24. The Afterlife of bpNichol

it’s precisely this borderline between the real life of the i & the i’s existence in narrative time, any narrative’s time, that was one of Stein’s central concerns.

— bpNichol in Miki,

Meanwhile: The Critical Writings of bpNichol, 318

I realize that I lived with a person who wrote, as contrasted to living with a writer. Actual writing took place separately: emotionally and physically. Barrie laughed over an incident in Vancouver at one of his readings when an old high school chum that he had not seen in many years was waxing eloquently to me as to how exciting it was to live with a writer. Lacking in tact, I guess, I told her it wasn’t like that at all, but that he went into a room, closed the door and wrote — hardly exciting.

— Eleanor Nichol, “The Ordinary Man”

The 1995 issue of West Coast Line magazine in which Ellie Nichol responded to a request to write about “The Influence of Therafields on bp’s Writing” was guest-edited by George Bowering, who titled his introduction “The Sound of the Beep” and wrote there that he was not about to do an issue without some Nichol in it. As well as Ellie’s contribution, “The Ordinary Man,”¹ the issue contained a short essay on The Martyrology by Steven Smith, a brief recollection of Therafields artists’ marathons by Philip Marchand and 10 pages of songs and dialogue from Barrie’s first musical Group — the songs’ first publication. The table of contents listed the latter as “From ‘The Group.’” The issue was one of many signs that bpNichol was very much alive to various readers and editors even though Barrie Nichol was no longer entering his writing room and closing the door.

Ellie’s choice of “The Ordinary Man” as her title, and her recollections that she lived with a person rather than a writer, that it had been Barrie with her in Vancouver at the bpNichol reading, and that whatever exciting bpNichol writing had come into being behind that closed door did so within a “hardly exciting” domestic context, recalls the Gertrude Stein advice he had cited in his 1986 letter to Kroetsch — that to be extraordinary in your writing you should be ordinary in your living. It also, however, reflected a tendency in Ellie to underestimate Barrie’s “extraordinary.” His passing through the door to his study to recommence bpNichol’s writing had not been as dramatic as Clark Kent’s rushing into a phone booth to become Superman, but had been at least equally productive. One had to be “ordinary” — reliable, punctual, careful about income, mortgages, and Fraggle Rock contracts, caring of one’s family members — in order to maintain the everyday rooms that supported the special doorway. One also had to be ordinary in order to nourish the continuing life of the work — stuffing envelopes with copies of Ganglia, rushing to make sure that bpNichol was included in New Wave Canada, booking airline tickets for multiple-reading tours, overseeing book publications, ensuring that manuscripts became ready for publication, consulting with doctors in hope of a continuing life, resisting the weariness-creating pain of his mortality. Inside the room would appear that “extraordinary” literary character bpNichol, the “Martyr-poet” as Roy Miki evidently came to call him (Swail 181–82), continuing his interrogations of the present moment, going through the hours, following the chains, journeying in search of a return. Inside the room and inside the books.

With Barrie’s death the potential scenarios that he had often anxiously foreseen had opened, as the Martyrology-poet bpNichol had revealed to him in the apocalyptic final hour of “A Book of Hours” in The Martyrology, Book 6 Books:

(in the library stacks the shelves grow fuller, the buildings forced to expand, the budgets cut, nonexistant [sic], of course the voices become more muted, even tho they are screaming, even tho they have things to say, things you might want to hear, the words disappear into the dust, the darkness, the books closed and noone here to read them, noone here to take them from the shelves, anything any one of us might say becoming simply what it is, ink on yellowing pages, disappearing into this wait of words, the unvoiced endless hours)

Here the authors may be dead, but the books still have voices — “muted, even tho they are screaming.” It is those still living who cut budgets, close books, and mute voices, or who allow humanity to so decay, as in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine — a book that Barrie knew well — that there is eventually “noone here to take them from the shelves.” The gloomy “Hour 28” had been a kind of visit to the underworld, or at least to the afterworld in which the afterlife screams of bpNichol would have to resound:

the old notion of immortality seen for what it is

a preening in the bleak light history reflects

For bpNichol saw, in this last “Hour,” that his own textual body was, in its own way, as material as Barrie’s bleeding body would be: “ink on yellowing paper,” dependent on shelves, buildings, and budgets, and the endurance of human culture. As much as this dusty library passage had echoed Wells’s view of the Darwinian future, it had also spoken of Barrie’s experience with libraries, first working at the Sigmund Samuel where thousands of books rested on their shelves undisturbed since acquisition, and latterly visiting Simon Fraser’s Special Collections where 50 or more boxes of his own manuscripts rested in a windowless vault.

