Steve McCaffery is a Canadian poet and scholar who was a professor at York University. He currently holds the Gray Chair at SUNY Buffalo (Amherst). McCaffery was born in Sheffield, England and lived in the UK for most of his youth attending University of Hull. He moved to Toronto in 1968. In 1970, he began to collaborate with fellow poets Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Paul Dutton, and bpNichol, forming the sound-poetry group, The Four Horsemen. McCaffery’s poetry attempts to break language from the logic of syntax and structure to create a purely emotional response. He has created three-dimensional structures of words and has released a number of sound and video works, often in collaboration with other poets. Two of his books of poetry, The Theory of Sediment (1991) and Seven Pages Missing (2000) have each been nominated for a Governor General’s Award.
bpNichol (Barrie Phillip Nichol, 1944–1988) was the author of numerous books of poetry, including In England Now That Spring (co-authored with Steve McCaffery), Truth: A Book of Fictions and nine volumes of The Martyrology, as well as four novels, several books for children and one collection of short fiction. The Alphabet Game: a bpNichol Reader, published posthumously, presents an overview of his writing. A founding member of the sound poetry quartet The Four Horsemen, Nichol was recognized internationally as one of the major avant-garde writers of his time. Besides his small press and magazine editorial activities (including Ganglia, grOnk and Underwhich Editions), he was a great collaborator with many artists in the areas of writing, sound poetry performance, and linguistic research. He was also a writer for the TV series Fraggle Rock.
