12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kit Dobson

Kit Dobson lives in Calgary, Treaty 7 territory, in southern Alberta. He is the author or editor of eight previous books, including Malled: Deciphering Shopping in Canada and Field Notes on Listening, one of the CBC’s top non-fiction books of 2022. We Are Already Ghosts, his first novel, is scheduled to be published in May 2024.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book was an academic book, Transnational Canadas, published in 2009. It changed my life in many ways, first and foremost by showing me that I could actually see a book through to publication. That book still brings me the occasional note from readers, for which I am grateful. My most recent writing has shifted toward creative work, so it’s quite different. The most recent examples are my 2022 nonfiction book Field Notes on Listening and my forthcoming first novel, We Are Already Ghosts. The work now feels very changed. I have the confidence of having seen other projects through, which is great, and I am continuing to challenge myself in new ways.

2 - How did you come to creative non-fiction first, as opposed to, say, fiction or poetry?

Spending a lot of time in university shaped my initial writing. So it’s shifting from academic writing that brought me to creative non-fiction and then to other modes. My first creative non-fiction book was Malled: Deciphering Shopping in Canada. I initially thought that I was writing an academic book. It took a discerning reader to let me know that I was trying to fit a creative project into a critical frame – and that it wasn’t working. With that book, it was a matter of shedding a protective layer (my academic voice) in order to let that book be what it wanted to be. Fiction has been harder. My thinking was that I’ve read hundreds and hundreds of novels; I’ve written essays and criticism about dozens of them; maybe I could write one. Turns out it’s really hard, as any fiction writer can tell you. Having now endeavoured to complete a novel has enriched how I read and write about all of the fictional works that I encounter. I have tremendous respect for anyone who manages to write a novel.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

It varies so much! I work on more than one project at a time. That means that if I get stuck on one project, I can flip to working on another – until I get stuck again and make another shift. It’s a process that works for me. So the forthcoming novel has been about nine years in the making, but in the middle of that I paused and wrote Field Notes on Listening, which took about five years. I kept editing the novel when I got stuck with Field Notes in turn (and I have more projects in the works, ones that I’ve kept working on in fragments). All of that is to say that my writing is a slow, laborious, and at-times painful process. First drafts look nothing like their final published forms. I have a notebook in which I scribble notes, plot timelines, do character sketches, organize ideas, and draft in longhand, then I rewrite drafts into my computer, then I take a pause, then I print out drafts, scribble all over them, and then rewrite from scratch on the computer all over again – multiple times, as necessary. It is not a tidy process, but it is one that I am pretty happy with.

4 - Where does a work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

For whatever reason, the scale and scope of the book works for me. I tend to think in book-sized and book-shaped projects, for good or for ill. I may put out some smaller pieces from that project along the way, but find that I am always working on a book from the get-go.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I enjoy doing some readings because I am concerned with fostering and building literary communities. Readings can be one way of supporting that process. But this question is perhaps a version of one that I often ask people who write, which is: do you prefer to write or to have written? That is to say, do you prefer the process or the product? While I do write because I have a goal of sharing an idea or of presenting an argument to readers, if I am honest I prefer the process. There is nothing better for me than being at home, at my desk (which is formerly my grandparents’ farmhouse dining table), with a coffee, during a cold, snowy day, and writing for an hour or two. That’s the best. I do readings for the sake of community, friendship, and conversation – but my writerly self (who is rather an introvert at heart) is happiest when writing.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

My answer to this question will vary from project to project, but I am always thinking in terms of theory, society, and the political. In the broadest of terms, I concern myself with thinking about the world we live in, analyzing its shortcomings, and trying to articulate how we might learn to think, see, listen, and live differently. My personal goal is to leave my own little corner of the world a little bit better when I go. I hope that I can do that. Whenever anyone tells me that they have read a piece of mine, my answer is some version of “I hope that it was useful for you in some way.” I really do mean it. I don’t think that I am a particularly interesting human, but I do think that we can have meaningful conversations with each other through words. To me, that’s an amazing thing. The current questions are wide-ranging, but I am at this moment very concerned with polarization and social fragmentation. The literary has a role to play in bridging between divides and I work in that spirit.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Writers absolutely have a role to play in larger culture. I have been following the conversations about book bans and censorship with interest lately. I taught a course on this subject this past year, one that featured some of the most controversial books of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. If books – and by extension writers – didn’t matter, then there wouldn’t be this intense energy being directed toward banning and censoring books. I’ve spent many years having to defend books and literary studies against the charge of being boring or passé. These days it's the reverse. Republicans in the US are threatening literal burnings of books with LGBTQ+ and BIPOC content and similar attempts to ban books are afoot in Canada. To me, this sign is one among very many that books continue to play a vital role in culture writ large. Books matter as a way of sharing vital information and for forming communities. I am a passionate believer in the importance of literary works and I believe that this role is a good one – if fraught – for writers.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Editors are crucial. Anyone who wishes to write and believes that they do not need an editor is, in my view, not ready to be making their work public. I say this because such a resistance means that the writer is not ready to accept feedback and criticism (which, believe me, happens when one publishes a book). The process can be difficult, yes, but it is essential. I gave the example already of a reader – who became my editor – who let me know that Malled wasn’t working because of the box into which I was trying to put that manuscript. That’s one example. The editor for my latest book is Naomi K. Lewis, who is a brilliant writer, reader, and editor whom I admire tremendously. Naomi’s insights were crucial, and I do my best to maintain positive relationships with anyone who has ever served as an editor for any of my projects.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Don’t fall in love with your own writing. That piece of advice was given to me by Judith Mitchell, the professor at the University of Victoria who taught the introduction to literary theory seminar that I took more than a quarter-century ago. I was frustrated by that advice at first because I wanted every word to count. I realize now that it was an invitation to the recognition that one can edit one’s work without worrying about “losing” important or valuable words. Most of what I draft doesn’t see the light of day – and that’s a good thing. Just because one has written a sentence doesn’t mean one needs to keep that sentence. Let it go. Becoming less precious about my writing has been tremendously helpful.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (essays to creative non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

My moving between genres has been an endeavour to respond to how best to share my arguments, ideas, or visions. Essays serve one kind of audience and creative non-fiction serves another. My academic training focused relatively little on thinking about audience, so that’s something that I’ve been meditating on in depth recently. That’s not a slight against my mentors or my training; they taught me fantastic and wonderful things about how to think and how to exist in this world. I wouldn’t be able to do the work without them. But I suppose that I wasn’t ready to learn to think in depth about audience until more recently. It’s been that shift in my thinking about audience that has helped me to move between genres.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I wish I had a routine! My daily life is moderately chaotic. My day begins with helping everyone in my household to get set for the day, walking the dog, and so on. I answer emails from my students first. I plan my teaching, I do my marking, I go to meetings. I keep scholarly tasks on campus moving along. I coordinate future plans, touch base with fellow writers, colleagues, friends. On good days, I squeeze in some writing early on (sometimes quite early). When deadlines start to loom, I deal with them. I think it may be easier to think of my routine in terms of seasons: fall and winter I am typically doing all of those things that I just listed at a full-out sprint. Spring and summer I get more writing done, but it remains a struggle. I look forward to a time when I might be better able to calibrate my rhythms, but I haven’t managed it lately. I do insist, though, on taking weekends away from my desk. I’ve been through enough rounds of burnout in my life to know that I need to maintain a level of balance. I have had cycles of burnout that have taken years for me to recover from and I never want to find myself there again. So self-care is also very important to me, as best as I can manage it.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Inspiration is a fine word by me, partly because it is connected to breathing. I head to the woods and get a breath of fresh air. I go outdoors as much as I can and that is what grounds my practice (literally and metaphorically). A good hike with a friend will do more for me than any amount of trying to force my writing when I stall out.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Pine, spruce, cedar. I am fussy about smells. I am actually fussy about almost all sensory inputs. I cut the tags out of my shirts because they itch and I can only tolerate certain fabrics. Same for smells. If it smells like a forest in Alberta or BC, then I can enjoy it. Otherwise I struggle with fragrance. Most fragrances tip me into a kind of sensory overload. Same with loud noises and bad lighting. My partner (rightly) tells me that I am not the easiest human to deal with.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Books definitely come from books – that’s a cornerstone to my practice. But yes, books come from elsewhere too. Field Notes on Listening came from other books, but also, and very importantly, that book came from the landscapes of Alberta, and northern Alberta in particular. That book is a result of over forty years of returning to the same landscape and then slowly learning words that could attempt to convey that experience. Music, science, and visual art can inspire me in ways similar to books, but I’d really like to emphasize the importance of returning to land and environment, especially in my most recent work. My previous non-fiction book, Malled, also involved being in specific spaces – in that case, each of the shopping environments about which I was writing. I literally wrote the initial draft of the first chapter of that book in Calgary’s Chinook Centre mall on Boxing Day.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I am often asked what my favourite book is. I thought for a very long time about this question before I settled on Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. It’s a novel that I return to every few years and I get something else out of it each time. My own novel is an attempt to mix stylistic elements of To the Lighthouse with bpNichol’s playful poetics in an Albertan setting. I have an extremely long list of key texts in my life – touchstones to which I return and new books that devastate and inspire me – but maybe that’s a whole separate conversation.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I would like to slow down. I could come up with a more zippy answers, but slowing down speaks to where I’m at right now. I return to this challenge periodically. One my commitments is to be in the forest as much as possible. Every summer for the last few years I have managed nearly a week of being fully off the grid, but it seems like a drop in the bucket in an otherwise very busy life.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Well, it sure wouldn’t be an astronaut. (My friends know that I have a perhaps ill-founded antipathy towards our celestial über-Menschen because they are always looking down on us. Besides, my eyesight isn’t nearly good enough.) I work at the University of Calgary and so I am also a professor, or at least that’s my job title. I don’t tend to think of myself as a writer. Instead, I usually think of myself as someone who writes. Back in the day I signed up to write the LSAT exam and to go to law school, but I don’t think that I would have been good at it. My baseline level of anxiety is too high for that profession.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Increasingly I will say that the best – or even the only – reason to write is that one couldn’t not write. I think that that’s my reason: I couldn’t not write. It’s a thing that I do. I do other things also, but I write because I couldn’t do otherwise.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is the most recent book that I read that absolutely knocked me flat. What an amazing book. Sad, devastating, and beautiful. I cannot recommend it enough. The film Portrait de la jeune fille en feu is probably the last great film; its nuanced reworking of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice made it one of the most touching and simultaneously heart-wrenching films that I have seen in a long time. Both are not exactly up-to-the-moment references, but I come to some things later than others do.

20 - What are you currently working on?

With my novel We Are Already Ghosts set to be published in May, I am going to dedicate some of my energies to having the follow-up conversations that that book may lead to, for a start. Behind that book I have several academic projects that I am working on, none of which are really in such a state that I can say too much about them yet. But more than any of those things, I am working on finding small cracks of time that might allow me to slow down. I might never complete another novel, I don’t know (though I have one in the works). I am working on community, on relationships, and on figuring out how to become a better person. I’m a work-in-progress myself, after all.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Please, No More Poetry: The Poetry of derek beaulieu, selected with an introduction by Kit Dobson

Not enough attention has been given to the fact that Calgary poet, editor, publisher, critic and new Calgary Poet Laureate derek beaulieu’s Please, No More Poetry: The Poetry of derek beaulieu (2013), the nineteenth title in Wilfrid Laurier University Press’ Laurier Poetry Series of critical selecteds, is the first work included in the series by a Canadian poet under the age of fifty (beaulieu was born in 1973). Simply that this new book exists, one might argue, highlights what beaulieu has accomplished throughout his artistic practice in a relatively short span. For this particular series, as well as The Porcupine’s Quill’s The Essential Poets Series of critical selecteds, the argument a selected poems appears to be, in part, introductory, allowing new readers an entry point to the individual writer’s body of work, and other authors published in the Laurier Poetry Series include Steve McCaffery, Don McKay, Fred Wah, Nicole Brossard, Di Brandt, Dionne Brand, Dennis Cooley, George Elliott Clarke, Lorna Crozier and M. Travis Lane, which equates to quite a hefty list of poetry by Canadian authors over the past few decades. Titles produced through the series have all included critical introductions and a post-script, most often by the author themselves, whether shaped as an essay or an interview, and this collection includes an interview conducted by critic Lori Emerson in 2012 on beaulieu’s practice. As he says in his interview:

Within the purview of conceptualism, there is a massive variation of individualized practice. All writing is expressive, either due to the semantic gestures or the compositional ones. The author function includes—as you said—elements of transcription, erasure, selection, and recontextualization. These are not radical compositional techniques; they are consistently incorporated into traditional poetic practice. In conceptual writing they are prioritized. My own conceptual work—like Flatland or Local Colour but also in How to Write—is the record, the detritus, of reading. Reading is a privately, and publicly, performative act.

Known throughout the small press for his own poetic conceptual works, derek beaulieu’s books include With Wax (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2003), Frogments from the Fragpool: Haiku after Basho (with Gary Barwin) (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2005), fractal economies (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2006), Flatland (York England: information as material, 2007), Local Colour (Helsinki Finland: ntamo, 2008), How to Write (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2010) and seen of the crime: essays on conceptual writing (Montreal QC: Snare Books, 2011), as well as being co-editor (with angela rawlings and Jason Christie) of the anthology Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2005). His work so far has been presented, at least in book form, as a series of book-length conceptual projects, from the evolution of his short texts and visual and concrete works of With Wax and fractal economies, the conceptual language explored in How to Write, and the more expansive conceptual structures of Flatland and Local Colour. As editor Kit Dobson writes in his introduction to Please, No More Poetry: The Poetry of derek beaulieu:

The best example from beaulieu’s oeuvre is Flatland, a book that takes the 1884 novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott (an unusual book in itself) and replaces the text of that book with a series of lines. These lines trace links from the first appearance of the different letters of the alphabet that appear on the first line of each page to all of the subsequent first appearances of each letter on the subsequent lines. It repeats this procedure on each page of Abbott’s text. beaulieu’s rewriting of Abbott’s novella is not a complete conceptual piece unless one examines the entire work, in which the procedure that the concept entails is worked through to its completion.

“It is within the realm of conceptual writing, however,” Dobson writes, “that I would particularly like to situate beaulieu’s work.” Over the past fifteen years or more, derek beaulieu has been one of Canada’s strongest and most visible champion of conceptual writing and concrete/visual poetry, and has, more than any other producer, publisher or critic, managed to bring each of these forms back into a larger conversation of Canadian writing, one that hadn’t really been as prevalent for quite some time, going back to the years of activity by the late, and much beloved, Toronto poet bpNichol (1944-1988). In his “12 or 20 (small press) questions” interview (posted January 3, 2011) discussing NO Press, beaulieu says:

If writing a poem is inherently tragic it is because it is hard to believe that the author had nothing better to do. It is inherently tragic because we still chose an outdated form as a medium for argumentation. If we had something to say would we chose the poem—with its sliver of audience and lack of cultural cache—as the arena to announce that opinion?

What has always been prevalent through beaulieu’s work has been the sheer physicality of it, in how his visual works turn a medium as clean as the printed page appear at different times rough, layered and deeply textured. Utilizing a variety of technologies, including digital, printmaking, Letraset, photocopiers and manual typewriters, he has managed to produce works that can’t help but feel as solid as any physical object, far more than most who work within visual and/or concrete forms. Please, No More Poetry includes a wide-ranging overview of his work in text and visuals, including more conceptual works, from a variety of his published works, and a healthy selection of works as-yet uncollected in trade form. Part of the conversation of his creative output is in exploring the possibilities of a poetic not limited to poetry itself, exploring how text can be presented as outside of language, and even playing up and over the boundaries of meaning itself. An example of such might be from the previously uncollected prose-sequence “from Extispicium,” that includes:

I remember something happening did it. Did something happen I remember it. I remember it did it happen. Something happens I remember it. It happened and she remembers. He remembers. She remembers. She remembers so does he.

I was born in Montréal. I was born in Montréal or Montreal. I was born in Montréal or Montreal or Brossard or Longueuil. When I was born I was born in Brossard but then I was born in Longueuil but now I was born in Brossard again but I wasn’t born there. I was born in Montréal or Montreal but we lived in Brossard. I was born in Montréal or Montreal but I lived once I was born in Brossard. Brossard was itself and then it was in Longueuil and then it was itself again but the whole time it was part of Montréal or Montreal. I was born in Montreal. Brossard has no cemetery.

