I dunno, Chris, the most convincing phrase in your essay to me was "however tenuously." I can't see what makes this little sketch a poem. Such exercises, with few exceptions, strike me as being adequate neither to the demands of visual art nor to those of poetry. The question you haven't answered here is: "Is this a good poem?" Presumably, you think it is, else why bother? But what makes it a good poem? A dazzling image? A thought-provoking metaphor? Powerful rhythm? Intellectual probity? Nope. The poemness of this poem can exist nowhere but in the beholder's eye--or rather, between his ears.

I often think that such alphabetical drawings have been conceived as tricks to be played on earnest analysts, to see to what strained lengths they will go to imbue the insignificant with meaning. The other perceptive comment you made was your concluding sentence: "The instrument is you." This is the sort of thinking that has made the analysis of restaurant menus--or any other "text"--fair games for "English" scholars: it's all about how the reader constructs meaning. Call it the false divorce of process and product. This is not the case with real art, which does not leave its audience so utterly alone to invent its importance.

A friend of mine who was a friend and collaborator of BP Nichol's said to me recently that he thought Nichol's reputation rested mostly on his personal magnetism--that what he had written, which is what a poet must be judged by, was of no great quality. I don't know if you knew Nichol personally or not, but it seems to me that the reverence in which he is held is due in no small part to a cadre of champions who did know him. I predict that when the last person who knew BP Nichol dies, so will his reputation as a poet. If not sooner.

I didn't know Nichol, and I may have once been more skeptical than you are because I was surrounded by those 'champions' you mention. Even now, I wouldn't count myself one of the champions, or even a second. I can say, though, that I see this as an attempt to do instantly rather than sequentially what any metapoetic poem does - make you conscious of language and the several ways we process written text. More celebrated critics have more celebrated versions of the division I offer here - Pound in _ABC of Reading_, Hollander in _Vision and Resonance_, Frye in _Anatomy of Criticism_; you'll need to argue with them about the method I've used. And "spelling" really does come from the notion of conjuring with signs.

The hard thing to accept is the shift in priority from words as signs to letters as pictures. You process the picture before you can process the word; you process the sound of the word before you process what the word denotes. At the risk of sounding like one of those champions, it's a poem more interested in making you do something than in saying something to you. Process and product aren't divorced - you're required to undergo the process if you want to find a product.

There are certainly metaphors here, too - whether you judge them dazzling or thought-provoking is up to you. Representing sound as a physical space is certainly a metaphor even if the metaphor isn't articulated as "Sound is Shaped Space". The "axe" here is also deliberate, an apt word for a poem that attempts to make a sharp break with traditional reading strategies. Include the title and you also have some intellection via an allusion to Blake's _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ - "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." I might have thrown some of this stuff in the essay, but I only had 500 words.

Have to say, though, Zach - that middle paragraph verges on Duckspeak. Writing this kind of work off as a trick on the critic appeals to those who already agree with you and alienates anyone who doesn't. It's only persuasive force is something like peer-pressure, or an appeal to a very conservative notion of common sense that is only reinforced by the gesture toward a monolithic "high art" at the end of the paragraph. There's a huge difference between the kind of tie-dyed 'divorce of process and product' you're attacking and attempting to find the intellectual unity in a work intended to create a particular meaning, and seeing how the form of that work encourages the mind (and body) to respond in order to realize that meaning.

Now - I'm off to Denny's.

I should also add that the basic impetus for the poem is a dead metaphor - "volume" as a measurement of both sound and space.

Subsequent to posting my comments, I had the chance to watch a documentary about Nichol. This was interesting, in part because it helped me to see what it was that people see in him. Most of the comments, from a wide array of writers et al., had to do with his overflowing positive energy and with what I'd call his stance. The title of the film, "Pushing the Boundaries" sums up what that stance is. It also showed that I was dead wrong in thinking the poem might be a trick played on critics, because there appears to have been more than a little of the earnest analyst in Nichol himself, based on the statements of methodology he makes in the film.

It's interesting to me that you bring up Blake, who was definitely a boundary pusher and who worked in both words and visual images. But the way you bring up Blake, as a possible oblique allusion in the title of Nichol's drawing, only reinforces the paucity of this thing as a poem and as a picture. Blake said things in his poems. In fact, he could be downright didactic. And his pictures were visionary metaphor. Nichol's is a doodle. A clever doodle, I'll concede, but a doodle nonetheless. When I say that process is divorced from product, I mean that Nichol has perhaps given the blueprint for a significant work of art, but seems to have lacked the industry and/or talent to take it beyond the initial sketch stage. This kind of disposability is something he and his followers sanctify: "it's all about process" is the mantra of "Pushing the Boundaries." This is an idea that's troublesome to me for a number of reasons: 1)We live in an age of disposability; if anything, artists should be criticizing, not embracing, our culture of tomorrow's trash. 2)When it becomes all about process, the idea of an audience outside of the writing community is abandoned. (A chicken and egg issue, I guess.) The cultural irrelevancy of a "poem" like this one is its own self-fulfilling prophecy. 3)Inflating process and deflating product creates the false notion that anyone can be an artist. This relates to 2): If you have no audience outside of the "community" then try to recruit as many people into the community as possible. The easiest way to do this is to drop any requirements for rigour and skill. It's fundamentally self-indulgent.

But on one level, I guess it does succeed as a poem that wants me to do something: It makes me deny that it's a poem. Nekked, I say, nekked!

I'd say Nichol could be downright didactic, too; at very least, the genesis of this column was pedagogical. I use this poem to teach, in the extreme, the various ways poetry creates meaning. Because it's a cartoon (the emperor in a T and bermudas, maybe, but not nekkid), it helps demystify the importance of looking and listening when reading a poem. It begins with a kind of thinking familiar to anyone who has taken an I.Q. test or perused the newspaper puzzle page - not exactly an exclusive, private code that leaves a public audience behind. This is a very different kind of recruiting for the community than the cultish model you suggest. The poem addresses how to read, not how to become part of a legion of kool-aid-stained imitators. I don't see it as the blueprint for a later work; I see it as an interesting compliment to existing great works.

"Doors 1" fairs poorly when compared to Blake, true. At least, I'd agree, though I'm not sure Blake's any more comprehensible to a wide audience. This feels like a zero sum game, though, and I don't see why it needs to be. I'm not arguing that "Doors 1" is a paragon, only that its content and its construction reflect on "How Poems Work". Appreciating different methodologies, engaging them with an open mind, is part of Nicol's equation.