conversations on
the long poem
The Martyrology is an
elusive text that facilitates constant variability and flux. From the portraits
of the saints in Books 1 and 2 that dissolve and reformulate into different
portraits to the song book and passion play of Book 9, Nichol privileges the
eclectic and enveloping nature of what the long poem affords him. In order to
construct a poetic selfhood through long poetry, Nichol employs a paradigm of
constantly shifting semiotics. By way of signature, The Martyrology relentlessly configures the author (or his multiple
selfhoods of subjectivity) in a textual and readable way—that is, Nichol adopts
countless iterations of his poetic self and deposits them throughout the work
as evidence of his ontological presence. Paul de Man, in his explanation of
semiotics, describes it as a “study of signs as signifiers; it does not ask
what words mean but how they mean” (1516). This distinction between the what
and the how of linguistic meaning favours the processes and methods by which
signatory meaning is provided to the reader. de Man also states that semiotics
is a procedure of constant revelation through reading, that it is reliant on a
constant and multiple process of updating its given form during any point of
the reading act: “The interpretation of the sign is not […] a meaning but
another sign; it is a reading, not a decodage, and this reading has, in its
turn, to be interpreted into another sign, and so on ad infinitum” (1518). Nichol’s signs develop meaning precisely in
how they shift from one form to the next. As an establishment of selfhood
through autobiography, his signs are substitutive in their movements. The
substitution of one variant of signature to the next is an exercise of
transfiguration through re-presentation. By way of syntax, spelling
conventions, etymology, anagrams, and, most roundly, puns, Nichol widely
permeates the text in an effort to exhibit his selfhood. Long poetry’s
enfolding of multiple generic strains becomes a direct mirroring of these
multiple signatory displays.
In
his understanding of the long poem, Frank Davey suggests that its generic
intent is to abound in dissimilar functions, tropes, expectations, and
possibilities, when compared to other facets of long writings. The long poem,
then, is tasked with introducing a novelty that is absent from previous
iterations of the long poem genre; through its self-mobilization, one of the
long poem’s crucial characteristics is to move
or propel itself into a new type of
language: "this is the central task of the long poem:
to drive right past St As Is into new territory, into new languages, into
surprise. To write long poems that are not, in sign, in image, in structure,
like earlier long poems" (The
Contemporary Canadian Long Poem 19). Utilizing Nichol-esque wordplay, Davey
creates his own saint in his manipulation of the word ‘stasis’; the long poem
is meant to disregard this saint, abandon the “as is” and progress from
inactivity into accretion. This proclamation of total newness is, for the long
poem, an inherent impetus reliant on a discourse of movement; not only does the
long poem document a process of distance, depth, and length in theme, but the
long poem propels itself towards a generic reliance on movement—out from one
and into another. Davey later states that the inclusivity and absorption of the
long poem allows it a sense of malleability and pliability when it considers
what to integrate: "I expect the long poem to encroach further upon
fiction […] And to encroach elsewhere. For the successful long poem exults in
new signs, thefts, adventures" (20). Davey’s description carries with it a
sense of cunning, that the long poem, at once, seeks adventure and surprise,
and can be accused of (or lauded for) thievery and encroachment.
Both
of the aforementioned passages also articulate the long poem’s utilization of
the sign, something Nichol exploits and harnesses, in word and action,
throughout the entirety of The
Martyrology. Davey doubly mentions that the sign of the long poem, at its
most core intention or utilization, is to proclaim generic divergence and
departure. Hence, a given long poem, in its state as a long poem, signals that
it is departing away from other,
previous long poems. In doing so, Davey suggests that the long poem becomes
“successful” in its “adventures.” Brian Henderson, too, acknowledges that The Martyrology as a long poem
encounters the sign in language, albeit in a form of pilgrimage seeking
sacredness: “For Nichol then, it is a journal
journey. It is through the landscape of letters and words that the pilgrim
moves, encountering saints and signs of the sacred” (“Soul Rising out of the
Body of Language: Presence, Process and Faith in The Martyrology” 112). Henderson’s comments largely derive from
Nichol’s Book 4, as this book displays Nichol’s employment of language that is
largely infused with notions of signature through music. Nichol, himself,
suggests that Book 4’s repertoire coalesces into a sensual totalization of
participation—reading The Martyrology,
at this point in its chronology, demands a visual, aural, and oral involvement:
“By the fourth book I had managed to bring together the eye, the ear, and
everything” (“Interview: Caroline Bayard and Jack David” 180). Nichol displays
this arrangement of sensuality in the following passage, playfully
incorporating references to his nominality and the musicality of the
individuated letters:
the d will out
as the b drops thru its
half note
configuration
i is singing scale
i
hails you
[…]
the oral hang-ups change
a concern for listening (Book 4)
Nichol
references his first two initials, b and p, with the letters d and b—the letter
d is a mirror of the letter b, and the letter b, besides suggesting Barrie, can
be turned upside down to form the letter p, suggesting Phillip. Similarly, the
three letters all represent half notes on the bass and treble clefs in musical
notation. The letter b, for example, simultaneously refers to the second letter
of the alphabet, the first letter of the name Barrie, and the various b notes
in half measure on the scales. Further, the letters d and b embody a vertical
mirroring as well as a horizontal mirroring, thereby connecting to the lines
later written: “i found / myself caught up in a) mirror image // (no way to
notate the break” (Book 4). Placed beside one another, the lower-case letters d
and b form a visual palindrome. Further is the fortuity of both notes serving
as the exact middle notes of each clef—d for the bass and b for the treble.
