For bpNichol, who called himself a “writer who writes about the act of writing,” criticism was not only a means to address his own poetics and the textual practices of his generation; it was just as essential to his imagination as were his poems themselves.

Finally, after years of readers struggling to find or access many of Nichol’s innovative critical writings, this much needed and anticipated volume makes it possible to follow Nichol through his thirty-year-long thoughtful engagement with the process of creation. With essays, reviews, talks on poetics, letters, notes, photographs, and excerpts from interviews, editor Roy Miki has put together a provocative record of bpNichol’s always explorative approaches to the material conditions of textual production.

Representing a substantial collection of Nichol’s critical writing from the mid-1960s up to the year of his death in 1988, Meanwhile: The Critical Writings of bpNichol puts him, rightfully, on the vanguard of Canadian literature and critical theory. This collection is essential to our sense of Nichol not only as a writer, but also as a person of exemplary generosity, imagination, and intellectual range.

Wayne Clifford came to Grand Manan, New Brunswick as a permanent resident in 2007 after thirty-five years of college teaching. A former resident of Kingston, Ontario and Halifax, Nova Scotia, he and his wife, M.J. Edwards, have built a house at Rocky Corner on the Whistle Road, where she practices as an artist, and he writes more or less full-time. Author of more than a dozen poetry books and chapbooks, Wayne is also an amateur musician, artist, and award-winning designer. He holds a BA from the University of Toronto, and an MA and MFA from the prestigious international Writers' Workshop at The University of Iowa, but appreciates that his adopted home has much to teach him.

bpNichol (Barrie Phillip Nichol) was born September 30, 1944 in Vancouver, British Columbia. His writing is, by definition, engaged with what he called "borderblur": in his lifetime he wrote (somewhere between) poetry, novels, short fiction, children's books, musical scores, comic book art, collage/assemblage, and computer texts. Nichol was also an inveterate collaborator, working with the sound poetry ensemble The Four Horsemen (whose members were Nichol, Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Paul Dutton, and Steve McCaffery); Steve McCaffery as part of the Toronto Research Group (TRG); the visual artist Barbara Caruso; and countless other writers. In the mid 1980s bpNichol became a successful writer for the children's television show Fraggle Rock, produced by Jim Henson. His early work in sound was documented in Michael Ondaatje's film Sons of Captain Poetry. A second film has been made on Nichol, bp: pushing the boundaries, directed by Brian Nash; he also appears in Ron Mann's film Poetry in Motion. bpNichol died in Toronto, Ontario on September 25, 1988.

bp Nichol's profile page

Roy Miki
Roy Miki is a writer, poet, and critic who has taught and written about the work of bpNichol for many years. He was the editor of Pacific Windows: Collected Poems of Roy K. Kiyooka which won the 1997 Poetry Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. His major bibliographic study, A Record of Writing: An Annotated and Illustrated Bibliography of George Bowering, won the Gabriel Roy award from the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures as the best book on Canadian Literature for 1991. Miki is also the editor of This Is My Own: Letters to Wes and Other Writings on Japanese Canadians (1985); Tracing the Paths: Reading‚ Writing The Martyrology (1988); co-editor with Cassandra Kobayashi of Justice in Our Time: The Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement, and Meanwhile: The Critical Writings of bpNichol.

Cassandra Kobayashi
Cassandra Kobayashi helped shape the grass-roots community movement in Vancouver to seek redress for the forced removal, internment, and abrogation of the rights of Canadians of Japanese ancestry. She served on the national Redress Committee that negotiated the historic 1988 settlement with the Government of Canada. The struggle for redress is documented in her book, Justice in Our Time: The Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement, co-authored with Roy Miki.

Roy Miki's profile page

“Almost 15 years after his untimely death, Nichol is being recognized as a major Canadian literary figure.”
— National Post