In a sense, to write is a visual act—to put letters on a page, to create lines
with a pencil or a pen. There's a very definite visual moment. The page is a
visual field and that's one of the elements of writing . . . The minute you start
to look at what you write, there's a whole set of visual possibilities that
opens up.
—bpNichol
When Fluxus artist Dick Higgins wrote of "the ongoing human wish to combine
the visual and the literary impulses," he might have pointed to no more exemplary
a contemporaneous instance than the visual poetic output of bpNichol. Over the
course of some twenty-five years or so, in and beyond the context of the
conventional literary frameworks of stanzaic poetry, Nichol drew on and drew with
the alphabet to forge a singular body of visual creations in a remarkable variety of
writerly media (with a few instances of painterly collaboration). He employed a
broad range of forms and styles dictated or suggested by those media, touched on
themes and subjects that concerned or preoccupied him in his more conventionally
literary endeavours, and ranged widely through a spectrum from the literarily visual
to the purely pictorial.
This enterprise was grounded in a vision of literature as a function of the
integrated sensory experience that language is, involving body and intellect, ear
and eye. Nichol's artistic vision, conceived with clarity at the outset of his career
and maintained and developed with unwavering consistency throughout it,
informed not just his visual work but his equally significant and innovative
achievements in sound poetry and in lyric and narrative poetry and
prose.
A certain proportion of Nichol's visual work extends beyond any
strictly linguistic context, veering exclusively into the category of
picture—as in Door to Oz, for instance,. or all but one page
of Movies. What's at issue, of course, is the breakdown of just such
distinctions, and there is certainly drawn work within the stanzaic work,
though rarely vice versa. Still, there is validity beyond mere convenience in
placing the larger part of the visual work, including much that is clear-cut
drawing, within the broad framework of visual poetry, a tradition that stretches
back through Western languages for more than two millennia, constituting a
body of literature neither generally known nor much acknowledged. Since
Simmias of Rhodes in 325 BC, there has been a discontinuous but persistent
strain of poems shaped to depict objects, individuals, or geometric designs.
Only a scant handful of these have, begrudgingly, been granted admission to
the canon of world literature, examples in English being George Herbert's
seventeenth-century shaped lyrics and the passage in Lewis
Carroll's Alice in Wonderland called "the mouse's tale"
(appropriately, punningly shaped).
When Nichol began to exercise his own visual-literary sensibilities at
the age of twenty in the mid 1960s, he knew of Carroll's piece, likely knew of
Herbert's works and of Apollinaire's Caligrammes, and had encountered
the typographic revels of the Dadaists. He did not know, however, of the long
history and broad range of antecedents for such work—virtually nobody did
(including Apollinaire, the Dadaists, and the Futurists, for that matter): it took
the long-term, assiduous scholarship of Dick Higgins to string it all together in
his 1987 book Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature.
Higgins, before he began that research, was himself part of a mid-twentieth-century
eruption of "the natural human impulse to combine one's visual and literary
experiences" (Higgins' phrase)—he international concrete poetry movement of
the 1950s, '60s, and '70s.
Spawned independently of the larger historical stream, and expanding
the techniques, forms, and esthetics of visual poetry, concrete poetry was so
called because it treated letters, syllables, words, and sentences as concrete
objects, with an existence separate from or in addition to their abstract
signification of other things. Practitioners throughout Europe, the Americas,
and Japan used typewriter and typesetting technology in highly individual,
largely unconventional, vastly differentiated ways. The term expired (at
least within the vocabulary of most practitioners) around the early '70s,
but the sensibility and its expression continue within the broadly applied
framework of visual poetry. One place where this occurs is within the context
of mail art, that broad and undefined area comprising work created for or
amenable to distribution through the mails, and which operates within
an esthetic atmosphere of anarchic unorthodoxy congenial to visual poetry.
