Black History in 1880s Vancouver
London Open Mic Poetry Archive
  • Home
  • Frank Davey Blog
  • Stan Burfield Blog
    • Fred Burfield's Homestead Memoirs
  • Our Events
  • News
  • PHOTOS & SUMMARIES
    • Season 5: 2016-2017 >
      • June 7th, 2017: Summary & Photos featuring Stan Burfield
      • May 3rd, 2017, Summary & Photos featuring Jason Dickson
      • April 5th, 2017 Summary & Photos, feeaturing James Deahl & Norma West Linder
      • Mar. 1st, 2017: Photos & Summary featuring Andy Verboom
      • Feb. 1st, 2017: Photos & Summary featuring Ron Stewart
      • Dec. 7th, 2016: Photos & Summary featuring David Stones
      • Nov. 2th, 2016: Photos and Summary featuring Don Gutteridge
      • Oct. 5th, 2016: Photos and Summary featuring David Huebert
    • Season 4: 2015-2016 >
      • June 1st, 2016: Photos and summaries: featuring Lynn Tait
      • May 4th, 2016 Photos and Summary: featuring indigenous poetry
      • April 6, 2016 Photos & Summary, featuring Steven McCabe
      • Mar. 2nd, 2016 photos, summary: featuring Andreas Gripp
      • Feb. 3rd, 2016 photos: 3 Western students.
      • Dec. 2, 2015 photos: featured reader Peggy Roffey
      • Nov. 7, 2015 photos: Our Words Fest open mic
      • Nov. 4, 2015 photos: featured reader Charles Mountford
      • Oct. 7th, 2015 photos: Madeline Bassnett featured
    • Season 3, 2014-15 >
      • Aug. 16, 2015 photos: The Ontario Poetry Society's "Sultry Summer Gathering"
      • June 3rd, 2015 photos: John B. Lee featured
      • May 6th, 2015 photos: Laurie D Graham featured
      • Apr. 1st, 2015 photos: John Nyman & Penn Kemp featured
      • Mar. 4th, 2015 photos: Patricia Black featured.
      • Feb. 4th, 2015 photos: feature Gary Barwin
      • Dec. 3rd, 2014 photos: Feature Debbie Okun Hill
      • Nov. 5th, 2014 photos: feature Julie Berry
      • Oct. 1st, 2014 photos: feature Roy MacDonald
    • Season 2, Sept. 2013 to June 2014. >
      • June 4th, 20114, featuring Monika Lee
      • May 7th 2014, featuring Susan McCaslin and Lee Johnson
      • Sept. 4th, 2013 featuring Frank Beltrano
      • April 16th, 2014, featuring Penn Kemp and Laurence Hutchman
      • March 5th, 2014, featuring Jacob Scheier
      • Feb. 5th, 2014: featuring four UWO students of poetry; music by Tim Woodcock
      • Jan. 2nd, 2014: featuring Carrie Lee Connel
      • Dec. 4th, 2013, featuring M. NourbeSe Philip
      • Nov. 6, 2013 , featuring Susan Downe
      • Oct. 2nd, 2013, featuring Jan Figurski
    • Season 1: Oct. 2012 to June 2013 >
      • June 4th, 2013 featuring David J. paul and the best-ever open mic
      • May 1st, 2013, featuring Sonia Halpern
      • Apr. 24, 2013 featuring Frank Davey & Tom Cull
      • Mar. 6th, 2013, featuring Christine Thorpe
      • Feb. 6th, 2013, featuring D'vorah Elias
      • Jan. 3rd. 2013: John Tyndall featured.
      • Dec. 5, 2012: RL Raymond featured
    • Dig These Hip Cats ... The Beats
  • Poet VIDEOS (open mic & featured readers)
    • 5th Season Videos (2016-2017)
    • 4th Season Videos (2015-16)
    • 3rd Season Videos (2014-2015)
    • 2nd Season (2013-2014) videos
  • BIOGRAPHIES - Featured poets & musicians
  • INTERVIEWS & POEMS (featured poets)
    • SEASON 6 - Interviews & Poems >
      • Kevin Shaw: Poem & Interview
      • David Janzen - Interview
    • SEASON 5 INTERVIEWS & POEMS
    • SEASON 4 INTERVIEWS AND POEMS
    • SEASON 3 INTERVIEWS AND POEMS
    • SEASON 2 INTERVIEWS & POEMS (only from Dec. 4th, 2013)
    • Season 1 INTERVIEWS & POEMS (& 1st half of Season 2) >
      • INTERVIEWS of Featured Poets
      • POEMS by Featured Poets (1st Season & to Nov. 2013)
  • Couplets: Poets in Dialogue
  • Future Events
  • Past Events
    • 5th Season: 2016-2017
    • Season 4: 2015-2016
    • Season 3: 2014-2015
    • Season Two: 2013-2014
    • Season One: 2012-2013
  • Who we Are
  • Testimonial
  • Our Mission
  • Links
  • Contact us
  • Frank Davey Blog
  • Frank Davey Blog
  • New Page