Depending on the notes’ placements on the scales, the stems of each half note
form the various alphabetic shapes of b, d, and p. The letter i, in the lines
“i is singing scale / i hails you,” also signals the poet’s name, in that the i
is the only vowel to appear in all three of the poet’s names—Barrie Phillip
Nichol. Specifically, the i, which is bpNichol, sings his name, borne out in
b’s and p’s, across the reaches of the notational clefs.
Nichol
later transforms the characteristics of his name to claim his own personhood:
sense out of nonsense
N on sense
(which is me)
i spell out changes
realign essentials
as i thot to
sing a
balance sing (Book 4)
Nichol
imports the N of “Nichol” into the reconstructive move of “nonsense” to the “N
on sense,” thereby involving himself in the transition from unmeaning to
meaning, all the while claiming an innocence, the implicit pun here, in such a
transformation. Besides being evidenced in the selected rhetoric—transitioning
from nonsense to sense—Nichol also proclaims and justifies his own inclusion,
suggesting that he, as poet and signifier through N, is deserving of this
stanzaic positioning. Similarly, the following line maintains the identical aim
of authorship in name through the authoring of the lines themselves; “i spell
out changes” recalls the i of Barrie Phillip Nichol, and it also stands as
self-commentary on the line itself—the i of bpNichol is present in these
various signifiers, and the i also commands these changes to authorially occur.
Nichol, as poet, governs the conveyance of these changes in the signified, shifting
nonsense into the N of sense and “questions to answer / answer’s an A / B /
ginning” (Book 4) and the following alphabetic enumeration:
i want
the world
absolute & present
all its elements
el
em
en
t's
o
p q
r
or b d
bidet (Book 4)
Suddenly, every N/en represents Nichol, every
b/B/be/being/Being represents Barrie, every p represents Phillip, and every i
represents the entirety of Barrie Phillip Nichol. In the various mirrors he has
erected in but a few of these recent passages—“p q” and “b d,” which are not
unlike the relationships he designs between M as an upside-down W and H as a
sideways I—letters beyond b, p, and n continuously typify the poet. q and d
represent a mirrored or disguised Nichol. The poet claims ownership over his lines
by leaving his signature, in any arrangement or rearrangement it may wish to
take.
