is nothing but a history
brief at best
an end of one thing
beginning of another
premonition of a future time or line we will be writing
— bpNichol, The Martyrology Books I and II
After years of planning we are pleased to launch bpNichol.ca, an online public archive of the works of bpNichol and his collaborators. Here you will find audio, digitized print materials, photographs, links and eventually video, critical articles and curated exhibitions.
The site was developed by the Artmob project in collaboration with Ellie Nichol, and is designed as a not-for-profit community initiative. It is intended as the start of a process, and we encourage everyone to read our submission guidelines if you have material you would like to contribute or an idea for an exhibition of bp's work.
Artmob is a York University-based research project dedicated to building accessible public archives of Canadian art. Over the coming years Artmob will add tools to improve the browsing and cataloguing. It will also provide novel approaches to intellectual property, encouraging contributors to identify themselves and set the terms of use for their works. Artmob hopes that a spirit of fair dealing will assist in getting artistic materials out of shoeboxes and filing cabinets and into the world where they belong. bpNichol.ca is Artmob’s pilot project.
Attached are images of the program for the Vivaxis production of bpNichol's musical comedy "Group." The first is the cover, and the second is the interior with notes about the production and the list of songs. Most of the cast were professional actors who were part of the community. Mary Beth Hall was often on the CBC children's show "Mr Dressup," and John Pepper and Maggie Shaw were regulars at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake.
We believe this poem (given to us by Frank Davey) is from 1970-1975. It is very similar to what bpNichol and Steve McCaffery called a "developer" translation or "developer" poem; an example appears in Rational Geomancy (p. 38) of one by Josef Hirsal & Bohumila Grogerova which takes the word "Svoboda" and runs it through 36 lines of permutations and substitutions that convert it to the word "Freedom" by the last line.
Title Scraptures : fourth sequence / bpNichol.
Publication Area Niagara Falls, N.Y. : Press Today Niagara, [1979?]
14 x 21 ½ cm.; paperbound in light yellow-orange; printed in black; saddle-stapled.
This scan was generously made possible by the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo.
Title Scraptures : second sequence / bpNichol ;
cover drawing Bill Bissett.
Publication Area Toronto [Ont.] : Ganglia, [1965]
5 ½ x 8 ½ in.; paperbound in white, saddle-stapled; printed and illustrated in black.
This scan was generously made possible by the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo.
Title Scraptures : basic sequences / bpNichol.
Publication Area Toronto [Ont.] : Massassauga Editions, c1973.
11 ½ x 14 ½ cm.; interior pages saddle-stapled on white paper, bound in deep purple-red paper wrappers; printed and illustrated in black.
Cover by bill bissett.
This scan was generously made possible by the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo.
Title Scraptures, tenth sequence / bpNichol.
Publication Area [Toronto : s.n., 1967?]
Poems rubber-stamped in black on tan leaves, 6 x 8 ½ in.; top leaf deckle-edged on bottom; single folded sheet cover, 6 ½ x 10 in., printed in black on yellow background.
This scan was generously made possible by the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo.
Title Scraptures : third sequence / bpNichol
Publication Area Toronto, Ont. : Ganglia, 1966.
10 ½ x 14 cm.; paperbound in white, saddle-stapled; printed and illustrated in black; some light yellow pages.
This scan was generously made possible by the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo.
Title Nights on prose mountain; some scraptures sequences.
Publication Area Toronto, Ganglia Press, 1969.
8 ½ x 11 in.; side-stapled on white paper.
This scan was generously made possible by the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo.
"Scraptures: 11th Sequence" was published as grOnk 8 in August 1967. grOnk was published monthly and was edited by bpNichol, David Aylward, and David W. Harris.
Title Scraptures : sequence eleven.
Publication Area [Toronto : Gronk, 1967]
8 ½ x 11 in.; side-stapled on white paper.
This scan was generously made possible by the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo.
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