It seems essential to include bpNichol in this first group of essays. The most important of many reasons is that he was a poet who continually started over from the beginning on most of the work he created. He was a poet who constantly explored what I think of as volume and triangulation, and the books I will discuss here allowed me to work out these concept in even greater fullness and amplitude. Had bp's life not ended early, I'm sure there would be more books listed - and not simply more titles, but continuations of the Translating Translating Apollinaire series as well as works starting from other positions. The two TTA volumes were, appropriately and ironically, only meant as beginnings of a larger project. In the development of my publishing efforts, working with him allowed me to resolve problems with publishing visual poetry in the era after the definitive Concrete anthologies of the late 1960s. He will reappear in further installments dealing with my New Fire audio tape series, and in the section devoted to my own poetry.

There may be some irony in me writing over and over, in essay after essay, that Barrie always started from the beginning, from the most rudimentary building blocks he could isolate. He rang seemingly endless inventions on the alphabet, one of the first symbol sets that children learn. He invented proto- and pseudo-alphabets and worked on the design of a typeface. Individual letters could always be reshaped and reconfigured. The sequence of the ABCs could act as a narrative line on which potentially infinite stories could be told. Pronouncing the names of letters or uttering them as phonemes could chart the most basic and often pre-lingustic articulations of sound, just as letters could be used on paper as drawing tools, as prefab elements or background patterns or plain or distorted linear modules - sometimes shaping poems without any semantic value at all. He could return to basics even in genres. Basho's frog pond haiku gave him the key to variations that run at least into the hundreds. Comic books are often the first print publications which children take to as their own discovery, instead of something brought to them, like the alphabet, through school. Hence after his typewriter poem, later titled "Blues," was transformed into rigid Concrete lettering for Mary Ellen Solt's anthology, he returned to Concrete idiom less and less in his visual poetry, but relied more on combinations of drawing based on comic strips and hand lettering. Hand lettering is not only more supple and expressive than the rigidity of type, it is also the first form of writing children make by themselves - or such was the case in the days before personal computers.

Beep's Translating Translating Apollinaire project began from a similar premise. He wanted to take a relatively simple and straight forward poem and transform it as many ways as he could devise. The poem he chose for the base was quite naturally his first published poem, "Translating Apollinaire." The poem was initially published in bill bissett's Blew Ointment magazine in 1964. Note that this was not his first poem written, but his first published. Since the project involved publication instead of simple Orphic inspiration, this was square one of his public projection, and hence suitable for use in a project that would include other people. It was also published at a time when Canadian poets were beginning to think of creating a literature of their own, not completely dependent on the U.S. elephant to the south.

In a plane over the Atlantic on his way home from The 8th International Sound Poetry Festival in London, he got the root idea for the project. Appropriately, he did not have a copy of the poem with him, so the first installments were transcriptions of what he could remember of it. When he got back to Toronto, he began working variations on the whole poem. He started inviting other people to do variations on the poem, too. One went back to his first installments written over the Atlantic: he showed them the poem, then taking the poem away, asked them to write what they could remember of it.

bp and I first started discussing publication of the results through implications of the whole work, with special attention to one of its most difficult and unusual subdivisions, TTA 26. (Here and elsewhere in this article, some "discussions" took place face to face in real time and continued through correspondence and telephone calls.) bp was at this time making significant revision to his longpoem, The Martyrology - starting some passages over from scratch. He was also working on several other projects. I too was juggling. Our conversation on the projects we had going included what it meant to finish a poem or related art piece. Beep kept coming back to the position that, with the possible but uncertain exception of The Martyrology, he wanted to pursue research. He was at times unsure about how much he should document some types of research. He did feel strongly that sound poetry should avoid excessive recording. He wasn't completely opposed to records or tapes (he was definitely not a purist about much of anything) but did not like the way audio recordings of performance art took the spontaneity not only out of the recorded performance, but of future performances of the same work. His sense of research allowed him to consider poems on the page works still in process.

I agreed on one level, but not on another. Some of my ideas on this appear throughout these essays. Perhaps the most important difference in our conversation was that I aimed at places of rest and reorientation. I often didn't chart or reveal how I got to these stages, which usually occurred at the time of publication. The continuation might be made by other people, or it might be made in the context of collaboration, or it might be part of my own development. As examples, I used works of mine in which the imaging was achieved with the aid of the quirks of photocopiers. In these, I didn't want the reader to fuss too much about how the image was made, since that might detract from what I was trying to achieve with it. Barrie described some of the stages of TTA 26, the section of Translating Translating Apollinaire that worked through xerographic decay. Xerographic decay is the alteration an image goes through as it is repeatedly copied. In older machines, the distortion or transformation tended to happen much more quickly than in the newer copiers just becoming available. I thought that a lot of the examples of stages of decay in his work were closer to what I though of as stages than simple research, since they usually presented a significant variation on the original, on the previous copy, and would have the potential of making a broader impact on the change that the next step might take.

This lead us into all sorts of areas, and I'm not completely sure how the conversation proceeded. The first important thing it lead to was his showing me most of Translating Translating Apollinaire. As part of the conversation, I thought we should do it as a series of books. We did not start immediately planning this, but continued talking about the implications of variations in process. This of course included my ideas of pluralism in editing and triangulation in publishing.

Part of the background to my role in the project, and to our conversation, was my uncertainty regarding the publication of visual poetry. I published a good deal of my own, but not as much by other people. One of my reasons for this was that in producing my own work, I could be certain that any sacrifices I made were indeed the author's considered decisions. This included when and to what extent I could use color. I couldn't produce four color process on my press, but I could design poems with the colors available to me in mind, not having to compromise later. I did not have to think about whether the poet would have preferred to use color on a conscious level or had simply ruled it out because of economic reasons.

I had been disgusted by the limited range of work in the Williams and Solt anthologies, and still see the failure of Concrete as due in part to the initial botching of these collections and the way they had brought about a fad that collapsed more thoroughly than any other serious genre in the 20th Century. I did not want to do books that could be construed as implying a narrow form of visual poetry, whether in Concrete or any of the many other forms of visual poetry until something redressed the imbalance created by the anthologies. At the same time, I did not want to do anything that would separate visual poetry from other forms in such a way as to imply anything but a continuum from abstract and improvised sound poetry, through lexical poetry, through the broad spectrum of visual modes.

The TTA project seemed just right for the kind of presentation I wanted. It included prose and traditional lyrics as well as visual poetry. Though it was basically a collection of the mimeo form of visual poetry, the typewriter poem, it could potentially include all other genres and forms - in fact, eventually it should. We could even look forward to volumes that included full color, to performances (both ephemeral and recorded), and to other media yet to be devised.

Once we agreed to produce the book near the end of 1977, we had to decided what to include in the first volume. This was almost entirely done by Barrie, though we did try to set up guidelines that would not only make this book manageable but would leave options open for other volumes. This took about a year.

The book more or less designed itself - all I had to do was not let it become crowded. It gave me several interesting opportunities for cover design. Part of this goes back to my sense of visual poetry and the use of color. Since the anthologies were printed almost entirely in black and white (the exceptions being several silk screened pages in Solt), many people who tried imitating them thought that black and white was something like a rule laid down as harshly as the rigid minimalism of type in the books. This despite the fact that much of the work that went under the name Concrete before the anthologies had been in color, and was only transposed to black and white for affordable printing. When the black and white fundamentalists argued for the necessity of monochrome, they sometimes dismissed color as being, in Duchamp's phrase, too retinal to attain a correct purity. I have nothing against retinal satisfaction. But even following the Manichaen obsessiveness of minimalist Concrete, there was a fatal flaw: If you use color, you can get more information on a page, and you can create simultaneities. Lyric poets tended to use the musical terminology of polyphonic music to describe work in this mode. "Counterpoint" and "harmony" are plainly impossible unless you have two lines running simultaneously. Using "counterpoint" to mean shifts in argument and "harmony" to indicate unity from one line or stanza to the next seemed ridiculous metaphors to me, the type that dulls the critical abilities, and indirectly minimizes masterpieces ranging from those by Scarlatti and J.S. Bach to Louis Armstrong and Thelonius Monk among the classics of the two sides of the Atlantic, and Ornette Coleman and John Cage among the current tribal elders. I had done some poems in which I had printed texts over each other in different colors so that they could be simultaneously present and simultaneously legible, not only satisfying retinal desires, but increasing the amount of information presented, and do so in a way that truly mimicked the harmonies and counterpoints of polyphonic music. This book seemed perfect for such treatment. Since I was not using a white stock, red and blue ink could not be read with the base as the colors of the American flag, They were, however, the components of Barrie's favorite color, purple.

As a bridge to bp's sound poetry, the phrases could be read by multiple voices. In a transformative process of the title and author, I took fractured words, usually two syllables long, and superimposed them over each other in a spindly type face that made the superimposed texts more legible. Since Barrie liked to start over from beginnings, I initially focused on the letter O. Calligraphers and type designers will tell you this letter is the mother of the alphabet. From it, all the others take their proportions. The Os in the design interact with all other types of letters, suggesting how much curved letters such as S depended on them just as they define straight lines like those in the letter L. bp's favorite letter, H, overlaps an A before an O, emphasizing the way O governs slant lines as well as vertical and horizontal strokes. I made some adjustments to make angled lines apparent, trying to echo some of the different types of formalism bp and I had discussed in other contexts, in relation to models primarily from Russian and Dutch sources.

For extended excerpts from the book click here