Nichol
has discussed this recurrent word play (or, perhaps, letter play) in comments
made in correspondences and interviews with Mary Ellen Solt and Ken Norris. In
“A Letter to Mary Ellen Solt” Nichol writes: “the key word was women i looked at it & saw ‘w’s omen’ &
it struck me that W’s omen was that it contained more than itself that it
flipped over to become M […] the omen or portent was that i was reading words as
sentences that said things about single letters” (116). These same sentiments
are echoed in his interview with Ken Norris, suggesting that the letters of a
word can be treated syntactically, allowing individual words their own
trajectories: “It led me into a lot of things, eventually into Book IV of The Martyrology where I’m reading words
as sentences that say things about single letters” (“Interviews: Ken Norris”
241). In the same interview, Nichol expounds upon his poetic process of
discovering the doubleness of puns, in which an established letter or word is
both a visual symbol and a linguistic conveyance of meaning (and the discussion
also raises the third characteristic of sonicism through visuality). Nichol
continues his discussion with Norris by situating his own poetry in a semiotics
achieved through shifting, visual puns—the semiotics of ancient runes, in
particular, allow all letter instances to embody visual meaning:
I really came more to terms with
what I think of as the runic potential of the alphabet, which is to say that an
‘a’ is the signifier for an ‘a’ which is the signified and it is itself, so
that when you mark down an ‘a’ you are not describing the name of something,
you are creating something in the world. At that level of the visuality of the
single letter you are creating in the very pure sense of the word, you are
creating thingness. (240-1)
The
word ‘runes’ is, etymologically, Old English in its current form (rūn ‘a secret, mystery’) and Old
Norse in its historical form (rúnir, rúnar ‘magic
signs, hidden lore’) (“runes,” New Oxford
American Dictionary). Nichol, himself, plays with the hidden signs inherent
through a runic-style of referentiality in his punning; as the movement of
vowels, in particular, comes to create or de-conceal discrete and separate
words, new meaning is signaled by new (through modification) words:
& the lines become as long as the
tongue can
/ carry
without breathing in
images shift
blue sky
turning back to grey
it is the wind moves it
it is a language the celts knew & spoke of
runes
(the running
e's)
pass as vowels thru energy
consonants as nouns
vowels as verbs
what are the sentences that form
words they're made of
syntax of alignment i want to see (Book 4)
This passage is a theoretical
presentation of how Nichol’s vowel use signals shifting changes in words—that
is, the displaced vowels create the shift in meaning brought about through a
syntactic advancement. Movement, both as a propulsive energy and a syntactic
furtherance through and towards meaning through reading, punningly appears in
Nichol’s reimagining of the word ‘runes’; though it is defined through its
etymology as a secretive, mysterious, magical, or hidden sign, Nichol
syntactically examines the word as a movement of vowels, a movement that is
spurred on by its own activity, transference, or running.
Often,
then, the visual pun of a given word, when treated as a syntactical unit, is
discoverable through strategic spacing, line breaks, and enjambment. All three
techniques disassemble an assumed wholeness inherent in a complete word,
eventually allowing words to be fractured and splintered into smaller
components which still maintain linguistic coherence (prefixes, root words, and
suffixes) as well as accidental and discovered words that are not intentional
composites of their larger wholes. A syntactical explication of the following
passage will indicate what Nichol is accomplishing in the disassembling of
whole words and the shifting of vowels from one dismantled word to the next:
to do what one does
with honour
is the all
ist heal-
ling
lang
u age
's h
on
our
hour
the days are marked by their divisions
purpose
less divisive in
the long run
lung ran
lang ren
tall (Book 4)
Beginning with the first stanza, Nichol imports
an ontological wholeness through action. The entirety of a life—regardless of
its span or duration—results in an accomplishment. One’s action indicates
fullness and totality, in that the ontological imperative suggests that being
is the summation of what has been done. One’s actions throughout the course of
an individual’s existence are defined as absolute and complete: “to do […] is
the all.” The innate proposition is that existence is dependent on action—it becomes
the signifier of a life lived; to act, behave, speak, or simply do with an
accompanying honour is indicative of an experiential and existential wholeness.
Nichol’s following stanza begins to manipulate the previous stanza (both in
meaning and linguistics) with the shifting emphasis created by word spacing and
enjambment. “is the all” becomes “ist heal-” with the space between the first
‘s’ and ‘t’ syntactically shifting to the left by an increment of one and the
final ‘l’ of ‘all’ extending into the next line after the hyphen. The English
verb “is” transforms into the German verb “ist,” also a singular, third-person
verb. The additional ‘l’ in the rendering of ‘healing’ is faithful to the
replication of the double ‘l’ in the previous stanza, but it signals the
poetry’s desire for addition, extension, and elongation. “ling” simultaneously
references a diverse range of poetic options. The enjambed spelling of “heal- /
ling” ushers in this notion of the extension and continuation of the previous
line. It also occupies multiple, morphological positions, simultaneously
serving as a referent to two separate nouns, a diminutive suffix, and two
etymological links: one, to the word ‘long’ (“long,” New Oxford American Dictionary), through Middle English and Middle
Dutch, and the other to ‘lingua,’ Latin for ‘tongue.’ Through the supplanting
of vowels, this passage proffers four separate variables (and one returning
variable); sequentially, they appear as such: “ling,” “lang,” “long,” “lung,”
and “lang.” The Saxon languages use the word “lang” frequently as a cognate to
the English ‘long,’ obviously the next in Nichol’s ordering. “long” is altered
into “lung,” a source of breath and a metaphorical source of speech, not unlike
the reference to the tongue in “ling,” and the cycle closes with a return to
“lang.”
