Faces: bpNichol

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Lone (from bpNichol Lane)

I'm a collector of faces; in fact, the face oftentimes appears to me long before the work does. Years ago I ripped out of an old copy of Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution a picture of the author himself, to be pinned to the side of my dresser drawer where he would greet me every time I entered my room. It was a picture I often turned to for solace whenever life or literary ventures failed or even, having started something new, all I needed was a little encouragement: it symbolized, in fact, the dogged perseverance & unstinting devotion to writing excellence embodied in the great Victorian. I can't say how exactly but it worked every time. Frazer in The Golden Bough might have described it as a primitive form of "sympathetic magic" by which the image of a revered personage appears to bring out of the viewer the attributes possessed by its original.

A remnant of folkloric superstition or a sort of concession to the power of hero-worship? I can't say for sure. The magic seems to be particularly more pronounced in the case of poets. I seem prone, in fact, to gauging the greatness of authors long before I've read them, & that's something that can only be done by an initial encounter with the face. None of the cold ontology in Levinas' celebrated 'face to face' encounter that really amounts to a meddling in someone's spiritual affairs. It's an odd way to get to know a poet but if you consider that most significant literary personages are already the bearers of a certain beauty (where it originates I can't say) presaging the aesthetic purity of  their work—an artistic aura, if you will— & is what draws you in, there's really no help for it. It's a kind of infatuation but without all the illusions & imminent disappointments.

There's bpNichol, for example—Canada's greatest avant-gardist— whose eyes and impish grin seem to announce The Martyrology perhaps even before he conceived it: in fact, bp is the best prelude to the poem there is. Eyes tragically dark but winsome announce the tragedy of the Canadian family, community & perhaps even country as passionately as a great epic work like George Grant's Lament for a Nation ever could. bp himself may have received his own lament from Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans, a work he particularly cherished. I see sadness in bp's pic. And if I'm not wrong, it was taken the day he was to receive the Governor-General's award, an event that literally incensed an entire Parliament.

Perhaps it's as a response to the call (evinced in the eyes most of all!) for a literary friendship among Canadians only that I've begun my own 'Faces' series with bp: perhaps he's led me to see I've internalized for too long now the friendlessness of an era of which he was a significant part and perhaps I've stupidly taken as a permanent condition of my life since. I'd never met bp and yet he must have been everywhere if only I'd bothered to look: the young man, poet and Tish radical I'd get to know years later. To traverse the same awkward spaces and memories (though thousands of miles had separated us), to walk exactly as he did, was a privilege I would've been too young to appreciate: & to look at him now in the picture is perhaps to recognize that I'd missed something deeply transforming.

And if I'd happened to see him, with shoulder-length hair & bow, looking a little husky & easily recognizable by the resonant laughter, he wouldn't have stood out too much. He could easily have been any one of the grad school acquaintances of mine who'd divided their energies between academics and their job at the campus pub, living on student loans & welfare. It was the kind of timidness our best spirits seemed to have in those days: George Grant, in particular, could have been taken for a homeless person. And if we associate a face not just with a myth-maker but sound poet (one of the legendary Four Horsemen), it'd be even more natural to associate bp with what was then a vibrant street-level arts activism that Ted Plantos, among others, would later come to embody til his death. And 70s Toronto (in areas like the Annex) was the place for him & for all awkward youth craving self-expression.

This portrait of agonizingly self-conscious artistry (or so bp's works seem to me) is easily matched by a face. The reaction to it is bound to be necessarily compassionate (now after almost thirty years!), even a little mournful, and I can certainly have expected to find in the writings of bpNichol (as I did in the visual poetry, sound poetry, fiction) the outlines of a real national poetry & of the lyrical heart that hadn't been completely stilled, as it was fated to be in the post-Tish craziness after bp's death. The writings have become emblematic & radical at the same time: and therein perhaps lies the tragedy. It's not entirely possible to be both in Canada. As I said, the picture is of a sad poet. Eyes, grin, & hair, framed in the house he'd built, were all the endearingly small, loosely joined fragments of a literary consciousness that's remained just as fragmentary to this day. Just memories still and a passing hope. We're still "A/Lone" with him after all this time.