NICHOLODEON: epitaph
note: this piece originally appeared in OPEN LETTER Ninth Series, Number 8 (Spring 1997): 99-114.True "mourning" seems to dictate only a tendency: the tendency to accept incomprehension, to leave a place for it, and to enumerate coldly, almost like death itself, those modes of language which, in short, deny the whole rhetoricity of the true (the non-anthropomorphic, the non-elegaic, the non-poetic, etc.).--Jacques Derrida, Memoirs for Paul de Man (31)
nniversary. Monday morning, July 15, 1996. A difficult enough day already. Too close to the anniversary of the end of my marriage to make any real difference emotionally, it was pissing rain outside in the name of pathetic fallacy (strike one). The weather was a real problem, because this was the date of the 4th annual Scream in High Park, the largest outdoor poetry reading in the country. No only am I part of the organization committee, I was also supposed to be reading (strike two). I phoned Peter McPhee, the Scream Ayatollyah, for the word on whether or not we proceed with the festival. Gayle Irwin answered the phone: "Oh, hi Darren... hey, I'm so sorry about your book, and what's happened to Coach House Press...." My response: incomprehension (strike three); my book, stillborn.
For every poet begins (however "unconsciously") by rebelling more strongly against the consciousness of death's necessity than all other men and women do.--Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (10)
ook. NICHOLODEON: a book of lowerglyphs, my first collection of concrete and visual poetry, was accepted for publication by Coach House Press in the spring of 1995. It was always an "anxiety of influence" book, a conscious attempt to sort and rearrange sundry fragments of bpNichol's poetic corpus into the digital equivalent of the mosaic ossuaries of the Paris catacombs. NICHOLODEON strives to be art as envisioned in the opening pages of Jack Womack's Elvissey: delicate sculptures built from the bleached bones of the stillborn and the recently deceased, a Manitoban Book of the Dead.
The fact that there are two of them signifies the end of all competition, the end of all original reference.--Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (136)
oach House(s). Coach House Printing and Coach House Press: my friends and I were always getting them confused, especially at grant application time. And when we'd been around enough long enough to hear the manifold narratives of the Great Schism, they were all different, and often contradictory. Seven blind sages, one elephant, and no omniscient perspective, ever. Printing/Press, part of the same machine, a proper noun despite protestations to the contrary.
becoming clear to me, in news, distilleries for worms and clouds in the way third persons insinuate--Steve McCaffery, "Lag," The Black Debt (20)
elay. It seemed like everybody knew about the death of Coach House Press before I did. Christopher Dewdney, who was acting as my editor, had been dropping dire hints about the possible demise of the press for months, but did his best to push the book through before everything collapsed. NICHOLODEON was initially scheduled for a 1997 release, but the editorial board decided to bump the book ahead a year when another writer was unable to produce a finished manuscript. By July 15, the final edit on the manuscript was long completed. Margaret McClintock and I had decided on a cover design and a size for the finished book. I was days away from beginning the final layout. But people at the press kept avoiding me. I would have worried more if I hadn't been busy with preparations for the Scream. From what I can gather, the editors were notified about the imminent death of the press around July 11. I was out of town for the weekend. Rumours filtered down to all of my friends by the night of Sunday July 14, while they were out drinking at Ilyich's. Some of them had known for days, but said nothing. Others tried to call me that night, but I never received the message. Nor did I ever receive the offical press release that Coach House assured me was in the mail. A weak end.
Optional steps: Holes can be cut into the cozy and text can be stitched onto the cozy to aid visitors in the correct identification of the grave site.--Anonymous, Tombstone Cozies for Knitters of All Ages (4)
pitaph. A deconstructive figure a fortiori because of its uncertain, reversible status: on the head of a grave at the tail of a life, dictated by an absent other but in no sense necessarily faithful to that dictation, capable of re-membering a deceased who was never fully present until the writing of his life at the moment of death. Like all forms of punctuation, epitaphs are liminal, falling between two states. Not only is NICHOLODEON a veritable graveyard of such (un)certain epitaphs -- for friends, states of mind, heroes, relationships, artistic movements, and language itself, it also acts as an epitaph for the press in that it marks precisely the dividing point between two states in the life of Coach House. Before it had time to lie in state as the last book out of Coach House Press, it was already "The first book out of the gate from the brand new Coach House Books." Epitaph from a tombstone on the marquee poster for Return of the Living Dead: Back from the grave and ready to party.
