It’s possible you may already know all of these things; I’m offering
them up here less as a list of things that will “change your life” and
more as a list of things whose range is notable for having all been
found while swimming in the pool of one person’s work. Many of these
are also the kinds of things which, in retrospect, seem completely
obvious, but the Fact of them wasn’t crystallized in me until the
tumblers were all clicked into place by the act of my exploration of
the work of bpNichol.
1) There are (at least) two kinds of “self-publishing”. The one I knew
before bpNichol was the kind where you self-publish because no one
else WILL publish the work (and that’s not necessarily a bad thing,
there are works whose appreciative audience is so small even this
kind of self-publishing can make sense). The one I learned was the
kind where you self-publish because no one else CAN publish the
work in the way you would yourself. This kind of book can’t be
found at all in a big box bookstore, rarely even in an independent
bookstore, occasionally in certain types of used and rare
bookstores, and most often in the hands of individual
collectors. To date, they have always been worth the effort to
find. The works that have been classified as “ephemera” are every
bit as worthy of critical attention as the books that get the bulk
of the attention.
2) I used to be a an ultra-perfectionist when it came to my
poetry. Perfectionist to the point where it affected my output. I
would get an idea to do something and would immediately see five or
six possible ways of rendering the idea. I would then obsess over
which of the ways was The Best Way to do it, convinced that I’d
only have one shot at doing this and so I absolutely had to get it
right. I would make maybe ten pieces per year, and of those ten,
I’d be happy with nine of them. Not a bad ratio. After bpNichol I
work in a different fashion. Now when I get an idea, I still
immediately see five or six possible ways of rendering the idea,
but instead of obsessing over which one to do, I do them all—and
in the process of the doing I get ideas for another five or six
possible ways of realizing the idea and I do those, too, and end up
with an entire suite of work. I am no longer happy with ninety
percent of the work, now it’s more like fifty percent. But I’m
producing hundreds of pieces per year now, instead of ten, and end
up happy with a number of pieces in the triple digits instead of a
number of pieces in the single digits.
3) In studying the creative output of someone else, there’s a sort of
hourglass-shaped double cone of relevance that extends through the
concentric rings of relation. There are exceptions, of course, but
in broad, general terms the work itself is of the most value, what
the artist says about their own work is next in value, what those
who’ve actually collaborated with the artist have to say is next,
what those who knew the artist but didn’t actually work with them
have to say is next, and the cone of relevancy reaches its
narrowest at the point of people who were contemporaries of the
artist but didn’t work with the artist or know the artist
directly. And then the cone begins to flare out, and more relevancy
can be found when enough time has passed that the writer is able to
provide the perspective of hindsight, and/or the contextualization
of historical ebbs and flows.
4) I’m still working to actively incorporate this one into my world,
but the factoid has been learned, nonetheless: Bold statements are
retractable. I tend (too much) to be cautious, provisional,
tentative in my own statements of poetics and as a direct result I
slow my own progress. It’s like that winter my best friend Ken and
I went out to Colorado to learn how to ski. He spent most of his
time with his ski tips together in the snowplow position, very
carefully avoiding falling down. I don’t think he fell down once
the whole week. I thought skiing was a lot like ice skating—which
I’ve been doing as long as I’ve been walking—only with much longer
blades. I spent the whole time skiing just a little bit beyond my
own abilities. As a result, I fell down a lot. But at the end of
that week, I was a far better skier then Ken was. I should learn to
be the same way with my poetics, because I will always be able to
say in response to any harkening back, “Yeah, that’s what I was
really into at that point in time.”
5) ’Pataphysics and/or ’Pataphysics were lost on me. I didn’t get it,
and didn’t really have any desire to get it. The same was largely
true of Dada and Surrealism. I saw them as valid points on the
trajectory of art, but, held them to be of value only as historical
markers. Even bpNichol’s own work in this area left me
lukewarm. Clever, cute, funny enough, but, so what? Then I read a
quote of his where he says “...the way I tend to think of
’pataphysics is that very often you climb a fictional staircase
that you know is fictional; you walk up every imaginary stair, you
get to your imaginary window and you open your imaginary window,
and there is the real world. You see it from an angle you would not
otherwise see it from.”* That was the paradigm shift for me that
brought it all into a snap-focus. As a method of getting outside
normal perceptual ruts the practice became alive to me, a rich and
vital vein of exploration wroth revisiting again and again.
6) Even after I got through that (possibly mandatory) juvenilia period
of not wanting to be influenced by others, I still floundered with
trying to locate myself and my work within a specific community or
tradition. Gradually, over time, I began to find pockets in a
variety of communities/traditions that were less ill-fitting than
others, but I continued to feel adrift in a way that made me
question the validity of what I was doing because I couldn’t fully
claim the mantle of “lyric poet” or “novel writer” or “digital
artist” or any other more or less specific categorization. If I
couldn’t name it, how could it be legitimate? Then, after about two
years of swimming further and further out into the sea of the work
of bpNichol I realized that the only way to accurately categorize
the breadth and depth of his output was to call it “inventive”. It
was a major epiphany in my life when I realized I didn’t need to
pre-fit my creativity into existing categories, that I didn’t need
to pre-locate it within any specific tradition. My creative process
consists of read, write, and revise. I’m only ever able to be
actively involved in one of the three at any given time. I can
switch modes fluidly, but can’t do any of them simultaneously, they
seem to use mutually exclusive parts of my brain. Categories and
traditions are valuable to help focus reading, and to inform
revising, but they are of no positive use to me in the act of
writing.
7) If you like the work of one artist there is a high probability that
you will like the work of those who influenced that artist. There
is so much brilliant work out there it can be crippling to consider
where to begin or where to explore next. This simple revelation has
provided me with all the focus necessary to fill the rest of my
reading life with highly relevant-to-my-own-work avenues of
exploration. I’m not really good at monomania—if I was, the work
of bpNichol alone would suffice to keep me busy—and when I need a
break from one person’s work, I look to their influences and those
they influenced. From the node of bpNichol I have rippled my
reading outward to: Steve McCaffery, Paul Dutton, David UU, Earl
Birney, Gertrude Stein, Nelson Ball, Barbara Caruso, jwcurry, Karl
Young, d.a. levy, Margaret Avison, Kenneth Patchen to name just a
few. Each of these is an equally rich node in and of themselves. My
cup runneth over.
8) This one is in the same family as 2), but moves from it
orthogonally: there are some ideas that can be realized not just in
several different ways within a single mode, but can be realized in
multiple modes. Before bpNichol I never would have thought a SMS
text message could be made into a small concrete poem, riffed into
a broadside-scale version, interpreted as an interactive digital
piece, and performed as a sound poem. Now the first question I ask
when I finish anything is “How else can I use this to help me learn
about another mode?”
9) Still Water (Talonbooks, 1970) is a notable work for many
reasons, only one of which is germane here within the present
piece. Still Water is so much like so many things I had done or
planned to do before I saw it that the one brilliant way in which
it was different really leaped out and grabbed me by the throat and
shook me. I would have been so terrified by the whitespace that I
would have never been comfortable with the poems being printed in a
normal, reading-sized font. But, holding it in my hand as the work
of another, I knew without a doubt that it was the correct decision
to have made. I never could have made it on my own—though I have
since made a similar decision on my own—without his example.
10) The Toronto Research Group (which was bpNichol and Steve
McCaffery) gave me what I currently find to be the best term for
the less traditional artistic endeavors that occupy my time. I
have always disliked the term “work” (if your art is work, find a
different art), and cumbersome compound phrases (like the
just-used “artistic endeavors”), and felt there was always
something marginalizing about the terms “experimental” and “avant
garde”. But the term “research” carries with it a much more
accurate set of connotations. Experiments often blow up in
Beaker’s face, but research is an exploratory mapping of a
knowable territory.
11) A little obsession goes a long way, and there’s just no telling
where it might lead. The first time I read that bpNichol had a
favorite letter of the alphabet I was sufficiently steeped in his
work that I wasn’t really surprised, but, it did strike me. I ran
quickly through the alphabet in my head and tried to decide if I
had one. I didn’t, but, I couldn’t rule out the possibility that I
could have a favorite. The idea of a favorite letter struck me
more than the fact of the specific letter. Over time, in no
planned or constant fashion, I’ve taken advantage of a few
opportunities to connect back with his favorite letter, H, some
more notable than others. One example (from many):
I’ve been camera-in-hand for a couple of months now because of an
unrelated project, and I’ve taken advantage of that by hunting for
Hs in the wild, and taking pictures of them whenever it was
convenient. One morning while I was having some work done on my
car I went on a walk with the camera and ended up in front of a
local independent transmission repair place that’s been around
forever. All their signs are hand-lettered and were strewn with
great Hs. As I was taking my pictures the owner came out and asked
me what I was doing. I spent a good half hour talking to him about
bpNichol, about poetry, about his store, about his terrific Hs,
and about his own appreciations of poetry. As I was walking away
he said, “Thanks, I never knew what I had here.”
* from “Talking About the Sacred in Writing” in Meanwhile: The
Critical Writings of bpNichol, edited by Roy Miki (Talonbooks,
2002). Thank you to jwcurry for his abundant assistance in helping me
re-locate the exact quotation.
an excerpt was previously published in HOLY BEEP!, Natalie Zina
Walschots, editor (filling Station Publications Society / No Press),
2007