Women's Post Wanders Through bp's Language
The Alphabet Game is exactly that: a game, a playful and clever cross-section of Can-Lit legend bpNichol’s work, a continuous exploration of the pun as a means to shift and re-invent language. His ongoing passion for language and need to bring written and oral works to new and unexpected places propel this collection, at once humorous and rich in underlying pathos and personal resonance.
The work begins with The Complete Works, which is a list of all the letters, numbers, symbols and punctuation on a keyboard followed by a note: “all possible permutions of all listed elements”. From the outset, the reader is drawn into Nichol’s base poetics: a special attention to the letter and how it can be constructed and combined to make sense. The challenge to traditional meaning-making courses throughout the whole work; the reader is asked to constantly reconsider the way she reads and receives text.
For instance, ABC: the aleph beth book takes each letter, enlarges it, then rearranges multiples of that letter into overlapping, gorgeous poems. This takes the reader’s expectations of the letter as a singular unit and re-imagines it as an abstracted pictorial arrangement, defusing the initial denotation of each letter and infusing it with fresh considerations.
What keeps the book compelling is the undercurrent of sadness, partly due to his untimely death, but mostly originating from the denser works included, like Nichol’s prose poetry Journal and Still. The sixth book of his life-long work, The Martyrology, is particularly moving. The lyrical work has the prairie landscape as a background to Nichol’s personal life, referencing his wife Ellie and his children:
“who to, Nicky?
only the future
invisible as my own
the first child died
the second awaits its birth”
As a collection, The Alphabet Game is thorough, covering Nichol’s entire body of work while providing excellent introductory points for those unfamiliar with his poetry. Included are his formative works, such as samples from The Martryology and concrete poems, as well as the author’s letters and afterwords that help to further illuminate the texts. The book is also useful for those who have some of the more popular works (such as Selected Organs) but can’t find more obscure works like Translating Translating Appollinaire and The Other Side of the Room.
The main issue with the collection is the lack of dates directly attached to individual pieces, an omission that makes it difficult to observe the chronological progression of Nichol’s work. However, the editors’ notes and notes on the poems give excellent insight into the construction of the work. In conjunction with this book, an excellent online bpNichol archive has been launched at www.bpnichol.ca.
The Alphabet Game and the web archive provide access to a deep, staggeringly diverse, and complex body of work that respects the multitude of readers’ tastes and interests while still remaining true to the idea of play and potential that language always holds.