Will Naomi Klein Read Derek Beaulieu's KERN?

4/7/2015

0 Comments

 
Picture
Kern, by Derek Beaulieu. Los Angeles: Les Figues, 2015. 92 pp. $17.00.

“Kern is made by hand using dry transfer lettering without the use of computers,” Derek Beaulieu begins his “Author’s Note” afterword to this impressive collection of visual poems. Most poems are made by hand, of course, even those made by hands on typewriter or computer keyboards. It’s not so much the hand, however, that Beaulieu seems concerned with here – disabled artists are known to draw with their feet or mouths, and hands are still used to turn on most smartphones and other computers – as it is the non-use of computers. Beaulieu follows the avant-garde tradition here of re-purposing commercial technologies that were abandoned before their full artistic potential could be explored. Usually artists have been attracted to commerce’s cast off technologies such as the letter press and the mimeograph because they’ve been inexpensive to acquire. That’s not necessarily the case here. In fact the production of Les Figues’ elegant 8" x 8" edition of Beaulieu’s poems appears unsurprisingly indebted to computers, right down the barcode.

The most widely known brand name of dry transfer lettering during the 1960s and 70s was Letraset, which bpNichol used in some of his early Ganglia books, and which I used on each page of the first four issues of Open Letter in 1965-1967. Beaulieu writes here that it was then “a specialized tool with an expensive price tag”; I don’t recall that. It was an inexpensive tool by contrast to typesetting, and could be easily combined with the other then developing technologies of offset printing, which I used, and xeroxing, which Nichol used, to make multiple


copies, and was also sold by most stationery shops. That’s a somewhat different avant-garde tradition – to use the latest technologies, in ways unanticipated by commerce, to reduce production costs and expand artistic practice. Nichol could produce a chapbook cheaply enough to sell it for a nickel. My overall cost to print and distribute an issue of Open Letter in those days was $250. To kern the Letraset letters appropriately, however, was a challenge. Beaulieu’s Kern is priced in the US at $17 and in Canada at around $20.

The ‘kern’ of Beaulieu’s title can be either a noun or a verb. As a noun it denotes the small parts of a piece of type that project beyond its body or ‘shank’ – the crossbar and bottom curl of a ‘t’ for instance, the ‘dot’ on an ‘i’. As a verb – likely the form that Beaulieu is using – it denotes the process of arranging and establishing the space between pieces of type. Most wordprocessing programs offer the user an option for changing the kerning of a word or line or paragraph. Beyond choosing the letters and fonts to include in these poems, kerning is what Beaulieu does here, and would probably be a more accurate title, I think, than ‘kern,’ with its noun/verb ambiguity. Though he could possibly intend the verb in its imperative mood – KERN!!! – the command that he has felt impelled to follow in this book 87 times.

