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Cipher poems are decoded then re-coded and transmitted through the act of reading.
Table des matières
Virtual Events
Ciphers
Cryptanalyses
Particle Traces
Dissipative Structures
A propos de l'auteur
Brian Henderson is a Governor General's Award finalist as well as a finalist for the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Award and the author of twelve books including The Alphamiricon, a deck of visual poem cards now online on Ubuweb. His latest is Unidentified Poetic Object from Brick Books, a poem from which won second in the 2017 Vallum poetry prize. Unidentified Poetic Object received a starred Quill & Quire review.
Henderson is a co-editor of the Laurier Poetry Series (with Neil Besner, past VP International at the University of Manitoba), has been the Director of Wilfrid Laurier University Press (1999-2016), the President of the Association of Canadian University Presses, the Treasurer of the Association of Canadian Publishers and is on the board of the Access Copyright Foundation, an organization that funds artists and arts groups and organizations with investments seeded by Access Copyright. He is currently the chair of the Grey Highlands Public Library board.
Résumé
[OR] might be a book of steganography. Or not. The tension of appearance inheres in it, and ciphertexts seem to abound. As the poems take up their concealing/revealing, coded/decoded, intelligence/counter-intelligence themes, borders and borderlands appear, are crossed, or are closed. Many of the borderlands turn out to be their own interiors – “secret” workings of the codes ghosting through them. Are they abject castoffs, lost possibilities, proscribed mutations, or future events?
Codes are hidden everywhere, sliding through the atmosphere, slipping into microwave towers, handheld devices, nervous systems, brains, retinas, bar codes, antimissile systems, the antennae of DNA, the traces of virtual particles, the Chauvet Cave drawings, your Twitter account. Each broaches a transformative version of its own transduction. The buck never stops. And since it’s been documented that perception happens before we know it (Benjamin Libet), and the future might already have happened, these poems ask what this might mean – especially in an accelerated, “semio-inflated” world of signs, words, and information.
Maybe it’s no wonder that the poems use tropes from spy thrillers and code breakers. In them a character may have been murdered, or moved to another dimension. Along the way strange perturbations occur to narrative and its others: memory, (prosthetic memory), dream, reportage, code, a little history of the future, déjà vu, paramnesia, the virtual – versions, evasions, and alternatives. Each poem gets read a few times, its code deciphered or ciphered back up. Some of the poems decay. Each reader reads his or her own poem and encodes it for another. What communication crosses out, these poems try to find. They might ask “What is reading?” while at the same time “Who are you?” In asking they acknowledge fragility, and in fragility, suggests William E. Connolly, lies the beginning of freedom.
![Brian Henderson, Brian Henderson - [Or]](https://blob.cede.ch/books/111000000/111694000/111694583_17.jpg?v=10)