Darren Wershler-Henry
The Tapeworm Foundry: andor the dangerous prevalance of imagination
publisher: House of Anansi Press, 2001
isbn: 0-88784-652-1
price: $14.95
Taking up the call of a global poetics infused with the criss-crossing of information flow, a local poetics (centered around a Toronto as you've never known it) and a need to communicate beyond the surface intensity of radical form, Wershler-Henry muscles through a single-sentence poem of possibility whose only punctuation is the conjunction "andor."
Any strand of this text -- a DNA fiber for the new world chaos theory -- propels the reader through a corridor exquisite options and micro-narratives, like a Borges short story compacted into the moment between breaths:
[...] andor realize your imac is just a big tamagotchi andor design a transformer to use up wasted ergs of energy from excessive pressure on electric buzzers andor quit making art in order to play chinese checkers andor tattooo your poems on the back of someone else but be sure to make no spelling mistakes anor prepare to correct them in a different colour of ink andor do it all for the nookie andor delete ambiguities and then convert to specificities [...]
[n/a]
Billed as a "list of book proposals," Tapeworm is actually much more: a manifesto for significant and/or excessive action in a world increasingly circumscribed by middle-of-the-road politics, false notions of rationality and productivity, and the infinite hunger of a technologized economy for all the good bad (read: useless, fun, diabolic) ideas that the young, the disaffected and the inordinately talented can produce.
Tapeworm's various attacks on institutions, the bourgeois, the mainstream and closed ways of thinking are not to be ignored; this is a book that revivifies the initial burst of excitement Dadaism and other modernist forms created, but unlike much "avant-garde" work today, it is not caught up in the self-satisfying, doxical terminology of the cultural institutions -- schools, museums, even the cliques -- but wants to reach out, to expand, to take no prisoners.
If the work seems juvenile and "easy," that's because the author -- who has conveniently escaped through the back door of exquisite process -- has sacrificed the "difficulty" (often just confusion or a hapless shield against obviousness posing as hieratic) of much experimental poetry today.
If there is an overriding metaphor to how this poem operates, it may be that of information itself; at times, even the simple paratactic structure (an advance over the disjunctivitis of much late "new sentence" work, including recent portions of The Alphabet itself) breaks down as a subset of phrases separated by "or" take over:
[...] andor find ninetynine different ways to retell the story of one man accusing another man of jostling him deliberately on a crowded bus at midday but aviod all anagrams or antiphrases or alexandrines or back slang or blurbs or epentheses or gallicisms or haiku or hellenisms of litotes or logical analysis or negativities or permutatiosn or proper names or prostheses or spoonerisms or syncopes or surprise andor [...]
[n/a]
Like all great literary works, Tapeworm presents some fundamental problems, one of which is: what is the use of all this discipline -- since this is, if anything, a disciplined work (as his tournequet approach to his Oulipian cousin suggests) -- in world whose only avenues for progress -- personal, social, and otherwise -- seem to lead inexorably into melding into the corporate whole?
This book raises suspicions about everything, not the least of which is where the "author" of such a work stands. Perhaps, like in the radical performative work of Beuys and Acconci, the author is the gesture itself.
|