The majority of these analogs are corporeal in
their linguistic genealogies and utilization in this passage as a whole. As
Nichol mentions, the composition of The
Martyrology, this sensuality of the project, is insistently indicative of
one of language’s major uses: “some new beginning / sensed here / amid the
sensory sensation of / speech / these words” (Book 4). The inevitability of
birth, growth and extinction, both as the biological process of existence and
the linguistic transmutation of all components of written, spoken, pictorial,
or musical speech, are a series of actions done by and to the body; when
language is presented as “lang / u age,” the imperative act of existing through
time, evidenced by aging, highlights the effable length required to indicate
the act itself. Time (“hour” and “days”) marks the passage of the body through
existence. As the word “runes” was earlier transformed into “the running e’s,”
the identical verb is presented in two different tenses; the progressive verb
is here expressed in the present and past tenses. As the body and language
move, the changes occur to the aging individual and the transfigured verbs; the
“long run” then affects the following line, “lung ran,” again situating breath
inside the utilized breathing apparatus of the individual. Breath and changing
speech become indicative of the body and language user.
Nichol’s
understanding of these sites of speech—the lungs, the tongue, the song, the
poem—indicates a fluency of mutation between what is voiced and what is written.
Often, these sites syntactically alter and blend into one another, suggesting a
continuation and transmutation of expressive locales (both bodily and writerly)
and techniques (poetry, song, speech, image). Despite the speaker’s demise, the
language ventures towards its sustainment:
the i dies finally
merges with the land's scape
scope increases
the folded page
writes its way into
the longed for
beginning
story
new
song
round
as the lips form
(Book 4)
The subjective voice finally dies, perhaps dies
with finality, yet is revitalized through transformation; the i is enveloped by
the land, which modifies into a folded page, one which then impulsively begins
to write upon itself; story becomes song, and the musical, vocal work of a
choral round leads to formed lips, ultimately intimating at a circular
perpetuity. Nichol replicates a comparable process of transmutation when
discussing generic melding, echoing Davey’s aforementioned comments regarding
the long poem’s tendency to encroach upon other literary trends:
reading B.S. Johnson earlier this week, discusses Scott's shift from
narrative poem to novel, what he saw as the death of the long poem,
puzzling its resurgence, its popularity in recent years, i realized
the
lines had disappeared between the forms, that the novel & the poem
were merging finally, a clarity, freedom to move as i choose (Book 4)
Again, this similar language—the subjective i as it concludes or
begins with finality, the process of merging and shifting, longing and the long
poem, the increase and resurgence of language, the punning and paired language
of the “new song” and the “novel & the poem”—accentuates the process of
continuation in each instance or section of The
Martyrology and also, most necessarily, the process of signifying constancy
from one section to the next.
Nichol also imbues the feet of the individual with a poetic source of
production, similarly to his sites of orality and breath. The speaker traverses
the poetry, in Nichol’s usual and punning way, on prosody’s metrical unit of
the foot; the streets, corridors, and
passages, another evidential pun
indicating a part of literature or song and also an avenue for travel itself,
indicate the syntactical and linear pathway for the language to span across the
page. This movement upon the foot, as a writing experience, echoes Michel de
Certeau’s understanding of the cityscape as a textual location, one in which
the inhabitants unknowingly write atop the streets they traverse upon: “They
walk—an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the
thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it
[…] The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poems in which
each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility” (“Walking in
the City” 93). The body’s foot imports itself onto the streets as a utensil
capable of textuality, indicating a multifarious pathway of signatory scribing:
the buildings rearranging themselves daily
the city no enemy ever took
because the streets shift even as you walk them
doorways change
familiar only to the saints who lived there
recognized dwelling signs no stranger'd ever see
they went crazy on this earth
only language retaining the multiplicity they were used to (Book 4)
Certeau’s passage reflects the city-dweller’s alienation from the city
itself, suggesting a civic unfamiliarity accompanies an individual throughout
the contours of the space. The language that is imprinted is doubly
indecipherable to the author and the reader—that is, the condition of occupying
both stances within the cityscape. In Certeau’s metaphor, a sense of
dislocation motivates the walkers throughout the space they find themselves in.
