Edited by Darren Wershler-Henrey and Lori Emerson
Coach House Books, 2007
Read by Nick McArthur
Given the breadth and variety of his work, it’s frankly amazing a book like this exists. In a career spanning 27 years, Nichol composed novels, comics, songs, essays, drawings, stories, teleplays, pamphlets, and, most famously and most impressively, thousands of pages of concrete, visual and lyric poetry. To have condensed such an oeuvre into a 300-page “reader” is a feat requiring considerable self-restraint, and the editors should be commended for having represented Nichol’s obsessions and experiments as exhaustively as they have. The Alphabet Game traces, among other things, Nichol’s career-long fascination with the relationship of the spoken to the written word and of the written word to the individual letter; his continuing obsession with saintliness and corporality; his facility with puns and multi-lingual wordplay. The editors attempt admirably what is, essentially, an impossible task: to compile a coherent and representative cross-section of Nichol’s immense body of writing.
Having said all this, there are several notable omissions, and a few strange inclusions. Unlike its (arguably better, but also flawed) predecessor— 1994’s An H in the Heart: a Reader— the new reader includes none of Nichol’s songs or comics, and none of his collaborative work. There is also, considering the length of the book, an alarming abundance of “sound poetry,” and a shortage of Nichol’s more lyric short poems. Nichol’s prose writings are also underrepresented— his novels, especially For Jesus Lunatick, are truncated almost into nonexistence, and the brilliant but hard to find Reading and Writing: the Toronto Research Game is left out entirely, as are many of Nichol’s best micro-fictions. The nine-book long poem, The Martyrology, is by far the most thoroughly excerpted work, though it too seems unjustly reduced as it appears here. Considering the expansiveness of The Martyrology, and its availability in most bookstores, it may well have been better to have omitted it entirely.
The Alphabet Game is currently the only book of its kind available in book stores, and, though it’s a hundred pages lighter than it rightly should have been, it performs its function impressively: it offers a useful introduction to the depth and scope of Nichol’s writing. With any luck, this book will inspire readers to explore Nichol’s work at greater length, and will help them to navigate his vast and diverse catalogue. For aspiring students of Nichol’s work, it is, at least, a good place to begin.
