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This is a site that will focus on the various facets of the poet bpNichol. Inquiries about contributions should be sent to the managers, Frank Davey and David Rosenberg. We welcome suggestions for additional kinds of topic or coverage. To offer a response to anything on this site, please go to the 'Response Blog' page.


IN NORTH AMERICA NOW THAT POSTMODERNISM HAS GONE


A Trailblazing Book Collaboration Out of the Past, the Journey of bpNichol and Steve McCaffery: In England Now That Spring (Toronto: Aya Press, 1979)

David Rosenberg

Springing out of a time capsule comes a book as gorgeously printed as written, in which two seminal poets wrote themselves into an epical journey, showing what a postmodern epic could mean. It's a journey spanning past and future: Wordsworthian England for McCaffery, Druid and Roman England for Nichol, exploring a future poetics that may need catching-up-to.

Meanwhile, in 2014, in a lucid and exhaustive critique of the current avant-garde in poetry ("Notes on Post-conceptual Poetry"), stretching back in historical context to the '60s, youthful critic Felix Bernstein fails to have discovered bpNichol's The Martyrology (previewed in In
England Now That Spring
) at least partly because Nichol breaches postmodern categories.


   "Within the '70s in avant-garde poetry, some poets, such as Steve
   McCaffery (b. 1947), drew on the open Bataillean libidinal excessive
   economy but were nonetheless canonized in a restricted refined
   literary economy by critics like Marjorie Perloff."


If these two "economies" can be fused, it's The Martyrology that does it, and that capability is on offer in Nichol's final section of In England Now That Spring, consisting of drafts from Book V in progress. The contrast to the book's less revolutionary first section, McCaffery's achingly lovely "A State of Mind," in itself makes the case, and I'll get to it in a moment. It's enough to say for now that Nichol's Martyrology drafts provide a film-like trailer for that lifelong poem's epic depth.

 
Last week, I came across an exhausting list of subjects for an academic conference plus symposium on bpNichol, to be held in Fall, 2014, at Brock University, yet there's hardly one topic that places him in an English-language literary history. One might hope this reflects an idealistic wish to read Nichol as sui generis, but no, it represents a decisive and painful schism in the appreciation of bpNichol in our age. There are those who see him as an M.C. of a hatful of genres, theories, and faces, a happy-go-lucky master of avant-garde ceremonies. And then there are those who see him as a major poet of the English language, going back forty years to when the critic Warren Tallman called Nichol the Walt Whitman of Canada. You won't find Tallman-like comparisons, however, at the latest Nichol confab; it's all M.C. bp -- and none of the Whitmanesque. The author of an epic that can be profitably compared to Song of Myself and Wordsworth's The Prelude; to the epical ambitions of Pound and H.D.; to Shakespeare's The Tempest and Blake's Jerusalem; and even to Virgil and Dante, receives none of that historical consideration. It's as if he wrote in 'avant-garde' rather than English, and that his lifelong poem
had but a disembodied life; there's a sad disregard for Nichol's biography, and in exchange we get the suggestion of a life confined to paper and audiotape. You won't likely find essential comparisons at the upcoming confab, for the M.C. mentality requires the prosthesis of theory along with a consequent fear of reading the autobiographical Nichol nakedly -- that is, against literary history and his own real life.

Concerning that life, its death is foretold in The Martyrology as the ending of the poem, whenever that is to happen. "bpNichol" can go on existing without Barrie Nichol's body -- that is, he can live forever in the moment of a processual poetics, but he is imbued by Barrie with an existential anxiety that the poem had to lead to the grave, sooner or later, so that the poem depends upon more than a literary life. I will get to the funeral procession of what turns out to be the last book, Bk.9, shortly. 


