A deleuzian reading of bpNichol's long poem The Martyrology: Books 1 & 2

I poured myself out thro' my tips. What's left?
I slipt. I slipt. What's right? Whose centre's where?
                                   (John Berryman, The Dream Songs)

Some procedural matters, first:

(a) pick randomly any line from bpNichol's The Martyrology;
(b) select randomly any page from Deleuze-Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (ATP) to be used as a palimpsest (or pentimento);
(d) write a poetic 'paratext' (of any reasonable word length, & in any determinate style) for the ATP page;
(c) in the paratext make something a 'rhizome' (and call it by name);
(d) create 'lines of flight' into at least three recognizable 'plateaus', calling them by name, too;
(e) identify anything/one into a 'body without organs' (BwO), provided nothing else be excluded by that sole decision; and
(f) rewrite the passage at least TEN times til it begins to metamorphose into a 'desiring-machine', interrupted and connecting at the same time.


Book 2 of The Martyrology



from "Book of Common Prayer": "saint of no-names" and page 26 from Chapter 2, "1914: One or Several Wolves?" (A Thousand Plateaus)

"saint of no-names "
_____________________

(1) Snow is a rhizome.
        Snowy field, poet's table and diptych are possible plateaus.
      The name-less saint is a BwO

Snow, snow everywhere! Like a good poststructuralist diptych with text and visuals the saint's name's lost in a pure white space ("of no-names"), stuck somewhere in the folding between two panels. It's not a metaphor: just a place to look (as in the book). But what saint? What names? Whose prints are those? You do distinguish a single name in the one (tablet) from the assemblage (or the folded Iconography) of the many held both together by string or scribed in wax. It's how we've strayed so soon from the page that matters. And it's the same way for the saint of no-names even if it were instead a tablet, painting, text we wanted, or even names of the dead. Or if any saint, call him the god-man, gave a damn for the same panting processes of words, clouds & whatnot, he rises first from his bed. The poet who finds unbearable the politics represented in snow or tablet-image won't face the day alone. A world of difference to him a name makes. The saint of no-names, embedded in bp's own cold text, makes sinewy mendicant tracks look singular or cluttered. The poet's (or saint's ) two choices is to be either outside & read the name of 'saint' like a covert sign-system or indoors, at his breakfast table, ready to feel the saintly come to him for once. Confront the silent sigilla in the snow, and create a tree of meaning with bloodroots, branches, et al, dropped in front of the poet's house or surprise the outdoors with fresh invention! Muse or technonarcissist, the poet's one or the other but bp's neither: he's still inside. And bp's saint's proper name is what, "mister or saint reat" ? We do read him in the snow, the part with the single-file line of prints surrounded by a plane of 'white' (as meaning "this way bp comes alone" )or the messier hodge-podge of saint's and bp's prints together that's always surrounding it? My god the snow's a rhizome to which you can't append the name canada or god, or whatnot as if you didn't see the ruse of the text inscribed in snow (where it intersects with poet) or snow in the prints, or even look for the answer futilely in prayers at the breakfast table. Has he been outside at all? Traces lead nowhere but to an imaginary Tree for bp is uncertain not just about names: the god-man or martyrs his book purports to be reside in a nameless land, practically indistinguishable from the sky & earth. Snow is a rhizome, or the clear emptiness of poet-mind or sky-blue of saint reat's falling hair.