barrie’s contracts, however, there was no mention that the show he was writing would have a “Head Writer” above him. And none of his many letters from Juhl were signed as “Head Writer”; the only title Juhl had used in any of these was “Creative Producer.” Barrie also had three “FRAGGLEROCK Contract Sheets” from different dates that listed Juhl only as “Creative Producer” and Stevenson as “Senior Script Editor/Writer” or “Senior Script Consultant/Writer.”
Complicating matters for Barrie was the fact that during the production of the series he and Juhl had become close friends. Barrie was careful in all his correspondence not to blame Juhl for what appears to have been a substantial diversion of funds, ascribing it instead to Henson Associates’ inattention to contracts, carelessness about screen credits, and weak accounting practices. He would write to Juhl in September 1987, beginning his letter by saying that he was very sure that he already knew that Barrie and other writers had been challenging the Henson corporation’s calculations of royalties. He wanted to assure Juhl, he wrote, that he didn’t begrudge him a penny of the money Henson had paid him — Juhl was probably worth twice as much. But he detested the accounting fictions he believed Henson had devised in order to rationalize its royalty distributions, and how the Henson accountants had seemed like sharks gorging on prey whenever the writers had questioned them about money. So Barrie and the other writers had formally filed a grievance, and were looking forward to having everything reviewed by someone who was objective. He signed the letter with “love” from his whole family (September 8, 1987). There is no return letter from Juhl in Barrie’s files; he quite possibly returned the message by telephone.3 The ACTRA grievance would eventually be resolved in the writers’ favour. That same month Lea Hindley-Smith died. Barrie made no mention of her death in his notebooks or letters, but of course most of his letters now were to non-Therafields correspondents.
Barrie began 1987 with three large new projects in view. He had eight episodes of CBC Television’s children’s series Under the Umbrella Tree to write for production that summer. He had a two-week residency being arranged for late April at the University of Turin, during which he would teach workshops on poetry, plus a possible one-week residency afterward in Rome. And through an actor friend he had made at Fraggle Rock, Terry Angus, he was involved in writing a double pilot for a new children’s TV animation series, Blizzard Island, and likely to be its head writer if it were sold to a network and put into production. By February, he had completed his work on those two scripts and was travelling to Halifax for a read-through by the actors. He had also been writing outlines and notes for the Ron Mann film, Comic Book Confidential, at this point known to him as only “the Comix movie.” His numerous February 1–9 notebook pages show him approaching the task with the same care and detail he gave to his own projects. He outlines the various reels and ‘chapters’ of the film, assigns topics and relevant writers and works to each, and adds notes that outline his personal understanding of the history of the comic book genre. He drafts the “chapter headings” that will later appear in the movie. He and Mann had been friends since The Four Horseman had performed in his 1982 movie Poetry in Motion. During Mann’s 1985–86 period in Los Angeles, Mann had consulted with him about entire screen plays.
BARRIE SPEAKING IN TURIN, 1987.
(Flavio Multineddu)
February also saw Barrie again troubled by Coach House Press events and again apologizing to writers who hoped to publish there. He told Endre Farkas that December at Coach House had been “stormy” and January more laid-back, but February was finding them hopelessly in conflict. As a result, he wrote, the press can make no commitments whatsoever about new books (February 8, 1987). He would tell Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland that things over the past eight months or so at the press had gone in every possible direction — and then a few more (April 11, 1987). The ongoing reorganizations would soon have him off the editorial board entirely and briefly on the new board of directors.
In early April he mailed to Marty Gervais at Black Moss Press his autobiographical prose poem “Organ Music” manuscript under the title “Selected Organs: Parts of an Autobiography” — minus an “unselected” part “The Lily,” a poem that is about the penis and that contains a long third section about Barrie’s father. He had, however, already published this poem in the Vancouver periodical Writing (issue 5, Spring 1982), which he assumed his father was unlikely to encounter.4 In the covering letter to Gervais, Barrie mentioned having begun a new poem — part of a new book of The Martyrology. It began in rhyming couplets, he told Gervais, and kept moving through a variety of other rhyme forms. This was very likely part of the “Frankensteinian” bard project that he had sketched the previous October in his notebook.