I've asked myself why it is that The Martyrology supersedes any parallel or oncoming longform quest for a larger poetics, including Olson & Snyder, Duncan & Spicer, Ashbery & Schuyler,
Coolidge & Bok, Johnson & Goldsmith, Mayer & Warsh, Wah & Blaser, Coleman & Rosenberg [full disclosure: writer cites his Lost Book of Paradise], Carson & Notley. Some things are obvious: Nichol's deep probe of childhood and adolescence is too extraordinary, so much so
that the first serious confrontation with it, Frank Davey's biography, is not even on the agenda of an airport-like listing of incoming flights-qua-topics at the upcoming avant-garde/ bpNichol confab. It's obvious too that Freud is considered a sort of Miltonian Satan-figure whose insistence on childhood and historical origins can be insulting to the Post-avant, yet just as Milton's Paradise Lost evokes a dynamic Satan, The Martyrology, in addition to the obligatory multiform postmodern "i's", presents a dynamic "I" as well, to counter the rush to disembodiment. Like a Miltonic Satan, the character Nichol creates of "bpNichol" is split between the cosmic and earthbound, and between a schizoid adolescence and a lay analyst's maturity (you won't find that topic at the confab either). I might stretch to mention Hamlet except that it's sure to press the a-g emergency buttons. Nevertheless, there are few characters in more than the last half-century of literature to rival the dynamism of "bpNichol" in The Martyrology.

It's a "bp" that bridges inner and outer history, rather than a full bore possessing of the world in neo-Heideggerian fashion that requires kicking Freud down the stairs and into the dungeon of repressed will-to-power. Bp and his author Nichol avoid that grandiosity by donning Freud's working clothes, back in the late twentieth century when one might substitute weed for cigar. Not that I'm aware of what, if anything, Barrie smoked in private, yet though he was sympathetic to the thought progression fueled by a toke, he was also aware of its resemblance to the Freudian analysand's freedom of association. As a lay analyst he was inclined to bridge private and public histories rather than bash them into a single entity, one that could then be represented by language-as-world, to re-invoke Heidegger.


Here is a Nichol bridge from In England Now That Spring:


   i try & follow thru an answer to a question Stein asked
   make the inner & the outer words rime
   this concept then
   these resemblances
   references & names that rime is
   more than a question of sound and content
   one of coincidence & intent
   the deliberate chance that living is


As Barrie writes "make the inner & outer words rime" he backs it up with not simply "the chance that living is" but rather "the deliberate chance that living is". What is a "deliberate chance" if not a cosmic journey in an age, ours, when the cosmos has shrunk into a quantum chance? (In his time, Blake had called it Newton's hell). The obvious rime with inner & outer worlds is likewise reinforced:


   Steve said (later)
   you walk a fine line writing this kind of poetry
   attempting to be true to
   the moment at hand
   the thrust of the poem
   the cumulative weight of your own history of a writing
   pushing you into this shock of perception
   again & again
                      it all crumbles
                                          it all falls away
   Castlerigg at sunrise
   Hard Knott hill fort as sun falls
   all the season's of the earth

   millennium falling away beneath me
   in the midst of this tiny poem
                                             these few books
   among the sheer weight of all literature
   or nature
                       wilder by far
   more enduring than these human walls & words but
   in the end
   simply to have said
   i began them
   carried them thru to
   the end or
   was outlived by them is          in a way to
   begin to
   be human


Nature is "wilder by far" but since it's also within us, not just without, the "human" that bp intends here is not the usual allusion to civilization but rather to Homo sapiens species consciousness,
with words a limited, provisional bridge to its wildness. For McCaffery in contrast, language is a see-through construct to nature, which might be merely more language beyond the limits of our senses. Yet McCaffery's content with what can be apprehended, like most avant-gardists, especially if it can be stretched (or deconstructed) into visual or aural dimensions. Nichol went along with this program too, as did all of us in some conceptualist mode or other, yet Barrie had a larger agenda way ahead of the rest of us, what I then dimly understood in the early Martyrology as a probing of the psyche, but what I now would call species consciousness, in which a seeming infinity of species, or "i's", is unified through the infinity of moments in which
we live by a singular self-awareness. The rest of us simply had no strong idea of who we were
outside of literature and academe, though for the sake of exposing the evolutionary tyranny of
language, we could be wonderfully or ironically transparent.

Here was McCaffery's counterpart to Nichol, as lip-smackingly good as it gets, where language is less a bridge than a malleable transparency:


   "From: The Prelude Book IV

   The moon in
   the moon

   a tall ash tall waving

   and the moon in
               the moon fixed tall

   ash waving ash waving moon

   to the moon in
               the moon

   watched her leaves leave

   poetry behind.