Around 1963-64 Nichol and fellow writers in Vancouver (bill
bissett, Lance Farrell, Judith Copithorne) and Toronto (Earle Birney, David
Aylward) were exploring visual poetry on their own terms, oblivious of the
newly emerging concrete movement, with which they had such affinity. Word
of it was soon to come, but before taking a look at that stage of things, let's
consider some personal contexts for Nichol's visual-literary predilections.
Barrie Philip Nichol, born 1944 in Vancouver, "always had," he once
informed an interviewer, "a kind of, I suppose, idiosyncratic, very particular
relationship to the idea of the alphabet, the idea of language." One aspect
of this special relationship was his love of the letter "H," whose
oft-proclaimed status as his favourite letter stemmed, he eventually
concluded, from two childhood factors: he lived on a street in the H
Section of a Winnipeg subdivision with street signs surmounted by the
respective sectional alphabetic designations, so that letters were geographic
locators for him, with H, where home was, holding understandably special
significance; and he read Harvey Comics, which employed a large block-letter
H as a logo. (More about Nichol and comics further on.)
Another dimension of Nichol's special relationship to the alphabet and
language emerged in Toronto early in 1965, when the twenty-year-old poet,
recently arrived from Vancouver, connected with printer Stan Bevington at
Coach House Press and undertook an intensive informal apprenticeship
in manual typesetting and letterpress printing. Nichol wrote in 1986 about
the transformative effect that this had on his literary perception: "there's no
doubt about it, the effect of setting my own texts, letter by letter, word by
word, line by line, was to create in me a whole new awareness of all the
components that go into any literature"—specifying then a variety of factors
that mediate the experience of printed works, including "the difference
in visual meaning between the differently shaped faces," different
densities and colours of papers and inks, different shapes and bindings.
Those elements were applied in his audacious 1967 publication,
Journeying & the returns (also known as bp), a slipcased
collection that comprised a book of lyric free verse, a record of sound
poems, a flip-poem, and an envelope of visual poems.
Prior to Nichol's Coach House involvement (which was to last the rest of
his life), he had begun working with visual arrangements of typewriter texts,
creating verbal, syllabic, and lettristic patterns and textures. He had also
got wind of the concrete movement through a couple of sources, one of
them Vancouver poet George Bowering, who wasn't keen on employing the
techniques himself, but offered correspondence contacts that Nichol in Toronto
and bissett in Vancouver eagerly followed up on, establishing a connection with
the British avant-garde poet, performer, and mimeo publisher Bob Cobbing
(still at it in his eighties, but with the mimeo long since abandoned for a
photocopier). A month prior to the appearance of Journeying & the returns / bp
in 1967, Bob Cobbing's Writers Forum issued Nichol's
Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer, a collection of typewriter
poems done between '64 and '66 that had nothing to do with confessions, fan
dancers, or the Elizabethan era—but what a great title. The book came out in
Canada six years later.
The period of the mid to late '60s was a busy and fertile one for
Nichol. He started a mimeo press and magazine, Ganglia, with David Aylward
in 1965. Nichol's poetry was appearing in small magazines and was included
in an anthology of work by upcoming Canadian poets. He was gaining
recognition in Canada for stanzaic lyrics, and abroad for concrete poems
(the connection with Cobbing generated further connections). One development
arising from the concrete movement was a degree of acceptance in art
galleries—where, at least initially, it received a warmer reception than in literary
contexts—and Nichol found himself exhibiting in England, France, and
Spain. He was moving beyond the typewriter and the printing press to the
greater plasticities available with Letraset, rubber stamps, and photocopies,
the latter two of which he used (albeit rarely) in the creation of visually
textured poem images (as opposed to poetic images, though they had their
poetic qualities). He was also doing hand-drawn pieces that worked with the
extended conventions of comic strips. In 1967 he started a new Ganglia
Press monthly, grOnk, with a focus on international concrete and
related poetries. And he found new uses for the resources at Coach House,
which he employed for a variety of what might be termed poem sculptures:
things like "The Birth of O"—around a dozen pages or more, each with
a letterpress, blindstamped (i.e., printed without ink), die-cut "o" in a
different typeface and size; and "A Little Pome for Yur Fingertips"—a
straight poem printed letterpress and blindstamped, so that an illegible but
tactile impression was left on the page. Such pieces as these latter two
may have been in Nichol's mind when he announced in the cover copy
for Journeying & the returns / bp his conviction that
if [the poet's] need is to touch you physically he creates a
poem /object for you to touch and is not a sculptor for he is
still moved by the language and sculpts with words ... I place
myself there, with them, whoever they are, wherever they are,
who seek to reach themselves and the other thru the poem
by as many exits and entrances as are possible.
