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.
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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 |
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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