The Alphabet Game: A bpNichol Reader

by bpNichol, Darren S. Wershler-Henry (Editor), Lori Emerson (Editor)

A member of the sound-poetry collective, The Four Horsemen, winner of a Governor General's Award for Poetry and writer of Fraggle Rock, bpNichol was one of Canada's most important poets.
All of Nichol's writing is distinguished by his desire to create texts that are engaging in themselves as well as in context, and to use indirect structural and textual devices to carry meaning. The astounding range of Nichol's practice included musical theatre, children's books, comic book art and collage/assemblage. Broadly spanning the history of Nichol's work, The Alphabet Game: A bpNichol Reader includes both classics and esoteric treasures. From the early typewriter poetry of Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer and Nichol's life-long work of poetry The Martyrology, to the heartbreaking prose of Journal and the whimsical autobiography of Selected Organs, this collection maps the literary career of this enigmatic poet.
For first-time readers of Nichol, this comprehensive collection is a perfect introduction to his groundbreaking work; for loyal Nichol fans, this reader is the the long-awaited compilation of his less readily available work.

Genres: Poetry

334 pages, Paperback

First published October 14, 2004

About the author

Barrie Phillip Nichol, known as bpNichol, was a Canadian poet, writer, sound poet, editor and grOnk/Ganglia Press publisher. His body of work encompasses poetry, children's books, television scripts, novels, short fiction, computer texts, and sound poetry. His love of language and writing, evident in his many accomplishments, continues to be carried forward by many.

Reviews

[Megan]

this just looks like a really fun book. However, the cover on some are just horrible looking.

[Star Sloth · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's an extensive anthology of bpNichol's work through his whole career. I didn't love all of it, but over such a breadth of styles and forms, not all the poems can be great. Yet almost every one presents a surprising idea about how language works, or could work, or can't work. Relentlessly inventive poetry.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

as always with bpNichol, a kaleidoscope of language performances, including about 50 pages of The Martyrology, and selections from just about every one of his books. Many more people should know about bpNichol's work. This is a great introduction to his work.

[Evan Pincus · Rating 3 out of 5]

I mean, it's acknowledged by the editors so fair play but this format makes next to no sense. It's designed to be as broad as possible an introduction to the author in as compact a volume as possible, which means practically zero complete work - we get A, B, C, D, E, I and J from an alphabet book, proudly "subjective" excerpts from his Martyrology, chapters 1 and 3 from his Journal, a few paragraphs from Two Novels, etcetera. I'm a reader who's really interested in the Probable Systems cycle, and this does not remotely address the problem that this cycle is scattered incomplete across several books - it becomes just another book the work is scattered across. Similarly, a few pieces from Translating Translating Apollinaire are included here, but the original publication of that work was already seemingly selected from a larger library of pieces, many of which remain unpublished or uncollected (if they exist at all). Lots of good material here - particular short pieces that stood out were The Frog Variations and The Long Weekend of Louis Riel (the latter of course existing as part of a larger sequence called "Three Tales," all of which are thankfully anthologized here, which was initially published in another book that has a few other excerpts included elsewhere in this one - see the complications in a project like this?) - but while finding bits of work I liked in this reader was pretty easy, finding more work I like in the same way seems to be an endless rabbit hole of "well, you can find more in this vein in this out-of-print book that no American libraries hold, and maybe if you're lucky the bpNichol archive has uploaded a PDF, but more likely it's only been published in literary magazines that never made it out of Canada if it's been published at all. Good luck!" I appreciate that Coach House continues to put the work in to keep this material in print (I believe a new collection of previously unpublished material comes out this month), but it seems like an endless archeology project, which is kind of frustrating for a new reader, a frustration only compounded rather than eased by a book like this one. A damn shame, because so much of this book is so invigorating, so inventive, so exciting and so inspiring - if only I could see a more complete picture! If only a complete picture exists at all...

[Oralmajority · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great edition, considering how versatile and unanthologizable a poet Nichol is. Nicely printed pages, semi-faithful type setting and decent reproductions of images and concrete texts.

[dimwig · Rating 4 out of 5]

probably never going to read everything in here but the true eventual story of billy the kid is probably the great canadian novel if you know what i mean