BAWDY BODIES: Bridging Robert Kroetsch and bpNichol
BAWDY BODIES: Bridging Robert Kroetsch and bpNichol

Summary/Abstract: How does a body in Canada seek to know itself? Only through the juxtaposition of largeness and detail, and by embracing a fragmented and necessarily incomplete vision. This ficto-critical piece performs a cross-genre reading of Canada’s bewildered and bewildering body through two key texts by major Canadian poets. "Too Bad" by Robert Kroetsch and "Selected Organs: Parts of an Autobiography", by bpNichol, suggest a conduit into the landscape of the body, and how that body seeks to invent itself through a bawdy language. These two Canadian writers, too large to be encapsulated, propose in their work a way of writing the body in Canada through fragments. This reading argues that dinggedicten, poetic forms that attempt to describe objects from within, rather than externally, are key to how the bawdy/body can unpack the large and thus unseeable body of Canada, from the perspective that we can never see the body of the whole, only parts, fractions, segments. The analysis addresses how these poets provide a contrapuntal edge to totalizing readings of the Canadian body, examining as well the use of ironic distance as a means of inhabiting the body in order to write that body. It moves from a discussion of Canada’s unwieldy body to the auto-biographical body. Its focus on liminallymapped bodies and the desires of detail within the experiencing body, vivisects the Kroetsch and nichol texts through van Herk’s own autobiographical ficto-critical interventions. Imbricated in the analysis is a meditation on how landscape marks the body and how body becomes itself a nation.

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