If death comes to the other, and comes to us through the other, then the friend no longer exists except in us, between us. In himself, by himself, of himself, he is no more, nothing more. He lives only in us. But we are never ourselves, and between us, identical to us, a "self" is never in itself or identical to itself. This specular reflection never closes on itself; it does not appear before this possibility of mourning, before and outside this structure of allegory and prosopopeia which constitutes in advance all "being-in-us," "in-me," between us, or between ourselves. The selbst, the soi-m'me, the self appears to itself only in this bereaved allegory, in this hallucinatory prosopopeiaóand even before the death of the other actually happens, as we say, in "reality."--Jacques Derrida, Memoirs for Paul de Man (28-29)
riends. By the time my conversation with Gayle and Peter was over, there were two messages waiting on my answering service. The first was from Christian Bök, confirming what I had just inadvertently discovered, and offering his condolences. The second was from Victor Coleman and Stan Bevington: "If you're interested, the old guys want to do your book." I told Victor I'd think about it, and thanked him. When I hung up, there were three more messages waiting for me. And when I finished with those, there were another two. And so on. I spent the next three hours on the phone, returning calls from nearly every writer I know in Toronto. This collective show of concern touched me deeply; it was a demonstration of the kind of support that makes it possible to continue to be a writer in a financially depressed, politically conservative era. If Bell had diagrammed the phonecalls in and out of my apartment that day onto a map of the city, it would have delineated the rhizome of an author-function in mourning: a net work.
Only Jim Hawkins may be innocent but even he is a little too eager to remain impartial and above the struggle which rages within every character in the story, and within himself.... There are no paragons in this story. There is no place for respectability on a creaking wooden ship manned by gentlemen of fortune, hell bent on getting rich quick on a blood-soaked hoard placing them only once removed from the villainous scum who accumulated the wealth on a god-forsaken island in the first place.--Ralph Steadman, Foreword to his illustrated edition of Stevenson's Treasure Island (7)
rants. Of course, everyone, including myself, had an agenda. My initial, skewed sense of moral certainty about NICHOLODEON stemmed from my conviction that its acceptance for publication was a rare instance of the Ontario Arts Council's Writers' Reserve grant program working in the manner that it professes in the Program Guidelines ("an outright and unconditional [grant] to the writer" that might lead to eventual publication) rather than the manner it which it usually does, despite its claims to the contrary ("A Writers' reserve grant cannot be represented or designated as any form of payment either owed or advanced by the publisher-recommender for past or future writing. Under no circumstances can a grant be substituted for royalties or fees"). I submitted the first seven poems from the manuscript to Coach House Press in the 1994 round of Writers' reserve applications, and received $750.00.
That fall, Michael Redhill, who had been serving as an editor for the press, introduced himself to me through Michael Holmes, and asked to see a copy of the full manuscript when I had completed it. In 1995, the press accepted the book for publication. Fine. But I did spend some nights lying awake wondering if what actually got me to that position was the calculating deployment of bpNichol's signature in the book's title and content.
On July 15, 1997, there was another cheque, this one for $1,000.00, from the Ontario Arts Council's Writers' Reserve program via the Coach House Press, sitting on top of my desk. It was for a project titled, ironically enough, The Manitoban Book of the Dead, a manuscript of post-L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poems (after the press collapsed, I had no compunctions about inserting much of that work, and the title, into NICHOLODEON). The cheque had arrived Friday the 12th, and I hadn't had time to cash it yet. I stared at it the whole 3 hours I spent on the phone, wondering if it would bounce, and it began to look more and more like one of the boxes of Rice-A-Roni ("the San Fransisco treat") that losing contestants on Seventies game shows received as consolation prizes. Thank you for playing.