On April 22 his literary editorial role at Coach House Press ended. The now right-dominated board voted to replace itself with genre-specific editors and transfer ownership of the press from Bevington to a non-profit corporation with a board of directors separate from the editors. Barrie, concerned about the philosophical/aesthetic directions the new corporation might take, volunteered to be a director rather than an editor. As a director he could at least initiate one of the four “workhorse” commercial titles that his colleagues now wanted the press to publish each year.
Ellie and Sarah accompanied him to Italy. They landed in Venice on April 25, 1987, and spent one day there, with Barrie writing a text he titled section “vii” of Martyrology, Book 7. The next day they went by train to Turin. There on April 30 and May 1 Barrie drew 23 visual poems in his large format notebook, leaving the backs of the pages blank as if he were intending the drawings to be removed and framed. The first six he had titled “Six Turin Texts.” On May 6 he wrote a new passage for “Ad Sanctos,” which he subtitled “Martyrology Book 11.” Later that day he sketched a two-page plan for The Martyrology’s Books 7, 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14. Book 7 was to be “Gifts” (which he planned to be unbound), Book 10 was to be “St Anzas: bases & basis” (to be interleafed among Book 7), Book 11 “Ad Sanctos” (to be bound sideways), Book 12 “IM: mortality play” (his new title for the bard project), Book 13 “J” (a novel with James, the younger brother of Jesus, as the main character), and Book 14 “A Book of Days” (modelled on his “The Book of Hours” — with each section composed in a different 24-hour period). He’d arrived at this numbering plan through his experiments with base-8 mathematics — 8 being his favourite number because of the symmetrical visual shape that it shared with the letter H. In conventional base-10 terms, Books 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14 would have been Books 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12. The next day he drafted a text that he titled “from the Martyr Bk 7 (+10)” — which would later be included in Book(s) 7& as the untitled prose poem beginning “the waste of my words & works. . . .” Two days later in Milan, May 9 and 10, he drafted 10 pages toward “Ad Sanctos.” Again, travel, and time away from commercial commitments, had given him hours of substantial productivity.
“[T]he waste of my words & works” had been triggered by the sight of Turin’s great Renaissance buildings “turning to dust around us” — as if foreshadowing his own decay or the fading into oblivion of his writing that might, like these buildings, become “inappropriate for another space or head.” In this poem the characteristic bpNichol/Barrie Nichol ambiguity of the The Martyrology’s speaking voice was created by both the ambiguous second-person pronouns — did they address Barrie or the reader or both (Barrie being a reader)? — and by how the verbs “fades, fade” were made to jointly serve the text’s words and a human subject’s life.
our bodies, our sounds, words, this page, even as you read,
even as your vision, your life — uneven, even — fades, fade.
The final four words both enacted the disappearance of letters, the un and the s, and mimicked the continuing disappearance of Barrie’s bodily agility. As so often in the later books of The Martyrology, Barrie achieved an unsettling portrayal of personal loss foregrounded against a millennia-spanning vision of inevitable entropy, foreseeing simultaneously Barrie Nichol’s death and the much slower fading to black of “bpNichol” and other ostensibly pathetic relics of human culture. Knarn was still yet to vanish.
