For the week of July 10-16 2011, I am teaching in Bragg Creek as part of the Wordsworth Literary Camp (aimed at 15-19 year olds). I’ll be teaching “Thriving under pressure” in which students will discuss how poets and fiction writers have found means of making language flourish under the most rigorous of restrictions; hone your voice through exercises related to some of the most unusual contemporary books out there: narrative without words, poems without letters, throat-singing and beat-boxing, missing vowels, restricted word-counts, visual poetry, sound poetry — all of these subjects are fodder for a class which will challenge how you see writing and what it means to be a writer.
I’m teaching English 364 – “Poetry Writing I” at the University of Calgary for the 2011/12 academic year. More information about the course can be found here.
I have spent the last week in Manchester and Bury preparing for the 3rd bi-annual Text Festival at the Bury Art Gallery. Curator and writer Tony Trehy has pulled out all the stops for what he claims will be the final iteration of the internationally acclaimed festival (barring any potential touring exhibitions currently in negotiation).
The festival includes participants from around the globe, gathered in a variety of exhibition spaces both within the Bury Art Gallery and throughout Bury. I won’t discuss every artwork in the exhibition but there are highlights (including Trehy’s curation) which deserve special comment.
The Festival’s central exhibition opens with a brief arrangement of contemporary Japanese visual poetry from the collection of Josef Lischinger. Lischinger is the world’s premiere collector of Asian visual poetry and is the author of Japanese Visual Poetry II (Ritter Verlag). Viewers access visual poetry through a discussion of the graphic and artistic possibilities of Japanese ideograms that prompts them to approach the exhibition with a consideration of both the physical appearance of language and its semantic content. The exhibition then presents a series of silkscreen prints by Eugen Gomringer which superimpose English vowels over Japanese characters, transitioning the gallery discussion from ideograms into a vocabulary of English characters, superimposition and the possibilities of the graphicism of text.
Wonder Room - Text Festival
The initial salon is the “Wonder Room” which includes an array of international visual poems. The exhibition is unconventionally hung (to say the least) with pieces arranged at both floor and ceiling level and—most controversially—overlapping each other. Meant to overwhelm the viewer with the cacophony of international directions in visual poetics (and give the viewer a crash course for the typographically unorthodox), the room also reveals a major issue in contemporary visual poetry: visual poetry today suffers from a lack of scale and a lack of editorial acumen. Trehy was inundated with digital submissions that did not consider the size of reproduction beyond the size of the computer screen. Poets submitted their work without digitally preparing it for printing and often omitted printing directions, which left the curator with the task of determining the printing threshold as the point at which the artwork became unacceptably pixellated. Too many visual poets are myopic in their output. They compose work on the screen without considering the size or scale of their final product and the work suffers from that lack of foresight. Poets should compose with an eye for both the page and the gallery, for both the reader and the viewer. A central concern in visual poetry is the materiality of language; this aesthetic concern must be coupled with an eye for the materiality of the artwork itself.
Christian Bok - The Xenotext
From the problematic din of the “Wonder Rooms,” the Text Festival presents three salons of work that more successfully investigates the poetic possibilities of the gallery. Christian Bök’s Xenotext Project presents a 7000-piece table-top maquette of the atomic structure of the poem written for implantation in the DNA of the microscopic extremophile Deinococcus radiodurans. The piece is augmented by the DNA poem (and the RNA reply), and is an exceptional example of the possibilities of visual poetry when it challenges the restrictions of the page.
Pavel Buchler - Studio Schwitters
Another highlight of the exhibition is Pavel Büchler’s “Studio Schwitters.” This monumental installation consists of dozens of antiquated military PA megaphones programmed to perform Kurt Schwitter’s Ursonata at their lowest collective volume. The megaphones are swerved from the Orwellian broadcast of state-sponsored directives to transmission of a text-to-speech computerized reproduction of Schwitter’s epic sound poem. Büchler has recently created an installation piece for a gallery in London that uses decommissioned speakers from the world’s largest stadium (the 220,000 seat Strahov Stadium in Prague) to broadcast the sound of a single bumblebee’s flight. Büchler eschews audio fidelity (which is beyond the capabilities of such monstrous antiquated equipment) in favour of a subtle and delicate misappropriation of technology in the service of ephemeral pastoral beauty.
