Some Lines of Poetry: From the Notebooks of bpNichol. bpNichol. Coach House Books, 2024. 160 pages.

Reading bpNichol’s to become obsessed with the single image on this train. Getting wrapped in seeking out the punctuation, trying to divide the words into something akin to prose, or a speech, as if the piece is half baked and my job as the reader is to translate it into semblance. In the background two children sing their ABC's; in the foreground the sun is setting over the mountain range known as the Pennines.

It's this singing and this sunset that keeps distracting me from dissecting; the laughter, the song now descending into some raspy tender vowels reaching to and from each other, two children repeating tones to each other, bending and curling their alphabets into fuzz. What’s so funny about the alphabet? The song is an exercise in converting sounds into shapes, shapes like a, like a speech bubble on a cartoon or a fat dog with a tail or an eye, slanting into the tear duct. That “a” could be a sound, which could then mean one, could slot into other words to make them whole; it feels like they’re not really laughing at each other, but at all of us, worrying so attentively about these bizarre shapes and what may lie behind them. 

I open a different page and, would you believe it, it's birds emerging from alphabet Feb 18/81. The letters are wonderfully, legibly characterful, little unorthodox clarities, arranged in a straight alphabetised line along the page. The v shuffles into a couple of dipped simple birds- a motif of the book some lines of poetry- shifting again into a trio of migrating lines, giving way to a simple murmuration of v’s decorating the empty space atop the regimented line of consonants and vowels. If it must be spelled out, the birds on the page mimic the laughter behind me, both emanating effortlessly from this most immaculate list; it is a poetic justice. You’d almost expect a flock of geese to fly past; instead, hills go by like great capital A’s, mumbling m’s, u-shaped half-valleys. This, then, is what’s so funny about the alphabet. The children laughing in the background are reading bpNichol much better than I am.

Listening to an interview for Canadian TV, Nichol is saying; “I always, even as a little kid, had this strong feeling about the alphabet. I have a favorite letter which is the letter H and all those sorts of things. I became very aware of the shapes of letters.” You can see this favoritism in 26 H’s, May 1st 1987, where the letter H bends, floats, extends in three dimensions, twenty six times, which you can only assume is an attempt to replace each letter of the alphabet with his perfect H. Or After an Inscription in the Egyptian Museum; the letter makes a ragged square out of a good few H’s, appearing like deranged cartoon laughter.

I look out the window. In Landscape #16, the sun can be an O atop the word mountain. It’s honest; “mountain” in this concrete poem is an image of exactly what it says it is. Nichol takes the meaning of the word from something hiding behind to something standing in front. It’s confrontational in its simple playfulness. In another poem, he teaches us how the moon falls from the sky and dapples its reflection in a pond beneath. He does both these things with two words; how? If you remade these poems from these descriptions alone, what would they look like? For him, a name is enough, a vivid description in and of itself;in the same interview, he says: “when you use an adjective you say: my noun is weak. Invest those nouns with the power they have. In religion, the power lies in naming.” It feels as if he's exploring the power of letters in their most carnal form; as shapes. He makes hieroglyphics out of Latin.

Skimming through; a fish is clasping it's mouth around the sharp bottom of a crescent moon in horizon #3: translation. A ky comes from the moon; an ea comes from the fish. The moon and the fish make up one S: s ky, s ea. The consonants on top are constellations (k and y are arguably the most starlike letters in the alphabet), the vowels underneath draw out like currents. You could look at it and see child's play, and you'd be right. The work reaches back into the first encounter with language, pulling these shapes out from some recession in our memories to play with. Sometimes reading this book, like with much concrete poetry, feels like playing with letters magnetised to the surface of a fridge, or arranging wooden blocks with A B C painted upon them. It feels like what would’ve happened had that been the way we had developed linguistically; not trawling through these letters for purpose, intent, objectives, but seeing them as they are, hearing them as they are; tones, shapes, curves, some lines of poetry. 

"I'm very often dragging the reader back to the surface," he explains in an interview at the end of the book, dragging the nubile first impression of the letter into the light. It's a tome of unrepression. It digs up and problematizes our obsession with meaning behind the letter, the word, the line, the poem, and tells us instead to just look at it. Look at any word long enough, and you can find yourself right there at the nascent moment, giddy with alien forms infused with absent markedness. Look at any of these words, and see how the meaning disappears, and they become jumbles of shapes. This is perhaps a good place to begin writing from. It is in this lesson that bpNichol’s work becomes of integral value to the writer and the poet.

Words proliferate in bedtime stories, spill out on the side of the road, wrap your food, litter themselves in myriad patterns and font-types. For Nichol, these letters are the clouds, they are the sky, they are the sea, they dissipate from smog and dilute into swamp. A sizeable minority of the pieces in this book are landscapes; in Fin de Ligne, Nichol rolls out a mumbling “m” sea into a simple wave. On a similar theme, Water Poem #7 interrupts several lines, like moments in a coast, with the word “wave”, slightly smaller in each iteration. Nichol in his journals, as some lines of poetry lays out, is arguably at his most unconscious, docile to the play of unspoken memory. He calls his work “bizarre translation systems,” which is sometimes more literal, like his translation of Niikuni Seiichi, a homage to the Japanese concrete poet, where we follow a square of “i” until we reach the word “rain”, which is almost a relief. All this self, or information, all these i’s, were nothing at all, only passing rain. in nsformation 1, we watch a snowflake melt; owfla transmogrifying into a, escaping to wat, until it’s a mere puddle of water at the bottom of the text. He spends a lot of time liquidating language.

When children talk their faces are full and they use the whole thing; each muscle has a direct line to whichever part of our body lets meaning. Or perhaps that is the part of the body where meaning experiences it's advent. To do without this, in the written form; it is a great bereavement and relief. The girls who were singing have trainers that light up when they walk; these new rhythms that blink across our days; how to write them? Perhaps like sewing card and sewing card / 2nd version, mere patterned blips on a page. We are not taught how to represent our lives in this way, nor necessarily do we want to know; these methods of communication are not popular. At the back of the book, Nichol talks about how there are some things that will not do well commercially, but that should be published on a smaller scale simply so they can be recorded. “I think of (it) as ‘put it on the record press.’ You want there to be a record of it somewhere; it’ll end up in a few libraries and as the years go by… there will be a record of what that author was doing.” Poets may be tapping into something which only becomes legible twenty, a hundred, a thousand years from now. Or perhaps a good generation into your past; part you haven't reached yet. Perhaps it will never catch on; probably. I find the link between bpNichol’s work and childhood poetry really striking. Nichol does not try to appease the child, as he does in his children's books or when writing for Jim Henson’s Fraggle Rock; he practices the early child's position in language. 

Off the train, on the tram, and the children are gone. Watch the hand of the driver move the carriage one way or another through a tinted window, gesticulating along the lever shuffling this way and that. a cloud strips a cohesive line across the pink. its edges muffle. finally, birds. five blackbirds ripple along the blush past Manchester's blossoming glass apartment oblongs. this city sometimes feels like another one of the alphabet poems from Feb 18/81, nothing emerging from alphabet, where the alphabet is once again laid out in meticulous order, except the letter o replicates and replicates again and again, above and below the line, a proliferation of nothings. O, as in another, as in of course, as in o! 

In Nichol’s afternoon attentions, he disintegrates the poem from where it starts: “plant / pl / ants / ants / ts” through into a repetitive, stuck: “and a / and a / and a / and a,” interspersing this movement with “fire / FIRE”. You look at the city skyline and imagine it a canopy, old growth forest replaced with and a, and a, and a; a great list of nothing at all, with the occasional fire. Perhaps this resonated in Vancouver too. 

These are pictures. It feels uncomfortable to write them out. I feel like I'm telling someone off. Or that I’m murdering them by bringing them into this clear-cut prosody. We try to encourage our children to speak their feelings; to put them into our language, rather than us reaching into theirs. It's practical, but some lines of poetry asks the question; what did we miss? What did we leave behind? What of this nascent moment lives on, where words are many faced beings, variously arranged patterns, visual spectacles? Perhaps I shouldn’t be pulling Nichol out from my side of language, but instead wading deeper in the asteroid belt of Fifth Turin Text: Vertical, Horizontal + Vertical, the jittering hum of the text pouring out in the jutting lines amidst the field of scattered characters. This poem is counterpoised beautifully with his poem Running in the Family on the next page, dots going down in a simple line until one dot extends into a line of its own; the name infuses each dot with a sense of urgency, of following on from. It turns a simple collection of dots into a narrative, with ourselves at the end, extending onwards, downwards, toward, depending on how you hold the book, the reader themselves. But there I go again.

I return to to become obsessed with the single image a few days later, because it’s much less a concrete poem, and feels like something I can spend longer getting lost in. I think about what it would be like to read this poem out loud, something bpNichol perhaps never did, this poem getting lost amidst his notebooks, only to be dug out and rediscovered by Derek Beaulieu & Gregory Betts, who lovingly call this collection “drafts, rejects, and maquettes” in the introduction. This book showcases “the idea of the page space as a form, of notation that goes beyond the spoken word,” how language can expand beyond some lines of poetry and into a series of lines making the word poetry; how play can overcome, humiliate, and thereby transform language. 

I’m reading in a pub, where Stevie Wonder is waxing “Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours)” along the more or less empty leather sofas and wooden chairs. The words blend insignificantly with the electric sitar, the narrative sublimating to the sound, meaning disappearing into the verses before reappearing in the chorus; oh baby, here I am. I want to go further into this poem, but I keep getting distracted by images and sounds, and perhaps Nichol would’ve approved of this. There’s a line in part IV of this poem, which goes “i know there are times when words make sense times when all this talking seems necessary / it doesn’t now.”