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.”)

launching bpnichol.ca an online archive (please forward)

Dear all,

After years of planning we are pleased to launch bpNichol.ca, anonline public archive of the works of bpNichol and his collaborators. Here (http://www.bpnichol.ca/) you will find audio, digitized printmaterials, photographs, links and eventually video, critical articles and curated exhibitions - all of which we expect to be tremendously useful for research and teaching.

The site was developed by the Artmob project in collaboration with Ellie Nichol, and is designed as a not-for-profit community initiative.

It is intended as the start of a process, and we encourage everyone to read our submission guidelines if you have material you would like to contribute or an idea for an exhibition of bp's work.

Artmob is a York University-based research project dedicated to building accessible public archives of Canadian art. Over the coming years Artmob will add tools to improve the browsing and cataloguing. It will also provide novel approaches to intellectual property, encouraging contributors to identify themselves and set the terms ofuse for their works. Artmob hopes that a spirit of fair dealing will assist in getting artistic materials out of shoeboxes and filing cabinets and into the world where they belong. bpNichol.ca is Artmob's pilot project.

Once again, if you or your students (undergraduate or graduate) would like to contribute to the site, please get in touch with us. Here are our submission guidelines:
http://www.bpnichol.ca/submission_guidelines

Please explore and enjoy!

http://www.bpnichol.ca/

best, Lori Emerson

related posts: my review of The Alphabet Game: a bpNichol reader, eds. Darren Wershler-Henry and Lori Emerson

The Alphabet Game: a bpNichol reader, eds. Darren Wershler-Henry and Lori Emerson

1

an h moves past an m
an i becomes an r

someone throws a snowball

o p
t r s u
v v v

w

i i i i


2

x d

one mile

a sky which is grey
blue

do not serve yourself

l e
4 3 1 2 2


3

z

zero than nothing

3
6 9 10
13 5

here a z becomes an e
becomes an m a w


4

a d in a cloudbank
an r by the sea

perhaps it is a river
passes over

sky

sun

a town
in which the r becomes an l (from “Trans-Continental”)

It serves as quite a compliment to the work of late Canadian poet bpNichol (1944-88) that every decade or so, due to a demand by readers, friends, editors and publishers, a new edition of his selected poems is brought back into print. Thanks to Smaro Kamboureli and Darren Wershler-Henry, who began the project, and Wershler-Henry and Lori Emerson, as editors, who saw it through, we now have the 336 pages that make up The Alphabet Game: a bpNichol reader (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2007) [see here for the announcement + table of contents, posted by Emerson]. The work of putting together any sort of collection like this has to be done by those who know the work, and know it well, and both editors have done much over the years either on or influenced by the work of Nichol, even back to Wershler-Henry’s first poetry collection as homage, his Nicholodeon: a book of lowerglyphs (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 1997).

Coach House is certainly the obvious choice for keeping Nichol in print, especially since they’ve been working for years to keep the nine-volume The Martryology in print, as well as issuing a third edition of Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer (2004) a few years back, edited by Nelson Ball (who also saw the second edition through his own Weed/Flower Press in 1973, after the original British Writer’s Forum edition in 1967). The obvious choice, even before the lane where the press lives was officially named “bpNichol Lane” a number of years ago, in homage to the late poet, with a Nichol poem etched into the lane itself (what the two photos, courtesy Amanda Earl, depict). Still, it does beg the question, why didn’t McClelland & Stewart consider keeping the previous selected poems in print (you can still get the much earlier selected poems that Talonbooks published, Selected Writing: As Elected, from 1980)? I mean, despite the fact that during his life, bpNichol said he’d never publish a book with McClelland & Stewart, and then, mere years after he dies, the first posthumous selected, An H in the Heart: A Reader (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1994) appeared with the same company. Didn’t they know? Or was this weighed against the argument of distribution that a more “national” publishing house like M&S would have for the work?

Still, a book promoting the work and/or life of the late bpNichol could never be all wrong. Even as Nichol himself said in an interview conducted by Flavio Multineddu (Open Letter, Eighth Series, Number 7, Summer 1993):

It seems to me that any form you choose both lets you say certain things and at the same time limits the contents of what you can talk about, and therefore to reach the other, which you could say is the reader in one way, but I also meant it in the very basic sense that other people are strangers to us, all other people, so to reach out is to find as many exits and entrances as possible, which I saw it as being a question of formal choice: the more fluid you become moving between forms … unless you are contained by the issue of form per se. But the issue is not to get rid of form, but rather to multiply the sense of possibility, and that’s the way I’ve been, I think, rather clearly, operating.

Perhaps Nichol wasn’t talking about publishing per se, but there are certainly considerations that could be applied to such. In a similar vein, the editors of the new collection work to explain their own framework, as they begin their postscript, “This book is a frame.”:

You can see bpNichol’s work through it, but our frame, like many frames, has glass in it – glass that colours and textures, reduces and magnifies, reflects, refracts and, yes, occasionally distorts. Any book that pretends to do otherwise can be trusted even less than usual.

The Alphabet Game is indeed ‘a’ reader. Given bpNichol’s extraordinary literary output, what we present here is by necessity only a fraction of what he wrote in his lifetime; there have been, and we hope there will be, other collections of his work, in both print and digital form. This is only the beginning, again.

Rife with in-jokes and other Nichol references, the two-page postscript ends with:

In the meantime, we have established a website, bpnichol.ca [unfortunately not actually scheduled for launch until spring], which will continue the project that The Alphabet Game has begun, acting as an open-ended online anthology. The site will house a range of digitized Nichol material, including sound files of Nichol’s recordings, full-colour images and scans of his musical scores. Our goal is simple: to ensure that as much of Nichol’s work as possible stays available in as many forms as possible. To paraphrase Nichol, there are infinite alphabets ahead.

Apparently the framework for The Alphabet Game: a bpNichol reader also included only considering works that appeared in books, as opposed to all the other small bits of ephemera that could easily contain whole libraries, whole rooms, by themselves; partly, I’m sure, so the project of editing down a manageable collection and even representation of Nichol’s oeuvre would be possible, and not a life-long work of its own, completely overwhelming and unfinishable. How does one work to represent a writer who tried, in his own way, to do everything? From comics (bpNichol published the first underground comics, they say, in Canada), computer poems, visual/concrete poems, essays, interviews, endless collaborations, text and word games, television scripts, songs, fiction, sound recordings, theory, etcetera. Imagine: just for the book he had seen through the process, there were at least four that appeared posthumously; how much work do you think there was still to collect, collate and consider sitting around uncollected otherwise?


What makes the book impressive is just how well of an opening it provides, with the option of going further into any of the nine volumes of The Martyrology (selections are included in this volume) that Coach House keep in print, or the two more recent volumes issued by Vancouver’s Talonbooks, bpNichol Comics (2001), ed. Carl Peters, and Meanwhile: The Critical Writings of bpNichol (2001), ed. Roy Miki. What really appeals is the forthcoming two-volume reappraisal that Lori Emerson has been collecting for Open Letter on the work of bpNichol, as an interesting pairing/extension of this brand-new selected poems, with the first issue scheduled for January 2008 (rumours have launches for both issues and selected happening then as well).