I pulled on my jacket, walked down the the bank in the rain, and cashed the motherfucker.
you are your favourite letter of the alphabet except H cuz that has already been taken--Bill Kennedy, "APOSTROPHE" (51)
(Ac)H(e). Think about it: one man's personal obsession with a more or less arbitrary letter of the alphabet has spread to the point where several generations of Canadian poets have internalized it as their own. H is the shiniest toy in the box, and everybody wants it. I've personally witnessed several fights over who gets the "H" copy of an edition of lettered ephemera, maybe even participated in a few. Michael Holmes even had the entirety of Nichol's poem "H (an alphabet)" tattooed on his arm, an act that deepens in significance when one realizes, as anyone who has been tattooed can tell you, straight thick black lines hurt. And since bp's poem "Angel of Mercy," a parody of the international H-logo for hospitals, all Hs necessarily must be blue. One of the ephemeral inserts for NICHOLODEON is an envelope bearing the title "Angle of Mercury." It contains two cardstock cutouts of the letter Y. In blue. (Wh)Y, not (w)H(y). Spelling counts.
[M]ost so-called "accurate" interpretations of poetry are worse than mistakes; perhaps there are only more or less creative or interesting mis-readings, for is not every reading necessarily a clinamen?--Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (43)
nfluence, Anxiety of. As tight-assed and hubristic as Bloom's criticism can be, he does allow for the absolute necessity of the absurd. Through meticulously following texts like the rats'-nest of bicycle tire tracks that comprises Alfred Jarry's uphill race through literature, Bloom makes a gradual departure, a minimal swerve (clinamen) away from his heavy investment in literary paternity. But he never quite realizes that some of those tire tracks that he's been following and annotating so carefully may belong to someone other than Jarry, or whoever the poet in front of him happens to be at the moment. This is a form of myopia endemic to critics. Somewhere between one third and one half of the poems in NICHOLODEON consist of poetic misreadings of Nichol's work, but they're still in the minority. The smug beauty of Bloom's argument, of course, is that as soon as one makes such a protestation, one proves the strength of the argument, QED. This realization in turn only provokes a sharper swerve. Expect heavy english on the next pitch.
If ëPataphysics (according to Jarry) is "the science of imaginary solutions" and thereby the source of answers to questions never posed, then "Pataphysics (diacriticized via the open quotation of a double elision) will be "the literature of all imaginary sciences."--Toronto Research Group, Rational Geomancy (302)
arry. The bulk of dull-as-dirt twentieth century Canadian writing that official literary culture continually foists upon the reading public has had less to do either directly or indirectly with the work of the writers I know than the writing of Alfred Jarry. Some of them came to Jarry through Nichol's work with Steve McCaffery as the Toronto Research Group, others though Nichol's "Pataphysical Hardware Company. Others found traces of it in Situationism, Surrealism, underground comix, punk rock, and many of the other dubious and greasy corners of the glorious mess that is contemporary culture. People don't read in straight lines, much less lines of descent. The question of literary paternity is joyously and hopelessly confused (not to mention politically suspect) in an age of hypertext, the literary analogue of non-nuclear families and in vitro fertilization. If we are anyone's at all, we are Jarry's kids: we accept you, we accept you, one of us, one of us ....
lost in the k-hole--title, track 9 of the Chemical Brothers' dig your own hole
enosis. By the time I got to the reading at High Park, I was feeling pretty empty. For a day where it had rained steadily until early afternoon, we did all right, and around a thousand people showed up over the course of the evening. By this point in the day I had two offers from other small presses to do the book, and the germ of what would become a third, but I hadn't had the energy to mull any of them over yet. It had been an exhausting day; I felt like I'd been emotionally Roto-Rooted.
