Monday, April 7, 2008

bp Nichol's "War and Peace"/sounding out

A new website devoted to Canadian avant-garde poet bp Nichol's work has emerged, and there's a treasure trove of audio, digital, and other poem- and art- works of all sorts.

One of the sound pieces, "War and Peace," is a pleasing exploration of war and peace by way of the oral materiality of language--it begins with the "ba-ba-ba" of bombs falling, and ends with the "aums" that we associate with the peace movement of Ginsberg, chanting "aum" for hours at Grant Park during the hours before the mayhem of police beatings and riots during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Together, of course, the "b's" and "om's" yield something that sounds scarily like "bom's"--as if we can't quite escape the bomb.

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