Nichol certainly was finding a wealth of exits and entrances from and to the
poem, even if he wasn't making enough copies for the masses to stream
through—not that the masses ever gave indication of wanting to. Ganglia,
being a litmag, was printed in small enough quantities, but the more
unorthodox items were mostly done in runs of less than fifty, often less
than twenty. The following quote from Nichol's statement accompanying his
contribution to Emmett Williams' 1967 An Anthology of Concrete Poetry,
contains a note of resignation that typifies Nichol's attitude at the time.
This excerpt also offers insight into his artistic intention with these specific
visuals, a series called "Eyes," consisting of six succinct clusters of
Letraset characters in abstract configurations (yes, yes—abstract concrete;
maybe one of the reasons why we stopped using the term). Here's what he wrote.
tight imagistic things, intended for what they teach the eye on
one looking tho some tend to be pleasing if looked at a few
times . . . not meant as pictures but as syllabic and sub-syllabic
messages for who care to listen.
Well, he did write "who care" as opposed to "who cares," so
he was expecting more than one listener. Or maybe not: as he recalled in
1986, "Not a lot of people were interested in what I was interested in. There
was a feeling I was just crazy, and the feeling I was pursuing an absolute dead
end assailed me in those days." Things started looking up when David
W. Harris (later to be David UU, pronounced "double u") arrived in Toronto
from Collingwood, Ontario, for a brief sojourn, and, more significantly, a
couple of years or so later, when Steve McCaffery came from England for
good. "That made a huge difference in my life," Nichol attested in 1986. "Here
was someone who was concerned with the same issues, and covered the same
ground from his own angle for his own reasons." By 1970, there was enough
interest for Nichol to find a mainstream small press (Oberon) to publish an
anthology of Canadian concrete poetry by thirty-one
contributors—The Cosmic Chef.
That same year, Talonbooks, on the West Coast, put out Nichol's box
of elegant visually oriented poem cards, Still Water, one of three
publications for which he received the 1971 Governor General's Award.
Oberon a year later published the Letraset suite, ABC: the Aleph Beth
Book, for which "Eyes," from the Emmett Williams anthology, could be
viewed as a study. The twenty-six iconic images in ABC, each effected
with one letter of the alphabet, are models of formal precision, possessing the
kind of economy, wit, and sophisticated graphic sensibility associated with
organizations' logos. These, however, announce allegiance only to the letters
of the alphabet, and resound here and there with echoes of twentieth-century
fine art: Mondriaan's rectangles, for instance, in the "L" composition and to
lesser degree in "I" and "H," and
's Nude Descending a Staircase in the overlapping "T"s. Nichol's
work, incidentally, had by this time appeared in further group shows—in
Toronto, Edmonton, Vancouver, Victoria, and Bloomington, Indiana, as well
as in Amsterdam's Stedjelik Museum, which in 1971 mounted a
major concrete poetry exhibit that toured to Austria and Germany.
Nichol maintained an interest in and enthusiasm for both the fine arts and
the popular arts, so when he wanted a title for an international poetry
publication he chose grOnk, a word invented, and so spelt, by
cartoonist Johnny Hart to convey a sense of the roar of a dinosaur in his
comic strip, B.C. (where he drew the central "O" with more
gigantically graphic drama than a typewriter could effect). Nichol's
appropriation of this term bespoke his respect for the popular art form
whose conventions he would extend with mischievous wit, humour both
subtle and broad, and more than a little visual and linguistic profundity,
fashioning a uniquely significant contribution to visual poetry and
(I'll risk it) the visual arts.
