Bpnichol poems

bpNichol

Canadian poet (1944–1988)

Barrie Phillip Nichol (30 September 1944 – 25 September 1988), known as bpNichol, was a Canadian poet, writer, sound poet, editor, creative writing teacher at York University in Toronto and grOnk/Ganglia Press publisher. His body of work encompasses poetry, children's books, television scripts,[1]novels, short fiction, computer texts, and sound poetry. His love of language and writing, evident in his many accomplishments, continues to be carried forward by many.[2][3][4][5]

Work

Nichol was born in Vancouver, British Columbia. Though his early writing consisted of fiction and lyrical poems, he first received international recognition in the 1960s for concrete poetry. The first major publications included Journeying & the returns (1967),[6] a purple box containing visual & lyrical poems and Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer (1969)[7] a book of concrete poetry. He won the 1970 Governor General's Award[8] for poetry with four publi

aka bpNichol: a preliminary biography

Written by one of his friends and confidants, a close reading of bpNichol’s poetry

aka bpNichol is the biography of the major Canadian poet bpNichol, who was a practising lay psychoanalyst and vice–president of one of the largest and longest–lasting communes in North America for more than a decade. Though he died at the young age of 44, Barrie Nichol was internationally influential as a visual poet and sound poet. Nichol authored the multi–volume The Martyrology, one of the most substantial long poems of the 20th century; four novels; two musical comedies; six children’s books; hundreds of hand–drawn visual poems; and 10 episodes of Fraggle Rock.

Written by Frank Davey, one of Barrie’s numerous literary collaborators, aka bpNichol reveals the close connections among Nichol’s various activities, and includes a close reading of Nichol’s poetry. Davey examines how the autobiographical inquiries and Freudian dream analyses linked with the young Nichol’s biographical self–awareness, ultimately producing a writer whose main psychoanal

I am highly suspicious of well-documented biographies, just as I am skeptical about historical records and events. If, on the other hand, the biographer would write about his subject purely from his imagination from he thinks his subject was or is, that is another matter.
— Henry Miller, letter to Jay Martin,
quoted in Martin's Always Merry and Bright
 
 

Barrie Phillip Nichol (aka bpNichol) records this passage from Henry Miller in 1979 in his Houses of the Alphabet notebook. It is one of many moments when his concerns for both the genre of biography and the way he would be remembered become apparent. This is also a theme in many of his poems as well, which can be linked to a much larger context, origin. For him, both biography and autobiography are fictions that try to make sense of incomplete data, memories, perspectives, and facts through plausible interpretations.

 

bpNichol (Barrie Phillip Nichol) was born in Vancouver, BC, in 1944. In 1963, he received a teaching certificate from the University of British Columbia and briefly taught elementary sch

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