Subscribe in a reader
This
biography, that connects the poet's life with his work, is a welcome
addition to the corpus building around Nichol. It explores the
relationship between Barrie Nichol - the living breathing human
being, as excavated from conversations with friends, relatives,
colleagues, and acquaintances; from letters; and from archives –
and bpNichol, the authorial persona created by Nichol to pull himself
out of the dreamworld he inhabited, according to Davey.
It
forwards the theory that Barrie's psycho-therapeutic work is a
crucial tributary of his poetic work. While I am not qualified to
evaluate this theory (I'm not versed enough in Nichol's poetry,
having read only Zygal and
some excerpts of the Toronto Research Group, bp's theoretical, albeit
playful collaboration with Steve McCaffrey in a course I took with
Christian Bรถk
at the University of Guelph in 2002), I would still like to offer
some reactions and thoughts.
My
initial reaction to the book was “I think this is the first
biography that has made me less interested in the person it's about
than I was before I picked the book up.” However, I persevered, and
I'm glad I did. Davey is an engaging writer, although his thoughts
are sometimes muddled. For example, take this passage:
“He
[bp] told Bowering he was creating the whole narrative out of a
series of images that would constitute a two-week period in the life
of a family, a period in which, as one would expect, nothing is
resolved. The reader enters and leaves the narrative in the middle,
and 'hopefully' will experience a resolution through the leaving of
it. The images will be all that the reader knows about it. That's why
he's calling the novel 'idiomatic,' he told Bowering, because it's
the normal 'family' story. The explanation, however, seemed to say as
much about Barrie's understanding of family, or about what is usual
in a family, as about the novel” (238).
Um,
what? Seriously, what just happened here? Some of the clarity problem
in this particular instance may have been inherited from Nichol
himself, as he's the one being paraphrased, but if you're writing a
biography, you better have enough of a grip on your subject to
clarify some of the subject's more incoherent thoughts. Nothing is
resolved, but the reader will hopefully experience a resolution? Is
he talking about relating to the aimless structure of life portrayed
by the in media res technique
as itself some kind of resolution? Furthermore, idiomatic is a word
used in linguistics to refer to expressions in language that are
“more than the sum of their parts,” so to speak. Translating each
of the parts of the expression literally will not produce the
intended meaning of the expression. How does this relate to “normal
family experience?” Idioms, I guess, are common expressions. So if
you consider “normal” and “common” synonyms, this metaphor
works. Ok, so with some very close reading, I could figure out that
much. But what Davey means by the next sentence (beginning “The
explanation, however. . . “) needs more elaboration as the logic is
unclear.
Furthermore,
Davey makes a big deal out of Nichol's intent from the 1960s onward
to subvert the arrogance of many poets' preoccupation with precious
(with that word's pejorative connotations culled from writing
workshops) wisdom as the occasion for the writing of poetry. To
express such wisdom, as an author with the mastery of experience,
Nichol objected to stridently, apparently. However, in the sections
detailing Nichol's work at Therafields, the experimental therapeutic
community for which he served as vice-president, and Nichol's
discussions of this work, he adopted the founder's discourse of
mastery. Lea Hindley-Smith, the founder, “had been moved by
Bergler's book to 'change her own destiny rather than blame others'”
(82).This contradiction between his lived experience as a therapist,
proclaiming mastery of experience and himself in a privileged
position to help his clients do the same, and his avowed poetic
intent to eschew such arrogant language, is a thorn in the side of
Davey's poetry-therapy theory.
Furthermore,
some of his poetry contains some of these golden nuggets he finds so
repugnant and arrogant. Take, for example, these lines quoted by
Davey, from “Book V” of The Martyrology Book 6 Books:
moving
reservoirs of cells & genes
stretches
out over the surface of the earth
more
miles than any ancestor ever dreamed
.
. .
tribal,
restless, constant only in the moving on,
over
the continents
thru
what we call our history
tho
it is more mystery than fact,
more
verb than noun,
more
image, finally, than story.
These
lines are redolent of the “preconceived notion of wisdom” bp (and
others such as Charles Olsen) rebelled against in poetry. While it is
true that people certainly change their views as their experience
changes them, it is Davey's job to elucidate this development in
Nichol's poetry. Instead, Davey returns to this youthful rebellion
several times, making it a central point or major departure for his
poetic work. For a dedicated avant- gardist, the first stanza of this
quote in particular has a harmonious sense of meter and rhyme (if
partial, or slant). Most of it is insightful and “wise” as well.
. . until the last line quoted. I find the frozen associations of the
word “image” do an injustice to his previous line about history
being more verb than noun. A photograph, after all, is an image
extracted out of the flow of time. I suppose you could argue that
this line is a subversion of the “preconceived wisdom” of the
poem, but I think it weakens its internal coherence. I also think he
missed an opportunity for a playful self-reflection of the line “tho
it is more mystery than fact” as itself a fact, considering the
always incomplete nature of archives. And by extension, this line and
its implications allude to the challenge of writing a faithful
biography, which by and large Davey has done.
Criticism
aside, I found this book fascinating because of the connection it
explores between Nichol's deep involvement with psychotherapy and his
poetry. It was also edifying to learn about Nichol's peripatetic
childhood, his hermetic “dreamworld,” and his relationships with
other Canadian literary figures. I was familiar with his relationship
with Steve McCaffrey, but his relations with other poets and writers
such as Daphne Marlatt, Michael Ondaatje, Dennis Lee, and bill bisset
came as a surprise and a delight to me.
I
was also surprised at how high-profile his sound poetry projects
were, such as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. For a
Nicholophile, to learn about how he felt like his creative input was
constantly marginalized in that project is a must. The last chapter
provides a useful summary of some of the main critical responses to
Nichol's work: the “theological reception,” those that emphasize
his “ideopoems” that merge comic strip art with conceptual visual
poetry, and those that focus on The Martyrology
as the keystone of his creative output. This summary is indispensible
for those interested in a critical engagement with Nichol's work.
Despite its shortcomings, Davey's biography was well worth the time.
Images from Zygal (1985), Coach House Press.
Subscribe in a reader