Kern begins with relatively small works – its first poem is two columns of six lower-case ‘n’ surrounding two facing and attached columns of four attached upper-case ‘K’, all sans-serif. It concludes with poems that fill the page with a riot of fonts, letters, and point sizes. So one way to enjoy the book is to treat it as a child’s ‘flip’ book, and riff the pages from front to back, creating a ‘big bang’ as a universe of type is born and expands, ultimately filling all that is.

The book is conceptually indebted – deliberately I’m sure – to earlier visual poetry that worked with the alphabet – Nichol’s 1967 ABC, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s 1976 The Boy’s Alphabet Book, Steve McCaffery’s 1973 Carnival (which the last poems here strongly resemble). McCaffery too had to ‘kern’ the spaces between the blocks and strands of his typewriter lettering. Beaulieu, however, makes no use of alphabetic sequence, opening with a poem made of an ‘n’ and a ‘K’, following with one made of two ‘r’ superimposed on two ‘i’ (a poem which deftly illuminates the shanks and kerns of the two letter-forms) and following those with one that deploys an ‘L’ and (two) ‘A.’

In that afterword Beaulieu reveals what these and the other sometimes seemingly cryptic poems ‘mean’ – SPOILER ALERT: Kern readers should be careful not to mar their fun by reading the afterword first, or by reading any more of this review.  But the afterword is a useful and innovative move – so much speculation would have been avoided had Joyce or Michaelangelo attached similar notes to their major works. Beaulieu reveals to the reader that the poems emulate “the logos of corporate sponsors,” that they are “the logos and slogans for ’pataphysically impossible businesses.” (I’m not sure I understand the last part here – shouldn’t that be “even ’pataphysically impossible businesses”?) He continues:

“... Kern uses the particles of language to represent and promote goods and corporations just out of reach. Kern presents moments of poetic nostalgia for the signposts of a non-existent past; they fitfully recall an etherial, ephemeral moment. [....]These poems are the street signs, the signage, the advertising logos for the shops and corporations that are just beyond reach.”

Indeed, the fifth poem with its connected ‘g’ and inverted ‘g’ with periods inserted into the top circles does suggest a panoptic Google trademark, and the twentieth poem with its bold-face ‘H’ surrounded by two ‘I’ suggests a very friendly (‘HI there!’) International Harvester. After reading the book AND Beaulieu’s afterword, a reader can locate all sorts of similar not quite decypherable messages. The two blurb writers for the book, Marjorie Perloff and Johanna Drucker, appear to have been assisted by the “Author’s Note” when they describe the book’s connection to “the signs, logos & slogans of everyday life” (Perloff) and to “the signs of masons, brands, trademarks, monograms & graphical poetics” (Drucker).

I like Kern. It makes me nostalgic for Letraset, rubber stamp art, the grainy images of early Xerox, and for dear bp. I can read it, thanks to the afterword, without fear of being baffled by its exuberant precisions. I wonder whether Naomi Klein will read it. It is so much richer than reading the advertising of Google and International Harvester.

FD

 


0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    FRANK DAVEY: Poet, former Coach House Press editor, co-founder of TISH newsletter in 1961, co-founder of e-mag Swift Current in 1984, editor of poetics journal Open Letter, 'author' of Bardy Google in 2010 (Talonbooks), author of the tell-much biography of bpNichol, aka bpNichol in 2012 (ECW), and author of the recently published poetry collection Poems Suitable to Current Material Conditions (Mansfield). He has two other websites: a personal one at FrankDavey.net and one (co-managed with David Rosenberg) focused on poet bpNichol at  akabpNichol.net -- have a look!

