Book to E-book, Keyboard to Keyboard: bp Nichol's "First Screening"

A “poet of process” who “created writings which reveal a rigorous formalism” (D. Barbour), Barry Philip Nichol spent as much time in rewriting his texts as in creating them. This is particularly clear in his concrete “typewriter” poems, which underwent at least three stages: the mechanical one, where they were meant to be both visual artifacts and score for performance; the electric one, with a fascinating typographic restyling of their layout; and, most importantly, the electronic, which released the inner movement of the poems in the creation of animated poems. Nichol’s premature death put an end to a pioneering work that would have eventually ended up as part of electronic literature. At the same time, it was precisely his experiment with First Screening that boosted the contemporary artistic explosion of contemporary Northamerican cyber-poetry.