As beaulieu says further in his interview with Emerson: “In a lot of ways I think that the best poetry being written today is ‘not-poetry.’ Poetry, culturally, is waste—it is a discarded, non-productive site. Poetry, then, as I argued in the manifesto ‘please, no more poetry,’ has the most to learn from ‘non-poetic’ forms as a means of invigorating not only the language but also the cultural spaces in which it speaks. Poetry is by no means exhausted, but Brion Gysin was right: ‘writing is fifty years behind painting.’ Turning one’s back on art as an artistic practice is not without precedent.” Part of the conflict that has always emerged with poetry generally, and any more challenging works, including concrete and visual poetry, more specifically, has been in the difficulty many readers so often claim with the material. How does one approach such difficult work? Where does one begin? Given that such experimental and conceptual works haven’t entirely been prevalent throughout mainstream publishing, beaulieu’s fractal economies, wisely, included an afterword by the author discussing some of what he was exploring and attempting to engage within the form and traditions of concrete poetry. Five years later, beaulieu’s collection of essays, seen of the crime: essays on conceptual writing, a collection of “statements, essays, missives, and informal discussions,” argues for the genre itself, as much as for a number of its practitioners in more specific pieces. Anyone wishing for arguments for and an introduction to conceptual writing would be wise to find a copy of this collection of thirteen short essays (long out of print, but available free as a PDF at UbuWeb), as beaulieu critically explores the work of bill bissett, Rob Fitterman, Gary Barwin, Emma Kay, Gregory Betts, Kenneth Goldsmith, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Dan Farrell, Caroline Bergvall, Gilbert Sorrentino, Craig Dworkin and many others working forms of conceptual writing, and providing context for works that rarely seem to get any kind of acknowledgement, critical or otherwise. It is as though, through his critical writing, publishing and editing, beaulieu’s work has been just as focused on creating a space for his work (and those of his peers) as much as on creation, as well as engaging with and acknowledging works by peers and mentors such as jwcurry, Steve McCaffery, bpNichol, Judith Copithorne, Bob Cobbing, Christian Bök, Darren Wershler and others. Please, No More Poetry is an essential critical overview of a poet working outside the boundaries of traditional poetic forms, and a worthy introduction to a larger conversation on conceptual writing. One just hopes there are enough readers willing to listen. Opening with the idea of a poet working “within a medium without using the medium itself,” Dobson’s introduction writes:

            It is in such a context that we should be prepared to read the work of Calgary-poet writer derek beaulieu. beaulieu is a poet, but this statement reveals little. He is interested in the materiality of language, in the texture of letters and words themselves.

Open Letter 13:5 + 13:8: Reappraising Reappraising bpNichol

There is a more recent element of the critical journal Open Letter, now some four decades old, that has concerned me, worried that the past few years have been treading the same ground, reworking the same authors, instead of looking further ahead. Why not issues on Erin Moure, for example, or Lisa Robertson or Christian Bök, for example? There were the two Fred Wah issues a couple of years ago [see my review of such here], and a new Bowering issue forthcoming, and now two (with a third on the way) on the late Toronto poet bpNichol. What makes these two issues interesting (and the Bowering as well, if the submission call is any indication), edited by Canadian expat critic and poet Lori Emerson, is how they move into working to reappraise the work of bpNichol, and fill some essential critical holes, published as “bpNichol + 20” (Thirteenth Series, Number 5, Spring 2008) and “bpNichol + 21” (Thirteenth Series, Number 8, Spring 2009). As editor Emerson writes in her introduction to the second volume:

I introduced the previous special Open Letter issue on bpNichol (13:5), in “’a writing of your seeing’: An Introduction,” by noting that “this special issue of Open Letter is the first of two issues which follow-up on the 1998 issue of Open Letter ‘bpNichol + 10’ in the hopes of re-enlivening and, especially, broadening the critical landscape of Nichol’s works.” With a range of young and experienced, Canadian and American, cutting-edge critics and poets, this second issue completes, I believe, the fulfillment of that promise.

Emerson has put a lot of her time and effort into Nichol, following in the footsteps of so many who have gone before, including Roy Miki and jwcurry, and is not only editor-in-chief of the recently launched bpnichol.ca, but co-editor (with Darren Wershler-Henry) of The Alphabet Game: a bpNichol reader (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2007) [see my review of such here]. These volumes serve as a wonderful extension of that previous work, with each issue working as their strength to talk about Nichol’s ephemera, concrete/visual and sound works as well as his works in different contexts. There has been a lot of criticism on Nichol, and somehow, much of it has focused on the same few works (predominantly The Martyrology), and the same few ideas, and for the sheer amount of Nichol criticism, it has actually been troubling to note just how uniform (and often incorrect, with misquotings abound) that criticism has been. The piece by Stephen Cain, “Hopelessly Devoted: The Sacred and the Sloppy in bpNichol Criticism,” for example, writes what had been said out loud for years by many on the problems with bpNichol Comics (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2001), edited by Carl Peters, and is breathtaking in its range, research and sheer force, calling the editor on poor choices, bad editing and careless criticism.

Well-known artists and authors are frequently misspelled: Laurence Sterne as “Laurence Stern” (26), Claes Oldenburg as “Claus Oldenburg” (19), for example, and complete sentences repeated verbatim on a single page (17). One could, charitably, attribute these errors to a copy editor’s negligence, but surely a proofreader could not introduce such errors in reference to a Stein text entitled The Geographical History of American and/or The Making of Americans (26). Here it appears that Peters has confused two separate Stein collections as a single one: The Geographical History of America or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind (1936) and The Making of Americans (1925). Is this mere nitpicking? Perhaps, but how can readers trust Peters’s claims about Stein’s influence on Nichol, or his insistent representation of Nichol as a devotional poet, if Peters cannot keep simple titles correct – especially regarding authors that he professes to know well?

The answer is: we can’t. In his review of bpNichol Comics, Paul Dutton characterizes Peters’s criticism as “commentary rife with solecisms, solipsisms, and unwarranted conclusions” (21), a list of problems which, I would add, also includes pointless assertions based on illogical reasonings and scant textual evidence.

Other works in the two volumes include critical and creative works by Peter Jaeger, Kit Dobson, Rob Winger, Jim Andrews, Geof Huth, Dan Waber, Stephen Scobie, Jonathan Ball, derek beaulieu, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Carl Peters, Natalie Zina Walschots and Debby Florence, among others. It’s good to see some new critical work by Clint Burnham. I’ve appreciated his essays over the years, going back to his early 1990s work in Vancouver’s Boo magazine. Is it worth finally collecting what he’s written over the years? How do we see more? And as good as a critic and bpNichol bibliographer is, jwcurry is referenced in the issue, but in a context of past tense, working his essay on the beepliography from an essay from 1986, with nothing more current (I can only presume that his lack of contribution to these two Nichol issues is, unfortunately, by his own choice), almost negating whatever work he has worked since, but at least referenced by Kit Dobson in the piece “Openings: bpNichol’s Ephemera,” writing:

jwcurry has spent many years assembling what he calls A Beepliographic Cyclopedia, an early portion of which was included in the Open Letter festschrift for Nichol in 1986. This project has become a massive, eight-volume planned work that includes entries on every Nichol work – as well as every work on Nichol. It is a monumental task that resists completion, of course, since work on Nichol is ongoing, but it marks a fascinating attempt to understand the output of one of Canada’s most prolific, eclectic, and provocative poets.

bpNichol’s influence over the years has been wide and far-ranging, and it’s good that these thoughtful two volumes work to capture some of that range. There is even a further volume forthcoming that sounds pretty interesting, “The Martyrology: Survivors’ Retrospective,” guest-edited by David Rosenberg (Fourteenth Series, Number 1, Fall 2009), as “American poet-critics read a volume of The Martyrology for the first time and look back on their own work of the period. Canadian poet-critics re-read a volume and look back at the ‘first time’ of reading.”

lope

your cumulous crushes granite
stomps thunderhead galoshes
chews tinfoil

my cirrus bums a light,
coughs smoke rings and spaghettios
grins licorice

your stratus sprays ozone
clatters through a tapedance
never keeps it down

my nimbus shoots and ricochets
splatterbuckshot
holepunches constellations (Natalie Zina Walschots, “vol a vent.”)