Back in Toronto, except for drawing 15 new visual poems he appears to have spent most of the rest of May back at work on television scripts. The Blizzard Island concept had been sold to the CBC and twelve shows needed to be outlined, written and produced. In June 1987 he attended the Fraggle writers meeting in New York, wrote notes for a Blizzard Island episode, and in his notebook drafted a criticism — addressed to Steve McCaffery as part of a dialogue for inclusion in Roy Miki’s collection Tracing the Paths: Reading . . . Writing The Martyrology — of what he perceived as the latent imperialism of the American “Language Poetry” school that had emerged out of the 1978 founding by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein of the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. He wrote that the fact that many of those writers considered to be “Language” writers were skillful both at writing essays and at getting them — along with their writing theories — into print had permitted their poetry to enter U.S. literary history as the work of a U.S. “movement,” even though many — including both McCaffery and one of the earliest L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers, Charles Bernstein, had often appeared to consider them neither specifically American nor sufficiently similar to one another to be considered a movement. In part Barrie blamed Ron Silliman for these misconceptions, particularly his 1986 anthology of Language writers In the American Tree, as well as Bernstein and Andrews’s 1984 anthology of essays that had appeared in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. In both of these, he argued, the editors seemed to have deliberately ignored their writers’ non-American indebtednesses. They appeared to have been claiming Language writing — an area of the mind much larger than a nation — as an American writing, like a conqueror planting his nation’s flag on a new territory. Seems rather imperialist to this guy, Barrie wrote. He went on to accuse the three editors of hypocrisy. How could they advocate a poetry that questioned the power relationships between writer and reader, he asked, when they themselves were claiming the power of national authenticity, and failing to challenge the blinkered tradition and selective historical thinking on which earlier exceptionalist theories of American writing had been constructed?
From the beginning of his work as writer and editor Barrie had been internationalist in his understandings of aesthetics, traditions, influence, and modernity. For him Silliman’s American Tree had been mostly a political manoeuver designed to consolidate Language poetry’s national reputation. The group itself — if it was a group — had roots in poststructuralism, in European psychoanalytical theory, in Dadaism, in Stein’s Cubism-derived emphasis on the materiality of an artist’s materials — much like his own writing — which Silliman’s “imperialist” tree had inevitably elided. However, he had misremembered the Andrews-Bernstein essay collection that, although preponderantly populated by American writers, had included ones such as McCaffery, Christopher Dewdney, Brian Fawcett, David Bromige, Alan Davies, and the British Eric Mottram and Cris Cheek.5 Perhaps because of this oversight, or his own second thoughts about the questions his comments raise, his views on “Language” did not find a place in the published dialogue.6
In late June and early July he taught at a one-week workshop in Red Deer, Alberta, and gave a reading at Simon Fraser, with Ellie and Sarah accompanying him for family visits in Saskatoon and Winnipeg. On their return Ellie began teaching a course for George Brown College’s academic upgrading program. Barrie went back to his family doctor to again seek help for his painful hip and repeatedly swelling foot, and was referred to a second specialist. He drafted another section of “Organ Music,” “The Nose.” He did more work in his notebook toward Ron Mann’s “Comix” film, sketching various “intercuts,” listing various themes that could be ironically invoked, suggesting the title “Comic Book Crazy,” and sketching on July 28 a “new opening sequence.” Mann recalls that he was also recommending visual artists who could work on the film, selecting much of the music for it, and would provide from his personal collection the majority of the film’s examples of comic books. He was doing all of this out of friendship and belief in the importance of the project.7 And he continued both his commercial and small press work. He described these to Steven Smith, writing that in the past weeks he had been working frantically, trying to finish doing outlines for 12 episodes of the Blizzard Island series. He was writing four and the rest he would be editing as the series’ head writer — plus he had a script to finish for the Under the Umbrella Tree series and some skits and continuity for a new CFTO children’s show. “Whew!” he added. As well he had the usual editing work with Coach House Press books that he still had to get into print, two sound poetry cassettes to get produced for Underwhich authors, and two Underwhich books to get produced before the end of the month. But so what, he asked Smith — implying that this was the normal life he had come to expect — just the regular crazy routine (September 8, 1987).
He had also recently received a $5,000 grant from the Canada Council to collaborate with composer David Mott on a music-theatre work to be titled “MEME” and to be performed outdoors in three parts.8 There was a possibility too that Barrie’s Space Opera collaboration with Howard Gerhard might receive a professional performance. As well, he was considering doing more individual work in sound poetry. In his letter to Smith he had remarked on the perpetually awkward issue of whether the Four Horsemen were still officially a group, and regretted that he’d linked his own activities as a sound poet so much to whether the “horsies” would continue. He indicated that he would prefer to extricate himself to the extent that he could do his own reassessment of sound poetry as a medium, and of the strength or weakness of the work he’d done so far. He told Smith that there were a number of works that he’d created in recent years for the group that it had never agreed to perform, and that rather than abandon them he’d like to perform and record each voice of these himself, and mix them into multi-track recordings.
