• 1 See Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse” October 110 (Fall 2004): 3-22: “[…] the work in question is a (...)
• 2 Examples include Thomas Hirschhorn’s Musée précaire Albinet (2004) and the earlier work of Christia (...)

3As demonstrated in visual poetry, the evolution of a “scriptural imagination” (137) intertwines with a continuing fascination for the archive as a cultural artefact and philosophical measure of our time. How do the apparatus and the procedures of the archive bear comparison with the aesthetic features of visual poetry and how, as a cultural construct, does it echo some of the epistemological questions visual poetry gravitates towards. One point of departure is to consider the relationship between the “archival impulse” 1 prevalent in contemporary art, as Hal Foster has defined it and the changing temporality and spaces of cultural memory brought into focus by visual poetry. The tendency amongst artists to thematize the archive and to appropriate it as a material source is one perhaps we are familiar with, through the work of such artists as Christian Boltanski or more recently, Thomas Hirschhorn.2 The metaphorical affinities between memory and the objects featured in contemporary art come alive in the patterns given to a shared past that are just as soon queried and taken apart. The compilation and recycling of artefacts direct us repeatedly back to the premise that what we know is shaped by the structures used to organize signs in a network of relationships. Alongside such examples from the art world, visual poetry points to the complexity and even the vulnerability of this assertion through a commitment to experiment—a willingness to define poetic praxis in terms of a dismantling of systems or at the very least, a refusal to locate poetry within the bounds of a single genre or a single network of relationships.

• 3 My translation. « La consignation tend à coordonner en un seul corpus, en un système ou une synchro (...)
• 4 « Extériorité d’un lieu, mise en œuvre topographique d’une technique de consignation, constitution (...)

4Among contemporary poets, the increasing attention to visual design appears to reflect what Hal Foster calls the “quasi-archival architecture” of materials when artists begin building their own matrixes of memory (5). Visual shapes and patterns arise almost as means to gauge the destiny of what Michel Foucault conceptualized as a form of archaeology. For Foucault, the archive has an archaeological premise since it is equated with a description of culture positing a point of origin, from arkhe (Greek for “beginnings”) (see Foucault). What description of culture does visual poetry provide? With its emphasis on praxis—on making but also on undoing—spurning the left-hand margin and the very conditions of reading and writing, the question remains whole. The performative intelligence of visual poetry has always denoted a critical strain of poetics—one that the Fluxus poet Dick Higgins argues stems all the way back to early modes of pattern poetry and which makes it averse to the authority embodied in the archive, as a physical place and as a system (Higgins 6). This is the same institutional authority, as Derrida explains, that is the very “condition of the archive” (Derrida 2, my translation). If the archive possesses this authority, however well it may function as a tool devoted to ordering, housing and transmitting traces of the past, the performance of poetry demonstrates that its action of “consignment”3 is never ideologically neutral and never definitive in a material and temporal sense.4

• 5 It is noteworthy that a detail from the cover of Beaulieu’s novel Local Colour (2008) is the cover (...)