Shezad Dawood’s work was also an under-discussed highlight of the exhibition. Ron Silliman used neon to construct the sentence “Poetry has been Bury, Bury good to me” —which will be on permanent exhibition in the Bury Tram Station—a construction that reflects poorly on his previous work by trading on his avant-garde reputation to submit a terrible pun. Dawood’s neon pieces, on the other hand, are a series of plinths that represent the epithets attached to Allah’s name in the Koran. On display was “The Majestic” which entwines the eponymous phrase in neon Arabic into the thorned branches of sage bush tumbleweed. The sage bush is native to Texas (not unlike a previous US president), and the epithet is barely readable though the bush’s branched confusion.
Shezad Dawood - The Majestic
While many of those same poets who submitted work digitally without an eye for the scale and dimensions of the gallery walls also sent work in such vast numbers that they overwhelmed the curator and his staff. Trehy categorizes this impulse as “the urge to over-production” but I believe is indicative of visual poets lacking both confidence and a critical vocabulary for their chosen métier. This lack of criticality not only restricts the discourse around visual poetry but also prevents visual poetry from successfully negotiating the transition into gallery exhibitions. Christian Bök on the Harriet blog anticipates the effect the 2011 Text Festival will have on the audience. I am just as curious to see what the effect will be on the poets themselves.
I plan to continue the post with a discussion of the Text Festival’s performances and some of the other events and conversations I had in Manchester and Bury and later in York and Coxwold…
Seen of the Crime, my first collection of essays and criticism has just been announced by Montreal’s Snare Books for Fall 2011. Snare is one of the best emerging presses in Canada and every title they make is worth the price of admission…
The City of Calgary Announces Short List for W.O. Mitchell Book Prize
The City of Calgary, the Writers Guild of Alberta and Uptown 17 BRZ are pleased to announce the short list authors for The City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize, one of 17 awards presented as part of The Calgary Awards.
The three finalists include Derek Beaulieu for How to Write(Talon Books), Weyman Chan for Hypoderm (Talon Books), and Clem Martini and Olivier Martini for Bitter Medicine (Freehand Books).
In How to Write,Derek Beaulieu writes an indexical, playful and innovative “how to” manual like no other. Derek is a Canadian poet, publisher and anthologist who studied contemporary Canadian poetics at the University of Calgary.
Hypoderm is Weyman Chan’s third collection of poems subtitled “notes to myself” which is a compilation of observations, intimations and recognitions of mortality. Weyman is a Calgary-born poet whose writings have appeared in many Alberta anthologies over the last two decades.
In Bitter Medicine, award-winning playwright Clem Martini chronicles his family’s 30-year struggle with schizophrenia that has plagued those closest to him – his brothers Ben and Olivier. The book is complemented by Olivier Martini’s childlike yet expressive drawings. Both Clem and Olivier reside in Calgary.
The City of Calgary established the W.O. Mitchell Book Prize in honour of the late Calgary writer W.O. Mitchell to recognize literary achievement by Calgary authors. The $5000 prize is awarded each year for an outstanding book published in the award year. The 2009 recipient was Gordon Pengilly for Metastasis and Other Plays.
The winner of The City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize will be recognized at the Calgary Awards presentation on June 15, 2011. The Calgary Awards will be televised live on Shaw TV.
On April 27 and 28th I will be installing an original concrete poem in the windows of the Bury Art Gallery as part of the Text Festival. In addition to that installation, the festival includes my Prose of the Trans-Canada and my Box of Nothing.
The Festival also includes visual poetry from Satu Kaikkonen, Eric Zboya, Geof Huth and a tonne of other international poets; performances by Christian Bok, Ron Silliman, Karri Kokko, Jaap Blonk and more; installation work by Pavel Buchler, Simon Morris and many others. This is the 3rd bi-annual Festival and promises to be an incredible affair. If you find yourself in the UK (or environs), check it out!
Geof Huth has just reviewed and riffed upon my Prose of the Trans-Canada. Check it out.
I recently used Jonathan Ball’s Ex Machina (Toronto: Bookthug, 2009) in a first year creative writing class.
Charged with teaching 22 young students how to write fiction, I shirked my task and concentrated on challenging the students to question their assumptions about how (or if) fiction “works.”
Weekly writing assignments requested that they model their work on poetic texts, Oulipan exercises and abstract comics. I asked them to transcribe every word on their street and all the words they said for an hour of typical conversation. They wrote using only questions, using only other people’s texts (excising and overwriting), starting every sentence with “I Remember…”; they sculpted their assignments, recorded their assignments—and some went so far as to build their work into self-creating video games.