    Postal Address: Books for review or other mail may be sent to FD at OPEN LETTER, 102 Oak Street, Strathroy, ON N7G 3K3, Canada

    -Bio/interview by 'Open Book'
    -Shorter bio/interview
    -Biography, online

    Categories

    All
    Adeena Karasick
    Agnes Threlkeld
    Aka Bpnichol
    Alan Edward McCartney
    Alan Reed
    Alice Munro
    Al Purdy
    Amodern
    Art Deco
    Artist's Homes
    Avant Garde
    Avant-garde
    Barack Obama
    Barbara Godard
    Barnicke Gallery
    Basil Bunting
    Battle
    Beauty
    Bill Bissett
    'Black Mountain'
    Bookthug
    BpNichol
    Buddhist Ecopoetics
    Canada At War
    Canadian Art
    Canadian Literature
    Canadian Pacific Railway
    Canadian War Lit
    CanLit Institution
    CanLit Teaching
    Ceramics
    Charles Bernstein
    Charles Olson
    Charles Olson
    Christian Bok
    Christine Miscione
    Christl Verduyn
    Climate Change
    Coach House Press
    Cold War
    Collaboration
    Conceptual Art In Britain
    Conceptual Poetry
    Concrete Poetry
    Creative Writing
    Daphne Marlatt
    Dennis Cooley
    Derek Beaulieu
    Devil's Artisan
    Donato Mancini
    Earle Birney
    Ecopoetry
    Emily Carr
    Epistolary Poems
    Eternal Network
    Eva Zeisel
    Ezra Pound
    Fetish Objects
    First World War
    Flarf
    Fluxus
    Frank Sanderson
    Franz Karl Stanzel
    Fred Wah
    Garry Thomas Morse
    General Idea
    George Bowering
    Gertrude Stein
    Greg Curnoe
    Gwendolyn MacEwen
    Gwynne Dyer
    Hart House
    Identity
    Indigenous Poetics
    Industrial Poetry
    Installation Art
    Irving Layton
    Jackson Mac Low
    Jacqueline Du Pasquier
    James Schuyler
    John Cage
    J.R. Colombo
    Judy Chicago
    Juliana Spahr
    Julian Assange
    Jussi Parikka
    Kathryn Mockler
    Kenneth Goldsmith
    Kevin Mcpherson Eckhoff
    Kit Dobson
    Language Poetry
    Laura Farina
    Laura Riding
    Lea Hindley-Smith
    Lemon Hound
    Leonard Cohen
    Lionel Kearns
    Lisa Anne Smith
    Lisa Robertson
    Literary Celebrity
    Literary Marketing
    Lola Tostevin
    Louis Dudek
    Louise Bourgeois
    Louis Zukofsky
    Love Letters
    Lyric Poetry
    Lytle Shaw
    Manifestos
    Mansfield Press
    Margaret Atwood
    Marjorie Perloff
    Max Laeuger
    Media Archaeology
    Michael Davidson
    Michael Morris
    Michael Ondaatje
    Mimesis
    Mina Loy
    Minimalism
    Misogyny In Poetry
    Modernism
    Nadezhda Tolokonnikova
    National Anthologies
    Nelson Ball
    Norman Yates
    Open Letter
    Pataphysics
    Paul Martin
    Peter Jaeger
    Peter-quartermain
    Philippe Petain
    Phyllis Webb
    Pierre Coupey
    Poetic Community
    Poetics
    Poetry Readings
    Procedural Art
    Public Poetics
    Pussy Riot
    Pussy Riot
    Rachel Blau Duplessis
    Rae Armantrout
    Robert Creeley
    Robert Duncan
    Robert Fitterman
    Robert Kroetsch
    Robert Lallemant
    Robert Lecker
    Ron Silliman
    Second World War
    Sharon Thesen
    Sherrill Grace
    Slavoj Žižek
    Smaro Kamboureli
    Stan Bevington
    Stan Dragland
    Stephen Voyce
    Steve Mccaffery
    Susan Bee
    Swiftcurrent
    Telidon
    Thea Bowering
    The Martyrology
    Theodor Adorno
    Tim Inkster
    TISH
    Tomson Highway
    Toronto Research Group
    Trg
    T.S. Eliot
    U-331
    U-Boat Surrenders
    Us Fiction
    Vimy Ridge
    Vincent Massey
    Visual Poetry
    Walter Benjamin
    Warren Tallman
    W.C. Williams
    Weardale
    Wikileaks

    Archives

    January 2022
    September 2020
    August 2017
    August 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly