Barrie Phillip Nichol, the son of G. F. and Avis Aileen Workman Nichol, was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1944. His family lived in various western Canadian cities while he was growing up, returning to Vancouver when he was fifteen. He attended the University of British Columbia for a year and earned an elementary basic teaching certificate, taught grade school in Port Coquitlam for part of a year; then, in late 1963, he moved to Toronto, his home ever since.
In Toronto Nichol at first worked in the University of Toronto Library, where he met David Aylward, with whom he edited Ganglia magazine. He also corresponded with Bill Bissett, whose blewointment magazine, along with the mimeographed magazine TISH, kept him in touch with developments on the west coast. At this time, as well, George Bowering put him in touch with Cavan McCarthy in Great Britain, and through that contact Nichol entered the international subculture of concrete poetry, publishing and exhibiting his work in many countries. Thus, before his first book of poetry appeared in Canada, he was internationally recognized in concrete poetry circles.
Nichol had been writing traditional lyric poetry, but about 1964 he became dissatisfied with his efforts in that mode, feeling that he was "somehow simply plugging in" to the form.
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