bpNichol

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bpNichol's friend Pierre Coupey introduced him to the work of Henri Chopin, which opened a new dimension of poetry to him. From there, he also came into contact with the work of Bob Cobbing, bill bissett, Ernst Jandl, and Cavan McCarthy.

 

Nichol's sound poetry moves back and forth between verbal meaning and vocal sound. In his sound poetry, Nichol explores the possibility of rendering language abstract. Words are always significant and always inherently refer to something else; thus language tends to resist abstraction. Nichol attempts to subvert or circumvent the referentiality of language by either placing words in a context that would drastically qualify, undercut, or cancel its function as a signifier; or by working with the sub-vocal elements of speech, like individual letter sounds, phonemes, morphemes, and pre-verbal vocalizations (e.g. grunts, yells, whistles, heavy breathing).

 

Nichol suggests that he started working with sound poetry in order to find a context in which he could let his emotions out. For him, sound poetry opened up new ways to get different kinds of poetic effects and reactions from the audience. It was for this reason that performing his poetry live was so important to him.

 

bpNichol believed that the voice and language were deeply resonant with the material world and that the kinesthetic senses and affect were important to meaning construction. In this sense, he felt that the voice which visible language carried on the page connected still to a broader reality, tying the speaker to the physical realm. Thus, it would appear that Nichol was moving, at least intuitively, away from the arbitrariness of signs towards meaning through embodied motivation and perception.This is reflected in a 1968 essay that he wrote about sound poetry and a Hopi creation myth (the myth of Palongahoya)where sound was responsible for creating and maintaining the Earth's harmony with the universe and the Creator. In this myth, it is only when the people misuse their sounds in speech that they fell out of tune with the universe. Similarly, Nichol believed that

 

"sound--human sound--has become dignified. the scream is a social taboo. music and singing tend to take us far away from our own sounds. THE POINT, THE PURPOSE, THE CREATIVE REASON FOR SOUND POETRY IS TO SET THE BODY'S AXIS BACK IN TUNE WITH THE UNIVERSE obviously intially with the hearing audience. it paves the way for a rebirth of the poem as a universal form of expression." [1]   

 

All of bpNichol's sound work is a reaffirmation of the presence of the voice in the body. This is why he preferred not to record his sound poetry performances on tape; although there are a few exceptions to this including his albums/cassettes/singles Borders (1967),
Motherlove (1968), ST (1971), Appendix (1978), Ear Rational: Sound Poems 1966-1980 (1982), and several compilation albums. From the 1970s onwards, bpNichol also performed and recorded with The Four Horsemen, one of the very first sound poetry ensembles with Steve McCaffery, Paul Dutton, and Rafael Barreto-Rivera. To poets like Nichol, who preferred the purity of the unassisted human voice, recordings were considered to be only secondary to live performance. Sound poetry performances were meant to be flexible fields for live experimentation, and a recording would freeze the performance into a fixed entity.

 

In the Modern Poetry Collection, ARC has only a few examples of bpNichol's early sound poems. To listen to examples of bpNichol's sound poetry, please click here.

 

LAMENT: A SOUND POEM

 

As a student of Gertrude Stein, Nichol was aware of the use of repetition to insist upon meaning. In sound poetry, the chant is one of the most basic rhythmic techniques and often relies on repetition to provide coherent continuity for the poem. However, repetition can function in two widely different ways: it can be used (as Stein suggested) to insist upon meaning, or it can be used to cancel meaning.

 

One of bpNichol's sound poems where repetition does insist upon meaning is Lament: a sound poem (to the memory of d.a. levy who took his own life november 1968. This poem consists of a basic text that has a repetition of the lines

 

you are city hall, my people

and look what you've become, I said

you are city hall, my people

and look what you've done, I said

 

There is a very clear sense of the poem's meaning and that it is about civic politics and the responsibility of each citizen for the actions of their government (e.g. "you are your own fuzz" and, ultimately, "you are your own distortion"). The repetition of the lines and the insistence of the rhythm of the chant work to insist upon the idea that the words contain.

 

On the other hand, the effect of repetition can also produce opaqueness; the rhythm and the repetition will come to refer more to themselves rather than the meaning and ideas signified by the words. Nichol suggests this in the printed/visual text of the poem by moving from a legible single printing of the lines to multiple overprintig in which the words become an illegible blur. In this way, "Lament" begins at a level of recognisable meaning and towards the end is subjected to semantic abstraction.

 

The poem can be angry or mournful depending on the inflection of the voice. The text of a sound poem is no more than a basis for improvisation, which means that no two performances will ever be alike. The performer may also shift the mood, tempo and duration of the delivery of the poem to create a different effect depending on the conditions of the performance and the audience. In this way, the meaning may change for each person listening to the poem.

 

bpNichol's ambition, which was never realised, was to deliver this poem over the loud speaker system at the Toronto City Hall.

 

BORDERS(SINGLE)

 

Borders is a record released with the concrete poetry box set bp or JOURNEYINGS & the returns from 1967. Many of the sound poems on this record have also been released on other bpNichol albums or cassette tapes.

 

Two of the poems included on this recording are "Dada Lama (to the memory of Hugo Ball)" and "Scraptures--Fifth Sequence." These two works move much more towards semantic abstraction than "Lament." In "Dada Lama" there are six sections in the poem, and each are quite distinct from each other. Section one begins by balancing a high nasal sound of "hweee" and "hyonnn" against the tripping front dentals of "tubadido;" while sections two and four alternate the high and low pitches of the vowels E and A. Section three is made up of non-words, which is a direct hommage to the work of Hugo Ball. These non-words are spoken in poetic rhythm as if they were words, and as if they had syntactic continuity. Section five is comprised of sounds that suggest the ticking of a clock, and then section six develops its pitch and alternates the sounds of M, W, E, and A into a recognisable chant of the word "freedom."

 

"Dada Lama" is a poem built on alternations of opposing pairs, some of them contrasting sounds (hyonnn/tubadido) or the contrasting ideas of time and freedom. Furthermore, the titlle of the poem gives the listener a frame of reference; the Dada poet becomes the Buddhist Lama and sound leads us into a meditative state which can free the worshipper from the limits of time.

 

Meanwhile, "Scraptures--Fifth Sequence" echoes some of the effects in "Dada Lama," but without further development. This poem can be "read" either entirely as variations of vowel sounds and the consonants B, D, and Y. The recording also uses a fair amount of overtracking and echo effects.

 

 

 

[1] bpNichol, "SOUND & POETRY (circa. 1968)" in Meanwhile: The Critical Writings of bpNichol. Ed. Roy Miki. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2002.