rfmcdonald | [BLOG-LIKE POSTING] bpNichol (Reply)

Toronto's bpNichol Lane, a side street in the Annex commented upon here at the University of Toronto website and here at blogTO, isn't just an amusing oddity tucked up against Robarts Library.

bpNichol Lane
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

It commemorates the life of bpNichol (1944-1988), an avant-garde Canadian poet who had a very long and productive career in the Toronto scene.

All of Nichol’s work is stamped by his desire to create texts that are engaging in themselves as well as in context, and to use indirect structural and textual devices to carry meaning. In The Martyrology different ways of speaking testify to a journey through different ways of being. Language is both the poet’s instructor and, through its various permutations, the dominant ‘image’ of the poem. The [nine] books of The Martyrology document a poet’s quest for insight into himself and his writing through scrupulous attention to the messages hidden in the morphology of his own speech.

This attention to syntax and morphology characterizes both Nichol’s concrete poetry and his prose fiction. His concrete poems were typically written as sequences, and involve the sequential development of syllabic relationships (Still Water) or of alphabetic shapes (Unit of Four, 1974; and Aleph Unit, 1974). His prose fiction employs Gertrude Stein’s technique of using evolving yet repetitive syntax to develop language both as a correlative for intense emotional states, as in Journal, and as a medium to divine meaning, as in The true eventual story of Billy the Kid.

Nichol first began performing as a sound poet in the mid-1960s. His early work in this medium was documented, together with early reflective poems, in Michael Ondaatje's film Sons of Captain Poetry (1970); in ‘Borders’, a small phonodisc included in bp (1967); and in the long-playing record Motherlove (1968). In 1970 he began what proved to be an extended collaboration with fellow poets Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Paul Dutton, and Steve McCaffery, forming the sound-poetry group The Four Horsemen.

In the mid 1980s bpNichol became a successful writer for the children’s television show Fraggle Rock, produced by Jim Henson of Muppets fame, along with fellow Toronto writers Dennis Lee and David Young. The astounding range of Nichol’s practice included musical theatre (Group and Tracks), children’s books, comic book art and collage/assemblage. A second film has been made on Nichol, his art and his legacy: bp: pushing the boundaries (B. Nash, director & Elizabeth Yake, producer, 1998). Nichol’s magnum opus has created a minor academic sub-industry by itself. Nichol’s less prosaic, more edgy works include The Captain Poetry Poems (1970), Konfessions of an Elizabethan fan dancer (1967, 1973), Love : A book of remembrances (1974), Zygal: A Book of Mysteries and Translations (1985), Art Facts (1990) and Truth: A book of fictions (1991).

An example of his concrete poetry can be found embedded on bpNichol Lane itself opposite the very Coach House Press that he was so long associated with.

"A lake, a lane, a line, a lone"
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

There's plenty of bpNichol material online outside of the online archive and a home page, with an archive of his 1083-1984 poems written for Macintosh computers, along with an entry at the University of Calgary's listing of 100 Canadian poets of note, another hosted out of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, and another at the Coach House Books site.