I started to think about Stan and Victor's offer. They were still acting primarily as a printing company at that point. Under his own imprint, Stan had published Michael Holmes' Satellite Dishes from the Future Bakery (channels 4 & 4.1), and Matthew Remski's Organon, which I'd co-edited with Christian Bök; together with Victor and David Bolduc as the BBC Press, he'd also published Roy Kiyooka's December-February 87 '88. At the Scream wrap-up party that night, Stan told me that he had no intention of getting back into business as a publisher, "but one thing we do know how to do is make books." I couldn't argue. There are a lot of Coach House books on my shelf.
Over the next few weeks I thought a lot about what it was that I wanted out of a published book. Operating on the assumption that about 10% of the public buys three or more books a month, maybe one percent of that ten (optimistically) is going to be buying poetry. Of that single percentile, a tiny fraction will be buying something other than canonical poetry. In other words, I realized that I basically knew the entire audience for NICHOLODEON personally. So the issue was not one of distribution, (an area in which most Canadian small presses fail dismally in any case).
What I was left with was my sense of the importance of the book as a material object. The initial discussions I'd had with Margaret McClintock at Coach House Press had discouraged me because she'd immediately ruled out a number of experiments with physical form that had interested me: embossing, foldouts, inserts, colour, new media. Even my desire to format the book as a square (a suggestion which Michael Holmes made in the early stages of the manuscript, which immediately seemed appropriate because many of the poems had a square aspect) was out of the question. None of the other presses that I knew of had the resources or the inclination to actually make the book the way that I wanted it. Stan and Victor's offer was looking better all the time.
FIX SIGNS--Unknown Toronto graffiti artist
owerglyph. In The Visible Word, Johanna Drucker argues that following the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, "The condemnation of the visual aspects of hieroglyphic writing to a subordinate, even insignificant, role was the harbinger of what would be typical of the nineteenth-century linguists' attitude towards all writing" (14). In many respects, that attitude is still with us. Though we live in a society that is becoming increasingly iconic and logo-driven, the response of a typical reader to anything glyphic is, paradoxically, to ignore its material qualities in favour of some other, absent text to which it allegedly alludes: "oh, the bathroom's this way...". There is nothing sacred or hieratic about the way we see glyphs, when we see them at all. What I tried to do in NICHOLODEON is reinsert a little uncertainty back into the circuit of reading, to insist on the materiality of the text to the point where it becomes problematic: "Like traffic signs from a parallel world, the job of these poems is to produce a vague sense of anxiety in the reader, fueled by the mistaken belief that they house some kernel of meaning that they desperately wish to communicate, despite nearly impossible odds." If it was up to me, you'd never find the bathroom.
In my opinion, the sycophantic, almost cult-like legitimacy gained in some circles by associating with Coach House (in whatever incarnation) paints a far grimmer picture of the future of Canadian literature than the institution's demise ever did.--Suzie Snipe (pseud.), Word Magazine, March 1997 (8)
anuscript. When I walked into the Coach House in mid-August, manuscript in hand, something had changed. Victor was talking about starting something he was referring to as "The Press Formerly Known As Coach House," which would publish books in digital form. I wasn't sure how my manuscript fit into that picture yet, if it did at all. He assured me that they'd produce bound photocopies of books, or of "the fetish items formerly known as books," (by this point, the Prince joke was already wearing thin) for people who wanted them, but only in small batches, in order to avoid the problems associated with warehousing back catalogue titles. I wasn't sure I wanted that either; the reason I'd decided on Coach House was because of the care that I knew they'd lavished on books in the past. But I decided to stay the course, despite my apprehension. As a result, I was privy to something quite amazing: the reconfiguration of a venerable Canadian publishing institution into something that a) may become the model for small presses into the next century, or b) will go tits-up within the next two years.
