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Nicholodeon: a book of lowerglyphs
Visual Poetry. "Imagine each page of this book as an embalmed cross-section of the trunk of some exotic body. The black marks on the pages constitute the outlines of capillaries that perhaps once carried strange vital fluids from extremity to extremity, but now lie dry and clogged with tarry residue. This is a Manitoban Book of the Dead, leading from now/here to nowhere." In the world of NICHOLODEON, desire dwells in the spaces between where its readers expect to go and where the poems eventually take them; misreading is mandatory because there are only detours. "If this book was a bicycle, a tour-de-force would be the winner of the Tour de France, and we would have happily waited for Godot"--Steve McCaffery.
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First published January 1, 1997
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September 18, 2010
"Maya?"
Trying to buy Darren Wershler’s apparently almost out-of-print Nicholodeon: a book of lowerglyphs (1997) is like trying to buy the amazing Pecan Pie from the Harvest Bread Company in Boulder at Thanksgiving, which requires making an order months ahead, calling several times during strangely specified hours, and attempting to pick up the pie during more strangely specified hours, with the pie usually unavailable anyway. Similarly difficult is finding a copy of Nicholodeon, published by Coach House Books in Toronto, where Wershler is an editor. So I went to Toronto. Well, I didn’t go to Toronto specifically for this book, but I was there for two wonderful days to attend a Neoism event and found out that Coach House was having its annual open house then. After touring the press, I went to the book table, and, not surprisingly, Nicholodeon wasn’t there for sale. The Coach House staff member said, it’s in back, and returned with the two copies I requested. I thought, at least it’s easy to get this book in Toronto! But I was wrong. After boasting my triumph to the friendly editorial director of the press, she said: oh no, Nicholodeon isn’t for sale! There are only a few copies left! I reluctantly pulled the books from my bag ready to return them. Relieved to see they weren’t special editions, she took pity on me and finally said, okay, you can have them. Then my cohorts and I ate veggie dogs, stood around not knowing anyone, and enjoyed magical bpNichol Lane before heading to SMASH in the Junction district, where Neoist Istvan Kantor enthusiastically swung on Olympic-style rings with steam irons on fire after pouring his blood from a self-inflicted blood-draw onto a hot plate that was passed in front of the audience like sage bundles used to be passed around at the start of the day at Greenpeace, where I worked for a summer during college.
Nicholodeon is an elaborate experiment in the “promiscuity” of language, responding to the work of bpNichol and others who make poetry that is attentive to the visual, conceptual, and DIY dimensions of language. The symbol of the chaos worshiping Discordians (see Principia Discordia) is appropriately used in the book’s dedication. The poems of Nicholodeon communicate on several scales at once, referring to additional symbols referring to concepts such as pataphysics and people such as bpNichol appearing in a legend at the beginning of the book. Sometimes the poems overtly mutate the spacetime of the page, and other times they ignore the page as a field in favor of self-contained image-narratives illustrating how wide poetry can be defined. Wershler’s experimentation extends into the concept of the book itself, as evidenced in its online version.
I became curious about Nicholodeon after reading Christian Bök’s analysis of Wershler’s “Sonnet for Bonnie,” a poem that consists of a question mark symbol to the power of the number eight, which represents Petrarch’s octave, and the letter “U” to the power of the number six, which represents Petrarch’s sestet. Bök suggests:
“If the lover does in fact express his love via a sonnet, then the octave (represented here by the interrogative symbol raised to the eighth power) might encode the query: ‘Who do I love?’—to which the sestet (represented here by the letter U raised to the sixth power) might encode the reply: ‘You!’ Love itself almost constitutes a kind of puzzle or enigma, which two lovers might have to resolve in the course of experiencing it. The cryptic quality of the poem itself suggests the degree to which any communication between two lovers begins to take on the character of an intimate language, too private or too illicit for others to understand. In the courtly context of earlier sonnets by Petrarch, for example, such a love-poem as this one functions almost as kind of ‘postcard,’ perused by many deliverers en route to its recipient, so the poet must find ways to build an obscure element of privacy into an otherwise overheard epistle. Even though this poem might represent a published statement of affection, it nevertheless preserves for itself a relatively enigmatic message, one that remains illegible to any uninformed readership—and thus I might suggest that, despite the fact that this poem, at first glance, appears very cryptic and austere, it is in fact a delicate, precious object, free from much of the sappiness that often plagues a rhapsodic outpouring of affection.”
