Davey Frank - Aka bpNichol: a preliminary biography

I am highly suspicious of well-documented biographies, just as I am skeptical about historical records and events. If, on the other hand, the biographer would write about his subject purely from his imagination, from what he thinks his subject was or is, that is another matter.

Henry Miller, letter to Jay Martin,
quoted in Martins Always Merry and Bright

Barrie Nichol records this Henry Miller passage in 1979 in his Houses of the Alphabet notebook. Its one of many moments in his notebooks that display his concern both with the genre of biography and with the question of how he will be remembered. The earliest such moment occurs in his very first notebook, in which, on July 15, 1965, after looking back over its contents, he worried that they might be mostly shit and, from the viewpoint of a future theoretical biographer, worthless. Barrie was then only 21 years old, virtually unpublished, and already anticipating being memorialized in a book such as the present one. A decade later he would chuckle whenever he or someone else mentioned British novelist B.S. Johnsons Arent You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs, but would continue recording his thoughts, dreams, ideas for novels, poems or drawings, and conversations with his parents in his notebooks anyway.

The present theoretical biographer met Barrie Nichol in Toronto in late 1970 toward the end of the half-decade in which Barrie met most of his important friends and collaborators. I knew him then as bpNichol, a young visual poet. We had argued in the pages of my journal Open Letter some years earlier 1966 over whether I ought to view visual poetry as relevant to what I understand as poetry. Wed differed somewhat vigorously causing Victor Coleman to quip in a letter to the journal that Frank was sure that people were saying ugh and the like before they could draw, and that bpNichol was defending visual poetry like the civil servant will defend his job. Four years later I was newly in Toronto and writing a small book about Earle Birney, who had created a number of visual poems. Even if I didnt want to create such things, I needed to understand them. bpNichol, with whom I had not been in contact since 1966, was now the author of the box of visual poems Still Water and anthologist of another boxful, The Cosmic Chef: An Evening of Concrete, as well as the creator of the more conventionally confessional booklet Journeying and the Returns itself part of yet another box of stuff, ambiguously labelled bp. I phoned bp or more likely Barrie and asked for help, and he suggested we have lunch in a little box of a Hungarian restaurant on Bloor Street near Spadina.

Lunch went on for quite a while: by 1972 he was the most active contributing editor of Open Letter, by 1976 we were together as the two most active editors of Coach House Press, and by 1977 I was writing books like Edward and Patricia in the midst of artists marathons that Barrie was conducting at the lay psychoanalytical foundation Therafields, of which he was vice-president. Lunch had stretched to include numerous pots of Earl Grey in my living room, numerous lobsters at the biannual Coach House wayzgoose, and numerous mugs of honey-sweetened coffee and Lisa bread in the Therafields barn in Mono Township. I saw Barrie in most of his various circles Coach House, the Four Horsemen sound poetry group, the international sound poets, his writing classes at York University, and Therafields. He was still the one of many names Barrie, bp, beep, beeper, beepers, bar, Bear, Professor Nichol. My son Mike, who much preferred the sciences to the arts, came to admire and trust Barrie/bp so much that in May 1988 he enrolled in what was probably Barries last high school sound poetry workshop. Unlike Boswell, I was not taking notes in any of these places, or planning to need such.

It was Barrie who was the more preoccupied with biography or for him both autobiography and much of its larger context, origin. Throughout his life he would search for forms that might be appropriate for telling his story creating numerous quasi-autobiographical texts, from the published