Comics were a lifelong passion for Nichol, whose childhood
fascination with the big, bold Harvey Comics "H" mushroomed, over
the decades, into a collection that spanned the history of the form from
the Sunday funnies of the early 1900s (we're talking originals here) to the
spandex superheroes of the 1980s, from the Golden Age classics of
the '30s and '40s to the underground radicals of the '60s.
It should be understood that Nichol didn't just read and collect
comic books and comic strips, he studied and revered them, finding rich
veins not just of humour but of esthetic thrills and of insight into the
workings of the mind. He once wrote that Winsor McCay, an early
twentieth-century Sunday comics genius and a pioneer of animation,
exposed the unconscious of the upper and middle classes, and that Pogo
creator Walt Kelly used a "post-Joycean base for language." On another
occasion, he and Steve McCaffery, writing on literary theory as the
Toronto Research Group (there were just the two of them, but Toronto
Research Two lacks a certain ring and Toronto Research Couple could
create the wrong impression), expounded on the complications of time
sense and the implied grammatical and syntactic analogues of the
comic-strip panel. That basic unit of comics art plays a prominent role
in Nichol's hand-drawn visuals, which include comic strips, single
panels (also called gag panels), and images presented with no
panels enclosing them.
Comic-strip and comic-book panels were restricted almost
exclusively to a standard grid pattern until the mid '60s, when the
anything-goes panel's lib of the underground comics movement hit.
Nichol weighed in with a vengeance. He fashioned complex, layered
lattice-works of variously sized frames in which characters got tangled
up ("Scraptures, Eleventh Sequence") or lost (one of the Lonely Fred
episodes). He arranged his frames in orderly squares on three lines, two
of them diagonal and one horizontal, so that the same page presented
three story lines simultaneously, all of them (lines and stories) intersecting
at a central common incident and frame ("Rocky Mountain Highs" in
the Lonely Fred series).
While painter Roy Lichtenstein moved into the comics frame to
work at a kind of molecular level of technique, Nichol pushed out against
the frame and other comic conventions to a more panoramic approach.
The simply drawn, minimally detailed figures of the characters and scenes
in Nichol's comics contrast with the sophisticated play occurring with the
panels themselves, to which our attention is guided by the reduction in
any possibly distracting elaboration of their contents. Also part of the play
is the fluidity of the panels' contents in relation to the various illusory
planes implied: a large oval eye, inherently blank, à la Little
Orphan Annie (as are the eyes of—with rare exceptions—all the
characters except animals and a guardian angel) is filled with a scene of
hills, birds, and clouds (Grease Ball Comics, 1); an entire face
becomes a panel itself, containing a landscape interrupted by the four
blank ovals of the face's eyes, nose, and ambiguously gaping mouth
("Allegory #26"); scenes and characters are repeatedly found to be
apportioned throughout a pattern of dissecting panels, as though existing
not in the panels, but behind them—except that occasionally
what's behind them is discontinuous, as are the letter fragments
in Grease Ball Comics, 1, thus suggesting that they are in
the panels after all. Of course, where they are, really, is on the page, a
point Nichol never lost sight of, and one that I'll return to. But first, some
comment on the implications of the panel play I've just described.
Nichol's notebooks (where, incidentally, preliminary sketches can
be found for many pieces that have, in finished form, the feel of a casual
toss-off) contain an unpublished comic strip, The True Tale of Tommy
Turk, which includes one page that has sixteen panels layered in three
blocks, each block of panels depicted on a respective plane in the foreground,
mid ground, and background, and every one of the panels empty except for
a caption at its top saying "Meanwhile." Nichol, who took delight in the
idea of simultaneity in narrative, and who more than once used the
"meanwhile" caption out of context in gag panels, here has depicted nineteen
simultaneities at once. Simultaneity of time suggests simultaneity of memory
and, consequently, simultaneously operating levels of consciousness, so it is
not too much of a stretch, I think, to interpret Nichol's lattice-works of panels
as figuratively suggesting the mind and levels of consciousness. This is, of
course, in addition to the sensuous intent that everywhere maintains in Nichol's
artistic output. (One must be careful about interpretations of work by someone
like Nichol, who once, in attendance at a pedantic literary lecture, received a
note from fellow poet Victor Coleman, saying "Exegesis saves," and responded
promptly with the reciprocal editorial comment, "Analysis in Wonderland.")
