Surplus Explanations
Iím not interested in giving accurate explanations.
--Charles Bernstein
A TEXT SHOUL
D INCLUDE IT
S OWN DECO
DING INSTRU
CTIONS
--Christopher Dewdney
he poems in NICHOLODEON were written out of the conviction that we only use language because we havenít got anything that works better. Like traffic signs from a parallel world, the job of these poems is to produce a vague sense of anxiety in the reader, fueled by the mistaken belief that they house some kernel of meaning that they desperately wish to communicate, despite nearly impossible odds.
The following notes have been provided for similar reasons; misreading is probably mandatory. Imagine each page of this site as a digital cross-section of the trunk of some exotic embalmed body that has been sliced, scanned, and sintered. The black marks on the screen constitute the outlines of capillaries that perhaps once carried strange vital fluids from extremity to extremity, but now lie dry and clogged with tarry residue. This is a Manitoban Book of the Dead, leading from now/here to nowhere. I hope you enjoy the trip.
The figure is king Ubu, uttering a savage war cry not unlike Tarzan's (or Tzara's). "B.P." stands for British Petroleum, a metonym for a dying rationalist society on the verge of being eclipsed by the disorder of a postmodern "pataphysical regime.
A rebus cartouche for the pharaoh of Canadian concrete.
The Sacred Chao is the symbol of the Discordians -- worshippers of Eris, goddess of chaos, discord and confusion. Its significance is fully explained in Principia Discordia, or, How I Found Goddess And What I Did To Her When I Found Her (ISBN 1-55950-46-8), a book at least as important as this one.
The Autobiography of Gertrude Stein by Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp in drag looks almost as much like Corporal Klinger as Alice B. Toklas does.
Translatingn Apollinaire
Many of the poems in this book, including these treatments of Nichol's first published piece, are what the Toronto Research Group refers to as "homolinguistic translations," texts in which the emphasis lies not on semantic import but on the formal procedure of the translation's development (see Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book-Machine, ISBN 0-88922-300-9).
1: EnantiomorphabetThis was written in 1990, on my first computer, with a then-powerful but now-obsolete painting program, and output to my 9 pin printer. It shows.
2: Mind ReaderThis poem was composed with another piece of obsolete software, a word processor named Mind Reader that attempted to anticipate which word you were typing as you wrote. Its idiosyncratic vocabulary reflects the fact that it was designed for the use of lazy businessmen.
9: Common Bullets"Common Bullets" is an iconic visual representation of the objects and places described in Apollinaire's poem. The Arc de Triomphe figures prominently in the centre of the text.
10: KlingonThis poem is written in grammatically correct Klingon, the most successful artifical language in history. There are some allowances here for poetic usage; since Klingon contains no equivalent for the word "car," for example, this text reads "primitive shuttlecraft." The characters themselves are not conventional Klingon, but those of a small splinter colony, the Klinzhai; they bear a striking resemblance to Hebrew script.
15: Deskjetsam"Deskjetsam" is either an evocation of Apollinaire's famous rain poem or what happens when you try to print to a Hewlett Packard printer that's recently run out of paper.
Originally appearing as a throwaway on the back inside cover of Nine Leaves from NICHOLODEON, this poem is an obscure reference to a line from Kathe Koja that describes purple and gray, the colours of the first edition of Books 1 and 2 of The Martyrology, as "the secret colours of the brain." Ech. I should have cut this one out of the printed edition of this collection instead of "The Autobiography of Gertrude Stein."
Orthodox concrete.
from Language: A User's Manual
Language is a virtual book; its only existence is symbiotic, within the pages of other books. The question that arises is, if one had to write a user's manual for language, what would one write it in, and for whom?
Figure 2: The Place of Language in the Facts of SpeechActually a rarely-seen, suppressed version of the famous image from the Course in General Linguistics, found in the University of Geneva archives among Saussure's original lecture notes.
Figure 4: Understanding the Sound PoemUsing concrete poetry to explain sound poetry is like architecture about dancing.
Figure 15: The Letter O In Its Natural EnvironmentPhoto of oblong rock forms on brook (Toronto, Ont.).
Figure 30: CommunicationThe Greystoke Model of Semiotics. "It appears that, using the great-ape language from the age of a year and a day (can we go so far as to say that it is a question of his mother-tongue?), Tarzan has, as it were, no particular attitude towards the plurality of languages and the arbitrariness of the sign, nor the faintest pre-babelian and inveterate nostalgia for THE unitary language--which, for my part, I find rather attractive" (Jacques Jouet, "The Great-Ape Love-Song," OULIPO Laboratory, ISBN 0-947757-89-9").
Dedicated to Ations, patron saint of subway passengers and sundry other troglodytes.
Here's a dubious piece that should have been stripped down to its constituent elements and totally reworked at least once more before it was published. However, I succumbed to the lure of the quick success, fame and riches that await those who sell out by upping the sex quotient in their concrete poetry.
Basho's Chinese and Canadian Food
A concrete translation of Basho's most enduring haiku, executed with all of the intellectual rigour and cultural sensitivity that Ezra Pound brought to his study of the ideogram.
Imagism compressed to its logical conclusion.
The photos came from a taxidermy catalogue; Steve McCaffery thought that they were penises. Theyíre not.
It's extraordinarily difficult to produce a "dirty" concrete poem on a computer, because the level of pixel-by-pixel manipulation imparts at least the illusion that everything is potentially controllable. I started this on a photocopier as a dirty piece, but scanning it onto my hard drive transformed it into some sort of knobby and irreducible hybrid.