5The work of two Canadian poets, bpNichol and Derek Beaulieu suggest how visual poetry challenges the authority of language, its ability to signify a recording of the past, all the while celebrating an awareness of the materiality of the writer’s medium. Similarly, if their poetry shies away from the discursiveness and the permanency of the archive, it shows at the same time the propensity for a visual architecture to fully embrace the problem of how memory is made intelligible. Memory materializes with bpNichol and Derek Beaulieu as their visual poetries engage with archival processes. A scriptural dynamic, pictographic gestures and an alphabetic design converge to celebrate a point of origin for poetic language and in a broad sense, for all logos. In a vein that recalls the alignment of poetry and semiotics, the alphabet is viewed as comprising a network from which emerges any number of potential significations. Scribe and painter, the poet is attuned to the visual scheme of language, but as though a semiotician, he is also an explorer of signs, unearthing the roots of signification. bpNichol, a member of The Four Horsemen, one of the leading avant-garde poetry groups in Canada in the 1970s, subscribed to the intermedial bent of Fluxus, which was alive to such interdisciplinary standpoints. When Nichol died at the untimely age of forty-three in 1988, he left behind a tremendously varied corpus, his work touching upon print and sound poetry and hosting a repertoire of musicals, cartoons, computer texts, concrete poetry, children’s songs, prose and an epic-length project, entitled Martyrology. Derek Beaulieu is a contemporary poet, born in 1973, who has been publishing and exhibiting a range of concrete and visual poetry since the 1990s. As bpNichol before him, Derek Beaulieu’s focus on the alphabet as a vector for poetic experiment and signification exhibits an interest in paragrammatic structures and equally so, repeatedly directs the reader back to the foundations of the code upon which poetic language is built. Beaulieu expands upon the awareness exhibited in bpNichol’s writing of the new textual environments available to poetry and the fluidity that characterize them. Beaulieu’s writing boasts a substantial body of criticism that reflects upon the interplay of print and visual environments, demonstrating for one how the “conditional space(s)” (Glazier 15) of the Web have come to inhabit the poetic imagination since bpNichol’s intermedial experiments. Here too, the influence of the intermedial theory of Fluxus is apparent and most recently, the overlap between a critical and a creative vein shows affinities with Conceptual writing, an international movement comprised mostly of poets whose work features techniques of procedural writing and appropriation.5

• 6 For a discussion of Beaulieu’s engagement with Conceptual writing, see Kit Dobson, Introduction, “W (...)

6In his book, seen of the crime: essays on conceptual writing, Beaulieu describes Conceptual writing as working “with extant material in order to recontextualize an already existing genre with a focus on materiality, collection and accumulation” (35).6 Long before this, bpNichol was taking to task the materiality of writing, asking what can be recorded in poetry and through what channels. These questions are threaded through some of his earliest work, as in the poem “Ruth” (1967), in a manner that might ring true across a long genealogy of writers and writing building modalities and registers of visuality:

• 7 “Interview with bpNichol, Feb 13, 1978” by Ken Norris, Essays on Canadian Writing 12 (Fall 1978): 2 (...)
• 8 First Screening (1984): originally a computer-animated piece written in Apple Basic code and now av (...)

7The meditation on patterning apparent in bpNichol’s early writing quickly acquired distinctly tangible forms. At the start of his career, this meant the innovative use of fonts and margins for the typewriter poems he likens to “eye-cleaning exercises” (As Elected 12),7 whose example was learned from the International Concrete Movement. From there, he transitioned to hand-drawn poems and parodic, cartoon-like illustrations. His poems made manifest various derivatives of abecedarian techniques, which in turn gave rise to an interest in primitive programming language and ultimately, the creation of computer-animated pieces as early as 1984. These were recorded on floppy disks and referred to then generically as “computer poems”.8 The early experiment with code is only one of the many visual typologies favoured by bpNichol that emphasize the spatial relationships of language outside the usual rhetorical connectives. With Nichol, the scriptural experience is consistently grounded in different technological environments and the upheaval they represent for modes of knowing and understanding.

• 9 Zygal: A Book of Mysteries and Translations, Toronto: The Coach House Press, 1985, 57.

9Whatever form it takes—a sustained narrative or one that is cut short, a mere trace—the narrative or the notation of memory enabled by the alphabet changes along with the shape of the print medium. In the graphic displays of Nichol’s work, this entails multiple alphabet tables or abecedaries, some of which are designed to carry an inscription revelatory of the past. In such instances, the visual design cannot be understood only as the repertoire of the poet’s scriptural ingenuity. Here the alphabet takes shape as part of the poet’s sketching of an ontological quest — how to inscribe one’s point of origin. The eighth letter in the alphabet, the letter “H”, forms the scriptural backbone and the pivotal point of this tropic architecture, in so far as it is made to represent a point of attachment to an ideal origin and the key to the poet’s autobiographical fictions, of which there are many. One example of a visual figuration of Nichol’s archival alphabet is the 1972 poem entitled, “A Study of Context: H”:9

• 10 Steve McCaffrey is referring to bpNichol’s volume The Martyrology. See North of Intention: Critical (...)

