Aka Bpnichol

Frank Davey

Description

Written by one of his friends and confidants, a close reading of bpNichol's poetry aka bpNichol is the biography of the major Canadian poet bpNichol, who was a practising lay psychoanalyst and vice-president of one of the largest and longest-lasting communes in North America for more than a decade. Though he died at the young age of 44, Barrie Nichol was internationally influential as a visual poet and sound poet.

Sujets

• Lettres et linguistique

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 20 septembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781770902602
• Langue: English

Extrait

aka bpNichol
a preliminary biography / frank davey
ecw press



ack nowledgements
I thank Barrie Nichol for being such a pack rat, Eleanor Nichol for ensuring that so much of what he created and gathered has been so well preserved, and for assisting me in the early part of my research, and his sister Deanna for offering me her still vivid early memories. His Therafields colleagues Grant Goodbrand, Philip McKenna, and Sharon McIsaac, his brother Don, and his fellow Four Horsemen collaborators Paul Dutton and Steve McCaffery generously helped me solve various narrative mysteries. Sharon Barbour, Lori Emerson, and Stan Bevington were also at the ready to help me mull through Barrie’s more complicated moments. David Rosenberg was repeatedly ready with encouragement, advice, and eagerness to read chapter drafts. Of great assistance as well were some of Barrie’s earliest friends, Andy Phillips, Arnold Shives, and Dezso Huba, all of whom offered details that could otherwise have been lost to oral history. I also have to thank Arnold Shives and bill bissett for being such loyal correspondents with Barrie at various times during the 1960s. Barrie had difficulty writing letters in those years, and without their friendship and engagement with Barrie’s ideas and projects much of his early thoughts about writing would also have been lost. I thank Sharon Barbour, bill bissett, David Robinson, Stephen Scobie, D.r. Wagner, and the late Nicholas Zurbrugg (via Tony Zurbrugg acting for his estate) for permitting me to quote from their letters to Barrie, and Loren Lind for permitting me to quote from his important unpublished 1965 interview with him. Thanks also to Arnold Shives, Paul Dutton, and Gerry Shikatani for permitting me to quote their unpublished recollections of Barrie, and again to Eleanor Nichol for helping me browse through the scrapbooks, photos, Therafields publications, and other memorabilia still in her basement. And a big thanks to Maria Hindmarch for listening to all my research anecdotes during my visit to Vancouver and being such a thoughtful host and excitable Canucks fan.
I must also thank the Ontario Arts Council for the Writers’ Reserve grant that helped me travel to gather the material for the book, and Tony Power, Eric Swanick, and Keith Gilbert of Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections for their kind assistance. I was a daily visitor to their department for more than a month, during which they often found items for me that I might not have known were there. I also thank York University’s Clara Thomas Archives for generous access to bill bissett’s papers. I should probably apologize as well to the hundreds of Barrie’s friends I didn’t manage to contact. This book could only be so long, and is undoubtedly preliminary to others whose authors will devote more years to them. I urge you all to record your memories of Barrie, and offer any letters you may have received from him to a public collection before they also fall “beyond the reach of talking.” Finally a huge thank-you to longtime bpNichol reader Jack David of ECW Press for undertaking to publish this story.
My main regret is that Eleanor (“Ellie”) Nichol, on reading partway through an early version of this book in manuscript, felt unable to support its publication by granting permission for me to quote or include photographs of previously unpublished Nichol material, including most of the material in his numerous notebooks and extensive correspondence. Although she was initially enthusiastic about the project, she had also assumed that a “literary biography” would make many fewer references to his private life and suggest fewer links between it and his writing. Her unhappiness may have also caused others who had been important to Barrie, such as Rob Hindley-Smith, to be unavailable for interview.
Frank Davey
May 2012



