Title: "Hazardous Connections": bpNichol's Poetics of Chain
By: Geoffrey Hlibchuk
“Book V was structured on the idea of the chain—chain of thot, chain of images, chain of events—so that in writing when a branching of thot occurred i would try to follow all the chains that opened up” (Martyrology 5, n.p.). So writes bp Nichol in reference to Book 5 of The Martyrology, a book which eschews linearity and instead allows for a multiplicity of different reading paths. Numerical superscripts within the text allow the reader to jump forward or backward to other specified parts of the book.
A shorter version of this essay appeared in the Spring 2008 special issue of Open Letter: bpNichol + 20.
Submitted by lori.emerson on Tue, 04/08/2008 - 16:10.
Title: Reviews of The Alphabet Game: A bpNichol Reader
From Eye Weekly: "One writer who never conceded defeat to the encroaching conventionality of the 1970s was the late bp Nichol. A poet in ways beyond the comprehension of most casual readers, Nichol set out from lyrical poetry to hinterlands where text is everything from unreadable sign to possible musical score and back again to a new kind of obsessive lyricism in his lifelong work The Martyrology.
