The poetic metrics of bpNichol

bpNichol´s poetry has attracted attention from literary critics who want to understand the methods used in its creation. His poems often combine traditional poetics with mathematical principles that are a challenge to analyze or repeat. In particular, his poems from Probable Systems contain mathematical games called alphametrics and cryptarithms. Mathematics provide a new way of reading these poems and challenge assumptions of existing literary criticism. In this study, four and five letter words are examined with alpha-metrics. The two alphametrics used are: 1) the ordinal value of the word, and 2) those of the form A + B = C which are known as additive alphametrics. The ordinal values are plotted for the five letter words and are shown to conform to the normal distribution. An exhaustive search technique is used to solve additive alphametrics and gives the enumeration of the first one hundred five letter alphametrics with unique solutions. Their use in poetry is speculated upon and connected back to the works of bpNichol.