still water detail distilled water vapour

In 1970, the concretist bpNichol published a small box of pages he called still water. The country of creation being Canada, still water had government support for the printing, and it and three other of Nichol's books won prestigious Governor General’s Literary Awards for that year.

A book in a box, 28 sheets total (3 of which were blank, 5 of which contained only publishing metadata, leaving a mere 20 pages of text), it’s not a long or hard read. The densest page of poetry held only 13 word parts (almost entirely repetitions of the element ing), and a few of the others included but a single word, such as the resonant pwoermd em ty.

Given the description so far, most Americans would expect me now to begin a tirade against government waste and the emptiness of contemporary art. Considering that Aram Saroyan’s famous pwoermd lighght once won a $750 government grant in the 1970s, initiating three decades of invective by anti-government anti-minimalist Americans—a jeremiad might indeed seem in order.

Unfortunately for you, I am a minimalist at heart, and I get ineffable joy out of the subtle insights possible from the fewest words.

By all accounts, bpNichol was a wonderful and generous man (and he once even complimented a small visual poem of mine, so I feel a special kinship only strangers who’ve never met can feel), and to this day, years after his death, Canadians and others still express love for him. He was a great creator of art, fashioning works of quirky visual and “regular” poetry, fiction, sound poetry, comics, television, essays, and on and on.

Nevertheless, still water is not a particularly successful fascicle of poems. It includes a few wonderful pwoermds (including one of the simplest and sweetest visual pwoermds ever), and it makes good use of praecisio (nothingness, blankness) as text, but frequently Nichol’s ear and eye are a bit off in this score of loose pages.

Yet I’m always drawn back to these poems. The attempts at pure minimalism (a double-dotted i as poem, the ing sequence, and a two- or three-word paean to writing) strike me as worth the experiment even when they don’t quite click for me.

& other readers feel the same attraction to this book.

The steady minimalist stuart pid loved the work so much that in 1990 he published distilled water, a beautiful handmade edition of a page-by-page reinvention of bp’s book. A reverent homage, distilled water even improves on some of Nichol’s own pieces, and each feels like Shakespeare’s reworking of the words of Kit Marlowe.

An interesting story by itself, yet not the end of it.

In the year 2000, pid’s pal, paloin biloid—a sequence of words found nowhere else on the planet save your head—wrote water detail. An homage (or anti-homage) to both still water and distilled water, this sheaf of leaves is a quasi-punk riff on the first two water books. In his own book, biloid incorporates visual eccentricities eschewed by the first two and usually uses a spidery serifed typeface, countering the concrete-standard sans-serif faces of its precursors. paloin biloid’s book is also less of a bibliophile’s object, packaged as it is in a plastic sandwich bag (the type one closes by pushing a flap of plastic into the bag and pulling a cuff of plastic back over the bag’s contents). Still, this usurper constructs a few remarkable reworkings of Nichol’s minimalisms.

And the transmogrificative sequence from Nichol’s natural groww through endwar’s triple-u version to biloid’s infinite growth is a wonder to perceive.

So there we have it: the foundation for my own water vapour.

Begun last week and tentatively completed tonight, water vapour memorializes its Canadian great-grandfather by spelling vapour with an epenthetic u, which suggests pour to the American eyeye. My huthification of the source text includes a more stylish sans-serif typeface (the Trebuchet you didn’t realize was the carrier of these words), the occasional use of color, a few more typographical games than any of its ancestral texts (save biloid’s), the incorporation of French into the text (appropriately enough, considering its genealogy), and a greater reliance on the pun for esthetic effect.

(I’ve decided to try out the more American spelling “esthetic” over “aesthetic” for the time being.)

At this point (so close to its birth), I still love my infant water vapour, but I leave to posteriority the work of determining its long-term value. What impresses me about this whole sequence of 5-by-5-inch-square books, though, is how one minimalist work served as such a rich source of inspiration for three separate yet related works.

Without the examples of its ancestors, water vapour would never exist.


a brief bibliography of water books:

Nichol, bp. still water. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1970. (If looking for a copy, try www.bookfinder.com and be prepared to pay at least $50 American for a copy of the second edition.)

pid, stuart. distilled water. Athens, OH: IZEN, 1990. (Contact IZEN and publisher endwar at POB 891, Athens, OH 45701-0891 or via email at endwar70@hotmail.com.)

biloid, paloin. water detail. Athens, OH: IZEN, 2000. (Contact Realific Press via email at earthmans@yahoo.com or contact IZEN at the address above—but there were scant few copies of this publication printed.)

Huth, G. water vapour. Schenectady, NY: dbqp, 2004. (Of course, I haven’t published this book yet, but I’ve laid it out and am waiting a little while before publishing.)

ecr. l'inf.