bpNichol
Barrie Phillip Nichol (30 September 1944 – 25 September 1988), known as bpNichol, was a Canadian poet, sound poet, editor and publisher, and a creative-writing teacher at York University in Toronto. He ran grOnk/Ganglia Press and first drew international attention in the 1960s for concrete poetry. In 1970 he won the Governor General's Award for poetry across four simultaneous publications: the prose booklet 'The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid', the lyric collection 'Beach Head', the box of concrete poetry cards 'Still Water', and 'The Cosmic Chef', a boxed anthology of Canadian concrete poems he edited. His best-known work, 'The Martyrology' (1972–1992), is an open-ended lifelong poem investigating language. In the early 1980s Nichol programmed 'First Screening' on an Apple IIe — a suite of twelve kinetic 'computer poems' written in Applesoft BASIC and published by Underwhich Editions in 1984 as a signed edition of 100 on diskette. It is the canonical work of poetry-on-disk and one of the earliest artist-authored works of animated digital literature. A second edition followed from Red Deer College Press in 1993, and the work has since been preserved and re-issued by Jim Andrews and collaborators.
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