Re-establishing care for the now Barrie-less bpNichol nevertheless would require the assistance of such “ordinary” public institutions. Ordinarily. Whatever their susceptibility to neglect and budget cuts, public institutions on average have much longer lifespans than individuals — even the lost Royal Library of Alexandria. It was to Simon Fraser University that Ellie, as Barrie’s executor, trustee, and default literary executor, quite reasonably turned for advice about how to deal with the contents of the room beyond that once opening and closing door; she was referred to Irene Niechoda, the Roy Miki student who had recently completed her source-book for The Martyrology, Book I and Book II. In three months in the summer of 1989 Niechoda sorted and organized the room and, on the basis of Barrie’s notebook and other sometimes ambiguous instructions, created a plausible and publishable manuscript of Book 7&. Niechoda then resumed her doctoral studies, working toward a dissertation that would create a source-book, or “sourcery” as she was calling it (fancying herself something of a bpNichol), for other Martyrology books. Her not completing this latter project repeated Barrie’s own inability to create more than hints of Books 10 and 11 and signalled once again the fragility of human expectation. It also showed that institutional longevity is not immune to the vagaries of individual lives.

Coach House Press published Gifts: The Martyrology Book(s) 7&, conceived by Barrie as Book 7 with Book 8 variously embedded within it, in 1990, and Ad Sanctos: The Martyrology, Book 9 — words by bpNichol and music by Howard Gerhard — in 1993. By the latter date the press was no longer affiliated with Barrie’s friend Stan Bevington, who was now taking legal action to reclaim the original Coach House logo. Much entropy. Longtime Barrie Nichol friend and Coach House author Christopher Dewdney was listed as the editor responsible for the production of both; another longtime friend of Barrie’s, David McFadden, was listed as typesetter. Collectively with Niechoda and Ellie Nichol they were standing in for Barrie to provide the supervisory oversight he had given each of the previous volumes. These were posthumous publications of Barrie Phillip Nichol but definitely not posthumous work of bpNichol. Even the board of directors of the recently incorporated Coach House Press, most of whom Barrie Nichol had never met, and who had hopes of making the press a successful bourgeois publisher, were contributing to keeping bpNichol alive because of their sense of a historical obligation to Barrie. But this was not necessarily a sense of obligation to those things Barrie had spent his life serving — the endurance of poetry, story, and self-reflection, and their news that individual lives could have meaning and that the journey from Dilmun could continue.

carry out this trust been granted me

those few left who see a worth in the activity

songs of praise and grief

songs of joy

bpNichol would continue publishing and being published about. Art Facts: A Book of Contexts would be published by Tucson-based Chax Press in 1990, a press operated by Barrie’s long-time poet-friend Charles Alexander. Truth: A Book of Fictions, edited by Irene Niechoda, would appear in 1993. In 1994 An H in the Heart: bpNichol a Reader, edited by Barrie’s old friends George Bowering and Michael Ondaatje, would follow from McClelland & Stewart — a press Barrie had once said he “would never publish with.”² That year also the City of Toronto would agree to name the alley on which Stan Bevington’s print shop was located “bpNichol Lane,” and Bevington and his colleague Rick/Simon would engrave in its concrete the Nichol poem “a lake / a lane / a line / a lone.” After the unsurprising 1996 bankruptcy of Coach House Press, Stan Bevington and his recently established Coach House Books would volunteer to keep all Martyrology volumes in print, and later make all volumes available online as attractive but unsearchable facsimiles of the original books. Installation artist Gil McElroy, who had met Nichol once in 1981, but had remained in tenuous friendly contact, would then begin work to curate the 2000 exhibition St. Art: The Visual Poetry of bpNichol, and edit the accompanying catalogue with informative essays by Paul Dutton and Barbara Caruso. bpNichol Comics, edited by Carl Peters, another Miki student, would appear in 2002, and include Barrie’s 21-page mixed-media memoir about the late Toronto comic strip dealer George Henderson, mistaken by Peters as a version of Barrie’s “John Cannyside.”

BPNICHOL LANE, TORONTO.

(Stan Bevington)

Some of those standing in for Barrie would do a better job than others. Also in 2002 would appear the carefully researched, almost 500-page Meanwhile: The Critical Writings of bpNichol, edited by Miki himself. The Alphabet Game: a bpNichol Reader would appear from Coach House Books in 2007, edited by Darren Wershler-Henry (now Darren Wershler) and Lori Emerson as a kind of 336-page rebuke to the Bowering/Ondaatje “reader”; to extend it and accommodate Barrie’s sound poetry and colour-based visual work, they established the companion website bpNichol.ca. The Captain Poetry Poems Complete would appear from Jay MillAr’s Book Thug press in 2011, but without any explicit statement of who had edited or “completed” it (MillAr was most likely the bashful stand-in). But of a “complete” or “unified” one-volume edition of The Martyrology there has not been discussion.

In 1992 Niechoda would publish her A Sourcery for Books 1 and 2 of bpNichol’s The Martyrology — to complaints that her commentaries rendered parts of the poem pedestrian. Roy Miki and Fred Wah would publish a collection of student essays about The Martyrology, titled Beyond the Orchard, in 1997; some of the student contributors would worry whether the poem was worth studying when Barrie himself had been male and white; many appeared to have read only two or three of The Martyrology’s eight books. I would publish a “bpNichol + 10” issue of Open Letter in 1999, Lori Emerson guest-edit “bpNichol + 20” and “bpNichol + 21” Open Letter issues in 2008 and 2009, and David Rosenberg a “The Martyrology: Survivors’ Retrospective” issue of Open Letter in late 2009.

In The Martyrology, Book 9, Ad Sanctos, 12 pilgrims — including several of Nichol’s paragramatically discovered saints — journey to Rome hoping to die and be buried near the grave of St Valentine. Once there, one of them discovers the grave offstage to the right, and another discovers it offstage to the left. After highly charged arguments about which is the “true grave,” groups of them depart in each direction, leaving three characters — “i” bracketed by St Agnes and St Ranglehold — to go in neither direction, and ambiguously singing “one and one makes one zero.” The critical response to bpNichol since 1988 has been somewhat like this scene; most critics have tried to situate themselves beside the grave of the “true” bpNichol. Some have seen this bpNichol as the Martyrology-poet — humanistic but postmodern, possibly religious, playful, generous, much like the once smiling Barrie Nichol, and paradoxically yearning for an ontological certainty he knows impossible. Others have ridiculed this view, suggesting it to be the work of “disciples and exegetes, mystics and sycophants” (Wershler-Henry, “Argument for a Secular Martyrology” 43); “The Martyrology is, sadly, not pomo because, despite all its alleged efforts to subvert humanist ontology, the text nevertheless reiterates the spiritual anxieties of modernism, substituting a poetic gain for a mythic loss . . .” (Bök, “Nickel Linoleum” 64). The latter have argued their true bpNichol to be the visual poet and ’pataphysician, the author of Zygal, Art Facts, Love: A Book of Remembrances, Truth: A Book of Fictions — books that wittily assert and demonstrate the semiotic constructedness of being. Somewhere in the middle of the stage a few, such as Steve McCaffery, have seemed to offer Deleuzian “both/and” readings. McCaffery argues The Martyrology to be a paragrammatic text that misses various opportunities to be entirely free of a lyrical humanism. But, he writes, “the core issue of The Martyrology coincides with the core issue of postmodernism: to achieve a finite inscription of writing’s infinite combinatory motions” (“The Martyrology as Paragram” 202). Such an approach would likely, at the end of Ad Sanctos, read “one and one makes one zero” as meaning both “one and one makes one zero” and “one and one makes one [plus] zero.” Also near the middle has been Roy Miki, who by 1998 had come to see “the Martyrology poet” as a textual being, as having become at the beginning of Book 4 “The M poet who signs himself into the text, simultaneously dying into language and being reborn as bp — no longer the imperial/empirical Nichol but a textual entity” (“Turn this Page” 122).

David Rosenberg’s readings of both 1998 and 2011 were somewhat similar, viewing “bpNichol” as the mercurial writer within the text and the clock-time Barrie Nichol as the “parental” author “watching over the shoulder of the bp who writes at a table in his room, comprehend[ing] the difficulty of separating from his created character — just as most parents and children experience” (“Body by Nichol” 12). Or, as in the dedication Barrie wrote for Book(s) 7&:

for Ellie

outside these books

that life

McCaffery too has sometimes implied such a view of a split Martyrology-Nichol — Barrie the parental watcher and bp the impetuous breaker of words into new meaning. “Nichol does not indulge in all-out logophilia, but rather censors, arbitrates, selects, and through restriction — (why not a St Upid?) regulates the plastic disposition . . . to which all alphabetic combinatory language is predisposed” (“Nichol’s Semiology of the Saints” 103). Rosenberg, a widely read Biblical scholar and translator as well as a poet and essayist, author of The Book of David and of Abraham: The First Historical Biography, and co-author with Harold Bloom of The Book of J, has brought to Nichol a view of literary history that is considerably larger than the modernist ones with which critics have usually framed Barrie’s work. Rosenberg has notably differed from most other readers on the possible humanism and ontological yearning of The Martyrology. So what if a resonant humanist modernist epic has been written in a historical period understood by many to be postmodern and — in terms of Aquinas’s framing of ontology — resolutely nominalist, he has seemed to say. In The Martyrology bpNichol has transcended the difficulties with fragmentation that had limited Pound, Williams, and Olson, he argues, and created “a classically epic journey through the history of civilization, from Sumer to modern Canada, and through the personal history of a journey out of hell and into the saving methods, systems, traps and graces of human language and the cloudily grandiose thinking it puffs up” (8).

This epic had not been invalidated by the poststructuralist theory some anti-humanist critics had attempted to use against it. Rather it had superseded “French and continental theory and philosophy; psychoanalytic commentary; continental and American avant-garde poetry, north and south; modern and ancient epic; and the nature of authorship and created character in Spanish and English-language literature back to Cervantes and Shakespeare” (9–10). Implicit in the arguments of Rosenberg — whose own work has had a lifelong focus on elucidating the implications of authorship — has been the suggestion that in its overall nine books The Martyrology may be the most significant English-language poem of the past century. McCaffery has endorsed at least a small part of Rosenberg’s comparison of the Martyrology-poet Nichol to earlier modernists, while continuing to affirm the poem’s anti-humanism: “For Nichol content is an extension of rupture and hence marks a radical departure from the processual poetics of Olson and Creeley” (2008 102).

Most of these current critical custodians of bpNichol have agreed on the overall importance of his writing (though few are as strongly evaluative as Rosenberg and McCaffery) but usually have disagreed about the relative importance of The Martyrology versus his visual, ’pataphysical, and conceptual creations. However, most of those who have preferred the latter as Barrie’s “true” postmodern works, such as Bök and Wershler-Henry, have had little to say specifically about them. This biography has also had little to say about them, partly because Barrie himself had little to say about them, was seldom asked to comment on them, and included few hints about his own life within them. For the most part his life was indeed “outside these books.”

As well, Barrie took a much more casual and patient approach to these collections of visual, ’pataphysical, and conceptual works than he did to either The Martyrology or his fiction. He was not worried by publication delays. Zygal’s publication was delayed by various typesetting considerations from 1973 until 1985, and that of Art Facts, also conceived around 1972, held back until after his death by the delays with Zygal. As Niechoda notes in her “Additor’s Note” to Truth, all of these books had been accumulatively constructed, with one-of-a-kind or series items dropped into the relevant file folder as they were created. Items that did not fit easily into one might be moved to another; some might accidentally be placed in more than one. Barrie was not troubled either by delays in his adding to a series or to a folder, as he was with whether or not he was adding to or still writing The Martyrology, nor by questions of unity or disunity, or of whether he was ending a continuing project such as “Probable Systems” or “Negatives” or completing a book. He appeared to assume there would always be more. Yet this series of books was as much “ended” by his death as was The Martyrology.

As a result of his low-key approach, except for the interim publication of individual items in magazines or as short-run pamphlets or as gift cards to friends, only two of the five projected collections were published in his lifetime, and one — “Ox, House, Camel, Door: A Book of Higher Glyphs” — still awaits publication. It would be perhaps unfair to say that Barrie was less invested in these personally than he was with other work — his notebooks reflect him creating or conceptualizing such drawings and texts almost every month of his life, sometimes in bursts such as the 23 drawings he created in Turin. But he was much less anxious about them than he was about either The Martyrology or “John Cannyside,” and much less “parental” — to borrow Rosenberg’s term — in his assisting them into print. These, however, were definitely bpNichol creations, ones that had their inception in the 1964–65 months in which Barrie had reinvented his writing self as the non-arrogant “bpNichol,” “ideopoet.”

if i am i i am

if i is i i is

(Love)

The four-book series Love, Zygal, Art Facts, and Truth, along with similar work such as his Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer, Still Water, ABC: The Aleph Beth Book, Unit of Four, Alphabet Ilphabet, and The Adventures of Milt the Morph in Colour, has tended to fall into a gap between the literary and the visual. Much of their contents has been more appropriate for display on the walls of art galleries — where the work of bp’s Seripress collaborator Barbara Caruso hangs — than on the pages of books. Literary critics have been much less comfortable writing about them than they have been about his work that was more obviously textual, while most art critics have not seen them as part of their field. Sotheby’s Canada is yet to offer a bpNichol creation at one of their auctions.

Barrie’s life’s work had predicted this overall carnival of signifiers, losses, and significations — a carnival that was already well underway in his lifetime. In the opening fragment from “The Chronicles of Knarn,” The Martyrology had begun with both an ending and a dispersal of fragments:

i’ve looked across the stars to find your eyes

they aren’t there

where do you hide when the sun goes nova

i think it’s over

somewhere a poem dies

inside i hide my fears like bits of broken china

mother brought from earth

millenniums ago

Whether this “Knarnian” ending that precedes, together with its very early — or late — Knarnian bpNichol “i”-narrator, comes into being before the saints reach Cloudtown or after Book 9 has been written, or resides somewhere in an Einsteinian circularity of time and space, both preceding and succeeding, is never resolved. “it’s too late to say anything and too late to have anything to send.” But the passage’s apocalyptic and spiritually empty images resound throughout the various books. “i wish i could scream your name” the speaker calls, foreshadowing or recalling the books that will scream, or will have screamed, in the deserted library of Book 6 Books. “a long time ago i thot i knew how this poem would go,” the speaker laments, foreseeing the thousands of times The Martyrology would surprise its writer with content he had no idea its words could contain. “i wish i could scream your name & you could hear me out there somewhere where our lives are,” he calls, somehow mysteriously echoing the dedication Barrie would sooner or later write for Book(s) 7&: “outside these books / that life.” Knarn is a lost home or an about-to-be-lost home, or perhaps a closed book, depending on one’s position in time. It’s a home about to be taken away, much like a home in H section, Wildwood Park, was taken away from young Barrie, or Cloudtown taken from his saints, the stone circles of Britain taken from their deities, Eden taken from the first couple, or Barrie from his neurotic fantasy-life of 1964 into his journey as bpNichol.

Each loss, each expulsion is from a fantasy of no future, no time left, or no time. If you are not planning the new, you are on the side of death, Barrie had written in 1972 with Lea Hindley-Smith and therapists Stan Kutz and Philip McKenna. After Cloudtown and its community of saints collapses, Therafields collapses. And after Therafields, the Coach House Press. Each time Barrie struggles against the changes, like a saint. Each time there is something more beyond the gates of Paradise to journey toward.

His final series of poems, the “Assumptions” of Book(s) 7&, forecasts in its punning reference to the upwardly rising Mary (bp’s last great ecclesiastical pun) other possible journeys. Assumption into what — an afterlife of language? or something beyond g & d, l or d? — had endured throughout The Martyrology as its major critic-troubling ontological mystery. Mary’s own afterlife of bodily assumption had itself been written into partial being in the sixth century, and become an official Church policy with a written proclamation by Pope Pius XII only in 1950. Institutions can last almost as long as the ars longa of Hippocrates, and write their own memories into cultural memory. Spider-Man can be both the white Peter Parker and the black/hispanic Miles Morales. The institution of Christianity is almost as old as the institution of Western literature and, as Northrop Frye argued in The Great Code, culturally almost inseparable from it. bpNichol’s own institutional future is more precarious than that of Frye, his fellow Canadian, who is indisputably at the moment a world literary figure, much like bpNichol was in 1967–70. Such futures are largely political, produced year by year by things such as the race and gender anxieties of Miki’s students, the right-wing humour of poetry columnist Starnino, the nationalist opportunism identified by Barrie in Silliman’s In the American Tree or interventions by other writers such as Miki, Rosenberg, McCaffery, Wershler-Henry, and Emerson.