Another dimension of Nichol's panel planes is indicated in "Fictive
Funnies" ("Featuring," proclaims the subtitle, "Syntax Dodges"), where
Milt the Morph, Nichol's ubiquitous circle-featured leading character, having
bent over to pick something up ("Hey!! What's this Pun doing here?" he
inquires in a speech balloon), trips a trap door at the bottom of one panel and
falls through into the panel below, realizing in a thought balloon: "OH MY
GOD!! I've fallen thru a hole in the narrative sequence into a different world!"
Different worlds: dream worlds, imagined worlds, worlds of memory,
worlds of thought, they are all worlds of the mind, which, wherever that might
be, is where thought occurs. And there is not much other than thought that
transpires in Nichol's comics, with action and narrative sequence almost absent,
and speech kept to a minimum. In all the comics he published—strips, gags,
and the many drawings without panels (Allegories and The Aleph
Unit series, and a raft of individual others)—there is only one instance of
dialogue, which is between Lonely Fred and his guardian angel. Thought
balloons are ubiquitous, and speech balloons rarely occur as anything other than
a character thinking out loud.
All this takes place in landscapes where the only human artifacts are
the occasional picket fence or castle-like house, a road now and then that
dwindles to the horizon, and mysteriously occurring alphabetic characters,
which may be depicted as sentient beings with their own thought balloons or,
more typically, as monumental constructs on the land or in the air. "Individual
letters," Nichol told an interviewer in 1984, "have always had a lot of
emotion for me for some reason. And for years there have been things I have not
been able to say in poems, so I've been doing drawings of landscapes with
letters floating in them and people being pursued by letters and all sorts of
things happening."
The sorts of things happening are often enough doing so within the
multi-dimensional letters. In The Aleph Unit, an "A," drawn three
dimensionally on the first page, loses on the next the interior lines that create
the illusion of depth, the remaining perimeter becoming an A-shaped panel
for a scene with a pier jutting out into a body of water, at the end of which
pier a man sits, thinking a blank "A" that has the precise two-dimensional
shape of the one that frames the scene he's in. In "Allegory #14," a
three-dimensional "H" is drawn lying on a landscape that bleeds into the
body of the "H" so that lines drawn to create the illusion of three dimensions
instead define transparent planes—except that behind the furthest lines of
the "H" a mostly obscured Milt the Morph peeps out, so the planes those
furthest lines define are not transparent ones but surfaces upon which the
landscape appears, with a few little "v" birds depicted here and there.
And if you think that description's confusing, go look at the poem,
the image, the—quite literally—poetic image. In the thirty-two poems
of Allegories (and elsewhere in Nichol's visuals, but concentratedly
in Allegories, published in their entirety only in Love: A Book of
Remembrances) the play with perspective and with the intersections of
ambiguous planes is worthy of Maurits Escher, albeit the draughtsmanship
makes no pretension to Escher's precision and detail in pictorial verisimilitude.
Nichol achieves similar results with a simpler line.
Lines, as it happens, are very much what Nichol's work is about.
He possessed an abiding and profound appreciation of and fascination with
lines of all types: poetic lines, prose lines, narrative lines, plot lines, typed
lines and lines of type, voice lines, drawn lines, solid lines, broken lines,
train lines, and all the fine lines of and in communication, especially lines
of questioning, and lines of thought. His plot-line interests he confined to
his reading, but the rest were grist for his creative mill and occur
throughout his works of art.
