| Apostrophe Contributor(s): Kennedy, Bill (Author), Wershler-Henry, Darren (Author) |
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ISBN: 155022722X ISBN-13: 9781550227222 Publisher: Misfit Book OUR PRICE: $14.36 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: April 2006 Annotation: 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. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Poetry | Canadian |
| Dewey: 811.608 |
| Series: Misfits |
| Physical Information: 0.78" H x 5.32" W x 8.72" (0.66 lbs) 293 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - Canadian |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: you are entirely happy with your poem / you are not happy then there is no charge and your deposit is returned / you are totally satisfied with the outcome / you are a man / you are a little confused / you are entirely happy with your poem / you are not happy then there is no charge and your deposit is returned / you are totally satisfied with the outcome ... "Apostrophe" is: a) a figure of speech in which a person, an abstract quality or a nonexistent entity is addressed as though present b) a poem written in 1993 in which every sentence is an apostrophe c) a program -- apostropheengine.ca -- based on the 1993 poem that hijacks search engines in order to extend the poem infinitely d) a book of poetry written using the website The answer: e) all of the above. Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler-Henry's Apostrophe contains all of these things, except the search engine (but you can visit that any time you like). Each line from the original poem has become the title of a new poem generated by the program's metonymic romp through the World Wide Web. Phrases rub against each other promiscuously; poems and readers alike come to their own conclusions. The results are by turns poignant, banal, offensive and hilarious, but always surprising and always unaffected. In other words, everything a book of contemporary poetry should be, and then some. Poet and scholar Charles Bernstein has suggested that Apostrophe may be related to Freud's notion of the uncanny, a somnambulistic drift that appears aimless yet somehow always returns to "you." Apostrophe is an entirely new kind of poetry: neither stable nor unstable, sections come and go, but the overall shape of the poem remains vaguely familiar, like a trick of memory. |