Such philosophically-mastered communications occur frequently in Nicholodeon, representing the possibilities for how language can interact with image to create novel translations of both and thus additional ways of imagining these disciplines. In the foldout poem in the middle of the book, a series of half-occluded black and white comic-strip images exist inside what might be an open-face dollhouse or a knickknack display. Slim portions of geometric words create the meta structure of the poem, and portions of words, repeating letters, and a word balloon containing “maya?” which means “illusion” in Sanskrit, create the micro structure of the poem, addressing a number of subjects explored throughout Nicholodeon such as peripheral voicing and vision, non-lingual communication, and interrupted sequentiality.
The poem, “Exxon Valdez (not to scale)”—which refers to the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989—depicts words like “deadseabird” and “deadwhale” in a text block made from the word “ocean,” which contains bolded letters that look like an oil spill. Like “Sonnet for Bonnie,” “Exxon Valdez (not to scale)” addresses an emotionally-charged concept, one that is sadly similar to today’s current BP oil spill crisis, with imagistic language that might at first seem detached or non-communicative but upon further reflection provokes a palpable impression. Much in the way “Sonnet for Bonnie” transcends the “rhapsodic outpouring of affection” we are so used to seeing in love poems, “Exxon Valdez (not to scale)” seems to usurp the repeated media image of the deadseabird choked with oil by transforming visually-inert letters into the deadseabird. While the subjects of these poems are different, the strategy Wershler takes to say the unsayable is consistent. If “Sonnet for Bonnie” is a love poem, “Exxon Valdez (not to scale)” is an eco-poetry of witness. The difference between Wershler’s strategy and what we might normally see in poems on love or an environmental disaster is that Wershler’s experiments, by making the word an image and the image a word, transubstantiate their impossible subjects.
Trying to buy Darren Wershler’s apparently almost out-of-print Nicholodeon: a book of lowerglyphs (1997) is like trying to buy the amazing Pecan Pie from the Harvest Bread Company in Boulder at Thanksgiving, which requires making an order months ahead, calling several times during strangely specified hours, and attempting to pick up the pie during more strangely specified hours, with the pie usually unavailable anyway. Similarly difficult is finding a copy of Nicholodeon, published by Coach House Books in Toronto, where Wershler is an editor. So I went to Toronto. Well, I didn’t go to Toronto specifically for this book, but I was there for two wonderful days to attend a Neoism event and found out that Coach House was having its annual open house then. After touring the press, I went to the book table, and, not surprisingly, Nicholodeon wasn’t there for sale. The Coach House staff member said, it’s in back, and returned with the two copies I requested. I thought, at least it’s easy to get this book in Toronto! But I was wrong. After boasting my triumph to the friendly editorial director of the press, she said: oh no, Nicholodeon isn’t for sale! There are only a few copies left! I reluctantly pulled the books from my bag ready to return them. Relieved to see they weren’t special editions, she took pity on me and finally said, okay, you can have them. Then my cohorts and I ate veggie dogs, stood around not knowing anyone, and enjoyed magical bpNichol Lane before heading to SMASH in the Junction district, where Neoist Istvan Kantor enthusiastically swung on Olympic-style rings with steam irons on fire after pouring his blood from a self-inflicted blood-draw onto a hot plate that was passed in front of the audience like sage bundles used to be passed around at the start of the day at Greenpeace, where I worked for a summer during college.