Yet, whilst navigating the city in a bewildered state, the walker creates a
text in a digressive and discursive mode, leaving behind the entrails of
confusion and uncertainty. Those walking are unaware of the creation of text as
a result of their own movements; thus, the legibility of signatures of every
individual housed within the cityscape is unauthored and unreadable.
Nichol describes the city as being in a state of vicissitudinous
shifting, wherein the city’s components are in flux during the body’s
navigation. The “buildings [are] rearranging themselves daily,” “the streets
shift even” as they are walked upon, and “doorways change.” The city resists
the occupation of its inhabitants, renouncing the ease and feasibility of their
participation; it wishes, seemingly, to reject the walker’s attempts to comport
him or herself throughout its form. In Nichol’s understanding of the
city-as-language, these lines speak of the linguistic mutability and
fluctuation of language itself. Etymology provides an historical construct of
language, yet words undergo reduction and accretion through morphology, words
introduce adaptation through translation processes, and words experience
extinction and resurgence. If the city rejects its walkers—if language
repudiates its speakers—then the individual must re-learn how to navigate such
spaces. The activity of change, loss, shifting, supersession imposes a
requisite onto the city dweller; a state of maintenance and adjustability
provides a purposeful attentiveness for the dweller, the language-user:
“purpose can / become conceit, shift beneath the feet, the line of speech
that's called / political, the signified slides below the signifier, gets lost
in what's / expedient, the strength of english" (Book 4). Nichol possesses
an approving attitude towards the city walker, unlike Certeau; for Nichol,
language is legible, decipherable, and approachable. Even though language walks
away from the user, the user can
elect to walk towards language.
Certainly, language alternates, exchanges, and transfigures, but this is a
provocation towards the language-user; Nichol asserts that the language-user
must be willing to make a comparable, responsive exertion of willingness to
alternate, exchange, and transfigure, both in his/her poetic proclivities of
production and tendencies of acquisition (of reading and studying).
Acknowledging that “the duty of a citizen” (Book 4) is to inhabit the
city expectantly, Nichol urges the language-user to maintain a vigilance of
upkeep—to orient and re-orient, as necessary, to perpetuate the inhabitation.
Finality—as it conceptually relates to the demise of a city space for the usage
of the public figure or even a concluding hope for The Martyrology itself—abates and diminishes the more that Nichol
produces in writing. Postponement, however, is a more accurate tendency that
Nichol writes towards. The long poem ventures towards an overabundance, an
unreadability (due to excess), and a ceaselessness, all of which attempt to
suspend an ending. This postponement is a process of deferral, by which the
movement through these streets of language evades a terminus:
i am thinking it is better left behind
this city they no longer had a use for
make my way thru the shifting streets
along these sheets of paper to an ending
it is not over
it is never over (Book 4)
Even though the city’s usefulness and accessibility reach an
expirational point in time, with its inhabitants seeking to depart, Nichol
conflates the city space with the space given to the poet; the avenues and
corridors the citizen traverses through simultaneously erect themselves as the
margins and lines the poet works upon. The city shifts, like the function key
upon the keyboard, providing its user with two (and more) modes of operations,
morphing and blending into different options of service for the user. As the
streets blend into the sheets of paper, an ending is ultimately promised; but
this is undercut immediately with Nichol’s proceeding lines. There is an
ambiguity with Nichol’s use of the singular pronoun ‘it,’ in that the word can
signal the two preceding, singular nouns: ‘ending’ and ‘city.’ Simultaneously,
then, this city is not over, and an ending is never over, or vice versa. As the
near-homonymic relationship between ‘streets’ and ‘sheets’ suggests a
coalescence, the thematic relationship between the unending city and unending
poetry blend, impactfully, into one another. The linguistic relationships that
Nichol forms in his wordplay suggest fluency between one word and the next,
certainly, but also the expectation of an ending and the immediate renewal from
the resisted conclusion:
to write my way thru the books of the dead
let the process take me
thru
into
the books of the living
& i move now
out of 3
into 4
or 1
some new beginning
sensed here
amid the sensory sensation of
speech
these words (Book 4)
The corpus of the city and the physical books of The Martyrology lead ‘thru’ and ‘into’ one another; the dying
cities and books pre-suppose the futurity of living cities and books. Nichol
suggests that the signatory qualities of pasthood, evidenced by expiration and
extinction, eventually foreground and
allow the substantiation of further presentations of signature.
Primarily, Nichol’s saints are a conception of language in its
material and movable forms; in this, the originary quality of an ‘st’ word is
transfigured into poetic meaning simply by the typographical introduction of
spacing. ‘st’ words become language’s realization of its own signatory status.