a pillow in a coffin's just as nice as a bed o baby I love it when you fuck me dead--Forgotten Rebels, "Fuck Me Dead"
ecrophilia. So what? It's all diagrammed out for you in NICHOLODEON, with tiny little skulls at the bottom of all applicable pages. Besides, necrophilia is in this year, what with the suburban legitimacy of Goth culture (they have annual conventions now, I shit you not) and the release of Kissed, the movie adaptation of Barbara Gowdy's story "We So Seldom Look On Love." We're all guilty of it -- myself, Margaret's McClintock's version of Coach House, Stan and Victor's version of Coach House -- at least as far as the deployment of bp's signature as a sign of legitimacy and continuity with one of the more interesting figures in recent Canadian literary history goes. That being said, what really chaps my ass are the people who don't realize that an avant-garde of any stripe, mine or theirs, is no longer possible, because in a decentred society, there's nothing to be avant of anymore. I choose to mark out my complicities to the best of my ability in order to figure out what has yet to be done, or what can be rewritten in a more interesting manner. If all of the third-rate Spoken Word waterheads in this country would do the same, maybe some of them would realize that they're reinventing the fifth wheel on the poetrymobile, and move on.
LEECHES, Physicians, Chriurgeons, and Anatomists employ Bodysnatchers. Sorcerers and Wizards use Ghouls. All may find, if they continue to use the services of such persons, the body of their best-loved friend before them on the dissecting table one foggy morning.--Barbara Ninde Byfield, "Bodysnatchers," The Book of Weird (32)
btainium. There's a real pleasure in swiping stuff to make art. Everything, even words, are a re-citation of something from somewhere else. Traces of other narratives, other contexts, extend off infinitely in all directions. Those traces act as heuristic handles for potential readers. Most days, I think that the more traces you leave, the more ways the art object can be manipulated, and the more interesting the art. Part of the fun is trying to figure out the crazy-quilt of samples, but knowing that you don't have to get it all to enjoy the art, because no one ever does. The danger lies in sampling too heavily from one source, which results in outright theft; I'd rather be DJ Shadow or Beck than the next Puffy Combs or Vanilla Ice.
Now Barabbas was a publisher.--attr. George Gordon, Lord Byron
ublishing. By the time Rick/Simon and I started doing the layout for NICHOLODEON in early October, Coach House Books was as well-formed an entity as it is now. Stan and Victor had decided on a sort of compromise for the format of their editions: small initial runs of finely printed books, coupled with more or less simultaneous electronic editions. That suited me fine, because it allowed for the kind of flexibility and input that I was certain was unavailable elsewhere.
Stan's whole approach as a publisher is interesting, because it demands input from the writer: he sits you in front a computer loaded with software that you likely know nothing about, and simply expects you to learn it. When you get stuck, he's there immediately with at least three different possible answers, and you can pick the one that suits you best. A Coach House book isn't so much designed as it is evolved. Every time I came up with an idea that I was sure they'd reject (the embossed cover, the foldout, the inserts, the colour text in "Amo(i)re"), the opposite happened: they became even more enthused about it than I was.
The only sticking point we had was over the price of the book. I did (and I still do) think that 35 bucks is too much for a book of poetry, even if a version of it is available online for free. We had several fights about that over the course of two weeks, but managed to work out an agreement that we both could stand. They'd sell the book for 18 dollars at the launch as a one-time only price, and they'd make copies available to me at cost so that I could ensure that my impoverished friends could afford them. They've been incredibly generous to me ever since, so I have a hard time with the argument that Coach House Books is only in it for the money. From poetry? Give me a break.
As for the online version of the book, Stan's brainwave was to design a form that would allow conscientious web surfers to tip the writers whose work they liked. I'm still undecided about this gesture. It's either hopelesslly naÔve (I've been online since 1990, and am very aware that hardcore net users are extremely reluctant to pay for anything that they can have for free), or totally visionary (at some point, web use will become ubiquitous due to new technologies like web TVs and cable modems, and the bulk of the population will begin to use the Internet in the same way that they do the home shopping channel... not that the bulk of the population buys poetry. At that point, presumably Coach House Books will have been in the online publishing game for several years, and will begin to reap the rewards). Either way, it's good press.
