aka bpNichol by Frank Davey

Author:Frank Davey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2012-03-11T05:00:00+00:00

16. Working Together

the family is all of man and the history is everyone

— bpNichol in Miki,

Meanwhile: The Critical Writings of bpNichol, 73

Although in mid-1973 Barrie — not yet having recognized that The Martyrology was itself an ongoing present-tense autobiography — was still in the grip of the unfinished prose “autobiographical” narratives about John Cannyside and Phillip Workman, his new Four Horsemen and TRG associations with Steve McCaffery were leading him in different directions. As early as the spring of 1972, after more than a year of performing with the Horsemen at events in the Toronto area, he had written in his notebook about his dissatisfaction with solo sound — that such poems were now “over” in his work; that he had learned from them all that he had needed. He had begun to see his connection to a collaborating co-performer as more creatively fruitful than his own connection to an audience, telling himself that he had become overly focussed on the responses of the people he was performing for, that he had always “retrogressed” to the material they were most comfortable with rather than moving forward and challenging them with something unfamiliar, that he thus needed to make “drastic” changes in what he aspired to. During 1973–74, the Horsemen, aided by the LP Nada Canadada, which they had released in late 1972, would become nationally known, giving performances in Ottawa, Montreal, Saint John, Wolfville, Hamilton, Edmonton, Winnipeg, and Vancouver. During appearances in the latter three cities they would record the tracks for their next LP, Live in the West, which would be released in 1977. They also began work on what they and their publisher believed would be a collaboratively written book, Horse d’Oeuvres. But the manuscript that resulted, which was published in the PaperJacks mass-market paperback format in 1975, was merely a collection of individual works by the group’s members. “When we were first approached about this manuscript, our impulse was to deliver a unified, collectively written book — a print parallel to our compositions in sound. But we have abandoned that idea,” they wrote in the collectively written foreword. Barrie’s disappointment at this abandonment (which he seemed at the time to have experienced as a literal abandonment by his fellow Horsemen) was partly mitigated, however, by the statement in the concluding paragraph that the group considered the book “the first compositional step in a process leading to more and more written collaborations.”

THE FOUR HORSEMEN IN PERFORMANCE, 1973.

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