bpNichol’s future is further complicated because Barrie wrote deliberately — like Frye and like Barrie’s other early Canadian contemporaries Sheila Watson and Louis Dudek — in an international modernist context, no matter whether one considers him a ’pataphysician or the Martyrology-poet. His first homage was a sound poem to Hugo Ball, and his first critical focus, and literary “mother,” Gertrude Stein. In visual poetry his peers were Houédard, Finlay, Gomringer, and the Garniers; in sound poetry and performance Bernard Heidsieck, Henri Chopin, and Jackson Mac Low; and in the long poem Charles Olson, David Jones, Basil Bunting, Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, and Ed Dorn. He was also one of very few significant poets, possibly the first, to be also a professional psychoanalyst, and to write implicitly as an exponent of Freud. The Martyrology is, among other things, the epic life-journey of a psychoanalysis, the psychoanalysis of a text, complete with analyst and analysand, an analysis, as Freud had written in 1937, “both terminable and interminable.” It effectively attempted to translate Freudian analysis into the company of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton as a primary survival and discovery narrative of Western literature. What is entwined with the bpNichol future is thus much less the history of any one national literature than the ongoing history of a modernism founded in Freud and Darwin and elaborated first by Stein, Dada, H.D., and Pound, and later by Bunting, Olson, Mac Low, and Duncan.

Barrie wrote and left that last writing to be “interleaved” among other texts, leaving the rest to the reader and the human future.

The lines arrive

like waves

beat at the shore of some knowing

some continent behaviour of your own

like waves of pain

pass thru this body

and the body & the pain & the words & the days simply are

(from “Assumptions,” Martyrology, Book(s) 7&)

That interleaving, however, was much more a metaphor for the care of literature, and specifically of the Martyrology as itself a lifetime affirmation of the importance of literature to culture, than it was a final clever postmodern gesture. Barrie had not spent most of his adult hours writing, editing, worrying about how to write, caring about the various ways language could signify — and caring also about the future of dusty libraries — in search of personal aggrandisement. He had been a therapist in his life as well as in his profession — one who had hoped to be an unobtrusive catalyst both to individual understanding and the enlargement of civilization. His early decision to be a non-arrogant “ideopoet” had been analogous to his decision to take up psychotherapy — as when he conflated the two roles to Caroline Bayard, “what you’re doing in the situation is not imposing yourself on the person but basically being a catalyst.” For bpNichol the next significant act beyond that Book(s) 7& interleaving will be the publication of a one-volume collected Martyrology. It will be a gathering that has already happened to many similar 20th-century projects — Blaser’s Holy Forest, Silliman’s Alphabet, Zukofsky’s A, Pound’s Cantos — and one that is implicit in both Barrie’s life and his writings about his work.

Those who fault The Martyrology for being insufficiently postmodern, or valourize it for being successfully so, are overlooking the possibility that, in adapting to the dominant international aesthetic of his period, Barrie may have both incorporated and transcended it. He created an Odyssean epic narrative that both completes itself and stays open, and within it a vivid literary character who voyages with him from teenage breakdown, through therapy in Toronto, through years of professional practice as a therapist, personal commitment to communal living, various searches to reclaim family, and a continuing struggle to write or not write a “lifelong” poem, to a reclaiming of wholeness and family, as in Book(s) 7&’s “You Too, Nicky,” a family that “was there before we began.” Both bp and Barrie seem to speak in many of the Martyrology’s later passages of lives that are books, and books that are lives.

And if i tries to retain a kind of loyalty to ideas, not blindly, but allowing them, always, to evolve under the scrutiny that time permits, it is simply that struggle with constancy, to stick with what makes sense until it no longer makes sense, to not be swayed by infatuation’s blind calling. It is what binds books together, these motifs and concerns, the trace of a life lived, a mind.

There is often an implicit sense of summing up in such passages; as usual the writing moves its searching forward but with a strong awareness of the earlier Martyrology books — the books its new lines dragged up that Del Mar hill. Readers of Book(s) 7& and the other late books who have not experienced all the ones preceding, as bp and Barrie have, are not reading the text in the fullness of its significations, much like someone who has read only a random chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses. Barrie Nichol’s particular journey from imagining the “Sailor from Mars” comes, despite the tragedy of everyone’s mortality, and despite the aesthetic expectations of Barrie’s period, not simply to a postmodern irony of five pieces of paper that may or may not be interleaved, but to a meaningful end.

To expand McCaffery’s observation, The Martyrology may not be “postmodern,” but it powerfully testifies to living, writing, and hoping within postmodernity. Part of its saga-end meaning resides in the contrast between the irrepressible bpNichol’s continuing Odyssean life, created like a “sayn’t” out of language, and his author’s own mortal “imperfection” — “gone beyond the reach of talking.” Part lies also in Barrie’s facing that imperfection with interrogation and analysis, in his asking repeatedly what human life could be without poetry, and in asserting and revealing poetry — as in “You Too, Nicky” — as news from the core of civilization.