bpNichol
ARCHIVES & RESEARCH COLLECTIONS
CARLETON UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
bp's
VI SU AL PO ETRY
In a sense, to write is a visual act--to put letters on a page, to create lines with a pencil or pen. There's a very definite visual moment. The page is a visual field and that's one of the elements of writing... The minute you start to look at what you write, there's a whole set of visual possibilities that open up.
- bpNichol
In the 1960s, it was Fluxus artist, writer, and scholar Dick Higgins who, speaking of conrete poetry, said that there was "[an] ongoing human wish to combine the visual and literary impulses" [1]. This is certainly true of the visual poems of bpNichol.
Even in a literary landscape, Nichol's visual sensibility is well rooted. Nichol's visual poems render language visible with destabilizing playfulness. His love of words and letters in all their aspects shows that he a keen eye for visual ambiguities, a refined aesthetic, a well-honed sense of humour, sophisticated taste in typography, and an awareness of language as both model and shaper of the human operations and experience. He constantly explored the dualism of language as both container and content. His visual poetry constantly reminds the reader-viewer of the physical and mental processes in the creating of the writing-drawing.
bpNichol's visual poetry developed several techniques in his personal style using elements from the grid of the typewriter, comic strips, and using breathline poetry and hand-drawn visual text that toy with narrative logic and their status as material texts. Nichol was interested in the tactile quality of language and poetry, and he wrote that "if the poet's need is to touch you physically he creates a poem/object for you to touch and is not a sculptor for he is still moved by the language and sculpts with words..." [2]
bpNichol experimented with a number of different strategies in his visual poems, ranging from the more "classical" concrete poetry to his post-concrete style that relied less on verbal elements (like his drawings of letters or landscapes), a static individual image than on a sequence, or on serial development and metamorphosis. In this way, Nichol found many routes out of the impasse that concrete poetry found itself in the late 1960s, and solidified his interest in the visuality of language.
His visual poems can be grouped into several categories; click on one of the following to learn more about the visual poetry of bpNichol.
ALPHABETS
In the places I go there are things that I see
That I never could spell if I stopped with the Z
I'm telling you this 'cause you're one of my friends
My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends!
- On Beyond Zebra, Dr. Seuss.
The title and subtitle of ABC: The Aleph Beth Book provoke a child-like and playful apprehension of language and the alphabet. This collection begins with a theoretical statement that the poem is dead, "Poetry being at a dead end poetry is dead... what has been constant till now have been the artificial boundaries we have placed on the poem. We must put the poem in our lives by freeing it from the necessity to be. The poem will live again when we accept finally the fact of the poem's death." [5] This statement has an obvious deconstructionist influence that seeks to break down and explore the aplhabet in a new way.
The aesthetic with which this book treats the letter shapes is a testament to Nichol's interest in transforming the alphabet, and making us rethink our conception of what an alphabet really is. In this way, his approach to the alphabet in this book is very similar to Dr. Seuss' approach in the classic children's book, On Beyond Zebra.
This collection portrays the alphabet in a series of letter overlays. Nichol takes the shape of the letter and overlays it upon itself numerous times in order to create an unexpected and new way of experiencing the alphabet. For example, the letter T in Nichol's alphabet (depicted on the right of the bottom image) appears as if it was a spiralling staircase, and shares some aesthetic characteristics with Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase" (DATE) (click here to view). The letter looks just as abstracted as the figure and the staircase itself.
In this alphabet, Nichol was interested in the play of negative space and light through the overlapping letters and what happened to the letter-form when it overlapped with itself. These are some of the most "classical" of the visual poetry that he has done.
Another alphabet that he made was in collaboration with silkscreen artist Barbara Caruso (best known for her Colour Lock series of paintings). Alphhabet/Ilphabet was published in 1978 by Caruso's press, Seripress.This collection contains two silkscreen prints of two different alphabets where there is a combination one letter with all of the letters of the alphabet. Alphhabet (depicted on the left side of the bottom image) combines the letter "H"--bpNichol's favourite letter--with the other letters of the alphabet. Meanwhile, Ilphabet combined the alphabet with the letter "I."
When Nichol showed Caruso his sketches for these alphabets, she saw a graphic potential in them and asked to work on them with him. She made the silkscreen print by using a square shape to configure the "H" alphabet and a lozenge shape to configure the "I" alphabet.
According to Caruso, this was not a collaboration since the alphabets were Nichols; however, Nichol believed it was. He liked to explore new forms of expression with others, because it was through collaboration that his perceptions were expanded. [6] Caruso and Nichol's collaborations started with Milt the Morph in the early 1970s, and almost half of Caruso's publications under Seripress in that decade were collaborations with bpNichol.