Within the seemingly unstudied form of this hand-drawn image lies a telling apposition. The eye is trained to see the end to an emblematic puzzle as it has been sketched out in this rough pen-and-ink drawing: how to get from “H” to “I”. If read metaphorically, the network of signs assembled on the page register as a cryptogram, a secret language designed to illustrate the path of “I”, a self that has gone adrift or who is momentarily standing outside the framework by which he is defined. Beyond the ironic distancing of the academic title (“A Study of Context: H”), the poem appears thus to reaffirm its intention to ascribe patterns to a quest ethos. Though contemporary with postmodern theories negating the possibility of unity and origin, the pattern asks, where do we come from and perhaps, at the same time, where are we going? The analogy between the quest as a narrative theme in poetry and as a form of graphic play for the artist arises repeatedly when reading Nichol at length. In this instance, a fictional autobiographical context emerges from the non-referential frame of the grid designed by the poet. The primary function of the grid structure, according to Rosalind Krauss, is to assert “modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse” (9). Only the spatial organization of Nichol’s grid falls short of generating the same opacity as in the works of painters whose geometric constructions rely on grid frameworks and to whom Krauss means to refer in her discussion of modernist abstraction (Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Suprematists of 1915-20, Piet Mondrian and the Dutch De Stijl movement). This stems from the fact that the poet chooses not to allow the objectified image, namely the grid, to obliterate discourse and importantly, to erase temporality and thus the ties with the past, imaginary or otherwise. Rather, the blurring of generic boundaries, between the grid and the letter, and the transgression it implies, begs to be viewed as discursively productive. It resembles perhaps most closely, among Nichol’s European contemporaries, the pungency of the novelist George Perec’s grids and generative techniques. The formal ingenuity of Nichol’s craft is defined by another contemporary, the poet Steve McCaffery, in reference to Nichol’s lettrist bent as “the remotivation of the single letter as an agent of semantic redistribution” (65).10 What this suggests is that by way of a paragrammatic function, poetry sets out to find a shape that rehearses how meaning is made in lieu of building representational images that are immediately recognizable. That each individual graphic sign become generative of meaning is what “A Study of Context: H” urges. This holds true in so far as the positions and inscriptions of the letter “H” come to encompass networks of signification that lie outside the grid: the single letter is remotivated.

• 11 “Line Telling 1”, in bpNichol, Zygal: A Book of Mysteries and Translations, 1985, 36.
• 12 “A Study of Context 2: S into H”, in bpNichol, Zygal: A Book of Mysteries and Translations (1985), (...)
• 13 The letters are drawn by Barbara Caruso, published by her Seripress in 1978 and then published in N (...)

10If letters in Nichol’s writing are derivative and a single sign is meant to tell a great deal, this can be observed first of all in a graphic sense.11 The eloquent example upon which Nichol builds is the letter “I”—the emblematic lyrical figure, the autobiographical self-presence, whose inscription evolves out of a game, a visual enigma. As it is featured in the volume Zygal: A Book of Mysteries and Translations, the first person pronoun grows out of a process of semantic redistribution from “H” to “I” (in another visual poem, Nichol graphically transfers from “S” to “H”).12 As one critic has suggested, “the basic H is used to re-create the alphabet” (Jack David, As Elected 13), a project that is carried through differently with the Toronto artist, Barbara Caruso in 1978. In another visual poem entitled, “H (an alphabet)”, Caruso draws the twenty-six letters of Nichol’s alphabet, all of which are derived from the letter “H”.13

• 14 bpNichol, “Portable Systems 18”, An H in the Heart: bpNichol: A Reader 28.

