Inter, Multi, Meta Medium Writ Large: bpNichol as Exemplar of Everything-all-at-once-together-foreveredness.

Around a hundred words for each letter, leading up to H

A. I arrived at York University in the early 1980s to study music and poetry. I was interested in experimental music but my favourite poet was Seamus Heaney. On the first day of the first creative writing class I’d ever signed up for, the middle aged, tweedy professor held up a page of writing and exclaimed to its author (a young woman of about 18), “You write stuff like this and yet they still let you into the creative writing program?” I immediately dropped the class. The following year I signed up for a poetry writing class with some guy called bpNichol.

B. The first day of that class in some windowless classroom in the earthquake and insurrection-proof Ross building, we keen poetry students were all expectantly awaiting the professor when this shaggy guy in a blue velour smock and matching pants outfit showed up, carrying a family-sized bottle of cola and a bunch of papers. “Guess this hippyish guy is a mature student,” I thought. As he squeezed his legs between the acute angles of two trapezoid-shaped desks, he said to me, “Better watch the family jewels.” And then we began class. By the end of it, Seamus Heaney was no longer my favourite poet and my mind was truly blown.

C. Each week I submitted a poem to workshop, confident that I had uncovered an innovative writing strategy such that they would have to revise physics to account for it. I had the arrogance of many 18-year-old young men. bp was extremely complimentary and encouraging to the students in the class, and I craved this kind of approval. But bp had my number. Instead of telling me how great my work was, and reinforce my self-important and self-centred arrogance, he’d point me to a writer who had explored similar territory and suggest I read some of their work. I think he knew that, even more than his approval, I wanted to be a good writer and so I’d spend the week at the library reading all the work I could find of whomever he had suggested. bp had the insight to use my genuine enthusiasm about writing and my desire for his approval to fuel a personalized guided reading through inspiring work. It was a really inspired and insightful teaching strategy and, as a result, one of those most influential years of my creative life.

D. The 1980s in Toronto was a remarkable time in the arts. Many of the professors in both the music and creative writing departments were extremely active in various downtown scenes, as performers, publishers, organizers and editors. I spent many nights listening to my profs read or play music. In bookstores, in events like L’Affair Pataphysique and in a lot of alternate arts spaces. Coach House Press and the Music Gallery were my Disneyland and Disneyworld. And even more exciting, many of my creative writing professors performed with my music professors. The free improvisation ensemble CCMC put on concerts with The Four Horsemen. There was bp performing with Casey Sokol or my saxophone teacher, David Mott. Embarrassingly, I wrote a review for the school newspaper encouraging bp to take a more experimental approach in his collaborations after one such show.

E. This was a potent model of to what a writer (or more properly, a creator) looked liked. bpNichol was a proponent and practitioner of not only inter- and multimedia but one who created work in many individual forms: visual, sound-, textual, narrative, comics, opera, TV, and other media. As model for other artists and for his students, he was an exemplar of this kind of engagement. He published and edited for presses and journals (for example, Coach House and Open Letter) and he also ran his own micropress, grOnk. He collaborated with many creators not only musicians but other writers and other artists (for example, Barbara Caruso). He wrote children’s books, plays and even an opera. It was a very exciting privilege for me that I got to play a part in Meme, the opera he wrote with my aforementioned music professor, David Mott. As well as his prodigious output of a variety of kinds of books, he was also active as a performer and improviser in the Four Horsemen.

F. While many writers at the time only wrote in one form (for example, poetry or fiction) Nichol was an exponent of many forms and approaches, sometimes but not always blurring the borders between them. He was not the only one in Canadian Literature during his lifetime who engaged in many arts practices (for example, his colleague Steve McCaffery, in addition to his work in various literary media was also a practicing improvising musician, collaborator and visu-vocal-verbal artist, and bill bissett also had an active painting practice), however bp was a particularly visible polymorph. This fact speaks to a time and a strand of Canadian Literature that was notable at the time and offered a powerful model to others both then and into the present.

G. Borderblur is the now well-known term for artistic boundary-crossing and genre-busting inter, or mixed-, or trans or multi media. However, here I’m speaking about bp not only as an exemplar of borderblur, but as an important exponent both as artist and teacher-by-example of an approach to a multi-faceted, many-pronged, pluripotent practice that I’m going to call, “Everything-all-at-once-together-foreveredness.” I think that this aspect of bp’s practice has had a major influence on subsequent generations of writers. What does a writer a do? They many and various. They polyvalent and manifold. They disparate. They various. They multifarious. They diversiform and sundry. They reframe and entertain multitudes.

H. H.