Type all

bpNichol published grOnk Magazine (through his Ganglia Press) from 1967 to 1988 - it was one of the most innovative, rare, and important small-press publications dedicated to Canadian Concrete poetry. This Ganglia Press Index was published as grOnk Magazine series 8 number 7 in 1972 and includes an author index for grOnk and SYNAPSIS magazines.

bpNichol's The Martyrology is a long poem begun in 1967 and continuing until Nichol's death in 1988. It includes Books 1 & 2 (1972), Books 3 & 4 (1976), Book 5 (1982), Book 6 Books (1992), gifts: Book(s) 7 & (1990), and As Sanctos: Book 9 (1992). The text in this volume is a facsimile, with minor corrections, of the 1990 edition of Gifts.

Greaseball Comics was a newsletter published by bpNichol. This is the eighth issue, possibly published in 1972.

Issue 3 consists of Phone Book, by Gerry Gilbert, with a found prose insert (I assume also by Gerry Gilbert but attributed to “Gerry Carrier”). Phone Book is a typewritten book of poetry published in association with Nelson Balls’ Weed Flower Press in 1969. The cover design is by the painter Barbara Caruso, with whom Nichol worked collaboratively on a number of occasions (the most stunning, beautiful example is, in my opinion, The Adventures of Milt the Morph in Colour).

Issue 4 is another typewritten, concrete poetry-esque collection: Nelson Ball’s Force Movements. The digitized version I’ve made available here is actually a second edition, slightly revised, that Ball published in November 1990 in memory of bpNichol. It was first published by Ganglia Press as grOnk 3:4 in July 1969.

Issue 7 is a long, narrow, typewriter-concrete poem Sprouds and Vigables by D.R. Wagner. I twas published in an edition of 250, also in July 1969. Note that the text of the first poem echoes a later Four Horsemen sound poem, “In the Middle of a Blue Balloon,” from their 1973 album CANADADA.

Issue 8 is a short, untitled piece by John Riddell – like the others in the third series, this too is typewritten concrete but with the difference that here Riddell also explores, or explodes?, geometrical shapes and patternings which intersect and break up the typewritten language.

The second series of grOnk was begun in September 1968 and the issues for this series were published irregularly. The fourth issue of the second series features Barbara O'Connelly's "THERE WERE DREAMS.' The cover is a sheet of 17 x 22" cream card-stock folded in half; inside are seven individual sheets of cream 8.5 x 11 paper stapled together. Curiously: while the first couple issues of the series were published in 1968, this work by Connelly was printed at Ganglia Press in July 1967.

The sixth issue of the second series of grOnk Magazine was published in 1969, a year earlier than the fifth issue, and featured John Riddell's "POPE LEO: EL ELOPE" with drawings by bpNichol.

In April 1969 bpNichol (along with David UU, John Riddell, Bill Bissett, and John Simon) published 300 mimeographed copies of the first issue of the third series of grOnk magazine. "QUOTE" by Gerry Gilbert, written in July 1965, is the most difficult, or impossible, of the grOnk issues to digitize since it consists of 23 separate slips of paper inside a standard letter-sized envelope.