Apostrophe

In the tradition of the phonetic poems of Hugo Ball and the "readymades" of Dada, this exploration of the nature of verse straddles the line between form and nonsense, between intention and happy accident. An apostrophe is a poetic figure of speech in which a person, abstraction, or entity is addressed as if it were present; it is also the name of a 1993 poem in which every line is an apostrophe. This project, in which an internet search engine innovatively employs the lines of the 1993 poem as starting points for searches, allows the poem to expand and continue infinitely. The search engine is rigid but indiscriminant, and words and phrases that might not otherwise meet collide and carom away in an unpredictable manner. By turns poignant and banal, the resulting poems are challenging and relevant to a world of increased technological input and intrusion.

Bill Kennedy is the artistic director of the Scream Literary Festival, a poetry editor for Coach House Books, and an organizer of the Lexiconjury Reading Series. Darren Wershler-Henry teaches communication studies at Wilfrid Laurier University and is the author of Free as in Speech and Beer and The Tapeworm Foundry. They both live in Toronto.