Through a linguistic shifting, the lowly and banal ‘st’ words are heightened to
a position of nominal referentiality, representing, predominantly, two
processes of conversion. Firstly, Nichol’s poetic impetus in discovering the
saintliness of language awakens St. Orm, for example, from his previous station
as, merely, the word ‘storm.’ This first conversion invokes a redemptive
quality by bestowing nominality onto the ordinary quality of the various ‘st’
nouns of the whole work. These words are allowed to access their own properties
of signature, ultimately providing Nichol with a new beginning in language.
Secondly, Nichol goes to great lengths to provide the individual martyrologies
of the assorted saints; in this aim, which is a primary concern in Books 1-4,
the supposed deaths of these saints of language are subverted with the emphasis
of their living status through Nichol’s own language that populates The Martyrology. Death is undermined
through a process of repurposing:
'you are dead saints'
given back into the drift of print
of speech
born anew among
the letters
a different tension
different
reach
of logic
of the mind's playing
out of
reason (Book 4)
To drift is to shift, speech becomes one’s effort to reach, and the
language bears its future iterations. Nichol’s language is genealogical and
expectant of future progeny. When investigating his own familial heritage, he
also comes to document the reproductive qualities of language bearing more
language: “i am / the evidence of / their lovemaking / their spoor” (Book 4). A
signature, then, is evidential of a current state of being and a past state of
being; Smaro Kamboureli indicates: “Signature functions as a sign that
oscillates between the author’s presence and absence in the text” (On the Edge of Genre 170). Signature
stands as the instance of self-presentation and self-proclamation,
demonstrating one’s beginning originating from one’s ending.
At the close of Book 4, a substitutional form of signature
presentation occurs, where the interplay between text and image becomes another
form of self-presentation:
begin again
that way among the tensions
the interplay between the letters
[….]
not in the saints’ names
which was beginnings
but in that space between
the s & t
among the shift of what at first seems arbitrary
‘to go beyond the point where it is even neces-
/ sary to
think in terms of words’ (Book 4)
This initial interplay issues an ability to “begin again,” formatively
reaffirming the reconstruction of words into new words through all of his usual
means—puns and spacing, most pointedly. But this final quotation, a journal
entry of Nichol’s from April 7, 1964 which also serves as a slightly altered
epigraph to Book(s) 7 &, suggests that Nichol seeks to progress past the
mode of written language. This is previously verified in the altering images of
the saints themselves from Books 1-4, but the conclusion of Book 4 presents a
rendered image of Nichol, beyond the various visages of Nichol that occupy the
front covers of all of the texts. Nichol is presented with simple line work,
the poet’s eyes are closed, and his head and chest spurt from the ground. It is
a humble and simple image, and it comes to represent a different form of
signature. The lone image of Nichol moves him beyond the necessity of language,
fulfilling a small prophecy his closing words intimate at. But at the bottom of
the page, the poet returns to language; “january to december 1975” closes the
entirety of Book 4. These are dates of composition, indicating the months that
spanned from one beginning to one conclusion, one month shy of an entire year.
Yet they also read as graven words of the poet’s existence or even Book 4’s
existence; jointly, the text and image appear as a tombstone might, with the
time stamp of survival beneath the bust of a (dead) man with closed eyes. The
text and the image dually demonstrate Nichol’s presence and absence, assembling
the poet’s and the poem’s exhibition of signature.
Works Cited
de Certeau,
Michel. “Walking in the City.” The
Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California
P, 1984. 91-110.
Davey, Frank. The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem.
Lantzville, B. C.: Island Writing Series, 1983.
Henderson, Brian.
“Soul Rising out of the Body of Language: Presence, Process and Faith in The Martyrology.” Read the Way He Writes: A Festschrift for bpNichol. Ed. Paul Dutton
and Steven Smith. Open Letter 6. 5-6
(Summer-Fall 1986): 111-28.
Kamboureli, Smaro.
On the Edge of Genre: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem.
Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1991.
“long.” New Oxford American Dictionary. 3rd ed. Ed. Angus Stevenson and Christine
A. Lindberg. Oxford: Oxford University P, 2010.
de Man, Paul.
“Semiology and Rhetoric.” The Norton
Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton,
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Nichol, bp. “Interview:
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Jeremy Desjarlais is a doctoral
student in McGill's Department of English where he is focussing on Canadian and
Indigenous long poetry.
