I won't be shouldn't be posting here very much for the next few weeks. Almost everything is due in the next two weeks: a huge paper, 3 assignment, 2 "tests" (exams in disguise), 2 reaction papers ("squibs"), and a take-home exam. After that, I have one more project for my independent study, and then I'm done my degree. Exciting and scary all at once!

Some bpNichol I've been reading over and over lately:

real pleasure
              saint reat
the poem can't provide

so many times the flesh aches with loneliness

& this marble this phony architecture you hide behind
well

     saint reat i want to talk to you

     you won't come back at me out of the poem

     if i say "hunger"
will they call it a figure of speech

it's such a long night to lie awake in

& the flesh does ache

& the night is lonely to belong in

(bpNichol, The Martyrology Book 1, Scenes from the Lives of the Saints)

This summer, I want to read The Martyrology along with some literary criticism of it. It's beautiful and complex and I know I'm missing a lot of what he's alluding to.

Writing of The Martyrology in What History Teaches, Stephen Scobie comments on the way in which Nichol creates saints' names out of common nouns. "Storm" becomes "St. Orm" and "stale" becomes "St. Ale" (with his wife "St. Alemate") (111). He points out that not all of the names were derived so easily. "St. Reat," for example, "is not connected with 'street.' His name emerged in the course of Scraptures: Fourth Sequence as part of a progression that went from 'a tree' to 'a treat' to 'as treat' to 'has treat' to 'HA!!!!!!! St. Reat.' Even more than others, St. Reat was discovered lurking in the corners of language" (111). Scobie is obliquely approaching a very important point about poetry as discovery. Very often the most important thing writers discover is not meaning (i.e. theme or statement of truth), but some unexpected knowledge about their medium. Hackers work to find out what is in a computer -- what its make-up is and what it can do. Poets do the same thing with language; by writing, they discover unexpected things about it -- about what it can and cannot do. As Nichol puts it, "how I personally can make it stronger or find out where the blocks are, if you like; what the things are that prevent it functioning the way it could."11 By discovering new things about the workings of language, the poet is "always out, on the frontier going out a bit further" (138).

(Of Poets and Hackers: Notes on Canadian Post-Modern Poets)