Arguments for a Two-Dimensional Surface
The product of an evening spent with Bill Kennedy, two large meat loversí pizzas, a case of beer and Black Sabbath's Master of Reality. Do not try this at home.
The Apocalypse of St. Kurt
These poems are the ephemeral traces of a poetic object titled Heart-Shaped Box: The Apocalypse of Saint Kurt. Cast on the platen of a photocopier like sybilline leaves, the puzzle pieces augur a merz fortune that remains opaque.
2nd Manifestation"Would you care to always live among ruins?" (Kurt Schwitters, "Profane Words Over the Eternal City," PPPP, ISBN 0-87722-894-9).
5th Manifestation"I take pride as the king of illiterature" (Kurt Cobain, "Very Ape," In Utero, DGSCD 24607).
7th Manifestation"Now I had to fall to pieces, so I fell, I fell to pieces, fell, fell flat. Aaaaa aaaaa aaaaa aaaaa b." (Kurt Schwitters, "The Onion: Merzpoem 8," PPPP, ISBN 0-87722-894-9).
Cormac McCarthy wrote in The Crossing that doomed enterprises irrevocably divide the world into the then and the now. This poem constitutes an inventory of things that I lost during the year that I finished these poems.
This piece is a metaphor for NICHOLODEON as a whole, an expression of the notion that a poet's vocabulary and legacy can take on the status of moveable type, pointing to the infinite number of possible alphabets that lie beyond zebra.
Concept swiped whole hog from Steve McCaffery's Carnival: the First Panel, 1967-70.
Supplement: A Chant for Saint And
These are the first poems that I wrote for this collection; Christian Bök suggested the shorter version.
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Of course, I didn't "write" this one, either. Constructed from nearly pure obtainium.
The title is better than the poem.
A foray into political commentary. The reason it's not to scale is that the Greenpeace guys are larger than the Exxon Valdez.
A portrait of the artist as a nervous system, this mysterious image, burned onto the dead poet's winding sheet, is now on permanent display in Turin, Italy.
A found poem inspired by a jwcurry piece called "A: plan for a monument."
Eugen Gomringer, who claimed that "it is important that [concrete poetry] should not become merely playful," and that "Concrete Poetry has nothing to do with comic strips," can bite me.
This piece doesn't really survive the transition from book to web. Its poetic value depends entirely on the contents of the two vitrines in the image, which are blurred beyond recognition at 72 dpi.
The first poem that I ever liked (without anyone telling me that I had to) was bpNichol's "Blues." This is an hommage to that piece, and to the work of cool Czech concrete poet JirÌ Valoch. On another, no less significant level, it's also one of the love poems that I wrote for Bonnie.
This text was written by running a section of a psychology textbook through a program called "Babble!", and no, you canít have a copy of the software.
Because of the Oblique Strategies, and (let's face it) Rocky Horror.
A treated text produced solely from lines under the heading "Ball Lightning," in the index of one of William Corlissí amazing catalogues of Fortean anomalies.
A birthday card for the Auburn Lady of Canadian Poetry.
So I said to her, "If we were still in Grade 12, youíd be one of those girls that wore a lot of black and sat in the back row and did drama after school, and I never would have been able to get you to go out with me because you were in love with Morrissey even though you knew he was celibate and probably more interested in boys when he thought about sex at all," and she flashed me that crooked little grin and said, "Yeah, youíre probably right." This poem is for her anyway, maybe even because of that.
Nightmare Anthology: The Corrected bill bissett
I hate Microsoft Word. It wants me to write like a fucking accountant. The first thing that I did when I loaded Office 95 on to my computer was to turn off all the auto-correct features. This poem was produced by running bill bissett's "i was printing billy th kid" through Word's spell checker, and is a pretty good indication of what literature will be like when Microsoft finally rules the world.
Not so much a semiotic as a semi-idiotic poem. I lost the key.
David UU (born David W. Harris) was a gifted and influential Canadian concrete poet and publisher. I met him shortly before he died, and wrote this piece for his memorial service.
Began life as a cut-up of the logo of one of my favourite bands, plastered onto the back of my staff tag at HMV. Lucas "Special Agent" Mulder, who I used to work with (two concrete poets in one record storeówhat are the odds?), thought it was interesting, so here it is.
Another love poem, written with a set of fridge magnets. Every magnetic surface in my house is now covered with them, which is handy if you want to leave someone a note.
Someday I'm going to write a "pataphysical essay titled "For A Secular Martyrology," suggesting that the entire work should be reread, giving preferential treatment to words that begin with the letters "dr-" instead of "st-."
In Memoriam: The Toronto Research Group, 1973-1982
Plato and Socrates. Laurel and Hardy. Hope and Crosby. Vladimir and Estragon. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Deleuze and Guattari. Bill and Ted.
John Barlow and Beth Learn did this photocopy degeneration of the large version of "Supplement: A Chant for Saint And" in the early days of Oversion. It remains of interest to me because it serves as a kind of chronological marker--before the trip to the copy shop that produced this piece, Oversion was a remarkably spare magazine. Afterwards--total nonlinearity.
Photblasted slice of Barlow's copy of the large version of "Collected Allegories," which he's been using as a kind of pomo DoodleArt poster for about three years now.
Go ahead. Display your casual contempt for commodity fetishism and your commitment to a general economy by destroying this book (online readers; smash your computers. That'll help too). To paraphrase Nietzsche, that which does not kill us must have missed us.
another ASCII project: workers of the world slack off!
po box 657, station p, toronto, ontario m5s 2y4