This card by bpNichol came to me via Ellie and Sarah Nichol this year:

It’s a reproduction of his first Christmas Card, 1979.  (That was just 9 years before his death at 44.)  I exchanged one or two brief letters with bp toward the end of his life, so can’t say I was very close to him.  But I’m pretty close to his oeuvre.  I mention how slightly I knew him because of my reaction to this card: I take it to be full of his spirit–bp, the gift-giving Santa, waving as he disappears behind hills of snow, leaving behind a wonderful H/castle, the letter H being his favorite letter and, as a textual element, representative of literature– and a castle being what a bp/Santa in this magical realm would have to have been leaving.  Ergo, the main gift he’s given us is his poetry.  The fact that he died too soon after this card adds a melancholy tone to what it conveys–that I feel deepens, and is deepened by, the card’s final joyous victory over life’s unavoidable, constant pains and sorrow.

I generally feel that a poem is what it is on the page.  Its creator, and his biography are irrelevant.  Sometimes that is not the case.  Not that I may not have gone overboard the wrong way in reading it.  In any case, I hope you enjoy it–and all that the day it celebrates is for you.

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This card by bpNichol came to me via Ellie and Sarah Nichol this year:

It’s a reproduction of his first Christmas Card, 1979.  (That was just 9 years before his death at 44.)  I exchanged one or two brief letters with bp toward the end of his life, so can’t say I was very close to him.  But I’m pretty close to his oeuvre.  I mention how slightly I knew him because of my reaction to this card: I take it to be full of his spirit–bp, the gift-giving Santa, waving as he disappears behind hills of snow, leaving behind a wonderful H/castle, the letter H being his favorite letter and, as a textual element, representative of literature– and a castle being what a bp/Santa in this magical realm would have to have been leaving.  Ergo, the main gift he’s given us is his poetry.  The fact that he died too soon after this card adds a melancholy tone to what it conveys–that I feel deepens, and is deepened by, the card’s final joyous victory over life’s unavoidable, constant pains and sorrow.

I generally feel that a poem is what it is on the page.  Its creator, and his biography are irrelevant.  Sometimes that is not the case.  Not that I may not have gone overboard the wrong way in reading it.  In any case, I hope you enjoy it–and all that the day it celebrates is for you.

.