"A State of Mind," a highly lyrical intertextual investigation, is the largest section of the book. It's McCaffery's repurposing of Wordsworth as words with their worth subverted by language. Language subverts nature -- the moon, the tree, the wind -- whereas in Wordsworth, nature is language; language even subverts poetry, "leaves...poetry behind," while in Wordsworth poetry is also a force of nature. In the end, McCaffery comes back to reinforce Wordsworth, because "the moon in the moon" is a stark moonness, the wind in tree and leaves is a palpable "waving" wind, and "her leaves leave/ poetry" can refer equally to tree and moon, or moonlight. Still,
there is more McCaffery in the poem than Wordsworth, as language trumps nature and poetry as if it were Heidegger's dasein. Some years earlier, in my own collection, Leavin America (Coach House, '72), deconstructing Rimbaud, I may have pre-empted McCaffery by staying true to Rimbaud (and Wordsworth): re-imaging how nature subverts language, rather than the other way round. Both of us, McCaffery and myself, collaged phraseology (intertextually speaking -- I from the French and he from Wordsworth's English -- but we came out in opposite places. Still, there was another poet at the time who was able to hold both in mind in the same poem -- that nature both subverts language and also is language -- and that aspect of bpNichol is on poignant display in this singular collaborative book.

In the collaborative poem, "In England...", the sympathy between the two journeying poets is reflected in an attempt to move in parallel from collaborative meaning to a humanitarian subversion of it -- in the hyper-conscious suggestion of "uncoupling," for example, that produces a new word, "ing". It might also be an old word, of course, as old as bird song:


   and of the sounds, here,
   what the bird knows is
   what the bird sings
   what the man knows (being any man) is
   what the song to mind uncouples

                                                         ing

Perhaps we should now understand why even Felix Bernstein's admirably stretchable queer theory can't account for this post-Gertrude&Alice relationship, in which bp and Steve undid the




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other's tender buttons. Yet it's bp who gives it a purpose, a journey, that is epic rather than Wordworthian romantic: if McCaffery reads over Wordsworth's shoulder, Nichol reads over Milton's. Moreover, and if I'm allowed to be English-language historical, I'm thinking of the recent edition of John Florio's translation (c.1598) of Montaigne's essays, the one Shakespeare "used." Whereas Montaigne writes, "A father over-burdened with years...ought to willingly distribute and bestow them (i.e. 'pomp and trash whereof he hath no longer use') amongst those to whom by natural degree they ought to belong" -- Shakespeare puts this in the evil mouth of Regan, who tells her father, King Lear, "O, sir, you are old/ Nature in you stands on the very verge/ of her confine. You should be ruled and led..." While that may sound only marginally ironic, like Montaigne's advice, it turns out to be satanic in its death-wish for the father. I would say Regan's subversive language here correlates to Nichol's, which subverts the language of processual poetics in the same way as Shakespeare. Take, for example, the "now" that Hamlet employs, as will Nichol in a similar manner in The Martyrology, where language can be
undermined by a "readiness" to process each moment of the poem anew:

   "if it be now, 'tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If
   it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all."

It is here in McCaffery as well, though less likely to be enlarged upon with the autobiographical sweep of Nichol. The otherwise Avant-challenged Harvard critic, Stephen Greenblatt, who introduces the recent edition of Florio's Montaigne, seems to be describing Nichol and McCaffery when he writes, "each [Montaigne and Shakespeare] managed to come to terms with strict limits to authorial control, with the unpredictability and instability of texts, with a proliferation of unlimited, uncontrolled meanings. Each turned uncertainty into art. And in accepting open-endedness, each great writer found a way to be 'loyal,' as Montaigne put it, to life." Yet Nichol's loyalty to life, like Shakespeare's, reaches a cosmic dimension when, after he deconstructs his own lines in a further stanza, he looks back at himself and his Homo sapiens limitations with tender humor. Here's Shakespeare's prophetic version of Nichol, in Theseus's lines from The Two Noble Kinsmen:

   O you heavenly charmers,
   What things you make of us! For what we lack
   We laugh, for what we have, are sorry; still
   Are children in some kind. Let us be thankful
   For that which is, and with you leave dispute
   That are above our question.

This is from Shakespeare's last play, and it reminds me of Nichol in Book 9 of The Martyrology, where the entire poem's range, from childhood to cosmic theater of the "heavenly charmers," is reprised in the saints' funereal journey across the metaphorical stage. It's the range of species consciousness depicted, embracing our Homo limitations rather than affecting an end-run around them, as an avant poetics might pose the wish for. That wish, of course, saves it from
nihilism, yet it remains a disembodied wish rather than a fully loving embrace of our pitiable species and its lamentably limited language (even as its dizzying layers exfoliate ad infinitum). Like Nichol, I'm speaking of human language here, when compared to all of nature's infinite languages, as they're expressed in each species and each evolutionary trail of the cosmos. Nichol invoked this infinitude by speaking directly to it, in the form of imagined saints from a
childhood "cloudtown" doomed to language. Here, in the excerpted drafts from his great poem that appear in In England Now That Spring, we get intimations of that doom in the visits to Neolithic Druid and Roman ruins.