He then commented on the possible negative effects on his reputation that the current critical interest in The Martyrology might be having, and how perhaps returning to solo sound poetry could be a way to remind his audience of his multi-dimensionality. Dutton and Smith’s bpNichol Festschrift had contained at least six articles on The Martyrology, and Roy Miki’s collection Tracing the Paths was in press for 1988 with many more. Barrie told Smith that now that the attention being given to The Martyrology had become “obsessive,” and along with it arguments that he was a “major” writer (whatever that might mean, he added), he probably should go back to emphasizing all the other kinds of writing he’d been doing at the same time as the Martyr. He would rather be multidimensional than major, he implied — if those were the only choices. In conversation he was telling other writers that he wanted to focus more on writing “ugly,” less aesthetically or thematically appealing poetry, such as his recent ’pataphysical writing, or the numeric lines of “St Anzas V” — he felt he needed to take more risks. As in the 1960s when he’d deplored “coterie” magazines that he believed published only fashionable poetry, he was suspicious of popularity, and preferred to be publishing an unfamiliar, difficult writing rather than one that readers found pleasurable or comfortable. He also told poet Gerry Shikatani that he hoped some day soon to be able to edit and publish 15 or more single-author collections of Canadian visual poetry, to create a “library” of work in this still academically neglected and non-popular genre. Shikatani recalls,“the point was that it would take up all this shelf-space, that it would have this big physical presence that would sit there — and not just be ignored as if this kind of art didn’t exist” (letter, January 4, 2012). Barrie was evidently still envisioning those Sigmund Samuel Library shelves.
There was considerable irony in Barrie’s literary situation. His writing was receiving the most attention it had ever received from readers, critics, and academics, but he now had the least time, and the least energy, that he’d ever had to work on it or change or enlarge its directions. In his notebooks he was often writing more plans for new work than he was writing actual new work. Ellie’s going back to teaching was one possible solution, one that could reduce his need to do commercial television work. He was also considering giving up the usual two writing courses he’d been teaching at York University. He had applied to the Canada Council for a Senior Arts fellowship, similar to the one he had held in 1978–79.
In October he and Shikatani began planning a Coach House Press “workhorse” title. Barrie tried to parody recent Coach House rhetoric when he described it in his notebook as “Percheron Book” from Coach House Press; its title was to be “Toronto Walks,” and it would feature accounts of favourite walks by Gwendolyn MacEwen, David Donnell, Christopher Dewdney, Gerry Shikatani, and four to six others. One of the walks would be a ’pataphysical walk recounted by some of the “Wild Culture” writers who had planned and hosted the L’affaire ’’Pataphysique conference.
There was some irony here also in Barrie, with his bad hip and leg, working on a “walking” anthology. Possibly the concept was nostalgic — Barrie after all had once been a successful middle-distance runner. He had again become optimistic about recovering some mobility and — with mainstream medicine doing little for him — had turned to the bioenergetics and homeopathic remedies offered by his brother Don. He wrote to Phyllis Webb on November 18 that his hip was surprising him by seeming to be getting better, that he’d been doing some “work” — the Therafields term for both physical and psychological therapy — with his brother Don in which he and some others attempted to heal his “energy body” and that in the last few days he had begun feeling a lot better. So he hoped that although he might always have to limp, he might not have to always endure a painful hip. On the same day he had written to British poet P.C. Fencott, telling him that whereas a year ago, when his back was at its worst, he had for many weeks been fortunate to get even one hour’s sleep in a night, he had been now been getting treated by his brother, who had begun practising holistic medicine, and he was feeling a whole lot better.