Who actually buys books of poetry and reads them? Whart happens to all the paintings of failed artists when they die? Why do you keep smoking when you know what it is doing to your lungs?--David Arnason, "Do Astronauts Have Sex Fantasies?" (94)
uestions. The pseudonymous "Susie Snipe" poses the following question about the rebirth of Coach House Books in her column in the March 1997 issue of Word magazine: "As is typical of their generation, Coach House is part of a literary establishment that would dupe the young into believing that only [sic] worthwhile accomplishments happened before they were born. More depressing still, they seem intent on feeding us those same fading accomplishments in perpetuity. Is that the sort of hopeless future that we really want to promote?" The only pose more tired than this weak-ass "us versus them" generational stance, which completely ignores the incredibly significant presence at Coach House Books of card-carrying disaffected GenX members like designer Chris Bolduc and editor Hilary Clark, would be the indignant reaction for which it begs. Alfred Jarry's dry ruminations on the subject are much more thought-provoking:
We too shall become solemn, fat and Ubu-like and shall publish extremely classical books which will probably lead to our becoming mayors of small towns where, when we become academicians, the blockheads constituting the local intelligentsia will present us with SËvres vases, while they present their moustaches on velvet cushions to our children. And another lot of young people will appear, and consider us completely out of date, and they will write ballads to express their loathing of us, and that is just the way things should always be. (85)In the words of the immortal Stan Lee: ënuff said.
Regrets: I've had a few, But then again, too few to mention--Paul Anka, "My Way" (as interpreted in turn by Frank "the Original Gangsta" Sinatra, Sid Vicious, and the Gipsy Kings)
egrets. I never met bpNichol. Nor did I ever see him perform live. But then again, if I had, I probably wouldn't have written NICHOLODEON. My mandate was to attempt to move beyond the purely anecdotal "I knew bp when" mode that dominates Nichol criticism in particular and Canadian LitCrit in general. Painstakingly combing over the sacred fragments of Nichol's corpus in order to produce glossaries, annotated bibliographies and the inevitable biographies in order to fix meaning is not only tedious, it also represents a willful ignorance of the polysemy and free play of any text. But what can you do? As Nichol himself noted in the motto to his "Pataphysical Hardware Company, "Anything That Signifies Can Be Sold."
The disgraceful pictures in nearly every locality corrupt the morals of boys and girls by wicked schemes--S. Hotchkiss (pseud.), "Evil Effects of Pernicious Literature: Nineteenth Century Hieroglyphics" (87)
acred Cattle Mutilation. The sacred is interesting insofar as it supplies a series of useful targets, but any form of blasphemy always presupposes the existence of some superior entity worthy of that blasphemy. That the legacy of bpNichol, and of Coach House itself, can be critiqued and lampooned indicates that there is still something there worth blaspheming. Not that either Nichol or the earliest incarnation of Coach House were afraid of making fun of themselves; one of my favourite Nichol pieces is the cartoon on the title page of ART FACTS, which depicts a cartoon human (Milt the Morph), frog, and dog, all with their arms round each others' shoulders. A single thought balloon floats above their heads. Each is thinking the same thing: "Soon I'll off these bastards and become number one in the kids' hearts." Pretty funny, coming from a guy who wrote for Fraggle Rock.
We will be able to read this cartouche both as a title and as a signature.... Where has the cartouche gone? It steals itself. (No) more narrative, (no) more truth.--Jacques Derrida, "Cartouches," The Truth in Painting (214, 220)
itles. NICHOLODEON's sub-title ("a book of lowerglyphs") points to a reference I've only found once in Nichol's published work. The acknowledgements to ART FACTS: a book of contexts mention that this book is the third in a series began by LOVE: a book of remembrances, and ZYGAL: a book of mysteries & translations. These books have always been very important to me; I think that they contain writing that is ultimately more interesting and provocative than anything in The Martyrology. The acknowledgements also refer to two books to follow ART FACTS: OX, HOUSE, CAMEL, DOOR: a book of higher glyphs, and TRUTH: a book of fictions. Nichol died in September of 1988, shortly after assembling the completed manuscript of ART FACTS. A posthumous manuscript titled TRUTH: a book of fictions (originally intended to be the fifth in the series) appeared from Mercury Press in 1993, but it's a sad, patchwork affair. The state of OX, HOUSE, CAMEL, DOOR remains a mystery, though it was to have been published fourth in the series by Underwhich Editions. I asked Paul Dutton about the manuscript, but he didn't remember it, and it remains a virtual book to this day. NICHOLODEON is not a substitute for that book, but a lowercase cenotaph, a monument to its absence.
