Typewriter/Art: “Pope Leo: El Elope”, 1969

POPE LEO: EL ELOPE @ bpNichol.ca

From the bp Nichol site: “While his initial attempts at writing in the early 1960s produced fiction and lyric poetry, Nichol first garnered international attention in the late 1960s with his hand-drawn concrete and visual poems—poems in which he brilliantly works against the conventions of the traditional lyric poem by exploring the material, tangible, and aural qualities of the word and the letter. (Not surprisingly his work with the aural qualities of language soon led him to sound poetry, resulting in the release of four solo audio recordings.) Nichol’s first major collection of concrete poetry, Konfessions of an Elizbethan Fan Dancer, marked the beginning of a long engagement with the typewriter and its unique ability to mechanically reproduce letters an exact distance apart; in other words, the grid-like qualities of typewritten text allowed him to create meaning semantically and visually, horizontally and vertically. Soon after, Nichol published typewriter concrete in the boxed bp and in the 1970 Governor General’s Award-winning collection of loose poems Still Water. While his concrete poems illustrate an astonishing range of techniques and concerns, other early works such as ABC: the aleph beth book and aleph unit point to his lifelong interest in representing processuality by gradually transforming series of letter-shapes.”