LETTER-DRAWINGS
Nichol's most radical transformations and expansions of the alphabet came in the form of his letter-drawings (this is a term that is used loosely as bpNichol never found a term that properly encompassed how he felt about these works). He expands on the concepts of his alphabet series by focusing on a single letter and its tangible shape.
The most widely available of his letter-drawings is the "Allegories" series in love: a book of remembrances and in Aleph Unit. These drawings are all based on the shapes of the letters of the alphabet, and they are usually represented in three dimensions—almost as if they were sculptural objects. These drawings also are usually related in some way to a landscape, either one that surrounds the letter-shape or one that opens up inside them. Nichol compares these letter-shapes to the pared down image vocabulary of comic strips.
In his letter-drawings, the letters become sentient. They think themselves and each other, and they become organic, metamorphosing constantly into their own interiors. Ultimately, the shape of the letter becomes more abstracted the further it recedes into its own shape.
The Allegories series of 32 poems have an almost M.C.Escher-like quality to them. Although not as precise as Escher, Nichol plays with perspective and with the intersections of ambiguous planes.
COMIC STRIPS
bpNichol's interest in the ideogrammatic possibilities of words and letters also ran parallel to an interest in the comic strip and its narrative and syntactical conventions. Ever since he was a teenager, Nichol maintained an interest in comic books, and even collected popular and rare comics.
According to bpNichol, "[the comic strip] is a different set of narrative conventions and a totally different set of linguistic conventions that cuts across language barriers. It's the universal language system that's already extant. It can be used powerfully." [7] In a traditional comic strip, this "language" depends on the manipulation of a visual field which is normally divided into frames that indicate the passage of time and a narrative. Nichol would experiment with this "language" to produce different poetic and artistic effects.
The "Frames" series from love: a book of remembrances allowed Nichol to pare down the image vocabulary to parallel the pared down verbal vocabulary that he had been experimenting with in his other poems. This series allowed Nichol to experiment with the narrative frame of the comic strip and play with the sequence of each frame. The simple hand drawn visual symbols in the "Frames" series were very easily interpreted and became interchangeable with the written word; Nichol insists on the priority of language over drawn representation in this series. For example, "Frame 10" is all descriptive language, situated in a visual settingUltimately, these drawings became a vocabulated landscape, a visible fact of language.
Each frame presents a lyrical glimpse of a story (e.g. a single bird in the sky thinking "lonely") or questions the concept of the frame itself (e.g. "Frame 7" assures us that "a frame runs arounds this phrase," but no frame appears on the page: so the frame is the page itself, the book, the reader's peripheral vision, the world). The series examines the ambiguity of the frame: its temporal ambiguity, its narrative ambiguity, and its spatial ambiguity. bpNichol continues this exploration of the frame in Aleph Unit, Movies, and Door to OZ-- other collaborations with Barbara Caruso and Seripress.
In Aleph Unit, the frame, the letter A, Aleph, remains constant at every stage, however there continuous shifts in the image as the work progresses. This metamorphosis of the image occurs within the same kind of ambiguous time/space "frame" that the "Frames" series developed. Furthermore, the serial nature and the stylized landscape of Aleph Unit are also influences of the comic strip.
In Door to Oz and Movies, there are no verbal or lettristic elements in the metamorphosing images (except for their titles). In Door to Oz, there is a landscape with a winding road between mountains, which is reduced to a curvy, sensuous non-referential shape. While in Movies, there is a tree by the seashore that metamorphoses into a pensive animal's head. Despite their lack of verbal or letteristic elements, Nichol still considers these pieces as "language texts... Working within & without the standard of one frame unit of the comic strip i was able to image a language change." [8]
TYPEWRITER
One of bpNichol's most well-known concrete poems is Blues (1966) which is depicted on the cover of love: a book of remembrances (top right corner). This poem demonstrates an exploration of the grid-like qualities of the typewriter. On the other hand, this poem also expresses an interest in narrative visual strategy that shrugs off semantic conventions. With only a single word, he explores the visual permutations across the horizontal and vertical axes of the page. The intention of Blues plays with the concept of the word "love" and how it is spelled backwards, "evol." Nichol does not mean to say that love is evil (a semantic connection to the sound of the pronunciation of "evol"), but that rather that it evolves and is the start of change. [3]
Nichol's poems from this period tended to have a very Minimalist aesthetic where the logic of the typewriter is self-contained, and the poems are true to their material and their making.
