024O3U

Nichol's other publications and disparate interests. This experience, my
familiarity with the physicality of Nichol's writing—the stages in his revision
process, his script, shorthand, notational symbols, etc.—as well as
the persnickety attention demanded by archival scholarship, suggested to
others that I would be able to handle the job of sorting and organizing the
papers in Nichol's study. It took three months. The project requiring the
most urgent attention, and that Ellie asked me to see to before anything
else, was the manuscript for this book.
When I first entered Nichol's study last summer, I picked up and
opened a small notebook covered in blue velour, and immediately encountered
one of the poems in "body paranoia: initial fugue." Guessing
that this was part of a sequence, I flipped through to find the rest of the
poems. Reading these lines in bp's last notebook was a difficult beginning.
But I proceeded, pulled out the file containing the "final" draft of
Gifts, and discovered a pencilled note (10 September 1988) preceding the
preliminary pages stating (asking?) that these poems be "printed on separate
sheets of paper" and "interleaved into final bound copy of Martyr
7&." (A vaguer note appears in the "bp:if' poem written on the same
day. The placement in the text of the "3000 B.C. quote" is indicated by
an arrow, but neither it nor its source is identified. Although I kept my
eyes open for it, I did not locate it in the drafts, among the rest of the papers,
or in any of Nichol's recent reading.)
These meditations on the outcome of his surgery, including his not surviving
it (as "bp:if," the abbreviated title heading some of the pieces in
the notebook, suggests) are the last five pieces of The Martyrology to be
written. They are now, in this posthumous publication, "emotionally
heavy," as Barrie might have said. But his speculative mind and irrepressible
wit prevent them from being maudlin or self-indulgent. And
this final outrageous gesture—leaving these last poems free of the book's
spine, so that they will be the first to be lost—merges the process of his
writing life with the materiality of the book.
leaf / leaves / leaving.
Irene Niechoda
August, 1990