ubu buddha
ubermensch
troubadour
obese oboe
beelzeboub
boobytraps
scuba gear
juggernaut
of bugaboo
bugger off
-- Christian Bök, "Ubu Hubbub"
bu. If the death of Coach House Press accomplished nothing else, at least it dragged the Ontario Conservative government's agenda for the arts community out into the light of day. Mike Harris' labeling of Coach House as a "corporate welfare bum" ricocheted across the TV and print media that week; even my parents heard about it ("Say, that business about Coach House in the news doesn't affect you at all, does it, son?"). There's nothing like a common enemy to galvanize the left; for a few weeks that summer, every writer I know was hyper-aware that what they do has serious political implications, whether they like it or not. Besides, imagining Premier Harris as King Ubu has the added advantage of placing a large, well-defined bullseye across his enormous, sagging gut.
The poet hosts a parasite.--Christopher Dewdney, "Parasite Maintenance" (77)
ectors. Most interesting of all is when people take what you've done and translate it (as opposed to simply stealing it and pawning it off as your own), extending the poetic continuum. Christian Bök, Steve Cain, damian lopes and Lucas Mulder have already all done translations of poems from NICHOLODEON, many of them better than the material with which they started. Collaboration of this sort interests me both creatively and theoretically, because it makes manifest something that is always the case: poems evolve themselves. Poets are simply the vectors that transport them.
VAC M--"Cenotaph for David UU," from NICHOLODEON (insert)
David UU (Born David W. Harris), another concrete poet, was a contemporary of bpNichol. His own work was by turns incisive and whimsical, but the project of his that impresses and inspires me the most was his Berkeley Horse chapbook series. These exquisitely handcrafted little books contained poetry of all descriptions by nearly every interesting Canadian poet I can think of in the past several generations. They weren't mass-marketed in any way; they sold simply by word of mouth, and through David's voluminous correspondence. The Berkeley Horse series set a very high benchmark for generosity, intelligence and craft that should be the goal of every publisher of poetry, period. The effect of David's death was like Laurie Anderson's lament for her father: "It was like a whole library burned down." Only nobody goes to libraries any more, which is why I think it's part of a poet's job to re-member the secret history of Canadian literature.
considered then as a complete unit the SECRET NARRATIVE of the alphabet becomesA ( B D E F G H I J K L N O M R S T P Q ) V = X
--bpNichol, "Re-discovery of the 22-letter alphabet: An Archaeological Report" (43)
There used to be this cartoon on Sesame Street about Cowboy X, who rode around yelling "Cowboy X! Cowboy X! Yahoo!" and branding great big Xs all over everything. The townspeople got really annoyed by this, and finally worked up the courage to ask him to stop. He agreed, and promptly changed his name to Cowboy O, with predictable results. I'm not really sure what this says about the state of Canadian letters, but it's probably yet another example of something. It sure would have made a good Grease Ball Comic, though.
Just say "Thanks, Man" to drugs--T-shirt on Yonge Street
(Wh)Y. Write this piece. Not really to explain myself, and certainly not to clarify anything. Perhaps because, as Charles Bernstein writes, "Poetics is the continuation of poetry by other means. Just as poetry is the continuation of politics by other means" (160). The borders of NICHOLODEON have always been deliberately fuzzy, and this is due to a number of factors: because it is built from collaborations (witting or otherwise), translations, and found material; because of the copious amounts of ephemera that circle the book like a literary asteroid belt; and because of the electronic edition of the book, which continues to grow and change. Appending an essay or two to this object makes sense (only) because I hadn't thought of it earlier.
