A Book of Variations: Love – Zygal – Art Facts is the title of the latest posthumous bpNichol collection. It’s a title created not by Nichol, of course, but by the book’s editor, Stephen Voyce, and it not surprisingly lacks the wit of the original titles of the three books that it reprints. The title Love: A Book of Remembrances mischievously winked at the emphemerality of dreams and joy, Zygal: A Book of Mysteries and Translations commented on the mystery of Nichol’s fascination with drawing and ‘translating’ the ‘mysteries’ of the letter ‘H,’ while Art Facts: A Book of Contexts punned on the ‘artifacts’ of art which were the contexts and inspirations of much of the book’s contents.

These were collections of what were for Nichol his ‘occasional poems’ – hand-drawn visual poems, typewriter poems, pataphysical poems of his “Probable Systems” series, experiments with the comic strip panel. They were poems he could complete, file away or publish without involving himself in a long-term project. Toward the end of his life he is reported to have been filing such work under two more titles: “ox, house, camel, door: a book of higher glyphs” and “truth: a book of fictions.” The new titles extended the wordplay of the three earlier ones. A collection titled Truth: a Book of Fictions, edited by Irene Niechoda, was posthumously published in 1993 by Mercury Press and is still in print.

Voyce writes that there is archival evidence that Niechoda cannibalized the manuscript of “ox, house, camel, door” in order to help give the more arrestingly titled “Truth” the length needed by the publisher. That’s quite possible, but in any case Voyce knows that this kind of collection was in Nichol’s mind an irregularly continuing series, with each volume to be published by a different publisher (10). Had Nichol lived longer there likely would have been more than

Donato Mancini’s ironically titled You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence could have been a big contribution to Canadian literary studies – the first to identify, analyze and theorize the limitations of the many current and late twentieth-century reviewers of Canadian poetry. It comes close, and will likely be built upon. But it appears to have been sabotaged by careless editing – by both its thesis supervisors at Simon Fraser and the copy editors at its Toronto publisher Bookthug.

The numerous punctuation and spelling errors (including the misspelling of Victorian poet A.E. Housman’s name several times) should not greatly trouble a reader, but they do index a persistent editorial indifference that extends to the book’s structural awkwardnesses – such as its abrupt shifts of vocabulary and implied audience, and its odd chapter-long discussions of poems by Bob Perelman and Yevgeny Yevtushenko where readers have been led to expect a focus on Canadian poetry and the ideologies of its reviewers.  References generally to Canadian poems or reviews are in fact disappointingly few in most of the first nineteen short unnumbered chapters of this thirty-seven chapter book, despite the wonderfully entertaining analysis of a J.R. Colombo review with which the book begins.

Mancini has several strong arguments, the central one being that most contemporary Canadian poetry reviewers appear intellectually and ideologically equipped to read and discuss only poetry based on pre-World War 2 Anglo-American poetics. They prefer such poetry, and they lament its 

Part of the work of writing my recent biography of Canadian poet bpNichol (aka bpNichol) took me to the special collections department of Simon Fraser University’s W.A.C. Bennett Library, where several deposits of Nichol’s literary and other papers had accumulated since the early 1970s. Most had come from Nichol himself, at least one posthumously from his wife Eleanor, and one or two from others, such as artist Arnold Shives, who had exchanged letters with Nichol in the mid-1960s. At Simon Fraser I discovered that parts the Nichol collection were not only large but relatively complete; the collection contained all but one of the diary-like notebooks he had kept, most of the letters he’d received, most of the outgoing letters that he had begun keeping copies of in the 1970s, and most of the many drafts of his published and unpublished writing. There were 50-60 or more large file boxes of often surprising materials. There was also his comic book collection, a large file of his visual poems, many done in colour, a part if not all of his toy collection, and a collection of audio recordings.

But there seemed to be also significant gaps, perhaps only noticeable to someone who hoped to write a Nichol biography. There was very little from the early years of his life, other than the recollections he had recorded in his 

Recalculating is Charles Bernstein’s twenty-first poetry collection, released this past month by the University of Chicago Press. The title, plus the cover image of a man looking down to his right as he drives and his female passenger looking somewhat anxiously ahead, not too subtly alerts the reader to a metaphoric invocation of the currently ubiquitous GPS navigator. The image, arrestingly anachronistic in the 1950s hat, scarf and tie that the man wears, suggests the traditional heterosexual couple, with the man driving, the woman subject to his driving; I was reminded that I have my in-car GPS set to speak to me in a woman’s voice. I was also, most likely along with many readers, prompted to begin looking for what might be being recalculated in Bernstein’s poetics. For over the years Bernstein’s poems have been mostly illuminations of poetry itself, and of language usage.

However the image of the couple on the cover also reminded me, as I’m fairly sure I was intended to be, of the couple that Bernstein is a part of, with his partner, the artist Susan Bee, and of their shockingly unexpected loss at age 23 of their artist and art-theorist daughter, Emma Bee Bernstein, in 2008. Indeed, five pages in, the book begins with a epigraph page topped by a tribute passage by Bernstein’s friend and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry colleague, Bob Perelman, to Emma. Page 11 bears another epigraph from Emma’s own writings, one that seems uncannily to allude to the cover image: “ ... put your hands on the wheel ... look only as far as the blur of passing yellow lines to see the present .” The personal note that all this strikes is itself unexpected in a Bernstein book – a Bernstein who has repeatedly asserted that poetry is about itself, and about language. Was this also being recalculated? However, perhaps a reader should also remember that when the GPS voice tells you it is “recalculating” it’s not telling you that you are changing your destination – only that you are now about to take a new, and unexpected, route toward it.

The opening poem of the book, “Autopsychographia” – marked as having been based on one by Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa – begins

  
     Poets are fakers
    Whose faking is so real
    They even fake the pain
    They truly feel  
    And for those of us so well read
    Those read pains feel O, so swell

The lines suggest a familiar Bernstein understanding of the lyric as a futile attempt at self-expression and sincerity – that language is always a representation that we might act on but whose authenticity is impossible to demonstrate. Although far from reconciling poetry and “pain,” the lines do point toward the numerous