In terms of Nichol's visuals, the only pieces that employ anything
other than linework of varying density are collaborations: the Seripress
colour screen prints done with Barbara Caruso, to which Nichol contributed
line drawings; and the hilarious "Nary-a-Tiff" fumetti (pop-culture
Latin melodrama comics-and-photos hybrid), a send-up of the form and of
the Toronto Research Group itself, photographed by Marilyn Westlake,
with Nichol and McCaffery acting the parts they wrote ("You always get a
headache when I want to discuss philosophy!" bitches Nichol, at the start
of a fight that sees McCaffery kill him with a letter-opener, immediately
reflecting that "Hmmm. I should've thot of this years ago! In one stroke my
Nichol collection has doubled in value!!").
Visual artist and poet Robert Fones, who has made his own
contribution to the use of language in works of visual art, recalls Nichol
speaking in the early '70s of an interest in the relationship between the line in
poetry and the line in drawing. That interest found expression through what is
almost a subgenre in Nichol's oeuvre, the verbal-landscape visual poem,
where the lines of the poem announce the words for landscape objects (or
state the landscape elements) at the point on the page where drawn lines would
be placed in a pictorial depiction of those objects or elements. Greg Curnoe
(another artist who worked with language in visual art) used a similar device
in his paintings, where he sometimes incorporated verbal descriptions within
painted depictions. While the two artists were familiar with each other's
work, and Nichol once cited Curnoe in a commentary on his own work, the
connection in this regard is parallel rather than derivative, with each artist
making distinctive use of a related technique.
Nichol's Still Water contains several typeset instances of
his working of the effect. One of these has the word "moon" towards the top
left of the page, "owl" some distance down and to the right, and a little less
further down, spaced widely apart on one line, the thrice-repeated word "tree,"
followed by "shadowy." In another poem, the word "tree" appears on three
staggered lines above the phrase "the train leaves," with the word "leaves"
repeated on three well-spaced lines. Nichol effected a still closer fusion of
the drawn and the poetic line in "landscape: 1" in Zygal. Typeset across the
middle of the page is a line that is transformed into a horizon by there being
set right above it the words, with no spaces between them, "along the horizon
grew an unbroken line of trees." Nichol returned frequently to depictions of
horizons with lines or words in typeset or pen drawings. He worked an
elegantly punning turn on this in a hand-drawn poem rendered in fabric by
his wife, Ellie Nichol: about a third of the way up, a line is stitched, at whose
left side occurs a large arc that, through the placement of the word "risin"'
at the other end of the line, becomes the top portion of both an "O" and the
orb of the sun, with the line now a horizon.
Nichol's exploration of line reached a minimalist peak in his
1981 boxed set of loose sheets, Of Lines: Some Drawings, featuring
thirteen textured pages, each an original drawing of a single silver line
executed with crayon pencil in a bold diagonal stroke from lower left to
upper right. The uniqueness of each is underlined (forgive me) by the titles
at the bottoms of the pages, which make arch metaphysical
distinctions: "Line #1" and "Drawing of Line #1"; or over-scrupulous
authorial qualifications: "Line #4 (drawn while thinking of previous
lines)" and "Line Drawn As A Response To An Inner Pressure To Draw
Another Line While Resisting The Urge To Call It Line #5." The intent
is not entirely ludic, though, for the device serves to remind the
reader-viewer constantly of the physical and mental processes in the
creation of the writing-drawing. Such direction of consciousness to the
medium of expression, especially in relation to language, is a central
concern in Nichol's artistic output, and in all three focal areas of it: the
more conventionally categorical literary works, the visual poetry,
and the sound poetry.
Having mentioned sound poetry, let brief acknowledgement be
made (space allows for no more) of the sonic dimension of Nichol's visual
work, which occurred either after the fact, with a sonic interpretation
applied to a piece conceived as visual, or in advance, as when a visual piece
would be created with performance in mind.
In the last few years of his life (he died in '88 of complications resulting
from surgery) Nichol added two more media to his repertoire of drawing
tools: the computer and water-soluble coloured pencil crayons, both of
which he acquired in the early '80s, and which he used for making significant
developments in his visual poetry technique.
With the computer Nichol could make type move, at least in a
rudimentary way, and he applied this to a couple of his early typewriter
poems, as well as to several newly written ones. The results can be seen
in First Screenings, a posthumously issued floppy disc.
With the pencil crayons, Nichol discovered colour. Not that he hadn't
known it was there, but he'd always used black felt-tipped pens for his
visuals, which were primarily targetted for publication in literary contexts,
where money is scarce enough in any case, let alone for multicolour
printing. The pencil crayons Nichol chose could be used for a water-colour
effect, creating a delicate wash aura around lines drawn on wetted
water-colour paper. Nichol exploited this effect in both black and
multicoloured pieces, which were done in limited quantities and sold
or given as gifts.
One of these pieces, Parrot, is of special note. It echoes
an effect that was almost a Nichol trademark in his comics landscapes,
the curving v-shaped line of a distant bird in flight, which is assimilated
in Parrot into the shape of each letter of the word "bird": the
ascenders of the "b" and "d" readily accommodate the curved-wing line,
and Nichol adapts the body of each to an outward curve with a reversing
arc; within this symmetry, the "i" is a dotted, inverted curving "v" and
the "r" is a curving "v" minimally modified on the right wing. The image
is repeated in four vertical overlaps, all sixteen letters a different bright
colour, the water-colour wash further accenting the suggestion of blurred
movement. The powerful presence of the word overcomes the illusion of
distance implicit in the v-based characters that constitute it, bringing the
bird up close. You can almost hear the wings flapping.
Parrot is reminiscent of another video-aural conjuration
that Nichol effected near the start of his career,
in Journeying & the returns / bp. Using type rather than crayon,
he drew a drumstick striking a beat, which he conveyed by fanning a blur
of five overlapping impressions of the word "drum," with the "m" of the
bottom one repeated extensively to suggest the sound envelope of the beat.
I stated earlier that Nichol, while sometimes deceiving the eye about
whether subjects in his comics are in or behind the panels, never forgot that
they are in fact on the page. It is to the surface of the page and the events
on it, drawn with type or by hand, that Nichol constantly directs the
viewer-reader's attention. The eye deceived is tricked into looking more
closely, and looking more closely, is alert, attentive. A line in book four
of his multivolume poem, The Martyrology, applies: "down at
the surface where the depth is." In The Martyrology and other of
his verse, Nichol retards the reader's progress by taking words apart in the
course of the writing, the reading: "words fall apart / a shell / sure
as hell's / ash ell / when i let the letters shift sur face / is just a place on
which im ages drift."
This is not an empty gimmick, but a device that invites re-reading
and reflection. Compositionally, it allows the language to lead the way in
generating content by building associations. Esthetically, it repositions
the reader in relation to the language. Philosophically, it springs from a
deeply held conviction about language and existence, which Nichol
expressed as follows in a 1987 essay:
We live in the midst of language, surrounded by books,
and, as a result, the nature of both has become transparent to
us. We look thru the books to the content inside them. We
learn to speed read so that the words too can be strip-mined
for their information. Thus are we made more ignorant. And
painting, sculpture, dance, photography, etc., all the
so-called Fine Arts, suffer, because we look but we don't
see. Once the surface of the world, of its objects, inhabitants,
etc., becomes transparent to us, it quickly becomes
unimportant to us as well, and things that should register—political,
social, ecological—don't.
Nichol's visuals—poems, images, drawings, or however one chooses
to categorize them—render language visible with disarming and deceptive
levity, with a love of words in all their aspects, an ear and eye attentive to
sonic and visual ambiguities, a refined visual aesthetic, a well-honed sense
of humour, sophisticated taste in typography, and an awareness of language
as both model and shaper of the human mind in its intellectual and
psychological operation.