Zygal: Pertaining to or having a zygon [an H-shaped fissure of the brain].--Paraphrased from bpNichol, ZYGAL: a book of mysteries and translations (125)
ygal. NICHOLODEON is an attempt to build a dialectical bridge, but one that will never be finished because it never can be finished. Sometimes it tends in a direction that would lead from my poetics to those of the writers I admire most, living and dead. Sometimes it looks like it spans the distance from Coach House to Coach House. Mostly, it goes from Now/Here to Nowhere. The important thing to me is the process of building; someone else can figure out what to do with it.
Supplement: A Chant for Saint And (Readers' Digest Version):
and
&
ampersand
ampers&
ampersampersand
ampersampers&
so on
Notes
* Text from the invitation to the NICHOLODEON launch, Coach House Books, 1997. [ back to article ]
* When we were discussing what kinds of ephemera we'd like distribute at the book launch, Stan Bevington grined at me and said, "So I've got this whole box of letter Ys. Wanna see ëem?" Cool. So I took them home, and the poem wrote itself two days later When we were discussing what kinds of ephemera we'd like distribute at the book launch, Stan Bevington grined at me and said, "So I've got this whole box of letter Ys. Wanna see ëem?" Cool. So I took them home, and the poem wrote itself two days later. [back to article ]
* Ceremonial chant of the eponymous Freaks in Tod Browning's classic film, and of Ramones fans everywhere. [ back to article ]
* Ketamine, an animal tranquilizer that has become the drug of the moment in the New York and London club scenes, produces a state of detachment and withdrawal that users refer to a s a "k-hole." [ back to article ]
* Visit <nicholodeon></nicholodeon>, Lucas Mulder's beautiful and extensive translation site. [ back to article ]
* The Grease Ball Comics were one of Nichol's smaller, and stranger, publishing ventures. [ back to article ]
Works Cited
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Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.
Bernstein, Charles. A Poetics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. London: Oxford University Press, 1973.
Bök, Christian. "Ubu Hubbub." Toronto: CrO2 Press, 1996.
Byfield, Barbara Ninde. The Book of Weird. (1967). New York: Dolphin Books, 1973.
Chemical Brothers. dig your own hole. EMI/Virgin, 7243 8 42950 2 8, 1997.
Derrida, Jacques. Memoires for Paul de Man. Revised Edition. Trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava, and Peggy Camuf. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, 1989.
-----. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Dewdney, Christopher. "Parasite Maintenance." Alter Sublime. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1980.
Drucker, Johanna. The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909-1923. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Forgotten Rebels. "Fuck Me Dead." In Love with the System. Oshawa: Star Records, SR 1846, ca. 1983(?).
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Hotchkiss, S. (pseudonym). "Evil Effects of Pernicious Literature: Nineteenth Century Hieroglyphics." Derek Pell, Morbid Curiosities. London: Jonathan Cape, 1983.
Jarry, Alfred. Selected Works of Alfred Jarry. Trans. Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor. New York: Grove Press, 1965.
Kennedy, Bill. "from APOSTROPHE." Carnival: A Scream in High Park Reader. Toronto: Insomniac Press, 1996. 49-53.
McCaffery, Steve. The Black Debt. London: Nightwood Editions, 1989.
Nichol, bp. "Re-discovery of the 22-letter alphabet: An Archaeological Report." Open Letter 4.6 & 7 (Winter 1980-81): 41-47.
-----. ZYGAL: a book of mysteries and translations. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1985.
-----. ART FACTS: a book of contexts. Tuscon: Chax Press, 1990.
Ontario Arts Council. "Grants to Writers for Writers' Reserve: Program Guidelines." Revised April 1995.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island. (1883). Illus. Ralph Steadman. London: Harrap, 1985.
Suzie Snipe (pseudonym). Monthly column, Word (March 1997): 8.
Toronto Research Group [Steve McCaffery, bpNichol]. Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book-Machine. The Collected Research Reports of the Toronto Research Group 1973-1982. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1992.
Wershler-Henry, Darren. NICHOLODEON: a book of lowerglyphs. Toronto: Coach House Books, 1997.
Womack, Jack. Elvissey. New York: Tor Books, 1993.
another ASCII project: workers of the world slack off!
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