bill bissett

Johanna Drucker

Steve McCaffery

Darren Wershler-Henry's NICHOLODEON employs two important tactics in the face of such social and cultural backsliding. In its dialogue with the poetics of bpNichol, NICHOLODEON asks what has been squandered from the oppositional aesthetics that Nichol and many other poets defined, promoted and defended from, say, 1973 until now. Poetic archaeology to foreground the boundaries of the present meets with a centrifugal referentiality that's a blues explosion with geoeconomic bootleg smokes and felix and oscar who smell like teen spirit.

That's the other tactic -- to refute the comfortable phenomenological positioning of the poet with a poem by taking referentiality to be, well, not a given. To make opaque this referentiality, NICHOLODEON both overloads references without "respect" to their cultural positioning ("anais nin and her nine inch nails," "the manitoban book of the dead") and shifts down to query the assuredness of meaning ("subtle sublet," "lakebed's abandon"). Not lost, however, is the awareness that meaning, although seemingly arbitrary, is enforced, is ideological. NICHOLODEON is generative not generational in its arguments, timely disrespects, pointed homages, and refreshing zine approach to audience.

Jeff Derksen

So it is in NICHOLODEON, York PhD student, and funny man Darren Wershler-Henry's first book, and the first sumptuous publication to issue forth from the resurrected veterans over everywhere yonder on BP Nichol lane. In the world of the Canadian small press, it often seems that the battle fought is the battle won. This is evident in this book, a sumptuous collection of poems that uses cartoons, graphs, sketches and accidents to chronicle twenty years of groping with the primacy of the word.

But NICHOLODEON is not about celebrating some bygone era. Instead, it takes the adventurous, almost whimsical panache that marked the days of the old Coach House Press, and combines it with a critique of contemporary culture as funny as it is devastating. "Grain: A Prairie Poem" is a series of boxes filled with various permutations of the letter g. "[A]t the clear spot" is a 7 page rant, a list of everything Wershler-Henry has yet to sacrifice on his long forced march. "Solar Eclipse" shows the word sun in black being slowly methodically crossed with the word "sun" in white. This is Wershler-Henry's secret weapon: Jokes so bright and true that if you look at them too long you might go blind.

Is this a tribute to past wars fought on the battlefield of language? Or is it the war anew? Either way it is evident that this practical joker/thinker has full command over the arsenal past troops have left him. "Now enters Nicholodeon," proclaims this book the way a general proclaims the overdue arrival of reinforcements. "Fading in, where ye 'B.P.' faded out."

Hal Niedzviecki, broken pencil magazine

NICHOLODEON by Darren Wershler-Henry not only inaugurates the resurrection of Coach House Press, but also represents the first salvo in an assault by Generation X upon the poetic idiocy of the English academy. NICHOLODEON reappraises the innovations of bpNichol, a poet whose potential for linguistic radicalism has been effectively eviscerated by university babyboomers, who wish only to beatify their own memories of his romantic lyricism at the expense of his most disturbing experiments.

Rather than focussing upon anecdotal biography in order to impose disciplinary restrictions upon interpretation (as Irene Niechoda does, for example), Wershler-Henry opposes such necrophilia in order to demonstrate that the work of bpNichol calls into question all the critical regimens that have traditionally characterized such literary pedagogy. Unable to absorb the 'pataphysical sensibility in the visual poetry of bpNichol, Canadian literati have simply ignored it in order to radicalize the kind of poetry that is already recognizably poetic by virtue of its subjective narratives (particularly in the case of The Martyrology).

When Wershler-Henry translates "Translating Translating Apollinaire" into Klingon, he reflexively applies the whimsical procedures of bpNichol to bpNichol himself, suggesting that, for the avant-garde, poetry is nothing but the opaque effect of an artificial language. In the case of Wershler-Henry, this premise is nowhere more obvious than in his own acts of computerized collaboration, where the machine itself becomes an aesthetic prosthesis -- a detached metaphor for unconscious inspiration. A poem like "Arguments for a Two-Dimensional Surface," suggests that the cybernetic surrealism of a truly automatic writing demonstrates that, no matter how heartfelt the expression of the poet, all the three-dimensional substance of such "meaningful experience" results from the anagrammatic recombination of an impersonal vocabulary.

A book such as this one is thus not simply an homage to a poetic mentor so much as a manual for poetic excess -- a set of instructions for the disposal of all the banal forms that impair the imagination.

Christian Bök, Word Magazine

Instead, Wershler-Henry, a poet, editor and critic currently writing a doctoral dissertation at York on "the relationship between the typewriter and the poetics of dictation in post-modern poetry," made himself out to be the only writer capable of not only comprehending Nichol's more obscure work, but extending it in his own direction, instead of simply re-styling previously covered ground. Designed specifically and beautifully according to the work instead of despite it, NICHOLODEON includes inserts, foldouts, coloured text and photocopied work, an accomplishment not only for Wershler-Henry as a writer, but Coach House as a publisher/printer....

To look deeper into this collection, beyond the initial premise, this is a brilliantly new, beautifully made collection that is a joy to read.

Rob McLennan, The Ottawa Express

Wershler-Henry has been an active contributor to online culture since 1990, when he bought his first modem. In 1993, he co-authored the infamous Virus 23 Meme with Christian Bök, and posted it on Andy Hawks' FutureCulture mailing list. Douglas Rushkoff's book Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture (Ballantine Books: 1994), takes its structure from and bases much of its argument on this incident; Rushkoff writes that the philosophy behind the Virus 23 Meme presents "the most subversive opinions that a person can hold [today]."