The Calgary Herald asks kevin mcpherson eckhoff a few questions
On Sunday, April 25, 2010, the Calgary Herald asked kevin mcpherson eckhoff (Rhapsodomancy) some questions:
Given that he works in the somewhat unheralded medium of visual poetry and is a relative newcomer to the publicity game, we can probably forgive British Columbia's kevin mcpherson eckhoff for often seeming at a loss for words when discussing his new book Rhapsodomancy (Coach House Books, 87 pages, $16.95).
Eckhoff's work travels the bumpy road between 'voice and words and visual poetry' -- offering a wild, energetic and defiantly unique strain of experimental verse that seems to take cues from off the beaten path wordsmiths such as Steve McCaffery's sound-poetry performance group Four Horsemen or Calgary's Christian Bök.
In fact, eckhoff was a student of Bök when he studied at the University of Calgary, In Rhapsodomancy, he resurrects the lost communication system of Sir Isaac Pitman, who designed the most common version of shorthand as a series of symbols meant to speed up the process of writing. He also taps into the largely unknown world of Unifon, a 40-character phonetic alphabet born in the 1950s to develop international communication between airlines (the origins of which are helpfully explained on Coach House's web-site in a cool comic strip styled after the creepily widespread work of fundamentalist Jack T. Chick). Rhapsodomancy mixes these lost systems with verse and sketches, making for an intriguing and often baffling collection.
Eckhoff took some time to chat with the Herald.
Q: You went to the University of Calgary and studied under Christian Bök, who certainly has achieved a reputation for unique, experimental poetry. Has he been an influence on your work?
A: I suppose so. He really showed me how language could do things I never thought it could before and how you could approach language or English almost like a science, very mathematically and systematically. I thought this was really groovy because I had a background in chemistry. So it made sense to me in some way.
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