They discussed and crafted responses to Melville, Gogol, Kafka, Moure, Slater, Calvino, Borges, Molotiu, rawlings, Blonk, Morris, Lethem and more. Their mid-term assignment was to reply in a piece of “fiction” (however they defined that) to Jonathan Ball’s Ex Machina.
Catalogued by the National Library of Canada as “poems,” Ball’s Ex Machina (which he considers a SF/horror novel) is a series of footnoted and intertwined aphorisms, quotations, statements and diagrams about the un-holy combination of book and machine, writer and reader, host and parasite.
With each page, the text becomes a labyrinth in which the reader’s breadcrumbs are devoured by mice as fast as they can be placed. Ex Machina is a predator with an elusive cat-and-mouse game in which it teases the reader into defining the terms of engagement, but “[i]n the garden of forking paths, you appear always to move forward.” (28) Ball’s text is purposefully evasive, preferring to challenge the reader on her need for clarity and purposefulness, for “If you are going to insist / on a poem, / I am going to persist / in this evasion.” (39)
Ball posits that the poetic text—or, in this case, a horror novel masquerading as a poetic text—is a textual symbiote which uses the reader to perpetuate its own survival:
The poem is not written by the author. [52] It is the root, the cause of authors. [57] Like a virus moving inside your skull. [43] To eat, and grow, and change. [61]. (51)
William Carlos Williams notably argued
There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words. […]Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matter like a ship. But poetry is a machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. As in all machines, its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character. (“Introduction to The Wedge”, in Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams. New York: New Directions, 1969. 256.)
William S. Burroughs notoriously postulated “language is a virus from outer space” and that we are simply hosts for the spread of this linguistic extraterrestrial disease. Ball’s novel articulates the nature of the parasitic relationship between book, text and reader. While Phyllis Webb famously stated “[t]he proper response to a poem is another poem,” Ball makes the generative quality that Webb desired fraught with the sinister overtones of mutation, for the book machine seeks those “who process the poem, to great effect: host minds for newer and stronger strains” (57)
Ball has published Ex Machina under a Creative Commons License, and encourages readers to respond. He hopes that readers will allow the text to infect their own writing practices for “[t]he human being [is] a larval stage in the reproductive process of the book-machines.” (57)
Ex Machina used my “larval stage” undergraduate students to reproduce as video games, hollowed-out books, 15-minute sitcoms, Norwegian rock operas, illustrated shuffle-texts, scrapbooks made from ransom-note-like assembled texts, photo-essays, comic books and narrative-driven short stories.
With Ex Machina the meme speaks and it is hungry.
“Clearly we are beginning to get nowhere.”
—John Cage
On April 7, 2011 I sent The Bury Museum and Archives an empty box.
I purchased the box for $3.95 (£2.50) and received skeptical looks from the UPS employees when I requested to send the box—devoid of any content—to Bury.
UPS also instructed me that they would not ship an “empty box” and that they needed the contents of the box to fit within one of their predetermined categories. We agreed to enclose within the box a single sheet of blank A4 paper. With this content—as unwritten as it was—UPS could now categorize the contents of the box as “documents” and could continue to process the application for transportation.
Their consternation was compounded with my request to insure the box and its contents to a value of £25,000; the same amount as the yearly wage of an arts worker in the UK (before the current government’s arts funding cutbacks).
UPS, not unexpectedly, refused to insure the parcel for more than $2,500 (£1,500). They would not guarantee the safety of a box of “nothing” and refused to insure the safety of “artwork” (even an empty box) as it was shipped to the UK. For insurance of the amount I requested would have to seek a rider for an independent insurance provider.
I was then asked to complete a Parcel Shipping Order form that included check-boxes which inquired “Are the contents of the parcel breakable?” (Yes) and “Are the contents of the Parcel replaceable?” (No)
Upon my completion of the form, I was invoiced a shipping cost of $135.90 (£86.23) and the box was assigned a tracking number and a series of bar-codes and QR Codes to expedite the box of nothing as it cleared various processing centres and Canadian and British Customs.
These bar-codes and QR Codes are included in The Bury Museum and Archives’ exhibition The History of Tradestamps.
Tradestamps were the cotton industry’s hand printed labels used to indicate the contents of their shipping bundles in order to appeal to their (often illiterate) purchasers. The tradestamps “often depicted scenes, emblems, animals or figures” and the industry “employed hundreds of designers to create these trade marks as an early form of branding.”
The resultant bar-code is the symbol of nothing. In light of the current administration’s draconian cutbacks and their lack of willingness to insure the growth of social programs and the arts, to quote John Cage, “Nothing more than nothing may be said.”
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