poetry – Page 2 – loriemerson

grOnk magazine: third series, issues 3, 4, 7, 8 1969 (part 5)

After taking a brief hiatus from digitizing the issues of grOnk magazine that Nelson Ball so generously donated to me, I’m happy to present to you here the rest of the third series of grOnk, published by bpNichol mostly throughout 1969. While there are eight issues in this series, I only have issue 1 (available […]

by Lori Emerson

Marshall McLuhan and the Avant-Garde

Recently I stumbled upon an odd but thrilling little publication from 1966 called Astronauts of Inner-Space: An International Collection of Avant-Garde Activity which includes – according to the front cover – 17 manifestoes, articles, letters, 28 poems and 1 filmscript. The collection is so astounding that I had to make a pdf of it – […]

by Lori Emerson

grOnk magazine: third series, issue 1 1969 (part 4)

In April 1969 bpNichol (along with David UU, John Riddell, Bill Bissett, and John Simon) published 300 mimeographed copies of the first issue of the third series of grOnk magazine. “QUOTE” by Gerry Gilbert, written in July 1965, is the most difficult, or impossible, of the grOnk issues to digitize since it consists of 23 […]

by Lori Emerson

grOnk magazine: first and second series 1967 – 1970 (Part 3)

In August 1967 bpNichol published the last (and eighth) issue of the first series of grOnk magazine; this issue features the almost entirely non-textual, visual, comic-book-like, frames-within-frames structure of “Scraptures: Sequence Eleven.” (This work is already available on bpnichol.ca.) The second series of grOnk was begun in September 1968 and the issues for this series […]

by Lori Emerson

bpNichol’s “Singing Hands Series”: Canadian Concrete Poetry 1966 (Part 2)

I’m starting to understand that part of the reason why few people, if anyone, has a complete run of grOnk is because it appears the print runs for each issue varied vastly (from 20 to, say, 200 copies); some Nichol simply gave away to friends, others he distributed through the Village Bookstore in Toronto, and […]

by Lori Emerson

grOnk magazine: Canadian Concrete Poetry 1967-1988 (Part 1)

The most remarkable package arrived in the mail last week from Nelson Ball, longstanding Canadian poet, editor, book-seller and husband to the remarkable Canadian painter Barbara Caruso: a nearly complete set of grOnk magazine along with bpNichol’s Captain Poetry Poems, the second issue of Grease Ball Comics, and Nichol’s “Cold Mountain.” It’s difficult for me […]

by Lori Emerson

from concrete poetry to the poetics of obsolescence: an interview with Derek Beaulieu

LORI EMERSON: Thanks so much Derek for being willing to talk about your concrete poetry work with me. I’ve long admired your experiments in concrete but recently, since I started to research the origin of the term “dirty concrete” and to think about Steve McCaffery’s Carnival in relation to what I call “digital DIY,” your […]

by Lori Emerson

The Archeological Media Lab as Locavore Thinking Device

The web address for the Media Archaeological Lab, formerly known as the Archeological Media Lab, has changed. Please click here. * Between the much-needed efforts of the Electronic Literature Organization‘s Electronic Literature Directory (ELD) and now the European-focused Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP), it seems our field has […]

by Lori Emerson

women dirty concrete poets

I would be blind indeed if I didn’t notice or acknowledge the fact that these dirty concrete/typewriter poets – Steve McCaffery, bpNichol, bill bissett, John Riddell – I’ve been writing about here and in my book project are all men…and nearly all them reference or acknowledge other like-minded men (though of course not always – […]

by Lori Emerson

copier machine poetics

bpNichol’s Translating Translating Apollinaire is a series of typewriter poems, not simply poems written on a typewriter, Nichol wrote between 1975 and 1979. In its relentless exploration of homolinguistic translation, it has become something of a cult serial poem in certain experimental writing circles, spawning iterations such as Stuart Pid’s Translating translating translating Apollinaire and […]