Typewriter concrete consists of visual poems whose ideal realisation is on a typewritten or mimeographed page; they use letters (and, sometimes, other visual symbols) and the typewritter's ability to evenly space out letters. With a typewriter a poet had more direct control over the matter and the visual structure of language. Until the typewriter, the grid was the exclusive preserve of the typsetter.
bpNichol's first major collection of typewriter poetry was Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer. Many of the poems in this collection take on a shape that also reflects their content, such as "Christian Cross #4 for e.e. cummings." Similarly, in "Tribute to Vasarely," the visual arrangement mimics the optical effects of Vasarely's paintings. This incites the reader to construct words out of the fluctuating surface (e.g. sing, song, so, spa, pawn, wow, etc.).
Nichol's other major collection of typewriter poetry was Still Water. The typewriter effects become even more minimal in this collection. Many of the poems consist only of a single word with slight typographical alterations. For example, the poem from Still Water depicted in the image on the left is simply consists of the letters "em ty. The reader is left to fill in the missing letter, which only reinforces the idea of emptiness which the word conveys.
Another collection, Extreme Positions works through the spatial dispositions of visual poetry, and also plays with word fragmentation and the use of individual letters. This leaves the construction and intepretation of the narrative entirely up to the reader. Like all visual poetry, it requires the reader's participation in a "semantic space" which has not been fixd or directed by syntax. This is similar to bpNichol's idea that language has a multiplicity of meanings: "language does not exist on just one level it exists on many. and rather than trying to find the one true level you must become fluent in all of them... two truths can exist side by side without contradicting each other." [4]
Nichol's ultimate typewriter poem is "The Complete Works" from An H In the Heart, and reproduces an entire keyboard with the addition of a footnote which explains: "Any possible permutation of all listed elements," which would indeed encompass the "complete works." (click here to see it)
Nichol aslo experimented with moving typewriter poems. In 1983 and 1984, bpNichol used an Apple IIe computer and the Apple BASIC programming language to create First Screening, a suite of a dozen programmed, kinetic poems (Click here to see it). What Nichol was doing with these poems was taking his aesthetic concerns (principally, a concrete poetry perspective) and playing them against a new set of rules in a digital format. First Screening was issued posthumously on a floppy disk.
[1] Dick Higgins quoted by Paul Dutton in "bpNichol: Drawing the Poetic Line" in St. Art: The Visual Poetry of bpNichol, exhibition catalogue, June 2000, Confederation Centre Art Gallery & Museum, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. (Call No. SPC PS 8527. I24. A6. 2000)
[2] bpNichol quoted from the cover copy for bp / JOURNEYING & the returns (1967) box set. (Call No. SPC PS 8527. I24. J68 1967D)
[3] see "Captain Poetry: In Love" in Captain Poetry Poems. blewointmentpress, 1971. (Call No. SPC PS 8527. I24. C36 1970)
[4] bpNichol, "Little Boy Lost Meets Mother Tongue" CBC radio serial, 1968. (full transcript of this serial is in the bpNichol collection at Simon Fraser University archives.
[5] bpNichol, ABC: The Aleph Beth Book, Toronto: Oberon Press and Coach House Press, 1971. (Call No, SPC PS 8527. I24. A72 1971)
[6] Barbara Caruso, "The Seripress Collaborations: Nichol and Caruso" in St. Art: The Visual Poetry of bpNichol, exhibition catalogue, June 2000, Confederation Centre Art Gallery & Museum, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. (Call No. SPC PS 8527. I24. A6. 2000)
[7] bpNichol quoted by Stephen Scobie, bpNichol: What History Teaches, Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1984. (Call No. SPC PS 8527. I24.Z88 c.3)
[8] ibid.
MINIMALISM
Throughout much of his work, bpNichol also explored the possibilities of line to convey a message. In Of Lines: Some Drawings this exploration of line reached its pinnacle. In a very minimalist style, Nichol produced thirteen pages with a single diagonal line drawn in pencil crayon on each page in this work. The uniqueness of each line was underscored by the titles that were given to each page, such as Line #1, Drawing of Line #1, Line #4 (drawn while thinking of previous lines), and Line Drawn As A Response To An Inner Pressure To Draw Another Line While Resisting The Urge To Call It Line #5. These titles were artistic and authorial qualifications that provided arch metaphysical distinctions between each drawing.
"Frame 7" from Love: a book of remembrances (top-left); "Aleph Unit Opened" from Aleph Unit (bottom-left); Door to OZ (middle); Movies (right)