The most remarkable package arrived in the mail last week from Nelson Ball, longstanding Canadian poet, editor, book-seller and husband to the remarkable Canadian painter Barbara Caruso: a nearly complete set of grOnk magazine along with bpNichol’s Captain Poetry Poems, the second issue of Grease Ball Comics, and Nichol’s “Cold Mountain.” It’s difficult for me to describe the sense of awe and gratitude that came over me as I pulled out each piece, one at a time. I was holding what was for me a crucial piece of Canadian poetry/publishing history – one that I’d only read about and occasionally seen isolated pdfs. Given the importance and the rarity of these documents, what I’d like to do is write a short blog post on each issue, each item, and include a pdf of each that I’ll also put up on the online archive bpnichol.ca. I hope you enjoy!

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I haven’t yet found any articles on the history of grOnk magazine – at the moment, all I know is that bpNichol established Ganglia Magazine in 1965, which was published by Ganglia Press, which in turn published grOnk magazine with David Aylward & Rob Hindley-Smith in 1967. Included in the bundle of goodies from Ball is the “Ganglia Press Index”, compiled by Nichol for Ganglia Press/grOnk series 8 number 7 in 1972. (The entire bibliography is now online here.). In the “Introduction” Nichol writes:

somewhere in 66 i met dave UU for the first time  he and i and rob (nee rah) smith decided it’d be nice to publish a monthly mag of concrete & related poetries & distribute it free so we invited dave aylward along for the ride launching the first issue of grOnk in january of 67  we ran them thru on a monthly schedule to august of 67 when dave uu moved west & grOnk went under wraps for a year   in september of 68 i started it up again   dave uu was still the most active co-editor with bill bissett & steve mccaffery in there in 3rd & 4th   we kept churning it out free right up to the present and mailing it out every four to eight months in big chunky envelopes which made for nice gifts of poems for people all 64 issues   anyway now times change  the frequency of grOnk as of this date (july 28 1972 is decreasing to make way for other projects   GANGLIA PRESS has served its function as a free information service to an audience of about 250 people…

And so, to inaugurate this series of blog posts on grOnk – and in the spirit of the gift economy that Nichol, UU and Smith had in mind – here is a pdf of the “Ganglia Press Index.” Scroll down to the bottom of the page on bpnichol.ca to download.

> See also bpNichol’s “Singing Hands Series”: Canadian Concrete Poetry 1966 (Part 2)

> See also grOnk magazine: first and second series 1967 – 1970 (Part 3)

> See also grOnk magazine: third series, issue 1 1969 (part 4)

> See also grOnk magazine: third series, issues 3, 4, 7, 8 1969 (part 5)