From “The Captain Poetry Poems,” by bpNichol, a mimeograph published the same year as Ondaatje’s documentary on Nichol, The Sons of Captain Poetry (1970). It’s more or less what it sounds like, a series of poems infused with the tone of comic books (and also some actual cartoons). This comes in a sub-sequence of poems titled Captain Poetry in Love.
I love the poem for first immediately appealing to the sensitivities of a writer–Captain Poetry coming to our rescue; the saviour. But on reinspection (and in context) it’s hard not to see that there is also a satirical bite to the poem: Captain Poetry’s poem echoes of lines by Shakespeare and Marlowe, and of course there is the absurdity that the super-powered Captain Poetry is so indignantly upset by the criticism. Writing later, Nichol said that the book was written in response to “the macho male bullshit tradition where if you were male & wrote poems you had to make damn sure you could piss longer, shout harder” he experienced in the Canadian poetry scene, but you can’t help but expand it further and bearing in mind techniques like the blazon which are so integral to the construction of sonnets and love poetry as a whole.
brilliant analysis!
