bp
: beginnings collects bpNichol’s early major poetic sequences –
including lyric, concrete, and sound – which have been out of print for more
than 40 years. Alongside The Captain
Poetry Poems (1971, reissued in 2011), the texts collected here now make
available Nichol’s long poems leading up [to] the publication of the first two
volumes of The Martyrology in 1972. Two
parallel sequences to these publications, Monotones
(1971) and Scraptures (1965-c. 1972),
were eventually folded into The
Martyrology Book(s) 7 & (1990), while the text of the sound poem Dada Lama (1968) has never been
unavailable, and can currently be found in The
Alphabet Game: a bpNichol reader (2007). The sequences collected here
represent what Stephen Voyce has recently characterized as “two distinct paths”
in Nichol’s early publications: “a lyric mode first anthologized in Raymond
Souster’s New Wave Canada: The New
Explosion in Canadian Poetry (1966), which earned Nichol early praise among
Canada’s literary elite, and the minimalist ‘typewriter concrete’ collected in Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer
(1967), which aligned Nichol with an international consortium of avant-garde
writers at home and abroad” (10). (Stephen Cain, “Introduction”)
Published
in a lovely edition is bpNichol’s bp :beginnings (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2014), edited with an introduction by
Stephen Cain. As Cain writes in the introduction, this collection focuses on a
number of predominantly pre-The
Martyrology publications by the late Toronto poet, fiction writer, critic, sound
poet, performer, editor and publisher, all of which existed in small editions
throughout the late 1960s and into the 1970s, with the occasional piece first
appearing in the 1980s. Cain’s opening introduction is impressive, and nearly
worth the price of admission alone (another impressive piece Cain wrote on bpNichol’s work involves the Toronto geography and landscapes of The Martyrology Book 5). For some time
now, the difficulty, or at least the problem with discussing the works of
bpNichol come from not only the massive volume of his output during his
relatively-short life (1944-1988), but the incredible range—from concrete and
visual poetry to novels to television work to self-published underground comics
to lyric poems, among so many, many other works. For example: bpNichol bibliographer jwcurry once numbered the items in his ongoing “beepliography” as twenty-five
thousand items “so far.” Still, so much of the critical conversation around
Nichol’s work over the years has focused on the multiple-volume project, The Martyrology. The reasons for such
are certainly understandable, given the nature and the scope of the project,
called one of the most important Canadian long poems in the second half of the
twentieth century, but The Martyrology,
as many readers and admirers of Nichol know, is but a fragment of a much larger
and longer writing and publishing practice.
**
this night the sea
moves into me
dark street
no way of sailing over
it
& so i must move
thru it alone
nameless
& walk beyond my
lies
but the words are on
me hang heavy
& the voice cries
to be heard
inside me all inside me
dark world
***
we can say the myths
end
return full circle
&
the actual untangles
its confusions
the world is given its
history
his story never changes
some journey is done
& the ear gathers
the words near
to measure what one has
won (“a letter in january,” “BEACH HEAD”)
Part
of the reason for the exclusions come, one might suspect, simply come from
availability. The fact that Coach House Press and later, Coach House Books,
have kept volumes of The Martyrology
in print is admirable and even incredible to think about, but so many other
works simply haven’t had the same kinds of visibility. Thanks to Coach House
Books and BookThug, as well as Talonbooks and Black Moss, some of that has been
changing over the past few years. Over the past decade, Coach House has produced
Zygal (1998), The Alphabet Game, eds. Darren Wershler and Lori Emerson (2007), Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer
(2004) and a book of variations, ed.
Stephen Voyce (collecting the trilogy love,
zygal and art facts) (2013), and BookThug produced The Captain Poetry Poems Complete (2011), as well as another
bpNichol work this spring, Nichol’s collaboration with Wayne Clifford, THESEUS: A Collaboration (2014). Not that
long ago, Windsor’s Black Moss Press even produced a first edition of Nichol’s Organ Music (2012), and Talonbooks produced
not one but two expanded editions of Nichol’s work: bpNichol Comics, ed. Carl Peters (2010) and Meanwhile: The Critical Writings of bpNichol, ed. Roy Miki (2010). One
would say that this is an enormous amount of work for even a living, active
author, let alone for an author who died over twenty-five years ago.
unfinished song
woke up in the morning
nothing in my head
woke up this morning
wishing i was dead
there was no sun in the
east
& all the stars had
fled (“The Other Side of the Room”)
Part
of the appeal of this collection is in the faithful reproduction of the
original publications, allowing typescript and sketched works to be scanned as
opposed to re-set or replicated in a less precise way, adding to the rough
elements that would have been evident in the original publications. Although not
all typescripts were produced in bp’s own hand, as the original edition of KON 66 & 67 was produced in such an
uneven way, that when above/ground press came to reissue the small work in
2002, it was with a typescript re-done by “beepliographer” jwcurry, which is
the version reproduced in this collection. What is also interesting about bp : beginnings is in just how many
works within are well-known, yet possibly more known of than actually seen and
read. Thanks to Cain and BookThug, readers and scholars might possibly, for the
first time, really be able to dig into a period of Nichol’s work that hasn’t really
been explored properly. Some of the works reprinted include pieces from (whether
whole or in part): Cycles Etc.
(Cleveland OH: 7 Flowers Press, 1965), New
Wave Canada (ed. Raymond Souster. Toronto ON: Contact Press, 1966), Journeying & the returns (Toronto
ON: Coach House Press, 1967), Konfessions
of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer (London UK: Writers Forum, 1967), The Year of the Frog (Toronto ON:
Ganglia, 1967), Ruth (Toronto ON:
Fleye Press, 1967), Ballads of the
Restless Are (Sacramento CA: Runcible Spoon, 1968; second “corrected”
edition, Ottawa ON CURVD H&Z, 2006), KON
66 & 67 (Toronto: Ganglia, 1968; Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 2002), Lament (Toronto: Ganglia, 1969), Beach Head (Sacramento: Runcible Spoon,
1970) and The Other Side of the Room
(Toronto ON: Weed/flower, 1971). The collection of disparate pieces of bpNichol’s
earlier works provides an interesting overview, or perhaps even a side-view, of
his first decade or so of literary production. One might say this is where
everything begins, before opening and even exploding outward into everything
else he produced, some decades worth of material over the relatively brief time
after he left his twenties. As Cain writes in his introduction:
Still, looking at the
ten sequences collected here as a whole, they do appear to reveal the concerns
of a young poet under the age of thirty. Recurrent themes include: the
inability to communicate, the failure of language, depression and isolation,
questions of the purpose of life and mortality, unfulfilled love, travel and
exploration, and friendship.
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