Unlike McCaffery or myself, who were also on literal journeys, his to England, in this case, and mine to France (full disclosure: my follow-up book Paris&London [Talonbooks, '71] collaging bits
of Mallarme and Valery, situates itself in Paris), Nichol's parallel journey to England also suggests a cosmic journey, epic in the classic sense of Dante or Isaiah:

   I'll make my way
   into whatever future the poem holds for me

   this issue of time
                            of rime
   -- climbed Glastonbury Tor in the pouring rain
   walked the ruins of the Abbey there
   noone spoke to me

   at Chysauster
   among the stone walled roofless huts
   the fluttering souls clung round me
   spoke in my ear as i walked the hedgerow
   did not touch or interfere
   merely spoke in their wordless voices
   & i listened
                    answered as best i could
   crouched under their roofless roofs
   talking
   it is like this saints
   it is the old days speak to me
   the old ways have their sway over me
   your own voices absent in this English air
   you seem North American who did not come from there
   immigrants like all of us
   you take on the accent of a place
   affects your own

What is, then, the poem in "whatever future the poem holds for me" but a cosmic inhabiting of his poem, in which he has talked to imaginary saints -- who are also "wordless voices" -- in not
simply a poetic way but also in a near-nervous breakdown way. Nichol speaks to his life: a schizoid failure to break through adolescence, that later turns, in the recovered psyche of a lay
analyst, into a cosmos of language. Language is not romantically nature but a deeply limited aspect of it, an "unwritable glyph/ ungraspable conception," as bp has it in the last section of In
England Now That Spring.
It's a species consciousness that Nichol was able to express in his poetry before any of us, an awareness that, as Homo sapiens, our grandiosity in language is hardly more splendid than a dog's bark or an alligator's mating song. And that is not meant to demean human language in the least, but rather to raise to awareness that utterly other manner of being that is no less perfect than we are: the Leviathan that Job hears God describe to him in
intimate detail as the Nile crocodile. It is a created creature that only God could love -- until now, that is, with the advent of species consciousness. Even today, few of us are reading the Bible's Book of Job as the poem of a life it is, though we've already been taught how to do that by Nichol.

   circling and turning        from the many into the one
   into the many many names by which we've known you
   Mother/Father in the vast beyond
   unwritable glyph
   ungraspable conception
   one of the many-named-one i name you
   sky & sun & wind & allness
   i invoke you on this lonely moor
   above the ruins of the mine here
   in the middle of my mind & life
   over the far-rolling hills of scrub
   i name you All & i invoke you
   as Ellie did
   at the mouth of Merlin's Cave below Tintagel Abbey

   i sort of feel like singing songs --
  ' Oh Lord
   what is man
   that thou hast
   thot of him'


Ellie is quoting from a biblical psalm, though not in my translation (Blues of the Sky, Angel Hair, '74 & Harper, '76), because, for one reason, I had failed to send a copy to Barrie until a '91 reprint, just before belatedly learning of his death. Perhaps if I'd kept in touch earlier, my parallel edging out on the limb that branches off from sentimentality, would have fortified him. At least then, it might have. A sentimental thought, for now. In any case, Nichol's chapter here
ends on a suitably cosmic note: "saints & airs/ prayers".


Finally, the collaborative serial poem of the title chapter, as noted above, is perhaps the least exhilarating, though lovely in its desire to make meaning of its disjunctions. Some PhD student may want to tease out the Nichol from the McCaffery lines (with the aid of Peter Jaeger's book on the earlier Nichol/ McCaffery collaboration, Toronto Research Group), but each seems on the
same wavelength in this chapter. Perhaps we may guess that Nichol adds the Homo sapiens
parenthetical in this line:

   what the man knows (being any man) is

Nevertheless, the fun, the insight -- expected and unexpected -- don't advance the game significantly, the way McCaffery's own chapter does in its fierce ironies of intertextuality, or change the game entirely, as Nichol's drafts from The Martyrology so powerfully accomplish.



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