The Wiki of Babel

Endorsements

"Kyle Flemmer’s The Wiki of Babel surveys the poetic possibilities of Wikipedia, wikiracing, collage, erasure, and substitution and discovers poetry that may not look like anything you’ve seen before, but feels immediate, present, and prophetic. Every page is a poem from the future, using the tools of today."

— derek beaulieu, author of Do It Wrong: How to be a Poet in the 21st Century

"The Wiki of Babel underlines that Flemmer is one of the most inventive writers in Canada today. This book, in its play and action, surfaces the contemporary collective unconscious through associative jumps and multilingual juxtapositions. These works are both instruction and poetry, surprising and puzzling, simultaneously roadmaps between wikis and sonnets, imagist works and hyperlink reportage. There is a hidden hand behind the random number generators and N+7 here, Flemmer’s and ours, writing by connecting words, phrases, lines, stanzas across the multiple expanses of the Internet’s knowledge."

— Aaron Tucker, author of Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys

"In The Wiki of Babel, Kyle Flemmer playfully reconfigures what is documented of our shared knowledge. Paying homage to conceptual writing, Oulipo, and hypertext, Flemmer creates linguistic contact zones between what, at first glance, appears distant and unrelated, only to reveal the worlds and words refracting within it, ultimately pointing to the beautiful entanglement of it all."

— Eric Schmaltz, author of I Confess

Publication History

Early versions of these poems have appeared in a variety of print and digital publications. Thank you to the editors of 845 Press, above/ground press, Hack the Planet, Michigan Quarterly Review, No Press, periodicities and The /tƐmz/ Review. Thanks also to the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, where poems from the book were begun and first performed, and to the faculty of the Computer Writing residency program for their guidance.