bp Nichol (1944–1988)

review of
bpNichol's The Captain Poetry Poems Complete
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - December 8, 2012

I can only recall meeting bpNichol (Toronto) once, probably at School 33 in BalTimOre, probably during an FDA (Festival of Disappearing Arts), where he was probably performing, & where his fellow sound poets Beth Anderson (NYC) & Katalin Ladik (Yugoslavia) were probably also performing. bp made a lasting positive impression on me thru one simple act: I had probably (I'm deliberately 'overusing' this word, in case you haven't noticed) bought something of his (esp remarkable for me at the time since I lived deep w/in the poverty level) & he sd something like: "Since you bought something of mine I should buy something of yours" & proceeded to buy one of my "TESTES-3" tapes. That might not seem like much to most people but to me it exemplified & continues to exemplify an egalitarian attitude that I prize highly. Besides wch, I'm sure that the few dollars that I got out of the sale went a long way for me.

Then, less than a decade later, he was dead, 5 days before his 44th birthday. According to his Wikipedia bio: "He died in 1988 due to complications from routine back surgery." I thought he died from a gall bladder operation - but what do I know? Whatever botched operation killed him off, I was reminded of the death of Andy Warhol &, once again, felt a mistrust of the medical world & of the 'wisdom' of its practices.

Nichol is, of course, one of the most famous of Canada's sound & visual poets, an exemplar of a pioneering era even further exemplified by the sound poetry group he was a part of, The Four Horseman. Somewhere in my vast archive I have a recording of them. They are ON. Despite my having NIchol's Journal & The Story So Four sitting around for 3 decades & despite my being convinced that Nichol was a 'major talent' AND a very Nice Guy, I STILL haven't read either of those 2 bks. For no particular good reason.

It wasn't 'til I found The Captain Poetry Poems Complete in a bkstore in NYC (around the same time when I was coincidentally to go to a McCaffery reading at the Bowery Poetry Club) that I finally put a bk of this (this one) in my pile of bks to-be-read sooner-rather-than-later - & now it's done. It's about time!

The cover, featuring what might be a pen-&-ink or marker drawing of "Captain Poetry", heavily muscled, naked except for a jockstrap & sunglasses wrapping around in one band over both eyes, winged, w/ a face like a chicken's & a chin suspiciously like a scrotum. The character's beating his chest & standing on top of what seems to be implied as a rocky high place w/ a large moon behind him. The image seems intentionally stark in its comedic ridiculousness. Still, if one doesn't think this is parody, one might think it's just plain juvenile & silly.

In Nichol's "some words on all these words" in the back, he writes: "it's a lot of years now since i wrote the Captain Poetry poems. the specific stimulus was an attack on the macho male bullshit tradition in canadian poetry where if you were male & wrote poems you had to make damn sure you could piss longer, shout harder, & drink more than any less obviously effete (i.e. they weren't writing poems) on this national block." That spells it out pretty clearly altho I didn't exactly read the poems that way. No matter.

The edition of this that I have is BookThug's "Department of Reissue No. 4" (2011) originally published by blewointment press in 1970 or 1971. If Captain Poetry is a mock superhero, perhaps bill bissett of blewointment (& other struggling small presses) is the real hero. Here're excerpts from bissett's endwords here:

"it was snowing fierslee outside winds
howling n raging as they dew around th
cabin mid wintr wun uv th worst up ther
north uv hundrid mile a wayze off th hiway
abt 45 below we cud still lift whole treez

"n me n bertrand wer printing captain poetree
on gestetner n offet"

[..]

"see me n bertrand lachance put all th finishd books
collatid n taped n a huge chest in theyr packages n
sent 50% uv th copieez 2 barree thru th post offis ther
2 barrie in toronto ths huge box on a sled we pulld
hauld in2 town ovr th ice n snow"

I quote the above to call attn to the dedication of publishers like bissett (& lachance?) to getting the work done & out there against the odds. How many people wd haul a giant box of bks on a sled across ice & snow to get them mailed off? Not many, I reckon. Only the 'heros', the people who're truly motivated. I also quote the above to show the spelling style.

In an article entitled "AFTER BIRD: Notes On and Around The Bird is the Word Writers' Conference" from "RAMPIKE vol. 21/No. 2 Poetics: Part Two" (fall 2012) there's an opening quote from bissettfrom his What Fukan Theory:

'so yu dont need th sentence
yu dont need correct spelling
yu don't need correct grammar
yu dont need th margin
yu dont need regulation use of capital nd lower case etc
yu dont need sense or skill
yu dont need thus
what dew yu need"

& if there's even been a manifesto of just-get-it-done DIY poetics this might very well be it. I associate bissett & Nichol w/ d.a.levy & w/ dirty concrete (at times, at least) & am happy to find an example of the young & raw that I feel The Captain Poetry Poems Complete somewhat represents.

If there's a word for young-but-no-longer-juvenilia that's where I'd probably pigeonhole this bk - if, indeed, I'd pigeonhole it at all, wch I probably wdn't. bissett, Nichol, & levy all use phoneticized spellings - all 3 probably used "thot" for "thought". Nichol uses "yur", "yuve", "tho", "thot", & "ryme" here. There's a conscious effort to break the rules & remake language. There's also a fair amt of references to fucking. Then there's this 'personal ad':

"Attractive young man wearing
cape and hood wishes to meet
lady with similar interests.
Object - mutual enjoyment."

In one of the drawings in the bk (done by D.J. NICHOL?), there's a pronounced capital "A" seemingly walking in a landscape. Underneath there's a caption: "NEXT!! B on sale in May!!!" as if "A" is a product about to be superseded by "B" in excitement. Letters as thrilling protagonists in & of themselves - a visual poet's attitude.

In "The NEW NEW Captain Poetry Blues - an undecided novel" chapter one is this:

"captain poetry walks down the street

"it's a long way round the foot of the mountain

"pulls out a pistol & shoots off his feet fires into the air
& dies

"dead he lies

"& beautiful

"all the necrophiles crowd round
while captain poetry floats away
into the clear blue plunkett day"

I like this, but at the same time I see it as mainly the-enthusiasm-of-youth & lacking in a more editorial rigor that I generally prefer. In chapter 7, "B" appears again: "don't take a chance on getting lost in "B" parts!". In the same chapter, there's a par that shows just how close this is to juvenilia:

""Dear Rex:

"All my friends say you're mean & stuck-up
but I think you're the greatest cowboy alive.
Please write & show them they're wrong.

"Your Friend
Barrie Nichol (age 10)""

All in all, this is an interesting bk, but like most juvenilia (or too late to be that but still similar) I don't find it of more than a particular type of specialized interest. Nichol seems to've been a free spirit & I'm sure I need to learn much more about him than I have from this bk.
… (mais)