bpNichol > Quotes

“The mouth remembers what the brain can’t quite wrap its tongue around & that’s what my life’s become. My life’s become my mouth’s remembering, telling stories with the brain’s tongue.”
― B.P. Nichol

“And then one day he realised that of course he was always staring at his hand when he wrote, was always watching the pen as it moved along, gripped by his fingers, his fingers floating there in front of his eyes just above the words, above that single white sheet, just above these words i’m writing now, his fingers between him and all that, like another person, a third person, when all along you thot it was just the two of you talking and he suddenly realized it was the three of them, handling it on from one to the other, his hand translating itself, his words slipping thru his fingers into the written world. You.”
― B.P. Nichol

“. Maybe postmodern writers like me all have post-atomic poetic feet & that’s what makes them ugly to the pre-atomic eye & difficult to notate. Maybe this is THE ATTACK OF THE MUTANT POST-ATOMIC FEET! Maybe this is why we’re always saying the words: ‘take me to your reader.”
― B.P. Nichol

“It's not that the poem has a mind of its own, it's that it is its own mind, a state you come to, achieve.”
― bpNichol, An H in the Heart: A Reader