11Nichol subjects the structure of the alphabet to the vicissitudes of writing, in the same way that he dramatizes the desire for a unified subject in literature. This analogy is apparent in an entry dated 1973, entitled “commentary 2: autobiographical note”.14 Here, among a combination of prose and free verse, under the heading “Portable Systems 18”, we encounter a lower case “i” whose ambulatory paths are directed by an alphabetical pattern centering upon the letter H:

• 15 See Zygal where Nichol devises a parodic mathematical formula to describe his compositional process (...)

12This is another instance of what Nichol calls his “transformational writing”,15 whereby the motif of destruction and repair is played out on the page. The attention devoted to what is lost through transience and change is expressed through the foregrounding of visuality. The poet performs his selections notationally, bringing to life the complexity of the dynamic between remembering and forgetting. In this regard, visual poetry mirrors the processes of history and fiction because it performs such selections, between what is to be lost and what is to become part of a larger narrative or scheme. As in Derrida’s typology, the contents of the past are subject to the social and material structures according to which the archive is organized, evolving both as a place of “consignment”, thus of preservation, and of “effacement” (26).

• 16 Quoted in Kit Dobson, Introduction, “Where Meanings Are Not Expected”, in Please, No More Poetry: T (...)
• 17 See Kit Dobson’s introduction, Derek Beaulieu, Please, No More Poetry, xii.

13The workings of the dynamic established between “consignment” and “effacement” continue to inform the practice of poets for whom visualization is less a spontaneous, generative process than a structural one, relying upon textual and technological constraints. Following in the footsteps of bpNichol, Derek Beaulieu espouses a visuality according to which “poetry is no longer the beautiful expression of emotive truths; it is the archaeological rearrangement of the remains of an ancient civilization” (seen of the crime 5516). As though a kind of alphabetical remapping, Beaulieu’s piece, “Wild Rose Country” records “every piece of text within one block”17 of the author’s home in Calgary, Alberta. These include advertisements on billboards, shop signs and license plates. Taken as a whole, they form an image of a suburban landscape studded with commodities, mostly cars whose license plates in Alberta until quite recently, used to carry the slogan, “Wild Rose Country”. This cataloguing landscape is ironically devoid of any sign of nature, of any “wild rose”:

• 19 Lori Emerson, “Afterword: An Interview with derek beaulieu”, Please, No More Poetry: The Poetry of (...)
• 20 derek beaulieu (ed.), 26 Alphabets (for Sol LeWitt), Calgary, Alberta: No Press, 2009, np. https:// (...)
• 21 No captions accompany each “Alphabet”, but if we observe the order in which the contributors of thi (...)

14As Beaulieu explains, “I view poetry, as typified by concrete poetry, as the architectural structuring of the material of language; the unfamiliar fitting together of fragments, searching for structure” (68).19 The poet’s filiation with bpNichol rings true in this statement, especially in light of another project, similarly grounded in techniques of appropriation and constraint, begun in 2008, entitled “26 Alphabets (for Sol LeWitt)”.20 This piece follows upon the artist’s death in 2007 and reads as a cross between an elegy and an ode. Adopting the role of editor, Beaulieu takes up Sol LeWitt’s instruction-based conceptual artwork and asks a group of 26 poets and artists (including Robert Fitterman, Johanna Drucker, Christian Bök, to name a few) to fulfill a series of simple instructions: “On a single sheet of paper in letters approximately one half inch tall write the alphabet from A to Z”.21 In the following example, these same instructions are subsequently parodied, as they fall in place word for word in one of the twenty-six “Alphabets”:

• 22 See derek beaulieu, 26 Alphabets for Sol LeWitt: “For each of the first two volumes, Simplex 17 (20 (...)

As Beaulieu explains in his foreword to the volume, this is the third iteration of his alphabet project, two previous such projects also being marked by “no editorial interference”.22 In what resembles a gesture of fetishisation, the compositional use of the alphabet strikes an interesting parallel with the “archival impulse” as described by Hal Foster—the desire to repeat, here visually, the denotative, descriptive and notational system of language. In another example, by the poet and visual artist Donato Mancini, the letters of the alphabet merge into a visual canvas where the repetition of signs exhibits a rhetorical playfulness and a graphic density: