Nichol's attitude towards writing (apparent or implicit) [is] one of the keys to an understanding of his work. Nichol's goal is to escape from the barriers of what Edward Sapir terms "a straight ideational language" in order to "return to the root elements of both the written and aural language." Sapir, Nichol's main source for this theory, also asserts that "ideation reigns supreme in language." In order to counteract this domination, Nichol th...

[In The Collected Works of Billy the Kid] Nichol's jokes are, however, on potentially serious subjects. To work out all the thematic implications which his fifteen paragraphs barely suggest may seem like building mountains out of molehills; and, though I believe the foundations are there for such an enterprise, the elaboration should not obscure the fact that the most characteristic virtues of Nichol's book are its wit, its economy, and its refusal to take itself too seriously. Nichol's...

During the early sixties, it was obvious that throughout the entire English-speaking world poetry was lagging far behind the visual arts, and I see bp Nichol's publication [bp] as part of poetry's catching-up process. Nichol has freed poetry from melody and meaning and levitated it above the printed page. He has brought it nearer both music and painting by freeing it from what we used to think songs and pictures were. Although the poet … has no musical training, I found his plastic reco...

bp Nichol's The Martyrology is a work of major dimensions. Nichol has found a way to make the many private and personal visions that go into his poetry available to his readers. He has, as a friend said, "created a personal mythology out of language itself"; a mythology that partakes of basic mythic geography yet remains singularly his own. Moreover, he has also clearly revealed the ways in which this mythology, the hagiography of saints about which the work turns, touches the various m...

In an introduction to his book, ABC, the poet bp Nichol complains about "the artificial boundaries we have placed on the poem." It is his expressed desire to break down these boundaries, to make the poem live again, to free the poem in order to bring it closer to the reader…. The regenerative process begins with experiment; Nichol utilizes basic elements of language and alphabet—sound and shape—in an attempt to remake poetry from its roots. In the ABC book, the technique i...

In any discussion of experimental poetry in Canada, the central figure is bpNichol. (p. 213) [Journeying & the Returns] in its very packaging provides a convenient schema of Nichol's concerns as a poet…. Journeying & the Returns came in a cardboard box, containing three distinct elements: a small printed book, a collection of postcards and other visual presentations, and a record.

Journeying & The Returns, [B. P. Nichol's] first book of non-concrete poetry, contains five poems, each subdivided into six or seven sections. Each section is about one page in length and stands as a single thought further subdivided into commentaries on the acts performed as the thought takes place. The strength of these poems lies in the internal energy Mr. Nichol generates from sustaining a single direct statement for the shortest possible duration. The best of the poems is the fourth one, Beg...