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“Plans for a Monument”
from Nicholodeon
by Darren Wershler-Henry
Coach House Books, 1997
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Darren Wershler-Henry has described Nicholodeon as “the most expensive colouring-book in the history of Canadian Literature.” The book is a lavishly designed production that has become one of the most extolled examples of visual poetry in Canada. The work represents a response to the poetic legacy of bpNichol—an almost saintly figure, who has done more than any other poet to popularize the poetic values of linguistic radicalism in Canadian literature….
Since his death in 1988, bpNichol has suffered from a kind of “honorific criticism” that that makes little effort to discriminate between the mortal issue of the writer’s life and the formal value of the writer’s work. Many vaunted critics have attempted to sentimentalize his subversiveness, indulging in a kind of “hagiolatry,” romanticizing their memories of him at the expense of his most experimental achievements. His death has gone on to spawn many acts of devotion among his most awestruck disciples.
Wershler-Henry suggests that the obsessive rehearsal of such obsequy over the years has done little except endorse a cult of personality, in which critics shy away from the most radicalized innovations of Nichol in order to portray his romantic humanism as avant–garde. Wershler-Henry suggests that, rather than deify Nichol, recycling his celebrity as a commodity, we might instead apply the whimsical procedures of Nichol to Nichol himself, thereby expanding his legacy beyond such apotheosis.
Wershler–Henry redresses this problem by modifying both his academic training and his critical practice when discussing Nichol so that, instead of responding to the various lessons learned from all the myriad genres of writing by writing in only one genre (the essay), he responds to the work of Nichol in the same form as Nichol himself (writing visual poetry that analyzes visual poetry). Wershler-Henry has, in effect, striven to compose a series of essays that a reader might “view” rather than “read.”
Wershler–Henry argues that the critic is no less obliged than the artist to invent a new way of writing—and hence, “the job of these poems is to produce a vague sense of anxiety in the reader.” He believes that we must find a new use for the “leftover concrete” from the neglected tradition of visual poetry: “we are faced with the impossibility of building something totally new”—but are nevertheless bound by “the responsibility to maintain […] the ruins that we build on, without romanticizing them.”
Wershler-Henry, in effect, performs a radical autopsy upon the corpus of Nichol, dissecting the rhizome of his influence, doing so on the assumption that writing itself constitutes a kind of taxidermy, in which the critic almost begins to resemble a literary coroner: “[i]magine each page of this book as an embalmed cross–section […] of some exotic body,” in which “[t]he black marks […] constitute the outlines of capillaries,” once flowing with vital essence, but now clogged with “tarry residue.”
Rather than redeem the death of Nichol, turning the absence of such an adored figure into a “meaningful experience,” no different from a posthumous brand of consumable grief, Wershler–Henry refutes the elegiac impulse altogether, writing poems whose density and opacity allude to the meaninglessness of the dead. As Derrida remarks, “[t]rue ‘mourning’ seems to dictate […] the tendency to accept incomprehension, to leave a place for it, and to enumerate [it] coldly, almost like death itself….”
While Nicholodeon has long ago gone out of print, disappearing perhaps like the body of the poet who has inspired the work itself, readers can nevertheless explore all the “lowerglyphs” and “hyperglyphs” here at the online version of Nicholodeon.
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