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Scope and Contents Book Thug Internet: Poetry, comic book art, pop culture, concrete poetry, the lyric, the myth of the cowboy, even the myth of the poet-hero: these are just some of the avenues explored by bpNichol in The Captain Poetry Poems. In this short portrait of the poet as a young man, our hero is a dilemma: part fabrication and part confession, Cap is a character created by these poems that extends their author into realms of possible identities. Who is Captain Poetry? Is he a poet? Is he a hero? Is he the bearer of heretofore important and unknown knowledge? Written at a time when questions about what poetry might be; when questions about what the figure of the poet might be, The Captain Poetry Poems showed Nichol grappling with some of the cliches inherent to both his craft and his identity. Playful, even at times silly, but never without the human intelligence Nichol is best known for, these poems may not be the "best" work in Nichol's oeuvre, but their experiments reveal important...

Scope and Contents This book was reissued by Book Thug in 2011 with a new afterword by bill bissett.Internet: This book tells the story of the eponymous superhero and his struggle to find happiness. Bald, beaked and wattled, "Cap""”Nichol's pet name for him"”is hardly the rock-jawed conqueror. In fact, with his visor, spandex, wings and six-pack abs, our man looks like a mutant chicken. Cap is a sad sack: self-conscious, plagued by doubts, undone by indecision, torn about his purpose in life. Nichol shouts encouragements from the sidelines ("O CAPTAIN POETRY SEE IT THRU") but, plum out of ideas, Cap finds himself in a Groundhog Day funk ("O he sings like a madman, talks like he's sane, / and does it each day again and again"). And popping up everywhere in the book (in one case even cradling Captain Poetry's head) is Nichol's most intriguing and disquieting alter ego: Milt the Morph, the dementedly smiling, empty-eyed troublemaker. It's obvious Nichol intended the book to be both a send-up of the...