intro duction
I am highly suspicious of well-documented biographies, just as I am skeptical about historical records and events. If, on the other hand, the biographer would write about his subject purely from his imagination, from what he thinks his subject was or is, that is another matter.
— Henry Miller, letter to Jay Martin, quoted in Martin’s Always Merry and Bright
Barrie Nichol records this Henry Miller passage in 1979 in his “Houses of the Alphabet” notebook. It’s one of many moments in his notebooks that display his concern both with the genre of biography and with the question of how he will be remembered. The earliest such moment occurs in his very first notebook, in which, on July 15, 1965, after looking back over its contents, he worried that they might be mostly “shit” and, from the viewpoint of a future “theoretical” biographer, worthless. Barrie was then only 21 years old, virtually unpublished, and already anticipating being memorialized in a book such as the present one. A decade later he would chuckle whenever he or someone else mentioned British novelist B.S. Johnson’s Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs , but would continue recording his thoughts, dreams, ideas for novels, poems or drawings, and conversations with his parents in his notebooks anyway.
The present “theoretical biographer” met Barrie Nichol in Toronto in late 1970 — toward the end of the half-decade in which Barrie met most of his important friends and collaborators. I knew him then as “bpNichol,” a young visual poet. We had argued in the pages of my journal Open Letter some years earlier — 1966 — over whether I ought to view visual poetry as “relevant to what I understand as poetry.” We’d differed somewhat vigorously — causing Victor Coleman to quip in a letter to the journal that Frank was sure that people were saying “ugh and the like” before they could draw, and that bpNichol was defending visual poetry “like the civil servant will defend his job.” 1 Four years later I was newly in Toronto and writing a small book about Earle Birney, who had created a number of visual poems. Even if I didn’t want to create such things, I needed to understand them. bpNichol, with whom I had not been in contact since 1966, was now the author of the box of visual poems Still Water and anthologist of another boxful, The Cosmic Chef: An Evening of Concrete , as well as the creator of the more conventionally confessional booklet “Journeying and the Returns” — itself part of yet another box of stuff, ambiguously labelled bp. I phoned bp — or more likely Barrie — and asked for help, and he suggested we have lunch in a little box of a Hungarian restaurant on Bloor Street near Spadina.
Lunch went on for quite a while: by 1972 he was the most active contributing editor of Open Letter , by 1976 we were together as the two most active editors of Coach House Press, and by 1977 I was writing books like Edward and Patricia in the midst of “artists’ marathons” that Barrie was conducting at the lay psychoanalytical foundation Therafields, of which he was vice-president. Lunch had stretched to include numerous pots of Earl Grey in my living room, numerous lobsters at the biannual Coach House wayzgoose, and numerous mugs of honey-sweetened coffee and “Lisa bread” in the Therafields barn in Mono Township. I saw Barrie in most of his various circles — Coach House, the Four Horsemen sound poetry group, the international sound poets, 2 the “’pataphysicians,” 3 his writing classes at York University, and Therafields. He was still the one of many names — Barrie, bp, beep, beeper, beepers, bar, Bear, Professor Nichol. My son Mike, who much preferred the sciences to the arts, came to admire and trust Barrie/bp so much that in May 1988 he enrolled in what was probably Barrie’s last high school sound poetry workshop. Unlike Boswell, I was not taking notes in any of these places, or planning to need such.
It was Barrie who was the more preoccupied with biography — or for him both autobiography and much of its larger context, origin. Throughout his life he would search for forms that might be appropriate for telling his “story” — creating numerous quasi-autobiographical texts, from the published Captain Poetry Poems , “Journeying and the Returns,” Monotones , The Other Side of the Room , The Martyrology , Two Novels , The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid (which he once considered part of his ongoing semi-autobiographical “The Plunkett Papers”), Journal , and Selected Organs: Parts of an Autobiography to the unpublished and unfinished “The Life and Search of Jonathan Quest” (begun 1964), “The Plunkett Papers” (begun 1969), “An Autobiography” (begun 1972), “The Autobiography of Phillip Workman by bpNichol” (begun 1972), “John Cannyside” (begun 1968), “John Cannyside an Epic Poem” (begun 1972), “bpNichol by John Cannyside” (drafted 1974–86), “Organ Music” (drafted 1980–88), and “Desiring to Become” (planned 1979–88), an autobiographical text probably to be based on family photographs that he asked his mother to gather for him in March 1979. 4 Sometimes he told his stories in the first person, as in “Journeying and the Returns” and Selected Organs , sometimes in the third, as in “The Autobiography of Phillip Workman,” where he gave his persona his own middle name and his mother’s maiden name. Sometimes he gave himself a metaphoric persona, like Billy the Kid, the kid who thought his “dick” was not only short but also “short for richard” like bp was now short for Barrie Phillip. Sometimes, as in “For Jesus Lunatick” in Two Novels , he blurred persons and narrative lines together in dream landscapes that echoed the confusions caused by psychological “transference” — again using his middle name Phillip for the main character. In the various drafts of “bpNichol by John Cannyside” he used the conventions of postmodern metafiction to create a work in which “bpNichol” was merely a fictionalizable character that he and several other rival characters could competitively vie to define. In The Martyrology h