Nicholodeon is an elaborate experiment in the “promiscuity” of language, responding to the work of bpNichol and others who make poetry that is attentive to the visual, conceptual, and DIY dimensions of language. The symbol of the chaos worshiping Discordians (see Principia Discordia) is appropriately used in the book’s dedication. The poems of Nicholodeon communicate on several scales at once, referring to additional symbols referring to concepts such as pataphysics and people such as bpNichol appearing in a legend at the beginning of the book. Sometimes the poems overtly mutate the spacetime of the page, and other times they ignore the page as a field in favor of self-contained image-narratives illustrating how wide poetry can be defined. Wershler’s experimentation extends into the concept of the book itself, as evidenced in its online version.
I became curious about Nicholodeon after reading Christian Bök’s analysis of Wershler’s “Sonnet for Bonnie,” a poem that consists of a question mark symbol to the power of the number eight, which represents Petrarch’s octave, and the letter “U” to the power of the number six, which represents Petrarch’s sestet. Bök suggests:
“If the lover does in fact express his love via a sonnet, then the octave (represented here by the interrogative symbol raised to the eighth power) might encode the query: ‘Who do I love?’—to which the sestet (represented here by the letter U raised to the sixth power) might encode the reply: ‘You!’ Love itself almost constitutes a kind of puzzle or enigma, which two lovers might have to resolve in the course of experiencing it. The cryptic quality of the poem itself suggests the degree to which any communication between two lovers begins to take on the character of an intimate language, too private or too illicit for others to understand. In the courtly context of earlier sonnets by Petrarch, for example, such a love-poem as this one functions almost as kind of ‘postcard,’ perused by many deliverers en route to its recipient, so the poet must find ways to build an obscure element of privacy into an otherwise overheard epistle. Even though this poem might represent a published statement of affection, it nevertheless preserves for itself a relatively enigmatic message, one that remains illegible to any uninformed readership—and thus I might suggest that, despite the fact that this poem, at first glance, appears very cryptic and austere, it is in fact a delicate, precious object, free from much of the sappiness that often plagues a rhapsodic outpouring of affection.”
Such philosophically-mastered communications occur frequently in Nicholodeon, representing the possibilities for how language can interact with image to create novel translations of both and thus additional ways of imagining these disciplines. In the foldout poem in the middle of the book, a series of half-occluded black and white comic-strip images exist inside what might be an open-face dollhouse or a knickknack display. Slim portions of geometric words create the meta structure of the poem, and portions of words, repeating letters, and a word balloon containing “maya?” which means “illusion” in Sanskrit, create the micro structure of the poem, addressing a number of subjects explored throughout Nicholodeon such as peripheral voicing and vision, non-lingual communication, and interrupted sequentiality.
The poem, “Exxon Valdez (not to scale)”—which refers to the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989—depicts words like “deadseabird” and “deadwhale” in a text block made from the word “ocean,” which contains bolded letters that look like an oil spill. Like “Sonnet for Bonnie,” “Exxon Valdez (not to scale)” addresses an emotionally-charged concept, one that is sadly similar to today’s current BP oil spill crisis, with imagistic language that might at first seem detached or non-communicative but upon further reflection provokes a palpable impression. Much in the way “Sonnet for Bonnie” transcends the “rhapsodic outpouring of affection” we are so used to seeing in love poems, “Exxon Valdez (not to scale)” seems to usurp the repeated media image of the deadseabird choked with oil by transforming visually-inert letters into the deadseabird. While the subjects of these poems are different, the strategy Wershler takes to say the unsayable is consistent. If “Sonnet for Bonnie” is a love poem, “Exxon Valdez (not to scale)” is an eco-poetry of witness. The difference between Wershler’s strategy and what we might normally see in poems on love or an environmental disaster is that Wershler’s experiments, by making the word an image and the image a word, transubstantiate their impossible subjects.
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